The celebrated Plate N of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique (1768)Footnote 1 includes among its various ancient and extra-European examples the melody reproduced here as Figure 1. That melody, which Rousseau identifies only as an ‘air chinois’, would enjoy a long afterlife in Europe, being incorporated first into Carl Maria von Weber's Overtura cinesa (1804), itself revised and expanded into Weber's incidental music (1809) for Schiller's German adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's Turandot; incorporated again into Ferruccio Busoni's incidental music for that same play (1904–1905); then into Eugène Goossens's Variations sur un thème chinois (1911); and, finally, into the second of Paul Hindemith Sinfonische Metamorphosen (1943).Footnote 2 But where did Rousseau himself get the melody? On this point, scholars differ. Ysia Tchen, in her foundational account of the early European reception of Chinese music and musical thought, suggests that Rousseau took the melody from the Jesuit missionary Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718–1793).Footnote 3 In his exemplary study of the Dictionnaire's extra-European examples, Roberto Leydi maintains that Rousseau copied it from the Description de la Chine (1735) by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743), a view with which the editors of the Pléiade edition of Rousseau's œuvres complètes concur without discussion.Footnote 4 And there is a third candidate as well: in his comprehensive study of Rousseau's exploitation of European travel literature, the distinguished rousseauiste Georges Pire maintains that Rousseau excerpted the melody from the Histoire des voyages (1749–1755) by the Abbé Prévost (Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles, 1697–1753).Footnote 5
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: La veuve Duchesnes, 1768), Plate N
In what follows, I claim to resolve these discrepancies, in part by rereading the received evidence with a critical eye, and in part by adducing new manuscript and archival sources. Such an undertaking might seem primarily like an exercise in bibliographic punctiliousness – and it certainly is that; I will unapologetically delight, over the pages that follow, in the ins and outs of archival detective work. But certain larger historical and interpretative points are present in the background as well. I have argued elsewhere that knowing Rousseau's sources is essential to understanding his Dictionnaire de musique:Footnote 6 a dictionary makes no intrinsic claim to originality, though Rousseau is often very original indeed, and a good part of its confection is a matter of compilation.Footnote 7 Sometimes, in a given passage, Rousseau is quoting, paraphrasing or parodying a source, and sometimes he is not; it makes all the difference, in construing his meaning, to know which is which. Clarifying Rousseau's source(s) is thus an indispensable first step towards elucidating his attitudes towards Chinese music – and indeed towards extra-European music more generally.Footnote 8
Among the most interesting matters here are questions about the conditions, material and otherwise, that allowed Rousseau to claim any knowledge of Chinese music at all. As with almost all early-modern European observers, Rousseau's knowledge of China was indirect, mediated by chains of transmission and distortion ranging from the more or less ‘first-hand’ accounts of European travellers – in the case of China, Jesuit missionaries above all – to the works of learned compilers such as Du Halde, who, as Voltaire put it, ‘had never left Paris and . . . did not know any Chinese’.Footnote 9 This discursive network depended in turn, as its condition of possibility, on patterns of trade, proselytization and diplomacy – and these, finally, depended on and were made possible by technological and material substrata: advances in seamanship, European demands for Chinese material goods such as silk and porcelain, and so on.Footnote 10 In hunting for Rousseau's sources, some of this rich background comes provisionally into view – not least the networks of transmission along which Amiot's writings flowed and circulated, in the first place from Beijing back to Paris and London, but then also within Europe,Footnote 11 as well as their subsequent entanglement with other Enlightenment historical and intellectual fascinations, including the Egyptological preoccupations of writers like Pierre-Joseph Roussier and Joseph de Guignes.Footnote 12 I do not follow these threads very far in what follows, in order to keep the focus squarely on the air chinois, but I do hope that this glimpse might serve to whet the reader's appetite for the eventual feast.Footnote 13 With respect to that larger enquiry, this current article is, as Jeffrey Sammons wrote in another context, ‘a pile of bricks and a certain amount of mortar for an edifice yet to be built’.Footnote 14
I should also clarify up front that I will be commenting more or less exclusively on French sources, so that my discussion is fundamentally one-sided in the sense that it ignores Chinese viewpoints on these encounters. The reason is my own linguistic incapacity: it will be some time before I am able to read Li Guangdi or Zhu Zaiyu for myself. Fortunately, there is a cohort of young Chinese and Chinese-American scholars who are beginning to make accounts of Chinese musical thought in the late Ming and early Qing periods available to readers of European languages. I refer the reader warmly to their work.Footnote 15
The discussion that follows unfolds in three main parts. I begin with Amiot, in order to evaluate Tchen's reconstruction, then I turn to Du Halde, and then to Prévost. My conclusion will be that there is no real reason to doubt Rousseau's own word that he took the air chinois from Du Halde, and that the weight of the evidence is consistent with that claim. The route to that conclusion, though, especially in the case of Amiot, involves a detailed consideration of the circulation of knowledge of Chinese music and musical thought in Enlightenment France.
AMIOT
Amiot is a fascinating figure who would reward even more study than he has thus far received.Footnote 16 His Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois (1779) has a reasonable claim to being the first responsible account of Chinese music in a European language; it was widely read, cited and considered authoritative well into the nineteenth century, and it has remained an object of fascination for historians both within and outside China to the present day. The Mémoire, though, was both preceded and then supplemented by many other documents and missives – and tracing the specific Chinese melody that Rousseau quoted through these various texts can begin to illuminate the networks of intellectual and diplomatic correspondence within which knowledge of China circulated in the early Qing period.
Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot was born in Toulon on 8 February 1718. In 1737 he became a Jesuit novice, and he was ordained in 1746.Footnote 17 Upon completion of his theological studies in 1748, he requested foreign assignment and received a commission for China. He left Paris on 17 November 1749 and embarked from Lorient on a ship called the Villeflix on 29 December of that same year. The trip – presumably following the usual route around Africa and across the Indian Ocean to Goa, then around India, through the Strait of Malacca and up into the South China Sea – took about six months,Footnote 18 and he arrived in Macau on 27 July 1750. Some nine months later, on 28 March 1751, Amiot left again for Beijing, and on 22 August 1751 he arrived in the capital, where he would reside until his death in 1793. Though he wrote widely on various aspects of Chinese language, culture and mores, Amiot is primarily remembered, at least among musicologists, for his Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, which – shipped back to Paris from Beijing in the later 1770s – was published there in 1779 in an edition supervised by Pierre-Joseph Roussier (1716–1792),Footnote 19 who added extensive and not always very illuminating commentary of his own.Footnote 20 Roussier, in fact, had also played an inadvertent role in the inception of Amiot's Mémoire. For, as Amiot recounts in the discours préliminaire to that work, Roussier's own Mémoire sur la musique des anciens (1770), which the Royal Librarian Jérôme-Frédéric Bignon (1747–1784) forwarded on to Beijing in 1774, was the catalyst for Amiot's own Mémoire. It drew his attention to the various misunderstandings concerning Chinese music to which an earlier missive of his – the manuscript translation of Li Guangdi's (李光地) Commentaries on the Classic Concerning the Music of the Ancients (Guyue jingzhuan, 古樂經傳) that he had sent back to France in the 1750sFootnote 21 – had given rise. The Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, Amiot says quite explicitly, is meant to redress those confusions.Footnote 22
Mindful of the perils of sea voyages, he sent two copies of the text, one to Bignon and the other to Louis XV's Secretary of State Henri Léonard Jean Baptiste Bertin (1720–1792). Roussier, who in his annotations refers now to the one manuscript and now to the other, clearly had access to both in preparing the text for publication.Footnote 23 These two manuscripts were not, of course, the only texts that Amiot sent back to Paris: he subsequently added a supplement to the Mémoire;Footnote 24 the Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France preserves a cache of letters from Amiot to Bertin;Footnote 25 one of Amiot's letters to Roussier also survives;Footnote 26 and, of course, there is the 1754 translation of Li Guangdi. This last seems to have enjoyed some circulation, since Amiot's contemporaries make frequent reference to it: Rameau cites it in the ‘Nouvelles réflexions sur le corps sonore’ that he appended to his Code de musique pratique (1760);Footnote 27 Roussier invokes it as well in his annotations to Amiot's Mémoire;Footnote 28 so too does Jean-Benjamin La Borde.Footnote 29 However, the manuscript itself, unfortunately, is now lost.Footnote 30
Amiot's 1754 translation is none the less the source from which Tchen supposes that Rousseau took the air chinois, though she thinks that Rousseau altered it in ways that, paradoxically, brought it closer to Amiot's own source: ‘It does not entirely conform to the original from which it was drawn, but by an extraordinary chance, it is closer to the Chinese original than is Father Amiot's direct transcription’ (‘Il n'est pas tout à fait conforme à l'original d'où il a été tiré, mais par un hasard extraordinaire, il est plus près de l'original chinois que ne l'est la transcription directe du père Amiot’).Footnote 31 One might reasonably wonder how Tchen knows what Amiot's transcription looked like, since it was she, after all, who first reported that the 1754 translation had gone missing. The answer is that she was relying implicitly on the testimony of Rameau's former student La Borde, whose Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780) disparages Rousseau's transcription as follows:Footnote 32
Quant aux caracteres musicaux des Chinois, il n'est pas de notre objet de donner ici les divers exemples qu'on en trouve dans les planches qui acompagnent le Mémoire du P. Amiot; mais nous allons raporter une partie des détails où ce savant Missionaire est entré à cet égard, dans les manuscrits qu'il avait adressés en 1754 à M. de Bougainville (cahier C, pag. 53 & suivante); & nous présenterons en original l'air Chinois que Rousseau a donné dans son Dictionnaire.Footnote 33
As to the musical notation of the Chinese, it is not to our purpose to give here the various examples that are found in the plates that accompany Father Amiot's Mémoire. But we will report a part of the detail into which that learned missionary went in the manuscripts that he addressed to M. de Bougainville in 1754 (notebook C, page 53 and following). And we will present the original version of the Chinese air that Rousseau gave in his Dictionnaire.
