art. music and ideology- rameau, rousseau and 1789 (subr)

Music and Ideology: Rameau, Rousseau, and 1789Author(s): Charles B. PaulSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1971), pp. 395-410Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708354 .Accessed: 14/05/2013 10:43

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MUSIC AND IDEOLOGY: RAMEAU, ROUSSEAU, AND 1789

BY CHARLES B. PAUL

Forty-four years ago Julien Benda drew up a devastating indictment of some of the best known intellectuals of his time. He charged Momm- sen, Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetiere, Barres, Lemaitre, Peguy, Maurras, d'Annunzio, Kipling, and their like with having forfeited their devotion to the discovery of eternal truths. Nearly every page of their writings, so went the indictment, betrayed an impatience with pure thought, a scorn for reason, an obsession with ideesfixes, a fear of abstraction, a thirst for sensation, a need for certitude, a hatred of opposition, and an inclination toward violence, vituperation, and relent- less vindictiveness.' In their passionate loathing for dispassionate pur- suits, these writers had forsaken their intellectual commitment for partisan or national causes. Hence we can hardly be surprised, Benda continued, if we discover political tracts where we had expected to find poetry, fiction, criticism, metaphysics, or history.2

Partisan history, it goes without saying, is not the specialty of nationalists, royalists, and conservatives. All historians are subjects of Francis Bacon's Idols of the Tribe, of the inescapable human frailties of bias, passion, and misjudgment. And possibly nowhere is the historians' capacity to adjust their judgments to their biases more conspicuous than in the writings on the French Revolution of 1789. It is a common- place among historians that "opinions on such questions as the inter- relationship of the state, the individual, religion, society, and classes, and . . . corresponding evaluations of nationalism, tradition, and the Church" are inseparably linked to interpretations of the Revolution of 1789.3 It is also a well-known fact that particular political, religious, social, economic, pedagogic, philosophical, and literary preferences imply particular interpretations of the life and thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of his influence on the Revolutionary and post-Revolu- tionary periods. What has been barely noticed, however, is the remark- able phenomenon of musicologists and music biographers interpreting a major composer and a famous musical incident to suit their political prejudices. These prejudices affect their interpretation of the Revolu- tion and Rousseau. The composer so misinterpreted is Jean-Philippe Rameau (the uncle of Diderot's famous neveu), and the musical incident in which Rameau and Rousseau were the major antagonists is the Querelle (or Guerre) des Bouffons (1752-54).

'Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs (Paris, 1927). 'Ibid., 82-96. 3Paul Farmer, France Reviews Its Revolutionary Origins (New York, 1944), 2.

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The historiography of the composer Rameau and the musical Querelle is but another aspect of the historiography of the French Revolution. Both types of studies are animated by the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary inclinations of their authors, both have generally treated the Revolution or the Querelle as blocs or indivisible entities, and both have linked these two events, for better or for worse, with the name of Rousseau. The Querelle was a debate over the merits of Italian light opera (opera buffa) against those of French music (especially Rameau's tragedies lyriques). This musical incident, however, assumes political significance because the supporters of Italian music included in their ranks nearly all the leading anti-Establishment philosophes (Diderot, d'Alembert, the Baron d'Holbach, and most prominently, Melchior Grimm and Rousseau) while the champions of Rameau's music numbered in their ranks many of the philosophes' bitterest rivals. This peculiar alignment has led most of the writers on Rameau or on the Querelle to interpret the musical events of 1752- 54 in light of their own preference for the political events of 1789-99, and thus carry into music history, biography, and criticism the ideological war waged by historians over the French Revolution and Rousseau. Hence, an adequate assessment of the differing partipris expressed by writers on the Querelle des Bouffons will be preceded by a brief description of the events of the Querelle itself and of the differing partipris expressed by historians on the Revolution in general.

I. Just before the outbreak of the Querelle, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), now remembered largely as the codifier of classical harmony, was universally extolled as France's greatest composer. Large audiences were flocking to the numerous performances of his dozen operatic works, the mainstay of France's musical repertory.4 On August 1, 1752, however, an Italian operatic company, recently arrived to France, presented to the Parisian audiences Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona.5

The successful performances of this Italian opera buffa (hence the name of Querelle des Bouffons) at a time when Rameau's tragedies- lyriques reigned supreme on the French stage led the German-born Melchior Grimm to direct an attack against the entire French operatic repertory.6 Grimm's objections to French opera were later sec- onded by two of his philosophe friends, Denis Diderot and the Baron d'Holbach.7 Both men had been associated for the past three or four

4Paul Marie Masson, L'Opera de Rameau (Paris, 1930), 39-88. 'Louisette Reichenburg, Contribution a I'histoire de la "Querelle des Bouffons"

(Ph.D. Diss. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1937), 29. 6Edmond Henri Adolphe Scherer, Melchior Grimm (Paris, 1887), 15, 33-35, 49. 7Reichenburg, 48-71.


