I never enjoy an evening more than when I am pleased with my morning. Boredom takes hold of them. Hemmed in as they are by an overwhelming abundance of riches, anyone who does away with them would be doing them a service. The only aspect of happiness they recognize is the bit that froths up quickest. I too have a palate, and it is tempted by a delicate morsel or a delicious wine. I too have a heart and eyes, and I love to see a pretty woman, I love to feel the firm round flesh of her bosom in my hands, to press my lips on hers, to feel aroused when I look deep into her eyes, and to expire with pleasure in her arms.
Every so often, I am not averse to an evening of debauchery amongst friends, even quite a riotous one. But I will not conceal from you that I find it infinitely more delightful to come to the aid of someone in need, to bring a fraught situation to an end, to give a salutary piece of advice, to read something pleasant, go for a walk with a man or woman dear to my heart, spend a couple of instructive hours with my children, write a good page, fulfil the duties of my position, say some tender loving words to the one I love and receive her embrace in return.
There are some things I would give anything to have done. Mahomet is a sublime piece of work, 82 but I would rather have cleared the Calas 83 name. A man I know of fled to Carthagena. So what does he do now, this younger son, who had been so harshly treated by his parents, and had gone to seek his fortune far away? He sends them help; he hurriedly winds up his affairs. He comes back wealthy. He restores his father and mother to their home.
He arranges for his sisters to be married. My dear Rameau, this man looked upon this as the happiest period of his life. He told me about it with tears in his eyes; and as I tell you this story, I can feel my heart fill with joy, and it gives me such pleasure I can hardly speak. But the way you see it, then, is that we ought to be decent and honourable?
On top of that, it would put me in a foul mood, inevitably — why else do we so often see the pious being so harsh, irritable, and unsociable? They are suffering, and when you suffer, you make other people suffer too. Virtue commands respect, and respect is uncomfortable.
Virtue commands admiration, and admiration is no fun. My business is people who get bored, and I need to make them laugh. How do you make him lower his voice? And if good old Rameau were, one day, to start looking as if he despised money, women, feasting, idleness, and start behaving like a little Cato 88 instead, what would that make him?
Rameau has to be who he is: Should people be able to say to me: Crawl, and then I have to crawl? I have had my tail stepped on, and I shall rear up. My lord hypochondriac, his head stuffed up inside a nightcap which comes right down over his eyes, looks like some kind of paralyzed puppet 91 sitting in an armchair with a string attached to its chin dangling down all the way to the floor.
Yes, you are quite right, Mademoiselle, it needs a little refining there. I love a nice bit of flesh myself, but there is such a thing as too much, and motion is an essential quality of matter, after all. And another thing, it has no idea about anything, and it also gets to decide things. And another thing, you have to applaud these decisions with your feet, as well as your hands, you have to jump for joy, be struck dumb with admiration: How do women learn all that?
Untutored, by sheer force of instinct, by natural insight alone: And then people come and sob to us about the beauties of experience, study, thought, education, and a whole load of other nonsense. Bowing ten times a day, one knee bent in front of the other, the other leg stuck out behind, arms outstretched towards the goddess, trying to read her every look, hanging on her every word, awaiting her command, and shooting off in a flash.
What sort of a person is it who can subject themselves to such a role, if not the wretch who has no other way of appeasing the torment of his intestines two or three times a week? When I was starting out, I would watch what the others were doing, and I would do the same, but better, because I am more openly brazen, a better actor, hungrier, and possessed of a better pair of lungs.
Apparently, I am directly descended from the famous Stentor. Mademoiselle is quite right. That really gives our pretty little wits something to think about. Nobody is more skilful at this than I am. But my most surprising skills are at the other end of the scale; I can produce tiny sounds which I accompany with a smile, an infinite variety of approving expressions; my nose, my mouth, my forehead, my eyes can all come into play; I can bend my back with ease, I have a way of twisting my spine, of raising and lowering my shoulders, extending my fingers, inclining my head, closing my eyes and being awestruck as if I had just heard an angelic and divine voice coming down from heaven.
I am not sure you entirely appreciate the impact of this last pose. I am far from having invented it, but nobody has surpassed me in its execution. I have to agree that you have taken the art of playing the fool and abasing yourself as far as it can go. Even the best of them, Palissot, for instance, will never be more than a good apprentice. Thought and skill have their limits.
