Charles Burney and The Cunning-Man

It all starts in Naples before Charles Burney is even born. Opera is booming, and with it a host of auxiliary theatrical and musical practices. Comic theater is thriving; the composers of the day—Alessandro Scarlatti, Leonardo Leo, Leonardo Vinci, and a young fellow named Giovanni Pergolesi—produce full-length operas in Neapolitan dialect as well as droves of shorter comic works, intermezzi to be played between the acts of serious operas. It's as if the public cannot stand to be away too long from the mother wit, sarcasm, raunchiness, and latent social criticism of the comic mode that make it an uncomfortable business for official censors.

Outside of the officially supported theaters, troupes of traveling players adopt and adapt these shorter works and take them on tour throughout Europe. One such group, under the guidance of Eustachio Bambini, comes to Paris in 1752 with an intermezzo by Pergolesi called La serva padrona (The Maid Made Mistress), which visits once again the old commedia trope of the sassy servant who tricks her master—in this case, into marrying her, thereby legitimizing her socially. The music, like that for all Neapolitan intermezzi, is deftly minimal: only a soprano and a bass singer, a mute actor, a couple of violins, and some supporting instruments are necessary to sketch the story in lively tones and acts. The Italian players and their music are appreciated in Paris, where the official opera tends toward ponderously magnificent tragedy, but they have been there for six months before their reception unleashes a controversy. All of a sudden, there are fights in opera houses; friendships are made and broken over the issue of the relative effectiveness of Italian and French musical styles. Everyone who can read and write—which in Paris at this time is a large number of people—gets in on the act, it seems; the storm of over sixty pamphlets that results is known as the Querelle des Bouffons, and it turns out to be one of the defining events in European musical history.

Among the pamphleteers are most of the philosophes, and prominent among them is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is a composer as well (something he would not like to be so generally forgotten as it is nowadays). He steps outside the fusillade of rhetoric long enough to write Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer), which resembles Serva in being deftly minimal: an intermezzo-length piece for three singers and a very small orchestra, and a plot that draws from ancient archetype, this time pastoral—a shepherd and shepherdess of low social station. They are lovers but each vaguely longs for something better, and they are persuaded by a "sorcerer" (whose main magic appears to be common sense) to accept their lot, and in so doing find happiness, which they celebrate by dancing. Le Devin is significantly different from Serva in its musical style, which is a conscious attempt to fuse the best of the French and Italian idioms, and thus a direct contribution to the ongoing Querelle.

The little piece is a success. In fact, it is one of the roaring successes of the entire history of opera. It is mounted and remounted, adapted and readapted, hundreds of times between its 1753 premiere at the Opéra and its last performances there in 1829. News of such success tends to travel rapidly. Within a year of its premiere, Le Devin has been reworked as an opéra-comique, Les amours de Bastien et Bastienne, by Charles-Simon Favart, with a mixture of pirated popular and operatic airs as musical material. In 1770 a translation of Favart's libretto into German comes to the attention of the violinist and composer Leopold Mozart, who, ever mindful of keeping the career of his prodigy son Wolfgang up to the minute, arranges for the twelve-year-old to compose new music for it. Meanwhile in 1765 the English actor David Garrick, visiting Paris, has seen Le Devin and been much impressed; upon returning to London, he prevails upon his friend Charles Burney, then a composer for the theater and an aspiring man...