Abstract
During the famous Querelle des bouffons opposing the rival champions of French and Italian music in 1752, the king of Prussia—Frederick the Great—wrote to the French public, tongue-in-cheek. In his letter, he criticized the censorship preventing the performance of foreign musical pieces in the kingdom of France. The interdiction had, in his mind, international consequences:
Tremble for the peace of Europe, [the Querelle] is an event that can overturn the equilibrium and the balance of powers that our fathers so wisely established. The system of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre is done for; never will we be able to put it into effect.
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Notes
Frederick II, “Lettre au public,” in La Querelle des Bouffons, ed. D. Launay (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), 1:591.
See A.C. Keys, “The Etymology of the Concerto,” Italica 48 (1971): 446–62.
See, for example, René Albrecht-Carrié, The Concert of Europe (New York: Walker, 1968);
John Lower, The Concert of Europe: International Relations, 1814–70 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990).
Carsten Holbraad, The Concert of Europe: A Study in German and British International Theory, 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1970).
See Florence Alazard, “La métaphore musicale et la genèse de l’État moderne,” in L’institution musicale, ed. Jean-Michel Bardez et al. (Sampzon: Delatour, 2011), 67;
Roland Bleiker, “Of Things We Hear but Cannot See: Musical Explorations of International Politics,” in Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture, and Politics, ed. M[arianne] I. Franklin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 183.
Merle L. Perkins, The Moral and Political Philosophy of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (Paris: Droz and Minard, 1959), 28.
Edouard Goumy, Étude sur la vie et les écrits de l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre (Paris: Bourdier, 1859), 31; emphasis in the original.
Saint-Pierre, Annales politiques: 1658–1740 (Paris: Champion, 1912), 97.
See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 361–400.
See John M. Sherwig, “Lord Grenville’s Plan for a Concert of Europe, 1797–99,” Journal of Modern History 34 (1962): 284–93.
Joël Cornette, Le roi deguerre: Essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du Grand Siècle (Paris: Payot, 1993).
John Spitzer, “Metaphors of the Orchestra—The Orchestra as a Metaphor,” Musical Quarterly 80 (1996): 234–64.
Julia Simon, “Singing Democracy: Music and Politics in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 441.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Contrat social (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966), 50.
John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 512–14.
See Jacqueline Waeber, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘unité de mélodie,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62 (2009): 79–143.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Accord,” Dictionnaire de musique, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 5:635.
See, for instance, Philip Zelikow, “The New Concert of Europe,” Survival 34/2 (1992): 12–30;
Richard Rosecrance, “A New Concert of Powers,” Foreign Affairs 71/2 (1992): 64–82;
Joseph S. Nye, “Seven Tests: Between Concert and Unilateralism,” The National Interest 66 (Winter 2001/2002): 5.
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© 2014 Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet
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Ramel, F. (2014). Perpetual Peace and the Idea of “Concert” in Eighteenth-Century Thought. In: Ahrendt, R., Ferraguto, M., Mahiet, D. (eds) Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463272_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463272_7
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