AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

144 saturday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
talent, dared to humiliate him publicly.” An astonishing variety of famous writers replied,
among them Grimm, Rousseau, d’Aquin, Ancelet, Burney, d’Alembert, Boisgelou, Choron,
and Fétis. They offered conflicting answers: that Pagin played in the Italian style, that he
played too much Tartini, and that the public was not yet ready to hear him.
Each of these explanations reflects attitudes that were present in Paris in the turbulent
1750s, but none is entirely satisfactory. It is true that Pagin played and composed in an Italian
style, but so did the Italian singers and Italian-trained violinists who had appeared at the
Concert Spirituel ever since it was founded in 1725. And although the Mercure reviews confirm
that Pagin played music by his teacher Tartini, they also show that he played Vivaldi and
Locatelli. As for the public being unready to hear him, the reviewers, who often divided the
public into “connoisseurs” and “amateurs,” agreed that connoisseurs enjoyed his playing, but
an examination of the use of the term “connoisseur” reveals that it may have served as a code
word denoting partisans of Italian music.
An alternative explanation for the hissing of Pagin was put forward by Denis Diderot, in
his satirical dialogue Le Neveu de rameau. But because this work was not published until the
nineteenth century, its concealed references to Pagin have remained unrecognized. By showing
that the Pagin story corresponds to passages in the Neveu—the pantomime of the violinist
and the remark that “the first to play Locatelli was the apostle of the new music”—I place
the Neveu as the eighth and last in a series of provocative and deliberately mysterious references
to the Pagin affair, the other seven of which appeared in querelle des bouffons pamphlets.
What is different about Diderot’s account is that he paints an exquisitely detailed picture of
the cultural context for the event, so that Pagin’s offense is clarified: as a Frenchman playing
in the virtuosic Italian style, he was participating in, and profiting from, the destruction of
French cultural patrimony.
CHERUBINI AND THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBLIME
Sarah Hibberd
University of Nottingham
Meyerbeer’s grand opera Le Prophète (1849) concluded with a highly charged melodramatic
tableau that engulfed the entire cast in an exploding palace. This “sublime” tableau of chaos
and destruction was received by many as collapsing political and aesthetic ideas of 1848 into
those of the 1790s, and as confirming the end of Revolutionary idealism. Such cataclysmic
tableaux were a feature of clusters of French operas in the 1790s (during and immediately after
the Terror), in the mid-1820s (in a climate of building tensions that were to culminate with
the July Revolution in 1830), and in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution. At these moments,
specific political anxieties were played out in the cultural sphere in what may be understood
as a peculiarly French conception of the sublime.
As established in the eighteenth century, the sublime was understood to combine two
dynamic tensions: first (as described by Burke, building on Longinus), the trajectory from
an overwhelming power that arrests the attention, through rapture and absorption, centered
on emotions of pity and terror; second (following Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment), the
simultaneous experience of violence and pleasure and a new sense of moral and spiritual transcendence.
French political orators were using similar language to articulate their (diverse)
feelings about the experience of revolution during the 1790s, and as David McCallam has
shown, using the volcano as a “sublime” metaphor to signal, variously, the abstract power of