A Genre in Flux: Grand opéra Through the Lens of French Touring Companies, 1830–1860

In March 1830, travelling troupe director Henri Delorme staged the local premiere of Daniel Auber’s grand opéra La muette de Portici in the northern French town of Valenciennes. The production marks a turning point in the circulation of operatic repertoire across France, kickstarting a thriving but as yet unacknowledged phenomenon of touring grand opéra that persisted into the 1860s and beyond. In this article, I reconstruct the artistic and working practices of this phenomenon, and demonstrate how the arrival of the genre in the northern touring circuit allowed local individuals, such as the director, theatre-goers and local critics, to voice their expectations – in musical, dramatic and staging terms – of the appropriate artistic parameters for the emerging genre when seen from a provincial perspective. I suggest that grand opéra’s adjusted scale, status and performance practices on tour had the potential to reconfigure the genre’s meaning for nineteenth-century French audiences and theatrical performers as local agents negotiated shifting sets of centre–periphery dynamics, at once seeking operatic imitation of the capital and rejecting it in favour of locally defined practices and values.