Only God and a few rare geniuses can have careers that keep stretching out before them as they advance. Bouret 97 may be one such genius: Remember Bouret was adored by his dog; remember that the bizarre clothes the minister wore terrified the little animal; remember that Bouret only had a week to overcome these obstacles. You need to understand all the background to really appreciate how ingenious the solution was. So come on then! I must confess that even the slightest thing of this kind is too much for me.
He has a mask made that looks just like the Keeper of the Seals; he borrows the voluminous robe 99 from a valet. He covers his face with the mask. He puts on the robe. He calls his dog, he strokes him. He gives him a little biscuit. In under two or three days of doing this morning to night, the dog knows to run away from Bouret the Tax Farmer and run towards Bouret the Keeper of the Seals.
Even the cobblestones know about them, so go and ask them; you should take advantage of happening to find yourself in my company to discover things that nobody knows apart from me. Having a mask made to look like him! But role models like these are depressing. You feel sorry for yourself, and you get discouraged.
I believe it may well have been in use before me; but who ever realized how well-suited it would be for having a secret laugh while bowing down before some upstart? I have ten different ways of forcing people to snatch them from me, and among those ways, I flatter myself that some of them are novel. I have a particular talent for encouraging shy young men; guided by me, even men as thick as two short planks and as ugly as sin have been successful. If it were ever written down, I believe people would acknowledge I had some genius.
It would be a pity if it were lost. Geniuses read little, do a lot, and are their own creators. Who ever gave Bouret any lessons? Do you think the dog and the mask is written down anywhere? That idiotic audience claps until it hurts and does not realize what a mass of charms we are; it is true that the mass is increasing a bit, but what does that matter?
Are you being ironic or are you telling the truth?
But let me tell you because I know, I really do, that she has lots of feeling. I am a decent man; kindly have the decency to be more straightforward with me, and leave out the clever stuff. Ingenii largitor venter [That teacher of art, that donor of talent — the belly]. But, however egregious such things seem to you, believe you me, the people to whom they are addressed are far more used to hearing them than we are to venturing them.
And besides, we look so convinced, so sincere! I say whatever comes into my head: I take every opportunity to speak my mind. Never in my life have I reflected, before, during or after speaking. So I never give offence. It was bad luck, a bad moment — they happen in life. We have, as you know, more friends than anyone else and ours are the best.
We are a school for humanity, we revive the hospitality of the Ancients. All those failed poets, we give them a home. They hardly take up any space! We appear cheerful; but deep down, we are resentful and voracious. Wolves are not as hungry, nor tigers as cruel. We are as ravenous as wolves after the long winter snows; we rip to pieces anyone or anything that is at all successful.
None shall have wit unless he be as foolish as thee and me. We insult everybody and upset nobody. If things get too riotous, he yawns, stretches his arms, rubs his eyes and says: Everyone around him exclaims: Between you and me, that sort of poetry is nothing but a hullabaloo, a whole load of noises jumbled up, like the barbaric squawking coming from the Tower of Babel. And this fellow is always on the receiving end. You lose your innocence but the compensation is that you also lose your prejudices.
When I read Tartuffe , I tell myself: I am myself and I remain myself, but I act and I speak according to the rules. Vice itself only occasionally causes harm, but a character displaying obvious signs of it causes permanent offence. Perhaps it would be better to be contemptuous than to have a contemptuous physiognomy; the contemptuous character is only insulting from time to time, whereas the contemptuous physiognomy is continuously insulting.
The only merit I can claim for myself is that I have a system, based on clear thinking and rational, true observation, for doing what most people do instinctively. Besides, remember that when it comes to a subject as variable as morals, there are no absolute, essential or general rights or wrongs except the law of self-interest, according to which we must always be what it wants us to be, good or bad, wise or foolish, decent or ridiculous, honest or wicked. If virtue had happened to offer a route to fortune, I would have been virtuous or pretended to be, like everyone else.
He appeared over our horizon yesterday for the first time; he arrived at the moment when we all come out of our dens: One of our number made fun of another for having arrived in the morning all spattered in mud and completely wet through, but when he went home in the evening, exactly the same thing happened to him. They had set up a running account; the creditor wanted the debtor to settle up, and the latter was not in funds.
