Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) (15 page)

ME:
There’s good sense—or something like it—in everything you’ve been saying.

HIM:
Sense! That’s fortunate. Devil take me if I’m trying to make sense. I say whatever comes into my mind. I’m like the Opéra musicians when my uncle first appeared: if I’m doing it right, so much the better. After all, an apprentice coalman will always speak more pertinently of his trade than would an entire academy or all the Duhamels in the world.

Whereupon he began pacing up and down, quietly humming some of the melodies from
L’Isle des Fous, Le Peintre amoureux de son modèle, Le Maréchal ferrant
, and
La Plaideuse.
*
From time to time, raising his hands, he’d gaze up at the sky and exclaim: ‘My God, isn’t that beautiful, isn’t that beautiful! How could anyone possessing a pair of ears even ask such a question?’ Next he started working himself into a passion. He was singing softly, and as his excitement increased his voice grew louder; then he began gesturing, grimacing, and twisting about. I said to myself: ‘Right, now he’s about to lose his head, and there’ll be another scene.’ And indeed, he suddenly shouted: ‘I
am a worthless wretch
…
my lord. My lord, permit me to depart
…
oh earth, receive my gold; guard my treasure well
…
my soul, my soul, my life! Oh earth! … my dear friend is here
…
he’s here! … aspettare e non venire
…
a
Zerbina penserete
…
sempre in contrasti con te si sta
…’
*
Now he was muddling and mixing some thirty airs of every style—Italian, French, tragic, comic; sometimes, singing a bass part, he’d descend into the depths of hell; sometimes, straining at the notes as he imitated a falsetto, he’d tear at the upper registers, all the while imitating, with gait, carriage, and gestures, the different characters singing; by turns furious, mollified, imperious, derisive. Now he’s a young girl in tears, mimicking all her simpering ways; now he’s a priest, a king, a tyrant, threatening, commanding, raging; now he’s a slave, obeying. He grows calmer, he grieves, he laments, he laughs; never does he misjudge the tone, pace, and meaning of the aria’s words and character. All the chess players had abandoned their games and gathered round him. Outside, the windows of the café were thronged with passers-by attracted by the noise. The roars of laughter were loud enough to open cracks in the ceiling. He noticed nothing of this; he just went on with his performance, transported by a passion, an enthusiasm so akin to madness that it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever recover from it, or whether he shouldn’t be flung into a carriage and taken straight to the madhouse, still singing a fragment from Jommelli’s
Lamentations
. He was performing the most beautiful passages of each work with incredible fidelity, sincerity, and warmth: the exquisite, fully orchestrated recitative where the prophet depicts the devastation of Jerusalem he accompanied with a torrent of tears, which drew further tears from the eyes of all the onlookers. Everything was there—the delicacy of the melody, the intensity of expression, and the pain. He stressed the moments where the composer had shown himself to be a particularly fine master of his art; if he abandoned the vocal part, it was to take up the instruments, which he’d suddenly drop to return to the voice; connecting one with the other in such a fashion as to preserve the links and the unity of the whole; taking possession of our souls and keeping them suspended in the most extraordinary state of being I have ever known … Was I filled with admiration? Yes, I was. Was I moved to pity? Yes, I was; but a tinge of ridicule was blended with these feelings, and denatured them.

