(Fr.: ‘lyric drama’).
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the term designated an opéra or, more often, an opéra comique similar in subject and tone to the contemporary spoken drame. Unlike the tragédie, whose plots were generally drawn from classical history and mythology and whose leading characters were upper-class, drames had modern, usually European settings and featured among the cast bourgeois imbued with a Rousseau-like sensibilité. The tone, more serious than that of the comédie and related forms, was also strongly moralizing. Most drames revolved around a virtuous person threatened by a loss of wealth or social position or even life, and swift changes in fortune and melodramatic scenes were common. The earliest important example at the Comédie-Italienne was Monsigny's Le déserteur (libretto by Sedaine, 1769). The drame lyrique also permitted an extension of the theatre's repertory by the introduction of historical or pseudo-historical subjects as, for example, in J.-P.-G. Martini's Henri IV (1774). During the Revolution the number of drames lyriques greatly increased: Grétry, Le Sueur and Méhul wrote striking works in the genre. The term was rarer at the Opéra during this period; the principles of the drama lyrique, however, permeated works called ‘opéra’ or ‘tragédie lyrique’. With the Consulate the Opéra-Comique turned to lighter fare, and drames lyriques gradually disappeared there, while at the Opéra the interest in European or modern historical subjects continued.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries ‘drame lyrique’ was applied to French operas influenced by the aesthetic ideals of Wagner (whose own works were usually termed ‘drame musical’ in French translation). They featured a continuous action, a prominent, symphonically treated orchestral part and a rich harmonic vocabulary. Some composers experimented with obvious Wagnerian devices, such as leitmotif, but more important for the essence of French drame lyrique was the avoidance of the pomp of grand opéra in favour of an intense psychological study. Massenet's Werther (1892), Bruneau's Messidor (1897), Chabrier's Briséïs (1899, incomplete) and Saint-Saëns’ Déjanire (1911), among others, were called ‘drame lyrique’, but scholars often extend the term to similar works designated by the more neutral ‘opéra’.
See Opera, §IV, 3(ii).
MGG2 (H. Schreider)
P.J.B. Nougaret: De l'art du théâtre (Paris, 1769)
B.F. de Rosoi: Dissertation sur le drame lyrique (The Hague and Paris, 1775 [1776])
E. Schuré: Le drame musical (Paris, 1875, 4/1930)
A. Bruneau: Musiques d'hier et de demain (Paris, 1900)
F.A. Gaiffe: Le drame en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1910)
O. Séré [J. Poueigh]: Musiciens français d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1911, 8/1921)
V. d'Indy: Richard Wagner et son influence sur l'art musical français (Paris, 1930)
S. Wolff: L'Opéra au Palais Garnier, 1875–1962 (Paris, 1963)
J.B. Kopp: The Drame Lyrique: a Study in Esthetics of Opéra-Comique, 1762–1791 (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1982)
H. Geyer-Kiefl: Die heroïsch-komische Opera, ca. 1770-1820 (Tutzing, 1987)
F. Labussek: Zur Entwicklung des franzözischen Opernlibrettos im 19. Jahrhundert: Stationen des ästhetischen Wandels (Frankfurt, 1994)
H. Lacombe: Les voies de l'opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1997)
J.F. Fulcher: French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York, 1999)
S. Huebner: French Opera at the fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style (Oxford, 1999)
D. Charlton: French Opera, 1730–1830: Meaning and Media (Aldershot, 2000)
M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET