Quarrel of the Buffoons

A cultural shock

The quarrel bursts the 1752, when an Italian itinerant troop, that of Eustacchio Bambini, settles with the royal Académie of music (the future Opera) to give to it representations of intermezzi and of comic operas. They begin with the representation of Serva padrona of Pergolèse. Same work already had been given to Paris in 1746, but without drawing the attention less world. It is the fact of having even presented it to the royal Academy which creates the scandal. The royal Academy does not have the plasticity of the Comédie-Française where one can without problem alternate tragedies with the comedies or the jokes of Molière. The comic one with the royal Académie of music was always limited enough.

At the 18th century, the Italian opera strongly evolved/moved, more quickly than the lyric Tragédie or tragedy in music (typically French) until being divided into two kinds, the opera seriated (with serious topics on booklets of Metastase) and the opera buffa or operated comic (buffo = which lends to laughing, grotesque) which introduces with the theater of the comic interludes impresses lightness, of naivety, simplicity, irrational and commonplace of the daily newspaper. If the “ballet buffoon” that Platée could represent, tragedy in music of Branch (1745), made already place with comic elements (assonances in “oi” imitating the song of frogs etc), it is rather as parodic elements of the kind. Besides the part held a marginal place until the bursting of the quarrel. On the other hand the Comic opera is not satisfied to parody the serious kind but it produces a type of comic original, more popular, rather near to the joke and comedy to mask.

The unexpected success of these “buffoons” will divide Parisian musical intelligentsia into two clans. Between partisans of the lyric Tragedy, royal representing French style, and sympathizers of the Opera-puffs out, truculent defender of the Italian music, will be born a true quarrel lampoonist which will animate the musical circles of the French capital until in 1754.

The role of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

However, the year 1753, one year after the arrival of the Buffoons, Rousseau publishes a lampoon ( Lettre on the French music ), in which it assembles Serva pins some, and with the end of the year, it publishes an edition engraved of it to diffuse a noncorrupted text of it. These two interventions will weigh heavy in the reception of work.

But without insisting on the Duet tragedies, kind of music which one does not have even the idea in Paris, I then to quote you a comic duet which is known there of everyone, and I will boldly quote it like a model of song, of unit of melody, dialog and taste, to which, in my opinion, nothing will miss, when it is well carried out, that listeners who can hear it: it is that of the first act of Serva padrona, Lo conosco has quegl' occhietti, etc I acknowledge that few French musicians are in a position to feel the beauties them, and I would say readily of Pergolèse, as Cicéron said of Homère, than it is already to have done much progress in art, than to enjoy itself in its reading. (Extracted the Letter on the French music of Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

In this same text, it defends musical qualities of the Italian and very severely overpowers the French: 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 eux. In the Parisian world, one will hold to him rigor of such remarks as well under provincial as from abroad.

Esthetic national identity and competitions

Among the lampoonists of the opposed edge, the father Manor house, for example, will answer in these terms:

A nation like the Frenchwoman, of which the unit has been so perfect for thousand two at least hundred years, under the unit of large and even empire does not suffer readily the too marked superiority, too marked, of an unspecified nation which has on all, neither on this extent neither on this number, neither this antiquity nor this unit of patrie.

Is forty years before the Bataille of Valmy thus necessary to already see there the assertion of an national identity vis-a-vis a threat of cultural imperialism? In fact the idea of nation advanced here represents only Parisian microcosm, i.e. the good pleasure of the court, therefore goodwill of the monarch. On the other hand, the Italian opera present as for him an esthetic form which is not already only any more Italian but European or at least international since number of the type-setters of the kind are not Italian. Germans like Nickel silver Grimm and the Baron d' Holbach are among most enthusiastic at the sides of the partisans of the Italian opera. The matter of the Castel father is due to the fact that at the 18th century, for the royal court, only France can claim with being the dominant nation in Europe. And the most quarrelsome remarks or most defensive emanate from the partisans of the French kind.

However through the stake of cultural domination especially the confrontation of two esthetics is played. In forty lampoons which enamel the period, contrast is recurring between a very musical Italian language and an Italian opera which privileges the song vis-a-vis a more consonant French language, more articulated and a more concerned French kind of the text. Moreover, for the “French” party the laughter caused by the comic opera is regarded as harmful because it makes lose the self-control and is contrary with the reason whereas the “Italian” party calls some with transport and the emotion.

Renewal of the forms

The same year Rousseau had just composed its small opera the Soothsayer of the village , created with Fontainebleau the October 18th 1752. The qualifier of “interlude” explicitly to the kind that at the same time the Buffoons illustrated on the scene of the Opera, but can one attaches it say in so far as Rousseau carried out its dream there to Italianize the French opera? Its music is well far from that of Pergolèse. Work did not shock the authorities of the court since Madam de Pompadour held itself the role of Hake at the time of a representation with the Château of Bellevue. It thus did not appear subversive, and its character pro-Italian did not jump to the eyes, for the good reason that at the time when he composed work, he had not attended yet the representations of Italian operas of the royal Académie of Music.

Seventeen years after first version, created in 1737, which was not a durable success although this opera renewed the tragic ritual musical invented by Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau proposes, in 1754, whereas the gibes of the Quarrel of the Buffoons still fused, a deeply altered version of “ Castor and Pollux ”. This time, the work, presented like the model of the French style opposed to the Italian style, triumphed, and for a long time.

In the final analysis, it appears that this polemic, which, after courteous beginnings, somewhat goes envenimer, and will die out at the end of two years, will have constituted one great moment of opening of the French music to new esthetic values. The French form, without giving up itself, will open with influences and will renew the kind. To the Commedia dell'Arte and the theater of the Fair in particular, will set up a new system of opera which re-uses what was the object of the quarrel: naturalness and simplicity vis-a-vis the harmonic richness of the tragedy in music.

External bonds

History and documentary bibliography relating to the quarrel of the buffoons on the site musicologie.org

Random links: