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Anne-Pierre-Jacques de Vismes du Valgay (1745-1819) was a French entrepreneur and cultural figure. He was twice the director of the Paris Opéra, the first time in 1778-80, the second in 1799-1800.

Early life

Devismes was born in Paris, the son of Pierre Martin de Vismes and his wife Marie-Louise (née Legendre).

Desvismes made money working as a tax farmer ///insert link]. He made contacts among the rich and powerful, becoming the brother-in-law of Benjamin de Laborde, the Tax-Farmer General. His sister Adelaide-Suzanne (1753-1832) married B de L. Ref:Pougin, p.9.

Brother: army officer and librettist.

Devismes was a businessman. He took great interest in the arts, but he had no experience in the world of theatre or music. It was thus a surprise to many when he offered to take over the running of the Paris Opéra.

First term as director of the Opéra

The City of Paris had administered the Académie Royale de Musique et de Danse (the Paris Opéra) since 1749, but by the late 1770s, the city authorities were worried by the institution's mounting debts. In 1777, Devismes offered to take over the management of the Opéra, paying the City a deposit of 500,000 (?) livres. In return, the City would give the Opéra an annual subsidy of 80,000 livres and Devismes would have complete control of the administration, staff and artistic programming. His contract would run for 12 years, beginning in April 1778. The contract was made official on 18 October 1777 and excited great public interest. Ref:Pougin p.8; Serre p.?

Berton artistic director at the time.

In February

Reforms and artistic programme

Devismes began with sweeping reforms: he had the theatre refurbished, expanding the stage and the orchestra pit, seating some of the audience on the stage, and removing the large chandelier in the auditorium. He introduced new rules, including banning women whose wigs were too high from attending performances.

Devismes had equally ambitious plans for the Opéra's repertoire. He took up his post at a time when there was great ferment in the Parisian musical world. Aficionados of opera were split between supporters of the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, famous for his stylistic reforms, and partisans of Niccolo Piccinni, who represented the Italian school. Others looked backward to previous generations, extolling the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau (who had died in 1764) or Jean-Baptiste Lully, seen as the founder of the French operatic tradition. Devismes' response was to provide something to suit all tastes, greatly expanding the number of works performed, mixing new and old and French and Italian. This also had a didactic purpose, as audiences could compare the different musical styles. Devismes announced this approach by staging a short theatrical prologue, Les trois âges de l'opéra ("The Three Ages of Opera"), with words by his brother and music arranged by André Grétry. The "three ages" in question were the eras of Lully, Rameau and Gluck and the piece contained short extracts from their works. Pougin p.16 //Work premiered 27 April 1778 (Pougin 20)///

1778-1779 season

Devismes began the 1778-79 season with Les trois âges de l'opéra. He wanted to follow it with a major opera /// by Grétry, the tragédie lyrique Andromaque, based on the famous play by Racine. Unfortunately, because the libretto of the opera contained lines taken directly from Racine, the Comédie Française, which had a monopoly on performing the play, took legal action to stop the opera going ahead. Rehearsals were abandoned on 26 May.<note: Andromaque finally staged 1780 or 1781 (?)

Devismes now turned to Piccinni and his librettist Jean-François Marmontel, who had scored a success with Piccinni's first French opera Roland, in January that year. Roland was an adaptation of a libretto by Quinault, originally set by Lully in ///. Marmontel wanted to capitalise on its success by adapting another Quinault libretto for Piccinni, Atys. However, Marmontel claimed the task of altering the old French libretto so it could be set in a modern Italian musical style was so great that he deserved to be paid as much as if he was the original author. Devismes, a stickler for the rules, refused Marmontel's demand and so Atys remained unperformed.

Devismes was now desperate to fill the schedule and he had the idea of inviting a troupe of Italian musicians to perform Italian-language works at the Opéra. This had been done before, in 1752, an event which had provoked the famous debate on the relative merits of French and Italian music, the Querelle des Bouffons. But Devismes intended to stage more substantial pieces. He engaged Piccinni to oversee the musical direction. The first such work to appear was Piccinni's Le finte gemelle on 11 June 1778. It had been a success at its debut in Italy in 1771, but the Parisian audience was only lukewarm. Perhaps the most /// Mozart.

The season continued with Italian operas by Pasquale Anfossi and Giovanni Paisiello and ballets by Noverre and Gardel. Devismes also revived Rameau's Castor et Pollux in October, a great success with the public (it ran for 34 performances). Devismes thought he had finally found the important new work he needed in Étienne-Joseph Floquet's tragédie lyrique Hellé. However, it was booed at its premiere on 3 January 1779 and lasted for only three performances, forcing Devismes to revive Lully's Thésée the following month. Again, the public showed little enthusiasm, but by this time Devismes had other, more pressing problems.

