Raguenet, Le Cerf, and Opera:

The Deconstruction of the French/Italian Binary By Jeff Israel

Introduction The central problem in both Raguenets essay and Le Cerfs essay on the value of French versus Italian operatic style is that each essentialize broad swaths of music using hegemonic cultural identifications based even more narrowly in personal value-judgments. Thus any analysis of the two essays must be bifurcated: on the one hand, what they report about the music they encounter must be dealt with and an attempt must be made to understand what, exactly, each is actually experiencing given their cultural backgrounds, knowledge base, and likely bias. The extremely important second step is to remove from these essays any semblance of an ontological character of the musicany generalizing statement about what it means to be French or Italianand to view the musics through the lens of objectivity. This would be difficult (if not impossible) to achieve using the clunky and monolithic nation-identified genres. Instead, in Part III of this essay, I will present two examples of operatic music, neither representative or exhaustive of their national genre, and will excavate them in order to gain a greater understanding of what Raguenet and Le Cerf were each really getting at: the experienceand meaningof opera (music, costume, sounds, presentation, et al) as a cultural reflection.

Part I: Raguenets Reflexive Reasoning and Italian Eroticism

It is shown fairly quickly that the actual music contained within opera is but one of a constellation of experiences that leads Raguenet (and later Le Cerf) to make his sweeping generalizations. There are so many things wherein the French musick has the advantage over the Italian, Raguenet begins his essay, and as many more wherein the Italian is superior to the French (671). We are placed in a deductive mode from the launch-point, with French and Italian already understood as enormous metaphysical locations. What this allows, of course, is for Raguenet to ascribe whatever values he personally attaches to French or Italian music and have them appear as true, which becomes important as his assertions consequently bear no responsibility to appeal to exact examples (they are attributes of a music, as opposed to effects) or to take into account either the multiplicity or the interreferentiality of individual French or Italian works/styles. He claims early on, for instance, that [French] operas [sic] are writ much better than the Italian; they are regular, coherent designs; and, if repeated without the music, they are as entertaining as any of our other pieces Nothing can be more natural. (672). We are given no exampleseven ones tagged as personalof French (or Italian) writing; the only form of support we are given for the claim is again an assumptive pre-disposition for what Raguenet terms natural. The quality of French writing lies in the fact that it is Frenchthat is to say the criteria upon which Raguenet assesses operatic writing are derived from the writing itself. It is this reflexive quality that undermines Raguenets (and Le Cerfs) ability to speak directly and intelligibly about any one aspect of the opera, without each resorting to generic and conflated reasoning. This discourse of naturalness, so central to Le

Cerfs critique of Raguenet and Italian opera, when stripped of its metaphysical ontology, reduces to mere statements of preference which reflect more about their authors interpretation of societythrough operathan about the opera itself. More could be written about Raguenets reflexive reasoning (his attack on Italian writing, melisma, the superiority of French divertissements, the crudeness of Italian dance, playing style, etc), but each instance falls into the same framework of pre-existent self-justification. What is more interesting is what can be said about Raguenets fetishization of the Italian initiated on page 674 of his essay. His emphasis on the Italian vowel sound is especially revealing of what might be underlying his critique. When he remarks, their vowels are all sonorous full and open, he is in one sense speaking of the actual timbre of the vowel (although the difference between the a sound in tuera and fedelt doesnt seem convincing), but on a much deeper level he is commenting on the openness with which he views the Italian lifestyle (674). It is hard to ignore the sexual overtones that sound in Raguenets description of his experience of Italian opera. The vowels are open and inviting, the arias are more bold and hardy, in fact they even carry their point farther (674). Raguenet is undergoing a deep internal conflict, as I see it, in which his sense of what is right, natural, harmonious, is being assaulted by his obvious attraction to the wrong, unnatural, and dissonant. What is interesting is that the naturalness of the French music is directly opposed to the sexuality of the Italian, inverting and complicating the traditional meanings of those terms. It becomes less and less clear whether Raguenet is describing music or his frustration with French prudence when

