The servants of the Young Pretender, and with them one of the retinue of the Princess de Talmont, whose antiquated charms had detained the Chevalier de St. Georges at Paris, were sent to the Bastille, upon which the princess wrote the following letter to M. de Maurepas:—
"The king, sir, has just covered himself with immortal glory by arresting Prince Edward. I have no doubt but that His Majesty will order a Te Deum to be sung, to thank God for so brilliant a victory. But as Placide, my lacquey, taken in this memorable expedition, can add nothing to His Majesty's laurels, I beg you to send him back to me."
"The only Englishman the regiment of French guards has taken throughout the war!" exclaimed the Princess de Conti, when she heard of the arrest.
There was a curious literary apparition at the Académie in 1750, on the occasion of the revival of Thétis et Pélée, when Fontenelle, the author of the libretto of that opera, entered a box, and sat down just where he had taken his place sixty years before, on the first night of its production. The public, delighted, no doubt, to see that men could live so long, and get so much enjoyment out of life, applauded with enthusiasm.
FRENCH COMIC OPERA.
In this necessarily incomplete history of the Opera (anything like a full narrative of its rise and progress, with particulars of the lives of all the great composers and singers, would fill ten large volumes and would probably not find a hundred readers) there are some forms of the lyric drama to which I can scarcely do more than allude. My great difficulty is to know what to omit, but I think that in addressing English readers I am justified in passing hastily over the Pulcinella Operas of Italy and the Opéra Comique of France. I shall say very little about the ballad operas of England, which are no longer played, which led to nothing, and which do not interest me personally. The lowest style of Italian comic opera, again, has not only exercised no influence, but has never attained even a moderate amount of success in this country. Not so the Opéra Comique of France, if Auber is to be taken as its representative. But the author of the Muette de Portici, Gustave III., and Fra Diavolo, is not only the greatest dramatic composer France has produced, but one of the greatest dramatic composers of the century. By his masterly concerted pieces and finales he has given an importance to the Opéra Comique which it did not possess before his time, and if he had never written works of that class at all he would still be one of the favourite composers of the English public, esteemed and studied by musicians, and admired by all classes. The French historians of the Opéra Comique show that, as regards the dramatic form, it has its origin in the vaudeville, many of the old opéras comiques being, in fact, little more than vaudevilles, with original airs in place of songs adapted to tunes already known. In a musical point of view, however, the French owe their lyrical comedy to the Italians. Monsigny, Philidor, Grétry, the founders of the style, were felicitous imitators of the Pergoleses, the Leos, the Vincis, and the Piccinnis. "In Le Déserteur, Le Roi et le Fermier, Le Maréchal Ferrant, Le Tableau Parlant, we are struck," says M. Scudo, the excellent musical critic of the Révue des Deux Mondes, "as Dr. Burney was, in 1770, to find more than one recollection of La Serva Padrona, La Cecchina, and other opera buffas by the first masters of the Neapolitan school. The influence of Cimarosa, Paisiello, Anfossi, may be remarked in the works of Dalayrac, Berton, Boieldieu, and Nicolo. Boieldieu afterwards imitated Rossini to some extent in La Dame Blanche, but the chief followers of this great Italian master in France have been Hérold and Auber." This brings us down to the present day, when we find Meyerbeer, the composer of great choral and orchestral schemes, the cultivator of musico-dramatic "effects" on a large scale, writing for the Opéra Comique; and in spite of the spoken dialogue in the Etoile du Nord and the Pardon de Ploermel, it is impossible not to place those important and broadly conceived lyrical dramas in the class of grand opera.
CHAPTER IX.
ROUSSEAU AS A CRITIC AND AS A COMPOSER OF MUSIC.
The Musical Dictionary.—Account of the French Opera from the Nouvelle Héloise.—Le devin du Village.—Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Granet of Lyons.
ROUSSEAU, a man of a decidedly musical organisation, who, during his residence in Italy, learnt, as he tells us in the Confessions, to love the music of Italy; who wrote so earnestly and so well in favour of that music, and against the psalmody of Lulli and Rameau, in his celebrated Lettre sur la Musique Française; and who had sufficient candour, or, rather let us say, a sufficiently sincere love of art to express the enthusiasm he felt for Gluck when all the other writers in France, who had ever praised Italian music, felt bound to depreciate him blindly, for the greater glory of Piccinni; this Rousseau, who cared more for music than for truth or honour, and who has now been proved to have stolen from two obscure, but not altogether unknown, composers the music which he represented to be his own, in Pygmalion, and the Devin du Village, has given in his Dictionnaire Musicale, in the before-mentioned Lettre sur la Musique Française, but above all in the Nouvelle Héloise, the best general account that can be obtained of the Opera in France during the middle of the 18th century. I will begin with Rousseau's article on the Opera (omitting only the end, which relates to the ballet), from the Dictionnaire Musicale:—
ROUSSEAU'S DEFINITION OF OPERA.