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Hearing Pygmalion’s Kiss: A Scientific Object at the Paris Opéra

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Abstract

In 1748, in his acte de ballet Pygmalion, composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau arranged the Paris Opéra orchestra to play “nature’s chord,” harmonies that reproduced the overtones an expert ear could detect in every natural musical vibrating body. The following year Rameau presented his music theory to the French Royal Academy of Sciences for their endorsement. Disillusionment with the promise of Cartesian mechanics as a source of a unified understanding of nature opened up the possibility that matter might have properties beyond extension and motion, such as aversion, desire, and memory. Speculations about this material sensibility also coincided with increasing claims about the authority of spontaneous emotion and feeling. The experience of music at the opera was a significant resource for claims about the cultural authority of sensibility.

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Notes

  1. Deism is the belief in a supreme being known through reason and who does not intervene in a law-governed Creation.

References

  1. I would like to thank musicologist Geoffrey Burgess for drawing this moment in the history of French opera to my attention. For his discussion of its importance see “Enlightening Harmonies: Rameau’s corps sonore and the Representation of the Divine in the tragédie en musique,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012), 383–462.

  2. Mary Terrall, “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences,” Configurations 3 (1995), 207–232.

  3. Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010).

  4. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

  5. For an excellent description of the audience for the opera in this period see, James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

  6. For an interesting parallel argument, see Simon Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992), 327–362.

  7. Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau in Oeuvres complétes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, Jean Varloot et al. (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 12:72.

  8. Peter Pesic, Music and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), ch. 1.

  9. H. F. Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650 (New York: Springer, 1984); Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Albert Cohen, Music in the French Royal Academy of Sciences: A Study in the Evolution of Musical Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

  10. Joseph Sauveur, “Principes d’acoustique et de musique, ou Système général des intervalles des sons et de son application à tous les systèmes et à tous les instruments de musique.,” Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences, (Paris, 1701; quarto edition, Paris, 1704), 297–364.

  11. “Sur l’application des sons harmoniques aux jeux d’orgues,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences, 1702 (Paris 1704), 92; Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 137–38.

  12. For details see Christensen, Rameau (ref. 11), 10–32.

  13. Ibid., Rameau, 31.

  14. Rameau’s Traité and Nouveau système de musique théorique are volumes 1 and 2 respectively of his Complete Theoretical Writings (ref. 14). Christensen describes Rameau’s use of the monochord in Rameau (ref. 11), 90–98.

  15. Ibid., 137–8.

  16. Charles B. Paul, “Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683–1764), “The Musician as Philosophe,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114 (1970), 140–54, esp. 143.

  17. Jean d’Alembert, Traité de Dynamique, dans lequel les loix de l’equilibre & du Mouvement des Corps sont réduites au plus petit nombre possible, & démontrées d’une maniére nouvelle, où l’on donne un Principe général pour trouver le Mouvement de plusieurs Corps qui agissent les uns sur les autres, d’une maniére quelconque (Paris: Chez David l’aîné, 1743; reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1967).

  18. There is a considerable literature on the vibrating string controversy but some essential references relevant include: C. Truesdell, The Rational Mechanics of Flexible or Elastic Bodies, 1638–1788, Introduction to Leonhardi Euleri Opera Omnia Vol. X et XI Serie Secundae (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1960); J. R. Ravetz, “Vibrating Strings and Arbitrary Functions,” The Logic of Personal Knowledge: Essays presented to Michael Polanyi on his Seventieth Birthday 11 th March 1961 (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 71–88; Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d’Alembert: Science and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); John T. Cannon and Sigalia Dostrovosky, The Evolution of Dynamics: Vibration Theory from 1687–1742 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981).

  19. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, tr. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 101; D’Alembert, Encyclopédie s.v. “Basse fondamentale,” 7:59; Jean d’Alembert, Élémens de musique théorique et pratique suivant les principes de M. Rameau (Paris: David l’aîné, Le Breton, and Durand, 1752; reprint, New York: Broude Brothers, 1966). For a comprehensive account of the relations between d’Alembert and Rameau, see Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought (ref. 11), 252–290.

  20. Aram Vartanian, “Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth Century Materialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950), 259–286.

  21. The review was of a translation of Henry Baker’s book, An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype (1743), “Essai sur l’histoire naturelle du polype insecte par M. Henry Baker de la Societé Royale de Londres &c.,” Mercure de France, 48 (January, 1745), 123–43.

  22. Mary Terrall, “Salon, Academy, and Boudoir: Generation and Desire in Maupertuis’s Science of Life,” Isis 87 (1996), 218–37.

  23. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, tr. Justin Leiber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994). Man a Plant appeared in La Mettrie’s Oeuvres philosophiques, published posthumously in 1751).

