Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Opera gets dismissed here with the kind of dry cruelty only a 17th-century moralist could deliver: not as a finished art, but as a rough sketch that merely hints at what it ought to be. La Bruyere's phrasing is a scalpel. "Obviously" pretends the judgment is self-evident, as if any discerning observer must agree. "First draft" is the real insult: opera is not wrong in principle, just prematurely published, an art form caught showing its seams. The line flatters the speaker's taste while reducing the genre to a brainstorm for something cleaner, tighter, more coherent.

The subtext is less about music than about social performance. In Louis XIV's France, opera is court culture at full volume: spectacle, hierarchy, money, and attention arranged into an evening. La Bruyere, who made a career of anatomizing vanity in The Characters, treats the whole enterprise as aspirational display that mistakes size for substance. The "fine spectacle" he's dangling is a fantasy of order: a show where elements know their place, where decoration doesn't overtake meaning.

It works because it's not a rant; it's a shrug with a blade in it. La Bruyere doesn't argue that opera fails. He implies it doesn't yet exist. That rhetorical move is snobbish, yes, but also modern: a critique of media that confuses maximal production with finished thought. Opera, in his view, is a concept pitch funded at court scale.