What quality in Balzac’s mind brings out this musical quotation? Why, in evoking the world of opera, does the writer cite Jommelli rather than someone else? He wants to set his subject in Baroque 18th-century Rome. Sarrasine, a young, still inexperienced sculptor, receives the benefit of a formative education in Rome, artistic cradle where geniuses are born. Let us recognise that for Balzac, the equation set—Rome/18th-century/opera—is immediately met by the name of Jommelli. Balzac imagines his hero Sarrasine, in Rome, excited by the living example of ancient reliefs. The young man’s hyper-sensibility is crystallised in an ecstatic over-ambition that leads him to a visual frenzy stimulating the seeds of his embryonic genius, and to an auditory and visual shock: the discovery of one of the most disturbing voices that ensures the passing of the mineral substance into the lasting intangibility of operatic music, from the ancient column to the throbbing body of the female singer Zambinella. One name alone, at Balzac’s time, seems to contain the enchantment of opera and the spell it casts: Jommelli.

So, in Balzac’s novel, destiny leads our hero to an opera theatre where he makes a decisive discovery—and more than a discovery, a veritable experience in sensibility—opera being this productive totality uniting theatre, music, poetry, and singing: “He had already passed a fortnight in the state of ecstasy that seizes all young imaginations at the sight of the queen of ruins when, one evening, he entered the Teatro Argentina, before which a large crowd had gathered. He enquired the reasons for this throng, and everyone replied with two names: Zambinella and Jommelli! He entered and took a seat in the audience... The curtain rose... The young sculptor’s senses were, so to speak, lubricated by the sounds of Jommelli’s sublime harmony.” In the truth of Balzac’s novel, Jommelli embodies opera’s power of amazement as a world of initiation: at the mere evocation of his name, “Jommelli, ” the state of acute sensibility provoked by the genre of opera springs forth at the crucial moment when its hero is at the acme of artistic emotiveness.

That quotation from Balzac’s novel accurately reveals the worth of the Neapolitan composer, his significance as the emblem of a condition, of an artistic and emotional area: the science of writing and the magic of bel canto. Jommelli clearly appears as the champion of the lyric theatre—a status that our contemporary knowledge could not deny, thus recognising Balzac’s pertinent utilisation, at his time, of Jommelli: enchantment, illusion, glamour, and ecstasy. Could one today imagine a similar homage that has dimmed since 1830?

What place does Jommelli, the Neapolitan, occupy? Are we truly inspired to maintain for him that specific position in the brilliant musical court of Enlightenment Europe? Our modern comprehension of the ancients has certainly changed since Balzac and is principally explained in the light of some emblematic beacons—Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel. Nevertheless, in the shadow of the great masters (at least those that our taste has chosen to revere) there exists a colony of artists who have ensured the articulation of linguistic and musical writing, from the Baroque to classicism. Jommelli is among them.