I come in, I see him. Rameau, you are an impertinent upstart. So we ate dinner; I ate up every last bit. I had given my word in front of so many people that I had no choice but to keep it. Was I any different from how I normally am? Even a puppet made of steel would get worn out if its strings got pulled all day and all night. In the midst of all this hoohah, a dangerous thought flashed through my mind, a thought which puffed me up with pride and insolence: Sure, there are plenty of basic fools.
But stupidity is more demanding than talent or virtue. I am uncommon in my species, yes, very uncommon. I am an endless source of rude remarks. I was always ready with a quip that would make them weep with laughter, I was their own personal little Bedlam. Do you know her, by any chance? It was much worse when she was on stage, and I had to be brave and stand right in the middle of an audience that was booing loudly — and they are good judges, whatever anybody says — and clap loudly enough to be heard; have people stare at me, sometimes attract the catcalls instead of her, and hear people around me whispering: What I used to do was make a few snide remarks to stop them ridiculing my solitary applause, which they then interpreted as the opposite.
We make our familiars privy to our every movement, and back then, I can tell you, I was more familiar than anyone. I am the apostle of familiarity and of privy movements. I used to practice what I preached, without anyone taking offence; the only thing they could do was to let me get on with it. And anyway, is it my fault if they degrade themselves? And is it my fault, if, once they have degraded themselves, they get betrayed and cast aside? When they take us on, do they not see us for the self-interested, low-down, treacherous souls that we are? There is a tacit agreement that they will be good to us, and that sooner or later, we will repay them for it by doing them harm.
Is this not the same agreement that exists between a man and his monkey or a man and his parrot? Brun is going around screeching that Palissot, his companion and friend, has written some verses attacking him. Poinsinet is going around screeching that Palissot is blaming him for the verses Palissot wrote attacking Brun. All of this is written down in the tacit agreement. So what did they get? What would you think of us if, with our filthy morals, we claimed we were in good standing with the public?
That we were out of our minds. And as for those who expect to have honest dealings with people who were born wicked and whose characters are vile and abject, are they being wise? Everything has to be paid for in this world. There are two public prosecutors, and one of them is at your door, punishing crimes against society; the other is nature herself. She is familiar with all those vices that escape the law. The easiest thing to do is to resign yourself to the fairness of these judgements, say to yourself, fair enough; shake yourself down and mend your ways, or stay as you are, albeit in accordance with the aforementioned conditions.
Everyone rushes in to help. We had a lot of trouble getting him out from underneath. What possessed such a little hammer to place itself beneath such a heavy anvil? I more usually congratulate myself on my vices than blame myself for them. You are more consistent in your contempt. We value unity of character in all things.
I think you yourself waver from time to time with respect to your principles. It is unclear whether you were born naturally wicked or whether you learnt it, and indeed, whether your learning has taken you as far as it might. Have I not had the modesty to acknowledge that there are beings more perfect than myself? Bouret is, to my mind, the most admirable man in the world. This one lived with a good and honest man, one of the descendants of Abraham, father of the faithful, whose seed was promised to him numberless as the stars.
How can you possibly expect there not to be lots of ungrateful scroungers when the temptation is there and they can get away with it? He confided in the Renegade that his conscience would not let him eat pork. You will soon see what an inventive mind did with a confession like this. A few months went by in which our Renegade became increasingly affectionate. Once he believed his attentions had so thoroughly moved, ensnared, and convinced his Jew that he had no better friend in all the tribes of Israel, then Admire the lengths the man went to.
He lets the pear ripen before shaking the branch. The point is that, ordinarily, greatness of character is the natural result of two or more opposing qualities balancing each other out. There are some days when I have to muse. A traitor has reported us to the Holy Inquisition, you as a Jew and me as a renegade, a vile renegade. It takes more courage than you might think to say out loud what you really are. You have no idea how hard it is to do that. But what about this vile Renegade?
The Jew takes fright, tears his beard, flings himself to the ground, sees the guards already at the door and himself in a sanbenito with his sacrificial pyre ready and waiting. Go out in public, pretend not to have a care in the world, behave as if nothing was wrong. We must make use of this time to sell up. The crucial thing, given our perilous situation, is not to do anything rash. The ship is hired and stocked with provisions and sailors. Tomorrow, they escape their persecutors.
