Mémoires, ou essai sur la musique

The agenda in these Mémoires, aimed at a wider audience than the select company of connoisseurs, is to convince readers that, despite the warring pamphlets and quarrels over particular composers, in which each one “preaches for his own saint”, “there is a saint for everyone” (p. 3), i.e. a music able to elicit universal acclaim, transcending genre and nationality. Drawing on his practical knowledge of music, his experience as a composer, Grétry sets himself to analyse the reasons for his works’ success, supporting his observations with numerous examples from great musicians such as Pergolesi, Lully, and Gluck. His aesthetic values align in many ways with those of Rousseau: melody is raised to the status of a fundamental musical principle, its quality dependent on the simplicity and emotional generosity of the soul that conceives it. Yet the melodist, though a “child of nature” (p. 261), must not overlook the harmonic resources of composition; Grétry ultimately takes an eclectic position, admitting, for example, Gluck’s expression of the passions through harmony and the orchestra rather than the human voice and melody.

It remains difficult to see this book as anything other than an “Essay on My Music”; if there really is “a saint for everyone”, a genuinely universal music, then Grétry, implicitly, is its model. On republication in 1797, the Mémoires were augmented with two new volumes containing descriptions of most of his operas, varying in detail and enriched with anecdotes about his life and on compositional technique. Beyond the details of interest to enthusiasts of his work, these two volumes are less dense and novelised than the first, which still reads as an essay.

Such an assessment,  however, risks diverting attention from a striking aspect of this work: its reception in the contemporary scientific community. The Mémoires were reprinted several more times (in 1812 and 1828) and translated into German by Karl Spazier in 1800. The physicist and musician Ernst Chladni promised in an 1801 letter to write a review of it. Moreover, Grétry was credited with several significant observations about music’s influence on the body – particularly rhythm’s effect on the pulse – as well as on the soul, as a balm for melancholy and a stimulant capable of inducing delirium. For this reason, he is often cited in medical theses and treatises from the early nineteenth century, such as Des maladies mentales (1838) by the French founder of alienism, Jean-Étienne Esquirol. Indeed, in trying to analyse the physical and moral effects of his music on audiences, Grétry started a line of inquiry into the connections between music and psychopathology, which paralleled the psychophysiological debates engendered by the rise of the human sciences during this period.

Pierre BROUILLET

28/06/2022

Trans. Tadhg Sauvey