totally forgotten or lost, there was at least one masterpiece, the Servant Mistress of Pergolesi, which had already been given in Paris in 1746, and had been only partially successful. This craze brought into fashion the comparison between French and Italian music, or rather brought it back; since for half a century the fancy of amateurs had been more than once employed on this subject; one may mention especially its treatment in the Letters of the president de Brosses. Jean Jacques followed the stream, and he, too, made a comparison of the French and the Italians. But he compared them as one compares evil with good, death with life, or hell with heaven.
"I think I have made it clear that there is neither time nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French singing is nothing but a continuous barking, unbearable to any ear that is not trained to it; that its harmony is dull, without expression, and smacking only of pedantic padding; that French airs are no airs and French recitative no recitative. From which I conclude that the French have no music, and can have none; or that if they ever have any it will be all the worse for them."
It was for the sake of this conclusion—this explosion, that the whole piece, the celebrated Letters on French Music had been written. And the object that Rousseau there caricatured under the name of French music was precisely the music of Rameau's operas.
Only a simpleton would think it worth while to go into the details of the arguments on which Rousseau was proud to base his maniacal doctrine—the kind of deduction, for example, extraordinary in its subtlety and a priori method, by which he proves that the music
