The Spirit of French Music/Chapter 2

by Pierre Lasserre

CHAPTER II

RAMEAU

His Theories—His Work—His Enemies

The worthy Deltour, in his day a university inspector, wrote an excellent book against the enemies of Racine. Another such book might be written against the enemies of Rameau, our musical Racine. He too found himself attacked at the height of his glory by a powerful cabal. But unlike that which was formed against Racine, this cabal was not fomented by jealous rivals. At its head were, not players of the lyre but philosophers of importance, dealers in general ideas, great lights of literature, and their names were Rousseau, Diderot, and Grimm. This Genevan, this German, and this Frenchman—as impressionable as a blank sheet of paper—, picked a quarrel with one whom Voltaire calls the greatest musician in France (he still deserves that name of posterity)—and this quarrel is one of the dominant, in fact one of the critical events in the history of our national music. I do not wish to rake up the details, but I should like to investigate its causes and give a general view of the interests and ideas which led the artist's detractors into this contest. For this purpose we must briefly call to mind the characteristic features of Rameau's career and work.

I

Rameau was as everyone knows not merely a composer of genius. He was also a great theorist in the technical side of his art. The work that he has left under this head alone would suffice to keep alive his name. Before writing the most richly and nobly harmoinsed music that our soil has produced, he devoted a long period of his life to the study of the abstract and theoretical science of harmony, to the investigation of harmonic properties, and to making a synthesis of those properties by connecting them with the general causes and initial facts from which they are derived. From the beginning of his artist's life he had felt on this subject a reformer's vocation. The doctrine that he had been taught struck him as confused and inadequate. It had not seemed to him to be at all in agreement with the practice of the succession of great masters for more than a century past, and in particular of Lulli. It took no account of their most striking features when compared with the masters of the preceding age, namely the preponderating and quite natural importance that harmony had assumed in their style of writing. Of all the various elements which go to make up musical utterance, harmony had become, with them, both the fundamental and the dominating element, the element on which all others rest and which regulates their use, at any rate in a great degree. Rameau saw in this transformation of the art not a simple fact, but a decisive step forward, the arrival at actual truth. He considered that by giving this place to harmony, by taking it as foundation and guide, he was doing what was needed for music to give it a wonderful increase of scope and extend its field of expression; music would thus enter on the wide and royal road that would lead to the most vast developments. The study of masterpieces and analysis of his own inspirations confirmed him in this idea. The invention of music is above all else an invention of harmony. To imagine a musical utterance is to imagine a sequence, a linked chain of chords embracing a certain expressive sense. The other portions of musical invention, that is to say melody and the interplay of concerted parts, are virtually included in these; they merely define, detail, shade, or as a philosopher would say actualise, the latent expression. Obviously this does not mean that for Rameau melody is deduced mathematically, and by a simple operation of logic, from harmony when once discovered. No, the creation of melody demands a special initiative, a stroke of genius of its own, a fresh inflow of the grace of inspiration. But that is a second process, and harmony does at least lay down for melody the limits within which it must trace its own line. Similarly it fixes for the intermediate processes certain signposts, certain points they must pass. In cases where the melody has been hit upon first, where a musician rejoices to have found a good piece of melody, this melody postulates, or contains in itself, a certain harmony which is necessarily bound up with it, and which has implicitly guided the artist's mind, because in the natural order of things harmony precedes melody.

Ignorance of the true doctrine concerning the function of harmony in music was not the only fault that Rameau found with the instruction he had received He complained also of not having found in it satisfying doctrine on harmony itself. Harmonic properties were not rationally classified, exactly defined, or traced to their true origins. They were presented diffusely and without connection, or else grouped in a purely empirical fashion. To Rameau this belated condition of theory was intolerable. He could not rest till he had resettled it, or, to speak more correctly, constituted it properly. For him the re-casting of principles was the only path to creation. Some might (I do not myself) contest the accuracy of his ideas on the primordial function of harmony in musical composition. But the world has accepted his explanation of the laws and rules of harmony. It has become classical, and by classical I mean scholastic.

We may compare him on the one hand to Malherbe and on the other to Descartes. His reform partakes of the spirit of both these great men. Rameau resembles Malherbe in being an artist who aspires to define the general conditions of purity and greatness in style. He resembles Descartes because these conditions depend essentially on the conduct of harmony, and harmony rests on physical and mathematical causes which have to be fixed and co-ordinated. The son of the Dijon organist was dowered from his cradle with the genius of art and the genius of science. Of these two gifts, the first was undoubtedly the stronger, but so far from stifling or ousting the other, it actually stimulated it, by providing, nay imposing the subject of its application. The material of Rameau's studies is the physics and mathematics of sonorous beauty. I have compared him to Descartes and Malherbe. It is exactly the same comparison as was made by the greatest critic of the century, Voltaire, when he called him "our Euclid-Orpheus."

I try to write in a manner that can be understood by all, whether learned or ignorant. Have I perhaps, in spite of my good intentions employed a somewhat too specialised vocabulary? Here in another way of presenting the same matter:

One may say that since its earliest days music has gone through three great phases, has existed under three forms: monodic, polyphonic, harmonic.

Monody is song without accompaniment, (or accompanied rudimentarily by a single note). The music of antiquity, and Plainsong, which is its continuation, are monodic.

This form was succeeded at the Renaissance by Polyphony. The latter contains in itself harmony, since several voices while singing together different parts have always to find a just harmonic relation among themselves. But the harmonic order of the piece, that is to say the successful choice of chords and sequences of chords, is not, in the eyes of the polyphonic composer, the principal and essential object of musical invention; it is only the secondary and as it were accidental object. What he takes into consideration before everthing else is the relations between the melodic lines followed by each of the concerted parts. These lines are taken as so many diagrams between which they must always maintain certain formal relations perceptible no less to the eye looking at the score than to the ear that hears it executed. A melodic phrase given out by one part will pass successively into all the others; either by direct imitation or with certain regular transformations under which it remains recognisable and continues to be itself. Imitations, reversals, condensations, elongations of the given theme, these are the springs in play in Polyphony. Harmony is merely a condition to which this play is submitted; it is treated here as though it had only a negative interest.

Rameau's doctrine explains and justifies the accession of Harmony to the kingship of music. Incidentally this doctrine, as happens with all great reformers, is unfair to the past. Rameau despises plainsong and the polyphony of the sixteenth century, just as in his day people despised the Gothic, and we are far from sharing this exclusive spirit. We can enjoy the expressive beauty of the church Monody and the marvels of polyphonic force in such writers as Jeannequin, Lassus, Josquin des Prés, Palestrina, Vittoria. But in itself Rameau's thesis is the truth. The complete discovery of the world of harmony, harmony known at last in all its richness and made the foundation of composition, this was an immense step forward in musical art. Out of this progress arose the great and superb forms whose nature and proportions infinitely surpass the power and resources inherent in the preceding forms of music: I refer to Symphony and Opera. Modern form in no way excludes the ancient forms. On the contrary it embraces them, giving them their full share in expression.

Have I still been too technical, too abstruse in what I have said? Literature will provide an analogy that leaves nothing to be desired in clearness.

When one states that the written style of our great classics, Malherbe, Racine, Bossuet, Voltaire, is superior to the style, or rather styles, largely individual because not firmly set, of Montaigne, Rabelais, Amyot, is one not uttering a sure and ascertained truth? No one can seriously doubt it. Certainly one may regret, with Fénélon, the loss in classical French of certain qualities of simplicity that gave a great deal of charm to each literary genius of the sixteenth century. But by the fixation of its vocabulary, the clarity and precision of its general terms, the firmness of its syntax, the admirable regularity of its constructions, the perfection of its rhythms, classical French far surpasses the French of the preceding periods as an organ of reason, an instrument of poetry and eloquence. Well, there is likewise in music a classical style, a language of Bossuet. And if Rameau is not the first to have understood the constitutive conditions, the natural laws, the essential mechanism of this language, in which have been written the greatest and most permanent masterpieces, at least it was he who mastered them most completely and most in the manner of a philosopher, who best co-ordinated and deduced them, and who showed most intellectual mastery in attempting (with some success) their synthesis.

II

The technical doctrine of Rameau is set forth in the Treatise on Harmony reduced to its Natural Principle which appeared in 1722 and in Harmonic Generation, issued in 1737. These are Rameau's two principal theoretical works. They find their complement in a long series of dissertations and monographs published from year to year in reply to criticisms, to clear up or to develop points on which discussion had arisen. The whole is written in a firm and strong style, but the argument is often close even to obscurity, and overloaded to the extent of being too complicated, and the study of Rameau's ideas would be a truly severe exercise, were one obliged to undertake it from his own text. Happily we are spared this by the work of d'Alembert who in his Elements of Theoretical Music as practised after the principles of M. Rameau (1752) gives us a most simple and lucid summary of the doctrines of the Treatise. The trouble taken by this great and illustrious geometrician on behalf of the conceptions of a musician, shows the rank that he assigned to him among men of intellect.

When the Treatise appeared, Rameau, born in 1683, was entering upon his fortieth year. He had so far published nothing but a collection of pieces for the harpsichord. During the ten following years he produced two other collections of the same kind and four "French Cantatas," short compositions, full of charm but lacking in relief, for one or two voices with accompaniment by three or four instruments.

The collection for the harpsichord contains masterpieces that became celebrated; M. Louis Diemer's marvellous execution and clever transcriptions have re-won popularity for them in our own day. And yet these works contributed far less to Rameau's fame among his contemporaries than the Treatise, which enjoyed considerable success.

We must not be surprised at the favour accorded by the public to a work so dry and technical. It was in keeping with the spirit of the age. Fontenelle's Talks on the Plurality of Worlds had brought into fashion the material of experimental knowledge, or rather they had provided wonderful sustenance for the craving for natural philosophy which the evolution of ideas had engendered in polite society. This taste had spread and become generalised. It found striking and amusing expression in the fact of Voltaire and Madame de Chatelet setting up in the country a physical laboratory, though they had hardly mastered the elements of Physics, and translating the Principles of Newton. The discoveries and systems of Rameau on harmonic properties and their "generation," on the physical and mathematical reasons of musical enjoyment, profited by this curiosity. But the glory which the author derived from them could not but be of a somewhat austere kind, like that of the great logicians who bring mankind more enlightenment than pleasure.

