Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries by Taruskin Richard;

Author:Taruskin, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

EX. 8-11B Giovanni Pergolesi, La serva padrona, Act II, Uberto’s aria, mm. 12–15, 31–39

This slightly revised version of La serva padrona was the one brought to Paris, along with Orlandini’s Giocatore and a dozen other intermezzos and newfangled comic operas, by a troupe of buffi under the direction of a canny impresario named Eustachio Bambini, for a run beginning in August 1752. The furor they touched off with their performances, and the debates to which it led, had extraordinary repercussions in the French capital, and in all of its cultural satellites both in France and abroad. The so-called Querelle des Bouffons (“press controversy about the buffi” or, more literally, “War of the Buffoons”), with its stellar cast of characters, presaged not only musical but also social and political change.

Press wars had always been a feature of France’s lively intellectual life. There had been one only shortly before between the “Lullistes” and the “Ramistes,” proponents of Lully’s and of Rameau’s operas. And there would be later ones too (including one to which we will have to pay attention, between the “Gluckistes” and the “Piccinnistes”). Always there were political and social subtexts, because under an absolute monarchy, where political, religious, and social issues could not be debated openly, they had to go underground, into highly suggestive and allusive art and literary criticism, among other things, for discussion. Such covert argumentation, often called “Aesopian discourse” because of the unstated but obvious “moral,” has been a feature of modern intellectual life in totalitarian societies ever since. A great deal of music criticism—and of music, too—has carried hidden messages since the eighteenth century, which, precisely because they are necessarily hidden, are ever subject to conflicting interpretation.

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