  24. A key figure here was Albrecht von Haller, to whom Man a Machine was dedicated (although he denied any connection either to the book or La Mettrie). Haller’s Primae linae in usum praelectionum academicarum, or First Lines of Physiology was first published in 1747 and translated into French in 1752. Both Haller and La Mettrie were students of Hermann Boerhaave in Leyden. This is not to say that irritable fibers were unknown before the mid-eighteenth century. See for example, Anne Lise Rey, “Metaphysical Problems in Francis Glisson’s Theory of Irritability,” The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 85–97.

  25. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology (ref. 4); Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism (ref. 3).

  26. Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  27. Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams A Short History of Opera, 4th edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 132–46.

  28. Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  29. Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 169; 179–200.

  30. Alexander Rehding, “Rousseau, Rameau, and Enharmonic Furies in the French Enlightenment,” Journal of Music Theory 49 (2005), 141-180; Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera (ref. 29), 163–69; Dill, Monstrous Opera (ref. 28), 46; Rameau, Géneration harmonique, in Complete Theoretical Writings (ref. 14), 3:91.

  31. Pierre-François-Guyot Desfontaines, Observations sur les écrits modernes 2 (3 September 1735), 238; reprint, 24 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 4:238; Dill, Monstrous Opera (ref. 28), 7; Johnson, Listening in Paris (ref. 5), 46.

  32. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans., H. A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Terrall, “Gendered Spaces” (ref. 2), 209–15. Christophe Martin, “D’un épicurisme ‘discret’: Pour une lecture lucrécienne des entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes de Fontenelle: L’épicurisme des lumières epicureanism.” Dix-huitième siècle 35 (2003), 55–73.

  33. The Pygmalion libretto is available at http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/pygmali.htm, accessed 7/26/12. The opera is available as a compact disc in Jean-Philippe Rameau, Pygmalion, Nélee, & Myrthis, conducted by William Christie, performed by Les Arts Florrisant (Arles: Harmonia Mundi, 1992/1999), HMC 901381. The opera can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1SzKPjHL1I, in which the statue awakens between 11minutes and 50 seconds and 14 minutes and 30 seconds.

  34. The edition I have been using is the second, Pigmalion, ou la statue animée (London: Samuel Harding, 1742), available on Google books. I have also consulted the version reproduced in Henri Coulet, Pygmalions des Lumières (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 1998), 49–70. Coulet follows the text of the first edition (1741) except the French has been modernized.

  35. It was recommended, for example, in Jacques-Elie Gastelier, Lettres sur les affaires du temps (1738–1751), ed. Henri Duranton, Robert Granderoute, Hervé Guénot and François Weil (Paris-Genève: Champion-Slatkine, 1993), 661–2. There were also at least five editions between 1741 and 1753, including one in German.

  36. Ovid, Metamorphoses tr., Mary Innes (London: Penguin, 1955), 231–232.

  37. Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, tr. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 111–60; Coulet, “Présentation,” Pygmalions des lumières (ref. 34), 7–29; J. L. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes: The Animated Statue in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courthauld Institutes 23 (1960), 239–55.

  38. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, tr. Brad Inwood and L.P Gerson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1994); Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, tr. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1994).

  39. Thomas S. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Margaret Jacob, Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists Freemasons and Republicans ([S.I]: Temple, 2003); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Paul Hazard, The European Mind: 1680–1715 (New York: Meridian Books, 1963), 119–30.

  40. Details of his life can be found in Jean Macary, Masque et lumières au XVIIe: André-François Deslandes, “Citoyen et Philosophe” (1689–1757) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975). J. L. Carr, The Life and Works of André-François Boureau-Deslandes,” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 1954.

  41. Gastelier, Lettres sur les affaires (ref. 35), 662, n. 4.

  42. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994).

  43. Margaret Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography,” The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, Lynn Hunt, ed. (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 157–202, on 158.

  44. [Boureau-Deslandes], Pigmalion (ref. 34), xiv–xv; Coulet (ref. 34), 50.

  45. [Boureau-Deslandes], Pigmalion, (ref. 34) 54–55; Coulet (ref. 34), 59.

  46. [Boureau-Deslandes], Pigmalion (ref. 34), 55–56; Coulet (ref. 34), 59–60.

  47. [Boureau-Deslandes], Pigmalion (ref. 34), 66–71; Coulet (ref. 34), 61–62.

  48. [Boureau-Deslandes], Pigmalion (ref. 34), 81–83; Coulet (ref. 34), 63–64.

  49. [Boureau-Deslandes], Pigmalion (ref. 34), 84–85; Coulet (ref. 34), 64.

