Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze.  He had himself taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other controversies of the century.  The French, as he said, forgive everything in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes as of an axe.[322] Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to put him in the Bastille.  This we may fairly surmise to have been a fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera.  After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in releasing him from them.[323] Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324] He went as often as he could to hear the works both of Gretri and Gluck, and Orfeo delighted him, while the Fausse magie of the former moved him to say to the composer, “Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought my heart had long been closed."[325] This being so, and life being as brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy.  It may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music for the Encyclopaedia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his own.

His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical instruction.  The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people.  Hence, although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocal performances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom Rousseau thought.  This is the true distinction of music, it is for the people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons to sing at sight.  The difficulty of the old notation had come practically before him as a teacher.  The quantity of details which the pupil