Tchen, then, took over La Borde's account, but reversed its poles – rather than corrupting Amiot's transcription, Rousseau somehow divined how to improve it.
La Borde makes good on his promise to present the ‘original’ a few pages further on in his discussion, where he gives the examples reproduced here as Figures 2 and 3. As the reader can easily verify, the first – which La Borde calls ‘Air Chinois, appellee Lieou yé Kin, c'est à dire, Le satin à feuilles de Saule [柳葉錦, Liuyejin], traduit par le P. Amiot’ – is identical to Rousseau's version, except that the note values are doubled and the famous error in Rousseau's bar 2 (corresponding to bar 4 of La Borde's version) has been corrected (there is also a variant in bars 10 and 23 of La Borde's version, where the first note of each of these bars is d2, not e2 as in Rousseau). As La Borde writes:
C'est le même air que Rousseau a donné dans son Dictionnaire, planche N, mais qui y est étrangement défiguré. 1°. D'un morceau de Musique Chinoise, très-lent & très grave, on a fait, dans le Dictionnaire, une sorte d'air de danse, & certainement de très-mauvais goût, en y exprimant par des croches, & d'une mesure légere, ce que le P. Amiot traduit par des noires d'une mesure lente. 2°. Presque tous les repos de cet air s'y trouvent à contre-sens, pour ne l'avoir pas fait commencer en levant, comme il aurait fallu faire, dès qu'on réduisait à une demi-mesure ce qui, dans la construction de l'air Chinois, forme une mesure entier. 3°. A la mesure 3 de l'air, donné par Rousseau, on trouve deux fa; surquoi il faut observer que cet air Chinois, ainsi que plusieurs autres morceaux de Musique Chinoise, n'est composé que de cinq notes, & n'a pour élémens que ce que les Chinois appelent les cinq tons, & qui sont ici sol la si re mi, dans lesquels n'y a ni fa, ni ut. 4°. Enfin il y a, dans l'air défiguré, du Dictionnaire de Rousseau, quelques autres fautes dans les notes, qu'on poura rectifier, soit sur l'original Chinois que nous donnons ici, soit sur la traduction qui est à la planche premiere.Footnote 34
This is the same air that Rousseau gave in his Dictionnaire, plate N, but which is strangely disfigured there. (1) Out of a Chinese piece that is very slow and serious there is made, in the Dictionnaire, a sort of dance, and certainly one in a very poor taste, given that what Father Amiot translated by crotchets in a slow measure is expressed through quavers in a fast one. (2) Almost all the cadences of this air are wrong-footed by his not having started on an upbeat, as should have been done once what should have formed an entire bar in the construction of the Chinese air was reduced to a half bar. (3) In bar 3 of the air given by Rousseau there are found two Fs, concerning which it must be observed that this Chinese air, like many other pieces of Chinese music, is composed of only five notes, and only has for its elements what the Chinese call ‘the five tones’, which here are G, A, B, D, E, among which there is neither an F nor a C. (4) Finally, in this disfigured air from Rousseau's Dictionnaire, there are some other wrong notes which can be corrected either from the Chinese original that is given here [page 147] or from its translation on the first plate [sic; the bottom of page 146].
Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, four volumes (Paris: Eugene Onfroy, 1780), volume 1, 146. Reproduced from gallica.bnf.fr
La Borde, Essai, volume 1, 147. Reproduced from gallica.bnf.fr
La Borde, then, seems still to have had access to Amiot's 1754 manuscript translation in 1780. By the time that François-Joseph Fétis went looking for it, however – well after the Revolution – the manuscript had disappeared: ‘It is very frustrating’, Fétis writes in his entry on Amiot in the Biographie universelle des musiciens, ‘that Amiot's translation should have gone missing, for it is certainly no longer in the Imperial Library of France, even though it was there in the epoch in which the abbé Roussier was charged with publishing the Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois’ (‘il est très fâcheux que la traduction d'Amiot se soit égarée; car il est certain qu'elle n'existe pas à la Bibliothèque impériale de France, bien qu'elle y fût à l’époque où l'abbé Roussier fut chargé de la publication du Mémoire sur la Musique des Chinois’).Footnote 35 Interestingly enough, however, La Borde's musical example (Figure 2) shows up in another source associated with Amiot, namely the manuscript entitled ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’ that is now housed in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale (Rés. Vmb. Ms. 14).Footnote 36 There, on page 136 (the manuscript is paginated, not foliated), the musical example reproduced as Figure 4a appears. As the reader should again verify, this version of the melody corresponds closely to what La Borde gives, with the following exceptions: Rousseau's e2 is reinstated in bars 12 and 23; there is a light rhythmic variant in bar 5 (a dotted crotchet plus quaver at the beginning of the bar, in place of La Borde's two crotchets); and bars 16–19 give a variant reading of the corresponding passage in La Borde's version.
Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Département de la Musique, Rés. Vmb. Ms 14, 136. Reproduced from gallica.bnf.fr
It is worth emphasizing that ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’ cannot be the missing translation of Li Guangdi. First, the reading of the air chinois in Rés. Vmb. Ms. 14 does not entirely agree with that given in La Borde's Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne. La Borde could, of course, have introduced these variants, but it is unclear why he would have done so, especially in a context that takes Rousseau to task for similar infidelities. Second, La Borde's citation – he refers to ‘booklet C, pages 53 and following’ – does not line up with the placement of the air chinois in Rés. Vmb. Ms. 14, where that melody appears instead on pages 136 and 139 (the latter is reproduced as Figure 4b). Finally, and more generally, Rés. Vmb. Ms. 14 contains none of the passages that contemporaneous writers attribute to it. Rameau, for instance, speaks of a great fire that destroyed Li Guangdi's first version.Footnote 37 (This, indeed, is one of the mangled passages for which Amiot takes Rameau to task.Footnote 38) No mention of any such fire appears in Rés. Vmb. Ms. 14.
Amiot, ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’, 139. Reproduced from gallica.bnf.fr
The manuscript, on the other hand, is probably correctly attributed to Amiot, if only because no other contemporaneous French writer could have boasted the erudition that would have been required to pen the detailed explications of Chinese instruments that occupy pages 10–71.Footnote 39 And we know that the manuscript must date, at the latest, from the middle part of the eighteenth century, because François Arnaud (1721–1784) published extracts from it in the Journal étranger in 1757, extracts that were reprised in 1768 in his and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard's (1735–1817) Variétés littéraires.Footnote 40 It is curious, to be sure, that Amiot makes no mention of this second text in the preliminary discourse to his Mémoire, but then he also fails to mention a third manuscript, the ‘Cantilenae Sinicae signis Europeis expressae’ that he sent to the Royal Society in London in 1751 (Figure 5).Footnote 41
Amiot, ‘Cantilenae Sinicae signis Europeis expressae’, Royal Society, London, Letters and Papers, II, 422, fol. 1r. © Royal Society. Used by permission
Arnauld and Suard, in any case, sowed considerable confusion when they styled their printed extracts as a ‘Traduction manuscrite d'un Livre sur l'ancienne Musique Chinoise, composé par Ly-koang-ty, Docteur & Membre du premier Tribunal des Lettrés de l'Empire, Ministre, &c’ (Manuscript translation of a book on ancient Chinese music, composed by Li Guangdi, Doctor and Member of the first Tribunal of Litterati of the Empire, Minister, etc.). The extracts are not, to reiterate, from Amiot's missing 1754 translation: they come instead from ‘De la musique Moderne des Chinois’, and that manuscript corresponds in neither its content nor its physical disposition to what we know about the missing translation. Arnaud and Suard's title is thus entirely spurious. But, as yet another wrinkle, La Borde seems to have had access to both manuscripts in preparing his Essai. For while the transcription of Lieou ye kin in chapter 15 of volume 1 must come, as I indicated above, from Amiot's lost manuscript translation, extensive passages from volume 2, chapter 17 are taken instead from ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’.Footnote 42
I cannot, alas, resolve all the mysteries surrounding these materials here.Footnote 43 I can, however, definitively evaluate Tchen's claim that Rousseau took the melody from Amiot, whether from the missing manuscript translation, from ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’, or even from the manuscript transcriptions in London. Recall that Rousseau's Dictionnaire appeared in the final months of 1767, with a publication date of 1768 on its title-page. The air chinois figures in the plates joined to the end of the text, and is cited in two entries, under the headwords ‘Caracteres [sic] de musique’ and ‘Musique’. The Dictionnaire itself began life in about 1753, originally as a modest revision of the extended set of articles on music that Rousseau supplied to Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie.Footnote 44 Those entries were apparently assembled all at once, in the astonishingly short span of three months, from about January to April in 1749.Footnote 45 Once finished, the articles were sent to Diderot, who passed them on to d'Alembert (as the Encyclopédie's science editor) one year later – that is to say, in about March or April of 1750.Footnote 46 These dates matter because the passages in question were in fact copied over unaltered into the Dictionnaire from the earlier Encyclopédie entries. Here, for instance, is the key passage from MUSIQUE, as it appears in the Encyclopédie:
On a beaucoup souhaité de voir quelques fragmens de l'ancienne musique, le P. Kircher & M. Burette ont travaillé à satisfaire là-dessus la curiosité du public. On trouvera dans nos Pl[anches] de Musique deux morceaux de musique grecque traduits sur nos notes par ces auteurs . . . On a ajouté dans la même Planche, un air chinois tiré du pere du Halde[.]Footnote 47
We have very much wished to see some fragments of ancient music. Father Kircher and Monsieur Burette have worked to satisfy the curiosity of the public on this point. One will find in the music plates two examples of Greek music transcribed into our notes by these authors . . . We have added on the same plate, a Chinese air taken from Father Du Halde.
