Boydell and Brewer, coll. Music in Society and Culture, 2017. ISBN: 9781783272013. 240 p. $99
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, French cultural life seethed with debates about the proper nature and form of musical expression, particularly in opera. Expressed in a flood of pamphlets, articles, letters and poems as well as in the actual disruption of performances, these so-called querelles were seen at the time as a distinctively French phenomenon and have been mined by scholars since for what they can tell us about French politics and culture in the revolutionary period.
This is the first full-length treatment of the entire history of this phenomenon, from its beginnings in the last years of Louis XIV to the 1820s when the new musical challenges of Berlioz and Wagner put an end to this particular form of debate. Arnold analyses the individual querelles, showing how they reflected and played their part in wider political and cultural events. At the same time, he traces themes common in varying degrees to them all - questions of authority, the issue of national prestige, and the relation of language to music. Where some scholars have characterised these disputes as simply politics by proxy, Arnold paints a more nuanced picture, showing that music itself was taken seriously beyond artistic circles because it was seen as having great, potentially limitless, power over popular sentiment and thus implicitly power to reform society and change the world.
R.J. Arnold is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London
From the author:
It is what might be called a social history of those querelles on operatic topics that were such a recurrent feature of French intellectual life in the eighteenth century, beginning under Louis XIV with a dispute between two gentlemen, and continuing through the quarrels of the Ramistes and the Lullistes in the 1730s, the celebrated Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s, and the complex confrontations between adherents of Gluck and Piccinni in the 1770s. I also explore the conspicuous absence of such querelles under the Revolution, and the ambitious talk of republican unanimity and the reconfiguration of taste that accompanied it. In fact, querelles broke out again with renewed vigour after 1800, although now regarded more indulgently as the inevitable hurly-burly of a bigger, more multifarious, more broad-minded society.
This is not a musicological study, but rather an attempt to understand how arguments were conducted and conceptualised. I am trying to interrogate a long-standing interpretation of these querelles – that they were some sort of rehearsal for revolution, a cautious flexing of the argumentative muscles ahead of the great argument that was to come in 1789. And the longue durée allows me to track the evolving ways that public dispute was conducted: both in scale – from the little dialogue at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a fully-fledged journalistic culture a hundred years later – and in content – in the rapid and creative adoption of new media, new forms, new techniques and new language to punch one's points home. Rather than futile and debilitating, a stain on the national cultural character, as was often alleged, these querelles showed French intellectual life as lively, pugnacious and ceaselessly inventive.
Source: H-France