Denis Diderot 'Rameau's Nephew' – 'Le Neveu de Rameau': A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition

The first edition of this book was viewed 5,242 times.

This new edition includes:
* Additional online resources
* Introduction
* Original text
* English translation
* Embedded audio-files
* Explanatory notes
* Interactive material
* 100 colour illustrations

In a famous Parisian chess café, a down-and-out, HIM, accosts a former acquaintance, ME, who has made good, more or less. They talk about chess, about genius, about good and evil, about music, they gossip about the society in which they move, one of extreme inequality, of corruption, of envy, and about the circle of hangers-on in which the down-and-out abides. The down-and-out from time to time is possessed with movements almost like spasms, in which he imitates, he gestures, he rants. And towards half past five, when the warning bell of the Opera sounds, they part, going their separate ways.

Probably completed in 1772-73, Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew fascinated Goethe, Hegel, Engels and Freud in turn, achieving a literary-philosophical status that no other work by Diderot shares. This interactive, multi-media and bilingual edition offers a brand new translation of Diderot’s famous dialogue, and it also gives the reader much more. Portraits and biographies of the numerous individuals mentioned in the text, from minor actresses to senior government officials, enable the reader to see the people Diderot describes, and provide a window onto the complex social and political context that forms the backdrop to the dialogue. Links to musical pieces specially selected by Pascal Duc and performed by students of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, illuminate the wider musical context of the work, enlarging it far beyond its now widely understood relation to opéra comique.

Read Marian Hobson's analysis of Diderot's interdisciplinarity on our

Pascal Duc began his career in music working in the Direction régionale for Cultural Affairs in the Paris basin (the Ile de France) and as administrator of the Festival of the Ile de France. He met Philippe Herreweghe at a moment when the rediscovery of ancient music was really taking off in France; this led to a collaboration round the Chapelle Royale then with the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées. He then became musical advisor to William Christie and Les Arts florissants. He still holds this post while being the Head of the Department of Early Music at the Conservatoire national supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Pascal has prepared a great number of working scores for Les Arts florissants, among which may be mentioned C. Monteverdi, Madrigals, Books 1 to 7 (8 and 9 are in preparation); G.F. Handel, Belshazzar and Te Deum HWV 208; G. Fauré and A. Messager, Mass for the Association of the Fishermen of Villerville, a version for choir, organ, and violin; H. Purcell, Incidental music for The Virtuous Wife - Distres'd Inocency.

Marian Hobson is Professorial Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a CBE and a Fellow of the British Academy. Prior to her post at Queen Mary, she was the first woman Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and earlier, taught at the University of Geneva. Her main interest is in the form and language in which philosophical writing is couched: her work in two areas, on Denis Diderot and on Jacques Derrida, both develop that interest. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Opening Lines (1998), and recently a number of articles.
She has published widely on eighteenth-century philosophy, in particular a study on illusion and aesthetics in relation to Diderot: The Object of Art (1982, 2008; 2007 in French). Rousseau and Diderot: networks of Enlightenment is a selection and translation of some of her articles, made by C. Warman and Kate Tunstall (2011). She has edited three French editions of texts by Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds et muets (2000), and Le Neveu de Rameau (2013).

Kate Tunstall is Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. She is the author of Blindness and Enlightenment (2011), which includes new translation of Diderot's Letter on the Blind and of La Mothe Le Vayer's Of a Blind Man. She has published on a broad range of subjects in French literature and culture from Diderot to Zola, and from Chardin to Racine and silent cinema.
She has recently edited the volume of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, entitled Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (2012), and co-edited a special issue of Romance Studies on questions of naming and renaming in early-modern Europe, to which she and Caroline Warman both contributed articles.

Caroline Warman is Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is the author of Sade: from Materialism to Pornography (2002) and has written widely on eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual history. She is currently preparing a book on Diderot’s late text, the Eléments de physiologie. She is also the translator of Isabelle de Charrière, The Nobleman and Other Romances (2012). She coordinated the translation by 102 Oxford students and tutors of the anthology Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment, also published by Open Book here.
She and Kate Tunstall both have essays in the periodical Europe’s 2013 celebratory Diderot issue. In 2010, together they wrote and presented a series of BBC Radio programmes on Diderot.

Text © 2016 Marian Hobson, Kate E. Tunstall, Caroline Warman, Pascal Duc
Music © 2016 Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris

The text and the music are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of it providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Marian Hobson, Kate E. Tunstall, Caroline Warman, Pascal Duc, Denis Diderot Rameau’s Nephew — Le Neveu de Rameau: A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2016, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0098

Please see the list of illustrations for attribution relating to individual images. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. For information about the rights of the Wikimedia Commons images, please refer to the Wikimedia website (the relevant links are listed in the list of illustrations).

Further details about CC BY licenses are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

The new versions now feature a slightly revised preface by Marian Hobson. They also incorporate a "mirror version" of the original French text that allows the reader to toggle between languages from the endnote section. The most stunning aspect of this digital enterprise, however, remains the edition’s "hypertext notes". Far more than simple endnotes, these references contain a wide variety of oil portraits, sketches, maps (all in full color) and, most spectacularly, eighteen MP3 recordings performed by the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris. It is no exaggeration to say that Hobson, Tunstall, and Warman, with the aid of Pascal Duc and his students at the aforementioned Conservatoire have attempted something truly remarkable: reconstructing the cultural context of one of the most complex and important works in eighteenth-century literature. [...] poring over the richness of this critical edition unquestionably allows for a deeper understanding of what is arguably Diderot’s most multifaceted and brilliant text.

—Andrew S. Curran, H-France Review, 17 (January 2017), 1-3.

This new edition includes a number of strengths that could serve both as an introduction to eighteenth century Parisian culture for undergraduate students and as a reference for scholars. Among the many endnotes — containing 100 illustrations, 18 musical pieces and 262 annotations — there are gems of information such as the drawing of Polish-style dresses and the pictures of popular ceramic pagodes. The accompanying figures for these objects bring clarity to a conversation that jostles the reader from high-minded aesthetic contemplation to gossipy tales of vulgarity, vengeance and promiscuity.

In terms of music scholarship, the editors illustrate adeptly through musical examples how Rameau’s Nephew argues for a ‘new style’ of French music, which modifies Italian vocal lines and instrumental music into a new form of French opera. The accompanying musical recordings bring to life lesser-known composers whose work Diderot and his contemporaries would have known.

—Scott M. Sanders, Eighteenth-Century Music, 13.2 (October 2016)

At the heart of this extraordinary achievement is a superb new translation by Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman that catches on the wing, as it were, Diderot’s flights of fancy, using a new kind of verbal rhythm. Instead of seeming glued to the page, this Nephew is encouraged to take convincing three-dimensional form, owning a fuller and more modern-sounding personality in English than he has hitherto been accorded.[...] The guiding principle is collaboration. Not just the visual but also the aural world of Diderot’s Nephew has been incorporated within the edition: pivotal references to music have been translated into performance and are keyed into the edition. They are activated electronically by using cues found in the text margins that are initially linked to music information within the sequence of notes at the end. One click, and the reader can listen through a computer or other device to, say, a Locatelli sonata or the Duni ariette to which Diderot is referring — or rather, which the Nephew is ‘performing’ after his own fashion.

—David Charlton, Project Muse, 69.2 (April 2015)

[...] the spirit of this updated, online realization of Diderot’s works, which—like an artist’s sketch or a piece of music heard from afar—renders audience participation irresistible.

—Tili Boon Cuillé, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 28.2 (Winter 2015–16), 375-77.

Textual Resources

1. Goethe’s translation of Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew/Satire Seconde: le Neveu de Rameau, or Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and the bizarre story of its survival
By Marian Hobson

2. Denis Diderot’s Rameaus Neffe
With notes by Joanna Raisbeck

3. Anmerkungen Über Personen und Gegenstände, deren in dem Dialog „Rameaus Neffe” erwähnt wird Vorerinnerung

4. Nachträgliches Zu „Rameaus Neffe”

5. Goethe’s and Schiller’s correspondence on Rameaus Neffe, including Goethe’s diary entries



Musical Resources

The pieces specially performed and recorded for this multi-media edition were chosen to provide samples of music or composers that are less well known today, or to give examples of transcription, one of the principle ways that pieces came to be known and played in a private setting at the time.

Please find below the list of the musical pieces included in this publication. You can download each of them, either in MP3 or in WAV format, by clicking on the correspondent link (please note that this works best with Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer).

All musical recordings have been released under a CC BY license and their copyright belongs to the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris.

1. François-André Danican Philidor, L’Art de la modulation [The Art of Modulation], extract: First quartet: Sinfonia (Con spirito – Moderato)

Clémentine Frémont, traverso
Josef Žák, violin
Tatsuya Hatano, violin
Rémy Petit, cello
Felipe Guerra, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.04

MP3
WAV

2. Jean-Philippe Rameau, Fêtes de Polymnie [The Festivals of Polyhymnia], extract: Air: ‘A la beauté tout cède sur la terre’ [Everything on earth gives way to beauty]

Dania El Zein, soprano
Rémy Petit, cello
Camille Ravot, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.05

MP3
WAV

3. Jean-Philippe Rameau, Fêtes de Polymnie [The Festivals of Polyhymnia], extract: Air: ‘Au vain plaisir de charmer…’ [To the empty pleasure of charming…]

Dania El Zein, soprano
Rémy Petit, cello
Camille Ravot, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.06

MP3
WAV

4. Jean-Philippe Rameau, Fêtes de Polymnie [The Festivals of Polyhymnia], extract: Air en rondeau: ‘Hélas, est-ce assez pour charmer…’ [Alas, in order to charm, is it enough…]

Dania El Zein, soprano
Rémy Petit, cello
Camille Ravot, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.07

MP3
WAV

5. Pietro Locatelli, Sonata op. VI no. 5, extract: Aria (Vivace)

Tania-Lio Faucon-Cohen, violin
Sarah Gron-Catil, cello
Camille Ravot, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.08

MP3
WAV

6. Domenico Alberti, Sonata for the fortepiano op. I no. 5, extract: Andante – Allegro

Luca Montebugnoli, piano (Clarke/Lengerer)

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.09

MP3
WAV

7. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Stabat Mater, extract, transcribed for solo violin by Johan Helmich Roman

Tania-Lio Faucon-Cohen, violin

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.10

MP3
WAV

8. Jean-Féry Rebel, Pieces for the violin, divided into suites by keys, extract: First suite in G-sol-ré: Allemande

Josef Žák, violin
Antoine Touche, cello
Loris Barrucand, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.11

MP3
WAV

9. Jean-Féry Rebel, Pieces for the violin, divided into suites by keys, extract: First suite in G-sol-ré: Prelude

Josef Žák, violin
Antoine Touche, cello
Loris Barrucand, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.12

MP3
WAV

10. Jean-Joseph Mouret, Les Amours de Ragonde, ou la soirée de village [The Loves of Ragonde, subtitled An Evening in the Village], extract: Bourrées I-II

Clémentine Frémont, traverso
Nicolay Sheko, oboe
Josef Žák, violin
Tatsuya Hatano, violin
Felipe Guerra, harpsichord
Rémy Petit, cello

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.13

MP3
WAV

11. Jean-Joseph Mouret, Les Amours de Ragonde, ou la soirée de village [The Loves of Ragonde, subtitled An Evening in the Village], extract: Air: ‘Accourez, jeunes garçons’ [Come running, young men]

Marie Soubestre, soprano
Sarah Gron-Catil, cello
Camille Ravot, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.14

MP3
WAV

12. Egidio Duni, Le Peintre amoureux de son modèle [The Painter in Love with his Model], extract: Arietta: ‘Dans le badinage, l’Amour se plait’ [Love is pleased with playfulness]

Marie Soubestre, soprano
Clémentine Frémont, traverso
Josef Žák, violin

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.15

MP3
WAV

13. Johann Adolf Hasse, Cléofide, extract: Air: ‘Vuoi saper se tu mi piaci?’ [Do you want to know if I like you?]

Fiona McGown, mezzo
Josef Žák, violin
Rémy Petit, cello
Louis-Nöel Bestion de Camboulas, harpsichord

http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0044.16

MP3
WAV

14. Nicola Antonio Porpora, Polyphemus, extract: Act III, sc. 5: Aria: ‘Alto Giove’ [Jove on high]

Victoire Bunel, soprano
Tania-Lio Faucon-Cohen, Ajay Ranganathan, altos
Juliana Velasco, Marie Bouvard, Josef Žák, Patrick Oliva,
Catherine Rose Barrett, Cyril Lacheze, Tatsuya Hatano, violins
Sarah Gron-Catil, Rémy Petit, Antoine Touche, cellos
Benoît Berrato, bass