Reading Critics Reading Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848

This book is among the first to examine French opera and ballet criticism during the first half of the nineteenth century both as a historical and a literary phenomenon. It thus provides a new and badly needed perspective for scholars and other commentators who have often been willing to treatthe journalistic responses to such musical genres chiefly as a simple source of factual information. The essays, taken from a conference in Oxford in 1996, explore the kinds of problem encountered and the types of methodology that might be employed in trying to interpret these critical responses;they throw light on such aspects as the cultural attitudes underlying the writers' rhetoric, the aesthetic stances and ideological agendas at play, and how modes of production influenced content.