“The Comedians of the King has the potential to be recognized as a central work on eighteenth-century musical culture. Doe approaches the subject through a mingling of social and political perspectives, keying into the major questions that have arisen about the last decades of the Old Regime in France. This book offers an intriguing discussion about how we might interpret the evolution of public life by looking at it in interdisciplinary perspective.”

William Weber, California State University, Long Beach

“The richness of the book’s vision is remarkable: its elegant syntheses offer a multiple picture of a key operatic genre from its modern formation to mature survival in the age of Wagner. Musical theater studies have needed something like this for a generation now, and Doe has written a persuasive and pleasurable account of the underlying tensions between a ‘national genre’ and the ebb and flow of national politics.”

David Charlton, Royal Holloway, University of London

“Skillfully combining detailed study of a wide range of works with institutional history and royal patronage, The Comedians of the King will transform our understanding of a key chapter in the history of lyric theater. A noteworthy feature of Doe’s work is her ability to weave the political dimension of her narrative with institutional and stylistic developments in opéra comique. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, this major study is essential reading.”

Mark Darlow, University of Cambridge

“The Comedians of the King provides a fascinating and nuanced account of the process by which the opéra comique, with its humble origins in the Parisian fairgrounds, became the cosmopolitan emblem of l’Europe française and an important vehicle for courtly propaganda. Clearly and compellingly, Doe tells the story of the opéra comique alongside the story of a queen, Marie Antoinette, whose tastes and efforts lay behind its transformation. The result is a book that amplifies our understanding of not only the genre but also the social ambivalences and contradictions it reflected on the eve of the French Revolution.”

Georgia Cowart, Case Western Reserve University

"One of the most valuable contributions of The Comedians of the King is to have integrated a deep dive into the business side of opéra-comique and the administrative machinery of culture, which made it possible for the genre to flourish, with an exploration of the artistic innovations and successes that it accomplished during the final decades of the eighteenth century. As a result of this capacious approach, Julia Doe captures in exemplary fashion the full complexity and paradoxes of the genre’s expansion in late eighteenth-century France. . . . The Comedians of the King will have a lasting impact on the study of eighteenth-century French musical culture and on scholars who, following Doe, hope to ground their work in a robust interdisciplinary methodology."

Journal of the American Musicological Society

"Groundbreaking. . . . Doe’s book presents a new historical account that explains how an originally operatic genre of secondary rank thrived and then outlived a major phase of the Bourbon monarchy. The Comedians of the King presents a freshly conceived continuity of operatic genre through major historic changes."

Music and Letters

"The overarching aim of Doe’s revised story of the opéra-comique is to offer, in her words, a framework that can better ‘match the nuance of the theatrical world it confronts.' Specifically, she hopes ‘to temper the assumed polarities of opera comique and tragédie lyrique; to deepen our understanding of these genre’s political functions; and to better capture the musical complexity, diversity, and contradictions of a society in the process of radical change.' I think the book she has created does achieve these goals, and I know my understanding of the opéra-comique, its social world and its political entanglements is much richer for it."

Eighteenth Century Music

"Doe demonstrates how librettists and composers came to test the limits of this genre by turning it into an alternative to Tragédie lyrique for the elite, while explaining how opéra-comique was exploited in the construction of the cultivated public image of the monarchy. This contribution is all the more important as it offers a nuanced picture of the aesthetic and musical evolutions of a complex genre that contributed to the construction of a genre éminemment national in the nineteenth century."

Maxime Margollé | H-France Review