Notes
© Marian Hobson et al., CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.03
- Diderot’s spelling of Satyre with a ‘y’ brings out libidinous associations with the mythical ‘Satyr’. His Satire première has as its full title Satire I sur les caractères et les mots de caractère, de profession etc [Satire on Characters and on the Language Peculiar to Them and to Professions] and is subtitled A mon ami M. Naigeon, sur un passage de la première satire du second livre d’Horace [To my friend M. Naigeon on a passage from the first satire in the second book of Horace’s Satires]. The expansion of the main title is however in fact owed to Jacques-André Naigeon (1738–1810), Diderot’s acolyte and the dedicatee of this satire; nevertheless, it has relevance to the Satyre seconde as well as to Satire I in that Rameau’s Nephew is also interested in the various ways of grouping men (character, trades) and contains a large number of lists, as if partially to enumerate them.
- Tr. Niall Rudd, Horace, Satires and Epistles; Persius, Satires, 1973 (rev. 2005). London: Penguin Classics, p. 67. Vertumnus is the god of change and transfer, of weather and of money. Diderot’s epigraph for his Satire seconde is taken from the seventh satire by Horace in the second book, the same as for Satire I. Its subtitle since antiquity is ‘only the wise are free’, from a Stoic paradox, that only the philosopher/the wise man is free (see translations in the Loeb edition by H. Rushton Fairclough).
- The Palais Royal was built in the 1630s and was given to the crown by Cardinal Richelieu at his death. It became the residence of the Orléans family, after the title of Louis XIV’s younger brother. Its famous gardens were open to the public.
- Marc-Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy comte d’Argenson (1696–1764), head of the Parisian police (lieutenant général de police) 1720 and 1722, then Secretary of State for War 1742–57. The d’Argenson bench was on the d’Argenson walk, on the east side of the garden, opposite the Foy walk, which was presumably named after the café keeper of that name.
- François Antoine de Le Gall (1702–92), said to be the first professional chess player (i.e. playing for money). A game of his is described at http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=77039 (all links cited in this volume were active on 23 June 2014).
- An acquaintance of Diderot, François-André Danican Philidor (1726–95) is said to have been one of the greatest chess players ever, of truly international fame. A nephew of Rameau, almost certainly not ‘our’ Nephew, but a child of Rameau’s brother’s second marriage, placed the chess pieces for a game Philidor played blindfolded in London in 1793 (see The Sporting Magazine, II, no. 1, April 1793, p. 8). Philidor was also an important composer. He is buried in St. James, Piccadilly.
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. 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.
- Fabre suggests, after Isambert in his edition of 1883, that Foubert may have been a surgeon from the rue de la Monnaie. Mayot has not been traced.
- Diderot contrasts a monastic order famed for austerity (Trappist) with one possessing great wealth (Bernardin).
- The Champs-Elysées were a kind of park at this point in time.
- I.e. Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). See the French edition associated with this one, Satyre Seconde: Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. Marian Hobson, 2013. Droz: 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, 1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- Jean-Baptiste Lulli (1632–87), born in Florence, Lulli was the major composer of Louis XIV’s reign, in particular of operas and opera-ballets (see fig. 8).
- Diderot here is mocking the formulaic vocabulary employed in French opera seria.
- Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763), playwright, journalist and important novelist (see fig. 9).
- Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1701–77), novelist and journalist (see fig. 10).
- Claude de Thiard de Bissy (1721–1810), soldier, author, member of the Académie française at 29, on a rather slim output which included at least one work of doubtful orthodoxy. He would repay further investigation; see the French edition, p. 11.
- Stage name (1723–1803) (see figs. 11 and 12). A famous actress and a supporter of the philosophes. What is said of Mademoiselle Clairon here is close to the account given of her acting in Diderot’s dialogue, Paradoxe sur le comédien [Paradox on the Actor], which he probably worked on at about the same time as Rameau’s Nephew, c.1772–c.1773. See the French edition, pp. 228–32, for further details of her as a huge star in Paris.
- Diogenes of Sinope (c.412–c.323 BC), a Greek philosopher and one of the founding fathers of Cynic philosophy.
- Phryne, a famous prostitute in 4th century BC Greece. Diogenes and Phryne reappear in the dialogue just before the end — an indication of careful construction not always accepted by Diderot’s critics.
- Silenus, a fat and bald follower of Dionysus, the god of wine and sometimes wine-inspired frenzy.
- A reference to the acoustical basis given to harmony by Rameau, most clearly in his Génération harmonique, 1737.
- Le Duc de Choiseul was an enemy of the philosophes because the political and military enemy of the French, Frederick II of Prussia, called ‘the Great’, supported intellectuals who were in difficulties in France owing to their unorthodox thinking. 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 1774.
- A principle for Diderot throughout his life. See his final bitter denunciation (in private, on paper) of his ‘friend’ Baron von Grimm, for his criticism of the Abbé Raynal and his Histoire des deux Indes [A History of the Two Indies], 1770, a major attack on European colonization. Grimm thought Raynal’s work incautious and upsetting to the great (Lewinter, vol. XIII, p. 67; all references to works of Diderot are to this edition, Œuvres complètes, ed. Roger Lewinter, 15 vols. 1973. Paris: Club français du livre).
- Throughout the dialogue, Diderot amuses himself at Voltaire’s membership of the nobility by inserting his ‘particule’, incorrectly for cultivated usage. Voltaire (see fig. 16) used the ‘particule’ from time to time well before he acquired a firm right to do so, on being made gentilhomme ordinaire du Roi in 1746.
- Antoine-Claude Briasson (1700–75), one of the publishers of Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
- A draper dealing in luxury fabrics, according to Jean Fabre, and earlier Maurice Tourneux, in their editions.
- Diderot throughout his life struggled with a version of what could be called ‘the problem of evil’. 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. See M. Hobson, ‘“Nexus effectivus” and “nexus finalis”: Causality in Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité and the Essai sur l’origine des langues’, in M. Hobson, ed. and trans. Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman, Diderot and Rousseau: Networks of Enlightenment, 2011. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, pp. 165–99.
- Charles Pinot Duclos (1704–72), journalist and moralist (see fig. 17). He managed to remain friends with Rousseau.
- Nicolas Charles Trublet (1697–1770), essayist, journalist and object of Voltaire’s satirical attentions; he eventually became a member of the Académie française (see fig. 18).
- Pierre-Joseph Thoulier d’Olivet (1683–1768), head of the religious party at the Académie française and famously intolerant. His works on poetics and prosody are still of interest.
- Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725–85), painter especially known for introducing new, more ordinary subjects, see his painting L’Accordée de village [The Village Bride] (fig. 21). Diderot appreciated this style of painting, which one may think attempts to do in paint something like what Diderot tried to accomplish in his plays, Le Fils naturel [The Natural Son], 1757, and Le Père de famille [The Family Man], 1758. He was also famous for his vanity.
- Mérope, 1743, tragedy by Voltaire, an imitation of the Italian Scipione Maffei’s tragedy of the same name. Voltaire’s contemporaries experienced the play as extremely moving.
- ‘Good’ is thus only a comparative term, and only has meaning if there is also evil in the world.
- Diderot here puts forward what is sometimes his own view: that there is a strict net of causality enveloping the world, so that actual freedom (as opposed to the subjective experience of action as free) is an illusion. It is when he envisages a more statistical view of causality that this necessitarianism is countered — see his novel Jacques le fataliste.
- Mahomet, tragedy by Voltaire, first acted in Lille in 1741 and in Paris in 1742; according to the code of allusions in eighteenth-century French tragedy, attacks on Muslim intolerance were interpreted as attacks on Christian bigotry (see below n. 82). Voltaire wrote the Eloge de Maupeou [In Praise of Maupeou] in 1771, in support of the chancellor René-Augustin de Maupeou (see fig. 22) and his attempt to reform the state finances. 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. 25, n. 55.
- Les Indes galantes, 1735, an opéra-ballet by Rameau. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zegtH-acXE.
- From Le Temple de la gloire, an opera by Rameau, with libretto by Voltaire, written to celebrate the victory of the French army over the British, Dutch and Hanoverian armies at Fontenoy in 1745. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we6vxXQ9hwo.
- Charles Palissot de Montenoy (1730–1814), enemy of the philosophes, flatterer of Voltaire, journalist, playwright, satirist (see fig. 23). Of pretty scabrous morality. See the French edition, pp. 205–11, especially p. 207, for the treatment of his sister.
- Antoine Alexandre Henri Poinsinet (1735–69), known as ‘little Poinsinet’ (see fig. 24). He collaborated with Diderot on the libretto of the first version of Philidor’s opera, Ernelinde, 1767, the first French ‘reform’ opera.
- Elie-Cathérine Fréron (1718–76), journalist, enemy of the philosophes, most especially of Diderot and Voltaire (see fig. 25). His son, Stanislas Fréron (1754–1802), was one of the organisers of the bloody repression of the insurrections against the Revolution at Toulon in 1793, which involved large-scale summary executions (see fig. 26).
- Joseph de La Porte (1713–79), journalist, gossip, an acquaintance of Diderot. It was he who related to Diderot the story of the split between Hus and Bertin (see Diderot’s letter to Sophie Volland of 12 September 1761 and French edition, p. 218). For Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle’s portrait of La Porte see www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_92775/Louis-(Carrogis)-de-Carmontelle/The-Abbe-de-La-Porte-and-the-Marquis-de-Saint-Chamans,-c.1766.html
- Les trois siècles de la littérature française [Three Centuries of French Literature], 1772–74, by Sabatier de Castres, opponent of the philosophes, after having failed to gain their approval.
- The Rameau family was from Dijon, in Burgundy.
- The Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, now houses the Archives nationales; it had the largest stables in Paris, now the reading room (see fig. 27).
- Robbé de Beauveset (1712–92), a satiric and erotic poet, known to Diderot, who liked Robbé’s enthusiastic method of declaiming his verses, see Diderot, Essais sur la peinture [Essays on Painting], 1766 (Lewinter, vol. VI, p. 292).
- Mlle Adélaïde-Louise-Pauline Hus (1734?-1805), a mediocre actress of the Comédie française. She was the lover of the ‘hero’ of the text, Louis-Auguste Bertin de Blagny (1725–88). From 1742 Blagny occupied the office of Treasurer of the king’s private funds for ‘les parties casuelles’, that is, the sale of public offices when they became vacant (‘the casual parts’ of his title). Legal and standard procedure, it was of course a major source of income for Bertin, and for the throne. He was also co-author of the libretto of the opéra comique L’Île des fous (see n. 192).
- Monsieur Viellard, lover of Mlle Hus.
- The Fêtes de Polymnie is an opéra-ballet in three acts (or ‘entrées’) by Jean-Philippe Rameau. The air A la beauté tout cède sur la terre occurs at the end of the first entrée, entitled La Fable [Fable], to which respond L’Histoire [History — second entrée] and La Féérie [Fairyland — third entrée].
Three stories and three distinct moods to celebrate the French victory at Fontenoy in the War of Austrian Succession. In this air, the music is subordinate to the text, brilliant in order to evoke the triumph of beauty, stormy in order to evoke the ‘terrible God of thunder’. 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.
This air occurs in the third entrée of the opera, La Féérie. 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. The second part begins in the related key of C major, bringing a kind of luminosity to the term ‘victory’ before returning to A minor, with a close in cadence emphasized by a very lyrical leap of a major seventh, which projects the voice into a high register before returning to the tonic.
This air from the beginning of La Féérie is characterized by its vocal writing, which is very free and natural, over an accompaniment showing great stability, with many held notes; the melody is emphasized by the appoggiatura which unfolds into a short da capo aria, culminating on a high A sharp at the end of the middle section.
- A similar portrait of Rameau was drawn by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin.
- Mme de La Marck (1719–93, a natural death, not the guillotine), was a supporter of the opera (see David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 2012. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Her relation to Diderot and his friend Grimm is not well understood; she would repay further investigation (see French edition, pp. 179–80). Bergier: there were two brothers, Claude and Nicolas Sylvestre, the latter an enemy of the philosophes. It is probably the latter (1719–90) who is being referred to here (see fig. 31): he was author of such works as Le Déisme réfuté par lui-même [Deism Disproved from its Own Arguments], 1766, and La Certitude des preuves du Christianisme [The Certainty of the Proofs of Christianity], 1767, and attacked Diderot’s friend, d’Holbach, despite frequenting his salon.
- Polish-style dresses, which first came into fashion in the 1770s, had a close-fitting bodice and a large skirt which was gathered up at the back to reveal the petticoat below.
- As yet, this song is unlocated.
- A quotation from Virgil’s Georgics and a joke attributed to d’Alembert when at stool (he suffered from hæmorrhoids), see French edition, p. 40, n. 88.
- Samuel Bernard (1651–1739), an immensely rich financier who lent money to Louis XIV and Louis XV for their wars; he had been born a Protestant but converted when the toleration of Protestants was abolished in 1685.
- Choir boys from orphanages in two different areas of Paris — the red boys from the Marais in the third arrondissement (see http://www.evous.fr/Histoire-du-Marche-des-Enfants,1118276.html) and the blue boys from the rue Saint-Denis in the second arrondissement (see fig. 35 and http://www.paris-pittoresque.com/rues/190.htm).
- Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695–1764), born in Bergamo, but established in Amsterdam (see fig. 36). Said by Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians to be the founder of modern virtuoso violin playing. See Daniel Heartz, ‘Locatelli and the Pantomime of the Violinist in Le Neveu de Rameau’, Diderot Studies, XXVII, 1998, pp. 115–27.
This aria is taken from the fifth of the twelve sonatas for solo violin and chamber basso continuo dating from 1746, which make up opus VI by Pietro Antonio Locatelli. 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.
- Concert spirituel, a concert series set up in 1725 to provide music in Lent, when theatres and the Opéra were closed.
- The name of Alberti is associated with the transition between the baroque and the classical styles, and in particular with that invention of a bass line which would become typical for the classical style.
This, known as ‘Alberti bass’, is found everywhere in Mozart and his contemporaries. It departs from the baroque principle of the ‘continuous bass’, in that it is a line of broken arpeggios. This ‘Alberti bass’ makes up the greater part of the accompaniment in the second movement of this sonata, and allows one single voice to accompany the melodic line, thus making possible a great freedom of development. 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. The second movement of this sonata, more virtuoso in style, is likewise based on the same tension in the keys, but in a simpler binary form allowing a coming and going between the tonic and the dominant (section A), and then from the dominant to the tonic (section B).
- Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85), a Venetian composer, especially of comic opera; he collaborated with Carlo Goldoni (1707–93), a Venetian playwright who moved to Paris in 1761 to work at the Comédie italienne. Galuppi travelled widely, working in England, Russia, and for a while in Vienna; see for instance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxFR_r_Wb0I.
- See Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought, pp. 200–05. Rameau’s enharmonic modulatory progressions were so difficult that they were originally not singable by everyone in the cast of Hippolyte et Aricie at the Opéra (p. 205).
- Van Loo’s portrait of Diderot, painted in 1767, shows him as a well-dressed and apparently well-off gentleman.
- Angélique Diderot (1753–1824), sole surviving child of Diderot and his wife, Toinette Champion, and much loved.
- Luckily, the teenage Angélique did in fact dance at balls, see her letters conserved at the Institut et musée Voltaire, Geneva. She actually went to a ball held by one of the butts of this text’s satire, Bertin. Diderot, moreover, took a great deal of trouble over her musical education. This sort of discrepancy suggests we should be careful not to align ‘ME’ and Diderot.
- Jean Le Rond de D’Alembert (1717–83), major mathematician (among many other important contributions to mathematics, he formulated what is now known as ‘d’Alembert’s principle’), co-editor of the Encyclopédie, littérateur, hero of Diderot’s dialogue Le Rêve de d’Alembert [D’Alembert’s Dream], illegitimate son of the novelist and former nun Mme de Tencin, left on the steps of the church of Saint-Jean-le-Rond (hence his name), cared for by his father, who however died young, though his family contributed to his son’s upkeep; adopted by his wet-nurse, the wife of a window-maker. After he became famous, very young, his real mother is said to have made overtures, which he refused: he regarded Mme Rousseau, the woman who had adopted him, as his mother. See http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/D%27Alembert.html
- Marie-Jeanne Lemierre (1733–86), singer at the French Opéra (Académie royale de musique) and at the Concert spirituel. Through marriage to the singer Henri Larrivée, she is also referred to as Mme Larrivée.
- Sophie Arnould (1740–1802), actress, opera singer, and courtesan. Famous for her liaison with the comte de Lauraguais (‘the little count’).
- M. de Montami (1702–65), maître d’hôtel of the duc d’Orléans, who presumably lived in the Palais Royal, owned by the Orléans family. He was an industrial chemist. Diderot published his book for him posthumously: Traité des couleurs pour la peinture en émail et sur la porcelaine [Treatise on Colours for Enamel Painting and on Porcelain], 1765. Paris: G. Cavelier. A letter to Diderot’s lover, Sophie Volland, recounts a visit to Montami after having failed to find her at their rendez-vous in the allée d’Argenson (letter of 12 October 1759).
- Pierre-Louis Dubus Préville (1721–99) was allied with the anti-philosophe group at the Comédie française. He starred in a restaging of the play, Le Mercure galant, by Edme Boursault (1638–1701) in 1763 (source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogue).
- Mlle Dumesnil (1713–1803), actress at the Comédie française; see Virginia Scott, Women on the Stage in Early Modern France, 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for an interesting account of her career. The journal Mémoires secrets, a kind of eighteenth-century ‘celebrity mag’ suggests why she doesn’t know what she’s doing — she was an alcoholic (see French edition, p. 229).
- Jean-Baptiste Javillier came from a famous Parisian line of dancing masters; for instance he taught the comte de Cheverny, see Mémoires sur les règnes de Louis XV et Louis XVI et sur la Révolution par J.N. Dufort, comte de Cheverny, publiés avec une introduction et des notes par Robert de Grèvecœur, 1886.
- C. Ernest Baron de Bagge (1718–91) — Diderot is spelling by ear — was a music lover originally from Latvia. See Georges Cucuel, Un mélomane du XVIIIe siècle: Le Baron de Bagge et son temps (1718–1791), 1911. Paris: F. Alcan. Bagge was famous for the concerts given in his private house.
- French: idiotisme, which until relatively recently (1835) only referred to specific turns of phrase proper to a dialect or language, see Encyclopédie: ‘article IDIOTISME, [...] c’est une façon de parler éloignée des usages ordinaires, ou des lois générales du langage, adaptée au génie propre d’une langue particuliere. R. ἴδιος, peculiaris, propre, particulier’ [a way of talking removed from ordinary usage or the general laws of language, adapted to the genius proper to a particular language].
- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1667–1767 — he died one month short of his 100th birthday), popularizer of science, writer of light verse, secretary in perpetuity of the Académie des Sciences until 1737, a head of the modernes in the long-running quarrel between the partisans of classical literature and those who preferred the moderns.
- Marie-Madeleine Guimard (1743–1816), a famous ballerina and courtesan, even more famous for the luxury of her dwelling houses — one on the Chaussée d’Antin was designed by the great architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Diderot seems to have known her, see French edition, p. 57, n. 125, for his letter to Sophie Volland of 22 November 1768.
- According to Jean Fabre in his great edition (Le neveu de Rameau, 1950. Geneva: Droz, p. 177), Anne Marie Pagès, called la Deschamps (1730–75?), courtesan, dancer and a famous spendthrift; Fabre refers to Diderot’s letter of 26 October 1760: ‘la Deschamps, who is barely thirty years old and who boasts that she has already spent her way through two millions’ (Lewinter, vol. IV, p. 937). Lewinter points out that the sale of her furniture (9 April 1760) to pay her debts caused so much interest that there was nearly a riot.
- Philippe Charles Le Gendre de Villemorien (1717–89), son-in-law of the financier Bouret. It was Villemorien’s wife who in 1753 helped Diderot, by means of bribery, to keep an office connected with the distribution of tobacco in the family of his future son-in-law (see French edition, p. 203).
- Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–88), important naturalist, became superintendant of the Jardin Royal (still to be visited in Paris as the Jardin des plantes). His work as a naturalist was more important because of the collections he assembled for the king, and because of his publication of the Histoire naturelle, 1749–1804, a work of synthesis written with collaborators, than for his own discoveries. The exception to this is his first article, on mathematical probability. He was famous in his lifetime for his style, and was already criticized for being too ponderous. Ironically enough, he is today principally famous, among a non-specialist French public, for his ‘Discourse on Style’.
- Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), author of De l’esprit des lois [On the Spirit of the Laws], 1748. Diderot was the only man of letters to follow Montesquieu’s coffin at his funeral in 1755, according to Rousseau, who himself was ill at the time. Montesquieu and Voltaire, both distinguished elders, in that they belonged to the preceding generation, contributed to the Encyclopédie, mostly on the relatively neutral subject of aesthetics, and probably as a sign of support.
- An urge felt by Diderot on occasions: see his letter to Sophie Volland, 31 August 1760.
- Diderot is parodying the Old Testament here, Ecclesiastes, I, v.2.
- Mahomet, by Voltaire is a plea for toleration, under cover of an attack on fanaticism. In the play, the fanaticism is Mahomet’s; Voltaire made it clear elsewhere, however, that it is any fanaticism that is at stake, and at the time, this meant Christian fanaticism. France was after all a Christian country, and intolerance shown there was Catholic intolerance. Contemporary readers were quite used to reading ‘Christian’ where the text said ‘Muslim’, and had little doubt that it was the institution of Christianity that Voltaire was attacking.
- Jean Calas, a Protestant, was tortured to death by order of the Parlement of Toulouse in 1763, in order to extract a confession to the murder of his son. This confession was not forthcoming, and the case against Calas collapsed. Voltaire had begun by believing him guilty, and had inveighed against Protestant bigotry. However when he met Calas’s family, who had fled, he became convinced of his innocence. He conducted a Europe-wide campaign to clear Calas’s name, and succeeded. Calas was rehabilitated in 1765. Voltaire wrote an influential Traité de la tolérance on the basis of the case.
- Probably to become a merchant in Cartagena, in what is now Colombia.
- Jacques Rochette, chevalier de La Morlière (1719–85), a novelist who is still sometimes in print (Angola, histoire indienne, 1746); contemporary accounts are very like the description Diderot gives through the mouth of ‘HIM’ (for further information, see French edition, p. 67, n. 142).
- A famous pornographic novel, published in 1741. The author is not known with certainty, but it is often attributed to Jean-Charles Gervaise de La Touche (1715–82).
- I Modi, 1524, by Pietro Aretino, a pornographic classic written to accompany paintings by Julio Romano, engraved by Raimondi, then by Agostino Carracci.
- The two Catos, ‘the censor’ and ‘the younger’ were famed for their austere morals.
- The whole question of freedom here, of finding a kind of freedom to be abject, asserted against social circumstances which insist on abjection, is one of the elements which fascinated Hegel, see G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J.N. Findlay, 1977. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The paragraph numbers cited below refer to this translation.
- Father Noël, a Benedictine monk, in favour with Louis XV because of the optical lenses he fashioned. See French edition, p. 70, n. 50.
- French: Pagode. The Nephew refers here to a porcelain figure, known as a ‘pagoda’, which was popular in the eighteenth century (see fig. 54).
- Madame Bouvillon (see fig. 55), a personage from Scarron’s novel, the Roman comique (1651–57).
- One of the key ideas in Diderot’s materialism of the 1770s.
- François Thomas Marie Baculard d’Arnaud (1718–1805), an acquaintance of Diderot from the early 1740s, when they both inhabited Grub Street. See French edition, pp. 221–22.
- Stentor, a herald of the Greek army in the Trojan War. A classical reference in a low-market context — a typical satirical procedure.
- The Nephew discusses his performance as parasite as belonging to one of the fine arts, see Lucian, 2nd century AD satirist: ‘On Parasites’ and especially ‘On salaried posts in great houses, or the dependent scholar’. See The Works of Lucian of Samosata: Complete with Exceptions Specified in the Preface, trans. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, 1905. Oxford: Clarendon Press. It is from this that the ‘in Praise of flattery’ is sometimes said to come.
- Etienne Michel Bouret (1709–77), the son of a laquais, he was a tax farmer (see n. 257) from 1741, and for much of his life immensely rich, lending money to the king, famous in the popular press for his talent for flattery. Diderot owed him favours. See French edition pp. 202–04.
- French: Garde des Sceaux. The names of the holders of the office in this period were: Berryer (1761–62), secretary of state for the navy and lieutenant of police, Diderot knew him; Feydeau de Brou (1763–68); Maupeou (1768–74) who united the office of Keeper of the Seals with that of Chancellor, before being replaced by Miromesnil in both offices. With thanks to Dr Michael Sonnenscher, King’s College, Cambridge.
- In Lacour’s portrait, Maupeou is depicted wearing the costume of the Keeper of the Seals (see fig. 56).
- French: la gimblette, the name of a little ring-shaped biscuit. In one version of Fragonard’s painting, la gimblette obviously refers to the girl’s vagina as well as to the biscuit she is offering her dog (see fig. 57).
- A military decoration founded by Louis XIV in 1693, the first that could be awarded to non-nobles (see fig. 58).
- Turenne (1611–75), marshal of France, perhaps the most famous (and talented) French general before Napoleon (see fig. 59). He took part in the Fronde (a small-scale civil war between 1648 and 1653), first on the side of the insurrectionary nobles then on the side of the King.
- Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, general and marshal of France, like Turenne, fighting on both sides in the Fronde (see fig. 60). He is principally known for his system of constructing near-impregnable fortresses. Also for his attempt to relieve the poor, among whom he had lived as an orphaned child. He formulated a method of reforming the French tax system, Projet d’une dixième royale [Project for the Royal Tax of a Tenth], 1707.
- The Marquise de Tencin (1682–1749) (natural mother of d’Alembert, and a successful novelist), her brother the Cardinal and his secretary, the Abbé Trublet (for whom see above n. 28). A descent into bathos, from great generals to a secretary and cleric, who was an object of scornful fun.
- Mlle Anne-Marie Botot Dangeville (1714–96), a famous comic actress of the Comédie française (see fig. 62).
- An accurate account of their relative popularity, it seems — the Comédie française was always full if Clairon was acting that night, see French edition, p. 231.
- Persius, prologue to his Satires (Choliambes, tr. Rudd, in Horace, Saitres and Epistles; Persius, Satires). The line has been completed here.
- Palissot’s first tragedy, taken on at the Comédie française in 1751 through influence, and a failure. The name is mangled, no doubt deliberately: it should be Zarès.
- Antoine Bret (1718–1805), like Baculard, was an acquaintance from Diderot’s past, all three formerly the recipients of police attention.
- Monsauge and Villemorien, the sons-in-law of Bertin, both held highly lucrative offices, the first a Maître des postes, the second also a tax farmer (see n. 257). Monsauge’s name appears as a member of the surintendance des Postes, the group of notables at the top of the system of renting horses for travel and for the letter post. He was responsible for the east of France. The tax farm or ferme included others, among them his brother-in-law, Legendre de Villemorien, and Bouret.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), important philosopher, writer and composer; formerly, a close friend of Diderot’s — they quarrel definitively in 1757.
- A pastiche of a line from Molière, Les Femmes savantes [The Learned Ladies], Act III, sc. 2: ‘Nul n’aura de l’esprit, hors nous et nos amis’ [None shall have wit, save us and our friends].
- The satirical play by Palissot, Les Philosophes, may have been the first impetus for Diderot’s dialogue. Palissot is said to have been given permission in 1760 for it to be represented at the Comédie française as a reward for writing a pamphlet against France’s enemy, Frederick II of Prussia (see fig. 64). A fellow, and much better, playwright, Charles Collé (1709–83), thought that it had actually been ordered by the government. It was acted at the Comédie française in spite of Mlle Clairon’s opposition. In it, Rousseau, that defender of natural man, was shown coming on on all fours, munching a lettuce, and Diderot was presented as a confidence trickster. The actress playing the part meant to indicate Mme Geoffrin, a patron of the philosophes, actually dressed like her. It was extremely successful in its first run, but even then, the treatment of the philosophe Helvétius shocked, because everyone knew the latter had helped Palissot pay his doctor’s bills. Its plot is a reworking of Molière’s Les Femmes savantes.
- La Théologie en quenouille [Theology in Petticoats], a play by le père Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant (1690–1743), printed in 1731 but never acted, which attacked the Jansenists.
- Abbé Jean-Bernard Leblanc (1707–81), a protégé of Madame de Pompadour, who, with the engraver Cochin, accompanied her brother the Marquis de Marigny on the tour of Italy which was to prepare him for his duties as Director of the King’s Buildings. She couldn’t get Leblanc into the Académie française, but she did obtain for him the post of Historiographer of the King’s Buildings. See the story told later by ‘HIM’.
- Abbé Charles Batteux (1713–80). Diderot had already attacked Batteux, in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets [Letter on the Deaf and Dumb], 1751, for his Les beaux-arts réduits à un meme principe [The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle], 1746, which is indeed much inferior to his later Cours de belles lettres [Lessons on Literature], 1765. Batteux is somewhat mysterious: in his relation to Diderot, who seems to have known him, and in his choice of classical texts for translation and commentary.
- Alexis Piron (1688–1773), poet and playwright. His play La métromanie [Mad about Metre], 1738, was one of the best comedies of the century.
- The Convulsionaries, a group of Jansenists who opposed the papal bull Unigenitus, which clamped down on the sect; some of them went into trances in the churchyard of Saint-Médard, in a poor area of Paris. Diderot must have witnessed these, since he lived fairly close by, in the rue de la vieille Estrapade. The Jansenists also claimed miraculous cures. Neither Church nor different governments liked this mixture of poverty and inspired, unorthodox religion, which seemed too close to an insurrectional ideology.
- Usually, and plausibly, identified as the Abbé de Voisenon (1708–75). See French edition p. 86, n. 189.
- Corbi and Moette followed Monnet as directors of the theatres at the Fairs. The Fair theatres were among the principal sites of the development of native French comic opera, see Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau.
- L’Avant-Coureur (1760–73), a weekly journal; its first editor Meusnier de Querlon was also a writer of salacious novels.
- Les Petites Affiches, a journal consisting mostly of announcements about the theatre and spectacles.
- L’Année littéraire (1754–76), a journal begun by Elie Fréron, continuing Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps (1749–54), and continued by his son, Stanislas. Fréron the elder was imprisoned several times for publishing matter which the government didn’t wish put about.
- L’Observateur littéraire (1758–61), editor abbé Joseph de La Porte, an acquaintance of Diderot. La Porte defended Diderot’s play Le Fils naturel, 1757, the subject of much ridicule from the groups around Palissot.
- Le Censeur hebdomadaire (1759–62), started by d’Acquin and Abraham Chaumeix, it was originally anti-philosophe; it toned down its later numbers.
- Abbé de La Porte.
- Moreau illustrated a lavish dinner of the sort described here in his painting of the inaugural feast held on the 2 September 1771 at Louveciennes [the house of Madame Du Barry, reigning mistress of Louis XV] in the presence of the King.
- Claude-Joseph Dorat (1734–80), dramatist, poet of ‘elegant nothings’, producing magnificent editions of his own poems at his own expense on royal occasions; he seems to have plagiarized Diderot. See Manuel Couvreur, ‘Diderot et Philidor: le philosophe au chevet d’Ernelinde’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, XI, 1991, p. 85.
- ‘I am always sitting like a mighty cock between two balls’.
- French: Messer Gaster, a reference to a character in Rabelais’s Quart Livre [Fourth Book], 1552.
- Allusion to Homer’s Iliad, Book 1.
- The emblem of Melancholy is sometimes portrayed in a similar way.
- French: pacte, one can wonder whether Diderot isn’t referring surreptitiously to Rousseau’s Contrat social, where the word appears first as the title of Chapter VI.
- Brun is not identified with certainty. He is possibly the poetaster nicknamed ‘Le Brun-Pindare’, who certainly was acquainted with Palissot, see his Lettre de M. Le Brun à l’auteur de la Dunciade [Letter from M. Le Brun to the Author of the ‘Dunciade’] [i.e. Palissot], which was published in La Dunciade, poème en dix chants [The Dunciade, A Poem in Ten Cantos], 2 vols. 1771. London.
- Abbé Rey is not identified with certainty. He is possibly the author of Considérations philosophiques sur le christianisme, 1785.
- Michel-Antoine David, one of the editors in the group who published the Encyclopédie. He was a guarantor at the marriage of Diderot’s daughter in 1772.
- See above n. 113.
- Palissot had indeed persuaded the naïve Poinsinet that the King of Prussia would nominate him as governor of his children, if he converted to Protestantism. Poinsinet did so in a ceremony invented and performed by Fréron and Palissot. He seems to have been the butt of a deliberate campaign of practical jokes, both cruel and mocking. He wrote libretti for comic operas, the genre which is one of the main thematic threads of Rameau’s Nephew.
- In his play L’Homme dangereux [The Dangerous Man], 1770; he added the word to the title in 1778: Le satirique ou l’homme dangereux [The Satirist, or the Dangerous Man].
- The comtesse de la Marck, see n. 49.
- The French is espèce, species. It is the word that caught the attention of Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, no doubt because Goethe had left it in French in his translation into German. Rightly, because one of the unthematized but powerful threads in Rameau’s Nephew seems to be the question of groups, social or natural. Again and again lists in the dialogue seem to create groups, of characteristics, of trades, even of actions.
- Rameau’s Nephew has turned his patrons into a kind of latinized animal specimen by joining up their names (see fig. 71).
- The Nephew has appointed himself and his like to be the punishment in this world of Bertin and his like; the Nephew, like Doctor Bordeu in the third part of Le Rêve de d’Alembert, and like a fragment from a manuscript (cited by the Diderot scholar Pierre Hermand, †1916), proposes a kind of naturalistic moral order: if not the law, then nature will punish wrong-doing or excess. The Nephew gives the likes of ‘ME’ the task of punishing those who have taken advantage of and thus punished the stupidity of the likes of Bertinhus. For ‘ME’ and his like will paint this chain of predator and predated as they are.
- ‘HIM’, like Diderot at various other points in his writings, breaks apart the assimilation between the good and the beautiful. Some philosophers in the eighteenth century, and in many ways the general public, were inclined to treat them as equivalent.
- See Morris Wachs, ‘The identity of the “Renégat d’Avignon” in the Neveu de Rameau’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 90, 1972, pp. 1747–56. Avignon was in fact a place of relative safety for Jews in eighteenth-century France; the events of this story seem rather to have occurred in Lisbon.
- Diderot makes a similar claim in Le Rêve de d’Alembert, see Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock, 1966. London: Penguin, pp. 212–13.
- Here, as in his writing on the art of the actor, Diderot is interested in the relation between acting and exaggerating. See Paradoxe sur le comédien, probably completed in c.1772–c.1773.
- ‘Sanbenito’, a sort of yellow-coloured tunic favoured by the Inquisition.
- French: Auto-da-fé; literally ‘act of faith’. The execution of heretics by burning was so called, apparently without irony. The last one at Lisbon seems to have taken place in 1739. See the ferocious denunciation by Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, book XXV, ch. 13, ‘Very humble remonstration to the inquisitors of Spain and Portugal’, which begins: ‘A Jewess aged eighteen, burned at Lisbon in the last auto-da-fé’, and ends with a condemnation and furious warning ‘if someone at future times ever dares say that the European peoples were civilized in the century we are living in, you will be cited to prove that they were barbarous’.
- Hegel, using Goethe’s translation into German of 1805 (see Preface), refers closely in his Phenomenology of Spirit to the dialogue from this point on. The extended nature of Hegel’s commentary has not been generally recognized — it goes well beyond the passages from Diderot’s dialogue that Hegel actually quotes.
- Egidio Duni (1708–75), was personally known to Diderot, indeed he introduced Goldoni to him, at Goldoni’s request. He had been recruited while in Parma to provide an opéra comique, on words by Anseaume, Le Peintre amoureux de son modèle [The Painter in Love with his Model]. Duni came to Paris for its première at the Saint-Laurent Fair in 1757, and as a result of its success stayed to work on other opéras comiques. Like many Italian composers of opéras comiques Duni had been trained at Naples.
- Daniel Heartz, who has done so much to give context and interpretation to Rameau’s Nephew, uses this phrase to underline the swing to a new kind of opera being developed in Paris (see D. Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720–1780, 2003. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company; ed. John Rice, From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment, 2004. New York: Pendragon Press (Opera series no. 1)).
- Throughout his life, Diderot was interested in the relation between the word and the sense we give it — see, for instance, Lettre sur les sourds et muets.
