Querelle des Bouffons

The Querelle des Bouffons ("Quarrel of the Comic Actors"), also known as the Guerre des Bouffons ("War of the Comic Actors"), was the name given to a battle of rival musical philosophies which took place in Paris, France between 1752 and 1754. The controversy concerned the relative merits of French and Italian opera.

It was sparked by the reaction of literary Paris to a performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's short intermezzo La serva padrona at the Académie royale de musique in Paris on 1 August 1752. La serva padrona was performed by an itinerant Italian troupe of comic actors, known as buffoni (bouffons in French, hence the name of the quarrel). The work had already been given in Paris in 1746, but had attracted little notice. This time it provoked a full-scale war of words between the defenders of the French operatic tradition and the champions of Italian music. In the controversy that followed, critics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, together with other writers associated with the Encyclopédie, praised Italian opera buffa and attacked the styles French lyric tragedy, a style originated by Jean-Baptiste Lully and promoted among then-living composers such as French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Sources

• Girdlestone, Cuthbert, Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work, New York: Dover Publications, 1969 ISBN 0-486-21416-8
• Parker, Roger C. (ed), The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-19-816282-0