On the French and Italian baroque operas

There are many differences between the French and Italian opera – the orchestration is different as are the styles of ornamentation; the French version requires dance divertimenti, is in five as opposed to Italian three acts, and the best music begins about the middle (since the first half was likely to be missed by the late arriving aristocrats) and so forth. One could write a long book on the subject. (Why, several have been written).

But the most essential difference is best captured by the two genres' respective vocabularies.

In the Italian baroque opera the most important words are, in descending order, vendetta (revenge), amore (love), sangue (blood), traditore (traitor), crudele (cruel) and disprezata (rejected); this reflects the opera’s preoccupation with intrigue, principally love intrigue.

By comparison, the French opera operates with a vocabulary indicative of less complex life strategies. The principal words of the French opera are gloire (glory), triumphe (triumph), victoire (victory), immortel (immortal), la chasse (the hunt). Amour comes only after chasse, because love is seen as a kind of a chase, I suppose, rather than entrapment. And there is none of this Italian scheming which requires terms like treachery and revenge.

The baroque French gentlemen fought not to right a scheming wrong but simply to establish their gloire immortelle through acts of armed victoire which did not need to be classified as either traîtrise or vengeance. You see, the French warrior needed no excuse to fight. To fight was glorious. It was natural and self-evident.

I confess that living among the furbo (cunning) Italians who daily display such amazing feats of cunning and alacrity in their everyday life, achieving the competitive life tasks – short changing a customer, securing the best seat on the bus – with art unsurpassed even by the Cantonese, I grow wistful for the simplicity of the baroque French life. Really, what could be easier to understand than man-man-stick. Honestly, I’d love to live the life for a day (maybe even two): wham bam, the best man is the one left standing. (With, maybe, in Hotspur’s phrase, crack’d skull and bleeing nose).

But there is something about this glorious life style which sits uneasy with me, and it is... the gloire itself. Gloire, it seems, the guarantor of one’s immortalité, lies in the fame which one assures for himself through all these superior feats of arms. The purpose of the superior feat of arms, therefore, it turns out, is not so much to secure for oneself the aforementioned crack’d skull, or the wonderful adrenaline rush which follows one's enemy’s thunderous collapse on the beaten ground (all that heavy armor) but – get this – what a deflator! – the favorable opinion of tout le monde.

Duh.

This actually seems to me not a very glorious thing at all. After all, is not the principal measure of one’s own superiority the ability not to care about the opinions of those whom one judges beneath himself? Really, think about it: taking an interest in the opinion of another person amounts of admitting their superiority -- their entitlement to judge us. After all, we care what grade our teachers give us, or what Mom thinks about the grades we bring home, because we depend on these people for something. On the other hand, the people we do not depend upon are free to think whatever they damn please.

And thus independence must surely mean indifference to the opinions of others and therefore, per force, to one’s gloire. For this reason, I think I would enjoy the inanities of French opera a lot more if the heroes did unto each other not for gloire but simply... because it felt good.

Still, it’s not bad opera, really, especially if the ballet divertimenti turn out half-decent.