Tili Boon Cuillé's study, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts, takes as its point of departure a selection of writings by Dubos, Batteux, Rousseau, Diderot and Jacques Cazotte familiar from many accounts of eighteenth-century French music aesthetics. Although her initial focus is on criticism produced during the Querelle des Bouffons (1752–4), particularly Rousseau's Lettre sur la musique française (1753), Cuillé extends well beyond the Querelle into the 1760s and 1770s to address responses to Rousseau in such texts as Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau and Cazotte's Ollivier and Le Diable amoureux, here expanding the purview of much previous scholarly engagement with the Querelle. Cuillé's reading of the fourth canto of Ollivier as a parody of the Lettre sur la musique française is of particular interest and illustrates the relevance of literary texts for a consideration of the impact of the Querelle.Footnote ¹

The guiding concept of the study is the idea of the ‘musical tableau’. Drawing from the work of Michael Fried, Jay Caplan, David Denby and Pierre Frantz,Footnote ² Cuillé characterises the musical tableau as a ‘new discursive device’ that stages issues of politics and aesthetics through musical scenes taking place before an ‘inscribed beholder’, that is, a character acting as a spectator within the fictional world. The studies of Caplan and Denby in particular provide a link from the painterly and theatrical conception of the tableau in Diderot to the field of narrative fiction. In Cuillé's view, the musical tableau is an especially powerful means of depicting female characters, who are shown to mobilise their musical skills in scenes of intimate self-presentation and communication.

After an introduction establishing the theory of the musical tableau and separate chapters on Diderot and Cazotte, chapter 3 examines the on-stage songs in Beaumarchais's Figaro trilogy, closing the first part of the study (‘Music and Language: La Querelle des Bouffons’) and pivoting into more unfamiliar territory in the second part (‘Music and Morality: La Querelle des Femmes’). In this second part, Cuillé considers the ramifications of operatic disputes from the Querelle des Bouffons to the Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes on the work of women novelists writing in French, examining scenes of music-making in novels by Isabelle de Charrière, Sophie Cottin, Barbara Juliana von Krüdener and Germaine de Staël published from 1787 to 1807. Through depictions of musical performance, Cuillé argues, these authors directly engaged with Rousseau's views concerning the active participation of women in the arts and letters. The principal focus of the study, then, is the response of critics, dramatists and novelists to Rousseau's music aesthetics. Each part presents a constellation of texts that confront these issues: the first part centres on responses to Rousseau's attack on the suitability of the French language for music in the Lettre sur la musique française (1753), the second part on critiques of Rousseau's views concerning women and the arts as expressed in the Lettre á d'Alembert and Émile. To this extent, the study forms a reception history of Rousseau's philosophy of music through the Revolution into the early nineteenth century, viewed not in terms of the history of music aesthetics as traditionally conceived (considering figures such as Chabanon and Lacepède), but through the lens of narrative fiction and drama. Whereas a focus on aesthetic texts such as Chabanon's De la musique considérée en elle-même et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poésie et le théâtre (1785) might trace the development of theories of imitation and the question of musical autonomy in relation to Rousseau, Cuillé's selection of texts foregrounds the relationship between musical cultivation, character and morality. This story of the reception of Rousseau's musical writings leads to the conclusion that Charrière, Staël, Cottin and Krüdener ‘collectively served to dissociate musicality and immorality in the minds of their contemporaries and readers, freeing women of subsequent generations from the suspicion that surrounded their musical pursuits’ (203).

The concept of the beholder is central to the distinction Cuillé draws between the broad category of ‘musical scenes’ and the ‘musical tableau’, which she defines more narrowly as a ‘musical performance staged for a beholder inscribed within the text’ (5–6). Not all references to episodes involving musical performance constitute ‘tableaux’ in the sense she defines; for example, Saint-Preux's description of Italian and French musical styles in Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse would qualify instead as a failed tableau.Footnote ³ The musical description in this passage is mediated through Saint-Preux's narration: rather than being presented as an episode directly before the reader, it exists only as Saint-Preux's desire for a moment of personal communion with Julie. Cuillé imagines rewriting the scene to give Julie a performative agency. The scene would then create a stronger temporal suspension within the plot and foreground Saint-Preux's inner experience as Julie's musical performance unfolds. The passage as it stands in the novel only contains the ‘raw materials’ for the construction of a genuine musical tableau. In its failure to materialise as an actual scene presented before an observer (Saint-Preux), the passage points to the essential characteristics of the true musical tableau. Not only must it take place before a witness, the tableau must be ‘internally dynamic’ and significantly alter the beholder's emotional condition and, therefore, the plot. Saint-Preux's narration is not the only failed tableau described in the study; we encounter a thwarted tableau in Malvina (158) and an interrupted tableau – and even an ‘anti-tableau’ – in Corinne (192–3 and 253). Cuillé might have explored these passages less as failures with respect to a definition and more as expressive and potentially self-conscious invocations of the trope of the musical tableau, in which the promise of musical immediacy is blocked by discursive distancing or events in the fictional world. Surely it would underscore the claim about the importance of musical tableaux to see these scenes strategically deferred or denied in certain instances. One is also left wondering if the extensive musical references in these novels – particularly in Corinne – which fall outside the category of the ‘tableau’ are not more significant, taken together, than the focus on the rare and pivotal ‘tableaux’ makes them seem.

