Grace A Tanner Faculty Distinguished Lecture

On Friday, 10 October 1800, a ragtag group of artists and Jacobins were arrested at the Paris Opéra, accused of plotting to stab First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte in his box. In the coming weeks the suspected ringleaders of this so-called Conspiracy of Daggers were swiftly tried, convicted, and guillotined as a warning to other would-be assassins. But how guilty were they? Although the regime prosecuted its case confidently, its critics from the beginning insisted that the accused were little more than patsies goaded into the crime by an undercover agent. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including official proceedings, firsthand accounts, architectural plans, secret British intelligence reports, as well as letters and scores in the French National Library and the Paris Opéra archives—this lecture reopens the case and argues that the “conspiracy” was likely an elaborate set-up by the authorities and that the opera performed on that fateful evening played a key role in entrapping and foiling the assassins.

Douglas L. Ipson is Assistant Professor of Music History and Theory at Southern Utah University. He received a Ph.D. in music history at the University of Chicago after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Brigham Young University. A specialist in nineteenth-century Italian opera—especially its political aspects—he has been published in the Cambridge Opera Journal and is a contributor to The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia (2013). He is preparing the critical edition of the opera La battaglia di Legnano for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, published by the University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi. His other areas of scholarly interest include Shakespeare and opera, the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal, and opera in revolutionary and Napoleonic France. He is also a composer and arranger whose works have performed across the United States and internationally. He is a native of St. George, Utah.