During the night, the Renegade gets up, relieves the Jew of his wallet, purse, and jewels, boards the ship, and off he goes. So far, the Renegade is nothing more than that. The Holy Inquisition came for the Jew the next morning, and put him on a nice, big bonfire a few days later. I wanted you to know how brilliant I am at my art, to compel you to admit that at least I have an original way of degrading myself, to make you think of me as the latest in a long line of glorious good-for-nothings, and proclaim: Come on, Mister Philosopher, make it joyful, all together now: Vivat Mascarillus, fourbum imperator.
At times, the melody was serious and full of majesty, at others, light and playful; one moment, he was imitating the bass, the next, the top parts; he would stretch out his arm and neck to show when to hold a note, performing and composing his own triumphal march, and showing he knew more about good music than good morals. I stayed, with the aim of bringing the conversation round to some subject that would clear my soul of the horror that was overwhelming it. I was beginning to find it hard to bear the presence of a man who could talk about a horrendous deed, a hideous crime in the same way as a connoisseur of painting or poetry would examine the beauties of a work of art, or as a moralist or a historian would bring out and highlight the details of a heroic deed.
I became sombre despite myself. He noticed, and said: Are you feeling ill? To get him to talk about his talent again, I said: What are you working on at the moment? By God, I can, I swear. You should hear how they sing the words! How true it feels! What model does the musician choose when he writes a song? And so it is for all of us. We have nothing in our memory but words, which we think we understand because we use them frequently and sometimes even accurately; and nothing in our minds but vague notions.
Declamation, if the model is living and thinking; noise, if the model is inanimate. We should consider declamation as one line, and song as another line, winding its serpentine way around the first. The more confident and true the declamation, which in itself is a type of song, the more frequently the song line following it will cross back and forth: In these works, there are all sorts of characters, infinite varieties of declamation. This is sublime, I assure you, and I should know. You must go and hear the piece in which the young man feeling his life slipping away, cries out: This tells you how difficult and how important it is to know how to do recitative well.
There was no end to the performances of a piece like Armide. Every age has its own apostle. They were convinced that after having cried along with a mother grieving for her son, and trembled at a tyrant ordering a murder, they would not be bored by all their whimsical fairyland, their insipid mythology, their sickly little madrigals which are as much a mark of the bad taste of the poet as they are of the poverty of the art which finds them acceptable. The true, the good, and the beautiful will always have their way.
Yawn away, gentlemen, yawn away at your leisure. Nature and my Trinity are quietly establishing their empire, and the gates of hell will never be strong enough to withstand my Trinity: The foreign god humbly goes to sit down next to the local idol on the altar; bit by bit, he grows stronger; and one fine day, he gives his companion a little shove, and booboom, down the idol falls. And the Jansenists can say what they like, but this way of doing politics, which achieves its goal without making a stir, without any bloodletting, without creating martyrs, without so much as a tuft of hair being pulled out, seems the best to me.
I just say whatever comes to me. How can you have two ears on your head and ask such a question? He started getting all impassioned and singing softly. He got louder the more impassioned he became; next came the gestures, the grimaces, and the bodily contortions; and I said: Monseigneur, monseigneur, laissez-moi partir [Your Lordship, Sir, please let me leave] A Zerbina penserete [Zerbina always on your mind] Sempre in contrasti con te si sta [I never know where I am with you].
He calms down, he is sorry, he complains, he laughs; never a false note, never out of time, always capturing the meaning of the words and the character of the music. All the pawn-pushers had left their chessboards and gathered round him. The laughter was loud enough to bring the ceiling down. It had everything, exquisite singing, powerful expression, and great sorrow. He emphasised those places where the composer had displayed particular mastery; if he abandoned the sung part, it was so as to pick up the instrumental line, which he would then suddenly drop to go back to the voice, weaving the two together in such a way as to respect the relation between each of the parts as well as the unity of the whole; capturing our souls and keeping them suspended in the strangest state I have ever experienced Yes, I was, but these feelings were tinged with ridicule, and it transformed their nature.
The horns and bassoons, he did puffing his cheeks up like balloons, and making hoarse, low sounds; he made a piercing, nasal noise for the oboes; his voice catapulting up and down at incredible speed, he did as close an imitation of the strings as he could; he whistled the piccolos and cooed the flutes; shouting, singing, charging about like a madman, single-handedly doing the dancers, both male and female, the singers, both male and female, a whole orchestra, a whole opera company, dividing himself between twenty different roles; running around, suddenly stopping and looking like a man possessed, his eyes blazing, foaming at the mouth.
It was boiling hot in there, and the sweat running along the furrows in his brow and down his cheeks got some hair powder mixed in with it, and streamed down and streaked the top of his coat. What did I not see him do? He wept, he laughed, he sighed; he gazed tenderly or serenely or intensely; he was a woman, overcome with sorrow; he was an unfortunate man, giving in to despair; he was a temple going up; birds falling silent at sunset; water burbling in a cool and solitary grove, or gushing forth in torrents from the mountain tops; a storm, a tempest, the cries of those about to perish, together with the howling of the wind and the crashing of the thunder; he was night in all its darkness, he was shadow and silence, for even silence can be painted in sound.
Worn out with exhaustion, like a man emerging from a long sleep or from deep concentration, he was unable to move, he was stupefied, stunned. He kept on looking around, like a man lost and trying to work out where he was. He waited for his strength and wits to come back; he kept mechanically wiping his face. Like a man who wakes up and sees a large number of people grouped round his bed, and who has completely forgotten or never known what he has been doing, he immediately exclaimed: Why are you laughing and looking so surprised?
And then he added: I challenge you to improve on the Ah! At this point, his voice swelled; he held the notes; the neighbours came to their windows; we stuck our fingers in our ears. This is when you need really good lungs, proper organs, some serious air capacity. Lyric poetry is yet to be born.
These expressions need to come thick and fast; the phrasing needs to be tight; the meaning cut off, left hanging; the composer needs to be able to freely arrange the whole and each of the parts, to leave out or repeat it, to add what he feels is missing, to twist it and turn it inside out like a polyp, without destroying it; all of which makes French lyric poetry much harder than languages that use inversion, which do these things all by themselves Cruel barbarian, plunge your dagger into my breast.
I am ready for the fatal blow. I am fading, I am dying A secret fire inflames my senses Cruel love, what do you want from me? Do not deprive me of that sweet tranquillity that gave me such delight Bring me back from madness The tune is almost always the culmination of the scene. We need exclamations, interjections, half-finished or broken-off phrases, affirmations, negations; we appeal, we invoke, we shout, we moan, we weep, we laugh out loud. None of that wit, none of those epigrams, none of those dainty thoughts.
It needs to be more energetic, less mannered, more truthful. Simple speeches, the shared voices of passion are all the more important when the language is monotonous and unaccented. The animal or human cry gives it its accent. Sitting on a banquette, his head leaning against the wall, his arms dangling, his eyes half open, he said: It came over me quite unexpectedly. I feel completely shattered. All my strength is gone; and I have a bit of a pain in my chest. He pours himself two or three large glassfuls and downs them one after another. Then, like a man coming back to life, he coughs loudly, stretches, and says: But in your opinion, Milord Philosopher, is it not rather odd that a foreigner, an Italian, one Duni, should be the one to come and teach us how to put accents into our music, how to make our melody obey movement, tempi, interval, declamation, without harming the prosody?
So then I said: The paternal molecule was hard and obtuse, and that accursed first molecule has absorbed everything else. But if the molecule wanted him to be a waster like his father, any trouble I might have gone to to turn him into an honourable man would turn out to be very damaging to him: A great waster is a great waster, and is in no way a specimen. He is already greedy, duplicitous, thieving, lazy, and a liar. I fear it runs in the family. Sometimes I look at him and grind my teeth, and say to myself: Do you realise that it might be easier to find a child able to govern a kingdom and be a great king than to find one who could ever become a great violinist!
And to give you some idea of how well you can do out of that talent, I have a daughter. Come along every day from seven-thirty to nine in the evening, give her a lesson, and I will give you twenty-five louis a year. The rest of the day will be yours to do with what you like.
Gold is everything; and without it, the rest is nothing. I take the louis out of my pocket. I show it to him admiringly. I look up to heaven. I kiss the louis in front of him. And to make him really understand the importance of the sacred coin, I make my voice tremble when I point out all the things you can buy with it, a fancy jerkin, a fancy cap, a tasty cake. One must turn a blind eye.
