Performing Scholarship for the Paris Opéra

Abstract

This chapter examines an opera based on an ancient Greek subject created by two scholars of ancient Greek music, dance, and history: Maurice Emmanuel, a composer, musicologist, and dance historian specializing in ancient Greek music and dance, and Théodore Reinach, a librettist, archaeologist, musicologist, classicist, and numismatician. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to the reconstruction of ancient Greek dance and contributions to musicology. It then demonstrates how tensions between conflicting trends manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine, with choreography by Nicola Guerra and a libretto by Théodore Reinach based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. During this time the Opéra had a eurhythmic dance section, a style that Emmanuel and critics such as André Levinson viewed with skepticism. In contrast to the Greek inspirations of Duncanism, Delsartism, and eurhythmics, Levinson used Emmanuel’s research to argue that classical ballet was the true inheritor of the ancient Greek tradition. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced during the eurhythmic years, while illustrating some of the conflicts between abstract and embodied knowledge.