Who could have believed that he was not destined to content himself with this glory, and that he was preparing to achieve in addition the more enviable fame won by the creators of pleasure, the favourites of Apollo? Who could have believed that those thirty years of a life so laboriously spent had been merely the preface of his life, and that he was to enter, when over fifty years of age, on the most brilliant and splendid phase of his career, and reveal himself as one of the greatest poetical discoverers of modern times? It was indeed when he was more than fifty, at the end of the year 1733, that Rameau decided on a theatrical venture and brought out his first opera, Hippolyte and Aricie, the first ring in that marvellous chain which includes the Indes galantes, Castor and Pollux, Dardanus, the Fêtes de Polymnie, Pygmalion, Plotée, to name only the finest links. Was it not madness to venture at that age into a field where only youth and force of imagination can prevail? A symbolist might say that it was not the first folly of the kind in the artist's life. At forty-two he had married a girl of eighteen. He had had no reason to regret it and she had borne him a charming daughter. At fifty, we find him giving himself to the embraces of the Muse, and receiving from her inspirations equal to those of the greatest composers, and some of them, to my thinking, superior to anything to be found in music.

III

One cannot interest oneself in Rameau without wondering why the manifestation of his great creative power came so late. More than one biographer has thought to answer the question by pointing to the relations formed a little before the year 1732 between the musician and the fermier général Le Riche de la Popelinière whose wife was his pupil. It is suggested that the protection of this wealthy Maecaenas encouraged Rameau to work for the theatre because it gave him the certainty of a welcome. Such an explanation is too material. Rameau undertook his dramatic work when he felt his powers were strong enough to realise his visions. It is indeed true that the support of La Popelinière helped greatly to open to him the doors of the Royal Academy and to spread among the public the expectation of great things from him. But it is morally certain that what made him take to work on a scale and in a style quite new to him was the magnificent development attained by his resources and means of expression. La Popelinière was the ladder that he used to gather ripe fruit. But what ripened that fruit was the rising of the sap. What is interesting is the fact of this splendid maturity coming upon him in the after season.

How we should like to be in the confidence of the artist himself about the long, hidden portion of his life which preceded this period of brilliance! But, so far from being allowed to know the history of his mind, we have only the most imperfect knowledge of his outward life during the twenty years that passed between the moment when he left the paternal roof and his definitely establishing himself in Paris.

The son of Jean Rameau, organist at the church of St. Etienne at Dijon, he began his classical studies at the Jesuit College in that town. If we may believe his Dijon biographer, Maret, whose short account of him was written just after his death, "he distinguished himself at this college by an unusual vivacity; but during the classes he used to sing or write music, and did not get beyond the fourth class." He retained from these somewhat inadequate studies, enough Latin to be able to read treatises on composition written in that language. But he had remained somewhat inexpert in the handling of the French language, and the same Maret tells us that one day "a woman of whom he was fond reproached him with this; he at once set to work to study the principles of French, and so far succeeded that in a short time he was able to speak and write correctly."

At the age of eighteen he set out for Italy in order to perfect himself in his art. But he went no further than Milan, made only a short stay there, and returned to France. There is some ground for supposing, though it is not certain, that for some time he travelled and "lived as best he could, making his expenses by playing the organ in churches, or the fiddle in the orchestra of a strolling company." At the beginning of 1702 we find him installing himself at Avignon as organist of Notre Dame, and some months later he obtained similar employment in the cathedral of Clermont in Auvergne. It was there that he composed his first harpsichord pieces, and perhaps the cantatas which he published later, though their renown in any case did not at this time extend beyond the limits of the province. He passed four years at Clermont. The desire for a change having come upon him before the expiration of the contract which bound him to the chapter of the cathedral, he could not persuade the canons to give him his freedom with a good grace, whereupon (such is the tradition) he took the heroic course of making himself intolerable by playing the organ in an appalling fashion. However, the same tale is told about his brother Claude who was an organist at Dijon, so the matter is open to doubt.

From Clermont he proceeded to Paris, where he was to gain his livelihood from two posts as organist, one with the Fathers of Mercy, the other with the Jesuits of the Rue St. Jacques. Here begins the part of his career of which very little is known. It has been impossible to ascertain the exact duration of this stay in Paris, during which he did not acquire fame. It is only known that he afterwards spent some months at Dijon with his family in 1715, and that he lived some time at Lyon, though it is not known what post he occupied in that town. We find trace of him again at Clermont, whither he returned; the canons cannot have had too unkind a memory of his escapade (assuming that it is not a myth), seeing that they gave him back his post as organist. Clermont boasts therefore two great musicians, in two different branches of music, its organist Rameau and its bishop Massillon. It was there that the Treatise on Harmony was completed, the fruit of twenty years of reflection and work, "a very large volume—too large, reeking of the provinces and solitude," as M. Laloz expressively writes—but it was a volume full of genius and discoveries, and it only remained to launch it in the world. Rameau now felt that fame was close at hand, and set off, with no intention of turning back, for Paris. In 1723 we find him definitely established there.

The friends that fame brought him used to question him sometimes on his experiences, ambitions, sufferings and dreams during those twenty years of "provincial solitude," but they got no reply. One of them tells us that he was dumb about his past. He unbosomed himself on that subject to no one, not even to his wife. Famous men, especially those who have become so late in life, have a very natural inclination to tell the story of their years of obscurity, as though they wanted to give them a share in the sun of their renown and in the presumed immortality of their works. This inclination did not show itself in Rameau. No doubt he judged that all these people who clamoured for his reminiscences were asking but for idle words. And I am convinced that if he had replied somewhat as follows: "What did I do in those twenty years when I was the most obscure of French musicians? I created the science of Harmony, and I learnt to compose music the like of which has never been heard," these words would have summed up, in his eyes, everything in the history of his personality that deserved to have any importance attached to it either by himself or by the world. In the same spirit, Descartes, if questioned on what had happened to him in Holland, in his "tub" to which he had retired might have replied, "I invented mathematical analysis and a system of the universe." It is their intellectual power that has led me to connect the names of these two men. Their temperaments also lend themselves to association. They are both solitaries. And they are not so from melancholy or natural misanthropy, but as the result of the extraordinary force of thought and imagination, which holds them fast in the dream and continual pursuit of the work to be created—which holds them there, I would say, all the more firmly because that work has a strongly systematic character. They do not detest the society of men, but they habitually prefer the society of their ideas. They find the latter lively and the former wearisome, whereas with the generality of mortals the opposite is the case. The soliloquy to which they give themselves up has a passionate interest, an inexhaustible wealth of material, and the conversations and visits which tear them away bring them no adequate compensation, at least in the majority of cases. But is soliloquy the right word? The work that these superior mortals elaborate in their meditations and vigils is addressed to the human race, and is accomplished for the human race. Humanity will be eager for it. will delight in it; such work will form one of the instruments of its education, will become part of the heritage of civilisation. Let us not then call such men solitaries, it is they who have the wide strange of company; in their semi-seclusion they might be called the most ubiquitous and sociable of men. Too much intimacy with a few individuals would spoil for them that intimacy with humanity which alone contents their vast desire. Nothing could be more crowded than Rameau's long provincial solitude; perhaps to his neighbours he seemed aloof and preoccupied—but he was living with all those to whom the creations he was preparing would bring sunlight and enchantment.

In Paris, in the midst of the bustle of the town, the thousand claims upon an artist in the public eye, the intrigues of the world of theatres, we find him still the same man. He went unending solitary walks, striding along the paths in the public gardens apart, and if anyone forced him to speak to him he seemed, we are told, "to be coming out of a sort of ecstasy."

Let us not on that account picture him as a figure of fun, a childlike, innocent dreamer, a stranger to everything but music, without action or defence in life. He was not that type at all. His abstraction is not the voluptuous slackness of an aesthete who dreads the harshness of human contact arid the fatigue of business. It is the sympton of a strong and tenacious will that has a horror of scattered energies, and concentrates on the main issue, the unum necessarium. Business does not frighten him, and he handles briskly the men with whom he has dealings. He is known as a rugged character, energetic, imperious, brusque, even crushing. He makes the artists who have to perform his works tremble. At rehearsals " he used to sit in the pit, where he insisted on being alone; if anyone came to see him there, he would wave him away without speaking to him or even looking at him." Here is another important detail—he was a miser; his was a solid middle-class avarice, which growing on this stock of greatness and genius, stands out in high colours, and would have delighted Regnard and inspired his wit. But there is no reason to suppose that this avarice, even if it went somewhat beyond the limits of wisdom, ever reached a morbid stage. Nor must we confuse a certain harshness of character, a certain sententious and hard caustic quality of mind with the fancy picture of a brutal, thick-skinned, distorted character, barbarous husband and cruel father, painted by his enemies, notably Diderot, Grimm, and the Lyric writer Collé. This literary rabble is not worthy of credit; obviously it is taking its revenge for hard blows, and for rejected opera libretti. One of Rameau's fellow citizens tells us that "the vacuity he found in society made him neglect it," and the great man must have got quite used to administering drastic treatment to simpletons, fools, wind-bags and intriguers. He was, we cannot doubt it, a good straight man, and not lacking in kindness too; but of this he was very sparing, as he was of his money so gloriously earned. We have evidence of his generous help being given to artists whose talent interested hin.

He was a very tall man, and extremely thin, "which made him look," says Chabanon, "more like a ghost than a man." Grimm finds him "as emaciated and shrivelled as M. de Voltaire," whom he resembled in appearance, but without having his mischievous physiognomy. The expression of his face was severe, "all its features were big and announced the firmness of his character."

Voltaire and Rameau … There exists a contemporary engraving in which we see these two gaunt figures shaking hands and paying each other compliments. It is symbolic. They were beyond all doubt the two finest spirits of their age.

