WILD ROUSSEAU

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 17

WILD ROUSSEAU

4EW men have been as tormented by their inadequacy and sensitivity as was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of the famous Confessions, and equally few would possess the unhappy knack of alienating all resulting sympathy. Throughout his life, from shyness, perversity, or petulance, he unmade the friends his writings had gathered, while his .enemies grew without checkespecially in his mind. To the modern psychoanalyst, Rousseau is the classic example of a sufferer from delusions of persecution-but not all his persécutions were delusions, for in the four years before his exile to England, and during that exile, events tended to reinforce Rousseau’s exaggerated fears. But the published Confessions, which were begun in 1766-7 when he was in England, stop short at the point where he was introduced to the philosopher David Hume, who had brought him to London. Rousseau wrote an account of what happened afterwards, but suppressed it; and the manuscript has never been traced. It is this period of Rousseau’s life which is the basis of this week’s YC drama, Rosseau in England, a BBC reconstruction of a curious story of exile. Before the condemnation of his novel Emile in 1762, Rousseau had enjoyed for 10 years what was for him comparative prosperity. Several days before the condemnation (by the parlement of Paris) he was warned that he must. either flee or be arrested. Rousseau thereupon fled, first to Yverdon in the territory of Berne, then to Moiters in Neuchatel, where he was safe under the rule of Frederick the Great-safe, that is, for a time. As one biographer commented, he "was unable to keep quiet," and his growing reputation as a heretic forced him to another shift. At last an order to quit the territory of Berne came from the Bernese Government (all government is tyranny, Rousseau had observed), and Rousseau, late in 1765, accepted the asylum that David Hume offered him in England. The story of the sojourn in England has been reconstructed from letters and contemporary memoirs by Maurice Cranston, who is also the narrator in Rousseau in England, Included in this programme are songs from Rousseau’s operetta Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), a parody of which. was the youthful Mozart’s foundation for the one-act opera Bastien and Bastienne, also to be heard from YC stations this week-at 8.15 p.m., Sunday, August 4. This performance, to be presented by the New Zealand Opera Company, has Terence Finnigan (tenor) as Bastien, Mary Langford (soprano) as Bastienne, and Donald Munro (baritone) as Colas, with the National Orchestra conducted by James Robertson.