Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s Tragédie en Musique: Between Tradition and Enlightenment by Cynthia Verba (review)

Admirers of Jean-Philippe Rameau are fortunate that the late-twentieth-century revival of his music, a revival that owes much to William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, has given rise also to equally flourishing scholarly literatures on both Rameau the composer and Rameau the theorist. With respect to the former, one thinks immediately of such studies as Charles Dill’s Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Downing Thomas’s Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); the latter, of Thomas Christensen’s Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Joel Lester’s Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Yet only rarely, in Brian Hyer’s article “‘Sighing branches’: Prosopopoeia in Rameau’s Pigmalion,” for instance, are these two literatures brought together (Music Analysis 13, no. 1 [March 1994]: 7–50). The stated aim of Cynthia Verba’s new book—“to weave seamlessly back and forth between Rameau the theorist and Rameau the composer” (p. ix)—is thus a most welcome departure from musicological business as usual.

Verba starts, in her book’s introductory chapter, with an extended series of binary oppositions: reason vs. feeling, theory vs. practice, tradition vs. innovation, masculine vs. feminine, music vs. text. Indeed, this brief chapter covers so much conceptual ground in so few words that a reader might be forgiven for wondering just where the argument is headed. Chapters 2 and 3, though, narrow the scope to Verba’s more immediate concerns: chapter 2 is devoted to “Rameau’s concept of musical expression” (p. 25); chapter 3 then cashes out this conceptual work with three sample analyses that in turn provide the templates for the more developed readings offered in chapters 5–7.

Verba begins, in her second chapter, from the conviction that “music has an expressive capacity in its own right” (p. 25), and she proceeds, drawing on both Rameau’s theoretical writings and his music (his “theory” and his “practice”), to explain what, in her view, is the substance of this expressive capacity. The key theoretical text in this regard is Rameau’s Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe (Paris: Chez Prault fils, 1754), and in particular, that text’s discussion of the affective implications of flat-ward and sharp-ward harmonic motions respectively, a discussion that comes immediately before the lengthy rebuttals to Rousseau’s attacks on Armide that preoccupy Rameau for the remainder of that book. The passage is worth quoting in its entirety, not least since one irritation of Verba’s study is its reticence about providing chapter and verse for the positions it imputes to Rameau. (One can sympathize, of course with the desire to keep citations to a minimum, especially in a discipline as enamored of the footnote as academic musicology; still, while historians of theory will be able to supply the missing references, the book clearly aims at a wider readership):

All these discoveries lead to observations that are all the more necessary because what follows depends upon them absolutely.

If it were a question of comparisons here, would we not attribute to joy that crowd of descendants that the submultiples [roughly: the first five overtones] offer, whose existence is indicated by the resonance [of a sounding body]? It is precisely there, also, that the major third, the major mode, the sharp, the melody whose force redoubles in rising, and the dominant—the fifth above—have their source. And by the opposite reasoning, would we not attribute to regrets, to tears, etc. these multiples [i.e. the symmetrical inversion, below the fundamental, of the overtones] whose mournful silence is awoken only by their division [into aliquot parts sounding] at the unison...