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years with the controversial and highly irreverent Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, the first as editor-in-chief and the second as occasional contributor. The German- born d'Holbach, in a seventeen-page pamplet, humorlessly aped Grimm's complaints against the pomposity and monotony of French operas.8 In three pamphlets appearing in the winter of 1753 Diderot, purporting to act as impartial observer, did not spare his irony at the expense of French music.9

By May 1753 the first stage of the musical debate had ended.0All was quiet on the polemical front until November of that year when the debate was revived, with a vengeance, by Rousseau's Lettre sur la Musiquefrancaise. In a series of close arguments, supported by prem- ises that were occasionally invalid, Rousseau reasoned that French music was not only inferior to Italian music, but that as music and as drama it was totally worthless. French music, he argued, did not match the sentiments it attempted to express-the sentiments were not genuine anyway-the melody was concealed under a mass of compli- cated harmony and counterpoint, and, he peremptorily concluded, "the French nation has no music and can never have any."''

The large number of pro-French pamphlets following Rousseau's Lettre and the virulence with which a great many of them attacked the Italian partisans, and especially Rousseau, suggest that more was at stake than the question of the excellence of a particular national style of music. What was apparently at stake for many of the partisans of French music is best displayed in the pamphlets written by Louis- Bertrand Castel, Caux de Cappeval, Jacques Cazotte, and Pierre Morand. All of them charged that the philosophes' criticisms of French music were motivated by a desire to subvert France's political, social, religious, and cultural institutions.

The best known of these four pamphleteers is unquestionably Father Castel (1688-1757), who cast doubt on the genuineness of Rousseau's and his colleagues' patriotism. If they had been "true Frenchmen, true Patriots, true subjects of the King," they would not have had the effrontery to question one of France's most hallowed

8Paul Henri Thiry Baron d'Holbach, Lettre a une dame d'un certain age, sur l'etat present de l'opera (Paris, 1752).

9Reichenburg, 49-50, 56, 61. Denis Diderot, "Arret rendu a l'Amphitheatre de l'Opera sur la plainte du milieu du parterre intervenant dans la querelle des deux coins"; "Au petit prophete de Boehmischbroda, au grand prophete Monet, etc."; and "Trois Chapitres, ou la vision de la nuit du Mardi-gras au mercredi des cendres," Oeuvres comple'tes de Diderot, ed. Assezat (20 vols.; Paris, 1876), XII.

"'Reichenburg, 71. "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Lettre sur la Musique Franqaise," Oeuvres completes de

J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1909), VI, 168-98.


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398 CHARLES B. PAUL

traditions, its opera, whose music is "national, specifically French, even Gallic; music of our soil, of our territory." The Encyclopedists' criticism of French music, he concluded, was part and parcel of their "Philosophical Deism," of their general attacks "on our customs, our character, and other arts, even religion and the government of this and other nations."'2

The three other pamphlets'3 presented similar ad hominem arguments. Caux de Cappeval (?-1774) dismisses Rousseau's competence as a music critic on the ground that he is a frantic madman about to burn the temple of art. Cazotte (1720-93) specified this madness: Rousseau is afflicted with a "sick brain, an equivocal heart, and a dangerous and false mind." Rousseau's tirades against French music, Morand tells his readers, have no esthetic validity whatever: they are motivated by Rousseau's personal failures that he resentfully projects into certain individual Frenchmen, including Rameau.'4

We have also a reference to the foreign origin of one or more of the philosophes, Rousseau being called an "Allobroge" (prehistoric Swiss) in the very title of Morand's pamphlet. Indeed, Rousseau's Swiss birthplace, argues Caux de Cappeval, accounts for his unpatriotic stand against the national music of France.'5

Finally, these three pamphlets share with Castel's brochure and with most subsequent Rameau studies a similar conspiratorial theory. If we are to believe Cazotte, Rousseau is at the head of a "conspiracy" of a "cabal of people most of whom are without talent or are literary failures, fanatics, sedition-mongers, and madmen (in music)." Caux de Cappeval names these conspirators: they are the philosophes, who are secretly plotting the destruction of the national art under the aegis of the Encyclopedie.'6

Subsequent criticisms of Rousseau and the philosophes were to surpass in length, in the number of instances, in chains of reasoning, and in vituperative tone the arguments presented by these four pamphleteers, but the main substance of the whole school of the Right, both political and musical, can already be found in these brochures written in 1753 and 1754.

12 Louis-Bertrand Castel, Lettres d'un academicien de Bordeaux sur lefond de la musique a I'occasion de la lettre de M. R. contre la Musiquefrancaise (Paris, 1754), Letters I, IV; 37.

'3Caux de Cappeval, Apologie du gout francais relativement a I'opera. Poeme, avec un discours apologetique et des adieux aux boubfons en vers (1754); Jacques Ca- zotte, Observations sur la lettre de J.-J. Rousseau au sujet de la musique francaise (1753); P. de Morand, Justification de la musique francoise contre la Querelle qui lui a etefaite par un Allemand et un Allobroge (The Hague, 1754).

'4Caux de Cappeval, 2; Cazotte, 6; Morand, 26-28. '5Morand, p. I; Cazotte, p. 1 note; Caux de Cappeval, 4, 7-8. '6Cazotte, 4-5; Morand, 34-36.



