Each year for the past decade, the French vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants has visited the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In that time, three of their productions stand out as particularly significant: Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys (1989 and 1992), Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Medée (1994) and Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1997). This trilogy of landmarks in the history of French opera was presented in fully staged productions conceived by stage director Jean-Marie Villegier and conductor William Christie.

The age of Louis XIV was an age of contrasts. It was fond of spectacle and ostentation, typified in the great fêtes of Versailles, yet it is rightly known as ‘l'époque classique’, characterised by order and decorum. Its greatest playwright was Jean Racine, whose eleven tragedies had only the barest of sets, presented one action in one place during a maximum of twenty-four hours, chose subjects from history or mythology that featured only mortal characters in easily believable situations, relegated violence and other unseemly behaviour to the wings and to descriptions (récits), and used a limited, noble vocabulary to explore the depths of the human condition and to create poetry of extraordinary beauty. However, in 1673, during the peak of Racine's career, Quinault and Lully created French opera (tragédie lyrique), which, while also using a limited, noble vocabulary, featured spectacular sets and costumes for each act, allowed subplots (even comic ones in the first three operas), staged battles, storms and divine interventions, eschewed historical characters, and presented simpler situations and characterisations in order to leave time for music and dance.

The day following the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), Voltaire observed in a letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville that the opera's libretto was by the abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, and he added with characteristic irony that it was ‘worthy of the abbé Pellegrin’. As we know, Voltaire was not alone in his sentiments. Few poets were reviled with the relish one finds in criticism of Pellegrin. Doomed to be a less-than-perfect poet in a literary culture, Pellegrin was forced by circumstance to do something few of his time could understand or accept: he earned a living writing poems on commission. This made him a faiseur. a hack who pursued art for money rather than inspiration, a paid servant who, improbably, sought to move in the very social circles that employed him. It is emblematic of Pellegrin's situation and his reputation that in 1774, twenty-nine years after his death, Voltaire did write noëls when the marquise du Deffand requested them, but complained that it was ‘une rude commission’ and compared his lot to Pellegrin's. Chastened, the marquise apologised. Pellegrin's artistic destiny would seem to have little to do with diat of die urbane and widely admired Voltaire, but I will argue that, in spite of this, the two shared some similar attitudes and experiences regarding the emplotment of tragedy and tragic opera, and further, that these shared views may have had a direct bearing on Rameau's development as a composer.

The libretto for a tragèdie en musique might be regarded as a tabula rasa. Whereas an Italian dramma per musica generally differentiates between recitative poetry and aria poetry — versi sciolti on the one hand, strophic versi misurati on the other — its French counterpart contains page after page of supple vers libres, which lend themselves to a great variety of musical shapes. Indeed, apart from a few highly conventional gestures, one cannot necessarily tell simply by looking at the libretto how a tragédie en musique will have been set. The point might be illustrated by an example, a pair of invocations sung by Phèdre in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733); one of them is a single quatrain, and the other consists of eight lines divided by their rhyme scheme into two quatrains. The columns at the left show the length of the vers (with + indicating feminine rhyme) and the rhyme scheme:

In the original version of the libretto of Hippolyte et Aricie, the librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin prefaced Act V with the rubric ‘le théatre ne change qu'à la troisiéme scéne’ [‘the stage changes only at the third scene’]. This is one of the few acts in the entire repertoire of tragédies en musique where the conventional formula ‘le théatre représente …’ [‘the stage represents … ’], followed by a description of what the stage was intended to depict, was not used. The annotation in Hippolyte warned audiences that, instead of the change of scenery that would normally occur during the entr'acte, the first two scenes of Act V retained the setting of Act IV (‘a wood by the sea, consecrated to Diana’), and the new décor (‘a delightful garden comprising the avenues of the Forest of Aricie’) was revealed only in the third scene. The sense of discontinuity at this ‘internal’ scenery change was also heightened by a break of liaison de presence (that is, none of the actors in scene 2 remained on stage for scene 3). A dispute arose over this breach of convention, and resulted in the first two scenes being omitted from performances sometime during the opera's first season in 1733, ostensibly to avoid the breach of unity of place caused by the change of scenery. This was not the only revision made to the opera in that season, but it was arguably the most significant.

When ‘la mesta’ (the sad one) intones ‘Salce!’ from the lonely heath within the Willow Song, she creates a situation at once compelling and artificial — a song within a song within an opera:

James Treadwell's perceptive and suggestive discussion raises a number of important questions that I am eager to engage. And while Treadwell was rethinking some of my arguments, the Met has unveiled a production of Lohengrin (directed by Robert Wilson) that challenges some of my claims about the Met's steadfast conservatism, especially when it comes to staging Wagner. So I am grateful for the opportunity to rethink some of my original claims and buttress a few as well.