The Querelle des Bouffons[1] was a music-theoretical dispute that took place in France between 1752 and 1754. The dispute was, at face value, about the relative merits of French and Italian opera, sparked by the arrival of a troupe of Italian players at the Paris Opéra.
It has been difficult for historians to gauge the contributions of women to the Querelle des Bouffons. All of the pamphlets published during the Querelle were penned by men. This is not to say that women did not make profound and lasting contributions to the dispute. But these contributions were often ephemeral – conversations in a salon or personal correspondences between friends.[2] This presents us with a distinct historiographical problem: how do we discuss the gender politics of the Querelle when the contributions of women are so conspicuously absent from its published record? The answer, I suggest, is that we must expand our definition of what constitutes a “music-theoretical” document vis-à-vis the Querelle and, more broadly, what constituted “music theory” in eighteenth-century France. The Querelle des Bouffons was never simply a “music-theoretical” dispute: rather, because it concerned the relationship between music, the listening subject, and the monarchical state, the Querelle was viewed as a broader philosophical disagreement with grave implications for French national politics.[3] As such, it was discussed in many documents that were not music-theoretical pamphlets or treatises, many of which were penned by women.
In this blog post, I will focus on the writings of one woman: Madame de Pompadour, the official royal mistress to Louis XV. Historians have long acknowledged Madame de Pompadour’s stake in the pamphlet war: in many ways, she was the most powerful player in the dispute due to the amount of cultural influence the King had bestowed upon her. However, because she left no music-theoretical treatises or pamphlets, and because her operatic patronage was so mired in paradox,[4] historians have found it difficult to pinpoint Madame de Pompadour’s position on the key issues of the debate, leading to a number of misunderstandings and misconceptions about her musical attitudes.[5]
Madame de Pompadour did, indeed, write about the Querelle des Bouffons, but she did so only by means of a personal anecdote in her memoirs. The anecdote in question concerns Madame de Pompadour’s first encounter with Rousseau, who had been invited to the mistress’s toilette at the height of the Querelle by her brother.[6] Rousseau and Madame de Pompadour did not immediately hit it off: to the favorite, he seemed “devoured by pride,” with a “sly gaze which viewed everything with a distrustful attention.”[7] But they gradually warmed to each other, and the visit culminated with Rousseau sitting down at the harpsichord to perform excerpts from his opera, Le devin du village, written as an exemplar of the Italian style.
Rousseau’s performance prompted considerable reflection from Madame de Pompadour. She recalled Rameau’s writings in the Querelle, remembering his contempt for Rousseau’s operatic writing. She suggested that Rameau objected to importing the Italian style – with its highly ornamented ariettas – into French music because the French language “does not lend itself to this piling-up of roulades, to this luxury of notes pressed against one another.”[8] Madame de Pompadour quietly scoffs at this argument, however, suggesting that it causes Rameau to “grimace with impatience” at even the “most beautiful” aria by Jommelli or Pergolesi.[9] In this statement, Madame de Pompadour distinguishes herself from many members of the French camp, who argued for a direct correlation between language and style that precluded musical cosmopolitanism.
Yet, despite acknowledging the “agreeableness” of Italian music, Madame de Pompadour ultimately asserts the superiority of the French style. The central issue with Italian music, she argues, was its “poverty of harmony.”[10] For Madame de Pompadour, the harmonic syntax of Italian music was almost entirely incomprehensible:
When the Italians […] produce harmonious effects, they lose their footing, and they produce nothing but noise. This is because, for our ear to be able to grasp the chord, it must be prolonged and, above all, well-marked, which cannot happen in a musical system that is too overburdened with notes.[11]
Madame de Pompadour’s gripe with Italian music concerned the cognitive effect of its melodic excesses on the ear’s ability to comprehend harmony. For Madame de Pompadour, the cognition of harmony took precedence over the appreciation of all other musical features. Musical style, she suggests, must be oriented towards the accentuation of harmony, even if it comes at the expense of melodic beauty. In this way, Madame de Pompadour’s was much closer in her music-theoretical ideology to Rameau (whose primary concern was the power of harmony as a “natural” force and its primacy in French music) than to the broad majority of the French camp, who generally disliked Italian music on nationalistic grounds.
Madame de Pompadour’s contribution to the Querelle des Bouffons is vital for a number of reasons: firstly, it brings an interesting flavor to the Querelle’s debates over melody and harmony by viewing this issue primarily in terms of musical texture, warning of the dangers of a melodic language which crowds out the harmonic grammar, rendering it unintelligible, “noisy.” In this way, her writings constitute a truly unique view on the cognitive relationship between melody and harmony. Her theories certainly warrant more investigation for this, and this alone. Secondly, Madame de Pompadour was one of the most prolific operatic patrons of the Enlightenment: her views on harmony were not just theory, but shaped the aesthetic profile of French opera in the eighteenth century.
My short blog post has had two goals: to show that Madame de Pompadour held a unique music-theoretical position within the French camp of the Querelle des Bouffons; and, to demonstrate that, in order to unearth this position, we need to look beyond those genres of historical text traditionally considered to be “music-theoretical.” Madame de Pompadour outlines an idiosyncratic theory of musical style as an afterthought to a personal anecdote about a rather socially awkward encounter with Rousseau. It is a quotidian anecdote in her sprawling, two-volume memoirs – easily missed amongst talk of global politics and court intrigue. Yet, neglecting these pithy, fragmentary, liminal writings necessarily means losing sight of the ways in which women shaped this landmark music-theoretical debate.
[1] Roughly “the quarrel of the comic actors.”
[2] Jolanta T. Pekacz, “Gender as a Political Orientation: Parisian Salonnières and the Querelle des Bouffons,” Canadian Journal of History 32, no. 3 (1997): 405–14.
[3] Indeed, as this complex pamphlet war raged on, it soon became about so much more than the dangers and benefits of musical cosmopolitanism. The Querelle expanded to encompass a range of interlocking debates: whether harmony was more expressive than melody; which aspects of music were “naturally” occurring and which were socially constructed; and whether or not music functioned as a mimetic force within the operatic diegesis.
[4] From 1747 to 1753, Madame de Pompadour ran a private opera house for the enjoyment of the monarch and his inner circle and also exerted considerable control over the menus plaisirs, the organization responsible for all official royal entertainment. During the Querelle itself, Madame de Pompadour deployed this patronage to seemingly contradictory ends: on the one hand, she commissioned Mondonville’s Titon et l’Aurore, which would become a landmark work for the French camp; on the other hand, she premiered (at her private theater) the full version of Rousseau’s Le devin du village, an opera written to emulate the melodiousness of the Italian style.
[5] Notably, scholars have asserted (incorrectly) that Madame de Pompadour disliked Rameau and his music, primarily based on gossipy, second-hand accounts that contradict Madame de Pompadour’s own writings.
[6] At that time, Madame de Pompadour had already performed his “charming” opera, Le devin du village, at her private theater, and so was familiar with his musical output. However, she confessed to only having heard second-hand of Rousseau’s work as a man of letters.
[7] Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, Mémoires de madame la marquise de Pompadour, vol. 1 (Paris: Mame et Delaunay-Vallee, 1830), 412.
[8] Ibid. Naturally, this is a gross simplification, and, perhaps, a gross misrepresentation of Rameau’s position.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Marquise de Pompadour, Mémoires de madame la marquise de Pompadour, 1:413.
[11] Ibid.