Sarah Hibberd

Cherubini and the Revolutionary Sublime

France receives little attention in narratives about the sublime in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This article will argue that the cataclysmic tableau at the climax of Cherubinis first opera for the Theâtre Feydeau in Paris, Lodoiska (1791), can be understood as part of a coherent and distinctively French discourse of the sublime, rooted in revolutionary experience that can be understood in relation to wider European trends.

‘Dormez donc, mes chers amours’: Hérold's La Somnambule (1827) and dream phenomena on the Parisian lyric stage

Ferdinand Herolds 1827 ballet-pantomime La Somnambule , written for the Paris Opera, is generally remembered today only as a source for Bellinis 1831 opera La sonnambula . However, Herolds worku2006–u2006which also inspired a series of popular vaudevilles on the same themeu2006–u2006illustrates the strong, voyeuristic appeal of the trance phenomenon at the end of the Bourbon Restoration. It can be viewed as encapsulating wide-ranging contemporary ideas about the relationship between sleepwalking, mesmerism, madness and the supernatural. The aims of this article are twofold. First, it seeks to introduce important nuances into the received and often generalised claims usually made about the containing nature of trance scenes in nineteenth-century theatre, positing an alternative model to that of the unhinged heroine of Italian opera familiar from recent feminist writing on opera. Second, it illuminates the musical practices specific to late Restoration Paris that were so crucial to the aestheticu2006–u2006and the successu2006–u2006of these sleepwalking heroines. A web of visual and musical allusions conjured up an entranced figure who, although related to the Italian operatic madwoman, has a personality and social implications all her own.