II. In most histories and encyclopedias of music, the Querelle des Bouffons is simply described as another dramatic incident in the tumultuous history of music. Yet, for historians of the Querelle and for biographers of its major antagonists, Rameau and Rousseau, this incident has been repeatedly treated as a political and ideological prelude to the French Revolution of 1789. Why were some of the disputants in this quarrel only too eager to impute political motives, ulterior or explicit, to their opponents? Why were some of these imputations repeated ad nauseam by twentieth-century biographers and critics? For an explanation of this extra-musical interpretation of a musical event, a brief description of the historiography of the French Revolu- tion is in order.

The particular postures assumed by historians on that Revolution have been grouped under two broad categories that were first named and described by the rightist historian Augustin Cochin, namely, the these de complot (argument for conspiracy) and these de circonstances (argument for circumstances).17 The argument for conspiracy, propounded by conservatives and counterrevolutionaries, holds that the course of history is largely determined by the deeds of individual men or of cliques. In particular, the Revolution of 1789 was caused by the subversive ideas propagated by such philosophes of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and put into practice by their disciples, notably such Jacobins as Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. Such a conspiratorial view of history is vehemently rejected by the rival school of historians, the moderates and radicals, who hold that the course of history is largely determined by material and impersonal movements. This argument for circumstances insists that the Revolution, far from being a subversive plot hatched by a minority of intellectuals, was inevitable and popular; only a revolution leading to a new regime could have solved or alleviated the problems that had beset the ancien regime. In rejecting this thesis, the rightist historians insist that these problems could easily have been solved and the old monarchy preserved if, as Pierre Gaxotte put it, "an intellectual and moral crisis had not sapped the French soul to its very roots."'8 It was Charles Maurras, the leader of the Action Francaise, who made the pithiest, if not the most peremptory, distinc- tion between his and the opposing schools of thought: "Historians who inquire into the economic circumstances of the Revolution are saga-

'7Augustin Cochin, Les Societes de pensee et la democratie: Etudes d'histoire revolu- tionnaire (Paris, 1921), 1-140; Farmer; Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution, 1789- 1799 (New York, 1963), 293-302.

IPierre Gaxotte, La Revolution franfaise (rev. ed.; Paris, 1962), 29, 50-51, and Le Siecle de Louis XV(rev. ed.; Paris, 1933), 236-38; Louis Madelin, La Revolution (Paris, 1918), 4-9.


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cious; those who call these circumstances a cause are insane. The cause is wholly intellectual and moral."'9

The denial of any causal relation between material circumstances and the Revolution, the repudiation of the new regime in favor of the old, and the insistence that men, not movements or impersonal forces, brought about the revolutionary climate of opinion are articles of faith for both the counterrevolutionary historians and the majority of the writers on Rameau and the Querelle des Bouffons. The musicologists, indeed, wrote an exegesis to this creed: the musical quarrel of the 1750's was a prelude to the larger drama of the 1790's; the same cast of characters, in each case, voiced the same subversive lines. It was axiomatic to the rightist historians Taine, Cochin, Madelin, and Gaxotte that the Revolution was the necessary effect of the ideology first formulated by the philosophes20 It was likewise axiomatic to the majority of these musicologists that this same ideology was the cause for the revolution in music brought about by the Querelle. The long-range consequences of these two events were likewise thought to be similar: the Querelle occasioned the decline of a genuine national music in France (at least until the 1870's), the Revolution occasioned the decline of everything else genuinely national.

III. The intrusion of extra-musical predilections into musical matters is pointedly illustrated by the first man to write at some length on the Querelle des Bouffons. The writer was Arthur Pougin (1834-1921), musician, music reviewer, and author of several biographies, including those of Rameau and Rousseau. Although Rameau's operas were the chief objects of criticism during the Querelle, not one word on this debate is so much as alluded to in the first full-length biography of a composer whose music had not been heard for nearly a century and whose name was barely familiar to the generation of 1876.21 Twenty-five years later, however, Pougin did devote a few pages to this incident, but in a biography of Rousseau.2 One possible explanation for the omission of the Querelle in the earlier book might be inferred from the fact that the biography of Rousseau was published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Another explanation might be found in the following passage and its con- cluding disclaimer:

A peculiar phenomenon that no one, to my knowledge, has pointed out for the last one hundred and fifty years, is that the three writers who were the most

'9Charles Maurras, Reflexions sur la Revolution de 1789 (Paris, 1948), 27. 2?Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (11 vols.; Paris, 1906-

0725); Madelin; Cochin; Gaxotte, La Revolution francaise and Le Siecle de Louis XV, op. cit. 2 Arthur Pougin, Rameau. Essai sur sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1876).

22Idem, Jean-Jacques Rousseau musicien (Paris, 1901).


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ardent enemies of French music in these circumstances, those who were most vigorous in prosecuting their campaign against that music and in favor of Italian music, were specifically three foreigners, that is, along with Rousseau, Grimm and the Baron d'Holbach. I draw no other consequence from that fact, I am merely stating it.23

The fact that three critics of Rameau were foreigners is sufficient in itself to condemn their criticism of French music. Pougin's few words to the wise, especially those vigilantly ferreting out foreign elements in the France of 1901, may have been intended to alert them to an out- side danger that might possibly have escaped them. But lest he be accused of making sly and unfounded insinuations, Pougin has, for all the world to see, disclaimed any responsibility for having uttered such insinuations.

Romain Rolland (1868-1944) differed from the large majority of Rameau scholars in his outright rejection of the these de complot. His musical interests, it is true, matched theirs, since he too wrote biographies of composers and studies on the music of the "classical" age.24 Where he strongly disagreed with his French musical colleagues was in his political views: Rolland emphatically rejected the conservative and ultra-patriotic views of d'Indy, Charles Maurras, and Maurice Barres. His numerous travels, his interest in the culture of India, his long-term residence in Switzerland, all confirmed his cosmopolitan sympathies. He repeatedly expressed the hope for a Weimar of the European intelligentsia and stood out in an overwhelmingly racist environment by his contention that France owed its greatness to the very admixture of its ethnic groups.25

Just as his travels abroad determined his confirmed pacifism, so the Dreyfus Affair determined his subsequent political career. After the sentence was meted out to Emile Zola in 1898, Rolland took up the cause of Dreyfus, speaking out in his behalf and writing a play in which the Affair is transposed to the French Republican armies of 1793. During World War I he publicly announced his opposition to the war, a stand which made him one of the most reviled and maligned men in France.26

It is only natural that Rolland with his radical, pacifist, and inter- nationalist convictions should take sides with the philosophes in the Querelle des Bouffons. Musical amateurs these Encyclopedists may have been, but Rolland's learned musical colleagues have no right to

23 Ibid., 96. 24Les origines du Theatre lyrique moderne; Musiciens d'autrefois; Musiciens d'au-

jourd'hui; Voyage musical au pays du passe; Vie de Beethoven; Handel; Beethoven, les epoques creatrices, all cited in Jean-Bertrand Barrere, Romain Rolland: I'Ame et l'Art (Paris, 1966), 17-18.

25Barrere, 16, 40-41, 63-67; Jacques Robichez, Romain Rolland (Paris, 1961), 52-57. 26Robichez, 42-44, 74-75.


402 CHARLES B. PAUL

sneer at their music criticism. Music is no secret cult accessible to initiates only. Although Grimm with his ariettas and Rousseau with his operettas displayed little or no professional training as composers, the former discovered the talents of Cherubini and Mehul and the genius of the seven-year-old Mozart while the latter propounded some orig- inal, profound, and far-sighted notions about musical performance and esthetics.27

Genuine, if untrained, musical connoisseurs, the Encyclopedists, according to Rolland's these de circonstances, were simply the articu- late spokesmen for a large number of the musically discontent. "The art of Rameau clashed with the deepest aspirations of the day, which the Encyclopedists interpreted with all the exaggeration that is cus- tomarily associated with such disputes." Hence the confrontation in 1752 between Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona and Rameau's tragedies- lyriques gave the Encyclopedists the opportunity to plead in defense of their own and others' musical grievances. They demanded a change from the bombastic to the simple, from the abstract formulation of reality to a concrete and direct imitation of nature, and from insipid mythological libretti to realistic bourgeois plots. Rousseau and his friends were only more vocal than most in their enthusiasm for Per- golesi's natural and cheerful facility, which contrasted so markedly with the theatrical artificiality and solemnity of Rameau's "Versailles" operas. Himself an avowed partisan of the aristocratic form of opera that flourished from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, Rolland concedes that this type of musical drama had run its course by the 1750's.28 What the philosophes demanded, Rolland argues, was that French opera profit from the popularity of Italian opera buffa, not that it give way to it, that it take the initiative in reforming itself, not that it succumb and die. Such at least was the intention of Diderot and d'Alembert, both "so French." Destructive intentions, however, may have been harbored by the German Grimm and the Swiss Rousseau.29

Rolland's verdict on the culpability of the Encyclopedists, therefore, is mixed and possibly inconsistent. The philosophes were histori- cally correct, even if intemperate, in their censure of French opera, and their intentions, in general, were simply those of a good portion of musical opinion. These critics of French music did not form a conspiratorial cabal, Rolland insists, since at least two of them hoped by their censure to bring a new lease on life to French operas. The two others, Rolland concedes, because they were foreigners by birth, may have expressed wishes for the demise of Rameau's operas. Yet, whatever the intentions of Rameau's opponents, the circumstances for the

27Romain Rolland, Musiciens d'autrefois (Paris, 1908), 207-10. 28Ibid., 212, 214, 220-22. 29Ibid., 222.



decline of French music after the 1750's cannot be imputed to them, since these were purely internal, wholly musical and dramatic, never political or ideological. There is not the least intimation in Rolland's discussion that the Querelle des Bouffons presaged and prepared for the Revolution of 1789, that there is a necessary connection between the demise of French classical opera and the demise of the ancien regime.

