Music, Copyright, and Intellectual Property during the French Revolution: A Newly Discovered Letter from André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry

Before the French Revolution began in 1789, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry composed opéra comique that achieved great success both in Paris and abroad. As the revolutionary tides swept toward republican musical aesthetics, the illustrious Grétry receded from the public eye and briefly struggled to remain afloat. A newly discovered letter that he wrote during this period to the famed Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes offers a window into the effects that revolutionary legislation had on musicians. Sieyes, author of the seminal revolutionary text “What is the Third Estate?”, pioneered liberty of the press and authors’ rights legislation as a member of the French National Assembly and National Convention. His efforts were realized when the first intellectual property laws relating to music became codified in 1791 and 1793. In the 1790 letter, although Grétry praises Sieyes’ policy proposals, he also raises personal and professional injustices surrounding intellectual property rights to music. Grétry’s letter addresses his concerns about the translations of stage works from French to Italian, the unsanctioned performances of opéras and opéras comiques, and the general welfare of French musicians. While in his nineteenth-century memoirs Grétry recasts himself as a republican, this letter from early in the Revolution focuses on musicians’ more tangible concern to, in his own words, “place bread on the table.” The letter invites an interrogation of how musicians approached the new patronage structure in revolutionary France, which abruptly transferred from the court and church to the nation as a result of political upheaval. A valuable addition to scholarly understanding of Grétry’s participation in the Revolution, the letter simultaneously begs a rethinking of his contribution to revolutionary causes and a reevaluation of musicians’ professional activities during the French Revolution.

them. When Grétry wrote to Sieyes, the two men had already witnessed a profound upheaval in the economic and legal structures that had once dictated the French music market.
The Philosopher and the Composer 5 At the time that Sieyes received Grétry's letter, he had followed an unlikely trajectory to become one of the most profound political philosophers of the French Revolution. 13 His father had served as a minor royal official in the town of Fréjus in the Provence region of France. Sieyes attended the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris and also studied theology at the Sorbonne. Although his academic performance at both institutions was underwhelming, his personal papers reveal a brilliant mind grappling with philosophy, natural history, and political and economic theories during the 1770s and 1780s. 14 The clergy offered him a path to a secure livelihood, despite his generally negative view of religion. Indeed, he described himself as an ecclesiastic-administrator rather than as a priest. 15 His impressive career trajectory, which began in 1775, was achieved through patronage within the first estate. The Abbé de Césarge helped Sieyes to obtain a position as secretary to a royal almoner, de Lubersac, who soon became bishop of Tréguier in Brittany. After briefly serving as chaplain to the king's aunt, Madame Sophie, in 1780, Sieyes became vicor general of Chartres, then a canon of the cathedral chapter three years later, and a delegate of the diocese to the Sovereign Chamber of the Clergy in Paris. By 1788 he served as the Chartres chapter's chancellor as well as a representative to the provincial assembly of the Orléanais. Still, the ambitious cleric harbored resentment toward the nobility who occupied the most prestigious positions of the first estate, often at the expense of more deserving bourgeois clerics who were overlooked merely because of their meager social connections. 16 6 Sieyes exercised his assiduous study of philosophy and his critiques of Old Regime privilege when he wrote three pamphlets in reaction to the political, economic, and fiscal crises of 1788 and 1789 in France. The publications earned him celebrity in Paris and invitations to salons, and by 1789 he found himself elected deputy to the Estates-General as a representative of the Parisian third estate. 17 In What is the Third Estate?, a pamphlet published six months before the storming of the Bastille, Sieyes critiques the Old Regime socio-economic hierarchy that divided subjects into three classes-clergy in the first estate, nobility in the second, and everyone else in the third. Instead, he proffers that the third estate, although always treated as "nothing," was "everything" to the French nation and deserved to become "something" politically. 18 He proposed that citizens be grouped into four classes based on their production of wealth for the collective good of the nation, his own idea of political economy that combines Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract with Adam Smith's economic acumen. 19 In his position as deputy to the Estates-General, Sieyes applied his acute political thought by suggesting that because the Third Estate held true sovereignty, it unquestionably held the right to declare itself the National Assembly without participation from the first and second estates. His leadership earned Sieyes appointment to committees that would draft the new constitution and the Declaration of Rights of Man.
