War of the Buffoons
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The War of the Buffoons (French: Querelle des Bouffons) was the name given to a battle of musical philosophies in Europe during the 1750's. The controversy was sparked by the reaction of literary Paris to a performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's opera La Serva Padrona in at the Paris Opera in 1752. Pergolesi's work was performed on the same evening as Acis et Galatée by the seventeenth-century composer Jean Baptiste Lully and critics were struck by the melodic character of the former and its contemporary and domestic plot which they contrasted with the stilted artificiality and grandiose subject-matter of the latter. In the controversy which followed critics such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, together with other writers associated with the Encyclopédie praised Italian opera buffa and compared it favourably to French lyric tragedy, a style originated by Lully and promoted, among then-living composers by French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Rameau defended his works in a series of essays, and continued to write music in his own style. The musical debate essentially ended when Rameau died in 1764.fr:Querelle des Bouffons ko:부퐁 논쟁 it:Querelle des bouffons ja:ブフォン論争