If only he were a girl! I want my son to be happy, or, what comes to the same thing, I want him to be respected, rich, and powerful. You may blame me, you and your wise friends, but the masses will absolve me, and so will success. And here, in truth, we have the most significant difference between my man and most of the people around us.
He was neither more nor less horrendous than anyone else, he was simply more open, and more logical; and occasionally, he was profound in his depravity. I trembled to think what his child would become with such a master. There can be no doubt that, by modelling ideas of education so strictly on our morals, he would go far, unless his progress were to be prematurely cut short. If only I had your talents! If only I knew how to write, how to throw a book together, turn a dedicatory epistle, intoxicate a fool with his own merits, worm my way into the company of women!
I am not even worthy of being your pupil. No one is born that way. What star was I born under? Nature smiled when she made Leo, Vinci, Pergolesi, Duni. And as he was saying this, he was pulling all sorts of faces, contemptuous, disdainful, ironic; and he seemed to be squeezing a piece of paste with his fingers, and smiling at the ridiculous shapes he was making. I felt that nature had put my rightful portion into the purses of the funny little figures, and so I invented thousands of ways to get it back. I fall over and break both my legs The man of the world replied: A bump on the forehead.
It seems to me that there must be something in there, but however hard I hit it or shake it, nothing comes out. Then he began shaking his head again, and hitting his forehead even harder, saying: I can feel something, yes, I can. He imitated a man getting angry, indignant, being moved, giving orders, imploring; he extemporised speeches that were angry, commiserating, full of hatred or love; he sketched out the characters of the different passions with surprising subtlety and truth.
I bite my nails, I wear my forehead out. But how are we supposed to feel, be inspired, think, paint powerful pictures, when we have to frequent the kind of people we are obliged to in order to make a living, when we have to say and listen to the kinds of things we have to, such as this drivel: Today, it was quite charming out on the boulevard. Have you been to see the little marmot? Her acting is quite exquisite. Monsieur So-And-So had the most beautiful dappled grey mount imaginable. Beautiful Madame Whatsherface is beginning to fade; can you get away with wearing your hair like that at forty-five?
Little Miss Whatsit is head to toe in diamonds that she got for free. The Punchinello at the Fair has got lungs on him, but no subtlety, no soul. Madame So-And-So has just given birth to two children at once. One for each father And you think hearing that, day in day out, is inspiring and leads to great things? And what do I do about the name I bear? Being called Rameau is quite a burden. The old stump ramifies into one great stem of fools; but so what? You have to inherit his fibre. I missed out on the fibre, but my wrist is nice and loose; the bow works, and the pot is simmering away.
It might not be glory, but it is good stock. I was barely fifteen when I first said to myself: What are you dreaming of? Of having done something or doing something to excite universal admiration. Sure, all you have to do is blow and move your fingers. All you need is a duck, and hey presto, golden eggs.
De Voltaire; and in third place? De Voltaire; and in fourth? The rest of them, surrounding this little group of Memnons, are no better than pairs of ears stuck on the end of a stick. Mister Philosopher, poverty is a terrible thing. I can see her now, crouching down with her mouth wide open, trying to catch a few drips of the icy water leaking from the barrel of the Danaides. Not much good singing goes on under that barrel. I musicked away like an angel; I played the fool; I wanted for nothing. In Utrecht, there lived a charming courtesan. The Jew was tempted by the beautiful Christian; he had his courier deliver her a pretty substantial promissory note.
The bizarre creature rejected his offer. He was in despair. The courier said to him: Why are you getting in such a state? Which is to say, my wife, whom I will surrender to you for the same price. No sooner said than done. The deadline for paying the promissory note arrives. The Jew allows it to go by and disputes its validity. This man will never dare to admit what the payment is for, and I shall not pay it.
At the hearing, he summons the courier. The Jew dismissed the threat, and the courier revealed all at the following session. The judgement went against them both; the Jew was sentenced to pay the promissory note, and the money went to the relief of the poor. So I left him. I came back here. What could I do? All sorts of schemes came to mind. One day, I decided I was leaving the next day to join a travelling band of musicians just as well or ill-suited to play in theatres or orchestras; the next day, I was considering having one of those paintings done that you attach to a pole and plant by a crossroads, where I would stand shouting at the top of my voice, pointing out the different scenes: This is the town where he was born; here he is saying goodbye to his father, the apothecary; here he is arriving in the capital, looking for where his uncle lives; here he is kneeling before his uncle, who sends him packing; here he is with a Jew, et cetera, et cetera.
