| Summary: | We intuitively accept the importance of the place and value of singers to being crucial to the formation of any repertoire. However, our understanding of their concrete influence (its manifestation and how to measure it) over opera production and related creative processes, especially for the early modern period, is still blurry. This thesis recentres the singer in the study of French Opéra (the institution, born in 1669, and its associated genres) under the reign of Louis XIV through the prism of the "emploi" (typecasting, stock of roles). Doing so, the dissertation reassesses the historical status and significance of this concept, which explanation is deficient in the existing scholarship. This study of the “emploi” in the context of the early stage in the ARM’s history demonstrates that the concept cannot be observed as a monolithic entity. Rather, it needs to be understood as a notion under development. The reason for this is due to a specific tension between explicit and implicit norms, written and unwritten conventions, fixed constitutions and evolving compositional and performance practices. Using a “performer-based perspective”, the “emploi” emerges as both the product and the catalyst of a complex dialectic between administration, performers, and sets of roles in different lyrical and dramatic genres. This method helps deconstructing preconceived ideas about well-established taxonomies regarding sets of roles during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries at the Paris Opéra, and exposes the ways in which administrative law contains a powerful creative seed that had a vital impact on the development of the French operatic institution.
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