Such questions or doubts that arise from Cuillé's interpretation of certain passages do not weaken the argument of the book as a whole but rather suggest the richness of the texts chosen in what amounts to a vastly expanded consideration of the cultural impact of the Querelle des Bouffons. Another question concerns the difference between the function of musical tableaux in narrative fiction and the theatre, as in Le Barbier de Séville, for example. Cuillé argues for the power of the musical tableau in part because it draws together spectacle and sound: ‘the combination of the musical and the visual arts in the musical tableau, or musical performance staged for a beholder inscribed within the text, enhances the appeal to the beholder's emotions via the ear and the eye, via successive and simultaneous signification, rendering it a particularly powerful persuasive device’ (xv, emphases in original). The ability of the tableau to operate at once successively and simultaneously holds for the primary beholder within a fictional world or the spectator in the theatre (observing the musical tableaux in Beaumarchais), but the effect must be displaced and of a different order for the reader of narrative fiction. The ‘simultaneous’ aspect of the tableau is visual in nature and would therefore seem to make the differences between spectator and reader – each distinct from the ‘inscribed beholder’ – worthy of greater comment. This distinction has relevance not only for the role of temporality in the tableau, as an on-stage performance asserts its own time upon the spectator, but for the role of interiority in novelistic versus dramatic presentation of character.

Another question that arises concerns the centrality of opera to the discussions of the musical tableaux in Charrière, Cottin, Krüdener and Staël. Whereas the material in part I is largely focused on operatic performance and style, the scenes described in part II involve a broader field of music-making that encompasses not only opera but Corinne's poetic improvisations, the chanson and other forms of singing more intimate than operatic performance, and sacred music. Despite Cuillé's judicious attempts to draw together the multiple strands of the narrative, particularly in the closing paragraphs of individual chapters and the ‘Afterward’, it is not always clear how much the themes circulating in the operatic criticism discussed in the first part are germane to the discussion of musical tableaux in part II.

It is possible, too, that Cuillé overvalues the Lettre sur la musique française, regardless of its admittedly incendiary effect on music criticism at mid-century, by focusing almost exclusively on its claims against the musicality of the French language. For example, Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux includes references to récitatif obligé and the ariette that point beyond the general issue of whether French is a musical language to more specific issues concerning vocal and instrumental idioms, as well as vocal virtuosity and the Italian style. Rousseau broached such questions in the Lettre itself and treated them more fully in his Dictionnaire de musique, which appeared in late 1767, well before Le Diable amoureux (1772).Footnote ⁴ Focusing on ‘the response of French authors who participated in the opera quarrels to Rousseau's attack on their language’ (xvii), Cuillé draws the conclusion that ‘Diderot, Cazotte, and Beaumarchais countered Rousseau's critique of the limitations of the French language by creating tableaux through which they convey music while continuing to write in French. The form of their tableaux thus put the lie to Rousseau's assertions’ (203). The importance of this diverse literary production seems to lie less in its existence as such but in the specific ways in which pantomime and diegetic musical performance, for instance, enrich traditional narrative and dramatic forms.

The value of the project for musicologists lies in the study of narrative fiction and drama as a means of engagement with the critical discourse of the Querelle des Bouffons and of music aesthetics more broadly. Cuillé's analyses lead to a greater understanding of the significance and configuration of musical scenes in fiction and point to the intersection of music and morality, a topic the novels studied in part II are particularly well suited to address. The musical tableau is a compelling object of study in that it presents not only characters in acts of persuasion but authors engaged in political and aesthetic argument – in the case of the novels examined here, attesting to the resonance of Rousseau's provocations concerning opera, musical expression, and the role of women in the arts and letters.