A musical and literary dispute waged in Paris between 1752 and 1754 over the respective merits of French and Italian opera. The performance at the Opéra, on 1 August 1752, of Pergolesi’s intermezzo La serva padrona by an Italian troupe under the direction of Eustachio Bambini is commonly believed to have instigated this controversy, but the seeds of the crisis had been sown months before the Italians’ arrival in Paris. The subsequent quarrel, which engaged many leading philosophical figures of the time and resulted in the publication of over 60 letters and pamphlets, used Bambini’s troupe, popularly known as the ‘Bouffons’, as a cover for voicing ideas of a profound political significance.
By the middle of the 18th century the Opéra had lost much of its former glory. Far more old works than new held the repertory together, and substantial debts had accrued. In 1749 Louis XV handed the privilege of the Opéra to the city of Paris, a political move intended to ease the pressure on the royal purse-strings. Alterations to the repertory, designed to restore public support and fight off insolvency, were introduced, and it is against this background of change that the arrival of the Bouffons may in part be explained.
In May 1752 Bambini’s comedians had been engaged to perform for several months in Rouen. The Opéra administrators, wishing to revoke this agreement, summoned the troupe to Paris, probably to dampen the pretensions of provincial theatres and ensure that their own privilege was not infringed. However, more complicated motives may have underlain this decision: either the inspecteurs-généraux of the Opéra felt the need to introduce an element of much-needed novelty into their repertory, particularly in the wake of the public exchange of letters between Grimm (Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale) and Rousseau (Lettre à M. Grimm au sujet des remarques ajoutées à sa Lettre sur Omphale) in the early months of 1752, questioning the substance of French opera; or, by deliberately inviting an unknown band of Italian comedians to present a limited repertory of short, farcical pieces in the dignified setting of the Opéra, they may have hoped to quell the popular support for Italian music that had been gathering throughout the first half of the 18th century. Whatever their motives, the Bouffons were certainly not an overnight success. The Mercure de France (September 1752) noted that for the first performance the troupe was clearly unaccustomed to its spacious surroundings and lacked vivacity. The review also criticized the recitative and some of the ariettes, which were apparently to the taste only of ‘un petit nombre de connoisseurs’. Cuts were implemented before the second performance, which met with greater public approval. Thereafter the troupe gradually won over Parisian audiences, although the Mercure still voiced some reservations: ‘il est à souhaiter cependant qu’ils n’excédent pas dans la charge’.
Masson has identified Grimm’s Lettre … sur Omphale as a continuation of the earlier controversy between Lullistes and Ramistes rather than as the opening salvo in the Querelle des Bouffons. The first exchange of pamphlets in this new debate did not take place until January 1753, with the publication of Grimm’s Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda. (D’Holbach’s Lettre à une dame d’un certain age, published in November 1752, had elicited no rejoinders.) The Bouffons had, by this time, spent nearly six months in Paris without inspiring the littérateurs to take up their pens. Why the literary dispute should have erupted at this point is, therefore, a complex matter. Certainly, one impetus for the pamphlet war was the success, at the Opéra in January 1753, of Mondonville’s pastorale héroïque Titon et Aurore, deliberately engineered by the supporters of French opera (see Pougin). But of more significance was the severe constitutional crisis that shook France at exactly the same time.
Since the early years of the 18th century, Jansenists and Jesuits had been arguing over the controversial papal bull, Unigenitus (1713). Matters came to a head around 1750 when a radical group within the episcopacy began to refuse sacraments to those opposed to the bull. (Appellants were often, although not always, Jansenists.) The Parlement de Paris, whose Jansenist sympathies dated back to the Fronde, began to intervene, only to have their judgments continually annulled by the king’s council, which comprised many Jesuit supporters. By August 1752 the two sides had begun a fierce exchange of pamphlets; in December the Parlement attempted to bring the Archbishop of Paris to trial. In February 1753 the king expressly forbade the parlementaires to continue with their legal proceedings; they ignored his edict and, in May 1753, were sent into exile.
The stance of the parlementaires challenged the very foundations of royal authority. Leaders of the Enlightenment realized that the same line of attack was available to them if disguised as a musical dispute, for opera, since its inception in France, had been a public celebration of absolutism. Support for Italian music, rather than French, could symbolize individual freedom of thought and weakening of the monarch’s influence. Consequently, musical, political and religious analogies operate throughout the texts of the quarrel. Grimm’s Le petit prophète, for example, is couched in a mock-biblical style, his hapless ‘prophet’ identified as an impecunious Jesuit, while the Lettre écrit de l’autre monde (probably by Suard) portrays the Bouffons and their supporters as wild, dangerous heretics. The ridiculous scenarios created in the fascinating Lettre au public (whose subtitle suggests ‘le Roi de Prusse’ as the author, although this is certainly not the case) satirize courtly circles and point to the growing plight of the Bourbon monarchy. Other texts mirror the characteristics of political pampleteering through their titles and use of language, a prime example (again of unknown authorship) being the Arrêt rendu à l’amphithéâtre.
