Debates concerning musical aesthetics in the eighteenth century had never witnessed two participants of such stature—nor, for that matter, did had they known such vitriol—as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau; before the first shot of the notorious Querelle des Bouffons, a pamphlet war in the early 1750s between adherents of French opera on the one side and Italian on the other, was fired, Rousseau had already received the prize of the Academy of Dijon for his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences [First Discourse] and had written the musical articles for Diderot’s famous Encyclopedia. Rameau, for his part, had not only composed several treatises on music theory, including the eponymous Traité de l’harmonie of 1722, but had also penned such masterpieces of the opera house as Hippolyte et Aricie, Dardanus, Zoroastre, and Platée, all of which brought him the greatest renown in French musical circles. Indeed, even his 1750 Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie earned him the official approbation of the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences.[1] Although the two would disagree bitterly on the nature of musical expression, Rousseau was in fact a Rameau acolyte early in his career.

 

Rousseau was a gifted musical thinker in his own right, though he lacked the polished credentials of his contemporary. A self-taught musician, Rousseau claimed to have learned harmony and composition by reading Rameau’s Traité,[2] and despite his subsequent falling out with the elder theorist, he never abandoned Rameau’s most crucial doctrine, that of the fundamental bass, despite his disagreement with Rameau’s scientific pretensions and his denial that harmony arises from Nature at all.[3] Before growing bitter, relations between the two figures were on the contrary rather cordial; Rousseau’s 1742 essay “Plan Regarding New Signs for Music,” though deemed impractical, “the exchange was conducted in a tone of mutual respect.”[4] Two subsequent incidents in 1745 would change the tone permanently. First, Rameau was openly hostile to Rousseau’s Les Muses galantes, an opera in the French style, during the actual performance no less, which left the composer mortified.[5] Later that same year, Rousseau was given the opportunity to set a text by Voltaire to music by Rameau, who nevertheless insisted on mingling in the process, and Rousseau was ultimately neither credited nor compensated for his efforts.[6]

 

After this affront, the two would oppose one another personally and intellectually, Rousseau the partisan of melody as the source of musical expression, Rameau that of harmony. The substance of this dispute and its relation to their respective musical aesthetics is the subject of this essay. We will consider their differences, chiefly as they played out in two key texts of the early 1750s, namely Rousseau’s Letter on French Music of 1752 and Rameau’s rejoinder, Observations on Our Instinct for Music of 1754. It is in this context where we encounter their famous analyses of the recitative Enfin, il est en ma puissance from Lully’s Armide, which will be treated here.

 

     Rousseau’s conversion from French music to Italian, and, correspondingly, to a melody-based aesthetic, began in during a trip Rousseau made to Venice in 1743-4, during which he began to shed his French biases. At the time, French opera was dominated by the legacy of Lully, the ancien régime, and the tragédie lyrique. This was an aristocratic genre, typically with a happy ending after a god or goddess has intervened in the affairs of main characters. It also maintained a pleasing balance between serious and light styles and, “[carried] the audience into an artificial world of enchantment, or an equally extraordinary human world filled with noble or legendary characters moved by grand passions.”[7] In contrast, the lighter, comic Italian style, opera buffa, dealt with ordinary people. What’s more, the contrast between recitative and aria, more seamless in French opera, was maintained here strictly. The main focus, musically speaking, was on the melody, and the orchestral scoring was nowhere as elaborate as with French opera, though by this time, the Italian model had caught on at the Paris Opéra as well.

 

     With his Letter on French Music, Rousseau sought to go beyond the Querelle, mostly a journalistic hodge podge that debated the relative merits of French vs. Italian music. Indeed, he intends to ask whether the French can be said to have any music at all, a question he introduces sardonically, and will ultimately answer with a “no,” with the parable of the child who was born with a golden tooth: when a child was rumored to have been born with a golden tooth, learned men attempted to explain this rationally without, however, verifying whether the claim was true in the first place.[8] Really he tells us all we need to know in his epigraph from Horace, “Sunt verba et voces, praetereaque, nihil:” “there are words and voices, and besides that, nothing.” Rousseau’s ambition was to “establish some principles” which will aid other learned men in their own pursuit of the question, for, “it belongs only to the Philosopher to speak finally them both [writing poetry and music].[9]

 

In an assertion that distinguishes his views on harmony from those of Rameau, who believed nature to be the source of both harmony and all musical expression, Rousseau states that harmony, while having its principle in nature, is nonetheless the same for all nations. What gives the music of a nation is particularity is, rather, melody, which is born primarily in their language. Thus, with melody being the source of music, harmony, when put into actual musical practice, is subordinated to a natural but contingent factor—language—and is thereby no longer natural per se, but culturally determined along national lines. Quite what he means by this was made much clearer in a passage from his celebrated, and posthumous, Essay on the Origin of Languages:

 

The beauty of sounds is from nature; their effect is purely physical, it results from the interaction of the various particles of air set in motion by the sounding body, and by all its aliquots, perhaps to infinity. All of this together produces a pleasant sensation: every man in the universe will take pleasure in listening to beautiful sounds; but unless this pleasure is animated by melodious inflections that are familiar to them, it will not be delightful, it will not pass into voluptuous pleasure.[10]

 

 With this, Rousseau acknowledges that the sounding body [corps sonore—he uses Rameau’s term] indeed produces harmony, but music founded on such a principle rings artificial, whereas music founded on language that imitates the passions is what is truly natural and expressive.