- There is a real problem of interpretation here. It was precisely Diderot, in Lettre sur les sourds et muets, who among European critics insisted most clearly that the arts cannot be aligned, though they can be compared. His work attracted the sustained attention of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) (see Laocoon, Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 1766) and also of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). But one cannot say Diderot’s work has received the study it deserves. This also poses the problem: What does this mean for Rameau’s Nephew? Had Diderot changed his mind? Does it mean that we are no more to follow Rameau’s Nephew in his ideas on music, than we are in morals?
- The Nephew is puzzling here: he seems to refer to Hogarth’s ‘serpentine line’ (Diderot knew The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste, 1753). And yet Diderot has altered the sense from the logo on the title page, and from Hogarth’s actual words. He makes of it a kind of mathematical figure, of a serpentine line approximating but never equal to a straight line.
- O terre, reçois mon trésor: it is possible that Diderot is citing Bertin here. He, together with Anseaume and Marcouville was the author of this comédie mêlée d’ariettes (an ‘ariette’ is a light air which breaks off the thread of the plot to give a character the possibility of expressing a feeling — see n. 193 below). What is more to the purpose is that the libretto is a ‘parodie’, that is, words written to an already existing score.
- Le Maréchal-ferrant, an opéra comique with libretto by Quétant, performed at the Saint-Laurent Fair in 1761. For excerpts from this work, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROQhqBo8_EA (Oui, je suis expert), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9wuqFTtbyM (Brillant dans mon emploi), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50B98nuThfc (Trio des ânes). The implication is that art and reality cannot be distinguished. This is something against which Diderot argues in a much more subtle way in his dialogue Le Paradoxe sur le comédien, which was probably written at more or less the same time, so that once more the question arises of how much faith to put in ‘HIS’ aesthetics.
- Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, Art du théâtre, où il est parlé des différents genres de spectacles et de la musique adaptée au théâtre [The Art of the Theatre, Where are Discussed Different Kinds of Spectacle, and the Music Which is Adapted for the Theatre], 2 vols. 1769. Paris: Cailleau, satirically and backhandedly praises the opéra comique for its treatment of the ordinary, especially ordinary trades and professions. The irony in the work has not always been recognized by modern critics. The Nephew appears to be taking quite another approach.
- ‘HIM’ could have read the same phrase in Diderot’s writings, given that the latter quotes the same phrase in the major piece of art criticism, The Salon of 1767, in Lewinter, vol. VII, p. 170, but also in a magnificent letter to Grimm about language and the sound of language: ‘The quantity of words is limited; that of accents is infinite. Thus it is that each person has his own individual language, and speaks as he feels; it is him, and is only him’, Lewinter, vol. VII, p. 799.
- According to Charles Burney, who knew Diderot, recitative is free of the time signature when the accompanist merely gives the chord for the song; when the recitative is accompanied, it must have a regular tempo (see the article ‘Récitatif’ in Michel Noiray, Vocabulaire de la musique de l’Epoque classique, 2005. Paris: Minerve).
- The rules of the Académie royale de musique provided that if a modern opera should fail, it should be replaced by one of Lulli’s.
- André Campra (1660–1744), especially known for Europe galante, 1679, an opéra-ballet.
- Philippe Néricault-Destouches (1680–1754, libretto) and Jean-Joseph Mouret (1682–1738, music), collaborated on Les Amours de Ragonde [The Loves of Ragonde], a comédie-ballet. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjhD0hURdOY
- The Nephew is imitating the foundational notes in Rameau’s chordal harmony.
- Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36), his music made a huge impression in Paris (see fig. 75). His Stabat Mater was first sung at the Concert spirituel in 1753, and remained in the repertory for a long time.
More than any other age, transcription played a hugely important role in the eighteenth century, allowing interpreters to make the repertoire their own. Johan Helmich Roman, a descendant of a family of musicians attached to the royal house of Sweden, came to court in 1711, at the age of 17, as a violinist and oboist. He divided his time between his Court duties — he became Deputy Master for the Swedish Royal Chapel in 1721 — and his several journeys in Europe, and strove to make the foreign repertoire known in his native country.
As well as the original works which he wrote down and translated tirelessly in order to make them accessible to his fellow countrymen, he also did a great deal of transcription. Technically very difficult, his reworking of Pergolesi’s famous Stabat Master for the solo violin is remarkable proof of his skill in transcription and also of his mastery of the violin.
- Pergolesi’s Serva padrona played a major part in the success enjoyed by the Italian troupe, or Buffoni, whose visit to Paris in 1752–53 sparked off a furious public quarrel, the Querelle des Bouffons, around the respective value of Italian and French music. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsUeywPFEgQ. The Buffoni were interpreted as threatening the hegemony of French opera seria. To compare serious and comic opera was to compare the incomparable; however, the Italian works used a music which was indeed very different from the French musical tradition associated with the Académie royale de musique. It emphasized melody and supple musical transitions, whereas French opera seria tended, in the case of Rameau at any rate, towards bold harmonic constructions. This quarrel indicates a real swing in public taste, for in fact this was not the first visit of such a troupe — one had visited in 1746, creating nothing like the storm that erupted in 1752. Rousseau added fuel to the flames by publishing his Lettre sur la musique française [Letter on French Music] whose last phrase reads: ‘the French have no music and are unable to have one; or, if they should ever have one, that’s just too bad for them’. Rousseau claimed that this social crisis around opera staved off a political crisis: see Rousseau, ‘Confessions’, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, pp. 384–85. For an assessment of this rather self-regarding claim, see Heartz, ed. Rice, From Garrick to Gluck, p. 223.
- For Tracollo see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VpiCjiSSU.
- Tancrède, 1702, tragédie en musique by André Campra (1660–1744). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qukSyIvBmUU (Overture).
- Issé, 1697, pastorale héroïque by André Cardinal-Destouches. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D6zoQ2poHM.
- Europe galante, 1697, opéra-ballet by Campra. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B58U3fu2oO4&list=PLC61043D2097E3FDE (entrée La Turquie).
- Les Indes [galantes], 1735, ballet héroïque by Rameau. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zegtH-acXE
- Castor [et Pollux], 1737, tragédie lyrique by Rameau. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSKe5WTVR0g&index=10&list=PL2TaO4x8VJQxc4srbA-XHIexb03lAcmWa
- Les Talents lyriques ou les fêtes de Hébé, 1739, opéra-ballet by Rameau. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w32WVmyzs8U
- Armide, 1686, tragédie en musique by Lulli. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWIaanFmhYY (Overture).
- Rebel and Francœur, known as the ‘petits violons’ [little violins], directed the Opéra. Heartz says that they were ‘lacklustre’ as directors (ed. Rice, From Garrick to Gluck); David Charlton (Opera in the Age of Rousseau) makes a case for their work being more innovative. The music by François Rebel is difficult to separate from that of his colleague, François Francœur (1698–1787) with whom he was constantly associated; we have recorded work by Rebel père (Jean-Féry Rebel, 1666–1747), whose music has been more influential, inasmuch as musicians still remember and sometimes record one or two other pieces, especially ‘Les Éléments’ and the ‘Caractères de la danse’, but would perhaps not do the same for François (though he did issue two sets of sonatas).
The first of these pieces for the violin by Rebel is a French suite. In a very classical manner it is made up of a prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, gig in the form of a rondeau, chaconne and a bourrée, also in the form of a rondeau. The suite is written for violin and basso and following the principle of the collection, explores a tonal universe, that of the neighbouring keys of G and D major. The function of the prelude is to introduce this tonal universe, stressing it from the very first bars by the chords of G and D major. The first phrase is then picked up in the key of D major before returning to the principal key after a short development of the principal melodic and rhythmic figures from the prelude. The allemande is a dance in two with moderate tempo, but one that permits great virtuosity in the playing of the violin over a simple basso continuo; composed of two sections with repeats, it is well balanced between the keys of G and D major.
- Duni’s opera, staged in 1757 at the Saint-Laurent Fair, was a huge success. For a recreation of the pantomime see http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10l840_acte-pantomime-tire-du-peintre-amoureux-de-son-modele-ballet-pantomime-de-m-ferrere-1782_creation.
- The Opéra was at the end of a cul-de-sac at the north end of the Palais Royal.
- See Collé, Journal et mémoires, ed. H. Bonhomme, nouvelle édition, 3 vols. 1868. Paris: Firmin Didot, vol. II, p. 33, for July 1755. Collé complains that a comic opera by André Cardinal Destouches and de La Motte has no success when revived because ‘Rameau’s music, Italian music have changed people’s ears’. This was one of the spurs to Hegel’s reflection on cultural change in this part of Rameau’s Nephew — for Diderot clearly discusses the way in which an artistic past is carried over into a different artistic present, and Hegel by his very choice of quotations shows he recognizes the relation of this understanding of cultural change to music.
- As discussed in n. 166 above, the Querelle des Bouffons, 1752, was followed almost immediately by Rousseau’s attack on French music for its lack of musicality, owing to its relation to a language, French, naturally unmusical when spoken. Diderot here is more interested in the relation between a nation’s music and the sound of its language than in the quality of the sound involved.
- Other commentators on music make a similar point, see M. Hobson, The Object of Art, 1982, 2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Part V. But Diderot’s awareness of cycles of historical change here is somewhat different, in that they are put forward as successive not as repetitive. They develop out of a process of opposition. One can see why Hegel was interested — his quotations, with one exception, all come from this section of the dialogue.
- A satire on the limited number and type of words, which return again and again in the libretti of Rameau’s operas. Diderot had already criticized the stereotyped nature of libretti of French opera in Entretiens sur ‘le Fils naturel’, [Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’], 1757.
