While the music historian’s view of the French Revolution was at first dominated by what appeared as the new regime’s specific creation, its repertory of hymns and songs, opera gradually emerged as the genre that best represented the spirit of the period. As might be expected, the revolutionary component in operatic practice has received the most persistent attention, in particular the ephemeral repertoire of ‘faits historiques’ and ‘faits patriotiques’ that became the mainstream of the Opera’s repertoire between 1792 and 1794. Operas based on heroic or romantic plots, like Cherubini’s Lodoiska or Mehul’s Mélidore et Phrosine, were also brought under the ‘revolutionary’ heading, the former because it involved the storming of a castle, the latter because it presented literary and musical features – incestuous love, daring experiments in musical continuity – which are easily bracketed with representations of social and ideological upheaval. The purpose of the present article is not to question the suitability of a political reading of French opera under the Revolution, but to place it in a wider perspective: operas of the 1790s, compared with the repertoire of the late Ancien Regime, can be viewed just as representative of continuity as of rupture. Similarly, when these works came under fire after the end of the Terror, it is not surprising to see typically Ancien Regime values and turns of phrase surface again, although their undertones were now linked to the new cultural climate that emerged under the Directory. How closely matters of style and taste were correlated with ideological factors, however, will remain shrouded in uncertainty; what can be reconstructed, chiefly, is the framework of intertextuality that makes it necessary to consider Parisian opera of the 1780s and 1790s as a coherent whole.

The phrase ‘terrorisme musical’ occurs in a review published in March 1797, one week after the first performance of Cherubini’s Médée: ‘If ever a theme and dramatic idea lent themselves to terrorisme musical, it is certainly that of Médée; furthermore, the composer neglected none of the means at his disposal, and deployed all his talent in this genre.’