IV

Apart from the indications of Maret on the uncompleted studies of Rameau at the Jesuit college at Dijon, we possess no direct information about the musician's intellectual development, his favourite authors or his reading. But we must not let ourselves suppose that he gave no attention to the cultivation of his mind, and that music limited the horizon of his ideas. There is extant a letter of his which is valuable evidence on this subject. It was found among the papers of the writer Houdar de la Motte, who was known as a successful librettist. Rameau, who was thinking of trying a theatrical venture, asks him for a "book," and seeks to inspire his confidence.

"When people speak of a learned musician," he writes, "they mean usually a man who has the various combinations of notes at his fingers' ends, but he is supposed to be so much absorbed in these combinations that he sacrifices everything to them,—good sense, sentiment, judgment, reason. Now such a man is merely a school musician, and of a school that deals with notes and nothing else; and one may rightly prefer a musician who prides himself less on knowledge than on taste. And yet the latter, whose taste is only formed by comparisons that are within reach of his sensations, can at the best only excel in certain directions—I mean by that in directions that correspond to his temperament. Is he naturally tender? Then he expresses tenderness. Is his temper quick, lively, jocular?—His music follows suit. But take him out of these characters that are natural to him and you would not know him again. Moreover as he draws on his imagination for everything without any help from art in its relation to expression, he ends by exhausting himself. At the first kindling he blazed brilliantly, but the fire is diminishing every time he tries to re-light it, and one soon finds in him nothing but repetitions or platitudes. What one should seek therefore, for the theatre, is a musician who has studied nature before painting her and who by his knowledge has been able to choose colours and shades the relation of which with the required expressions is borne in upon him by his judgment and taste … Nature has not entirely denied me her gifts, and I have not devoted myself to combinations of notes to the extent of forgetting their intimate connection with natural beauty."

The style of this passage is somewhat involved, but its sense is clear and strong, and its application singularly large. Let us put beside it this passage taken from the Treatise on Harmony:

"A good musician should throw himself into all the characters that he seeks to depict, and, like a clever actor, put himself in the speaker's place; he should imagine that he is in the places where the different events happen that he seeks to represent, and take the same share in them as the characters chiefly concerned; and he must be a good elocutionist at any rate internally."

These fine sentences remove, not only as regards Rameau himself, but generally, a prejudice that is too widely entertained against the intelligence of musicians. You will find many people quite ready to believe that genius of musical creation or interpretation is compatible with a poor development of this faculty, that a man may be a first class musician without having brains. That is almost a commonplace. But it is a profound mistake. At any rate this idea is no more true for music than for other arts. In so far as it is true at all it applies to all alike. In all ages one may find poets, painters and sculptors who combined with real talent a quite ordinary brain, occasionally even a weak one, lacking judgment and finding room for nonsense and fatuity. But such talent has always been of a petty kind, and has not gone far; it draws on a very limited capital; it has so to speak only one note, and having once produced it is condemned to repeat it constantly whatever the subject chosen. When the note is too obviously ill-tuned to the subject, all such a talent can do is to force it, it can never find a fresh one. The terms employed by Rameau admirably characterise the trivial merits and huge inadequacy of talent without mental power. The fact that these terms are so general as to be applicable, as they stand and without any change whatever, to all arts can only strengthen their special authority in respect to music. The primordial virtue of good music is truth of expression, fidelity to nature. And, as Rameau says, the study of nature is not comprised within the special study of music; the sense of the exact relation between the thing to be expressed musically and the formula of sound which will express it is a sense which a merely musical education does not give, and which one may say calls for the accuracy of the whole of a man's thought. There have been no truly great musicians who have not added to the special gifts of their art the capacity to ponder over humanity, human situations and human passions, in other words who have not possessed a generally superior brain. But it is abundantly clear that it is precisely those who have at their command a stock of the most extended, varied and richly shaded impressions, who have needed to wield the richest musical language and the resources of the most powerful and subtle technique. Power and delicacy of feeling do not render technical mastery and fertility unnecessary; on the contrary they call for their highest development.

Such are Rameau's principles. They are admirable. They would still be so if he had lacked strength to apply them effectively in his own works. But in truth this hypothesis is contradictory. Rameau's ideas on his art have a strong and sovereign quality just because he derives them from the experience of his own creative power. Suppose that his musical works had been lost, and that only his writings remained to us, we should say on reading them, "That man must have been a great creative genius."

V

Learned men and skilful writers on music such as Messrs. Lionel de la Laurencie and Laloz have given us very sound analyses drawn up in technical language of Rameau's musical work. In a book such as this, addressed to a public that is interested in music but not versed in the secrets of musical composition, it is rather by their expressive and poetic qualities that we must delineate the master's invention and manner of writing. An analysis which fastens on this aspect may be no less instructive and exact, especially if it does not refuse to make occasional reference to technique. However, I do not intend to give such an analysis of the whole of Rameau's works, far from it. His theatrical works were numerous. It is impossible and would be useless to go through them all. It will be better to choose one as a type, and follow it throughout its development, and then pick out in others the features necessary to complete the picture which this first study will have given us of the genius and inspirations of the artist.

Castor and Pollux is considered by most connoisseurs to be his masterpiece. It is a safe verdict if we take it to mean, not that there is more life, grandeur and grace in the musical invention of Castor than in that of Hippolyte or Dardanus but that of all Rameau's dramatic productions Castor is the one which presents as a whole most unity, sequence, balance and harmony and the liveliest and best connected movement. For this merit we must to a great extent pay honour to the poem which cleverly attaches the ballet and spectacular portions to the action. The author of this poem is P. J. Bernard. Voltaire admired his Castor, finding in it "many glittering diamonds."

Like all Rameau's overtures, that of Castor is in two parts, the second being in the form of a fugue. The first, whose style is grave and accent vigorous, is a resounding appeal to the soul's heroic ideas and proudest impulses; it forms the fitting prelude to a drama that glorifies the heroism of devotion and the sacrifice of passion in a higher cause. The fugue gives promise of the brilliant and gracious interludes which are to be introduced. It is a fugue in the French manner, wonderfully alive, without the slightest pedantic heaviness, swinging, rapid, sonorous, full of life and charged in every note with gaiety and vivacity.

The curtain rises on a mythological prologue, the nuptials of Venus and Mars, War yielding place to Pleasure. Rameau contrives to give a natural effect in scenes of this kind. In it the choreography and figuration are infused with dramatic animation; the gods, goddesses and heroes appear in it each in a definite and distinct character, into which they throw themselves with charming simplicity, and take an active part in the scene. This gives the composer the opportunity of tempering the magnificence of the general effect with a great variety of delicate shades—I would mention particularly here:

(1) The "symphony" in C major announcing the descent of Venus and Mars on earth, two groups of contrasted melodic fragments, the one suitably rendered by the sweet sound of flutes, the other coloured with the brightness of trumpets, but offering in their opposition (and here we have the touch of a great master) the unity and continuity of a single melody.

(2) The "rondeau gavotte" in A major, first played by the orchestra, then taken up by the voice to the words "Brighter return, O charming Peace." An admirable theme at once sinuous and simple in form; a dance theme, but also like all Rameau's dance themes, a theme of sentiment, as it were the light step of a young woman who comes forward observing in her movements the purest cadence, and smiling with an enigmatically tender expression. She does not advance all at once. After each step she hesitates, stops just long enough to resume with yet more grace her movement as of one treading on air. Six times she thus suspends our enchantment the better to renew it, until at last she gives the finishing touch by completing with a wonderfully measured ease both her waving movement and the expression of her smile.

(3) The Minuet sung by Love, "Spring to life ye gifts of Flora", one of the most divinely calm melodic tunes, one of the most serene expressions of pleasure, ever imagined by Rameau.

I would set beside this prologue the interlude in the third act, which has a similar inspiration. Jupiter, to dissuade Pollux from his purpose of offering himself to Pluto in the place of his brother Castor makes Earthly Pleasures appear before him. From among the posy of inspirations which once more the musician has here collected, we cannot but pick out that superb flower, the air for Hebe and her followers, in E major "Let our sports crown your prayers." It is a long melody, and the pure regularity of its course, the absolute perfection of the symmetrical sections, seem almost miraculous, when one remembers that its development counts no less than twenty-three bars in triple time moderato. It surpasses, I think, all that I have quoted before. This too is a hymn to Pleasure, but there passes over it the breath of an emotion sacred to Lucrece.

VI

The dramatic subject of Castor and Pollux is the sacrifice of Pollux who renounces life on earth in order to bring back Castor from the realms below by taking his place. It is a cruel sacrifice, not on account of the joys and glory that earth offers in abundance to a demi-God—to these Pollux is not more attached than befits a lofty soul—but because of the beautiful Telaïre whom he loves. Telaïre had been in love with Castor, and while the latter yet lived Pollux was secretly in love with her. After his brother's death he dared to declare his love, and he felt the more emboldened to do so in that he had slain in a duel of vengeance Lincée the murderer of Castor, and brought the spoils of his victim to Telaïre. How could he fail to feel assured that such homage, added to the already decisive argument provided by Castor's decease, would win him the fair one? Alas, the faithful Telaïre is inflexible. Passionately attached to Castor beyond the tomb, she is far from accepting Pollux as his substitute but has quite another plan in view for him. Born of the same mother as Castor, but having Jupiter for his father, Pollux is more than a mortal; he can do what mortals cannot. Following the example of other heroes of antiquity he can penetrate to the realms below, and take back from the master of those regions one of his victims and restore him to the light of day. In reply to the ardent declarations of Pollux, which she rejects with a subtly respectful grace, Telaire demands of him this act of devotion. What is the love of a mere woman to him, a demigod? How can he attach such value to her? Glory is a far greater prize. And how it will shine down all the ages, the glory of this expedition to the world below!