It stands to reason that Rousseau would have delivered, together with the discursive texts of his entries, the accompanying figures, tables and examples that were to be engraved and published in the Encyclopédie's plates, since he cites these ancillary materials frequently in the body of his entries.Footnote 48 Very few manuscript materials pertaining to the Encyclopédie have survived. One that does, however, is an autograph version of selected musical examples, including the air chinois, that is held in the British Library and reproduced here as Figure 6.Footnote 49 (This document, incidentally, also serves to establish that the famous printing errors for which La Borde so harshly criticized Rousseau are actually engraver's errors: the notes in bar 3 of the handwritten exemplar are correct, in the sense of matching other European witnesses to the melody.) If I am correct in thinking that this manuscript is coeval with Rousseau's production of the original articles for the Encyclopédie, then it also serves to exclude on chronological grounds the possibility that Amiot was the source. The first manuscripts on Chinese music by Amiot to arrive in Europe were the transcriptions that he sent to London in 1751. These, we know from the Royal Society's records, were received on 1 March 1753.Footnote 50 The lost Li Guangdi translation, on Rameau's testimony, reached Jean-Pierre de Bougainville (1722–1763), the Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, in 1754.Footnote 51 Whenever ‘De la musique moderne des Chinois’ was sent, it certainly cannot have been before 1750, the year of Amiot's arrival in China – or indeed, before 1751, when he first reached Beijing.Footnote 52 Rousseau's Encyclopédie articles, however, date from 1749. It follows that Rousseau cannot possibly have taken the air chinois from Amiot. There is also no evidence to suggest that Rousseau subsequently acquired any knowledge of Amiot's writings. Those writings are, to my knowledge, first mentioned in print in 1760, in Rameau's Code de musique pratique. Yet in a marginal note scrawled into the Neuchâtel manuscript of his Dictionnaire de musique, Rousseau claims never to have read the Code:
Il est vrai que je n'ai point lû le Code de Musique ni les derniers écrits de M. Rameau ainsi je n'en puis rien dire mais j'aimerois mieux cent fois jetter ce dictionnaire au feu que de relire de ma vie une seule page de cet auteur avec l'obligation de la comprendre.Footnote 53
It is true that I have not read the Code de musique or the other later writings of M. Rameau and thus I cannot say anything about them. But I would a hundred times rather throw this dictionary into the fire than ever in my life reread a single page of that author with the obligation to understand it.
Of course, that assertion might not be true (though why would Rousseau deliberately lie in a private marginal note?), but it remains the case that Rousseau's extant writings on music contain no references to Amiot (nor, to judge by the index, does the Correspondance complète). But in any case, on chronological grounds alone, Rousseau cannot have taken the air chinois from Amiot. Tchen's claim can therefore be dismissed.
Rousseau, Manuscript examples for the Encyclopédie. British Library, Add MS 29,627, fol. 22r. © British Library Board. Used by permission
DU HALDE
If Rousseau clearly knew the air chinois before it could have reached him through Amiot's writings, does it follow that he took it from Du Halde? This, after all, is what Rousseau explicitly says in both the Encyclopédie and the Dictionnaire de musique. The second article from the Dictionnaire to mention Du Halde is the entry ‘Charactères de musique’. There Rousseau somewhat credulously repeats an anecdote from that learned Jesuit's Description de la Chine:
Il n'y a que les Nations de l'Europe qui sachent écrire leur Musique. Quoique dans les autres parties du Monde chaque Peuple ait aussi la sienne, il ne paroît pas qu'aucun d'eux ait poussé ses recherches jusqu’à des Caractères pour la noter. Au moins est-il sûr que les Arabes ni les Chinois, les deux Peuples étrangers qui ont le plus cultivé les Lettres, n'ont, ni l'un ni l'autre, de pareils Caractères . . . quant aux Chinois, on trouve dans le P. du Halde, qu'ils furent étrangement surpris de voir les Jésuites noter et lire sur cette même Note tous les Airs Chinois qu'on leur faisoit entendre.Footnote 54
It is only the nations of Europe that know how to write their music. Although in other parts of the world each people has its own music, it appears that none of them has pushed its enquiries so far as to arrive at characters for notating it. It is certain at least that neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, the two foreign peoples who have most cultivated letters, have such characters . . . As for the Chinese, we find in Father Du Halde, that they were strangely surprised to see the Jesuits notating and reading from that same notation all the Chinese airs that they were made to hear.
