La Muse de l’Opéra is a cantata for soprano and orchestra by Clérambault, who was once and is still considered to be the composer of the most beautiful French cantatas. Moncrif’s libretto delights in summarising in the monologue of a modern, albeit imaginary, muse the common scenes of classical French opera – war, hunting, storms, birdsong, sleep, the Underworld. Clérambault’s music makes one regret even more that he never wrote an opera:
“Ah! Are you not too happy
That one seduces you for pleasure?”
This edition of La Muse de l’Opéra is the first in a series of orchestral cantatas, with middle parts recomposed by the musicologist Graham Sadler, which the Éditions du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles has decided to make available to performers. Indeed, while most 18th-century French cantatas were written for solo voice and basso continuo, or for a small instrumental ensemble, Graham Sadler has shown that many of them were in fact composed for an orchestral group – particularly for the large orchestra of the Académie Royale de Musique and the Concert Spirituel – as is evident from their writing and publication in reduced scores: the reconstruction of the lost middle parts allows them to regain their full splendour.