(Fr.).
Like the Italian Intermedio, a spectacle given between the acts of a stage work. It entertained the audience, allowing the actors to ‘catch their breath, or change their costumes, or to allow time for changing the stage sets’ (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, iii, 1743, p.1718).
The history of the intermède in France is complex, and the degree of latitude in what constituted an intermède was indeed wide. The earliest examples date from the 16th century; they used Italian comedians and stagecraft and were built on the tradition of Italian mascheratas and French entremets (elaborate choreographic and musical spectacles given at court banquets). Cardinal Bibbiena’s comedy La calandria (1513) was performed for Henri II at Lyons (27 September 1548) with four intermèdes representing the four ages of mankind (iron, bronze, silver and gold). At Blois in February and April 1556 four intermèdes were inserted between the acts of G.G. Trissino’s Sofonisba in a French translation by Mellin de Saint-Gelais. The ‘entremets’ of the 1559 edition include choruses and a monologue, La furie mégère, by J.-A. de Baïf, who also contributed five ‘Chants recitez entre les actes de la Comédie’ for his own comedy Le brave, ou Le taillebras, performed at the Hôtel de Guise (28 January 1567).
The intermèdes of the Balet comique de la Royne (performed at the Petit Bourbon, Paris, 15 October 1581) turned the tradition of the masquerade towards a more dramatic type of intermède. The mythological subjects and sumptuous staging of those for L’Arimène, ou Le berger désespéré, a pastorale by Ollenix de Mont-Sacré (given at the château of Nantes, 25 February 1596) are also more dramatically conceived.
In the 17th century the Jesuits were among the first to use ballets as intermèdes in their theatre productions. As early as 1614 a French ballet, Ballet des onze anges, was inserted at the end of the second act of Le jeu de la conversion de St Guillaume d’Aquitaine in a performance in Brussels (9 February). From 1623 to 1631 five Latin tragedies by the Englishman Joseph Simons were performed with danced intermèdes at the Jesuit college of Saint-Omer.
In the latter part of the century, notably at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, Paris, more elaborate intermèdes were placed between the five acts of Latin tragedies. Some of these were closely aligned with the action of the tragedies that they supplemented; some were extended compositions in their own right (e.g. Sylvandre, a ‘pastorale en musique … pour servir d’intermèdes’ for the tragedy Coriolanus, March 1683). From 1684 the concept of the intermède could embrace an entire opera, comparable in every way to those of Lully and Quinault which were then drawing crowds to the Académie Royale de Musique. Démétrius by Claude Oudot (performed 5 March 1685, music lost), Celse martyr by M.-A. Charpentier (performed 10 February 1687, music lost) and David et Jonathas by Charpentier (performed 28 February 1688) are examples of ‘tragédies en musique pour servir d’intermèdes à la pièce latine’. Among other composers who wrote intermèdes for Latin tragedies were Beauchamps, Lalande, Pascal Collasse, Campra, J.F. Lallouette, Clérambault, Henry Desmarets and J.N.P. Royer.
In Paris, French intermèdes performed between the acts of Mazarin’s ill-fated Italian opera importations proved more popular than the operas themselves. The title-page of Carlo Caproli’s Le nozze di Peleo e di Theti (14 April 1654) states that the opera was ‘intermingled with a Ballet on the same subject’. In Cavalli’s Xerse, however, the six entrées of ballet composed by Lully for the 1660 performances in Paris, which ‘serve as intermèdes to the Comedy’, have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the opera.
For his tragedies Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), which were written for the young ladies of the Maison Royale St-Louis de Saint-Cyr, Racine tailored all the intermèdes (music by J.-B. Moreau) to the specific goal explained in his preface to Athalie: ‘In imitating the Ancients, I aimed for continuity of action that never permitted an empty stage; the intermèdes (“intervalles”) between the acts being marked only by the hymns and moral lessons of the chorus that comments on the action just past.’ The original versions of Racine’s masterpieces could not be staged publicly until 1791 when the law on ‘freedom of the theatres’ abolished the Académie Royale de Musique’s monopoly on works with choruses.
The full range of possibilities inherent in French intermèdes may be observed in those by Lully (and later by Charpentier) for 14 of Molière’s comedies, where they may precede or follow the comedy as well as separate its acts. The intermèdes of George Dandin (1668) have no bearing on the comedy; nor do those of Les amants magnifiques (1670), which include a sung prologue (first intermède) before the comedy, a self-contained pastorale (third intermède, between Acts 2 and 3) and a brilliant operatic celebration of the Pythian games following the comedy (sixth intermède). On the other hand, La princesse d’Elide (1664) begins with an intermède, a sung prologue preparing the action of the comedy, and minor characters from the comedy take part in its other intermèdes. Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) also contains intermèdes closely related to the plot, yet concludes with the Ballet des nations, an intermède totally independent of the comedy.
In mid-18th-century French opera, ‘intermède’ had two meanings. It was the translation of the Italian ‘intermezzo’ to refer to the Italian opere buffe that were performed in Paris in French. Thus Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, when performed in Paris in French translation as La servante maîtresse (1754), was termed a ‘comédie mêlée d'ariettes, intermède italien’. When Rousseau defined ‘intermède’ as ‘a work of music and dance inserted between the acts of an opera, or sometimes a comedy’, he was describing the French practice for the latter but only the original Italian one for the former. In France these translations were always given as independent works – one of two or three on an evening's programme. By extension, ‘intermède’ was also applied to works in a similar lighthearted spirit and generally in one or two acts, originally written in French. These were performed at either the Académie Royale de Musique, where they were sung throughout (e.g. Rousseau’s Le devin du village, 1752), or the Opéra-Comique or other theatres, where they had spoken dialogue (e.g. Duni’s Nina et Lindor, 1758). By the late 18th century the term ‘intermède’ had virtually disappeared.
ES (‘Intermezzo’; P. Mélèse)
Dictionnaire universel françois et latin (Dictionnaire de Trévoux) (Paris, 1743–52)
D. Diderot: ‘Intermède’, Encylopédie,ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. D. Diderot and others (Paris, 1751–80)
J.-J. Rousseau: Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768/R; Eng. trans., 1771)
H. Prunières: Le ballet de cour en France avant Benserade et Lully (Paris, 1914/R)
L.E. Reichenburg: Contribution à l’histoire de la ‘querelle des bouffons’ (Paris, 1937)
W.H. McCabe: ‘Music and Dance on a 17th-Century College Stage’, MQ, xxiv (1938), 313–22
F.A. Yates: The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947/R)
F.A. Yates: ‘Poésie et musique dans les “Magnificences” au mariage du duc de Joyeuse, Paris, 1581’, Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle: Paris 1953, 241–64
R. Lebègue: ‘Les représentations dramatiques à la cour des Valois’, Les fêtes de la Renaissance [I]: Royaumont 1955, 85–91
R.W. Lowe: Marc-Antoine Charpentier et l’opéra de collège (Paris, 1966)
I. Mamczarz: Les intermèdes comiques italiens au XVIIIe siècle en France et en Italie (Paris, 1972)
E. Lance: ‘Molière the Musician: a Tercentenary View’, MR, xxxv (1974), 120–30
A. Niderst: ‘La tragédie à intermèdes musicaux (1650–1670)’, Les premiers opéras en Europe: Paris 1988, 141–51
M. Noiray: ‘L'opera italiana in Francia nel secolo XVIII’, SOI, ii (1991)
J.S. Powell: ‘L’aspect proteiforme du premier internède du Malade imaginaire’, Société Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Bulletin (July, 1991), 2–14
A. Fabiano: I ‘buffoni’ alla conquista di Parigi tra ‘Ancien Régime’ e Restaurazione (1752–1815) (Turin, 1998)
J.S. Powell: Music and Theatre in France, 1600–1680 (New York, 2000)
JAMES R. ANTHONY/(with M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET)