Music, the Market, and the Marvellous: Parisian Féerie, 1864-1900

Music, the Market, and the Marvellous examines féerie, the French fairy play, in the last third of the nineteenth century. It is among the first book-length studies on the genre, the first in a language other than French, and the first from a musicological perspective. Sabbatini demonstrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, féerie was still thriving during the fin de siècle, giving rise to innovations such as composerly féerie and scientific féerie. The plays, the theatre industry, and urban geography are discussed together, as befits a commercial genre where the marvellous was shaped by the market. Recovering this forgotten -- but once hugely influential -- repertoire provides an occasion to rethink generic taxonomies of Parisian theatre and the ontology of nineteenth-century ’popular’ theatre.

Tommaso Sabbatini, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Bristol

Tommaso Sabbatini is a music historian specializing in nineteenth-century French theatre. He is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol and McGill University. His research has been supported by the French Government, the American Musicological Society, and the British Academy. He has edited the Opéra-Comique production book from the French première of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca (forthcoming).