Rococo.

A term from decorative art that has been applied by analogy to music,
especially French music, of the 18th century. It properly stands for a style
of architectural decoration that originated in France during the last years of
the 17th century, born of a relaxation of the rules of French classicism, not
as a consequence of the Italian Baroque. The derivation of the term
(rocaille, ‘shellwork’) is post facto and pejorative, like most critical
descriptions of the style. The term seems to have originated around 1796–
7 as artists’ jargon in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, where (as Sheriff
noted) it was used ‘to denigrate the painting produced during the reign of
Louis XV, when Mme de Pompadour was an arbiter of taste’.
(Condemnation of the more ‘feminized’ features of the Rococo style was
routine until recent times.)
Kimball, one of the first to establish the origins of the Rococo, described it
as ‘linear organization of surface through the transformation of the frame
on the suggestion of the arabesque’. According to him the first phase, one
of incomparable lightness and grace, lasted until about 1730 and is
properly called ‘style régence’; the main creative figure was Lepautre, who
derived his inspiration from the painted arabesque of Berain, the so-called
prophet of Rococo. A second phase, the ‘genre pittoresque’, ‘genre rocaille’
or ‘style Louis XV’, lasted until about 1760 and was an elaboration of the
first in the direction of more exaggerated shell- and plant-derived forms;
Pineau and Meissonnier were the main figures. The accompanying
illustration, probably dating from the 1730s, shows the second phase. The
style’s caprices were criticized even during its heyday, by Voltaire (1731)
and the architect Blondel (1738) among others. The Rococo’s downfall was
hastened by its diffusion beyond the nobility, for whom it had connoted a
distinct set of cultural values (Scott, 1995), and by the neo-classical
reaction, begun by French academicians in Rome working in collaboration
with Piranesi. The 1750s marked the triumph of the neo-classical style in
Paris, and in 1754 Cochin published an ironic obituary of Pineau saying
‘everything that separates art from the antique taste may be said to owe its
invention or perfection to Pineau’. In 1763 Grimm summarized the change
in style: ‘The forms of ancient times are much in favour. Taste has
benefited thereby, and everything has become à la Grecque’. The demise
of the older style was less complete or abrupt than he claimed; it was too
ingrained and quintessentially French to disappear without leaving many
traces. Several of the greatest artists, schooled in the playfulness of the
Rococo, continued to draw delight from its manner, albeit in more refined
and sober terms, for example Boquet, whose ethereal costumes and
scenic designs set the style at the Opéra into the 1770s.
The Rococo style, in all its applications, spread rapidly, even as far as
China, generally with a lag of a decade or so behind Paris. A Viennese
equivalent evolved somewhat independently, starting from the same
designs of Berain. As ‘the French style’ it flowered briefly in England (e.g.
Chippendale, and Hogarth’s serpentine ‘line of beauty’), whence it travelled
to the American colonies; there, during the Revolutionary period, it became
so ‘naturalised’ as to acquire patriotic connotations, in opposition to the
neo-classical taste then gaining favour in Britain. The most genial clients of
the Rococo were in the southern, predominantly Catholic, parts of
Germany. By the 1720s French artists, or their plans, were put to use at
Bonn and Würzburg. The elder Cuvilliés, trained in Paris (1720–24), carried
the style to Bavaria, where he worked under the lavish patronage of the
electors for several decades, building several country houses and the
theatre in the Munich residence (1751–3) which has been called the ‘Jewel
of the Rococo’. French architects dominated building at the courts of the
two most important south German music centres, Mannheim (Pigage) and
Stuttgart (Guépière). German artists fused Rococo ornament with
traditional styles of church building, largely Italian-inspired, and achieved
an architectural synthesis that is still much admired. The collision of an
Italian-derived style with a French-derived one in south Germany and
Austria has led to theories that the former yielded to the latter, temporally,
producing the sequence Baroque–Rococo–neo-classicism within a few
decades around the middle of the century. Hitchcock correctly regarded
German Rococo as ‘a sort of enclave in the Late Baroque rather than its
successor’. He added that ‘no inexorable stylistic sequence leads from the
Baroque, through the Rococo, to the Neoclassic. The major historical break
… came not at the beginning but at the end of the Rococo’.
The concept of a Rococo in music has never been seriously elaborated.
