SOURCE: “Tarare” and “La Mere Coupable,” in Beaumarchais and the Theatre, Routledge, 1995, pp. 196-220.

In the excerpt below, Howarth, a noted Beaumarchais scholar, places Tarare and La Mère coupable in the context of Beaumarchais's writings as well as the eighteenth century literary world.

Beaumarchais's next—and penultimate—dramatic work was already on the stocks well before the production of Le Mariage de Figaro in 1784. Although Tarare was not to be performed in public (at the Opéra) until 1787, its original conception dates from the 1770s, and a prose version of the opera libretto was apparently completed, and the composition of a verse version well under way, as early as 1775. The project of an opera was inspired by the Paris performance of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide, and the composer's visit to Paris, where he met Beaumarchais, in 1774. Both were keen, it seems, to work together on an...