Music, Pantomime and Freedom in Enlightenment France

How did composers and performers use the lost art of pantomime to explore and promote the Enlightenment ideals of free expression? This book explains the relationships between music, pantomime and freedom in pre-Revolutionary France. It argues that composers and performers recognized their agency when they attempted, from the 1730s through the end of the OldRegime, to revive a lost art called 'pantomime' for their compositions. In musical settings of pantomimes in French operas and instrumental