Critics have applied the term to a wide variety of musical phenomena, most
of them more appropriately described by the 18th-century expression
‘galant’. Pergolesi’s La serva padrona has been called ‘Italian Rococo’,
which illuminates neither artistic nor musical connections between France
and Italy; nor is Sedlmayr and Bauer’s connection of the stage architect
Galli-Bibiena’s scene vedute per angolo with the Rococo’s characteristic
asymmetry particularly helpful. The concept has been used just as
dubiously about literature, even about the young Goethe. Prudence
dictates that musical parallels with the Rococo style in the visual arts be
restricted to France, or to areas, geographic or artistic, where French
culture was paramount. The ballet is such an area, being largely French-
directed wherever encountered. At Paris itself preferences for the opéra-
ballet, a lighter and less demanding spectacle than the tragédie lyrique,
corresponded in time no less than in aim with the early Rococo. The
opéras-ballets and pastorales of Destouches and Campra represented a
considerable relaxation of tone compared with the solemnity and pathos of
Lully’s heroic tragedies. Favart’s later pastorales for the fairground theatres
inspired notable examples of Rococo decorative art, in tapestries and
porcelains after designs by Boucher. The first phase, or ‘style régence’, of
the Rococo also corresponds with the maturity of François Couperin, who
lightened the French style by further refinements in ornamentation while
continuing the traditions of his 17th-century predecessors; the Rococo
element is especially clear in his little character-pieces on pastoral
subjects, a genre in which Daquin also excelled. The same period saw the
emergence of the French flute school, of significance in helping to establish
and further the galant style, which could also be described as a relaxing of
the old rules. La Laurencie outlined a ‘style rocaille ou galant’ in connection
with the French violin school (Leclair). The second phase (c1730–60)
corresponds with the ascendancy of Rameau, whose works baffled many
listeners with their unexpected harmonic turns and complications. One
contemporary commentator (Bricuaire de la Dixmérie, Les deux âges du
goût, 1770) applied the term ‘pittoresque’ to Rameau’s Platée (1745);
Gardel attributed the perfection of dancing to Rameau, saying he created it
by ‘l’expression pitoresque’ and the prodigious variety of his airs de ballet
(Albert de Croix, L’ami des arts, 1776). Mondonville’s new kind of keyboard
sonata with string accompaniment, a fanciful and rather fussy genre, might
also be compared with the ‘genre pittoresque’. Even so, the clearest
parallels between music and visual arts emerge when the Rococo was
overthrown by neo-classicism (see Classical, §3).

See also Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Galant; and Sturm und Drang.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
La LaurencieEF
E. Bücken: Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927)
F. Kimball: The Creation of the Rococo (Philadelphia, 1943; Fr. trans.,
enlarged, 1949, as Le Style Louis XV)
C. Cudworth: ‘Cadence galante: the Story of a Cliché’, MMR, lxxix (1949),
176–8
C. Cudworth: ‘Baroque, Rococo, Galant, Classic’, MMR, lxxxiii (1953),
172–5
P. de Colombier: L’architecture française en Allemagne au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris, 1956)
H.A. Klaiber: Der württembergische Oberbaudirektor Philip de la Guépière
(Stuttgart, 1959)
L.W. Böhm: Das Mannheimer Schloss (Karlsruhe, 1962) [on Pigage]
G. Zick: ‘D'après Boucher: die Vallée de Montmorency und die
europäische Porzellanplastik’, Keramos, xxix (1965), 3–47
P. Minguet: Esthétique du rococo (Paris, 1966)
H. Sedlmayr and H. Bauer: ‘Rococo’, Encyclopedia of World Art (New
York, 1966)
J. Harris: ‘Le Geay, Piranesi and International Neo-classicism in Rome
1740–1750’, Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf
Wittkower, ed. D. Fraser, H. Hibbard and M.J. Lewine (London, 1967),
189–96
F. Wolf: François de Cuvilliés 1695–1768 (Munich, 1967)
H.R. Hitchcock: Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany (London,
1968)
A. Mayeda: ‘Ongakushi ni okeru rokoko no gainen ni tsuite’ [The concept
of Rococo in music history], Oto to shisaku: Nomura Yosio sensei
kanreki kinen ronbun-shū (Tokyo, 1969), 362–72 [incl. Ger. summary]
A. Blunt: Some Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo
(London, 1972)
S. Erikson: Early Neo-classicism in France (London, 1974)
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(Bologna, 1983), 109–27
A. Laing: ‘Boucher et la pastorale peinte’, Revue de l’art, lxxiii (1986), 55–
64
M. Sheriff: Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (Chicago and London, 1990)
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1993)
K. Scott: The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early
Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT, 1995)
R. John and L. Tavernier: ‘Rococo’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner
(London, 1996)
DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN