"Polymnie" de Marmontel et la guerre des deux musiques

Résumé En

Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1800), a successful writer and active encyclopaedist, was also a librettist. As Piccinni’s collaborator, he was at the forefront of the famous quarrel that opposed gluckists to partisans of the Italian composer. With Polymnie, which he started writing as soon as 1777, he brought out a major contribution to the quarrel in pointing out, in the guise of a paean to Piccinni, the excellence of his choices and talent. In this burlesque poem of over 3,500 decasyllables, Marmontel stages the muse of song, Polymnia, as well as her setbacks and successes, so as to mock Gluck and his partisans by denouncing the lowliness of their motivations. In attacking attackers, Marmontel took the risk of being guilty of what he blamed his opponents for, i.e. the use of ad hominem attacks and derisive witticisms to ridicule the enemy. Satire, which he condemned elsewhere on aesthetic and moral grounds, is therefore double-edged; the poem was not published in its author’s lifetime. The issue is also to reveal the genuine nature of Gluck’s music in opposing it to Piccinni’s,seen as being harmonious and free-flowing: next to strongly-marked aesthetic characteristics (Gluck is shown as a “German wolf”), Marmontel posits a form of cultural universalism. Beyond the strictly musical aspects of the quarrel, Polymnie epitomises an age of taste that favoured organised regularity over frantic disorders, Virgil over Homer and Racine over Shakespeare,according to criteria that remain both aesthetic and moral.