Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Part 1 Composers
- Part 2 Themes
- 11 Raise Your Glass to French Music!
- 12 Comic Opera
- 13 Repeats
- 14
- 15 The Musicians' Arrondissement
- 16 Les Anglais
- 17 Dr. Mephistopheles
- 18 The Prose Libretto
- 19 ‘Un pays où tous sont musiciens…’
- 20 Modernisms that Failed
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
11 - Raise Your Glass to French Music!
from Part 2 - Themes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Part 1 Composers
- Part 2 Themes
- 11 Raise Your Glass to French Music!
- 12 Comic Opera
- 13 Repeats
- 14
- 15 The Musicians' Arrondissement
- 16 Les Anglais
- 17 Dr. Mephistopheles
- 18 The Prose Libretto
- 19 ‘Un pays où tous sont musiciens…’
- 20 Modernisms that Failed
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
At the end of his Lettre sur la musique française, published in 1753, Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared:
I think I have shown that there is neither measure nor melody in French music because the language is not capable of them; that French singing is a continual squalling that no unprejudiced ear can put up with; that its harmony is crude and devoid of expression and suggests only the stumbling of a student; that French airs are not airs, that French recitative is not recitative. From this I conclude that the French have no music and cannot have any, and that if they ever have, it will be so much the worse for them.
Why on earth was a Frenchman like Rousseau (French-Swiss to be precise) telling the French that they were unmusical? Louis XIV had devoted his long life to establishing the might and glory of France, and French manners in dress and diplomacy were emulated everywhere. But while everyone admired Versailles, not everyone liked the music played there, with its quaint old-fashioned viols and its fussily ornamental style. For all his genius Rameau has never been to everyone's liking. In the early eighteenth century cultivated Frenchmen were painfully aware of the supremacy of Italian music then dominant right across Europe from Madrid to St. Petersburg, and they examined the reasons for their own apparent inferiority in countless pamphlets and tracts, of which Rousseau's Lettre is the most famous.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beethoven's CenturyEssays on Composers and Themes, pp. 129 - 132Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008