Regime, and although he had not mounted any recent successes as the Revolution heated, he held a long-established musical reputation in Paris. Biographers, musicologists, and historians have debated Grétry's navigation of the Revolution, some asserting that a heavy-handed government coerced his revolutionary compositions and others convinced that he was a committed republican. 20 While scholars have speculated about Grétry's support for the Revolution based on his musical output, his financial decisions, and his published Mémoirs, which appeared first in 1789 and again revised in 1797, personal reflections by Grétry from the height of the revolutionary turmoil remain sparse. 21 Although he never enjoyed a formal patronage relationship, during the 1770s and 1780s Grétry benefited from the French monarchy's support of opera and the admiration of Queen Marie Antoinette, receiving stipends from the Opéra-Comique and a royal pension. 22 Moreover, the royalist interpretations of his 1790 opéra comique Pierre le Grand and pre-revolutionary "Ô Richard, ô mon roi" colored the composer as politically conservative. By 1801, however, Grétry thoroughly recast himself in his published writings as an even-handed republican. 23 The question of his true sentiments regarding the Revolution has nonetheless persisted. 8 Both Sieyes and Grétry, despite their mutual patriotic rhetoric, seemed to foster ambivalent views about the Old Regime structures of privilege from which they had benefited. Sieyes demonstrated open distain for the second estate, the nobility, which he perceived as a lazy class that leached off the productive labor of the third estate. Yet his views about privilege became murky concerning the first estate, technically his own order. Sieyes viewed the clergy as a professional class that provided necessary services to the nation, particularly as educators. Thus, he did not initially support the retraction of the clerical tithe on the night of August 4, 1789. This hesitation instigated his gradual decline from leadership in the National Assembly because he was perceived as insufficiently radical, an ironic turn of events for the man who might be said to have single-handedly created the political rhetoric that ushered in the Revolution. Grétry enjoyed income from monarchical privilege until the Revolution. Although he also openly critiqued the nobility in his post-revolutionary writings, he never disparaged the monarchy. 24 What the two men undoubtedly shared was a disdain for the second estate and a view of man as "sociable not servile." 25 Grétry, like Sieyes, derided the servile status that non-noble professionals endured under the Old Regime at the hands of the idle nobility. Thus, when Grétry read Sieyes' legislative proposal to grant ownership rights to musicians, he likely saw a kindred spirit who valued the industry of professional individuals.
Petitions and a Personal Letter 9 When Grétry's letter arrived to Sieyes in late 1790, the composer's name was likely familiar to him not only for his opéra comiques, but also because Grétry's signature appears on an undated petition found among the private papers of Sieyes. 26 Composer Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac also signed the petition, in addition to many librettists associated with the Théâtre-Italien. 27 Sieyes received the petition because he was a member of the assembly's committee on liberty of the press. The petition asks the committee to present a law to the National Assembly that would protect the intellectual property rights of writers and artists. 28 Though undated, the document likely dates to the fall of 1789 or the spring of 1790, because in January 1790, Sieyes indeed brought a report on issues of liberty of the press and copyright to the constitutional committee. The petitioners either contacted Sieyes as he compiled the report during the fall of 1789 or upon hearing of his initiative in January 1790, with the hopes of encouraging the legislation to pass. 10 The suggestions outlined by the artists in the petition manifest quite clearly in the January 1790 report. The petitioners specifically demanded that no copies of their works be printed or sold without explicit written permission from the author, and that upon the author's death, his or her heirs would inherit rights to the work for a specified period of time. Though the legislation never passed in the form in which Sieyes presented it, the proposal he submitted on January 20, 1790, represents a milestone in French legal history on intellectual property rights and copyright. 29 The report proposes to grant intellectual property rights to individual creators of published works. Article XIV clearly states, "the property of a work should be assured to its author by the law." 30 The language used in the proposal seems to synthesize the competing natural right and property right perspectives about creative work that had competed for a century in pre-revolutionary Europe. 31 The report also outlines details of this legal protection from counterfeit publications and performances in four subsequent articles, and in article XIX, it explicitly states that the preceding articles apply equally to printed music and theatre scores-a key element that was absent from previous English laws on copyright. The petition Sieyes received from Grétry and his associates similarly asserts in the final paragraph: "Musicians, as talented associates with men of letters in the composition of works destined for the lyric theatre and in the community of work, interests, and rights with them, solicit from the National Assembly the same protections for their property and the same portion of profits from their operas in the provincial theatres." 32 11 Another undated petition sent to the National Assembly by authors and editors of music similarly focuses on the legal process of printing music, rather than on the abstract notion of natural ownership rights over products of self-expression. This petition proposes a detailed legal process by which music should be printed. It demands that "authors of music" register works with the municipality and obtain a visa before selling or ceding the manuscript. 