Questions and Answers about Rousseau and Le Devin du village:
An Interview with Charlotte Kaufman

Charlotte Kaufman: It is little known that Rousseau considered himself foremost a musician, that he was captivated by the sound of the human voice, and that he acquired much of his musical education through his lifetime occupation as a musical copyist. During the famous "Querelle des Bouffons," over the relative merits of French and Italian opera, Rousseau took a decisive stand against French music in favor of Italian for its more natural form of declamation in recitatives and the emphasis on melody rather than harmony. From Italian music, Rousseau evolved a "unity of melody" principle that he later described in his Dictionary of Music (1768). His pastoral opera Le Devin du village is the artistic synthesis of his philosophical views on the moral superiority of the lower classes and his declared antipathy against the established mannerist French operatic style of Rameau and Lully. Le Devin was only one of Rousseau's several attempts to write an opera, but it was by far his most successful. The premiere was given at Fontainebleau before the King in October 1752, and Le Devin remained in the repertory of the Paris Opéra until 1829. Le Devin inspired a parody by Favart and numerous imitations and adaptations, including Mozart's Bastien and Bastienne and Charles Burney's English version, The Cunning Man. Although it can be argued that many of the French traditions that Rousseau was so eager to expunge remain somewhat in Le Devin, he is responsible for such innovations as the use of sung recitatives in comic opera, the inclusion of obbligato recitative, pastoral characters instead of deities and nobles, the use of pantomime and melodrama in the ballet divertissements, and the new operatic Romance.

A-R: How did you become interested in Rousseau's comic opera?

CK: As a performer I have always been interested in presenting programs of vocal music, especially smaller works such as chamber operas, intermezzi, ballad operas, songs and theater music in general from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. I was especially interested in the life and work of Charles Burney and was shown a piano-vocal score of his 1766 adaptation of Rousseau's Le Devin, The Cunning Man, while engaged in research at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. My group, Boston Musical Theater (then called The Friends of Dr. Burney) was in residence from 1981 to 1987 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where annually we performed historical theater pieces that were not available in modern editions. In 1978 we made a recording of Burney's Cunning Man based on Rousseau's reduced 1753 engraved score, of which I had acquired an original copy in excellent readable condition. Eager to perform the work live, we presented performances of The Cunning Man at the Museum of Fine Arts and at the Mellon Center for British Art at Yale, both in October 1979. We have yet to perform Le Devin du village.

A-R: What is your favorite piece in Le Devin?

CK: So many of the airs are in major keys that I find "Si des galants de la ville" the most interesting both texturally and rhythmically. The King loved the first air, "J'ai perdu mon serviteur" and after the performance at Fontainebleau was reportedly heard singing it all day (out of tune). The public embraced the Romance, perhaps because it was a new style and was published separately. It is the most enduring of the airs in Le Devin.

A-R: How does Charles Burney's arrangement differ from Rousseau's original?

CK: After discovering manuscript recitatives in Burney's own copy of the piano vocal score of The Cunning Man at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, I decided, with Cynthia Verba's encouragement, to attempt an edition of the Rousseau and Burney versions, with one superimposed on the other. After struggling with it, I realized that Burney had made so many changes that no "easy" reading of either would be possible in that format. The compromise was to start over, make a clean edition of the Rousseau, and include Burney's graceful English translation in the edition. Burney's Cunning Man exists only in a piano-vocal score, but from it one can see the addition of instrumental accompaniment to several airs, added introductions, condensation of overly long passages, and some welcome improvements in Rousseau's sometimes awkward voicing and part writing. Burney divided the opera into two acts and added two new airs to the first act, "I'll tease him and fret him" and "Some think in the stars we are able," so that the two sections are more evenly balanced. The new airs bow to British taste and are definitely neither French nor Italian in character. Burney also separated out the ballet divertissements, which were not appropriate to the British stage, and published them separately.

A-R: What have you learned about editing eighteenth-century opera?

CK: In the eighteenth century there were no copyright laws. I examined nine librettos and several sets of manuscript parts in the library of the Paris Opéra. Only the earliest libretto and one from 1760 agreed with the original engraved score. Subsequent parts were changed to suit performers' desires, to accommodate the introduction of horns and clarinets, which were not in the original score. Cuts were made and new airs inserted. The project seemed hopelessly disordered until Elizabeth Bartlet directed me to the "Music of the King," now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. That collection has a very early set of instrumental parts including one vocal part dated 1754, which made possible the re-creation of a reliable performing score that agreed note-for-note with the original engraved version. The librettos proved to be invaluable guides in identifying the evolution of the piece through its various incarnations.

Rousseau's interest in Le Devin was lifelong, and in the final year of his life, 1778, he revised six of the airs, which were published posthumously. These are included as an appendix to the edition. Rousseau, as one would expect, wrote both words and music. His opera, which takes only an hour and a quarter to perform, had a remarkable and profound influence on the subsequent development of French and German comic opera during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This is the first modern edition of Le Devin du village since its original publication in 1753. It is enhanced by the expertise of Cynthia Verba, a Rameau specialist who provided a historical foreword, and by the supplement, a facsimile of Burney's Cunning Man, with an introduction by the eminent Burney scholar Kerry Grant. This "user friendly" score, with separate instrumental parts and a vocal score (with keyboard realization), will encourage revival performances.

Title page of Rousseau's Le Devin du village.	Jean-Jacques Rousseau, composer of Le Devin du village.

Charlotte Kaufman is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music Continuing Education Department, where she has taught piano and harpsichord and coached the Baroque ensemble since 1968. In 1976 she founded Boston Musical Theater (originally The Friends of Dr. Burney), a vocal and instrumental ensemble that specializes in theater music from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and continues to serve as its director. The initial phase of research for Le Devin du village was supported by a summer stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.