Nine years later, however, the strongest case ever put forward for a necessary connection between these two institutional deaths was published by Pierre Lasserre (1867-1930), an associate of the ultrana- tionalistic and counterrevolutionary Action Francaise for nearly twenty years.30 This self-proclaimed counterrevolutionary was born in the southern French province of Bearn, where his mother belonged to the local aristocracy, and his father, a lawyer, to a family of landhold- ers. Pierre Lasserre was always extremely proud of his native province, which fact, according to a biographer, accounts for his hatred of centralization and, to some extent, for his rabid patriotism.31

His chauvinism, however, was accentuated by a trip he took in Germany a few years before the outbreak of the Dreyfus Affair. This visit confirmed his belief in the threat German Kultur posed to French civilisation. Alert as he became to the influx of German ideas into France, it was, nonetheless, the danger of a German military invasion that was uppermost in his mind when the Dreyfus Affair broke out. The division it brought into French society led him to fear for its very survival. Accordingly, he allied himself with the Action Francaise, and until 1914 wrote hundreds of articles in defense of its tenets. In addition, he made speeches and gave courses on its behalf, tutored young initiates, advocated sharp measures against Protestants who held important positions in foreign affairs, and waged an unrelenting campaign against the University of Paris as the alleged intellectual sanctuary of Protestants, Jews, Masons, and subversive republicans. Until the 1920's, at least, he proclaimed himself a traditionalist, stress- ing the value of maintaining the social and political status quo, the evils of democracy and of socialism as the rule of inferior men, the disintegrating influence of Jews and Protestants, and most persistently and most eloquently, the baneful influence of Romanticism and its presumed founder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.32

Indeed, Lasserre won many friends and influenced countless cultural

30Eugen Weber, Action Franfaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford, 1962), 78-79; Wilbur Merrill Frohock, Pierre Lasserre: The Evolu- tion of His Critical Doctrines (Ann Arbor, 1937), 36-37.

3Pierre Lasserre, Le Romantisme francais: Essai sur la revolution dans les sentiments et dans les idees au XIXe siecle, (new ed.; Paris, 1908), 350; Frohock, 1.

"Weber, 38-39; Frohock, 6-10, 19-21; Lasserre, op. cit., 470-72, 488-91, and Cinquante ans de penseefrancaise (Paris, 1922), 156-57.


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historians and critics with his Le Romantismefrancais (1907), in which he incorporated many of the views he had set forth in articles for the Revue de F'Action Francaise.33 The book was dedicated to the proposi- tion that Romanticism, "an esthetic of ugliness, a philosophy of ob- scurity, a morality of passions, and a political theory of the instinct," like liberalism and democracy, was the product of Rousseau's patho- logical mind and consequently, the source of all the evils besetting the modern political and cultural world. The Dreyfus Affair only brought to a climax the century-and-a-half-long evolution of Rousseau's doctrines-the psychic deterioration of man, an obsession with solitude, the sovereignty and idolatry of the passions, a revolutionary and disso- lute conception of human nature, the primacy of emotion over judgment, and the belief in the baneful effects of institutions and law over the primitive goodness of man. Because the Swiss Rousseau was not so much the precursor of Romanticism as Romanticism incarnate, Lasserre regarded it as foreign in origin and essence, alien to the classical temperament of eternal France. Through Rousseau, moreover, Romanticism was intimately linked with the Revolution of 1789. Rous- seau preached and the Revolution practiced nihilism in morality, religion, politics, sentiment, and art.34

The general views Lasserre had expressed about the French Revo- lution, Rousseau, and Romanticism he applied ten years later to the particular Rameau-Rousseau debate during the Querelle des Bouffons. Rousseau is vehemently attacked not only as the informing spirit of the political, educational, moral, and literary anarchy embodied in Romanticism and the revolutionary tradition but of musical anarchy as well. "Led away by the gloomy resentment of his pride, his ideas of persecution and his delusions," Rousseau in 1753 lashed out at his ideological opponent. The Querelle provided the pretext for Roman- ticism incarnate to condemn the symbol of the classical qualities of "clarity, precision, fixity, and symmetrical order of form." This con- demnation carried sufficient weight to mislead many gullible members of the French public, with the result that the Swiss Rousseau, in concert with his colleagues of the Encyclopedie, deprived French music of "the sap and flavour of its native growth."35 Lasserre's these de complot has now been completed. Having argued elsewhere that Rousseau, by waging war on all established rules-political, religious, educational, or literary-brought about the destruction of the ancien regime and classical philosophy and literature, he concluded

"3Weber, 78. 34Lasserre, Cinquante ans, 13-15; Le Romantisme, VIII-IX, 10-12, 14-18, 57, 74, 80,

153, 192, 198,311-12. 35Pierre Lasserre, L'esprit de la musiquefrancaise (Paris, 1917), trans. as The Spirit

of French Music, by Denis Turner (London, 1922), 80-87, 93.



the argument in 1917 with the assertion that Rousseau, by waging war on French music, brought about its decline as well. Lasserre's treat- ment of Rousseau, the philosophes, the Revolution, and Romanticism proved to be a model for nine subsequent writers on Rameau to follow.

IV. In the forty-seven year interval that elapsed between the publi- cation of Lasserre's work in 1917 and Rameau's bicentenary in 1964, twelve authors expressed a particular view on the origins, circumstances, and consequences of the Querelle des Bouffons. The arguments presented by these authors, however, are not as varied as the number of authors might suggest. Though their works differ in intent and presentation, their explanation of the events of the Querelle, the motivations of the major participants, and the consequences this dispute presaged for the ancien regime or subsequent French music do not, in the majority of cases, differ greatly from previous explanations. Consequently, to avoid undue and tedious repetition, I shall briefly discuss the remaining works on the Querelle collectively.