33 The editor would then also register the work with the municipality to avoid duplicate printings. Engravers would subsequently have to request proper paperwork from editors, proving that the author granted rights for the publication. Next, compilers would need to obtain notarized permission if they wished to change any notes or instrument parts in a score. The legislation would forbid printers from moving forward with printing without a signed copy from the editor verifying that these processes had been properly followed. The petitioners also hoped to ban imported counterfeit works and to strictly regulate exportation. More than sixty musicians signed the petition, from professors at the École royale de chant et de déclamation to instrumental performers from the Théâtre Feydeau. Almost all of the signees would become professors at the Paris Conservatoire when it formed five years later. 12 Grétry's letter to Sieyes, dated October 16, 1790, was probably pursuant to the petitions he had signed, as he was likely pleased to see the petition's echoes in Sieyes' proposals. The short, four-page letter touches upon a host of legal and economic issues that concerned musicians at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly as the music market's foundation abruptly changed from royal pensions and privileges to an open market. The letter also offers a rare perspective on the composer's personal perspective about revolutionary ideology. Grétry ostensibly penned the letter to congratulate Sieyes about his recent work on liberty of the press, and in particular, the implications of the proposal for dramatic authors and composers. The letter may be read in its original orthography in Appendix 1. What begins as a congratulatory note, however, soon exhibits a host of anxieties, both professional and personal, that weighed on Grétry's mind as the Revolution unfolded. 13 Grétry contrasts Sieyes' proposals with those of the playwright Jean-François de La Harpe, who had been outspoken about authors' rights during this period. 34 Grétry critiques La Harpe's prejudiced view that only men of letters are "dramatic authors" because they write for the same theatre for which Racine and Molière had written-the Comédie-Française. 35 Grétry complains about how the Comédie-Française authors consider the writers and composers of the Comédie-Italienne as mere actors (a social group who suffered an unfavorable regard in eighteenth-century Paris). 36 Indeed, during his 1790 speeches, La Harpe had accused the sociétaires who ran the Comédie-Française of feeding off of a system of theatrical privilege that deprived authors of their property. In these arguments, however, La Harpe never addressed the rights of composers as authors of stage productions. 37 Grétry highlights Beaumarchais' Figaro (1786) as an example of this inequality between the two theatres, claiming that the play generated more revenue in a few performances than his own opéra comique Richard, Coeur de Lion (1776) ever could. He argues that as long as laws favored librettos and scripts over scores, artists who created successful opéra comique would continue to struggle to survive-with "no bread" on the table and "with but an écu from performances throughout the kingdom." 38 He encourages Sieyes to continue considering the "big picture," that is to say, the diverse creative energies involved in successful stage productions. 14 Grétry raises concerns surrounding the composer's natural right to his creative work as well as property rights over performances. Interestingly, he does not broach the issue of copyright at all. His concerns stemmed from the organization of Old Regime cultural institutions, particularly tensions between the Opéra and Comédie-Française versus the Comédie-Italienne and Théâtre Feydeau. 39 Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais, who Grétry singles out in his letter, had established the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers in 1777, motivated by some of the very issues Grétry raises in his 1790 letter. Indeed, many of the artists who signed the petitions to Sieyes had been members of this group. One of the primary concerns of the society was how provincial theatres continued a long tradition of restaging comic works that first appeared in Paris without first requesting permission from the authors. 40  authorities. 42 The increasing popularity of comic works and Italian translations, coupled with the enhanced role of music in comic productions, led librettists to include composers in their struggle for ownership over stage works. 15 Composers like Grétry argued that, like dramatic authors, their works were born of genius and thus should earn compensation when reproduced, whether through performance or print. Only weeks before the first law regarding copyright was passed in January 1791, Grétry submitted a letter to the Journal de Paris, which quipped that if theatres were going to continue performing his works without permission, they should at least correct the music using a faithful engraved copy. He goes on to say, "The hope that there will soon exist laws that make the property of artists respected makes me endure this last injustice with patience." 43 Despite the arguments set forth by Sieyes and the artists who encouraged him, the legislation that would eventually pass in January 1791 only protected the rights of libretto authors, and not explicitly the intellectual property of all artists. Still, during the Revolution, even musicians, singers, and dancers from the Opéra began to demand their share of performance profits, arguing that productions were the fruit of these artists' combined individual industry. 44 Yet Mark Darlow has demonstrated that arguments for the private interests of individual musicians and composers counterbalanced perceptions of music as a public utility until 1794. 45 Property rights are typically a private interest and, in France, music was increasingly viewed as a public good. It is along this line of argument that proponents of a free market saw copyright laws as a hindrance. The focus of Grétry's letter on the status of composers among men of letters and the unsanctioned performances of musical works indicate that he, along with many of his peers, increasingly viewed ownership of musical works as a moral, natural right, rather than merely a cut of revenues from print sales. This right would be increasingly valuable, as composers would inevitably struggle to live on publication revenues alone. During the summer of 1790, the French government abolished the nobility and stripped the clergy of their unique rights, making them government servants. With the two main patrons of music in France vanished, when Grétry wrote his letter to Sieyes, he likely had this other "big picture" in mind-a music market with no wealthy patrons, no privileges, and no pensions.
A Legal and Economic Legacy 16 A series of laws passed after Grétry's appeals to Sieyes achieved some of the legal protections for which composers had longed. The Le Chapelier Law, passed on June 14, 1791, champions private, individual interests. The remarkably short text had an immense impact on French society by abolishing craft guilds and trade unions. Guilds represented one of the pillars that upheld the absolutist, mercantile economic system of eighteenth-century France. Their abolishment represented a firm stand for individual rights over collective privilege. Moreover, it held a variety of ramifications for musicians. "The freedoms granted to labor and industry by constitutional law" through Le Chapelier ostensibly legalized the Physiocratic, that is, free market economic philosophy that had gained traction in France since the 1770s. 46 Article 1 bans guilds and hierarchical structure within a trade or profession, which came to be viewed as an unfair collective privilege of the stratified Old Regime social hierarchy. The law abolished the monarchy's monopoly over theatres, thus the right to open a theatre in Paris became available to anyone who had the means. Theatres multiplied from three official sanctioned theatres in 1789 to 35 in 1792. 47 This proliferation of performance venues caused a relaxation in censorship since it was no longer the centralized authority representing the crown that would determine repertoire choices. Theatres would instead negotiate repertoire decisions within individual institutions and among various municipal bodies. Thus, more parties and bureaucratic levels participated in the negotiation of repertoire decisions. 48 The idea at the heart of Le Chapelier-the abolishment of collective privilege for the sake of individual opportunity and enterprise-seemed to offer a profound opportunity for musicians. As venues multiplied, new theatres and revolutionary festivals would require more music. Unfortunately, the new venues also caused a flurry of unauthorized performances in Paris.

17
The French laws of 1791 and 1793 would come to be considered the first copyright laws that firmly applied to musicians as well as authors. Michel Thiollière identifies the law of January 1791 as the first author's right "with both a moral and patrimonial dimension." 49 Through it, works became public property five years after the author's death, until which time authors and their heirs held exclusive rights. Thus, the law both acknowledged the author's work as personal property, and also that artistic works constituted a public good that should be openly accessible in perpetuity. Although it was the first "right of performance," that is, authors had the right to dictate performance of their works during their lifetime; this right was limited in time. 50 The Law of 19-24 July, 1793, presented by Joseph Lakanal to the legislative assembly, brought debates on authors' rights to a close in France for a time. 51 The law granted authors, composers, painters, and draftsmen, the right to the printing and distribution of their work, and rights transferred to their heirs up to ten years after the authors' death. Strict regulations demanded that two copies of any printed work should remain in the Bibliothèque nationale or Cabinet des Estampes to establish an authoritative collection of legally printed works in France. 52 While this law definitively granted copyrights to all auteurs, it failed to protect against unsanctioned performances. It could be argued that composers had, as Grétry feared, fallen between the cracks in the vigorous arguments between librettists, theatre entrepreneurs, and actors.

18
Thoillière identifies a tension articulated in Isaac René Guy Le Chapelier's summation of the Law of 19-24 July, 1793, that persists between legal and economic perspectives into the twenty-first century on music copyright: Le Chapelier saw the work, the fruit of a writer's thoughts as "the most sacred, the most legitimate, the most unassailable, and […] the most personal of properties." [Le Chapelier] adds, "Although, as it is extremely just that men who cultivate the domain of thoughts reap the fruits of their labor, during their life and for some years after their death, no one must be able, without their consent, to possess the product of their genius. But also, after an established period of time, public property begins, and everyone should be able to print, publish the works that have contributed to the enlightenment of the human mind." This desire to reconcile authors' rights to their works with the existence of a public domain then leads to a limit in time, thus a separation from property rights, which are, by nature, perpetual. 53 19 In his 1791 letter to Beaumarchais, Grétry acknowledged that Le Chapelier sympathized with the plight of dramatic authors. 54 From the law of 1791 regarding performance to the law of 1793 regarding reproduction, however, the author became distanced from his work as an owner, and became instead a medium for cultural heritage that could not possess his creation in perpetuity. The author instead contributed to a collective national heritage of genius. 55 Carla Hesse has asserted that the goal of legislative actions in 1793 was to create an open commerce of ideas to balance public and private interest within a free market system. 56 Artists' political identities were renegotiated "from a privileged creature of the absolutist police state into a servant of public enlightenment." 57 Thus, it was through neither a philosophical nor material concern for intellectual property that these laws were founded, but through a political concern of where artists and their work would fit into a regenerated France. "Works of genius" in France were now shared between individual artists, on one hand, and the public, on the other. 58 Despite these policies, an undated letter from Grétry, Dalayrac, and other dramatic authors sent during the Consul government to the préfect de police, Dubois, demands that he stop the unsanctioned performances of their works at second-and third-tier Parisian theatres. 59 Conclusion 20 The French Revolution expedited the gradual transitions that had begun to take place in the eighteenth-century music market. This abrupt change required a firm delineation of not only who owned music, but also what music was-a text, a performance, or an abstract ideal. Although copyright laws sought to grant composers ownership rights over the publication of their works, Grétry's letter reveals concerns about two other aspects of ownership: rights over performances and rights as an artist over the abstract work. Grétry wanted the art that he created to be considered equal to the creative output of men of letters. These rights to ownership over self-expression, whether text, performance, or art object, were matters of individual concern. The French laws of 1791 and 1793, the first copyright laws to explicitly apply to music, attempted to wed these individual concerns to the view that art represents a public, collective good. These first laws on music as property in fact codified the tension between the legal and economic arguments surrounding music ownership. The former asserting the composer's property rights, the latter, the ideologies of a free market economy. On a personal level, Grétry's letter adds more evidence to debates about the composer's involvement in the Revolution. Grétry clearly supported the revolutionary causes that provided professional opportunities in a changing legal and economic framework. Moreover, while scholars have debated the intellectualist and materialist motivations of music copyright, Grétry's letter shows that both factors played into the professional concerns of composers at the end of the eighteenth century. Because the privilege structures that supported musicians in Old Regime France suddenly collapsed, it seems that musicians quickly realized that mere publication revenues would not sustain a comfortable livelihood. Thus, musicians, including Grétry, attempted to legally protect their work in an uncharted economic system. 27. During the revolutionary period the Comédie-Italienne and Opéra-Comique were the same venue and the names could be used interchangeably. I use the titles interchangeably based on how sources refer to the institution. The Comédie-Italienne had been merged with the Opéra-Comique in 1762, and was officially titled as such, however, many contemporaries refer to the theatre as either the Comédie-Italienne or Théâtre-Italien.

ABSTRACTS
Before the French Revolution began in 1789, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry composed opéra comique that achieved great success both in Paris and abroad. As the revolutionary tides swept toward republican musical aesthetics, the illustrious Grétry receded from the public eye and briefly struggled to remain afloat. A newly discovered letter that he wrote during this period to the famed Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes offers a window into the effects that revolutionary legislation had on musicians. Sieyes, author of the seminal revolutionary text "What is the Third Estate?", pioneered liberty of the press and authors' rights legislation as a member of the French National Assembly and National Convention. His efforts were realized when the first intellectual property laws relating to music became codified in 1791 and 1793. In the 1790 letter, although Grétry praises Sieyes' policy proposals, he also raises personal and professional injustices surrounding intellectual property rights to music. Grétry's letter addresses his concerns about the translations of stage works from French to Italian, the unsanctioned performances of opéras and opéras comiques, and the general welfare of French musicians. While in his nineteenthcentury memoirs Grétry recasts himself as a republican, this letter from early in the Revolution focuses on musicians' more tangible concern to, in his own words, "place bread on the table." The letter invites an interrogation of how musicians approached the new patronage structure in revolutionary France, which abruptly transferred from the court and church to the nation as a result of political upheaval. A valuable addition to scholarly understanding of Grétry's participation in the Revolution, the letter simultaneously begs a rethinking of his contribution to revolutionary causes and a reevaluation of musicians' professional activities during the French Revolution.