    

He then expounds in capsule form on what is really his main thesis concerning the status of Italian and French music. The French language—he has not yet specified this but his intention is unambiguous—is particularly ill-suited for melody. It is “composed only of mixed sounds, of mute, indistinct, or nasal syllables, few sonorous vowels, many consonants and articulations,” which makes music to which it is sung “indistinct” and “piercing.” Moreover, the abundance of harsh consonants would render the music heavy and monotonous, which he likens to a “heavy and angular body rolling along on cobblestones.” Such a music, unable to attain a beautiful melody, would require the supplement of harmony and learnedness, of “trills cadenzas, portamenti and other fake pleasures.”[11] This degradation would be truly devastating for melody, for the polyphonic conception of musical texture and the unrefined ear for harmony would, according to Rousseau, dupe the musicians into thinking that any arbitrary “inner voice” of the thoroughbass—as music theorists today might refer to them—could constitute for the melody: “wherever they saw notes they would find song …”[12]

 

The Italian language, on the other hand, is much better equipped. It is sweet, its articulations are not compounded, it lacks roughness, its frequent elisions engender a more pleasing flow, among other qualities. Later, Rousseau lists three qualities he believes make Italian music superior to French music, and he can now, having sketched a framework for such judgments, tie them to his views on language.[13] First, he notes the sweetness of Italian, which here he says is more malleable in the sense that the melodic profile can be more individuated for each particular character in an opera, thus allowing him to be more distinguished from the other characters. His third quality is the strength of meter in Italian, which lends itself well to vibrant melody and lively accompaniment.

 

His second quality is a little more subtle. This is the boldness of the modulations, which are all the more effective by their not being “servilely prepared” as he considered French modulations to be.[14] It is by these means that composers can express the subtleties in language that imitate the passions. He would later give a much clearer idea of what this means in his definition of recitative in the Dictionary of Music of 1768, which also involves the concept of modulation. The importance of modulating boldly and effectively is still there, but Rousseau stresses how recitative is, more than the aria, the closest musical form to actual speech and, as such, all the more interesting for him. In fact, he even says that “the best recitative is that in which one sings the least.”[15] Inappropriate for arias, frequent modulation is best suited for recitative, with their moment-to-moment declamations and rapidly shifting thoughts. However, for Rousseau modulations are actually a modern patch required of a music that cannot represent the fine intonational gradations of the speaking voice:

 

The inflections of the Voice are not limited to musical Intervals; they are infinite and impossible to determine. Not being able to fix them with a certain precision, therefore, the Musician, in order to follow speech, should at least imitate them as much as possible, and, in order to convey to the mind of the Listeners the idea of the Intervals and of the Accents he cannot express in Notes, he has recourse to Transitions which assume them. If, for example, he needs the Interval from the major Semi-tone to the minor, he will not notate it—he would not know how to; but he will give you its idea with the help of the Enharmonic transition.[16]

 

It is also worth pointing out that implicit in Rousseau’s discussion of speech and melody is a much older one, that of fourth-century BCE writer Aristoxenus. In his Elementa Harmonica, he distinguishes continuous from intervallic motions of the voice, that is, motions that do not fall on a definite pitch, but simply wander about only to stop, and motions that bound an intervallic space with definite pitches. The former is associated with speech and the latter with singing.[17] Though he had other ways of justifying the use of harmony, this ultimately represents his defense of modulation, a defense that, in many ways, constitutes some of his most imaginative remarks on harmony.

 

Most of the remaining aesthetic content stems directly from Rousseau’s doctrine of the “unity of melody,” which he likens to the unity of action in a Tragedy.[18] For Rousseau, this means that all other aspects of composition such as harmony and accompaniment, composed or extemporized, or embellishments must be subordinate to the melody and must serve only to clarify, the bass moving only when necessary, the frequent inversions of harmony found in French music not required. He praises Italian accompanists for their restraint when accompanying, frequently relying on octaves or unisons, never feeling the pressure to fill out all the harmonies in a chord, as prescribed by French practice.[19] Rousseau even extends the concept to pieces that exhibit duo textures, where two independent lines are either the only two voices in the piece, or in, say, an operatic duet. In these cases, Rousseau’s prescription is that the two lines do not interrupt one another, and frequently pass off their ideas from one voice to another, thereby maintaining a single, unified melody.[20]

 

Before turning to Rousseau’s analysis of the Lully recitative, it will be useful to discuss briefly Rameau’s response to the Letter, in which he—succinctly by Rameauian standards—spells out his conception of the nature of musical expression. This will also serve to facilitate a comparison between the two writers’ analyses on the disputed passage of Lully, which Rameau also treats in the Observations.