I chose to do something else. You get my point. They threw me a scrap. Nothing is stable in this world. We are led by unfortunate circumstances, and very badly they lead us too. Monsieur, would you, out of the goodness of your heart, give me a little pinch? The vantage point I see things from is not so lofty that things become indistinguishable, that the man pruning a tree with his shears and the caterpillar nibbling at one of its leaves simply look like two insects going about their business.
What a bloody awful economy! Some men are full to bursting while others are as clamorous as their stomachs, their hunger reviving as often as they do, but without a thing to chew on. The worst of it is how need forces you into certain postures. I leave others to walk about with their heads in the clouds. I look around, and I take up my positions, or I laugh at the positions I see other people taking up. I am an excellent mime artist, as you can judge for yourself. These three storehouses supply me with ridiculous masks to put on the faces of the most serious of personages; and so I see a prelate as Pantaloon, a high court judge as a satyr, a cenobite as a piglet, a minister as an ostrich, his private secretary as a goose.
Everyone else just takes up positions. Anyone who needs someone is indigent and takes up a position. The King takes up a position before his mistress and before God; he dances his steps in the mime. The minister does all the steps of the courtier, flatterer, valet and beggar in front of his King. Crowds of ambitious people dance your positions, in hundreds of different ways, each more base than the next, in front of the minister. Everyone has a little Hus and a Bertin. It was Bouret in the office of the Auditor-General. But nonetheless there is one person who is exempt from dancing the mime.
He went about naked. What does the savage turn to? To the earth, the animals, the fish, the trees, the plants, the roots, the streams. The Cynics were the Carmelites and the Franciscans of Athens. Other people had to pay a lot of money to sleep with the courtesan but she gave herself to him for the sheer pleasure of it. You are dancing, you have danced, and you will keep on dancing the vile mime. She was as brave as a lion. She, meanwhile, happy as a lark, sat herself down at her harpsichord, and accompanied herself as she sang. On the way, I would say to her: Do make sure, Madame, that everyone admires you; show off your talent and your charms.
Show us your brio. Give us a crescendo. We arrived; she sang; she showed her brio; she gave us a crescendo. I lost her, poor little thing. The way she walked! The arse on her! Oh God, her arse! He took little steps; he flung his head back; he played with his fan; he waggled his backside furiously; it was the funniest and most ridiculous caricature of our little coquettes.
There was no way she was ever going to stay with me. The fact was that the head was as good as the tail. I lost her; and my great expectations all vanished into thin air with her. But the truth is, so I could wear my dog bowl on my head What do you expect? Quisque suos patimur manes. Yes it is, unfortunately. He who laughs last laughs longest. Vertumnus is the god of change and transfer, of weather and of money. Its famous gardens were open to the public. A game of his is described at http: Philidor was also an important composer.
He is buried in St. The sixth suite is made up of an adagio, an allegro and a minuet. The play on the modulations as a principle of composition is quite remarkable in these pieces.
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The adagio movement, which stresses the key of D major by long ascending scales, played in alternation with two groups of two instruments, moves away from this key, taking on those of A major and E major, with an intervening B flat which, in spite of the major key of the piece, gives a sense of melancholy to the whole of the adagio. The allegro, on the contrary, with its repeated staccato notes, its trills and appoggiatura, never forsakes the spirit of joy it began in. With its sonata form, the piece offers a development through careful modulation and numerous harmonic sequences.
Sinfonia Adagio — Allegro ma non troppo To listen to this piece online scan the QR code or follow this link: Mayot has not been traced. See the French edition associated with this one, Satyre Seconde: Le Neveu de Rameau , ed. Geneva hereafter referred to as the French edition , for an extended discussion of the role of music in this dialogue. Rameau the uncle was an important theorist of the acoustical basis of harmony see Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment , Jean-Baptiste Lulli early 18th century , by Henri Bonnart — He would repay further investigation; see the French edition, p.
