Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France 9780520943872

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Com p osing the Citizen

Jann Pasler

. Composing the Citizen Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France

University of California Press Berkeley  Los Angeles  London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Otto Kinkeldey Publication Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society and of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pasler, Jann.   Composing the citizen : music as public utility in Third Republic France / Jann Pasler.    p.   cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-25740-5 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Music—Social aspects—France—History—19th century.  2. Music— Political aspects—France—History—19th century.  3. France—Social life and customs—19th century.  4. France—Politics and government—1870– 1940.  I. Title.   ML3917.F8P37  2009   306.4'842094409034—dc22 2008029252 Manufactured in the United States of America 18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/ niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Frontispiece: The Tuileries Palace in ruins, between 1871 and 1883. Courtesy Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

For my father, Anton Joseph Pasler, and the late Jacques Riboud, with love and gratitude

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Contents

Preface  xi Acknowledgments  xvii

Introduction. Paris: A Walking Tour  1 Topographies of Power: The Semiotics of the Parisian Landscape  •  Negotiating Life in the City  •  New Promenades in the Aural Landscapes of Paris  •  The Legacy of the Third Republic





Part on e

F o r m ing Publi c Spir i t a nd Us eful Ci t izens

1 • Use, the Useful, and Public Utility: A Theory of Musical Value  53 Tensions between the Useful and the Beautiful  •  Satisfying Social Needs and Creating the Nation  •  Music as Utilité Publique



2 • Reinscribing the Revolutionary Legacy  94 Public Instruction of Mind and Heart  •  Music in Public Festivals  •  National Institutions  •  Music, Character, and the Utility of Gender



Pa rt t wo S h a ping Judgm ent

a nd Nat i ona l Ta s te



3 • Music as Political Culture: From Active Listening to Active Citizenship  159 Political Legitimacy and Civic Society  •  Republican Pedagogy, Cultural Integration, and Citizenship  •  Performance and Public Taste under the Moral Order



4 • Regenerating National Pride: Musical Progress and International Glory  231 Moral and Musical Progress  •  Exporting French Music and French Values  •  Arts Policy and the Utility of Competition  •  Contradictions and Paradoxes





Pa rt t h r e e Ins t i tut ing R epubli c a n Cultur e 5 • Imagining a New Nation through Music: New Traditions, New History  301 Enacting Change at Schools and the Opéra  •  Reevaluating Luxury and the Question of Opera  •  Renarrating the Revolution  •  Reconceiving Music History



6 • An Ideology of Diversity, Eclecticism, and Pleasure  358 Cultivating Aesthetic Tolerance  •  Redefining Music’s Utilité Publique  •  Exploring Uncharted Territory



7 • Musical Hybridity and the Challenges of Colonialism  401 Musical Fantasies Fueling Colonialist Desire  •  Music and Colonial Assumptions  •  Songs Inspiring Resistance



8 • Useful Distractions and Economic Liberalism in the Belle Epoque  451 Department Stores  •  Competition in the Musical World  •  Expanded Performance Opportunities, Including for Women  •  Theater and Popular Entertainment



Pa rt fou r S hif t ing N ot i ons o f Utili t y:

Be t w een t he Nati on a nd the Self



9 • Music as Resistance and an Emerging Avant-garde  493 Reviving Memory of the Ancien Régime  •  Wagner’s Threatening Allure  •  Art beyond Politics, Music of and for the Mind  •  Intuition and Radically New Concepts of Music



10 • The Symbolic Utility of Music at the 1889 Universal Exhibition  547 Republican Values on Display  •  The Utility of Exotic Music  •  The Exhibition in Retrospect



11 • New Alliances and New Music  595 Mandating Change  •  The New Left’s Hopes  •  The New Right’s Progressism in Politics and Music  •  Revisiting Musique ancienne et moderne



12 • The Dynamics of Identity and the Struggle for Distinction  643 Race and French History  •  Listening through Women  •  Fusion versus Distinction  •  From the Useful to the Healthy

Coda  695 Appendix A. Important Political and Musical Events in the Early Third Republic  701 Appendix B. References in Ménestrel to Performances of French Operas Abroad, 1872–1888  708 Appendix C. Selected Publications on Revolutionary Music after 1870  724 List of Illustrations  729 List of Musical Examples  733 Illustration Credits  735 Index  737

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P r e fac e

Growing up in a post-Sputnik generation that valued scientific pursuits along with the American dream of economic prosperity, I understood the role of music in life as marginal. Music could entertain, distract, engross, and elevate, but it was not socially useful. Its proper place in society was secondary to other, more obviously serious or practical pursuits. Living in France changed my mind. At the age of nineteen, when I got lost in Paris and stopped a woman on the street for help, she gave me a glimpse of another perspective. Learning that I was a musician, she went out of her way to accompany me to my destination. It wasn’t just her generosity that impressed me. There was a twinkle in her eye, a suggestion of some deeper knowledge about the meaning of her gesture. When I asked her why she’d gone to such lengths to help me, she explained that, when all is said and done, it is the arts that survive from our past. The arts ensure the continuity of civilization. This woman had known the war. She’d experienced the annihilation of much that she valued and loved. It wasn’t that I represented the future, although my father, at my age, had been among those who had fought to liberate her people. It was the music. Seeing an opportunity to support someone involved with the continued creation of music, she smiled broadly. For French people like this woman, music has social as well as personal significance: it empowers a conception of history that includes oneself in the present and has implications for the future. Like history, people use music to understand themselves and their world. Music not only records and interprets memories and traditions, it also helps one to construct an identity. I could not know what music the woman was thinking about when we spoke, or if she had any specific music in mind, only that whatever personal meaning she associated with music was intimately tied to its social meaning, a notion of civilization—of values, traditions, and citizenship—that she assumed we shared. This attitude posed puzzling questions: why has France as a nation valued music so highly, although many French have not traditionally seen themselves as xi

a musical people? And why, although not all politicians have seen it as significant and challenges to its ongoing support have grown over the years, has France continued to dedicate major public funding to music? Struggling to answer these questions led me to probe French history during the Third Republic (1870–1940), a time when politicians intent on creating a lasting democracy in France saw music as integral to the public good—a way to imagine the future, voice diverse aspirations, and discover shared values. What the French call “public utility” stands out as one of the most important engines of Third Republic culture and among its widest-ranging criteria of value. Rather than build my own theory about what was important at the time, I have taken the history of this concept of public utility in France seriously, examining its roots, implications, and consequences. After arising in the seventeenth century, public utility, along with the ideological position it represents, subsequently gave revolutionaries a way to articulate the common will as separate from the interests of the king. Later, it focused attention on the needs and desires of the people, that is, on what was in the country’s general interest. When it came to music, what was uniquely French about this idea was, not simply that it could be socially useful, but that public institutions, and to a certain extent the French public as well, should regard music’s utility as ideologically important, and therefore treat it as a significant object of public policy. In the 1870s and 1880s, appreciation of music spread widely in the population as the government increasingly looked to it and the other arts to contribute to the formation of citizens, the health of the democracy, and the unity of the French people, over and above class distinctions. Third Republic officials believed that music could be part of a shared cultural imaginary, if not an entirely shared material reality, and of the struggle over cultural identity—how their international peers and future generations would remember them, regardless of social, economic, religious, and political differences among the population. For these reasons, artists came to be valued as integral parts of society, potential leaders capable of inspiring social progress.1 The Third Republic also understood the arts, and especially progress in the arts, as capable of engendering national pride. These notions blossomed into national policy and have continued to resound in French society through the present. 2 Whereas culture in America is decentralized and arts funding comes mostly 1.  In Paris “the artist is the true rich man. He rides in the automobile, while the public follows by bus,” Jean Cocteau observes in Le Coq et l’Arlequin: Notes autour de la musique (1918; rpt., Paris: Stock, 1979), 47. 2.  Progressives in the United States during this period also saw music as a democratizing force. For a wonderful study of American musical Progressivism, see Derek Vaillant, Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North

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from private individuals and corporations through nonprofit organizations, in France it is still largely overseen by hierarchically organized government agencies, centralized in Paris. Cultural action continues to be understood at least ideally as a way to effect social change.3 To fully appreciate music as part of public life, I had to get beyond certain presuppositions. Like many American musicians, I grew up associating French culture with ideals inspired by the French Revolution: the importance of individual freedom and resistance to the mainstream. In the arts, Paris—the home of revolutions, bohemia, and the avant-garde—long represented the epitome of change and renewal in Western civilization. It has also been known as a haven for those testing and probing the “boundaries” of bourgeois life. 4 As Roger Shattuck puts it, “the fluid state known as bohemia, a cultural underground smacking of failure and fraud, crystallized for a few decades into a self-conscious avant-garde that carried the arts into a period of astonishingly varied renewal and accomplishment.”5 Study of France’s musical world, however, taught me that our focus on bohemians doesn’t tell the whole story. To live a marginal existence, dissociate from the musical world at large, and possibly create an alternative to it, has been virtually impossible for most musicians. Composers and performers need one another, patrons, and a public. The most effective leaders of musical change, including Claude Debussy and Pierre Boulez, have worked within the system, while serving the needs of those trying to escape the limits of bourgeois culture. Carolina Press, 2003). This book examines many similar themes, but Chicago’s ethnic diversity, interethnic competition, and the dominance of German music in concert halls and singing societies in America constitute important differences from France. 3.  Extrapolating from the definition of culture in Littré, Dictionaire de la langue française, 5th ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1881), as related to agriculture and its figurative meaning as “instruction, education,” I here use it to mean that which the French have tried to cultivate in themselves and their nation, including its manifestations in music, art, and literature. Examining its German and Anglo-Saxon roots, Marc Fumaroli, L’Etat culturel: Essai sur une religion moderne (Paris: Fallois, 1991), criticizes the concept as having become too vague, opaque, and impersonal even if it may constitute “the collection of ‘artifices’ through which human society constructs itself” and represent a kind of “national order” or “state religion” (171–75). For more on French concepts of culture, see Evelyne Ritaine, Les Stratégies de la culture (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1983); David Wachtel, Cultural Policy and Socialist France (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987); Kim Eling, The Politics of Cultural Policy in France (London: Macmillan, 1999), and Maryvonne de Saint Pulgent, Le Gouvernement de la culture (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 4.  Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 11. 5.  Roger Shattuck, preface to The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War I: Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire (1955; rev. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1968). This rich, path-breaking study of the late nineteenth century was a major influence on my early intellectual development and remains, from the perspective of its methodology, perceptions, and penetrating evocation of the period, a landmark.

P r e f a c e . xiii

To understand the broader world also meant deconstructing many of the premises underlying my previous work on French modernism. These included the hierarchical importance of the composer and the dominant influence of elites, elite genres, and elite institutions in the musical world. In doing so, my focus has shifted from the avant-garde, analysis of canonical works, and reception studies to the public nature of musical taste and the social relevance of music. Through the lens of music’s public utility, then, I look at social and aesthetic practices across classes. I examine a wide variety of genres, musical venues, and performance groups never before regarded as interconnected, compare elite and popular ensembles, interrogate the ephemeral as well as durable aspects of musical life, and seek out the networks constituting a musical world. My conclusions call into question some of our most cherished assumptions: namely, that in the past, only the elites had access to or an interest in serious art music; that serious and popular domains were distinct; that early mass culture had a necessarily deleterious effect on musical progress; and that art music performances by the major orchestras increasingly presented music by dead composers. None of this was true in France. Approaching musical works from the perspective of their multiple uses and meanings, as well as their resonance in music culture, I’ve come to think of individual works not only in history, but as history. With their public utility as my focus, I seek to show what music and musical practices can contribute to a democracy, including a sense of what a people are willing to share and how differences can be negotiated. Along with the other arts in the early Third Republic, music helped both express and construct republican France and its identity as complex and dynamic. In this sense, music can contribute to our understanding of political as well as social and cultural history. Today, witnessing the challenges posed to nation-states by globalization, market capitalism, and what the French call néo-libéralisme, we need to recognize that culture, and music in particular, is not just a commodity, the product of market forces, or the protected domain of elites trafficking in the business of prestige. The example of France in the early Third Republic teaches that music can express social realities and imbue social ideals. It helps to establish a community, the social bond that makes it possible for humans to live together. In a world with populations and identities in flux, music may provide a medium for expressing aspirations not necessarily consonant with dominant ideologies; for cultivating and circulating taste among diverse groups; for sharing experiences and forging relationships that transcend time and place; and for discovering shared values that enable us to rise above differences and discord over the past, present, and future. In Composing

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the Citizen, I suggest what we in the twentieth-first century can learn from the legacy of the Third Republic and its music. 6 Not only people struggling in emerging democracies, but also those living in the most modern of cultures can find in this story reasons to renew and deepen their relationship to the arts, music, and ultimately themselves.

6.  I hope that this book will be useful particularly to people advocating “cultural democracy” today. Those, like Marian Godfrey of the Pew Charitable Trusts, who understand that what adds most value to society are “creative innovations, the preservation of cultural heritage, and the enrichment of the lives and capacities of children” will find that this is precisely what was promoted and practiced during the early Third Republic. See James Bau Graves’s study, Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

P r e f a c e . xv

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Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

In the late 1980s, the late Stanley Sadie commissioned me to write an article on the social history of music in late nineteenth-century France for his series Man and Music. Stanley, who published my first musicological article, had a vision of what I was capable of that often far exceeded my own awareness. Challenged by his faith in me, although I had just received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to write a monograph on the fin de siècle group of Parisian artists, writers, and musicians (including Ravel and Stravinsky), who called themselves Les Apaches, I changed gears. That fall, after some detective work based on a savvy tip from Joël-Marie Fauquet, I obtained access to the long unavailable archives of Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe and learned of her role as a patron of music, and of that of the broader aristocracy, in organizing premieres of Wagnerian operas and the Ballets Russes. This led me to write a long article on the social roots of musical innovation. I gave Stanley the last third of it and realized I had the beginnings of a book. An auto accident slowed down the process substantially but had the felicitous effect of turning my attention to collecting data. A summer spent copying programs and program notes in the archives of the Concerts Colonne pushed the scope of my project into the 1870s, a period totally new to me. In 1993–94, a senior fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center gave me the time and a very supportive context in which to begin writing. Starting with examination of what Colonne’s orchestra performed between 1874 and 1900, I wrote the core of what would later become Useful Music (forthcoming). Close analysis of works in chronological succession piqued my curiosity about the larger context and pointed to contingencies underlying the perception of musical meaning. I soon realized that my readers would need a sense of history to better understand this music. Over the next decade, then, the historical chapters emerged and became this book. Between 1996 and 2001, I was privileged to participate in two research groups funded by the European Science Foundation, one on musical education in Europe xvii

organized by Michael Fend and Michel Noiray, and another on concert societies and their publics organized by Hans-Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner. Our stimulating international conferences led me to see concert life as a tradition shared across Europe and resulted in a number of papers that laid the foundations for my third book in this trilogy, Useful Performance. The University of California, San Diego, where I have taught since 1981, has provided valuable support. In fall 1998, the UCSD Humanities Center funded a release of my teaching duties. The Committee on Research funded several trips to Paris, and enabled the assistance of Jean-Louis Morhange, who tirelessly not only xeroxed from microfilms and helped with translations, but also read chapters in initial drafts and offered the invaluable perspective of a native Frenchman. As the Flora Stone Mather Visiting Professor at Case Western Reserve University in 2003–4, I was able to revise this book in the beautiful tranquility of their Putnam House and benefit from the generosity of its staff, research assistance from Juanita Karpf and Michael Westmoreland, and, most especially, the support of Georgia Cowart, chair of the Music Department. As the Frank H. Kenan Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2006–7, I made final revisions and shared my work with other Fellows there, especially the distinguished historians. Will Gibbons helped with preparation of the illustrations. Trevor Henthorn and Joel Elliott offered invaluable technical assistance, and Juliana Snapper her editorial expertise. To these organizations and individuals, I am deeply grateful. This book could not exist without the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, especially its Département de musique, with its extraordinary collection of music, concert programs, and other documentation of musical life. Returning there year after year since 1976, I have always felt at home, working among a staff of rare competence and generosity, led by directors François Lesure and Catherine Massip. The Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris has also been extraordinarily helpful. Some of this collection is uncatalogued, and the assistance of Geneviève Morlet, curator of actualités, allowed me access to rare source material. Other public archives—the Bibliothèque nationale at Tolbiac, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Archives nationales, especially Mme Suzanne d’Huart of the Archives privés, Institut de France: Académie des beaux-arts, Bibliothèque administrative de la ville de Paris, Archives de Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Centre de documentation juridique du Ministère de la culture, documentary centers at the Assemblée nationale and the Musée Carnavalet, and the Préfecture de Police, Paris—also provided rich sources. Over the years, I have also been extremely fortunate in gaining access to private archives, often as the first scholar from music. I am deeply grateful to the duchesse de Gramont, granddaughter-in-law xviii . A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

of Comtesse Greffulhe, for permission to consult her archives between 1988 and 1991, for the friendship and moral support she extended until her death in 1994, and for the continued endorsement of her son Duc Antoine de Gramont. I would also like to thank M. Guy Arnaud and his staff for permission to work in the Concerts Colonne archives throughout the summers of 1993 and 1994 and later Lieutenant Colonel François Boulanger, conductor of the orchestra of the Garde républicaine, and Lieutenant Colonel Verdy of their public relations section; Guy François, secrétaire général of the Bon Marché department store, his successor, Hélène Lévy Baudoin, and its archivist, Elizabeth Russo; and Valérie Magnier of the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation. Their warmth and generosity made the work pleasurable and inspired my faith in the project. Often, presenting one’s work contributes to its conceptualization and refinement. Besides the conferences of the European Science Foundation groups, I’m grateful for having been able to share my work on the following: initial perspectives on the period: at the “Festival of French Romantic Music,” organized by Calvert Johnson at Agnes Scott College (1990), Stanford University (1994), the University of Calgary (1997), and UCSD (1999), and on the notion of music as a public utility at the conference, “Music and the Public Sphere,” organized by the musicology graduate students at UCLA (2006), and at the Institut d’études politiques, Paris (2008); research on amateur performances of art music and the problem of sources: at the American Musicological Society [AMS] (1999), UCLA and UCSB (2000); seminars of the doctoral program “Musique et sciences sociales,” directed by Antoine Hennion and Joël-Marie Fauquet at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the research group “Le Concert en France de la fin de l’Ancien Régime à la première guerre mondiale,” directed by Patrick Taïeb and Hervé Lacombe at the Institut universitaire de France (2002); the symposium on musical meaning organized by Byron Almén and Marianne Wheeldon at UT Austin (2003); the conference “The Case of Wagner,” organized by Mitchell Morris at UCLA (2003), Cornell University (2003), and Case Western Reserve University (2004); the role of the aristocracy in music, particularly Comtesse Greffulhe: at the Musée d’Orsay (1992) and at the conferences “1900–1920: Music, Politics, and the Transcendental Strain,” organized by Mitchell Morris at UC Berkeley (1992) and “The Musician as Entrepreneur and Opportunist, 1600–1900,” organized by William Weber at the Clark Library, UCLA (2001); and on Vincent d’Indy at the conferences “Vincent d’Indy and His Times,” organized by Gail Woldu-Hilson at Trinity College, Connecticut A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s . xix

(2001), “Vincent d’Indy et son temps,” organized by Manuela Schwartz at the Bibliothèque nationale (2002), and at the Institut des hautes études de Belgique, Brussels (2004); and the political significance of la musique ancienne et moderne: at the AMS (2005) and Trinity College, Dublin (2006). In France, I’ve been blessed in knowing two of the finest French musicologists of my generation, Joël-Marie Fauquet and Michel Noiray, ever since we participated in François Lesure’s seminar at the Ecole pratique des hautes études in 1976– 78. Always making time for me amid their busy schedules, they’ve listened to my ideas with openness and empathy, invariably endeavoring to strengthen them. Their knowledge, integrity, and encouragement have been of inestimable value to me over the long years of the book’s gestation. Since he invited me to help him establish the first research center in music at the Centre national de la recherché scientifique in 1983–84, the renowned composer and brilliant philosophe Hugues Dufourt has shared with me his perspectives on French musical politics. I owe many insights on this subject to Hugues, who for two decades has listened with interest and enthusiasm to the development of my arguments and helped me to see them in the larger context. Over the years, I’ve also had fruitful conversations with Pierre Bourdieu, Alexandre Dratwicki, Françoise Escal, Thierry Favier, Yves Gérard, Jean Gribenski, Philippe Gumplowicz, Malou Haine, Antoine Hennion, Hervé Lacombe, François Lesure, Pierre-Michel Menger, Marie-Claire Mussat, Jean-Michel Nectoux, Manuela Schwartz, Laure Schnapper, Pierre Souvtchinsky, Patrick Taïeb, Henri Vanhulst, and Patrice Veit, many of whom became friends. Beyond France, I’ve had intellectual support especially from Georgia Cowart, Annegret Fauser, and Steven Huebner, who took great care in reading earlier versions of the whole manuscript, offering useful criticisms and sincere encouragement. Beth Bartlet, Lynn Hunt, Michel Noiray, and Tracy Strong strengthened my forays into the eighteenth century. Evan Bonds read chapter 1, and Mitchell Morris and Charles Kronengold, an early draft of chapter 3. I also received intellectual stimulation and/or help of various sorts from Elliott Antokoletz, William F. Arens, Tildy Bayar, Jeanice Brooks, Carlo Caballero, David Charlton, Nicolas Cook, Mary Davis, Tia DeNora, Katharine Ellis, Dana Gooley, Brian Hart, D. Kern Holoman, Sylvia Kahan, Joseph Kerman, Ben Kiernan, Mi Gyung Kim, Raymond Knapp, Robert Lempert, Myriam Levin, Ralph Locke, Damien Mahiet, Roberta Marvin, Susan McClary, Michael B. Miller, Philip Nord, Marjorie Perloff, Nancy Perloff, Sabina Ratner, Ivan Raykoff, David Rosen, William Sewell, Jr., Kay Shelemay, Myriam Silverberg, Michael Strasser, Jean Touzelet, William xx . A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Weber, Robert Winter, and Steven Whiting. At UCSD, Chandra Mukerji, George Lipsitz, Richard Madsen, and Cynthia Truant offered perceptive feedback in the early stages of the project. Crucial moral support came from the late Philip Brett and Eugene Wolf, Carol Glaser, May Kennedy, Elizabeth Langhorne, George Lewis, Mitchell Morris, Marjorie and Joseph Perloff, Anne Seshadri, and Joseph T. Williams. I am deeply grateful to all these individuals for their generosity of spirit. At UC Press, Lynne Withey deserves credit for intuiting years ago what the book could be. She not only read chapters along the way, more versions than anyone else, but gave me the time and space I needed to bring it to fruition. As the only historian to have read the entire manuscript, she played a crucial role in helping me to understand how historians work. Seeing me mired in a sea of details, Lynne challenged me to stand back and theorize, something I would not have had the courage to do without her. Thanks also to Rose Vekony for her enormous care in the book’s production. My biggest debt of gratitude goes my father, whose love of France and the French people motivated me to cross the Atlantic in 1971 and planted the seeds of my own deep admiration for French culture. From my ever-insightful father, I learned how and why to engage with others and the benefits of always being open and curious. Over the years, numerous French people have offered me shelter, great meals, and, most of all, devoted friendship. The Barbiers and the Ribouds accepted me almost as one of them. For the last ten years of his life, the late Jacques Riboud, a writer, inventor, monetary theorist, and developer, made possible frequent séjours in his homes because he believed in me. Leavened with wit and a sense of humor, his observations and interactions taught me much, and his kindness to me was boundless. To my father and Monsieur Riboud I dedicate this book.

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s . xxi

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Introduction Paris: A Walking Tour

Nowhere is the distinction of French culture or French faith in the utility of the arts clearer than in the physical geography of Paris. Promenades through the city, aided by pictorial guides, have long introduced visitors to its history and that of the nation.1 Whether along tree-lined avenues or narrow cobble-stoned alleys, historical time and space intersect with the present. To commemorate and legitimatize the interests of successive governments, considerable resources amassed from the country as a whole have gone into the creation of Paris’s public architecture, sculpture, and urban design. While in many modern cities, buildings and urban design embody the economic priorities of private enterprise, in Paris, they use beauty to encode political and social values. The Gothic spires of the Hôtel de Ville, the Greek-inspired proportions of the Assemblée nationale, and the elegant cupolas of the Printemps department store assert that beauty and utility are not mutually exclusive, but can be interdependent. Paris has served for centuries as a visual demonstration of the harmonious beauty of reason and power. As an architecture critic put it in 1870: “The public 1.  See, e.g., Galignani’s New Paris Guide (New York: Putnam, 1874); Karl Baedeker, Paris und Umgebungen nebst den Eisenbahn-Routen (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1876) and Paris and Environs (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1884–1900); Augustus J. C. Hare, Walks in Paris (New York: Routledge, 1888); Ward and Lock’s Pictorial Guide to Paris (New York: Ward & Lock, 1889); John Stoddard’s Lectures, vol. 5 (Boston: Balch Brothers, 1898); Georges Cain, Promenades dans Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1906); and Elizabeth Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris (Chi­ cago: A. C. McClurg, 1907). French promenades à Paris, such as Edouard Drumont’s Mon vieux Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1879), were also popular. When it comes to musical institutions from the past, see J. G. Prod’homme and Theodore Baker, “A Musical Map of Paris,” Musical Quarterly 18, 4 (October 1932): 608–27. My walking tour was conceived when Stanley Sadie commissioned me to write the entry on “Paris, 1870–the Present” for the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. For other recent approaches to this subject, see Maurice Agulhon, “Paris: La Traversée d’est en ouest,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, III: Les France, vol. 3: De l’archive à l’emblème, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 868–909; Jacques Réda, Les Ruines de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); and Nigel Simeone, “Four Musical Walks,” in Paris: A Musical Gazetteer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 4–8.

1

monument, which addresses itself to everybody and belongs to the nation, needs to satisfy the general, national sentiment of beauty. . . . Beauty must shine on the face of our public buildings like glory on our army, holiness on our religions, loyalty on all acts of national life. . . . [It is] a profession of aesthetic faith by the race.”2 In the nineteenth century, private as well as public buildings in France embodied this aesthetic.3 They communicated, not only collective memory of their heritage, but also French aspirations and French pride. Whereas people elsewhere have sometimes viewed history as a “useless and crippling” burden and, before the postmodern era, have regularly purged the landscape of relics of the past, most French have typically enjoyed a sense of continuity in their culture. 4 Widespread interest in history assured that, not just Parisians, but also provincial visitors and foreigners would recognize the city’s references to the past and the present.5 Because Paris has long served to represent French values, understanding why and where these allusions appear is fundamental to developing a horizon of expectation about the French, their preferences, and their art. 6 Experiencing the city is thus like an overture to its music. Walking through 2.  César Daly, L’Architecture privée au dix-neuvième siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Ducher, 1870), 11–12, cited in Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 291. 3.  The architectural historian François Loyer notes that by the late nineteenth century, apartment buildings rivaled monuments. As construction became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, this was encouraged by the large insurance companies and financial institutions, which built large blocks of apartment houses. See Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism, trans. Charles Lynn Clark (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 296, 357. 4.  In France, a committee was created in 1837 to oversee historical monuments—Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was in charge of this in mid-century—and in 1887 the preservation of the country’s historical monuments was made legally mandatory. For American attitudes toward the past, see David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 105–24. 5.  In the nineteenth century, architecture “could not only convey information, represent the social and political structure, and express the aspirations of owner and occupier, but serve as an ethical agent, a moral statement to the world at large. . . . Paris thought of itself as the school of civilized humanity. As such it was necessary that it look the part,” Olsen observes in City as a Work of Art (292). Nelson Goodman describes four ways that buildings can have meaning (denotation, exemplification, metaphorical expression, and mediated reference) in “How Buildings Mean,” in id. and Catherine Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 33–44. See also Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 4–10, and James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6.  In The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Paul de Man discusses the concept of the “horizon of expectation,” derived from Husserl’s phenomenology of perception and used by Jauss, to explain the nature of historical consciousness. As in

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neighborhoods and contemplating crucial intersections help us comprehend how French citizens have used culture to build an identity, and how culture, more than military power, provides the basis for a French sense of superiority in the world.7 The city’s grandeur keeps alive memory of past greatness and explains why it has been so difficult for French people to get beyond that associated with the French kings, the Revolution, and Napoléon. The city, like French music, testifies to the importance many French ascribe to history and what they share as a people. Embodying the country’s ideals, its monuments showcase their will to instruct as well as elevate. The urban environment attests to the overwhelming nature of state power in France, yet it also beckons beyond its prestigious emblems. Any promenade in the city invites us to acknowledge the fleeting as well as the durable aspects of culture, popular as well as elite expression, and to find meaning in both. In music, this means performances as well as compositions, amateur as well as professional practices. The juxtapositions of classes and neighborhoods, characteristic of other French cities as well, are the contexts for music-making and for the clashes and counterpoints of musical culture. The structure of Paris—its grand vistas, monuments, and bridges alongside its charming cafés, sinuous alleys, and hidden-away treasures—suggests a model for thinking about the structure of the musical world, where musical institutions are sited and their forms of power reside; it also encourages us to think about the kinds of networks music needs to thrive, and the sense of national fraternity as well as personal empowerment to which music can contribute.

Topographies of Power: The Semiotics of the Parisian Landscape Parisians do not realize they can read the history of Western civilization in general and of France in particular like an open book [à livre ouvert] just by observing the architectural monuments, the “puzzle” of the map of Paris, in which each piece stands for a moment in human consciousness. Façades, roofs, dripstones, gutters, large rooms, deep paintings . . . all of these form a sort of backdrop, if you will,

perception, conscious attention—especially to works of art—“is only possible upon a background, or horizon, of distraction.” The term also implies a “passage from the individual to the collective or social aspects” of what is being analyzed (58–60). 7.  In 1989, President François Mitterrand asserted that if France was only the world’s third military power and fourth or fifth economic power, it was nevertheless still “without equal” as a cultural force. See Le Monde, 20 May 1989, cited in Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 112.

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 3

against which the plot of more serious events, of events packed with death, sometimes develops, yet a backdrop of one of the most beautiful theaters imaginable. Léon-Paul Fargue 8

Indeed, on the stage of Paris, a theater for the accumulated narratives of history, we make meaning of the scripts laid out before us as public to its pasts and as players in its present. Through the flow of its landscape, Paris inscribes a web of symbolic relationships on each generation. The rationally ordered grid of some cities, like midtown Manhattan, suggests homogeneity and tight interconnections, while Los Angeles (sometimes compared to an “aleph”) and London (recently described as a “soft city”) are centerless labyrinths, defined by extraordinary heterogeneity and fragmented movement.9 Paris resembles more a living body. In good times its charms and sensuality are compared with those of a woman, its warrior soul with that of a man; in bad times Paris is condemned as an unhealthy prostitute or monster. The city’s water and traffic traverse it in sensuous arabesques, cutting across it like intricately connected veins and arteries. People, materials, and ideas enter from every direction and leave transformed. The health and heartbeat of France depend on the concentration of political, social, economic, and cultural power in Paris. Although Parisians make up only 20 percent of the population, Paris is a microcosm of the complex coexistence of elites, small businessmen, and workers that constitute the nation. As Michelet once put it, only Paris can unite the country, attracting people from every corner. Moreover, centralized government has long been based in the city, its decisions affecting the whole country. Paris produces France’s major newspapers and journals, and its urban design, public gardens, cafés, monuments, and concert organizations inspire others around the country. French people come to their capital expecting to encounter the latest fashions, whether in clothing, theater, or music, expecting perhaps also to be uplifted by its glory and feel pride in being French. Parisians them8.  Léon-Paul Fargue, Refuges (Paris: Emile-Paul frères, 1942), 250. Fargue, a poet and member of les Apaches, was one of Maurice Ravel’s closest friends. Refuges is a collection of memoir‑essays, in which he recalls “running in the middle of this living library” (22). With his book Le Piéton de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1932), Fargue became known as “the pedestrian of Paris.” 9.  In his Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989), Edward Soja describes Los Angeles using Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph (1949), “the only place on earth where all places are—seen from every angle, each standing clear, without confusion or blending” (222). In The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1989), David Harvey begins with a discussion of Jonathan Raban’s Soft City (1974), a portrayal of London as the “soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare” where “fact and imagination simply have to fuse” (5). See also Jann Pasler, “Postmodernism, Narrativity, and the Art of Memory,” in id., Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 72–73.

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selves may be a certain breed, quite distinct from the Lyonnais or the Bordelais, the Bretons or the Savoyards, and the desire to respect these differences as well as acknowledge resentment and reaction to the centrality of Paris has led to periodic attempts at decentralization. Yet because so many provincials (ambitious musicians among them) come to make their careers in the city, and Paris represents France to the rest of the world, inevitably the pendulum swings back. Government officials have long known this and used the state to play a strong role in shaping French interactions with their capital.10 Paris is a structure of interconnected parts. Each element may recall a “moment in human consciousness,” but what makes it understandable, what gives it meaning, is its relationship to other elements and to the whole, like a jigsaw puzzle.11 The metaphor of Paris as center of the nation (and, by extension, France, as center of the world) begins in its center and moves outward in a spiral (fig. 1). The Ile de la Cité, the original Lutetia, lies at its physical as well as historical core. This little island in the middle of the Seine river was relatively easy to defend until the Romans came. Subsequent rulers through Louis VII lived on it. There the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame Cathedral are perpetual reminders of the city’s medieval past. Later, the official center of Paris migrated from the Cité to the first arrondissement, a rectangular-shaped district around the Louvre, including the western side of the Cité. In the fourteenth century, the palace moved across the Seine and successive monarchs enlarged it. During the Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety occupied it, and, until 1870, when the Communards forced the government to retreat to Versailles, the Louvre served as the seat of executive power. To the north, the first arrondissement takes in the Palais Royal, the seventeenth-century palace and gardens where Louis XIV lived as a child and revolutionary leaders called people to arms. Its eastern 10.  For a more extended discussion of the relationship between Paris and the provinces, see Alain Corbin, “Paris-Province,” and Maurice Agulhon, “Le Centre et la périphérie,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, III: Les France, vol. 1: Conflits et partages, ed. Pierra Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 776–849. In choosing to focus on Paris at the beginning of a book on French music, I do not wish to deny the importance of musical life in the rest of country, with the diverse and heterogeneous languages spoken there. As Katharine Ellis has pointed out in Interpreting the Musical Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), xxi, the regions were not always “docile in their acceptance of models from the capital” and the capital was not necessarily “ahead” of them. For example, French operas were sometimes premiered outside Paris. Yet, the major musical institutions, performers, composers, and government officials with power to influence the nation’s musical life were based in Paris and, as the first issue of La Révolution française (1881) put it, since the Revolution Paris had been the “central municipality and the common patrie of all French” (21). Understanding the capital gives the reader a window on the ideals and the values that operated throughout the country. 11.  Georges Perec discusses the nature of jigsaw puzzles in the preamble to his novel La Vie: Mode d’emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978), 15.

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Fig. 1  Map of Paris, 1889, showing the city’s twenty arrondissements, or municipal boroughs, organized in a clockwise spiral, beginning with the first arrondissement in the center. Strangely, the Tuileries Palace (demolished in 1883) is here still standing.

border is the most important north-south axis of the city, its western one, the Place de la Concorde. Until recently the north wing of Louvre, its midpoint, housed the country’s Ministry of Finance, perhaps the real seat of power since the Revolution. The succession of arrondissements around the first derives, not from some overarching plan, but from actual growth patterns in existence long before these administrative divisions were established. Beginning in the third century c.e., kings encircled Paris with walls, the last built in the mid nineteenth century. The imprint of these fortifications resulted in “three closed belts” that concentrated growth within them.12 The boulevards and avenues that replaced the walls not only determined the flow of circulation, they also gave future generations the impres12.  These “belts” do not include fortifications built on the Ile de la Cité by the Romans soldiers to protect Lutèce. In chapter 3 of his Etudes sur les transformations de Paris (Paris: L’Equerre, 1982), reprinting texts from 1903–10, Eugène Hénard points out that whereas London

6 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

sion that Parisians liked to “turn in circles.”13 The arrondissements grew in tandem with these enclosures. They spiral out from the center, with the first through the sixth arrondissements in the middle (the city through the fourteenth century), the seventh through the eleventh encircling them (Paris through the mid nineteenth century), and the twelfth through the twentieth on the periphery (added in 1860). In nature, mathematics, and art, the spiral is associated with growth and energy. Thought to be the most beautiful curve, it combines the forces of inequality and resistance with a structure of perfect proportions. It also describes the form of the human ear. Paris too is like an ear, its outer areas encircling, protecting, and funneling energy toward its center. To love Paris is to engage with it as one might with a book.14 Every neighborhood has a past; every building resembles music in bringing the old and the new into relationship.15 Neighborhoods provide symbolic frameworks for Parisians’ identity, although none of the quartiers are socially homogeneous. Where Parisians live affects who they are, how they think, and what they see and hear, including the kind of music to which they might be exposed. The Seine generates the most significant division of the city. Much of the city’s intellectual and political life, major churches and ecclesiastical centers of learning, numerous ministries, and the country’s premier military school are located its southern half, on the Left Bank. In the first century, the Romans expanded what is today the fifth arrondissement. The Université de Paris, with much of its teaching long based on classical Greek and Roman traditions, emerged in the twelfth century near today’s Sorbonne. The sixth and seventh arrondissements became known as the “noble faubourg” in the early eighteenth century, when many aristocrats built sumptuous residences there. The Institut de France, a kind of annex to this faubourg dependent on its opinions, sits nearby along the Seine. Behind grew without the constraints of a physical barrier, continually assimilating towns and villages around it, the walls of Paris imposed strict limits, resulting in almost double the number of people in the city center per hectare in the early twentieth century as compared with London. 13.  Hénard, Etudes, 211. 14.  Christophe Prochasson, Paris 1900: Essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999), 27, 40. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, in her Paris as Revolution: Writing the NineteenthCentury City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), notes, “one reads the structured space of the city as one reads the structured language of a book” (38). She suggests that many nineteenth-century writers, such as Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, and Zola, assumed that the city was “readable” and wrote “within the conviction of legibility” (7). See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 8. 15.  See the discussion of this spiral notion of progress in Jann Pasler, “France: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in Man and Music: The Late Romantic Era, vol. 5, ed. Jim Samson (London: Macmillan, 1991), 389–416.

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the Ecole militaire lies the large open field (1 km long) called the Champ de Mars, named after the god of war, the only “monument” remaining from the Revolution, albeit empty space. During the Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1790, 600,000 revolutionaries reputedly gathered there. Beginning in 1799, the site has hosted the city’s largest industrial exhibitions. The Eiffel Tower at its western edge, built for the 1889 Universal Exhibition, has symbolized not only the Third Republic but also the city’s openness to technological progress and the future. In contrast, the Right Bank—home of France’s kings and the city’s other elites—has traditionally served as the center of commerce, banking, the press, and theatrical life. The second arrondissement contains the city’s central banks, the Stock Exchange, publishers, and newspapers. During the Ancien Régime, theaters condemned by the Church had to set up outside city limits, while seeking to remain close to their clientele. This explains the many theaters along the grands boulevards connecting the Opéra, the Place de la République, and the Bastille.16 There, department stores, cabarets, and cafés have also drawn people from all classes. At the end of the nineteenth century, the train stations at the Gare du Nord and Gare Saint-Lazare welcomed the lion’s share of the city’s visitors to these arrondissements, as well as to Montmartre, immediately to the north, known for its nightlife. It is no accident that the Conservatoire has always been on the Right Bank to be near these theaters and concert halls. The interdependence of personal and professional relationships on each side of the Seine has contributed to certain distinctions. Until the early twentieth century, the Left Bank appeared calm, devout, and dull—according to those from the Right Bank, “nothing but a vast leaden convent covered with teary-eyed bells [cloches larmoyantes]”—while the Right Bank vibrated with commerce and economic activity. To inhabitants of the Left Bank, the Right seemed a “Sodom and Gomorrah.”17 This division also reflected the distinction between two rival conservative elites—Legitimist aristocrats (the traditional nobility) in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and Orléanist bankers (nouveaux riches in the nineteenth century) in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The latter tended to live in the eighth arrondissement behind the Champs-Elysées, where in 1880, rents were the highest in the city. In the middle of the nineteenth century, economically privileged elites moved further west, where, in the spacious salons of the seventeenth arrondissement, 16.  Historians describe this series of boulevards as a “perpetual fair.” For two centuries it has been the center of Parisian night life. Bernard Marchand, Paris: Histoire d’une ville (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 45. 17.  Fargue, Refuges, 248–49, and George Riat, Paris (Paris, 1904), cited in Olsen, City as Work of Art, 145–46.

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the culture of conversation and music-making flourished. After 1890, the upper classes also settled the sixteenth arrondissement, in residences fitted out with the latest luxuries and facing the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of the modern age. An aerial perspective cannot communicate what one learns on foot. The remnants of Paris’s first urban renewal in the early seventeenth century still remain—narrow, picturesque streets, the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), and the Place Dauphine on the Ile de la Cité. But since the mid nineteenth century, much of the old town’s knotty complexity has been replaced with wide, straight avenues, many of them conceived by Napoléon III and realized by Baron Georges-Eugène Hauss­ mann.18 Besides other ambitions, including better hygiene and real estate speculation, they wished to control the populace, preventing the easy building of barricades, and hoped a new organization of space would give rise to a new society less bent on revolution. They also envisaged a perfectly harmonized environment, with a fixed proportion between the width of streets and the height of buildings. Together with their neatly trimmed, evenly arranged trees, lined up like soldiers, their ordered, almost monotone buildings of similar size lead the eye to vistas sculpted in the horizon. At key intersections, monuments or statues impose an element of stability on the topography, while offering a “useful pedagogy” to the masses. Since 1870, these statues, meant to hold up men of progress for the populace to emulate, have commemorated artists and intellectuals rather than military heroes and rulers.19 In Fargue’s words, they give “body and soul to the past” as a succession, not just of wars, but also of ideals.20 Institutions are often juxtaposed at these sites in some significant way. Since the late nineteenth century, one of the most symbolically instructive walks one can take in the city has been from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde. After the Palais des Tuileries was demolished in 1883 (see below), the Louvre opened westward. Today, in its middle, one can trace a line from the Arc du Carrousel (fig. 2), commemorating Napoléon’s victories, to the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, to the Arc de Triomphe, Napoléon’s tribute to his imperial armies. 21 Walking along this line clarifies Napoléon’s ambition to surpass 18.  Before Napoléon III and Haussmann, Napoléon I and others had already envisaged the need for large avenues in Paris. In his Projet d’un système de grandes voies de communication, et des emplacements les plus favorables pour des monuments d’art et d’utilité publique qui sont à édifier ou à reconstruire, Hippolyte Meynadier argued in 1843 that these avenues would serve three purposes: cleanliness in the old neighborhoods, beautification of the city, and opening “great monumental paths to give an aspect of grandeur and majesty.” Cited in Marchand, Paris, 56. 19.  See Prochasson, Paris 1900, 19–23. 20.  Léon-Paul Fargue, Méandres (Paris: Milieu du monde, 1946), 9. 21.  One could also see this arch as initiating the grand entry into Paris, leading through the Champs-Elysées to the Tuileries, Napoléon’s residence and the seat of government. See

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Fig. 2  The Arc du Carrousel, with view up to the Arc de Triomphe, after 1883. All photographs from the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris, such as this one, were rephotographed by Jann Pasler in 2005–6.

earlier French monarchs. The Arc de Triomphe’s size and position on top of the hill dwarf everything around it (as perhaps Napoléon conceived his conquests in comparison with the kings’ accomplishments). From much of the eighth, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements and the twelve avenues leading up to it, the Arc dominates the horizon, a symbol of French pride. From the Louvre, it seems a gateway to the future. More symbolic juxtapositions seen from the Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI and Robespierre were guillotined, suggest the new relationship Napoléon envisaged between church and state in postrevolutionary France. 22 To the north and south, equidistant from the center, are two templelike buildings. Across the river is the Assemblée nationale. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Napoléon added a façade to what was originally a private residence and turned it Mark Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 178–79. 22.  The U.S. embassy is adjacent to this square.

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into the home of the French parliament. With its architectural shape and twelve Corinthian columns, it alludes to Greek architecture and the first attempts at democratic government in the West. Directly north up the rue Royale, the SainteMarie-Madeleine church reflects the shape of the Assemblée nationale, with almost the same façade. Some have called it the Parthenon of Western Europe. 23 Before he built the Arc de Triomphe, Napoléon conceived the idea of rebuilding the Madeleine as a “temple of glory” in memory of his soldiers. It is the main church of the prestigious eighth arrondissement, and its parish quickly became one of the city’s richest and most fashionable. Surrounded by fountains imitating those of Saint Peter’s Square in Rome and statues representing the eight major cities of France, the Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde recalls France’s connection to a still older civilization (fig. 3). When juxtaposed with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, it encourages one to perceive an affiliation between ancien and moderne. Strangely similar in form, both rectangular columns set on pedestals and coming to a point at their crowns, the Obelisk and Eiffel Tower are symbols of eras their creators hoped would last for centuries. The triangle of institutions north of the Louvre articulates another symbolic relationship between French institutions, this time linking the arts with the state. Until recently, the Ministry of Finance was located in the middle of the north wing of the Louvre, and across the street in the Palais Royal were the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts (now the Ministry of Culture) and the Conseil d’Etat, the ultimate authority on all administrative decisions of the government. Directly in front of these ministries is France’s premier theater of classical drama, the Comédie-Française. Then, at 45 degrees to the west in the distance is the Palais Garnier, or Paris Opéra, the Académie nationale de musique et danse. Completed in 1875, this became a symbol of the new Paris. In demolishing much to site it near banks, hotels, and department stores, the government demonstrated how important the arts had become in the city’s commerce. Two years later, when they carved out the Avenue de l’Opéra linking the Palais Garnier to the ComédieFrançaise, the Louvre, and the ministries that controlled them, the relationship between these guardians of the country’s traditions became a permanent feature of the Paris landscape (fig. 4). 24 Forming the third point of an invisible triangle, is the Opéra-Comique, north of the Comédie-Française, burnt down in 1887 and 23.  John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, 5: 14. 24.  In “After 1850 at the Paris Opéra: Institutions and Repertory,” in The Cambridge Com­ panion to Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Steven Huebner suggests that this avenue was originally conceived to connect the Palais Garnier with the Tuileries Palace (303).

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Fig. 3  The pink granite Obelisk of Luxor, Place de la Concorde, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Photograph by the author, 2006. The Obelisk, approximately 3,300 years old, was given to France by the viceroy of Egypt in 1829, and was installed in the Place de la Concorde in the 1830s. A visual as well as symbolic parallel to the Obelisk may be found in the Eiffel Tower, built in 1889, but in contrast with the single mass of stone found in the ancient monument, the modern construction is made up of numerous smaller interlocking parts. Miriam Levin finds in the Tower’s construction “a symbol of the liberal democratic production system,” as each part, composed of the same material, works together towards the goal of progress (Levin, “The Eiffel Tower Revisited,” French Review 62 [1989], 1052–64).

Fig. 4  The Avenue de l’Opéra. This photo looks along the Avenue de l’Opéra, which begins at the Palais du Louvre and ends at the Palais Garnier. Originally, this thoroughfare, begun in the 1860s, was to have been called the Avenue Napoléon, but following the fall of the Second Empire and the construction of the Palais Garnier, it was given its current name. As this photograph shows, unlike many of the wider Paris streets, the Avenue de l’Opéra is not lined with trees—a decision made to permit the best possible view of the Opéra’s façade.

reopened in 1898. 25 Until recently, these three theaters, with their state-appointed administrators, consumed most of the country’s cultural funding. In return for enormous subsidies, programming decisions have had to comply with changing state regulations. Situated thus, with its windows facing the Opéra and the Comédie-Française, the Ministry of Finance could literally keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, such proximity permitted their directors to engage in last-minute negotiations with those holding the country’s purse strings. Bridges mark other important juxtapositions, some also symbolically significant. For artists, the most significant is the Pont des Arts. This metal footbridge (begun in 1802 but not completed until 1876) joins the principal courtyard of the Louvre to the Institut de France (figs. 5 and 6). The architect responsible for additions to the Louvre in the late seventeenth century, Louis Le Vau, also designed the Institut, which houses the five academies. Their related architecture suggests an analogous harmony between the past housed at the Louvre and the future conceived at the academies. The bridge contributes to this symbolism in several ways. First, in the eighteenth century, the royal academies and their artists took over the Louvre palace to work there. Second, the Pont des Arts has beckoned academicians to cross that bridge metaphorically, to connect with the country’s past, to respect its traditions, and then to return to the present remembering the legacy of their predecessors. And third, the bridge reminds academicians of their duty to maintain this connection. Winners of the Prix de Rome have often assembled on the bridge after receiving the country’s most prestigious art prizes, marking the end of their training and the beginning of their careers. The message of the site was clear: these artists and composers were the physical link between the art of the past housed at the Louvre—the country’s memory—and the art of the future—the country’s hope. It should not be surprising that many have often complained of the conservatism this implies. The Pont Alexandre III (fig. 7) likewise symbolizes an alliance between institutions on either side, here linking the headquarters of French political power since 1870 (the presidential palace behind the Champs-Elysées) with that of French military power (the city’s “military governor,” since 1892 at Les Invalides, a complex that houses Napoléon’s tomb). Both banks of the river here are as grandiose as Paris gets, laden with emblems of the country’s glory. Inaugurated in 1896 25.  These three theaters were not always at these sites—the Comédie-Française began on the Left Bank and the opera houses occupied several sites, often because of fires. However, except during rebuilding after fires, for the most part they remained in the same neighborhood throughout the nineteenth century. Their relationship to the country’s cultural ministries has been one of the most important in Parisian cultural life.

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Fig. 5  The Pont des Arts facing the Institut de France.

Fig. 6  The Pont des Arts facing the Louvre. The Pont des Arts, the construction of which spanned nearly three-quarters of a century, was finally completed in 1876. The bridge connects the Louvre with the Institut de France.

Fig. 7  The Pont Alexandre III. Photograph by the author, 2007. The Pont Alexandre III, the widest and most ornate bridge in Paris, completed in 1900, connects the Grand Palais and Petit Palais with Les Invalides.

and finished in 1900 to honor the assassinated Russian czar, this bridge was also conceived of as a permanent, visual symbol of the alliance France was seeking with Russia, based on shared political and military interests. The large figure of “the Parisian” as a modern woman sets the tone, but, with its sides adorned with streetlights and excessively ornamental metalwork and statues, much of it gilded, the bridge represents all that France hoped for from the alliance between the two countries—mutual wealth, glory, brilliance, and particularly triumph (e.g., with Russian help, the recapture of the French provinces lost to Germany in 1870). The story of Paris, however, is not just a story of elites, with their hopes, desires, and accomplishments. To the east, where workers, immigrants, and others of lesser means have traditionally congregated, lies another symbolic triangle of avenues. At its three points stand the Bastille column and statues representing the Republic and the Nation, all monuments commemorating struggle and the patriotism of ordinary people. The medieval rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine (connecting two of them and forming the southern border of the eleventh arrondissement) long housed furniture makers and woodworkers, who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were frequently revolutionaries. At either end, the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la Nation once functioned as entrances to the city. During the Revolution, guillotines stood in both. On the site of the storming of the Bastille fortress, a column commemorates victims of the July Revolution of 1830 that unseated King Charles X. At the Place de la Nation where ten radiating avenues coincide as at the Arc de Triomphe, a statue erected in 1899 depicts a woman standing for Justice and a man symbolizing Work. This “Triumph of the Republic” serves as a republican analogue to the Napoleonic military glories memorialized by the Arc de Triomphe. It also echoes another female symbol of the Republic up Haussmann’s boulevard Voltaire to the northwest—an icon that has dominated the Place de la République, at the intersection of the third, tenth, and eleventh arrondissements, since 1883 (fig. 8). Historically, the French have used these sites to remember the dead and various revolutions; today, political and union demonstrators tend to gather there. Unlike at other key intersections in the city, however, one cannot see from one of these monuments to the next: the avenues are too long, or they curve. The effect and the message are different, signifying not glory, but working-class pride and hope for change. Such heady symbolism in the landscape came at a cost. The creation of these avenues, many begun in the 1850s, entailed some of Haussmann’s most devastating urban surgery, destroying thousands of homes and dispersing many people. Between 1860 and 1870, there were 3,926 expropriations of property in Paris,

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 17

Fig. 8  The Place de la République.

resulting in 2,095,000 m2 being acquired by the government. 26 In part to pay for these, as well as new constructions (like the Palais Garnier and the two theaters at Châtelet), Haussmann persuaded the city to annex communities around the city walls. On 1 January 1860, Paris expanded from 12 to 20 arrondissements, more than doubling its surface area and increasing its population by one-third. The hike in taxes in the new arrondissements caused many to flee. Expanded costs pushed Haussmann eventually to resign and contributed to the unfavorable elections that immediately preceded the Franco-Prussian War. 27 After 1870, disparities continued to increase in the city, especially between the rich and the poor. As the wealthy moved increasingly westward, workers, artisans, and lower-level employees, displaced by the construction of the grand avenues, migrated further east and northeast. By 1886, they constituted more than half the residents of Belleville (twentieth arrondissement), built after 1860 for those coming from the provinces to participate in Paris’s reconstruction. Some workers remained in the city center near the central market, Les Halles (first arrondisse26.  See Pierre Lavedan, “Amis et ennemis d’Haussmann: Emprunts et expropriations,” in Louis Réau et al., L’Œuvre du Baron Haussmann, préfet de la Seine (1853–1870) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), 37–52. 27.  Marchand, Paris, 91–92.

18 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

ment), but others moved to the northern and southern gates to be near factories and slaughterhouses. 28 Traveling north along the Saint-Martin Canal from the Place de la République to La Villette, one can see remnants of their modest houses before arriving at the site of the city’s main slaughterhouse, built by Napoléon III, now a space for exhibitions and concerts. 29 Workers could traverse the entire city on one of the thirty-two horse-drawn omnibus lines, the thirty-five tramway lines, the eight river boats (bateaux-mouches), and after 1900, the underground Métro. However, then as now, one rarely encountered elites in working-class neighborhoods. If the association of classes laborieuses with classes dangereuses did not deter them, the number of prisons and hospitals there may have. Haussmann appears to have understood the havoc his new order wreaked. Attempting to stave off social unrest by providing recreation and relaxation for everyone, he and the chief of his Park Service, Alphonse Alphand, vastly expanded the city’s public spaces. The state forests on either side of Paris became public gardens, and new ones were created.30 Given that people living in eastern Paris, many of them workers, caroused in the Bois de Vincennes on Sunday afternoons, while those in western arrondissements, most of them well-off, preferred the Bois de Boulogne, parks did not necessarily serve to mitigate the class distinctions encouraged by the city’s new landscape, as some might have hoped, although perhaps this was true at the centrally located Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens. Albert Boime may be correct in arguing that the blurry lines and subjects used by the impressionist painters in the wake of the Commune represent an attempt to reappropriate the Paris landscape for the bourgeoisie, “restoring sites where bar28.  Heavy industry was not pushed outside the city limits until 1900, and Les Halles not until the 1970s. 29.  Such neighborhoods are described in Rodolphe Trouilleux, Paris secret et insolite (Paris: Parigramme, 1996). Those interested can still find the apartments and studios of nineteenthcentury workers in the eleventh and twelfth districts, a mirror manufacturer functioning since 1886, a washhouse cited by Victor Hugo, and numerous alleys and courtyards offering “a little trip back in time,” even if inhabited today, not by provincials, as years ago, but by immigrants from North Africa or Asia. 30.  Alphand, who had been chief engineer of pleasure grounds and plantations since 1854, was appointed director of works for the city of Paris in May 1871. In his Contemporary France, 1873–75, vol. 2 (1905; New York: Books for Libraries, 1971), Gabriel Hanotaux interprets his appointment as indicating “a desire to preserve for the town its noble proportions, its graceful shady avenues, and the beauty of its ornaments” (629). As Christopher Prendergast points out in Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), “the building of the Buttes-Chaumont [in the nineteenth arrondissement] obliterated not only the former cesspools of the Montfauçon but also the site of a notorious gibbet, while the refurbishing of the Parc Monceau [in the ninth arrondissement] during the Third Republic made use of the debris of the Hôtel de Ville, demolished during the Commune, for the flower-beds” (167).

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 19

ricades once stood . . . to their pristine urban glory” as “metaphors for the actual rehabilitation of the Third Republic France.”31 For this government, the social divisions embodied in the Paris landscape were both a problem and a solution, and certainly the subject of ongoing controversy. From 1871 to 1883, the most striking visual reminder of the country’s internal divisions was the gutted Palais de Tuileries at the very center of Paris (frontispiece). Suggesting the power of absence as well as presence in the cityscape, these ruins, untouched for twelve years, were fraught with uneasy and powerfully ambivalent symbolism. The site evoked the grandeur of the monarchy, installed there since the sixteenth century, the opulence of the empire, and the locus of executive power since 1800. The Convention was housed there during the Revolution, recalling the courage of the people who in 1789 invaded to remove the king, in 1830 and 1848 attacked again, and, on 23 May 1871, just before the French army’s violent suppression of the Communards, torched it in one their last acts of defiance. 32 Monarchists, if they could not persuade the government to restore it, were content to let the devastation serve as a warning against “the horrors of revolution.” Republicans would either rebuild it as an art museum or replace it with a public garden. 33 Only when the latter came fully into power was the site cleared, allowing for the magnificent new vista from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe (see frontispiece and figs. 2 and 9). After the 1870 siege of Paris, defeat by Prussia, and civil war under the Commune, French of all political persuasions needed to feel renewed pride in their nation and its culture, whether this pride was rooted in past glories, present accomplishments, or future utopias. In many ways, after the ruins were cleared away and the city rebuilt, the landscape of Paris rose to this challenge, and not just in its urban design and public sculptures. Through various laws controlling the design and height of private buildings, state officials were able to ensure visual harmony in the city and enforce their evolving conceptions of beauty. The decrees of July 1882 played an important role in the blurring of design criteria for public 31.  Albert Boime, Art and the French Commune (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 45. 32.  Ironically, just before the attack, the Commune government sponsored four concerts within the Tuileries palace, “infused with nationalist spirit and anti-monarchical propaganda.” One critic saw the palace thus “purified by the presence of the people.” See Jess Tyre, “Music in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune,” Journal of Musicology 22, 2 (2005): 189–92. 33.  For more extended discussion, see Kirk Varnedoe, “The Tuileries Museum and the Uses of Art History in the Early Third Republic,” in Saloni, gallerie, musei e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte dei secoli 19. e 20., ed. Francis Haskell (Bologna: CLUEB, 1981), 63–68.

20 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

Fig. 9  The Arc du Carrousel in front of the Tuileries Palace, before May 1871. See also figure 2 and frontispiece. Begun by Catherine de Médicis in 1564, the Tuileries Palace was the residence of Louis XIV while Versailles was being built. Louis XVI was held there under house arrest after the Revolution. In the nineteenth century, the Tuileries was the imperial palace of Napoléon I and Napoléon III.

and private buildings. In the case of “private constructions having a monumental character” or for “the needs of art” as well as science or industry, the Conseil des batiments civils would grant exceptions to the predetermined height and protrusion limits forced on the city by Haussmann. 34 To the extent that hotels, banks, insurance companies, and department stores invested resources in decorating their façades, they were allowed to add huge cupolas, allegorical statues, bay windows, and other prominent architectural references to palaces, châteaux, and theaters to enhance the distinction of their buildings (fig. 10). City officials sought to combat the visual monotony of Haussmann’s straight boulevards, and by the end of the century, one could find domes, towers, and other decorative anomalies on corner 34.  “Décret portant règlement sur les saillies permises dans la ville de Paris (XII, B. DCCXIII, n. 12, 151), titres I, IV,” as reproduced in Marilu Cantelli, L’Illusion monumentale: Paris, 1872–1936 (Liège: Mardaga, 1991), 83, 85. In her discussion of changing official policy on architectural design in Paris, Cantelli shows how architects adapted to private settings the notion of monumentality, previously associated with the state and state power, thereby helping officials to undo the uniformity forced on the city under the Second Empire by Haussmann. See also n. 3 above and Loyer, Paris Architecture and Urbanism.

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 21

Fig. 10  Au Printemps department store, Boulevard Haussmann. One of the principal department stores in Paris, Au Printemps opened for business in 1865. In order to provide its customers with an experience that was at the height of fashion both technologically and aesthetically, the building underwent a variety of improvements in the years after its initial construction. Elevators were added in the 1860s, much to the delight of customers and the press, and the famous stained-glass cupola was added in 1923. By the turn of the century, a similar dome graced the top of the Grands Magasins Réúnis in Hanoi, evidence not only of the influence of Parisian architecture, but also of colonialists’ belief in the universality of French notions of beauty.

buildings and those facing public squares throughout Paris. In their official report of 1897, a committee appointed by the city to study “all questions relative to the beauty of Paris” explained, “aesthetics is not a luxury for a nation, but a need as important as hygiene.”35 This led to a 1902 decree allowing even apartment buildings to express originality in their façades, whether on wide or narrow streets, in rich or poor neighborhoods. Moreover, façades were defined as not only the street side of a building, but also what faced courtyards and back alleys. The result of all this is a city in which the state, in conjunction with private enterprise, has made aesthetics determine much of one’s visual experience even today. To circulate in Paris is to move through these spaces as in a dance or ritual. Parisians, French provincials, and foreign visitors learn and relearn the city’s stories until the urban body they sculpt over time with their movements feels as natural as their own. If French people are sometimes accused of trusting and enjoying appearances too much and of loving order, it may well result from their experience of Paris, where they are subject to this regular inscription of beauty and symbolic order.36

Negotiating Life in the City If the exquisite and spontaneous banality of the everyday were taken away from Paris, leaving us with only its admirable treasure of monuments, I believe our sensations, our illusions, would lose many vitamins. Léon-Paul Fargue 37

Of course, one can ignore the monuments and the weighty symbolism of the city’s topography. In Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro (1959), a parody of a modern guided tour of Paris, the taxi driver is never quite sure what he is pointing at. Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur, the Invalides, the Panthéon, or the Gare de Lyon— they all have domes. While the humor may depend on the reader’s recognition that the monuments come from different periods and represent different meanings, the point is that one can live without this knowledge. Experience of the modern city can remain wholly private, an occasion to dream.38 35.  Louis Bonnier, “Rapport sur les travaux de la sous-commission administrative,” 3 Feb­ ru­­ary 1897, as cited in Cantelli, Illusion monumentale, 54, n. 51. 36.  From the seventeenth century on, this inscription was also explicit in the urban planning and building of other city centers in France (i.e., Versailles, the old Le Havre, and the central plazas of Nancy, Reims, Charleville, etc.) 37.  Fargue, Refuges, 22. 38.  Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, 228–29.

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 23

Contradictions also beset the city, as elsewhere in the nation. How does one negotiate “the insistent mobility of the present and the visible weight of the past”?39 How to comprehend chaotic neighborhoods characterized by irregular streets and heterogeneous architecture bordered by grand, homogeneous boulevards? Below-ground realities and above-ground appearances? The inside and outside of buildings? The expansion of the bourgeoisie brought newer buildings with fewer height differences between the floors, implying a more democratic use of space (previously only the lower floors, intended for the wealthy, had had lofty ceilings). Other distinctions in these buildings, however, remained. While their façades often had expensive stonework, and entry staircases grew increasingly grand, their inner courtyards were built of brick. Service staircases for domestic workers with rooms on the top floor also stayed simple, a metaphor and reflection of class differences. 40 Haussmann may have made the city seem more coherent and beautiful—turning it into an aesthetic object—but at the cost of hiding much from public view. If we take the city as a context for everyday life rather than the symbolic representation of power and elite desires, Paris’s grandiose vistas, didactic monuments, and evocative urban juxtapositions become frameworks for something besides submission to what Michel de Certeau has called “regimes of domination and control.”41 Some prefer purchasing sensations along its grands boulevards or the tiny streets of Montmartre. Others focus on the city spectacle as detached observers. Hanging out, or flânerie, as Balzac, Flaubert, and Baudelaire called it in the nineteenth century, can lead to exultation or alienation. Any promenade promises the charm of the unexpected: consider the juxtaposition of scale and materials at the intersection of a Haussmanian boulevard with a medieval alley. Meaningful experiences also begin in the transient moment. For Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin, the fugitive, contingent impression provided one of the most prominent pleasures of the city. More recently de Certeau has advocated resisting the narratives of the cityscape with self-consciously “denarrativized” walking involving detours in order to avoid the “fixities” of the city. 42 Also valuable, I would suggest, is an experience that acknowledges “the tension between the lived and the imposed,” as Christopher Prendergast puts it, 43 and seeks to negotiate possible relationships between them, as might an improvisation on a well-known tune. 39.  This is where Ferguson situates the nineteenth-century flâneur (ibid., 80). 40.  Marchand, Paris, 88–89, 94. 41.  Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in id., The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–110. 42.  Discussed in Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 209–11. 43.  Ibid., 214.

24 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

The well-recognized popularity of cafés in Paris should alert us to how Parisians have bridged this tension. Outdoor cafés represent an alternative use of Paris streets, an overlap between private and public activities. In these nonhierarchical spaces—what Fargue called “Everyman’s Academy” (l’Académie de Monsieur Tout le Monde)—people of all kinds gather to combat the despair of daily life. 44 Cafés have also been one of the few places where Parisians reveal themselves. 45 Writers, intellectuals, artists, and anyone with time on their hands have gravitated to them as if to “confessionals.” There, as Fargue put it, “pride falls to our feet and true talent becomes recognizable.”46 People “unravel the glories of the antechamber and salon” and, unlike what they write in newspapers, magazines, and speeches, bare their real opinions. 47 Paris’s long succession of cafés offers an important respite from the city’s power structures and frenzied momentum. They suggest how important informal, spontaneous encounters are to the French in their experience of the city. To the extent that cafés encourage people to explore connections and form bonds, some have served as the “cradles” of clubs and artistic movements, many of them interdisciplinary. Thinking about the city as something other than a “living library” forces us to acknowledge the ephemeral aspects of city life, the multiple-use spaces, and the movement within movement. Narratives animated by the rhythms of commerce and markets, leisure and entertainment, domesticity and families evolve out of practicalities and personal choices more than political symbolism. Their ebbs and flows also shape the city. Delivering a very different message than that encoded in the city’s monuments and urban design, they demand an acceptance of its opacity and unpredictability, the fast circulation of capital and ideas that have kept any stable identity from lasting for very long. Musical worlds might appear to be structured like the city of Paris, with the elites gravitating toward some venues and the masses to others; and compositions themselves, like certain aspects of the city, may aspire to monumentality, inspire ideals, and use present experience to connect us with the past. However, we should not forget the spontaneous and ephemeral aspects of French musical life, not only in cafés-concerts and cabarets, but also in art music venues. Like a person’s experience of the city, musical performance itself is, by its nature, of the moment. Late nineteenth-century French audiences had so many choices—up to six orchestras on Sunday afternoons alone—that they tended to purchase their tickets at the last 44.  Fargue, Refuges, 102, 104. 45.  Léon Daudet, Salons et journaux (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie nationale, 1917), 296. 46.  Fargue, Refuges, 96–97. 47.  Daudet, Salons et journaux, 297.

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 25

minute. Programming decisions could not be made entirely in advance, for audiences often demanded that works be repeated the next week. Moreover, all classes got involved with art music, joining amateur music societies in unprecedented numbers and sometimes attending the same concerts. All this affected the flux of public taste, not only in Paris, but throughout the nation. Even those with little interest in music might enjoy a transcription of a recent Opéra premiere wafting through the summer air in their favorite public garden, where several days a week military and amateur wind bands performed. While the competition produced variety and choice, it also encouraged organizational turnover. To understand this, we need to meander through newspapers, journals, and family magazines seeking, not just reviews, but also documentation of performances not reviewed. Many contingencies affected what music was composed, performed, and heard, and the country supported small-scale uses of music as well as large-scale productions. What have we missed from our music histories that, like Haussmann’s boulevards, have effaced most of this, preferring vistas that prepared a self-fulfilling future?

New Promenades in the Aural Landscapes of Paris There is not just one Paris, there are three or four—a worldly Paris, a bourgeois Paris, an intellectual Paris, an ordinary people’s Paris—living side by side and hardly ever meeting. If you do not know these small cities within the City, you cannot picture the whole, the powerful and often contradictory life of this gigantic organism. To have a glimpse of musical life in Paris then, you need to take into account the variety of milieus and the never-ending movement of ideas, which always reaches beyond the goal it had seemed to set for itself. Romain Rolland 48

In French musical life, as in the city and the nation, official structures orient and elevate certain perspectives. Preoccupied with increasing literacy in the late nineteenth century, French republicans of all classes expected music to function as a signifying practice, like public sculpture, illustrated magazines, and newspaper supplements. They believed it was legible, although its narratives might be abstract or multivalent. At the same time, they saw comprehending and appreciating the beauty of its form and the harmony of its proportions as a prerequisite to feeling its beneficial effects. Such ideals might reflect elites’ ambitions or at least a desire to share something valuable with everyone. Yet music also provided opportunities for 48.  Romain Rolland, “Le Renouveau: Esquisse du mouvement musical à Paris depuis 1870” (1904), in id., Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Hachette, 1921), 211.

26 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

resistance to dominant ideologies, escape, and shared tastes that mitigated the city’s social, political, and economic distinctions. Startling discontinuities and innumerable “cities within the City” alert us to the complexity of musical life in nineteenthcentury Paris and, by extension, the rest of the country. Like the Parisian landscape, music could express many different values, behaviors, and actions. 49 What claimed the right to speak through music, of course, was first and foremost the state, music’s major patron. As with its action in urban design, the state created many contexts for music, including institutions, performance venues, and competitions. Third Republic leaders took music seriously. They believed deeply, and for many years, in its power to imbue values. Some considered musicians a kind of elite, a “sacred battalion” of the city’s “capacities and glories.”50 For others, musicians were the “breath,” and society was the “instrument” being played. Nothing else acted so powerfully on a crowd and made people’s hearts beat as quickly as music, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts Georges Leygues observed.51 In opera, in particular, the leaders of the Third Republic saw a way to promote certain messages, as well as to assert French cultural superiority in the world. From today’s perspective, the surviving musical monuments of this period are telling. Certain operas, especially by Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Bizet, Gounod, and Thomas, are historical landmarks, not only because of their grand scale, but also because they crystallized and clarified the structure of the musical world around them.52 Yet, as with Paris after Haussmann’s transformation of the city, what we are given to experience besides these monuments is the product, not just of natural selection, with strong works surviving over weak ones, but also of a reconfiguration of nineteenth-century realities. “Struggle itself creates the history of the field,” the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues.53 Successors have rewritten history and promoted new symbols reflecting their concerns. After Third Republic leaders had cleared space in the collective memory for heroes like Berlioz, twentieth-century critics and historians who espoused different values elevated new ones—the musical trinity of Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré, and later Satie, little known in the nineteenth century.54 49.  Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 16–18. 50.  “La Vie et les castes musicales,” Revue de gazette musicale, 6 October 1872, 314. 51.  Georges Leygues, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beauxarts: Séance publique annuelle 4 août 1894 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1894). 52.  On the nature of monuments, see Loyer, Paris Architecture and Urbanism, 292. 53.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 106. 54.  Emile Vuillermoz—an admirer of Debussy, a student of Fauré’s, and friend of Ravel’s— argued for the primacy of these composers as early as 1935 in the collective volume, Initiation à la

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 27

As a modernist raised on this musical trinity, along with Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, I grew up inspired by their bold artistic visions. The symbolist imagination fascinated me, as did music’s power to reveal the dynamism of the mind, correspondences among the arts, and abstractions without expressive signification.55 These provided my teachers with pleasurable escape from the chilling realities of the Cold War and the banal consumerism of 1950s domesticity. As the imagination seemed to be free of gender, race or class, so we thought, these concerns also transported our attention away from the troublesome social conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s. Art for art’s sake presented challenges that helped shape how we thought and listened. But as the ideology of progress and the avant-garde itself came increasingly into question, the postmodern world reminded us that culture informs the subjectivity expressed by music, that politics and sociocultural circumstances are part of the creation as well as the reception of all art, and that what we know is often linked to what those in power want us to know. Today, the image of these trinities representing the Belle Epoque in modern colors has tended to skew our experience of late nineteenth-century France. Debussy with his elitism and arrogant disdain for others, Ravel with his refined detachment, Fauré with his generous liberalism, and Satie with his bohemian idiosyncrasies have taught us much about French musical culture. But their careers and reputations did not mature until the twentieth century. What understanding have we lost in rendering invisible and mute so many of their contemporaries, including other well-known musicians of the time, such as Augusta Holmès? Why do we judge those like Vincent d’Indy by what they later became?56 Is it only our taste for what we already know that deprives us of curiosity? Or has taste evolved such that we have difficulty appreciating music that displays other aspects of French culture, musique (1935). He baptized them explicitly as the new trinity of French music in his own Histoire de la musique (1949), still available today in a 1973 Livre de Poche. I address what happened to music history of this period during the 1930s in Jann Pasler, “Bleu-horizon and Beyond: The Politics of L’Initiation à la Musique (1935)” (paper first presented at the conference “Nation, Myth, and Reality in the 1930s,” Royal Holloway, University of London, 24 October 1998). In her contribution to a round table on “Romanticism and the Historical Consciousness” at the International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music (Royal Holloway, University of London, 30 June 2000), Katherine Kolb argued similarly that “historical consciousness depends in part on the vocabulary available to it” and “is a matter not only of awareness, but also of erasures.” 55.  These interests culminated in my MA Thesis, “Paul Valéry and His Concept of Harmony” (University of Chicago, 1974). 56.  For a new perspective on Vincent d’Indy, see Jann Pasler, “Deconstructing d’Indy, or the Problem of a Composer’s Reputation,” 19th Century Music 30, 3 (Spring 2007): 230–56, and in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

28 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

including heroism?57 As Romain Rolland noted in his diary of the 1870s and 1880s, “the country lived in the expectation of war.” It seemed “certain, imminent.” Young men felt they were “awaiting the order to leave at any moment.”58 In this context, patriotism was important culturally as well as politically. History since then has been as much a result of disenchantment as enchantment. Should we not look at things as they were before modernist agendas (and certain political motivations) seduced us into amnesia, leading us to forget important elements of the past? In Composing the Citizen, I turn to history to write it anew. If, admittedly, I come to it from afar, by appreciating not just the well-trodden vistas but also the dark corners of the past, I aim to bring a broader acceptance of what transpired than previously acknowledged and a more historically grounded interpretation of why. French music historians who first promoted the Debussy-Ravel-Fauré trinity, such as Emile Vuillermoz, elevated their heroes through binary oppositions, largely disdaining their training and the contexts from which they emerged. Such writers degraded the competition and emphasized modernists’ originality. The state and all that it represented was either left out of their stories, or presented as dull background, unworthy of attention. Anything that concerned “the masses,” from transcriptions to the musicians who performed them, was considered useless in discussing art music. With military metaphors, these scholars and their successors have divided musicians into camps and presented their conflicts as “battles,” but at the expense of nuance and sometimes accuracy. When politics is mentioned, it is for its pernicious influence, whether coming from the Right or the Left. My goal is not to argue about which composers “won” or to disparage those who “lost,” a product of how we construe the “battle.” Rather, I hope to change the terms of the discourse, shifting it away from what leads too quickly to value judgments. Previous histories of this period, most written in the wake of the world wars, suffer from the prejudices of a generation that needed to turn its back on the Belle Epoque to move beyond it. Most scholarship since then has been in the form of biographies, studies of individual works, genres (mostly opera), and elite institutions, with a few recent exceptions.59 57.  Romain Rolland describes Debussy’s music as expressing one aspect of the French genius, the other being “heroic action, drunken reason, laughter, the passion of light, and . . . in music, the France of Berlioz and Bizet. . . . It’s this double ideal, the alternatives of delicate sunlight and light fog that make the soft, luminous, and veiled sky of the Ile-de-France” (“Pelléas et Mélisande de Claude Debussy,” in Rolland, Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 206). 58.  Romain Rolland, Mémoires et fragments du journal (Paris: Albin Michel, 1956), 63 (entry for 15 January 1888). 59.  See n. 90 below and especially Steven Huebner’s study of Wagner’s influence on French composers; Jane Fulcher’s interpretation of music and politics before and after this period;

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Here, I set out a hermeneutics of French republican culture, in all its complexity and contradiction, with music at its center. Focused on the national interests of the country more than the special interests of factions or individuals and seeing social value in musical differences and diversity, I ask what rendered music valuable to French people of all classes and what it contributed to “composing” citizens. Concentrating on productive tensions between the political and the aesthetic, I try to explain, not only the compelling nature of the ideology that embraced the idea of forging citizens, but also how music could be a part of it. Examining the multiple and overlapping identities of musicians, I explore interconnectedness in the musical world, repertoire that reached workers as well as elites, and continuities as well as discontinuities with the French past. Debussy’s and Ravel’s achievements are all the more remarkable when understood, not as reactions to a lame or corrupt Republic, but as reasoned critical responses to strong and vital forces within it, including those centrally important in the evolution of the French democracy down to the present. This project began when, in studying aristocrats’ involvement in music and their support for innovation in the 1890s, I came to understand the role music played in the conflict over what France’s cultural legacy would be. This led me to hear some of their music as sites of memory (lieux de mémoire), like the statues placed at strategic points in Paris—something fixed, as in marble or bronze, but ever mobile in the imagination, an accomplishment of more than beauty. 60 To understand what was at stake, I had to go back to the French Revolution. Its symbols—like the liberty tree, the patriotic altar, and music—both expressed political positions and served as the means by which people became aware of their politics. As metaphors, these symbols erased and negated differences, while, as Lynn Hunt has argued, offering the means and ends of power itself. If Hunt, François Furet, and others have convinced us that politics can help fashion a people, then we should take seriously the French revolutionaries’ faith in music as a force to help form French citizens. 61 The example of the revolutionaries encourages us to enquire into the meaning of all musical activities, not just those supported by the state—the anarchy as well as the accord. James Ross’s Crisis and Transformation: French Opera, Politics, and the Press, 1897–1903 (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1998); and Didier Francfort, Le Chant des nations: Musiques et cultures en Europe, 1870–1914 (Paris: Hachette, 2004). 60.  Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, is the title of a seven-volume collection of essays in three parts, La République (1984), La Nation (1986), and Les France (1992). 61.  Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 88.

