VI
The last half of the eighteenth century in France gave the world some of the loveliest songs of the age. The types continued for a time to be those mentioned above, but the gain in grace and fluency over the preceding century was enormous. Opéra comique was filled with romances and brunettes and bergerettes. Not a few songs, also, were composed independently. Among the latter class we should mention those of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), literary adventurer and musical dilettante, who entwined himself so strangely into the whole cultural life of France. Rousseau never had an adequate musical education. He had served as tutor in music in Switzerland and did not improve himself much with his desultory self-education after he came to Paris. But he was a true journalist, and no inadequacy of preparation could daunt him. He had that rare journalistic gift of knowing what people wanted ten years before they themselves knew it. His opéra comique, Le devin du village (1752), still occasionally played, was the lightest of theatrical entertainments, but continued in unabating popularity for sixty years. Its success played no small part in setting or maintaining the tone of opéra comique for the next half century. Its songs were chiefly the romances which were popular in Paris; they showed, perhaps, no great creative ability, but were extraordinary, like all Rousseau’s work, in catching a certain popular quality which escapes analysis. The composer’s activity as essayist and novelist, which places him as one of the greatest social forces of modern times, prevented his ever doing much work in music and the world is perhaps not much the loser. But in his musical activity he was at least important as a fashion-follower and a fashion-setter. In 1781, after his death, there were published the hundred romances and duets which he called Les Consolations des misères de ma vie, containing some of his most typical melodies. Among them is the famous romance on three notes—Que le jour—which does not, indeed, escape a sense of melodic poverty from its limited compass, but reveals a delicate grace which makes it worth remembering apart from its interest as an experiment.
Mozart’s Manuscript of the first page of his setting
of Goethe’s ‘Das Veilchen’
But far greater than Rousseau in actual musical value are, of course, the great French writers of opéra comique, Monsigny (1729-1817), Philidor (1726-95), Dalayrac (1753-1809), and Grétry (1741-1813). In technical learning these men, especially Grétry, were all deficient. But in a certain subtle melodic grace their romances and bergerettes have never been surpassed the world over. At first singing they may seem trivial or meaningless or dry. They always lack that rich strain of human genuineness which characterizes the German Lied. Without doubt they are artificial, not spontaneous in the more human meaning of the word. But if they are artificial it is in the best sense. They represent the most delicate conscious artistry, the nicest adjustment of the means to the end, the more expertly for being achieved with the simplest materials. The singer needs a quite special faculty to understand them. The joy of them is that of perfection in limited space, of work well done. The singer must have a complete command over detail, must be conscious of the relations of each note he is singing. The beauty of these songs is that of perfect good taste. They do not obtrude themselves, they do not assume a higher value than they possess, they do not seek undue praise. They are restrained as a well-mannered hostess is restrained in talking of politics or religion to her guests. It is not that she is insincere, only that she feels it is not the time for unrestrained sincerity. Like a true gentleman of the world, these songs hate the too obvious. Like a true aristocrat, they refrain from laying bare their souls; they value themselves too highly to exhibit their own virtues. They seek to be elegant and suave and courteous. In short, they seek to be ‘good form.’
But a very different ideal from that of good form was about to burst upon French national life. Rousseau’s highly colored writings had carried with them the germs of the great Revolution. A few of the best observers were able to see that conditions could not stay as they were, that human emotions, long inarticulate, must soon spring to violent expression. The lovely romance, Plaisir d’amour (1785), mingling with such an innocent military song as Malbrouk’s s’en va-t-en guerre, could show no hint of the completely changed state of the public emotions five years later. In 1789 the storm broke. Europe realized that the people had entered the institution of government. And soon, too, in their crude way, the people had begun to enter the institution of French musical art. A certain fiddler-beggar, playing daily for sous on the Pont Neuf, one Ladré by name, picked up a lively dance tune, heaven knows where, which he played daily on his fiddle and presently published under the name, Carillon national. And some one, even more obscure to history, set words to it, beginning with the immortal phrase which Benjamin Franklin had repeated continually in France in reference to the American Revolution—Ça ira! (‘It is coming!’). These words shall not here be called poetry. Yet they had certain of the supreme virtues of poetry, namely, simplicity of language and utter sincerity of statement. ‘Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!’ sang the mob as it led its captives to their death. ‘Les aristocrats à la lanterne’ (‘Hang the aristocrats!’). Such sentiments were not exalted. Their statement was far from delicate. Similar sentiments toward the peasants had many a time been expressed with infinite grace and good taste in the court of Louis XVI. But when the mob had achieved the ability to think ‘Hang the aristocrats’ and to make a song of it and to sing that song aloud on the streets a new force had entered into the life of men. And, what is more to our purpose, a new force had entered into the art of song. Never before had emotion been expressed so directly or so violently. The tune is something like our ‘Dixie,’ though without its joyousness. It is a fiddler’s tune, distinctly unsingable, especially since it was ignorantly arranged so as to lie in places far above the compass of the untrained voice. But its spirit was that of flowing blood and clattering iron. To this day Ça ira produces an effect of emotional savageness which can hardly be duplicated in all song literature.
And Paris presently gained, from some unknown source, another tune, almost equally effective and with words equally to the point. It was the Carmagnole, with its grim refrain, Vive le son du canon (‘Long live the sound of the cannon’). This was sung daily in what is now the beautiful Place de la Concorde, where, during the ‘Reign of Terror,’ scores of aristocrats and political suspects were executed daily. The mob liked to see the blood flow and, joining hands in a great circle, would bellow this very singable tune and its sentiments to the just Heavens. But this song was overshadowed in popularity by another—the famous Marseillaise, which has been called, perhaps justly, the greatest of all songs. Rouget de Lisle, a military engineer and dilettante musician, wrote the poem and the melody one night in Strassburg, early in 1792, for the troops to sing at the review the next day. He called it Chant de Guerre. The song made its way to Marseilles and was taken up by the body of Republican volunteers on their forced march to Paris in July, 1792. It instantly spread in the capital, being known as le Chant des Marseillais. The Marseillians, with this song on their lips, were among the foremost in the storming of the Tuileries a few days later, when the king finally became the helpless prisoner of the people. Thenceforth it accompanied the Republican armies on their victorious marches through Europe. It is part of the irony of such things that de Lisle, who wrote the great Republican song of the Revolution, was born a royalist and remained one till his death. Patriotic songs, during the revolutionary period, appeared in great abundance, but the great majority of them, as always at such times, were vapid and artistically insignificant. From among them, however, have remained two or three of exceptional quality. One is Gossec’s ‘Hymn to the Supreme Being,’ designed as a religious song which an anti-ecclesiastical government could use without inconsistency, and Méhul’s noble Chant du départ, written to be sung at the departure of the armies, and still so used. This song, which was Napoleon’s favorite (he forbade the Marseillaise as too violent), represented the pure Republican element of the Revolution, as opposed to the more violent communistic elements. In its elevation of style, in its perfect fitness of words and music, it remains one of the greatest patriotic hymns of the world.