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Au tournant des années 1690, les épopées d’Homère et Virgile font pour la première fois leur incursion dans les sujets des tragédies destinées à l’Académie royale de musique, en pleine Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Si Achille et Polyxène (Campistron/Collasse, 1687) renoue en partie avec les grandes conceptions aristotéliciennes de la tragédie, Énée et Lavinie (Fontenelle/Collasse, 1690) se veut une réécriture moderne, évacuant toute la dimension héroïque de l’original virgilien au profit des codes du roman contemporain. Ces deux œuvres montrent l’envie de renouveler un genre pour les auteurs de paroles, aboutissant de facto à de nouvelles situations dramaturgiques pour le musicien.

The appearance some four decades ago of the author's article 'The role of the keyboard continuo in French opera 1673–1776', Early Music , viii/2 (1980), sharply divided opinion. While many readers accepted the evidence that the chordal continuo instruments at the Paris Opéra customarily remained silent during most, if not all, of the dance movements (and, from the mid-1710s, the choruses), others proved sceptical or even hostile to the conclusions drawn. In revisiting the evidence, the present article focuses on the extent of the movements omitted from original continuo parts (around 50 per cent in some cases), and argues that the practice became more pronounced in the early 18th century. Noting that continuo playing was not traditionally associated with dance music in France, the article cites subsequent scholarly writings that draw attention to parallel practices in England and Germany, and reviews how far the findings of the 1980 article have been taken up by performers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major painter of the French 18th century, François Boucher had a brilliant career during the reign of Louis XV, becoming first painter to the king in 1765. Like other artists of his generation, such as Charles-Joseph Natoire, he had a constant fascination with the world of the stage, which influenced his entire oeuvre. Less known because of the scarcity of sources, his work as a set designer and designer of costumes for operas and the fairs was very important, bringing the painter to rub shoulders with talents as famous in their time as Jean Monnet, the Favarts and Jean-Nicolas Servandoni. Boucher was one of Servandoni’s close friends. During the 1730s and 1740s, Boucher and Servandoni succeeded each other as heads of set design at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris and sometimes worked on the same productions. In the middle of the century, their careers seemed to diverge but the two artists never ceased their activity for the stage, whose profound changes they accompanied, in the 1760s.