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The history that interests me begins with republican idealism and what it engendered in French music and society. When the Third Republic collapsed in 1940, some denigrated it as a “cabal” of Protestants, Freemasons, and Jews, and many since then have reduced it to its positivist orientation. 62 But why would someone like Rolland write in his diary, “I feel more republican than French; I would sacrifice my country to the Republic, as I’d sacrifice my life to God”?63 And what was so compelling about the Republic that so many French were willing to suffer another political cataclysm in 1870 (after those of 1848 and 1851) even before the Germans besieged Paris and the Communards raised their torches? In many ways, the answer is its utopian character—as Philip Nord puts it, “its imagining of a universal order in which human beings might live in harmony with nature and themselves.”64 This meant achieving, not only political unity, but also political inclusion, that is, extending the rights and duties of citizenship to all classes. When they finally took over government, conservative as well as progressive republicans looked to music, along with the other arts and literature, to help initiate this process. In Composing the Citizen, I investigate how French citizens thought music could contribute to the formation and health of their democracy, and why they embraced musical progress as emblematic of national progress. I explore the musical education they envisaged, from thinking a child’s first intellectual efforts should involve singing to devoting a significant place to music in the Universal Exhibitions. I examine the shifting beliefs and conditions that led to and then mitigated the pervasiveness of republican ideology in French culture. Elites may have tried to dominate the musical world, but among themselves conflict remained. Their stories are compelling, but not necessarily unified or coherent. The history that remains may seem the result of a perspective commonly agreed upon by historians and critics, inviting one to follow it like a Parisian avenue to a predetermined conclusion. As we’ve seen with the city, however, there is always more to it. If history is a series of questions and answers (with the question occurring as an individual disruption of an answer that has become common knowledge but before was a response to an earlier collective question), 65 those posed by the early 62.  Philip Nord, The Republican Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 191, 245. 63.  Rolland, Mémoires, 68. This excerpt comes from a diary notation made the night after the opening of the 1889 Universal Exhibition. 64.  Nord, Republican Moment, 191. 65.  In his Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “A person who seeks to understand must question what lies behind what is said. He must understand it as an answer to a question. . . . We shall understand historical events only if we reconstruct the question to which the historical actions

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Third Republic are crucial to understand, in part because this government laid the foundations for public support of the arts in France. Much was at stake in music as well as society when republicans were battling monarchists for control in the 1870s and reforming education, rethinking French traditions, debating colonialist expansion, and promoting eclecticism, competition, and liberalism in the 1880s. And much had to be reconsidered in the 1890s as socialist congresses and anarchists demanded social justice and workers’ empowerment, progressistes politicians sought political realignment among conflict-ridden elites, a nationalist Right began to emerge, and the Dreyfus Affair split the population into two groups, separated by irreconcilable ideological differences. Music and concert life helped people to negotiate the gap between political ideals and political realities, although, as a critic pointed out in 1873, music reviewers were not supposed to faire de la politique in the music press. 66 Whether implicitly or explicitly, music could articulate contradictions and suggest ways of accommodating differences. Responding not only to a loss of French pride after the Franco-Prussian War but also to the overwhelming popularity of Offenbach on Paris stages during the Second Empire, musicians in the Third Republic struggled to agree on French values. Their notions of beauty and pleasure raised questions their successors had to confront, as did a new elitism that rejected what had rendered art music accessible to the masses. As various countercultures began to look to music to help ensure the survival of their values, this brought about not merely opportunities for dissent and contestation, but also new frameworks for the unexpected. Modernist attitudes and aesthetics arose in this context. To understand this, we must return to the “lived” experiences of these times, not just to the musical canon that remains. The history of the latter may articulate important sites of continuity and shared values in the cultural landscape, but often underestimates the precariousness of any music’s survival and leaves aside the of the persons concerned were the answer” (333–34). See also Jauss, as explained by de Man in The Resistance to Theory: “As the answer metamorphoses into a question, it becomes like an individual, tree, or portrait set within a stylized landscape and it reveals, by the same token, a live background behind its background, in the form of a question from which it now can itself stand out” (59). 66.  “Il ne nous est pas permis de faire de la politique dans les colonnes de ce journal et nous ne le regrettons pas. Il y a 45 journaux politiques à Paris sans compter les revues, qui nous consoleraient de cette défense, si elle pouvait nous affecter,” M. de Thémines observed in “L’Art et le luxe,” Art musical, 16 October 1873. Nevertheless, politics did occasionally seep into reviews, especially at moments of political crisis and, in any case, formed part of the context in which music was heard. It seemed as if the monarchy might be restored that fall, and Thémines asked, “Sous quelle forme de gouvernement le développement de l’art peut-il être le plus favorisé?” (329–30).

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complexity of how works become canonical. Thus, while presenting a macrohistory of republicans’ hopes and desires and their attempts to institutionalize their ideals, I look at a wide range of musical works, ideas, people, performances, and other “events” (in the historical sense). 67 Examining these in the context of largescale ambitions allows us to recognize what Paul Ricoeur calls the “initiative and capacity for negotiation of historical agents in situations marked by uncertainty.”68 To the extent that these forces worked together, meaning circulated, and not necessarily unilaterally, from composers to audiences. To show this, I attempt to integrate the conceptual apparatus implied by the notion of public utility into the rich details of daily life, balancing clarity and complexity. What results is a diachronics of the musical geography that addresses the contingencies of musical life and the extent to which music took part in the constitution of a social bond and national identity in flux. My aim, then, is to situate music in and as history. As the historian Michel Faure points out, “The work of an artist, of a genius, does not fall from the sky. Music is an earthly and social thing. It is the vibrant flesh and blood of history. It is also one of history’s most effective instruments, because it remains above all suspicion.”69 How music was composed, therefore, interests me less than how it was valued, disseminated, and received. My focus is neither on innovations per se nor on how certain works served as precursors or predecessors to the music of our own time. Rather, I suggest how music may have functioned, or some hoped it would function, within its society for people of all classes. By presenting these works in close relationship to the vagaries of political life, I suggest how music helped support and express two of the most defining characteristics of democracy, that is, uncertainty and mutability (as opposed to totalitarianism or the timeless truths of religion), a society that changes in time.70 Such an approach demands context-specific, intertextual analyses and a concept of music that goes beyond scores and sounds. If some people consider the nineteenth century as responsible for conventions that have limited our understanding of and participation in music—such as, most notably, our focus on the artwork (as unpacked by Lydia Goehr)—here I suggest we rethink these preconceptions. 67.  My use of the word event here is influenced by Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 245– 46. Events take on meaning from the narrative in which they are recounted. 68.  Ibid., 187, 210. 69.  Michel Faure, “Le Néoclassicisme musical en France entre les deux armistices de Rethondes,” in 20ème Siècle: Images de la musique française, ed. Jean-Pierre Derrien (Paris: SACEM, 1986), 39. 70.  Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 25, 29.

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Carolyn Abbate has recently suggested, “what counts is not a work . . . in the abstract, but a material, present event.” I agree that it is in attending performances that audiences most often experience music. As she notes, “music’s effects upon performers and listeners can be devastating, physically brutal, mysterious, erotic, moving, boring, pleasing, enervating, or uncomfortable, generally embarrassing, subjective, and resistant to the gnostic.” All true. What interests me, however, is how concert organizers, performers, and audiences participate in the production of musical meaning, not just its “reception.” This becomes clear in examining specific performances, “musicology’s perpetually absent objects.” At particular times and places, surrounded by other music chosen for the occasion, listeners negotiate music’s potential for meaning, and ground it, if only momentarily, but in ways that can later be recalled and built upon. As such, concerts have the capacity to help listeners both engage with music’s “ineffability” and make relationships with it. Those I here examine suggest that concert experiences in fin de siècle France elicited responses far more sophisticated and contemporaneously relevant than the “drastic state . . . unintellectual and common” that Abbate associates with music in live performance. Moreover, they offer important clues to the fluctuations of public as well as private values.71 I thus argue that we take seriously concert programming as one of the determinative categories influencing musical meaning. If, as this implies, we take performance to be a fundamental aspect of not only of musical analysis, but also history, we need also to expand the range of performances we study. French audiences continued to look to opera and opera singers to confer distinction on their consumption, in part because of opera’s traditional association with elites. But, as with the city, a fuller apprehension of the musical world comes in looking beyond elites, their genres, their institutions, and the histories their agendas have dominated. Thus, while other scholars have mostly focused on ensembles that played for the privileged few, I include popular orchestras, amateur choruses, and military bands, many of them also respected for their public utility, even if market-driven. Republicans agreed that all citizens should be able to experience the musical expressions and symbols of the nation, as well as have opportunities to make art music. This encouraged everyone to participate in supply as well as demand. When working-class girls sang alongside Opéra singers, such as in concerts at the Bon Marché department store, music helped mediate class 71.  Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, 3 (Spring 2004): 506, 513–14, 521, 534. See also Françoise Escal and François Nicolas, eds., Le Concert: Enjeux, fonctions, modalités (Paris: Harmattan, 2000); and Jane Fulcher, “The Concert as Political Propaganda in France and the Control of ‘Performative Context,’ ” Musical Quarterly 82, 1 (Spring 1998): 41–57.

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and cultural differences—another important republican ideal. The musical tastes and practices of the middle and especially lower classes may have been largely ignored, hidden, forgotten over time, and eventually erased from public memory, like the winding streets of old Paris. Perhaps they’ve been simply judged too ordinary, like the outer arrondissements of eastern Paris. Yet history itself, as Thomas Carlyle once put it, is made up less of what is preserved than of what is lost.72 To understand what remains, we need to understand what was swept away, as in the city transformed by Haussmann. In decentering my history by giving voice to a broader range of cultural participants, I reflect on a historical precedent to the amateur musical practices studied by sociologists today.73 This leads me to reconsider our concepts of center and periphery, professional and amateur, public and private, the tastes and musical practices of les élites and les classes populaires. In late nineteenth-century France, not only the elites were interested in serious art music; elite and popular domains were not necessarily distinct. In examining performances of diverse performance organizations, we learn that, as in the city, boundaries were fluid. To the extent that musicians and similar repertoire migrated from venue to venue, the musical culture did not reiterate the constraints of class or individual performance organizations. Links between les classes populaires and eminent composers, popular anticipation of official taste, and popular performances of art music point to something other than an entirely unidirectional movement of influence. This forces us to reconsider “trickle-down” theories of cultural hegemony.74 When we take the public nature of musical taste seriously, other conclusions too can be drawn. First, despite what scholars may have found elsewhere, the struggle over what would become popular in France after 1871 did not principally concern the emergence of a canon of Western musical classics as we conceive it today (even if, as Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion have pointed out, love of J. S. Bach, especially among the upper classes, eventually became synonymous with love of music).75 Second, composers from the past did not dominate concert life in late 72.  Carlyle, “On History” (1830), cited in Aleida Assman, “Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory,” Repercussions 56 (1996): 131. 73.  See, e.g., Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Antoine Hennion, La Passion musicale (Paris: Metaille, 1993), and Hennion et al., eds. Figures de l’amateur (Paris: Documentation française, 2000). 74.  Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” International Quarterly 10 (1904): 130–55. In his analysis of the fashion world, Simmel saw the process of “subordinate social groups” seeking new status claims by imitating the tastes of “superordinate groups” as unidirectional. 75.  Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach: L’Amour de la musique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2000). Here I am referring in part to William Weber’s work on canon-formation in Germany and England.

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nineteenth-century Paris. Widespread access to art music supported and perhaps even fueled a renaissance in French contemporary music. French audiences were strikingly tolerant of the unfamiliar, even drawn to it, including new art music. This was not restricted to members of elites who may have sought an association with the new to bolster their own distinction. State-funded organizations, such as the Opéra, became increasingly identified as museums; they were not trendsetters. Elsewhere, curiosity, fashion, and national pride brought numerous new works to public attention, whether they were masterpieces or not. In the 1890s, military bands and zoo concerts performed more music by living French composers than did the Conservatory orchestra. Market competition rather than monopoly helped fuel the evolution of taste in France, especially in orchestral music. With classes and ideologies in flux, the emergence of a complex body of citizens multiplied the possibilities for musical engagement and musical meaning. Just as Parisians could take diverse promenades in the urban geography, there were many ways of listening and relating to music besides the “absorbed silence” which James Johnson assumes took over concert halls after 1840.76 Each consisted of a sensual, aesthetic experience that could evoke a personal, temporal, social, and/or political response, thereby involving associations among various realms of memory. As society became increasingly complex, music’s capacity for meaning expanded. Those who embraced the cult of beauty for its own sake arrested this ballooning potential by arguing for the contemplation and admiration of pure form. Music became a religion, based on faith in the creator. Many looked to music to “forget my misery, to flee who I am in order to find who I want to be,” as Camille Mauclair put it.77 To the extent that modernist efforts situated music as difficult and distant, however, they rendered it ungraspable, almost unknowable. No wonder that, increasingly over the next century, audiences turned away from such music: avantgarde innovations were antithetical to the democratization of music. In seeking to understand what attracted so many people to art music before their uses of it were dominated by mass media and disdained by modernists, I hope to encourage reconsideration of what modernists both sought and sacrificed. Such conclusions come from studying more than the typical primary sources. Thanks to the phenomenon of collecting among the bourgeoisie and the beginning of modern archives from 1870 to 1900, we can examine a rich array of informative documents. Print journalism sheds invaluable light on both the reception and the 76.  James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 280, 284. 77.  Camille Mauclair, La Religion de la musique (1909; Paris: Fischbacher, 1928), 41.

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growing taste for art music, especially its critical reviews. Here, I’ve also looked in too often ignored sections of the press, les nouvelles and foreign news (about French and other music) reported from abroad, for clues as to what forces, internal and external to music, national and international, may have affected public perception of music. To understand what prepares audiences for premieres of major new works, what keeps this music in their ears, and how reception of a work can change over time, I’ve examined transcriptions, excerpts, and various contexts in which major works could be heard. Family music magazines, sheet music reproduced in newspapers, military band transcriptions, concert programs, and the statutes of amateur music societies have helped me flesh out the texture of musical life, one of the most important kinds of context. That French individuals as well as libraries collected such ephemera suggests that they took their content seriously. They clearly wanted to preserve the traces of activities as well as works. These collections reveal what Pierre Nora calls “the everyday life of the past” (le quotidien du passé) through a kind of unmediated parole, or speech. They record “the slow passing of days and the flavor of things” in the musical world.78 Even though we cannot converse with the people who used these documents, they encourage us to ask questions about a broad range of musical activities and the meanings associated with music. Such debris from the past, as in a Rauschenberg still life, has enabled me to construct a horizon of expectations about music and musical life in the Third Republic. Intense scrutiny of minute particulars has engendered the resistance I need to feel that my stories are not just in the language I have invented. Such resistance has kept me focused on what indeed did exist.79 In this way, I have sought to imagine a world through a complex interplay between knowing and not knowing. Numerous illustrations will allow readers to test their own hypotheses and come to their own conclusions. I hope this level of detail will help readers bridge a sense of distance and estrangement and use the speech of these documents to become conversant in the language of the times. In some ways, this preoccupation with texture and variety and the desire to 78.  Pierra Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire,” in Lieux de mémoire, ed. id., I: xxxiii. This absence of people to interview has its own advantages. One is not subject to distortions of memory or perspectives reflecting realities postdating this period. 79.  I use the word “resistance” here as in the foreword by Wlad Godzich to de Man’s The Resistance to Theory. It is the property of something that allows us “to know it to be outside of ourselves and not illusions fostered upon us by our unreliable sensory apparatus. Resistance is a property of the referent, we would say today, which allows this referent to become the object of knowledge of the subject that we are. Without this resistance, we would never be able to ascertain whether the phenomenal or the sensible is really ‘out there’ and thus whether we have any knowledge of such an ‘out there’ ” (xiii).

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interest readers in questioning assumptions and entertaining surprises are driven by empathy with what in landscape painting is called the picturesque. Whereas the charm of Paris for Fargue lies in its “blending of such dissimilar neighborhoods,”80 the charm of its musical world for me comes from its unpredictable juxtapositions of ideologies, aesthetics, practices, and purposes. I believe we can learn much from meandering as well as dwelling in this world, negotiating our own relationship to the “lived” of past performances as well as the “imposed” of printed scores. While I do not wish to underestimate the power of works themselves, the great contributions made by dedicated, talented individuals, and the collective force deriving from big ideas like democracy and republicanism, I hope this book will help readers understand the collaborative, collective nature of what was produced, negotiated, and shared. Even the great works, the monuments, never stand on their own, autonomous and self-contained. Musical meaning, as suggested above and in my walking tour, depends on how works and performances relate to the landscape—other works and the spaces in which people experience them. At concerts and elsewhere, a “sense of interconnectedness” characterized these times, giving rise to a certain kind of sociability. 81 As Vanessa Schwartz observes, experience of the city made its inhabitants who they were: “In, and thus as, the audience, they became ‘Parisians,’ ”82 and, one might add, French. Alliances, too, were integral to a society struggling with conflicting ideologies and in a musical world permeated by constant power struggles. So were amateur groups whose difference offering resistance to a too-easy grasp of the whole often confirms the extent of the city’s interconnectedness. When Foucault refers to discourse as a network of texts, documents, practices, disciplines, and institutions that together produce forms of knowledge, he could well be referring to how society produced art music at the end of the nineteenth century. For me, the pleasure of reading and writing comes from holding many diverse elements in one’s mind at once and from watching connections emerge, people and places return, and concurrent stories unfold, as in Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual. 83 These micro-stories and intertwined chapters may not complete the puzzle, as in the novel, but hopefully, they give us a better idea of how such worlds operate. In writing this book, I’ve grown increasingly aware of my own perspectives 80.  Fargue, Refuges, 110. 81.  Olsen mentions this as part of the historical orientation of nineteenth-century Europeans (City as a Work of Art, 297–98). 82.  Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 44. 83.  Perec, La Vie: Mode d’emploi.

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as a woman, historian, and foreigner. The forgotten as well as the memorable interest me, the silent as well as the voiced. 84 Like the historian Pierre Nora, I’ve constructed stories about the little-known as well as deconstructed assumptions about the well-known. 85 My purpose has not been to elevate the former or diminish the latter, but to show how each contributes meaningfully to the musical world. Being a detective who follows multiple clues and who is willing to consider material that others have discarded as trivial has led me to reconsider the subject of music histories, the questions we ask as well as the answers we seek. Rather than pursuing specific answers to specific questions, I’ve approached this research nonteleologically, particularly when working in archives, moving through “question spaces” and from one kind of material to the next, as if in the Parisian landscape. The answer spaces so discovered inevitably pose new questions that spin out more work in a chainlike, multifaceted manner. 86 I try to compensate for being foreign to France by not prejudging the material and by letting it determine my priorities. Often, failures in the use of music to influence people tell us more than successes. If understanding Paris and the art produced in France requires an appreciation of people’s aspirations, this is something to which outsiders can perhaps contribute. Like a tourist in the city, the foreign critic may have an advantage. Being alert to differences in another culture may lead to questions and observations that would not occur to those “for whom the city is the background of daily life.” It encourages examining what others have “unquestionably accepted” and bringing these “into the openness of the question” for creative dialogue. 87 84.  “To think like a woman in a man’s world means thinking critically, refusing to accept the givens, making connections between facts and ideas which men have left unconnected. . . . And it means that most difficult thing of all: listening and watching in art and literature . . . for the silences, the absences, the nameless, the unspoken, the encoded.” Adrienne Rich, “Taking Women Students Seriously,” cited in Elizabeth Flynn, “Composing as a Woman,” in Gender in the Classroom, ed. Susan Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 112. 85.  Pierre Nora, “Présentation,” in Lieux de mémoire, ed. id., III, 3: 14; id., “Entre mémoire et histoire,” xxiv. 86.  For more on these concepts in my historical writing, see Jann Pasler, “Boretzian Discourse and History,” Perspectives of New Music (Summer 2005 / Winter 2006): 177–91, and the introduction to id., Writing through Music, 8–11. 87.  In his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), cited in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), Mikhail Bakhtin explains what outsiders can contribute to cultures: “In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. . . . A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning; they engage in a kind of dialogue. . . . We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 39

Working in various Paris institutions since the 1970s, 88 each dependent on the aims and desires of a succession of ministers and state-funded administrators, has encouraged me to take seriously the contingent and often political nature of music-making in France. In seeking to understand music culture in broad, inclusive ways, I have crossed numerous disciplinary and methodological boundaries, beginning with those separating classical and popular music, historical musicology and ethnomusicology, and have borrowed ideas from architecture, art history, philosophy, and the social sciences, particularly history, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, political science, economics, gender studies, and cultural theory. I’ve been influenced by those who understand truth as a product of a system of signs and music, like any language, as a “play of signifiers.” In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s words, “knowledge can be objective and subjective at the same time,” and “history is never history, but history-for.” Adorno’s notion that music, as a dialectical discourse, both reveals and conceals its relationship to language and society has influenced me less than Foucault’s insight that “truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power.” Still, as in my promenades through the city, it is the truths of many perspectives that I wish to understand. I’m not troubled if these truths present a partial image of reality, clash, and contradict one another, or appear mutually exclusive. If Romain Rolland was right, “the principle of change,” especially with regard to taste, “lies within the Parisian spirit itself.”89 Following an organic geometry like that of Paris, Composing the Citizen progresses like a spiral, building continuously on the themes introduced in the walking tour. It examines their origins in the Enlightenment and the Revolution and their manifestations in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s; it proceeds outward from the historical context of French music to its creation, performance, and reception. I’ve tried to address the basic needs of the musical world to have its musicians trained, its music heard, and its traditions continued, although the history sketched, the works chosen, and the groups analyzed may be, at best, only representative of the new semantic depths. Without one’s own questions, one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign. . . . Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched” (xxiii). See also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (1965), cited in Taruskin, xxv. 88.  As a doctoral student in the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), 1976–78; a chercheur associé at the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) helping Hugues Dufourt to set up its first research center in music, the Centre d’information et de documentation, “Recherche musicale,” 1983–84; a visiting professor in the doctoral program “Musique et musicologie du XXe siècle,” a joint project of the CNRS, EHESS, and IRCAM, 1989–91; as well as in other doctoral programs and research groups in Paris and the French provinces, 1992–present. 89.  Rolland, “Renouveau,” 212.

40 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

terrain explored. Soft focus has its benefits in allowing one to see from the center to the peripheries, and its limits in the depth of knowledge one can derive from any one point.90 For the intellectually open and eternally curious, this approach to archival research, interrogation of the past, and writing has certain rewards. With it, I invite the reader into the process of making syntheses and reaching conclusions, because, by its nature, there is no final answer, no clear end. As in the city, the point is to experience, contemplate, and enjoy as much as possible.

The Legacy of the Third Republic Since 1900, French officials have seen it as their mandate to protect the republican heritage. The demise of usefulness as a criterion of social good has not deterred them, nor have the fashion for innovation and individuality or the destruction of two world wars. This has meant respecting past achievements as well as present 90.  To complement the larger picture offered in this book, consult recent in-depth studies of individual musical institutions such as the Palais Garnier (Frédérique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne, 1875–1914 [Liège: Mardaga, 1991]); the Société nationale (Michel Duchesneau, L’Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à 1939 [Liège: Mardaga, 1997], and Michael Strasser, “Ars Gallica: The Société nationale de musique and Its Role in French Musical Life, 1871–1891” [PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1998]); and the Société des concerts (D. Kern Holoman, The Société des concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004]). See also biographies of individual composers such as Hervé Lacombe, Georges Bizet (Paris: Fayard, 2000); François Lesure, Claude Debussy (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992); Manuela Schwartz, ed., Vincent d’Indy et son temps (Liège: Mardaga, 2006); Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: Les Voix du clair-obscur (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Joël-Marie Fauquet, César Franck (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Delmar Irvine, Massenet: A Chronicle of His Life and Times (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus, 1994); Jean-Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); Jean Gallois, Camille Saint-Saëns (Liège: Mardaga, 2004); Steven Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Elisabeth Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas ou La Tentation du lyrique (Besançon: Cêtre, 1994); and the biography of Saint-Saëns that Yves Gérard is preparing. New research on this period will also be found in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, and in the Dictionnaire de la musique au XIXe siècle, edited by Joël-Marie Fauquet. Close analyses of individual genres will be helpful, such as Hervé Lacombe, Les Voies de l’opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), trans. Edward Schneider as The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagner, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lawrence Archbold and William Peterson, eds., French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1995); and Rollin Smith, Saint-Saëns and the Organ (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon, 1992). For other perspectives on music and politics during this period, see Michel Faure, Musique et société du Second Empire aux années vingt (Paris: Flammarion, 1985); Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat sous la IIIe République (Paris: La Sorbonne, 1992); André Michael Spies, Opera, State,

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 41

needs, beauty and utility.91 In 1905, a Committee for the Protection of Monumental Perspectives persuaded the government to forbid any alterations along the rue de Rivoli. Beginning in 1909, another committee called for classifying certain streets, squares, and private buildings as historical monuments because of their beauty.92 Since 2000, the Commission du vieux Paris has overseen any changes in city buildings. When renovating a building, architects are often forced to leave the old façade intact even as they demolish everything else—a striking difference from city redevelopment in many other cities. If the Paris landscape has become “a marvelous museum,” it also echoes French hopes of the present and the future. Because French leaders understand the power of symbolic spaces, they have not allowed the needs of modernization to obliterate the signifying capacity of urban design. The city continues to reinvent its spaces in symbolic ways, drawing renewed attention to its own legibility. Attention has focused less on new government buildings than on new spaces for subsidized cultural organizations. In the 1970s, the government built a center for avant-garde art, the Centre Pompidou (fig. 11), across from the ruins of the old Les Halles market in the Beaubourg area of the fourth arrondissement. Architecturally, the building presents an inverted notion of how space is usually organized, with the pipes and paraphernalia normally hiding behind a building’s façade exposed to allow for moveable walls and adaptable spaces within. As in a spiral, the flagrantly new thus arises on the foundations of the old, a major theme in French thinking since the turn of the twentieth century. In housing the Musée national d’art moderne, together with numerous exhibition spaces, it was built to stimulate commerce of another sort, the international market for art, with Paris as its center.93 Adjoining and Society in the Third Republic (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2005). To understand better predecessors of the institutions I discuss and analogues elsewhere in Europe in the nineteenth century, the volumes sponsored by the European Science Foundation will be useful, especially Michael Fend and Michel Noiray, eds., Musical Education in Europe, 1770–1914, 2 vols. (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), and Hans Erich Bödeker and Patrice Veit, eds., Les Sociétés de musique en Europe, 1700– 1920: Structures, pratiques musicales, sociabilités (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007). Comparison with the French provinces will allow the reader to ascertain the extent to which Parisian musical life was “the motor of music life” in the country. See esp. Marie-Claire Le Moigne–Mussat, Musique et société à Rennes aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Geneva: Minkoff, 1988). 91.  See discussion of Eugene Hénard in Prochasson, Paris 1900, 40–41. 92.  Cantelli, Illusion monumentale, 67. 93.  See Section C.F.D.T. [a workers’ union], “Beaubourg, vue de l’intérieur,” in Beaubourg et le musée de demain, L’Arc 63: 35. This article was written by the Centre Pompidou employees

42 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

Fig. 11  The exterior of the Centre Pompidou. Photograph by Tildy Bayar, 2007. The Centre Pompidou, named after the former French president Georges Pompidou, was completed in 1977. Its innovative architecture, which displays the building’s mechanical workings prominently on the exterior, was not initially popular in Paris but, like the Tour Eiffel, it has become a well-known landmark. The Centre Pompidou contains a public library, various exhibition spaces, and the Musée national d’art moderne.

this underground, beginning in 1977, is its contemporary music wing, the Institut de recherche et de coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM). The Ministry of Culture’s disproportionately generous funding of this research institution (with its ambitions to lead the international contemporary music market) reflects the composer Pierre Boulez’s close relationship with various ministers, as well as his prominence in the world of contemporary music.94 With increasing commercialism penetrating the Parisian spirit, city planners also allowed construction of a new concerned about the “collusion between cultural milieux and the powers of money.” According to Bernard Pingaud, the Left was also deeply troubled by the elitist nature of the Centre Pompidou. In his article in L’Arc 63, “Un Choix culturel,” he compares it to Versailles, a monument created to “make France into the most important center in the world for artistic creation.” He concludes, “Like all institutions of capitalism,” this one is “not made for the people,” even if it can occasionally serve them (22, 25). 94.  For a penetrating analysis of the role of Boulez in the ongoing funding of IRCAM, the Ensemble InterContemporain, and the Cité de la musique, see Kim Eling, The Politics of Cultural Policy in France (London: Macmillan, 1999), chaps. 1, 3, and 4.

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 43

Fig. 12  The Grande Arche at La Défense, as seen from the Arc de Triomphe. Photo by Marina H. Rukarijekic.

Grande Arche to the west of the Arc de Triomphe, deliberately planned by state institutions to serve as the business headquarters capital and enhance the power of the nation through the power of its companies (figs. 12 and 13). In this way, the government integrated commerce, represented by a modern office building in the suburb of La Défense, with the city’s monumental past. There on the horizon since 1989, its modernity has challenged Napoleonic visions of the future, linking the high culture of the Louvre, redeveloped under I. M. Pei’s glass pyramids, with state-influenced capitalism.95 Distressed by the elitist connotations of this modernity, the socialists who came to power in the 1980s moved major institutions and sited new ones to reflect other values. They aimed to shift attention away from old hierarchies encoded in the landscape and to offer alternatives to centuries of elitist thinking. Like Haussmann, François Mitterrand, with his own taste for monuments, concentrated his grand travaux in working-class arrondissements in the lesser-developed eastern part of the city. The Ministry of Finance, formerly in the Louvre, was transferred 95.  Vale discusses the impact of Sprechelsen’s Grande Arche in his Architecture, Power, and National Identity, 20.

44 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

Fig. 13  Close-up of the Grande Arche. Photograph by Tildy Bayar, 2007. The Grande Arche de la Fraternité is a twentieth-century version of the Arc de Triomphe, celebrating the ideological, rather than military, victories of France. It was begun in 1982 and inaugurated in 1989, in time for the celebrations surrounding the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. The Grande Arche completes the line through Paris that begins at the Louvre and passes through the Arc de Triomphe, other monuments to the glories of France.

to a new building that arches over the expressway at Bercy in southeastern Paris, where it sits next to a new sports arena on the east bank of the Seine that is often used as a mega-concert space (replacing warehouses for all wine and alcohol entering Paris until 1979). Such a position recognizes a change from the Finance Ministry’s role in managing the central government and the arts to overseeing commerce, as represented by the traffic its officials now literally stare down upon. Across the Seine from this ministry at the site of the old Gare des marchandises, is the Bibliothèque nationale de France, transferred from the old Hôtel Mazarin, near the Palais Royal. Inverting tradition, books are held in four large towers resembling two open books, while readers consult collections on lower levels facing an open park. It is an understatement to note that these decisions have been controversial, especially given their huge budgets. For the first time in the city’s history—and in parallel with other efforts at decentralization in France as a whole—elite musical institutions, too, have been

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 45

Fig. 14  The Opéra de la Bastille. Photograph by Tildy Bayar, 2007. The impetus for the creation of the Opéra de la Bastille came in 1968, when Pierre Boulez, Maurice Béjart, and Jean Vilar delivered a report to President François Mitterrand that called for a new concert hall in Paris—one that could bring classical music and modern audiences together, a goal reflected in the modern architecture of the opera house. The building, designed by the architect Carlos Ott, was inaugurated on the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

removed from prestigious neighborhoods and traditional centers of cultural life. On the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution, 13 July 1989, the Opéra opened a new home at the Place de la Bastille, next to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, symbolically associated with the Revolution (fig. 14). 96 In design and materials, it is a modernist anti-Opéra. Its purpose, however, was to accommodate a larger, more socially diverse public with lower ticket prices and a more popular repertoire than those of the Palais Garnier. Even though these goals have been difficult to reach, at least seats are not distributed in hierarchically ordered boxes. In 1990, the Conservatory too moved across town to a working-class neighborhood. Whereas in the nineteenth century, it was near theaters in the ninth arrondissement and after 1911 not far from the Opéra in the eighth arrondissement, the Conservatory is now part of the Parc de la Villette in the northeast on the site of the old slaughterhouse. Like the Opéra-Bastille, the Cité de la musique, conceived in 1979 and finished in 1995, makes no reference to the past. Fragmented and almost puzzlelike, its architecture presents “the antithesis of the classical 96.  The Palais Garnier is now used mostly for ballets and early music.

46 . I n t r o d u c t i o n

Fig. 15  The Cité de la musique. Photograph by Thierry Ardouin. The appropriately named Cité de la musique is a compound made up of several buildings, including a concert hall, musical instrument museum, and amphitheater, as well as teaching spaces. The work of architect Christian de Portzamparc, the Cité was opened in 1995. Plans to expand, including the construction of a large new concert hall, are under way.

ideal” (fig. 15).97 Within the Cité are the Musée de la musique and concert halls; next door are a Science and Technology Museum, an urban park, and a huge hall holding 6,400 people for popular music and a summer jazz festival since 1984. All of this suggests a mutually supportive relationship between culture and education, and an expanded concept of culture that includes popular music.98 City planners, many working through the Ministry of Culture, are using the limited space available for redevelopment; at the same time, they are extending the populist ideals of the Third Republic and encouraging new symbolic relationships in the city.99 Nothing represents the continuing legacy of the Third Republic more than the annual Fête de la musique. Inaugurated on 21 June 1982 by Minister of Cul97.  Francis Rambert, “A Pluralistic Architecture,” in Cité de la musique (Paris: Société française de promotion artistique, 1996), 13. By this, he means that the architecture “cannot be taken in at a single glance. Its successive planes, frames, and sequences, which play on the opposing dimensions of the grandiose and the intimate” create “a dynamic through geometry. . . . There is no sense of being enclosed. . . . Its wealth lies in its poetic fragmentation: it might almost be described as fractal architecture. The West City is an intricate game; the East City is a puzzle” (13–15). 98.  In 1981, when Jack Lang became minister of culture and declared, “Everyone can make their choice: academic art or popular art, contemporary art or traditional art,” the government officially recognized popular music in its funding. In 1989, the first ministerial chargé de mission for rock and variétés took office. See Eling, Politics of Cultural Policy in France, chap. 7. 99.  In 1995, Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris and president (1995–2007), commissioned the Musée du Quai Branly for national collections of African, Asian, and Oceanic indigenous art. Its proximity to his middle- and upper-class constituents in the seventh and sixteenth arrondissements was perhaps meant to encourage them to broaden their horizons through contact with these cultures. Reception has been mixed.

I n t r o d u c t i o n . 47

ture Jack Lang, Director of Music Maurice Fleuret, and Christian Dupavillon, the festival was conceived to celebrate music and to address problems faced by all democracies: the need for inclusion and broad participation, tolerance for diversity and change, fraternity and community.100 Each year on the summer solstice, music-making takes place in every arrondissement in the city, mostly by nonprofessionals. Beginning around noon, concerts animate train stations, open markets, banks, courtyards, museums, cultural centers, bookstores, cafe terraces, public gardens, race-courses, and dead-end streets. At night, it takes over major intersections. In front of such sites as the Assemblée nationale and at the Place de la République, huge crowds have gathered to hear pop stars, such as the late James Brown, Oasis, and Lenny Kravitz, recalling revolutionary fêtes and the mass demonstrations of the late 1960s. Nearby at Les Invalides, in 2002, for example, the Garde républicaine performed film music from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Mission Impossible, joined by 300 children from the working class, largely immigrant twentieth arrondissement. They followed this with Berlioz’s orchestration of the “Marseillaise,” Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy,” and Méhul’s “Le Chant du départ.” While most concerts express present-day tastes, some, such as this one, hark back to what one might have heard during the Third Republic. The music at the Fête can be just about anything—classical, jazz, rock, rap, pop-underground, rai, funk, hip-hop, blues, reggae, gospel, traditional, folk, variety, world, or some combination; acoustic, electronic, or techno; performed by adults, teenagers, or children; involving soloists, small bands, school groups, Conservatory students, choruses, quartets, or orchestras. But the chief pleasure of such a plethora of music—there are now up to one thousand events annually in Paris alone—does not derive from ideology or nostalgia, but from participation. Inviting “the musical practices of everyone without any hierarchy of genres,” including mixed genres—the most prevalent category in recent years, organizers have hoped that musical practices could help people enact new identities and “revitalize a society in crisis by helping to alleviate the identity crisis of victims of the new global economy.”101 Despite ongoing political divisions in the populace and sociocultural changes resulting from the influx of immigrants in recent 100.  The festival also recognizes the increasing practice of music in the country by amateurs—8 percent in the early 1990s, as opposed to 5 percent in 1973. Direction de la musique et de la danse, La Musique et la danse: La Politique culturelle, 1981–1991 (Paris: Ministère de la culture, de la communication, et des grands travaux, 1991), 15. Beginning in 1984, several other cities participated in this festival; by 1991, there were sixty-two countries holding simultaneous Fêtes de la musique, and by 2007 over 250 countries. 101.  “25 Années de Fête de la musique: Un Bref historique,” in 25e Fête de la musique: Dossier de presse (Paris: Fnac, 2006), 3, 8.

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years, music thus continues to serve as a significant means of bringing people together to appreciate what they share in the city. For a few hours, boundaries dissolve between professionals and amateurs, public and private spaces, serious and popular genres, as well as between les élites and les classes populaires, rich and poor, citizen and foreigner, native-born and immigrant. In traversing the city to hear these concerts, people are invited to expand the sphere of their lives, to circulate and get to know their city, and one another, better. Such a festival brings people face to face with the reality, not of struggle or control, division or unity, but rather of tolerance for diversity, openness to the unfamiliar, inclusion and broad participation, coexistence, and, ideally, fraternity. Through music, the three conceptual trinities—the revolutionary liberty-equality-fraternity, the republican people-nation-culture, and the contemporary identity-memory-heritage—inflect the present with experience and meaning.102 Minister of Culture Christine Albanel declared in June 2007: I see in [the Fête de la musique] a school of citizenship, of liberty, of intelligence, an indispensable path toward a shared culture. . . . More than ever, through practicing as well as listening to it, music represents for our citizens a genuine engagement with and opening to others . . . a language that unites cultures, countries, and people.103

102.  Evelyne Ritaine, Les Stratégies de la culture (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1983), 13: “Dans le savoir politique français, la triade Peuple-Nation-Culture est centrale: la culture y est le fondement de la nation, l’instruction du peuple l’instrument majeur de la démocratie.” Pierre Nora, “L’Ere de la communication,” in Lieux de mémoire, ed. id., III, 3: 1010: “Identité, mémoire, patrimoine; les trois mots clés de la conscience contemporaine, les trois faces du nouveau continent Culture. Trois mots voisins, fortement connotés, chargés de sens multiples qui s’appellent et s’appuient les uns les autres”; see also Mona Ozouf, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” in ibid., 583–89. 103.  Christine Albanel, “Editorial du ministre de la culture et de la communication, porteparole du gouvernement,” in Dossiers de presse: Fête de la musique, 21 juin 2007 (14 June 2007), 1.

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P a r t o n e • Forming Public Spirit and Useful Citizens

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1 • Use, the Useful,

and Public Utility A Theory of Musical Value

It is hard to imagine today why, in nineteenth-century France, usefulness came to mean something as all-encompassing and socially legitimizing as the public good, and how the arts were esteemed to the extent that they were useful. With the advent of modernism, the avant-garde from Maurice Ravel to Pierre Boulez responded to this pervasive concern with disdain. Their rhetoric, which many of us have come to share, makes the useful seem banal and pedestrian, conjuring up the notion of something suitable or merely adequate, efficient, perhaps, but only marginally better than useless and not meriting close attention. Why, then, is the concept still deeply meaningful in France? Ravel and Satie’s playful experiments with the useful, although critical, prod us to take this seriously. Can we disagree with the former’s epigraph for his Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), which refers to “the delicious and ever new pleasure of a useless occupation”?1 After his brilliantly sensual Jeux d’eau, exotically lyrical Shéhérazade, classically restrained Sonatine, bizarre but virtuoso Scarbo, and ambitiously original Daphnis et Chloé, composing waltzes must have felt to Ravel like making a frothy Viennese dessert. If this was art for art’s sake, the music would have “a superior utility in and of itself” serving the cult of beauty or truth. 2 Or was Ravel’s music a retort to Vincent d’Indy, who linked the modern artist’s usefulness to artistic progress that “assimilates the lofty manifestations of art from all times”?3 Ravel borrows an older genre to give it a modern twist. As charming melodies, sensually softened by suspensions on major and minor seconds, alternate 1.  From the preface of Henri de Régnier’s novel, Les Rencontres de M. de Bréot (1904). Michael Puri, in “Dandy, Interrupted: Sublimation, Repression, and Self-Portraiture in Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1909–1912),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, 2 (Summer 2007), connects this attitude to Ravel’s dandyism. 2.  Adrien Mithouard, “Déclaration,” L’Occident (February 1902): 120. “L’art est à lui seul une utilité supérieure. . . . La beauté est le seul déterminant véritable de l’œuvre.” 3.  Vincent d’Indy, “L’Artiste moderne,” L’Occident, December 1901, 8; Monde musical, 15 January 1903, 3.

53

with sweetly languorous cadences that resolve traditionally, Ravel both caresses the listener’s ear and gives the mind a sense of well-being. At the same time, chords using as many notes as the pianist has fingers, juxtaposed tonalities, and accents that jar, interrupting the lilting waltz, challenge any reduction to the “noble” or the “sentimental.” But, given the association with ballroom dancing and light entertainment, waltzes were not an obvious context for extending the musical language. Marcel Marnat suggests that Ravel chose the epigraph for the work’s publication in response to listeners who criticized him at its premiere for using “wrong notes that created a useless practical joke [mystification].”4 Was it the disorientation they objected to, or were the work’s harsh dissonances perceived as not adding anything meaningful to the experience?5 Ravel suggests his motivation was just pleasure. Perhaps he also enjoyed bucking expectations. The work starts out fortissimo and moves in a gradual decrescendo. It was premiered at a concert of anonymous works organized by his friends for an audience of connoisseurs. After protests and boos, he got to watch the surprise of this public when few guessed it was by him. Erik Satie, who some thought was the composer of Ravel’s waltzes, went further in playfully questioning the utility of music. In his Musique d’ameublement (Furniture Music) (1920), he expresses a kind of glee in shocking through banality. Composed with Darius Milhaud for the intermissions of a Max Jacob play, the work incorporates well-known fragments from two popular works, Ambroise Thomas’s opera Mignon (1866) and Camille Saint-Saëns’s tone poem Danse macabre (1874). 6 In the score, however, Satie notes that this music “replaces ‘waltzes’ and ‘operatic fantasias.’ Don’t be confused! It’s something else!! . . . It’s new, it doesn’t upset customs; it isn’t tiring; it’s French; it won’t wear out; it isn’t boring.”7 In a prospectus, Satie and Milhaud expressed their ironic intentions: “We want to establish a music designed to satisfy ‘useful’ needs. Art has no part in such needs. Furniture music creates a vibration; it has no other goal; it fills the same 4.  Marcel Marnat, Maurice Ravel (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 298. The premiere took place at a concert of the Société musicale indépendante on 9 May 1911. Marnat’s thesis may be true, but it was common practice at the time to use epigraphs when submitting works anonymously for competitions. Ravel’s epigraph could have been used for the concert and thus chosen before the work’s premiere. 5.  Marcel Proust writes about “useless complexity” in Gabriel Fauré’s music: “Do you know that young musicians [e.g., Claude Debussy and Pierre de Bréville] are almost unanimous in not liking Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson? It seems that it’s uselessly complicated, very inferior to the others.” Letter to Pierre Lavallé, 30 September 1894, in Marcel Proust, Correspondance, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970), 1: 338. 6.  See also Satie’s Sonatine bureaucratique (1917), which parodies Clementi’s sonatinas. 7.  Reproduced in Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 319–20.

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role as light and heat—as comfort in every form.” With this in mind, for the first performance they explained, “We urgently beg you not to attach any importance to it and to act during the intermission as if the music did not exist. . . . It hopes to contribute to life the way a casual conversation does, or a picture in the gallery.”8 Such comments situate Satie’s music beyond art as it was conceived at the time, beyond concert performances in hushed halls full of listeners attending to it seriously. Who could have known at the time that the functionless repetition of the same few chords in Vexations (1893) or the melodic fragments in Musique d’ameublement might both foreshadow elevator music and inspire John Cage, Fluxus, early minimalists, and Brian Eno, in concept if not sound?9 Ironically, something conceived as artistically useless can turn artistically useful. To understand what “useful” meant to the French and often still means today, however, we must go further. What is the use of composing music? Can something playful and pleasurable be socially useful? What needs can music satisfy? Forty years later, and from a radically different perspective, Boulez made some similar assumptions. In 1952, he claimed, “any musician who has not felt the necessity of the serial language is useless. All his work situates itself short of the necessities of his times.”10 If “useless” here means not responding to the dictates of progress, what is useful, Boulez implies, is the extent to which composers and their music address “the necessities” of their times. Boulez’s mentor, Pierre Souvtchinsky, calls this “historical utility.” For him, the “great creator” is one who is useful to history, shedding light on “everything around him . . . the close and the distant, what lies ahead and what came before him.”11 Of course, since histories are relative, dependent on the needs and desires of those writing them, so are claims of utility. “Useful” implies a value judgment. Boulez dismisses one kind of taste to promote another. His objection to nonserial composers is not that they failed to achieve 8.  Satie and Milhaud quoted in Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War I: Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire (rev. ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 168–69. Biographers have pointed out the possible influence of Matisse who “dreamed of an art without any distracting subject matter which might be compared to a good armchair” (Orledge, Satie, 222). 9.  The 34 chords in Vexations are to be repeated 840 times (see ex. 23 below). John Cage, whose music was influenced by Satie, organized its American premiere in New York on 9 September 1963 and performed it, alternating with David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and others. See Orledge, Satie, 143–44, 277–78, as well as chaps. 11 and 12. 10.  Pierre Boulez, Relèves d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 149. Boulez stresses the word inutile by capitalizing it. 11.  Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Ceux du ‘Domaine musical’ ” (1963), in (Re)Lire Souvtchinski, ed. Eric Humbertclaude (La Bresse: Eric Humbertclaude, 1990), 253. Thanks to an introduction by François Lesure, I got to know Souvtchinsky in Paris in the late 1970s–early 1980s and am grateful for our many conversations on Stravinsky and French music culture.

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their desired results, but rather that their music was futile from his perspective: it did not contribute to his hopes and desires. Now, fifty years later, what Boulez found useful, many are finding no longer relevant to today’s “necessities.” In France, this is not just semantics and opinions, whether humorously provocative or deadly serious. Nor does it always carry pejorative connotations as in English, where utility usually refers to the practical benefits of something useful, or is synonymous with “utilitarian” (cf. utilitarianism, the ethical doctrine promoted by Jeremy Bentham in the early nineteenth century). With virtue based on utility, “utilitarian” refers to that which is “conducive to the happiness and good of the greatest number.”12 In France, as Ravel, Satie, and Boulez intimate, there is far more to it. The concept of utility, as the French use it, has a long tradition, stretching back to Plato. Recognizing the importance of music in the Republic, Plato insisted on it as part of the education of young citizens. Because music was powerful enough to be dangerous, however, he would admit only musical modes that would harmonize the soul.13 Many cultures in Europe and elsewhere have since then appreciated the social utility of music. Kings, dukes, and bishops have long commissioned artwork for their own greater glory, and its prestige has sometimes been linked with theirs. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Germans and Americans also used the rhetoric of utility to promote the public culture of music. The concept took on particular significance in France. Art and beauty emerged as useful when, after centuries of monarchy and a society based on inequalities, Enlightenment philosophers began to consider what it would take for human beings to live together as equals. From this came the radically new idea that people had needs as a people and that a government should focus on them. Anything that 12.  The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., ed. Stuart Flexner (New York: Random House, 1987), s.v. In England, utilitarianism flourished from 1820 to 1850. For the origins of these ideas and their relation to French concepts, see Elie Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, 3 vols. (1901–4; rpt., Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995). 13.  In his Republic, Plato proposes that education should begin with music, then gymnastics (376e). Rejecting certain modes as “useless” because they are too “soft and convivial” to train men of war, he prefers the Dorian and Phrygian “because they imitate the tones of men in adversity and in prosperity, in a moderate and in a courageous mood” (399a–c). He attaches “supreme importance to a musical education because rhythm and harmony sink most deeply into the recesses of the soul and take most powerful hold of it, bringing gracefulness in their train” and because “he that has been duly nurtured therein will have the keenest eye for defects . . . he will rightly blame and hate all shameful objects . . . and when reason comes he will welcome her most cordially” (401d–e, 403a). Music imparts “not knowledge, but a kind of harmoniousness” (522a). See also the Timaeus on music’s effect on the harmony of the soul and the Laws for connections between music and legislation.

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served those needs was considered useful. As people evaluated the hierarchy of their needs, utility became a way of navigating the tensions between individual and collective interests in France. Since the late eighteenth century, no other society or national government has embraced and applied the principles of public utility to such a degree, or made it a central, organizing concept through which both to construct the very notions of the state and the nation and to locate music within them.

Tensions between the Useful and the Beautiful In debates over the nature and relative merits of the useful, French philosophers and artists have often disagreed about whether the useful is necessarily pleasing, or the pleasing necessarily useful, and how both of these relate to the true, the good, and the beautiful. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French philosophers linked the useful and the beautiful. Some believed that, in art as in nature, true beauty, defined by symmetry, proportion, and arrangement of parts of a whole, inevitably has utility.14 As we have seen with the city of Paris, the useful can indeed be beautiful and the beautiful useful. Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849), an architect and sculptor as well as magistrate, and the Paris deputy most concerned with making the city attractive during and after the Revolution, was passionate about “composing” Paris, as one might a work of art.15 He thought it should serve as an example. Not only should the city function well, Quatremère wanted its beauty to be part of its utility. That is, conceiving architecture as a form of language, he saw its buildings and urban design as serving needs of the imagination.16 Unlike Chateaubriand, who enjoyed losing himself in the tiny alleys of the Cité, or Victor Hugo, who preferred his Notre Dame surrounded by streets and boutiques, Quatremère, inspired by what he saw in Italy, preferred space around major buildings in order to show off the harmony of their parts. 14.  Charles Rollin, excerpt from Traité des études (1726–28), in A. Chaillot, Leçons élémentaires de littérature, de style, et de composition spécialement écrites pour les pensionnats de demoiselles (Paris: Sarlit, 1867), 23. See also Shaftsbury as discussed in Annie Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne, 1680–1814 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), 169–70. 15.  Imprisoned under the Terror, a member of the Five Hundred in 1795, and close friend of the republican painter David, Quatremère de Quincy was elected deputy from Paris in 1791 and again in 1820–22. Beginning with the Restoration, he became perpetual secretary of the Académie des beaux-arts (1816–39) where he exerted a conservative influence on the arts, resisting both romanticism and the commercial spirit. 16.  Sylvia Lavin develops this thesis in her Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

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“Accessories” too were important to him. The beauty of the Tuileries Palace, he pointed out, was set off by the avenues and gardens surrounding it. City “accessories” with symbolic power, such as statues of the king, had to be replaced; new ones, such as fountains, were added for embellishment.17 Quatremère, like others at the time, thus understood that some arts, such as architecture, could embrace both utilité, construed as serving needs, and agrément, pleasing with their charm.18 Indeed, it was how the architecture of Paris synthesized beauty and utility that made it a compelling model.19 Many French philosophers, artists, and teachers throughout the nineteenth century looked to Horace’s Ars poetica for arguments as to why the other arts— music, painting, sculpture, and dance—should, like poetry, embody both the useful and the pleasurable. 20 From Boileau and translations by Voltaire to the many nineteenth-century prose versions of his works compiled for schoolchildren, including one by the revolutionary poet Marie-Joseph Chénier (André Chénier’s younger brother), Horace had a significant influence on French thinking about art. French theorists appreciated how, in reiterating the Aristotelian ideal of art as the imitation of nature and the notion of music as the imitation of feeling, he elevates nature as the unique principle and model of art. From such ideas, they concluded that if art imitates, it is necessarily useful as a sign. 21 Still more important was another kind of utility to which Horace pointed. Construing art as the most perfect 17.  René Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (1788–1850) (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 20–28, 63–65. 18.  In his Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe, ed. Jean-Rémy Mantion (1746; rpt., Paris: Amateurs de livres, 1989), Charles Batteux argues for three kinds of art: those that use nature as it is and whose object is serving man’s needs (the mechanical arts); those that arise from feelings that produce abundance and tranquility, that imitate nature, and whose object is pleasure (the fine arts); and those generated by need, that taste perfects, and whose object is both utility and pleasure (architecture and rhetoric) (82). 19.  Quatremère de Quincy was interested in architecture that was not merely useful and incidentally beautiful (and thereby excluded by Kant from the fine arts on the grounds of its utility), but rather architecture that was fundamentally useful and beautiful and, as such, the model for a conceptual synthesis of utility and beauty. I’m grateful to Evan Bonds for this clarification. 20.  In his Poèmes diverses: Edition à l’usage des classes (Paris: Maradan, 1818), Marie-Joseph Chénier translates lines 343–44 in Horace as “L’art tout entier, c’est d’instruire et de plaire /  A l’agrément que joint l’utilité.” J.-P.-A. Lalanne, in his Art poétique d’Horace (Paris: Gedalge Jeune, 1887), offers this prose translation: “Ou instruire ou plaire, voilà le but des poètes; ou bien ils veulent tout à la fois peindre ce qui est agréable et utile dans la vie” (44). I am grateful to Annegret Fauser for encouraging me to examine Horace’s importance in nineteenth-century France. 21.  In his Beaux Arts, Batteux argues that music and dance too must have meaning as signs in part because they are constantly compared with nature. Without this capacity, the arts can only be compared to prisms, things that amuse the sensations but bore the mind.

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form of thought, he stresses the capacity of the arts to instruct. With this, the arts can address a moral need. Eliciting a moral jouissance, a delight of the mind, they can have moral utility. 22 This notion of moral utility as the highest purpose of literature and the arts resonated widely from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries in part because of the perceived connection between morals and virtues. 23 Descartes saw this moral potential as rooted in the belief that there can be a mechanical connection between the arts, particularly music, and one’s body and soul. Not only does one experience sensual pleasure from music, one can learn from it and use the practice of music to demonstrate inner virtues to the world. As such, music and the other arts can instill moral values and suggest models for behavior, providing benefits to the individual as well as the community. 24 Eighteenth-century theorists who focused on the moral utility of the arts considered usefulness an alternative artistic goal to pleasure or fantasy. They looked to the useful to extricate from the pleasurable a more elevated sense of beauty, and thus a significant role for the arts. 25 These perspectives influenced thinking about the arts in France for centuries to come. Many French thinkers also focused on the importance Horace assigned to charm, 22.  In his Considérations morales, Quatremère de Quincy defines the moral as the opposite of the material and the sensual. Arts have a moral utility, he writes, only if they result in enlarging the mind, evoking noble feelings (18). 23.  See J.-F. Marmontel, “Essai sur les romans,” in id., Œuvres complètes (Paris: Verdière, 1818–20), 10: 287, and Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne, 595. 24.  Michel Noiray suggests that arguments inferring a moral purpose for music may also have arisen in response to the debates about religion. Music at the time was associated with sensuous temptations and seen as distinct from the sacred, though people went to church services in part for the pleasure music afforded them there (private conversation, Paris, September 1997). 25.  These ideas come up particularly in essays on the social function of theater and fiction. Some assumed that if an artwork supported or promoted a social ideal, if it addressed the society’s perceived needs and desires, it could not have abstract, universal value, i.e., beauty, and vice versa. Rousseau comments on this in his Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), “It is necessarily the pleasure they afford, and not their utility. . . . To please people, one needs spectacles that reinforce their tendencies instead of those that would moderate them. . . . The general effect of the spectacle is to reinforce national character, to augment natural inclinations, and to give new energy to all the passions. . . . [in sum] to exaggerate and not to change established morals.” Of course, Rousseau’s notion of using art to “reinforce national character” implies just as explicit a social utility as the moralizing kind he is arguing against. In his response, d’Alembert agreed with Rousseau’s statement that “an author who wants to go against general taste will soon write for himself alone. . . . The principal goal of playwrights is to please.” But, he counters, “being useful is at least their second goal. What does it matter then if it is their first or second purpose if they are, in effect, useful?” (app. 3 in the 1889 rpt., 300–33). See also Watelet, “Art,” in Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture, et gravure (Paris: Prault, 1792), 106, and Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française, 595, 599.

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a concept dear not only to Ancien Régime aristocrats but also to nineteenth-century republicans. Pleasing and seducing, he argued, encourages attachment: in nature as in art, things touch us in proportion to the relationship we have with them. 26 When we are attached to something, we listen more easily to its lessons. In this sense, utility is a relationship we develop with something encouraged by the pleasure it brings. French thinkers built on Horace, proposing that the principal purpose of writing was to convince and touch and that “pleasure helps persuasion.” The addition of agréments, or what Charles Rollin calls ornaments, simultaneously satisfied the mind and the imagination, turning the pleasurable into an auxiliary of the useful. 27 In the late nineteenth century, republicans who focused on civic instruction in the schools took care to portray Horace as a sympathetic character. Although he had worked to glorify the Roman emperor, they pointed to his studies in Athens and early embrace of republican values. 28 This allowed them to use Horace’s texts as models of clarity and accessibility, texts that showed how thinking well leads to writing well, lessons forming the moral fiber of the young and promoting leisure as more than amusement. 29 Horace continued to be translated, taught, analyzed, and read by old magistrates and schoolchildren alike. In 1895, he was considered by some to be the “liveliest writer from antiquity.”30 The discourse about beauty’s utility, particularly through education, had great currency up through 1900. Music remained a central part of this. In an 1880 report arguing for obligatory music education in the country’s primary schools, Saint-Saëns points out, “The development of a music culture is a sure index of a superior civilization.”31 The educator and scholar Julien Tiersot echoed this when 26.  Horace, Ars poetica; Batteux, Beaux Arts, 167–69. 27.  Rollin, Traité des études, 21–22. See also Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française, 65. 28.  In his “Etude” in Œuvres complètes d’Horace, ed. Félix Lemaistre (1866; Paris: Garnier frères, 1885), Hippolyte Rigault points out that if Horace was a conservative, he never promoted monarchy or rejected the republican friends of his youth. The anonymous author of Virgile et Horace, leur vie et leurs ouvrages: Notes d’un professeur (Paris: Crouille-Morant, 1892) notes how much his poor father sacrificed for Horace (an example of paternal love) and what a good friend Horace was to his patron. 29.  As François Gouin points out in Essai sur une réforme des méthodes d’enseignement: Nouveau procédé pour étudier les classiques: Horace, L’Art poétique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880), republicans continued to teach the classics in Latin and Greek as a way to enrich students’ moral and intellectual capacities. Other Horace studies written for use in schools include Chénier, Poèmes diverses; Lalanne, Art poétique d’Horace; Virgile et Horace, leur vie et leurs ouvrages. Notes d’un professeur (Paris: Crouille-Morant, 1892). See also Antoine Campaux, De la critique du texte d’Horace au XIXe siècle (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1889). 30.  Rigault, “Etude,” xlviii. 31.  “Rapport de M. Saint-Saëns” in Ministre de l’Instruction publique, Rapports sur l’enseigne­­ ment du chant dans les écoles primaires (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1881), 5.

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he called choral singing an “incomparable agent of moral civilization and national education.” If classes could only start the day with singing, when students were attentive and receptive, he noted, music could “turn school’s moral influence into a living reality.”32 However, not everyone associated beauty with utility. Both abroad and within France, there were counterdiscourses, some rooted in political conservatism and Ancien Régime values. In Germany, where aesthetics, the study of the beautiful, emerged as a discipline in the late eighteenth century, philosophers disentangled the two concepts. While Frenchmen such as Rollin believed that “what has the most utility usually has dignity and grace” and therefore “true beauty is never separate from its utility,”33 in 1755, the Swiss J. G. Sulzer, focusing on form, proposed that the beautiful is distinct from both the useful and the perfect. Immanuel Kant agreed that what is pleasurable satisfies some need, but believed that the useful pleases only as a means. Beauty is simply what pleases.34 Taste in France had been tied to logic and, with judgment, was part of rational reflection.35 But for Kant, it was subjective. He thought that beauty was grasped immediately and spontaneously. Mysterious and ineffable, it is a kind of ideal, autonomous of external concerns and having no need for a connection to use or pleasure. When released from the necessity of imitating nature, beauty leaves aside its potential for utility as a sign. As such, Kant saw its perception as disinterested. Out of such propositions emerged the romantics’ fascination with the sublime—the incomparably great—and art for art’s sake. French romantics followed the Germans in exploring subjective feeling, and the English in their taste for the picturesque. They also looked to Rousseau, who accorded much importance to passion and the logic of various feelings. However, in his preface to his play Cromwell 32.  Jullien Tiersot, Programme d’un recueil de chant à l’usage des écoles primaires de France (Paris: Hachette, 1893), v–vi. 33.  Rollin, Traité des études, 23. 34.  “Kant’s attack on utility as a criterion of the beautiful comes from his need to locate purposiveness internally to an entity (e.g., art) rather than externally (which is what he thinks utility to be),” Tracy Strong notes (personal communication). See Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. 35.  Henri Tronchon points out in his “Une Science à ses débuts en France: L’Esthétique,” Revue du mois, 10 July 1912, that the French Académie pretty much ignored the new discipline of aesthetics until 1838, even though d’Alembert had cited Sulzer in the Encyclopédie in 1776 and Victor Cousin lectured at the Sorbonne on the beautiful as early as 1818 (37–64). In his “Music, Beauty, and the Paradox of Rationalism,” in French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), Charles Dill posits that Jean-Pierre de Crousaz’s Traité du beau (1715), an early French treatise on aesthetics, uses music to test the limits of rationalism (201, 206). In her Genèse de l’esthétique française, Becq agrees that Crousaz saw aesthetics as a way to transform the idea of reason (305).

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(1827), Victor Hugo argues against the notion of absolute beauty and instead encourages poets to look for “the characteristic,” that which roots a drama in its own time. For him, literature is an expression of society, the evolution of art and artistic genre linked to the evolution of humanity. French romantic poets tended to be preoccupied with the social and political responsibilities of the artist. They saw themselves as prophets and continued to see art as useful in influencing morality. Hugo represented the best of this tradition throughout the nineteenth century. In his “The Function of the Poet” (1839), he writes, “Peuple! écoutez le poète! . . . Lui seul a le front éclairé.” The poet should be a visionary as well as guardian of the past, one who understood the mysteries of the world and could unveil its truths: From the poet’s thought “a better society” would come. 36 These ideas resonated with Third Republic statesmen and Hugo became one of their heroes. Other French, however, followed the Germans in rejecting the association of beauty with utility. Whereas classicists like Quatremère de Quincy had to find artworks useful to find them beautiful, 37 the French philosopher Victor Cousin came to different conclusions in part after studying Kant, Schelling, and Hegel and spending time in Germany. Although still focused on morals, in 1818, he explained, “The form of the beautiful is distinct from the form of the good; if art produces a moral perfection, it does not seek this or see it as its purpose. . . . Art serves neither religion and morals nor the pleasant and the useful.”38 Cousin’s Lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good (1815–54) reflect the tension in France that crystallized around the notion of usefulness in both aesthetics and politics. Cousin sees the useful more narrowly as “the agreeable generalized,” although, like his predecessors, he links it with virtue, “that wisdom which discerns what is truly useful and surely leads to happiness.” But when judging the beautiful, like Kant, he emphasizes beauty’s disinterested nature. Whereas Quatremère and Batteux understood the purpose of the arts as addressing people’s needs, 39 Cousin thought 36.  Victor Hugo, “Préface,” in id., Cromwell (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 91, and “Introduction” by Annie Ubersfeld, 44–45; Victor Hugo, Les Rayons et les ombres (Paris: Hetzel, 1840), 13, 18–19. See also Alfred de Vigny’s poem “La Bouteille à la mer.” I’m grateful to JeanLouis Morhange for these references. 37.  Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales, 45. 38.  Victor Cousin, Cours de philosophie professé à la Faculté des Lettres pendant l’année 1818 . . . d’après les meilleures rédactions de ce cour par M. Adolphe Garnier (Paris: Hachette, 1836). 39.  When it came to art, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Quatremère and others argued that if the arts had reached perfection in ancient Greece, it was because they addressed people’s principal needs. See A.-C. Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art ou de l’Influence de leur emploi sur le génie et le goût de ceux qui les produisent ou qui les jugent, et sur le sentiment de ceux qui en jouissent et en reçoivent les impressions (1815; rpt., Paris: Fayard, 1989), 9–10, and Batteux, Beaux Arts, 81.

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fine arts should “produce the disinterested emotion of beauty without regard to the utility either of the spectator or the artist.” For Cousin, “need” was a pejorative. It gives rise to desire, and this “presupposes in him who experiences it a want, a defect, and, to a certain extent, suffering.” Unlike Quatremère and the revolutionaries, who attached great importance to developing love and passion in a people, Cousin considers passion, the culmination of desire, as something passive limiting our free will. Beauty is important because it is “free from all desire.” It does not have to address needs or otherwise be useful. It can be “its own satisfaction.” In this sense, Cousin considered art autonomous. Yet, Cousin notes that the sentiment of the beautiful can serve a function: it “purifies and elevates the soul by the affinity between the beautiful and the good, and by the relation of ideal beauty to its principle, which is God.” In this sense, art is, ideally, “the expression of moral beauty by the aid of physical beauty.” Although he differs with Kant on the nature of the sublime, giving it more substance, Cousin, like Kant and others, sees ideal beauty as similar to the sublime in that it “awakens in us the sentiment of the infinite.” Artworks too “may have the charm of the infinite.” Because of this, Cousin sees art as fulfilling a religious purpose: nurturing hope for the immortality of our souls. 40 Music held a special place for Cousin. Seeing its domain as sentiment and its mode as expression, he shared much with musicians of his generation, especially Meyerbeer. 41 But unlike Hector Berlioz, Cousin objected to programmatic music and music stimulating mental images. Seeing “its peculiar charm” as elevating “the soul toward the infinite” more than any other art, he believed music could bring us closest to ideal beauty. 42 In some ways, his work intersects with Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (The Beautiful in Music) (1854), which argues that only in the “pure contemplation” of its form and through our imagination can we truly appreciate the beauty of music. For Cousin, however, all beauty shares a “spiritual beauty” more sacred and religious than Hanslick’s Geist. Cousin’s concern with the spiritual derived not only from his fascination with German philosophy and his religious orientation, but also from his politics. As someone who took sides with the royalists in 1814–15, Cousin may have reduced 40.  The citations in these paragraphs come from Victor Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, trans. O. W. Wight (New York: Appleton, 1854), 131, 142–46, 154, 157, 162–74, 230, 234–36, 338. 41.  Meyerbeer embraced Cousin’s eclecticism in his music. In her Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Katharine Ellis discusses the influence of Cousin on François-Joseph Fétis’s understanding of musical beauty of the past, his teleological approach to music history, and his distaste for program music (36–43). 42.  Ibid., 170–73.

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needs to desires and desires to passions because he associated such concerns with bourgeois industrialists, intent on social mobility and the acquisition of wealth. 43 He may also have been responding to Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in Democracy in America (1835), had proposed that democratic nations with an absence of superfluous wealth “will cultivate the arts that serve to render life convenient in preference to those whose object is to embellish it.” In other words, the “universal desire for well-being and the constant efforts in which each engages to procure it for himself, make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of the beautiful” and make people “want the beautiful to be useful.”44 In the preface to his Lectures, addressed to the “serious youth of the Restoration” as “the seed and the hope of the future,” Cousin’s politics are front and center. He hoped that his philosophy would conduct “human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls in which our times can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy.” Democracy, he believed, would “always traverse liberty, bring all right into disorder, and through disorder into dictatorship.”45 Such comments suggest that there were political implications associated with the ideals he was promoting, including the autonomy of art, as if it belonged with the leisured practices of the aristocracy. Cousin’s idealism may have served as a needed balance to the era’s materialist positivism, promoted by Auguste Comte. His moral principles influenced major leaders of the Third Republic. However, republicans differed with Cousin over the nature of duty and sacrifice, crucial to the nation’s needs from its people. 46 After the failures of the 1848 revolution, French poets like Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire embraced art for art’s sake more decisively than Cousin. Their intense distaste for the bourgeoisie’s rising power led some to withdraw from society rather than try to change it; they sought refuge in the transcendence of beauty in 43.  Cousin may have been influenced by nineteenth-century French political economists who defined utility as the “property of an object or a human action to satisfy our needs, not the object or action itself” and believed that, because the utility of something can render it desirable, utility can also represent the “ability to satisfy economic desires.” See Paul-Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 6 (Paris: Hachette, 1873), and Léon Say and Joseph Chailley, Nouveau dictionnaire d’économie politique (Paris: Guillaumin, 1892), 2: 1140. 44.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 439. 45.  Cousin, Lectures, 10–11. 46.  In his book Victor Cousin (Paris: Hachette, 1887), the republican minister Jules Simon stresses Cousin’s working-class background and plays down his royalist sympathies calling him a “simple spectateur de la lutte,” like the duc de Broglie, who had friends on both sides and accepted the Revolution when it became a fait accompli (26–28). In explaining his politics, Simon points to Cousin’s preference for unity within variety—not variety without unity (anarchy) or unity without variety (despotism) (44). On Simon’s differences with Cousin on the subject of duty, see p. 47.

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art. Gautier prepared for this in the preface to Albertus (1836), claiming, “When something becomes useful, it ceases being beautiful. . . . It is no longer freedom, luxury, the blossoming of the soul in idleness.” Although he admitted that art can reflect artists’ feelings and their lives, twenty years later, he echoed Cousin in holding that art should not be a means, but an end. 47 Rejecting the preeminence of nature and considering all virtue artificial, Baudelaire, too, considered utility to be “the idea the most hostile to beauty” and enseignement, particularly the use of poetry to teach morals, a heresy. Poetry, he argued, should have no other goal than itself. “Is art useful? Yes. Why?” he asks. Not as propaganda, but because “it is art.”48 Poetry can elevate people above their vulgar interests, but if a poet pursues a moral goal, it will diminish his poetic strength. Beauty for Baudelaire is mysterious and bizarre. This explains its individual nature. He foreshadows Ravel and Henri de Régnier in proposing that no poem will be so great, so noble, as that written uniquely for the pleasure of writing it. Like Cousin, Baudelaire sees the principle of poetry as “human aspiration toward a superior beauty.” But spirituality for him was an end in itself, not a form of religion. Later, the symbolists, who also rejected bourgeois preoccupations, likewise found the need for art to serve some moral or religious purpose too constraining. They also wished to make art with no function other than its own beauty. Republicans for the most part did not agree with these conclusions.

Satisfying Social Needs and Creating the Nation If certain major philosophers and poets disdained the notion of utility so strongly, what kept it a viable concept, especially in the arts? Utility has remained compelling for the French even today, essentially because over time it developed from simply the concept of that which serves something into a theory of value. 49 This was inherent in the first use of the word in French (utele) in the Psautier d’Oxford of 1120 where it referred to that which satisfies not just any need, but a legitimate 47.  Théophile Gautier, Preface to Albertus (1832), in id., Emaux et camées (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), and “Du beau dans l’art,” in L’Art moderne (1856). 48.  Charles Baudelaire, “Les Drames et les romans honnêtes (1851)” and “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe (1859),” in id., Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Ruff (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 297–99 and 346–53. In “Les Drames,” Baudelaire also makes fun of virtue as “the condition sine qua non of success” and rejects academic prizes as encouraging hypocrisy. 49.  In their Nouveau dictionnaire d’économie politique, Say and Chailley define value as utilité produite (2: 1143). Earlier, Condillac had defined the value of something as determined by its utility, and what satisfies a need as that which has value. In the early nineteenth century, JeanBaptiste Say and Destutt de Tracy debated whether utility or labor constituted the measure of value. See Cheryl Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Idéologues and the Transformation of

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need, particularly a social one. Whereas during the classical era utile also meant the practical advantage that something provided, utilité in France maintained this sense of the word as satisfying social needs.50 Underlying usefulness for the French is not only an explanation of economic exchange, but also a social relationship, an ethical position, and a political belief that, through addressing shared needs, one can build shared interests. As such, it helps those who espouse democracy to address society’s needs and respond to them in a dynamic fashion. The concept of utility grew in importance in the eighteenth century as a way to conceive of society as more than the domain of privileged elites using luxury to signal their status and distinction. Luxury was generally synonymous with frivolity, that is, excessive or superfluous consumption, consumption that was not strictly necessary. However, the debates about it beginning in the eighteenth century were rarely neutral and concerned far more than taste or fashion. Diderot distinguished between good and bad luxury, the former having social utility when it produced wealth and prosperity for all. Rousseau blamed luxury for corrupting morals and lashed out at the decadence of court life. He associated it not only with privileged elites, but also with women, effeminacy, and the decline of “true courage” and “military virtues.” Drawing on broader issues, such as the nature and sources of social inequality, the attack on luxury crystallized criticism of the Ancien Régime. During the Revolution, some considered combating luxury as “the most important and patriotic of subjects.” In the nineteenth century, republican political economists continued to lambaste luxury as a symptom of social inequality and a form of ostentatious, unproductive consumption that discouraged hard work. They preferred to define wealth by capital accumulation and investment rather than expenditure on luxury.51 The notable exception to this was state Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 76–77. Michel Foucault also discusses utility as a theory of value in his Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 209–14, where he argues that the value of things is tied to their exchange. Although these discussions refer to economic value, the term utilité, as used in the Third Republic, is not restricted to this domain. 50.  In France, utilité also has other connotations. In legal and administrative contexts it has been synonymous with “effective” (such as in producing a legal result) or sufficient (such as en temps utile, a sufficient or determinate amount of time needed to execute contracts). In his Vocabulaire juridique, Cornu notes that the useful “presents an interest different than the voluptaire [expenses for luxury, pleasure, or fantasy] and larger than the necessary” (831–32). In the theater, it refers to secondary roles or characters. 51.  See Rousseau’s early Discours, Diderot’s Observations sur le Nakaz, Antoine-Prosper Lottin’s Discours contre le luxe (1783), and Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique (1803), Discours préliminaire. Pointing out that the debates about luxury did not end in 1789, but continued throughout the nineteenth century, Jeremy Jennings discusses these in his “The Debate about Luxury in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, 1 (January 2007): 79–105.

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spending on opera, which every French government since the eighteenth century has continued to support despite its enormous cost. Opera was among those “collective luxuries”52 that could prove useful to the state in a variety of ways. As they offered a way to both theorize and moralize in an alternative social mode diametrically opposed to self-indulgent luxury, questions of utility also created a counterdiscourse that, in interrogating the purposes of society, went hand in hand with the emergence of a new political system. This is already evident in Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), which expands the above definitions to mean a kind of relationship between people: “One is worth nothing if one is not useful to someone.”53 In today’s terms, this means having a capacity or pursuing an activity that is beneficial to others. As such, utility becomes a kind of judgment. Voltaire and Diderot, in debates about the social function of various aspects of life, employ the concept to reflect a point of view and an ethical standard distinct from those of the king.54 To the extent that the Enlightenment “made every man feel he can be better,” as Beaumarchais pointed out in 1784, utility became associated with an individual’s contributions to social progress: “I see in each class a wish to be useful, to succeed, to enlarge its ideas, its learning, its pleasures, which can only work to universal advantage, for this is how all will grow, prosper, and improve themselves.”55 French monarchists, revolutionaries, and their republican successors all em­­ braced the idea of serving others. It underlies French notions of duty—duty to God, religion, and country. It characterizes aristocratic loyalties, Catholic preoccupations, and republican civic responsibilities. As such, one could invoke utility to make appeals that go beyond political differences, particularly when related to the national interest. But whereas monarchists thought of the king’s subjects as useful in the economic sense, revolutionaries saw usefulness in the form of duty as an ethical requisite of citizenship. Duty was what Frenchmen were supposed 52.  In his Manuel républicain de l’homme et du citoyen (1848; Paris: Colin, 1904), Charles Renouvier considered libraries, theaters, and museums as expressions of fraternity and civic education. Renouvier also believed that “nothing is beautiful, nothing is noble that is not also useful” (278). See Jennings, “Debate about Luxury.” 53.  “C’est proprement ne valoir rien que de n’être utile à personne.” Cited in Guilbert and Lagane, Grand Larousse. 54.  Littré’s Dictionnaire, s.v. utile, cites inter alia Voltaire’s remark about “douze mille sujets du roi très utiles, enchaînés par vingt chanoines très inutiles” (twelve thousand very useful subjects of the king, enslaved by twenty utterly useless canons). Under utilité, Littré cites Diderot’s assertion that “general utility [utilité générale] and common consent must be the two great rules of our actions.” 55.  Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, introduction to his libretto for Salieri’s Tarare, cited in James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 52.

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to share, a “common interest” that could form a basis for “the general will.”56 In this sense, an association of the common with the useful does not come from the banal, the practical, or the universal. Utility here connotes finding self-interest in the collective interest.

The Concept of Utilité Publique The idea of utilité publique (public utility) helps clarify what people value as a nation and the relative importance they attach to a wide range of activities and institutions.57 It derives its power from the fact that, for the most part, many French since the Revolution have historically accepted the role of the state in

56.  Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (1950; rpt., Paris: Vrin, 1995), 354. Tracy Strong explains that in Rousseau’s concept of the “general will,” the “common” is “what designates what [humans] experience when they experience the natural in each other” or what occurs when no tension is experienced in movement between the first person singular and the plural for the same activity. . . . The general will has the common as its object and springs from a will that is common. . . . The common self, and by extension the general will, is the ability to participate in a certain kind of interaction. It is certainly not to be thought of as some kind of collective mind. . . . The general will is then the expression of my common self, that is, of the self that I find, as the same self in myself and in others. . . . Far from being the expression of a single, unitary overarching collective consciousness, the general will is in fact the expression of the multiplicity and mutability of my being. . . . [it] is the thought of the humanness of the human being, ontological rather than (merely) moral . . . what I see when I see myself in you, you in me, and me in myself. . . . When acting on the general will, I then encounter myself as what I share with others, as human. This is what is meant by political society. (Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary [1994], 2nd

ed. [Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002], 34, 79–85) Richard Vernon explains the idea of the general will in Rousseau’s Social Contract somewhat differently: while “will” introduces the notion of voluntary obedience, the assent of autonomous individuals to rules of association and behavior, “generality” introduces, rather, a reminiscence of classical virtue, of cohesiveness and public devotion, and of the thorough absorption of the individual by an admired community. As the bearer of will the individual obeys the requirements of citizenship; as a bearer of the spirit of generality, he is a citizen, and conformity (rather than obedience) to a common good is simply the medium in which he lives. (Vernon, Citizenship and Order: Studies in French Political Thought [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986], 49)

57.  The definitions of utilité publique in this chapter come from (1) historical studies, esp. Jean Belin, La Notion d’utilité publique en droit administratif français (Paris: Dalloz, 1933) and La Logique d’une idée-force: L’Idée d’utilité sociale pendant la Révolution française (1789–1792) (Paris:

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negotiating the conflicting desires of its citizens and in pursuing the public good as well as the public interest, as determined by principles such as equality and freedom.58 Under the aegis of public utility, late nineteenth-century republicans, building on the ideas of Cicero, Helvétius, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and others, empowered the state to claim authority and justify its actions in many domains, from Haussmann’s expropriation of land to the support of music, thereby helping to form a new society. In this way, public utility became a persistent and significant force in French culture (tables 1 and 2). This focus on utility has created a logic underlying public institutions and a means of holding them accountable. Cicero, building on Greek ideas, believed that all laws should have utilitas rei publicae as their goal, and that public institutions should be appreciated because of their public utility. Since 1677, utilité publique has described a specific kind of relationship between individuals and their society inscribed in French law. In the law, “the activity of the general will,”59 it is not needs that are addressed so much as interests. Utilité publique refers to the role of

Hermann, 1939); and Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau; (2) legal sources, such as Gérard Cornu, Vocabulaire juridique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996); André de Laubadère et al., Traîté de droit administratif (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1988); and Juris-Classeur administratif, 5th ed. (Paris: Editions techniques, 1997); and (3) dictionaries, including Louis Guilbert and René Lagane, Grand Larousse de la langue française, vol. 7 (Paris: Larousse, 1978); Alain Rey, ed., Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Paris: Robert, 1993); and Trésor de la langue française, vol. 16 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 58.  While Anglo-Saxons tend to assume that the individual preexists the community and that the source of legitimacy lies primarily in the individual, French republicans have conceived of the state as preexisting its members, thereby giving it certain powers as well as duties to serve the nation’s needs. In this chapter, I use the term “public good” (bien public; also known as the “common good”) to mean a country’s goods, services, and resources that serve the general interest of the people, usually a product of political decision-making. This ideal and the Anglo-Saxon concept of public goods, more specifically economic in nature, have in common the characteristics of nonexcludability/nonexclusivity (that is, the benefits are available to all) and nonrivalry (consumption by one person does not preclude consumption by another). Although most public goods stop short of these ideals (and, as such, are impure public goods), the term refers only to goods and services with positive utility and positive externalities. With the public good and public goods (like national defense and clean air), political decisions can lead to exceptions to the logic of the market. Some public goods, such as knowledge and music, are not necessarily financed or controlled by the state. For fuller explanation of public goods, a concept first theorized by Paul Samuelson in 1954, see Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, and Marc Stern, “Defining Global Public Goods,” and Ismail Serageldin, “Cultural Heritage as Public Good: Economic Analysis Applied to Historic Cities,” in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, ed. Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–6, 254–55. I’m grateful to Rob Lempert for pointing me to this book. 59.  Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 85.

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Table 1.  Usefulness Objects, actions, organizations

→

Useful relationship (serves, satisfies needs and/ or desires; communicates value, importance, wealth)

→

Needs and/or desires of individuals or society

Table 2.  Public Utility Private interests of individuals or organizations ↓ Moral personality of a collective body (people’s shared interests, what the community values) ↓ Common will

→

→ Public utility (defines and shapes, contains or limits general interest, distinguishing it from private interests)

General interest, public good

government, whose duty (and utility) lie in serving the general interests (intérêt général) of those otherwise divided by class, politics, region, profession, religion, and temperament. The idea that the social utility of goods and services should take priority over their personal utility provides a key to understanding French notions of government up to the present. Colbert, Louis XIV’s prime minister, believed that it is incumbent upon society to accomplish what individuals cannot. That is, the state should take initiatives for the common good when individuals’ efforts are insufficient. By making it part of the common law, utilité publique could serve as a legitimating tactic, justifying the government’s actions even if only for the sake of appearances, such as when the state took over the tapestry and mirror-making companies. Asserting that the state’s interests take precedence over individual interests, it could also be used to surmount any opposition and to appease the bourgeoisie who owned these companies. This signals a transition away from the absolute power and authority of the king, who was thought to embody the will of God, and whose motives no one would question. 70 . F o r m i n g P u b l i c S p i r i t a n d U s e f u l C i t i z e n s

By the eighteenth century, utilité publique had become “the supreme law,” a criterion for judging anything involving the public domain. 60 The philosopher Helvétius made the concept fashionable in his popular De l’esprit (1758), in which he used it to criticize despotism and to argue for a “public” or notion of the state separate from the person of the king. 61 His thesis revolved around the idea that “interest” dictates our judgment. It determines whether one values or scorns actions or ideas. Like some of his English contemporaries and Jeremy Bentham after him, he hoped to conceive of a way to link individual interests with those of society as a whole. If perfection for Helvétius meant harmonizing our personal pleasure as fully as possible with the interests of others, then (echoing Descartes) to be virtuous meant being useful to others. 62 Because Helvétius believed that man is a product of social and therefore changeable circumstances more than fixed or geographical ones, 63 he thought that education could accomplish this fusion of individual and general interests. Along with Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, and others inspired by the latter, he saw legislators as potential pedagogues, and morality and legislation as “one and the same science.” Ideally, the principle of public utility would ensure that governmental actions, however vaguely defined, benefited the good of the greatest number. As the definition of general interest and the collective needs of the nation evolved, the separation of public and private realms became increasingly ambiguous. The concept of utilité publique played a critical role in helping writers and politicians negotiate this evolution and reconceive their society. Extending some basic ideas in Helvétius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made it an integral part of his new political theory. In both his essay on the political economy and his Social Contract, he conceptualized a close relationship between utilité publique and what he calls 60.  See Turgot’s Encyclopédie article of 1757. 61.  Discussed in Halévy, Formation du radicalisme philosophique, vol. 1: La Jeunesse de Bentham, 1776–1789, 27–31, and Pierre Rosanvallon, “L’Utilitarisme français et les ambiguïtés de la culture politique prérévolutionnaire (position d’un problème),” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1: The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 435–40. Rosanvallon notes that this text was one of the most often read in the thirty years before the Revolution. 62.  Say and Chailley, “Helvétius,” Nouveau dictionnaire (Paris: Guillaumin, 1891), 1:1127. 63.  For the same reason, Helvétius and many of his followers believed that inequalities ascribed to women were a result of social conditioning rather than physiology and as such could be changed. Halévy, Jeunesse de Bentham, 30. Note that in the section of his Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique (New York: Da Capo, 1971), on the influence of the physical on the moral (3: 83–86), the composer André-Ernest-Modest Grétry takes issue with Helvétius’s De l’esprit. He thinks that Helvétius overestimated the power of education to change a person, especially his or her health.

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the sovereign power. 64 For him, utilité publique both contains sovereign power, establishing its limits in the public domain, and articulates the border between public and private, providing a rationale for private “sacrifices” or encroachments into the private domain. Analogously, Rousseau believed that laws should not reflect a specific leader’s will, but that of the people. Sovereignty thus resides not in one individual (i.e., an all-powerful king), but in the common will (volonté générale) (see table 2). The common will results from the shared values and interests of the collective body— or what he calls its “moral personality.” In Rousseau’s theory, then, common will both determines what is in the general interest of the people and unites them into a political entity. It also helps produce the feeling of social solidarity. 65 Such a system has the advantage of joining people without forcing them to give up their rights; however, its dependence on the country’s leaders and their determination of the public interest contains a fundamental weakness, which Rousseau was not to solve. The Revolution built on these ideas, and the Constitution of 3 September 1791 accustomed people to reflecting on social phenomena. 66 This document allows for social distinctions among free and equal men, but only based on their utilité commune, that is, their virtues and talents. This belief underlies the critical role competitions have played in anything regulated by the state since then (see chapter 4 below). Inspired by Rousseau, revolutionary leaders charged their government to “form a people that is the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest.”67 Utility became one of their most effective arguments for taking action. Virtually all revolutionary laws were written with the intérêt général of the people as their goal and purpose. They invoked utilité sociale to press for or explain a wide range of decisions, expenses, and activities, including the protection of forests, the free flow of capital, the separation of administrative and judiciary responsibilities, the 64.  “The sovereign power that has the common good [intérêt général] as its object has no limits except those of public utility. . . . Public utility renders the sacrifices that public powers require of individuals both legitimate and obligatory.” Cited in Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 344–51. 65.  See n. 56 above. 66.  This constitution posits that for the rights of men and citizens to be guaranteed, there needs to be a “force publique” instituted for the advantage of all, not the “utilité particulière” of those in charge. Its purpose is to express the common will (volonté générale). See Belin, Logique d’une idée-force and E. Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique: La Révolution et la doctrine d’utilité (1789–1815) (Paris: Alcan, 1900). 67.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, in id., Œuvres complètes (Dijon: Darantière, 1959), 1: 404–5.

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defense of borders, the National Guard, and the importance of art. Utility also emerged as a way of defending science because it offered either power over nature or something to improve daily life. 68 Arguing for music’s utilité publique in “producing a good effect on the national character,” in 1793, revolutionary statesmen approved the creation of the first national conservatory of music. 69 The vague, malleable qualities underlying utility thus allowed leaders to respond to changing circumstances and political ideologies even if, after the year XII (1803–4), the general will and utilité publique were determined by concrete cases, not by any general formula. Because of their utilité publique, the government could take charge of areas left to the private domain under the Ancien Régime, including religion and education. One of the most significant developments in the history of this concept was article 649 of the 1804 Civil Code (and the opinion rendered by the Conseil d’Etat, 17 June 1806). This article established the range of utilité publique’s influence and the extent of its controls and limits on the exercise of state power. Both to recognize and to control private organizations whose existence the state wished to support, this law granted them a déclaration or reconnaissance d’utilité publique.70 To win this status, groups had to demonstrate that they fulfilled a public need and contributed to the public good (bien public). In return, they received legal benefits, but were also subject to supervision and the rules of common law. The first request for this designation came from a women’s charitable organization in 1809. In 1901, another law made utilité publique consubstantial with the notion of an association. As the public domain expanded, leaders increasingly invoked the notion of utilité publique. It was especially useful in determining the boundaries of the private domain. For example, whereas an 1838 law recognized a Frenchman’s right to own property, an 1841 law limited it in the case of “expropriation pour cause d’utilité publique” (state appropriation or compulsory public purchase for reasons 68.  In his “Applied Natural History and Utilitarian Ideals: ‘Jacobean Science’ at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 1789–1870,” in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant Ragan Jr. and Elizabeth Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press), 129–43, Michael Osborne explains that “for a substantial body of revolutionary scientists, ‘utile’ was something that demarcated their own science from romantic misconceptions like Mesmerism and thus freed humanity of its prejudices” (130). 69.  See Sarrette’s “Petition for the Creation of a National Institute of Music” read to the Convention on 8 November 1793, reprinted in Constant Pierre, ed., Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation: Documents historiques et administratifs (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), 88–90. The Institut became the Conservatoire on 3 August 1795. 70.  This was significant because since 1791, when all associations of people from the same class (état) were abolished, there had been a fear of collective organizations.

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of public utility).71 Accordingly, the state could take possession of private property for the greater social good if the collective interests were not temporary but longlasting, and if the state paid the property’s owners, property being considered since 1791 a useful thing, but not a right. In the nineteenth century, perhaps the most significant application of this law resulted in Haussmann’s reconfiguration of Paris. Appealing to an 1850 law about unhealthy buildings and another from 1852 allowing for expropriation for public works, Haussmann had only to borrow money and answer his numerous critics to fulfill his and Napoléon III’s dream of a new Paris that was easier to control. As public became synonymous with public interest, the state brought under its aegis any enterprise having utilité publique. From this principle, the notion of public service emerged. Laws passed in 1873 established public service as a central part of the administration. An activity could become a public service when it satisfied a need involving the general interest.72 In this spirit, the government took over French mines in 1880 and the transportation industries somewhat later (paving the way for the metropolitan subway system beginning in 1898). As the state looked for more control over organized religion, it created a position of minister of religious cults. After laws passed in the 1880s ruled that all children must go to school, and that secular public schools would be free, education became a public service.73 Any organization or activity that could argue for its educational value could receive support from the state. When the arts were formally placed under the jurisdiction of the minister of public instruction in 1870, they entered the domain of a public service.74 With this in mind, as arts administrator Gustave Larroumet notes, 71.  In the United States, this is called the law of eminent domain. In his Le Droit de l’expropriation pour cause d’utilité publique (Bordeaux: Delmas, n.d.), Georges Ferrière points to early examples of this practice by Philip le Bel in 1303 and Henri IV in 1607 (22–23). For how this concept was understood in nineteenth-century France, see Gustave Sabatier, Traité de l’expropriation pour cause d’utilité publique (1859), Edmond Picard, Traité général de l’expropriation pour utilité publique (Paris: Larcier, 1875), and Pierre Avril, Les Origines des établissements publics et des établissements d’utilité publique (Paris: Rousseau, 1900); for how this law is applied today, see Denis Lévy, “Réflexions sur la notion d’utilité publique,” in Service public et libertés: Mélanges offerts au professeur RobertEdouard Charlier (Paris: Editions de l’Université et de l’enseignement moderne, 1981), 195–204, and Conseil d’Etat, L’Utilité publique aujourd’hui (Paris: Documentation française, 1999). 72.  Belin, Logique d’une idée-force, 367; André de Laubadère et al., Traité de droit administratif. See also J. Chevalier, Le Service public (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), and Réné Rizzardo, “En quoi l’enseignement musical spécialisé relève-t-il (ou pas) de la notion de service public?” in Enseigner la musique, no. 4: L’Avenir de l’enseignement spécialisé de la musique (2000): 27–32 and the discussion that follows, 33–43. 73.  As Claude Nicolet points out in his La République en France (Paris: Seuil, 1992), teachers, as government employees, are not at the “service” of their students, but of the state, or the general interest (68). 74.  This recalls the Latin source of the word “minister,” meaning someone who serves.

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“the state purchased artworks as it purchased books, formed museums as it formed libraries, and taught the arts as it taught literature and the sciences.”75 The government also supported music. Declaring the construction of a new opera house, the Palais Garnier, of utilité publique on 29 September 1860 was necessary before an architect could be selected and ground broken. Each year in the budget discussions of the Assemblée nationale in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, deputies cited their utilité publique as the main reason for continuing the annual subsidies of the Opéra and Opéra-Comique. Larroumet explains: “The truth is that our dramatic and musical heritage is part of the nation’s wealth and that without the state’s protection, this heritage from the past would weaken and not grow in the present. Theaters supply a certain kind of teaching in the realm of the arts, and subsidizing them amounts to providing a public service.”76 This way of thinking also applied to individual initiatives addressing social needs. In 1795, citing their utilité publique, the Convention created the Hôpital Saint-Antoine for the poor and disadvantaged and recognized Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s zoological Ménagerie for observing animals. The state likewise acknowledged smaller organizations—public baths, municipal gymnasiums, and especially groups advocating something it wished to encourage. These ranged from geographical societies to the Alliance française and various associations promoting education, science, agriculture, and commerce. Over the years, numerous arts organizations have sought this status, including the Société des artistes français, started in 1882 and recognized in 1883 for its annual exhibitions of French art. In the musical world, obtaining official approval through a déclaration d’utilité publique especially helped concert organizations. One of the earliest such groups was the Société des concerts de chant classique (Fondation Beaulieu), founded in 1860 and recognized in 1867, not only for its contributions to musicians’ retirements, but also for its concerts of vocal music by deceased composers. In 1888, even the private composers’ organization, the Société nationale de musique, asked to be declared an établissement d’utilité publique.77 Today, for the very same reason, the Concerts 75.  Gustave Larroumet, L’Art et l’Etat (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 291–92. 76.  Ibid., 264. 77.  To obtain this status, the process began with an investigation and formal reports reviewed by the Conseil municipal, the prefect of police, the prefect of the Seine, and the minister of the interior. The organization had to prove that it had existed for at least three years, so that its previous activities could be examined for their utility, and that its resources were sufficient to allow it to continue. The Société nationale was required to present a history of its organization, its goals, founders, statutes, financial resources, and activities. In a document signed by Franck, Fauré, Vidal, Tiersot, and Chabrier, the Société argued that it had been an “artistic and patriotic foundation” for seventeen years, during which time it had presented six hundred premieres of new French works. As such, it functioned as “a kind of experimental music school [école d’application

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Fig. 16  Concerts Pasdeloup program, 1998–99. The text on the brochure announcing their 1998–99 season reads: “Association recognized for its public utility, subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and the City of Paris.” This indication still appeared on the cover of their brochures in 2007.

Pasdeloup receives a state subsidy for performing orchestral music (fig. 16).78 Such recognition has also been given to charitable foundations and professional societies providing retirements funds and care for workers in the case of sickness. Two such groups, the Association des artistes musiciens, founded in 1843, and a similar organization for painters, sculptors, and other visual artists, founded in 1840, were musicale] helping its composers to perfect their art.” Playing into the republican interests of the Conseil municipal, who would have noted the quasi-private nature of their concerts, they noted that in the future the Société would like to bring its music to “popular audiences” so that they too “can judge the progress of national art.” Bibliothèque nationale, Musique, Rés F. 994 (D. 13, 21). 78.  Other more recent organizations receiving a “déclaration d’utilité publique” for their musical contributions include the Fondation Singer-Polignac (1928), Les Amis de Lili Boulanger (1971), the Fondation Cziffra (1975), the Académie internationale de musique Maurice Ravel in Cibourre (1975), and the Société musicale russe en France (1983).

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recognized for their public utility in 1876 and 1881, respectively. The crucial requirement has been convincing state administrators that, while carrying out its mission in the private domain, the organization is voluntarily fulfilling a genuine social need. Organizations of utilité publique collaborate as partners in the administration of public services. The state can give them money, but it does not assume their debts. Although a déclaration makes such organizations accountable to the state in some way, they remain private, responsible for their own artistic and budgetary decisions. Because the state recognized an increasing number of associations in late nineteenth-century France, people were inevitably aware that the private domain could benefit by serving public needs. This contributed to building a strong foundation for democracy, with public and private efforts alike serving the public interest and the public good. However, these institutions also helped the state maintain its power and set the context for both rising socialism and reactionary resistance.

The Power of Utilité Publique The idea of utility has thus served the French well over the centuries. Because it depends on the perception of the country’s needs, it could protect the status quo. More often it was invoked to promote change. Whereas in the eighteenth century, it led people to reevaluate the relationship of pleasure to happiness and goodness, it also forced revolutionaries to come to grips with needs the state had to serve in replacing the Church, particularly in primary education. If Cousin criticized the principle of general interest by pointing out that it could also “produce great crimes,” if he worried about “a single class of duties, duties towards others” with no “duties towards ourselves,” and if he pointed out that utility is never the “sole measure of the goodness of actions,”79 nonetheless these ideas helped set the terms for a revolution in values—the liberty, equality, and fraternity that made the people, the working classes, an important part of the nation. Since the Revolution, when this concept began to dominate all French administrative law, many French politicians and public administrators have construed their principal purpose as the fulfillment of utilité publique. For those in control, it has helped determine what laws were necessary and, increasingly over the years, how to balance the various legitimate, albeit conflicting, needs of society. At the same time, it aided in the growth and centralization of the state and provided a way to explain (or rationalize) state initiatives or forays into the private domain. Private organizations, too, have invoked the concept, especially when soliciting recogni79.  Cousin, Lectures, 238, 265–68. On p. 307, he takes on Helvétius’s ethics directly.

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tion for their efforts at serving the public interest. In the nineteenth century, in particular, when the public and private were constantly being reevaluated, utility defined the terrain where the two spheres met and sometimes overlapped. Under the aegis of public utility, both state administrators and private groups could articulate and justify their functional needs and desires—money, buildings, and land—as well as their symbolic ones—official recognition or public approval, preservation of tradition or promotion of progress, patriotic pride or national identity. Both could assert that certain actions were respectable and in the country’s general interest and that others were not. Utilité publique thus articulated the site of contention where their conflicting interests inevitably clashed, the space of negotiation for everything political. The significance of utilité publique comes in part from how, to the extent that it addressed the collective interests of the French people, it helped create the nation. Revolutionaries understood the nation as more than its territory, the inheritance of its monuments and museums, its laws and symbols, its military victories, and its language. 80 To replace the king, in their 1791 Constitution, they made the nation the “principle of sovereignty.” Rousseau had understood that this was not based on unity, but on shared needs and desires translated in the common will. From the revolutionaries’ perspective, “the only titles one needed were the love of the public good and the desire to be useful to the country.”81 After the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the French returned to this utopian notion of what determines a nation. As the history professor Fustel de Coulanges put it in 1870, more than race and language, what makes a country is “a community of ideas, interests, feelings, memories, and hopes.” These define the present, while race and history represent the past. In his 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” Ernest Renan likewise points to the importance of having a “shared program to realize”—his version of Rousseau’s “common will” that makes a nation into a “moral personality.” Renan also sees shared suffering as imposing duties “requiring an effort in common”: “To have suffered, rejoiced, hoped together—these are worth more than common customs and borders, these are what one understands in spite of diversity in race and language.”82 Through its orientation to the public good and the public interest, as articulated by the country’s shared needs and desires, the notion of 80.  Categories studied in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). 81.  Belin, Logique d’une idée-force, 293. 82.  Fustel de Coulanges, “L’Alsace est-elle allemande ou française?” (1870) and Ernest Renan in a lecture at the Sorbonne, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (1882) reproduced in Raoul Girardet, Le Nationalisme français (Paris: Colin, 1966), 62–67.

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utilité publique was associated with both the fatherland (patrie)—serving what one loved—and the happiness or well-being (bonheur) that resulted from having one’s needs satisfied. Utility was a valuable tool in the discourse about the nation. Like the nation, utility represented hopes, desires, and emotional needs as well as an ideology created to address them. Just as legitimating a concept as the nation, it linked society and the state, allowing the two to be perceived as “the same,” the former “merging and being absorbed” in the latter83—an idea with resonance in France as far back as the reign of Henri IV and possibly the Gallo-Roman period. Satisfying needs is not the same as controlling them, but as in any relationship between two closely identified entities, manipulation can go both ways. Utility, then, is not just descriptive of how the common will should determine the general interest. It can also be prescriptive of how desires can be educated and needs constructed to constitute the general interest. In this sense, it can be powerfully normalizing. In other words, if the state can respond to the needs of a majority of the people, it can also help shape the desires of these people so that they agree on their needs. To the extent that the state can increase appreciation (and therefore desire) for music through teaching singing in school, encouraging participation in amateur choruses, rewarding performance through competitions, and subsidizing opera and orchestral concerts for the lower classes, it can promote music as a shared interest of diverse people. This is the essence of the top-down theory of cultural hegemony, which includes the cultural paternalism underlying support for orphéons and the birth of concerts populaires. Like the nation, however, utility is problematic in its claims at general representation. Belief in the common will and in people’s ability to comprehend it probably motivated the state more than the reality behind these concepts. 84 Still, since utility implies its own contingencies, it allows us to rethink citizenship and the nation as having contingencies and fluctuating identities that are dependent on a diversity of needs and desires. From this perspective, French notions of citizenship are not absolute or theoretical but rooted in history, subject to the needs and desires of those alive at any one time. 85 To the extent that it tolerates diverse needs and desires, the concept of utilité 83.  Albert Duruy, L’Instruction publique et la démocratie, 1877–1886 (Paris: Hachette, 1886), 312. 84.  Numerous historians have pointed out the social and economic inequities not accounted for in the revolutionary concept of the citizen and in the eventual domination of the state by the bourgeoisie. 85.  I agree with the critic Max Silverman who, in his Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1999), points out that the nationstate should not be the primary context for consideration of citizenship.

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publique also allows us to explore the limitations of this top-down perspective. In certain contexts, for example, private music organizations took on the role of the state and sought to promote very different interests. In the 1890s, frustrated with the lack of renewal in the national theaters, the aristocratic Société des grandes auditions musicales de France had the connections and the money to produce some of the first staged performances of Berlioz’s and Wagner’s operas in France well in advance of the state’s productions at the Palais Garnier. Because these productions provided an ideal of what some thought art and the public good should be, some critics praised the society as “eminently useful” and accused subsidized theaters of being “useless” to the cause of art because of their apathy and bureaucratic structures. 86 The taste for art music thus sometimes “trickled up” from private organizations to influence state-supported institutions. This points to how the concept of utility addressed the challenges of the nation in a uniquely French way. French of all political persuasions claimed to be serving utilité publique in the lively and ongoing debates over whose interests would be seen as society’s interests, whose values the state would embrace and support. When the politicians who called themselves opportunist republicans (républicains opportunistes) rose to power in the late 1870s, but proved unable to meet society’s needs, debates over what was in the general interest of the people gave rise in the late 1880s to new antirepublican nationalism, alongside republican nationalism, and in the early 1890s to political alliances between conservative republicans and royalists. Nationalism, or invoking the general interests of the nation, functioned as a domestic political weapon to attack both opponents of the state and, by the end of the century, the Republic itself.87 From the perspective of utilité publique, however, the only real “enemy” was anyone who wished to spend public resources on unnecessary luxuries. The significance of utilité publique also derives from its function as a sign of social goodness. This made it a basis for comparison, a kind of standard. In some contexts, it also became a criterion for judgment, for asserting value in the community. In describing the “principles and utility of the 1889 Exhibition,” for example, organizers saw the event as “useful” to the extent that it demonstrated “French superiority” in a wide range of products, a reflection of “the taste and talent of [France’s] manufacturers.”88 With public concerns inflecting those of private individuals in the nineteenth century, people increasingly invoked the useful to attract 86.  “La Société des grandes auditions,” Art musical, 15 April 1890, 51. 87.  Robert Tombs, preface to Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918, ed. id. (London: Harper Collins, 1991), xi. 88.  “Principes générales et utilité des expositions universelles,” Moniteur de l’Exposition de 1889, 21 April 1889.

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attention to what should be valued from small and almost insignificant objects and actions to great and important ones. As such, utility was also considered a form of knowledge. In this regard, “useful” was often linked not to “pleasurable,” as it had been for Horace and eighteenth-century philosophers, but to “interesting”—interest being a criterion (since Helvétius) for determining whether something was worthy of one’s attention. For example, feeding their readers’ desire for continuing education, monthly magazines advertised “useful and interesting complements to their arid studies in the past.”89 While many family magazines reproduced or made available to their subscribers musical scores whose “attractiveness and utility will be appreciated,”90 reciprocally music magazines tended to have short biographies and portraits of people in the news, as well as summaries of current events. By the century’s end, the taste for “indispensable savoir-faire” led La Vie de famille to publish a regular section, “Useful Knowledge” (Connaissances utiles). This included medical advice, travel information, science games, and tips for the homemaker—such as how to get grease out of sheets and restore old paintings. Just like La Famille and La Vie de famille, the Album musical, a monthly collection of musical scores, included a “Financial Conversation” its editors thought would be “useful to their readers” and “interest them” because it discussed stock market fluctuations.91 Any information addressing a legitimate need was considered “useful”—a useful reform, useful work, useful initiative, useful explanations. Usefulness was understood not merely in terms of helping satisfy a need; the need in question had to be justifiable and potentially shared with others. Simply arguing that something was useful in the nineteenth century, however, should never be taken at face value, for rarely were assertions of utility or usefulness neutral. Brandishing these words could shield a group or interest from scrutiny when there were competing political, economic, or social agendas. Utilité publique could parade as negotiating competitive interests while serving only one. Moreover, it easily implied rendering or evaluating a service that the public should desire or need, not necessarily one that many agreed was in the common interest. This has often been a problem with social policy dictated from on high. It also could mask market forces, conformism, and habits capable of influencing people’s perception of their needs and desires. When it came to the arts, the advantage brought by something useful could go both ways. The state, like artists themselves, could benefit from certain actions, such as those that reinforced the 89.  See, e.g., La Vie de famille (1898). 90.  L’Album musical de la famille, advertised in La Famille, 12 October 1879, 210. 91.  Album musical, August–September 1906.

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status quo rather than questioned it. Determining the public interest is problematic when the utility, or the logic for invoking it, is circular. Utilité publique, conceived in this way, sometimes reflects a certain impotence or insularity in the systems that invoke it. In all situations concerning utilité publique, then, we should ascertain which public it addresses and what kind of social significance its proponents seek to achieve. Consequently, we should not dismiss this crucial concept in European culture or assume we understand it at face value. Usefulness is broad in its capacity to signify, and effective in helping us better to understand the democratic forces of the Third Republic and French culture since then. Depending on one’s perspective, at its extremes, utilité publique could imply a stifling action, calling for the surrender of individual interests to the common will, as in the case of expropriating private property. But it could also protect and empower the community to defend itself from the undue power of certain individuals. Utility legitimates the concept of the social and social needs without relying on the assumption of natural differences between social classes. In France, it harks back to revolutionary ideals that point to difference as a matter of access to resources and experience rather than innate privilege. Utilité publique provides a way to conceive of a broader sense of the French people and to understand more than the needs and desires of their elites. This is particularly relevant in studying music, especially if we are to get beyond the prejudice that historians have long imbued in us that art music is, fundamentally, of and for elites.

Music as Utilité Publique If French musicians have escaped the kind of vitriolic attack that Hindemith, for example, met with in Germany in the 1920s, it is in part because of how music’s utility has been construed in France. Whereas German scholars, writing in a tradition that values metaphysics, developed the term Gebrauchsmusik to describe music that serves social functions or engages people through active participation more than aesthetic contemplation,92 the French have needed no such category. Few French have gone as far as the Second Viennese School composers in their 92.  For an excellent essay on Gebrauchsmusik, see Stephen Hinton’s entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie et al. (New York: Grove, 2001). Unlike the scholars who promoted this term, Hinton points out that music’s use-value and its autonomy are not necessarily mutually exclusive. When critics such as Adorno claimed that the only use music can serve in capitalist society is that of a commodity, they were showing how limited their concept of the useful was. In his The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964),

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claims about autonomous concert music, against which Gebrauchsmusik composers were reacting. Artistic value in France is not as linked to musical autonomy. Opera has historically been the most highly supported art in France, and certain kinds of musique d’occasion, such as that written for revolutionary festivals, have been broadly appreciated. Generally speaking, in France, the useful in music is what links sound to society, music to the community. As they envisaged bringing together republican government and democracy, leaders of the Third Republic looked to ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy for “triumphant examples of what the alliance of art, religion, and the state can do.”93 They sought an explicit relationship between music and the state, the basis of its utilité publique. Democracies, as Tocqueville pointed out, are not just a form of government, a regime of reason, or a set of laws, but, above all, a way of life. They have their own mœurs (from the Latin mores), the habits, attitudes, or implicit norms that determine what is considered just or unjust, good or evil, desirable or undesirable, 94 distinct from those of aristocracies. What characterizes democracies, above all, is “the equality of conditions,” even if “equality places men beside one another without a common bond to hold them.”95 French republicans were looking for ways to both shape democratic mœurs in the country and build such bonds. They understood music—an art, a form of sensibility, a kind of knowledge, and a practice—as able to contribute to the mise en forme and the mise en scène of the new society. In this sense, music could be politically useful, especially if the political means an ensemble of principles that generate relationships among people. This does not mean that it was reduced to its utilité publique, just as for Plato, education was not reducible to its political function. Critics continued to foreground music’s aesthetic qualities. But, in engaging and reflecting individual as well as public

Alan Merriam distinguishes between use and function, the former referring to “the situation in which music is employed in human action,” the latter to “the reasons for its employment and particularly the broader purpose that it serves” (210). I tend to agree with the cognitive neuroscientist Steven Brown who, in discussing these, argues that use emanates from function in his “Introduction: ‘How Does Music Work?’ Toward a Pragmatics of Musical Communication,” in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music (New York: Berghahn 2006), ed. id. and Ulrik Volgsten, 1–25. This stimulating volume explores the negative as well as the positive social uses of music in our time. 93.  In his Lectures, Cousin understood this relationship to be without the “servitude of art” (163). 94.  Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 9. Tocqueville explains mores as “the different notions that men possess, the various opinions that are current in their midst, and the sum of ideas of which the habits of the mind are formed,” in other words, “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people” (Democracy in America, 275). 95.  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 3, 485.

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taste and having personal as well as social meaning, music supported the duality characteristic of democracies, individual freedom together with collective action. For a society that considered ideology and culture as integral aspects of politics,96 after 1871, certain aspects of music and musical practices, as we shall see, arguably bore the “imprint” of politics. The founders of liberal democracy recognized that universal suffrage was a bold, difficult, and uncertain project. It had been tried before and failed.97 Leaders of the Third Republic looked to music to contribute to its success in four principal ways.

1. Music could discipline private desires and internalize public virtues.98 French who understood the ear as the “intellectual faculty”99 regarded music as a mode of learning and assimilating values. Listening could involve rational processes like discrimination and empirical comparison and call on the imagination for the interpretation of meaning. Germany offered important models for how to use music to cultivate virtues, especially through music education. German singing manuals were admired throughout the nineteenth century because they offered not only a systematic pedagogy, but also texts promoting values likewise esteemed in France (love of work, devotion to country, the greatness of God). After the Franco-Prussian war, French music educators continued to borrow German songs (e.g., by Abt, Gläser, Nägeli, and Silcher) and teach them in the schools.100 Like their European and American counterparts, French officials recognized music’s intellectual, moral, and physical functions: while bringing us pleasure, it enlivens the intellect and memory, affects our mood, and, in singing it, strengthens our lungs and other vital organs.101 They acknowledged its capacity to further causes 96.  My concept of politics here is indebted to Lefort’s Essais sur le politique, 7–14, 112, and François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 97.  Félix Pécaut, L’Education publique et la vie nationale (Paris: Hachette, 1897), 126–27. 98.  This is the first definition of civility, or civic virtue, in Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 281. 99.  Adolphe Le Doulcet, marquis de Pontécoulant, Les Phénomènes de la musique, ou, L’influence du son sur les êtres animés (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1868). 100.  I analyze these in my next book. 101.  An early nineteenth-century report stressing music’s capacity “to make people love virtue, calm the passions, soften manners, and civilize people” is M.-H. Boulay de la Meurthe, Rapport au Conseil municipal de Paris sur l’introduction de l’enseignement du chant dans les écoles primaires communales, 6 mars 1835. In his High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800–1861 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), Nicolas Tawa, in a section entitled, “To Serve a Useful Purpose” (25–29), explains how Americans, too, understood music as serving to satisfy various biological, social, and imaginative needs.

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and encourage patriotism as well as reveal the “unique character of a people of a nation.”102 After 1871, French leaders of all kinds looked to music for its potential in revitalizing people. However, there were differences in what was sought from musical practices. In the nineteenth century, both German and French educators recognized that teaching music by imitation and rote memorization had its limits and needed reform. But whereas in Germany, new approaches focused on the connection between hearing, listening, and obeying, the “basic common ground of education” being what David Gramit has called an “internalization of obedience,” in Third Republic France, music education, like other kinds of education, was seen as a way to form citizens.103 As political scientists have pointed out, citizenship means more than obedience to rules. A citizen cannot be “a creature who obeys a creature who wills” as Montesquieu put it. Citizenship refers more to the person than the prescriptions and implies an attitude that leads citizens to rely on their own judgment and to identify with what rules encode because they make sense.104 French educators saw moral discipline as nurturing the health of the soul, helping one to order one’s instincts and impulses. Yet they considered teachers intellectual “liberators” more than disciplinarians, people who taught judgment so that citizens would then be free to “construct their own destiny.”105 Republicans looked to education to “transform the obscure, anonymous, unconscious, and instinctive multitude into a people capable of examining and reflecting” and thus “governing themselves.”106 The goal of their education thus was “forming vigorous character 102.  David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Gramit stresses the important of Herder and Schelling in this regard (41–45). 103.  Ibid., 118. As Gramit explains, referring to “disciplinary practice in Foucault’s sense,” in the early nineteenth century “Nägeli’s constant use of brief, frequently repeated exercises rather than larger musical pieces and his desire to banish evaluative aesthetic language from preliminary instruction likewise attest to the disciplinary character of the Gesangbildungslehre” (25, 108). Gramit sees the “larger Enlightenment goal of popular pedagogy” as part of the need for “rationalized and regulated forms of interaction associated with capitalist relations of production” (20). In France, obedience and belief were associated with the authority of the Catholic Church, which republicans wished to replace with individual judgment. See chapters 3 and 5 below. See also Noémi Lefebvre, “Education musicale et identité nationale en Allemagne et en France” (PhD diss., Université de Grenoble, 1994). 104.  See n. 56 above on Rousseau’s notion of the general will, Vernon, Citizenship and Order, 2–3, and Descartes as discussed by Tocqueville in Democracy in America. 105.  Pécaut, Education publique, xvi. In his “Cours d’histoire générale de la musique, séance d’ouverture,” Ménestrel, 1 December 1878, L.-A. Bourgault-Ducoudray also asserted that instruction turned people into “real men” by “rendering their judgment free” (2). 106.  Pécaut, Education publique, viii–ix.

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and free conscience.”107 Music could contribute to this effort. Not only was singing believed to attract children to school and make them love discipline and study, but musical performance was also perceived as enhancing a person’s dignity and self-respect. Music touches and moves “the common foundation of all virtues, the spontaneous energy of being, and the lively strength of the soul . . . the place where physical and moral life have common roots.”108 Listening to as well as performing music, they believed, also taught judgment, a critical requirement of citizens, which helped give them “the sentiment of [their] own existence” as well as their existence in common with others.109 As such, music was part of the political education that began in primary school. Along with literature, history, and the rest, it would help “the intellectual and moral dispositions of the young become part of the esprit public of a free state.”110 Republicans thus wished to engage music’s educational capacity to give people access to new, productive identities that would help build democracy.

2. Music connected people to one another despite their heterogeneity. In France, music has often been considered something cooperative. While Quatremère de Quincy wrote of music’s capacity to “arouse impressions, paint the passions, move, and please,” he stressed the role of the listener’s imagination in its perception: “Music may take us on the path to pleasure, but we still need to walk toward it; it does not present us with ready-made images; it makes us realize them within ourselves; we paint along with it; we collaborate with it; we are actors in its action and only receive the pleasure it provides us by contributing to it, which is to say that music has no effect upon those who do not cooperate with it.”111 Thus the power of beauty for Quatremère resided not just in forms, but also in the capacity of the person “who receives the impressions.” From this idea, he pointed to the “correspondences” between art and the imagination, “without which the musical language is reduced to sounds,” and between the properties of one art and those of another—a concept Baudelaire was later to develop into an 107.  Cf. Félix Pécaut, “La Musique ou le chant choral à l’école (1880), in id., Education publique, 117, and the German attitudes discussed in Gramit, Cultivating Music, 117–18. 108.  Pécaut, “Musique ou le chant choral,” 118–19; Rapport au Conseil municipal de Paris sur l’introduction de l’enseignement du chant dans les écoles primaires communales, 2 avril 1843, 12, and “Mémoire adressé à M. Gréard, directeur de l’enseignement primaire du département de la Seine, en Novembre 1878 par M. A. Dupaigne,” in Ministre de l’Instruction publique, Rapports, 68, 75. 109.  This idea harks back to Rousseau. See Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 74–77. 110.  Pécaut, Education publique, 126–29. 111.  Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales, 76. See also 52–54.

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aesthetic principle. Dependent on “the laws of sympathie” (empathy, or a certain connection between music and listener), music is thus more than metaphysics and “abstract knowledge.” Like French composers and critics who were preoccupied with music’s capacity to charm, that is, penetrate people’s hearts, minds, and bodies, both Quatremère and republicans focused on music’s ability to “move us” and what that connoted to them.112 As one late nineteenth-century educator put it, “the harmony of its sounds awaken in us, like an involuntary echo, the sense of moral harmony, order, agreement, and thus perfection, that is, our dream and our destiny.”113 From this perspective, symphonies and music without text or narrative, too, could have utilité publique. When an audience attends to a musical performance, they share something basic whether they are similarly moved or not. The experience mitigates their sense of isolation. Ideally, it can lead to compassion, a moral bond Tocqueville associates with democratic citizens.114 What concerned late nineteenth-century republicans was how music can help people of different classes, not just the same class, feel “solidarity,” forging bonds of fraternity through shared experiences and developing shared tastes.115 This would encourage them to identify with larger groups, and with the nation as a whole, despite their social, economic, religious, and political differences.116 Shared musical experiences build a community of feelings alongside the community of ideas, engendering a palpable sense of what it means to be a public. From a political perspective, to the extent that music leads people to respect and love the same things, it encourages them to hold to the common law. Fraternity was encouraged, not only by listening with others, but especially by performing with them. Choral music was particularly important to republicans, both because it could be easily taught and because it made people want to come 112.  Ibid., 76–80. 113.  Pécaut, “Musique ou le chant choral,” 118–19. 114.  Mansfield and Winthrop, Introduction to Tocqueville, Democracy in America, lxviii. 115.  Pécaut, “Musique ou le chant choral,” 118. Tocqueville points out that while people within the same class tend to “consider themselves all as children of the same family” and thus “feel a continual and active sympathy for one another,” this is not the same “for the different classes vis-à-vis one another” in a democracy, who “cannot understand well what the others might feel” (Democracy in America, 535). In his “Rapport de M. BourgaultDucoudray” in Ministre de l’Instruction publique, Rapports, Bourgault-Ducoudray, ad­vocating for universal musical education, suggests that music can mitigate these perceived differences: “Just as there is only one sun for the poor and the rich, there should only be one truth and one art. If feelings are common to all classes, then art expressing them should be practiced by all classes. From this will arise not only a community of perceived feelings, but also a community of manifested feelings. Nothing exalts or revives a feeling in our hearts more than to hear it expressed around us by those who share it” (26). 116.  This is the second definition of civility in Pettit, Republicanism, 281.

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together in voluntary association. There, in “mutual but partial dependence,” people influence one another: “the heart is enlarged and the human mind is developed.”117 Like Germans and German Americans, who had long understood the value of choral singing as a cooperative model of interaction, French republicans believed that, as a group effort, choral singing instills “solidarity, communion, and collective harmony, which are among the most important [attributes] to develop.”118 Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, both a composer and an educator, felt that choral music alone could produce “that warmth of soul and spirit of cohesion” associated with republican “fraternity.”119 Moreover, choral singing is a palpable metaphor for citizenship, in that singers participate in a “shared situation that represents more than the triumph of one will over another.” Singing also gives people opportunities to show how they might “grasp and adapt their actions” to some mutually agreed-upon order.120 The key concept here is the order empowered by fraternity, something in music more felt than analyzed, a physical experience as well as a model for the democratic ideal. The concept was powerfully normative but also, through its connection to the order of music, construed as natural. French republicans went much further than German critics and educators in insisting that all classes of society have access to such experiences. Unlike in nineteenth-century Germany where, according to Gramit, the cultivation of music served two distinct goals—“producing obedient, productive subjects among the lower classes and capable, broadly educated administrators among the cultivated middle classes,” and where the notion of “all classes” often meant only the cultivated classes121—in the Third Republic, republicans were determined to break down the differences between “utilitarian education for the people” and “liberal education for the rich classes.” They threw into question the idea that “the people” do not have the time or the inclination to “wander in the useless splendors of the ideal.”122 Serious music did not have to be a luxury associated only with elites; republicans wanted all citizens to have access to the kind of deep experiences music can stimulate. “If there are feelings common to all the classes,” BourgaultDucoudray writes, then there should be an art as well. In this way, they hoped a 117.  Mansfield and Winthrop, Introduction to Tocqueville, Democracy in America, lxxii– lxxiii. Tocqueville considered voluntary associations “an indispensable supplement to government in a democracy.” 118.  Pécaut, “Musique ou le chant choral,” 118–19. 119.  “Rapport de M. Bourgault-Ducoudray,” 17. 120.  Vernon, Citizenship and Order, 23. 121.  Gramit, Cultivating Music, 117. 122.  Pécaut, “Musique ou le chant choral,” 116.

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union would result from “the community of not only feelings experienced, but also feelings expressed.”123 Thus music’s social utility was not about dividing and regulating, objectifying relations between the classes and reinforcing hierarchies as in Germany and the United States.124 Rather, it was valued for bringing the classes closer together, giving them ways to bridge their inequalities of background, and, in so doing, help solve the “social problem.”

3. Given that the Third Republic itself was the result of a compromise, perhaps not surprisingly, republicans also looked to music to help people negotiate conflict and imagine new identities. Conflict and competition are characteristic of democracies. In the Third Republic, citizens had to come to grips with both the inevitable ideological contradictions of the Republic’s double heritage (the Revolution and the Ancien Régime) and the social antagonisms between its conservative and progressive forces. Certainly, music helped people celebrate and affirm their beliefs, but it also offered a means of confronting these differences, as well as any underlying ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes. Through music, one could resist both the weight of past traditions and the dominance of contemporary conventions. Through music, one could explore new kinds of being and imagine new futures for oneself and society. For example, scholars have often noted how repressive bourgeois values felt to many in late nineteenth-century France. As frustration with positivist, secular rationalism grew, a number of “movements” in elite and popular culture emerged that were critical of the artistic agendas of republicanism. Wagner’s music inspired symbolist poets and composers such as Debussy to focus on the inner experience it stimulated, the transcendence it encouraged. Wagnerians used music as a form of contemplation that stimulated self-growth for its own sake. But for those from the working class involved in amateur choral societies or wind bands, musical performance represented not only the possibility of social solidarity, self-improvement, and escape from the banality of everyday life, but also liberation from the prejudices commonly associated with the masses. When, in an annual competition of hundreds of choruses, a workingclass ensemble from Belleville won over bourgeois choruses from wealthier parts of Paris, Tocqueville’s “equality of conditions,” created through the competitions, 123.  “Rapport de M. Bourgault-Ducoudray,” 26. 124.  See esp. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” in Media, Culture, and Society 4 (1982): 33–50 and 303–22.

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made available to the previously disenfranchised the prestige and social benefits associated with art music.

4. Music encouraged consensus amid uncertainty. In his Les Phénomènes de la musique, ou, L’influence du son sur les êtres animés (1868), echoing Rousseau, L.-P.-A. Le Doulcet de Pontécoulant, an aristocratic music lover, sees music as “analogous to climate, language, customs, the characters and habits of a nation.”125 Music, as part of the country’s heritage and a mode in which to understand French culture, records the country’s collective memory, especially important in a democracy, a form of society that is always changing. As Third Republic music historians put it, the history of the fine arts is “necessarily related to the general history of people” and constitutes “the most attractive and poetic” part of this history. Or, more precisely, “the history of French music in the nineteenth century is, to a much greater extent than political history and at least as much as social history, a moral revelation and an account of our diversity and our evolution.”126 Pointing to the example of Charlemagne, who imposed a common chant tradition throughout France, republicans called on music to help “knit together or knit back together identity and national unity.”127 To help French citizens imagine a common identity, however, they needed to reconceive their history, decontextualize and recontextualize their monarchist and revolutionary pasts, and trace an evolutionary path from the past to the present. This meant writing new music histories. The French also needed to feel renewed pride in their heritage. Musical genres, such as opéracomique, touted as “quintessentially French” in the Assemblée nationale, and musical organizations, such as the Société nationale, founded to promote contemporary French music after 1871, were often praised for their utility in this regard. The public played an important role in articulating consensus. Horace had taught that artists, while rising above all commercialism, should consult the taste and opinion of the public. They should have a relationship with those whom artists sought to “instruct and please” and should listen to them: “public approval should be their goal.”128 Republicans, seeking to build a consensus that would represent the general interest of the people and legitimate the democracy, largely concurred. As Bourgault-Ducoudray put it: “The public is the majority, and the majority 125.  Le Doulcet, Les Phénomènes de la musique, excerpt reprinted on the back cover of Joaquín Nin, Idées et commentaires (Paris: Fischbacher, 1912). 126.  Gustave Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), xv; Eugene Solenière, Cent Années de musique française: Aperçu historique (Paris: Pugno, 1901). 127.  Larroumet, Art et l’Etat, 92. 128.  Lalanne, Art poétique d’Horace, 44, 84.

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makes the law. One can say that public taste is a touchstone that permits evaluation of the value and strength of the production of a period of time. . . . The public makes art and the artists what they are. Nothing is more useful in the interest of art than to see the public’s taste rise and its aspirations grow.”129 In the 1870s, when royalists hoped to restore monarchy and republicans were struggling to win a majority, much was at stake in forging a consensus. Concerts that placed la musique ancienne et moderne in dialogue gave listeners opportunities to come to grips with and see value in conflicting ideals. Music and concerts thus could provide arguments for tolerance and reconciliation over the nature of French identity. In this sense, addressing the public did not mean just pleasing, but also challenging audiences and making them think. Because music was part of national industry and capable of contributing to the nation’s wealth and glory, to the extent that it had broad appeal across national borders, it could also encourage mutual understanding among nations. In what contexts these ideas arose, how they were understood, and how musicians addressed these potential utilities is the subject of this book. In it, I suggest that music can be a critical tool to help us understand cultural, social, political, and historical complexity and change. Musical creativity underlines the dynamic nature of democracies. The flux of taste reflects shifting conditions among heterogeneous constituencies.130 Music articulates the ever-changing intersection of private and public interests and negotiates a delicate balance between them. It could do this because, unlike for the German romantics, the power and meaning many French saw invested in music came not only from music itself but also from how music, whether implicitly or explicitly, voiced and attempted to satisfy people’s needs and desires, which were always changing. The concept of utility thus allows us to get at a “mechanism” that permits music to connote.131 As a property relating music to people’s concerns and interests, it locates the nature of music’s “symbolic, emotive, or corporeal force,” allowing us to articulate when and why music was social. Through its uses, music thus became part of French political consciousness. Like other forms of politics, it contributed to both the expression and the pursuit of republican ideals. This is not to say that everything about music was political, just as not everything about politics concerned culture. Music continued to 129.  Bourgault-Ducoudray, “Cours d’histoire générale de la musique,” 2–3. 130.  Lefort, Essais, 25, 29. 131.  In her Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Tia DeNora notes that scholars have often pointed out what they think the music connotes, but rarely located the “mechanism” that permits them to make these claims (30–31). I agree with the suggestion of Rousseau and Wittgenstein that use often teaches the meaning of something. See Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 24.

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be composed, performed, and listened to apart from the republican project and in resistance to it. Other forces besides the state also exerted power over music and musical practices. Still, if music could affect public mœurs, republican educators and political leaders sought ways to shape the conditions that would make this possible. The ideology of republicanism permeated every aspect of musical life, private as well as public musical practices, and most genres (except perhaps chamber music conceived for aristocratic salons). Focusing on music’s utility sheds light on the conflicting needs and desires of the French—whether to secure the new democracy or return to a constitutional monarchy—that kept politics at the center of life.

e If, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was increasing discomfort with the idea of music satisfying human, social, and national needs, it was not only state control and interference in private domains that were responsible. As art music became accessible and increasingly popular among all classes, some composers objected. Possibly frustrated with the expanded applications of utility to an increasingly banal set of objects and actions and concerned about the demands that music’s popularity might make of composers, Debussy sniped, “art is absolutely useless to the masses.”132 In reacting this way to the emergence of mass culture, he was not alone. After 1900, this resistance took two forms. Some embraced luxuries for their own sake—for the pleasure they gave or the distinction associated with them—even if, as for Ravel, this could mean pursuing a “useless occupation.” Others made “useless” art or art conceived to satisfy the mundane needs of life, like Dada and Satie’s Furniture Music. Comments about anything “useless” in France should, therefore, give us pause. When it comes to understanding what set the stage for modernism, one should not assume that musical change resulted principally from the struggle for freedom of individual expression or the influence of Wagner. Although seemingly insignificant, utility gives us a fresh way to understand the history of France as well as the hermeneutics of French musical life at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1875, in his multivolume study of Paris, Maxime du Camp remarks: “One could say without exaggerating that the more a people has needs, the more it is civilized, because civilization is the culmination of the combined intelligence and demands 132.  Claude Debussy, “A propos of Charles Gounod,” from Musica (1906), in Debussy on Music, ed. Richard Langham Smith (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), 224.

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of everyone. Can you imagine Paris without its theaters, libraries, and newspapers . . . its public administrations, particular institutions, and the individuals that give life to these organisms?”133 Because addressing needs underlies much of French culture, we should remember that, along with rationality, order, and the controversy over luxury, utility represents the continuity of Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals up to presentday France. In the next chapter, I examine the origins of the republican ideology empowered by this concept, the specific national needs revolutionaries expected music to address, and the particular qualities in music and musical practices that helped their ideals take root. That is, beginning with revolutionaries’ debates over music’s value to the state, which set the terms for those of the Third Republic, I explore when, why, and how music came to be part of public policy and people’s public lives in France.

133.  Maxime du Camp, Paris: Ses organes, ses functions et sa vie (Paris: Hachette, 1875), 6: 232. In his Histoire du luxe privé et public depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1878), Henri Baudrillart agrees, seeing “the multiplicity of needs as a sign of the superiority of the species” and the races, because needs give rise to effort and thus to corresponding capacities and, through the work involved, to human sociability and society (1: 48–53).

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2 . Reinscribing the

Revolutionary Legacy Republicans of my generation were raised on the school of the French Revolution, in the religion of its principles, in the cult of its great men. Eugène Spuller, Minister of Public Instruction, Religion, and Fine Arts1

The Third Republic—unnamed, unformed, and precarious during its first five years—was a regime in search of its identity. Like its predecessors, it faced daunting challenges. What constituted legitimate social order in the absence of a monarch and the authority of the Catholic Church? How, with no established rules as a guide, did one form a government based on the abstract principle of equality among citizens united by civic virtue? Throughout the nineteenth century, the idea of a republic frightened many French, who associated it with violence and dictatorship or, at least, uncertainty. The Paris Commune in spring 1871 recalled the Terror of 1794. In 1874, Victor Hugo called for a republic of “minds,” not “swords,”2 yet republicans were divided over which revolutionary principles were fundamental. The Revolution had instituted the first French democracy, turning the people (le peuple) into a political force, but the revolutionary heritage boasted not only the liberation of 1789, with its proclamation of the Rights of Man, but 1.  Eugène Spuller, Hommes et choses de la Révolution (Paris: Alcan, 1896), v. It was not uncommon for Third Republic education ministers to have strong feelings about the Revolution and to publish books on it. Spuller noted that “the spirit of the Revolution” underlay his speeches of the 1880s, published as Education de la démocratie (Paris: Alcan, 1892), xiv. Some of what Spuller promotes in his Au Ministère de l’Instruction publique, 1887: Discours, allocutions, circulaires (Paris: Hachette, 1888), reiterates Rousseau to the effect that “the goal of man is to be man” and the best education is one that forms different and varied beings, those who have the freedom to be original and “not copy their teachers” (xvi). Alfred Rambaud, minister in 1896, similarly published a Histoire de la Révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris: Hachette, 1883). 2.  From Hugo’s novel Quatre-vingt-treize (1874), cited in Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 37.

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also radical Jacobin reforms (the attempted abolition of slavery as well as royalty) that disrupted the social order. Republican values, consequently, were complex and fragile. The Republic needed citizens who, despite their differences, would espouse and help promote its ideals. What would it take for them to identify with this government? To build a republic not only of minds but also of hearts, republicans looked to three models the Revolution offered for pursuing this: instruction that implants common values, experiences that engender fraternity, and various means of producing unity, particularly, emotional unity. A citizen was not only “something one has to make” but also “a being in whom the thought of the common is realized” (fig. 17).3 The “common self,” in this sense, is not some kind of collective mind, but the ability to interact and share something as human beings. To the extent that individuals embrace the same social contract, they sing the same song, so to speak. 4 Of particular interest to republicans was how music could contribute to this project, that is, what its utilité publique might be. Music was more than merely a frivolous activity of aristocrats or an emblem of monarchical power and prestige. Revolutionaries had demonstrated that it could spread ideas; influence mind, heart, and body; infuse energy; and shape character. It also offered ways to explore new kinds of behavior and identity. On the streets during the 1790s, people used a “war of songs” to express their differences.5 As Rousseau put it, music also “brings man closer to man and always gives us some idea about our own kind [nos semblables].”6 3.  Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (1994), 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), calls Rousseau “the first philosopher of what humans have in common,” which is “what they experience when they experience the natural in each other” (34, 76). 4.  Ibid. As Strong points out, “we could not share anything unless we were to acknowledge each other’s separateness.” For this reason, Rousseau’s notion of the common depends on maintaining the differences between human beings. Rousseau was drawn to singing in unison as a model for his concept of commonality, because each singer in a group “performs the whole and hence experiences the other as he or she experiences him- or herself.” This contrasts with the “coordination of Rameauian harmony where each plays a different part and the whole is experienced only in the listener.” Strong explains, “at the moment of the social pact we take into ourself, as our self, a self that is common or general, and that each individual engaged in the pact does exactly the same; each self has, one might say, the same melody” (34, 60–62, 77). 5.  In the 1880s, François-Alphonse Aulard studied what he called the guerre de chansons of the mid 1790s. More recently, Laura Mason has explored this perspective in popular as opposed to patriotic songs. See her Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 6.  Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, quoted in C. N. Dugan and Tracy Strong, “Music, Politics, Theater and Representation in Rousseau,” in the Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 353.

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Fig. 17  Engraving of statue of Rousseau (1889). From J.-J. Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui, ed. John Grand-Carteret (Paris: Perrin, 1890). Republicans credited Rousseau—philosopher and composer—with founding a new world and conceiving a new people, someone who, in face of an all-powerful monarch, proclaimed individual liberty and the people’s sovereignty, argued for their duties along with their rights, and understood the public utility of music. In this statue, erected in 1889, Rousseau, holding a book in one hand, his other extended in a gesture of friendship, suggests a man of reason as well as empathy. In the introduction to J.-J. Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui, a volume of essays about his influence on French politics, education, and music, Grand-Carteret explains, “all our political theories are in the Social Contract; all our aspirations for justice in the Discourse on Inequality, all our educational programs spelled out in Emile” (vii).

In large public festivals, communal singing helped people transcend those differences and physically experience what they shared as human beings. This brought a reality, presence, and coherence to abstract notions of equality, fraternity, and the common will, making ideology palpable as experience. Revolutionary music showed republicans how music could confront the fundamental challenges of a democracy: how to change habits of mind and body, forming individuals as well as citizens of the nation; how to understand the needs of those otherwise divided by politics, class, region, and temperament; and how to shape their desires so that they agreed on their needs. With its rituals of emotional and symbolic significance, music could encourage a sense of belonging—social solidarity and shared tastes. As such, it could both produce and enact a collective way of being. Of course, during the Revolution and thereafter, problems accompanied the use of music to inculcate political values. The French did not need Adorno to warn them about the potential abuses of trying to control or manipulate a population with music. Moreover, little was permanent during the Revolution. Decisions made during one regime were often questioned in the next. Music and performances could be used for propaganda—tactics borrowed from the kings—or 96 . F o r m i n g P u b l i c S p i r i t a n d U s e f u l C i t i z e n s

express political resistance. Republicans were impressed with the revolutionaries’ mechanisms for shaping music as a political activity, an instrument of political identity and social change. These showed how music could function within the state and merit long-term encouragement and support. With utilité publique as a guiding principle, the Revolution, despite its complexities and contradictions, thus offered paradigms for concepts, institutions, and musical practices that would ensure the growth and survival of republican values. Beliefs about which republicans could agree—the need for l’esprit public (public spirit) and public instruction—took shape in the 1790s, including the idea that through “virile,” “healthy” music a democracy could combat the decadence and lethargy of salon culture. Most revolutionary documents we study today were chosen, pieced together, and published in the late nineteenth century by historians such as François-Alphonse Aulard and music scholars such as Arthur Pougin, Julien Tiersot, and Constant Pierre. This chapter is informed by the perspectives of Third Republic scholars as well as revolutionaries and contemporary historians. Under the Empire, the republican Jules Michelet had resurrected the revolutionary past, trying to rid it of associations with anarchical violence.7 Third Republic scholars sought to unveil a past less mediated by interpretation, so that their contemporaries could reimagine and reenact revolutionary practices. They wanted to understand why music moved people so powerfully during the Revolution, how it helped form the public spirit, and how they might appropriate this music’s power and meaning as the foundation for a new national French music, reflective of republican values. Understanding these is crucial to grasping why and how the heritage of the Revolution permeated republican rhetoric and shaped republican identity. 8

Public Instruction of Mind and Heart As Jules Michelet pointed out in Nos fils (1869), if the question is how to make and remake a human being, someone who understands what it means to live in public, 7.  In his Histoire de la Révolution, 7 vols. (Paris: Chamerot, 1847–53), Jules Michelet shifted public discourse from glorifying the Revolution’s leaders to exploring the human complexities of its major players and the patriotism of the people. While working at the National Archives (1831–52), he also wrote a History of France (1833–67) in 17 volumes. 8.  As Gildea writes in The Past in French History, “The tension between the need to present an acceptable image of the Republic, and the need to constitute it on revolutionary principles, goes a long way to explaining the nature of political argument between 1848 and 1914” (34). For an indepth study of various philosophical and intellectual influences on the Third Republic, including those from the Revolution, see Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). For their ongoing relevance today, see his La République en France (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

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in the presence of others (and not just one’s peers), there is no better way than through education. Rousseau’s Emile had shown how education helps individuals experience the common in themselves and thus become capable of living in political society.9 But during the Second Empire, as in the Ancien Régime, the Catholic Church dominated education, preaching the principles of authority and respect and seeking to produce obedience and belief. With the end of the empire and defeat by the Prussians came a new regime, but not yet a new educational system. If, as Michelet pointed out, the Revolution was the moment when France became conscious of herself as a nation, then to help French citizens know themselves, love la patrie libre, and be prepared for action on its behalf meant revisiting the secular public instruction advocated by the revolutionaries. The challenge of public instruction, a central project of the Revolution, was how to teach people to think of themselves as members of a collective body and thus come to some agreement concerning the country’s general interest, the basis of anything with utilité publique. Under the Ancien Régime, little linked Frenchmen other than their allegiance to the king. Civil rights belonged to those with privileges. Revolutionaries, in contrast, conceived of the nation as consisting of citizens who shared membership through equal rights, freedoms, and their embrace of selfless civic virtues.10 Good citizens should desire “only the general well-being of the nation.” The utopia of civic pleasure, morality, and virtues derived from classical antiquity should take precedence over “private pleasures.”11 Revolutionaries’ arguments for universal, secular, and free public instruction, and the importance they ascribed to elementary instruction (largely ignored under the Ancien Régime), were based on the belief that human beings are perfectible. In 1791, when the Constitution guaranteed the French “public instruction” (instruction publique) and set up a committee to supervise it, Talleyrand pointed out 9.  Jules Michelet, Nos fils (1870; rpt., Geneva: Slatkine, 1980), iv, and Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 105–6. 10.  For a study of virtue as conceived by kings, nobles, and republicans, see Marisa Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (New York: Palgrave, 2001). She sees virtue as a source of moral authority. The Convention criticized Condorcet’s plan for public instruction, saying citizens needed virtue more than enlightenment. See James Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 76–77. 11.  Révolutions de Paris 9, cited in Pierre Rétat, “The Evolution of the Citizen from the Ancien Régime to the Révolution,” in The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship, ed. Renée Waldinger, Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 12, and Guillaume-Joseph Saige, Catéchisme du citoyen (1775) cited in Michael Fitzsimmons, “The National Assembly and the Invention of Citizenship,” ibid., 29–30, 37. For more on the invention of citizenship by French revolutionaries, see also Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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that ignorant men were at the mercy of charlatans and overly dependent on their environment, whereas instruction helped protect one’s civic liberties and promoted equality. For this reason, it should be available to all ages and both sexes and cover all human faculties, physical, moral, and intellectual (those addressing the imagination, memory, and reason).12 In his 1792 report to the Assemblée, Condorcet agreed with Talleyrand on the nature of instruction and called on the Assemblée to “offer individuals [education as] the means to address their needs, assure their happiness, know and exercise their rights, understand and fulfill their duties . . . and by this to establish their political equality.”13 In the late nineteenth century, these ideas were again vigorously debated.14 The distinction in terminology is significant. Whereas education connoted the culture, the ideals, and the customs that each generation transmitted to its successors—which can be religious or secular—instruction addressed what everyone needed to know, “from the simplest elements of the arts to the most elevated principles of public law and morality.”15 Utility was integral to the concept of instruction—“the act of teaching what is useful or indispensable to know” (action d’apprendre ce qu’il est utile ou indispensable de savoir)—and social usefulness the criterion for its existence.16 Attending to people’s needs enabled them to acquire human 12.  Talleyrand, “Rapport sur l’instruction publique,” in Orateurs de la Révolution française, ed. François Furet et Ran Halévi, vol. 1: Les Constituants (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 1067–85. 13.  Cited in Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel (Paris, ca. 1871), 208, and Albert Soboul, Précis d’histoire de la Révolution française (Paris: Editions sociales, 1962), 513–14. 14.  Jules Ferry, responsible for instituting practices that revolutionaries only conceptualized, was particularly influenced by Condorcet’s Projet sur l’instruction publique. Meanwhile, in his L’Instruc­tion publique et la Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 79–85, Albert Duruy criticizes Talleyrand’s and Condorcet’s ideas (“emancipating” children and risking a lack of discipline, leaving out religion, putting the two sexes in the same classes). From the perspective of a royalist intellectual, Ernest Renan defined instruction as “the acquisition of a certain amount of knowledge, diverse depending on vocations and aptitudes,” and education as “what makes the gallant man, the honest man, the well-raised man.” “Education is the respect for what is really good, great, and beautiful.” La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), ed. P. E. Charvet (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 197–99. 15.  Talleyrand, “Rapport,” 1070. In his Grand Dictionnaire, Larousse defines instruction as addressed to one’s intelligence and education to the will (volonté). In addition, “One of the aims of education is to induce habits that will make man happier and will gain him the esteem of others” (se propose de faire contracter à l’homme des habitudes qui le rendront heureux par lui-même et lui feront mériter l’estime d’autrui) (210). In the Le Petit Robert (Paris, 1972), Paul Robert defines education likewise first as “the putting into place of the proper means to assure the formation and development of a human being” (mise en œuvre des moyens propres à assurer la formation et le développement d’un être humain) and second as “the knowledge or understanding of social customs” (connaissance et pratique des usages de la société) (541). 16.  Robert, Le Petit Robert, 918. H. Marion, writing in La Grande Encyclopédie vol. 15 (Paris: Lamirault, n.d.), stresses the importance of raising children for what they can contribute to the future (581–83).

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qualities and develop.17 Late nineteenth-century republicans agreed with the revolutionaries that public instruction was a function of the state and should provide the “foundation of human knowledge.” Its purpose was not to “fill the mind with information, but to prepare it to acquire knowledge and exercise judgment.”18 Such a notion of instruction implies an important role for whoever determines what is “useful or indispensable” and is thus taught. It suggests the injection of something by an external force, rather than the result of this process. Someone needs to establish priorities and put them into action. Through the Committee of Public Instruction (and later the Ministry of Public Instruction), instruction was a telling as well as accurate way to name the state office that directed this activity. During the Revolution, this committee focused principally on primary and secondary instruction, while the National Institute of the Sciences and the Arts, also created during the Revolution, encouraged research and oversaw scientific and literary works “having as their object general utility and the glory of France.”19 If we consider that liberty, equality, and fraternity—the three principal republican values—implied a reconsideration of the nature of human needs and certainly a new way of being in the world, we must remember that they were also rights governments wished to impose (or restrict, depending on their ideologies), rights they hoped everyone would desire (or reject) if they understood their consequences. A second French definition of instruction—“the act of enriching or forming the mind,” or, as Littré put it, the “directions morales que l’on donne aux sentiments”20—is also illuminating. Revolutionary leaders envisaged a nation whose body was not only self-consciously collective but also deeply moral, infused with principles capable of providing an alternative to those of the Catholic Church. Like Helvétius, they believed that humans were a product of their education, and that civic virtues could be made instinctive if children were taught them starting at an early age. During the Revolution, children were considered apprentice citizens, the “future sovereign.”21 Instruction in the moral and political sciences was intended to lead them to the search for truth, love of country, and a willingness to defend their 17.  See Strong’s discussion of Rousseau’s Emile in his Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 24, 112. 18.  Félix Pécaut, Le Temps, 20 November 1871, in Etudes au jour le jour sur l’éducation nationale, 1871–1879 (1879), 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1881), 43–45, and Léon Bourgeois, L’Education de la démocratie française (Paris: Cornély, 1897), 163. By focusing on instruction and leaving philosophical or religious education to the Church and families, republicans followed the example of Switzerland, the United States, Holland, and other countries. As Pécaut puts it, “l’école enseigne la lettre, le prêtre l’esprit” (45). 19.  Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 378. 20.  Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris: Hachette, 1881). 21.  Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 79.

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newfound freedoms, thereby assuring the country’s regeneration. In the revolutionaries’ texts, as in Rousseau’s, utility, especially the utility of education, often appears as synonymous with country (patrie), as if responsible for the country’s well-being (bien général) and happiness (bonheur). 22 The children’s textbook Pensées républicaines (1793) preaches that after harming no one, the next most significant law of society is to “be useful,” and that “a good citizen cannot be useful to anyone who is not useful to the Republic.”23 As the deputy Pierre-François Gossin put it, being “useful to the nation” meant upholding and defending its new laws. 24 Public instruction then, by analogy, refers to not only state-sponsored teaching, as opposed to that of church or private schools, but also a way to form l’esprit publique (public spirit)—that which anything of public utility was meant to serve. 25 Good method books could form good minds, and good principles could form good citizens, but it was only their combination that gave rise to the real esprit publique.26 Public instruction’s goal was to create a common idea of what constitutes utilité publique, utilité sociale, and intérêt général. This would create a bond of understanding or trust between the people and their government that would allow it to act. Late nineteenth-century republicans agreed with the revolutionaries that public instruction should address, not only children in schools, but also adults wherever they gathered—in popular societies, theaters, civic or military events, and especially national festivals. 27 Through these, public instruction could produce the kind of knowledge necessary to assure the growth and success of democracy. One of the great novelties in the revolutionaries’ concept of instruction was the role envisaged for the emotions. Rousseau believed that before we think, we feel. Therefore, as he put it, “unless the idea that strikes the brain . . . penetrates to the heart, it is nothing.”28 In other words, influenced by Locke’s idea that ideas come from sense perceptions, the revolutionaries believed that to reach people they had 22.  Belin, Logique d’une idée-force, 276, 293. 23.  Cited in James A. Leith, “French Republican Pedagogy in the Year II,” Canadian Journal of History 3, 1 (March 1968): 60. 24.  In 1792, the revolutionaries even set up a Bureau of Public Spirit and charged it with distributing revolutionary pamphlets to the départements and the army. See Mona Ozouf, “Public Spirit,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. id. and François Furet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1989). 25.  Under Robespierre, public spirit “conveyed the idea of unity and held out the promise of full integration in the collectivity” (ibid., 773–74). 26.  “Rapport présenté au Directoire exécutif par le Ministre de l’Intérieur le 26 pluviôse an VI,” in Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution,381. 27.  See Gabriel Houquier, Rapport et projet de décret formant un plan général d’instruction publique (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1793), 9–10. 28.  From the Dialogues, cited in Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, xxii.

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to start with the senses. Thinking that they become attached to something through their emotions, reformers wanted instruction to speak to both the imagination and the heart. Mirabeau explained, “It is not enough to demonstrate the truth, what is important is to make one passionate about it.” He and his colleagues hoped that by appealing through sensations and feelings, they would make people love the laws. The country would found its political ideals on the hearts of its citizens, aided by their reason. 29 At the end of the nineteenth century, republican educators concurred, noting that intelligence needed the intermediary of feeling. Ideas only act on us after being transformed into feeling. Passion is what makes action. Education should develop and “exercise” feelings and emotions, particularly the feeling, not just the idea, of the good. 30 Revolutionaries’ and republicans’ desire to penetrate and control more than the Cartesian rationality of the mind set the context for a new kind of social control, one that invaded and filled private space in a way perhaps never before attempted except by the Catholic Church. 31 Besides instilling new values in the people, revolutionary leaders also had another reason to focus on feelings and sensations: their need to replace the charisma of the king with something equally powerful and unifying. This they did by shifting the power of presence from the king to the masses and by making the people performers of their own new identity. To accomplish this, they encouraged people not only to think and feel as a collective body, but also to act as one. This entailed a redefinition of the crowd as representative of the people, a magnification of the sense of purpose characteristic of local and neighborhood crowds focusing on what could be shared nationally rather than what constituted regional differences. 32 It also meant encouraging behavior that would help people fuse their interests with those of the new government. 29.  Belin, Logique d’une idée-force, 292. The role of sentiment in forming the nation and in the movement called nationalism was later echoed by Max Weber in his Verhandlungen des zweiten deutschen Soziologentages vom 20–22 Oktober 1912 in Berlin (Tübingen, 1913), 50, and Ernest Gellner in his Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 1. 30.  Félix Pécaut, L’Education publique et vie nationale (Paris: Hachette, 1897), xx–xxi, and Bourgeois, Education de la démocratie française, 129, 164–65, 168. This idea also comes from Pascal. 31.  This control was thought possible because, as Leith explains in his “French Republican Pedagogy in the Year II,” obedience for the laws would be the natural result of people’s inner sense of right and a natural sympathy for their fellow men, in which the revolutionaries had confidence (54). 32.  Colin Lucas contrasts how the crowd represented the community in the Ancien Régime as opposed to the Revolution. In the former, he argues that the representation was more “emblematic or virtual,” given that “not all community members entered any particular crowd and [with a few exceptions] it did not implement a policy debated and determined by the community.” In the latter, the crowd was “harnessed,” given a function, instructed in certain

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One unusual new behavior enacted during the Revolution entailed the ritual use of words. It was not unusual for hundreds or thousands to speak the same words at once, symbolizing the union of private and public voice, individual and common will. Communally articulated words, such as the oath of loyalty to the nation or the Constitution (eventually almost obligatory at all public ceremonies), served as a way to imply sovereignty (or common will) from within the community instead of through the person of the king. Such gestures went beyond what Rousseau had imagined, for the common will they expressed was not just an abstract idea, but also something given the physical embodiment of sound. To explain the effectiveness of such a practice, historians point to the tremendous faith in the power of rhetoric during this period. Whatever could persuade, that is, speak to the heart as well as the mind, could bring people together in the same feeling. Through shared sentiment, citizens would become “transparent” to one another, that is, coexist without any artificial manners, conventions, or institutions separating them. This form of transparency was supposed to serve as a model for that which was to exist between citizens and their government as well as between individuals and the common will. It translated Rousseau’s notion of authenticity into political practice. 33

Music’s Political Utility The challenge to find venues that accessed feelings and modes that shaped them for “useful” purposes led straight to the arts. To the extent that the arts could be harnessed to communicate ideas and elicit emotions, they could contribute to public instruction.34 Whereas earlier in France, the use of music as political promeanings, and “taught good revolutionary behavior.” In both contexts, however, the crowd had a “passion for open spaces” and could be called upon to “endorse the power of the state.” See his “The Crowd and Politics,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2: The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. id. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 262, 281. For more on the “dream of unity and national homogeneity,” see Mona Ozouf, L’Ecole de la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), chap. 1 on the “perception of a national space.” 33.  See Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 1; François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); and Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Plon, 1957) and 1789: Les Emblèmes de la raison (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). For the use of oaths in music, see M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “The New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Operatic Consequences,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107–56. 34.  In an appendix to volume 1 of their minutes (1792–93), the Committee of Public Instruction noted, “We will honor the arts in proportion to their utility.” See Procès-verbaux du Comité d’instruction publique de la Convention nationale, ed. J. Guillaume (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891–1907), 1: 675.

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paganda had largely been directed at the aristocracy, especially under Louis XIV, in the new democracy, revolutionary leaders wished to reach the people.35 Music had a special role to play, because, like language, it was something humans had in common. It could potentially touch everyone, whether they understood it or not. When arguing about whether to make music instruction mandatory in French schools, republicans pointed to how important this simple idea had been to the revolutionaries. Like the inspector of primary education who in 1878 observed that everyone loved music, from “the young to the old, the ignorant to the knowledgeable,”36 the distinguished poet Marie-Joseph Chénier, when he mounted the tribune of the Convention in 1795 to advocate the founding of a national music school, began by evoking the “empire of this art, of all arts the most universally felt”: “The child sings at the breast of his mother, whom he can hardly name; the impetuous young man sings in the midst of battles; the old man, weeping, repeats the song that was the delight of his youth; and especially women, gifted with an exquisite sensitivity superior to ours, passionately love music, which, like them, softens manners, tempers force with grace, brings the diverse parts of society closer, binding them together.”37 Couched in the story of Orpheus’s lyre and a reminder of Plato’s inclusion of music in his Republic, Chénier’s message was clear. What would motivate legislators to set aside 260,000 francs per year during a time of war and great instability did not need a more explicit argument. Revolutionaries explained that people liked to sing, and that many French could sing more than they could read. But more important, music could “electrify souls,” especially when singing patriotic hymns.38 Because it had a physical impact, they believed, music could influence morals.39 Republicans concurred with this notion of how music moves people 35.  J.-L. Jam, “Fonction des hymnes révolutionnaires,” in Les Fêtes de la Révolution, ed. Jean Ehrard and Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1977), 433–34. 36.  Albert Dupaigne, “Mémoire (Novembre 1878),” in Rapports sur l’enseignement du chant dans les écoles primaires (Paris: Ministre de l’instruction publique, 1881), 68. 37.  Chénier, who wrote the words to Méhul’s “Chant du départ,” was speaking for the Committees of Public Instruction and Finance. Cited in Julien Tiersot, “Les Origines du Conservatoire à l’occasion de son centenaire, VII,” Ménestrel, 8 September 1895, 281. 38.  Telling the Convention on 15 January 1794 of the enthusiasm he found in people throughout the country after the singing of such hymns, Dubouchet concluded, “Rien n’est plus propre que des hymnes et des chansons patriotiques à électriser les âmes républicaines.” Cited in Constant Pierre, Les Hymnes et les chansons de la Révolution (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904), 32. 39.  In his Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique, vol. 3 (an V [1796–97]; rpt., New York: Da Capo, 1971), A.-E.-M. Grétry dedicates a long chapter, “De l’influence du physique sur le moral par rapport à l’homme,” to this idea (61–88).

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and, building on it, pointed to how “its electrical impulse encircles, penetrates, subjugates man, his thought, feelings, and sensitivity, producing the perfect union of thought and form.”40 For such reasons, the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety budgeted a large sum to underwrite the monthly publication of music (in parts, so that they could be performed). Considering this as an “aspect of public instruction,” independent of “its utility in terms of music,” they stipulated that the music be distributed throughout the Republic. It was given free to municipalities and the army, as well as sold to the public. Music could disseminate republican values in the provinces, where the clergy and conservatives were so influential. Revolutionary leaders hoped it would “improve the public spirit,” “stimulate the courage of the country’s defenders,” and provide civic festivals with a “very efficient” way of reinforcing their “moral effect.”41 Some of the most popular music associated with the Revolution appeared in these volumes—François-Joseph Gossec’s “Marche lugubre,” Etienne-Nicolas Méhul’s “Chant du départ,” and Charles-Simon Catel’s “La Bataille de Fleurus.” With their popularity soaring and some of the volumes selling 20,000 copies, music became recognized as a potentially useful political force. Music could be politically instructive for a number of reasons. Besides its capacity to influence morals and sway the heart, it constitutes a being and a form of behavior separate from knowing, an order distinct from that of reason. This kind of being infuses an understanding of the political that in some ways resembles Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty. Just as music creates a palpable sense of the present, Rousseau’s sovereignty has the quality of existing in the present and as the present. 42 Like music, sovereignty is not constrained by the need to represent. And just as choral singing constitutes a group involving contingent and nonobligatory participation, sovereignty assumes people’s contingent relation to the 40.  P. Charreire, Du rôle de la musique dans la civilisation moderne et du rôle de la France dans le développement de l’art musical (1886), cited in Olivier Ihl, La Fête républicaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 324. 41.  Guillaume, “Arrêt du 27 pluviôse, an II,” in Procès-verbaux, 303, and Pierre, Hymnes, 32–33. The publication house was called “Le Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales.” Each volume of fifty to sixty pages contains an overture, patriotic chorus, march, and patriotic song. Pierre notes that he found 105 composers of hymns for large chorus in the collections he examined (100). In addition to sponsoring these volumes, “to celebrate the principal events of the Revolution,” the government opened a national hymn and civic song competition. Pierre wrote a book on Le Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales et du Conservatoire (Paris: Fischbacher, 1895). 42.  Dugan and Strong explain in “Music, Politics, Theater” that this means “we have no way of encountering it [sovereignty] except as what it is” (331).

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political body. C. N. Dugan and Tracy Strong compare Rousseau’s sovereignty to an aesthetic object in that, as we respond to it, we find ourselves in it. Since music “does not by its nature require that we give ourselves over to that which is not ourselves,”43 it offers an experience of authority coming from within the self or the self as part of a group (the common will), a crucial distinction between the sovereignty of the nation and the sovereignty of the king. To the extent that much revolutionary music called for singing in unison, it thus served a function similar to ritual oaths. In managing humans’ differences (particularly useful with so many revolutionary clubs and coteries) and fusing people’s sense of self, music could form and embody the public spirit. This attracted nineteenth-century republicans most to revolutionary music. In an era in which those espousing art for art’s sake thought music should break its ties with its social context and cling to its association with elites, republicans like Julien Tiersot looked back to the Revolution for a more populist ideal of music, a music for all the people without class distinctions, a national music. 44 Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, republican, composer, historian, and choral conductor, also considered revolutionary music as something antithetical to “art for art’s sake,” especially its choral music, which expressed “real, lively, and exciting” collective feelings about real situations, not the “sterile joys of dilettantes or the hollow joys of virtuosity.” For him, “the most formidable pedagogical engine will lead to only a superficial result . . . without the coexistence of a moral need: to express collective feelings. If there are feelings common to all classes,” he notes, then the country needs an art “practiced by all classes. 45 While individual songs such as “Ça ira” and the “Marseillaise” could rouse the public, choral singing in unison during public festivals ( fêtes publiques or fêtes nationales) and, to a lesser extent, opera offered significant models of commonality and fraternity that republicans wished to revive. Largely controlled by the state, huge outdoor festivals were symbols of the new nation. Quatremère, who considered festivals the “liveliest art of the Revolution,” called them a kind of pedagogy in action (mouvement). 46 They reconfigured people’s experience of cities, taking them out of narrow, overcrowded streets and leading them in processions 43.  Ibid., 332, 346. 44.  Julien Tiersot, Les Fêtes et les chants de la Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1908), xviii–xxi. 45.  “Rapport de M. Bourgault-Ducoudray (6 November 1880),” in Rapports sur l’enseigne­ ment du chant (cited n. 36 above), 23, 26. 46.  René Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (1788–1850) (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 49–62.

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down tree-lined boulevards to large open spaces, where fêtes encouraged citizens to reimagine the public sphere with themselves as the principal actors. 47 As such, fêtes called for a new “civic” music distinct from that of the Church and the court, music at once secular, accessible, and conceived for plein air. Revolutionary opera, sometimes suppressed, sometimes encouraged by the state, likewise staged models of conduct and celebrated national ideals, albeit for a much smaller audience of listeners. It too featured music for large choruses with which listeners could identify. Both public festivals and opera attempted, not only to teach revolutionary virtues and values, but also to unite through mutual sentiment. Both used performance to help people conceptualize, mobilize, and internalize a new identity for themselves and their country, a new “national character.” Even the idea that these could be true was enough to motivate a generation of republicans to pour over old newspapers and dusty manuscripts, seeking the truth from the lore to envisage what might be possible again.

Music in Public Festivals As the country prepared for 14 July 1880, the Third Republic’s first national holiday, republicans became fascinated with their ancestors’ festivals, how they empowered the masses, and music’s contribution to this. As Tiersot pointed out, “the first day of the Revolution was a festival day.”48 Although he was here referring to 5 May 1789, the first gathering of national representatives before the king in Versailles, 14 July 1789 was “the day of the whole people.” As Michelet tells it, “With daylight, one idea dawned upon Paris, and all were illumined with the same ray of hope. A light broke upon every mind, and the same voice through every heart: ‘Go! And thou shalt take the Bastille!’ . . . And the thing was done. . . . Nobody proposed; but all believed, and all acted.”49 The Bastille prison represented the tyranny of the Ancien Régime; its destruction promised their salvation. Michelet calls this “one of the eternal fêtes of the human race,” not only as “the first of deliverance,” but also “the day of concord!”50 47.  In his preface to Fêtes, xxvi, Tiersot refers to Rousseau here. See also David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 317. 48.  Julien Tiersot, “Les Fêtes de la Révolution française, I,” Ménestrel, 3 December 1893, 385; also in his Fêtes, 1. For his publications on this subject beginning in 1880, see Appendix C. 49.  Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1967), 161. For another version of the story, see http://home.nordnet .fr/~blatouche/pa4.html (accessed 24 August 2008). 50.  Ibid., 163–64.

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The inspiration for 14 July 1880, however, was not the taking of the Bastille, which some associated with mob violence, but 14 July 1790, the “Festival of the Federation” (fig. 18). For this, the first national celebration, the vast Champ de Mars in front of the Ecole militaire, also called the Champ de la Réunion, was transformed into an enormous arena with an “altar of the fatherland.” After a fourhour parade through Paris accompanied by music, then songs and regional dances, the festival resembled a huge secular Mass. A series of rituals—processions, hymns, allegorical representations, and speeches—replaced Catholic worship and the monarchy with a new liturgy and music glorifying the nation.51 “Majestic music commanded the souls to lift their spirits to the Eternal” and La Fayette pronounced the oath of the Federation, reiterated by all. Afterwards, a thousand singers, large orchestra, organ, and cannon performed a new Te Deum by Gossec (1734–1829).52 Three hundred thousand representatives of the eighty-three départements came from all over France to participate. Whereas five months earlier, on 14 February, a similar ceremony had taken place within Notre Dame cathedral for members of the Assemblée nationale to swear their fidelity to the nation, the July celebration was for everyone. Travelers implicitly recognized the need to leave behind social and geographical differences and to be united in support of what they shared. Newspaper accounts commented on how they worked together, animated as if having the same soul and without quarrels or need for police, many singing: “This will work! This will work! Whoever raises himself up will be brought down.”53 Many stayed for a week of celebrations. Republicans saw this as the greatest “surge of brotherly feeling” ever seen. “For the first time,” writes Tiersot, “men from the same country, earlier separated by arbitrary divisions, understood that they were no longer strangers. They felt united as friends, brothers, and their hearts felt an immense enthusiasm.”54 Michelet considered this the zenith of French history, the apotheosis of brotherhood and unity toward which the nation had been aspiring for centuries. While spontaneity characterized this festival, later ones were more rigorously 51.  For a comparison of Christian and revolutionary festivals, see Bernard Plongeron, “La Fête Révolutionnaire devant la critique chrétienne (1793–1802), in Fêtes de la Révolution, ed. Ehrard and Viallaneix, 537–51. 52.  Tiersot’s installments on this festival in Ménestrel are republished in his Fêtes, 31–46. 53.  “Ça ira! ça ira! Celui qui s’élève on l’abaissera” is a line from the famous revolutionary song, “Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, les aristocrates on les pendra!” Tiersot analyzes the history of this song and its use here in Fêtes, 19–26. Also in Révolutions de Paris, no. 52, cited in Henri Radiguer, “Les Jours d’enthousiasme de Paris, III,” Petit Poucet 5 (1903): 3, and 6 (1903), 2–6. 54.  Ibid., 17, and “Les Fêtes de la Révolution française, III,” Ménestrel, 17 December 1893, 401.

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Fig. 18  Jacques-François Swebach-Desfontaines, watercolor of the 1790 Fête de la Fédération. The enormous arena for the Fête de la Federation was constructed on the Champ de Mars, at the time outside the city of Paris. The enclosure brought people face to face before the altar of the patrie to swear their allegiance to the new constitution. “For the first time, men of the same homeland, separated in the past by arbitrary divisions, agreed that they were no longer strangers; they felt themselves united, friends, brothers; and their hearts were lifted up with a great enthusiasm,” Julien Tiersot writes of it (Les Fêtes et les chants de la Révolution française [Paris, 1908], 17).

scripted, especially when revolutionary leaders wished to engage the masses in their armies’ triumphs. A festival ordered by the Convention to celebrate the military victory at Toulon in 1793 was typical. Numerous versions were to take place throughout the country, but in Paris the painter Jacques-Louis David was put in charge. He imagined a Greek-like spectacle. Working from newspapers of the period, Constant Pierre describes it on its hundredth anniversary: On the appointed day (10 Nivôse [31 December]), a large procession gathered at the national garden (the Tuileries). It was composed of significant groups from the army, representatives of popular societies, committees and tribunals of the provisionary executive Council, conquerors of the Bastille, etc., separated by groups of trumpets, sappers, and fifty drums. Then came the various chariots: that of the revolutionary army carrying the defenders of Liberty surrounded by forty girls dressed in white with three-colored bands around their waists and holding laurel branches in their hands; then those of the armies [of the various provinces of France]. The entire Convention followed, surrounded by a three-colored ribbon held by veterans and the country’s children. A mass of fifty drums, the Parisian National Guard wind ensemble, and the singers in charge of performing the hymns preceded the principal chariot carrying the national symbols [ faisceau]. This was topped by the allegorical statue of Victory, around which would come fifty invalids and brave sans-culottes in red caps. A cavalry platoon ended the march. After the performance of warrior airs, everyone proceeded to the Temple of Humanity and the Invalides. They then sang a hymn before leaving for the Champ de Mars, designated as the central focus of the festival. There one could hear military symphonies, the chorus “Chant à la liberté,” the air of Chateauvieux [“Ronde nationale”], and a hymn written specially for the event by M.-J. Chénier, put to music by Catel . . . one of the rare pieces written for three solo voices.55

If this list of participants avoids mentioning the public, it does point out that the government and the people, young and old, marched to the same tune, traversing the same path through the city. Music structured the procession, clarifying divisions among the groups and animating the movement from one place to another. After everyone arrived at the Champ de Mars, music became the focal point. When 55.  Although the government budgeted 15,000 pounds for such an event, the final cost approved by the Committee of Public Instruction came to almost double that. Constant Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales de la Révolution française (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1893), 62–63.

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the public joined in the singing, they appeared to ratify the ideal of the common will in harmony with the will of the organizers. For nineteenth-century republicans and revolutionaries alike, festivals resulted from the need for a fiction, however utopian, of a “unanimous people.”56 Inspired by ancient Greek and Roman models of “communal togetherness, simplicity, and joy,” the first revolutionary festivals took place in villages, on the roads between them, or on large fields in the open air where their organizers could erect large bleachers so that everyone could see and take part.57 Unlike the sites of most official celebrations—churches and the court—these spaces were free of memory. Not closed and vertically organized, they were open to everyone, and their horizontal nature implied no visual hierarchy. Whereas traditional festivals in France had been either private or what economists today would call “club goods,” in which attendance was restricted—that is to say, “impure” public goods more exclusive than inclusive, revolutionary festivals, with their lack of exclusiveness and rivalry, were, in today’s terms, a public good. The earliest festivals in the provinces arose spontaneously. Some reflected a desire for “liberty,” others, for union, symbolized by the merging of military bands from adjoining villages. 58 In Paris, where the government eventually took charge, leaders like Mirabeau saw festivals as “the most powerful means of attaching citizens to the country [ patrie], uniting them by ties of a happy fraternity.”59 They hoped that the “equality” and “fraternity” citizens might experience in festivals would abolish any distance they felt from one another and instill a sense of community. One hundred years later, republicans marveled at how festivals arose from the popular instinct to express the general will and embody the nation. Fraternity may have been the most nebulous of revolutionary values, but for 56.  Colin Lucas uses this expression to describe how the Jacobins needed to think of themselves as “the people,” but the idea applies as well to revolutionaries’ concept of the crowd in revolutionary festivals. See Lucas, “Introduction,” Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. id., xiii. 57.  See Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1976), trans. Alan Sheridan as Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), chap. 6. Ozouf cites a report about one festival in which “four hundred thousand citizens were out in the streets for a half day and all went to the same spot, without the slightest mishap” (69). For the roots of this preoccupation with utopia and French desire for regeneration, see Ozouf, “La Révolution française et l’idée de l’homme nouveau,” in Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Lucas, 213–32. 58.  Ozouf, Festivals, 27, 33–34. 59.  Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 312–13. Robespierre believed that “a system of festivals would be both the sweetest bond of fraternity and the most powerful means of regeneration” (Julien Tiersot, “Les Fêtes de la Révolution française, XVIII,” Ménestrel, 22 April 1894, 122).

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many, including Michelet, it was the central principle of the Revolution and “the beauty and the strength of the society to come.”60 Republicans hoped that recalling memory of these festivals would revive a shared sense of community in the country, still divided by class, politics, and regional distinctions. Equality was a more elusive problem. In the early federative festivals, citizens of all trades, villagers, mothers, and children took part. Yet this did not mean an absence of social divisions. The 1791 Constitution instituted a controversial way of distinguishing citizens, depending on the taxes paid. Those with sizeable property were eligible to serve as elected representatives. Other male, adult, French tax-paying nationals were considered active citizens. Women, children, foreigners, servants, prisoners, beggars, vagabonds, the sick, and other social dependents—called passive citizens—were protected by the law but had no political rights. Robespierre, a disciple of Rousseau, led a rebellion against this idea and the insurrection of August 10 overturned the division into active and passive citizens. However, for Robespierre, the only good crowd was an organized one. For his Festival of the Supreme Being on 8 June 1794, “the people” consisted of 2,500 chosen in equal numbers from all the neighborhoods of Paris to sing national songs, of whom ten old men, ten mothers, ten girls, ten adolescent boys, and ten male children served as representatives. In this highly organized event, however, only women and children could march “indiscriminately”; men were “always carefully categorized.” Festivals thus seemed to be about equality, but were a world of coexistence in which everyone had a role. 61 Republicans also looked on revolutionary festivals as “the vastest means of public instruction” and “the most powerful means of regeneration.”62 They made it possible “to conceive of a society in which propaganda and social manipulation could be explicit. 63 As the state’s coordination of festival activity grew, legislator-pedagogues made them subject to approval by the Committees of Public Instruction or Public Safety. Since each was “a lesson in everyday morals, the 60.  Michelet, Nos fils, 411. 61.  Tiersot, “Fêtes de la Révolution française, XVIII,” 122; Ozouf, Festivals, 41, 115; William H. Sewell Jr., “Le Citoyen / la citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” in Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Lucas, 105–13. As Sewell writes, in such a system “passive citizens would not be citizens at all, but subjects of an aristocracy of wealth.” For this reason, the 1791 Constitution was soon overturned. 62.  Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 314–16. 63.  Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 2; Ozouf, Festivals, 275–76. Cynthia Gessele points out in “The Conservatoire de Musique and National Music Education in France, 1795–1801,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), that in the 1791 Constitution, the guarantee of public instruction and the institutionalization of national festivals were in adjacent articles (205n45).

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impregnation of every citizen by the spirit of the Republic,” and because “the movement of eyes, the exchange of feelings and ideas, seemed to carry with them an immediate teaching,” the experience went beyond what books could provide, the “action of signs on ideas and ideas on morals” functioning like a “contagion.”64 Festivals’ increasing popularity led to a call for an overall plan in 1793 and to a law in 1795 that established seven national festivals, coordinated with the new revolutionary calendar, as part of a bill on public education. Between 1789 and 1799, there were literally thousands of festivals around the country, varying in tone and purpose. The larger, more formalized ones celebrated military victories, the funerals of great men, or the Republic. Others were organized around abstract ideas or moral values such as Youth, Old Age, Agriculture, Reason, and the Sovereignty of the People. Conceived as integral to social change and a form of “national upbringing,” festivals showed how a government could transform individuals into civilized citizens, the banner of the nation and the general interests it symbolized subsuming regional and class differences.

Vibrating in Unison As Constant Pierre’s description of the 1793 festival reveals, music played an integral role in revolutionary festivals, much of it determined by the state. On the most basic level, the sound of drums called everyone to action, waking them at 5 a.m. on festival days and accompanying processions through the city. This was not without a certain power. On 21 January 1793, when Louis XVI, now styled Louis Capet, was being driven from prison to the Place de la Révolution (later called Place de la Concorde), military drums accompanying the two-hour procession effectively drowned out any expression of support for the king. Drums continuing to beat at the scaffold stifled his last words. 65 At the festivals, besides structuring these events, music’s primary purpose was to give everyone a way to participate and thus to identify with what was going on. Typically, especially at the large festivals of the Champ de Mars, every section of the public would have its own orchestra as well as orator, and at regular intervals of the ceremony, all the orchestras would play the same music as everyone sang. 66 The idea was to make 64.  Ozouf, Festivals, 325n4, 197–204. 65.  Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson summarizes contemporary accounts of this procession in her Paris as Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 36. 66.  For the Fête des Victoires in 1794, Opoix proposed twelve orchestras with singers from all over France, and Merlin, thirteen orchestras, accompanying citizens singing first in dialogue and then in unison “to symbolize the emergence of a single will” (James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 127).

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participation easy and appealing, so that people could “vibrate in unison” and become “even more receptive to revolutionary ideas.”67 Music helped discipline people’s natural tendencies, focusing their attention (especially when the speeches were inaudible) and, with their lyrics, served an instructive function. Republicans admired how such music both contributed to the external spectacle and expressed an intimate feeling, sometimes translating a common thought. 68 They also gave the participants something to take home, so to speak, music that would continue to instill republican ideas into them in everyday life. Late nineteenth-century republicans marveled at how extensive state support had been for revolutionary festivals and how they had involved the country’s best composers. Various governments commissioned compositions, paid for the free distribution of sheets of music and text or text alone, and issued directives concerning the music performed. In 1789, Gossec left his position as director of the Académie royale (the Opéra) to help the cause. For the Festival of Federation on 14 July 1790, he wrote not only the Te Deum mentioned above, but also a “Chant du 14 juillet” for male chorus, one of the first revolutionary hymns, and one that served as a prototype for others, including the “Marseillaise.”69 He also wrote hundreds of songs, choruses, marches, and wind band symphonies conceived specifically for the immensity of festival sites. Whereas previously Te Deums had been used to accompany processions, consecrate new leaders, and give thanks after victories of one sort or another, after this point, secular hymns or anthems—that is, patriotic sing-along songs—and, to a lesser extent, marches, symphonies, or overtures for wind ensembles took their place.70 Through such music, as Tiersot saw it, “the people” become more than an “abstraction”: “This is a living, active being, whose thousand voices merge into a single one and whose thousand hearts beat as one, stirred by the same feeling and 67.  Louis-Marie de La Réveillière-Lépeaux’s 1797 Essai sur les moyens de faire participer l’universalité des spectateurs à tout ce qui se pratique dans les fêtes nationales (Essay on How to Get All Spectators to Participate in All Aspects of National Festivals) is discussed in Jean Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789–1830, trans. Sylvain Frémaux (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus, 1996), 41. 68.  Tiersot, Fêtes, xv, 69.  David Charlton, “Revolutionary Hymn,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan; Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1980), 15: 777. Tiersot calls the “Marseillaise” a song of action, a song of war, and the “Chant du 14 juillet” a song of contemplative faith, a song of love for humanity (“Les Fêtes de la Révolution, II,” Ménestrel, 14 January 1894, 9). 70.  On this subject, see Tiersot, Fêtes, and Pierre’s three immensely erudite volumes, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales (Paris: Leduc, 1893), Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1899), and Hymnes et les chansons de la Révolution.

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the same disinterested, burning, and sincere passion.”71 Borrowing revolutionaries’ electrical concept of musical performance, he believed that “when voices are united, hearts understand one another better; this creates a kind of sympathetic current among singers that draws them together and orients them to the same goal.”72 No song was more important to Revolutionaries than the “Marseillaise.” Many believed that it exercised a powerful influence on the revolutionary armies and contributed to their successes. With the “Marseillaise” “more useful and more consistent with the public spirit,” the Te Deum, associated with the French monarchs, soon became “out of date.” Cognizant of the ability of the “Marseillaise” to remind people of their armies’ glory and keep alive the spirit of the Revolution, government leaders called for its performance on various public occasions, ranging from the sessions of the Convention to evenings at the theater.73 Through its staging in Gossec’s patriotic scene L’Offrande à la liberté (1792), a work symbolizing national pride, the “Marseillaise” became known, not only for its martial qualities, but also for the religious aspect of its verse, “l’amour sacré de la Patrie.”74 In the 1870s, this symbol of patriotic resistance remained alive in Paris cabarets before republicans made it their national anthem in 1880. Tiersot considered it a hymn “in which are expressed all the lofty and generous aspirations of not only the Revolution, but modern France as well.”75 71.  Tiersot, Fêtes, xiii. 72.  Julien Tiersot, “La Musique dans les fêtes de la Révolution,” Nouvelle Revue, 1 August 1884, 592. 73.  In 1792, after the conquest of Savoy, the Convention voted to have the “Marseillaise” performed in the Place de la République, after which it became known as the “Hymn of the Republic.” It was also sung at the Opéra for the first time that year. Eventually, each Convention session began with its performance, sometimes also in the middle when announcing military victories. A 1795 law required it performed by all military bands, along with Gossec’s “Chœur à la Liberté” and other “civic” songs. And in January 1796, the government ordered the “Marseillaise” sung before the curtain went up in all theaters of the Republic. See Georges Kastner, Les Chants de l’armée française (Paris: Brandus, Dufour, 1855); Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales, 61; Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 44; Charlton, “Revolutionary hymn”; and Frédéric Robert, La Marseillaise (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1989). 74.  According to Pierre, Hymnes, 223–31, the “Marseillaise” was variously thought of and published during the revolution as a war song, a march, a hymn, and an air. See also M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Gossec, L’Offrande à la liberté et l’histoire de la Marseillaise,” in Le Tambour et la harpe, ed. Jean-Rémy Julien and Jean Mongrédien (Paris: Editions du May, 1991), 124–35. 75.  In his “Les Chansons de la Révolution,” Nouvelle Revue, 15 June 1884, 790–93, Julien Tiersot asks the questions that will later motivate him to write his book Histoire de la chanson populaire (1889), that is, “under what conditions, in what environment, and under what influences could such a national song arise, a song in which the soul of the country seems to vibrate” (797). In 1892, he published in Ménestrel an 18-part article on Rouget de Lisle, the composer of the “Marseillaise.”

R e i n s c r i b i n g t h e R e v o l u t i o n a r y L e g a c y . 115

Between 1789 and 1803, over 1,300 songs or choruses were written for patriotic gatherings—some newly composed, some set to popular melodies, others to opera airs.76 The utility of the new genre, the chanson patriotique or chanson nationale, was physical as well as intellectual. Such songs became state-sanctioned mediums of communal expression. At the same time, publicists and propagandists used them to promote diametrically opposed ideologies. Supporters of the new Constitution set its articles to music as a way to teach them to the lower classes, while royalist opponents used the same context to criticize the new doctrines.77 Rifts developed in the streets and theaters between those whose singing expressed conflicting aspirations.78 Tiersot compared the collective feelings that popular patriotic songs expressed to religious convictions. Both brought people’s “souls together in one and the same thought [confondre leurs âmes en une pensée]”, albeit sometimes to express their ideological differences.79 Constant Pierre stresses that these genres were meant to be accessible to a wide range of people—politicians, villagers with limited performance abilities, and the large crowds that gathered in the cities. 80 Consequently, patriotic songs and hymns performed at the festivals tended to be simple, three- or four-part choruses encouraging memorization. Most set strophic texts with the same music repeated for each verse. 81 Some were responsory, the chorus following the lead of a soloist, often in a refrain. Chénier’s lyrics for the “Chant du départ,” for example, were to be sung by soloists representing successively mothers, old men, children, wives, girls, and warriors, with each group in turn reiterating the choral refrain. The effect was to imply that everyone supported the call to live and die for the country. Many songs were written especially for the occasion only a few hours before the festival (en temps utile) and never heard again, especially those intended for celebrations after military victories. Others, like Gossec’s “Hymne à l’Etre suprême,” Catel’s 76.  Ralph Locke, “Paris: Centre of Intellectual Ferment,” in The Early Romantic Era, ed. Alexander Ringer (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991), 32–40. 77.  See Herbert Schneider, “The Sung Constitutions of 1792: An Essay on Propaganda in the Revolutionary Song,” in Music and the French Revolution, 236–75. 78.  See Mason, Singing the French Revolution, and Michael McClellan, “Counterrevolution in Concert: Music and Political Dissent in Revolutionary France,” Musical Quarterly 80 (1996): 31–57. 79.  Julien Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire (Paris, 1889), 275. 80.  To prepare for the festival of 10 August 1794, the Committee of Public Instruction ordered 18,000 copies of Méhul’s “Chant du départ” to be sent to “the Convention, [various] citizens, and each of the fourteen armies” (Pierre, Hymnes, 346). 81.  A good example of this is Gossec’s “Chant du 14 juillet,” which has twenty-six stanzas, of which he set only six to music.

116 . F o r m i n g P u b l i c S p i r i t a n d U s e f u l C i t i z e n s

“Hymne à la victoire,” and Méhul’s “Chant du départ,” became so popular that they were added to all kinds of festivals. Tiersot and Pierre were both taken with the Gossec hymn that the Committee of Public Safety chose for the Festival of the Supreme Being (1794) (ex. 1). It could not have been simpler, in C major and 6/8, with a choral refrain echoing the soloist’s music. 82 To help people learn the hymns, two days before the festival, there were rehearsals at the Conservatoire, and its members taught the words and music to schoolchildren assembled from each district. More than a thousand copies of the score were sent out the next day, and experienced singers directed three hours of rehearsals with the masses just before the festival began. The goal, as Pierre concluded, was not to worry too much about the artistic result, but to have a “moral effect.”83 Such music suggested how composers could get back in touch with “the people,” something republicans envied in the late nineteenth century. 84 Lest one think that simplicity was all there was to revolutionary hymns, imagine the challenge of getting thousands of people to sing in unison. Other difficulties also explain Pierre’s comment—Méhul’s homophonic choruses sometimes use chromaticism and multiple scales. Moreover, not all were meant for amateurs and were entirely homophonic. Some choral hymns, often second and third versions of the simple ones, 85 were written for professionals to perform at notable points of the festival. During the transfer of Voltaire’s ashes, for example, the procession from the Bastille to the Panthéon stopped three times for the performance of choral hymns setting Voltaire texts—at the Opéra, in front of the house where the writer died, and at the Odéon theater. For this occasion, Gossec wrote his first work for a male chorus accompanied by wind instruments: an excerpt from Voltaire’s Samson, “Peuple, éveille-toi!” (People, awake!). Its martial rhythms and energetic 82.  Pierre reproduces this in Musique des fêtes, 239. The first version of this hymn, commissioned by the Committee of Public Safety, sets a Marie-Joseph Chénier text for four-voice chorus and wind band in 4/4 (232–37). Apparently, Robespierre was so upset at the choice of Chénier, a political enemy, to write this “national hymn” that he demanded a second one written by another poet and in a version to be sung by the people (Pierre, Hymnes, 308). Pierre suggests that Gossec then wrote a different piece, the simple hymn in 6/8 discussed above, first with the Chénier text, then a Desorgues text, before returning to the original hymn in 4/4 and substituting the Desorgues text for the Chénier one. 83.  Pierre, Hymnes, 323. See also his essay on the teaching of this hymn to school children in La Révolution française (1899), 53–64. 84.  Tiersot, Fêtes, xxi. 85.  See n. 82 above. As for Gossec’s “Hymne à l’Etre suprême,” the Committee of Public Instruction commissioned two versions of Catel’s “Battle of Fleurus,” one for simple song with refrains for the people, another for large chorus and orchestra. See Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales, 66.

R e i n s c r i b i n g t h e R e v o l u t i o n a r y L e g a c y . 117

Ex. 1  Gossec, “Hymne à l’Etre suprême,” popular version (1794), in Constant Pierre, Mu­­ sique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1899). On the morning of the Festival of the Supreme Being in the Tuileries gardens, trained singers led the singing of the solo stanzas and the harmonized parts of this simple version of the Gossec hymn, alternating with everyone else singing the main line of the refrains. Later at the Champ de Mars, the 4/4 version of the hymn was performed, sung exclusively by the trained singers. In telling this story, Tiersot notes that the multiple changes made in responding to Robespierre’s severe criticism led to insurmountable problems in trying to teach the song to the mass audience, and that they had to give up performing ex.1 Pasler.UCP pagefestival 1 of 3 pages the main song at- the (Pierre, Les Hymnes, 322–24; and Tiersot, “Les Origines du Conservatoire,” Ménestrel, 25 August 1895, 266)

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call for freedom could be heard at all three stations. In front of the Opéra, singers and musicians from its orchestra also performed Gossec’s “Invocation.”86 This piece, setting the last two stanzas of the Voltaire text, is extraordinary for the virtuosity and coordination it requires, sometimes in imitative passages, other times together in intense sixteenth and thirty-second notes. The work’s juxtaposition of woodwinds with strings and powerful fortissimo chords with pianissimo scalar passages are especially dramatic. Also powerful is the first utterance of the word “God,” when the full orchestra and chorus hold a major triad fortissimo twice for an entire measure, followed each time by a subdued piano interjection, “God of liberty.” This is followed by imitative entries of each voice, building to a tutti chorus (ex. 2). Despite their complexity, words in such works were set in such a way to make them clearly understandable even in large-scale music influenced by Gossec’s symphonic writing before the Revolution. Marches, also important in the revolutionary tradition, helped turn the civic religion into one of action. They did this in several ways. Military music coordinating the movement of soldiers dressed in similar uniforms not only roused soldiers and inspired fear in their enemies, it exemplified how sound could induce a large number of individuals to appear as one collective body with one collective mind. Whether played by large wind ensembles or fifes and drums, marches at festivals coordinated processional movement. Marc-Antoine Désaugiers’s 1790 hiérodrame La Prise de la Bastille depicts the people advancing on the Bastille to the accompaniment of a military march. 87 Archival documents describing the various festivals are full of indications of who follows whom—“the order of the march.” 86.  Ibid., 11, 51. 87.  Pierre, Hymnes, 191.

120 . F o r m i n g P u b l i c S p i r i t a n d U s e f u l C i t i z e n s

Ex. 2  Gossec, “Invocation” (1791) for chorus and symphonic orchestra, in Constant Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales de la Révolution française (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1893). After the instrumental prelude and choral passages on “God of liberty,” come two short stanzas introduced by solos and repeated by duets, trios, and tutti passages. The second stanza—“Give us virtues, talent, and luminaries, love of our duties, respect for our rights, . . . and customs [mœurs] meriting our laws”—is introduced in one part. It then builds momentum with imitative repetition by a second and then third solo, and finally ex.2 Pasler.UCP page 1 ofsyllabic 2 pages writing of choral homophony. This symbolizes the climaxes in the -simpler group’s gradual embrace of concepts introduced by individuals.

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The marches Constant Pierre reproduces are all AABB forms, whose sections could be repeated as many times as necessary. 88 Marches’ emphasis on movement also contributed. Like many of his contemporaries, the liègeois composer André Grétry (1741–1813) believed that music “acts more directly on behavior” than any other art form, and that music “whose movement predominates over melody and harmony affects people most.” Movement then becomes critical, whether in marches or in songs with march rhythms such as Méhul’s “Chant du départ.” In such music, Grétry writes, “energetic accents fortify souls that are too soft.” This association of marches with energy is significant: “Energy in the arts is born of self-assurance [aplomb] and the balance [équilibre] that truth alone provides.” Because of this, “when the most savage of men consent to march in time to the beat of military instruments,” marches serve as civilizing forces, their balanced binary forms inscribing order on bodies as well as minds. 89 Neither eighteenth-century revolutionaries nor nineteenth-century republicans saw this emphasis on bodily movement as disengaging the mind, unlike later critics such as Adorno.90 Nor did they see this as denying music’s potential to address mental perceptions and encourage cognitive conclusions. Marches indoctrinated a mode of consciousness that linked physical movement with certain feelings and mental constructs. In most marches or Pas redoublés, revolutionary composers accomplished this by creating effects more than memorable tunes. Opening motives, with frequent dotted rhythms, give a sense of decisiveness. Juxtapositions 88.  Pierre, Musique des fêtes, 545–60. 89.  Grétry, Mémoires, 294, 335, 413, 420–21. 90.  In her After Adorno, Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Tia DeNora discusses Adorno’s criticism of Stravinsky from this perspective (18).

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of fortissimo and piano sections and sometimes high and low registers impress by their power and strength, especially in Gossec’s marches. To the extent that listeners get involved with the music, the regular pulse and repetitive patterns of marches can synchronize their heartbeats and breathing, while the constant return to the same themes suggests internal coherence. Because of this, marches give people a sense of solidarity and help them feel as part of one movement. Surrender to a march rhythm, if only in the imagination, gives group consensus a physical reality and renders citizens’ different positions, classes, and political attitudes irrelevant. This can inspire boldness and courage, as if the group force is irrepressible. Marches also encourage an association of joy and vitality with this bonding, a shared esprit public, and an association of male energy with the country’s regeneration, important to both revolutionaries and republicans after the Franco-Prussian War. Music’s new function in service of public utility and its destination for performance outside churches and concerts halls demanded an appropriate style that would maximize such effects without debasing the concept of music. In writing choral songs, it was easy for composers to reject elegant vocal lines and ornaments, audible symbols of luxury and prestige in the previous era, in favor of simple, syllabic tunes. Their similarity to liturgical hymns reinforced the sense that festivals created an alternative sacred space with its own secular rituals. Innovation in such a context was less vital than comprehensibility and easy memorization. Yet republican scholars were quick to point out that such contexts presented composers with significant challenges, to which the latter responded in innovative ways, bringing about a “new era of music” and helping to propel France into the “first ranks of musical nations.” In writing his Te Deum for the Festival of the Federation in July 1790, Gossec renounced the tradition of using soloists, fugues, and an orchestra with strings, as in similar works by Haydn and Mozart. Instead, he called for 300 musicians playing wind instruments including trombones, and fifty serpents reinforcing the chant in the bass.91 In his “Marche lugubre,” written for a state funeral ceremony in September 1790, he expanded the size and composition of the normal military band, adding not only trumpets and trombones (used as melodic rather than harmonic instruments), but also three exotic tuba corvae, inspired by depictions of an instrument on ancient Roman vases, each of which sounded like six serpents.92 With a large and small drum alternating 91.  Julien Tiersot, “Les Fêtes de la Révolution française, V,” Ménestrel, 7 January 1894, 1–2. 92.  Julien Tiersot, “Les Fêtes de la Révolution française, VII,” Ménestrel, 21 January 1894, 18; Adélaïde de Place, “Les Chants et les hymnes de la Revolution française: Rôle moral et fonction

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with a tam-tam (gong), heard here for the first time in Paris, he pushes the slow tempo and drum articulations of funeral marches to an extreme and fragments the work’s themes into numerous short sections. These unusually bold juxtapositions, the frequent interruptions of the line, the empty void of the rests accompanying them, and the dissonant chord progressions in the woodwinds give the work great expressive power (ex. 3). Audiences found it thrilling, the gong inspiring terror, and the work was performed at many subsequent funeral festivals, sometimes by very large ensembles. Republicans, who pointed to its formal novelty and the absence of melody, ironically appreciated both its severity, its “masculine expression”—unusual at the time for military bands, which played mostly operatic pots-pourris—and its sensational qualities, which Pierre saw as a predecessor of impressionist music.93 Its popularity suggests that revolutionary music did not have to be devoid of structural or innovative interest to be valued.94 To animate the large spaces with a sense of grandeur, composers also experimented with spatial effects, with multiple choruses and divided ensembles replacing melodies. Catel’s “La Bataille de Fleurus,” written for chorus and woodwinds to celebrate a military victory in 1794, was explicitly conceived for the out-ofdoors. Except when backing up the voices, its chordal successions aim for massive effect, while its flute and clarinet arpeggios and arabesques give the impression of “a thousand sounds of the wind.”95 Méhul’s “Chant National du 14 juillet 1800” uses three orchestras, each with its own chorus, to be placed in different locations. Spatial effects resulted from the dialogue between the first two with timpani, trombones, tuba corva, drum, and tam-tam; and the third with only a solo French horn and harps accompanying an all-female chorus.96 Composers, state patrons, and audiences found significant symbolic utility in the emotional impact of such works; republicans later looked to them as examples of an emerging French style. By incorporating images and music, however, festival organizers were treading a problematic path. Just as in the arguments for beauty over utility in the arts, they sociale,” in Musique et médiations: Le Métier, l’instrument, l’oreille, ed. Hugues Dufourt and Joël-Marie Fauquet (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 187. On the tuba corvae see Malou Haine, “Sonorités nouvelles aux fêtes de la Révolution française,” in Fêtes et musiques révolutionnaires: Grétry et Gossec ed. Robert Mortier and Hervé Hasquin (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1990), 193–209. 93.  Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales, vol. 2, and Tiersot, Fêtes, 52, 274. 94.  The march later had numerous imitators, including Berlioz’s Funeral March in Hamlet. 95.  Catel also wrote a simple song based on this piece, with a choral refrain for “the people” (Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales, 64–65). 96.  Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 47.

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Ex. 3  Gossec, “Marche lugubre” (1790–91), in Constant Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales de la Révolution française (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1893). The juxtaposition of the drums and brass with high woodwinds, horns, and bassoons playing strident dissonances (diminished sevenths) and then of the gong (tam-tam) with all the other instruments creates an eerie effect. Although there is no evidence that Gossec knew Asian music, in some ways this march resembles gagaku, an ancient ritual music in China, Korea, and Japan, usually played by sixteen musicians: three flutes, three oboes, three mouth-organs, two lutes (biwas), two citharas (kotos), a small gong (Shoko), a large drum, and a drum played with sticks by the leader. As in Gossec’s “Marche lugubre,” the pulse is deliberately slow and solo drum beats interrupt Pasler.UCP page 1 of 2line, pagesdividing it into fragments. orex.3 punctuate the- melodic

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had to recognize the arts’ capacity for distracting as well as instructing. While many may have wished for festivals without any spectacle, thereby avoiding the possibility of exhibitionism, exaggerated effects, and any association with the king, festival organizers realized the power of the theater to draw people and keep their attention. They increasingly incorporated elements drawn from it. In this spirit, for the Festival of Reason (1793), conceived as the Festival of Liberty, the government asked the Opéra to contribute a decor as well as singers and dancers. Although Liberty in the form of a woman was meant to be a secular replacement for the Virgin Mary, a reference to the Roman goddess of Liberty, a reminder of the queens of traditional, popular rituals, and an allusion to an abstract quality in all people, she was in fact an actress.97 Opéra singers, assisted by musicians of the National Guard, also rehearsed and led the performance of the hymns, as did 97.  Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 65–66. In her Festivals, Ozouf also reflects on the problematic relationships between sensualism, symbols, and spectacle that revolutionary organizers found in the festivals.

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Conservatoire teachers and students for the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794. Such preparatory steps and collaborations raise questions about the nature of festival experience as essentially popular. However, they do not deny the importance of collective enthusiasm and participation as the festivals’ primary purpose.

Ideologies in Flux Focus on music was convenient for republicans studying revolutionary festivals because it kept attention on what was shared instead of what divided. Because music remained a part of festivals over the years, republicans could downplay the extent to which festivals evolved between 1789 and the an VIII (1799–1800), largely dependent on the aims, purposes, and ideology of their organizers. Nonetheless, as republicans point out, song lyrics and allegories document certain ideological shifts. Tiersot gives many examples of how political songs became, beginning with the use of “O Richard, O my king, the universe abandons you” from Grétry’s opera Richard Cœur de Lion as a royalist symbol, with text or without it.98 He argues that all political songs from the Revolution arose during the most violent popular uprisings as the “spontaneous expression of ideas that would arouse the masses.”99 Although their meaning has been subject to interpretation, Pierre too traces a close relationship between revolutionary politics and hymn texts. He sees a progression from religiously inspired hymns invoking the divinity to moralizing ones that speak of Liberty and Country, then texts focused on tyranny and oppressors, songs of victory, and finally hymns celebrating the glory of the Republic.100 Robespierre’s severe censuring played a role in this, as did M.-J. Chénier, except while in prison. Allegories, especially allegories with utopian implications, also reflected the political changes. These were particularly important, for not only did they address the problematic relationship with spectacle mentioned above, they also put a veil over reality, necessary in such a turbulent period. Allegory produces allusion rather than verisimilitude, substitution rather than reproduction. Its tendency to “tone down whatever features might otherwise be too vivid” defuses the 98.  In his Méhul (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889), Arthur Pougin cites Chénier who recounts that Robespierre put Sarrette into prison when one of his students played this song on his horn (108). 99.  Tiersot, “Chansons de la Révolution” (cited n. 75 above), 790–93. 100.  Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales, 2. Jean-Louis Jam sees these changes differently. He finds that during the earlier years, the hymn lyrics by the most important poet and playwright of the period, Marie-Joseph Chénier, concern anticlericalism and the abolition of privilege; in later ones, they focus on war and the English enemy, then a return to anarchy and a call for forgiveness. See his “Marie-Joseph Chénier and François-Joseph Gossec: Two Artists in the Service of Revolutionary Propaganda,” in Music and the French Revolution, 234–35.

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weight of reality and “the invitation to brutality” in the stories being told. By keeping the emotional charge of their images at a distance, allegories also encouraged participant/listeners to keep a lid on their own ignitable emotions.101 Perhaps the most compelling role played by allegories during the early 1790s was the use of women to suggest alternative models of authority. From 1789 to early 1793, as women gained recognition, such as for their valor in the army (sometimes in disguise),102 an abstract woman was often used to represent the nation, the French “motherland.” The most popular was the goddess of Liberty. Everywhere she appeared in place of the king or the Christian God, most notably on the seal of the Republic beginning in 1792. She symbolized fertility, renewal, and varieties of the public good. 103 All this did not last for long. Some leaders objected to using women as symbols, particularly when Liberty became Reason in the reconceived 1793 festival. With this shift came a dismissal of women’s desire to become active outside the home and influence their husbands’ politics within the home. When Robespierre rose to power, there was a backlash. Sexual order was seen as necessary for social order.104 The Constitution of 1793 excluded women from politics and the army, and in 1795 the Convention banned them from attending any political debates even as spectators. For women to espouse l’esprit public and act in the public interest meant going back home, raising children to love their country, and making any sacrifices 101.  For this essential irony, Ozouf suggests, festivals were limited in their actual power of persuasion (Festivals, 211–12). 102.  Throughout the country, women organized women’s clubs to develop their political consciousness and take part in political life. In 1791, a group in Lyon published “The Rights of Women and Female Citizens.” In 1792, women won the right to divorce. For discussion of these clubs, women’s political activism, and the challenge they presented to society and traditional notions of feminine sensibility, see Suzanne Desan, “‘Constitutional Amazons’: Jacobin Women’s Clubs in the French Revolution,” in Re-Creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan Jr. and Elizabeth A. Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 11–35, and Sewell, “Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” 115–20. See also Ozouf, Festivals, 44, 51–52, 76–77; Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat: L’Imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), trans. Janet Lloyd as Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789– 1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); C. Marnard-Fouquet, La Femme au temps de la Révolution (Paris: Stock, 1989); and Bartlet, “New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror,” 114–17. 103.  During the Revolution, the Catholic name Marie-Anne was used in populist circles to refer to the Republic, but by others pejoratively to put it down. In Marianne au combat, Maurice Agulhon shows why Liberty was the more widely preferred female allegory of the nation until the Second Republic. 104.  Desan, “‘Constitutional Amazons,’ ” 30.

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required by their government, including the lives of loved ones. Méhul’s “Chant du départ” (1794) mirrors this new attitude. It features mothers who entreat their sons to go off to war: Expect no tears from mothers’ eyes . . . We have given you life, warriors, But your life’s no longer yours; Henceforth your days are your country’s. She is your mother before us.

A wife and a girl, each with her own stanzas, make similar self-sacrificing entreaties.105 As recent scholars have shown, these notions were not entirely enforceable. However, such allegories and the conflicting attitudes they reflect returned during the Third Republic, whose leaders held equally complex views of women and their public utility.106 With order firmly established under Robespierre, festivals turned to celebrating peace and calm. As Tiersot points out, “to express this, nothing was more effective than music.” For 14 July 1794, the Committee of Public Safety sponsored a concert in the Tuileries gardens. There were no speeches, no ceremonies, only music, a “Concert of the people.” This time, “wanting a concert worthy of a great people,” organizers called for “sublime and well-known pieces.” After negotiation, they decided on the chorus from Gluck’s Armide and a Haydn symphony, in addition to favorites by revolutionary composers. Of course, they ended with a massive performance of the “Marseillaise,” but otherwise this was the first time in such festivals that music was performed for its own sake. And perhaps more amazing, according to Tiersot, people listened “en grand silence.” As such it was an important predecessor to the “popular concerts,” orchestral music for the masses, that began in the 1860s.107 For republican music scholars, this was clearly a high point; after the fall of Robes­pierre, much changed.108 The Thermidor government reintroduced the distinction between active and passive citizens based on property, invoked justice and social order instead of calling on the general will or popular sovereignty, and 105.  Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, Chant du départ, score ed. M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet and D. Kern Holoman (Davis: University of California, Davis; San Francisco: Consulate of France, 1989). 106.  See n. 198 below. 107.  Tiersot, Fêtes, 174–89. 108.  In Fêtes, after devoting entire chapters to earlier individual festivals, Tiersot devotes a mere sixty pages to festivals from 1794–1800.

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viewed sensibilité and the emotions as suspect. The song that best expressed this regime was the “Réveil du peuple,” a reactionary piece by an actor at the Théâtre Feydeau that focused on rousing people to rid their “unhappy country” of “horrible cannibals.” Tiersot found the tune “utterly ordinary.” Although politicians tried to replace the “Marseillaise” with this on 14 July, musicians refused to perform it, and in 1796, the Directory forbade its performance at theaters.109 For the festival celebrating “the death of the tyrant,” Gossec had his “Marche lugubre” performed, but this time politicians took it as an offensive suggestion that they were mourning Robespierre’s funeral instead of celebrating their deliverance.110 Festivals continued to include new and popular revolutionary pieces, but many took place indoors at the Assemblée and Notre Dame cathedral, where there was little room for “the people.” Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, a member of the Council of Five Hundred, hoped that festivals would engage people “in the same ways that opera had engaged the audiences of the Ancien Régime.”111 Still, not everyone wanted to turned back the clock entirely.112 In his Essai sur les moyens de faire participer l’universalité des spectateurs à tout ce qui se pratique dans les fêtes nationales (Year VI), the president of the Directory, Louis Marie La Reveillière-Lépeaux, refutes the commonly held notion that popular participation was excluded from festivals under his regime. He advises the government to use anything that could help people “identify with the government” and encourage them to participate. Among the other government-sponsored activities at festivals, he calls for 200,000 to 300,000 people singing together, “all conscious of the same feeling.” In spite of these intentions, however, the public spirit was changing. A reviewer writing in the Journal de Paris on 30 July 1796 described a festival audience that year: “No enthusiasm, but the forgetting of positions and parties, the abandonment to pleasure, simple and frank happiness. . . . Today the Revolution and Con­stitution are accomplished. It is up to the government to tend to our affairs, 109.  Ibid., 197–98. See also Tiersot, “Chansons de la Révolution” (cited n. 75 above), 807– 8, and id., “Les Origines du Conservatoire, VI,” Ménestrel, 1 September 1895, 274. 110.  Tiersot, Fêtes, 273. 111.  Gessele, “Conservatoire de Musique and National Music Education,” 201, summarizing Jean-Baptiste Leclerc’s Essai sur la propagation de la musique en France, sa conservation, et ses rapports avec le gouvernement (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, an IV [1795–96]). 112.  While in his Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 (New York: Routledge, 1990), 27–29, Brian Jenkins sees the Thermidor government as one that crushed the popular movement, rendering the people “victims or spectators,” Suzanne Desan and Lynn Hunt point to the reforms that were maintained. See Desan, “Reconstituting the Social after the Terror: Family, Property, and the Law in Popular Politics,” Past and Present 164 (1999), 92, 113–14, and Hunt, The Family Romance of the Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 160–63.

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and the public spirit cannot show it better than by enjoying the pleasures offered it with confidence and security.”113 As Directory leaders turned festivals into an ideological apparatus of their regime, they instituted an increasingly rigid festival format. In his essay on spectator participation, La Reveillière-Lépeaux said he would no longer permit the “hideous filth and horrible confusion” that had characterized previous gatherings. Pamphlets publishing the order and “exact details” of the festivals in advance document not only the use of patriotic songs, but also “the most beautiful symphonies by our contemporary composers,” to be performed one hour each night of the festivities by a large orchestra in a central place. They also give a place to dance music at the end of each morning’s games and each day’s activities, which suggests that by the late 1790s, music’s entertainment value was again being recognized. 114 As Albert Duruy later describes it, people increasingly resisted these constraints, especially when laws in 1797 turned festival days into obligatory days of rest and in 1798 forced citizens to attend and participate by law. Eventually, the spirit of Voltaire—including hatred of intolerance—replaced the cult of Rousseau. Also, a period of reaction set in. People returned to church. Students abandoned the new public schools (écoles centrales).115 Attendance at festivals dropped dramatically. By December 1799, when Napoleon came to power, the government had reduced its sanctioned festivals to two, and in 1800, popular festivals were virtually extinct.116 Parallel to this, by Constant Pierre’s count, revolutionary hymn production fell from 701 songs in 1794 at its peak to 25 in 1800.117 113.  Cited in James H. Johnson, “Revolutionary Audiences and the Impossible Imperatives of Fraternity,” in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Ragan and Williams, 77. 114.  The many pamphlets entitled Ordre, marche, et détail exact des cérémonies spell out activities for the five days before the festivals, and the exact succession of events during the final day. For the Festival of the Foundation of the Republic in Year VII (B.N. Lb42–1969), trumpet calls gathered people to the Champ de Mars at 6 a.m., morning games and dances followed, accompanied by orchestras playing patriotic songs and music for the dances. Trumpets also announced the beginning of the afternoon games. The orchestras then accompanied the arrival of dignitaries with patriotic airs, after which Conservatoire members played a triumphal song. Then, after the president’s speech came a song by Martini, with words by Chénier, a series of awards, more games, military music, and orchestras playing dance music. 115.  Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 330–35, 336ff., and app. 17, 480–91. 116.  The “truly popular national festival ended” with Napoléon; “imperial festivals” meant to celebrate the monarchy tended to be banal and “never had the power to move le vrai peuple,” Drumont asserts (Fêtes nationales de la France, iv), but in Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Sheryl Kroen shows that people remembered the revolutionary festivals, the dates of which were used to organize resistance to subsequent monarchs. 117.  Gessele documents this decline in “Conservatoire de Musique and National Music Education,” 205.

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A Valuable Legacy Some, including M.-J. Chénier himself, considered the revolutionary festivals a failure, “colossal in their intention, limited in their execution.”118 Henri Baudrillart’s opinion in 1880 was more mixed. He depicted the festivals as attempts to address the problem of luxury in a democracy, “public luxuries” meant to bring joy and pleasure to all, albeit with the element of luxury reduced to a minimum. In a 1873 speech, the first addressing the genre during the Third Republic, Baudrillart bemoaned the “frivolity” associated with festivals, which followed largely from their connection to monarchical celebrations, and the lack of “utility and moral grandeur” in contemporary festivals. Asking if it would not be possible to “add the useful to the beautiful,” he called for reviving national festivals and proposed historical and patriotic ones as a means of reinvigorating the French people.119 However, although they would succeed for a short while in expressing grandeur and elevated ideas, elements missing from traditional festivals, he worried about the limited educational value of revolutionary festivals, some of which fell back into cult performances resembling those of religious practice. “Stay away from imitation,” he then warned his contemporaries, and “reject the idea that the state can do everything.” The people should be free to create their own public luxuries, just as they had their own ideas and made their own art. Legislators could only help and encourage. Baudrillart concludes that state support of the arts would be more useful than festivals.120 Despite such attitudes and the demise of the genre, festivals nevertheless carried a valuable legacy, especially for the Third Republic. First and foremost, they created a collective body of the populace and made it aware of its own presence and identity. This required encouraging citizens to reconceive public space, to merge private or individual concerns with public ones, and to map these experiences onto 118.  Text of 28 September 1794, from Chénier, Œuvres, cited in Henri Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe privé et public depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1880), 4: 576. 119.  Henri Baudrillart, Les Fêtes publiques (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), 1, 5–6, 13; see also Charles Rearick, “Festivals in Modern France: the Experience of Third Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 12, 3 (July 1977): 440. 120.  Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe privé et public, 4: 573, 577, 713. In his “Festivals in Modern France,” Rearick suggests that some officials may have shared Baudrillart’s perspective. The government’s involvement in July 1880 amounted to no more than “small and belated initiatives,” while there was extraordinary “grass-roots inventiveness” and “an outpouring of strong and local initiatives, both governmental and private.” Moreover, while the government tried to curtail political opposition during such gatherings, in fact, “modern festivals have been occasions for conflict,” touching off dissent from those who did not identify with the Republic and rejected their integrative function (444–45).

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their imagination of a new collective life, despite any internal contradictions they might have sensed. Without these, the nation could not exist. Second, festivals conceived by state officials and executed under state command gave governments the locus for a new kind of power. Despite serving as “spaces of discipline and moralization”121 for both propaganda and surveillance, they made state power acceptable, sometimes appealing to the masses. Third, music proved itself useful and durable in such contexts, regardless of the regime in power. If festivals gave people an idea of the public sphere, music showed them what could be enacted in such spaces. As an embodiment of the rhetoric promoted by revolutionary speakers and a way for people to experience their connection without losing their individuality, music was at the center of the project to induce the masses to imagine, feel, and behave like citizens of a nation. Like other means of serving public utility, it permeated the unstable boundaries between the public and private: it enabled political leaders to touch and harness private emotions for public purposes. Especially when coupled with words having a moral or political purpose, Leclerc recognized that music could “insinuate itself into souls,” as the “Marseillaise” and “Ça ira” had shown. These songs could recall the memory of these feelings even if there were no words, enabling “all souls, open to the same impressions, to merge for a moment in the same rapture,” bringing “unanimity to the passions.” He understood the potential of this music, not only to instill useful feelings of fraternity and devotion to the patrie, but also to “create similar morals throughout the republic.”122 In 1796, Leclerc called on the government to take advantage of this “new explosion of feeling” by supporting the creation of a “national music.” From later republicans’ perspective, festivals laid the foundations for such music. While establishing a precedent for state support and providing its rationale, they suggested how slippery were the boundaries between state support and state control. Festivals in turn had a major impact on the understanding and reception of music. Music in the mid eighteenth century had largely been a sensuous affair, seldom touching the souls of spectators. As James Johnson has explained, “sentiment was a quality of a plot and not an effect of the tones.” During the Revolution, music was understood, not only to have affect, but also to cause affect in its listeners and listener/performers as in ancient Greece, what Johnson has called exultation rather than passive amusement.123 Certainly the texts of revolutionary music played an important role in this transfer of emotion, but, as I have suggested, so 121.  Paul Rabinow uses these words to refer to reform efforts through the 1870s in his French Modern, Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989), 82. 122.  Leclerc, Essai sur la propagation de la musique en France, 2, 6, 26, 33, 48. 123.  Johnson, Listening in Paris, 35, 119.

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did its rhythm and movement. Festivals encouraged understanding music based on its physical impact and its influence on group behavior as well as its emotional and moral content. And they provided the first really large-scale public concerts (involving hundreds of thousands of people), more than music used in popular religious processions and festivals before the Revolution. This transformed music written by the country’s finest composers into something for the masses. Except for the concerts at the Conservatoire that at first did not attract the fashionable crowd, the main concert organizations from 1789 to 1814 continued to serve the old elites largely hostile to revolutionary ideas. They continued to be social events at which to see and be seen.124 Meanwhile, festivals were open to all, illiterate villagers as well as city dwellers and intellectuals, an ideal that republicans later sought to revive. The constant debate over what should be the nature of each successive festival and the wide-ranging perceptions about their utility also served a purpose. In the short term, festivals served various political factions in their struggle to defeat opponents. Ozouf concludes that “the meaning accorded them by the organizers always triumphed over the meaning experienced by the participants,” and that changed depending on who was in charge. In the long term, however, this variability taught future leaders that it was natural for notions of the public good to change over time, along with what was needed to fulfill it. Festivals suggested that, regardless of the political fluidity that constituted life in a republic, there was faith in the ability of the state to “form a people.” Festivals thus created a precedent for taking action on behalf of “the people” and for embracing Rousseau’s concept of public utility as justification.

National Institutions Opéra The Opéra’s legacy was more complicated. During the Revolution, the orchestras and choruses of the Opéra and Opéra-Comique contributed to the major festivals. But the Opéra remained a symbolically problematic space associated with aristocratic pleasure and monarchical privilege. It continued to address a very limited public and as such was a “club good” (see above). Court patronage played a role as well. In her Grétry (1884), Marie Bobillier fleshes out the composer’s close ties to the court, where he served as music director for Marie Antoinette, who was the 124.  On the Feydeau concerts and those at the Rue de Cléry in particular, see Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 205–24.

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godmother of his third daughter, before becoming sympathetic to the revolutionaries.125 Also troublesome, some of the Opéra’s repertoire with Ancien Régime origins, including Gluck and Grétry’s Richard Cœur de Lion (1784), continued to be performed during the Revolution and remained on stage throughout the nineteenth century. During the Third Republic, administrators worried that, because the Opéra remained an “institution of luxury” with little relationship to the “new necessities” of a democracy, opera risked disappearing with the simple elimination of state subsidies.126 The arguments needed to muster continued support for this elitist genre, the country’s most expensive cultural production, depended in part on understanding how revolutionaries thought of the genre and the extent to which their ideals infused its history. Opera’s potential contribution to public instruction and the representation of a new political identity were hotly contested during the Revolution as well as under the Third Republic. In 1789, Bailly, using words later used to describe the effect of festivals, saw the theater, “where many men gather and are mutually roused [s’électrisent mutuellement],” as part of “public education [enseignement].”127 Others agreed, including M.-J. Chénier, who sounds like Horace here: “In a good stage work, pleasure induces the spectator to be instructed without his being aware of it or being able to resist.”128 However, he refused to consider opera’s “little airs and pas de deux” of instructional value. And Rousseau had a problem with theatrical representation in general, arguing that if we empathize with the characters, they can evoke passions that interfere with both reason and the perception of truth.129 There were other problems too. Many people distrusted performers because of their close relationship to aristocratic patrons, and some were fired.130 Perhaps because audiences needed variety and relief from politics, in the early years of the Revolution, operas with nonrevolutionary content dominated. In 1791, the government abolished the Opéra’s subsidy, begun in 1757, and made it possible for anyone to open a theater, eventually creating competition with around sixty new venues. Under the Terror, however, turning the theater into a “school of patriotism” 125.  Michel Brenet [Marie Bobillier], Grétry, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1884), 93–94. 126.  Gustave Larroumet, L’Art et l’Etat en France (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 280–82. 127.  Cited in ibid., 262. 128.  M.-J. Chénier, De la liberté du théâtre en France (1789), cited in Elizabeth Bartlet, “A Newly Discovered Opera for Napoleon,” Acta Musicologica 56, 2 (1984): 266. 129.  Dugan and Strong, “Music, Politics, Theater,” 344. 130.  Pougin, Opéra-Comique pendant la Révolution, 64; Johnson, “Revolutionary Audiences,” 57–62.

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became one of the government’s highest priorities. In August 1793, the Committee of Public Instruction took control of the dramatic arts and the moral policing of spectacles.131 With the possibility of censorship assured, in November 1793, leaders renewed the Opéra’s subsidy. They withdrew traditional repertoire, such as Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, although Gluck’s music was partly responsible for the interest in music’s capacity to evoke emotional responses.132 Censors previewed all works and made changes (such as removing kings or changing them into generals). Revolutionary rhetoric and subjects reduced the risk that spectators could read their own meanings into the works.133 Not only did many of the operas and patriotic scenes incorporate revolutionary oaths—serious French operas in 1793–94 included at least one—but they used historical tales, current events, or everyday scenes to illustrate love of country, self-sacrifice, or group heroism. Emphasis shifted from dramatic effectiveness to truth from a revolutionary perspective. Stage “fiction” almost disappeared, as if tantamount to falsehood. If late nineteenth-century republicans had not been so eager to forget the Terror, they might have found reasons to revisit this repertoire. In fact, as recent scholars have shown, the priority of spectacle over plot in most of these operas made the Opéra in some ways an ideal theater in which to learn about and experience group solidarity. Composers found numerous musical ways to reinforce the mass enthusiasm generated by the festivals. In his Le Triomphe de la République (1793), Gossec recalled the grand, oratorio-like ceremonies of the open-air festivals, with their successions of hymns, marches, chansons, and choruses.134 To draw attention to the people’s sovereignty, he and his peers reduced the role of soloists and solo airs, avoided heroes and strong women characters, and gave greater roles to choruses and marches, even when not suggested by the text or dramatic action. They preferred allegorical figures such as Liberty to individual characters. And they experimented with all kinds of eccentricities, including frequent diminished seventh harmonies, huge instrumentations, and bold transi131.  As Jacqueline Letzer has suggested in her “Making a Spectacle of Oneself: French Revolutionary Opera by Women,” Cambridge Opera Journal 11 (1999): 215–32, women composers were “surprisingly vocal in protesting their continuing exclusion” from the benefits of the Revolution. Ironically, however, two operas by women with family connections in the theater found great success during the Jacobin repression of women (215). 132.  Johnson, Listening in Paris, 81–95. 133.  Bartlet, “New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror”; Johnson, “Revolutionary Audiences,” 69. 134.  The year before, his Offrande à la liberté (1792) presented a huge staging of the “Marseillaise” and other tunes, typical of those later performed at the Opéra to celebrate military victories. See Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 52, and Bartlet, “Gossec, L’Offrande.”

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tions—reflections of what could be considered liberty without limits.135 Perhaps for these reasons, the Opéra maintained its preeminent status. The use of choruses, soldiers and military fanfares, the exaltation of virtue, and the setting to music of subjects drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity so popular at the time were part of its heritage.136 Ironically, operas using them took over vocabulary and conventions from the older lyric tragedies of the 1780s. All that was necessary was a change in the emphasis and interpretation of the stories. Audience reaction to opera—public opinion as a manifestation of l’esprit public—was just as essential as it was for festivals. As those sympathetic to revolutionary ideals filled the hall, the Opéra became a highly politicized space for the expression of clashing opinions. Before the Terror, traditional classics provoked outbursts between royalists and revolutionaries and came to be seen as potential threats to public order. When administrators replaced them with operas promoting explicit revolutionary content, perhaps to meet what they believed were the standards of the day, the genre began to induce the revolutionary ideal of transparency between the real and the imagined. In these operas, performers often dressed as ordinary citizens and sang songs of the people. Spectators responded by sometimes behaving like participants in the drama, jumping on stage or singing along. At the end of Toute la Grèce, for example, when “the Greek warriors on stage swore to conquer for their country’s sake, French soldiers in the audience reacted by declaring, ‘what they have sworn, we shall do.’ ” Music was thought to succeed to the extent that it helped fuse the public through its common responses and “single, united applause.” Reviewers liked to cite enthusiastic responses to choruses that made listeners feel like “witnesses and actors at one and the same time.”137 As James Johnson puts it, “this fluidity between actor and audience made citizens realize that the drama—that is—the Revolution itself—was still unfinished when the final curtain had fallen.”138 By 1794, Opéra officials and the public alike agreed that this theater had lived up to its goal of “arousing public spirit to the degree that current circumstances require” and providing “models of an ardent patriotism and a passionate love for country, liberty, and equality.”139 Of all the theaters, some felt, it had done the most that year “to fire up the public spirit [échauffer l’esprit public] with patriotic 135.  Bartlet, “New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror.” 136.  Michel Noiray, “L’Opéra de la Révolution (1790–1794): Un ‘tapage de chien’?” in La Carmagnole des Muses, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Colin, 1988), 373. 137.  Bartlet, “New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror,” 147–49. 138.  Johnson, “Revolutionary Audiences,” 69. 139.  Cited in Bartlet, “New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror,” 109.

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scenes designed to electrify [électriser] the coldest souls.”140 Because of its previous association with the court, the Opéra was perhaps an ideal place to combat the “coldest” of souls, possibly those most resistant to revolutionary ideals. Assuring the support of the Opéra and its “artist-patriots” meant continuing the work of the Revolution where it was perhaps most needed, that is, among the elites. For a variety of reasons then—educational, political, and social—in October 1794, the National Convention voted to increase the Opéra’s subsidy to 460,000 francs. Making similar arguments for continuing this support, republicans let that sum grow in the late nineteenth century.141 Opéra-comique thrived during the Revolution. Using preexisting tunes and spoken dialogue (what we now call vaudeville) and performed in other Paris theaters beginning in 1762, this genre captured the interest of republicans in the 1870s, who considered it an “essentially French genre.”142 Michel Noiray explains its success by referring to its long tradition of social criticism: “Democratic values have always flowed in the veins of opéra-comique”—which was perhaps why later republican leaders thought of it as “one of the veritable glories of French art.”143 Before 1789, opéra-comique resembled pastorals and Watteau’s fêtes galantes.144 With its naïve and simple airs, written when paysannerie was in fashion, Grétry’s L’Epreuve villageoise (1784), a good example of this, remained popular at the Théâtre de Opéra-Comique in the 1790s (and later especially during the Second Empire). Bobillier explains that parodies and opéras-comiques “strongly seasoned with Gallic salt” provided relief from the “pompous productions” at the Académie royale de musique.145 During the terrifying years of the Revolution, however, “suave romances” were inappropriate.146 Republicans, like Arthur Pougin, praised Méhul (1763–1817) for introducing “power and action” into opéra-comique. Inspired by Gluck, he sought to express “the great human passions, the most violent move140.  Ibid., 124. 141.  Antonin Proust, L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 82. 142.  M. de Tillancourt, Annales de la Chambre des députés, Procès-verbaux, 14 February 1878, 248, and M. le Rapporteur, ibid., 250. See also Albert Bertelin, “Le Nationalisme en art,” Courrier musical, 15 June 1913, 363. Larroumet uses a similar expression in Art et l’Etat, 281. 143.  Noiray, “Opéra de la Révolution,” 375; M. le Rapporteur (cited in the preceding note), 250. In his “Dix scenes d’opéra-comique sous la Révolution: Quelques éléments pour une histoire culturelle du théâtre lyrique français,” Histoire, économie, société 22, 2 (April–June 2003), Patrick Taïeb discusses other aspects that rendered the genre popular. 144.  Gustave Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), 181. According to Bartlet, “New Repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror,” however, opéras-comiques were more often melodramatic than comic, and a few were even tragic. 145.  Brenet [Bobillier], Grétry, 26. 146.  Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique, 184.

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ments of the soul and the senses,” evoking “terror” in listeners. This was the result not of occasional effects, but of “a mature, considered theory, a truly new conception” in how music works in the theater.147 Méhul’s first drame-lyrique, Euphrosine (1790), overturned expectations, “elevating the tone of our second lyric theater” by “the strength of his ideas, his faithful translation of the words, sincere accents, and strict obedience to the laws of theatrical truth.” This was “male” music, “sometimes sublime.” Even Grétry appreciated its dramatic duo.148 After this, much changed. With the 1791 law giving rise to new theaters, competition with their rival, the reactionary Théâtre Feydeau, increasing use of revolutionary subjects, which pleased some but alienated others, and the requirement to remain closed on festival days, the Opéra-Comique suffered severe financial problems. In his careful study of repertoire, finances, and politics from 1788 to 1801, “based on unpublished documents and the most authentic sources,” Arthur Pougin devotes the same attention to this institution as his contemporaries gave to its Third Republic successor. Perhaps most interesting to nineteenth-century republicans were the effects of government involvement. The committee “in charge of enlightening and forming opinion” thought that theaters had for too long “served tyranny.” From August through October 1793 (and again in 1794), the Convention decreed that three times a week republican tragedies such as Brutus and Guillaume Tell must be performed, and once a week, free performances, paid for by the government, must be given “by and for the people,” that is “by the authority of the people and for its pleasure.”149 The Opéra-Comique put on four such spectacles in the first two weeks. Each time there was “a formidable dramatic catharsis,” as at the Opéra, Noiray points out, “it was accompanied by an explosion in the orchestra and a cataclysm on stage, leaving the spectators stunned and also purified of the violent emotions to which they had been submitted during the piece.”150 But, as Pougin notes, the real spectacle was often in the hall, the hallways, and the staircases more than on stage: stormy discussions and noisy cheering between enemies and defenders of the Republic.151 Whether theaters were ultrarevolutionary, moderately republican (like the Opéra-Comique), or audaciously and openly reactionary 147.  Arthur Pougin, Méhul (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889), 46–47. 148.  Ibid., 50–51; Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique, 184. 149.  According to a Convention decree in January 1794, the government would spend 100,000 livres on such performances in twenty major theaters in 1794, of which the Opéra would receive 8,500 and the Opéra-Comique, 7,000. Pougin, Opéra-Comique pendant la Révolution, 81–83, 127. 150.  Noiray, “Opéra de la Révolution,” 376. 151.  Pougin, Opéra-Comique pendant la Révolution, 131, 158.

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(like the Vaudeville), art had proved it could persuade, although by 1795 much had been “sacrificed.”152 Such free performances inspired later republicans and planted the seeds for a future Opéra populaire. When in 1796 the Opéra-Comique asked for government support, and in 1800 came under its direct authority, it posed the same “questions” about opera—whether and how to support it—that would plague republicans under the Third Republic. Late nineteenth-century research thus suggests that the real utility of opera during the 1790s, as far as the state was concerned, was as more than a mode of instruction. Yes, it could inspire audiences with its revolutionary themes. But, as Pougin points out, the Convention allowed reactionary theaters to coexist alongside revolutionary ones, with booing and hissing at the “Chant du départ” in the former and at the “Reveil du peuple” in the latter. Music allowed people to express their opinions. Perhaps what impressed republicans most was that the genre could “electrify” people, energize them, “fire” them up with a common esprit public—words also used in arguing for the utility of patriotic hymns. As for festival music, opera addressed a fundamental need in the country—giving people, not only the motivation, but also the energy to continue the work of the Revolution. Though it might not be able to heal or mitigate people’s differences entirely, through giving them the common experience of spectacle, it could rouse them to the same physical responses. With its diverse subjects, opera could explore the range of what would excite people, as well as the limits of music’s power to excite. If the reviews are at all accurate, it was the physical effect of this music on listeners, perhaps more than the shared sentiments it encouraged, that assured the genre’s continuity through this period. After the Terror, opera’s political function was redefined. To return to social order, leaders sought national unity through “collective forgetting” of previous political turmoil rather than collective enthusiasm, “a forgetfulness always aware of the need to forget.” Works referring to the Revolution or current events did not disappear from the opera houses, but they took different forms. In 1797, Grétry returned to the Opéra-Comique with a new work, Lisbeth, which nineteenth-century reviewers saw as about “peace, harmony, and family serenity” and “full of charm.”153 At the same time, Gluck’s kings and queens came back to the Opéra, and, although modified in revolutionary ways, these operas were “deliriously applauded”;154 their grand and monumental style had been an important predecessor to revolutionary music. Grétry argues that certain remembering, however, was useful. Putting on works 152.  Ibid., 158. 153.  Ibid., 190; Henri de Curzon, Grétry (Paris: H. Laurens, 1908), 70. 154.  Johnson, “Revolutionary Audiences,” 74. I’m grateful to the late Beth Bartlet for clarifying these distinctions.

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by predecessors such as Pergolesi, Handel, Lully, Rameau, and others had “great utility” in reminding listeners of “the first seed of all our dramatic productions” and opportunities to judge “if we have surpassed them.”155 Regardless of what opera was composed and produced, what eventually became essential under both the First and the Third Republics was its contribution to national pride. To the extent that opera represented the work of the country’s finest musicians and contributed to its musical posterity, it also represented the government that supported it as well as the people who attended it. As we shall see, this argument returned again and again in the next century. Regardless of its cost and luxurious image, opera was an emblem of the country that no one wished to debunk.

The National Conservatoire With increased attention to the importance of public instruction came many new institutions, predecessors of those under the Third Republic, some devoted to advanced study of various kinds. In June 1793, the Jardin des Plantes became a national museum and site for scientific research. The Ecole centrale des travaux publics (later the Ecole polytechnique) opened in 1794, as did the Ecole des langues orientales vivantes. In 1795, the Institut des sciences et des arts (the Institut de France) was conceived. In this context, music education became a national project. Revisiting the history of the Conservatoire, one of the most substantial legacies of the Revolution, Third Republic administrators found the “best arguments” for its continuing “utility.” Not only had this institution proven that the French were as “apt at learning this art and profiting from it as anyone else,” for a century, it had served as “the peaceful sanctuary of French art” and contributed to the country’s glory.156 With its library and instrument collection, it also laid the foundations for the invention of a French musical tradition. From the standpoint of the Third Republic, it was not its royalist predecessors that gave rise to the Conservatoire, but rather the private initiative of Bernard Sarrette, director of the military band that performed at festivals.157 It had long been assumed that the Conservatoire originated in Ecole royale de chant, founded in 1784 with the support of a minister of Louis XVI to compete with the Ecole de 155.  Grétry, Mémoires, 3: 14–15. 156.  Amédée Boutarel, “Les Origines politiques du Conservatoire de musique et de décla­ ma­­tion, I,” La Musique des familles, 29 July 1886, 324; Larroumet, Art et l’Etat, 259; Henry Roujon’s speech at the Conservatoire, 3 August 1895, reprinted in Ménestrel, 11 August 1895, 251; and Tiersot, “Origines du Conservatoire, III,” 259. 157.  See especially Constant Pierre, B. Sarrette et les origines du Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation (Paris: Delalain frères, 1895).

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chant de l’Opéra, created in 1672 by Lully. The purpose of the former, directed by Gossec, was to train singers for the Opéra and provincial theaters producing opéra-comique as well as provide music for the king. As budgetary restrictions kept this new school from growing past seven girls and eight boys, it turned out not to be the most “useful” institution during the Revolution.158 Instead, reflecting its relative importance in the early festivals, Sarrette’s Paris National Guard took the lead. The city of Paris had sponsored its forty-five musicians since the taking of the Bastille in 1790. In 1792, with the support of Talleyrand and Quatremère, this turned into a government-supported school.159 When he wanted to increase enrollments from 120 to 600 students, Sarrette joined with Gossec, music director of the early festivals, to ask legislators to upgrade his school to a national institute, placing it under the jurisdiction of the Committee of Public Instruction. His reasons, as republicans later point out, were political as well as musical.160 First, the country needed musicians and patriotic music, not only for national festivals, but also for the armies of the Republic. France was at war with Prussia, Austria, and England. In the initial conflicts of July through September 1792, the French armies were completely disorganized and a Prussian army made it all the way to Champagne. After six months of victories, the country was again invaded on all sides until the end of 1793 when, with added forces from the institution of the draft, the enemies were expelled and the country’s borders reasserted. Music was expected to help prepare and energize the Republic’s fourteen armies. Besides accompanying soldiers into battle, like a flag, it announced their presence on the battlefield and symbolized their reason for being there. Newspapers, citing the marquis de La Fayette in 1791, claimed that the musicians of the National Guard were more effective on the battlefield than bayonets.161 Some historians credit the “Marseillaise,” written for the army of the Rhine, with helping soldiers ward off fatigue, inspiring heroism, making their enemies tremble, and ultimately deciding the outcomes of battles.162 As if to recall this role in recent military victories and 158.  For a discussion of the distinctions between these two singing schools, see Michel Noiray, “L’Ecole royale de chant (1784–1795): Crise musicale, crise institutionnelle,” in Musical Education in Europe, 1770–1914: Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges, ed. Michael Fend and Michael Noiray, 2 vols. (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 1: 49–77. 159.  Tiersot, “Origines du Conservatoire, I,” Ménestrel, 28 July 1895, 234. 160.  Boutarel, “Origines politiques du Conservatoire, II,” 332. 161.  Chronique de Paris, 3 November 1791, cited in Julien Tiersot, “Les Fêtes de la Révolution française, III,” Ménestrel, 25 February 1894, 57. 162.  Georges Kastner, Les Chants de l’armée française (Paris: Brandus, 1855), 45, 47. As Beth Bartlet points out, the effectiveness of the “Marseillaise” in making enemies tremble is a myth

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to incite the legislators’ enthusiasm, Sarrette and Gossec began their presentation at the Assemblée on 8 November 1793 with a military march. Afterwards, one of the musicians explained that certain aristocrats had been pressuring them to play royalist music in public places, and their troupe needed “national protection.” Pointing to the “public utility of instruction in music,” Sarrette argued that “public interest” demanded such protection. Second and no less significant, such instruction would aid in forming “national character.” Since 1791, revolutionaries had been aware that although political changes could affect laws and “remove the chains of “slavery,” they could do little to alter “our character.”163 Concentrating on this point, Sarrette borrowed binary oppositions made popular by Robespierre—the monarchy versus the Revolution, and despotism versus liberty164—on the assumption that there could be transparency between concepts, political systems, music and people’s “virtue.” Drawing on a gendered antithesis associated with these political systems, he then used them to distinguish the music revolutionaries rejected from what they promoted, as if, like old and new, the two were mutually exclusive. Under the Ancien Régime,165 Sarrette noted, the arts had become so corrupt that “they were considered only instruments of superstition or simple objects of amusement.” The French soul had been “softened by the effeminate sounds in the salons and temples devoted to Imposture” (i.e., the court) and “plunged into a voluptuous and lethargic languor conducive to slavery”—a model of the people’s dependence on the king. Music’s “treacherous caresses” had led to a lack of energy in the people, a listlessness, a softness associated with women and effeminate men. As such, art under the monarchy had mirrored what the revolutionaries abhorred and feared: not only superstition and religious fanaticism, but also the corruption and injustice of a world dominated by aristocratic privilege, ministers, and courtesans. Veiled with mystery and dissembling seduction, the arts at court were considered by revolutionaries as incapable of transparency with the truth, and therefore virtue. Under whose origins date to the 1790s. See Léonard Bourdon, Recueil des actions héroïques et civiles des républicains français (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1794), 10–11, cited in Bartlet, “Gossec, L’Offrande,” 132n14. 163.  From Dictionnaire de la constitution et du gouvernement français (1791), cited in Diego Venturino, “La Naissance de l’Ancien Régime,’ ” in Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Lucas, 26–27. 164.  Like Venturino in “Naissance de l’Ancien Régime,’ ” Lynn Hunt also cites Robespierre’s use of these binaries in her “Révolution française et vie privée,” in Histoire de la vie privée, vol. 4, ed. Michelle Perrot (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 23–24. 165.  During much of the Revolution, this was a vague term used to permit ambiguity. For more on its use, see Venturino, “Naissance de l’Ancien Régime,’ ” 11–40.

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the leadership of the new Institut, Sarrette claimed, music would help lead people away from this past. Looking to military music, with its empowering energy, to promote what the nation needed—especially liberty, which Grétry later called “the mother of all virtues” and “the mother of the arts”166—Sarrette asserted that music could “exalt” its listeners, “imprint” them with character and energy, and (implicitly) give them what they need to act as free citizens.167 Thus, it could be useful in helping them accomplish the personal revolution that must accompany that of the nation. M.-J. Chénier agreed. He reminded the Convention of the National Guard’s “utility,” that is, the character-building influence that music had had on patriots. Thuriot concurred, stressing that everyone was “aware of the utility of this institution. That’s the point, the only point.” The Institut’s public utility having thus been established, the petition was adopted. With this transformation from music school to national Institut came new responsibilities. Students (“chosen proportionately from all parts of the country”) were obliged to participate in national festivals and other civic ceremonies. Gossec and four other composers were expected to write and direct the music used therein (a responsibility that gave them monopolistic control of festival music). Any piece performed at a national festival became “national property” and was printed for national distribution. At the Institut’s first concert, patriotic choruses and marches dominated, including a six-voice “Marseillaise”—genres that subsequently became integral to any French music aspiring to have a patriotic effect. In this context, two aspects of the musical world grew significantly, laying a foundation for widespread dissemination of music by wind bands throughout the nineteenth century. First, these instruments, associated with the Revolution, became popular. Under the monarchy, their role had been limited. A survey of instruments in 120 aristocratic houses of the time found wind instruments in the minority, even when there were multiple keyboards, harps, guitars, and viols.168 Large festival venues needed instruments that could be heard at a distance in the open air. Since compositions written for festivals increasingly called for wind 166.  Grétry, Mémoires, 3: 6. 167.  Sarrette’s comments in this paragraph are from his “Petition for the Creation of a National Institute of Music” read to the Convention on 8 November 1793, reprinted in Constant Pierre, ed., Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation: Documents historiques et administratifs (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), 88–90. 168.  Michelle Biget, “Political Revolution and Musical Revolution: Coincidences and Contradictions,” in Culture and Revolution: Cultural Ramifications of the French Revolution, ed. George Levitine et al. (College Park: Dept. of Art History, University of Maryland at College Park, 1989), 56.

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instruments, the Institut “proved its utility by its discoveries in instruments,” some modeled on those of ancient times.169 By 1794–95, the Institut had engaged nineteen professors of clarinet, twelve each for bassoon and horn, six for flute, four each for oboe and serpent, two for trumpet, and one for trombone. Inasmuch as earlier instruction had concentrated on the voice, this constituted a revolution in teaching.170 The emphasis on wind instruments may also have had a symbolic meaning. Unlike percussion, which can also project loud sounds on large fields, woodwinds are tubes activated by the human breath. The sound produced by some of these instruments was thought to resemble the human voice. If the nation was to be understood as a living being, woodwinds in concert were like its collective voice— unified, disciplined, and uttering the same sounds.171 Second, the need to provide music for national festivals increased the status of military bands and their music. Earlier in the eighteenth century, the genre had consisted of only a few short marches and airs from opéras-comiques written for small wind ensembles. During the Revolution, the country’s best composers enlarged the repertoire substantially. They contributed pieces of extensive length for a variety of instruments, some requiring huge instrumentations. They incorporated aspects of their symphonic writing, such as in the alternation of tuttis and solos, and this resulted in a grand style, especially when they added male choruses. With their musical textures thickening by the early 1790s, revolutionary composers preferred bold effects and energetic movement, appropriate for inspiring a warrior nation. As the armies under Bonaparte triumphed in battle after battle, their music became associated with masculinity and military glory, whose importance was reemphasized for the French after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. But the Institut was not yet the institution that would later inspire imitators across Europe down to the present.172 Given its success in providing music for festivals and the army, in July 1795, only one month after the promulgation of the new Constitution, M.-J. Chénier asked the Convention to reconsider the Institut’s status. Already in July 1794, the Committee of Public Instruction had subsidized the addition of singers and supplementary musicians needed in civic performances. In the spirit of integrating institutions, and acknowledging the crucial role sing169.  Tiersot here cites Sarrette, “Les Origines du Conservatoire, III,” 258. 170.  Biget, “Political Revolution and Musical Revolution,” 48. 171.  Grétry, Mémoires, 3: 426, speaks of woodwinds as resembling human voices. I am grateful to Jean-Louis Morhange for encouraging me to reflect on this interpretation of woodwinds’ significance during the Revolution. 172.  See Fend and Noiray, Musical Education in Europe.

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ing played in the festivals, it was proposed that the Institut merge with the Ecole (royale) de chant to become the Conservatoire National (Quatremère had proposed calling it the Conservatoire in 1791, borrowing the name from the Italian conservatorio, to distinguish it from the Institut des sciences et des arts).173 While the Convention sought to exclude women from public life, the country needed female singers, so the Institut admitted women. This union of singers and instrumentalists would enable its leaders to begin to address another pressing social need, the creation of a truly national music.174 Festivals had offered the potential for a national music embraced by the people, something Tiersot wanted to recreate. But such an ideal was not easy to realize. Many citizens spoke other languages than French and clung to their regional music and dance. Some found these differences dangerous: “Federalism and superstition speak bas-Breton, emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counterrevolution speaks Italian, fanaticism speaks Basque. Let us crush these harmful and erroneous instruments.”175 In late spring 1794, revolutionaries passed a law that created a new grammar and vocabulary of the French language. Practically speaking, this decree meant sending someone out in the provinces to teach French at a time when six million French citizens did not know the language—thirty dialects were spoken—and another six million could not speak it well.176 Teaching children the same songs could address this problem. But Sarrette’s notion of creating thirty music schools for children in provincial towns never materialized. Unifying the country with a shared language and music was a long-term process, still elusive at the beginning of the Third Republic. Although the centralization of music study in Paris was a holdover from the Ancien Régime, nineteenth-century republicans found much to admire in the Conservatoire. It not only trained professional musicians in a similar spirit, it produced fourteen method books that allowed music to be taught similarly throughout the country.177 These helped the French compete with the strong traditions of their 173.  Tiersot, “Origines du Conservatoire, I,” 234. 174.  The Institut became the Conservatoire on 3 August 1795 and received 240,000 francs from the Convention. 175.  Decree of 18 Prairial Year II [June 1794], cited in Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 109–10. See Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (New York: Norton, 2007) on the vast differences, notably of language, that divided the French. 176.  Grégoire, “Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française,” a speech to the Convention on 16 Prairial II [June 1794], reproduced in La Révolution française 1 (1881): 652. 177.  Emmanuel Hondré, “Le Conservatoire de musique de Paris: Une Institution en quête de sa mission nationale (1795–1848),” in Music Education in Europe, 81–90.

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neighbors and the many foreign musicians in their midst, who, Gossec declared, “corrupt our language and pervert our taste.”178 With the country’s singers submitted to the same control as its instrumentalists, the Conservatoire’s administrators thought they could address both these issues. In addition to creating a national music for national festivals, this integration would help them dominate the future of lyrical theaters in France, especially those producing opera, the genre with most international visibility and mobility. Strengthening the education of French musicians would free France from the need for foreign musicians. By promoting growth in the woodwind industry, the Conservatoire would encourage job creation and economic growth. With the Convention and the Committee of Public Instruction in charge of who was accepted into its various classes and what results were desired, the ground was set for the state, through the Conservatoire, to become the “supreme enforcer of a national musical style.”179 In the final years of the Revolution, revolutionary leaders looked to the Conservatoire to play a somewhat different role. In one of the first of many such speeches that politicians would give at the Conservatoire throughout the nineteenth century, on 4 December 1798, the reform-oriented minister of the interior François de Neufchâteau reaffirmed the relationship between the Conservatoire and the state.180 However, with the number of national festivals declining, he redefined students’ usefulness, shifting emphasis from their patriotic to their civic function in the new society. Being a musician, he noted, entailed a number of “civic duties.” Rejecting the notion of music as “the language of feelings and passions” and song as a “sort of natural soothing,” because this leads to a kind of “slavery,” Neufchâteau asked students to think of music as an art capable of teaching virtue. It should “inflame minds with the love of good . . . open souls to an enthusiasm for the beautiful, the powerful impact of virtue, the strength of good examples.” Lead men to virtue, accelerate heroes’ steps toward victory, help citizens connect to their institutions and national occasions, bind their organizations and affections to the memory of their country! These are the destinies that await you if you succeed in understanding the true direction the musician 178.  Cited in Gessele, “Conservatoire de Musique and National Music Education,” 198. 179.  Many composers and theorists, including Grétry in his Mémoires, 3: 419–200, thought of style in terms of genre. They saw French music as different from Italian melody and German harmony, original in having rendered both dramatic, under the influence of French writers. 180.  François de Neufchâteau, a poet, was twice minister of the interior, first in Year V [1796–97], and again in Years VI–VII [1797–99]. He renewed textbooks in the schools, instituted reviews of instructors, and created competitions for prizes and positions within the educational system. See Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 260–86.

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gives to his art if he is to be useful to his country [emphasis added]. . . . Sing of the immortality of the country . . . In your instrumental music, let the pride of a free man and the harmony of a friend of order imprint its majestic character. Refuse an embarrassing marriage with the effeminate muses.181

Méhul reiterated these ideas in a letter of 1803 to Joseph Payan, secretary to the Commission of Public Instruction: “The French people are not yet musical, though they are very sensitive to music. With time, they will sing and sing well if our musicians, aware of the dignity of their art and the influence it can have on public spirit [l’esprit public], forget their effeminate music and give their new chords the grandeur and strength that must characterize the republican artist.”182 Such words imply a shift from early revolutionary ideas about music. De Neufchâteau does not so much value it as a language of feelings and a way to the heart—for him, this view of music teaches passivity; rather, returning to Enlightenment concepts, he recommends music as a form of the beautiful, something abstract and distant, an ideal to be contemplated. The beautiful might be a metaphor for the good and the virtuous, but he does not associate it with the effeminate music of Ancien Régime aristocrats. Revolutionaries, like their republican successors, preferred grand music. While sensuous, “soothing” music might speak to the individual and create space for experiencing private sensations, grand music was hard to embrace. It set itself apart and impressed by its distance from the listener. It made one feel small, humbled, and respectful. If it taught, it was by example rather than by evoking empathy. Conceived of in this way, music could be very useful to the state after the Terror, when leaders were seeking ways to downplay individual sentiment held responsible for the violent internal conflicts of the Revolution.183 So too after the Franco-Prussian War. Grandeur in music supported both revolutionaries’ and nineteenth-century republicans’ need to rebuild the public’s trust, to reassure them by both associating the state with strength and glory and inspiring confidence in its ability to instill the same feelings, even devotion, into its people. Music could help listeners comprehend the benefits of subsuming parts into the organization of a whole (as in the role envisaged for the law or in families), thereby supporting leaders’ efforts to reconstitute the social order in ways that cut across class lines. 181.  Reproduced in Pierre, Conservatoire, 900–902. 182.  Archives of the Académie des beaux-arts, Paris. 183.  Desan, “Reconstituting the Social after the Terror,” 84, 115. See also Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michael Petherham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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De Neufchâteau was aware that the public spirit was more of an imaginary ideal than a reality among the populace, and that, as such, it needed to be formed.184 If the business of education was to teach virtue, meaning how to submit private interests to public interests, then, as he put it, music could be one of the “foundations of public instruction.” In supporting the Conservatoire, the government provided music with “an honorable sanctuary and a political existence,” “a reproductive home for all parts of which this science is composed,” and “a study center” in which to form the artists needed for republican festivals, military service, and the theaters, “whose influence is so important for the progress and the direction of good taste,” thus establishing a tradition on which the Third Republic wished to build.185 Its role, its utility for the state, was clear: to promote “national character” in music—independence, “superiority of mind,” and “magnanimity of heart”186—to create new musical traditions based on revolutionary ideals, to “conserve” them while staying in contact with “the soul” of the nation, and to teach them to future generations. In this way what was taught would strengthen the construction of the nation and serve the public good for many years to come.

Music, Character, and the Utility of Gender Music’s utility during the Revolution brings to light a number of issues that help explain why, despite their differences, both the liberals of 1789 and the radicals of 1793 turned to music to support their goals, and why nineteenth-century republicans looked to them for inspiration. First, music was perceived as an explicit form of power, not just a symbolic power. At the theater and in festivals, it roused bodies and minds, eliciting comparison with an electrical charge. Its influence on the troops, in particular, was indisputable, recounted again and again, even in the Assemblée nationale. Constant Pierre notes that warrior tunes written to excite the enthusiasm of soldiers or ridicule their enemies accompanied battles at Hondschoote, Wattignies, Maubeuge, Landau, and elsewhere in 1793. The same was true of conflicts in the north and south in 1794. After battles, music’s 184.  Ozouf, “Public Spirit,” 777–79, explains that Neufchâteau asked his subordinates to travel throughout the country evaluating the public spirit, but was told that if this meant “generous spirit” or “love of the Fatherland,” there was little to be observed. But “there was at least an educable people, in whom it might be possible to form one.” 185.  From Sarrette’s speech upon the opening of the Conservatoire on 22 October 1797, cited in Proust, Art sous la République, 73–74. 186.  Neufchâteau, cited in Pierre, Conservatoire, 900.

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expressive power helped the country celebrate its victories as well as mourn its dead. Gossec’s “Marche lugubre” was first performed for the victims of Nancy in 1790. Méhul’s “Chant du départ” was written for a festival on 4 July 1794 honoring a French victory over Austria and its allies, and his “Chant du retour” for Bonaparte’s return to Paris in 1797. Patriotic songs document the long series of military victories from 1792 to 1797, the most popular being performed at celebratory public festivals.187 With France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War came renewed need for such a genre. Second, music was understood as something that encouraged the utopian goal of transparency, which was a key to its influence on people. Music’s value was linked in part to its utility in helping people to feel and act as a collective body, transparent to one another and to some shared feeling or value. This feeling of transparency was encouraged by grand music that got people to conceive of something greater than themselves without turning to religion. The transparency critical to achieving a revolution within citizens depended on their embrace of certain moral values. Whereas honor (behavior based on the pursuit of personal distinction)188 was a central value during the Ancien Régime, character was seen as indispensable to citizens. The notion of character has a long history in France. If it meant “outward signs that reveal essential inner qualities,” “a mark by which one thing is distinguished from another,” or a “habitual disposition of the soul,” composers, nations, and music could have character. In music, Rousseau equated it with style, a kind of representation of the national character.189 During the Revolution, character became associated with virtue, conceived of as the love of law and country. Essentially, this meant putting public interests over individual ones—being transparent to the general will as soldier or voter.190 The assumption that music influences character gave it legitimacy as well as a reason to be taken seriously. Not only did legislators listen to it and reflect on it, they included six musicians in the new National Institute of Arts and Sciences created in 1795 (later called the Institut de France) and ordered music taught as a 187.  Pierre, Hymnes, 39–45. Perhaps for this reason, legislators increased the size of military bands to twenty-seven in Year V (1796–97) and to forty-eight in Year XI (1802–3). 188.  Norman Hampson, “La Patrie,” in Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Lucas, 125ff. 189.  See, e.g., Jane R. Stevens, “The Meanings and Uses of Caractère in EighteenthCentury France,” in French Musical Thought 1600–1800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press, 1989), 27–34. 190.  In his National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Roberto Romani argues that the notion of national character was an effect of institutional government in the eighteenth century and a cause of it in the nineteenth century (5).

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branch of national education. Music, they believed, could inspire power, majesty, and grandeur in the French people. Napoléon Bonaparte agreed: “Of all the arts, music has the most influence on the passions, [and it is] the art legislators should encourage most. A piece of moral music by a master inevitably touches one’s feeling and has more influence than a good book about morals, which convinces our mind without influencing our behavior.”191 Some revolutionaries had a precise sense of what music had the greatest utility. Building on an aesthetic associated with a Poussin painting, which would later reemerge in nineteenth-century pointillism, Grétry underlines the power of contrasts: “It is by contrasts, above all, that sensibilities are moved. . . . An idea does not strike our imaginations forcibly if it is not accompanied by shadow.” He recounts seeing Louis XVI guillotined while he heard country dances nearby. The march in 6/8 used in the military procession that accompanied the king to the scaffold “so ill-suited to the funereal nature of the occasion,” affected Grétry “by its contrast” and made him “tremble.” As Anselm Gerhard explains, affects had previously been considered “sufficient unto themselves”; with the Revolution, people became accustomed to “unprecedented shocks.” After Cherubini’s Médée (1797), Berlioz and Meyerbeer built on this idea.192 During the Third Republic, one can find this principle underlying many compositions, as well as concert programming. Rhythm was particularly important to both musicians and politicians. Grétry believed that “rhythmic music” had the most impact. Submitting one’s body to a rhythm affects one more than following a melody or mentally inhabiting a tonal space. La Reveillière-Lépeaux, the president of the Directory, concurred: music’s rhythm alone “imprints true character.” A hundred years later, the choral composer Camille de Vos also agreed, explaining that rhythm brings both movement and character to a melody.193 This focus on rhythm as the primordial musical element is significant. It devalues the more intellectual or sensuous aspects long associated with Western music, foreshadowing the importance Debussy and Stravinsky give to rhythm. (In 1907, Debussy defined music as “de couleurs et de temps rythmés,” 191.  In an address to the Conservatoire in July 1797, cited in Oscar Comettant, “De l’influence de la musique sur le style littéraire,” in John Grand-Carteret, ed., J.-J. Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin 1890), 411. For more on Napoléon’s relationship to the arts, see Jean-Caude Bonnet, ed., L’Empire des muses (Paris: Belin, 2004). 192.  See Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: Uni­ ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1998), 51–56. 193.  Grétry, Mémoires, 3: 420–21; La Reveillière-Lépeaux, Essai sur les moyens de faire par­ ticiper l’universalité des spectateurs; Camille de Vos, “Composition musicale,” Nouvelle France chorale, 16 January 1883.

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and Stravinsky noted in his sketches for The Rite of Spring that “music exists if there is rhythm, as life exists if there is pulse.”)194 It also establishes a precedent for the way many have thought about contemporary popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This interest in rhythm in the late eighteenth century may explain the prevalence and importance of marches and marchlike music, and why energy was often associated with character, as if indispensable to it. The country’s militarization and the ensuing changes in concepts of gender and masculinity underlay these preferences. To use gender differences, however, revolutionaries had to call on stereotypes that began with the human body and then transcended it. At first, they saw moral power in women’s capacity to touch the emotions and move people, which was important both at home and in their clubs. Women were expected to inspire male courage and patriotism and act as “moral guardians and forces of regeneration within the new revolutionary society.”195 Finding this power of influence potentially dangerous, however, under the Terror, leaders shifted focus to women’s “natural” tendency to mystery, seduction, and deception. They also used these traits to paint the private sphere as murky and potentially seditious and to link it, by analogy, with counterrevolution. In the new social order, women were to stay at home but had a vital role in educating their husbands and children in mercy, charm, and love, virtues integral to the ideal citizen.196 To valorize a public sphere made up exclusively of male citizens, Jacobin revolutionaries defined masculinity in a way that excluded not only women but also men who frequented salons and the court of the king. What counted were military virtues such as energy and courage, especially after the military spirit had fallen off so much under Louis XV. This limited notion of masculinity allowed them to leave aside the Enlightenment’s “man of sensibility”197 and, by an essentialist logic, to associate reason and truth with the political activism expected of men, and emotions and mystery with the passive behavior associated with women. Radical republicans under the Third Republic who saw merit in Jacobin ideas tended to agree with these conservative attitudes, even if they represented the Left.198 194.  If we read “rythmés” as modifying both “couleurs” and “temps,” it implies that form is the “rhythmization” of sections, each with its own “color and sense of time.” Debussy, Lettres à son éditeur (Paris: Durand, 1927), 55; Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches, 1911–1913 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1969), 36. 195.  Desan, “‘Constitutional Amazons,’ ” 19. 196.  Sewell, “Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” 119. 197.  Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris, 310–11. 198.  “What we are asking of you is to form wives for the men of our free, equal, and fraternal society descended from the French Revolution. . . . While men are made for action, women’s mission is to inspire,” Eugène Spuller explained in a speech at the Lycée Racine on 19 October 1887 (id., Au Ministère de l’Instruction publique, 1887, 245).

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When speaking of music, musicians and politicians made similar arguments during the Revolution (which republicans also echoed a hundred years later). Build­ing on the backlash against women, in their 1793 petition to create a national Institut, Sarrette and Gossec depicted the music of the salons and the court as effeminate, and held up that of the battlefield as energetic and character-building. Effeminate music, they suggested, leads to slavery—a model of the people’s dependence on the king. By contrast, military music, with its empowering energy, promotes the nation’s needs, especially liberty. In 1798, De Neufchâteau used gender similarly to differentiate the musical values he rejected—the “voluptuous, lethargic languor” and “treacherous caresses” of “effeminate” music—from those he wanted Conservatoire students to espouse and promote—anything that would “incite listeners to great dedication [grands dévouements],” express “gaiety” and courage, “elicit virtues,” and “strike down vices.” From his perspective, the ultimate utility of revolutionary music lay in its capacity to form a different kind of people, characterized by virile energy instead of effeminate lethargy. This discourse suggests that revolutionary leaders expected music to function like a woman—to teach, inspire, animate, and influence the behavior of those who heard it—to charm them, in the sense advocated by Horace.199 Ironically, however, as “moral guardian” and regenerative force, music should still embrace masculine values. These were not mercy, sweetness, and love, or qualities associated with the bewigged ministers of the court, but those embodied by soldiers in the field. Revolutionary music was to function like the women in Méhul’s “Chant du départ.” To the extent that it could energize citizens, increasing their capacity or inclination to act, political leaders thought it could infuse (or inseminate) values crucial for the evolution of the nation. Music could thus contribute to the virilization of the people—something the country needed for its soldiers in battle and for its citizens in their struggle against counterrevolutionaries. From this perspective, ascribing gender to music was useful, while not altogether adequate or accurate. Whether associated with effeminacy and people’s enslavement or with virility and their liberation, it encouraged people to acknowledge music’s impact on character and behavior. Opposing definitions of masculinity were meant to help people imagine revolutionary change, even if gender stereotypes veiled continuities or similarities with the past. (So, too, in music; with its instrumental interludes, lyrical adagios, and recitatives, a work such as Méhul’s “Chant national du 14 juillet 1800” borrows elements from symphonic writing 199.  In his speech advocating for the Conservatoire in 1795, Chénier calls music an “enchanting art.” It not only “charms society,” but also “enlivens both war and love, the hunt and pastoral life.” See n. 37 above.

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and the dramatic music of the Ancien Régime.) Gender, then, may say little about the actual nature of music at the time; however, as form of rhetoric, it suggests problems in a discourse that roots music’s essence (and utility) in its sensuality and aural caresses. The Revolution set an important precedent for late nineteenth-century republicans’ use of gendered discourse to condemn the effeminacy and decadence associated with Second Empire entertainment and to promote strength, grandeur, and moral values in music of the Third Republic.200 However, even if the music, including that of women composers such as Augusta Holmès, explicitly promoted masculine values, being seen to function socially as a woman did not put music in the best position. Under Napoléon, women never regained the rights they had earned in the early years of the Revolution. In exchange for “protection,” they had to obey their husbands, and a woman could make no important decision without her husband’s consent. 201 Likewise throughout the nineteenth century, music in public institutions continued under the control of the state, after 1870, mostly of the Ministry of Public Instruction. As we shall see, by making the premiere performance venues state-supported and discussion about their budgets an annual item in the Assemblée nationale, legislators controlled administrators the way a husband constrains a dependent wife. Music could reflect and teach “the nation’s image,” if agreed to by state administrators. 202 Whether it was valued for its own sake in the public domain was another matter.

e The public spirit, as promoted and embraced during the Revolution, left a compelling legacy, “consubstantial with the project of Revolution itself,” although it was never much more than an imaginary ideal and not really capable of replacing the 200.  On the meaning of gendered discourse, see Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nation: the Ideologies of French Discourse on Music (1870–1914),” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 72–103, esp. 73–74. 201.  Moreover, in 1806, the word “subject” replaced “citizen” and passive obedience was preferred to active citizenship even among men. The country as a whole became feminized in this sense. Although women again became political in 1848, writers in the 1850s like Michelet returned to the idea that if women were “productive,” it was from their influence on men rather than from any inherent creativity. See Jean Rabaut, Histoire des féminismes français (Paris: Stock, 1978), 144. 202.  Jane Fulcher develops this idea from 1830 to 1870 in her book, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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diversity of public opinion. 203 Napoléon hated the idea. Instead of trying to mold people’s minds through education, he preferred the constraints of public order and a new Civil Code. With the Empire, national festivals were abolished. But after republicans gained control in the late 1870s and prepared to celebrate the Revolution’s centenary, there were widespread efforts to understand, not what had gone wrong, but the elusive qualities the revolutionaries had coveted. Stories about the past, the imagination they stimulated, and the memories they implanted contributed much to reviving interest in the Revolution, although conflicting interpretations of the Revolution’s legacy remained, particularly in the wake of the Paris Commune. Just as during the 1790s, moderates and radicals, the latter owing much to Jacobin revolutionaries, clashed over their notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as well as over the use of state power. Others pushed for class revolution and international socialism. Still, there were principles they shared. In unearthing the past and renarrating the Revolution, they agreed on the need for national education, patriotism, and regeneration, together with whatever it took to revive them. They also wanted people to reexperience what had moved their predecessors as a collective body. Huge orphéon festivals with amateur musical ensembles, considered “useful for the people’s education,” attracted crowds throughout the nineteenth century. On 29 August 1875, in the Tuileries gardens, for example, 3,000 performed for 40,000. 204 But republicans wanted bigger, and more explicitly republican, celebrations that would spread their ideals throughout the country. Music was part of this. They believed that hearing the voices of the Revolution would help people connect to it, spark feelings of fraternity, and legitimate forms and expression associated with the people. Revivals could help republicans reengage with the music’s original meaning while serving new needs in the Third Republic. In the chapters that follow, I return to the Revolution again and again. The Revolution set republicans’ agendas and outlined paths to realizing them. Music played an important role. Whereas historians have long acknowledged how republicans used the Revolution to articulate their differences, I show how revolutionary music helped them find commonality. Through performances in elite as well as popular contexts, revolutionary music broke down the barriers of class and politics. It reminded everyone of a tradition the French shared as a nation, infusing a sense of fraternity, albeit limited, among elites, the bourgeoisie, and workers. These experiences were useful in posing deeper questions, equally important to 203.  Ozouf, “Public Spirit,” 779. 204.  This was a fund-raiser, though ticket prices were only 50 centimes. “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 22 August 1875, 303, and 5 September 1875, 319.

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understand in the Third Republic, and not the questions so easily raised by the music of the Ancien Régime or the Renaissance, two other traditions that were experiencing revivals at the time. 205 How could music provide a context, not just for momentarily forgetting social and political differences, but also for addressing the inner conflicts and contradictions of multifaceted individuals and groups? If music could turn ideas into feelings, teach virtue, and imprint character, and if these ideas were not just wishful thinking on the part of high-minded, idealistic leaders, how could it make certain values desirable? How could it make certain truths seem right, or create a sense of national identity? Not could music, but how could music help reconcile society’s desire for both order and progress? Addressing such questions forced French of all political persuasions to interrogate, not just the Revolution, but also their own society and its music.

205.  Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), examines the revival of music by such composers as Handel and Palestrina, but not revivals of revolutionary music.

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P a r t t w o • Shaping Judgment and National Taste

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3 • Music as Political Culture

From Active Listening to Active Citizenship

“Who said that frivolity was the lot of the French, and the Parisian in particular?” objected a critic after one of the Concerts populaires de musique classique on 19 October 1873. On Sunday afternoons in a dark circus on the edge of the eleventh arrondissement, the hall still reeking from the stench of horses, Jules-Etienne Pasdeloup’s orchestra attracted four to five thousand souls (fig. 19). A third of the seats cost only a little more than bus fare, although some people had to wait for hours in the wind and rain to get tickets. A “naïve and sincere” audience of petit bourgeois and workers sat spellbound, squeezed onto hard wooden benches, half of them facing musicians’ backs. Many were totally ignorant of music. Families seeking stimulating leisure came together, as well as students, piano teachers who “adored Pasdeloup like a father,” and bourgeois music lovers shut out of the prestigious Conservatoire concerts, whose subscriptions were passed down in families for generations. Composers, music critics, and the occasional aristocrat or foreign dignitary enjoyed the best seats at the Concerts Pasdeloup.1 For this first performance of the season, the Orléanist pretender to the French throne, Philippe, comte de Paris, and his wife attended, their presence being noted in the press. 2 The city was tense and apprehensive, because many expected an imminent return to monarchy. The attendance of the comte and comtesse de Paris would have demonstrated sympathy for the people and an interest in their education. Such concerts instructed, fascinated, and infuriated listeners who came not only 1.  According to police records, when the emperor and empress of Brazil attended on 14 January 1872, the huge crowd was forced to wait for them to leave. Archives of the Préfecture de la Police, Paris, Concerts Pasdeloup, Da 62. 2.  “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 26 October 1873, 382. Because the Legitimist pretender to the throne, the comte de Chambord, had no children, the comte de Paris was recognized as his successor by royalists, even though from a rival branch.

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Fig. 19  John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver (ca. 1879–80), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

to escape their mundane concerns and enjoy something beautiful, but also to learn, to confront the unknown, and to express their opinions. After the first movement of a Schumann symphony some booed and whistled, thinking “they had to bring down” a composer they associated, however erroneously, with Wagner. Many felt insulted by Wagner’s publication of a contemptuous satire ridiculing the French under the German occupation of Paris. The audience was more receptive to new French music. They unanimously called for an encore of Massenet’s “elegant and colorful” new work. But then “strange” Russian airs by Glinka elicited another 160

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affront. Afterwards, Beethoven’s C minor symphony “calmed the nerves of this overly impressionable public.”3 Four days later, Henri Baudrillart, in a speech before the five Académies, wondered if Sunday concerts could not serve as “a model for others in different genres.”4 That they disciplined the lower classes escaped no one. When Wagner was performed, “lots of whistling” clashed with exuberant applause, but police records also document many concerts in “perfect tranquility” and “without any disturbance.”5 More important, such concerts offered occasions for all classes to be uplifted spontaneously through music and to feel as one, momentarily realizing a revolutionary ideal elusive in French society since revolutionary festivals. While those nostalgic for monarchy or the empire wished to forget that the Revolution had taken place, republicans sought to incorporate its legacy, assimilate its various factions, and render permanent its impact on French society. 6 Like their revolutionary predecessors, they believed it was possible, in Rousseau’s words, to “form a people,” the source of all legitimacy. Serving the public good would be the goal of government. The arts were part of this project, their utility a function of how aesthetics and artistic practices could support nation-building. Devastated by defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and humiliated by the Commune, France was fiercely divided in the 1870s. The monarchists, who dominated government for much of the time, hoped to reinstall a king. Bonapartists yearned for a return to empire. Republican strength grew steadily, but differences among moderates, socialists, and radicals caused turmoil. Whatever the depth of their dissension over the nature of government, the role of the Church, and the priorities of the nation, however, this generation did not want its struggles to end in violence.7 Culture offered a nonviolent, secular domain in which to face their differences and explore what they shared. It could help revitalize the nation. In the 3.  From Charles Bannelier, Revue et gazette musicale, 26 October 1873, 341; Ménestrel, 26 October 1873, 382; Adolphe Jullien’s reviews reproduced in his Musique (Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1896), 308–24; and Maurice Griveau, “Impressions musicale de jeunesse,” Revue musicale S.I.M., 15 December 1910, 662–70. Jullien, who considered Pasdeloup the most popular conductor in France ever, attended almost every Sunday. 4.  Henri Baudrillart, Les Fêtes publiques (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), 17. 5.  Archives of the Préfecture de la Police, Concerts Pasdeloup, Da 62, 24 September 1872, 22 October 1872, and 15 October 1874. 6.  How the French sought closure to the Revolution is the central theme of François Furet, La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry, 1770–1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1988), trans. Antonia Nevill as Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). 7.  As Edgar Quinet pointed out, if the Republic was to survive, they had to repudiate the violence of their revolutionary predecessors or risk the failures of the Jacobins. See Philip Nord, The Republican Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1–2.

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early 1870s, liberals and conservatives alike looked to “serious” music expressing high ideals to nurture “moral strength” in the country. 8 With the fine arts annexed to the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1870 and the arts a branch of national education until 1958,9 music was expected to serve a political function. Certainly there was a continuation of values, practices, and institutions from the Second Empire and earlier, along with careful negotiation of compromise. Traditional forms of state patronage, particularly of opera, and paternalism remained, but elsewhere there were increasingly important differences and the launching of more ambitious democratic ideals. Republicans envisaged an almost mechanical relationship between musical practices and social change for workers, bourgeois, and elites—one that was easier to articulate than it was to prove. However overly optimistic and idealistic it might sound, we need to take their discourse seriously. In focusing on music’s public utility, their widespread efforts to encourage musical practices and shape musical taste laid the foundations for broad public support of the arts in France and shed light on why democracy took hold there and lasted.10 To the extent that they helped the Republic address its need for political legitimacy and cultural integration, the language and practices of music emerged as aspects of political culture.11 As a new mode of aesthetic activity for many, they 8.  In his “Tablettes artistiques, 1870–71,” Ménestrel, 7 January 1872, Arthur Pougin refers to the force morale necessary to resist defeat and chaos (44). 9.  Who controlled the arts changed over the years. In 1792 the Administration of Royal Buildings under the Ministry of the Interior was responsible, in 1830 the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works. The Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Public Instruction, and the Directorate of National Museums were jointly responsible in 1848; the Ministry of State took over in 1853. Civic buildings (including museums) were placed under the Ministry of Public Works in 1870, technical instruction (the Conservatoire and Ecoles d’arts et métiers) under the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. See Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat sous la IIIe République: Le Système des beaux-arts, 1870–1940 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1992), app. 17, 356, and Antonin Proust, L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892). In 1878, the government also appointed an inspecteur de la musique (Vaucorbeil) within this ministry to advocate for music. 10.  Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), mistakenly claims that before 1900, the Republic “had largely neglected to imprint its values through music” (7). 11.  In The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1: The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. id. (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), xii, Keith Baker defines political culture as a “set of discourses and practices”; through these, James Lehning explains, “individuals and groups articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the completing claims that they made on each other” (Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early Third Republic [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001], 3–4). Lehning argues that political culture is discursive, “expressed not only through institutional and constitutional arrangements but also in cultural representations of and discourses about the Republic. A discursive version of

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prepared people to engage in voting, a newly consequential mode of political activity.12 As at the Concerts Pasdeloup, listening entailed developing an opinion and defending it, for, as one writer described them, concert intermissions were “not for relaxation, but for combat,” a time when “opinions are confronted, passion inflates nostrils and lights up pupils.” To the extent that concerts stimulated empathetic, imaginative engagement with music, republicans sought to use music to influence mœurs, the beliefs and behavior proper and necessary to republicanism. When they presented opportunities for comparative judgment, concerts called on active listening, a corollary of active citizenship. Aesthetics could merge with ethics through music and musical practices as cultural identity interwove with political identity.13

Political Legitimacy and Civic Society To grasp how music and concert life could contribute to the debates over national identity and the public good, we first need to understand the tentative stability in which the early Republic teetered in the 1870s and its unnerving political crises. Political legitimacy was not easy to come by. The Republic began in September 1870 with a series of failures—the military’s (for its manner of conducting the war), the new government’s (for its collaboration with Prussia to end the war), and Parisians’ (for their blind idealism and their inability to speak to the interests of those in the provinces, especially the peasants). Saddled with 5 billion francs in reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and horrified by the destruction of Paris and the killing, jailing, or exiling of over 100,000 Parisians during the political culture broadens the meaning of politics, emphasizing that discourses about republican politics were significant elements of the political system, forming a part of power relationships and guiding individuals as they participated in those relationships. It also suggests that these discourses were unstable, inconsistent, and constantly being renegotiated” (4). I see music as one of these discourses in Third Republic France. 12.  Furet explains the subtleties of previous attempts at universal suffrage in France in his La Révolution de Turgot à Jules Ferry: what had been a brief experiment in 1792 and an erratic, imperfect practice beginning in 1848 was assured after 1876 (494–96). Others, such as Theodore Zeldin, concur that, even if it politicized the peasantry, universal male suffrage during the Second Empire had little effect on imperial policy. 13.  Camille Mauclair, La Religion de la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1909), 12–13. In his memoirs, Refuges (Paris: Émile-Paul frères, 1942), Léon-Paul Fargue writes similarly, “At the time of Ravel’s youth audiences would get up from their seats, demonstrate, intervene, wrinkle their nostrils, frequently whistle during concertos, and make a show of leaving the room to smoke the cigarette of freedom outside. . . . We needed this atmosphere to live happy and poor” (196–97). Such accounts refute James Johnson’s and others’ assumptions about increasingly disciplined, silent audience behavior over the nineteenth century.

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Commune, many French craved order and were willing to entertain compromise. Some had new objectives as well: respecting gender, social, and economic differences while assuring equal rights, and infusing energy, courage, and willingness to go off to war into a populace tired of conflict. Foremost, the country needed to deepen the bonds between the needs and interests of people and those of the nation and to inspire an imagination of the future on which many could agree. Arguments over these remained at the center of public discourse for decades, influencing aesthetic and musical choices as well as political ones. The 1870s were characterized by political compromises. From 1871 to 1873, President Adolphe Thiers, who had been prime minister under King LouisPhilippe,14 organized a government that was both conservative, not interfering with the customs and interests of elites (including at the Opéra), and definitively republican, embodying the rights and principles of 1789.15 He appointed the moderate Jules Simon as the first minister of public instruction, religion, and fine arts (1870–73), rather than the populist Léon Gambetta.16 An active, anticlerical republican in the minority party during the Second Empire, Simon was among those for whom the idea of a republic implied a kind of sacrosanct idealism—the result of having been “dreamt about during long years of combat, presented and exalted as the antithesis of [the previous] regime.”17 Like others, he prioritized the Republic’s indebtedness to the French Revolution, the importance of freedom and the democratic process, the separation of Church and state, and the government’s duty to help the masses. Among his first actions in 1870 was to abolish theatrical censorship. Still, the quintessential républicain opportuniste,18 Simon believed 14.  Thiers was prime minister in 1836 and again in 1840. 15.  Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic, 1879–1992, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 3. 16.  The son of a Genoese grocer, Gambetta was deputy for the working-class district of Belleville and a powerful orator; preferring to continue the war rather than negotiate with the Prussians, he led France’s armies in the provinces in an effort to relieve Paris in fall 1870. In November 1871, he founded the antimonarchist, anticlerical newspaper La République française to promote democracy, universal suffrage, and free secular education. For a sympathetic portrait of Gambetta, see Gabriel Hanotaux, Contemporary France (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), 2: 52–66, 620–21. 17.  Raoul Girardet, “Jules Ferry et l’image d’une République à fonder,” in Jules Ferry fondateur de la République, ed. François Furet (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985), 246; see also Louis Girard, “Jules Ferry et la génération des républicains du Second Empire,” in ibid., 49–57. 18.  In his Contemporary France, Hanotaux defines opportunism as “a compromise, a search for balance, for measured equilibrium. . . . It reacts against the abuse of authority . . . but takes care not to break with discipline, and it sees in tolerance the only control of moral unity. . . .

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in working toward compromise, balance, and equilibrium. As a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques since 1863, he was highly respected in conservative circles and, through his policies and appointments, had a significant impact on the arts. With his support, the musical world could begin to focus on reviving patriotism, a deep concern of monarchists and republicans alike. After Thiers had paid German reparations and German soldiers left, royalists prepared a return to constitutional monarchy. In May 1873, they elected as president Marshal Patrice de Mac-Mahon, whom Napoléon III had made a duke for his distinguished service.19 Mac-Mahon named Duc Albert de Broglie as prime minister and installed a government dedicated to restoring “Moral Order” (Ordre moral), a coalition of conservatives supporting renewed alliance between Church and state. De Broglie was an Orléanist, an aristocrat, a Catholic, and a member of the Académie française. His majority was supported by those with money and property, as well as some aristocrats, many peasants, and rural landowners who feared socialism. With monarchists and Catholics then appointed to head the major ministries, including the Ministry of Public Instruction, Religion, and Fine Arts, the Moral Order government not only restrained republicans’ projects to secularize society and reintroduced censorship, but also required conservative approval of what the state would support in the musical world. In many ways, the Moral Order solved the problem of the Republic’s legitimacy by practical consensus both within rival factions and between them, albeit for contradictory purposes. Legitimists and conservative Orléanists agreed on the need for another monarch. The former, the descendants of Ancien Régime aristocrats whose families had installed Louis XVIII as king in 1815 and Charles X in 1824, wished to crown the comte de Chambord as dynastic successor under the title of Henri V. The latter, descendants of the liberal bourgeoisie who had elected LouisPhilippe d’Orléans in 1830, looked to the comte de Paris as heir to the throne. Whereas Legitimists hoped for a return to the Ancien Régime, Orléanists wanted to integrate the French monarchy into the modern world, as under the so-called Absorbed with other cares, it does not concern itself with the evils which result from an unequal division of riches. . . . At the bottom of Opportunism lies Nationalism” (2: 716–17). See also Maurice Agulhon, in Les Opportunistes: Les Débuts de la République aux républicains, ed. Léo Hamon (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1991), 8–9, 13. In his The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), Robert Gildea suggests that republicans dubbed opportunistes those who refused “to amnesty the Communards until the opportune time” (38). 19.  Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945: Politics and Anger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 199.

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July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830–48). 20 But for both, the Moral Order was a context in which to prepare for a return to constitutional monarchy. 21 A third elite constituency, the Bonapartists, were nostalgic for the Empire, which they celebrated in Saint-Napoléon festivals. 22 Napoléon IV, Louis Napoléon (1856–1879), the only child and heir of Emperor Napoléon III, lived in exile in the United Kingdom. Distrustful of monarchy as well as idealistic republicanism and fearing another social revolution, the Bonapartists embraced political repression, imperialist expansion, and the illusion of representative government. Sharing an interest in property, social hierarchy, and the Church as a force for social order, these three constituencies saw a revival of Christianity as “the first condition of the recovery of France.”23 This kept many composers significantly engaged with religious themes and genres in the 1870s, regardless of their political orientations. When it came to the arts, many monarchists continued to admire and use them as emblems of past achievement or class distinction and as stimulants to personal enhancement or pleasure. But during the Second Empire, Napoléon III had shown how culture could speak to the masses, especially in the provinces, and promote social and moral values. He believed in charity and compassion toward the working classes. Following the example of the Catholic Church, Christian ethics, and rigid hierarchical social relations, Napoléon III and others espoused paternalist patronage “where the superior protects and helps the inferior like a father to his children or a monarch to his subjects and receives recognition and devotion in return.”24 In this spirit, and perhaps feeling guilt after demolishing entire streets in the neighborhood, Baron Haussmann, prefect of Paris, subsidized Pasdeloup’s concerts populaires, begun in 1861, for those living near the Cirque Napoléon, one of 20.  In La Droite en France (Paris: Aubier, 1963), René Rémond distinguishes the Legitimists from the Orléanists by observing that whereas for the former, the monarchy was “a person,” namely, the king, who demanded absolute devotion and loyalty, for the latter, it was “a principle, a form of regime” (138). 21.  Whereas Rémond argues that the goal of the Legitimists and Orléanists was “counterrevolution” rather than monarchical “restoration” (ibid., 132, 135), Hanotaux sees the elections of May 1873 as a “prologue to a bid for the Restoration of the monarchy” (Contemporary France, 2: 118). 22.  Throughout the nineteenth century, some French celebrated Napoléon I’s birthday, 15 August, as “an official fête” during the two Bonapartist regimes, as well as an “anti-fête” during the Restoration, July Monarchy, and late nineteenth century. See Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 23.  Hanotaux, Contemporary France, 2: 35, 46–47. That July, as a sign of penance for the Commune, the Assemblée voted to subsidize building the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur atop Montmartre. Rémond, Droite en France, 142. 24.  Rémond, Droite en France, 136.

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the only buildings he had spared on the eastern boulevard. 25 Since the Restoration, conservative leaders had also supported choral singing, which, they felt, had a moralizing impact on the masses, “softening their manners and improving their intelligence,” and taught respect for social institutions. Wind bands and orphéons, amateur male choruses drawn from the working classes, had grown steadily throughout the country; more than three thousand such groups were invited to perform at the 1867 Universal Exhibition. Charles Gounod, François Bazin, and Pasdeloup directed over 12,000 workers in the Paris Orphéon. So that they would not become breeding grounds for political dissent, the statutes of such choruses, which required government approval, spelled out that at meetings members could not discuss “politics or anything besides music.” To ensure the Republic’s survival, conservative and opportuniste republicans participated in this regime. Republicans had long offered resistance to the various monarchists, its populists firing up rebellions in 1848, 1851, and 1871. But the working classes they wanted to represent were divided, the urban populace pitted against the peasantry, with the former inclined to social revolution and the latter opting for stability. Consensus was needed among conservatives (including Catholics), moderate republicans (the opportunistes), and broad sections of the middle class. If the French bourgeoisie was divided over how to pursue national interests in Alsace and Lorraine, Germany, the rest of Europe, and the overseas colonies, the majority agreed on the need for order, stability, and peace at home. Some coherence in republican ideology was provided by its leaders, many of whom were anticlerical Freemasons opposed to the influence of the Church in the secular domain. 26 These included Gambetta (initiated in 1869), Jules Simon (1870), Jules Ferry (1875), and two presidents of the Republic, Jules Grévy and Félix Faure. 27 In lieu of the preeminence of faith over reason, Freemasons, according to 25.  Haussmann fixed the rent of the Cirque Napoléon, which belonged to the city, as a proportion of concert receipts. Journal officiel, 15 February 1878, 1580. 26.  Ironically, Freemasons used the concept of “moral order” in the late 1860s to describe a democracy in which everyone governs themselves according to a “universal moral dictated by natural law or universal religion” and seeks “the order of familial and social harmony.” Freemasons considered clericalism the “adversary of natural moral order.” See Le Gérant fondateur, “Le Passé et le présent, le surnaturel et le naturel,” and “Qu’est-ce que la bonne nouvelle du XIX siècle?” La Bonne Nouvelle du XIXe siècle 1 (March–April 1868): 1–3. 27.  Other Freemasons served variously as minister of foreign affairs, of commerce and industry, and of public instruction and fine arts. The latter included Ferry (1879–81, 1882, 1883), Pierre Berthelot (1886), Eugène Spuller (1887), Edouard Lockroy (1888), and Léon Bourgeois (1890, 1892, 1898). The number of Freemasons grew in France from 10,000 in 1862 to 20,000 in 1889. Pierre Miquel, La Troisième Republique (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 362–67, and Jérôme Grévy, La République des opportunistes, 1870–1885 (Paris: Perrin, 1998), 141–49.

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their 1877 Constitution, believed in “the search for truth, the study of universal morality, science and art . . . liberty of conscience and human solidarity.”28 Their camaraderie helped them to push through legislation (particularly on education) and build political alliances. Freemasonry may also have predisposed its members to see value in music and festivals, since they sang at their banquets. Many republican leaders, including Jules Simon, also espoused Saint-Simonian ideas from earlier that century, especially a belief in the “care and salvation of the collectivity.”29 They wished to shift power from the landed aristocracy to bourgeois entrepreneurs, believed in scientific progress, and saw art as a means of influencing people’s behavior.30 Most (including Ferry and Gambetta) were lawyers, too, and pragmatic as well as utopian humanists. 31 And all were members of the bourgeoisie, a class determined by education more than by birth, who believed in eloquence and the written word, respectability, and consideration—qualities that made them well-suited to public administration. 32 This combination of reason, progress, pragmatism, and public service proved an increasingly compelling alternative to the restoration of privilege and the dominance of the nobility and clergy. With republicans joined by liberal-minded Orléanists, feeling betrayed by the reactionary politics of the Moral Order, a new constitution was passed on 29 January 1875, which instituted a new Chambre des députés and a Senate. The next day, the government became known as the Republic.33 Republicans were not in control until March 1876, when elections brought a majority of them into the new Chambre. In December 1876, Mac-Mahon summoned the moderate Simon to form a government.34 In rising from minister of public instruction, religion, and the fine arts to prime minister, Simon (and later 28.  Charles Sowerine, France since 1870: Culture, Politics, and Society (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 42–45. On the radical utopianism this implied, see Nord, Republican Moment, chap. 1. 29.  Hanotaux, Contemporary France, 2: 701. 30.  For these ideas earlier in the century, see Ralph Locke, Music, Musicians and the SaintSimonians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 31.  From 1877 to 1914, one minister in three was a lawyer, as were many in the Chambre des députés. All were trained in writing, public speaking, and statesmanship. See Nord, Republican Moment, chap. 6. 32.  Hanotaux, Contemporary France, 2: 545–47. 33.  The vote was 353 to 352. Before this, apparently no one had formally named the regime. See Furet, Revolutionary France, 530. In his Contemporary France, 3: 341, Hanotaux explains that some on the monarchical Right voted for the Republic because the attempt at a “fusion” among themselves had failed and the comte de Chambord, the Legitimist pretender, insisted on restoration of the white Bourbon Banner as the flag of France. 34.  Simon was also a member of the Académie française and of the new Senate beginning in 1876.

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many of his successors, a third of whom made a similar move within the government) helped make arts and education policy an integral part of national policy. The republicans’ support for music was based on its public utility, not paternalism. They continued to support orphéons, the concerts populaires, and opera, but considered philanthropy, in Simon’s words, “an ineffective response to the needs of the working poor.”35 They also saw music as a way to build class unity among the bourgeoisie. Antonin Guillot de Sainbris, Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, and others directed amateur choruses for the bourgeoisie and upper classes, including women and girls. To elevate the genre, they commissioned new works from major French composers. Instead of bowing to the lowest common denominator, they wanted artists to “raise the level of art and reform the taste of the public.” This required music that could compete with the musique frelatée (not pure, not natural) of the cafés-concerts, perceived as unhealthy and immoral, together with numerous occasions for ordinary people to hear it. 36 And it meant challenging the taste and music that had dominated the Second Empire and its limited definitions of bourgeois society. Saint-Saëns thought that the bourgeoisie hated art and pushed composers to express “little ideas.” If music, language, and society were to remain interconnected (and not just through the model of “conversation,” as Hervé Lacombe brilliantly observes of opera in the 1860s), and if public taste were to remain a criterion of judgment, it was necessary to lay the foundations for a more enlightened public opinion, one that would demand more from life. 37 Considering the French as “great by their intelligence and character,” Jules Simon called for “noble” works.38 In 1876, Saint-Saëns likewise called on composers to “be great, be strong, be sublime” instead of writing music that was “easy to understand.”39 Subsidized theaters should have “a more elevated, more noble goal” than mere 35.  Janet Horne, “Presenting Modern France: The Rhetoric of Reform at the 1889 Universal Exhibition,” in Unfinished Revolutions: Legacies of Upheaval in Modern French Culture, ed. Robert Denommé and Roland Simon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1998), 156. 36.  Ernest L’Epine, “A propos des auditions périodiques,” Ménestrel, 24 February 1878, 103. 37.  In his Les Voies de l’opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), Hervé Lacombe points out that “the idea of satisfying public taste at any price” was the most notable characteristic of French lyric opera during the Second Empire. As Daniel Auber once put it, “to please is to succeed.” This opera pandered to the bourgeois taste for “the pretty, the gracious, and the light.” Lacombe compares it to conversation and describes the aesthetic as “marked by a savoir-vivre transposed onto music,” characterized by politeness, elegance, and a preference for the real over the ideal (23, 294–98). 38.  This came in discussing funding of the national theaters in 1872. See Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 44, 408–9. 39.  Saint-Saëns, Harmonie et Mélodie, cited in Lacombe, Voies de l’opéra français, 295.

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entertainment and should help “refine [épurer] public taste.”40 Because ideally a “stream of tightly unified emotions” bonds “the soul of the composer and that of the listener,”41 music, in expressing such aspirations, could contribute to the common good. Thus, even before the republicans were in power, they looked to musical practices to help lay the foundation for republican values. Under the Moral Order then, a new patriotism and taste for the serious pushed aside Second Empire frivolity and hedonism, even if, while Mac-Mahon and the monarchists were in power, some works written during the Second Empire continued to dominate the Opéra and Opéra-Comique. These institutions remained for the elites, regardless of their politics. Composers who had made careers earlier, such as Gounod and Ambroise Thomas, also thrived. But as republican power grew, the musical world grew increasingly open to new voices and attentive to new values. Certainly, patriotism revived l’esprit public, but, perceived as a vice as much as a virtue,42 it was not enough. While conservatives embraced laws and preventative censorship to assure public order and police public morality, republicans wished to develop mutually agreed upon mœurs that would not only discipline personal desires and internalize public values but also build a civic society characterized by “widespread trust” and “confident mutual reliance.”43 Whatever instilled such mœurs, such as music, could play a significant role in establishing the conditions of democracy and articulating its legitimacy.

Shaping Mœurs To inculcate bourgeois values broadly in the population, help people imagine community, and build support for republicanism, the opportunistes needed not “identity thinking”—useless in a country whose divisions were rarely rigid and often bridged by alliances—but rather an “action-oriented sets of beliefs” that would legitimate their power and help turn their ideals into reality. 44 They wanted 40.  Ernest Reyer, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats, 27 September 1873. 41.  See Antoine Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale et considérations sur le beau dans les arts (Paris: Heugel & fils, 1884), 259, 261, 275. 42.  H. Eugène Carlu, Etudes sur la république démocratique et morale (Mantes: Beaumont, 1883), 6–15, 26. 43.  Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 281. See also chap. 1, n. 94. 44.  In thinking about the internal divisions within France, Adorno’s and Fredric Jameson’s concept of ideology as a form of “identity thinking”—“a rigid opposition between the self or familiar, which is positively valorized, and the non-self or alien, which is thrust beyond the boundaries of intelligibility,” as Terry Eagleton puts it—is not as useful as his own notion of an “action-oriented set of beliefs” in his Ideology (New York: Verso, 1991). Since ideas like

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people to desire democracy and support the survival of the Republic. For this, they needed mœurs that brought personal meaning into the social arena and could adapt to multiple contexts and experiences as fluidly and relevantly as the concept of utility. Because this was long a concern of the Church as well, it was necessary to theorize mœurs from a specifically republican perspective. No one did this better than Jules Simon. Although historians have given him little attention, Simon best represents the moral position of the républicains opportunistes, with links going back to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Robespierre. 45 A student of Michelet’s as well as a protégé of Victor Cousin’s, Simon took on traditional notions of religion, public education, work, and the working class in numerous books, most of which appeared in multiple editions. Among the most important are Le Devoir (Duty) (1854; 8th ed., 1867) and Dieu, patrie, liberté (God, country, freedom) (1883). 46 Like his colleagues, Simon hoped that certain virtues and values, if understood as desirable and natural, would help people transcend their troubling social divisions, find internal cohesion, and stimulate long-lasting stability. In Le Devoir, he points to two sources of order in a society that combat or control internal differences: laws and mœurs. Mœurs has multiple meanings here. It refers to the habits, customs, manners, and practices of society, as well as those of individuals, whether they

liberty, equality, and fraternity do not always connote the same things to everyone, ideology from this perspective is a process for producing “meanings, signs, and values in social life,” a self-conscious construction in constant process of being negotiated and changed, depending on “who is saying what to whom for what purposes.” It concerns “the actual uses of language between particular human subjects for the production of specific effects” (1–2, 5–6, 9, 126). This emphasis on the use of language harks back to the concerns of Aulard and the revolutionary orators and stresses the means of communication for instilling an ideology. It leaves room for differences rather than an insistence on absolute consensus, especially important during periods of dissent and instability. 45.  Claude Nicolet discusses the origins of the moral aspect of republican ideology in his L’Idée républicaine en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), esp. 492–97. 46.  During the Second Empire, Jules Simon published editions of Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche and wrote book-length essays on religion (1856), political and civil liberty (1859), female workers (1861), popular instruction (1864), work (1866), radical politics (1868), the death penalty (1869), and the family (1869). During the Third Republic, he wrote books on politics, L’Instruction gratuite et obligatoire (1873), La Réforme de l’enseignement secondaire (1874), Le Livre du petit citoyen (1880), Dieu, patrie, liberté (1883), Une Académie sous le Directoire (1884), Victor Cousin (1887), and La Femme (1891), an introduction to the Rapport du jury international: Exposition universelle internationale de 1878 à Paris, as well as several memoirs. Simon was also a professor, journalist, and organizer of the 1878 Universal Exhibition and the labor section of the 1889 Exhibition. For an analysis of his ideas as they relate to arts policy, see Miriam R. Levin, Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986).

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agree with the social norms or not. The word also connotes morals, or the beliefs and principles underlying behavior, encompassing not just practical wisdom, but also sacrifice and devotion. 47 Mœurs, like utility, articulate the malleable boundary between various interests in a society; at the same time, they negotiate a relationship between beliefs and behavior. In the context of postrevolutionary thinking about the permeability of private and public values, mœurs takes on a specific meaning for Simon. As he puts it, laws repress more than they prevent; they punish but don’t destroy wrongful tendencies; they are only external forces and sometimes veil hatred and discord. Mœurs, by contrast, “make laws useless and disorder impossible; they lead everyone to conduct themselves voluntarily as the law would command.” To the extent that people share certain mœurs, Simon posits, idealistically, citing Plato, every citizen should have “no other interest or care than the well-being of the Republic.”48 The Revolution, Simon points out, was accomplished in the name of “liberty through the law” and “fraternity in mœurs.”49 Whereas laws had gone a long way toward assuring certain liberties, fraternité—the sense of belonging derived from family, but meaning more than blood ties among people, the belief in the existence of an emotional bond and solidarity among humans (related to the republican notion of le peuple)—remained “only a word.” During the Revolution, some argued that fraternity came from sharing affections and called for a new “communal liturgy” in the huge outdoor festivals that brought people together to hear moral instruction and participate in patriotic singing and dancing.50 But gradually the country’s tendency to skepticism and sometimes hypocrisy undermined the trust underlying common values. The remedy, Simon argued, was education. Fraternité, he suggested, could only be engendered through reaching children at an early age, “no one having the will or the power to restrain the freedoms of a mature person.”51 Among the values Simon believed would most encourage “fraternity in mœurs” was love of family, 52 which Cicero had defined as the foundation of the Roman 47.  Félix Pécaut, L’Education publique et la vie nationale (Paris: Hachette, 1897), xxiii. 48.  Jules Simon, Le Devoir, 8th ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1867), 187–88. 49.  Ibid., 416. As Marie-Joseph Chénier pointed out in his Rapport fait à la Convention nationale au nom du Comité d’instruction publique (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, an III [1794– 95]), important new values like liberty not only needed wise laws to be strengthened, but also mœurs to be perpetuated. 50.  Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, Essai sur la propagation de la musique en France, sa considération, et ses rapports avec le gouvernement (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, an IV [1795–96]), 27, 28. 51.  Simon, Devoir, 416–18. 52.  Simon, Dieu, patrie, liberté, 12th ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883), 298.

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Republic. Ideally, the members of a family would feel active sympathy for one another. A father’s love is the origin and source of all devotion, Simon asserted. Although in the late 1860s, he saw increasing individual freedom threatening the “spirit of family,” what republicans wanted to encourage was not the “spirit of family as it existed in our old society,” based on political and legal ties, but rather the “feelings and duties of family” emanating from “natural and moral” ties that needed strengthening.53 Simon’s point was to suggest that love of family gives rise to love of patrie (or fatherland)—something “useful for the prosperity of the state.”54 When asked in 1870, “Is Alsace German or French?” Fustel de Coulanges said that patrie is “what one loves.”55 Songs in republican school manuals later stressed a connection between home and love of family with patrie and love of country.56 Such a loose definition allowed those using it to avoid potentially divisive political connotations, offend as few people as possible, and concentrate on what was shared. As a poet put it in 1875, “I was looking for meaning, I found it in love. . . . To love God, one’s parents, and one’s fellow man is to carry out the laws going back to the prophets.”57 A problem arises, however, when different kinds of love clash, as when a family member needed at home is called upon to defend his country. Simon acknowledged these “principles and feelings that conflict with one another” as characteristic of complex, multifaceted people. Rejecting Stoic and Roman answers to this dilemma—necessarily choosing country over family—he proposed that “we must try to reconcile rather than stifle” these inner contradictions. 58 His key to resolving them was duty [devoir]. For Simon, duty was not a legal obligation or an implied contract, such as between soldier and country, requiring coercive means to ensure its enactment. It was a rational feeling that came naturally, expressing 53.  See M. Guizot cited by Eugène Spuller in the introduction to his speeches, Au Ministère de l’Instruction publique (Paris: Hachette, 1888), xxi. 54.  Simon, Devoir, 190. One should remember that Robespierre defined patrie as consisting of those who possessed “virtue,” or morals. 55.  Cited in Raoul Girardet, Le Nationalisme français, 1871–1914 (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 64. Nicolet, Idée républicaine, 498–99, sees a “confusion of the spiritual and the temporal” in republican notions of patrie and attributes the attempted “sacralization” of the Republic and its politics to the use of such words. 56.  See, e.g., in Adolphe-Léopold Danhauser, Les Chants de l’école, vol. 1 (Paris: Lemoine, 1881), “La Patrie” with text by Arrenaud: “La patrie est le foyer / Béni de notre enfance”; also in Oscar Petit and Charles Manso, Chants scolaires du nord de la France (Tourcoing: RosoorDelattre, 1885), “Hyme à la patrie (a school song for boys and girls): “Nous adorons la France /  Du fond de notre Cœur . . .  / La France est notre mère.” 57.  Télémaque-Charles Maureau, Etude de l’Ordre moral (Périgueux: Dupont, 1875). 58.  Simon, Devoir, 188, 418–20.

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a deeper concept of the person.59 While we may think of duty as opposed to love, or, as Corneille depicts it, synonymous with glory, Simon saw it as the reflection and expression of love. In other words, whereas today we might think of duty as something we are bound to despite what we love, Simon understood duty as what we feel because of what we love. Love in this sense means putting the interests of others over self-interest. Duty expresses love’s extent and determines its limits. 60 Duty to family, other citizens, and the state, as Simon saw it, should shape one’s will, behavior, and mœurs in the service of some interest greater than one’s own. In his introduction to an 1880 school manual about civic instruction, the republican deputy Paul Bert wrote similarly that duty is what one learns when one loves and understands the motives and consequences of love, that is, how to give back. 61 Jules Ferry thought of duty as loving the patrie like a mother and obeying it like a father. 62 Late nineteenthcentury French republicans saw duties as the natural consequence and companion of rights for individuals as well as governments. Earlier generations of republicans had concentrated on citizens’ rights and worked to establish certain freedoms, but a pronounced need remained for more fraternité and the “teaching and promoting” of citizens’ duties. Duty, the essence of one’s utility to one’s country, thus became central to the Third Republic’s moral agenda. By defining patriotism as an extension of familial feelings, and duty as patriotism in action, Simon turned ideas into feelings that seemed inborn, easily understood. They could be encouraged by education, but were not dependent on it. Such a notion neither derived from religious convictions, as it often did for the French Right, nor relied only on concepts of French greatness and pride, which charac59.  Simon’s concept of duty was influenced by Cousin, from whom he learned that “the voice that sometimes commands me to prefer suffering to pleasure and to sacrifice my own interest and even my life to the general interest is an inner voice that resounds from within my reason and speaks a different language than that of the world” (Simon, Cousin, 47). As such, duty comes from reason. 60.  Although Simon advocated protecting love for family and country as “sanctuaries of our most tender feelings,” he also believed that love should have limits. In the case of arguing that love for humanity prevents one from going to war, this love for humanity—loving everyone to justify loving no one in particular—is “only an illusion” (Devoir, 193–94). This harks back to the Revolution, when school manuals emphasized that “love of patrie must be our first duty and our first feeling.” James A. Leith, “French Republican Pedagogy in the Year II,” Canadian Journal of History 3, 1 (March 1968): 60. 61.  Paul Bert, L’Instruction civique à l’école (Paris: Alcide Picard & Kaan, n.d.), 5, from Bert’s speech to the Chambre on 6 December 1879 in which he proposed a new law introducing civic instruction into elementary schools. This little book stayed in print at least through its 29th edition (1905). In 1886, Bert was also resident-general of Annam and Tonkin, where he died. 62.  Jean Foucambert, L’Ecole de Jules Ferry (Paris: Retz, 1986), 169.

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terized patriotism for the extreme Left. 63 Patriotism, as articulated by Simon and Bert, helped republicans address feelings of naturalness and belonging on which many could agree. It spoke to their need for legitimacy and consensus. Simon later credited the “powerful inspiration of patriotism” with getting the French through the war of 1870, but he bemoaned the return of skepticism and patriotism’s gradual retreat from their consciousness in the late 1880s. 64 The sociologist and philosopher Alfred Fouillée later agreed that patriotism was the best way to teach morality. However, he was more optimistic and rejoiced in how much patriotism had come to affect the hearts of French youth by the 1890s. 65

Music, Morals, and Mœurs The French were divided over whether mœurs could be rationally and scientifically taught, or whether they are “not so much learned as inspired” or “breathed [respirés].” Novels and short stories published in installments in newspapers provided the masses and the bourgeoisie with various perspectives on their lives and suggestions for self-improvement. Simon, among others, believed that citizens had a duty to “develop their capacities through exercise and culture.”66 As more and more people learned to read (subscriptions to the working-class newspaper Le Petit Journal increased from 220,000 in 1872 to 700,000 in 1882), the press grew into an increasingly powerful influence on society’s mœurs. 67 Since the Revolution, music had been considered, not just a “thermometer of mœurs,” but also, through affecting our feelings, a powerful influence on mœurs. 68 Some believed it could be extremely useful in instilling values, for, unlike print journalism (or poetry, from Plato’s perspective), “it can’t lie.” Oscar Comettant explained: Of all the arts, music [that is, pure music, music without words] is the only one in which it is impossible to be dishonest, the only one that does not allow 63.  Agulhon juxtaposes these two kinds of patriotism in his French Republic, 1879–1992, 5. 64.  Jules Simon, Nos Hommes d’état (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1887), chap. 1 on “La patrie,” 5–10. 65.  Alfred Fouillée, Education from a National Standpoint, trans. W. J. Greenstreet (New York: Appleton, 1892), 214–15. 66.  Simon, Devoir, 390. 67.  For contemporary French reading tastes and habits, see Anne-Marie Thiesse, Le Roman du quotidien: Lecteurs et lectures populaires à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 68.  In his “De l’enseignement public de l’art musical à l’époque moderne,” Ménestrel, 15 October 1876, F.-A. Gevaert considers this idea so clear as not to need demonstration (365).

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for showing a perverse feeling or vicious thought. What is dishonesty? It is a transgression against the good and the just with which man is born and which makes up the conscience of every responsible being. To do something against the good and the just, one would have to struggle against one’s conscience and, to hide it from others who disapprove, conceal it and, if necessary, lie. One cannot conceal or lie by means of music. . . . The only feelings it evokes are those of order and justice, along with the feeling of the beautiful. . . . Music is thus essentially an honest art, the most honest of all arts . . . because it lacks anything that could corrupt a weak mind by either the sight of external objects or nasty sophisms. 69

Suggestive of the revolutionary notion of transparency in terms of music’s capacity to influence people, music was thought not to lie because it has the capacity to communicate the unveiled truth.70 As Antoine Marmontel put it, “the first law of the beautiful in the arts is la vérité d’expression [truthful expression], the idealized but also living and true manifestation of a thought, a passion.”71 Truth for many late nineteenth-century French, especially Freemasons, meant moral truth, truths that both regulate and inspire mœurs.72 The popular music weekly Journal de musique, perhaps to attract subscribers, echoed this in its first issue in 1876: “Alone among the arts, [music] is the translation of moral feelings. The cry of passion, the idealized accent of feeling makes a melody, the movement of the soul furnishes the rhythm.”73 That is, just as feelings are usually imprecise but understood through one’s attitude or behavior, those “translated” by music, equally diffuse, are communicated through tone, accent, and movement. Republicans believed that music encouraging transparency to the truth gives rise to a taste for order and beauty in life as well as in art; it can express moral virtue and encourage progress. “Expressive truth” should be the “first quality” of French 69.  Oscar Comettant, “De l’Influence de la musique sur le style littéraire,” in John GrandCarteret, ed., J.-J. Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin 1890), 410–11. 70.  During the Revolution, transparency was understood as antithetical to theatricality, associated with appearances, dissimulation, corruption, and the hypocritical aristocratic culture of the Ancien Régime. While monarchists were thought to “hide their political and social action under the mask of religion,” First and Third republicans looked to transparency, because linked to sympathy, as the basis for a new society. Fabre d’Eglantine believed that sympathy was the foundation of morality and the basis of all virtue and that the arts could nurture it. See Maslan, Revolutionary Acts, 4, 79, 121, and Eugène Spuller, Hommes et choses de la Révolution (Paris: Alcan, 1896), 301. 71.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 246, 255. 72.  Pécaut, Education publique, xxii. 73.  Journal de musique, 21 October 1876, 2.

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music, “transparency” the “essence” to which the young French musician should “cling as a soldier to his flag.”74 What made the subject of music and mœurs of particular concern in the 1870s was the perceived threat to mœurs posed by popular culture, the “invasion of bad taste,” as Minister of Public Instruction, Religion, and Fine Arts Agénor Bardoux called it, especially in urban centers. Both Moral Order politicians and republican educators attacked cafés-concerts for leading to the “ruin of mœurs as well as the ruin of music,” their “antisocial and antimusical” nature making musicians “slaves to public whims.” 75 They looked to art music to “strengthen resistance to the invasion . . . of bad taste, bad literature in all its forms, and especially cafés-concerts, the most formidable competitor of great music.”76 Some felt that its study taught one to “distinguish the expression of laudable and virtuous feelings from the expression of despicable and criminal ones.”77 Republicans and monarchists agreed on the need for an art that was “true” and “noble,” an art that “consoles and fortifies,” helping people to resist anything that would corrupt their spirit and their mœurs.78 Legislators concurred that the goal of subsidizing music was “raising the level of art and reacting against the public’s pronounced taste for light works of an inferior order, associated with periods of decadence.”79 Because of its narrative use of these musical attributes, opera was particularly able to serve as an embodiment of mœurs. 80 No one questioned its capacity to represent. What was important was its transparency, not just to rational thinking, but also, and especially, to character and sentiment, as if these, perhaps more than ideas, were capable of influencing those of a listener. In opera, the simplest way to promote or reinforce certain mœurs was for the librettist to identify them with 74.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 421; Victor Wilder, “Semaine théâtrale” (review of Massenet’s Eve), Ménestrel, 20 April 1873, 163. 75.  Albert Dupaigne, Le Chant dans les écoles (Paris: Delagrave, 1878), 12; Bardoux, Journal officiel, 15 February 1878, 1580. 76.  Ibid., also cited in Ernest L’Epine, “A propos des auditions périodiques,” Ménestrel, 24 February 1878, 103. 77.  Adolphe le Doulcet, marquis de Pontécoulant, La Musique à l’Exposition Universelle de 1867 (Paris: Art musical, 1868), 150. 78.  A.-E. Vaucorbeil, “Mémoire présenté à l’Assemblée nationale,” Ménestrel, 26 June 1874, 270. 79.  M. de Tillancourt at the Assemblée nationale, cited in Henri Moreno [Henri Hengel], “Semaine théâtrale et musicale,” Ménestrel, 2 August 1874, 275. 80.  By referent, like Tia DeNora, I am less interested in what music may signify than in how it serves as “a cultural ‘work space’ for the articulation of meaning and action, a real structure upon which one can ‘map’ or ‘hang’ non-musical associations and activities.” See DeNora, “The Musical Composition of Social Reality: Music, Action, and Reflexivity,” Sociological Review 43 (May 1995): 306, 309.

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sympathetic characters and for the composer to translate their feelings into music. With music and character serving as a ground for understanding one another, music and texts were “co-productive of each other.” In other words, “we look for ways that the music ‘illustrates’ character and plot and we look for how plot and characterization help to clarify the dramatic import of the music.”81 If the words and music do not make the message clear, seeing the action on stage could suffice. Gounod once rejected a libretto he had commissioned from his longtime collaborator Jules Barbier because its final gesture seemed to condone adultery. 82 To understand its ideological impact, however, one should not think of opera, even grand opera supported by the state, as propaganda. As Lacombe points out, it is the reception of the work in a given context that shapes its meaning. 83 Critics sometimes discuss the ideological dimensions of libretti, especially when patriotic. At other times, they ignore such issues. Summaries of libretti (which inevitably began all theatrical reviews, sometimes to serve as a “guide” for the musical analysis that follows) 84 made listeners aware of the situations and feelings with which they might identify, whether tragic or humorous, idealistic or caught up in the struggles of life. Reviews could also suggest what kind of imaginative leaps and compassion might be appropriate responses. As André Michael Spies has argued, such a context helped to define and promote values useful to the dominant elites precisely because it often implicitly reproduced their prejudices. To the extent that appealing, uncontroversial stories seemed ideologically neutral because they expressed the interests of the opera-going public, they would tend to encourage uncritical acceptance of their values. 85 81.  Ibid., 308. This argument has a long history in analysis of music-text productions, particularly of Wagner, and is most pertinent when music and text leave expressive space for one another. Not everyone, however, has agreed. In 1875 some critics believed that a libretto’s language “matters little,” especially since feelings can be expressed by music. For a discussion of this in nineteenth-century opera, see Lacombe, Voies de l’opéra français, 146 and chap. 6. 82.  In his Opera, State, and Society in the Third Republic, 1875–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), based on studying 138 French operas, André Michael Spies makes a strong case for taking opera libretti seriously. He points out that Gounod rejected Barbier and Carré’s adaptation of Dante’s Francesca da Rimini because the last act portrayed Beatrice assuming Paolo and Francesca into heaven in spite of their illicit affair. In its place, Gounod set their libretto on a Christian martyr. Polyeucte premiered at the Opéra in 1878 (3, 4). 83.  Hervé Lacombe, “The ‘Machine’ and the State,” in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 35. 84.  Paul Bernard, “Théâtre national de l’Opéra: Le Roi de Lahore,” Revue et gazette musicale, 6 May 1877, 138. 85.  Spies, Opera, State, and Society, 12–13. For Spies, this reinforced the cultural hegemony of French elites: “Unable to recognize their own values, conveyed through the medium of opera, the audience elites genuinely believed that opera had no ideological function. As long

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Music by Meyerbeer, a Freemason, remained popular at the Opéra in the 1870s, as well as Gounod’s Faust (1859), a Christian drama, which entered the Opéra’s repertoire in 1869. 86 But it was perhaps Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon, the most successful work at the Opéra-Comique from its premiere in 1866 through the next three decades, that best addressed the heart of Simon’s concerns. 87 Jules Barbier and Michel Carré’s libretto, based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, promoted a paternalist society structured by familial love. Mignon, we are told, comes from “a faraway country”; her origins are as unclear as those of Maeterlinck’s Mélisande. As the male characters point out, she is the embodiment of “grace and charm,” but also innocent, simple, and, above all, naïve. The men around her constantly refer to her as a “poor child,” and she implicitly calls on men (and God) to protect her. When the gypsies trot her out to dance at a tavern, she prays to the Virgin Mary, but it is two men who come to her defense, Lothario and Wilhelm. The latter subsequently buys her freedom. When Wilhelm asks her about her name, her age, and her parents, the music pulls back. Rather than lively, rhythmically punctuated recitative, Mignon responds that she doesn’t know, in a series of bare, repeated C#s, alone and accompanied by a violin, that suggests her lack of voice as well as touching simplicity (ex. 4a). This recalls Marguerite’s song on a single note in the garden scene of Faust, when she wonders who Faust is. 88 But when Mignon remembers her home and begins to dream of it, she modulates to Dƒ major and sings a strophic song dolce with a lilting boatlike rhythm in 6/8 expressing nostalgia for her homeland, “Connais-tu le pays où fleurit l’oranger” (ex. 4b). Thomas’s achievement lay not only in the easily remembered tunes, but also in the manner in which his music translates character, its expressivity communicating as the opera repertoire bore messages compatible with their interests, critics, librettists, audiences, and the Tout-Paris of the opera failed to remark that it did so, because such messages seemed to them to be common sense, and therefore unremarkable” (177). Such an observation recalls current race theory focused on the blindness many whites have to race when it applies to themselves. 86.  The Opéra produced a thousand performances of Les Huguenots by 1903 and of Faust by 1905. 87.  Reputedly Jules Barbier had written the libretto for Meyerbeer, who found it too light, and then offered it to Gounod, who found it too serious. 88.  Steven Huebner points out in “Gounod,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie et al. (New York: Grove, 2001), “how bold the understated first appearance of Marguerite” in the first act of Faust appeared to early audiences. In their “Faust et Mignon face à la presse” in Sillages musicologiques, ed. Philippe Blay and Raphaëlle Legrand (Paris: Conservatoire national de Paris, 1997), Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï and Hervé Lacombe see this simple writing as the effect of a science rentrée; the grace of these charming works is the result of their composers’ immense erudition and knowledge (103).

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Ex. 4  Thomas, Mignon (1866), act 1. a.  Recitative, Wilhelm and Mignon. When Wilhelm first meets Mignon, the scene turns ex.4a Pasler.UCP from traditional recitative, accompanied by a momentary orientalist passage, to one of extreme simplicity and weighty suspense as Mignon sings on a single pitch.

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truth. 89 The laughter and exuberant vocalises of Philine, whose tunes often include leaping octaves, grace notes, and virtuoso showmanship and borrow rhythms of the polka and waltz, give musical form to her seductive playfulness, pride, and self-confidence (ex. 5). In contrast, Mignon’s mezzo voice and more restrained melodic lines suggest her modest, pious, affectionate, and docile nature, as well as her touching sadness. The contrast of music underlines that of character. The challenge of listening involves negotiating one’s attraction to Philine’s gaiety, laughter, and liveliness with one’s empathy for Mignon’s sweetness amid her suffering and loneliness. In act 3, Wilhelm must rise to this challenge when Philine’s music interrupts his love duo with Mignon. There is irony here for, as Mignon and Wilhelm 89.  A critic for Ménestrel, 8 March 1868, noted that Mignon, Philine, and others “have a way of expressing themselves musically specific to each of them and analogous to their temperament as well as the situations. This individualization of the elements of lyric drama, including the instrumentation accompanying each of them, is a new concept whose success is complete.” Cited in Elisabeth Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas, ou la tentation du lyrique (Besançon: Cêtre, 1994), 217.

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Ex. 5  Thomas, Mignon, act 2, “Je suis Titania la blonde.” At this point in act 2 of Mignon, the theater troupe has just performed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Philine in the role of Titania, queen of the fairies. After the performance, crowds cheer for Philine with cries of “Philine is truly divine!” ex.5 Pasler.UCP Intoxicated by her success, she reprises her role by singing this virtuoso polonaise, in which her own character blends with that of Titania.

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sing of their happiness, three out of every four measures of their opening melody are unstable, with an accented second beat emphasized by leaping up an interval of a sixth. Still, in the end, he chooses her naïve sincerity and innocence over the manipulative charms of the “beautiful enchantress” Philine, and Mignon wins the wealthy, educated Wilhelm as her husband. She also learns that Lothario is her father, the marquis of Cipriani. At the end of the opera, they sing the last lines of her nostalgic strophic song at the octave. With father and the fatherland recuperated, she turns out to be one of “us” and thanks God as the curtain falls. Although in an earlier version, and one written for the German stage, she dies 182

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overwhelmed by happiness, the librettists changed Goethe’s ending to accommodate the conventions of the Opéra-Comique, replacing the death of the young woman with her marriage. Families loved the opera, with its implicit elevation of bourgeois values and normative gender roles: modesty, sincerity, sweetness and restraint in women and dependence on men for their identity; confidence and protective benevolence in men. With a story about a search for origins, the importance of faith as a conduit to truth, and the attendant implications of social stability, such an opera articulated terms on which the bourgeoisie, otherwise divided by politics, might agree. Audiences attended 100 performances in its first eight months. Between 1866 and its 1,000th performance on 13 May 1894, it never left the repertoire of the Opéra-Comique and was performed there an average of 35 times a year (fig. 20). Thomas’s influence on music and, through music, on French mœurs was institutionalized in spring 1871, when Daniel Auber died and Simon was forced to appoint a new director of the Paris Conservatoire. Thomas did not nominate himself, but he felt “public opinion” had already chosen him.90 And he was right. Thomas was ideal for the job. He had been born in Metz in 1811, a city in Lorraine recently lost to the Germans, with the surrender of an army of 140,000, one of the great catastrophes of the war. To defend his country, he had served in the army in 1848 and again in 1871 at the age of 60. He was a patriot, albeit a conservative, and an ideal representative of Moral Order compromise, someone committed to the country’s traditions as well as its regeneration. Thomas had an impressive background as composition professor at the Conservatoire and as member of the Académie des beaux-arts since 1851, when he’d been elected on the first ballot over Berlioz. Highly respected by the most prestigious artists in the country since his stay at the Académie de France in Rome, in 1855, he had served as president of the Institut. Moreover, Thomas had written fifteen choruses for amateur singers in orphéons and was known for opéra-comique, the quintessential French genre. His first success at the Opéra came with Hamlet (1868), a work based on Shakespeare, but cast to foreground bourgeois values: a son’s duty to avenge his father’s wrongful death and the fragile inconstancy of women. With it, Thomas established his reputation as “the most brilliant representative of the French school.”91 In choosing 90.  Arthur Pougin, “Ambroise Thomas, notes et souvenirs,” Ménestrel, 16 February 1896, 51–52. Jules Simon explains in “Ambroise Thomas,” in id., Figures et croquis (Paris: Flammarion, n.d.), 335, that although at first he hesitated between Gounod and Reber, he decided on Thomas in part because Thomas had experience as inspector-general of fine arts. He needed un savant et un patriarche, and Gounod agreed. See Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas, 55–56. 91.  Ménestrel, 3 March 1868, cited in Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas, 47. By March 1874, Hamlet had received 100 performances in Paris, and by 1883, 200.

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Fig. 20  The thousandth performance of Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon. Illustrated supplement of Le Petit Journal, 13 May 1894. This image, published in a newspaper supplement oriented to the working class, features operas that Thomas wrote about three kinds of characters: a poor, simple woman, a noble couple, and a military officer. These suggest a certain balance in his operatic subjects: female and male, poor and rich, simple and elegant and helps explain their immense popularity over time to a broad range of people, both in France and abroad.

Thomas, Simon assured a strong foundation for traditional values in the training of the country’s finest musicians, especially since he remained as director until his death in 1896, and as president of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire, the country’s premiere orchestra and chorus. In hiring his own ex-students to fill its most important positions, Thomas ensured continuity into the next century.92 Simon later praised Thomas, not only for his administrative skill, but also for reestablishing respect in the institution for “old as well as new masters,” guarding against any spirit of exclusion, and caring for students like a father.93 Beyond Thomas’s operas, in the immediate postwar period, many new compositions provided explicit ways to make Simon’s ideals of fraternity and love of patrie accessible, understandable, and desirable to the population at large, including works expressing conflict between individual and collective interests. Leaders of the new Republic thought patriotic works in particular would inspire a sense of unity in the country, as during the Revolution, and confer emotional legitimacy. Among the many explicitly patriotic pieces was Gounod’s very popular motet Gallia: Lamentation (1871), a work that combines patriotism and religious sentiment. After its premiere in London and then by an amateur chorus in Paris,94 concert programs throughout France featured it. For this large choral and orchestral work, whose themes are both grief and revenge, Gounod wrote both words and music: “The idea came to me to represent France as she was, not only conquered and crushed, but also outraged, insulted, violated by the insolence and brutality of her enemy. I thought of Jerusalem in ruins, the moaning of the prophet Jeremiah, and on the first verses of Lamentations, I wrote a biblical elegy called Gallia.”95 Ideally, the work helps listeners bond through mutual pain and suffering and find strength in that connection. The vocal writing is largely syllabic, so that the 92.  Thomas’s students included Théodore Dubois, hired in 1871 to teach harmony, later composition, and from 1896 to 1905, to direct the Conservatory; Massenet as composition professor beginning in 1878; Lenepveu as teacher of harmony in 1880 and composition in 1894; Lavignac as teacher of solfège as of 1875 and harmony in 1895; and Bourgault-Ducoudray as professor of music history starting in 1878, among others. César Franck’s appointment in 1872 as organ professor is often cited as an example of Thomas’s openness to diverse aesthetics. See Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas, 60–61, for twenty other appointees. 93.  Simon, Figures et croquis, cited in Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas, 58. 94.  Guillot de Sainbris’s Choral Society gave the French premiere on 23 July 1871. Thereafter, it was the Société des concerts’ “principal commentary on the siege and the Commune,” according to D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828– 1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 291–92. 95.  Cited from his autobiography, 36–37, in J.-G. Prod’homme and A. Dandelot, Gounod: Sa vie et ses œuvres d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Delagrave, 1911), 123.

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impact of the words can be fully heard; 96 the large orchestra, including four horns and three trombones, functions principally as support for the singers. As the four-part chorus sings, “Here is the city, the queen of all cities, alone, empty,” the orchestra maintains a single chord on G until the cadence—a musical emblem of tenacity. It does so similarly for “Her children cry day and night.” When they sing of “a river of tears,” string figurations intervene between the words as if to tone-paint. Then when the chorus asks God, “the avenger,” for “pardon” (grâce) and arms “against the insolent conqueror,” the music proceeds in two- and fourmeasure blocks, sometimes abruptly juxtaposing different sonorities or alternating between one set of instruments and another without any transition, both groups fortissimo. This serves to build a sense of growing power and strength, a metaphor of what was needed to return to war. Although the religious text is addressed to Catholic France, the use of music to help people to come together in feelings greater than themselves and rebuild the country’s trust and self-confidence harks back to the revolutionaries’ understanding of grandeur in music and constitutes one of the most characteristic aspects of the “heroic style” (style héroïque) in French music of the time. The conservative consensus of the Moral Order stimulated a response in the musical world that built on this sense of national fraternity, especially in the use of Joan of Arc to promote shared notions of patriotism, heroism, and the need for revenge (revanche). Joan, who had emboldened her vanquished countrymen and led them to glory in the fifteenth century, was a model with whom many could identify and from whom the French could take inspiration. She was also a malleable symbol. Monarchists linked her with the Catholic Church, part of their base of support. Joan listened to God through angels’ singing voices and followed His orders—a significant example of the power of music. In 1875, Pope Pius IX wrote the preface to a book on Joan by France’s minister of public education, religion, and fine arts, concluding, “We hope that readers will learn from Joan’s obedience, resolution, and suffering that it is always useful and glorious to submit to the will of God and serve one’s country well.”97 Meanwhile, republicans recognized Joan’s agency: she was a fighter, although a simple peasant from Lorraine. A heroine of the people, she represented masculine pride, strength, and determination. 96.  As superintendent of singing instruction for Paris city schools and director of their choral society for years, Charles Gounod had learned “to utilize large masses of vocal sound so as to develop the maximum of sonority under very simple methods of treatment.” Autobiographical Reminiscences, trans. W. Hely Hutchinson (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 149. 97.  H. Wallon, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1876), ii. The pope’s letter is dated 25 October 1875.

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Jules Barbier’s play with Gounod’s music, first performed at the Théâtre de la Gaîté on 8 November 1873, and Auguste Mermet’s opera, the first work premiered at the new Palais Garnier in 1876, are two among many works about Joan of Arc performed under the Moral Order government. In his review of the former, the theater critic Auguste Vitu confirmed its patriotic appeal: “Alas, the disasters of recent times have made the story of Joan, la bonne Lorraine, only too contemporary. . . . I cannot speak of this pious girl without emotion, she who saved her country with the sword and the cross and who, in the middle of the rubble of medieval France, founded the religion of la patrie.”98 Republicans erupted at the premiere when the singers referred to the French as “the first people on earth,” some in the upper galleries singing the revolutionary “Ça ira.” Other than several marches and the crucial “melodrama” scenes, Gounod’s music is almost entirely choruses. An intimation perhaps of a certain ideal of the people—their unity of mind and spirit—all the choral scenes are largely homophonic and homorhythmic, with much of the music easily singable; members of the chorus sing together, sometimes in unison, perhaps to encourage the audience to imagine their participation in the drama. Some serve narrative purposes, most drive home the central message of the work, the need for collective action. In some ways, the work reaches out to republican interests. Pougin points to Méhul’s music for Chénier’s Timoléon as a predecessor to this “alliance of music and drama” wherein both maintain their integrity.99 Others, including Victorin Joncières and Adolphe Jullien, note references in the work to Méhul’s “Chant du départ.” But some complained that Gounod had also imitated himself too much in this work, making no effort at any renewal.100 Nonetheless at the premiere, “everybody applauded, everybody cried.”101 The work was performed thirty times through February 1874. Mermet’s Jeanne d’Arc reiterates these themes of duty, obedience, and courage and, like other works about Joan, gives a large place to marches and choruses. But here Joan appears simple and domestic, made the more so by love stories added to the tale. Her self-image as weak is important, for it implies that she is not a strong individual by herself and that only in fulfilling her “duty,” that is, in obeying the 98.  Auguste Vitu, “Premières représentations: Gaîté. Jeanne d’Arc,” Figaro, 11 November 1873. 99.  Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 9 November 1873, 395–96. 100.  Most critics focused on references in the work to Méhul’s “Chant du départ,” marches from Halévy’s La Juive and Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, and Gounod’s own Gallia, Faust (the church scene), and Reine de Saba, Prod’homme and Dandelot found in a survey of fifteen reviews of the first performance (Gounod: Sa vie et ses œuvres, 147–49). 101.  Un Monsieur de l’orchestre, “Jeanne d’Arc,” Figaro, 11 November 1873.

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angels’ voices and promising “her life to France, her soul to God” does she find strength within herself. Musically, Mermet reinforces this sense of weakness by depicting her conversion as slow and gradual. The opera ends unlike most other works about her: Joan, despite a dream of burning at the stake, goes off to save France. This suggests that the salvation of France (in its current state of despair) may yet lie ahead. In the early 1890s, concurrent with another alliance of traditional conservatives and the Church, Joan returned to the French stage in a revival of the Barbier-Gounod collaboration, along with many new works about her. 102 Love stories in opera helped promote the notion of love as the basis of patriotism. Many of these dwell on what Simon discusses—what happens when love between a man and a woman clashes with love for one’s country. Predictably, such works often revolve explicitly around the idea of duty and suggest what its obligations imply. The opposition of love and duty was not only the basis of French classical drama (Corneille) and a theme recurring in music history (Lully and Gluck), but also a quintessential republican preoccupation. Libretti chosen for composers to set to music in their final exams at the Conservatoire often revolved around such a conflict. The 1872 cantata libretto Calypso, for example, centers on how duty to country is more powerful than love for a woman. Calypso fights her lover’s call to leave for the sake of “duty” and “glory” by setting fire to his ship. After the institution of the new constitution in 1875, some composers turned to Judith as a model for a patriotism and duty different from that embodied by Joan of Arc. Judith, as the Bible depicts her, is renowned for her tremendous strength of character. Like Joan of Arc, through prayer, Judith calls on God’s strength to overcome her natural weakness. But in the libretto and music for the 1876 Prix de Rome competition, Judith, unlike Joan, looks to feminine charm as the key to conquering her enemies. The irony of their different intentions remains hidden as Judith and the king seduce one another with almost the same words and imitative patterns in the music. In Charles Lefebvre’s three-act opera (1873–76), Judith is praised for her “grace and beauty”; she seems almost French. In this, Ernest Reyer’s Salammbô (begun in 1875), and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1868–77), Judith and strong women like her are arguably allegories for a new kind of power associated with republicans coming into power, also possibly meant to reignite fervor for return to war. In the wake of the defeat by Prussia and the Commune, music thus could help the French reconceive their strengths as a people. With its depiction of strong women 102.  See chapter 12 below and my Useful Music (the forthcoming second book in this trilogy), which contains a chapter on Joan of Arc music.

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and in genres ranging from patriotic choruses to opera, it encouraged imagination of a weakened people as strong—important to Legitimists, Bonapartists, and republicans alike. Although female, Joan and Judith exert agency. They also subsume private desires to public interests and in doing so show how to be transparent to the general will. However, while music about both Joan and Judith echoes Simon’s bold and unusual concept of duty as a form of love, in the former, divine love is connected to duty, whereas in the latter, human love is a foil for duty. The example of Judith suggests that love of one’s country must be as strong and as passionate as love for a beautiful, seductive woman. It is possible that even love stories without explicit patriotic content were valued for teaching about the nature of love, the basis of republican mœurs. Through love, a citizen’s duties and rights come into harmony. To the extent that people empathized or identified with these models of love, the operas both expressed and embodied a political point of view and a certain consensus about French identity. As works on Joan gave way to works on Judith, music recorded shifts in the country’s self-image.103

Republican Pedagogy, Cultural Integration, and Citizenship In addition to addressing the challenges of consensus and legitimacy, the country needed ways to help people transcend their differences, revive their faith in one another, and pull together in ways distinct from those provided by religion. Yet addressing the state’s needs in the context of internal dissension was not an obvious approach, given its long habit of trying to impose unity by decree. Some steps at finding common ground, however, were successful—the military, education, and especially music. Before radical changes could be made to public education, music offered a relatively neutral terrain to work out differences and discover commonalities. It was particularly valuable because it could reach children as well as adults, women as well as men, workers and the petite bourgeoisie as well as the elites. And it did not alienate some more than others or require speaking the same language or dialect. In 1872, the Chambre des députés made three years of military service obligatory for all young men over 20. Although there were exemptions, and the aristocracy still dominated the higher ranks, military service leveled many kinds of differences and provided common experiences for large segments of the population. 103.  See chapter 12 below, Useful Music, and Jann Pasler, “Politics, Biblical Debates and Judith in French Music after 1870,” in The Sword of Judith: Essays, Sources, Images, eds. Elena Ciletti, Henrike Lähnemann, and John Nassichuk (forthcoming).

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For many, the army was consubstantial with la patrie and all that it represented, a kind of “school of national fraternité,” in which divisions in the population were subsumed under a higher cause.104 In place of the revolutionary notion of nation as unifying principle, republican writers and propagandists preferred patrie, an older, less politically tainted concept of the country that was seen as stretching back to the Gauls and Franks. With this focus on patrie came ideas on which Catholics and anticlerical republicans could agree: not only love of country, but also the importance of military virtues and belief in France’s civilizing influence around the world. Since it reached all the population, republicans invested their greatest hope in pedagogy. At the most basic level, illiteracy, as Simon saw it, disinherited people. Teaching everyone to read and write would ensure that everyone was part of the “family” of humanity.105 Republicans considered education and instruction keys to the country’s regeneration, progressive forces that would lead to the moral and intellectual improvement of all humanity. Because they believed, like their revolutionary and Saint-Simonian predecessors, that people adapt and grow in response to their environment, they saw secular education as helping people adopt the mœurs that would render them happy. This would shape their identity and behavior.106 Like Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, republicans also trusted that “man can, by his own efforts, save himself.”107 This implied faith in reason and confidence in a person’s ability to determine his or her own destiny. Republican pedagogy thus focused on teaching people to observe evidence and look for causes and laws, that is, to examine, judge, and seek the natural order of things. As Inspector-General of Public Instruction Félix Pécaut put it in 1871, “the function of the state is to use instruction to place man in a position to develop himself.”108 As such, citizens’ first duty was to self-instruct themselves. A process not dependent on schools or literacy, this could include musical performance and concert attendance. Many motivations underlie this interest. The older generations were exhausted from years of political turmoil and losses suffered during the Franco-Prussian 104.  In his Problèmes politiques du temps présent 1900, E. Faguet remarks, “La patrie is the army and the army is la patrie. . . . The army is, in the precise sense of the word, the conscience of the nation.” Cited in Raoul Girardet, La Société militaire de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 1998), 157–58. 105.  Simon, Dieu, patrie, liberté, 298. 106.  Grand dictionnaire universel, ed. Pierre Larousse (Paris, ca. 1872), 7: 204, 210. 107.  Nicolet, Idée républicaine, 501. For an extended study of the influence of Comte and others on Ferry, Gambetta, and Littré, see chap. 6. 108.  Félix Pécaut, Etudes au jour le jour sur l’Education nationale, 1871–1879 (Paris: Hachette, 1879), 35, 44.

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War. They saw youth as their hope, the most important resource in the country,109 and also understood the need to educate adults about the advantages of republican values. Attributing the German success at Sedan to the vitality of the German educational system, which was both progressive and secular, some thought strengthening French schools would prepare the country for a stronger, more secure future. For education to help heal the nation, they thought, it should educate the whole person, character and spirit along with intellect. Many also hoped a common education would bridge differences in the population, dispel inequalities, and promote a common language across vast provincial differences, a goal articulated during the Revolution but not yet realized. Education would help “domesticate” the working class needed by industry, ideally replacing their oppression and desire to revolt with their cooperation.110 By opening the doors of higher education to the lower classes, it would broaden what might be thought of as the middle class and allow the country to benefit from a wider range of talents. As Jules Ferry put it in 1870, republican leaders believed that only with a sufficiently educated population could universal male suffrage lead to a “healthy democracy.”111 Formal and informal education in its various modes—in school, at home, and through art—promised to solve the need for cultural integration by imbuing common notions of truth, history, and national interest. Walking around Paris, visitors as well as residents can notice the statues and street names alluding to people the French want remembered, even today a surprising number of them French musicians—five from the Revolution and fifty from the nineteenth century.112 Patriotic figures esteemed during the early Third Republic abound, especially Joan of Arc on her horse across from the Tuileries garden on the rue de Rivoli and in front of the Saint-Augustin Church (fig. 21). Like medieval religious leaders who used sculpture and stained-glass windows in their cathedrals to teach stories from the Bible and the good deeds of the saints, republicans used such symbols to remind the French populace of their heroes and heroines and to commemorate critical moments in their history. Like everything else in nineteenth-century 109.  “Rapport adressé à M le Ministre de l’Instruction publique, des cultes, et des beaux-arts par M le Directeur des Beaux-Arts,” 6 August 1878, published as a supplement to Ministère de l’instruction publique, des cultes, et des beaux-arts, Bulletin, 1877–78 (Paris: Société anonyme de publications périodiques, 1878). 110.  Foucambert, Ecole de Ferry, 49. 111.  From his “Discours sur l’égalité dans l’education” (April 1870), cited in Odile Rudelle, “Jules Ferry et le gouvernement de la République,” in Jules Ferry, fondateur de la République, 132. Jules Ferry was elected député from Paris in 1869. 112.  See the list in Nigel Simeone, Paris: A Musical Gazette (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 259–62.

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Fig. 21  Emmanuel Frémiet, statue of Jeanne d’Arc, rue de Rivoli, Paris. Frémiet created this statue in 1874. This depiction of Jeanne suggests her rise in public esteem in France during the nineteenth century, particularly in that it is an equestrian statue—an honor reserved for great military heroes. Her zeal on behalf of both God and country enabled her to stand as an emblem of the conservative Moral Order, and, more recently, of the Front National.

France, these changed over time, depending on which government was in power and the symbols it wished to elevate.113 But their pedagogical function did not. Ideally, republicans hoped education would also encourage social reconciliation, collective idealism, and emotional solidarity, while assuring continuity of republican values over time. Reporting on the 1878 Universal Exhibition, its organizer, Jules Simon, made one’s utility to the country dependent on one’s education: In our current society, everyone must walk or run. Whoever stops is lost. Progress is everywhere. No one is permitted to rest . . . all must now go to school. Before there were battles between peoples, now it is science winning these battles. Who knows the most can do the most. Who can do the most is 113.  For example, the statue of Louis XIV in the Place Vendôme was replaced by a statue of Liberty during the Revolution and later by an imitation of Trajan’s Column, originally crowned with a statue of Napoléon as Caesar. An enormous fleur-de-lis was substituted for the emperor under Louis XVIII, but Louis-Philippe later restored a statue of Napoléon. The Commune took the whole column down in 1871, but in 1874, under impetus from the political Right, seeking to revive a symbol of French military victories, it was rebuilt. For discussion of the reconstruction, see Jane Mayo Roos, Early Impressionism and the French State (1866–1874) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 193–94.

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the master. The people who have the best schools are the number one people. If they are not today, they will be tomorrow. . . . Listen well, citizens, you must study or go under. There is no longer any place in the world for a useless people; there is no place among any people for a useless citizen. No one has the right to stop, no one has the right to rest, no one has the right to be ignorant. Let us begin the holy crusade, the crusade of science. There is no superiority or security other than by it. We must run or die.114

As Gambetta put it in a speech on 2 February 1876, “What constitutes a true democracy is not recognizing equals, it is making them.”115 When republicans took control of the Chambre des députés only weeks later, they took on as many forms of education as possible, seeking to transform what had been the domain of the Church or the home into the public interest. Because significant changes were impossible until a republican government was fully installed in 1879, republicans hoped to influence other educational modes in French society, especially the arts.

The Utility of Arts Education In 1870, when the minister of public instruction simultaneously became minister of fine arts, major changes ensued. Undoing the reforms of 1863, President Thiers restored much of the power over the arts to the Académie des beaux-arts and appointed an academician as director of fine arts.116 At first this administration— run by Catholics, conservative republicans, and academicians—stressed the production of art, particularly inspired by the Great Tradition. In November 1871 the government also restored jurisdiction over the Prix de Rome to the Académie and reestablished the history landscape competition. In 1875, however, the opportuniste deputy Edouard Charton proposed a closer relationship between art and public education.117 And at the inauguration of the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts that 114.  Jules Simon, “Introduction,” in Rapports du jury international (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1880), 459, 576. 115.  Nicolet, Idée républicaine, 492. 116.  Charles Blanc, founder of the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1859, a member of the Académie and long a champion of the Grand Tradition, was first director of fine arts under the Third Republic from 1870 to 1873; he was succeeded by Marquis Philippe de Chennevières from 1873 to 1878. See Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 2. 117.  Michael Orwicz, “Anti-Academicism and State Power in the Early Third Republic,” Art History 14, 4 (December 1991): 572.

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year, Minister of Public Instruction, Religion, and Fine Arts Henri-Alexandre Wallon proclaimed, “the fine arts have a rank equal to that of the sciences and letters.”118 In a culture that valued science highly and in which idealism and positivism intersected for many republicans, this meant a lot. It underlay their belief that taste was teachable and worth teaching. Noting that the state “teaches the arts as it teaches literatures and sciences,” “buys works of art just as it buys books,” and “creates museums as it creates librairies,” as the arts administrator Gustave Larroumet once put it, they envisaged the arts as a “public service” with a function not unlike that of the public schools. This idea of service was the first definition of the role of the arts in a democratic society.119 Acknowledging their educational potential, republican leaders first focused on dessin. Miriam Levin explains that this term combines the active characteristics of drawing with the organizational implications of design. Citing Talleyrand’s suggestion in 1791 for this to be part of elementary school reform, some saw it as a form of social engineering for the lower classes, giving them “an accurate eye, a sure hand, and good habits, for these are the elements of all the trades.”120 Indeed when it was instituted in schools during the Revolution, dessin quickly became one of the most popular classes, attended in particular by sons of artisans.121 It was introduced in state schools in 1833, but only on a limited scale, and then eliminated under the Second Empire in 1850. Republicans wished to extend its instruction to everyone as a universal language that taught students to observe the world around them. As Levin notes, it would bring them “out of a state of self-absorption into active discourse with the surrounding world,” helping them perceive relationships between subjective experience and its equivalent in reality. Dessin also confronted students with the fact that “perfection in a product and in life consisted of the precision and balance attained among the various elements, not in the erasure of distinctions.” It emphasized being “self-critical in the organization of empirical information,” that is, not copying details but analyzing parts and the relationship of parts to whole—learning methodologies that still characterize education in 118.  Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 2, 328. 119.  Gustave Larroumet, L’Art et l’Etat en France (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 291–95. He traces these ideas back to Edouard Charton’s 1875 speech cited in n. 117 above. The notion of public service refers to both the social demands it is meant to address as well as the general interest it is meant to serve. For more on this concept, see Jacques Chevalier, Le Service public (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003), and chapter 1, n. 72, above. 120.  M. Talleyrand-Périgord, “Rapport sur l’instruction publique (10 septembre 1791),” cited in Mainardi, End of the Salon, 70. 121.  Excerpt from minutes of the Conseil d’instruction publique, 16 pluviose an VIII [1800], in Albert Duruy, L’Instruction publique et la Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 395–96.

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France. Republicans considered dessin of great utility to the country, because it would teach everyone, not just to manipulate materials and forms according to a preconceived idea, but also to organize their thoughts and perceptions in coherent ways, follow logical procedures, and work independently. In other words, dessin, as they conceived it, would not only build the technical skills needed by industrial designers, engravers, painters, sculptors, and architects, it would also instill discerning judgment and thereby contribute to building a rational society.122 It would teach taste to students in lycées and those preparing for careers outside the arts.123 Associating drawing with the Ancien Régime aristocracy, the upper classes believed reviving it would help the French rediscover the integration of art and craft, artist and artisan, that had earlier been the “genius of our country,” potentially “raising industry to the dignity of art.”124 Among workers who studied at technical institutions such as the Ecole professionnelle de dessin of the Silversmiths’ and Goldsmiths’ Union, it was thought to encourage students to create new forms, ensuring the future of French industry and thus the prosperity of the country.125 With these ideas in mind in 1876, immediately after winning their first legislative majority, republican legislators passed laws making dessin obligatory in elementary and secondary schools, and in 1877, they created the Ecole nationale des arts décoratifs, supported by the Union centrale des arts decoratifs. Women would not be allowed into this school until 1890, nor into the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts until 1896, but because they were thought to be particularly apt at dessin, they could attend the Ecole nationale de dessin pour les jeunes filles, reorganized in 1881.126 With differences over their goals and teaching methodologies and resistance from the university and the Académie des beaux-arts, some republicans were disappointed that the net effect of this educational project was not as great 122.  The language in this paragraph comes from Miriam Levin, Republican Art and Ideology, 79–85, 107, 111–2, and 244n9. See also Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 23, and Mainardi, End of the Salon. 123.  Paul Dupré and Gustave Ollendorff, Traité de l’administration des beaux-arts, 1 (Paris: Dupont, 1885), cited in Orwicz, “Anti-Academicism and State Power,” 575. 124.  Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 115. 125.  Eugène Spuller, Education de la démocratie (Paris: Alcan, 1892), 231, 238–40. In 1881, Minister Spuller attended the awarding of the union’s annual prizes, just as ministers did at the Ecole des beaux-arts and the Conservatoire. His administration believed that all the arts should be treated as a public service. 126.  Inspecteur des beaux-arts Gruyer, in the ministry’s Bulletin, 1877–78 (cited n. 109 above), 339–40, and Philippe de Chennevières, “Discours prononcé à la distribution des prix,” 11 August 1875, ibid., 365–406. See also Garb, Sisters of the Brush, 77–79.

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as desired.127 Still, this belief in the educational value of art led to the government installing electricity in the 1879 Salon of the newest paintings so that workers could attend in the evenings—an innovation that led to much higher attendance, along with the objection that this threatened the “aristocratic” tone of the exhibition.128 The Office of Museums was attached to the Education Ministry in 1882. In many ways, the equivalent in music to drawing in the visual arts was singing.129 Between 1834 and 1836, singing instruction was made obligatory in elementary schools for girls and an elective in schools for boys, but by 1850 it too had fallen out of favor in schools.130 Along with their efforts to gain control of the government, republicans renewed attention to the importance of teaching singing. Like drawing, it was an activity taught in groups. Drawing instruction was oriented toward getting students to reproduce the same images, and republicans thought of singing as even more inherently social. In singing, voices blended together to produce one thing. Certainly, both taught the discipline and method of work and prepared those with talent to pursue more specialized training. However, singing also gave people opportunities to tune their expression to that of others and enjoy the pleasure of reaching collective harmony.131 Harking back to Plato, some believed that the “harmony of sounds awakens in us, like an involuntary echo, a sense of moral harmony, order, accord, and consequently perfection that is our dream . . . our destiny.”132 Albert Dupaigne, another primary education 127.  Antonin Proust notes that the Académie des beaux-arts was resistant to “any instruction other than that given for the past two centuries.” For discussion of the value of drawing and its influence on arts policy in the early Third Republic, see id., Art sous la République, 15–21, 30–31, 60–63, and Larroumet, Art et l’Etat, 213ff. In End of the Salon, Mainardi presents the attitude of Academicians differently, arguing that they supported drawing and design instruction out of self-interest (70–71). 128.  Mainardi, End of the Salon, 72. 129.  Rousseau compared dessin in painting to melody in music. See Adolphe Jullien, La Musique et les philosophes au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Bauer, 1873), 16. 130.  The history of singing in French schools follows the flux of national politics. In 1833, it had the same status as history and geography. Laws in 1836 required all instructors to know how to sing and in 1838 allowed those who could not to substitute playing an instrument. However, in 1850 song moved down the ranks to join sports as the least important subjects to learn. In 1865, it was made obligatory in the teachers’ schools (écoles normales), and in 1867, it was authorized in the elementary schools, but still not formally reinstated. Johannes Weber contrasts this with music in the elementary schools of Germany, where it was taught since 1745. See his La Situation musicale et l’instruction populaire en France (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Haertel, 1884). 131.  In his “L’Orphéon de Paris,” Ménestrel, 7 April 1872, Emile Perrin distinguishes drawing, “more individual,” from singing, “a collective art.” “It is the habit of bringing all efforts together, of only existing as an ensemble, that makes music a useful art, healthy for young minds” (119). 132.  Félix Pécaut, “La Musique ou le chant choral à l’école” (1880), in id., Education pu­blique, 118–19.

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inspector, suggested that singing was a powerful form of general education, its “inexplicable charm always awakening what is best in our soul.”133 Republicans saw tangible benefits in singing quite distinct from those associated with drawing. Teaching children aged 5 to 9 how to sing—from matching pitches to concentrating on vocal timbre, articulation, breathing, pronunciation, and diction—was good for their health. It fortified their voices and ears when still in formation. Because singing also helped children memorize words, it could be used to teach particularly difficult subjects that needed to be remembered. It was a way of learning rhetoric and eloquence. It was reputed to help students develop a taste for discipline and appreciate the “charm of things of the mind,” which they could then take to study of other subjects as well. Singing would also prepare students to recognize beauty, forming a taste for the good as well as an understanding of music.134 To the extent that these aptitudes were recognized, “the result of a slow, progressive education and the powerful impact of mœurs, habits, social milieu, and civilization,” Marmontel writes, “having intelligence and a feeling for the beautiful in the arts” would no longer be a “monopoly of privileged people.”135 However, resistance to change was strong, and it was not until 1881 that Ferry, arguing that singing was obligatory all over Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States, succeeded in passing laws requiring music in schools. Before singing became mandatory in public schools, amateur choral groups reinforced the teaching of musical taste and values among adults as well as children. This movement began in 1833 with G.-L. Bocquillon-Wilhem’s founding of a choral society known as the Orphéon—a specifically Parisian “orchestra of voices alone” made up of singers, most of them artisans, with only the most basic musical education. The orphéon tradition grew during the Second Empire and thrived in the early Third Republic, in part through the support of Jules Simon.136 133.  Albert Dupaigne, “Mémoire (Novembre 1878),” in Rapports sur l’enseignement du chant dans les écoles primaires (Paris: Ministre de l’instruction publique, 1881), 68. 134.  Of the many essays on the merits of singing instruction, see M.-H. Boulay de la Meurthe, “Rapport au Conseil municipal de Paris sur l’introduction de l’enseignement du chant dans les écoles primaires communales, 6 mars 1835” (Paris, 1843); Paul Boiteau, De l’enseignement populaire de la musique (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1860); Albert Dupaigne, Le Chant dans les écoles, Conférence faite à la Sorbonne le 25 août 1878 (Paris: Delagrave, 1878); “La Musique ou le chant choral à l’école (1880),” in Pécaut, Education publique, 115–25; Weber, Situation musicale; and Michèle Alten, La Musique dans l’école de Jules Ferry à nos jours (Paris: EAP, 1995). 135.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 417. 136.  Simon was a close friend of Pierre-Louis Torchet, orphéon director and founder of the newspaper L’Orphéon.

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Musical kiosks went up in city gardens and parks, four thousand of them between 1850 and 1914. These introduced what Marie-Claire Mussat has called an architecture of transparency, an inscription of music in the urban geography, and a place to enact popular education through music.137 As Philippe Gumplowicz points out, orphéons presented a civic model of transparency. They were open to all, including those of “dubious morality.”138 Some involved schoolchildren, others consisted largely of workers and employees. By 1873, there were 300 orphéons in Paris alone, involving 9,000 working-class singers. Members were expected to demonstrate their ability to take musical dictation, understand rudimentary music theory, and sing music composed by a wide range of living French composers. Works such as the Soldiers’ Chorus from Gounod’s Faust, a favorite, encouraged solidarity through loyalty and devotion to la patrie. After blossoming all over France during the Second Empire, orphéon festivals and competitions continued to assemble groups from all over to sing huge homophonic choruses. In August 1875, for example, almost 8,000 children from local elementary schools performed together in the Tuileries gardens and eighty local choruses participated in a choral competition. Fifteen thousand sang during the 1878 Universal Exhibition, and groups performed in every neighborhood on 30 June. In performing music, these democratically run organizations were widely recognized for their utility in educating the masses and “preparing the future of the French democracy.”139 In 1878, legislators claimed that “today there is not one town or village that doesn’t have an orphéon or wind band. Everywhere well-organized musical societies are engaged in these musical studies, which have advantages from all points of view.”140 Singing thus gave ordinary people an active role in culture. As with drawing, the elites also turned increasingly to singing as adults. Numerous femmes du monde and demoiselles took lessons at Oscar Comettant’s Institut musical, founded in 1870, which was considered very useful for teaching music to women. Those in Guillot de Sainbris’s amateur chorus of bourgeois and 137.  Marie-Claire Mussat, “Kiosque à musique et urbanisme: Les Enjeux d’une autre société,” in Le Concert et son public, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michel Werner (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002), 317–31. 138.  Philippe Gumplowicz, Les Travaux d’Orphée: Deux siècles de pratique musicale amateur en France, 1820–2000: Harmonies-chorales-fanfares (Paris: Aubier, 2001), 122. 139.  See Spuller, Education de la démocratie, 129, and descriptions of these groups and festivals in Ménestrel, 25 May 1873 and 8 and 29 August 1875. 140.  In “La Musique et les musiciens à L’Exposition 1878,” Orphéon, 12 February 1880, Mathieu de Monter reported that in 1878 there were 3,243 such choruses and wind bands in the country, with over 147,000 members in all. On such groups, see Gumplowicz, Travaux d’Orphée, and Donna di Grazia, “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertoires, c. 1828–1880” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1993).

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aristocratic men and women considered this a form of continuing education for themselves and their audiences. Teaching music to women also had the potential for reaching their children. As such groups performed more and more difficult music, and in public, including works they commissioned from major composers like Gounod, Franck, and Massenet, and as their concerts began to be reviewed in the musical press, they began to break down the stereotypical distinction between amateur and professional performers, salon and concert-hall performances. With the advantage of not requiring much training or expense, choral performances helped people to forge a physical connection with the musical imaginary and through it connect with others. Repeated performances of an evolving repertory, sometimes shared with other similar groups, reinforced singers’ memories, selfobservation, and possibly reflection, while instilling attachment to certain works and those performing them.141 Amateur choruses also strengthened ties to family, profession, neighborhood, region, and class. Fathers, uncles, and sons, sometimes practicing the same trade, sang together in working-class and petit-bourgeois districts such as Belleville. Young male and female employees joined in department store choruses such as that of the Bon Marché, founded in 1872, when the store, in expanded quarters, sponsored music as well as English and fencing lessons to encourage self-improvement in its employees and provided a large salon for them to practice in (fig. 22). Husbands and wives, parents and their daughters, collaborated in ensembles of bourgeois and aristocratic amateurs, such as those directed by Guillot de Sainbris and Bourgault-Ducoudray.142 Singing together could ease tensions and deepen bonds, strengthening community. Choruses encouraged a sense of responsibility and duty to something beyond oneself, as well as a taste for discipline, work, and self-control. Members typically practiced emulation, judging, respecting, and trying to equal or better one another’s sound. In such contexts, emulation “as a rhetoric of competitive and collaborative achievement” stimulated the capacity for assimilating knowledge and experience.143 Particularly useful were frequent local and regional competitions. Like sports teams or gymnastic societies, 141.  In his “Pragmatics of Taste,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, ed. Mark Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), Antoine Hennion explains amateur taste as “the reflexive result of a physical and collective practice,” involving self-observation, a continuity of interest, and attachments (136–37). 142.  I present case studies of these choruses in my forthcoming book Useful Performance. 143.  On the uses and limits of emulation in France, see Carol Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Choral societies that included women (e.g., that of the Bon Marché department store and upper-class ensembles) are a counterexample to her assertion that “emulation and voluntary association were distinctly male preserves” (9, 104).

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Fig. 22  Music classes of the wind band and choral society of the Bon Marché department store employees.

singers learned to unite individual and collective energies in a kind of consensus. When Bourgault-Ducoudray used orphéon singers in his ensemble’s performances of Handel oratorios in 1872 and 1873, mixing workers with those from bourgeois and aristocratic backgrounds, choral practices produced a shared sociability that bridged the class divide, a metaphor for what many republicans hoped was possible in French society as a whole.144 That the audiences of such concerts were equally mixed, attracting a “virgin and new audience, recruited as if by chance,” to performances of works such as Handel’s Alexander’s Feast (Fête d’Alexandre), was increasing evidence that “great music” was “gaining ground and infiltrating the popular classes little by little.”145 Not surprisingly, the government rewarded Bourgault-Ducoudray’s choral society with a small subsidy. Visiting museums and attending concerts, made easier and more accessible to a wider range of people by ever-improving transportation, contributed to this process of self-instruction and taste formation. Through their “contact with geniuses” and the imagination they stimulated, these activities were thought to help people discover their own creativity.146 Antoine Hennion describes this self-discovery as an intimate part of the “pragmatic self-formation of taste by amateurs . . . perceiving what one had not formerly perceived, and, at the same time, sensing that one feels other’s feelings.” It is an activity in its own right, not the “passive play of social differentiation.”147 To the extent that the self-knowledge obtained in listening to or performing music shaped one’s mœurs, and therefore one’s identity, certain music quite possibly gave individuals empathy for the kind of regeneration that was needed in the country. With the number of concert societies growing, everyone had an increasing range of concerts from which to choose, whatever their financial situation. Besides local choruses and orphéon festivals, French cities increasingly offered low-cost concerts of classical orchestral music, modeled on Pasdeloup’s concerts populaires.148 144.  Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 223, 226, cites this intention as documented in the choral society’s statutes and points to others who in the 1860s saw “the fusion of different classes in society” as the “primary goal” of orphéons. 145.  Ménestrel, 23 March 1873, 135. 146.  Jacques Offenbach discussed this in giving advice to Americans about the importance of creating public museums and subsidizing theater in id., Notes d’un musicien en voyage (Paris: C. Lévy, 1977), an excerpt of which was published in Ménestrel, 4 March 1877, 109. 147.  Hennion, “Pragmatics of Taste,” 135, 142. 148.  For a study of this movement, see Jann Pasler, “Democracy, Ethics, and Commerce: Concerts Populaires in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” in Les Sociétés de musique en Europe, 1700–1920: Structures, pratiques musicales et sociabilités, eds. Hans Erich Bödeker and Patrice Veit (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007), 455–79.

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The goal was to reach a new social class, giving the less fortunate the chance to hear great music, perhaps for the first time. As noted earlier, the concerts began as paternalist patronage, as if music were a necessity of life and it was the responsibility of those who had it to bring it to those who did not, in the way charitable societies distributed food or money.149 Conservative deputies called these concerts “one of the most useful institutions,” “one of the best ways to spend Sundays away from the café and cabaret,” and a way to “purify and form the taste of the working classes.”150 For republicans, however, the point was to enable everyone to hear great music and benefit from the self-growth encouraged by musical practices.151 They were particularly pleased that orchestra concerts had started to attract women, who, as a group, had few opportunities for self-improvement outside of the arts. In 1878, in recognition of Pasdeloup’s efforts and to help him hire a chorus, the government voted him an annual subsidy of 25,000 francs. With the proliferation of orphéons, wind bands, and popular orchestras, the participation of elites as well as workers in amateur choruses, and increasing concert attendance by all groups, by 1878, Bourgault-Ducoudray could observe, “in all classes of society, people are passionate for serious music.”152 Just as important, all classes could, on occasion, experience this music side by side, as performers or as listeners.

Fashioning Citizens With France embarking on its first lasting democracy, active participation in political life became a right and a duty. Democracy called for informed leadership and informed citizens. In 1872, the Ecole libre des sciences politiques was founded to train a public service elite and enlightened politicians. There, politics was studied from the perspective of policy and applied public administration.153 Focused on inclusion rather than exclusion, republicans wished to transform citizenship from 149.  I’m grateful to Jean-Louis Morhange for this insight. 150.  Dugné de la Fauconnerie and Madler de Montjau, Journal officiel, 15 February 1878, 1582. 151.  As Horne points out in her “Presenting Modern France” (cited in n. 35 above), “in the political, social, and religious context of late-nineteenth century France, charity was considered by many to be incompatible with the needs of a secular republic, since it was linked to the Catholic church, a framework of Christian ethics, and a model of rigid hierarchical social relations. A republican rhetoric of reform that stressed self-help was therefore needed” (156). 152.  Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, “Cours d’histoire générale de la musique, séance d’ouverture, II,” Ménestrel, 22 December 1878, 26. See also de Tillancourt, Journal officiel, 15 February 1878, 1517. 153.  Condorcet and others had proposed something similar during the Revolution. Many were frustrated with the country’s “natural leaders,” the upper classes and the clergy, who,

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an aspect of elite politics to mass participation. This meant not just city dwellers from a certain class, but also workers, provincials, and eventually women. But how to convince these citizens that democratic politics was more than “the triumph of one will over another” and that they shared something meaningful? And how to enable them to enact their citizenship effectively? To encourage political participation, republicans acknowledged various forms of expression as legitimate types of political activity, including journalism, public meetings, ceremonies, parades, and music.154 Music was particularly valuable in preparing individuals to think as well as act like citizens. It supported the training of citizens in two crucial ways: through teaching judgment and helping people imagine a new world. If citizenship involves negotiation between collective concerns (the general interest of the people) and individual interests (i.e., political preferences), it requires people to make judgments.155 To be human, Rousseau noted, involves being able to make one’s own judgments.156 Republicans considered learning “judgment” as central to instruction and necessary for self-governance.157 Music and drawing not only taught skills and served as outlets for personal expression, contributing to people’s self-esteem, they also provided opportunities to learn judgment by observing, making comparisons, exercising choices, and developing tastes. Besides composing and performing, listening, too, should involve “mental activity” and “intellectual effort,” Marmontel writes. Whereas passive listeners tend to concentrate on the sensation or the impression of music, “immersing themselves in sound waves as with the smell of flowers,” falling into “vague, delicious dreaming,” or becoming “intoxicated with sound,” lost in “ethereal pleasure,” attentive listeners analyze their sensations while experiencing them. Ideally, “entendre c’est weak and fearful, were not prepared to take charge of a democratic society. See Félix Pécaut, “La Situation politique et morale” (2 November 1871), in id., Etudes, 5; Pierre Favre, Naissances de la science politique en France, 1870–1914 (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 29–36; Michael Stein, “Major Factors in the Emergence of Political Science as a Discipline in Western Democracies,” in Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science, ed. David Easton, John Gunnell, and Michael Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 178–79. 154.  Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 2. 155.  Four excellent studies of French citizenship have informed my perspectives: Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), Lehning, To Be a Citizen; Dominique Schnapper, Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality, trans. Séverine Rosée (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998), and Richard Vernon, Citizenship and Order: Studies in French Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), esp. 2–3. 156.  Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Politics of the Ordinary (1994), 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 54, 74. 157.  Léon Bourgeois, L’Education de la démocratie française (Paris: Cornély, 1897), 163; Pécaut, Education publique, ix.

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comprendre” (to listen is to understand).158 More was at stake for republicans than aesthetic jouissance, especially when concert organizers called for attentive listening in order to understand the macro-experience of a concert. Aesthetic judgment, then, was not just about expressing preferences through approving applause or disapproving rejection, thereby exerting influence and “surveillance” over artistic production, as in theaters during the Revolution.159 Nor was it merely genteel cultivation and embourgeoisement, the acquisition of bourgeois habits and values. The arts, whether as creator, performer, or perceiver, involved distinguishing aesthetic differences and evaluating their meaning. Learning critical judgment through contemplating differences, making comparisons, and forming opinions connected art to politics, active listening to active citizenship. Music presented far more neutral, abstract, and impersonal contexts to practice this than the press, theater, cafés, and the street. Musical practices were voluntary and sometimes took place within musical associations, analogues to political associations in breeding fraternal solidarity. Increasingly available in schools, concert halls, and city parks, music became part of many people’s lives, including those of the socially and economically disadvantaged. It could be brought into the home and shared with family or experienced in public. Through music, individuals experienced their own values in a larger context, as in voting. Shared experiences could lead to compassion and shared taste, a connection similar to the common will. Like political practices, musical practices, especially singing in groups, could transform individual identity into communal identity. Music nourished not only empathy but also the imagination, integral to the perception of beauty.160 Grasping meaning through music’s forms, its narratives, and the feelings it elicits requires an act of the imagination. This begins an interpretative practice, sometimes controversial. In the 1870s, monarchists wanted people to conjure up an ideal past, while republicans needed them to “dream of what will 158.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 147–49. 159.  In her Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), Susan Maslan points out that during the Revolution the theater “was an alternative space for developing the practices of participation, scrutiny, interpretation, and judgments that newly created citizens would put to use in the sphere of politics as well as the theater. It would offer citizens a different structure in which to understand their relation to representation itself and thus to their own new status and identity as citizens” (3). Because audience responses did not always harmonize with choices made by those in authority, theater gave people direct participation in the public sphere in a way that representative government did not, thereby contributing to the growth of the democracy. I agree with this thesis, but go further in how I think of aesthetic judgment and its importance after 1870. 160.  Victor Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, trans. O. W. Wight (New York: Appleton, 1854), 154.

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be.”161 In other words, both saw music as creating occasions when people not only contemplated the values, beliefs, and behaviors associated with political regimes, but also imagined what it would be like to live with them, a prelude to considering change itself. In some ways, imaginative listening resembles what Christopher Small has called “musicking”: “an activity by means of which we bring into existence a set of relationships that model the relationships of our world, not as they are but as we would wish them to be, and if through musicking we learn about and explore those relationships . . . then musicking is in fact a way of knowing our world . . . and in knowing it, we learn how to live well in it.”162 In this sense, music could help the French imagine the emerging nation, whether as a revived monarchy or a functioning democracy.163 If art music increasingly attracted people from diverse families, classes, neighborhoods, regions, and politics, nevertheless, these ideals were inevitably difficult to realize. Not everyone was ready to see musical practices as demonstrating integrity, morality, and industry rather than the assumed nonchalance associated with leisure and pleasure for the aristocracy, as under the Ancien Régime.164 Moreover, not all artists appreciated the focus on what art promised beyond itself, rather than in and of itself. It is also difficult to know whether these attitudes to music took hold among ordinary people, even if critics may reflect them. Still, in the turbulent 1870s, both monarchists and republicans recognized music as a potentially transformative and integrating force.

Performance and Public Taste under the Moral Order In principle, giving everyone the right to culture helped democratize taste, spread values, and build community. Through organizers’ choices and public opinion, the performance of music expressed that taste. So did music criticism and scholar161.  “Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to contemplation of the past and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for the old. . . . Democratic peoples scarcely worry about what has been, but they willingly dream of what will be” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop [1835; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 459–60). 162.  Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998), 50. 163.  I’m here referring to the concept of nationalism developed in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 164.  I’m grateful to Georgia Cowart for this understanding of good taste in France before the Revolution.

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ship. Reaching a taste consensus was not easy, however, especially under the politically unstable Moral Order. With musical decisions sometimes reflecting political interests, particularly during times of political crisis, and concerts calling for increasingly active and imaginative listening, this period offers a fascinating example of the utility of aesthetics and concert life to ideology, more subtle and complex than one might expect.

Preparing a Return to Monarchy In January 1873, anxiety was already growing about the elections that May. For republicans, the Republic signified “the triumph of the principe moderne, secular and liberal, over the principe ancien of divine, royal, and priestly right.”165 These two “principles” stood, not only for two governments, but also for two ways of thinking, which permeated all human activities, including moral behavior, education, and music. With agitation by those nostalgic for the Ancien Régime, republicans feared a coalition of conservatives, especially a “fusion” between Orléanists and Legitimists.166 Royalists, already in the majority in the Assemblée nationale, had considered the Second Empire “merely a long digression.” After the Commune was crushed and peace restored, they wanted nothing more than return to a king. Political songs, such as “La Fusion” and “Henry V va revenir,” served to focus attention on these developments among the masses and begin to explore their implications (fig. 23).167 They made fun, for example, of the comte de Chambord’s intransigence about restoring the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy as the national flag. At the same time, scholarly publications and concert organizations offered educated audiences opportunities to confront France’s complicated past, reflect on it, and eventually accommodate it through music. Not content to let royalists dominate thinking about the distant French past, and concerned about influencing future perceptions, republicans were as engaged with this music as monarchists. They too understood that debates about the future could be shaped by an understanding of the past. Composers, writers, and concert producers thus made choices that, at first glance, seem explicitly supportive of republicanism or monarchism. Yet, in many ways what they made of these choices—how they explained them or situated 165.  Pécaut, “Situation politique et morale” (8 January 1873), in id., Etudes, 3. 166.  Charles de Freycinet, Souvenirs, 1848–1878 (Paris: Delagrave, 1912), 279. 167.  “La fusion va commencer / Allons! qu’on se le dise! / Nous devons tous fusionner . . . Ainsi, le comte de Paris, / Avec le Chambord fusionne.” Boissier, Chansons politiques (Paris: Debons, 1874), cited in Pierre Barbier and France Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 8–9.

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Fig. 23  Félix Régamey, “La Situation politique en France (Novembre 1873),” Harper’s Weekly, New York, reproduced in John Grand-Carteret, Les Mœurs et la caricature en France (Paris, 1888). This caricature depicts the discord in French politics of the 1870s through factions battling musically for attention. Beneath a stone head representing the République française, a staid choral group, its members in white, kneeling, and wearing wigs, sings “Long live Henry IV,” under a banner portraying the Virgin Mary. Facing them, the Orphéon de Chantilly, with its men standing in dark modern suits, offers its rendition of “La Parisienne,” while a rambunctious brass band in the distance competes for attention with “Leaving for Syria.”

them—suggests that, through music, republicans and monarchists had intersecting interests. To the extent that listeners were actively engaged with music and the values underlying musical practices, music could help bridge political differences. On 29 January 1873, the republican Gustave Chouquet signed the preface to his substantial Histoire de la musique dramatique en France. Written in response to an 1868 competition for a book on the origins of French opera, and eschewing the typical approach to the genre based on anecdotes, Chouquet takes on music as an art of philosophical, historical, and social importance. Underlying his text is a linear notion of progress: “History teaches us that music developed according to a natural and logical order, beginning with a simple element and gradually rising to the most impressive and complicated effects. [After serving the interests of priests, the aristocracy, or political power], it finds its triumphant expression in the interpretation of feelings that move the heart of vast multitudes. . . . In bringing together all classes of society and becoming theatrical and dramatic, music achieved the immense favor it enjoys in modern nations.”168 Because Chouquet believed that music history was part of a country’s general history, his conclusions propose larger arguments about the function of the past in the present. Respect, admire, and above all feel pride in past French achievements, even Lully, he advises, but rejoice in what has changed over time. Concerts contributed to this nationalist discourse. That spring, while a popular “pastoral playlet” with music à la Watteau distracted the beau monde in the fashionable salons of Paris, Edouard Colonne conducted eight “Concert National,” with tickets priced very low to attract a broad audience. These concerts, subsidized by Georges Hartmann, aimed to promote French music, especially music Hartmann published. However, they included not only symphonic premieres by living French composers, along with the typical German classics, but also la musique ancienne and religious music—a Gluck gavotte, a Palestrina motet, a Handel oratorio, and Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” In addition, respecting the fashion for religious music at the time,169 the Holy Week concerts featured premieres with explicitly Catholic 168.  Gustave Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), xiv–xv. This book contains an annotated list of works from 1671 to 1873, with fascinating information on the use of instruments, and a large bibliography. Installments appeared in Ménestrel and Revue et gazette musicale that spring, although in the latter, they began with the fourteenth-century court mascarade. This followed immediately upon F.-A. Gevaert’s eight-part “La Musique vocale en Italie,” Ménestrel, 1 December 1872–19 January 1873. 169.  An ad in Ménestrel all May lists over forty compositions celebrating Mary, variously from the distant past (Lassus, Palestrina, Handel), religious conservatives (Niedermeyer), or republicans (Weckerlin).

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themes by republican composers as well as conservatives: Saint-Saëns’s Psaume XVIII, Massenet’s Marie-Magdeleine, and Franck’s Rédemption. Although based on biblical subjects, these works presented a range of perspectives reflecting those of their composers. Marie-Magdeleine, which Massenet, a republican, calls not an oratorio but a drame sacré, addresses the woman’s humanity rather than her conversion to the divine, titillating its listeners with pornographic detail. To the extent that such concerts and compositions take a political position, it is one that encourages mutual tolerance. When elections loomed, concerts became even more politicized, both for monarchists and republicans. On election day, 24 May 1873, the Opéra-Comique premiered Le Roi l’a dit. With everyone’s minds elsewhere, the public “consumed with worry” and with “fearful anxiety toward Versailles,” it was doubly difficult for two neophytes to make an impression. Yet, with the possibility of monarchy reemerging, deidealizing the past with a farce on the gap between appearance and reality at court was a fitting republican response. Edmond Gondinet’s and Léo Delibes’s opéra-comédie pokes fun at kings, who, by decree, can cause people to make ridiculous claims, and at nobles, who, putting on airs, end up having to substantiate them (in this case, produce a fictitious son and then his fictitious death because “the king said it”). Monarchists may also have smiled, for the imperial counts inevitably had to show feelings that were not theirs, play roles with which they did not identify.170 Delibes, here in his first work of such dimensions, deftly captures court grandeur with choruses inspired by Handel and suggests the wigs and lace with a gavotte and minuet, foreshadowing a taste that would grow in the late 1880s. The rest, despite the silly subjects, is charming music, somewhat like Adolphe Adam’s, which everyone could embrace as French.171 The work was a hit, and it returned to the stage the following fall. When the royalists won the election, disruption ensued in the ministries with the beginning of the Moral Order.172 Perhaps sensing the anxiety that some might feel, the Opéra-Comique planned to revive Cherubini’s Les Deux Journées (1800), inspired by the Reign of Terror’s proscription of people for their politics. Since it ends with social reconciliation, the story may have been chosen as a metaphor

170.  Edouard Drumont, La Fin d’un monde (Paris: Savine, 1889), 308. 171.  Art musical, 29 May 1873, 169–74, and 5 June 1873, 177–81 reproduced excerpts from twenty-three reviews. See also Paul Bernard, “Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique,” Revue et gazette musicale, 1 June 1873, 169–70, and “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 1 June 1873, 211. Adam’s music mostly likely came to mind because from March through July 1873, Ménestrel published Pougin’s 22-installment biography. 172.  See the editor’s perspective on this in Ménestrel, 25 May 1873, 206.

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to quell fears under the new regime. However, when the music was judged “too serious,” the theater dropped the project.173 In October, just as legitimists were trying to place the comte de Chambord on the throne, the Opéra-Comique put on Richard Cœur de Lion (1784) after an absence of eighteen years.174 Before it was banned in 1791, Richard Cœur de Lion had been used as a royalist counterpart to “Ça ira,” a tune associated with the masses. Famous for its air, “O Richard, O my king,” when it was performed before the king in 1789, it provoked enthusiastic responses of “Long live the king!” from the audience. Some royalists later sang it substituting the words “O Louis, O my king.” Just as the word seigneur had to be replaced by monsieur in classical French theater (Corneille, Racine) during the Revolution, these lyrics were sometimes changed to “O Richard, my heart is devoted to thee.”175 If nineteenth-century audiences heard the choruses in Richard as James Parakilas proposes—as “action choruses” representing the peasants as protagonists in a political struggle to free the king—then the work also becomes a way of reminding listeners that the peasants were royalists, which many of them continued to be in the nineteenth century.176 When Napoléon was crowned emperor in 1806, the opera returned to the stage and thereafter, with its original text, was identified as to some extent royalist.177 It 173.  La Revue et gazette musicale, 27 July 1873, 238, and Ménestrel, 10 August 1873, 294. 174.  In fall 1873, “the government considered the re-establishment of the monarchy as certain” (Hanotaux, Contemporary France, 2: 299). On 22 October, after the issue of whether France should return to monarchy had been debated in heated speeches and discussions at Versailles, the moderate Right and the extreme Right came to agreement. Many felt that “the union is perfect” and “success cannot escape us.” That summer the comte de Paris had reconciled with the comte de Chambord, accepting him as the next French monarch; the comte de Chambord seemed ready (ibid., 234). However, because the Left center declared that the Restoration would bring about a “fresh Revolution” and the comte de Chambord was unwilling to accept changes introduced by the Revolution or the tricolor flag, on 27 October he wrote a letter of refusal, preferring “suicide to dishonor,” in the words of Le Gaulois (ibid., 273). 175.  “O Richard, c’est à toi que mon cœur s’abandonne.” I’m grateful to Jean Mongrédien for sharing the source of this textual change (Etienne Destranges, Le Théâtre à Nantes depuis ses origines jusqu’en 1893 [Paris, 1893], otherwise noted in Jean Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789–1830, trans. Sylvain Frémaux [Portland, Ore.: Amadeus, 1996], 148.) See also Laura Mason, Singing the Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787– 1799 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 46–60. Although the reception of the work had political overtones, in his Grétry and the Growth of Opéra-Comique (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), David Charlton argues that the political significance of the work per se is vague: the king is a victim and is worth saving, but he gives no speeches explaining why (240). 176.  James Parakilas, “Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera,” 19th-Century Music 16, 2 (Fall 1992): 188. 177.  I’m grateful to David Charlton for this observation.

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was again barred during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, but reemerged in 1841 and in 302 performances at the Théâtre-Lyrique between 1856 and 1868, some of which provoked a response similar to that of 1789.178 Grétry, at the height of his popularity before the Revolution cost him his court position, was known for criticizing the Revolution after the Terror and remaining loyal to his Ancien Régime patrons. At the same time, he considered patriotism and political conservatism “not incompatible”179—perhaps like much of the opera-going public in 1873. A music critic writing in Art musical found the choice to revive Richard an especially pertinent response to the contemporary political situation. Since 24 May, the king had indeed spoken (referring to Delibes’s opera) of “a fiery fever . . . tormenting our poor country” (referring to a song in Richard), and why not show Blondel taking the king far away from his dear France? “We understood the allusion and gave the most lively reception to Grétry’s work. . . . Everyone in the hall cheered for an encore of Richard’s famous romance, ‘O my king.’ Blondel, bring back the king—they want it.”180 In returning to the original score (rather than Adolphe Adam’s reorchestration for the 1841 revival), the Opéra-Comique undoubtedly also pleased those wanting to hear music from the Ancien Régime. Echoing reviewers in 1784, Victor Wilder points out that the story came from “our old trouvères [medieval poet-musicians].”181 But he also shifts attention from Grétry’s Italianate melodies and conventional forms to progressive qualities of the kind that Wagner would later develop. More than the “freshness” of the melodies, what impressed Wilder was the accuracy of the declamation, the faithfulness to the stage. These qualities and staying close to the “truth” as “transfigured” in art, he argues, gave the work its “eternal youth,” its “immortality,” words perhaps chosen to resonate with those nostalgic for the Ancien Régime. Almost in response to critics of court life, Edouard Schuré found in it “nothing false or pretentious, everything is natural and healthy.” In the famous romance “Une Fièvre brûlante,” he writes, “song becomes action” as music translates the drama. Repeated nine times in the work, it calls on the power of memory, suggesting that song has special power to recall the past. As the first work of music theater to turn memory into a dramatic theme, Richard 178.  T. J. Walsh, Second Empire Opera (New York: Riverrun, 1981), 73. 179.  See Elizabeth Bartlet’s perceptive and enlightening essay “Grétry and the Revolution,” in Grétry et l’Europe de l’Opéra-Comique, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 83. 180.  G.E., “Opéra-Comique; Reprise de Richard Cœur de lion,” Art musical, 23 October 1873, 339–40. 181.  In his “Histoire de Blondel,” Revue et gazette musicale, 26 October 1873, Henri Lavoix fils published a long essay on the twelfth-century character whose devotion to Richard is central in Grétry’s opera (339–41).

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underlined the utility of music for anyone interested in the past. Historically minded republicans were just as engaged with the work as nostalgic monarchists. Arthur Pougin praises Grétry for seeking “an old style capable of pleasing modern people.” 182 Le Ménestrel published the romance and in December 1873, acknowledging its broad appeal, offered a piano-vocal score to all subscribers. Another provocative revival came in January 1874 with Jannequin’s La Bataille de Marignan (between the French under François I and an army of Swiss mercenaries, ca. 1515), possibly meant to elicit sympathy for another old king. In his review, Henri Lavoix fils explains that the French king was on the front lines of this battle, characterized by great courage and chivalry. Also important from a republican perspective, François had led a mixed force drawn from all classes. The victory led to his enormous popularity.183 Most critics focused their reviews on this forgotten work by a composer whose genius they considered “male and vigorous,” a patriot who wrote to glorify the French armies.184 Likewise the Théâtre de l’Odéon may have produced Alexandre Dumas’s La Jeunesse de Louis XIV in spring 1874 to show the human side of the Sun-King, in conflict with his mother over a love affair. Music critics and scholars, too, responded to the new political situation, again with republicans as engaged with Ancien Régime music as monarchists. In a lead article in October 1873, M. de Thémines tried to assuage French fears about a return to monarchy, explaining that music had thrived under it, that the court needed it, and that its patronage was like “the sun to a flower.” In contrast, republican mœurs were just too “austere” and republicans too preoccupied with their incessant struggles to encourage the development of music. Republicans incensed with these arguments wrote numerous letters of response—unusual at the time— pointing out that art does not need the court to progress and had enjoyed great development under republican regimes.185 At the same time, despite his republi182.  Victor Wilder, “Richard Cœur-de-lion,” Ménestrel, 7 December 1873, 5–6; Edouard Schuré, Le Drame musical (Paris: Sandoz & Fischbacher, 1875), 322–23; Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 26 October 1873, 379–80. Anselm Gerhard, in his The Urbanization of Opera, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 271–72, and Charlton in his Grétry, 246, discuss the role of memory in the work. 183.  Henri Lavoix fils, “La Bataille de Marignan,” Revue et gazette musicale, 25 January 1874, 26–27. 184.  Pougin, “Concert Danbé,” 61. See also Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past for other similar reviews (156–60). 185.  M de Thémines [Achille de Lauzières], “L’Art et le luxe,” Art musical, 16 October 1873, 329–30; id. “Les Propos et les faits, réponse à plusieurs lettres,” ibid., 23 October 1873, 337–38.

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can sympathies, in February 1874, the librarian of the Paris Conservatoire, the composer Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, reached out to aristocratic elites (the queen of Spain, dukes, and others) by conducting a concert of early music (Lassus, Louis XII, Lully, Mozart, Gluck) at the home of a prince.186 Others focused on reassuring audiences and music professionals that if France returned to monarchy, musical life would not suffer. In October, despite its republican sympathies, Ménestrel offered two studies: one of monarchs who had been musicians, Charles the Bold and Charles V, another on the Dutch king’s music patronage.187 New attention also turned to musical life under the Ancien Régime. When the Opéra suffered a fire in November, Ménestrel published an account of fires at the Opéra just before the Revolution.188 Throughout 1874, it featured Mozart, a universally respected composer from that period, and, beginning in November, Philidor and a seventeenpart series on Gluck, the composer most associated with Marie Antoinette. Gluck, “creator of the great lyric drama in France,” Barbedette recounts, “scorned French frivolity,” while wanting nothing more than to please the French public.189 New editions of Gluck’s operas were also begun, aided by state subsidies.190 Next came Pougin’s argument, in multiple installments, that the “real creators of French opera” had been Pierre Perrin and Robert Cambert, two Frenchmen, not the Italian Lully. Republican critics thus revisited seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates from a nationalist perspective, encouraging French disengagement from its ties to Italian melody. Katharine Ellis has discussed how La Chronique musicale, conceived as both “beautiful and useful” by its wealthy publisher, sought to “resuscitate the inspirations of our old French masters piece by piece” and, like Pougin, to decenter Lully’s role in the creation of French opera. From 1873 through 1874, 66 percent of the articles addressed French music or theatrical history from 1650 to 1789. Included were excerpts on Ancien Régime stage music by Paul Lacome and Théodore de Lajarte.191 Arguably no one was more active in this than Adolphe 186.  Ménestrel, 15 February 1874, 86 187.  Francesco d’Avila, “Deux monarques musiciens,” Ménestrel, 19 October 1873, 372— 73; Oscar Comettant, “La Musique au château royal du Loo” and “Paris et départements,” ibid., 26 October 1873, 381–82. 188.  A. de Forges, “Incendie des deux salles d’Opéra,” Ménestrel, 2 November 1873, 389–90. 189.  H. Barbedette, “Gluck, préface,” Ménestrel, 15 November 1874, 394. 190.  Ménestrel, 1 March 1874, 102. 191.  Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 123–24. See Paul Lacome, Les Fondateurs de l’Opéra français (Paris: Enoch, 1878) and Théodore de Lajarte, Airs à danser de Lulli à Méhul (Paris: Maison G. Flaxland, Durand, Schoenewerk, 1876), first published in La Chronique musicale in 1873 and 1874 respectively.

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Jullien, apparently a royalist sympathizer, who began intensive research at the Opéra and the Archives nationales. In fall 1873, he published a series of articles on the theater of Mme de Pompadour in La Chronique musicale. Then, in addition to a short brochure on music and the Enlightenment philosophers, to whom he looked as models of French music criticism, between 1873 and 1881, he published nine books or brochures on music, theater, and their relationship to the court of Louis XVI.192 Like Edmond de Goncourt, Jullien took the tastes and practices of this elegant society seriously, particularly those of Marie Antoinette, herself a musician.193 His choice to focus on this period suggests that he was interested in recovering memory of music, composers, patrons, and performers that had been obliterated by the Revolution or since forgotten. At first, Jullien reports on the divertissements aristocrats put on for one another, which were often attended by Louis XVI. Perhaps to attract the leisured class nostalgic for this period, he subtitled one book “Adventures and Secret Plots” and published luxury editions. But he was also interested in larger issues such as the relationship between music and society, and, like republican scholars, in earlier evidence of French glory. In La Cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI, he re­­ vives interest in two forgotten composers who received French royal patronage after Gluck, Antonio Sacchini and Antonio Salieri. His purpose was twofold. First, they exemplified the many foreign composers who had thrived in France, thanks to French generosity and the influence of French music. Born Italian, both became French “by adopting the style and spirit of our theater.” Second, their music showed how French politics could shape, not only the reception of music, but also the form in which it was heard. Jullien was particularly drawn to the Salieri-Beaumarchais collaboration Tartare (1787), because of similarities between Beaumarchais, Berlioz, and Wagner. Its long-term success he attributes not to its novel mélodrame, however, but to its susceptibility to adaptation, given 192.  Jullien’s first two books, La Musique et les philosophes au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Baur, 1873) and L’Opéra en 1788 (Paris: Pottier de Lalaine, 1873), were followed by La Comédie à la cour de Louis XVI: Le Théâtre de la reine à Trianon (Paris: Baur, 1875), Les Grandes Nuits de Sceaux: Le Théâtre de la duchesse du Maine (Paris: Baur, 1876), Un Potentat musical: Papillon de La Ferté; son règne à l’Opéra de 1780 à 1790 (Paris: Detaille, 1876), L’Eglise et l’Opéra en 1735 (Paris: Detaille, 1877), La Cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI (Paris: Didier, 1878), La Comédie et la galanterie au XVIIIe siècle, au théâtre—dans le monde—en prison (Paris: Rouveyre, 1879), 1770–1790, L’Opéra secret au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Rouveyre, 1880), and La Ville et la cour au XVII siècle (Paris: Rouveyre, 1881). Some chapters appeared previously in the Revue et gazette musicale and Le Correspondant. 193.  Cf. Edmond de Goncourt, Histoire de Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Charpentier, 1878) and sections on Marie Antoinette in Jullien’s La Ville et la cour and La Cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI.

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its depiction of opposing passions—despotism and public opinion, powerful vice and private virtue. Beaumarchais made the first changes just after the Festival of the Federation in 1790. Turned into an opera promoting constitutional monarchy, Tartare was popular until the Terror, disappearing with it, only to resurface afterwards, this time with a new “republican sauce” by Nicolas-Etienne Framéry.194 Although in La Ville et la cour, Jullien claims that art served as a “distraction [dérivatif ] from politics,” the parallels between Tartare and Richard Cœur de Lion suggest an interdependence between taste and politics. Such research may have been intended to elicit desire for the authentic, original form of works before their bastardization by politics. Some composers and theater directors sympathized with these interests. Addressing the Assemblée nationale in July 1874, Vaucorbeil, as president of the Société des compositeurs, asked for the repertoire of the national theaters to be expanded beyond the seven or eight works. The Opéra should include Gluck, Salieri, Sacchini, and others totally ignored by the institutions, as well as more music by André Campra, André Destouches, Lully, and Rameau. Likewise, he would like to see Grétry, P.-A. Monsigny, Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac, and others at the Opéra-Comique, along with more contemporary music.195 Meanwhile, the director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon reduced his orchestra to ten musicians as in Lully’s time to accompany its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire more authentically with music from the period.196 Together with the Théâtre de la Gaîté, in fall 1874, he also planned to revive repertoire from Ancien Régime, such as Grétry’s Les Deux Avares and Monsigny’s Le Déserteur, in matinée performances specifically oriented to families.197 When the passing of the first republican constitution in 1875 dashed hopes of a monarchist restoration, concerts nevertheless continued to present the upper class with reasons to be nostalgic for the Ancien Régime, nostalgia here referring to a sense of loss associated with a class in decline. Early music permeated salons and concert halls, both evoking that past and showing how its charm and grandeur could persevere in the present. On 19 January 1875, for example, Parisians could attend an afternoon of music and poetry from the period of Louis XV (Leclair, Rameau, Boccherini, Grétry, Voltaire, Beaumarchais). On 2 February, only days after the vote on the new constitution, they could hear music and poetry from Louis XIV’s time (Lully, Campra, Destouches, Molière, La Fontaine) or Lully’s 194.  Jullien, La Cour et l’opéra sous Louis XVI, 6, 251–57, 268–74. 195.  Vaucorbeil, “Mémoire présenté à l’Assemblée nationale” (cited n. 78 above), 268–69. 196.  “Nouvelles diverses,” Revue et gazette musicale, 5 October 1873, 318. 197.  Revue et gazette musicale, 15 November 1874, 366.

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music in an aristocratic salon.198 Later that month, as the republicans reached a legislative majority for the first time (425 to 254), the Concerts Danbé presented a new reconstruction of Destouches’s opera Callirhöé (1712) “as it would have been done in the court of the great king with choruses, costumes, and sets,” its score subsidized by the minister of public instruction and fine arts.199 Meanwhile, from January 1875 to May 1876, the Théâtre de la Gaîté offered a series of plays by Molière, with music by Lully and Charpentier, performed as matinées to attract families. 200 In January 1875, Guillot de Sainbris’s amateur singers performed excerpts from Carissimi’s Jepthé (1650). Contemporaneous with significant republican gains in the legislature, these performances may have seemed to some like a form of monarchist resistance, reassuring their public of the greatness of an earlier time and giving them an occasion to contemplate values associated with the Ancien Régime. As such, these concerts may have functioned or been construed as ways to unite a divided nobility. For others, production of a work such as Lully and Molière’s comedy-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme may served as a reminder of the critical stance adopted by the latter, a bourgeois, under Louis XIV, and later by Beaumarchais, especially since Weckerlin, a republican, was asked to make a new edition of it. 201 In any case, the performance of old music, like the revival of Molière, helped audiences, regardless of their politics, begin to construct a collective memory of the French past. With the republicans enjoying victories in almost all elections between 1872 and 1875, gradually wearing down the monarchist majority, 202 such concerts might have played to their political advantage. To win an electoral majority, historians 198.  The first two were part of a concert series of matinées caractéristiques organized by Marie Dumas, possibly the daughter of Alexandre Dumas, which lasted for at least three years and in 1878 received a subsidy of 10,000 francs from the budget committee of the Chambre des députés. See Ménestrel, 17 November 1878, 410. 199.  Ellis sees the choice of this work as an attempt to challenge the preeminence of Lully in French music history; however, the work flopped, because it was found monotonous and insubstantial. Interpreting the Musical Past, 136. 200.  Offenbach’s matinées classiques pairing a classical play (e.g., Beaumarchais, Racine, Molière) with a late eighteenth-century opéra-comique (e.g., Monsigny, Dalayrac, Grétry, Méhul) had begun in March 1874. Ellis presents these as a “parasitical revival, feeding off a combination of Molière’s cultural capital and the traditional museum culture in French drama” (ibid., 137–38). 201.  For discussion of the Lully-Molière production at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1875–76, see Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 137–40. For a study of the anticlericalism and royalist critique associated with performances of Tartuffe in the French provinces under the restoration, see Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 202.  Furet, Revolutionary France, 520.

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have suggested that the republicans needed a “myth of counterrevolution” to encourage liberal monarchists and Bonapartists to side with them. 203 To the extent that these concerts encouraged sympathy for the Ancien Régime, they may have helped revive such fears. However, I find that most concerts probably functioned differently. Just as republicans agreed with monarchists on the importance of Ancien Régime drama, 204 there was an emerging consensus on the capacity of Ancien Régime music to support a nationalist agenda, bolstering French pride. Under the Moral Order government, music became a site for actively exploring a new identity. Moreover, it was not, as Ellis suggests, that “French music had little symbolic part to play in popular education,” nor was it merely “among the intelligentsia and arguably for the intelligentsia that the cultural activity of elevating national heroes past and present served to ‘prove’ France’s artistic greatness.”205 The negotiation and promotion of national identity was something in which performers and audiences from all classes took part.

La Musique ancienne et moderne Scholars have begun to research the increased interest in “early music” in France at this time and to examine its meaning. Yet they have missed something significant: in many such cases, old masterpieces were juxtaposed with contemporary music, sometimes premieres, especially during the Moral Order. In the concerts mentioned above, for example, Bizet, Gounod, and others were included. What interests me, then, is not only how individual pieces may have supported one ideology or another, but also how juxtapositions of works on concerts may have helped people come to grips with their differences and contemplate what they shared. Contemporary French music had particular utility after the Franco-Prussian War, because it drew attention to what was distinctive and admirable about the French. Beginning in 1871, composers of all political persuasions joined forces to support one another at the Société nationale de musique, founded that year, and orchestral concerts began to feature more French music. Whereas in the 1860s, such organizations as the Société des concerts du Conservatoire and Concerts Pasdeloup had concentrated on the German classics, with only the occasional work by Wagner, Berlioz, or Saint-Saëns, after the war, they increased their offerings of “modern” music, especially by French composers. Gounod and Thomas were 203.  Gildea, Past in French History, 36–37. 204.  Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 121. 205.  Ibid., 120.

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the only living Frenchmen on Conservatoire programs in 1871, but that summer, Pasdeloup offered three concerts explicitly divided into la musique classique—his standard repertoire: Beethoven, Mozart, and Weber—and la musique moderne, featuring premieres and opera excerpts. In spring 1872, the Conservatoire added Berlioz, Franck, Saint-Saëns and two younger composers, Théodore Dubois and Charles Lenepveu, to its roster, framing their compositions with classical works. Patriotism and the need to support compatriots probably motivated this change. Along with more attention to music by living composers came concerts that juxtaposed la musique ancienne, especially of the eighteenth century, with la musique moderne. A few predecessors had tried this during the Second Empire, 206 but the practice grew widespread in the 1870s, particularly under the Moral Order. It was not unusual for the Conservatoire to include the occasional sixteenth-century motet or Handel chorus in the 1860s, but to perform Dubois next to Lully, or Gounod, Bizet, and Saint-Saëns after Handel was new. Moreover, from workingclass children to elite adults, amateurs and professionals, many groups in the 1870s paired la musique ancienne et moderne. On 28 April 1872, the annual concert of the Paris Orphéon presented music by French composers ranging from Rameau to Thomas and Gounod. Two days earlier, Guillot de Sainbris’s bourgeois choral society, which was explicitly devoted to la musique d’ensemble ancienne et moderne, performed choruses excerpted from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, as well as Weckerlin’s own version of that composer’s Alexander’s Feast and an unpublished opera by Massenet, Méduse. Two orchestras of elite amateurs, both called the Société philharmonique de Paris, the second founded in 1878, also performed old and new works, including some by young composers. In these cases, I would argue, the performance of early music was not just a celebration of old France or, as Ellis has suggested, a “natural extension of the contemporary repertory.” The two repertoires were placed in dialogue for a reason. Most concerts in the nineteenth century presented music from different genres and periods. In England, William Weber has called these “miscellany concerts.”207 In France, this reflected a taste for contrast, developed from grand opera since the Revolution. Both Pasdeloup’s concerts and those of the Société des concerts du 206.  Predecessors for this practice during the Second Empire included the Société pour l’exécution des quintettes anciens et modernes (1857–58), the Société des trios anciens et modernes (1865–86), and Weckerlin’s Société Sainte-Cécile, founded in 1865, which performed old music during the first half of its programs, and living composers during the second. See Joël-Marie Fauquet, Les Sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restauration à 1870 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986), 176–83. 207.  See William Weber, “Redefining the Status of Opera: London and Leipzig, 1800– 1848,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 46 (2006): 507–32.

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Conservatoire usually began and ended with some classical overture or symphony, with the middle space left for a concerto, dance, chorus, or excerpt from a chamber work or opera. As these concerts grew from four or five items in the early 1860s to five to eight in the late 1860s and early 1870s, not wanting to exhaust listeners with too much of any one work, they often included a succession of fragments rather than entire works. This allowed for more variety. French audiences got to know Wagner in this way through orchestral excerpts. 208 In amateur contexts, such as at the Bon Marché employee performances, concerts also typically consisted of alternating genres—solos, chorus, or wind band, arranged with maximum contrast for the sake of variety. The explicit juxtaposition of la musique ancienne et moderne on concert programs of the 1870s, however, suggests a different focus and approach to concert organization, as well as, in certain cases, different expectations of the listener. Like exhibitions of painting, such concerts served as useful occasions to learn and practice the art of comparison. In 1875, the music historian François-Auguste Gevaert explained, “to judge is to compare.”209 A poet wrote similarly that year, “We teach ourselves only by comparison . . . when I judge, it is the hidden influence of reason that I consult. Reflection persuades me of the existence of a being in me that reasons.”210 This idea harks back to eighteenth-century theorists like Quatremère who used the Greek notion of imitation to explain how, in great art, one compares art with nature. But in this case, the comparison is with other works and the process calls on memory and reason, the enhancement of which were important educational goals. Through the technique of comparison, listeners could build knowledge starting with what they already knew, hear something unfamiliar in a certain context, and contemplate relationships between things that were comparable. 211 For many, the practice of comparison drew attention to change over time, implanting a sense of history. As Gevaert put it, the more “monuments” of the past we can hear, the more we can “appreciate in what way the musical conception of the moderns is 208.  I elaborated on this in my paper “Contingencies of Meaning in Transcriptions and Excerpts: Popularizing Wagner in France” (presented at the conference, “The Case of Wagner: A Reconsideration,” Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 10 May 2003). 209.  F.-A. Gevaert, from the preface to his Histoire et théorie de la musique de l’antiquité, completed on 1 February 1875 and published in Menestrel, 14 February 1875, 82. 210.  Maureau, Etude de l’Ordre moral. 211.  This emphasis on comparison suggests a different perspective on the nature and purpose of critical judgment than in Germany. “Both taste and judgment are evaluations of the object in relation to a preexistent whole to see it if fits in with everything else,” Hans-Georg Gadamer explains in Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York:

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superior to that of the ancients, [and] in what way it is inferior.” This suggests that the practice of comparison, as enacted at concerts, not only consists of examining similarities and differences, ideally leading to a fuller appreciation of the individual works, but also adds meta-questions to the listening experience. Questions, such as the continuity or progress from one to the next, place the listeners’ concerns at the center of the musical experience—what they are listening for—along with what they are listening to. Emerging through comparisons, musical meaning is not only something communicated by a work or a property associated with or generated by it, but also the product of what we hear with or as it. Through the practice of comparison, audiences became part of the production of musical meaning, not just the reception of it, and meaning a reflexive, reciprocal process between composer, performer, and listener, full of contingencies. This allowed audiences to bring timely issues of contemporary concern to bear on old masterpieces, or to hear this music as part of a discourse in the contemporary world with political, religious, and/or musical ramifications. Besides playing the role of enablers, reviewers and critics contributed to the production of meaning through their own acts of comparison. In 1880, a critic in L’Orphéon saw concerts as the “only occasion” permitting comparison of composers’ music, printed scores not being used by all audiences. 212 A pertinent example is the concert in January 1874, referred to above, in which children and workers in the choral society Le Louvre joined forces with upper-class singers of the Société Bourgault-Ducoudray, Opéra singers, wellknown soloists, an actor, and an orchestra to present a program that ranged from Jannequin, Bach, Rameau, and Gluck to Bizet and Saint-Saëns (fig. 24). Pougin took this as stunning evidence of the progress, not only that amateurs had made in their willingness to perform serious music, but in audiences’ interest in hearing it (several hundred were turned away at the door). 213 He calls it a concert historique,

Seabury Press, 1975). Judgment is “necessary in order to make a correct evaluation of the concrete instance.” Karol Berger, who defines judgment as discrimination, cites these passages from Gadamer in his A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 86. However, in France, particularly during the political transition of the 1870s, there was no “preexistent whole” to serve as a standard, only a collection of contradictory and mutually exclusive political ideals. Moreover, throughout this decade, French voting patterns shifted from center right to center left, suggesting that whatever preexistent ideals individuals espoused, they were capable of changing. What was necessary, then, was the ability to differentiate among plausible options and learn from difference, rather than to evaluate in order to protect or avoid dissension from a desired norm. 212.  Julien Torchet, “Revue des concerts,” L’Orphéon, 15 March 1880. 213.  Arthur Pougin, “Concert Danbé,” Ménestrel, 25 January 1874, 61.

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Fig. 24  Concert-Danbé program, 22 January 1874. The Concerts du Grand Hôtel, led by Jules Danbé (conductor of the OpéraComique [1876–98]), also took place at the Salle Herz. This collaboration between two amateur choruses and distinguished opera singers and composers features early music juxtaposed with modern music with which performers and audiences may have been able to make useful comparisons. The work here that most captured critics’ attention was Jannequin’s “Bataille de Marignan,” considered very “curious.”

and if we look more closely, more can be said. Although the concert alternated genres rather than juxtaposing comparable works—perhaps because of the taste for contrast—the choice of repertoire suggests how one might present a history lesson to a contemporary audience. Boieldieu’s overture from the Fête du village voisin sets the tone and a certain context for later hearing the minuet from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne (1872). Saint-Saëns’s unaccompanied choral motet Ave Verum may have been added to prepare listeners for Jannequin’s unaccompanied Bataille de Marignan, although a reviewer for L’Echo des orphéons felt that the “Blessing of the daggers” from Meyerbeer’s Huguenots would have been better to pair with it. 214 At the Conservatoire in January 1875, audiences would have been able to compare Massenet’s Scènes dramatiques d’après Shakespeare (1874) with a scene from Lully’s Alceste (1674), the former’s rendition of the witches from Macbeth with the latter’s conception of Charon’s introduction to the underworld, both new to their audience. Choral societies founded to revive German baroque oratorio also included French contemporary music on their programs. Besides the Société BourgaultDucoudray, Charles Lamoureux’s concert society for chorus and orchestra, L’Harmonie sacrée, modeled on its English contemporary and known for its Handel, included contemporary music with baroque oratorios. On 7 February 1875, listeners could compare excerpts from works by Handel, Mendelssohn, and Gounod. Here the “thundering modern sonorities” of Gallia created a patriotic perspective on the chorus that followed, “Sion now her head shall raise” from Judas Maccabaeus; a work about celebrating Jewish resistance to Seleucid conquest would have been particularly relevant after Gallia. Some insisted on an encore. On 18 March, framed by familiar fragments of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast, Judas Maccabaeus, and Messiah, his group presented the premiere of Massenet’s “mystery” Eve to a sold-out audience. With the young composer again forging a modern perspective on a biblical character, listeners could compare classical notions of beauty and masculine strength with Massenet’s voluptuous image of female passion. Handel’s musical grandeur here is a foil to Massenet’s “charming score, full of color,” which Pougin saw as representing the future of French music. 215 The public, whenever possible, could compare works across concerts as well. For example, a month after an air from Handel’s oratorio Samson was performed by the Concerts Pasdeloup, audiences could compare it with the Handel-influenced 214.  André Simiot, “Concerts et auditions musicales,” L’Echo des orphéons, 5–7 January 1874. 215.  Arthur Pougin, “Société de l’Harmonie sacrée,” Ménestrel, 21 March 1875, 124.

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oratorio-like choruses of act 1 of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila at the Concerts Colonne. For little-known works from the past or present, such contexts, together with repeat performances, were crucial in helping audiences construct an understanding of the music and take active part in producing a taste for it. As such, whenever possible, conductors reprogrammed new works soon after their premieres. The Harmonie sacrée, for example, gave two more performances of Eve on 23 and 27 March 1875 (fig. 25). 216 These recurrences not only allowed audiences to confirm or amend their previous opinions, but also provided new juxtapositions with other works, thereby potentially drawing audience attention to different aspects of the new work. For those able to attend numerous concerts, the experience could be particularly instructive. On 16 February 1875, for example, in an afternoon devoted to medieval and renaissance music and poetry, Parisians hearing the provençal tune, “March of the Kings,” may later have listened differently to Bizet’s artful appropriation of it in his L’Arlésienne, performed that Sunday by the Conservatoire orchestra. 217 Gevaert saw these opportunities for judgment and comparison as a way to make music part of the country’s intellectual life. They stimulated reflection and discussion. Of course, one could point out that old masterpieces were timeless and belonged on all concert programs, that they set a standard for judging newer works. With the identity of the nation in question in the France of the mid 1870s, however, I think more was going on. The ancien was not just what the French had inherited, but also what they made for themselves of the past, the perseverance of the past in the present. Concert programs provided occasions to enact this presence, contemplate its meaning, and begin to reconcile with France’s various pasts. Such juxtapositions came in the late 1860s, when republicans were gaining strength under the Second Empire, and reappear in the early 1890s, a period of similar political compromise (see chapter 11). 218 But during the Moral Order, the 216.  Di Grazia, “Concert Societies in Paris and Their Choral Repertoires,” suggests that Lamoureux’s practice of presenting successive performances of the same work was an important precedent for Colonne and Pasdeloup (353). 217.  The concerts and Gevaert text I here discuss are reported in Ménestrel, 17 January 1875, 52; 24 January 1875, 62; 7 February 1875, 78; 14 February 1875, 82–83, 86–87; 21 February 1875, 94–95; 28 February 1875, 102–3; 14 March 1875, 114; and 21 March 1875, 127. 218.  I discussed this at length in my paper “Forging French Identity: The Political Signifi­ cance of la musique ancienne et moderne” (presented at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Washington, D.C., 28 October 2006). See also Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past; Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach (Paris: Fayard, 2000); and James Garratt, Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Fig. 25  Harmonie Sacreé program, 27 March 1875. During his travels in England and Germany, Charles Lamoureux was impressed by the prominence of oratorios and the amateur ensembles that performed them. After returning to France, he tried to persuade the Conservatoire to allow him to program this genre, but was refused. He promptly resigned from his post as assistant conductor of the Conservatoire orchestra and in 1873 founded his own oratorio society, the Harmonie Sacreé. As this concert demonstrates, the society programmed the works of both baroque masters and modern French composers.

juxtaposition of ancienne and moderne music can be seen as a musical analogue to the political relationship among royalists and republicans, while complicating the perception of a too easy binary opposition between them. I do not mean to suggest that the use of this music in such contexts determined how people heard or understood it, or that any one meaning of works such as Richard Cœur de Lion, earlier linked with a political position, dominated any other way to hear it. Rather, I see these aural juxtapositions as providing opportunities for listeners, whatever their politics, to conceive of possible relationships between the past and the present as represented by la musique ancienne et moderne. Because the practice of comparative listening encouraged them to pursue their own questions and take responsibility for their own conclusions, quite possibly the meaning they found in these juxtapositions led them to reflect on the coexistence of various values elsewhere in society. Viewed ideally, then, comparing works from the Ancien Régime and the Third Republic might have led audiences to recognize plausible relationships between the past and the present. The motivations underlying such juxtapositions and the benefits envisaged, however, were not always the same. Scholars of early music (and perhaps Gevaert himself) have tended to assume that old music was the draw for its audiences, or, as Ellis proposes, that the juxtaposition of old and new served “as a defence against the charge that, in their dedication to the masterworks of the past, conductors were neglecting more recent, or living, composers.”219 Even among republicans, this may have been true, for, as Ellis has argued, Handel was a model of the strength republicans wished to assimilate. However, new music could also have been the attraction. On 20 February 1874, the L’Echo des orphéons published an open letter to Jules Danbé, who had just conducted Jannequin’s Bataille de Marignan and would later put on Destouches’s Callirhöé. Explaining that “the public understands la musique moderne better than la musique ancienne” and pointing to the huge crowds at Massenet’s Marie-Magdeleine the day before, he advised, “it’s not good to do too much music from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. We can hear it every once in a while to encourage the living and to prove that art progresses.”220 For republicans and certain less sophisticated listeners, then, such programs encouraged greater appreciation of contemporary music. Conservatives, by contrast, most likely saw the new as a way to validate the old. In his organ concerts at the Trocadéro, Alexandre Guilmant built huge audiences for his own 219.  Ellis, conclusion to Interpreting the Musical Past. 220.  André Simiot, “Lettre ouverte à M. Danbé, “L’Echo des orphéons, 20 February 1874, 2.

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music alongside that of Bach and Handel. In the school’s annual concerts, teachers at the arch-conservative Ecole Niedemeyer presented their own motets and counterpoint with those of Palestrina and Lassus. In such cases, the style and genres of new music served to foreground the influence and ongoing importance of early music. In other words, to the extent that old music influenced new music, it would have a voice in the future (which was later borne out in the 1890s). This idea closely resembles the spiral notion of progress, later advocated by Vincent d’Indy, in which art turns back on itself to propel itself forward. 221 Supporters of the Moral Order were not the only ones who may have found value in this coexistence of ancienne and moderne on concert programs. “For French art to regain its force, rediscover its path, and recover its step, it would suffice to take it back to its own past,” the radical republican minister of fine arts Antonin Proust contended. 222 Just as some conservatives (and even Wagnerians) believed in a spiral notion of progress, most republicans understood that rethinking the past could be an important part of inventing the future. In winter 1878, a year before the Senate fell to republican control and Mac-Mahon resigned, Jules Cressonnois organized a series of concerts with French identity explicitly in mind. 223 They featured, not only old and new music, but also a broader notion of la musique ancienne, which included music of the Revolution (fig. 26). His two series of six moderately priced concerts presented fifteen French composers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and fifteen living French composers, with Massenet, Gounod, Rameau, and then Gossec the most frequently represented. Listeners could hear music of all genres and compare them across time. Music from the Revolution was juxtaposed with dances from the Ancien Régime—a sixteenthcentury pavane and romanesca, a Lully sarabande, minuets by Gossec and Gluck, and gavottes by a Grétry and Gluck, acknowledging that France had two pasts, equally illustrious. These were performed alongside waltzes by Berlioz, Reber, and Joncières, encouraging listeners to take a distanced perspective on the past, rather than an engaged defense of one past over another, and reflect on changes in French dance forms over the long term. There were also overtures by Méhul and Berton to compare with overtures by Rossini, Weber, and Joncières; choruses from 221.  In his speech at the inauguration of the Schola on 2 November 1900, d’Indy said: “Art, in its march forward throughout the ages, . . . is not a closed circle, but a spiral that always rises and always progresses.” See Jann Pasler, “France: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in Man and Music: The Late Romantic Era, vol. 5, ed. Jim Samson (London: Macmillan, 1991), 389–416. 222.  Proust, Art sous la République, 275. 223.  Cressonnois was a composer-conductor who put on evening concerts daily in the Champs-Elysées in summer 1876.

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Fig. 26  Concerts Cressonnois program, 3 March 1878. The purpose of these concerts, construed as concerts historiques, was to “hold high the flag of la musique ancienne, especially that of the French school, without neglecting modern masters.” Particularly interesting is the mix of revolutionary-era composers with those associated with the Ancien Régime, but comparisons are also elicited with French modern music. Long program notes by Henri Lavoix fils, unusual in Paris until the mid 1880s, helped the public understand the historical context of the lesser-known works performed.

Catel’s Wallace alongside choruses of Bizet and Gounod, from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes with choruses by Paladilhe and Gounod, and from Rameau’s Dardanus with choruses by Massenet and Bizet; opera excerpts from Gossec’s Thésée with Lefebvre’s Judith, and from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux with Guiraud’s Madame Turlupin; the programmatic Symphonie de chasse by Gossec with Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre and Guiraud’s Carnaval; serenades by Grétry with serenades by Haydn and Beethoven; and a romance for violin by Beethoven with one by Lalo (in a premiere on 24 March). 224 Cressonnois’s concerts and others like them set up opportunities to perceive relationships between music of the past and the present in terms of the taste for certain forms, the manner of treating texts and different genres, the modes of expression, the use of the chorus, and the originality of the orchestration. This would suggest continuity in French history. Some works, such as a sixteenthcentury pavane and excerpts from Rameau’s Dardanus, were presented in recently orchestrated versions. These showed that France’s cultural heritage could be embraced, assimilated, and used for new purposes, thereby acquiring new meanings in the present. Lavoix fils’s extensive program notes for the Concerts-Cressonnois—perhaps the first of such length and substance in France—stimulated interest in the older works through anecdotes about their creation and early performances. 225 With them, he tried to broaden audiences’ limited expectations. Analytical details directed listeners to what was original in the works and what debt contemporaries owed to their predecessors. Hoping “to hold high and steady the flag of early music, and especially that of the French school, without neglecting modern masters,” Lavoix pointed out the “utility” of these concerts “for both old and modern art.” Juxtaposing la musique ancienne et moderne could help audiences reflect on the shared attributes of French music. This not only provided a new notion of French identity but would also characterize concerts oriented toward the future in France in the 1890s and into the next century. 226 If the coexistence of la musique ancienne et moderne became an integral part of French musical identity, it was in part because the genres that showed how this could work—especially songs, choruses, and dances—could be performed by 224.  In 1878, Guillot de Sainbris’s choral society presented similar juxtapositions, with two premieres, Handel’s Jeptha and Massenet’s Narcisse, the latter written for them, framed with choruses by Rameau and Grétry. 225.  Henri Lavoix fils ran the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève. He later published a Histoire de la musique (Paris: Quantin, 1885). 226.  See further on this in chapter 11.

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everyone, young or old, amateur or professional, poor or rich, in huge public halls as well as private salons, and because concerts with these programs proliferated in the 1870s. The juxtaposition supported both spiral notions of progress associated with conservatives and linear notions espoused by republicans. Moreover, used to construct various stories about France’s past, present, and future, ancienne and moderne were malleable categories. Ancienne signified ancestors the French admired or from whom they wished to assimilate something. But which composers counted as ancienne depended on who was listening and what they hoped to get out of the experience, whether they felt pride in the Ancien Régime or the Revolution, whether they envied and sought inspiration from the strength and grandeur of German baroque masterpieces or the charm and grace of the French baroque. So, too, the moderne. If the musical world was politicized during the Moral Order, it was not just because musical choices sometimes reflected the values of republicans or monarchists, but, more important, because they served as a context for open deliberation about the merits and meaning of the ancien and the moderne and helped the French reflect on what they shared as a people. By showing the relevance of both to the present, the examples discussed above, particularly the Concerts-Cressonnois, helped to break down the ideological divide between the Revolution and the Ancien Régime. Republican composers, performers, and concert organizers used music and musical taste to encourage tolerance in part because they needed the Republic to be seen as democratic, accepting differences. Republican politicians thus supported the Opéra’s continuing subsidy, despite its close association with luxury and the upper classes. As a nationalist agenda developed, musique ancienne and musique moderne were neither necessarily opposed nor clearly mapable onto royalist and republican positions. In using the past to “invent” a nationalist tradition, musicians and music scholars pursued their own ways of forming a people through taste.

e If I have had to review the political factions struggling for power, the desire to shape French mœurs, and the rising importance of elementary education—all of which have long histories in the nineteenth century—it is because they are foundational in French culture. Any attempt to understand music in and as political culture must begin with them. Where I have tried to break new ground is in examining how music was expected to help “compose” citizens and support ideology during this period, despite ideological diversity and complexity; in looking broadly at the extent to which all classes were involved with music and musicMusic as Political Culture

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making—which necessitated studying a wide range of genres; and especially in taking concerts seriously as meaningful experiences. If we wish to understand the political function or significance of music, we must look to not only musical works and the contexts in or for which they were written, but also the contexts in which they were performed and heard. Concert organizers played an important role in how audiences would encounter music. They understood that meaning arose when listeners grasped connections to immediately neighboring music, when music resonated from one work to the next—whether in the juxtaposition of Wagner with the new French music or in la musique ancienne et moderne. 227 Not all concerts, to be sure, were organized as opportunities for people to practice making comparisons, reaching judgments, and forming opinions. However, before republican laws and a new kind of secular, civic education could form a new generation of French citizens, active listening was particularly valuable, because, absent an absolute authority like the Church, a schoolmaster, or the king, the French were on their own. In the context of performances, especially under the Moral Order, people learned how to deal with uncertainty and ambivalence, while discovering connections among disparate experiences. They could test the relative merits of their opinions against those of their peers and have the opportunity to stand firm or tune to the whole. This not only helped develop their taste and their critical judgment, teaching them the habits of citizenship and preparing them to make better choices in the voting booth, it also contributed to the consensus of public opinion. When musical taste reflected tolerance of multiple pasts and multiple presents, musical practices contributed to the modern equivalent of l’esprit public, the sense of sharing as a people. Ironically, through the form its political compromise took in music and concerts, the Moral Order contributed to the republican program of national cohesion.

227.  I’m extrapolating here from Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), which owes much to Edmund Gurney’s The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880).

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4 • Regenerating National Pride

Musical Progress and International Glory

In March 1878, Viennese newspapers published a caricature of Jean-Baptiste Faure, France’s greatest baritone, dressed as Hamlet, holding the reins of a vigorous horse and dragging sacks overflowing with florins, piled high on a cart. He and Christine Nilsson, a lovely Swedish soprano who made her career with French opera, had just earned 122,000 francs in a month, ten times the annual salary of the Paris Conservatoire director.1 That spring the Imperial Opéra’s “Italian season” introduced Faure to the Viennese public in La Favorite, Don Giovanni, and, with Nilsson, in Gounod’s Faust and Thomas’s Hamlet in Italian translation. Over twenty Austrian newspapers “sang the glory” of these stars. One observed, “with such a Mephisto and Marguerite, the role of Faust became entirely secondary.” Hamlet was most appreciated (fig. 27). Eduard Hanslick, Vienna’s infamously conservative music critic, managed to get his review on the front page of the Neue Freie Presse. He lauded the transparency of Faure’s acting and singing, how he brought the text to life and how these talents made audiences forget his presence on stage. Never had the Viennese public seen such a “perfect identification of text and song, music and dramatic action.” 2 Acknowledging the baritone as “the most substantial representative of the beautiful French lyric school,” the emperor Franz Joseph himself decorated Faure and made him a singer of the imperial court—an honor for France as well as the performer.3 1.  Since the 1860s, these two had been known all over Europe for their roles in French and Italian opera. In Paris, they had premiered Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet (1868), and Faure sang Don Giovanni in the first season of the new Palais Garnier (1875). In January 1878, between doing Hamlet in Bordeaux and Marseille, Faure also made 40,000 francs for four performances to celebrate the king of Spain’s wedding. Ménestrel, 13 January 1878, 54. 2.  Eduard Hanslick, “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse, 28 March 1878. Hanslick (1825–1904), also a professor at the University of Vienna and advisor to the government, was known internationally for his Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik in der Tonkunst (The Beautiful in Music) (Leipzig, 1854). 3.  Ménestrel, 5 May 1878, 181. Hanslick’s reviews and others cited here are also summarized in Ménestrel, 7 April 1878, 149, through 30 June 1878, 246, and 25 August 1878, 313.

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Fig. 27  Edouard Manet, Faure in the Role of Hamlet (1877), Museum Folkwang Essen. Jean-Baptiste Faure was one of the leading French opera singers of the nineteenth century. After studying at the Conservatoire, he made his début in 1852 at the OpéraComique, but spent the next decade in London at Covent Garden, to which he would return throughout his career. In Paris, he created numerous roles, but became most associated with the title role of Thomas’s Hamlet. Though he undoubtedly possessed an excellent voice, many critics were most impressed with his abilities as an actor; he could convey any sentiment with ease.

For those resistant to change, the clarity, grace, and traditional forms of French music counterbalanced and perhaps neutralized the increasing importance of Wagner. Hanslick could not tolerate Wagnerian notions of musical progress and two months later would have to contend with the Viennese premiere of Siegfried. He preferred new French music. The Neue Freie Presse published a review of an Offenbach premiere in Paris. And in another front-page review, Hanslick heaped praise on other French genres performed in Vienna that month. Significantly, this music was not marginalized in a concert of French works, but rather performed in contexts that tested new French music against Germanic musical giants: SaintSaëns’s cello concerto (1873) in an orchestral concert with Beethoven’s Prometheus, Saint-Saëns’s C minor piano concerto (1877) paired by a pianist with Mozart’s C major piano concerto, and male choruses by Léo Delibes juxtaposed with choruses by Mendelssohn and Brahms. Hanslick even gave attention to BourgaultDucoudray’s little gavotte, which harkened back to the French rococo. 4 The critic’s enthusiasm for French music made him ideal to organize Austria’s musical contributions to the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris, where he would have worked on committees with these same composers.5 Claiming that Faure and Nilsson had “revolutionized” the city despite the “sensitive political preoccupations of the moment,” reviewers alluded to another possible reason for this receptivity to French music: international politics. European objections to the treaty Russia signed at San Stefano (near Istanbul) on 3 March 1878 dominated the news throughout spring 1878. The major European powers, especially the Austro-Hungarians, heatedly debated the separation of the Balkan states from the Ottoman Empire, refusing to accept this extension of Russian power. Every day discussions, reports from abroad, and last-minute telegrams from European capitals took up pages of the Neue Freie Presse. What were Europe’s interests? What were the French thinking? the English? To enlist support for their perspective and come to agreement on what could be done, Austro-Hungarians needed to reach out to their neighbors and offer evidence of friendship, shared interests, and common values. The French back home, cognizant of the need for good diplomatic relationships if they were to expand abroad, 6 called it a “gracious reply” when, after they honored Johann Strauss with the Légion d’honneur, 4.  Eduard Hanslick, “Feuilleton,” Neue Freie Presse, 23 March 1878. 5.  Saint-Saëns, Delibes, and Bourgault-Ducoudray served on the supervising committee for music, Delibes also on the committee for foreign concerts, and Bourgault-Ducoudray on that for folk music from all countries. 6.  For this reason, Gambetta supported France’s participation in the Congress of Berlin (1878). Jean Meyer et al., eds. Histoire de la France coloniale, vol. 1 (Paris: Colin, 1991), 577–78.

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Delibes received the cross of the Order of Franz Joseph. The extraordinary reception of Faure and Hamlet, whether motivated by escape from political concerns or not, validated French taste and, by analogy, the French nation, even if the growth of republicanism in France may have troubled the Habsburgs. Through the neutral sphere of music, diplomacy had a place to begin. In the context of close relationships with the rest of Europe, reinventing themselves as a nation entailed not only looking back to past glories, whether under kings, emperors, or revolutionaries, but also taking stock of present accomplishments and promoting hope in the future. With defeat to Prussia, French conservatives and progressives alike looked to the arts rather than the military to revive national pride and respect from their neighbors. In 1872, Camille Doucet, president of the Institut de France, explained, “The glory of our arts will avenge the mourning of our arms. When the canon is reduced to silence, better voices are heard; when the bloody battle has ceased, noble struggles begin. . . . Let’s be even prouder of those who remain.”7 During his visit to America, Offenbach made a similar point, noting that great nations needed, not only industrial force, but also “the brilliance and glory that alone the arts are capable of proving.”8 The arts in France had long elicited glory, renown, and admiration from many near and far. Associated with heroic achievements, glory was an idea around which all French could rally, as well as a technology with which to unify and rebuild the nation.9 The task ahead was to get people to identify with the nation’s artistic achievements. This included opera. Although les classes populaires might never have the opportunity to enjoy it in all its splendor, opera had enormous utility in bolstering French pride.10 France had long attracted major foreign composers—such as Lully, Gluck, Cherubini, Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Verdi—to write for French lyric theaters, and they typically modified their styles to suit French taste. Opera also reflected and promoted France’s glory abroad. The popularity of French dramatic music beyond Paris and all over the world during this period was taken as evidence of the strength and distinction of French culture, if not also its superiority. 7.  Cited in Ménestrel, 27 October 1972, 389. 8.  “Notes d’un musicien en voyage,” Ménestrel, 4 March 1877, 109. 9.  I use technology here to mean stabilized procedures that generate representations and sustain traditions. See Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream: A Genealogy of the Chemical Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 8–9. 10.  Economists call this nonuse value, in that opera had value for those who would never experience it, except perhaps in transcriptions, but derived benefits from the knowledge that it existed. See Ismail Serageldin, “Cultural Heritage as Public Good: Economic Analysis Applied to Historic Cities,” in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, ed. Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, and Marc A. Stern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 246.

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Part of this resulted from works such as Mignon and Hamlet, which successfully articulated French taste as universal, that is, an embodiment of shared values in western European culture. Having to negotiate old and new, real and ideal, Italian and German influences, and, in opera, vocal and dramatic priorities, attracted foreigners to French music. It seemed like an aesthetic analogue of France itself, geographically situated between north and south and, under the Moral Order, politically perched between monarchy and republic. As earlier, some called this the juste milieu and saw the role of French music, and of France itself, as one of “alliance and reconciliation.”11 French composers’ desire to please and their inclination to appropriate what they admired in others facilitated this, particularly valuable for the young Republic on a continent still full of monarchies. To the extent that French music represented the country abroad, as a form of cultural diplomacy, it could strengthen ties, particularly important during times of conflict, and lay the foundation for future political relationships. In this sense, staying aware of music as a transnational force and maintaining France’s reputation in the arts were in the national interest. With music, politics, and markets intertwined, French production and its influence abroad also supported France’s economic prosperity. The music press thus devoted substantial space to regular reports of foreign as well as provincial performances of French music and its international as well as national reception. Like their neighbors, the French recognized that the perceptions of others could both reinforce and shape their understanding of themselves and their music. Central to the country’s regeneration and its future glory, progress in French music—particularly new orchestral sounds reinforcing its sensual immediacy— served as a metaphor for French aspirations and an emblem of French pride both at home and abroad. For the government, encouraging artistic progress meant investing in infrastructure and helping artists. Republicans, particularly those dominating the Paris municipal council, supported competitions that increased access to a wide variety of artists and ensured broad participation in the public sphere; they also backed more democratic arts policies. But musical progress could be particularly challenging. Premiered in March 1875, only two months after the passing of the republican constitution, Bizet’s Carmen put forth a new vision of musical theater, as well as a daring portrait of the appeal and dangers of freedom, mapped onto an exuberant, seductive woman. Yet after forty-eight performances of it that year, the Opéra-Comique dropped Carmen from its repertoire for seven 11.  For an extended discussion of the juste milieu in French music of the Second Empire, see Hervé Lacombe, Les Voies de l’opéra français (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 282–84.

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years. Judged too realistic, its message of personal liberty conflicted with the Moral Order, especially threatening when President Mac-Mahon’s government was beginning to lose its conservative majority. The official world could accept the titillations of Massenet’s pornographic drames sacrés, but not the audacities of Carmen. That foreigners produced Carmen and premiered Samson et Dalila but not the state-subsidized Paris theaters inspired bitterness and disenchantment. Under the Moral Order, certain compromises had to be made, particularly by republicans. Despite the wounded pride of the French, many looked to German music for compelling models of strength, and a good number of composers took inspiration from Handel and Wagner. And even with their vigorous anticlerical and nationalist agenda, republicans had to tolerate the Catholic Church, still closely tied to the monarchists, which employed many musicians. Republicans continued to write music for Church services. Just as they had to work with monarchies in Europe, republicans also had to accept the association of opera with traditional elites and to focus on the economic advantages it brought to the nation. In this spirit, acknowledging a shared respect for classical aesthetic values and lofty, inspiring ideas, they chose to integrate rather than reject less progressive aesthetic tendencies. Composers such as Saint-Saëns and Massenet sought ways to incorporate traditional aspects of grand opera into their music, regardless of its associations with luxury, while borrowing innovative structures from Wagner. They wrote music as a form of entente cordiale, whether for kings and queens or the masses. Such attitudes to music and its public utility both within France and beyond not only characterized the Moral Order but also became integral to the republicans’ notions of music, suggesting more complexity than their politics might imply.

Moral and Musical Progress For many republicans, progress, a linear force, resulted from human creativity and intervention in the material world. Condorcet had promoted progress in knowledge as essential;12 Comte and the positivists saw it as the key to advancing from superstition to reason. As Public Instruction Minister Jules Ferry conceived it, progress was a “slow development, an evolution, a phenomenon of social growth, of transformation, that first affects ideas, then spreads to mœurs, and finally becomes expressed in laws.”13 In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the 12.  Condorcet, Outline of the Intellectual Progress of Mankind (1795). 13.  Ferry, speech in Le Havre, 14 October 1883, cited in Claude Nicolet, L’Idée républicaine en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 256n1.

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bourgeoisie used the term “progress” to validate and contextualize its successes in industrial development, such as electricity, the telephone, and the telegraph, some of which improved the living conditions of the poorer and less privileged. New forms of transport also helped link people together, especially in the cities. The seemingly unlimited capacity for technical improvements and the growth of France’s gross national product into one of the highest in Europe bolstered the idea of progress as a potent material and economic force. Like their revolutionary predecessors, late nineteenth-century republicans believed that the concept also operated in the psychic world of people. That is, moral improvements could be encouraged and would be cumulative, like those of industry. Of course, there was dissent over whether such progress could be induced by “great art” as taught at the Académie or by a liberalism permitting a wider range of aesthetic attitudes. In the 1870s, especially during the Moral Order, government officials promoted the former, the artistic merits of great masterpieces of the past. Certainly, they appreciated art as an object of contemplation or knowledge, but for republicans, as Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix explains, it was also an object of perception representing the sociopolitical reality of humanity. In addition, she argues, because conservative as well as liberal republicans understood aesthetic taste and style as potentially shared, a product of education and experience, they saw art as “a means of cultural action oriented to social and economic progress.” Art was thus placed squarely in the public domain and expected to serve the general interest of the people.14 The first principle republicans advocated in art was beauty. They saw beauty as the sensation of natural order, harmony, and measure, which, together with clarity, were assumed to have characterized French art and culture since classicism. There was thus nothing original in their concept. However, just as they wished to do away with the opposition between liberal and utilitarian education, republicans were intent on transforming the eighteenth-century opposition between beauty and utility. For them, beauty was not a luxury, the domain of the privileged. Rather, like truth and other “noble and pure ideas such as duty, justice and progress,”15 beauty had social value and could have a direct impact on society’s mœurs. Agreeing with Cousin, Jules Simon understood the beautiful as distinct from the pleasurable, an ideal independent of the self and all human intelligence, something 14.  Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat sous la IIIe République: Le Système des beaux-arts, 1870–1940 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1992), 77–79. She notes that many ministers—Ferry, Gambetta, Proust, Lockroy, Clemenceau, Dujardin-Beaumetz, Bourgeois, and others—subscribed to this notion of progress in art. 15.  Eugène Spuller, Education de la démocratie (Paris: Alcan, 1892), ix.

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that took one beyond the present.16 In 1875, Simon’s friend Deputy Edouard Charton, a Saint-Simonian Freemason, explained republicans’ attitude to the arts in a much-cited speech to the Assemblée nationale, saying, “We recognize the arts’ right to the state’s concern, not only because they are a source of exquisite and rare pleasure for a few delicate souls, but also because they respond to a general need [besoin général]. They develop a feeling of love for the beautiful in the entire country—something the nation cannot distance itself from with impunity, be it for the progress of its civilization or its glory.”17 Art, republicans believed, could not only help people imagine an ideal social order; through its beauty, it could give them a sense of what it felt like to inhabit an orderly, well-proportioned space—a just world—if only in their imaginations. This was not Kantian transcendence, but an embodied ideal capable of a stimulating a taste for order and new ways of being. Art could influence one’s perception of the world and shape one’s behavior. This went for both creators and consumers of art.18 In this sense, music was not just a potential reflection of society, but an agent with the capacity to affect it.19 Republicans distrusted unstructured, formless works as expressions of uncontrolled emotions. They considered the excesses of romantic individualism elitist and antidemocratic. 20 At the same time, as in the words “transform,” “reform,” “perform,” and the notion of “forming” citizens, form for them was neither static nor merely a geometric abstraction. Like my notion of “composing” the citizen, it translated concepts into reality. If, as they believed, a work should give rational shape to reality, its form should reflect the conscious reconciliation and equilibrium of apparently disordered material realities. Inhabiting a form could then have a certain power over one’s sensibility. The unity and coherence of form, in this sense, was what the government hoped to inspire in society, the result of balance and interlocking connections. From this perspective, on 5 August 1872, Simon told Conservatoire students 16.  Jules Simon, Victor Cousin (Paris, 1887), 48. 17.  Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, 140–41 and app. 16, 354–56. Charton, elected deputé in 1871, was concerned about the pedagogical and social role of art. He started Magasin pittoresque, an illustrated magazine for children and working-class families. According to Antonin Proust in L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), this attitude was largely absent during the Second Empire whose government “took only a mediocre interest in anything that could spread a feeling for art” (7). 18.  This idea of music as a means of encouraging inner harmony recalls that of the utopian socialists before 1848, such as Charles Fourier. 19.  Tia DeNora, “The Musical Composition of Social Reality: Music, Action, and Reflexivity,” Sociological Review 43 (May 1995): 306–11, calls art a referent for action. 20.  Miriam R. Levin, Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986), 227n11.

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that art should “touch us, console us, strengthen us” with its visions of order and make us feel the splendor of beauty. Students should use their imaginations “to create a new world around us.”21 To the extent that clarity of thought went along with clarity of message, clear language and form were foremost. 22 Other principles, too, were valued: in the visual arts, Charles Blanc pointed to repetition as a form of consonance and to contrast and symmetry, and Antonin Proust, to measure and proportion. 23 If art was to exemplify a dynamic process in motion toward a stable resolution, closure was also crucial. Republicans hoped that acquiring a taste for the beauty of clear form, measured proportions, and formal closure would help people to understand the basis for a harmonious, ordered life. 24 In this use of music to contribute to the “improvement of the human species,”25 moderates and conservatives of the Moral Order reached another consensus. In the 1870s, as throughout most of the nineteenth century in France, many composers and music critics agreed about the importance of formal clarity, balance between contrasting forces, and closure in music. This has led historians to refer to a certain classicism during this period, but perhaps not entirely for the right reasons. The Viennese classics did interest them. Beethoven was a staple of orchestral concerts, and Ambroise Thomas loved Mozart. Ménestrel published forty-seven lead articles on Mozart in 1873–74, seventeen on Gluck in 1874–75, and twenty-six on the young Beethoven in 1877. But when the term was coined in 1863, “classicism” referred to music composed during the reign of Louis XIV— not what republicans were promoting. More than with seventeenth- or eighteenthcentury classical models, the principles that Simon valued found resonance in the romantic/classic antithesis as one of tension/relaxation, in the association of the classical with art involving reflection, and in the idea of serious music as having moral value. 26 21.  Jules Simon, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1872). 22.  “Ce qui se pense bien s’énonce clairement,” Boileau observed in his L’Art poétique (1674). 23.  See Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts décoratifs: Décoration intérieure de la maison (Paris: Librairie Renouard, H. Loones, 1882), and Proust, Art sous la République, 276. 24.  Levin, Republican Art and Ideology, 10–16, 177–79, 216–17. Levin notes that republicans considered art a model for the kind of socialization they wished to support, not only because it involved work and was a product of human labor, but also because it often involved collaboration (in music, for example, between a composer, patron, editor, performer, public and sometimes critic). 25.  Agénor Bardoux, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beauxarts: Séance publique annuelle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1878). 26.  Joël-Marie Fauquet, “Classicisme,” in Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIX siècle, ed. id. (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 283–84.

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Such principles can be found in many genres of French music. For example, military marches, which were often on late nineteenth-century concert programs, embraced clear ternary forms, ABA, with middle B sections that presented maximum contrast with the framing A sections. In most of them, balance comes from opposing aggressive outer sections with lyrical inner ones. French orchestral marches, in contrast, were usually rondos, ABACA. In them, the initial A material tends to grow increasingly strong as it confronts and eventually incorporates the contrasting material in B and C, such as in Berlioz’s very popular “Marche hongroise,” often excerpted from the Damnation de Faust. In his concertos, symphonies, and symphonic tone poems, Saint-Saëns created coherent, balanced forms that renewed the genres and embraced clarity as a way to insulate French music from the influence of Wagner. Saint-Saëns’s oratorio Le Déluge (1876), setting a text by Louis Gallet, exemplifies Simon’s principles in a large work for two soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Not only is it Protestant in attitude, suggesting direct contact between God and Noah, but it uses clear contrasts of an original nature. In its prelude, as if depicting the first days of mankind, Saint-Saëns reduces the orchestra to the strings only and, in a musical emblem of Western civilization, contrasts four-part counterpoint, a Bach-like theme treated in fugue, with a lyrical violin solo, accompanied by strings playing pizzicato. In part 1, he adds the harp to accompany a narrator as he then recounts the degeneration of man’s soul. Two soloists and the chorus then take on God’s voice, reiterating over and over in furious fugal imitation, “I will exterminate this race.” In part 2, he expands the orchestra to include a gong, timpani, and huge brass section (including five trombones and four low saxhorns) to portray the rising waters of the flood—what one critic called “a symphonic description of Niagara”—and the cries of people being engulfed in it. Waves of repeating scalar and arpeggiated ostinati patterns, a gradual thickening in the upper register, and a very slow crescendo builds as the waves and the “furious winds” crash against one another, then subside into “an eternal night” (ex. 6). In part 3, an orchestra classical in nature returns to accompany the rebirth of the earth and human feeling. Was Saint-Saëns here implying that the natural sublime evoked in music must be framed and controlled by the beautiful—so far from German, especially Wagnerian, notions of music?27 After the luminous appearance of a rainbow in the clouds, a “symbol of peace,” counterpoint also returns, however here to drive home God’s exuberant call for people to “multiply.” The audience at its premiere by the Concerts Colonne on 5 March 1876 was fiercely 27.  I’m grateful to Mitchell Morris for this insight.

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Ex. 6  Saint-Saëns, Le Déluge (1876), part 2. Here the strings and upper woodwinds, representing the waves, collide against the brass, the “furious winds.”

divided. Some critics bemoaned the composer’s use of descriptive music, a genre they found inferior, and thought he was “going astray” in this “complicated and difficult” work, preferring the “simple and sweet” soprano air in part 3. However, they admitted that he had achieved “the effect he sought with mathematical precision.” Counting on the “clear-cut contrast” of its “violent effects” with the “adorable simplicity of L’Enfance du Christ and the sober instrumentation of Méhul’s Joseph,” Edouard Colonne repeated part 2 on his popular Good Friday concert. 28 French music could also serve as an abstract model for society’s morals and mœurs, and vice versa, because it could embody progress. While formal clarity encouraged the experience of musical order, ironically, it provided a framework for exploring new freedoms. Typical of French music from this period is the combination of relatively simple forms with inventive uses of the orchestra and creation of new sound colors. One wonders if this was heard as a metaphor for the kind of liberty republicans envisaged for individuals who could live in harmony within the structure of an ordered society. Occasionally, composers sought to use new resources, such as when Meyerbeer asked Adolphe Sax to create special instruments to help situate act 4 of L’Africaine in an unknown country, or when Gounod commissioned a pyrophone, an instrument producing sound from gas in crystal tubes, to accompany the divine voices heard by Joan of Arc. 29 But for the most part, as in Le Déluge, composers used standard instruments in new ways, combinations, or contexts. Progress in this sense meant extending the limits of preexisting materials, building on previous accomplishments, and making these achievements readily graspable. Coloristic orchestration earlier in the century resulted in part from operatic practices (by Meyerbeer and others) as well as the influence of Berlioz. Thomas and Gounod incorporated harp, percussion, and, in Hamlet, saxophones, to produce unusual effects and enhance the expressivity of their operas. The press considered the orchestra responsible for the poetic atmosphere in their music.30 This interest in sound led Thomas in 1873 to institute an acoustics course at the Conservatoire, initiating study of the scientific basis for sound. Some theorized the sound palette, 28.  A.-M., “Concerts et soirées,” Ménestrel, 23 April 1876, 167. See also Brian Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), 193–97. 29.  P. Lacome, “Les Voix de l’orchestre,” Ménestrel, 30 June 1872, 254, 24 August 1873, 311, and 23 November 1873, 414. Unfortunately, Meyerbeer died before this collaboration bore fruit, and Frédéric Kastner’s pyrophone could not be made in time for the premiere of Jeanne d’Arc. See also the report on this instrument at the Universal Exhibition in Vienna, Revue et gazette musicale, 21 September 1873, 301, and the inventor’s commentary in ibid., 20 December 1874, 465–66. 30.  Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï and Hervé Lacombe, “Faust et Mignon face à la presse,” in Sillages musicologiques, ed. Philippe Blay and Raphaëlle Legrand (Paris: Conservatoire national de Paris, 1997), 103.

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seeking to understand relationships between the natural phenomena of sound and human sensibility. These were concerns shared with impressionist painters. 31 SaintSaëns also experimented with sound colors, especially in his tone poems and the two ballets in Samson et Dalila (1868–77).32 In his Danse macabre, for example, he incorporates a xylophone, which some heard as the sound of bones clanking against one another.33 Critics applauded him for using the orchestra as one might a keyboard. It gratified audiences’ taste for the new and different, offering a kind of “mysterious color” and “brilliant orchestration” that made for instructive comparisons, especially when next to Mozart and Beethoven.34 The combination of ordered forms and progressive sounds was also one the government rewarded. After the premiere of Marie-Magdeleine (1873), Thomas lauded Massenet for proving that “one can proceed in the path of progress while remaining clear, sober, and measured”—an accomplishment that helped earn him the Légion d’honneur in 1876.35 Many republicans also associated progress with achievement reached through conquering adversity. In his history of French music, Chouquet had shown that “artists of genius had to struggle against public opinion and withstand scorn and injustices before they could get accepted innovations on which the progress of music depended.”36 In the 1870s, the composer most associated with such struggle was Berlioz, whom the press regularly portrayed as “a hero by the force of his will,” whose works were “echoes of his suffering and his joys.” This view of him derived from three aspects of his career. First, there was his own existential condition, his loneliness and melancholy expressed in his memoirs and the characters he set to music. Critics pointed to his possible identification with Herod’s sleepless nights in L’Enfance du Christ, Faust’s soliloquy, and the burial of Julie to depict a life filled with tragic emotion. Second, French audiences during the Second Empire had shown indifference to his greatest works. Although he was elected to 31.  In “Voix de l’orchestre,” Lacome proposes a study of orchestral voices as one might study human voices, classifying them according to the effect that various registers make, whether natural or artificial, in the hope that this might help composers “in their preparation of their sonorous palette, their palette impressionnelle” (255). This is contemporaneous with Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise (1872), shown at the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, although impressionists’ interest in color was not necessarily accompanied by a concern for clear form. 32.  By 1880, reviewers were ready in advance to praise this aspect of his new works. See the review of his Suite algérienne in Ménestrel, 26 December 1880, 31. 33.  Revue et gazette musicale, 31 January 1875, 37. Jean Bonnerot, in C. Saint-Saëns, sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Durand, 1922), notes that the tone poem is a “transformation of a melody written in 1873, setting a Jean Lahor poem, ‘Egalité, Fraternité’ ” (70). 34.  Ménestrel, 13 February 1876, 86, and 4 April 1880, 143. 35.  Cited in Elisabeth Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas ou la tentation du lyrique (Besan­ çon: Cêtre, 1994), 92. 36.  Adrien Desprez, “Bibliographie musicale,” Revue et gazette musicale, 1 June 1873, 172.

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the Institut at thirty-five, and Paganini had proclaimed him Beethoven’s successor, Berlioz complained endlessly of lack of money and failures, especially the cool reception given his Damnation de Faust. That some of his works were performed in Germany while being rejected in his own country irked not just Berlioz but later nationalist-minded republicans. Third, his music presented substantial difficulty to orchestras, performers, and listeners. It required artists of the first order, lots of rehearsals, and money for extra performers. It challenged listeners, not only with extreme states of ecstasy and despair, but also with musical complexities. To grasp it fully required multiple performances and repeated hearing. A year after the composer died, on 23 March 1870, the Concerts Pasdeloup presented a Berlioz Festival, and a “campaign of public reparation of his memory” began. Thereafter excerpts of his major pieces appeared regularly on concert programs. At first, it was the sophisticated subscribers of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire who applauded them. Then Colonne’s efforts to perform these works complete—two performances of Enfance du Christ on consecutive Sundays in January 1875, then two of Roméo et Juliette in November—paid off in interest among new audiences and significant critical attention. The eminent composer and critic Ernest Reyer noted that although serious musicians knew the scores, few had heard them in their entirety. In the months and years that followed, Colonne reprogrammed these and other works by Berlioz so that audiences could get to know the music and engage in comparisons. That Colonne’s public made Berlioz popular is significant. Most listeners bought their tickets at the last minute, rather than in annual subscriptions, and thus were particularly sensitive to the vagaries of Parisian tastes and fashions. Presented as the French heir to Beethoven, but not overly dependent on music of the past, Berlioz soon took on the mantle of musician of the future. With his passionate love of liberty, genius for orchestration, “colossal style,” invention of the dramatic symphony, and theatrical music filled with riotous crowds, people saw him as a “musician of revolutions.” With works such as his Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, he was understood as the musician most influenced by the traditions of the French Revolution. As Romain Rolland saw it, Berlioz’s greatest originality was the creation of music “that suited the spirit of the common people, recently raised to sovereignty, and the young democracy.” He showed “the music of France the way in which her genius should tread . . . the possibilities she had never before dreamed of,” laying the “strong foundation of a national and popular music in the greatest republic in Europe.”37 To 37.  The quotations in these two paragraphs come from Romain Rolland, Musicians of Today, trans. Mary Blaiklock (New York: Books for Libraries, 1915), 15, 23–24, 46, 51, 58–59,

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Fig. 28  Engraving of the inauguration of the statue of Berlioz, 1886. From Adolphe Jullien, Hector Berlioz: Sa Vie et ses œuvres (Paris: La Librairie de l’Art, 1888). A stone statue of Berlioz now stands in Paris in a garden at the end of the rue de Calais. The original bronze statue (destroyed in 1942) was inaugurated on 17 October 1886, with the address given by Berlioz’s friend and supporter Ernest Reyer.

the extent that his music inspired audiences to expand their listening skills and face up to adversities and struggles in their own lives, and that it encouraged composers to explore the dramatic symphony and plumb the depths of the orchestra for new musical resources, Berlioz became an emblem of French progress embraced by both republicans and progressives on the right (fig. 28).38 63, 251. As Steven Huebner remarked to me, Rolland’s championing of Berlioz should be understood in the context of his admiration for Beethoven, and Berlioz’s own efforts to position himself in Beethoven’s lineage. 38.  Adolphe Jullien wrote books on Berlioz in 1882 and 1888.

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Exporting French Music and French Values To heal France’s wounded pride after the loss to Prussia required not only symbols and an imagination of social progress in French society, but also economic prosperity. Monarchists and republicans alike considered the arts as capable of contributing to the country’s economic progress, a function of its exports and international reputation, as well as of French productivity. In the visual arts, good design and fashion were considered indispensable to certain French industries, particularly those related to luxury goods.39 The republicans thought that art education would help future industrialists maintain French superiority in this domain, to the extent that taste was teachable and not just intuitive. In his address to art students on 11 August 1875, Fine Arts Director Philippe de Chennevières, asked them to be the “instructors of French industry” and “officers in the future struggle of French against foreign industry.” Through teaching drawing in elementary schools, he hoped “to create an army of innumerable soldiers, as many soldiers as there are schoolchildren in France.”40 In their speeches of 1876 through 1879 at the Conservatoire, the ministers of public instruction and fine arts used similar language calling its students a “brave and peaceful army of artists,” “soldiers” whose “peaceful struggles bring the most brilliant successes,” whose “triumphs make France proud,” and who “merit admirers and friends.” Politicians expected these young musicians to “remember [their] duties” in return for the privilege of a free education. This meant not only joining others in the “march” toward progress in the arts but, above all, defending and helping maintain French artistic supremacy. Concerts and especially theater contributed to this effort. At home during the first half of 1872, for example, the French spent an unprecedented eight million francs on them. 41 In addition to various cercles artistiques and sociétés philharmoniques that performed largely for local elites, the musical life of French cities grew with the advent of popular orchestras modeled on Pasdeloup’s concerts populaires 39.  This idea dates back to M. de Laborde who, in a report on the 1867 Universal Exhibition, pointed back to a conviction that emerged from the 1851 Exhibition: “the arts are the most powerful machine of industry.” He noted that at this point each country had resolved “to conquer this motor of success at all cost.” This meant “organizing this machine,” i.e., creating museums and schools of the industrial arts. Proust, Art sous la République, 7–8. 40.  Philippe de Chennevières, “Supplément au Rapport du août 1878: Discours prononcé à la distribution des prix, 11 août 1875,” in Ministère de l’instruction publique, des cultes, et des beaux-arts, Bulletin, 1877–78 (Paris: Société anonyme de publications périodiques, 1878), 365. 41.  “Revue de 1872,” Revue et gazette musicale, 5 January 1873, 1.