But Telaïre knows not, nor does Pollux, to what conditions the performance of so high a deed is subject—the most terrible of conditions. The liberator of Castor will have to be his substitute with Pluto. He can enter those realms, but he cannot return. Jupiter, whose consent is necessary, reveals to his son the terrible law to which his purpose must submit. He leaves him free master of his decision, not without recalling to his mind and conjuring up before his eyes the charms of life. An agonising conflict takes place in the heart of Pollux. If he remained on earth, might not Telaïre change her mind? Would she persist eternally in her refusal? But fraternal love, chivalrous pride, and the lust of fame carry the day … As Pollux is approaching the entrance of the lower world, difficulties are put in his way by a character whom the author has not managed to incorporate very firmly in the action, though at certain moments she takes a very eloquent part in it; this is young Phoebe, who loves Pollux with an unrequited passion. She has mustered the peoples whom the hero governs to restrain him by their prayers and tears. Pollux does not let his resolve be weakened; he even scatters with sword strokes the crowd of furious demons who bar his way.

Castor dwelling in the happy shades is giving himself up to the charm of the Elysian fields and to melancholy thoughts of his earthly loves. Neither the fair prospect of a return to life, nor the pain that he feels on hearing that his brother, his liberator, is his rival, disturbs his sense of honour. He will not consent to the death of Pollux. He agrees to return to earth for one day only; Mercury transports him thither. The extreme shortness of his happiness dashes with sadness the tender words that he exchanges with Telaïre in a pleasant Spartan glade. But as he is preparing to descend again to the shades, songs of joy burst forth. Jupiter, satisfied with the test, restores both brothers to life, and to reward their devotion promises that they shall have their place among the stars.

The poet Bernard has handled this theme in sparkling—often too sparkling—verses of the minor school of the 18th century, and in style that smacks of Ariosto rather than Racine—not that we would bring that up against him, for Ariosto may well be called the greatest of the poets of opera. Yet there is in Castor much that recalls Racine but it is Rameau's music that puts it there.

The interludes, dances and figures led up to by the development of the subject are as follows: in the first act the entrance of athletes and warriors, who celebrate by their games and songs the victory of Pollux over Lincée: in the second, the entrance of Hebe at the head of the Celestial Pleasures, holding in their hands garlands of flowers with which they seek to bind Pollux; in the third the choruses and sarabands of demons who, to frighten Pollux, "emerge from the lower world through flames:" in the fourth the singing ballet of the Happy Shades; in the fifth, by way of finale, the gathering of "stars, planets, satellites and gods" celebrating the glory of their new colleagues, Castor and Pollux.

In this slight sketch—and I am conscious of its weakness—I have tried to bring out the rich and deep poetry, the clever simplicity, the magnificent and delicate colouring of Rameau, painter of the lures and pleasures of life, of the feasts of Nature. Rameau as painter of warlike pageants, of the sports of athletes and soldiers, is just as great, perhaps more so. Perhaps Mars inspires him with even more life than Venus, and fills him with more enthusiasm. The interlude in the first act is extraordinary in its power and virile gaiety. In particular, the air for the athletes, "sound forth, proud trumpets" is remarkable for a strength, a burst of rhythm, and a flame of melody to which I find nothing comparable in other masters. Handel himself, though he shews much genius in pictures of the kind, and though this heroic note is familiar to him, has not such vitality and directness. He puts into them a certain eleboration and solemnity: incontestable as is his greatness, he has not that French lightness and quickness of touch.

As to the purely dramatic part of Castor, I will choose among the countless comments to which it lends itself those that seem to me most significant.

Rameau's recitatives have been much criticised. They have been denounced for their dryness, their coldness, their formal and affected style, and their monotony. I am far from saying that Rameau has not in some instances given ground for these complaints. But as a generalisation they are absolutely false. The truth is that in this very difficult and delicate branch of dramatic art he has created undying models of expressive force. The type of recitative that he conceived and in many cases realised is an admirable thing, and Monteverde, though his genius of expression is profoundly different, is the only master whose art can be compared in this department with Rameau's. In the work of the Italians from Pergolesi onwards, in Glück, Mozart and Rossini, in the Frenchmen of the first half of the nineteenth century, Recitative is presented as the part that is sacrificed; it is employed in passages of subdued dramatic interest, where the lilt and lyric expression of the air are unsuitable; and it is admitted that what befits these passages (at any rate in the absence of any thing better) is sung declamation, a chant more or less accentuated in its outlines, and accompanied by a few chords the object of which will be rather to sustain the voice than to make any real contribution to the expression. But is nothing better possible?

Could not an effect be obtained intermediate between the musical vacuum proper to the recitatives of this school and the plenitude of music which distinguishes the airs? Must one necessarily accept as an imperfection fatally inherent in opera this eternal alternation of void and fulness, of desert tracts and flowery oases, as repellent to the spectator as they are offensive to truth and nature? I have mentioned Monteverde and Rameau as the two greatest operatic musicians who have been of the contrary opinion. I hasten to add that they were so because they could afford to be so, and they could afford it because they were incomparable masters in the handling of harmony. Except Mozart (who no doubt paid no great attention to this point) the exponents of the recitativo secco, whatever genius some of them may have shewn elsewhere, were far from equalling these two in this department, and that is why they were, as one may say, condemned to the recitativo secco.

The truth is that what properly belongs to recitative passages is the expression of sentiment, and fine shades of sentiment. Now, if it is naturally the part of melody to convey sentiment in its stages of simplicity, pronounced determination, or frank expression, yet the subtle use of all the resources of harmony is necessary to render the fine shades of sentiment, because it is in the nature of harmony to provide countless shades—at least if the composer has the ability to use it as some have done. I am not running to extremes; emphatically I do not say that the line of the melody, its divisions and the manner in which the words are spaced, are of minor importance; but the movements of thought can only be thrown into relief by favour of a harmony that models itself on them continually. By the way in which they satisfy the above conditions the majority of the recitatives in Castor are to be counted among the finest things in music: they contain no less music than the airs, but it is music of another nature.

I will take as example the passage introducing the famous air "Sad preparations" with which it is connected by a celebrated modulation, where Telaïre begs Phoebe to leave her alone with her tears before the funeral monument of Pollux; or again the mournful and proud replies of Pollux when his father reveals to him that to deliver Castor he must separate himself for ever from his loved one. Important considerations of propriety (the presence of a stranger, a woman, regard for the sovereignty and benignity of Jupiter) oblige the characters to give vent to their feelings only in a gentle and subdued fashion, though despair is in their hearts. Hence the necessity for Recitative. But mark how through the measured inflexions of the language the combinations and contrasts of an intense harmony modelled by a quivering hand are able to lay before us the most secret agitation of their hearts.

And how can I fail to dwell upon that marvel of marvels, the love scene in the fifth act between Castor and Telaïre? A love scene treated throughout in recitative, what a change both from the impotence of the recitative secco and from the romantic eloquence to which we are accustomed! Rameau employed this method because truth required it. The two lovers are re-united only for a day. The hour that brings them together bids them also take their last farewell. How could they yield themselves to happy embraces, surrenders, or songs of passionate despair? Their souls are divided between ecstasy and utter heaviness. Other musicians, in some cases great ones, dealing with an analogous situation, have expressed successively and separately the two contrary feelings, giving free play in either direction to their eloquence, but they are false to Nature. Rameau follows Nature. He keeps to the true note of this state of mixed feelings, he represents the double current. Is his music thereby less moving? On the contrary it is more so, and in style far more lofty and appealing. Read and re-read those four immortal pages beginning at the words: "So heaven is touched at tenderest alarms" and on to these: "Alas, can I believe it? Faithless one, thine only boast to keep thy tryst with death!" Read those lines again: you will not weary of them. What rhythm, what stateliness, what judgment, what feeling, and what music! In modern music I know of long love duets, that have gained well-deserved fame, that fill the orchestra with music, the theatre with sound, and the audience with delirium. But how much would I prefer to have written just those four pages, that melodious murmur divinely touched with tenderness and grief!

It is the French manner. We must get back to it—if we can. It is not easy. It is infinitely difficult, It is the perfection of musical delicacy and exquisite feeling. But it is the French manner.

Wagner too found himself at grips with the problem of the Recitative. For Wagner's music is itself divided between recitatives and airs, as theatre music has been, is, and will be in all ages and in all countries, seeing that this division is absolutely inevitable. It is no less impossible to write dramatic music that shall not be a succession of recitatives and airs than it was for M. Jourdain to speak without uttering prose. But note, if it is impossible to conceive dramatico-musical utterance in which these functions are not fulfilled, yet they may be fulfilled under many different forms. The form which Wagner has chosen for his recitatives is not one of the things most to my taste in his art. In order to fill them with music (a praiseworthy object in itself) and avoid those awkward breaks of continuity between them and the singing parts, those shocks which certainly ought to be avoided, he makes their tissue out of fragments borrowed from the melodic themes of the work; these he develops, combines and elaborates according to the rules of counterpoint and symphony. I will not discuss here the value (very variable) of the results given by this procedure. What is certain is that for Frenchmen nothing could be more heavy, hampering, scholastic and crushing. Nothing could be more unsuited to our alert temperaments. The recitative that suits us is one that follows Nature with simplicity and has the lure of spontaneity of expression and of freshness due to continuous inventions. That is Rameau's way and it is, let me repeat, far more difficult to get hold of.

VII

Rameau's Airs are of two kinds, or one might better say of two degrees. The shorter ones offer an intermediate form between the Recitative and the airs on a larger scale. They coalesce with the recitative itself; they are inserted in its development and are as it were a more sustained phase of recitative. Free declamation gives place to song properly so called, but it is song that has its melodic movement so adjusted as not to contrast excessively with the declamation, and seems to be its natural sequel. The musician's tact has to tell him the exact points at which the utterance requires this slightly more elevated tone, this more rhythmic diction. Two airs, in the second scene of the first act, "Let your foe's fate …" and "How poor a victory!" may be quoted as examples. The melodic restraint of these passages allows the same natural ease in the return to recitative.

