Fanning the flames of fashion: André Grétry’s Panurge dans l’isle des lanternes (1785) and its extramusical artifacts
In a May 1785 letter to her cousin Elizabeth Cranch, future First Lady of the United States Abigail Adams recounts the plot of a popular new opera she and her husband attended in Paris titled, Panurge dans l’isle des lanternes. In addition to the plot, Adams describes how Parisian music and fashion cultures often overlapped: “When a celebrated piece appears at either of the Play houses, there is very soon some Hat or Cap, [that] comes out named after it. Panurge appears in a very large hat as large as an umbrella, and it was not a week before the Milliners had made a hat, which is called Chapeau à la Panurge; it is a straw hat stripped with black.”
The popularity of the opera, composed by André Grétry, moved well beyond the walls of the theater, as evidenced by the hat. Panurge also inspired several extramusical artifacts that memorialized the work including a woven cotton fabric depicting scenes from the opera, manufactured by a textiles company (Petitpierre et Cie) in Nantes (the same company also released a similar fabric based on Grétry’s earlier opera La caravane du Caire). A 1785 issue of the French fashion magazine Galerie des Modes describes the opera and includes an image of a woman’s dress including a “sable and gauze apron trimmed à la Panurge." And the hat described by Adams in her letter is also depicted in another fashion accessory made in response to the opera. A folded hand-held paper fan, which was recently acquired for Stanford’s Memorial Library of Music, was manufactured around the time of the opera’s premiere. The fan includes three tableaux from the opera on the recto, each encircled with jewels.
The opera’s plot follows Panurge, a character from François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantegruel books. Panurge is caught in a folly that involves a shipwreck off a fictional island near China where his abandoned wife Climène — disguised first as a local man and then a sybil — teaches him a lesson about marriage, fidelity, and the cunningness of women. The opera was hugely popular and was given a total of 211 performances between its premiere (January 25, 1785 at the Académie Royale de Musique [the “Opéra”]) and 1824. It has since been largely forgotten, with only one recording available of the opera’s first act. The opera itself was significant in Grétry’s oeuvre; it was one of five works written between 1782 and 1785 that musicologist David Charlton notes represents a shift from Grétry’s previous focus on tragic plots towards lyric comedies (pp. 200-202). These were the first operas based on comic plots, according to Grétry’s memoirs, to be performed at the Opéra, which was more so the domain of lyric tragedy and other serious operas. Panurge dans l’isle des lanternes was the last opera of this period of Grétry’s comic phase, and like the earlier La caravane du Caire (1783), centered spectacle, dance and orientalist themes, all of which were increasingly favored by French audiences.
The central tableau on the fan depicts Panurge hoisted above a ceremonial procession, flanked on either side by local islanders. It also shows Climène both with and without her disguises. The right lateral medallion illustration depicts the scene where Panurge talks with Climène's male persona, seeking advice on which of the local women he should ask to a ball. The left lateral medallion shows Panurge in conversation with the Sybil at the mouth of a cave. Panurge is seen kneeling in front of her, depicting the moment in Act III, Scene IV where Panurge begs for his wife’s forgiveness at the feet of the Sybil, still unaware they are one in the same. The illustrations are painted in gouache and the paper of the fan is mounted on fifteen carved mother-of-pearl sticks. The two outer sticks (the guards) are also carved and painted, depicting an image of a woman holding what appears to be a temple adorned with columns. This figure might represent the goddess Lignobie, to whom the characters in the opera pray for love’s blessings. The libretto describes her temple as “porticoed,” and her placement on the guards of the fan suggests an “encasing” of the narrative, watching over the action of the lovers.
The verso contains two arias from Act I, complete with musical notation and text. The upper aria is the first of the opera, sung by Climène (“Que n’êtes vous dans mon pays”) details how Climène was abandoned by her husband as well as her thoughts on the pains of love. The lower aria is Panurge’s first number (“Les voyage sont à la mode”), in which he sings of his libertine life philosophy and escapades. The choice of arias further demonstrates the fan’s Panurge-Climène focus. Because fans were, by the eighteenth century, strictly a women’s fashion accessory (often thought of as “the woman’s sword”), one might conclude that the fan aligns with the opera’s overall morals of love, spousal fidelity, and the women’s unique intellect in these matters.
The music on the verso is additionally intriguing because it is curved to fit the arc-shape of the fan, indicating that a special plate in the shape of the fan would have been engraved specifically for production. This might suggest that the manufacturer intended to produce many of these fans for sale. The Panurge fan, however, was likely owned by a woman of substantial financial means. As Rebecca Harris-Warrick notes, the least expensive seats at the Porte-St-Martin theater, which housed the Paris Opéra from 1781 to 1794, were the parterre, “where the spectators, all of them male, stood throughout the performance” (Grove). We might conclude that the fan belonged to a woman with the means to afford (or accompany someone who could afford) more expensive seats.
Fans remained fashionable in Europe through the nineteenth century and were often thought of as hand-held paintings, pieces of art that publicly demonstrated one’s cultural sensibilities. The Panurge fan was no exception: it allowed women to show off their musical taste through the sartorial rhetoric of Paris’s fashion economy.
Bibliography
- Charlton, David. Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
- Harri, Moira F. “Fans.” In Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Global Perspectives, edited by Joanne B. Eicher and Phyllis G. Tortora. Oxford: Berg, 2010.
Harris-Warwick, Rebecca, David Charlton, Janet Johnson, Richard Langham Smith, and Charles Pitt. “Paris (Opera).” Grove Music Online (2002).
Guest blogger Michael Kinney is a postdoctoral fellow with the Stanford Center on Longevity. His research engages the politics and ethics of listening by asking how sociocultural narratives about the human life course shape sound and musical practices, communities, institutions, histories, and aesthetics. He received his PhD in musicology from Stanford in 2023.
We wish to thank Chris Hacker and Astrid Smith from the Digital Production Group for their careful and thorough imaging work, and Sarah Newton from the Conservation Department for creating the unique protective case for the item.
This article is one in a series highlighting rare music materials in the Stanford Libraries collections.