Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): Le Devin du Village

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): Le Devin du Village
Interlude in 1 act.
Performed on September 19, 1780 at the Petit Théâtre de la Reine, Marie-Antoinette singing the role of Colette

Caroline Mutel, soprano
Cyrille Dubois, tenor
Frédéric Caton, baritone

Les Nouveaux Caractères
Sébastien d'Hérin, conductor
Compagnie Les Corps Éloquents

Hubert Hazebroucq: Choreography
Caroline Mutel: Staging

Jean-Paul Bouron Costumes
Jean-Paul Gousset: Historical set designer

Le Devin du Village is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712-1778) first success in the field of opera. “Musical interlude in one act”, the work was composed in three weeks in the spring of 1752, on a libretto by Rousseau himself, then premiered at the court of Fontainebleau on October 18, 1752, in the presence of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. Rousseau applied the theories of Italian music: he composed a simple melody to highlight the words, where the harmony follows the melody. Inspired by the Italian opera buffa, he moved away from the ancient and mythological themes that usually provided the plot of French operas to stage the loves of a shepherd and a shepherdess, Colin and Colette, protected by the wisdom of the soothsayer of their village. The work enjoyed a certain success, remaining in the repertoire of the Royal Academy of Music for sixty years. As for the libretto, it was immediately parodied by Guerville and the Favarts in Les Amours de Bastien et Bastienne (1753), which was translated into German in 1768 to become the libretto of Bastien et Bastienne, an opera by Mozart.

Le Devin du village is the first opera whose words and music are by the same author. This work also illustrates the many contradictions that dot the life and intellectual work of a man who would write, shortly after, in his Lettre sur la musique française proclaiming a "superiority" of Italian music (whose foundation would lie in the more appropriate character of Italian for musical expression), that "there is neither measure nor melody in French music, because the language is not capable of them; that French song is only a continual barking, unbearable to any unprepared ear; that the harmony is crude, without expression and smelling only of its schoolboy filling; that French airs are not airs; that French recitative is not recitative. From which I conclude that the French have no music and cannot have any; or that if they ever have any, it will be too bad for them." However, a few years later, Rousseau would change his mind. In 1774, he wrote to the composer Gluck, after attending the rehearsals of his opera in French Iphigénie en Aulide: "I have just come from the rehearsal of your Opera Iphigénie; I am delighted with it! You have achieved what I thought impossible until now."

If the performance at court was a success, it was quite different in the city where for the first performance it took part in the troubles of the quarrel of the Bouffons, supporters of Rousseau and Rameau who insulted each other during the opera amidst laughter. The young men in the stalls had imagined covering their heads with a long-wicked cotton bonnet.