AUDIO BOOK

The Village Diviner

(1752)

The Village Diviner  is an interlude (small opera) in one act performed on October 18, 1752 at the Château de Fontainebleau before Louis XV and the court, and on March 1, 1753 at the Royal Academy of Music in Paris.  The Village Diviner  is the first opera whose words and music are by the same author. This work also illustrates the many contradictions that dot the life and intellectual work of a man who will proclaim, shortly afterwards, in his  Lettre sur la musique française , the "superiority" of Italian music (the foundation of which is said to lie in the more appropriateness of Italian for musical expression). However, a few years later, Rousseau changed his mind. He wrote in particular in 1774 to the composer Gluck, after having attended the rehearsals of his opera in French  Iphigenia in Aulide  “I have just left the rehearsal of your Opera d'Iphigénie; I am enchanted! You have achieved what I thought was impossible until now”. *