Parisian theatrical, artistic, social, and political life comes alive in Mark Everist's impressive institutional history of the Paris Odéon, an opera house that flourished during the Bourbon Restoration. Everist traces the complete arc of the Odéon's short but highly successful life from ascent to triumph, decline, and closure. He outlines the role it played in expanding operatic repertoire and in changing the face of musical life in Paris.

Everist reconstructs the political power structures that controlled the world of Parisian music drama, the internal administration of the theater, and its relationship with composers and librettists, and with the city of Paris itself. His rich depiction of French cultural life and the artistic contexts that allowed the Odéon to flourish highlights the benefit of close and innovative examination of society's institutions.

List of Illustrations
Tables
Music Examples
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction

Part One: The Institution
1.Un délassement honnête et instructif: The City and Music Drama in Restoration Paris
2. L’obligation de jouer le répertoire du premier ordre: Repertory, Infrastructure and Management at the Odéon
3. Cet ensemble si harmonieux et si parfait: The Odéon’s Personnel
4. La férule sévère et souvent capricieuse: Control and Consumption

Part Two: The Repertory
5. Une heure à l’opéra-comique: Occasional Works
6. Rendre service à notre scène lyrique: The Pasticcio
7. Le fruit défendu: Opéra Comique and the French Tradition
8. Les heureux étrangers: Italian Music Drama
9. Une leçon de morale: German Music Drama

Conclusion
Appendices
Bibliography
Index

Mark Everist is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. He is the author of French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry, and Genre (1994) and Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France (1989), as well as editor of three of the volumes in the series Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris.

"Everist's command of the primary sources is truly virtuosic, a model of thoroughness and care. He moves effortlessly between government bureaucracy, over-arching business strategies, day-to-day management, and the character of the audience."—Music & Letters

["M]akes a convincing case for writing this short-lived but influential venue into our histories of the Parisian musical landscape. In addition, it raises questions as to how the operatic activities of one small theater—a theater only partially committed to music drama for a brief period of time—relate to operatic activities and musical meaning in other locales."—Journal of the American Musicological Society

"Everist has truly met his ambitious goal of writing a synchronic study of a complicated theater with a complicated repertory in a complicated city. . . . Nor can one help but admire this book’s author, whose thorough, painstakingly researched, and far-reaching study provides the patient reader a sense of acquaintanceship with a time and place in some ways quite unlike our own, and thus all the more worth knowing."—Journal of Musicological Research

"Everist’s book is best seen as a statement of faith in writing about music theatre, for the future, in a new way, respecting legal as well as social fashions."—Times Literary Supplement (UK)