Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics)

by Denis Diderot

  For my own part, I couldn’t decide whether to stay or leave, laugh or be angry. I stayed, intending to shift the conversation onto some subject that would cleanse my soul of the horror filling it. I was beginning to find it hard to tolerate the presence of a man who could discuss a horrible deed, an abominable, heinous crime, the way a connoisseur of painting or poetry discusses the beauties of a fine work of art, or the way a moralist or a historian points out and emphasizes every aspect of a heroic action. In spite of myself, I was overcome with depression. Observing this, he enquired:

  HIM: What’s the matter? Are you feeling unwell?

  ME: A little, but it’ll pass.

  HIM: You look anxious, as if you’re worrying over some disturbing idea.

  ME: That’s so.

  After a moment’s silence on his part as on mine, during which he paced up and down whistling and humming, I said, to bring him back to the subject of his talent: ‘What are you doing now?’

  HIM: Nothing.

  ME: That’s most exhausting.

  HIM: As it was, I was feeling quite stupid enough already, then I went to hear the music of Duni and our other young composers and that really finished me.

  ME: So you approve of that style of music?

  HIM: Definitely.

  ME: And to your ear these new melodies sound beautiful?

  HIM: Do they sound beautiful! My goodness! A thousand times yes. Such declamation! Such truth! Such feeling!

  ME: All imitative art takes its models from nature. What is the model the musician uses in composing a melody?

  HIM: Why not start at the beginning? What is a melody?

  ME: That question, I admit, is beyond me. We’re all the same. Our memories contain only words which, from the frequent and even the appropriate use we make of them, we believe we understand, and our minds contain only vague notions. When I utter the word ‘melody’, I have no clearer idea in my mind than do you and most of your fellow men when they say ‘reputation, blame, honour, vice, virtue, modesty, decency, shame, ridicule’.

  HIM: Melody is an imitation, using the notes of a scale invented by art or copied from nature (you decide), with the human voice or an instrument as its medium, that mimics physical sounds or tones of passion; and, as you can see, by changing the necessary terms in that definition it would precisely fit painting, eloquence, sculpture, and poetry. Now, as to your question. What’s the model for the musician or melody? It’s declamation, if the model breathes and thinks, sound, if the model’s inanimate. Declamation should be pictured as a line, and melody as another line that snakes up and down above it. The more powerful and true the declamation—the model for the song—the more the song mirroring it will break it into separate phrases; then the truer the song, and the more beautiful. And that’s what our young musicians have understood so well. When you hear: ‘I’m a poor devil’, you feel you’re listening to a miser’s lament; if he weren’t singing, he’d be using that same tone to say, as he entrusts his gold to the earth: ‘Oh earth, receive my treasure’.* And that young girl who feels her heart beating rapidly and, blushing, flustered, begs monseigneur to permit her to leave, would she express herself otherwise? These works present a great variety of characters and a wide range of declamatory styles. They’re sublime, I tell you. Go and listen, please, listen to the piece where the dying youth cries out: ‘My heart’s forsaking me’.* Listen to the song; listen to the accompaniment, and afterwards tell me in what way the actual tones of the dying man, and the form of this melody, differ. You’ll see if the modulations of the melody do not perfectly coincide with those of the spoken word. I’m saying nothing about the metre, which is another essential component of melody; I’m only concerned with the expression; nothing could be more self-evident than this maxim, which I read somewhere: musices seminarium accentus: metre is the source of melody.* From which you can see how difficult, and how essential, it is to know how to perform recitative properly. There’s no beautiful melody which cannot be made into a beautiful recitative, and no beautiful recitative from which a clever musician cannot create a beautiful melody. I’d hesitate to assert that someone who declaims well would sing well, but I’d be surprised if a fine singer weren’t good at declamation. You must believe all this that I’m telling you, for it’s the truth.

  ME: There’s nothing I’d like better than to believe you, if I were not prevented by a trifling difficulty.

  HIM: Which is?

  ME: If this music is sublime, then it follows that the music of the divine Lully, of Campra, of Destouches, of Mouret and even—just between you and me—even that of the dear uncle must be a bit dull.

