(b Rouen, 6 June 1606; d Paris, 1 Oct 1684). French poet and dramatist. Educated at Rouen by the Jesuits, who introduced him to plays and speech-making, he set out to practise law. However, the success of an early comedy (Mélite, 1629) persuaded him to attempt a career in the theatre. He was one of the original members of the Académie Française and was protected by powerful patrons such as the Duke of Liancourt, the Duke of Vendôme, Cardinal Richelieu, Nicolas Fouquet and the Duke of Montausier. Between 1629 and 1674, when he retired, he produced some 33 dramatic works of great diversity and range – comedies, tragedies, drames lyriques and tragi-comedies – exploring historical, Christian, Roman, heroic and bourgeois themes. He admired the theatre as a magical world of illusion and spectacle, as an arena for the discussion of morals and politics and as a place for experimenting with language, different sorts of character and new dramatic structures. For some 30 years from about 1635 he was the dominant figure in the Parisian theatre, recognizing its rules and the prevailing tastes but responding to both very freely (in his Examens and Discours, 1660, he analysed and defended his style and methods). His independent spirit aroused antagonism as deep-seated and long-lasting as the admiration that both Mme de Sévigné and Seigneur de Saint-Evremond unfailingly expressed for his heroic plays.
In many plays (e.g. La veuve, La galerie du palais, La suivante, La place royale, Le Cid and Polyeucte) Corneille interrupted the flow of action with reflective moments usually written in a verse form distinct from the alexandrine and called stances. He considered these lyrical pauses as embellishments in the same way that he judged Dassoucy’s music for Andromède (produced on 26 January 1650) as having nothing to do with the action of his tragedy. This work, originally commissioned by Cardinal Mazarin in 1647, was to be ‘mi-chantée, mi-parlée’ and adorned with spectacular sets by Giacomo Torelli. Corneille turned it into an attack on Italian opera and the extravagant singing of Luigi Rossi (in Rossi's own Orfeo, 1647). Although he acknowledged that spectacle enhanced the drama, about music he emphatically stated in the preface to Andromède:
I have taken good care to have nothing sung that was necessary to the understanding of the play, since as a rule words that are sung are imperfectly heard by the audience because of the confusion that results when a number of voices sing together.
Choruses and airs were incidental; there was no recitative. In his tragedy La toison d’or (1660) machines played the same dominant part and music a similar reduced role. It was not until he collaborated with Lully, Molière and Quinault in Psyché, a tragi-comédie et ballet produced on 17 January 1671, that he was forced to accord more importance to music; but even here it was largely restricted to the prologue, epilogue and interludes, where an orchestra of 300 accompanied some 70 dancers in the vast theatre at the Tuileries. The dancing and the spectacle were memorable; the acoustics were appalling. Never again did Corneille allow himself to be involved in such collaborative efforts, in plays into which, to quote Saint-Evremond’s letter Sur les opéra, ‘one is obliged to introduce dances and music, which can only damage the presentation’. Many opera librettos of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, especially in Italy, were based on Corneille’s plays, and Le Cid and Polyeucte in particular remained popular sources for operas until the 19th century. Corneille also wrote poems, a few of which were set to music in his own day and by later composers.
AnthonyFB
O. Nadal: Le sentiment de l’amour dans l’oeuvre de Pierre Corneille (Paris, 1948/R)
L. Maurice-Amour: ‘Les musiciens de Corneille, 1650–1699’, RdM, xxxvii (1955), 43–75
G. Mongrédien: Recueil de textes et des documents du XVIIe siècle relatifs à Corneille (Paris, 1972, enlarged 2/1973)
M. Benoit: Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1992)
MARGARET M. McGOWAN