Dissonance in the Republic of Letters

The Querelle Des Gluckistes Et Des Piccinnistes

Mark Darlow

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351192057
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Scienze sociali
• Sous-sujet: Antropologia culturale e sociale

"Eighteenth-century French cultural life was often characterised by quarrels, and the arrival of Viennese composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris in 1774 was no exception, sparking a five-year pamphlet and press controversy which featured a rival Neapolitan composer, Niccolo Piccinni. However, as this study shows, the Gluck-Piccinni controversy was about far more than which composer was better suited to lead French operatic reform. A consideration of cultural politics in 1770s Paris shows that a range of issues were at stake: court versus urban taste as the proper judge of music, whether amateurs or specialists should have the right to speak of opera, whether the epic or the tragic mode is more suited for drama reform, and even: why should the public argue about opera at all? Mark Darlow is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge."

CHAPTER 1
Opera Reform on the Eve of Gluck's Arrival

The question of opera reform became an urgent matter in the second half of the eighteenth century in France, especially under pressure from the Philosophes who campaigned loudly from mid-century for a new approach to the lyric theatre, using the experience of Italian opera buffa as a yardstick to measure French opera and the musicality of the French language. In fact, musical quarrels were a frequent phenomenon in eighteenth-century France: Lecerf de la Viéville and Francois Raguenet had disputed the relative merits of French and Italian opera in 1702—04; the increasing popularity of Rameau led to quarrels between 'Ramists' and 'Lullists' in the 1730s; and the early 1750s saw the best known of these: the Querelle des Bouffons. Robert Isherwood, whose important 1980 article on the controversy surrounding Gluck and Piccinni did much to put the quarrel back on the agenda of musicological research, provocatively titled his text 'The Third War of the Musical Enlightenment', thereby implying a long-term view of reform which attacked common elements over the century, an approach which underlay his article as a whole. In such an approach, it follows that the 'third' quarrel can only meaningfully be considered if the wider context is properly clarified. Accordingly, this chapter sets out some of the issues which were common to the century, and aims to sketch the critical and institutional 'heritage' as it appeared in 1774. However, I am not convinced that considering elements of continuity is the only, or even the best, approach to the 1770s, and so the chapter also aims to sketch out some of the specificities of the prior disputes, against which the originality of the 1770s debate can be better appreciated. The balance between continuity and specificity as concerns the Gluck—Piccinni quarrel will be a central element of my discussion throughout.

The 'Third War' of the Musical Enlightenment?

One issue confronting any historian of eighteenth-century French music is the sheer number of musical disputes which took place over the century, and some have tended to see the three major quarrels as three episodes in a series, since the issues debated in all three have common elements, such as national differences and the means by which French and Italian vocal music expressed the meanings of the text which was set, and the balance between musical and dramatic qualities. However, this supposed coherence begins to disintegrate once the focus is brought closer; and one starting-point of this study is my agreement with Alain Cernuschi that each 'episode' has specific issues, and to conflate the three robs them of that specificity.¹ For instance, in the Querelle des Bouffons there is no clear equivalent of the 1777 debate over the role of men of letters, nor can the later debate really be reduced to a question of two national musics, since although the point of the dispute was Gluck's claim to the status of heir to the French national tradition, his 'reformed' opera had incorporated French dramatic qualities and the sonata-based, periodically phrased style of Italian music into a new synthesis. James Kaplan uses term 'guerre des deux musiques', but (equally interestingly) neglects to explain what are the two musics in 1777, when Marmontel wrote Polymnie; and for good reason, because by then the Italian—French divide had become marginal: any other distinctions between Gluck and Piccinni are not so easily labelled.

Nor was the form taken by the 1770s debate entirely familiar. In 1752, polemical texts were first written concerning Omphale, a tragédie lyrique by Destouches (1701) recently revived at the Opera, taken as an example of the faults of the old French tragédie lyrique, soon followed by guest performances of Italian intermezzi and opere buffe: although many issues were ultimately at stake, the primary question concerned the characteristics of this (to many, unfamiliar) form of music drama, versus the familiar form of French tragédie lyrique. In 1774, however, the debate was not between two forms — nobody argued in favour of the maintenance of tragédie Iyrique in five acts — but for and against Gluck's own operatic style as a worthy model for reform. Only much later was an 'Italian' rival produced; from a quarrel for and against one single composer, the form of debate shifts to a binary exchange. More important, the types of intervention are very different, writers in the 1770s making much greater use of the periodical press to debate matters of detail, whereas the use of pamphlets was predominant in the Querelle des Bouffons.

