(Fr.). A type of French opera or opéra-ballet that has a plot drawn from fairy tales and/or makes extensive use of elements of magic and the merveilleux. In his ballet-héroïque Les fêtes de Polymnie (1745), Rameau ranked the ‘féerie’ with history and fable as a resource for the lyric stage. A huge corpus of opéras (such as Monsigny’s La belle Arsène, 1773), opéras-ballets (such as Zélindor, roi des sylphes by François Francoeur and François Rebel, 1745) and opéras comiques (such as Duni’s La fée Urgèle, 1765, and Grétry’s Zémire et Azor, 1771) of the late Baroque and Classical periods in France attests its popularity. While the term opéra féerie was uncommon in the 18th century (although it did exist, e.g. Dezède’s Alcindor, 1787), and entered the current vocabulary only after 1800, modern scholars use it with justice to refer to these earlier works. Some early 19th-century examples employ the term (e.g. Isouard’s Cendrillon, 1810, Catel’s Zirphile et Fleur de Myrte, 1818, and Carafa’s La belle au bois dormant, 1825). After this period the féerie survived in ballet. (For the German 19th-century fairy tale opera, see Märchenoper.)
D. Diderot: ‘Féerie’, ‘Merveilleux’, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. D. Diderot and others (Paris, 1751–80)
‘Fée, féerie’, Annales dramatiques, ou Dictionnaire général des théâtres, ed. Babault (Paris, 1808–12/R)
P. Ginisty: La féerie (Paris, 1910/R)
M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET