Summary: 240 years ago today – on July 2, 1778 – the Swiss-born philosopher, novelist, educator, music theorist and critic, and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau died at age 66 in the township of Ermenonville, roughly 25 miles north-east of Paris.<br> Rousseau was one of the greatest and most significant thinkers ever born to our species. According to Will and Ariel Durant, writing in their book Rousseau and Revolution, Rousseau:<br> “transformed education, elevated the morals of France[!], inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before.”<br> Rousseau also helped to redefine the role and substance of opera at a time when opera – like movies and television today – was not just a form of entertainment but both a reflection and a driver of the political and social values of its time.<br> A little background<br> Opera was invented in Florence Italy around 1600 as a courtly entertainment. Its inventors were convinced that they were recreating, in modern guise, ancient Greek drama, which they believed was entirely sung.<br> In 1639, the first public opera house opened in Venice. By 1670, there were seven opera houses in Venice, pumping out over 50 different productions a season. Sadly, Venetian opera’s growing popularity resulted in operas of ever-lower literary quality: dog-and-pony shows that featured insipid stories, visual spectacle, and over-the-top virtuosic singing. In the words of Joseph Kerman:<br> “Venetian opera had thrown dignity into the canals. It was the worst period of Italian opera.”<br> And so ensued the first of many operatic reforms, during which serious writers and composers periodically attempted to rescue and re-elevate opera from puerile entertainment to high art.<br> <a href="https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/course/how-to-listen-understand-opera/"></a>By the mid-eighteenth century, the dominant style of opera was opera seria, or “serious opera”: a formulaic operatic structure that alternated arias and recitatives, peopled by gods and heroes drawn from ancient history and myth singing music as overblown as the characters themselves.<br> Opera seria was embraced by the royalty and nobility of Europe, who perceived its heroic plots centered around ancient gods, kings, and warriors as a reflection of their own magnificence. Ultimately, the absolutist rulers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries co-opted opera seria; in France, opera actually became a powerful propaganda tool of the state.<br> However, by 1750 opera seria’s days were numbered, and what would drive it to its doom was the rise of an ever-growing middle class.<br> Yes: a small-to-middling middle class of some sort had existed in Europe since the High Middle Ages: merchants who traded in capital and goods; bureaucrats; and skilled artisans who served the mercantile and administrative needs of the towns and cities. They were the “bourgeoisie”: literally, the “town-dwellers”.<br> However, by the early eighteenth century they were much more than that. Tremendous population growth and urban development had created entirely new patterns and methods of trade, manufacturing, ownership, and banking, all of which served to create a large and ever-growing bourgeoisie whose wealth was based on cash. A dynamic, entrepreneurial spirit had come to characterize the life of Western European towns and cities, as a large segment of the population strove to make money and perhaps even buy a title and some land. According to the contemporary Scottish novelist Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771):<br> “Without money, there is no respect, honor,
