Moliére, Descartes, and the Practice of Comedy in the Intermezzo

The comic intermezzo currently holds a prominent place in the historiography of eighteenth-century music. The comic music contained in these short entertainments provides evidence of a burgeoning musical style that came to dominate the opera house and the chamber in the Age of Enlightenment. But by examining these works retrospectively, musicologists have produced a distorted portrait of the genre itself, downplaying the artistic merit of the works in favour of promoting their supposed naive comic naturalism. This article examines the working methods of intermezzo librettists and composers through the example of a remarkable scene contained in Leonardo Vinci’s second intermezzo, Albino e Plautilla da pedante, produced in Naplesin 1723. This scene recreates an exchange about philosophy from Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. While scholars have known of six intermezzo adaptations of Molière for some time, the discovery of this scene provides new insights into the nature of the comic intermezzo. It suggests that the genre was highly literate by drawing on the works of Molière, and highly erudite by drawing on contemporary debates about Cartesianism and the role of women in the New Philosophy.