1777-78 season: only three new works

Disputes

Devismes' appointment had been controversial from the start and his personality, often inflexible and tactless, did not help matters. He soon fell out with the artists of the Opéra: the singers, dancers and musicians. They were not used to discipline being strictly enforced and had a long history of quarrelling with the management or among themselves. For instance, the leading ladies Rosalie Levasseur and Mlle Beaumesnil (born Henriette-Adélaïde de Villars) fell out in the 1778-79 season over a poor review Beaumesnil had received for her performance as Télaïre in Castor et Pollux, a role Levasseur considered she had made her own. Beaumesnil believed the review was the work of one of Levasseur's friends and threatened to resign in protest.///

This dispute was nothing compared to the hostility Devismes soon faced from many of his personnel. The underlying motive may have been an attempt by the singers, dancers and musicians to wrest control of the Opéra and run it themselves, in the same way the Comédie Française was run by its own actors. In September 1778, a group of Opéra artists attempteed to oust Devismes by outbidding him and offering to take over the running of the institution for surety money of 600,000 livres and no subsidies. On being informed, King Louis XVI was unimpressed, referring to the artists as canaille (scum).

The ringleader of the cabal against Devismes was the leading ballerina Marie-Madeleine Guimard, and the discontented artists gathered to discuss action at her house, the Hôtel de la Chaussée d'Antin. They compared themselves to the leaders of the American Revolution which was then under way: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock. The king responded with harsh measures to the insubordination and the refusal of the artists to perform as required. The ballerina Mademoisselle Duplant, who had worked for the Opéra for 18 years, was summarily dismissed without a pension. D'Auberval was also expelled, but forced to continue working until Easter. Thereafter, he was forbidden to enter the Opéra ever again, even if he had bought a ticket.

These draconian measures came too late for Devismes, who found his situation untenable. On 23 January 1779, he tendered his resignation. //// Accepted February. Details of deal. More disputes. Continues as artistic director.

1779-1780 season

Introduction ////

The first production in the new season was an oddity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, now most famous as an Enlightenment philosopher, was also a music theorist and composer. In 1752, he had produced a short opera, Le devin du village, which had become an immense popular success. Nevertheless, Rousseau was annoyed by continuing allegations that he had not written the music himself. To disprove his critics, he decided to take the same libretto and set some sections to new music.

After the failures of Echo et Narcisse and Amadis de Gaule, Devismes was forced to turn to Marmontel and Piccinni again. Somehow, he managed to end his quarrel with Marmontel and acquire the rights to stage Atys, which appeared on 22 February 1780. After some adjustments were made to the score, the opera was a success from the third performance onwards.

Atys was the last major production before Devismes left the Opéra in March. Under his administration, the institution had run up 700,000 livres of debts. Devismes did not have to pay these. Moreover, he was given 24,000 livres in compensation and a pension of 9,000 livres a year.

Interim

Virtually nothing is known of Devismes' life for the next 19 years. He may have returned to his job as a tax farmer. It is unknown how he fared during the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789. He re-emerges from obscurity in 1798 as the probable author of two unsuccessful opera comiques for the Theatre Montansier. ///

Meanwhile, the Opéra went through many changes and a troubled time.//// After Devismes' resignation, it came under the control of the Maison du Roi (the Royal Household). The artists partially got their way and a committee was established to run the Opéra with Devismes' predecessor, Berton, as director general.

Second term as director of the Opéra

Although now aged 55, Devismes showed the same energy in his second term as he had in his first. He began with some successful revivals, starting with Grétry's La caravane du Caire on 1 November 1799, followed by Antonio Sacchini's Arvire et Évélina and Gluck's Armide. However, on 11 February 1800, he was arrested and charged with embezzlement during his first period as director. The background to this scandal is murky and the charges were dismissed on 28 February, allowing Devismes to resume his post.

Devismes staged a number of new works: the tragédie lyrique Hécube by the young composer Fontenelle; a popular ballet, La dansomanie, with music by Méhul and choreography by Gardel; and a one-act opera by his own wife, Jeanne-Hippolyte Devismes, Praxitèle.

Two productions in late 1800 became famous for extra-musical reasons. Napoleon Bonaparte had now become sole ruler of France. The police discovered an alleged plot to assassinate him on the evening of 18 October 1800 as he travelled to the Opéra to watch Porta's Les Horaces. An even more notorious conspiracy to kill Napoleon on the way to the Opéra, the Plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise (otherwise known as the Machine infernale), was thwarted on 24 December. That evening saw the premiere of Daniel Steibelt's adaptation of Haydn's oratorio The Creation. ///

On 28 December 1800, Devismes was summarily dismissed from his post as director, for reasons which are unclear. He received no financial compensation. His partner, Bonet, kept his job.

Final years

After his dismissal, Devismes took up writing, publishing three books: Pasilogie, ou La musique considérée comme langue universelle (1806); Éléonore d'Amboise, duchesse de Bretagne (1807), an historical novel; and Nouvelles recherches sur l'origine et la destruction des pyrimades d'Égypte (1812), a work of amateur Egyptology. He retired to the small town of Caudebec in Normandy.

He had not yet finished with the Opéra. On the downfall of Napoleon in 1814, Devismes, then aged 69, sent a letter to the minister of the new regime, Blacas, offering to take over the institution for a third time. Blacas declined. Devismes continued to work on his memoirs, which were never published, and died on 3 May 1819.

Sources

• Arthur Pougin Un directeur d'opéra au dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1914. Available online here [1].