Reply To: Music
Two French Baroque Composers
1. Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau, a contemporary of Bach and Handel, enters the consciousness of socialists through Denis Diderot’s satire Rameau’s Nephew.
Marx, in sending a copy of Rameau’s Nephew to Engels, reminded him “This unique masterpiece will give you fresh pleasure again.”
Engels, in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, famously wrote
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“Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality.”
Diderot was the courageous editor (with d’Alembert) of the enlightenment Encyclopédie and he was Marx’s favourite prose writer.
Danse des Sauvages
Les Indes Galantes (1736)
The Amazonian girl Zima chooses the hand of the defeated Indian Adario over those of the victorious European colonists—a jealous Spaniard and a French fop.
The Indians and the colonists then make ceremonial peace, extolling the simple joys of nature—a sentiment pointedly directed at the Europeans.
Rameau and his librettist are playing out a trope that has not yet flowered into the politically-charged rallying cry that it was to become for the revolutionary bourgeoisie, despite embryonic glimmerings of Rousseau’s noble savage and critique of feudal social relations.
Rondeau, ‘Forêts paisibles’ — Peaceful forests
- Chorus of the Savages
[In our] peaceful forests, we are no longer victims of vain desires.
Here we enjoy everything that Fortune can favour us with.
Zima, Adario
[This forest] sanctuary, shuts out [European] “Greatness”.
Here we are impregnable to all such vain attractions!
Oh Heaven, you created [the forests] for innocence and peace…
How could we be happier—why hanker after anything else?
Peace-Pipe Ceremony
The concert performance (above) is played at a frenetic a pace for dancers to keep up with.
Here, from a comfortably paced stage performance, we see the South American “Indes” through French colonial eyes, as thoroughly North-American but with 18th century French military drumming.
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2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a generation younger than Rameau, was a musician and writer on music. D’Alembert commissioned him to write the entries on music in the Encyclopédie after Rameau turned Diderot down.
Rousseau’s beef with Rameau came to a head in the 1750s Querelle des Bouffons (battle of the comedians)—a pamphlet war pitting the new Italian opera buffa, championed by Rousseau, among others, against traditional French lyric tragedy, associated with Rameau.
Rousseau’s practical argument was a short Italian-style pastoral opera Le Devin du village about a simple peasant love-breakup, reconciled by a mediating “soothsayer”, in which he put
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nothing with kings, crowns, gods or fate; nothing that’s Greek.
Its favour with the opera-going public eventually shifted aesthetic tastes.
Le Devin du Village — The Village Soothsayer
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1752)
Even if subsequent trends eclipsed Rameau’s musical form, that baroque master (like his contemporary J. S. Bach) has stayed the course.
