Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew a multi-media edition
(eBook)

English

Available through Open Book Publishers.

Includes bibliographical references.

Open access resource providing free access.

"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, colour 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, Paris, illuminate the wider musical context of the work, enlarging it far beyond its now widely understood relation to opéra comique."--Publisher's website.

The PDF and epub editions of this book contain embedded audio files. If your device supports MP3 files you will be able to listen to the music directly. Alternatively, you can access the music online by following the links or scanning the QR codes provided.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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.

The text and the music are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). For more detailed information consult the publisher's website.

Translated from the French.