Querelle des Bouffons


The Querelle des Bouffons, also known as the Guerre des Bouffons and the Guerre des Coins, was the name given to a battle of rival musical philosophies which took place in Paris between 1752 and 1754. The controversy concerned the relative merits of French and Italian opera.
It was sparked by the reaction of literary Paris to a performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's short intermezzo La serva padrona at the Académie royale de musique in Paris on 1 August 1752. La serva padrona was performed by an itinerant Italian troupe of comic actors, known as buffoni. The work had already been given in Paris in 1746, but had attracted little notice. This time it provoked a full-scale war of words between the defenders of the French operatic tradition and the champions of Italian music. In the controversy that followed, critics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, together with other writers associated with the Encyclopédie, praised Italian opera buffa and attacked French lyric tragedy, a style originated by Jean-Baptiste Lully and promoted among then-living composers such as French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Culture shock

The quarrel broke out on August 1, 1752, when Eustacchio Bambini's Italian touring company arrived at the Royal Academy of Music to give performances of intermezzi and opera buffa. They opened with a performance of Pergolesi's La serva padrona. The same work had already been given in Paris in 1746, without attracting any attention at all. The scandal was created by the fact that it was performed at the Royal Academy, which did not have the flexibility of the Comédie-Française where one could alternate tragedies with comedies or the farces of Molière without problem. Comedy at the Royal Academy of Music had always been rather limited.
In the eighteenth century, Italian opera evolved greatly, considerably faster than tragédie lyrique or tragédie en musique, until it split into two genres: opera seria and opera buffa, or comic opera, which included comic interludes marked with lightness, innocence, simplicity, irrationality, and the triviality of daily life.
If "comic ballet" could be represented by Platée, Rameau's tragédie en musique, it was already giving way to comic elements rather than the genre's elements of parody. The piece was marginal until the outbreak of the quarrel. On the other hand, what one later called opéra bouffon was not satisfied with parodying the serious genre but producing a type of original comedy, more popular, closer to farce and the commedia dell'arte.
The unexpected successes of these "farces" were going to divide the Parisian intelligentsia into two factions. Between supporters of tragédie lyrique, royal representative of the French style; and sympathizers of opéra bouffon, colorful defenders of Italian music, there was born a veritable pamphleteer quarrel which would animate the French capital's musical circles until 1754.

The role of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In 1753 Rousseau published a pamphlet, boosting La serva; and at the end of the year, he published it in an engraved edition to disseminate an uncorrupted text. Both versions would weigh heavily in the reception of the work.
In that same text, he justified Italian music's qualities and harshly condemned the French:
In the Parisian world, one would hold such statements against him both at home and abroad.

French identity and aesthetic rivalry

Among pamphleteers on the opposite side, Fr. Castel, for example, would respond in these terms:
It can be argued that Forty years before the Battle of Valmy, a national identity was already asserted as a response to the threat of cultural imperialism. However, the concept of a nation proposed here only represented the Parisian microcosm, that is to say the court's good graces, thus the good will of the monarch. On the other hand, Italian opera showed an aesthetic form in itself which was no longer only Italian but European, or at least international, since numerous composers of the genre were not Italians. The Germans like Melchior Grimm and Baron d'Holbach were among the most fervent adherents of Italian opera. Fr. Castel's statements held fast because, to the eighteenth century royal court, only France could claim to be the dominant nation in Europe. And the most bellicose or defensive statements emanated from the supporters of the French genre.
However, the stakes for cultural domination played out through comparison of the two aesthetics. In the forty or-so pamphlets that dotted the period, the contrast recurred between a totally Italian musical language with Italian opera that favored singing, and the more consonantal, articulated French language and a French genre more preoccupied with words. Furthermore, for the French side, the laughter provoked by comic opera was considered noxious because one lost self-control and was irrational even though the Italian side called for passion and emotion.

Renewal of forms

The same year, Rousseau composed his little opera, Le devin du village, created in Fontainebleau, on October 18, 1752. The term "interlude" explicitly refers to the kind being performed at the same time by the Bouffons on the Paris Opera stage, but could that mean Rousseau had thus realized his dream of Italianizing French opera? His music was very far from that of Pergolesi. The work had not shocked the court authorities since Madame de Pompadour herself played Colin in a performance at the Château de Bellevue. It therefore did not appear subversive, and its pro-Italian nature was not quite obvious, for the good reason that at the time he composed the work, he had not yet attended Italian operas at the Royal Academy of Music.
Seventeen years after the first version created in 1737, which was not a lasting success although this opera renewed the ritual of tragédie en musique invented by Lully, Jean-Phillipe Rameau offered, in 1754, while the Quarrel of the Comic Actors still raged, a thoroughly revised version of Castor and Pollux. This time the work, shown as a model of the French style, as opposed to the Italian style, triumphed, and for a long time.
When all is said and done, it appeared that this controversy, which, after beginning with courtesy, was going to worsen somewhat then burn out after two years, having constituted a great moment exposing French music to new aesthetic values. The French form, without sacrificing itself, would open itself to new influences and renew the genre. At the Comédie-Italienne and Théâtre de la foire in particular, they established a new way of opera which reused the object of the quarrel: natural simplicity facing the harmonic richness of tragédie en musique.