Of the nine post-World War I works espousing the these de complot, four are biographies,36 one is a study of the Querelle itself,37 while four are general histories of French music with one chapter or more devoted to Rameau.38 The scanty biographical information available on some of the authors of these works might prove of some interest. Pierre Lalo (1866-1943) was the son of the composer Edouard Lalo and himself a music reviewer for several periodicals. Georges Migot (1891- ) and Paul Berthier (1884-1953) were composers of some merit themselves. Two of these authors held important positions with the Societte francaise de musicologie, Lionel de la Laurencie (1861- 1933) as its founder and first president, and Norbert Dufourcq (1904-

) as its president from 1956 to 1958. La Laurencie had also been appointed editor of the Encyclopedie de la musique in 1916 while Du- fourcq has held the position of professor of music at the Paris Con- servatory of Music for a number of decades.

However unlike in background and interests, these nine French authors shared a conspiratorial view of the Querelle. They all agreed with La Laurencie in his belief that the Encyclopedists formed "a

36Lionel de la Laurencie, Rameau (Paris, 1926); Georges Migot, Jean-Philippe Rameau et le genie de la musique francaise (Paris, 1930); Henri Charlier, Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) (Lyon, 1955); and Paul Berthier, Reflexions sur I'art et la vie de Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) (Paris, 1957).

37Noel Boyer, La Guerre des Bouffons et la musique Francaise (1752-1754) (Paris, 1945).

"3Bernard Champigneulle, L'age classique de la musique francaise (Paris, 1946); J. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Histoire de la musiquefranfaise (Paris, 1946); Pierre Lalo, De Rameau d Ravel (Paris, 1947), 15-48, 282-88, 302-12; and Norbert Dufourcq, La musiquefrancaise (Paris, 1949).


406 CHARLES B. PAUL

veritable coterie, whose members unanimously swooped down on anyone so bold as to criticize even one of their own," and with Boyer, that the Quarrel "formed part and parcel of an extensive plot which, on all levels, was to undermine the foundations of a regime and a society." This was no civilized dispute over musical matters, Boyer argues elsewhere, this was a war "with slander as a weapon, trickery as the means, and the ruin of a French art as the end." As Champigneulle expli- cates it, Grimm, Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert "were making preparations for the fall of the monarchy," by first "mortally wounding the most faithful artistic expression of royal majesty, namely, the operas of Rameau."39

Whether acting by stealth or in the open, by himself or in consort with like-minded colleagues, and whether in response to personal grievances, artistic preferences, or widespread public dissatisfaction, Rousseau, as the conservative accounts have it, bears the chief responsibility for the decline of French music, the French monarchy, and nearly all other "native" French institutions. Had not Rousseau inter- vened to satisfy his personal and esthetic grievances, the Querelle, according to Boyer and Champigneulle, would have remained a purely musical affair and thus would have expired of its own accord.40 The indictment against Rousseau, however, was phrased most succinctly by Lalo: Rousseau was the mortal enemy of French music; more than anyone else, he has contributed to bring it to ruin and to set up in its place a foreign music, that of Italy. After a century and a half, the consequences of this destruction of our musical art of which Rousseau was one of the leading agents have not yet ceased from making themselves felt.41

Noel Boyer's judgment on Rousseau, as on Romanticism, the Revo- lution of 1789, and foreigners within France, is a these de complot with a vengeance. Every evil that has befallen France in Rousseau's day or since is attributed to this "spiritual father of 1789." The dedi- cation of Boyer's title page-"To Thierry Maulnier, for Rameau-our musical Racine-and French Order against Rousseau and barbarian anarchy"-gives a foretaste of the tenor of this book and of its main arguments. These can be summarized in a syllogism that fails to meet the test of sound logic. "French culture is equivalent to Classicism. Rameau's music is the finest product of that classical culture. Rous- seau and his colleagues denounced Rameau's music. Rousseau denounced French culture. Therefore, this denunciation led to the deca- dence of French music, French culture, and the French state." If

39La Laurencie, 31-37; Boyer, 7-8, 95; Champigneulle, 285-86; Gaudefroy-Demom- bynes, 126, 135.

40Boyer, 130; Champigneulle, 285. 41Lalo, 303.



Boyer's argument sounds unconvincing, we learn elsewhere that it is Rousseau who preached "spiritual disorder, intellectual confusion, social anarchy, a depraved education, [and] a political utopia."42

The book, indeed, is one continuous and shrill tirade against Rous- seau. A few of Boyer's vituperations will suffice to display the extent of his Rousseauphobia: "He is as wretched a musician as he is a bad teacher"; "Baneful political theorist, embittered philosopher, and second-hand musician"; "Political charlatan, philosophical charlatan, educational charlatan, the musician in him was likewise but a charlatan"; "this Huron, this savage."43

Extraordinary as Boyer's vituperations against Rousseau may ap- pear, they can be explained by his conviction that all the causes which the Swiss-born philosophe espoused were anti-French in character.44 This conviction Boyer held in common with most of the conservative writers on the Querelle, even if they were generally too reticent to assert it in so many words. Without further elaboration, writer after writer reminded their readers, in passing as it were, that it was the foreign-born Rousseau, Grimm, and d'Holbach who were in the fore- front of the attack against French music in the 1750's.45 Not only was the opposition to Rameau's music led by foreigners from Germanic Europe, Pierre Lalo asserts, but it was specifically anti-French in character. The pro-Italian cause during the Querelle, he insists, was di- rected

openly and directly, at the heart of a nation, against the art of that very nation.... The supporters of the Bouffons specifically wanted, in France, to annihilate French music, and to replace it.... It is, moreover, foreigners, Rousseau and Grimm, who led this war in our midst and against us [chez nous et contre nous].