This much-repeated anecdote, which appears in multiple sources, seems to have originated with Ferdinand Verbiest, who recounts it in his Astronomia europæa sub imperatore Tartaro Sinico Cám Hý (1687).Footnote 55 To recall only the most salient detail, the scene has it that when Filippo Grimaldi (1638–1712) and Tomás Pereira (1645–1708) appeared before Kangxi in 1676, the latter greatly impressed the Emperor by his facility in jotting down and then singing back an unnamed Chinese melody performed by the Emperor and his musicians. Rousseau had the anecdote from Du Halde, who tells it in a version very close to Verbiest's. Du Halde, incidentally, only says that the Chinese lack ‘notes de musique’, meaning presumably that they did not have a system of musical notation that looked like the European one – with its staves and different noteheads and so on.Footnote 56 The entirely spurious inference that the Chinese had no indigenous system of musical notation whatsoever seems to have been Rousseau's. (This error, incidentally, is a further proof that Rousseau had not read Amiot, who gives the air chinois not just in European but also in gongche (工尺譜) notation, something that would have disabused Rousseau of his error if he had seen it; see Figure 4b above. There is a particular irony here in that Rousseau's own system of musical notation, advanced in the Dissertation sur la musique moderne, bears a conceptual resemblance to gongche notation.Footnote 57)
Beyond Rousseau's explicit avowals, there is also independent evidence available to show that he was reading Du Halde in the late 1740s. In penury as ever, but now with Thérèse Lavasseur and her family to support, Rousseau took a job as secretary to the Dupin family.Footnote 58 Though he downplays and makes light of this arrangement in the Confessions,Footnote 59 Rousseau was extensively employed not just by Louise-Marie-Madeleine Dupin, née de Fontaine (1706–1799) and by her stepson Louis-Claude de Francueil (1715–1787), but also by the paterfamilias, the tax-farmer (fermier général) Claude Dupin (1696–1769), who was by that time one of the wealthiest men in Paris. He assisted M. Dupin in drafting two refutations of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des loix.Footnote 60 With M. de Francueil, he attended Guillaume-François Rouelle's (1703–1770) chemistry lectures and assembled the notes he took into the Institutions chymiques (1747).Footnote 61 With Mme Dupin, he collaborated on a projected Traité de l'amitié as well as the proto-feminist treatise that is generally known as the ‘Ouvrage sur les femmes’.Footnote 62 (There is, of course, a particular irony to this last, given the vehement misogyny to which Rousseau would later give vent in the Confessions, in the Lettre à d'Alembert, and especially in Émile. Footnote 63)
The manuscripts pertaining to Mme Dupin's ‘Ouvrage sur les femmes’ remained in the possession of her descendants until the mid-twentieth century, when, between 1951 and 1958, they were auctioned off in five sales at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. The principal repositories of these materials are now the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Bibliothèque de Genève and the Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, with some materials also held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, at Harvard University's Houghton Library and at the Bibliothèque d’études rousseauistes in Montmorency.Footnote 64 The manuscripts are of two broad kinds: continuous drafts of chapters intended for Mme Dupin's projected works and – something of considerable interest to rousseauistes anxious to reconstruct the philosophe's intellectual activities on the eve of the First Discourse (1750) – extracts and reading notes in Rousseau's own hand. Among these last are twenty-five leaves bearing extracts from Du Halde's Description de la Chine.Footnote 65 None of the leaves that I have seen preserves an extract pertaining to Du Halde's comments on music – let alone a copy of the air chinois – but they do serve to establish that Rousseau had all four volumes of Du Halde's work in his hands.
