Figures of sympathy in eighteenth-century Opéra comique

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Leavens, Janet Kristen
Copyright Year	2010
Abstract	Eighteenth-century opéras comiques often turn around moments of sympathy— moral and affective bonds through which the Enlightenment imagined a natural basis for the social order as well as the pleasures and transformative potential of art. Through musico-literary analysis informed by models of moral and aesthetic relationality that I derive from Dubos, Marivaux, Rousseau and Diderot, I argue that opéras comiques written and performed between 1762 and the Revolution feature three distinct forms of sympathy: 1) a worldly-sensuous sympathy most typically found in the common subgenre of the sentimental pastorale and characterized by a happy blending of moral and sensual connections; 2) an amorous intersubjectivity found occasionally in sentimental comedies and characterized by a sometimes empowering, sometimes trying encounter with an other experienced as a site of subjective freedom; and finally 3) a sacrificial sympathy found most frequently in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s sometimes pointedly antiworldly, morally sober lyric dramas and characterized by an obstacle-triggered leap into an identificatory, affective imagination. Although there is much that distinguishes these forms of sympathy, they are all shaped by eighteenth-century empiricist assumptions as to the existence of a basic relationality between the self and his or her social environment and thus resist a standard critical model that sees such emotional ties as merely the effect of some more fundamental separation between self and other.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.17077/etd.8ai8cx0l
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2029&context=etd
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2029&context=etd
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2029&context=etd&httpsredir=1&referer=
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.8ai8cx0l
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article