This form is necessary to truth of expression in dramatic music. Its absence leaves an appreciable void and the liveliest musical pleasure experienced in other parts does not make up for the discomfort which this gap causes to any good judge. It disappeared from opera at the same time that there disappeared that great richness, that superabundance of musical resource employed in opera by the old Italians, such as Monteverde and Stradella, and by Rameau their true successor. We see the lack of it in the modern Italians, and one must add, in Glück, though this remark must not be taken as detracting from his genius. It disappeared at a time when a doctrine prevailed which made it a grievance against Rameau that he put "too much music" in his operas. That "too much music" was just what rendered half tones possible, just as in painting it is only a rich palette that can introduce tone and graduation in the colouring. But does what allows of half-tones exclude the opportune application of strong and lively colours? Certainly not. Like all truly great artists Rameau has both. He draws from the same source his double superiority in delicate expression and in the vigorous inspirations of eloquence. If anyone ever knew how to put energy into music, it is he. He has no equal for feats of conciseness and strength, for the sudden frankness and overwhelming bursts of melodic spate. This boldness is the most striking characteristic of his airs of the second class, airs in the proper and full sense of the term. But what is so admirable is that thanks to the graduations these fine strong strokes come in perfectly naturally.

In the school with which I contrast him and which replaced him, the important kind of air only emerges after some preparation. The musical embellishments by which it is compulsorily introduced seem to be proclaiming that serious matters, great matters, are about to be uttered, and now it will be well worth while to listen. However successful and fine the air may be, this gives a shock, it shows favouritism, it almost asks for objectionable mannerisms from the interpreter both as actor and as singer. With Rameau, at any rate in his best work, there is nothing of this. The great expressions whether vocal or instrumental arise from the actual progress of the sentiment and of the dialogue, with such spontaneity that one feels their elevating effect without having, so to speak, noticed it. The listener is out on the ocean of music without having been conscious of leaving the shore. The composer, carried away by the exaltation of the passion he is translating into music lets himself go and plies his tools joyfully on his material Sound. He strikes it preferably at the most sensitive spots, those that answer the call with most sharpness, power and fulness; I mean on those tonal notes, those perfect chords which weak or over-subtle musicians only dare approach with hesitation and equivocation, by roundabout ways, because the vagueness or generally blurred style of their utterance can only with difficulty support their sovran precision and clean cut effect. The great masters, on the other hand, in their strength, have always gloried in striking them, without petty precautions or beating about the bush—striking them again and again through long passages, in conformity with the robust decision and majestic gait of their thought. No one, not even the author of the Heroic Symphony and the Symphony in C Minor, has put more energy than Rameau into this familiar and superb handling of what might be called the fundamentals of the world of sound. Look at the reply of Pollux to Jupiter (Act II., Scene IV.): "Oh, let me penetrate e'en to the sombre shores,"—that affirmation of resolution and youthful heroism. Its musical substance consists (at least one may say so with almost complete accuracy) in a sequence of six perfect chords; this sequence's rhythm (itself repeated six times) by which the constituent notes of the chords sound again successively from the highest to the lowest, suffices to make it the most original, virile, proud and sturdy piece of music in the world. This remark with slight modifications might be extended to apply to many other passages, in particular to those two airs absolutely different both from the one quoted above and from each other; Phoebe's song of passion and vengeance at the beginning of the fifth act, or (Act. III., Scene III.) the rapid account of Telaïre's prophetic vision, "His chariot suddenly recoiled before me," a page as warmly coloured as it is full of movement, making one think of certain passages in the Rheingold. Always the perfect chord. Truly it is with that that music strikes her strongest blows. But is it not the "common ground" which provides the greatest orators and poets with their most striking passages? What is paradoxical in the definition of "common ground" is that it is only within reach of exceptional abilities.

It is also to be noted that the observance of natural effects inspires in Rameau various methods of introducing airs. Sometimes he underlines their arrival by a touch of grandeur. Thus for "Sad preparations," Telaïre, left alone, can at last withdraw herself from the outside world, and give herself up to mournful meditation on her hero's death. A dignified modulation, the sudden appearance of a broad and very simple rhythm, a grave and pathetic prelude, mark this moment. Everyone knows the sublime song that follows, before whose beauty Diderot's anti-Rameau mania was subdued and the youthful Grétry's somewhat depreciatory envy was silenced. Everyone did I say? Well, I thought so! But let me repeat what one of our celebrated singers told me a short time ago. One day she had occasion to ask one of our equally celebrated conductors to accompany her on the piano in "Sad preparations." At the end, "That's a fine thing," exclaimed the worthy musician, "whose is it?" He knew his Beethoven and his Schumann by heart, but he didn't know who composed "Sad preparations." This little story is typical of a long period which the war and the victory of France will have brought to an end. The great thing is that our hero realised and admitted that it was fine. As to that I will make no further comment than to quote the remark of a friend of mine who has deep feeling for music, and knew nothing finer than, "I have lost my Eurydice." I gave him the opportunity of hearing "Sad preparations." He sought for words to express his exact sentiment,—"That," said he, "is on a higher plane."

Let that be understood as the expression of a comparison between these two pieces, and not of a general comparison between Rameau and Glück. We will not set the author of Castor before the author of Armide. These two great men are peers. And there are not wanting parallels where the second wins. To my thinking, the air in Castor at the beginning of Act 4, "Abode of eternal peace," is far from equalling the song of Orpheus greeting this same sojourn in the Elysian Fields, or the song of Renaud contemplating the gardens of Armida. On the other handone may wonder whether Glück could have rendered with the same mixture of broad musical poetry and subtle touches Pollux's struggle of conscience at the beginning of Act II. "Nature, and Love, ye sharers of my heart, which of you twain shall be the conqueror?"

Having now treated of the recitatives and airs, we have next to consider the scenes and acts in their development. We know how important in dramatic art are the balance and good handling of these units. In musical dramatic art they require a special simplicity of treatment. In this respect Castor is a very great success. The interludes which are interpolated in the drama, far from impairing its emotion, render it more beautiful and poetic. The poet has shown great cleverness. Dardanus may be quoted as marking the opposite defect. Its drama is very weak; its springs are mechanism rather than sentiment; it seems to be made for the interludes, not they for the drama. It is to be feared that in spite of a great deal of admirable music, it must have fallen flat on the stage. Rameau used to worry the life out of his librettists, by forcing them constantly to undo or reconstruct their text, but it seems to me that he exercised this very formidable censorship only on the prosody and detail of the words. As to the general conception he showed himself accommodating, and one certainly cannot consider he was wise in so doing, as he thereby to some extent injured the future of his work. But in Hippolyte, which like Castor is by Pellegrin (and by Pellegrin guided by Racine) he found in this way an excellent book. I might have chosen Hippolyte as the subject of an analysis intended to bring out the form that opera took in Rameau's hands. But Castor appears to me to be a more perfect whole. I find in the parts of Hippolyte and Phèdre an element of coldness and weakness, something of that forced effect with which the master is reproached. But I am far more impressed with the prodigious musical creations which that work contains—creations of a style quite wanting in Castor.

All those who know the score will know that I have specially in mind the second act, that of the world below, in which the power of evocation is blended with the grandeur of true tragedy:

"On us thy destiny hath cast a horrid spell.
Tremble! In terror quake! Poor wretch, what is thy goal?
To leave behind the realms of hell
To find sheer hell within thy soul!"

Thus sing the Fates to Theseus, and one seems to feel the crime of Phaedra with its awful consequences stealthily following the unhappy hero along the dark ways of the nether abodes. Human tragedy adds its own colours to the colour that depicts the world below. When we reflect on the loftiness of style and the outburst of musical force that this act presents, one might say lets loose, at its opening, we are astounded to find the artist's power not only sustained but extended and increased right up to its conclusion. There are two elements opposing and warring with one another in this series of scenes: on the one hand the humanity, generosity, courage and tenderness of Theseus, and on the other the eternal callousness of the powers of Erebus and the avenging wrath of Pluto (illacrimabilis Pluto); and we marvel to find that the one element has been treated with no less force than the other. Each enhances the other. Then there is the "Trio of the Fates" singing together in solemn notes the prophetic malediction, while in the orchestra amidst the howling of the winds of hell, resounds the brazen voice of doom. One must know this trio if one would know how far the power of music can go. But it would not be what it is were it not followed by the magnificent and touching entreaty of Theseus: "Since Pluto is inflexible." Here it is no longer simple intervals and perfect chords that the musician employs. He throws forth in full flight a swarm of chromatics like Pluto setting loose devils. But handled with this power even chromatics have the firmness of the hardest metal. To find passages comparable to these we must turn to the laments of Theseus in Act V., where he discovers his error and involuntary crime, "Great gods, with what remorse I feel myself distraught." The fine passage, "Since an eternal barrier lies between us," has heart-stirring melodic analogies with the farewells of Wotan.

For the purpose of completeness (completeness, that is, within the bounds of this slight study), we ought to point out the prominent features of Rameau's ballets as we have sought to do with his "tragedies"—for that is the significant name under which Hippolyte, Castor, and Dardanus were presented to his contemporaries. We should take as our type the "Heroic Ballet" of the Indes Galantes, abounding as it does in gracious and fresh beauties; its "first entrance" in particular has the charm of a fresco by Tiepolo … But however tempting it might be to set before the world the variety of the master's work, we should be afraid of lapsing into wearisome detail. It will be better, at the point we have now reached, to sum up our opinions in a few general remarks.

VIII

I have emphasised Rameau's high qualities of dramatic expression, because it often happens that they are not recognised, and he is represented as a great symphonist who strayed into opera. I think I have shewn on the contrary that the same basis of musical wealth from which his symphonic inspiration draws its nourishment, provides also the eloquence, variety and fine shades of his dramatic expression. If in the total of his work symphony seems to hold a more important place than dramatic music, it is in the first place because his ballets are more numerous than his tragedies: it is also because in two out of his four tragedies, Dardanus and Zoroastre, the moral springs of the tragedy are too feebly conceived to rival the figurative and airy portion which gives scope for symphony properly so-called (in the latter I include dance music).

Rameau as symphonist is a match for the greatest. One has only to go through his scores to recognise that Mozart and Beethoven do not surpass him in invention. His work contains nothing like Beethoven's great contemplative adagios. But Beethoven has not his picturesque fancy—so sturdy and of such astonishing creative originality. The two are equal in force of enthusiasm. But if Beethoven's enthusiasm raises and organises far vaster sonorous masses, Rameau's throws out more brilliant flashes. That is only to say that Rameau is a Frenchman, a Frenchman of the eighteenth century, while Beethoven is of another race. If Rameau (beware, I am about to utter a blasphemy!)—if Rameau had written the finale of the ninth symphony, the Ode to Joy, he would never have made of it that extraordinary architecture of sounds, but on the other hand he would not have put that heaviness into it; he would have really put more joy into it.