  50. Coulet, “Présentation,” Pygmalions (ref. 34), 24.

  51. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures (ref. 39), 52–70; Jacob, “The Materialist World of Pornography” (ref. 43), 184–85.

  52. Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  53. Diderot, Pensées Philosophiques ([Paris: Laurent Durand La Haye, 1746).

  54. Vartanian, “Trembley’s Polyp” (ref. 20), 269.

  55. Diderot, Pensées (ref. 53), para. 1, 2.

  56. The three opera ballets were: Les Fêtes de l’Eté; Armours déguisés; Le Triomphe des Arts, Mercure de France (Sept., 1748), 221–22.

  57. Mercure de France (April, 1751), 166.

  58. Coulet, “Présentation,” Pygmalions (ref. 34), 11–12.

  59. Antoine Houdar de la Motte, Le Triomphe des Arts (Amsterdam: Henri Schelte, 1701), 41–44; Coulet Pygmalion des lumières (ref. 34), 39–46.

  60. Mercure de France (Sept., 1748), 222.

  61. Amanda Claridge, Judith Toms, and Tony Cubberley, Rome: An Oxford Archeological Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 211.

  62. Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a fin de siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 100.

  63. Correspondance de Madame Graffigny (13 vols.) 26 avril 1749–2 juillet 1750, letters 1391–1569, English Showalter and P. Allan [et al.], ed. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004), 11:244, n.14.

  64. There was also some amusing verse circulating among the public: “Against the honor of the dead sublime / You know, Houdard, what are your crimes / By the rigour of your penalty: / It is that our day, with impunity / Makes you the butt of vile outrage / Your fate is decided at Passy / But what fate? / Tremble, here it is: / Ballot rewrote your work.” [Passy was the country home of Rameau’s patron Poupelinière]. Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, Correspondance littéraires 2 vols. (1877; Nendeln/Liechtenstein, 1968), 1:226.

  65. Correspondance de Madame Graffigny (ref. 63) 9:244. Note: Paris dates were Sept. 10, 1748, March 9 and Dec. 2., 1751.

  66. Mercure de France (April, 1751), 166.

  67. Mercure de France (April, 1751), 67.

  68. Paul-Marie Masson, L’Opéra de Rameau (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1930), 79–80.

  69. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (New York: Penguin, 1988), 326–63.

  70. Paul-Marie Masson, “La ‘Lettre sur Omphale’ (1752),” Revue de Musicologie, 24, no. 73/74 (1945), 1–19, on 2.

  71. Masson,“La ‘Lettre’” (ref. 70).

  72. Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale, tragédie lyrique, reprise par l”Académie royale de Musique le 14 Janvier 1752, in Denise Launay, La Querelle des Bouffons 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973) 1:48–49 [pp. 46–47 in the pamphlet].

  73. Grimm, Lettre, 42–43 (ref. 72); Masson, “La lettre” (ref. 70), 13; Mercure de France (Avril, 1751), 167–68.

  74. Wilda Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 27–33.

  75. Grimm, Nouvelle littéraires, 1er Octobre 1753, Correspondance littéraires (ref. 64), 2:285–91. Grimm’s apology for the passions occupies 288–89.

  76. Grimm, Correspondance (ref. 64), 2:288.

  77. Thomas Christensen, “Diderot, Rameau, and Resonating Strings: New Evidence of an Early Collaboration,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 323 (1994), 131–66. Rameau’s “Mémoire où l’on expose les fondements du système de musique théorique et pratique” is reproduced on 153–166.

  78. Denis Diderot, Mémoires sur différents sujets de Mathématiques [1748], Oeuvres (ref. 7) 2:231–338.

  79. Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (ref. 74), 27 – 33.

  80. Diderot, Pensées from his Oeuvres (ref. 7), 7:60.

  81. Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue 1750–1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Jacqueline Waeber, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘unité de mélodie,’,” Journal of the American Musicology Society 62 (2009), 79-143.

  82. Art historian Victor Stoichita is tempted to say that the eighteenth century was“haunted by” the motif of the man statue; Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect (ref. 37), 111.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Emily Bonney, Nonny de la Peña, Joe Gonzalez, Margaret Garber, Angeles Sancho-Velazquez, and Mary Terrall for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I have also benefited from Peter Pesic’s generous support and advice.

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  1. Liberal Studies Department, California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, 92834-6868, USA

    Kevin Lambert

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Kevin Lambert is an historian of science, associate professor in the Liberal Studies Department at California State University Fullerton, and Dibner Fellow at the Huntington Library. He research interests include late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French and British sciences. He is currently working on a book about nineteenth-century British mathematics and physics.

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Lambert, K. Hearing Pygmalion’s Kiss: A Scientific Object at the Paris Opéra. Phys. Perspect. 16, 417–439 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-014-0148-2

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