 

Precisely the opposing position is taken up in the Observations, where Rameau states in no uncertain terms that:

 

It belongs to Harmony alone to stir the passions; Melody derives its force only from that source, from which it directly emanates and as for the differences from low to high, etc., which are only the superficial modifications of the Melody, they add almost nothing to it…[21]

 

The major chord is found in nature through the corps sonore (any vibrating body will produce octaves, fifths and a major third in its first six overtones)—formerly the divided string, as in the Traité. And it is nature’s “gift” to us that we may understand harmony in music almost unconsciously, harmony, moreover, having been founded in nature herself and, thus, the source of musical expression. Not only is the perfect chord found in any vibrating body, but proper progressions in the fundamental bass—that is, from root of the chord to root of the chord—proceed according to the intervals of the perfect chord itself, namely in thirds and fifths.[22] Rameau also discusses the three principle chords in a key, the tonic, dominant and subdominant. The dominant, built a fifth above the tonic, is associated with joy and strength, as it is directly generated above a fundamental frequency. The subdominant, a fourth below the tonic chord, represents sadness or tension, as the fifth below a fundamental frequency does not resonate when the source is struck.[23] Therefore, whereas for Rousseau harmony in musical practice was unnatural, arising from recondite calculations and the like, for Rameau it was nature herself.

 

Turning to Rousseau and Rameau’s treatment of the Lully recitative Enfin, il est en ma puissance, a portion of which will be discussed here, we can see some of their ideologies in action, a glimpse into their workshop.[24] This scene in the opera Armide depicts Armide intending to kill her prisoner, Renaud, whom she actually loves. A mere glance at the score has Rousseau moaning:

 

Look at the Thoroughbass. How many eighth notes! How many little fleeting notes to run after the harmonic succession! Is this then how the Bass of a good recitative progresses, in which only the long notes should be heard, here and there, as seldom as possible …?[25]

 

Rousseau is referring to the tendency of the bass to follow the melody in exactly the same rhythm as the melody, thus in blatant violation of the principle of the unity of melody.[26]

 

Rousseau acknowledges the beauty of the verses but questions the composer’s handling of them.

 

Enfin il est en ma puissance,

Ce fetal ennemi, ce superbe vainquer.

 

Rousseau feels that the second line ought to have been omitted, its content to be imagined by the audience. Forced to deal with it anyway, Rousseau complains that although the second line is in a different key (thought we would not consider it to be today, preferring to think of it merely a change to another chord within the larger key), there is still not changes in key to express the poetry. Already Rousseau is rehearsing his views on modulation in recitative. He goes on:

 

Le charmed u sommeil le livre à ma vengeance

 

Rousseau finds this passage languishing; Lully “takes a nap from here from which he wakes up on the word percer.” Presumably Rousseau is again criticizing Lully for not having modulated sufficiently, which is inferable from the relatively slow harmonic rhythm and the return of denser, more chromatic melodic activity upon singing percer.

 

Je vais percer son invincible coeur.

Par lui tous mes Captifs sont sortis d’esclavage:

Qu’il éprouve toute ma rage!

Quel trouble me saisit? Qui me fait hésiter?

 

In this passage Armide begins to question her intentions, and Rousseau calls for more harmonic alternation, for he questions Lully’s bass change when Armide asks, “Qui me fait hésiter?” Here the key shifts from D major to G major, and although the harmony is still a D chord, it has indeed become the dominant of G major. Rousseau acknowledges all this, but demands to know why during such a moment of tension Lully should be playing with mere tonics and dominants. His solution would involve greater modulations and a livelier melody, as a mere change in the bass cannot affect the imitation Rousseau desires.

 

Qu’est-ce qu’en sa faveur la pitié me vuet dire?

Frappons

… Ciel! qui peut m’arrêter?

Achevons … Je frémis. Vengeons-nous … Je soupier.

 

And here, at the height of the drama, Rousseau again finds the harmony lacking—he believes it actually to be all in the same key— and the melody “little distinguished” and “inconceivably clumsy.”

 

In the Observations we see an entirely different response, naturally, guided by Rameau’s belief in the natural basis of harmony, but also by an acute poetic sensibility.

 

Enfin il est an ma puissance.

Ce fatal Ennemi, ce superbe Vainqueur.