he complains, The French would think themselves undone, if they offended in the least against the rules; they flatter, tickle, and court the ear, and are still doubtful of success (675). What natural means, for Raguenet, is something like soulless, or more exactly asexual, as the soul implies a Christian underpinning which he clearly is dissatisfied with. We can feel Raguenets experience of overflowing libidinous energy on p. 676 when he describes an Italian violinist, while performing a symphony of furies that shakes the soul:

it undermines and overthrows it in spite of all; the violinist himself, whilst he is performing it, is seizd with an unavoidable agony; he tortures his violin; he racks his body; he is no longer master of himself, but is agitated like one possessed with an irresistible motion.

This clearly has gone beyond the experience of merely the sounds emanating from the violin; the music. This is an idealization of a man literally being consumed by physical passion, an ecstasy that resembles nothing so much as orgasmic fulfillment. The neatness and perfectly-executed ornamentation of Raguenets French music has become like a dowdy bureaucrat, immaculately-kept and aesthetically perfected but lacking the fire and eros of Italian music. In the concluding segment of Raguenets essay, he locates the sexuality of the Italian music even more specifically. With the attention to a performancein Rome, in a church, no lessof an aria comprised of these two wordsMille

saette, a thousand arrows, Raguenet centers on a homoeroticism which continues through his discussion (and lauding) of Italian castrati (677). In his comparison of the Italian and French trios, he posits that because the voices of the castrati are so close to each other, and generally higher, that they can much more successfully penetrate and interact with the other lines (including the continually phallicized bow of the violin). The attraction in general to the Italian conversational mode of trio, in which parts more freely intersect and hold their own beauty goes beyond the sexual level, of course: it indicates an appreciation for what Raguenet clearly sees as the jouissance of the Italian.

Part II: Le Cerf and the Valorization of Truth

Le Cerf is similarly at a remove from the specific music he is commenting on. He fundamentally agrees with Raguenets characterization of what the peak attribute of French music isits naturalnessbut he rejects the value Raguenet places on the eroticism of the Italian and valorizes instead the adherence of French opera to classical (Platonic) ideals of beauty in art. Where Raguenet established French and Italian as grand entities to which he could derive preexistent qualities, Le Cerf is choosing to fall back on an even greater monolith: History (Truth). It is not merely that French writing is superior because it is French, as Raguenet suggests, but that French writing is superior

because it is True, in the sense that it follows (naturally) from a grand tradition of artistic Truth set down by Horace, Aristotle, Augustine, and Virgil (all of whom he magisterially quotes in his introduction), et al. Obviously, Le Cerf is a far more conservative (and far less ingenuous, in my opinion) critic, with a firm belief that there is a correct chord for each word, a correct dance, costume, setting, etc. for each opera. He has no interest in what he terms playing and fooling around with runs and roulades, which he considers not a harmonious representation of the sacred? text (681). He implores the musician to set the words vividly and exactly, in order to amplify the meaning of the words of the poem or play being represented (681). How does Le Cerf deal with the question of a Mass, for which the same words are endlessly reinterpreted and set to endless variations of harmony and melody? Does he simply pick one version, arbitrarily anointed as the True version, and discount the rest as not providing the correct music? Or does he take it one step further is there a vivid and exact chord, instrumentation, and orchestration for Dies, a separate one for eleison, and so on? Does every word in any language have an innate setting that makes it acceptable? Le Cerf might argue, validly, that his meaning is that the words of the text which he finds so moving should be preserved sonically and accompanied by music which fits them, given the overall context of the operas thematic material. But even with this qualification, which rescues Le Cerf from the edge of absurdity, the idea that music is secondary and should be almost unnoticed (An accompaniment that is wrong or too dull does not necessarily commit a perceptible offense on the

subject) leads one to believe that for Le Cerf, opera would best be executed by having an orchestra play light background music as someone read Homer into a microphone (682). Of course this is not true, but it highlights the lengths to which Le Cerf will go to defend the ideal of Opera with the shield of Historic Truth to the insult of the music itself (which even he wouldnt enjoy). Thus we are left with these two repressed and skewed views on French and Italian music: Raguenets hypersexualization of the Italian and exsanguination of the French, and Le Cerfs adamant obsession with the truth of the French and the artless barbarism of the Italian. Since we can neither impugn nor validate either position, as they are based on contradictory presuppositions, the following endeavor will be made to use actual scores by Lully and Handel to identify certain applications of the undercurrents of both Raguenets and Le Cerfs texts.