In any case this is not the comparison I wish to press; I make it merely to indicate Rameau's rank, rather than to add another stroke to the portrait of a genius. A comparison between Rameau and Handel would be much more fruitful. They are exactly contemporary, and great as are the differences between them, one is conscious that they share a certain common style belonging to European music that still shews traces of the seventeenth century. But I should like to draw attention to another analogy, more interesting and more instructive.

Rameau wrote operas largely blended with symphony. His symphonies are inspired by mythological and fabulous scenes, and these scenes it is their object to illustrate and bring to life in music. Now since his time there has been one other great musician, and only one, whose work presents precisely this aspect, and who has made the same kind of application of music. I mean Richard Wagner. Their mythologies are different. Rameau's mythology is borrowed from classic fable: the models of the figures who appear in it, of the landscapes in which the events take place, have been imagined and elaborated by the painters of Rome and Venice, so that it wears the halo of a long heritage of beauty. Wagnerian mythology is taken from German and Scandinavian fable, of which one may at least say (without of course refusing to recognise its attraction) that it comes nowhere near Greek fable either in taste or in intellectual appeal; and the scenic realisations of this element of the marvellous are far coarser and very far from adjusting themselves to the same degree of style. Nevertheless the work of the two composers belongs to branches of the art sufficiently similar to render somewhat ridiculous those critics who delight in the theatrical figures of Wagner, and relish in them the freshness of Nature, while they condemn those of Rameau as artificial and class them with all that is old fashioned and cast-off in art. Would they suggest that the Rhine maidens are a less^[1] artificial conception than Diana and her huntresses or the Norns than the Parcae? And are not the latter infinitely nearer to us than the former, and far richer in meaning?

But what want bringing out are the analogies of musical feeling that correspond to the analogies between musical subjects. Rameau and Wagner have given to their symphonic music the character of real plastic creations. I am not saying that they are descriptive writers; that term would be weak, or rather the idea would be inaccurate. An act of the imagination is involved that is far deeper and stronger than description. In these masters the poetic impressions of spectacles of nature and fancy inspire musical forms that have as much boldness in rhythm as simplicity in melody, and shew a wonderful relief. They might well be called syntheses by music. "Rameau's music" as M. Lionel de la Laurencie so well says "seeks its end outside itself. It strives to paint, to express. It has an extra-musical function; it aims no doubt at translating human sentiments, but it aims also and especially at transposing spectacles and visions, at characterising their appearance and profound signification. That is where Rameau is a great, a magnificent musician. His themes present themselves to us with an astonishing clearness and firmness of outline. They have a marvellous precision, a definitive quality. Their tonal clarity is perfect and their character clearly shewn." These features would apply, with a shade (but an important shade) of difference to the more famous symphonic themes of the Tetralogy. The difference is that the latter have in their splendour a certain heaviness, though a heaviness that suits them. We prefer Rameau's light material. It is of no less good quality.

In any case the comparison is confined to these figures of sound. The methods by which the two masters develop them are as different as possible. We realise easily what an immense gulf lies between them as far as the dramatic aspect and human expression are concerned:—the same gulf which is seen to separate the heroes of noblest poetic and literary origin who fill Rameau's theatre, and the colossal but scarcely living figures, half men and half elements, which furnish the characters of the Wagnerian dramas.

Work such as Rameau's belongs not merely to the history of Music. It has its place in the general history of Taste, in the history of Civilisation. Considered from this point of view, the author of Castor appears to us as one of the most imposing figures in art that France has ever produced. A harmonious quality of nature, or one might better say, of formation, unites in his personality the features of two great periods, the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. From the seventeenth he draws the tone of pride, grandeur, nobility, the vigour and rhetorical fulness, which form the most striking feature of his style; also his dominant concern for clarity, precision, fixity, and symmetrical order of form; also the learning that exacts a kind of exactitude and mathematical perfection in the realisation of beauty; also, and lastly, the dignity of tragic tone which he assumes without effort at the right moment. All these features affiliate him rather to Bossuet, Descartes, and Racine than to Voltaire. But in one point he is unique; that is that he contrived in that language which has the grandeur of another century (a century far superior in respect of art) to express his own century. He has conveyed into his music the sensibility and imagination of his contemporaries. Their dreams have found an interpreter in him—dreams of life according to Nature, of pastoral innocence, of charm in sensual joys, of grace and lightness in passion, of happiness through the daintiness and radiation of pleasure. This moral and poetical ideal is reflected in his works with the same sweetness and light as in the paintings of Watteau and Fragonard. Does it follow that he was personally led captive, or intimately imbued with this ideal, that he was subject to the sentiments and desires that he clothed with such beautiful expression, that he yielded himself up to them, and shared the intoxication of them? Here a fine distinction must be made. In temperament as in brain, Rameau belongs to another period. He is a bourgeois of the old school, positive and severe, of Cartesian education, the very last man to run after sentimental will o' the wisps and idyllic illusions. In that lofty and firm soul there is no nook for pastorals. But he is a very great artist with a quick and piercing eye, quick at probing the meaning of what lies around him, seizing passionately its appeal and grace, transforming it into rich material for his art, and appreciating it rather with the heart than the intellect. One might compare him to one of those great painters, of whom France has had many, who have come to Paris from their villages, and there, in the midst of their fame have preserved (not without a whimsical satisfaction) their rough peasant ways, the burrs of the backwoods—and yet they have had no equals for realising on canvas the poetry of supreme elegance in woman. So stands Rameau to the idyllism of the eighteenth century. It is a barbaric error (and the barbarism comes from Germany), that of a certain contemporary school, who maintain that an artist must identify himself with the spiritual conditions that he translates—that he must experience them within himself, in a sense "live" them. On the contrary he must dominate them, must see them from a height; only thus can he sound them deeply and get out of them what they contain of general humanity. It is in this higher way, with this independence and serenity, that Rameau, as it seems to me, shared the sensibility of his age. It is just in that that he was a great poet. He was the great poet that music gave to the eighteenth century, a century which according to a commonly received (and indeed true) opinion could find none in literature.

Rameau gained for himself this high place because in the midst of that delightful century he retained the stamp of a stronger age.

IX

I come now to Rameau's enemies and the campaign waged against him by Rousseau, Diderot, and Grimm, the encyclopaedic party. Later we find Rousseau quarrelling with the enclopaedists, but at this period there was ostensibly a warm friendship between him and them.

This war was not the first that Rameau had had to undergo. At the time of his first appearance in the theatrical world he had found himself vigorously attacked by the party of Lulli. It was just the hostility of old Corneille's partisans against young Racine over again.

Every great artist has at first been confronted with this resistance from a public that is shocked by the novelty of his expression. Rameau was all the more sure of overcoming it because so far from seeking to dethrone the Florentine, he proclaimed him, and with justice, his master and guide. His art, compared with Lulli's, had nothing revolutionary about it; it was a continuation of Lulli. It was the art of Lulli with a very great advance in musical richness, variety,suppleness and colour. It was the musical tragedy of Lulli resumed by an artist who joined to a poetic genius at least as fine and an equally lofty sense of expression, the advantage of being a greater musician and far more fertile in resource. People were not used to this copiousness of invention, all this magnificent stream of music; at first the ears of theatre-goers were stunned and bewildered by them. But they soon recovered, and Rameau had his devoted admirers

The attacks of which I shall now speak were far less honest. Personal feeling, the spirit of clique and intrigue, had far more to do with them than loyal and disinterested conviction. It is practically impossible to accuse Jean Jacques of bad faith in his pamphlet against Rameau; for to shew bad faith one must be capable of good faith, and of such a character as Jean Jacques one may say indifferently that he always shewed good faith or that he never did so. At any rate when we examine without prejudice the substance of the objections that he raises to Rameau's teaching, we are certainly compelled to recognise their purely artificial and fictitious quality. Before a cool judgment on which wild blows of verbiage and irrelevant displays had no effect, Jean Jacques would have cut a contemptible figure, if forced to set out the objective reasons that led him thus to discredit the musician.

We will deal presently with the motives which led Diderot, Grimm, and even d'Alembert to join the cry We must devote ourselves first to the part played by Rousseau, the ringleader of this orchestra in full blast; by the rumpus produced the whole thing might I have been an affair of state. As leader Rousseau was himself led away by the gloomy resentment of his pride, his ideas of persecution and his delusions.

He had begun by shewing for Rameau an admiration of which there is abundant evidence. He recognised his genius as a theorist, acknowledged in him the true creator of the synthesis and classification of harmony. He was equally appreciative of his operas, and praised their power of pathetic expression, richness of harmonisation and colour. These eulogies, which have special reference to Dardanus, the Indes galantes and Hippolyte, occur in a comparison of French and Italian music; this has not been published, but M. Tiersot after studying it in manuscript, gives us an analysis of it. In this comparison Italian music is put far below French music. Rousseau allows the former the credit of "fine sounds" and of brilliant melodic artifices such as refrains, repetitions, glides and vocalisations, but as for sentiment he finds it "frozen" and says that only French music can touch the heart. The amusing thing is that the great attack upon Rameau which is two or three years later than this little document, is also presented in the form of a comparison between French and Italian music, and that practically one has only to interchange the characteristics which Jean Jacques had previously attributed to them respectively, to get the drift of his new criticisms. But French music is worse treated than the Italian had been. It is now the French music which is frozen and repulsive in its insipidity; it has not even the "fine sounds".

It must indeed be admitted that Rameau had done all that it lay in him to do to bring the storm upon himself. Rousseau had respectfully asked him to examine the score of the Muses galantes (his first musical work), but the master excused himself because the reading of scores wearied him. He consented however to hear some extracts from this comic opera performed at the house of M. de la Popelinière. The experiment was disastrous, a fact of which one can have no doubt inasmuch as the accounts of the scene given by the two interested parties agree even in the smallest details. Rameau explained that some of these pieces were by a consummate artist, while others were by an ignoramus who simply didn't know Music, and he concluded by stating baldly that what was good had been stolen.

It is obvious that he was wrong in not being civil, especially towards a morbidly irritable man. But the question that interests posterity is whether he was right in his judgment. We cannot refer to the text of the Muses galantes, as the score has not come down to us. But we have the observations of Jean-Jacques, which throw all the light that is necessary on the matter. "It is quite true," he writes, that my work, being unequal and not conforming to rules was sometimes sublime and sometimes very flat; that must be the case with anyone who soars only on occasional bursts of genius, and is not sustained by science." Is that true? . . . . No, it is not true, at least as Rousseau states it; it cannot be true. It is as impossible without science to write fragments of sublime music, as it is impossible to make discoveries in higher mathematics without a mastery of the elements. Intention does not make power, and power only comes from sufficient studies. With the finest natural gifts, but without studies, a man's most interesting work will be half spoilt, a state of things that is incompatible with the sublime. Moreover the distinction which Rameau drew was not between the "sublime" and the "flat," but between pieces that were very well constructed and pieces without form. That is quite another matter. Here, again, we have only to listen to the "confessions." There only remained some accompaniments and some filling in to be done. This drudgery was very wearisome to me. I suggested to Philidor that he should undertake it, offering him part of the proceeds, He came twice, and did some filling-in in the act of "Ovide"; but he could not tie himself down to this laborious work for a distant and even uncertain profit. He came no more, and I finished my task myself." I fancy that to anyone who can read the position is sufficiently clear. But for musicians its clarity is blinding. The pieces that Rameau had thought good were those which Philidor, one of the best musicians of his age, had furbished up.

It may be admitted that Rameau had gone rather far. We can understand that the personality of Jean-Jacques, being such as we know it to have been must have got on his nerves. But if he had given a little more attention and kindly consideration to the subject, he would not have crushed him with this summary accusation of theft.

He would have recognised that even in the work of Philidor Jean-Jacques had his share. As I have said, we no longer possess the Muses galantes. But we have the Village Seer, which must have been composed after the same fashion. Now, without entering into the detail (though I am not ignorant of it) of the numerous controversies to which the question of the authenticity of the Seer has given rise, and of the solutions that have been found, I venture to state as a certainty that some professional musician or other must have set his hand to this work to make it capable of rendition, but that its happiest and most characteristic melodies are the work of Jean-Jacques. Nature had not denied him a certain gift of melodic invention. He could invent pretty airs of a sentimental, simple and rustic turn. But he was assuredly incapable of embodying his ideas in a composition of wider scope. He had no musical education. He had never worked. He had read Rameau's Treatise with sufficient care to be able to give an approximately correct summary of it in some articles of the Encyclopaedia, but this could not make up for his lack of practical apprenticeship. For want of such apprenticeship not only did he not know how to compose, but the very notion of musical composition had remained a stranger to him. On that he had only the most superficial, puny, and even false ideas. The terms in which he speaks of Philidor's collaboration would be enough to prove it. To talk of accompaniments as drudgery is a scandal, a gross heresy. With all his gift as a melodist, Jean-Jacques was not only no musician; he was not in reality even a judge of the art, or an expert to be taken seriously. But that was not going to stop him from treating of it very doctorally in his Letter on French Music, in which he issues in a tone of resounding decision and oracular authority the decrees of his own incompetence.

The execution at La Popelinière's house—an execution in both senses of the word-had taken place in 1744. The great attack upon Rameau was made in 1752. The comparatively long interval between these dates might lead one to suppose that the resentment he cherished did not enter into the matter. And what might confirm this opinion is that the unpublished writing in which Rameau is praised dates from the year 1750. But a little phychology will perhaps dissipate these illusions, A feeling of rancour may ferment and accumulate for a long time internally before it manifests itself outwardly; internally too, the mind in which this feeling has been sown may bide its time, before letting it grow and frankly giving way to it, until means are available for its satisfaction; the spring of passion, till then restrained and softened by impotency, is suddenly released, and for the flabby inclination for vengeance is substituted a firm resolve. This moral interpretation as applied to Jean-Jacques will grieve those for whom he is a saint, and I do not offer it as self-evident. But at least it is impossible to deny its agreement with facts. In 1744 Jean-Jacques is an obscure individual, and Rameau the prince of French music. In 1752 Rousseau is a celebrated writer, upheld by friends and by a party, while on the other hand, an artistic event has occurred which seems to have withdrawn from the great musician the favour of an important section of the public. That is the moment chosen by Jean-Jacques for attacking him. That event was the famous Opéra-bouffe War."

 

X

The performances given by the Italian opéra-bouffe company at the Opera in the winter of 1752 were enormously successful. Among the dozen works produced, of which the majority are to day either totally forgotten or lost, there was at least one masterpiece, the Servant Mistress of Pergolesi, which had already been given in Paris in 1746, and had been only partially successful. This craze brought into fashion the comparison between French and Italian music, or rather brought it back; since for half a century the fancy of amateurs had been more than once employed on this subject; one may mention especially its treatment in the Letters of the president de Brosses. Jean Jacques followed the stream, and he, too, made a comparison of the French and the Italians. But he compared them as one compares evil with good, death with life, or hell with heaven.

"I think I have made it clear that there is neither time nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French singing is nothing but a continuous barking, unbearable to any ear that is not trained to it; that its harmony is dull, without expression, and smacking only of pedantic padding; that French airs are no airs and French recitative no recitative. From which I conclude that the French have no music, and can have none; or that if they ever have any it will be all the worse for them."

It was for the sake of this conclusion—this explosion, that the whole piece, the celebrated Letters on French Music had been written. And the object that Rousseau there caricatured under the name of French music was precisely the music of Rameau's operas.

Only a simpleton would think it worth while to go into the details of the arguments on which Rousseau was proud to base his maniacal doctrine—the kind of deduction, for example, extraordinary in its subtlety and a priori method, by which he proves that the music of the French can have no time, or again his theory on incomplete chords and harmonic padding, which would make a schoolboy laugh, while Rameau refused to reply otherwise than by a shrug of the shoulders.

More deserving of attention is his comparison between the languages, from the point of view of their respective sonority. He states, what is obviously true, that Italian lends itself far better to singing. Must we draw from that the conclusion that French refuses to be sung, and necessarily renders singing indistinct and harsh? Let us put it at its worst, and admit that German is to French, in respect of natural harmony, what French is to Italian. The songs of Schubert and Schumann sung in German, have a great deal of charm, and it is disagreeable to hear them in another language after receiving one's first impression of them in the original. The fact is that a music closely associated with its words by the double tie of fitness of sentiment and prosodic accuracy (with words of course that have been well chosen) communicates to them all the sonority that can be desired. Can anything sound finer than "Sad Preparations"?

Rousseau is not anxious to contrast French and Italian music in general. Little as he knows of the subject, he knows enough not to be unaware that the reasons for which he rejects Rameau would be equally applicable to the Italians of a past, but still quite recent, age, such as Monteverde, Stradella, Carissimi and others, not to mention Lulli, whom he makes a Frenchman. Rameau's musical formation and conception affiliate him to these great masters, and if his art is profoundly French, if it is French as the work of Descartes and Racinę was French, yet this national character is allied to traces no less deep of Italian seventeenth century influences. Rameau's music and the old Italian music are two provinces of the same kingdom rather than two independent kingdoms. Rousseau therefore is covering both in the same condemnation; here are some expressions of the horror with which they inspired him at this period: "ridiculous emphasis of harmonic science; pedantic pretension of learning; music that is methodical but without genius, invention or taste."

"All this, which only succeeds in making a noise, like the majority of our much admired choirs, is alike unworthy to occupy the pen of a man of talent and the attention of a man of taste. As regards the counter fugues, double fugues, reversed fugues, ground basses, and other difficult follies which the ear cannot endure and reason cannot justify, they are obviously the relics of barbarism and bad taste; like the porches of our gothic churches, they continue to exist only to the shame of those who had the patience to make them."

But Frenchmen would no longer put up with all this, because in the year of grace 1752 opéra-bouffe had come to open their ears. Italian ears had had to begin by getting themselves opened first. The formal thesis of Rousseau is that this came to pass from the day when France lost all influence on the Italian musicians. It was the French element that spoilt the natural gifts of Italy, because in music all that is anti-musical is French. The two terms are interchangeable.

I have dealt at too great length with Rameau for it to be necessary for me to defend him against this attempted travesty. The reproach of treating music as a scholastic and pedantic exercise often falls on people who deserve it, and it is perhaps the worst reproach one can incur. But very often also it is the alibi under which a taste too mediocre, too clumsy and too little sensitive to seize the sense of a rich and delicately expressive music, hides itself and seeks its revenge. Then it cries down pedantry and the abuse of science, it cries down the fugue. After all it is surprising to find Jean-Jacques making himself the mouthpiece of this lack of understanding, this semi-inertia of feeling, and upsetting all the accepted notions of art merely to set up such a disposition as the real judge and sovereign umpire of good music. Is he sincere? It was quite recently that he had admired the Indes galantes as containing more harmony than all the Italian operas put together." Now this harmony has become for him " emphasis on harmonic science." But let us not embark on the question of sincerity in the case of Jean-Jacques! The fact is that what he, aided by his obsession and craze, finds charming in the music of the opéra-bouffe is (side by side with the undoubted delicacy of some of its examples) its decadent tendencies. For there is a decadence of Italian music which begins at this period, a decadence destined to last a very long time, to be brilliant, and have its masterpieces and its examples of genius, only finally to lead the music of Italy to the state of perdition in which we find it at the present day. Of what does this decadence consist? Of impoverishment of writing and of musical style, of the emancipation of melody, which henceforth ceases to attach itself to the fine shades of truth and expression, and is concerned only with the sensual pleasures of the bel canto That is what Rousseau exalts in opposition to Rameau, and I believe that, if at first his resentment contributed to form his convictions, yet these convictions soon become sincere. Jean-Jacques' languishing and sluggard sensibility was bound after all to take more pleasure in this method of expression, a method at once violent and loose. He thought he saw "Nature" in it—and his gossip Diderot had no difficulty in toeing the line with him.

