In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country.  A violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards.  The quarrel between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height.  The Parliament had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State.  The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another channel.  Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and position that Italian music is good.  Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any.  Their language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit either for poetry or music.  All national music must derive its principal characteristics from the language.  Now if there is a language in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing.  It is sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its pronunciation more flowing.  It is sonorous because most of the vowels are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no nasal vowels.  Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French.  And so onwards, with much close grappling of the matter.  French melody does not exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it beautiful.[320]

The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the like.  Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained hardly rewards the labour.  As for counterfugues, double fugues, and “other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify,” they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism—­shows that even a man who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not escape its influence.