This project investigates the issue of performance practice from the standpoint of the actors’ relationship with music. We investigate how it contributes to understanding the changing trends in declamation between 1650 and 1780, and how it inspires and drives today’s performers of period drama.
Forty years ago, pioneering work, notably Dene Barnett, Eugène Green, Philippe Lénaël and Michel Verschaeve, paved the way to reviving early performance techniques based on treatises on song, grammar and prosody in the 17th (and to some extent) 18th century. The art of declamation in the 19th and 20th centuries (until the 1940’s) is well documented, with numerous archive recordings and treatises on diction appearing from the 1820’s onwards. It should be noted that there is a gap in the history of declamation between the late 17th century and the 1780’s. This research project hopes to show it evolved outside its phonetic aspects, in response to the aesthetic trends emerging around 1720-1730 and then from 1750. By studying recitatives from Lully to Gluck and dipping into contemporary French language journals, it aims to bring out an 18th century manual of declamation to help the staging of productions and encourage a rethinking of stage productions and the related imagery.