- The phrase seems to have been a common refrain in a variety of popular poems. It probably derives ultimately from a popular song or songs.
Les Amours de Ragonde is an opera by Jean-Joseph Mouret. This work, which dates from 1714, was rediscovered by Rousseau and Rameau at the beginning of the 1740s. It is a comic opera, written in the manner of a pastiche of the great operas of Lulli, and parodying the music and the manner of speech of peasants. This scene is a concentration of the spirit of the opera: the bourrée, a peasant dance par excellence, is defined both by its catchy rhythm and by its somewhat heavy bass — this last is the village lads’ dance, as they come on stage. This dance is composed of two parts, each divided into two phrases, in the manner of a popular song. Each phrase is played a first time by the oboe, and is then taken up by the violins, creating an effect typical of popular music, where one theme is stated first by an instrument or by a voice before being picked up by the ensemble. The writing of this piece is characteristic of the first years of the eighteenth century, notably in its use of a long sequence at the beginning of the second bourrée, derived from more sophisticated music and sticking out from the rest of the piece, which otherwise stays in a decidedly peasant style.
In fact this extract, from the same opera by Mouret, comes just before the bourrée. In this air, Mathurine calls on the young men to come and ‘frolic and laugh’. ‘Come running, young men, join in our songs. Come and frolic, come and laugh; let pleasure be your guide and your leader, follow no other lessons, the simple goods we enjoy must suffice for our desires’. The words indicate the tone of the air, simple and playful. The structure of the air is twofold. After a brief introduction emphasizing the key of E major, the first part of the air, which is played twice over, is completed by a second, slower part, starting in the key of A major but coming back to the main key. In the cycle of fifths, the passage from E major to A major provokes the sense of descent, which itself in turn emphasizes the more restrained character of these bars, and permits a more striking return to the original key.
- Platée, a ballet bouffon with music by Rameau, produced as part of the Dauphin’s wedding festivities at court in 1745. The opera tells the story of the belief nourished by the queen of the frogs, Platée, that Jupiter the king of the gods is in love with her. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbHsmr2YoBI (production by the Opéra National de Paris, in two parts). The story is thought to refer to the arrival and marriage at court of the Spanish Infanta, who was found to be ugly. If so, one hopes she didn’t understand the undercurrent of public mockery in the entertainment created for her wedding to the Dauphin. The Dauphine died soon after her marriage, in childbirth; however, she eventually had the last laugh — the Dauphin became devoted to her and when he died twenty years later, although remarried and with children by his second wife, he asked to be buried beside her.
- This is the substance of Rousseau’s attack on French music: the language is simply unmusical, and has affected even instrumental music.
- An attack on the plots and the form of French opera seria.
- However, elsewhere the Nephew, like Diderot in other works, understands the beauty of evil, and they have broken the alignment, common in the eighteenth century, of ethics and aesthetics. Which suggests that ‘the true’, ‘the good’ and ‘the beautiful’ are already stripped of ethical meaning in this passage, and that the Nephew is supplying them as three near-synonyms, to bring in an undercurrent of deliberately off-key religious language (see Jean Fabre’s reaction to it, who asks ‘if this “trinity” so dear to Diderot is anything other than scholastic verbiage refreshed by a parody in doubtful taste’, ed. Fabre, Le Neveu de Rameau, p. 222, n. 268). This analogy of cultural and religious change gains purchase a few lines later as a metaphor for how musical styles succeed each other.
- Hegel quotes this passage (§332) describing cultural change which is both long-prepared and sudden in its effect, like a snake casting its skin.
- This passage, not quoted by Hegel, seems to point to the structure the German philosopher gives to the development of human culture as a process of opposition and incorporation.
- Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700–82), referred to by Diderot as ‘le grand’, farmer, agronomist, author of Art du charbonnier, 1760. He is cited in the Encyclopédie. Later (c.1771, i.e. around the time Rameau’s Nephew was put together) he was involved in a mild dispute with Diderot’s friend, Galiani and his brother, about plagiarism (see French edition, p. 118).
- L’Île des fous, an opéra mêlé d’ariettes by Duni; ironically enough, Bertin was involved with Anseaume and Marcouville in creating the libretto. See French edition, p. 111, n. 233 for further details, and for a relation with Goldoni which deserves investigation. See excerpts at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LYVuIPgOkU.
Duni’s Le Peintre amoureux de son modèle, a comic opera in two acts from 1757, parodies an Italian opera. The painter Alberti and his student Zerbin are both in love with a young girl, Laurette, who loves Zerbin but repels the overtures of Alberti. The arietta Dans le badinage, l’Amour se plait occurs at the beginning of Act II, when Laurette has learned that she is loved by both men, and thus that she may choose between them. ‘In playfulness, Love enjoys himself like the child he is. If he ever wins over me, it will be with gaiety. I want to find all the enjoyment of liberty in my enslavement’.
An arietta is a light air which breaks off the thread of the plot to give a character the possibility of expressing a feeling. Its very lightness entails great simplicity in form: here, we have a structure: A A’, the second part being identical to the first and written around exactly the same text but in a more virtuoso fashion, with more ornamentation. Unlike an aria, there is no further element which might create a contrast with these two parts.
- La Plaideuse, ou le procès, an opéra comique mêle d’ariettes, libretto by Favart, music by Duni, first performed 19 May 1762.
- More airs from the Île des fous. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p HVtS8hVRc0
- Airs from Pergolesi’s La Serva padrona. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= xfbhdeSSbPo
- Hegel picks these sentences out for quotation. But he is using the Goethe translation, which is not of the same manuscript, the autograph manuscript that we now use. The manuscript used by Goethe has disappeared. I should like here very tentatively to fly the following kite: that the manuscript Goethe used might just have been supplied not from the group deposited by his daughter in St. Petersburg at his death, as a gift to Catherine the Great, as is usually thought, but by the Princess Golitsyn, who certainly tampered with the trunk in which Diderot’s manuscripts had been left for safe keeping with her and her husband in The Hague, while he was in Russia (winter 1773–74). Goethe was certainly in contact with her at various times.
- French: Les Petites Maisons, an asylum founded in 1557 and located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. The French equivalent of the Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) in London.
- See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hHwuOISu8 for a beautiful and disturbing excerpt.
- A translation of Récitatif obligé, itself a translation of ‘recitativo obbligato’. ‘The actor is agitated and transported by a passion which does not allow him to say everything; he interrupts himself, stops, holds back, during which time the orchestra speaks for him’, Rousseau, ‘Récitatif obligé’, in his Dictionnaire de musique. Michel Noiray defines it thus: ‘it is marked off from a formal air essentially because it allows the music to penetrate deeply into the thought of a character’ and makes the telling point that Mozart’s Don Giovanni never sings such recitative. (‘Récitatif’, in his Vocabulaire de la musique).
- The last lines of this paragraph are quoted by Hegel while bringing out the kind of mad mixing which, he says, is ‘the universal deception of itself and others: and the shamelessness which gives utterance to this deception is just for that reason the greatest truth’ (§522).
- This is close to a passage in Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues [Essay on the Origin of Languages], where he argues that music can ‘paint’ everything, even silence: Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, vol. V, p. 421. There is no definite date of composition for the Essai, although it is certainly connected with the work Rousseau did around his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité [Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality], 1755.
- Roland, 1685, tragédie en musique, music by Lulli, libretto by Quinault, 1685; Act IV, sc. 2.
- Castor et Pollux, 1737, by Rameau, Act II, sc. 2. Diderot has misquoted — the libretto reads ‘day’. For the aria see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSKe5WTVR0g
- Le Temple de la gloire, 1745, by Rameau.
- Diderot seems here to suggest that grandiose Church music has been left behind in the past, like the setting to music of religious texts. New ones are needed. Diderot had shown an interest in reforming libretti since at least his Entretiens sur ‘Le Fils naturel’, 1757. Rousseau, in his Lettre sur la musique française, spoke against large scale Church music and almost immediately mentioned meeting Terradellas in Venice, who criticized large-scale polyphonic music (Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, vol. V, p. 308). Diderot, likewise, has the Nephew mention Terradellas only a few lines later.
- Johann Adolf Hasse, nicknamed ‘The Saxon’ (1699–1783), born near Hamburg, but worked in Dresden, Vienna, and Venice. His movement between the north and south of the Alps meant that he was a conduit between Italian and German styles. His very numerous operas are largely neglected now, unjustly for many. Several are online in excerpted form, see for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIz_guxlPdU.
Cleofide is an opera seria in three acts, first performed at Dresden in 1731. The libretto, taken from Metastasio, centres on the conflicts between the rulers of the Indies after the conquest by Alexander the Great in 325 BC. A da capo aria is typical of eighteenth-century opera or oratorio. It has three sections, the second contrasting in key or mood with the first; the third repeats the first, on which the performer is expected to improvise embellishments as he or she plays. This da capo aria in D minor has a middle section in F major which is striking for its concerto-like features, made up of a play of questions and answers between voice and orchestra, and by its use of ritornello. In spite of the basso continuo, the discourse is occasionally suddenly interrupted by long silences, to which the characteristic figure of the ritornello responds, namely the ascending three related notes of an anacrusis which regularly punctuate the air. Anacrusis (or upbeat) is the term for an unstressed note or group of notes at the beginning of a phrase of music preparing for the first downbeat of the first bar.