 

After reproaching Rousseau for hearing a perfect close (by all accounts involving dominant to tonic motion—and Rameau is quite right to do so, as no such motion occurs, which Rousseau himself should know) on puissance, Rameau accounts for the expression of these two lines by appealing first to harmony. His ear more finely tuned to the power of harmonic motion, Rameau praises Lully for his passage from major to minor, from an inherently vigorous sound to one that is softer. Moreover, Rameau makes the interesting point that it is only with ce superbe Vainqueur where “Armide’s spite rests.” For, “it is not at all ce fatal Ennemi that occupies her, any more than her liberated captives.” Thus the perfect cadence on G, having confirmed the shift to G on ennemi punctuates by means of harmony the most crucial dramatic aspect contained in the opening two lines.[27]

 

Le charmed u sommeil le livre à ma vengeance.

 

Rameau praises Lully for passing form the subdomiant A minor, colorfully prepared by the G# in the bass, which then passes to the dominant B major on Vengeance, an effect “redoubled,” as the dominant is associated with “the sphere of forcefulness.”

 

Je vais percer son invincible coeur.

Par lui tous mes Captifs sont sortis d’esclavage:

Qu’il éprouve toute ma rage.

 

Here Rameau deals in one of his classic conceits. Rousseau has found boring the transition from Par lui tous mes Captifs sont sortis d’escl-, occurring over an E minor harmony to –vage, where an A major harmony is initiated. Because the E minor was the result of its own perfect cadence (the preceding chord was B major) and then descends another fifth to A major, it is understood as a dominant in itself, albeit it one lacking the leading tone. Under Rameau’s system, this new context for E minor obtains a dissonance 7^th (D) which guides the ear to the succeeding A major harmony. “But are the eyes enough in Music? Ears are needed …”[28] Whether Rameau would have accompanied this moment by adding the 7^th on the keyboard is ultimately irrelevant in respect to this analysis. What matters is that Rameau understands here to be more variety in the score than there appears on the page, owing to his theory of how we mentally make sense of music. The shift of context of the E minor chord from tonic to a dominant is enough to carry the drama for Rameau.[29]

 

Quel trouble me saisit? Qui me fait hesiter?

 

As Rousseau has noted, tonic has indeed become dominant under trouble, but for Rameau, this is a momentous occasion, for “day, it is true, becomes night.”[30] In addition, the key change from D to G occurs towards the subdominant side, and while Rameau does point this out, he does not note its significance with respect to the text, but it is easy to imagine what he might have thought, namely that the softness of the subdominant is perfectly suited to the hesitation that Armide reveals at this moment.

 

Qu’est-ce qu’en sa faveur la pitié me veut dire?

Frappons.

Ciel! qui peut m’arrêter!

Achevons … je frémis! vengeons-nous … je soupier! [sic]

 

Rousseau considers this passage ([arrê-]ter … soupier!) be in the same key, an assertion that leaves Rameau incredulous. On his reckoning, although the passage begins and ends on a G major chord, harmonic variety is achieved by the increased harmonic rhythm and the presence of implied dissonances on the second halves of the bar. In m. 19, Rameau’s system requires a seventh be heard in passing to the following chord, again, despite there not being any in the score. What’s more, Rameau seizes on the notion of implied chromatics in all of this. For instance, in passing from The G chord in m. 20 to the C chord in m. 21, an F-natural (indicated by the implied lowered fifth above the bass in the figures) is required for the ear to “understand” the motion. Thus, in the span of two bars, the number of accidentals in the key signatures has been reduced from two (D major) to zero (C major), and these two are immediately replaced by the implied A7 harmony in the second half of m. 21, with equilibrium restored by the end of the phrase. For a harmonist like Rameau, what could be more expressive than such harmonic variety—as he considered it—at a moment of such unrest?[31]

 

In the end, one can debate who “won” the battle of Lully. Rameau’s views are perhaps more finely wrought, though we should pause to consider that it is difficult if not impossible to imagine what Rousseau held as his ideal for sound in the recitative and in music. We know the scores of Italian operas of his day, but, as we have seen, in the recitative, Rousseau clearly articulates an ideal that is beyond the grasp of our tonal system, and it is by means of synthetic and learned modulations after all that the effects of Ancient accented languages are brought about. But while music was indeed expression for both Rameau and Rousseau, it was other things as well. For Rameau, it was science, and he lusted for approval from Europe’s scientific elite his whole life. For Rousseau, it was also tied to effective government, as he discusses briefly at the end of his Essay; moderns scream at the top of their lungs and wave placards and are still not heard, while Ancient orators could recite all day to a rapt audience.[32] With Rousseau and Rameau we see two original musical thinkers articulating diametrically opposed conceptions of nature and expression—a nature that for Rousseau furnished an empathetic crying out of the passions, for Rameau the corps sonore and its rational working out in the tonal system, the understanding of which is nevertheless afforded to us by her “gift.”