it, and force the singers to scream and howl in a manner
which no ear of any delicacy can tolerate. We come away from an opera
of Rameau's intoxicated with harmony and stupefied with the noise of
voice and instruments. His taste is always Gothic, and, whether his
subject is light or forcible, his style is equally heavy. He was not
destitute of ideas, but did not know what use to make of them. In his
recitatives the sound is continually in opposition to the sense, though
they occasionally contain happy declamatory passages.... If he had
formed himself in some of the schools of Italy, and thus acquired a
notion of musical style and hahits of musical thought, he never would
have said (as he did) that all poems were alike to him, and that he
could set the 'Gazette de France' to music."

From this it may be gathered that Rameau, though a scientific and
learned musician, lacked imagination, good taste, and dramatic
insight--qualities which in the modern lyric school of France have been
so preeminent. It may be admitted, however, that he inspired a taste for
sound musical science, and thus prepared the way for the great Gluck,
who to all and more of Rameau's musical knowledge united the grand
genius which makes him one of the giants of his art.

Though Rameau enjoyed supremacy over the serious opera, a great
excitement was created in Paris by the arrival of an Italian company,
who in 1752 obtained permission to perform Italian burlettas and
intermezzi at the opera-house. The partisans of the French school took
alarm, and the admirers of Lulli and Rameau forgot their bickerings to
join forces against the foreign intruders. The battle-field was strewed
with floods of ink, and the literati pelted each other with ferocious
lampoons.

Among the literature of this controversy, one pamphlet has an
imperishable place, Rousseau's famous "Lettre sur la Musique Francaise,"
in which the great sentimentalist espoused the cause of Italian music
with an eloquence and acrimony rarely surpassed. The inconsistency of
the author was as marked in this as in his private life. Not only did he
at a later period become a great advocate of Gluck against Piocini,
but, in spite of his argument that it was impossible to compose music to
French words, that the language was quite unfit for it, that the French
never had music and never would, he himself had composed a good deal
of music to French words and produced a French opera, "Le Devin du
Village."