One might reasonably wonder why Tchen dismisses Rousseau's own testimony. Rousseau says explicitly that he took the melody from Du Halde, and he was demonstrably reading the Description de la Chine in approximately the right period. Part of the reason, perhaps, is La Borde, who mentions Rousseau's version in close proximity to Amiot's. But a second factor is the significant misreading of Du Halde's version (Figure 7) that Tchen inherited from earlier French scholarship. Note that Du Halde's transcription is written in French violin clef (G1), so that the starting note is g2 – exactly as in Rousseau. In his ‘Étude sur le système musical chinois’ of 1901, however, Antoine Deschevrens misread the clef as a standard treble clef (G2) and so presented the example a third too low (beginning on e2), while, curiously enough, also silently incorporating La Borde's metrical ‘correction’ (Figure 8).Footnote 66 Tchen takes over the mistake and likewise places Du Halde's melody a third too low (Figure 9).Footnote 67 Curiously, an early reader of Deschevrens's text, Ilmari Krohn, sensed that something had gone awry, but made things worse by proposing an alto clef (C3) for Deschevrens's treble;Footnote 68 Krohn's suggestion had the happy effect of bringing Deschevrens around to the correct solution in his reply,Footnote 69 but by that point the damage was done.Footnote 70
Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Déscription géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinois, four volumes (La Haye: Henri Scheulerleer, 1736), volume 3, plate between 328 and 329
Antoine Deschevrens, ‘Étude sur le système musical chinois’, Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 2 (1901), 526
Ysia Tchen, La musique chinoise en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1974), 35
PRÉVOST
What, finally, of George Pire's alternative hypothesis – that Rousseau took the melody from Antoine-François Prévost (1697–1763)? One of the main preoccupations of Pire's article is simply to emphasize the extent of Rousseau's debt to the Histoire générale des voyages.Footnote 71 Pire's other essential concern is with how certain ‘big ideas made fashionable by travel accounts’ (‘grandes idées mises à la mode par les récits de voyages’) came to mark Rousseau's thought, above all in the two Discourses and Émile.Footnote 72 (By ‘grandes idées’, Pire has in mind such themes as Rousseau's polemics against swaddling clothes and in favour of maternal breast-feeding in book one of Émile, on the one hand, but also much of his portrait of l'homme naturel in the first part of the Second Discourse.Footnote 73) On his way to making these larger points, Pire mentions the air chinois in passing:
L'air chinois que nous trouvons également à la fin du Dictionnaire de Musique est, d'après ce qu'on lit chez Rousseau, repris au Pére du Halde. En fait, il provient de l’H. G. V. Quand Jean-Jacques nous parle de l'absence de notation musicale en Chine et de l’émerveillement de l'empereur en voyant le Père Pereira écrire la musique qu'il entendait et la reproduire aussitôt, il se réfère encore à l’H. G. V. Footnote 74
The Chinese melody that is likewise found at the end of the Dictionnaire de musique is, according to what we read in Rousseau, taken from Father Du Halde. In fact, it comes from the Histoire générale des voyages. When Jean-Jacques tells us of the absence of musical notation in China and the amazement of the emperor at seeing Father Pereira write down the music that he heard and then reproducing it straight away, he is again following the Histoire générale des voyages.
This, however, is all he says. Pire is content to insist on the alleged fact; he says nothing about its warrant – how, that is, he thinks he knows that Rousseau took the air chinois from Prévost and not from Du Halde. To the extent that there is an implicit argument, it seems merely to be that Rousseau demonstrably relied extensively on the abbé Prévost's collection, and that the relevant details appear there.Footnote 75
Of course, these details are transmitted by Prévost. Figure 10, for instance, gives the air chinois as it appears in the Histoire générale des voyages. And it is clear enough from Pire's substantial catalogue of borrowings that Rousseau made extensive use of Prévost's collection when he came to write his Discours sur l'inégalité (Second Discourse) in 1753–1754.Footnote 76 Prévost is mentioned twice in the Confessions, first in connection with the circle of friends gathered around François Mussard (1691–1755) at Passy in book eight, and then again much later on for his translations of Hume.Footnote 77 The first passage occurs in close conjunction with Rousseau's narration of the circumstances surrounding his composition of Le devin du village, which places it around 1752.Footnote 78 Prévost's name does not appear in Sénéchal's catalogue of the Dupin–Rousseau papers, which, of course, does not mean that Rousseau had not read the Histoire générale des voyages by the late 1740s, only that no reading notes survive in his hand.Footnote 79 Prévost does, on the other hand, show up in Le Bouler and Lafarge's studies of Rousseau's and Mme Dupin's borrowings from the Bibliothèque du roi, though the entry is from 14 April 1750. On that date, Mme Dupin borrowed volume 6 (1748) of the quarto edition (in twenty volumes) published by Didot.Footnote 80
Antoine François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, ou Nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyage, twenty volumes (Paris: Didot, 1746–1761), volume 6, plate between 288 and 289
Thanks to Michèle Duchet's archival sleuthing,Footnote 81 we know that the old shelfmark – ‘1498’ – given in the library's Registres des livres prestésFootnote 82 corresponds to ‘G.6057’ in the library's current catalogue. Volume 6, the one Mme Dupin borrowed, belongs to a phase of Prévost's project early enough to remain quite close to the model of Green's New General Collection of Travels and Voyages (1745–1747), which Prévost began by simply translating (Green's book is the collection anglaise to which Pire alludes). Green in turn copied from multiple earlier sources, but principally from Du Halde's Description de la Chine. In fact, pages 1–499 of the volume Mme Dupin borrowed are in effect taken over largely from Du Halde. As Prévost writes in his introduction to the volume: ‘In making use of all the authors just named, I did not neglect to follow here, as my principal guide, Father Du Halde, who took the trouble to excerpt everything that merits any attention from them’ (‘En faisant usage de tous les Auteurs qu'on vient de nommer, on ne laissera pas de suivre ici, pour principal guide, le Pere du Halde, qui a pris la peine d'en tirer tout ce qui mérite quelque'attention’).Footnote 83 This holds particularly true for the relevant part of the chapter ‘Goût des Chinois pour la Musique, la Poësie & l'Histoire’. There Prévost closely paraphrases Du Halde's chapter on Chinese music (‘De leur musique’), including the much-repeated story about Pereira's audience before the Kangxi Emperor.Footnote 84 As in Du Halde, a plate with examples of Chinese melodies is tipped in amidst the discussion, though Prévost produces only the first two of Du Halde's five examples. And so Rousseau's air chinois appears in Prevost's volume in the form given in Figure 10. The volume itself, to recall, was published in 1748, and so was in principle available to Rousseau as he was writing the articles for the Encyclopédie, even if Mme Dupin did not borrow it until April 1750.
