Genre-Style and Spiritual-Ethical Metamorphosis of French Musical Theater of the 17th-20th Centuries

The purpose of the work is to identify the genre-stylistic and spiritual-meaning specifics of the French musical theater of the New Age and its evolutionary paths in the European culture of the 17th-20th centuries. The historical paths of the development of French musical theater of the 17th–20th centuries reveal its genre and stylistic diversity, represented by the typologies of “lyrical tragedy”, “salvation opera”, Empire opera, “grand” French opera, lyric opera and numerous varieties of samples of experimental musical theater and synthetic genres formations of the 20th century. The timbre-intonational and dramaturgical palette of the mentioned genres is organically inscribed in the stylistic priorities of French culture and music of the New Age Baroque, Classicism, Empire, Romanticism, Biedermeier, etc. At the same time, the mentioned typologies of the French musical theater combine a number of common features, among which we single out the essential role of its cult-mysterious primary basis, the corresponding types of imagery and their leading features, oriented to the cultivation of Christian virtues, the idea of spiritual transformation, the harmonious union of the earthly and sacred worlds. The appeal to educational and didactic, as well as spiritual and ethical factors in French opera (even at the level of biblical thinking of own history) conditions its appeal to large-scale bright spectacular performances with a large number of mass and ballet scenes, the genesis of which went back to the spiritual traditions of the culture of French absolutism in its historical development The specified genre metamorphoses of modern French opera at the level of “genre memory” focused the attention of the listener-spectator first of all on the original manner of conveying the poetic Word, its spiritual and ethical meaning, which went back to the “mysterious mode” of the French musical theater, on a clear fixation of dance-plastic movement-gesture, which collectively retained its significance at all stages of its historical existence.