  HIM [coming right up to me and murmuring his reply in my ear]: I don’t want to be overheard, for there are plenty of people here who know me; but the fact is, it is dull. It’s not that I’m worried about the dear uncle—since ‘dear’ is what we’re calling him. He’s made of stone. He’d see me with my tongue hanging out a foot from my mouth and wouldn’t give me a glass of water. But however hard he tries—with octaves, with sevenths (tum, tum, tatata, tirelee, tirelee, da) making the devil of a din, those who’re beginning to see through him, and no longer confuse a tremendous racket with music, won’t ever come to terms with it. There should be a police order forbidding anyone, regardless of their rank or position, from having Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater sung. That Stabat ought to have been burnt by the public executioner. My goodness, those damned Italian bouffons, with their Serva padrona and their Tracollo, have really given us a good kick in the pants.* In the old days a Tancrède, an Issé, a Europe galante, Les Indes, Castor, Les Talents lyriques played for four, five, six months. An Armide ran forever.* These days, they keep coming one after the other, falling like ninepins. So Rebel and Francœur* are foaming at the mouth. They’re saying they’re done for; ruined; and that if people put up with those trashy fairground music-makers any longer, the national music will go to the devil, and that the Académie Royale, down in the back alley*—the Opéra—might as well put up its shutters. And they do have a point. The old fossils who’ve been going there every Friday for thirty or forty years no longer find it as much fun as they did in the past; they’re bored and they nod off without knowing why; they wonder about it, but can’t come up with an explanation. Why don’t they ask me? Duni’s prediction will come true, and the way things are going, I’d stake my life that within four or five years of the Peintre amoureux de son modèle,* you won’t see a living soul in the famous alley. Those simple souls, they’ve deserted their own symphonies for the Italian ones. They imagined their ears would become attuned to the latter without it affecting their vocal music, as if a symphony were not, in relation to song—allowing always for the range of the instrument and the dexterity of the fingers—what song is in relation to actual declamation. As if the violin were not the ape of the singer, who’ll one day become, when complexity’s replaced beauty, the ape of the violin. The first musician to perform Locatelli was the apostle of the new music. There’ll be others, many others. We’ll grow accustomed to imitations of the accents of passion or the phenomena of nature, through melody, voice, and instruments, for that’s the real range of the purpose of music. Do you then suppose that we’ll keep our taste for pillage, spears, triumphal marches, ovations, victory celebrations? ‘Go and see if they’re coming, Jean.’* They’d imagined the public would weep or laugh at tragic or comic scenes that had been transmuted into music; that they could let the public hear tones of rage, hatred, and jealousy, genuine love laments, and the ironies and jokes of the Italian or French theatre, and that they’d still admire Ragonde and Platée.* My reply to that is: fiddle-faddle. They’d imagined that they could regularly let the public experience with what ease, flexibility, and fluidity the harmony and metre of the Italian tongue, with its ellipses and inversions, adapt themselves to the art, movement, expression, and structure of the songs and the measured rhythm of the sounds, and that they’d still fail to notice how stiff, hollow, heavy, unwieldy, pedantic, and monotonou
s is their own tongue.* But such is the case. They’ve told themselves that the public, after mingling its tears with the tears of a mother bewailing the death of her son, after shuddering at a tyrant’s murderous decree, wouldn’t be bored by their fairyland decors, their insipid mythology, their mawkish little madrigals which reveal as much about the poet’s bad taste as they do about the sterility of the art that tolerates them. The simple souls! It is not so, and never will be. The rights of the true, the good, and the beautiful will always prevail. They may be contested, but in the long run they’re admired. Art lacking in these qualities may be admired for a time, but eventually the applause gives way to yawns. So yawn away, my friends, yawn to your hearts’ content. Don’t be embarrassed. The supremacy of nature and of my trinity is such that the forces of hell can never prevail against it—Truth which is the Father, engendering Good, which is the Son, whence comes Beauty, which is the Holy Spirit—my trinity establishes its dominion imperceptibly. The foreign god humbly takes his place upon the altar, at the side of the indigenous idol; little by little he consolidates his position until, one fine day, he gives his neighbour a gentle shove; and—lo and behold! the idol falls. It’s said that that’s how the Jesuits introduced Christianity into China and India. And whatever those Jansenists may say, this political system that makes straight for its target without commotion, or bloodshed, or martyrs, without hurting a hair of anybody’s head, strikes me as the best.

  ME: There’s good sense—or something like it—in everything you’ve been saying.

  HIM: Sense! That’s fortunate. Devil take me if I’m trying to make sense. I say whatever comes into my mind. I’m like the Opéra musicians when my uncle first appeared: if I’m doing it right, so much the better. After all, an apprentice coalman will always speak more pertinently of his trade than would an entire academy or all the Duhamels in the world.

  Whereupon he began pacing up and down, quietly humming some of the melodies from L’Isle des Fous, Le Peintre amoureux de son modèle, Le Maréchal ferrant, and La Plaideuse.* From time to time, raising his hands, he’d gaze up at the sky and exclaim: ‘My God, isn’t that beautiful, isn’t that beautiful! How could anyone possessing a pair of ears even ask such a question?’ Next he started working himself into a passion. He was singing softly, and as his excitement increased his voice grew louder; then he began gesturing, grimacing, and twisting about. I said to myself: ‘Right, now he’s about to lose his head, and there’ll be another scene.’ And indeed, he suddenly shouted: ‘I am a worthless wretch … my lord. My lord, permit me to depart … oh earth, receive my gold; guard my treasure well… my soul, my soul, my life! Oh earth! … my dear friend is here… he’s here! … aspettare e non venire… a Zerbina penserete… sempre in contrasti con te si sta…’* Now he was muddling and mixing some thirty airs of every style—Italian, French, tragic, comic; sometimes, singing a bass part, he’d descend into the depths of hell; sometimes, straining at the notes as he imitated a falsetto, he’d tear at the upper registers, all the while imitating, with gait, carriage, and gestures, the different characters singing; by turns furious, mollified, imperious, derisive. Now he’s a young girl in tears, mimicking all her simpering ways; now he’s a priest, a king, a tyrant, threatening, commanding, raging; now he’s a slave, obeying. He grows calmer, he grieves, he laments, he laughs; never does he misjudge the tone, pace, and meaning of the aria’s words and character. All the chess players had abandoned their games and gathered round him. Outside, the windows of the café were thronged with passers-by attracted by the noise. The roars of laughter were loud enough to open cracks in the ceiling. He noticed nothing of this; he just went on with his performance, transported by a passion, an enthusiasm so akin to madness that it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever recover from it, or whether he shouldn’t be flung into a carriage and taken straight to the madhouse, still singing a fragment from Jommelli’s Lamentations. He was performing the most beautiful passages of each work with incredible fidelity, sincerity, and warmth: the exquisite, fully orchestrated recitative where the prophet depicts the devastation of Jerusalem he accompanied with a torrent of tears, which drew further tears from the eyes of all the onlookers. Everything was there—the delicacy of the melody, the intensity of expression, and the pain. He stressed the moments where the composer had shown himself to be a particularly fine master of his art; if he abandoned the vocal part, it was to take up the instruments, which he’d suddenly drop to return to the voice; connecting one with the other in such a fashion as to preserve the links and the unity of the whole; taking possession of our souls and keeping them suspended in the most extraordinary state of being I have ever known … Was I filled with admiration? Yes, I was. Was I moved to pity? Yes, I was; but a tinge of ridicule was blended with these feelings, and denatured them.

