Tuesday 14th November 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Zak Eastop (Durham): 'Anatomy of a Scandal: Reading, (Re)writing, and Restricting Rabelais on the 19th-century lyric stage'

On Christmas Eve of 1855 the Paris Opéra was embroiled in a scandal. That night, Pantagruel, a newly written two-act opera based (loosely) on the works of François Rabelais, received its first performance. Unfortunately, it was not the rip-roaring success that everybody had predicted: the piece caused such a stir among the audience that its run was immediately cancelled. The production disappeared from public view overnight and has never been performed since. We still don’t really know why.

In my talk I will sift through what is known about Pantagruel’s implosive premier, asking whether disagreements about how to read Rabelais’s texts played a part in the demise of their operatic afterlife. How did the composer, librettist, and those involved in the piece’s production - as readers of Rabelais themselves - reformulate and represent aspects of his texts on stage, and how might this have rubbed the Second Empire’s audience or authorities up the wrong way? What might this negative reaction tell us about how they understood Rabelais? And what can this, in turn, reveal about the curé’s texts themselves, or their potential to be read plurally, divergently, and in ways that often seem incompatible with one another? 

Though extremely patchy archival records, wildly divergent published accounts of the evening, and the ever-snipping sound of the censor’s scissors mean that there is simply no way of knowing for certain what went wrong at Pantagruel’s premier, I contend that this scandal represents more than a merely musical misjudgement. It is an example of a historical community reading and disagreeing about the meaning and status of a text. So who, then, was Rabelais to these people? And why all the fuss? 

Hestia Zhang (St Peter's College, Oxford): ‘When the Flâneurs Sit Down: The Haussmannian Benches and Urban Storytelling’

In the 1850s, as part of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the French architect Gabriel Davioud designed the iconic dark-green public benches that are still seen in Paris today. Wooden benches and chairs had been installed on the walkways in royal gardens in the ancien régime, making them more than merely a place for strolling. It was not until the French Revolution that the gardens and parks in Paris were opened to the general public, which, throughout the century, developed into a sort of outdoor salon for social mingling and licit encounters among people of different socioeconomic status. Conforming to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s political ambition of social integration, Davioud’s public benches pervaded the new boulevards and public parks and provided the untiring flâneurs a moment of rest. By settling people, sometimes even strangers, in close proximity, the benches also created more potential for urban meetings. In this paper, I will look closely into some nineteenth-century Parisian writings and paintings to see how, by juxtaposing characters of various social types in one line and staging them facing the audience, the artists exploited the bench’s theatrical effect and narrative potential to present a microcosm of nineteenth-century Parisian society.