1 ene 1752 año - War of the Buffoons

Descripción:

Beginning in August 1752, La serva padrona, along with a dozen other intermezzos and comic operas, was brought to Paris by an Italian opera buffa troupe fo ra twenty-month run of more than 150 performances. The furor these performances created led to heated debates concerning Italian versus French opera, the funny, commercial, naturalist comedies versus the official and artificial tragedies lyriques. The so-called Querelle des Bouffons (Dispute of the Comic Actors, also known as the War of the Buffoons) foreshadowed not only musical change but also social and political change. Such debates, with the opposing factions publishing open letters, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, had long been a feature of France's lively intellectual and cultural life, as in the conflict between the proponents of Lully and of Rameau. Moreover, in the context of the absolute French monarchy, political, religious, and social issues could not be debated openly; they instead had to go underground, into highly suggestive and implied cultural criticism. The debates about music, therefore, worked on various levels with the stakes being more than just musical and aesthetic.

So what seems a greatly inflated press controversy about opera was in fact an important coded episode in the ongoing battle between political absolutism and the emerging Enlightenment movement that would consume much of the eighteenth century. Italian commercial opera--epitomized in La serva Padrona by a feisty maidservant who dominates her master, subverting the social hierarchy that French opera ffirmed--stimulated the politics of opposition.

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