Abstract
Reviewed by : Friedemann Pestel, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
R. J. Arnold’s monograph is the first book-length study of the well-known French genre of querelle in the field of opera that took place throughout a long eighteenth century. The motivation for this study, situated at the intersection of musicology, literary studies and cultural history, comes from scholarship revolving around the formation of the French public sphere, politicization of intellectual and scientific debates, theatre and opera, or censorship and liberty of the press – discussions all more or less explicitly addressing the question of the long-term cultural origins of the French Revolution. Arnold frankly rejects the idea of an ‘Aesopian discourse’ proposed by musicologist Richard Taruskin that claims contemporaries subversively conveyed coded political messages through aesthetical debates. As Arnold convincingly demonstrates, the relation between music and politics in the eighteenth century was not a simple one of instrument and means, but one of institutions, media and contexts. Rather than being covert political controversies, debates about opera, first of all, turned around music, but took place in the public and were, therefore, also connected to the political sphere.
Unfolding his argument, Arnold undertakes a survey of four eighteenth-century querelles, all richly documented by a variety of sources. Chapter 1 presents the small-scale and rather unknown early-eighteenth-century Raguenet-Lecerf controversy, echoing the mother of all querelles between the Anciens and the Modernes. Forging and abiding by the rules of the emerging genre, the opponents – the clergyman and historian Raguenet and the magistrate Lecerf de la Viéville – discussed the superior qualities of French (with regard to Jean-Baptiste Lully) or Italian opera. Focusing on content and arguments as well as the style and semantics of the debate, Arnold’s analysis – here and throughout the book – stands out through its clear structure, multiple perspectives and balanced conclusions.
The subsequent Ramiste–Lulliste querelle brings further contextual factors into opera controversies: power struggles between the monarchy and the parliaments in the early reign of Louis XV, generational effects, broadening mediatic coverage including iconographic formats, and new Enlightenment participants in the debate such as the declared defender of Rameau, Denis Diderot. If these contexts have already played a role for Jürgen Habermas’ argument about the constitution of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, Arnold responds to this narrative in a highly nuanced and sometimes surprising way. For example, the Lulliste ‘defenders of tradition’, far from being ‘yesterday’s men’ (66), recurred to innovative argumentative techniques in order to make their claims about Lully’s exemplarity. Highly instructive is also Arnold’s discussion of the emergence of the figure of mélomane as a sectarian advocate of music.
With the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s, which revolved around the appearance of an Italian opera group, social conventions of subjects, and the genre of opéra comique, Chapter 3 reaches more familiar and also better researched territory and introduces, among many others, part-time composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a detractor of French-language opera. As Arnold brings out, the querelle not only took place in the context of the French ‘cult of the nation’ (David Bell) or contestation of monarchical power; it also allowed for making claims about the link between the ‘liberty of music’ and the ‘liberty of (public) action’ to use D’Alembert’s terms.
If, however, the Querelle des Bouffons provided the first traces of the anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic ‘language of 1789’ (109), chapter 4 on the quarrel between Gluckists and Piccinists in the 1770s and 1780s makes clear that there was no direct path from the opera house to the Ancien Régime’s final crisis. While granting attention to the politicization and mediatization of musical discourse, it is Arnold’s great merit that he carefully refrains from socio-political over-interpretation, but puts the main emphasis on an expanding media market. The revisionist stance of his argument comes most clearly to the fore in the analysis of the ‘revolutionary interlude’ (Chapter 5) where the absence of querelles may appear striking at first. This is, however, a question of perspective: contemporaries had already been discussing the ‘Révolutions de la Musique en France’ in a vocabulary also applied to politics well before the storming of the Bastille. Whereas pro-revolutionary German composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt on his visit to Paris in the 1790s made immediate comparisons between political antagonisms and operatic quarrels, those revolutionaries who showed an interest in music thought of it, as with other fields, more in terms of either conformity and universalism or rational pluralism instead of controversy and ‘party spirit’.
As the much-welcomed extension into the early nineteenth century (Chapter 6) makes clear, the genre of musical querelle did not see a post-revolutionary revival. Debates on music and its wider implications for politics and society continued, as in the case of quarrelsome mélodistes and harmonistes, but generally were held in a more professional manner. Compared to the previous debates, they lacked much of the earlier divisive quality and rarely reached beyond a community of music specialists, unlike eighteenth-century quarrellers.
Arnold’s detailed, dense and carefully argued study makes a substantial contribution to ‘rethinking contradiction’ (148) in the long-eighteenth-century public sphere. Throughout the book, Arnold prefers insightful descriptions to straightforward causal explanations or sharp-edged claims. His overall conclusion, is, therefore, all the more stimulating in terms of further debate. For Arnold, the genre of querelle flourished under neither ‘complete liberty’ nor ‘complete oppression’ (173), rather it needed the dynamics of ‘somewhat toothless absolutism’ (213) in order to exploit its full discursive potential.