- Domenech Terradellas (1713–51). A Catalan, he studied music in Naples. He worked in London for a while. His opera Sesostri was a considerable success and has been recorded.
- Tommaseo Traetta (1727–79), trained in Naples like many of the Italian composers mentioned in Rameau’s Nephew. His music may be being rediscovered — a recording of his magnificent, Antigona, 1772, is available, and excerpts can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0-dxtyykc. Traetta seems to have been in St. Petersburg at the time of Diderot’s visit, since his name, misspelled, is an addition in the margin of the autograph manuscript (see ed. Fabre, Le neveu de Rameau, p. 86). One can wonder if they met, or if Diderot heard Traetta’s music there.
Polyphemus is an opera seria composed for the famous castrato singer Farinelli around the figure of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, son of Poseidon and the nymph Toosa. Alto Giove is one of the composer’s most famous arias. This air to the glory of Jupiter takes the form of a da capo aria with an air in E minor, a middle section in G major, and reprise of the air without transition, the possible embellishments improvised by the soloist. This aria’s accompaniment rests on a writing in repeated notes, the four parts opening out towards the deeper tones, in a depressive movement, before starting out on an ascending movement which leads to a progression of cadences. This motif of accompanying takes on the role of a ritornello and punctuates the first and last parts of the air. The middle section, in a major key, is in contrast through its character and its tempo, andantino.
This air, preceded by its recitative, follows the same structure as the preceding. This recitative, by using many modulations, introduces in a very free and natural manner the key of C flat major. This is stressed right from the first bars of the aria by the recurrent motif which is constructed round the two notes which are the poles of this key: E flat and C flat. This allegro is based on a contrast and alternation between these first solemn bars and a rapid and virtuoso movement. Besides the speed of execution of the semiquavers, even demisemiquavers, on the strings, the virtuosity of this air is revealed in the constant utilisation of melisma (several notes, sometimes a good many, on one single syllable), big leaps (sevenths, sometimes even twelfths), with a range of two octaves.
- Metastasio (pseudonym of Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi) (1698–1782), the most important librettist of the eighteenth century, was born in Rome, but spent the most successful part of his career in Vienna. His dramas were set several times over by different composers, including Mozart. He was also considered an excellent poet by his contemporaries.
- Once more, Diderot’s concern with libretti as vectors for the fusing of language and music is clear.
- Since the work of Daniel Heartz, this ‘new style’ of music has been identified with the music of the opéra comique, Italian and also French.
- Rameau claimed to be able to set anything, even the Gazette d’Hollande, to music, to Collé’s disgust — Collé himself was an excellent comic writer and librettist: Collé, Journal, vol. II, pp. 211–12.
- It has often been remarked that these cut-about phrases resemble bits and pieces of Racine’s Phèdre. But, and there is a but, Racine’s verse is never so disjointed.
- Diderot has the Nephew wonder here about the relation between the phonic qualities of a language and the sound-scape of the associated music, the point of Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique française. The Nephew dates the development of the opéra comique from the arrival of Egidio Duni in 1757; but this seems to have been at the invitation of Anseaume the librettist. That Parma, from where Duni was poached, had a French princess, is probably relevant to understanding his move to Paris. French was the diplomatic language at the time; until 1768, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80) was tutor to Louis XV’s grandchilden in Parma. Duni collaborated with Anseaume, Favart, and later with Diderot’s friend, Sedaine. As already mentioned, n. 151, he knew Diderot personally.
- Armide, music by Lulli, libretto by Quinault, Act I, sc. 2.
- Les Indes galantes, Act II, sc. 3. Both this quotation and the preceding are invitations to marriage. Omitting the connection is one of Diderot the writer’s most telling characteristics.
- The Nephew here connects the split between the beautiful and the good to physiology which, for him, is the foundation of character. In this passage, the relation between the Nephew’s point of view and a particularly hard, perhaps slightly cynical materialism becomes apparent — a thread that runs through the core of Diderot’s sensibility, from the notes to the Essai sur le mérite et la vertu [Essay on Merit and Virtue], 1745, to Rameau’s Nephew.
- French: espèce, this is the term picked out by Hegel in §488–89, and left in French in his extended commentary in the section ‘Culture and its Realm of Actuality’. He has, it seems to me, almost seized on this word because it offers two advantages, one possibly social, one intellectual. First, Diderot’s work has been honoured by a translation by Germany’s foremost poet and intellectual, Goethe. Second, espèce as a term of logic, species, fits in very well with one of the structures of argument he had inscribed in his Phenomenology of Spirit. This is that of the ‘besondere’, the particular or special, which in traditional logic mediated between the general, applicable to everything, and the individual, applicable to only one thing.
- Possibly between Diderot himself and a music master, Bemetzrieder, whom he employed to give music lessons to his talented daughter. Diderot is thought to have had a hand, or more than a hand, in the work by Bemetzrieder, Leçons de clavecin et principes d’harmonie [Lessons for the Clavichord and Principles of Harmony], 1771, which is usually treated as a work by Diderot.
- Samuel von Puffendorf (1583–1645) and Hugo Grotius (1632–94), theorists of Natural Law (see figs. 83 and 84). Diderot is thought to have studied for the law, briefly; he certainly studied mathematics, on his own.
- Another of Diderot’s dialogues, entitled Lui et Moi [Him and Me], is very brief, but seems to end with a mention of parricide. The attribution to Diderot has been contested; however, the autograph manuscript is in the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Geneva.
- One can wonder whether this remark is not a satirical side-swipe at Rousseau and his Emile ou de l’éducation, 1762.
- ‘HIM’ is answering something that ‘ME’ has not expressed in the actual word-flow of the conversation. Does this point to a careless stitching together of different pre-existing elements of text (see Preface)? Or on the contrary is it deliberate, pointing to the fact that the subjectivities behind the speakers ‘HIM’ and ‘ME’ are unstable sometimes, and most strikingly at this point? There are related problems in the text of Diderot’s novel, La Religieuse [The Nun].
- ‘HIM’ seems to move here from acoustics to optics (see Diderot’s Leçons de clavecin, 1771). This passage needs more investigation: by the time he put together Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot had a long track record of discussing the relation between sound and sight, most notably in Lettre sur les sourds et muets.
- Diderot later wrote a play, Est-il bon, est-il méchant? [Is He Good, Is He Bad?], based on actual events in his own life. These involve doing good turns, actual ones, by means which approximate to lies. The comedy (which develops La pièce et le prologue, distributed in the manuscript journal La Correspondance littéraire in 1777) was written over the remaining years of Diderot’s life.
- Diderot, in the Encyclopédie article ‘Hobbisme’, quotes Hobbes, De Cive, 1642, preface, while referring to Rousseau’s political thought. Another sign that in this part of the dialogue, anyway, there is a kind of reflexion on and writing over of Rousseau’s thought.
- Freud noticed this passage, for obvious reasons (see Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI, 1931), quoting it in his expert evidence in the trial of Dr Philippe Halsmann, the ‘Austrian Dreyfus’ case. Halsmann was tried for the murder of his father. Freud used the universality of the complex in his criticism of the prosecutor’s case (which had cited Freud but was so evidently anti-Semitic that the verdict was quashed in 1930).
- Leonardo Leo (1694–1744), studied in Naples. He created an opera La ’mpeca scoperta (1723) in Neapolitan dialect. Unlike other composers of the Neapolitan school, he does not seem to have travelled. He wrote serious operas, including Demofoonte, 1735, but his comic operas were more successful. For an excerpt from his opera Le nozze di Ercole et Iole, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfGFtqgypuU.
- Leonardo Vinci (1690–1730), like Leo, he wrote comic operas in Neapolitan dialect (see fig. 86). In total he is thought to have written about forty operas.
Leonardo Vinci succeeded Alessandro Scarlatti at the Naples Royal Chapel. He was a typical representative of the new generation of Italian composers of opera seria, and had great influence on the generations that succeeded him. He was admired for the tender and sorrowful expression of his compositions. Besides a large number of lyric works, he also left some instrumental pieces, published in 1748 in an anthology entitled Twelve solos by Vinci and other Italian authors. This sonata exhibits all the simplicity of melody and the flexibility of rhythm which characterized his opera airs, that song which, so Marmontel said, presents the ear with something like a thought completely rendered in music, and thus reveals the deep mystery of melody.
This air, originally written for a castrato singer, offers several characteristics of the opera seria genre: its sombre tonality constrasts with the comic operas from which some of our earlier extracts were taken. This feature is accentuated by the slow tempo and the dotted rhythms; likewise, its form is that of a da capo aria, with an air composed out of a theme, a modulating development and a long cadence, succeeded by a part which is in contrast through its key and the use of chromaticism, and which precedes a reprise of the air, this last staying identical though it can be freely ornamented by the interpreter. As was usual in this genre of opera, the air was created specifically for the castrato singer who was to interpret the role at its first performance in 1725.
- It seems true that Rameau’s reputation suffered a much longer and more complete eclipse than other later composers. Yet the Correspondance littéraire of October 1778 says of a performance of Castor and Pollux: ‘people hardly clap; yet everyone rushes to go and the sixteenth performance is as crowded as the first’, ed. Maurice Tourneux, vol. XII, p. 173.
- See above n. 115.
- Madame de Pompadour (1721–64), the official mistress of Louis XV from 1745; she was intelligent, educated and for a long time very powerful. The nature of her connection to the philosophes is not clear — she is portrayed, for instance, in one portrait by Boucher, with a large volume of the Encyclopédie beside her; there are allusions in Diderot’s writings of the 1740s which suggest some kind of perhaps only imaginary acquaintance.
- L’Enfant d’Arlequin perdu et retrouvé, possibly identical with a play by Goldoni, performed at the Comédie italienne in 1761. Mentioned in the Dictionnaire dramatique contenant l’histoire des théâtres… by the Abbé de La Porte, vol. I, p. 431 (see https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedram01lapo).
- The statue of Memnon, so called by early Greek tourists to Egypt, one of a pair to the honour of the Pharoah Amenophis III. After an earthquake in 27 BC one of the statues began to emit strange sounds; the Emperor Septimius Severus most unromantically had the damage repaired in 199 AD. See http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/signs/memnon.html.
- Rinaldo da Capua (1705?-1780?), who is now obscure, despite receiving the approbation of Charles Burney. His La Zingara was performed during the Querelle des Bouffons by Bambini’s company (19 June 1753), and reworked with a libretto by Favart for the Italians and then the Saint-Laurent Fair (source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, catalogue). His work may have recycled others’ music, and certainly his was rekitted with different libretti.
- Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770), a famous virtuoso who is said to have established the modern style of bowing. He wrote sonatas, including the famous ‘Devil’s trill’. He mainly lived in Padua, but did work in Prague for a couple of years. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFI5mwbAqQ.
These six sonatas for three parts, which constitute Locatelli’s opus V, date from 1746. This extract from the second sonata makes up the first movement, in the key of E minor. It is preceded by an introduction marked largo, and characterized by slowly repeated chords, followed by heavy silences. The whole exposition of the sonata, where the flute and the violin parts supersede each other and then play together over a basso continuo, leads from the key of E minor to the related key of G major, in a movement completely typical of the original sonata form. Then comes a development that leads to a restatement of the theme in the key of E minor. What is particular to this sonata is its writing as a trio with two principal instruments (here a flute and a violin, the composer leaving the choice of which instruments to the interpreters) and a basso continuo — a group that allows a great variety in the combination of different voices, which sometimes respond to each other, sometimes double each other, for example at the interval of a third, and sometimes accompany each other.
- In Greek mythology, the Danaides, daughters of the King Danaeus were condemned to fill a leaking tub, as punishment for the murder of their husbands.
- It seems likely that Diderot heard this story from an acquaintance, Isaac de Pinto, whom he had met in Paris, and whom he saw again in Holland. Lewinter implies that the story is told about Pinto, of whom Diderot certainly relates that he had been fined two hundred ducats for ‘libertinage vague des hommes mariés’ [vague promiscuity of married men], Lewinter, vol. XI, p. 388. Pinto himself was an economist of considerable importance (his work has been more sympathetically studied recently). See Traité de la circulation et du crédit [Treatise on the Circulation of Money and on Credit], 1771. Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey. There is a manuscript in the University of London library. He may have influenced Diderot in his understanding of probability: ‘Lettre à M.D. sur le jeu des cartes’ [Letter to Mr D. on Playing Card Games].
- Lulli was the son of a Florentine miller.
- An allusion to Montaigne, Essays, Book II, chapter 17, ‘De la présomption’ [On Presumption].
- René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757), a scientist, important for his study of the measurement of temperature (the ‘Réaumur’ scale) and of insects: Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes, 6 vols., with 267 plates, 1734–42. Amsterdam: P. Mortier. It is this work that Diderot is referring to, and the reference drives home one of the inexplicit themes of Diderot’s text, that of classification. Réaumur and Diderot were enemies from the beginning of Diderot’s career.
- Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), in many ways the founder of modern European ballet. He was influenced by Diderot’s ideas on pantomime, and developed ballets around Diderot’s two published plays, insisting in his Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets [Letters on Dancing and on Ballets], 1760, that ballets needed content. But Diderot is at this point in the dialogue once more interested in classification, here of movement, the ‘positions’.
- Ferdinando Galiani (1728–87), a Neapolitan economist who between 1759 and 1769 was secretary to the Neapolitan embassy in Paris. His most important economic work for the period was his Dialogues sur le commerce des blés [Dialogues on the Commerce in Wheat].
- One of the most important characters in commedia dell’arte, Pantalone is a metaphorical representation of money (see fig. 93).
- In Greek mythology the satyrs were the companions of Pan and Dionysus, and were usually depicted with goat-like features (see fig. 94).
- Nicolas Bonnart’s late-seventeenth century drawing illustrates the type of robes that Diderot refers to here.
- Abbé Gauchat, Analyse et réfutation de divers écrits modernes contre la religion [Analysis and Refutation of Different Modern Writings against Religion], 19 vols. 1756–63. Paris: Claude Herissant. The Bishop of Orléans seems to have been a key dispenser of Church patronage (see ed. Henri Coulet, Diderot: le Neveu de Rameau, 1989. Vol. XII of Œuvres complètes, ed. Dieckmann, Proust, Varloot. Paris: Hermann).
- French: Contrôleur general, the office was, according to Marcel Marion, more or less equivalent to that of prime minister, given the condition of the state’s finances under the last three Bourbon kings (Dictionnaire des institutions de la France au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 1923. Paris: Auguste Picard). Bertin held this office from 1759–63 (i.e. through much of the Seven Years War). Bouret went bankrupt for the last time in 1777, the day before his death (a suicide was rumoured). For their careers and characters see the French edition.
- See Diderot: ‘I [Diderot] don’t like acorns or animal lairs or hollow oak trees [he is thinking of the picture of the life of early man that Rousseau has given]. I would like a carriage, a comfortable apartment, fine linen, a perfumed prostitute, and I would put up easily with all the rest of the curses of our civilized state’, to l’Abbé Le Monnier, on about 15 September 1755, in Rousseau: Correspondance complète, ed. R.A. Leigh, vol. III, letter 322.
- The figure of Diogenes the cynic bears a complex role among the philosophes, see the French edition, pp. 154–55. He also appears at the beginning of Diderot’s dialogue, suggesting a more careful construction of the dialogue than is often admitted.
- Pericles, 5th century BC, was a general and statesman. Lais and Phryne were Greek courtesans. Phryne, fabulously wealthy, made the wonderful offer to the Thebans of rebuilding their city walls, if they would inscribe on them: ‘destroyed by Alexander, restored by Phryne the courtesan’ (Encyclopædia Britannica).
- This well known illustration of an afternoon concert is believed to show the child prodigy that was Mozart being exhibited at a social gathering. HIM is proposing a sexually orientated showing off of his wife’s talents during a concert he will be giving at a party no doubt later in the day and less sedate. See note 72 for a famous holder of private concerts in his salon.
- In 1726, after the financial crisis of the ‘Law System’, named after the Scot John Law — who founded a national bank in France using paper money, which collapsed, ruining many — a more stable monetary system allowing the collection of taxes by a system of ‘farming’, was set up for the rest of the Ancien Régime.
Every six years the lease of the collection of taxes was passed, or rather sold, to a group of financiers, known as ‘Fermiers généraux’, or ‘La Ferme’. They were 40 in number, and they acquired their positions as tax collectors not only from the group itself, but also from the group financing the whole, and backing it with the huge sums of money needed to buy the position. The interest paid them for this was known as the ‘croupe’, that is, the ‘backside’; in Diderot’s text, it seems clear that there is some connection here, perhaps merely a pun. Louis XV was himself a ‘croupier’. See ‘Croupe’, in Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France, n. 234.
- Pierre Chartier, in his edition of the Neveu de Rameau, 2002. Paris: Livre de Poche, has explained this joke: the dog’s bowl upside-down has the shape of a clerical cap, la calotte.
- Antoine Dauvergne (1713–97), a composer of opera seria — though it isn’t clear which one might be referred to here; but also of Les Troqueurs [The Wife Swappers], often called the first French opéra comique, and performed with huge success at the Saint-Laurent Fair in July 1753. It is interesting that no mention of it is made in Diderot’s text. Rousseau disliked it because, one suspects, it successfully brought together Italian-type music and a French libretto by Jean Joseph Vadé (1720–57), an important deviser of libretti for opéras comiques and a writer of one act comedies, some in the genre poissard, that is using the dialect of the lowest classes in Paris). This contradicted his theory about the relation of a national language to a national music. Diderot, like Rousseau in his Lettre sur la musique française, ends with a reference to Dauvergne, but to his opera seria.
- ‘We put up with our forebears, each one of us’, with this Latin quotation from Virgil (Æneid, VI, 743), Diderot brings up the ‘anxiety of influence’ that seems to run lightly throughout the text. When he quotes it elsewhere, in his Salon of 1767, he adds ‘says the madman Rameau’, Lewinter, vol. VII, p. 205.
- Etienne de Canaye (1694–1782), celebrated for his learning and his impish sense of humour. Diderot in his Satire première (Lewinter, vol. X, pp. 273–86) recounts an evening at the Opéra in the company of Canaye, and Fougeret de Monbron (?-1761), a care-for-nothing and writer of cynical works (Le cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde [The Cosmopolitan or the Citizen of the World], 1750) and mildly licentious novels (Le canapé couleur de feu [The Flame-Coloured Sofa], 1741; Margot la ravaudeuse [Margot the Mender], 1750).