One further specificity of the latter quarrel is its approach to taste, and here it is worthwhile considering the three quarrels in the long-term perspective of the evolution of taste-discourses. The difficulty with early-modern French opera is that it did not benefit from basic and dedicated aesthetic or theoretical texts of criticism; it was instead discussed in relation to something else, most famously, theories of spoken tragedy.⁸ Crucial to all is the place of the French (neoclassical) tradition of aesthetics which claimed — to speak schematically — that there is an objective Beauty, and that good taste consists in discerning that Beauty. The growing influence of an alternative, English, tradition, which — speaking equally schematically — would argue that Beauty is a matter of perception (Locke and Hutcheson being the major theorists), had important implications for the musical quarrels.⁹ A study of taste in the Querelle des Bouffons remains to be written, but the Philosophes were variably sympathetic to the latter position, and the very issue was a matter of debate.¹⁰ As I shall try to show in Chapter 4, Du Bos's 'sensationalist' aesthetics feeds the Piccinnist angle on music, whereas Gluckists tended to grow their discourse of musical specialization out of normative or rationalist positions: to speak schematically, that one may objectively posit such a thing as good music, which percipients can be trained to recognize. The points are made polemically, and so cannot be reduced (or neatly assimilated) to speculative writing on aesthetics, but certain tendencies can nevertheless be observed. Here too, then, the 1770s quarrel has specific approaches to long-standing historical problems.

As readers of Irailh's Querelles littéraires are aware, there were various types of controversy in early-modern France. A basic definition of a quarrel might be an 'adversarial' exchange over a defined set of issues or individuals, which pitted the judgement of individuals one against the other, and expressed that in print and in person. It is worth saying that the adversarial dimension lends a particularly meta-critical edge to the controversy, in the sense that disputes over an issue quickly become disputes over judgement itself, and the individuals who are judging. To focus only on the musical life of eighteenth-century France, quarrels could take various forms. One is the parallel, a mainstay of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, where two different individuals, styles, aesthetics, were explicitly compared. The chevalier de Jaucourt defined a parallèle in 1765 as a rhetorical exercise in comparison between two individuals, and took the example of La Bruyere's discussion of Corneille and Racine in his 'Des ouvrages de l'esprit' and a subsequent discussion by La Motte.² He placed the term within the category of 'art oratoire'. Whilst the parallèle could take many different forms in early-modern France, the essential point is that it was essentially distinct from both a 'querelle d'auteur' and a 'querelle d'oeuvre', comparing two alternatives rather than alternative views over one single creator or work. Probably the best known such text is Claude Perrault's Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, a mammoth work of comparison subdivided by genre, published between 1688 and 1697 in four volumes, of which the last concerned a comparison between the Ancients and the Moderns as regards music.³ Comparison between two periods had been inherent in the genre since the foundational work, Plutarch's Lives, which paired one Greek and one Roman individual for comparison, a work still well known to eighteenth-century France; and parallels between Antiquity and France remained a common form after the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes proper. However parallels were not just historical exercises, but also rhetorical, with a long tradition stretching back to Antiquity, which had placed the form of the parallel within the epidictic, a genre dealing with praise or blame (for instance, of a monarch). But Antiquity is also a lieu de mémoire, in the sense that comparisons with Antiquity allowed early-modern France the opportunity to draw essential critical distance from its cultural present, and thereby rethink the present according to alternative models derived from the past, consider the implied historical development linking the two, and thereby also imagine a future according to similar lines of development. Thus parallels also implied a philosophy of history and a series of questions about whether civilizations develop in linear fashion, and if so, whether any such development is a progress or a degenerescence, whether such matters as genius and taste are susceptible to progress, and what the place of tradition in our own present and our future should be, not to mention whether culture should more properly emulate a past 'golden age' of civilization or rather invent anew.⁴ Also involved is a philosophy of time: is time a factor of corruption, decadence or progress; is history linear or cyclical?⁵ Such issues were foregrounded in a series of texts such as Mably's Parallèle des Remains et des Français par rapport an gouvernement [Parallel between the Romans and the French concerning government] (1740), but parallèles could also take a synchronic perspective, comparing contemporaries. In the case of music, parallels generally implied a syncretic comparison, for instance between French and Italian as rival musico-dramatic systems. In this sense, Lecerf de la Viéville and Raguenet were engaging in a quarrel where each adversary's text took the form of a parallèle, comparing two different traditions: Lecerf's, indeed, was entitled Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, où, en examinant en détail les avantages des spectacles et le mérite des deux nations, on montre quelles sont les vraies beautés de la musique [Comparison of Italian music and French music, in which, examining in detail the advantages of the theatre and the merits of the tivo nations, it is shown what are the true beauties if music]. As I suggested in the Introduction, a...