Grimm’s Le petit prophète elicited 25 known responses and these comprised the first stage of the dispute. The second, inspired by Rousseau’s vitriolic Lettre sur la musique française (November 1753), prompted over 30 further replies and led the dispute to new ground. Arguments centred around vindications or condemnations of Rousseau’s strong personal views; opinions of the Bouffons and comparisons of French and Italian operatic styles took second place to the defence or attack of French language and prosody. Supporters of the national style, aptly named the coin du roi, were quick to assert the dramatic power of the tragédie lyrique, the nobility of its declamatory recitative and its close matching of music and poetry. The coin de la reine preferred the graceful charm and clear harmonic structure of Italian cantilena. Laying aside the political implications of the quarrel, its participants argued largely along the lines of whether opera should be regarded as a primarily musical, or primarily literary, phenomenon. Few, however, seem to have realized the futility of comparing two vastly different genres: the one light and comic, the other noble and tragic.
The exchange of pamphlets ceased one month before the Bouffons left Paris in March 1754, suggesting that literary polemics were not directly accountable for the troupe’s departure. The Italians did not leave in a blaze of glory, because their last production, Leo’s I viaggiatori, proved unsuccessful with Parisian audiences; but they had spent some 20 months in France and given over 150 performances of 13 different intermezzi and opere buffe. What they thought of their eventful stay in Paris remains unknown because they took no active part in the literary dispute; but they certainly owed the highpoint of their careers to a chance combination of factors. Crises at the Opéra, major political upheavals and philosophical agitation by the Encyclopedists brought them success where previous Italian troupes in 1729 and 1746 had failed.
The position of the Opéra vis-à-vis the Bouffons was delicate. On the one hand, the Italians usurped the prowess of the native tragédie lyrique, while on the other, it brought valuable revenue to an establishment in considerable financial straits. The Opéra may have emerged as the temporary victor in the Querelle des Bouffons since the tragédie lyrique continued to dominate its repertory for a further two decades; but the Bouffons proved highly influential in shaping a native style of comic opera in France, and by the late 1750s the first generation of opéra comique composers – Egidio Duni, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny and François-André Danican Philidor – were making their mark. This new genre was eventually to rival the established tragédie lyrique in popularity and success, for which, as Rousseau observed in Les confessions (1782), the Querelle des Bouffons was entirely responsible: ‘Quelque temps avant qu’on donnât Le devin du village, il était arrivé à Paris des Bouffons italiens, qu’on fit jouer sur le théâtre de l’Opéra sans prévoir l’effet qu’ils y allaient faire … elles ne laissèrent pas de faire à l’opéra français un tort qu’il n’a jamais réparé’.
A. Pougin: ‘Mondonville et la guerre des coins’, RGMP, xxvii (1860), 193–4, 201–3, 217–18, 225–6, 241–2
F. de Villars: La serva padrona, son apparition à Paris en 1752: son influence, son analyse, querelle des Bouffons (Paris, 1863)
E. Hirschberg: Die Encyclopädisten und die französische Oper im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1903)
L. de La Laurencie: ‘La grande saison italienne de 1752: les Bouffons’, BSIM, vii/6 (1912), 18–33; viii/7 (1912), 13–22
H. Goldschmidt: Die Musikästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Zürich, 1915)
L. Richebourg: Contribution à l'histoire de la ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ (Paris, 1937)
N. Boyer: La Guerre des Bouffons et la musique française (Paris, 1945)
P.-M. Masson: ‘La lettre sur Omphale’, RdM, xxvii (1945), 1–19
A.R. Oliver: The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (New York, 1947)
A.M. Whittall: La Querelle des Bouffons (diss., U. of Cambridge, 1963)
S. Sacaluga: ‘Diderot, Rousseau, et la querelle musicale de 1752: nouvelle mise au point’, Diderot Studies, x (1968), 133–73
D. Launay, ed.: La Querelle des Bouffons (Geneva, 1973) [facs. of 61 pamphlets pubd 1752–4]
D. Launay: ‘La Querelle des Bouffons et ses incidences sur la musique’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 225–33
D. Heartz: ‘Diderot et le théâtre lyrique: “le nouveau stile”, proposé par Le neveu de Rameau’, RdM, lxiv (1978), 229–52
W. Weber: ‘La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime’, Journal of Modern History, lvi (1984), 58–88
E. Cook: The Operatic Ensemble in France, 1673–1775 (diss., U. of East Anglia, 1989), 76–127
R. Isherwood: ‘The Conciliatory Partisan of Musical Liberty: Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 1717–1783’, French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. G. Cowart (Ann Arbor, 1989), 95–119
A. Fabiano: L’affirmation de l’opéra italien à Paris et le rôle de Carlo Goldoni (1752–1815) (diss., U. de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, 1995), 13–55
R. Isherwood: ‘Nationalism and the Querelle des Bouffons’, D’un opéra l’autre: hommage à Jean Mongrédien, ed. J. Gribenski (Paris, 1996), 323–30
ELISABETH COOK