The history of the opéra-comique reflects the political and cultural life
of France from the last days of the ancien régime, the tumult of the
Revolution and Napoleonic era, through the ongoing saga of France’s
search for the right mode of governance, and the decisive battle between
monarchy and republicanism that found its watershed not in the
revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, but in the defeat by Prussia in the
Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). The mentality that had fostered the steady
evolution of the opéra-comique from 1762 was altered forever by these
traumatic events. The victory of Prussia, the proclamation of the Second
Reich in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, that symbol of French
ascendancy in the apogee of Louis XIV’s golden reign, marked a change
of direction in French thinking, a turn away from the type of musical
theatre represented in the authentic traditions of opéra-comique, and a
search for a new intellectualism and abstraction in both music and art. The
strand of popular culture was to flow into a reduced and more vulgar form
of comedy and satire in the new genre of the operetta (a process initiated
in 1858 by Offenbach’s brilliant parody of the fashion for neo-classicism
and aesthetic intellectualism in Orphée aux enfers staged in his own
theatre, the Bouffes-Parisiens). Sentimentality and risqué manners would
dominate the operetta after 1870, and confirm its break with the OpéraComique
and its establishment as a new genre.