  Music remained Rousseau’s primary interest in this period, and the years 1752 and 1753 saw his most important contributions to the field. The first of these was his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), which was an immediate success (and stayed in the repertoire for a century). The second was his participation in the “querelle des bouffons”, a controversy that followed the performance in Paris of Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona by a visiting Italian company and which pitted the partisans of Italian music against those of the French style. Rousseau, who had already developed a taste for Italian music during his stay in Venice, joined the dispute through his Letter on French Music and the controversy also informed his (unpublished) Essay on the Origin of Languages. Rousseau’s emphasis on the importance of melody and the communication of emotion as central to the function of music was in opposition to the views of Rameau, who stressed harmony and the relationship between music, mathematics, and physics. Rousseau went so far as to declare the French language inherently unmusical, a view apparently contradicted by his own practice in Le Devin.