  You’d have burst out laughing, seeing how he imitated the various instruments. The horns and bassoons he did with bulging, ballooning cheeks and a hoarse, mournful tone; for the oboes he adopted a piercing, nasal sound; he speeded up his voice to an unbelievable pace for the stringed instruments, seeking the truest sounds; the piccolos he whistled; the transverse flutes he warbled; shouting, singing, flinging himself about like a madman, being, just he alone, at once dancer and ballerina, tenor and soprano, the entire orchestra, the entire theatre, dividing himself into twenty different roles, running and then stopping, with the air of one possessed, eyes flashing, lips foaming. The heat was overpowering; the sweat, mingled with the powder from his hair, was streaming along the creases of his brow and down his cheeks, and flowing in channels over the upper part of his coat. Was there anything I didn’t see him do? He wept, he laughed, he sighed; he gazed tenderly, or placidly, or furiously; he was a woman swooning with grief; a wretch overcome with despair; a temple rising up from the ground; birds falling silent at sunset; rivers murmuring their way through cool solitudes or cascading down from high mountains; a storm; a tempest, the moans of the dying mingling with the whistling of the wind and the crashing of the thunder; night, with its darkness; shadows and silence—for sound can portray silence itself. He had completely lost touch with reality. Utterly spent, like someone emerging from a deep sleep or a long trance, he stood there motionless, stupefied, astounded. He gazed all around, as would a man who had mistaken his way and was trying to discover where he was. As he waited for his strength and his wits to return, he kept automatically wiping his face. Like a man who, on waking, finds his bed surrounded by a large number of people, but has not the faintest recollection of what he’s been doing, he immediately exclaimed: ‘Well, gentlemen, what’s the matter? Why are you laughing, why are you so surprised, what is it?’ Then he added: ‘Now that’s what’s meant by the words music and musician. However, gentlemen, we shouldn’t despise some of Lully’s pieces. I challenge anyone to compose anything better than the music of ‘Ah, j’attendrai’,* without changing the words. We shouldn’t despise certain passages in Campra, my uncle’s violin melodies, his gavottes; his processions of soldiers, clergy, high priests … “Pale torches, night more ghastly than the shadowy dark … Gods of Tartarus, and of oblivion …”‘* Here his voice swelled, sustaining the notes; neighbours came to their windows and we stuck our fingers in our ears. He added: ‘Here’s where good lungs are required, a mighty voice, plenty of air. But soon, it’ll be goodbye to the feast of the Assumption; Lent and the Kings are over. As yet they don’t know what should be put to music, nor, consequently, what suits the musician. We still await the birth of lyric poetry. But they’ll get there, by dint of hearing Pergolesi, Hasse, Terradeglias, Traetta, and the others, by dint of reading Metastasio, they surely must get there.’

  ME: What are you saying, that Quinault, La Motte, Fontenelle didn’t know how to write?

  HIM: Not for the new style of music. There aren’t six consecutive lines in all their charming poems that can be set to music. They give us ingenious maxims and light, tender, delicate madrigals; but if you want to discover how lacking they are in material suited to ou
r art, which is the most violent of all arts, not even excepting that of Demosthenes, have someone recite these pieces to you; how cold, vapid, monotonous they’ll seem! That’s because there’s nothing in them to supply a model for song. I’d sooner have to set to music La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes or Pascal’s Pensées.* The animal cry of passion should be what determines the melodic line. Expressions of passion should come fast one upon another; they should be brief and their meaning fragmented, suspenseful, so that the musician can use the whole as well as each part, omit a word or repeat it, add a word that’s missing, turn the phrase upside-down and inside-out like a polyp, without destroying its meaning; this makes French lyrical poetry much more difficult to set to music than poetry in languages with inversion, which provide all these advantages naturally … Plunge your dagger in my breast, cruel barbarian. I am ready to receive the fatal blow. Strike, dare to strike… ah, I faint, I die … a secret fire inflames my senses… cruel love, what do you ask of me… Leave me with the sweet peace I used to know… give me back my reason…* The passions must be intense and the sensibility of the musician and lyric poet extreme. Almost always, the aria is the culminating point of the scene: we need exclamations, interjections, pauses, interruptions, affirmations, denials; we call out, invoke, shout, moan, weep, laugh openly. No wit, no epigrams, none of those pretty conceits. They’re too remote from simple nature. And don’t imagine that the theatrical style of acting and declamation can serve us as a model. What an idea! We need it to be more energetic, less mannered, truer. Simple speech, the common words of passion, we need these all the more where the language is more monotone, less accented. The animal cry—the cry of man in a passion—will give it the accent it lacks.