Sauts, gambades et monnaie de singe: Les représentations pour la capitation du personnel de l'Opéra sous l'ancien régime

Well known to historians and musicologists specializing in the Opéra de Paris during the Ancien Régime, the «capitations», a kind of abbreviation used to designate the annual performances given at the Académie royale de musique whose revenues, distributed to the personnel, were intended both to reward their services and to act as a symbolic payment of the taxes on those same revenues, have themselves been the object of no detailed study. If this subject seems rather austere and complicated by the scarcity of the sources and the poverty of the bibliography, it is nonetheless not without interest. When did the practice of the «capitation» actually begin and what are its origins? What criteria were used to determine the repartition of the revenues? What body was responsible for the performance programming and how did it make its decisions? What may we conclude from these programs about the public's taste and about the celebrity of the works performed? These are some of the questions treated in the present article.