Having enlisted French-born philosophes on their side, these foreign critics then "lunged against French music, to the greater glory of the Bouffons [partisans of Italian opera buffa]."46

Within the forty years following World War I, only three writers on Rameau unreservedly expounded the these de circonstances: Jean Chantavoine (1921), Alfred R. Oliver (1947), and Jean Thomas (1951).47 All three categorically reject the conspiratorial interpretation of the Querelle des Bouffons. The philosophes' censure of Rameau's operas was neither inspired by political unorthodoxy nor motivated by a per-

42Boyer, 7-8, 11, 104. 43Ibid., 8-9, 39, 52, 83. 44Ibid., 11. 45La Laurencie, 36-37; Berthier, 18; Champigneulle, 172, 203-04, 221-23, 283-90;

Gaudefroy-Demombynes, 127-29. 46Lalo, 25-26. 47Jean Chantavoine, De Couperin a Debussy (Paris, 1921); Alfred R. Oliver, The

Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (New York, 1947); Jean Thomas, "Diderot, les En- cyclopedistes et le grand Rameau," Revue de Synthese, XXVIII (Jan.-June 1951), 46-67.


408 CHARLES B. PAUL

verse desire to overthrow one of the cultural foundations of the ancien regime. Instead, these authors present the alternative circumstantial interpretation that shifts the causes and consequences of the Quer- elle from the individual Encyclopedists to the public at large. The philosophes, we are told, were simply the spokesmen for a large and restless segment of musical opinion, bored by the century-old Ver- sailles opera and expectantly awaiting the coming of a lighter and more naturalistic type of musical drama. Hence, far from heaping abuse or censure on this or that particular individual, Chantavoine, Oliver, and Thomas praise the philosophes, whether foreign-born or not, as musically knowledgeable and esthetically prophetic. For all these critics, circumstances and the climate of musical opinion, and for Chantavoine, the very unmusicality of the French language, are the main causes for the slow and gradual decline of French classical music in the second half of the eighteenth century.

V. Jean Malignon and Cuthbert M. Girdlestone have commented on the association between patriotism and the resurgence of Rameau studies and performances in late nineteenth-century France. Undoubt- edly referring to the propaganda waged on behalf of pre-Revolutionary music by d'Indy and lesser luminaries, Girdlestone regrets that Ra- meau "should have begun to come into his own on a wave of anti- Wagnerian and more generally anti-Italo-German feeling, expressed amusingly [by Claude Debussy] in Monsieur Croche and the Lettre au Chevalier Gluck and more ponderously in Georges Migot's book, published in 1930."48 A like singling out of Migot's book as a model of nationalistic musical biography and an expansion of Girdlestone's association between politics and Rameau studies was made three years later by Malignon. He would undoubtedly have agreed with Girdle- stone that Rameau "is not just a pretext for national sentiment nor an astringent after a surfeit of German Romanticism and Italian grand opera." Following Girdlestone, indeed, Malignon sarcastically commented that the German victory over the French in 1870-71 was the grand occasion for the digging up of the great heroes of the nation's past. Rameau, like so many others, was flung into the enemy's face to bolster one's courage and one's faith in the national destiny of France.49 Yet, Girdlestone's and Malignon's comments on the association between the military defeat of France and the renaissance of Rameau studies are scanty and vague.

Furthermore, only two men, to my knowledge, have called attention to the political terminology and rhetoric informing nearly all the musical studies on Rameau and the Querelle des Bouffons written since 1901. Jean Chantavoine and Malignon, however, referred to the matter in only half a dozen paragraphs, named in their indictment but

48C. M. Girdlestone, Jean-Philippe Rameau. His Life and Work (London, 1957), 570. 49Ibid., 570-71; Jean Malignon, Rameau (Paris, 1960), 118-19.



two authors among the dozen or more scholars on Rameau, and, un- derstandably enough, exonerated themselves from any possible ac- cusation of political bias.50 Chantavoine and Malignon may have thought it impolitic to impugn the impartiality of living fellow-scholars; more likely, they may have assumed that their readers, familiar with the political and musical history of France since the mid-eighteenth century, would be satisfied with the few passing remarks they had expressed about the connection between politics and the studies on Rameau.