In spite of its radical inconsistency, the manifesto of Jean-Jacques had most unfortunate results. In this world the violence of passion when combined with power of declamation often compensates for a dearth of ideas. This blazing and barbarous invective against French music by a great writer disturbed men's minds. Too many people in Europe were only too glad to run down anything French. Such people cheered for Jean-Jacques and greeted him as a liberator. The worst consequence was that a destructive doubt of the aptitude of Frenchmen for music entered the mind of the French themselves, and largely tended to drive them into excesses of imitation, to lead astray the musicians of our country and weaken in our music the sap and flavour of its native growth. Music is an international language, subject everywhere to the rules of the same syntax; consequently, if there is a domain in which each country can profitably take lessons from other countries and be the richer for it, it is Music. But this acceptance of influence ought not to extend to the absorption of personality, above all when the latter is so magnificent and precious as was the musical personality of France. No one has done so much as Jean-Jacques to make our artists lose the sense of this gift. If we have given ourselves up, not without great loss to our creative vigour, to the unrestrained invasion of musical Italianism and afterwards of Germanism, it was he who was the great promoter and prophet of this betrayal. That falsest of ideas, the idea that Nature has refused to Frenchmen the gift of expressing themselves in music, comes from the citizen of Geneva. Let us reflect for a moment on what this idea implies. It assumes in effect that the universal qualities of reason, taste and feeling as employed by the French in literature and the other arts, cannot find employment in music, that there is some natural incompatibility between these superior qualities and music. That would be a serious inferiority for music. But let us be reassured; to attribute this inferiority to music, as Jean-Jacques implicitly did, is a calumny.

By a sequence of ideas which has nothing contradictory in it, Jean-Jacques, while denying to the French the faculty of musical expression, exalted to excess the spirit of musical nationalism in other nations. He spoke of Italian music as an independent plant which had everything to gain in growth and beauty by keeping itself absolutely untouched by the breath of the outside world, and which must provide entirely for its own nourishment and development if it would not spoil its fruits. But if that is true of Italian music the same must logically be said of German music, Russian music, and the music of every nation. And thus we see the destruction of that common spirit, that great common style of the older European music, of which Mozart and Beethoven still furnish examples, and of which the dissolution was to occur at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Jean-Jacques was the active worker of this ruin. And it is, I should say, very significant that. the same murderous blows which he directed against French national art strike home to the fine unity that had been realised in the music of Europe. But is that the only sphere in which all that is done against France is done against Europe?

Rousseau at the time of this quarrel was involved in the Encyclopaedic group, if not by the basis of his ideas, at any rate by his personal friendships, and above all by the presence of his name among the collaborators in that work. Party spirit (that scourge of letters) was very strong and uncompromising in the group which was obliged to defend its enterprise and its very existence against powerful enemies. "One for all, and all for one," an excellent principle as long as no one says or does anything foolish.

But with a Rousseau on the list it would have been idle to expect this discretion. Diderot, who had himself judged Rameau very justly in a passage of the Bijoux indiscrets (1748), where he compares him with Lulli, sang in chorus with Jean-Jacques, and did so with his customary thoroughness. It is true that the work from which I quote the following criticism is posthumous; it is the celebrated Rameau's Nephew, that farrago so much admired in Germany; its first ten pages are dazzling, and the remainder utterly wearisome. But it shews us the tone and drift of the opinions which this indefatigable talker must have aired in Paris when war was declared on the musician:

"It was Rameau (the nephew) pupil of the celebrated Rameau who delivered us from the plainsong that we had been droning for more than a century, who wrote so many unintelligible visions and apocalyptic truths on the theory of music whereof neither he nor anyone else could make out the meaning, and from whom we have a certain number of operas containing harmony, scraps of song, frayed ideas, noise, flights, triumph, rushes, murmurs, gasping victories, dance airs that are to last for ever, which after superseding the Florentine will be superseded by the Italian virtuosi. He had a presentiment of this which made him dark and gloomy and surly, for no one is so peevish—not even a pretty woman who gets up in the morning with a pimple on her nose—as an author doomed to survive his reputation, witness Marivaux and the younger Crébillon."

One might call this an ingenious piece of spoof.

D'Alembert intervened in a second phase of the contest. Rameau, not willing to let Rousseau have the last word, had published a vigorous pamphlet against Musical Errors in the Encyclopædia, the musical articles being by Rousseau. To do this was to lay his hand on the Holy of Holies. D'Alembert wrote a reply; Rameau retorted and exposed himself to the enemy. He was getting old, and, irritated by this campaign, was no longer quite master of his ideas. He imprudently mixed metaphysics with his music. He said that music was the foundation of geometry and the mother of all sciences. D'Alembert handled somewhat roughly these extravagances of an obstinate old man.

 

XI

The turn of the tide began about twenty years ago, in the resurrection of Rameau who had lain buried throughout the nineteenth century under the waves of the successive invasions of musical Italianism and Germanism. Credit for this is due to the initiative of Charles Borde and M. Vincent d'Indy, who had numer-ous large portions of the master's work performed at the concerts of La Schola. Credit is due too to M. Saint-Saëns, who undertook the complete edition published by Durand, and had as his collaborators in this task musicians chosen from among the best in France, Vincent d'Indy, Paul Dukas, Claude Debussy, Alexandre Guilmant, Georges Marty, Auguste Chapuis, Reynaldo Hahn, Henri Büsser. The brilliance and varied significance of these names proves what rallying power, what virtue as a banner, is still possessed by the name of the author of Hippolytus: his cause is the cause of French classicism. There is no question, in exalting Rameau, of driving the musicians of later generations to cultivate archaism by direct imitation of his forms. Nothing could be more unreasonable. What is sought is rather to lead them back to grandeur, nobility and simplicity of taste, to elevate their sense of art, to help them to set their feet again firmly and completely on the highway of the great natural French manner.

But the existence of a fine edition is a small thing if it does not result in the conquest of public taste, that is to say, in the regular installation of Rameau in the repertories of our concerts and theatres. We must begin with concerts. Modern theatrical conditions hardly allow of a presentation of Rameau's operas that would respect the features that make its strength and beauty.

On the other hand, what is immediately possible and extremely desirable is that Rameau should take an important place in our Sunday concerts, at Lamoureux', at Colonne's and the Conservatoire. What was done for Wagner twenty and thirty years ago must be done for Rameau; extensive selections and long suites from his works should be performed. Even supposing the musical public were, for some weeks or some months, puzzled by a style so far removed from what they are now accustomed to, a little persistence and perseverance is all that would be required. It was forthcoming for the German Wagner, and it will be forthcoming for the Frenchman Rameau.^[2]

To tell the truth this necessity of a period of resistance, experiment and initiation, has no terrors for me. On the contrary my conviction is that prompt and magnificent success awaits the musical society that sets out upon this royal road. To-day is not yesterday: tomorrow will be less so. But for the achievement of these great victories, the superior quality of the executants, the precision and discipline of the execution will not go far, unless the soul of an enthusiast penetrate and inspire with its breath the glowing mass of sound. What will be needed is the soul of a leader, who has not been so weighed down by twenty years' servitude in German music, as to be unable to glow with enthusiasm for this music that is so light and so living in its splendour. If this condition be realised, the public after hearing one or two acts of Castor or Dardanus, the second or the fifth act of Hippolytus, or the first chorus of the Indes Galantes, or any of many other pieces taken from the vast treasure house of airs, dances and descriptive pages, will not merely applaud; it will be roused.

I have no misgivings. Our conductors ask nothing better than to be turned in this direction. It is true that except at the Conservatoire where the establishment includes a choir, they will have to add to their budget the expenses of a choral body.

They will be encouraged by the fact that concert halls without choirs are of necessity favourable to Germany and unfavourable to France, seeing that, with the exception of Wagner, the masterpieces of German music are symphonic, whereas the masterpieces of French music comprise for the most part the vocal, that is the human, element.

"Rameau as operatic symphonist" wrote his contemporary Chabanon, "never had a model or a rival, and we do not hesitate to affirm boldly that after all the revolutions that art may undergo in the future—when it has been brought to the highest perfection by no matter what nation—even then it will be a difficult task to equal our artist in this respect and to deserve a place beside him." This magnificent eulogy, adds M. Laloz, from whom I borrow the quotation, appears to be deserved; at any rate nothing up to the present day has invalidated it. The dance music and the descriptive music (I would add numerous dramatic pages that are so closely bound up with the descriptive pieces that they form one fabric with them) shine with untarnished brilliance. Time which has dimmed so many glories seems to have added to the beauty of his work, effacing from it what his contemporaries found over bold and rendering it clearer and more harmonious. Of all these compositions nothing has grown old, whereas Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner and César Franck, offer many pages or phrases that are out of date.

I thoroughly agree with the eminent critic, without however being able to admit the explanation which he gives of these different destinies. "Nothing," he says "loses its freshness so soon as a lyrical effusion, be it the most touching imaginable, for nothing changes so rapidly as our mode of life. It is by abstaining from appearing in his own work that Rameau has assured for himself the greatest chance of immortality." It would seem to result from this theory, which is inspired by certain aesthetic formulae of Flaubert, that Rameau is assured of immortality because his inspiration is cold, and because he has expressed a void. But indeed what can one express by the arts, and especially in music, if one does not express the human heart? And how can man know the human heart but from himself? It would be truer, I think, to say that Rameau has expressed the same sentiments as all musicians and all poets, but that he has expressed them in their permanent and general aspects, and that it is this underlying generality that alone renders possible the perfection of a form capable of defying Time.

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1. Translator's note: The original says "more," but this is surely a slip.
2. It is clear that in view of the size of modern concert halls and the orchestral mass now found necessary, some amplifications would have to be made in the scoring, though these must respect the character of the master's work. But we have plenty of clever people at the present day who could undertake this delicate task.