Part III: Armide et/e Rinaldo

I shall, in this section, reference one aria from each score and perform on it a Raguenedian reading and a Cerfian reading. Let us use, from Lullys Armide, the aria from Act III scene IV in which Hate (La Haine) is confronting Armide. Specifically, to attain the emotional benefit, I will concentrate my analysis on Armides frantic response to Hates injunction. Quinaults libretto reads as such:

Stop! Stop! Fearsome Hate! Leave me under the laws of so sweet a conqueror Leave me; I renounce your fearful help. No, no, do not continue, no, To tear out my love without tearing out my heart

In this French piece, the music during the dramatic opening line Stop! Stop! Fearsome Hate! (bars 4-6) is surprisingly constrained, orchestra in a lower octave (the first violion reaches only a middle b) while the soprano rides above. The vocal line for the rest of the section very closely follows the orchestral rhythm, often being doubled exactly, with the exception of the fourth line (bars 10-11) which brings the voice, clarion, out of the accompaniment. It is clear to see, here, where Raguenet might attack Lully for the lack of passion in his instrumentation and harmonization. The music is largely syllabic, and each word is placed almost exactly with an appropriate note and chord. In this extreme exhortation, Armide is unbelievably within the music. Raguenets appeal to sexuality in the Italian mode would demand that more tension be wrought in the harmonic (chordal) development, where the familiar cadencesused in banal sections of the librettoare all too cauterizing of Armides passion. It is similarly easy to see how Le Cerfs desire for delivery of the overarching Truth, the storyline given in appropriate setting, would lead him to enjoy the moment in which his mind could embellish and interpret its favored lines without sonic disruption. And, truly, what Le Cerf is experiencing (I am dismissing his

seemingly reflex-argument that music is secondary) is the music presenting a much more subtle and complicated relationship to the text than some of what Raguenet blatantly rushes over in his desire for the Italian juiciness. Armide is trapped, and the music reflects this trap sympathetically by accompanying her even as she tries to escape with her high-arching range. In a careful listen, the music tenderly treats Armide in a narrativerather than sexualfashion. Where Raguenet would prefer the music to reflect Armide, Le Cerf is content to have it effect and affect her, that is to create in the listener a sense of who she is, her situation and also to interact with the music of her vocal line. We can now somewhat more clearly see the value of Le Cerfs de-sexed experience of opera.

My heart is like a fire Between two winds, two flames. Glory feeds it, Steadfast love nourishes it

This is the libretto from Handels Rinaldo, a classic example of Italian baroque music. It reveals a similarly emotional moment in that opera. Unsurpisingly, the music takes up much more time and bars than the concise French relation. There are also many moments (bar 14, 18, etc) in which a given word (fiam, fire) is held out during an extended melisma. We can easily see the Raguenet analysis of this aria. It is suggestive, the word love (bar 23) and fire (bar 14) are extended in dramatic melismas during which the

accompaniment completely drops out. The accompaniment comes back in in strident fashion afterwards, buffeting and responding to Rinaldos romance. It is a fast aria, exultant, and obviously sexual. The Le Cerf analysis would be that we can not understand the words that are being related, and we are subjected to only odd, disjointed phrases. Here is where the Le Cerf thought process falls somewhat apart, despite the musics obvious power and relation of the intent of the above lines, Le Cerf would object to the inability to hear a specific word, which most of the audience probably knew anyway.