A famous actress and a supporter of the philosophes. See the French edition, pp. Frederick gathered a group of such around him, and used them for political ends. Diderot, unlike Voltaire, did not have contact with this particular enlightened despot, and refused to visit Berlin on his way back from Russia in He was unwilling to see any action as irremediable, any situation as unchangeable. This is why a tragic vision is quite simply missing from his work, unlike his former friend Rousseau.
Behind this difference in viewpoint is a radical difference in their experience of time and of causality. Networks of Enlightenment , He managed to remain friends with Rousseau. His works on poetics and prosody are still of interest. He was also famous for his vanity. It is when he envisages a more statistical view of causality that this necessitarianism is countered — see his novel Jacques le fataliste. Since this had involved authoritarian action with the aim of breaking the opposition of the Parlements to the reform, the philosophes were in general opposed to it.
For more on the politics of this, see the French edition, p. Of pretty scabrous morality. Legal and standard procedure, it was of course a major source of income for Bertin, and for the throne. Three stories and three distinct moods to celebrate the French victory at Fontenoy in the War of Austrian Succession.
The piece is a rondeau in three parts. The opening is a triumphal march, in three sections separated by a kind of attack from the voice with high-pitched notes and a cappella , starting off a second part with more movement and resolving in a final section with strongly marked cadences. It appears as a march in triple time in the key of A minor. It is made up of two parts which contrast in their key, but are in a stable tempo. Her relation to Diderot and his friend Grimm is not well understood; she would repay further investigation see French edition, pp.
It is probably the latter —90 who is being referred to here see fig. Pietro Antonio Locatelli — , born in Bergamo, but established in Amsterdam see fig. Pietro Locatelli, Sonata op. Aria Vivace To listen to this piece online scan the QR code or follow this link: This movement follows the andante and allegro movements, and constitutes a set of four variations on the same air, made up of two musical phrases.
The basso continuo remains the same throughout the air, and the solo violin offers four different versions of it, with ever increasing embellishments, first by the arrival of more rapid rhythms, then by the expanding of the range, and lastly through the intervention of a second voice which doubles the main melody at the interval of a third.
This movement constitutes the final of the sonata and seems to foreshadow the classical rondeau which will take up the idea of variations on a theme. Domenico Alberti, Sonata for the fortepiano op. Andante — Allegro To listen to this piece online scan the QR code or follow this link: So the second movement is written right through for two voices only, and the bass line on its own represents the combination of two or three voices, making up a single line, a feature that is highly idiomatic in music for a keyboard instrument.
Like the writing, the form of this sonata is characteristic of the pre-classical period in which Alberti was working. The first movement is made up of an exposition leading from the main key A major to the dominant E major ; there is then a development that leads to a restatement bringing back the main key. This movement has the main characteristics of a sonata. In his early years, Mozart had studied the scores of Alberti. He then extended these principles of composition and made them the driving force of the developments in his music, which was built on a larger scale. Galuppi travelled widely, working in England, Russia, and for a while in Vienna; see for instance http: Diderot, moreover, took a great deal of trouble over her musical education.
After he became famous, very young, his real mother is said to have made overtures, which he refused: He was an industrial chemist.
Diderot published his book for him posthumously: He starred in a restaging of the play, Le Mercure galant , by Edme Boursault — in source: Cambridge University Press, for an interesting account of her career. The Levee —33 , by William Hogarth. Ernest Baron de Bagge —91 — Diderot is spelling by ear — was a music lover originally from Latvia. Le Baron de Bagge et son temps — , Art dans le monde. Innocent m, pape v. Roma, II, , Nach der Pariser Handschrift und den Monseer Fragmenten neu herausgegeben.
Lineamenti per una storia dei rapporti ideologici- umani fra i due mondi. Islamic Studies, III, , The Need for Restatement. Italia sacra, 5 [cf. Deutsche Texte in Handschriften, 2. Univers, libre de Bruxelles, Trav. Jean saint d'Iviron Xe s. Comitato per la prepar. Jeu et joie d'amour. Dall'esilio babilonese ai giorni nostri. Vie sociale et religieuse.
Beacon Texts in the Judaic Tradition, 2. Univers, of Wisconsin Public, in Mediev. Graphics, Phonology and Morphology.
Rameau’s Nephew - Le Neveu de Rameau
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