So did Rousseau take the melody from Prévost or from Du Halde? To some degree, the point is moot: Prévost's account is loosely copied from Du Halde in any case, and so the question amounts in one sense to a distinction without a difference. Rousseau had clearly read Du Halde by March of 1749, when he wrote his Encyclopédie articles; that he may well have also read Prévost cannot be rigorously excluded. Which of these two sources he in fact had in front of him when he copied out the air chinois in the early months of 1749 might therefore seem unimportant. Still, a closer look at Du Halde's and Prévost's transcriptions, and a comparison of their notations with Rousseau's, suggests that Du Halde is more likely. A first consideration is rhythmic: Prévost gives the melody largely in dotted rhythms, whereas in Du Halde (as in Rousseau) these are flattened into even quavers. The misprint in the rhythmic values at beat two of bar one in Prévost is easily corrected. But had Rousseau been copying from Prévost, would he have just as easily altered the c2 on the fourth beat of bar 3 to d2? Or altered the rhythmic organization of bar 2 from Prévost's version to Du Halde's two dactyls and made similar rhythmic adjustments elsewhere? In short, while Rousseau's version corresponds approximately to Prévost's, it matches Du Halde's more or less exactly.
In sum: by way of a first – bibliographical – conclusion, I can say with reasonable confidence that Rousseau took the air chinois from Du Halde, and not from Amiot, Prévost or any other source. Of the three principal sources, Rousseau's version of the air most closely resembles Du Halde's – the other two witnesses transmit variant versions. Moreover, since Rousseau himself maintains that he took the melody from Du Halde, the burden of proof clearly lies with Tchen or Pire in wanting to make the case for Amiot or Prévost respectively. On chronological grounds alone, Amiot's candidacy can be eliminated: Amiot did not arrive in China until 1750 (and was not in Beijing until the summer of 1751), but Rousseau's Encyclopédie articles, which cite the air chinois, were written in 1749. La Borde's suggestion, which Tchen echoes, that Rousseau took the melody from Amiot is therefore mistaken. Prévost's discussion, in contrast, was certainly available to Rousseau in 1749. None the less, the weight of the evidence points to Du Halde. Again: Rousseau claimed to have taken the melody from Du Halde; he was demonstrably reading Du Halde in the later 1740s; and his version matches Du Halde's up to slight rhythmic variants and of course the famous misprint (which, to reiterate, is an engraver's mistake that did not enter the transmission until the melody's publication in the Dictionnaire de musique). Any further argument in support of Pire's reconstruction would need to explain why Rousseau's version should depart from its alleged source in Prévost in ways that bring it closer to Du Halde, and also why Rousseau would have wished to conceal his actual source.
It is a curious fact that this one melody shows up in so many variants, in so many French sources (some of them, at least, independent of one another) and that it is so often paired with the anecdote about Pereira and Kangxi. Why this particular melody? Why this anecdote? And from where, exactly, did Du Halde, Prévost and Amiot each get the tune? Answers to these questions must, alas, await further research, as must a fuller probing of the epistolary and other networks linking the Jesuit mission in Beijing to the high Parisian Enlightenment, by way of the Académie des Inscriptions and the office of the French Secretary of State – a network that made these two far-flung world capitals seem more proximate, in the later eighteenth century, than they had any geographical right to be. In pursuing the narrow question of the source of Rousseau's air chinois, I hope I have at least gestured towards the scholarly, scientific and diplomatic networks that facilitated its transmission.
