Excursus: Hierarchy at the Opera

Image right: Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691-1765), Musical Fête (1747). Oil on canvas, 207 x 247 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. The painting depicts the musical fête given by the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, on 15 July 1747 in honour of the marriage of the Dauphin of France. Image source: Web Gallery of Art. View the Teatro Argentina as it appears today.

The opera illustrates well how the most cultural institutions of eighteenth-century brought together bourgeois and nobles together while also maintaining hierarchies between them. Consider seating arrangements at the theater of the Academie Royale de la Musique—the most prestigious opera house in eighteenth-century Paris. To us, the most striking thing is that the seats were not arranged in order give a good view of the stage. The theater was in the form of a rectangle; three levels of boxes lined the walls, and they faced directly out, so that boxes on side directly faced one another. If an opera goer wanted to see the stage, she would have to turn the direction of her chair. Barriers between boxes also obstructed the view, so that unless you were sitting in the front row, you had to stand to see the stage. In the words of one architect, “It’s as if they placed the partitions there intentionally to obstruct one’s view of the stage.” The top two levels—the paradis—contained the balconies where one sat on benches. And on the lower level in front of the stage—the parterre—the audience stood. Most curiously, the rows of boxes continued right onto the stage—three on each side. These boxes, of course, afforded a horrible view of the stage, and were all the worse since the stage lamps shone directly into the spectator’s eyes.

But all this was the point. For opera goers, the point was not to listen and see, but to talk and to be seen. People to came to the opera in order socialize, and so they talked right through the performance. They might talk about the latest goings-on at court, about foreign affairs, or even about the performance. But mostly they talked about each other. And they watched each other, far more than they paid attention to the action on stage. The opera was where a young aristocratic might be taken to be “presented” to the world; at the opera, she would be examined carefully by everyone present. Everyone came equiped with opera glasses—not in order to see the stage, but the better to study one another.

The point here is that music and performance were secondary to the primary function of the opera, which was decidedly social. A man might occasionally listen to an aria, especially if one of the women in his displayed an interest in the music; or he might take interest in a particular dancer, since dance troupes were a notorious recruiting ground for courtesans. But to pay too much attention to the music was decidedly gauche. As one visitor explained, the only spectators who listended to the music were “several clerics, several shopkeepers, several schoolboys, sucklings of the muses and soldiers just returning from leave.” These, of course, were the folks who stood on the ground floor, the parterre, in front of the stage, where they enjoyed the best vantage for such low-brow activity. In the words of a young nobleman: “There is nothing so damnable as listening to a work like a street merchant or some provincial just off the boat.” Listening intently was “bourgeois.”

The opera, in short, was first and foremost a theater of society, a place where society assembled to inspect itself. It should come as no surprise, then, that seating arrangements in the opera offered a visual analogy of old regime society. Opera boxes were rented, often for several years at a time. Boxes on stage were the most sought after, and therefore the most expensive. On one side of the stage sat the king and his court; opposite him sat the queen and her entourage. One’s place in the hierarchy of the court could be measured by the distance one sat from the king. Upstage sat the most important persons of realm: princes of blood, the king’s inner circle of advisors, foreign diplomats. In 1750, for example, the future minister of state to Louis XV, the Duc de Choiseul, sat near the king; so did his minister of war, the Comte d’Argenson. On Fridays, the Prince de Clermont and the Prince de Soubise, the Duc de Luxembourg and the Duc d’Orléans, the Princesse de Sens and the Marquise de Polignac could all be seen in these first boxes.

Most of the subscribers in this first level of boxes were aristocrats: of 135 annual subscribers at mid-century, only four were commoners and three were wealthy bourgeois of Paris. All the rest were aristocrats. Of these, an amazing 51% were Grands—princes of the blood, dukes and peers of the realm—the very highest stratum of French society. The second and third tiers were a bit different: “this was the domain of wealthy priests, courtesans with benefactors, and lesser nobles.” Here boxes were usually let out for a performance at a time, sometimes even shared; it was claimed that the practice of sharing a box kept virtuous girls away from the opera altogether for fear of being seated next to a courtesan. Most boisterous place was the parterre, where spectators stood. The parterre contained the fringe of Parisian elites: younger sons of seigneurs with money to burn, servants of the great houses, intellectuals, literary hacks, soldiers on leave. Only men allowed in parterre. Here men stood, strolled, sang, occassionally danced; heckled the performers and audience alike; and sometimes fought. Like the rest of the opera, the parterre was patrolled by a contingent of thirty armed soldiers; but it was here that they were concentrated