Molière’s comédie-ballets on the Croatian stage and the possibilities of a historically informed approach to their interpretation

A significant part of Molière’s opus is distinguished by his cooperation with composers in the hybrid musical-dramatic genre of the comédie-ballet (ballet comedy). In terms of scope and ambition the late works The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670, music by Jean-Baptiste Lully) and The Imaginary Invalid (1673, music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier) stand out. They have been performed relatively frequently and in different ways from the time of their creation to the present time, even in Croatia. In doing so, the original musical and dance numbers were often omitted or replaced by other kinds of music and dance, although not always. At a time when numerous musical ensembles are devoting themselves to historically informed performance of early music, attempting to reconstruct not only the musical instruments, but also the manners in which the musical works were performed in the past, certain theatres and specialized festivals go for this kind of revival in terms of theatrical performance, occasionally also in the case of Molière’s ballet comedies. They strive to be faithful to the period when they were conceived in musical terms (period instruments and their replicas, instrumental and vocal techniques, but also approaches to interpretation from the past) and theatrical terms (set design, costume design, lighting, acting and dance, sometimes even the stage machinery close to the time of creation). The goal of this research is to establish how many traces of this approach are present in the rich reception of Molière in Croatian theatre. The performance of The Bourgeois Gentleman on the stage of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 2009 under the baton of Saša Britvić and in a production by Krešimir Dolenčić, with the participation of the Croatian Baroque Ensemble, is the most recent example of this striving for „authenticity“, but by no means the only one. In addition to the two aforementioned works, the ballet comedy George Dandin (1668, with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully) was also performed on the Croatian stage, and this kind of approach was the most common in the 1920s.. After examining the context of the creation and presenting the specifics of these three works, the article will refer to their documented performances in the period from 1922 to 2009 in Zagreb and Osijek. With the help of reception in the press and the preserved recordings, it will be attempted to establish whether a continuity of historically informed performance tendencies is present.