We are pleased to bring you these Program Notes about our Pergolesi! producton, written by scholar of eighteenth century music and Assistant Professor of Music, Historical Musicology at Columbia University, Professor Julia Doe, PhD. Her full bio is below.
The professional career of the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was exceptionally brief. Pergolesi fulfilled his first operatic commission at the age of twenty-one, as a fresh conservatory graduate in 1731. He succumbed to tuberculosis only five years later, in 1736.Remarkably, the body of music he wrote in the short, intervening span included two of the most successful works of the entire eighteenth century—both of which are featured on this evening’s program. The Stabat mater (1736), a sacred reflection on Mary’s suffering at the crucifixion of Christ, was the most frequently printed piece of music of the European Enlightenment. The comic intermezzo, La serva padrona (1733; performed here in French translation), was one of the most influential and widely traveled operas of this same period. Pergolesi’s output achieved this extraordinary, pan-European renown because its style—now described as “galant”—helped to incite a large scale shift in musical aesthetics. The composer’s works, which foreground elements of clarity, balance, and “natural” simplicity, presented a challenge to the then-predominant features of the high Baroque (as reflected, for example, in the intricate, polyphonic writing of Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, or Jean-Philippe Rameau). Pergolesi particularly excelled in the genre that has come to encapsulate this stylistic evolution: comic opera. As the musicologist Richard Taruskin aptly notes, “the music of change in the eighteenth century ... was the music of comedy.” La serva padrona is a distinctly forward-looking work, placing an emphasis on highly tuneful arias, dynamic ensembles, and gentle social satire; the plot hinges on the machinations of the titular servant girl, Serpina/Zerbine, who wishes to trick her employer and guardian, Uberto/Pandolphe, into marriage.
““the music of change in the eighteenth century ... was the music of comedy.””
Pergolesi’s compositions were performed throughout the continent and in Britain in the decades following his death. In France, he achieved tremendous posthumous fame during theera of Madame de Pompadour. Both of the works highlighted in tonight’s concert took on outsize roles in a controversy known as the querelle des bouffons (or “war of the comic actors”):a Parisian musical-literary dispute over the relative merits of French and Italian opera. Themain thrust of the conflict was sparked in the summer of 1752. A traveling troupe of Italian singers (the “Bouffons”) presented a series of imported intermezzi—headlined by La servapadrona—on France’s most prestigious lyric stage, the Paris Opéra. The light, comic programming was overwhelmingly successful, but also highly unusual for this theater, whichhad long specialized in serious works by established national composers (Rameau and Jean-Baptiste Lully foremost among them). The firestorm that followed—dozens upon dozens of pamphlets and articles in the periodical press—pit partisans of modern, Italian comedy againstdefenders of the traditional and eminently French genre of courtly tragedy (tragédie lyrique).
National style in opera was a frequent subject of debate in pre-revolutionary Paris, and there were clear musical distinctions at play here: the “natural” melody of the new Italian school stood in stark contrast to the harmonic and structural complexity of the French Baroque. But the scope and vehemence of argumentation in the querelle des bouffons was unprecedented in French musical discourse. And, indeed, because the most ardent members of the Italianist camp—including philosophes like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot—were known for their progressive social views, historians have surmised that their criticism had both aesthetic and political import. In other words, to argue for operatic evolution was a veiled means of arguing against the governmental status quo, so closely linked was Bourbon absolutism with the courtly strains of tragédie lyrique. Over the course of the querelle, it was the œuvre of Pergolesi, above all, that stood in for Italian composition (and cultural modernity) writ large. Rousseau would praise the Stabat mater—presented frequently in Paris in the 1750s—as containing some of “the most perfect and touching” music ever written. To La serva padrona, the philosophe would attribute an even more significant artistic change. The Bouffons, Rousseau famously quipped, “dealt a blow to French opera from which it would never recover.”The precise role of Madame de Pompadour within the querelle des bouffons is complex.Pompadour had long been a champion of Rameau and could not openly scorn the traditional French style that he represented. And yet, the programming of her own private theater at Versailles was both varied and experimental, laying the groundwork for the broader operatic reform that took hold elsewhere.
For all the controversy it generated, the residency of the Italian troupe did not entirely transform the repertoire performed on the French tragic stage. With the exception of Rousseau’s Italianate Le devin du village, the buffa style proved something of a dead-end at the ultra-conservative Opéra. For the upstart, comic companies of Paris (the Comédie Italienne and fairground Opéra-Comique), by contrast, the impact of the visiting Italian players was immediate—and would prove lasting. These latter troupes were eager to take advantage of both the success of imported intermezzi and the skirmishes that surrounded them; their directors began aggressively to commission Italian-inspired works for production at their own theaters. One of the most important results of these programming initiatives was La servante maîtresse: a French-language translation of La serva padrona, made by Pierre Baurans for the Comédie Italienne in 1754. Baurans made modest alterations to Pergolesi’s original text and music. He granted the characters French names, inserted several additional numbers to showcase his leading soprano, Marie-Justine Favart, and replaced the recitative with spoken dialogue to satisfy local conventions. With these changes, La servante maîtresse would far surpass its Italian counterpart in Parisian popularity. As the music historian Julia Hamilton has shown, it was presented nearly every season at the Comédie Italienne—hundreds of times, in total—from the 1750s through the fall of the Bastille. During the 1790s, it enjoyed a marked resurgence. The so-called “liberty of the theaters” of 1791—a relaxation of royal dramatic monopolies—led to an explosion of further productions. The work enjoyed more than 300 performances at more than twenty-five different theaters, making it one of the most successful spectacles (of any kind) of the revolutionary decade.
“La servante maîtresse is a significant work in French operatic history not merely for its ubiquity on Parisian stages, but for the influence it exerted on French composers in the years that followed its premiere. ”
La servante maîtresse is a significant work in French operatic history not merely for its ubiquity on Parisian stages, but for the influence it exerted on French composers in the years that followed its premiere. Authors working for the nation’s comic theaters soon turned away from direct translation of pre-existing Italian operas and toward creative imitation. These artists wrote new French-language works that built upon the musical style of cosmopolitan models,while catering to the plot and character expectations of native audiences. The opéra comique composers at the foundation of Opera Lafayette’s repertoire—including André Grétry, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, and François-Andre Danican Philidor—were thus direct beneficiaries of,and ultimate successors to, Pergolesi’s forward-looking musical and dramatic achievements.
About Professor Julia Doe, PhD
Julia Doe is an Assistant Professor of Music, Histoical Musicology at Columbia University in New York, NY. She received a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University in 2013. She is a scholar of eighteenth-century opera, with particular emphasis on the music, literature, and politics of the French Enlightenment. Her first book, The Comedians of the King (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the final decades of the Old Regime. This monograph interrogates how comic theater was exploited in (and worked against) the construction of the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—examining the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the courtly propaganda machine.
Prof. Doe is currently at work on two new projects—concerning, respectively, the historiography of women’s musical labor in eighteenth-century France, and the Atlantic underpinnings of the French theater industry. Essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, Current Musicology, Renaissance Quarterly, and in the edited collection Histoire de l’opéra français. Prof. Doe is the recipient of the Alfred Einstein and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet awards from the AMS, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Opera Association, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Before beginning her tenure-track appointment at Columbia, she served in the music department as a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
In addition to her scholarly work, Prof. Doe is keenly interested in public engagement with music of the Enlightenment period; she has assisted with educational events for Columbia’s Maison Française and the Washington, DC-based Opera Lafayette, among other groups. She currently serves as a Director-at-Large on the board of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music.