You’d have burst out laughing, seeing how he imitated the various instruments. The horns and bassoons he did with bulging, ballooning cheeks and a hoarse, mournful tone; for the oboes he adopted a piercing, nasal sound; he speeded up his voice to an unbelievable pace for the stringed instruments, seeking the truest sounds; the piccolos he whistled; the transverse flutes he warbled; shouting, singing, flinging himself about like a madman, being, just he alone, at once dancer and ballerina, tenor and soprano, the entire orchestra, the entire theatre, dividing himself into twenty different roles, running and then stopping, with the air of one possessed, eyes flashing, lips foaming. The heat was overpowering; the sweat, mingled with the powder from his hair, was streaming along the creases of his brow and down his cheeks, and flowing in channels over the upper part of his coat. Was there anything I didn’t see him do? He wept, he laughed, he sighed; he gazed tenderly, or placidly, or furiously; he was a woman swooning with grief; a wretch overcome with despair; a temple rising up from the ground; birds falling silent at sunset; rivers murmuring their way through cool solitudes or cascading down from high mountains; a storm; a tempest, the moans of the dying mingling with the whistling of the wind and the crashing of the thunder; night, with its darkness; shadows and silence—for sound can portray silence itself. He had completely lost touch with reality. Utterly spent, like someone emerging from a deep sleep or a long trance, he stood there motionless, stupefied, astounded. He gazed all around, as would a man who had mistaken his way and was trying to discover where he was. As he waited for his strength and his wits to return, he kept automatically wiping his face. Like a man who, on waking, finds his bed surrounded by a large number of people, but has not the faintest recollection of what he’s been doing, he immediately exclaimed: ‘Well, gentlemen, what’s the matter? Why are you laughing, why are you so surprised, what is it?’ Then he added: ‘Now that’s what’s meant by the words music and musician. However, gentlemen, we shouldn’t despise some of Lully’s pieces. I challenge anyone to compose anything better than the music of ‘Ah, j’attendrai’,
*
without changing the words.
We shouldn’t despise certain passages in Campra, my uncle’s violin melodies, his gavottes; his processions of soldiers, clergy, high priests … “
Pale torches, night more ghastly than the shadowy dark … Gods of Tartarus, and of oblivion
…”‘
*
Here his voice swelled, sustaining the notes; neighbours came to their windows and we stuck our fingers in our ears. He added: ‘Here’s where good lungs are required, a mighty voice, plenty of air. But soon, it’ll be goodbye to the feast of the Assumption; Lent and the Kings are over. As yet they don’t know what should be put to music, nor, consequently, what suits the musician. We still await the birth of lyric poetry. But they’ll get there, by dint of hearing Pergolesi, Hasse, Terradeglias, Traetta, and the others, by dint of reading Metastasio, they surely must get there.’

ME:
What are you saying, that Quinault, La Motte, Fontenelle didn’t know how to write?

HIM:
Not for the new style of music. There aren’t six consecutive lines in all their charming poems that can be set to music. They give us ingenious maxims and light, tender, delicate madrigals; but if you want to discover how lacking they are in material suited to our art, which is the most violent of all arts, not even excepting that of Demosthenes, have someone recite these pieces to you; how cold, vapid, monotonous they’ll seem! That’s because there’s nothing in them to supply a model for song. I’d sooner have to set to music La Rochefoucauld’s
Maximes
or Pascal’s
Pensées.
*
The animal cry of passion should be what determines the melodic line. Expressions of passion should come fast one upon another; they should be brief and their meaning fragmented, suspenseful, so that the musician can use the whole as well as each part, omit a word or repeat it, add a word that’s missing, turn the phrase upside-down and inside-out like a polyp, without destroying its meaning; this makes French lyrical poetry much more difficult to set to music than poetry in languages with inversion, which provide all these advantages naturally …
Plunge your dagger in my breast, cruel barbarian. I am ready to receive the fatal blow. Strike
,
dare to strike
…
ah, I faint, I die
…
a secret fire inflames my senses
…
cruel love, what do you ask of me
…
Leave me with the sweet peace I used to know
…
give me back my reason
…
*
The passions must be intense and the sensibility of the musician and lyric poet extreme. Almost always, the aria is the culminating point of the scene: we need exclamations, interjections, pauses, interruptions, affirmations, denials; we call out, invoke, shout, moan, weep, laugh openly. No wit, no epigrams, none of those pretty conceits. They’re too remote from simple nature. And don’t imagine that the theatrical style of acting and declamation can serve us as a model. What an idea! We need it to be more energetic, less mannered, truer. Simple speech, the common words of passion, we need these all the more where the language is more monotone, less accented. The animal cry—the cry of man in a passion—will give it the accent it lacks.

While he was talking to me in this way the crowd surrounding us had dissipated, either because it didn’t understand, or because it took no interest in his remarks, for as a rule children, like men, and men, like children, would sooner be amused than instructed. The chess players had resumed their games, and we were left alone in our corner. Seated on a bench, his head leaning against the wall, his eyes half closed and his arms dangling, he said to me: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me, when I came I felt fresh as a daisy, and now I’m worn out, exhausted, as if I’d walked for miles and miles. It hit me quite suddenly.’

