Letter on the French music

The Lettre on the French music of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is in fact a Essai of the philosopher, also very minor musician and theorist in charge of the drafting of the articles on the music in the Encyclopédie. It was published in November 1753 towards the end of the Querelle of the Buffoons and caused an general outcry.

In this writing, Rousseau shows the very committed and very partial partisan of the Italian music against the French music then personified by Jean-Philippe Rameau to which an old personal rancour opposed. In this “demonstration” of the superiority of the Italian music, whose base would be the character much more appropriate Italian language to a pleasant musical expression, Rousseau currycomb the erudite harmonies of Branch and goes until supporting that the French language cannot be used as support with works of quality. Taken with the letter, its argumentation disqualifies by advance, and for example, the opera S of Wagner…

Rousseau, musician missed whose Rameau has several times lowered the claims as regards musical science, does not completely fear a déjuger by sentences which show its own insufficiencies, for example:

With regard to the contrefugues, double fugues, runnings away reversed, low constraints, and other difficult stupidities that the ear cannot suffer and that the reason cannot justify, they are obviously remainders of cruelty and bad taste, which do not remain, like the gates of our Gothic churches, which for the shame of those which had patience to make them.

As for the conclusion, she explains easily why the letter received a rather bad reception:

I believe to have shown that there is neither measurement nor melody in the French music, because the language is not likely; that the French song is only one continual, unbearable barking with any not prevented ear; that the harmony in is rough, without expression, and feeling only its filling of schoolboy; that the French airs are not airs; that récitatif French is not the récitatif one. From where I concluded that the French do not have music and cannot about it have, or that, if ever they have one of them, it will be so much worse for them.

Branch retorted by the publication, in 1754, of the Observations on our instinct for the music and its principle : it is devoted to it in particular to an examination of the monolog of Armide , parallel with that of Rousseau, by presenting a completely opposite analysis of what one then regarded as one of the insurpassés models of musical declamation in French.

External bond

The text of the '' Lettre on the French music ''

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