Musical Debate and Political Culture in France, 1700-1830

The first full-length treatment of the operatic querelles in eighteenth-century France, placing individual querelles in historical context and tracing common themes of authority, national prestige and the power of music over popular sentiment. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French cultural life seethed with debates about the proper nature and form of musical expression, particularly in opera. Expressed in a flood of pamphlets, articles, letters and poems as well as in the actu