Opéra-ballet

Opéra-ballet is the French eighteenth-century operatic form in which dance and song are given roughly equal dramatic weight, with each act often presenting a self-contained narrative.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 6 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag Opéra-ballet, premiered between 1745 and 1783. A span of 38 years separates the earliest from the most recent, which gives the modern reader a useful longitudinal view of how the genre evolved over time. The principal composers represented under this heading include Jean-Philippe Rameau, André Campra, and André Grétry. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the Opéra-ballet tradition catalogued here were composed in French. The works fall principally within the Classical, Unknown, and Baroque traditions. For the listener encountering the genre for the first time, the language and era of a particular work usually offer the most useful first orientation: a Romantic opera in Italian will sound and behave differently from a Baroque opera in French, even where the genre tag is the same.

Representative works from this genre catalogued by OperaPedia include L'Europe galante by André Campra, Le temple de la Gloire by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1745), and Les sibarites by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1753). These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag Opéra-ballet refers to in practice. As always, the full encyclopaedia entries set out the synopsis, the principal voice categories required, the premiere details, and the production history through to the present day.

Houses associated in this catalogue with premieres in the Opéra-ballet tradition include Fontainebleau and Palace of Fontainebleau. The clustering of a genre at a particular venue is rarely accidental: it reflects the resident orchestra's strengths, the kind of singers under contract, and the audience's established appetite for a particular kind of evening.

The complete list of catalogued operas in the Opéra-ballet tradition is set out below in chronological order of premiere. Each title is linked to a full editorial entry; each composer is linked to a full biographical entry. We invite the curious reader to follow those internal links rather than treating the present page as a destination. The encyclopaedia is intended above all to encourage cross-reading among related works.