Pygmalion (Rousseau)
Pygmalion , (original title: Pigmalion, scène lyrique ), next to the village fortune teller ( Le devin du village , 1752), is the most influential, if rarely performed, stage work by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau . It is one of the first melodramas (that is, it consisted of spoken text and pantomime gestures with musical accompaniment) and was the foundation of one especially in the German-speaking area, where it spread in new settings (e.g. by Anton Schweitzer and Georg Benda ) new type of theater.
Without Rousseau's consent, who insisted that the first performance of 1770 could not be repeated and confirmed his loyalty to the statue's first interpreter, the piece in its own version remained in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française for about five years from 1775 .
material
The legend of the sculptor Pygmalion , who falls unhappily in love with one of his statues until the goddess Venus takes pity on him and brings the statue to life, comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses . In the Middle Ages , which endeavored to curb every secular cult of images , the material is to a certain extent taboo. However , there have been revisions since the Renaissance , and in the Baroque it becomes a popular subject for ballets . In all versions the futility and hopelessness of Pygmalion's endeavors and divine grace are emphasized as the solution to the problem. This makes Pygmalion an important vanitas symbol.
Emergence
In his youth work Narcisse, Rousseau caricatured Narcissus, who fell in love with his own mirror image, as a traditional vanitas motif. In response to the violent attacks as a result of his criticism of civilization in 1750 and his anti-nationalist rejection of French opera in the Buffonist dispute ( Lettre sur la musique française, 1753), he had the comedy performed in 1753, which, according to his foreword, should identify him as " homme de lettres ".
To legitimize the mirror image and echo as an alter ego was increasingly one of his concerns. Rousseau probably wrote the text for Pygmalion in 1762, but hesitated before performing it. Like his protagonist Pygmalion, he complained about his failure in composing the music. The businessman and amateur composer Horace Coignet was able to induce Rousseau to realize it and wrote the music together with him. The half-hour piece with its overture was performed in April 1770 in the Lyon town hall in a private setting with amateurs. His lack of professionalism, which should forestall the accusation of vanity, was part of the conception of the work. The fact that Rousseau wanted to withhold it from the public made it all the more famous.
Similar to his one-act opera Le devin du village (1752), Rousseau took the productions of the Parisian fairground theater as a model. Rousseau's Pygmalion is evidently the first version of the subject in which the main character brings his image to life by perfecting it without divine help. The last time the chisel is applied, the stone comes to life. Galathée begins to speak and recognizes her creator in reverse as her reflection: She touches herself and says “I”, touches another statue and says “not me”. Thereupon she touches Pygmalion and says: “Again me.” The dialogue with the reflection becomes a real dialogue, which turns the vanitas motif into the opposite.
It is important that the sculptor then swears eternal loyalty to his animated statue. He is not a collector. In Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Pigmalion (1748), which Rousseau undoubtedly envisioned as a counter-image, the main character, fixed on the image, is still unfaithful to a living lover, which was in keeping with the anti-image tradition of depictions of Pygmalion. In Rameau's work, the statue is not yet animated by the artist himself, but by Cupid hurrying to help .
music
In the animation of the picture without divine help, as presented by Rousseau, music plays a decisive role. The intention to play music was evidently more important to him than the type of music, since he no longer devoted nearly as much ambition to the composition of the musical numbers as he did to his ballet opera Les muses galantes (1745).
This indicates a change in the meaning of the musical: from now on music no longer laments an inevitable offense through its own powerless fading away, but becomes a sign of a coming to life, as a cipher for the imagination of the viewer, who moves the still and silent image and makes it eloquent. From now on, music stands for the collective will of an “audience” that should no longer be doomed to failure. Rousseau was much more hesitant than his followers towards this idea. The fact that Rousseau lends this meaning to melodramatic music is related to his socio-political ideals, especially his theory of the Volonté générale .
The score of Rousseau and Coignet contains short pantomime interludes between the text passages, so no music that sounds to the language. Instrumental music was considered inferior to singing until the 18th century. That the ghostly voices of musical instruments could help liven up an image was a new and daring claim at the time. Rousseau was conservative in that he only accepted instrumental music as dance music, i.e. in connection with body movement.
The melodramatic music in Pygmalion can be seen in the context of the efforts of that time, the ballet of the formalized sequence of steps of ballroom dancing to free as Jean-Georges Noverre had in mind. The short musical insertions are irregular and often have no final cadence . The overture , which imitates the sculptor's brave hammering, also demonstrates self-confident affirmation of life instead of humble denial of life.
Contemporary parallels
In 1762, the year the text was written, Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice was premiered, in which Orpheus brings his deceased wife Eurydice to life by singing instead of losing her through a lack of trust in the gods. With Gluck, however, it is still the god Eros who intervenes in a saving manner and brings about the animation. Orfeo does not yet come close to the arrogance of Pygmalion.
Together with Orfeo , Rousseau's Pygmalion demonstrated in the 1760s an attempted revaluation of artistic failure into success that intensified in Beethoven's time and increased to a triumph or an imperious pose by the beginning of the First World War (see, for example, Also sprach Zarathustra ( Strauss) ).
From a media history perspective, this is related to the increased importance of records, be it civil contracts according to Rousseau's work On the Social Contract or Principles of Constitutional Law (1762) or be it sheet music by great composers who are increasingly being declared a repertoire work (Rousseau had worked himself as a sheet music copyist for several years ). What was “held” should apply in future.
literature
- Edgar Istel: Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the composer of his lyrical scene Pygmalion, Wiesbaden: Walluf 1901.
- Annegret Dinter: The Pygmalion Stuff in European Literature. Heidelberg: Winter 1979. ISBN 3-533-02776-7
- Milovan Stanic, "Pygmalion révolutionnaire", in: Revue d'esthétique, 17: 1990, pp. 79-96.
- Carl Dahlhaus , Sieghart Döhring (ed.): Piper's Enzyklopädie des Musiktheater, Vol. 5, Munich: Piper 1994, p. 464f. ISBN 3-492-02415-7
- Jean Jacques Rousseau: Pygmalion, ed. Jacqueline Waeber, Geneva: Éditions Université-Conservatoire de Musique 1997. (critical edition)