ME:
Would you like something to drink?

HIM:
Yes, very much. I feel hoarse, and weak; my chest hurts a bit. This happens to me almost every day, just like that, I don’t know why.

ME:
What would you like?

HIM:
Whatever you think. I’m not particular. Poverty’s taught me to like anything.

They serve us beer and lemonade. He pours some into a big glass which he empties two or three times in quick succession. Then, like a man restored to life, he gives a tremendous cough, shifts about in his seat, and goes on: ‘But in your opinion, Master Philosopher, isn’t it extremely odd that a foreigner, an Italian, a Duni, should come and teach us how to accentuate our music, and adapt our songs to all the tempi, metres, intervals, declamatory passages, without harming prosody? After all, it wasn’t all that difficult a thing to do. Anyone who’d heard a down-and-out begging in the street, a man in the grip of rage, a jealous, furious woman, a lover in despair, a flatterer—yes, a flatterer softening his tone, drawling out his syllables, his voice like honey; in a word, a passion, no matter what kind, provided that by its intensity it deserved to serve as a model for the musician, must have noticed two things: first, that syllables, whether long or short, have no fixed duration, and are not even in any necessary proportional relationship to each other; second, that passion can mould prosody more or less at will; it accommodates the very longest intervals, and the man who cries out in deep despair: “
Ah! Wretched that I am
!” raises his voice on the first exclamatory syllable to the highest, sharpest pitch and sinks down on the others to the gravest and lowest, ranging over an octave or even more and giving each sound the quantity appropriate to the melody, without offending the ear or letting the syllables, be they long or short, preserve the length or brevity of unemotional speech. We’ve come a long way since the days when we would cite, as miracles of musical expression, the parenthetical remark in
Armide
:“Rinaldo’s conqueror (if any such exists)”, or “Let us not hesitate, but obey!” from
Les Indes galantes
.
*
Now, those miracles make me shrug my shoulders with pity. The rate at which the art is moving ahead, no one can predict where it’ll get to. While we’re waiting, let’s have a drink.’

He had two, then three, without noticing what he was doing. He would surely have drowned himself, the same way he’d exhausted himself, without realizing it if I hadn’t pushed away
the bottle, which he kept reaching for absent-mindedly. Then I said to him:

ME:
How can it be that with such delicacy of feeling, such great sensitivity towards the beauties of musical art, you’re so blind to the beauties of morality, so insensible to the charms of virtue?

HIM:
Apparently some people have a sense that’s missing in me, a fibre I wasn’t granted, or a loose string that it’s useless to pluck because it doesn’t vibrate; or perhaps it’s because I’ve always lived with good musicians and bad people, which is why my ear has become very acute and my heart very deaf. And then there’s the question of heredity. My father’s blood and my uncle’s is the same blood. My blood’s the same as my father’s. The paternal molecule was hard and obtuse, and that accursed original molecule’s taken over all the others.

ME:
Do you love your child?

HIM:
Do I love him, the little savage? I’m crazy about him.

ME:
And won’t you do your utmost to halt the effect on him of the accursed paternal molecule?

HIM:
Trying to do that would be, I believe, absolutely useless. If he’s destined to be a good man, I won’t do him any harm. But if the molecule drove him to be a ne’er-do-well like his father, any attempts of mine to make him into an honest man would harm him greatly; his education would be perpetually at odds with the influence of the molecule, he’d be pulled by two contrary forces and would travel the path of life all askew, like countless people I see who are equally inept in good and in evil; they’re what we call ‘types’, of all epithets the most to be feared, because it indicates mediocrity, and the ultimate in contempt. A great scoundrel is a great scoundrel, he’s not a ‘type’. It would take forever for the paternal molecule to regain control, and draw him into the state of utter degradation that I’ve attained; he’d have wasted his best years. So for now I’m leaving him alone. I’m letting him develop. I observe him. He’s already greedy, glib, rascally, lazy, lying. I’m very much afraid his pedigree’s beginning to show.