Despite their generality and brevity, however, Girdlestone's, Malignon's, and Chantavoine's comments are noteworthy because most historical and biographical accounts persist in enforcing the illu- sory segregation between the musical and political cultures. A case in point is three twentieth-century studies of two men who were at once politically active and musically gifted. Romain Rolland, as previously noted, acquired his reputation in French musical circles with a doctoral dissertation on seventeenth-century opera and his European reputation with a fictional account of two musicians (Jean-Christophe). Yet the two recent biographies of him are political and psychological studies bereft of any serious musical significance.51 Contrariwise, Leon Vallas' two-volume biography of Vincent d'Indy is nearly totally devoid of political comments. Vallas duly notes that d'Indy championed the revival of past French music largely to enhance his compatriots' pride in their national heritage, that he was an active member of a leading counterrevolutionary committee (La Ligue de la Patrie Francaise), and that he composed an antisemitic oratorio (La Legende de Saint-Christophe) for the express purpose of confounding the supporters of Captain Dreyfus. In passing, Vallas occasionally deplores d'Indy's extremist views but in one instance only does he give substance to his statement that "Every musicologist is a prisoner of his prejudices [partipris] or at least, of his education and of his moral, social, philosophical, religious, political, and nationalistic views."52 The sole instance is his discussion of d'Indy's interpretation of Beethoven as a devout Catholic;53 otherwise Vallas' scattered comments compel the reader to infer by himself the extent and import of d'Indy's political commitment.

Like Vallas, Barrere, and Robichez, most musicologists, biographers, and general historians have not yet taken full measure of the in- terjection of political predilections into musical compositions and musicological studies. Undoubtedly, compositions glorifying God or man, the folk or the individual, rustic charms or mechanical wonders have led musical scholars to consider the presence of temporal con-

50Chantavoine, 84-89; Malignon, 101-02, 118-19. .5Barrere; Robichez. "5Leon Vallas, Vincent d'Indy (2 vols.; Paris, 1946 and 1950), II, 83-84. 53Ibid.


410 MUSIC AND IDEOLOGY

cerns in eternal musical verities. These considerations, however, have frequently disclosed not so much the composer's as the biographer's partipris. Thus, within the last century alone, there have been published, in addition to Rolland's pro-revolutionary and d'Indy's counterrevolutionary biographies of Beethoven, Debussy's Germanophobic and Nohl's and Parry's Social Darwinist portraits of Wagner, and Tovey's anti-Romanticist and Barzun's pro-Romanticist interpretations of Berlioz.54

Yet the abundance of ideologically committed accounts of musical history has not been matched by a corresponding number of inquiries into these ideological commitments. Most inquiries have reluctantly conceded the intrusion of moral, religious, or philosophical values into the arts. Few inquiries, however, have so much as hinted at the prev- alence of political presuppositions in the great majority of musical biographies and histories. Accordingly, each reader is his own historiographer: he must infer by himself the extent to which musicologists have adjusted their interpretation of the past to their own ideological preferences.

The vogue for Rameau, by and large, seems to have been motivated less by esthetic curiosity and pleasure than by the nationalistic impulse to pay respects to the musical counterpart of Louis XIV, Boi- leau, and Racine. These four hallowed figures were usually exhibited as symbols of the peculiarly French virtues of order, reason, in- telligence, and restraint, while Rousseau was generally exhibited as the incarnation of the allegedly un-French vices of disorderly imagina- tion and licentious sensibility.

Historiographical inquiries into other works of musical scholarship would reveal that other composers and other musical incidents have also engaged those deep-seated commitments that musical scholars share with laymen. By drawing upon the presently distinct special- izations of musicology and historiography, such essays in musical historiography would, obviously, illustrate our increasing tendency to cut across all traditional disciplines. Hence this survey of musical and extra-musical circumstances, it is hoped, will serve as an illustration of the necessity for including historiography in the study of music history and musicology in the study of history in general.

San Jose State College. 54Romain Rolland, Beethoven, les grandes epoques creatrices (7 vols.; Paris, 1928-

49); Vincent d'Indy, Beethoven (Paris, 1911); Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche anti- dilettante (Paris, 1921); L. Nohl, Richard Wagner, Sein Leben und sein Schaffen (Mu- nich, 1869); C. H. H. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music (New York, 1932); D. F. Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis (7 vols.; London, 1935-44), IV, VI; J. Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (2 vols.; Boston, 1950).


Article Contentsp. 395p. 396p. 397p. 398p. 399p. 400p. 401p. 402p. 403p. 404p. 405p. 406p. 407p. 408p. 409p. 410

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1971), pp. 323-480Volume InformationFront MatterThe Idea of Liberty in Machiavelli [pp. 323 - 350]A Paradise Within: The Fortunate Fall in Paradise Lost [pp. 351 - 366]Berkeley, Clayton, and an Essay on Spirit [pp. 367 - 378]"To Charm Thy Curious Eye": Erasmus Darwin's Poetry at the Vestibule of Knowledge [pp. 379 - 394]Music and Ideology: Rameau, Rousseau, and 1789 [pp. 395 - 410]Symposium: Kant on RevolutionKant and the Right of Revolution [pp. 411 - 422]Kant, Authority, and the French Revolution [pp. 423 - 432]A Brief Commentary [pp. 433 - 436]Comments [pp. 437 - 440]

The Finitude of Descartes' Evil Genius [pp. 441 - 446]The Flying Spider [pp. 447 - 458]ReviewPhilosophy as Artistic Achievement? [pp. 459 - 470]

Books Received [pp. 471 - 480]Back Matter [pp. 475 - 479]

art. music and ideology- rameau, rousseau and 1789 (subr)

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