French grand opera, this book argues, was a different and more complex kind of theater than we ordinarily suppose. Focusing on the period of grand opera's rise, its dominance, and its final decline, Professor Fulcher shows that it was a subtly used tool of the state. Using the Opera's archives, she analyses the mechanism and goals of state intervention in the theatre and how these underwent subtle change. As she demonstrates, the official framework helped to shape not only the nature of artistic development, but also politicized the theatrical experience itself. Although concerned with the audience's understanding of the operas, this book is not narrowly a 'reception history'. Rather, it is an attempt to see the part played by grand opera in a specific social and cultural context - how it arose within larger structures and in turn reacted back finally upon them.

Jane Fulcher received her MA and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She teaches courses and seminars that focus on 19th and particularly 20th-century music within its larger cultural, social, political, and intellectual contexts. A specialist in French music, she is especially interested in the relation between music and cultural theory from a sociological, anthropoligical, and historical, as well as from a literary perspective. Dr. Fulcher is General Editor of the New Cultural History of Music Series of Oxford University Press and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (Oxford University Press, 2011).

She has received fellowship awards from ACLS, NEH, the Wissenschaft Kolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris), the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, New Jersey). She has also served three times as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).