What a joy Rousseau's Village Soothsayer is: surely the first opera whose words and music were written by the same person! Aside from its exhilarating musical discourse, this work illustrates the many contradictions that litter the life and work of a figure who was soon to declare, in his Lettre sur la musique française, that Italian vocal music was superior. "There is neither a clear beat nor melody in French music", he boldly stated, "because the French language is not susceptible to either. French song is only a continual squealing, intolerable to every unbiased ear; French harmony is brutish, without expression and suggests nothing other than the filling material of a beginner; the French “air” is not an air at all; and the French recitative is not at all a recitative. From all this I conclude that the French do not have music, and that if they ever do have it, it will be all the worse for them."
Nothing too controversial then! Le Devin du village gives a gentle contradiction to this earlier statement (which Rousseau would go back on when he heard Gluck sung in French): memorable melodies (including some real hits), a delicious vocal line, perfectly comprehensible and yet intimately French: all the elements of this 1752 "intermède" add up to a real gem of French lyrical art from the middle of the 18th century. Unfortunately, the work has rarely been recorded, and so we mustn’t take this new work from Sébastian d'Hérin for granted. Here he leads his ensemble, Les Nouveaux Caractères. The recording took place in July 2017, during concerts at the Queen's Theatre of Versailles. © SM/Qobuz