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Fig. 29  Célestine Galli-Marié as Mignon (1866). This portrait of Galli-Marié shows the 25-year-old singer as Mignon, one of the roles with which she was most closely associated. She achieved such fame that many composers wrote leading roles for her, including Massenet and Offenbach, and she became one of the most celebrated Carmens of her day. She frequently toured outside Paris, bringing major operatic works both to the provinces and abroad.

in Marseille and Brest (1872), Versailles (1872), Lyon (1874), Angers and Lille (1876). 42 Paris-based music journals, particularly the Revue et gazette musicale, reported regularly on operas and operettas produced in the départements, sometimes by singers associated with Paris productions, such as Célestine Galli-Marié (fig. 29), who took Mignon to Bordeaux in 1873, and Jean-Baptiste Faure (fig. 27), who did Hamlet in Lyon in 1877. Sometimes, other French cities took the lead. For example, in 1877, Lyon produced the premiere of Saint-Saëns’s Etienne Marcel; in 1883, Nantes did the same for Massenet’s Hérodiade; and in 1886, Aix-les-Bains put on the first French production since 1863 of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles. After it had left Paris, Angers produced Carmen in 1878. French operas by the major composers also had a tradition of quickly making their way across Europe soon 42.  See Jann Pasler, “Democracy, Ethics, and Commerce: The Concerts Populaires Movement in the Late 19th-Century France,” in Les Sociétés de musique en Europe, 1700–1920: Structures, pratiques musicales et sociabilités, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007), 333–57.

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after their French premieres and revivals, eventually being heard in the Americas and Australia. 43 In London, the director of the Royal Italian Opera had made his reputation and the theater’s with French repertoire. 44 The omnipresence of French opera abroad—which French readers kept up with through the music press— was a particular source of pride, helping to promote a certain image of France in Europe. For these reasons, despite the huge reparations promised to Prussia, Jules Simon argued for continuing support of the Opéra, Comédie Française, Opéra-Comique, and Odéon (traditionally funded in that order of importance) during the state’s review of their annual budgets in spring 1872. He pleaded passionately that France should not “abdicate” its “moral and intellectual influence on the world” and “the idea of being one of the great peoples of the world.” From this perspective, theatrical art was “the most essential and goes the furthest the quickest”: Go anywhere, in the great cities or the small towns, you will find a French play in our language or translated; you will find French music, French artists. Well, it’s part of our influence, it’s part of our glory, it’s part of our soul, it’s something that should not be abandoned. . . . I don’t think I’m wrong about this Assemblée. Its instinct is not to abandon France in its suffering or to let the ruins accumulate, but to show it living, powerful, active, ready to come back and to fight in the world of ideas and the world of the arts. 45

Concurring with the comte d’Osmoy, who considered the arts “the only national glory left for us,” the Orléanist minister of the interior Charles Beulé likewise saw the Opéra as one of France’s “greatest glories,” not a “place of pleasure and frivolous dissipations.” 46 Republicans and monarchists thus agreed on a substantial subsidy for the Opéra for a number of reasons. It supported the theatrical life in the départements and to some extent abroad. Paris theaters helped connect the social and intellectual life of Paris with those of elites around the country and abroad. The disproportionate amount of state funding going to the capital reinforced the 43.  For an overview of these performances, see the essays in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 44.  Gabriella Dideriksen, “Mener Paris à Londres: L’Utilisation du répertoire français par le Royal Italian Opera dans sa lutte pour la survie artistique,” Histoire, économie, société, April–June 2003, 217–38. 45.  Simon, during annual budget discussions at the Assemblée nationale, March–April 1872, reproduced in Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 44, 408. 46.  See the comte d’Osmy cited in ibid., 276, and Charles Beulé, also secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, cited in “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 24 March 1872, 131.

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centrality of Paris in French culture, as well as its hierarchical relationship with the départements. Most important, republicans and monarchists concurred because the Opéra assured “the supremacy of France over other nations from an artistic perspective.” It had provided “new horizons” for some of Europe’s finest musical geniuses and helped them become greater artists. 47 Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829), Halévy’s La Juive (1835), and Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), Les Huguenots (1836), Le Prophète (1849), and L’Africaine (1865) made republicans and monarchists alike feel pride in a French institution that had turned foreign musicians into French men and women. This was also true of foreign singers who made their reputations in Paris with French works, such as Gabrielle Krauss (Viennese), Mlle de Reské (Polish), Christine Nilsson (Swedish), and Marie Van Zandt (American) (figs. 30–32). 48 Simon and Beulé also realized that they should help the next generation. Enthusiastic applause followed Beulé’s description of young French composers as “our hope, our vengeance, our future,” and of the Opéra as their “pedestal,” although everyone was aware of how few new works the theater produced. Some conservatives, however, preferred that the Opéra be a museum, “the Louvre of music,” producing only established, “truly glorious” works. Since many opera lovers came to Paris to see the sumptuous sets and hear the refined performances of works they already knew from simpler local productions or instrumental fantasies, it was vital for Paris theaters to keep older masterpieces in their repertoire so that audiences could “judge them by comparison.” With much of the opera audiences made up of either conservative subscribers or these outsiders from the départements and abroad, it should be no surprise that the Opéra produced only one new opera and one new ballet annually after the Palais Garnier opened in 1875. New works, 47.  Ibid. From the perspective of Charles Beulé in his L’Opéra et le drame lyrique (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1872), “France created his talent and revealed Meyerbeer to himself. . . . He was, despite himself, subject, vassal, tributary, something conquered, but calling himself a French genius” (12–13). Cited in Kerry Murphy, “Race and Identity: Appraisals in France of Meyerbeer on His 1891 Centenary,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 1, 2 (2004): 33. 48.  Krauss sang for the Théâtre-Italien (1859–70), then Rachel in La Juive at the Opéra in 1875. Through 1888, she was a member of the Opéra’s company, where she sang Meyerbeer’s heroines, as well as Pauline in Gounod’s Polyeucte (1878), Hermosa in Gounod’s Le Tribut de Zamora (1881), and Catherine of Aragon in Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII (1883). Nilsson created Ophelia in Thomas’s Hamlet (1868) and sang in the Opéra’s first performance of Faust (1869). Mlle de Reské did Hamlet at the Opéra in the 1870s. Van Zandt did Mignon at the OpéraComique in March 1880 and created the title role of Lakmé (1883). See the entries for Krauss and Van Zandt in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie et al. (New York: Grove, 2001).

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Fig. 30  Christine Nilsson, from an engraving. In Charles Simond, Paris de 1800 à 1900 d’après les estampes et les mémoires du temps (Paris, 1900). Nilsson, born in Sweden, had an active career in Paris and London. In 1868, she created the role of Ophelia in Thomas’s Hamlet, and later played the title character in the London and New York premieres of Mignon (in 1870 and 1871, respectively). The flowers in her hair and the word “Hamlet” written on the paper be­­­ neath her frame, indicate that Nilsson is depicted here as Ophelia, demonstrating her close association with that role. Fig. 31  Gabrielle Krauss, from an engraving. In Charles Simond, Paris de 1800 à 1900 d’après les estampes et les mémoires du temps (Paris, 1900). The Austrian Krauss was a favorite at the Opéra during her lengthy time there (1875–88), creating major roles for Gounod and Saint-Saëns and garnering acclaim for her performances in Meyerbeer’s works. She is pictured here in the title character in Rossini’s Semiramide.

Fig. 32  Marie Van Zandt as Lakmé. The American Van Zandt spent only five years in Paris (1880–85), but she made a lasting impact there. Her portrayals of Mignon, among other roles, were so impressive that Delibes composed the title role in Lakmé for her. The setting of this image of her in that role, as well as her costume, highlight the exoticism of Lakmé’s character.

it was argued, put the institution at risk financially and so should have their own theater. 49 Older French grand opera not only dominated the Opéra in the 1870s, it also had perhaps the largest presence outside Paris, representing the conservative tastes of a relatively homogeneous elite audience.50 In 1873, besides the new production in Paris, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine was especially popular in French cities and abroad. In 1874, Ricordi produced an Italian edition of Robert le Diable that cost less than one franc, and singers at the Moscow Conservatory performed Robert le Diable and Dame 49.  Pierre du Croisy, writing in La France, 17 June 1872, used these arguments to propose that the government subtract from the Opéra the money it was using to put on the occasional new work and use it to fund a separate Théâtre-Lyrique. That December, the minister did include a small subsidy for this theater, which was increased to 100,000 francs in 1874. 50.  Performances at Berlin’s Imperial Theater in 1873–74, for example, included Meyerbeer’s Prophète (7 times) and Robert le Diable (4), Halévy’s La Juive (6), Boieldieu’s Dame blanche (6), Auber’s Muette de portici (2), Gounod’s Faust (8) and Roméo et Juliette (4), and Thomas’s Hamlet (5). See Ménestrel, 5 July 1874, 247.

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blanche in their 1878 public exercises.51 There was also interest in postrevolutionary French music. Along with nine other French operas, Berlin’s Imperial Theater kept Méhul’s Joseph in its repertoire in the 1870s, and an opera by Cherubini.52 But since the late 1860s, not only Parisians but also foreigners and provincials alike heard a lot of French operetta, especially by Jacques Offenbach.53 This was not unproblematic. Encouraging a reputation for frivolity in French music, operetta did not present the image that politicians wanted foreigners to associate with French taste and French glory. Most republicans, as well as conservative Catholics, wished to distance themselves from Second Empire decadence. Moreover, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, many French were disturbed that, although Offenbach had been a Paris resident since 1833 and a French citizen since 1860, he had been born in Cologne. Republicans bemoaned his close relationship with his “protector” and collaborator the duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoléon III. After 1871, they forbade La Grande Duchesse to be performed in Paris because it satirized the military.54 In part to show his patriotism, when Offenbach took over the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1873, he spent considerable money producing the premiere of the Barbier-Gounod collaboration Jeanne d’Arc, for which he was widely appreciated. Some reviewers referred to the “invasion” of operettas abroad, praising towns that “resisted.”55 Still, Offenbach’s well-known competitors, such as Charles Lecocq, Robert Planquette, and Hervé, were French and their operettas and opéras-comiques also had great success.56 For example, after Lecocq’s La Fille de Madame Angot was premiered in Brussels, it played to a hundred packed houses 51.  Ménestrel, 13 September 1874, 326, and 5 May 1878, 182. 52.  See Journal de musique, 21 July 1877. Joseph was also in Vienna’s repertoire. 53.  For example, La Vie parisienne (1866) had had eleven foreign premieres by 1871 and seven more by 1880; La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) had been given on 117 foreign stages by 1873. Orphée aux Enfers (1874) and Madame l’Archiduc (1874) were also popular abroad. See Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera (Cambridge: Heffer, 1943), 989. 54.  Offenbach took two of his world premieres to Vienna in 1872 and London in 1874. See Jean-Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 469–78. 55.  Ménestrel, 9 November 1873, 399, and Charles Bannelier, “Revue de l’année 1874,” Revue et gazette musicale, 3 January 1875, 3. 56.  Charles Lecocq’s Fleurs de thé (1868) was done in at least fifteen European capitals through 1872 and in eight languages, La Petite Mariée (1875) in sixteen foreign theaters by 1877 and in eight languages, and Le Petit Duc (1878) in eighteen of them through 1880 and seven languages. Robert Planquette’s operetta Les Cloches de Corneville (1877), which had over 400 consecutive performances in Paris its first season, also played in sixteen foreign theaters through 1880 and eight languages. According to “Foyers et coulisses,” Petit Journal, 16 November 1892, by 1892, the work had been done 1,111 times in Paris, 677 times in the Parisian suburbs, 5,510 times in the French départements, and 9,100 times abroad, for a total of 16,790 times in fifteen years. The burlesques and comédieopérettes of Hervé (Florimond Ronger), founder of French operetta, were also popular

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in Paris between February and June 1873, its “gay” melodies a perfect distraction from political anxieties over the country’s future. Although the genre tended to attract mostly the middle class, in Paris, the comte and comtesse de Paris, the queen of Spain, visiting princes, Ambroise Thomas, and Christine Nilsson attended. The work was also performed repeatedly in ten French cities and nine foreign ones that year, including Cairo, and in eleven French cities and twelve foreign ones in 1874.57 By 1875, Italian critics considered French opera buffa as popular as Cimarosa and Rossini in Rome.58 If theaters were to “repay the state in glory what had been given them in money,” as one politician put it, 59 they needed positive reception of music written by France’s officially consecrated living composers. (Indicating the substantial attention the music press regularly gave to French repertoire in foreign theaters, Appendix B documents how often Ménestrel mentioned certain French operas in its “foreign news.”) 60 In 1872, two works in particular, Faust and Mignon, were said to “proclaim our superiority in musical lyricism today.”61 By then, Gounod’s Faust (1859), always popular in Paris, had already been performed in thirty-nine foreign cities and had entered the repertoire of major houses in Berlin, Brussels, London, St. Petersburg, and Vienna, where it remained throughout the 1870s and 1880s (see table B-1). Significantly, as Steven Huebner has pointed out, early reviewers abroad as well as at home considered Faust “learned and serious,” even “too lofty,” and demanded repeat performances to understand it. 62 In the 1870s and 1880s, other works by Gounod, especially Mireille (1864) and Roméo et Juliette (1867), although with many fewer performances, contributed to his reputation outside France as a composer of noble grandeur and high ideals (see table B-2). all over Europe, and performances of his Chilpéric (1868) and Le Petit Faust (1869) later influenced British musical theater. See Kurt Gänzl, “Hervé,” www.grovemusic.com. 57.  Not surprisingly since Brandus, its director, published La Fille de Madame Angot, the Revue et gazette musicale kept careful track of who attended in Paris and productions elsewhere, particularly in Brussels, where La Fille de Madame Angot was performed 100 times between December 1872 and April 1873, a local record, and went on to 500 consecutive performances there. By June 1874, it had been done over 400 times in Paris, and from 1873 to 1879, it could be heard in twenty-three cities. 58.  Ménestrel, 4 April 1875, 141. 59.  M. de Tillancourt at the Assemblée nationale, cited in Henri Moreno [Henri Heugel], “Semaine théâtrale et musicale,” Ménestrel, 2 August 1874, 275. 60.  A similar project, which I have not pursued, would be to trace performances of French operas in the départements, also regularly reported in the musical press, especially the Revue et gazette musicale. 61.  Ménestrel, 17 March 1872, 123. 62.  Steven Huebner, The Operas of Charles Gounod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56–57.

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Mignon and Hamlet Abroad In part because Heugel published them, Ménestrel was particularly assiduous in reporting on performances of Thomas’s operas. By 1878, Mignon had broken all records in Paris; it seems to have been the French music most frequently performed abroad in the 1870s and 1880s. 63 Whereas Gounod’s Faust is reported in an average of six countries and nine foreign cities annually in the 1870s and 1880s, Mignon is discussed in an average of eight countries and fifteen foreign cities annually (see tables B-1 and B-3). 64 In over 450 references to Mignon abroad (as opposed to 220 to Faust during this same period), French readers could follow when and where the opera was performed, in what languages (eventually Czech, Hungarian, Swedish, Polish, and English as well as French, German, and Italian), and in what genres. 65 Such presence in the repertoire of more than a dozen foreign theaters and through touring groups that continually reached new audiences meant not only steady, substantial income for the publisher and composer, but also evidence of broad sympathy for France and French values. To the extent that Ménestrel’s reporting is representative, comparing the entries in tables B-1 and B-3 suggests heterogeneity in the foreign taste for French operas. Mignon appeared more often and in more places, but also was embraced by Italians more than Germans, perhaps in part because there were more theaters in Italy. That is, from 1872 to 1880, Mignon was most often reported in Italy (22 percent of citations), followed by England, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia, Germany, Belgium, and the United States (see table B-3b). In contrast, Germans preferred Faust, which was most performed in Germany and Russia (10 percent each of citations), followed by Belgium and England, Austria, and finally Italy, Spain, and the United States. This implies that although both operas were performed in the major European capitals, Italy and Germany in general had inversely related tastes in the 1870s, perhaps related to the stereotypes associated with their preferences for light or serious music. 66 Mignon too appeared in many more cities in these countries, in 63.  Mignon took only twelve years to reach 500 performances in Paris (as compared with twenty-one years for Manon and twenty-eight years for Faust) and twenty-eight years for the 1000th performance in 1894 (twenty-nine years for Carmen, thirty-five for Faust, and sixtyseven for Les Huguenots). Rogeboz-Malfroy, Ambroise Thomas, 12. 64.  In neither decade is there a substantial difference in the presence of these two operas abroad, as reported in Ménestrel, except for a slight increase in Gounod performances in the 1880s. 65.  It was also popular in “pot-pourris” done by military bands in such places as Vienna. Ménestrel, 13 July 1873, 262. 66.  This was balanced somewhat in early 1882 when Mignon was performed in seven German cities and Faust in six Italian cities.

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ten Italian cities, ten English, and nine German cities from 1872 to 1880, as compared with Faust, which was heard in five German, four Italian, and three English cities. Differences within the countries also existed. Although Russians welcomed both operas, they were performed three times more often in St. Petersburg than in Moscow. In the 1880s, Italian theaters performed Mignon most often (38 percent of the citations in Ménestrel). German performances increased, in part from tours, in 1882 and 1888 (now 21 percent of citations), but those in other countries dropped off somewhat that decade. Mignon’s success came in part from its malleability and how singers used their voices to embody the characters. Given its tragic ending, grand opera houses could perform it. And because people perceived it as “clear, simple, and melodious without being trivial,” Mignon allowed for a certain transparency between music and character, a product of the composer’s science rentrée—the considerable knowledge and skill he used to produce the appearance of simple grace. 67 References in Ménestrel to Mignon’s success note how great singers who knew how to act used the “grace and tenderness” of their voices to suggest those qualities in Mignon. Célestine Galli-Marié’s “sweet and supple” voice, for example, translated Mignon’s character perfectly (fig. 29). In Christine Nilsson’s rendition of the role in London, audiences could not tell where she left off and Mignon began. 68 Critics abroad also emphasized the “purity” with which the roles were sung. 69 In Emma Albani’s Covent Garden performance, the reviewer had heard “nothing more pure nor more perfect”; her “Connais-tu le pays” performed with a “concentrated emotion immediately communicated to the audience.”70 This kind of close identification of singer and subject drew listeners into the work, encouraging empathy with its characters. With its bourgeois notions of womanhood and its implicit comment on the rewards of docile modesty and innocent sincerity in a paternal society, the work offered an idealized notion of French mœurs. Besides stimulating widespread appreciation and recognition of French music and French values, Mignon’s enormous popularity abroad intimated something universally appealing about this music in the Western world. With melodies inspired by Italian music and a story from Goethe, Thomas reinforced the notion of France as the “cosmopolitan school of absolute beauty,” which, by virtue of its 67.  Review of the Rome premiere in Ménestrel, 3 November 1872, 397. The notion of science rentrée comes from Ernest Reyer, cited in Coudroy-Saghaï and Lacombe, “Faust et Mignon face à la presse,” 103. 68.  Ménestrel, 14 April 1872, 123; De Retz, “Saison de Londres,” Ménestrel, 11 July 1875, 252. 69.  See, e.g., Ménestrel, 5 October 1873, 358, and 8 August 1880, 287. 70.  De Retz, “Saison de Londres,” Ménestrel, 5 July 1874, 244.

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geography and spirit, “combines opposite qualities.” From the beginning, reviewers used the work to comment on the nature of French music in comparison with German and Italian music. French melody, as exemplified in Mignon, was “less lyrical” than Italian melody and “less elevated and penetrating” than German melody, but “more human,” a quality important to republicans, the perfect example of the French juste milieu that “assimilates the progress of all countries.” 71 Also significant, the clear and simple melodies of Mignon could be performed in many Western languages and by singers with diverse accents and from widely varying backgrounds. Not only the Swede Christine Nilsson and the American Marie Van Zandt, but also the Canadian Emma Albani and the Viennese Pauline Lucca popularized the work abroad. The clear simplicity of the melodies, such as in the repeated notes of ex. 4a, and the purity of timbre reportedly achieved by these singers embodied an ideal beyond nation and national differences within the West, beyond the particularities as expressed in Western languages, as if a musical analogue of the white race. Occasionally, the reviews imply this universality when they point out the performance of Mignon in political contexts abroad. In 1873, for example, the Viennese put on Mignon and Faust for a visit of the Russian czar, and Liège chose Mignon when the Belgian king and queen came to town. These choices suggest that the opera served, not only to articulate a certain kind of music as French, but also to promote French taste as universal taste, the ultimate mark of its legitimacy. Hamlet, a grand opera, had similar success, aided perhaps in being performed for many of the same publics by singers associated with Mignon and Faust. By 1874, when it reached its hundredth performance in Paris, the opera had been performed all over Europe and as far as New York and Algiers. Table B-4b documents that, just as with Mignon, performances in Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire were mentioned most often (19 percent each), followed by Russia. The Belgians performed Hamlet more than the English, despite the Shakespearean subject, and even Belgian Wagnerians embraced the work.72 The Germans again trailed, despite Hamlet’s being performed often in Berlin. Whereas Ménestrel cites Mignon most often in Rome and London in the 1870s, Hamlet captured interest above all in Brussels and in Vienna where it inaugurated Vienna’s 1873 Universal Exhibition, with German singers. Although they featured French singers, performances at Vienna’s Imperial Opéra and Budapest’s Royal Opéra in 1878 were such a hit that Hungarians treated Hamlet as though it were one of their own national operas.73 With Hamlet as with Mignon, the singers’ 71.  Lacombe, citing reviews in the 1860s, in his Voies de l’opéra français, 282–84. 72.  Ménestrel, 7 January 1872, 46. 73.  Ménestrel, 28 April 1873, 173, and 28 April 1878, 173.

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capacity to merge with the characters drew audiences powerfully into the work. While some singers emphasized Ophelia’s “strange charm,” especially in the mad scene of act 4, an audience favorite, others portrayed her as an “ideal beauty,” like Mignon, communicating her truth with simplicity, sincerity, and “moving expressiveness,” rather than “tormented passion” or “convulsing sobs.”74 Her birdlike melismas, echoed by the flutes and harp, called on the singer to celebrate her voice and its sensibility. Faure’s renditions of Hamlet also drew praise across the continent, particularly in Vienna, as noted earlier.75 Its success in 1878 led the Viennese to program other French music that fall, including Gounod’s Philémon et Baucis, Thomas’s newly revised Psyché, and Delibes’s ballet La Source (just written for them), as well as, in 1881, the latter’s new opera Jean de Nivelle.

Money and Influence In the eighteenth century, the upper classes all over Europe shared a taste for opera. This provided a cultural component to their class coherence and a link between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Operas moved about, along with composers and their wealthy patrons, thanks in part to impresarios.76 It is not my intention here to review the meaning of this relationship between opera and society, other than to point out that throughout the nineteenth century, the upper classes, especially aristocrats, continued to maintain a network of personal, political, commercial, and cultural connections across the continent.77 The rationale for such practices, however, evolved under the Third Republic as French political economists came to define wealth in terms of utility.78 Because commerce satisfied a need and a desire of the state as well as individuals, in this sense, it could have public utility. Opera remained the biggest music industry in the late nineteenth century, its 74.  Ménestrel, 7 January 1872, 25 January 1874, 62, and Don Alberto, reporting on the Barce­­lona production of Hamlet, Ménestrel, 22 October 1882, 373. 75.  See a similar response from the Belgians in Ménestrel, 26 January 1879, 71. 76.  In his Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003), Daniel Heartz examines operatic culture in cities, some of whose musical organizations were controlled by courts. 77.  For an example of close relations among aristocrats all over Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, see Jann Pasler, “Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation,” in The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists, ed. William Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), and id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 78.  Joseph Chailley and Léon Say, minister of finance in the mid 1870s, considered utility “one of the necessary conditions for wealth [richesse].” See their Nouveau dictionnaire d’économie politique (Paris: Guillaumin, 1892), 2: 1140.

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performances providing substantial income for everyone involved. With over 1,400 theaters in Europe by 1882, the possibilities for making money were almost unlimited.79 Thanks to international trade agreements over property rights, “authors” (composers and librettists) could expect 5 percent of the proceeds in major theaters and 10 percent in secondary ones, both at home and abroad. 80 A work in a theater’s repertoire could make a composer wealthy. Singers associated with an opera in Paris, like Faure and Nilsson, got paid still more handsomely when taking it on the road, whether they were French or not. 81 After these operas became audience favorites worldwide, foreign impresarios considered them a “gold mine.” French publishers were furious when traveling troupes did well but failed to pay rights for performances of Mignon with reduced musical forces in Havana, Cuba, and Melbourne, Australia, in 1882. 82 Charities back home benefited from these successes, thanks to the “rights of the poor,” an additional 5 percent tax on all theatrical performances, concerts, cafés-concerts, balls, and various festivals. In 1874, this totaled over 2 million francs. 83 French opera and ballet abroad thrived. In the 1870s, Berlin’s Imperial Theater put on over two hundred French productions annually of some forty or fifty French operas. So, too, in Vienna and Russia. After they left the repertoire of Paris theaters, French ballets also continued to be performed abroad. In Russia, Petipa choreographed new versions of Adam’s Le Corsaire (1856) and Giselle (1841) in the 1880s and 1890s. Delibes’s ballets received the same kind of attention as French opera during this period. In October 1876, only months after its Opéra premiere, the three-act ballet Sylvia was performed at the Imperial Opera of Vienna, together 79.  According to Ménestrel, 3 December 1882, 6, in Italy, there were 348 theaters; in France, 337; in Germany, 194; in England, 150; in Spain, 160; in the Austro-Hungarian empire, 132; in Russia, 41; in Belgium, 34; in Holland, 22; in Switzerland, 20; in Portugal, 16; in Sweden 10; in Denmark, 10; in Norway, 8; in Greece, 4; in Turkey, 4; in Romania, 3; and in Serbia, 1. 80.  This meant, for example, the authors earned 1,400 francs for three performances of Mignon in Vienna in 1872 (i.e., more than Thomas’s monthly salary of 1,200 francs as director of the Conservatoire), and over 4,000 for Hamlet there in 1873. At the time, there were approximately 5 francs to the dollar, and the best seats at the Opéra cost 15 francs (also the price of full board at a good hotel on the rue de Rivoli, Place Vendôme, or rue de la Paix). 81.  For example, Nilsson received 7,000 francs per performance in Hamlet and Faust in Russia in 1874, 112,000 francs for sixteen performances. Ménestrel, 5 July 1874, 247, 2 June 1878, 213, 14 April 1878, 157. 82.  Foreign impresarios also organized performances of Hamlet. Edouard Sonzogno produced it at La Fenice in Venice in 1876. 83.  Ménestrel, 11 July 1875, 254. In 1878, a proposed law would impose this tax only on profits but increase to 15 percent of the gross revenues of cafés-concerts. Ménestrel, 17 March 1878, 126.

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with Coppélia (1870), for an enthusiastic crowd. Hanslick praised Delibes for his “graceful” music and pointed out how ballets offered composers musical contexts in which to write “with the freedom of a pure symphonist.” But he also used it as an opportunity to berate German composers for being “too stingy with their melodies to waste them on ballets.”84 Berlin put on Sylvia the following year, and in 1878, it was conducted in Budapest as though it were a symphony by Schumann or Mendelssohn. An orchestral suite based on it did so well at Covent Garden that it subsequently toured the English provinces. That year in Vienna, Delibes was commissioned to write a ballet expressly for the Imperial Opera. 85 In 1884, a one-act version of Delibes’s Coppélia (1870) was staged in London. Seeing it for the first time in St. Petersburg, and finding it “penetrated with the essence of poetry,” and “one of the most charming” in all of ballet, the future Ballets Russes designer Alexandre Benois declared Delibes a genius. “Coppélia played a decisive part in my musical development and led me to demand from the ballet a high standard of music,” he wrote. 86 Delibes’s symphonic approach to the genre also influenced Tchaikovsky. Fame translated into money, especially to the extent that French music served as a model for foreign music and influenced taste and fashion. Simon connected the health of French theater and music with the growth of French industry. As he pointed out in an 1872 speech to the Assemblée nationale: We have a commercial and industrial interest in not losing our theatrical influence in Europe. Our great French industry is not a cheap industry: it’s an industry of taste and luxury. It’s especially through artistic matters, matters of taste and luxury that we have a large turnover—I’m speaking commercially—in our merchandise. Fashion makes turnover in matters of luxury. And what makes fashion, what spreads fashion in this country? It’s material success and it’s also the influence of artworks. Every time a people has dominated in war in Europe, it has set the tone in Europe. France imitated Spain at one time, then Italy, then Germany. At the present, the world is used to imitating France; it will no longer imitate her if we don’t have precursor ideas and French mœurs in our theatrical works. And rest assured that you will not refuse this subsidy for local theater without our industries of luxury, our makers of luxury silk, for example, feeling it. So, there is in this a general 84.  Eduard Hanslick, writing in the Neue Freie Presse, cited in Ménestrel, 15 October 1876, 366. 85.  Ménestrel, 6 January 1878, 46, and 17 November 1878, 412. 86.  Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet (1941; New York: Da Capo, 1977), 64–72.

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interest, and it’s not just art I am defending. It’s the money of France. . . . It’s in the national interest, and not just Parisian interest. 87

These arguments harked back to the discourse used to support luxury since the eighteenth century—that the state should use luxury to its advantage, that the production of luxury goods was an important part of the French economy, and that prosperity was manifested by such luxury. 88 Minister Beulé again concurred with Simon, noting that for every million francs spent on music by the government, eighty million came into the country—an “inestimable conquest” of money and people from the départements and abroad. 89 Everyone hoped that the Palais Garnier, the Paris Opéra’s new home, would attract audiences from throughout Europe and confirm Paris’s role as an important musical center. If one judges by the receipts during its first four years, the Palais Garnier was a huge success.90 The war had raised people’s consciousness about their own products, and from 1872 to 1875 the country succeeded in exporting more than it imported. This included more than opera. The Commerce Ministry kept track of annual imports and exports of musical instruments, especially pianos and church organs, with each of France’s major trading partners.91 Ménestrel, which cited a Dutch critic who put France in the first ranks of organ builders, 92 reported with pride when a CavailléColl organ was purchased abroad. The French organist Alexandre Guilmant was brought in to inaugurate those in Amsterdam in 1875 and at the Crystal Palace in London in 1880, inevitably performing French music, his own and that of his 87.  Simon is here referring to the fact that Paris theaters would not be the only ones to benefit from such subsidies, because work presented there involved a large number of industries. Annual budget discussions in the Assemblée nationale, March–April 1872, reproduced in Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 44, 408–9. 88.  See Jean-François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), Renouvier’s Manuel républicain de l’homme et du citoyen (1848; Paris: Colin, 1904), and Ernest Feydeau, Du luxe, des femmes, des mœurs, de la littérature et de la vertu (1866). In his Histoire du luxe privé et public (Paris: Hachette, 1880), Henri Baudrillart argued that the arts of dessin likewise had a “prodigious influence on national wealth” (4: 714). 89.  Beulé cited in “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 24 March 1872, 131. 90.  These receipts averaged 3,410,000 francs a year. The Comédie-Française made roughly half this, the Opéra-Comique one-third, the Odéon one-eighth. See the income of the other Paris theaters in Ménestrel, 2 June 1878, 214, and 27 July 1879, 279. 91.  Even though the country exported more instruments than it imported in the early 1870s, this reversed in the late 1870s and fluctuated thereafter. See Tableau décennal du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères, 1877–1886, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888). See also “Le Commerce extérieur,” Le Monde musical, 30 September 1898, 195–96, which reprints a rather humorous article from the Moniteur officiel de commerce with advice on how to sell more French musical instruments abroad. 92.  C.-M. Philbert, cited in Ménestrel, 17 September 1876, 332.

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contemporaries. He repeated this music in his tours afterwards. Dutch reviewers, overwhelmed with the instrument’s “perfection that has surpassed everything in our country, otherwise known for its grand organs,” called it “proof of the progress accomplished in France.”93 Music journals followed the performance of French music and performers around Europe and the United States, since they made valuable contributions to the understanding of French music and the expansion of French prestige. This, too, was not limited to opera and opera singers. Just as Faure took Hamlet abroad, and Galli-Marié, Carmen, Alfred and Marie Jaëll brought foreign audiences SaintSaëns’s music, including four-hand piano transcriptions of his symphonic tone poems and his “Variations for Two Pianos on a Theme of Beethoven,” dedicated to them. When Saint-Saëns himself traveled, he performed, conducted, and attended rehearsals of his own music. Along with other soloists, such as Francis Planté and Caroline Montigny-Rémaury, French conductors also brought a French perspective to the performance of French music abroad. In spring 1881, Charles Lamoureux impressed the English by covering all the expenses to perform a new suite by Massenet, fragments of Sylvia, and Danse macabre, giving the profits to a local charity.94 Not only did reviews describe these tours as “victories” in “conquering” new audiences, they also mirrored back to French readers the values associated with French music. Pointing to a French choral symphony performed by a group of English amateurs in 1879, an English critic noted that his countrymen were increasingly attracted by the lightness and grace of French music, seen as a necessary counterweight to the heaviness and density of German music, a tradition with long-standing authority in England. This critic believed the English could benefit from the influence of French clarity on their way of thinking and French elegance on their mode of expression.95 The French also celebrated their theory and method books respected abroad, adopted, and recognized for their innovations. Louis Mayeur’s saxophone method, for example, was used in the Conservatoire of Brussels in 1878 before there was a class for such instruments at the Paris Conservatoire. In London, in 1880, a singing teacher used Pauline Viardot’s Heures d’étude with her students. And in 1882, Ménestrel claimed that Germans were paying more and more attention to French music theory texts and cited several reviews that had recently appeared in the 93.  Ménestrel, 6 November 1875, 75. 94.  Ménestrel, 27 March 1881, 132. 95.  The context is a Daily Telegraph review of a choral symphony by Bourgault-Ducoudray, performed by an English amateur choral society, the Leslie Society, in a concert of all French music. “Un Concert international à Londres,” Ménestrel, 9 March 1879, 116–17.

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German press. The famous Bach scholar Philipp Spitta, professor of music history at the University of Berlin, and one of the greatest musicologists in Europe at the time, praised a new French Histoire de la notation musicale as “excellent because it was not only accurate and complete, but also full of new perspectives.”96

The Advantages of Success Abroad Music publishers and critics sometimes used performances in other countries to put pressure on decision-makers within France, particularly when it came to opera. Earlier, when the Théâtre-Lyrique eliminated Gounod’s Faust (1859) from its repertoire, the publisher Choudens kept it before the public by arranging for performances in the French départements and major German cities.97 Similarly for Carmen, also published by Choudens, when the Opéra-Comique dropped it. Some have asserted that Choudens “imposed” this work on foreign directors.98 Three days after Bizet died on 3 June 1875, Vienna had announced that Carmen would be its first French work that fall, not the original opéra-comique with spoken dialogues, but a version as grand opéra, with recitatives written by Ernest Guiraud and a ballet from Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth inserted in act 4. Between 1875 and its Paris revival in 1883, Carmen was performed in twenty-three foreign cities (see table B-5) from Brussels and Budapest (1876) to Buenos Aires (1881) and in six languages. Until 1882, after the Austro-Hungarian empire, references to the foreign performances of the opera averaged the same number between England, Germany, Russia, and Italy. But in the 1880s, it was in Germany and Italy that the work took root above all, Ménestrel citing an equal number of references to performances in twelve Italian and twelve German cities. Despite what this international presence might imply, reviews of Carmen cited in Ménestrel were mixed. With her dance tunes and unstable chromaticism, the main character seemed a “disordering force” in society,99 not someone bourgeois audi96.  Ernest David and Mathis Lussy, Histoire de la notation musicale (Paris: Heugel, 1882), reviewed in “Bibliographie musicale,” Ménestrel, 16 July 1882, 260; see also ibid., 6 December 1878, 14, and 24 October 1880, 373. 97.  Huebner, Operas of Charles Gounod, 53–54. 98.  A critic of the 1879 Italian premiere in Naples suggested this. See Nuova antologia, 15 April 1880. In a letter of 22 September 1886, Edouard Lalo implied this tactic as typical of Choudens. See Hervé Lacombe, “La Réception de l’œuvre dramatique de Bizet en Italie,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome 108, 1 (1996): 174–75, 184. 99.  In her Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Susan McClary discusses the reception of the opera abroad. See also DeNora’s interpretation of McClary’s reading in her “Musical Composition of Social Reality,” 307.

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ences could take as a role model. In addition, Carmen was often paired with Mignon and certain singers, such as Galli-Marié, were known for their interpretation of both characters. This juxtaposition would have highlighted similar binary oppositions and homologies between music and character as in Mignon (Mignon/Micaela vs. Philine/Carmen), however with attention focused on the dangerous seducer rather than the sweet innocent girl. Ménestrel mentioned the major premieres to make the French aware of them, but discussed none. Its only extended review through 1880 concerned the 1876 Brussels premiere. Its audiences found the work “frank and spontaneous,” but also “too personal and too original.” The singer of Carmen in Vienna, Mlle Ehn, however, purportedly considered it among her “favorites” and in 1877 proposed to perform it, along with Mignon, Faust, and Roméo et Juliette, during her six weeks in St. Petersburg.100 Other singers, too, made possible premieres in Europe and America, suggesting that they had the power to impose their tastes. Besides Carmen, foreign theaters picked up certain new operas by younger respected French composers, such as Delibes’s Le Roi l’a dit (1873) and Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (1877), soon after the French premieres (see tables B-6 and B-7). In Vienna, Delibes’s opera had successes in 1874, 1877, and 1882. Besides Belgium, the work caught on in eleven cities of northern and eastern Europe, performed mostly in German. Ménestrel first discusses the work in Italy (Rome) in 1888. In contrast, Ménestrel followed closely the 1878 tour of Massenet’s opera from Turin that February through Rome, Milan, Vicenza, Bologna, and Naples to Venice in December. In Rome, with Italian singers, Massenet received twenty-two curtain calls at Le Roi’s premiere, thirty at its second performance, and three excerpts encored at each performance. The queen of Italy, who knew his music well, congratulated the composer personally.101 In 1879, the opera was performed in various languages in ten cities, attracting large crowds in London. However, faulting it for an “absence of melodies,” the Times reviewer predicted only a “temporary success,” preferring Carmen.102 Thereafter, performed mostly in Italian, Le Roi de Lahore continued to be produced in new places, although less so by the late 1880s. Foreign impresarios took heed of other successes in Paris as well. Their appreciation of Massenet’s orchestral music persuaded organizers in Buenos Aires to produce Le Roi de Lahore in September 1879. The reputation of Saint-Saëns’s oratorio Le Déluge led the Vienna Opéra to perform it in March 1879. And after seeing how popular it was becoming with Parisian audiences, Brussels’s orchestral 100.  Ménestrel, 13 February 1876, 85, and 1 July 1877, 246. 101.  Ménestrel, 31 March 1878, 140. 102.  “Saison de Londres,” Ménestrel, 6 July 1879, 253.

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society performed Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust that April, achieving its greatest success to date. Some French works, such as Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, were performed abroad before they were put on in France, although French critics argued for producing them at home. The Journal de musique’s review of Samson et Dalila’s premiere in Weimar in 1877, for example, opens by exclaiming, “Saint-Saëns has just victoriously planted the flag of the French school in the middle of Germany. If our war prestige has faded for a moment, our artistic and literary prestige still shines gloriously. . . . The other day, it was Vienna that gave a big welcome to Delibes’s Sylvia; this time, it is Weimar that salutes the author of Samson et Dalila and triumphantly celebrates his work. He is to be praised for having upheld the honor of French art.”103 Ménestrel reported that in 1878, the opera was performed in a concert version before the Belgian monarchs. Unfortunately, for reasons I analyze elsewhere, it took the French until 1890 to produce Samson et Dalila, and two more years before it reached the Opéra.104 Some blamed the Opéra, with its practice of producing only one new work annually in the 1870s and early 1880s, for French composers leaving France to premiere their new works. After the Opéra’s director turned down his Hérodiade, Massenet discussed it with producers in Rome, Naples, and Turin. Brussels, however, premiered it on 19 December 1881, after which Massenet dined at court and received a Belgian title. In 1882 and 1883, it was produced in Milan, Budapest, Hamburg, and Prague. The French premiere took place in Nantes in March 1883 and finally Paris’s Théâtre-Italien did it in 1884 in Italian. Gaston Salvayre had to go to St. Petersburg for the premiere of his Richard III in 1883. And whereas provincial French theaters depended on opera repertoire created in Paris, many newer French works were first performed in other French cities. If France had “artistic supremacy over other nations,” as politicians claimed, it was not always because of the luxuries of the Paris Opéra, but sometimes through new French works, such as Carmen, that ironically were more recognized abroad than at home. By the early 1880s, major foreign theaters confirmed this conclusion, performing as much recent French music as established masterpieces. In 1882–83, for example, St. Petersburg’s Imperial Italian Opera produced as many works by living French composers (Thomas, Gounod, Bizet, and Massenet) as by dead ones (Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Hérold). In 1885, from half to the majority of operas put 103.  “Samson et Dalila,” Journal de musique, 15 December 1877, 1. 104.  See chapter 10 below and Jann Pasler, “Contingencies of Meaning in Transcriptions and Excerpts: Popularizing Samson et Dalila,” in Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 170–213.

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on in Italian theaters were French, again about half by living French composers. For example, in Naples, three of five operas were French (Hamlet, Les Huguenots, and Carmen); in Rome, three of six, (L’Etoile du nord, Hamlet, and Lakmé, as well as Delibes’s two ballets).105 An Italian critic pointed out, “There is no theater whose repertoire is not sustained in great part by French works.” To counteract this “invasion of French musical products,” he noted, Germany had only Mozart, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Wagner. Thanks to Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, Italian music thrived abroad, but of the modern school, Italy exported only five or six operas by Verdi and four other works. By 1884, Italian theaters had become “tributaries” of French theater, “dependent on French masters.” Some were willing to acknowledge that France, among all the nations, had made “the most sacrifices to maintain the musical art at its summit.”106 Italians considered France their “Latin sister” in upholding clarity, simplicity, and pleasure. They appreciated Gounod, Thomas, and Bizet for maintaining a lyric tradition “put into place by Italians.” For these reasons, in 1881, Italian critics could show openness to French innovations and encourage young Italian composers to take inspiration from Carmen.107 Elsewhere, too, one suspects French influence, such as in the Belgian composer Alexandre Stadfeldt’s Hamlet, performed in Weimar in June 1882, and the Czech Antonín Dvorˇák’s Dimitrij, premiered in Prague that October, possibly following the example of Victorin Joncières’s Dimitri (1876). Performances and prestige outside France presented the French with hard-core facts and tangible francs as well as symbolic successes, particularly important since some sectors of production—silks, porcelain, mirrors, and crystal—experienced a notable decline in exports during this period.108 Performances abroad reinforced the legitimacy of French musical production, rewarded French composers and performers, and suggested potential French influence on the taste and mœurs of foreigners. Opera reached foreign aristocrats and foreign royalty, giving them experiences in the language of luxury they understood and appreciated. Although some resisted transformations of the originals, hearing a German story in German (Faust), an English masterpiece in English (Hamlet), and a beauty pine for “the land of orange trees” in Italian (Mignon) provided appealing experiences for foreigners, whether in Paris or abroad. Such works encouraged receptivity to French 105.  Ménestrel, 4 January 1885, 38. 106.  Nuova antologia (Rome), 1 January 1884, cited in Lacombe, “Réception de l’œuvre dramatique de Bizet en Italie,” 197. 107.  Ibid., 198–200. 108.  Marius Vachon, Decorative Arts Exports from France, 1873–81 (Paris, 1882), cited in Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65.

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music and sensitivity to nuances in the French interpretations. French orchestral music also attracted a public beyond French borders, especially Saint-Saëns’s tone poems. The success of such music with foreign audiences told the French back home that French musical values (such as clarity, grace, and melodiousness; a close relationship between music and character, song and text; elegance of expression; and orchestral color) had broad appeal. Performances abroad engendered respect, earning France “admirers and friends” who could turn into political allies. Carrying French values across national borders, music served public as well as individual interests. What others appreciated encouraged the French to come to agreement on what they shared, as well as pride in French taste.

International Culture It escaped no one that foreigners appreciated French music enough to spend considerable money on it. Indeed, some Italian critics noted that French operas suited Italian taste more than Italian operas. What then does this imply about the French listener back home? How could music be understood as a locus of collective identity, implying something inherently French about its listeners and their tastes when non-French audiences also embraced it?109 How could it serve a political function, representing France abroad, while at the same time being used both by foreign monarchs to signal their own distinction and by foreign critics as an aesthetic weapon with which to support or resist change at home? An answer to these paradoxes can be found in thinking of these operas, not just as money machines, but also as participants in an international culture. Consider the recurring use of the word “pure.” Politicians often called for increasingly “pure” taste, critics for “pure” dramatic sentiment, “pure and noble” musical lines, and singers who could produce a “pure” timbre. “Pure” often refers to the need for more refinement or true expression of precise situations and feelings. Sometimes it connotes an absence of self-interest. In this sense, the word does not call for eliminating foreign influences on musical style, invoke national origins, or instantiate an essentialist perspective. French music, after all, was generally recognized as the product of assimilating German and Italian elements. Because French critics used the word to refer to Mendelssohn as well as Thomas, German as well as French music, “pure” seems to refer to a quality that rose above nation and national differences. Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 2 in A Minor (1878), known in Germany and Italy long before it was performed in France, was praised for its “altogether 109.  I’m grateful to Damien Mahiet for this question.

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classical purity.”110 When it came to singers, a pure timbre, a common compliment at the time, meant sound devoid of the distinctions of an individual voice and the language in which a composer set a text to music. In some ways, what was at stake was a kind of refined sound equally valued across Europe and definitive of Western music at its finest, for “very irregular intonations” were associated with “the most uneducated [inculte] and savage nations.”111 Racial purity at the time also meant a quality shared by white Europeans, although, as Ernest Renan pointed out, racial purity did not exist in Europe—everyone was mixed.112 Successfully producing such sound would not only earn wide recognition from France’s neighbors but also be evidence of the superiority that its leaders wanted to associate with French culture. When joined to “noble,” the term “pure” also connoted transcendence of material and mundane concerns, a taste for elevated ideas, or the refined world of the upper classes. To the extent that “pure” also conveyed a value judgment— something necessarily better, more perfect—ordinary people normally had access to this domain only through their imaginations. This leaves us with a question: to what extent was opera an international public good, or merely what economists call a club good, something that benefits a limited group of people, even when consumption among them is nonrival.113 We know that opera had large externalities and diffuse benefits, confined neither to its creators nor to the nation first producing it. Opera reached across borders, generations, and population groups, involving international cooperation. It also functioned as an international commodity, increasingly regulated by property laws (copyright). But was the international culture in which opera moved largely of and for elites, whether bourgeois or aristocratic? In Third Republic France, some form of opera was available to all classes, whether as vocal and instrumental excerpts or transcriptions for piano, chorus, or wind band. Neighborhood ensembles, department store societies, and military bands often performed fantasies, concoctions assembled from operatic fragments and tunes, and, in the case of new operas, soon after their premieres.114 Republicans did their best to provide periodic free perfor110.  Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1880) (Paris: Ollendorff, 1881), 706. 111.  Johannes Weber, “Ethnographie des instruments de musique,” Revue et gazette musicale, 29 February 1880, 65–66. 112.  Ernest Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale, ed. P. E. Charvet (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 124. 113.  Serageldin, “Cultural Heritage as Public Good,” 254–55. 114.  I discuss specific cases of this in “Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the ‘Popular’ in Late 19th-Century French Music,” in Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, ed. Roberta Marvin, Michael Marissen, and Stephen Crist (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 356–87, and in my Writing through Music.

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mances at the Palais Garnier and low-cost productions at an alternative institution, the Opéra populaire. Yet it is not clear that this “trickle down” took place outside France. Virtually all reporting on French opera abroad focuses on major theater productions in various languages, sometimes noting the presence or patronage of foreign royalty. Without more data on musical life in other European capitals, we cannot know whether the repertoire of opera theaters “trickled down” under other political systems. While republicans endeavored to build democracy at home, the prosperity of France thus grew by accepting its limited presence elsewhere.

Arts Policy and the Utility of Competition French politicians realized that musical progress and the evolution of taste also depended on other genres and the efforts of young French musicians. To encourage these, the government gave subsidies.115 The attempted use of the arts for political ends after 1875 was marked more by innovative approaches to arts administration and arts policy, however, than by increased intervention in the creation of art. Republicans wished to do away with the Ancien Régime concept of artistic production, when “general interest” connoted “royal interest.” Annexing the fine arts to the Ministry of Public Instruction (rather than, as had been the case, Commerce or Public Works) was a crucial first step. Since republicans and much of French society believed that society and the state were one and the same, to change the structure of society, it was essential to change the structure of the state. In 1872, a law was passed that made administrative power distinct from political power, and administrative law autonomous. This had significant implications for the arts. Henceforth, the administration of the arts as a public service would be the “personification of the patrie and supreme arbiter of interests, representing all the general needs of society.”116 One of the most important administrative innovations, modeled on the Conseil 115.  The government awarded 3,000 francs to Danbé’s concerts in the Grand Hôtel in 1872 and 1873, 500 francs to young composers running the Société nationale in 1873, and 2,000 francs to the Concerts Colonne in 1875. It also supported the amateur choral society founded by Bourgault-Ducoudray, the publication of orchestral suites by Massenet and Guiraud, and the quartet competition sponsored by the Société des compositeurs. See Ménestrel, 14 April 1872, 159, 5 January 1873, 47, and 24 January 1875, 62. 116.  Nicolas Noussu, L’Administration des beaux-arts (Paris, 1877), 1–7, cited in GenetDelacroix, Art et Etat, 161. See also her chap. 4 and app. 16; Albert Duruy, L’Instruction publique et la démocratie, 1877–1886 (Paris: Hachette, 1886), 312; and Gustave Larroumet, L’Art et l’Etat en France (Paris: Hachette, 1895).

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supérieur de l’instruction publique, was the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts. Facing up to the frequent changes in the ministry, this organization was conceived to give more stability to arts administration. Created in 1875 by the center-right republican minister of public instruction, religion, and fine arts Henri-Alexandre Wallon to replace a commission organized by his Legitimist director of fine arts, the marquis de Chennevières,117 the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts had three purposes. First, it would give advice to the state, aid the minister in encouraging, guiding, and controlling artistic production of all kinds, in the industrial or applied as well as fine arts. To accomplish this, it could appoint its own subcommittees, and it did so frequently. Second, it would coordinate artistic intervention with the pedagogical or conservation needs of the country. And, third, it would institutionalize greater democracy—a kind of fraternity—in arts administration. By including a broad range of artists and distinguished art connoisseurs, along with selected politicians and arts administrators—with those in the first two categories far outnumbering those in the second two—it sought to break the monopolies held by the Institut over educational policy and by artist juries over public awards. As many artists later insisted, its job was not to control artists, but to support them in their contributions to the national interest. More than the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, the Conseil functioned as a “laboratory” for the minister’s politics and as “a supreme parliament” for the artistic and cultural elite of the country. For years, members of the Conseil led the discussion about arts support during debates over the national budget in the Chambre des députés.118 The Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts believed that involving those espousing aesthetic tendencies not represented at the Institut, and encouraging the confrontation of diverse opinions, would democratize discussion of arts funding at the highest level. Practicing a form of rational judgment that took into account diverse perspectives constituted a new mode of aesthetic judgment that was both formal 117.  As director of fine arts under the Moral Order in 1874, the marquis de Chennevières created an advisory commission consisting mostly of Academicians to promote the revival of history and religious painting. See Mainardi, End of the Salon, 48–49. 118.  Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, esp. 50, 69, 81, 140, 161, and 403. From its inception until 1905, there were only two musicians on this committee, the director of the Conservatoire, and one independent artist. (Bazin served in 1875, Gounod in 1878–1880, Massenet in 1885–1909 and, after 1905, Saint-Saëns and Paladilhe; see 34–35.) In the beginning, the “distinguished personalities” were deputies or senators; later they included ministers or ex-ministers (Proust and Turquet in 1875, Ferry in 1895, Poincaré and Leygues in 1898), and beginning in 1880, writers like Alexandre Dumas fils and the art collector Cernuschi, and in 1890 the art critic Louis de Fourcaud. This was the group responsible for discussing whether women should study at the Ecole des beaux-arts. They appointed a subcommittee to study the issues in 1889 and discussed it in full session twice in March 1891.

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and objective.119 Classification and comparison helped the Conseil make collective judgments based on something other than personal intuitions. It hoped in this way to master both the inevitable ideological contradictions within the Republic and the social antagonisms between its conservative and progressive forces. This attention to aesthetics led to conscious investment in the arts and a redefinition of art in the public domain. In the visual arts, republicans focused on education, conservation, construction, and decoration. Like their predecessors, they commissioned buildings, paintings, and sculpture. They also acquired tapestries and porcelain, the latter costing them almost a million francs annually. And because the state considered itself responsible for protecting the national heritage in the broadest sense of the term, in 1877, it created a decorative arts museum. In 1887, it also made the conservation of historical monuments a national priority, resulting in a museum of “scale models” at the Trocadéro. Yet whereas earlier administrations had focused almost exclusively on commissioning, acquiring, and conserving art, republicans looked also at human development and influence on the public’s historical and cultural perception of the arts. They wished to subsidize individual initiative and whatever would lead to “symbolic profits” supporting the republican agenda.120 As Simon explains, they considered helping artists to be one of the country’s “great duties” in the “national interest.” 121 In this spirit, upon the advice of the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, the government began to train more workers in the industrial arts and created more professional schools. Besides the Ecole nationale des arts décoratifs, in 1882, it opened the Ecole du Louvre to train specialized curators and librarians in rational methods for running the country’s collections.122 The government’s faith in comparative judgment and its new investment strategy resulted in a change in arts funding. Whereas in the early 1870s, the ministry subsidized artists and arts organizations directly, this kind of support declined constantly after 1874. In its place, to “affirm the responsibility and assure the utility of its intervention” as well as “reward the art forms most necessary for the maintenance of national traditions,”123 the republican government created new 119.  Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, 125. 120.  Ibid., 303–4. 121.  From the 21 March 1872 session of the Assemblée nationale. Reproduced in GenetDelacroix, Art et Etat, app. 21, 365. 122.  This led to numerous important catalogues such as those of the Bibliothèque nationale and the Conservatoire’s Musical Instrument Museum. 123.  Minister of Public Instruction Jules Ferry, speech to French artists on 24 June 1881. Reproduced in Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 14, 353–54.

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prizes, some of which still exist today. This entailed competitions for building designs, public monuments, paintings, and music. Competitions brought the art of comparison into the public domain. In his 1791 speech on public instruction, Talleyrand had included the right to compete among the principles of instruction out of which the greatest good would arise.124 In 1875, de Chennevières agreed, telling art students to seek “victory” in competitions, not only for themselves, but also their teachers (and implicitly their country): “You must take part, my children. Our time is a time of competitions, our time is an era of struggle, and competitions are struggle. It is the teaching of each artist by his rivals. Competitions alone provide social equity, [determining] the strict worth of each person. The career of the artist is only a series of competitions . . . the efforts you will make to acquire just renown among your colleagues. . . . It’s the perpetual daily struggle. In a word, competitions are life, the essence of the life of artists, because competitions, my children, are honor.”125 In the arts, competitions preserved, rationalized, and domesticated the Greek model of competition as struggle.126 They allowed artists and musicians of all kinds to be judged (se faire juger) and encouraged participation in musical activities by all kinds of people, not just members of the elites. Each summer, around the country, children, amateur choruses, and wind bands received awards for their hard work in competitions. Such events served as a catalyst for cooperation and an impetus for new compositions. They attracted participation by amateurs as well as professionals. A guide to music societies notes: “To take part in a competition is always a serious affair for a society . . . an occasion to learn and progress.” Competition results could either maintain the reputation of a society, “affirming its value and vitality,” or cause it to fold.127 Sponsoring cities considered them a source of civic pride and revenue. Composition competitions in music magazines might imply class tastes, but not necessarily in predictable ways. In the 1880s, Le Mélomane, a good source for studying the tastes of music lovers without professional sophistication, initiated an annual “International Composition Competition” for the best (1) prelude, fugue, or minuet, (2) romance without words, and (3) dance music, all for piano. Contestants were exhorted to seek “grace, elegance and originality, but not dif124.  Talleyrand, “Rapport sur l’instruction publique,” in Orateurs de la Revolution française, ed. François Furet and Ran Halévi, vol. 1: Les Constituants (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 1073. 125.  De Chennevières, “Discours prononcé à la distribution des prix, 11 août 1875” (cited n. 41 above), 365. 126.  Charlie Kronengold offered this insight. 127.  E. Guilbert, Guide pratique des sociétés musicales et des chefs de musique (Paris: n.d.), 20.

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ficulty.” Winning this meant publication in the magazine and publicity, especially valuable for those without easy access to these. In contrast, while one might have expected an interest in something similar or perhaps in chamber music, in 1892, the elite-oriented Figaro musical announced that it would award 500 francs for the best 100-measure “Allegro militaire” for fanfare or wind band. It is not clear why a magazine for upper-class readers, including those in the colonies, would call for a genre normally performed by workers or soldiers. The most consequential from an aspiring professional’s perspective were competitions to enter and graduate from the Paris Conservatoire. To encourage applicants, the press reported entrance exam pieces for instrumentalists and singers. Figaro published piano exercises composed for such occasions by Conservatoire professors.128 Competitions intended for adult professionals suggest how some hoped taste would evolve. For example, the Société des compositeurs, a composer’s organization, established a prize for the best quartet in 1873.129 However, in 1875, 1878, and 1880, as part of an interest in stimulating more French contributions to the genre, it added a prize for a symphony, and in 1880, one for a historical work on the symphony. In 1877, it also sponsored a prize for a madrigal. And, through the generosity of the Cressent Foundation, every three years, beginning in 1873, it sponsored a competition for an opera or opéra-comique, preceded by a competition for an opera libretto. The winner received 2,500 francs, with 10,000 allotted for five performances of the work in a theater of the composer’s choice.130 This prize gave composers access to the public without their having to address the increasingly commercial interests of Paris theaters. Since usually one had to be French, such competitions helped support local composers. They also led to recognition, not just of Conservatoire graduates, but also of women, music teachers, and those living in the départements or the colonies. When the government created prizes, it hoped to stimulate activity. During the Moral Order, this included music in private as well as public schools, and in those teaching religious as well as secular music. At the Ecole Niedermeyer, which trained Church musicians, and whose concerts were patronized by the comtesse de Paris and other aristocrats, the minister of public instruction, religion, and fine arts founded annual prizes for composition, organ, and notated, accompanied plainchant—music that would have been performed in church. In 1875, 128.  See chapter 6 below. 129.  In 1877, they awarded prizes for a piano quartet and a woodwind quintet. 130.  A lawyer, Anatole Cressent (1824–70), gave 120,000 francs to establish this prize. See the rules of this competition in Ménestrel, 9 February 1873, 83–84.

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the Conseil municipal de Paris, strongly republican, set aside 10,000 francs to “encourage music” in various other ways. Of this, two small cash prizes went for teachers in local elementary schools who presented the best music students; three to reward excellent private schools of music; and one to fund examination expenses for women who wanted to become music teachers. Two prizes went to choral societies who presented the best female choruses, with the reasoning that the country needed amateur women’s ensembles to make performing the masterpieces of Bach and Handel affordable. And two prizes of 1,000 francs were destined for the best songs chosen in a competition, one “to be sung in unison by the people” and the other for four voices destined for the (male) orphéon choruses of the city of Paris. As it was explained, “These pieces should have as their object the grandeur and love of the Patrie. They should not be war songs, but patriotic songs, abstracting from politics and war. Their goal is to make one love France by singing of its virtues and genius.” The librettists, also chosen in a competition, would likewise receive cash. Finally, the Paris municipal council established a 3,000-franc prize for the best nontheatrical musical work of the year (symphony, oratorio, etc).131 In the provinces, there were similar prizes, albeit for genres that could be easily performed there. For example, in 1874, there was a prize in Béziers for a cantata for male chorus and wind band. Arguably, the most important, government-sponsored competitions, as Jules Ferry put it, “indicated to young artists and the public which tendencies the state approved of and wished to encourage” and which provided “a truly advanced education in art.”132 In the visual arts, the most significant were the annual salons exhibiting paintings by living artists. (The Salon des refusés was instituted in 1863 by Napoléon III to accommodate works rejected by the Academicians.) “When a government wants to develop a great national art, the best means available are exhibitions,” the undersecretary of state explained to his colleagues in the Chambre. “For an exhibition to be useful, according to us, it must have three aspects: it must first be a competition loyally organized by all who take part, it must then be a place of instruction for the visitor, and third, it must be a sure means of educating the minister of fine arts, who has commissions and purchases to make.”133 In the 1870s, the government recognized the need in music for something like the annual salon for painters, that is, a prize to compete with the Prix de Rome 131.  “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 22 August 1875, 302. 132.  Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, 130–31. 133.  Sous-Secrétaire d’Etat, discussion in the Chambre des députés, Journal officiel, 19 May 1880, 5391.

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in stature and importance, but one not determined by the Academicians.134 Since 1874, the Conseil municipal de Paris had been studying a proposal by Ernest L’Epine (originally made in the 1850s) for a government-sponsored series of concerts featuring works by living composers.135 L’Epine suggested a jury modeled on the Conseil supérieur with half its members named by the government, half by musicians themselves. There would be six categories of work—Church music, symphonies, dramatic scenes, chamber works, choruses, and military music—performed in fourteen concerts, with the last one free and for prizewinners. This idea, though never entirely embraced, resulted in a biannual prize finally agreed to by the Conseil municipal de Paris on 9 August 1875. At first, the idea was to encourage “symphonic and popular works,” leaving the composer to choose the subject. The only constraints were that the work not be for the theater or church, nor its subject be political. The Conseil wanted “music in the most elevated and most absolute sense.” When the prize was finally funded on October 1876, offering the winning composer 10,000 francs and a state-funded performance in a major venue, politicians decided the work should be a “symphony with soloists and chorus.” Just as Saint-Saëns that year had called the symphony “the musical art in all its glory, strength, and liberty” and the “equal to painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature,”136 the Conseil considered it “the purest and most abstract form” of music. In the tradition of Berlioz, however, there could be a program or story, and competitors could choose their own libretti, unlike with the Prix de Rome. It was to address “feelings of the highest order” (sentiments de l’ordre le plus élevé). Among the eight on the jury making the decision, half would be chosen by the préfet, half by the competitors themselves. Fifty scores were submitted, and the first such prize was awarded on 7 December 1878.137 In six separate votes, two composers tied for first prize: Théodore Dubois and Benjamin Godard. Although many complained that the jury could not agree, and that Gounod and Massenet exhibited too much enthusiasm for their respective pro134.  By 1895, as Larroumet presents it, both the Prix de Rome and the Prix du Salon, also called the Prix de Paris, had their own purposes, but whereas the former rewarded “Italian imitation,” the latter recognized “French originality.” Art et l’Etat en France, 52–53. 135.  The public could follow this debate in the press, which published L’Epine’s letter to the minister of public instruction and fine arts. 136.  Saint-Saëns writing in his first theatrical feuilleton, published in Le Bon Sens and reproduced in Henri Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 2 July 1876, 243. 137.  See “Nouvelles de partout,” Journal de musique, 4 November 1876, 4; “Le Prix de 10,000 francs,” ibid., 11 November 1876, 1; and “Un Rapport de M. de Chennevières,” ibid., 25 January 1879, 3–4, as well as the discussion of Holmès’s works for the 1878 and 1880 competitions in Jann Pasler, “The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès,” Women and Music 2 (Fall 1998): 1–25, and in id., Writing through Music.

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tégés, this decision to reward two contrasting aesthetics and compositional styles did reflect the manner in which these committees were constituted, that is, on the model of the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts. Ironically, neither was a symphony or a “purely contemplative” work—Godard’s Le Tasse was sometimes called an opera and Dubois’s Le Paradis perdu, based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, was clearly an oratorio. The latter, with its lofty subject, was more classical, praised for its “pure” style, vast proportions, and the clarity of its musical construction; it was a work “the mind admires more than the ear.”138 By contrast, the former had a very “thin” story but lively orchestration, “picturesque” symphonic writing, and effective choruses, as well as a form and certain passages based on Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust, a hit in concert halls beginning in spring 1877. Godard appealed to Wagnerians as well as to fans of Berlioz, though some thought his unusual harmonies “curious” if not “bizarre,” his instrumentation sometimes overdone, and his ideas too conventional.139 That the jury awarded prizes to both works suggests that music could embody French values in quite different ways, and that the battle over which direction French music should take was at a standstill.

Utility on a Grand Scale The Universal Exhibition from 1 May to 10 November 1878 proved the utility of competition on a grand scale and, in the context of a popular national festival with international implications, exposed sixteen million people to extraordinary occasions for making comparisons and exercising value judgments.140 It was not the first such event. Major exhibitions of France’s industrial and artistic products had begun in 1798 on the site of the country’s most important revolutionary festivals, the Champ de Mars. Minister of the Interior François de Neufchâteau considered exhibitions a “means of surpassing our rivals and conquering our enemies.” He advocated having one every year, and indeed small ones were held every few years throughout the early years of the century.141 Organizers of the 1878 Exhibition, 138.  Reviews cited in Georges Favre, Compositeurs français méconnus (Paris: Pensée universelle, 1983), 122–23. 139.  Adolphe Jullien, review, December 1878, reprinted in his Musiciens d’aujourd’ hui (Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1894), 2: 427–34. 140.  Over 500,000 free tickets were provided for Parisian workers, as well as a good number to provincials and foreigners. Total attendance far exceeded that of the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Although the government lost money because of the building projects, local theaters and businesses prospered. 141.  Jules Simon, “Introduction,” in Rapports du jury international (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1880).

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also on the Champ de Mars and, across the Seine, up to the Trocadéro, intended to surpass all others, demonstrating the nation’s recovery after the war and its strength and vitality under republican leadership. The Minister of Commerce and Industry and the Exhibition’s organizer, Jules Simon, wished to show France as a center of invention and arbiter of taste and fashion.142 The Exhibition educated the public in a variety of ways. Its physical layout, as Miriam Levin explains, made the values of utilitarianism palpable and the opportunities for self-instruction numerous. The sequence of displays suggested interconnections between related human activities, gave primary place to les forces productives, and reflected the dynamism and systematic energy flow of republican social order.143 The public could evaluate the usefulness of inventions and the desirability of consumer goods, as well as the attraction of national styles. Various products represented national identity, including music and musical instruments (259 instrument producers and music publishers participated). Japan received the most press attention, along with India, thanks to gifts from the Prince of Wales in 1875–76.144 Nations, too, were emblematized, however artificially, in the buildings representing various countries on the “street of nations,” Georges Berger’s innovative idea, inspired by the 1872 London Exhibition. It featured façades as “specimens of national architecture” (e.g., the Chinese pagoda, Swiss chalet, Turkish kiosk, and Japanese village). “To accentuate more forcefully the character distinguishing their art,” the styles of peoples who resembled one another the least were juxtaposed in near proximity to encourage comparison. After Italy came Japan, after Denmark, Greece, and after Central America, Morocco. Reportedly, this was the public’s favorite place to linger. 145 Comparative thinking helped people sort through anything from abroad— “new inventions, literary works, scientific discoveries, artistic masterpieces”—a reason not to reject them for purely political reasons. It gave people a means of digesting the huge flow of information unleashed by the relative liberty of expression, widespread industrial development, and international trade. This process gave authority to the public, its judgment being “the reward of any true progress.” 142.  Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, The Expanding World of Art, 1874–1902 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 14–15. 143.  Levin, Republican Art and Ideology, 31–33. Levin understands utility in aesthetic terms as “limited to the Republicans’ understanding of functional design” or the use of design to “make manifest the character of social relationships.” 144.  Germany had declined the invitation to participate and so, except for a few paintings sent at the last moment, was excluded from the publicity the exhibition provided. 145.  Adolphe Démy, Essai historique sur les expositions universelles (Paris: Picard, 1907), 237–41.

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Explicitly comparing the music with the industrial products at the 1878 Exhibition, Simon explained, The best judge is the consumer, the clientele is the reward of all progress that is accomplished. The great service that exhibitions render is precisely to give publicity to all the products and to render comparisons easy. Publicity replaces authority or, what is the same, the authority of science replaces the authority of government. Is it the role of government to tell us Rossini is better than Meyerbeer? [That] Delacroix is better than d’Elbeuf? No, government has nothing to do with that. But great artists or great industrial producers can make us discover the merits that without them would escape us, correct our taste if it goes astray, and indicate new goals to follow, more powerful and surer methods.146

Comparison thus provided a way to determine the state of a country’s progress. Of course, it also had risks. Gambetta found from the Exhibition that those who had been imitators of French goods were becoming rivals. More reforms were necessary. Still, organizers hoped it would encourage pride in French products and the French way of doing things. This included music and the other arts. Once they decided to treat music “just like any other product of thought,” government officials decided to present a far more serious exhibition of music than they had ever produced before.147 Exhibitions in 1798 and 1867 had set precedents, but neither was as significant.148 Although in 1867, the government had sponsored a cantata competition, to which over a hundred cantatas were submitted, many of its plans for music fell through. Very little music was performed during the 1867 Exhibition other than by wind bands and choruses. And efforts to organize historical concerts were not funded. To celebrate the nation at the 1878 Exhibition, President Mac-Mahon needed 146.  Simon, Rapport du jury international, 149, 151. 147.  “Règlement de l’Exposition,” Journal de musique, 23 February 1878, 1–2, and 2 March 1878, 2–3. 148.  Documents concerning the 1798 exhibition indicate that “a large orchestra played the most beautiful symphonies by our living composers every evening for an hour.” Moreover, the prizes awarded in 1798 (also determined by juries) recognized not only the best “industrial arts” cited as “models for French industry” and the best works of science and books about morality published that year, but also the authors of the best tragedies or comedies and the best opera. See Ordre, marche, et détail exact des cérémonies qui auront lieu les 5 jours complémentaires et le premier vendemiaire au Champ de Mars, an VII (1798–99). This exhibition was to precede the Festival of Foundation of the Republic. The visual arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, statues, drawing, and prints—came only afterwards, implying a hierarchy among the arts that was soon to change.

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an official song. With the “Marseillaise,” associated with revolutionaries and republicans, a controversial choice, he commissioned Gounod to write a new one. The composer had previously composed several patriotic songs expressing Bonapartist sympathies. For his text, Gounod looked to Paul Déroulède, whose Chants du soldat he had set to music two years earlier.149 His choice, “Vive la France,” however, stimulated controversy, especially with its last stanza calling for revanche (fig. 33). At the premiere on 30 June 1878, audiences far preferred the orphéon director François Bazin’s rendition of Victor Hugo’s “Gloire à notre France éternelle,” performed by 500 singers.150 Beginning in 1877, a committee chaired by de Chennevières and Thomas devoted a year to conceiving concerts for the 1878 Exhibition, appointing six subcommittees, as with painting juries.151 At first, the government budgeted 250,000 francs to be divided equally among twenty-six concerts of new art music, wind band music, and military music.152 All composers had to be French, most of them living, and each granted performance of only one work. By February 1878, there were exceptions, including Palestrina, and the committee proposed spending the most on classical music concerts: 181,000 francs on ten concerts of French symphonic and lyrical music, 10,000 for chamber music, 30,500 on orphéons, 4,800 on organ concerts, and 3,000 on musique pittoresque et populaire (i.e., folk music). They expressly forbade lyrics “contrary to morals or having any political character,” probably to avoid airing internal political differences before an international audience. Performers (interprètes) would receive as much attention as composers. Concerts were to serve as useful occasions for appreciating innovation, not only “initiate [listeners] to the most recent progress in the art form,” but also “provide artistically beneficial means of comparing works of the same genre, regardless of their origins.”153 Foreign musical societies could participate if “officially accredited” by their countries, expecting no French subsidy, and presenting “no works of a political character.” Some countries sent popular musicians—gypsies from Hungary and Bohemian singers from Moscow were two French favorites. French 149.  For discussion of this man and his work, see chapter 7. 150.  Frédéric Robert, La Marseillaise (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1989), 91–92. 151.  This committee also included the marquis d’Aoust, Beauplan, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Jules Cohen, Cornu, Deldevez, Delibes, Dubois, Gounod, Guilmant, Guiraud, Halanzier, Joncières, Lascoux, Laurent de Rillé, L’Epine, Massenet, Membrée, the comte d’Osmoy, SaintSaëns, Vaucorbeil, and Weckerlin, with Des Chaleppes and Gouzien as secretaries. 152.  Philippe de Chennevières, “Section des théâtres,” in Ministère de l’Instruction pu­blique, des cultes, et des beaux-arts, Bulletin, 1877–78, 415–17; “Les Expositions musicales,” Journal de musique, 18 August 1877, 1–2. See the “Rapport de la Commission des auditions musicales de l’Exposition universelle de 1878,” Ménestrel, 24 February 1878, 97–102. 153.  “Rapport de la Commission des auditions musicales,” 98.

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Fig. 33  Gounod, “Vive la France” (1878), with lyrics by Paul Déroulède. “Gounod makes patriotic songs a bit the way the dentist Capron, of whom Voltaire speaks, forged Pensées by La Rochefoucauld—noisily orchestrating an already used ‘Vive la France!’ that he will later put in some Polyeucte [one of his operas]” (Henri Blaze de Bury, Revue des deux mondes 28 [1 August 1878]: 678).

Fig. 34  The Palais du Trocadéro. The Palais du Trocadéro, built for the 1878 Universal Exhibition, was received with mixed enthusiasm. It was criticized for having no single unifying architectural style, but rather combining elements from a variety of influences, including French Romanesque, neoclassical, and North African. Today we would think of such a building as postmodern avant la lettre. The Palais was torn down in 1937 and replaced by the new Palais de Chaillot.

organizers were proud that “never had such a beautiful, large, and generous place been given to music in an exhibition of this nature.” The hall built for these concerts, the Palais du Trocadéro, reflects other effects leaders sought with the Exhibition (figs. 34–35). This site of various royal châteaux and, in the seventeenth century, a female monastery would have pleased monarchists and Catholics. Its semi-circular shape, facing the Seine, harked back to a prototype designed for the Festival of the Nation in November 1798, reminding attendees of its revolutionary origins. The building’s name, borrowed from a Spanish fort the French had captured in 1823, its crescent shape, and its tall towers resembling Egyptian minarets, pointed to French fascination with their Oriental “other,” the Islamic traditions of North Africa. Set on a hill overlooking the entire Exhibition, surrounded by “vast spaces, cascades, sweet-scented gardens, chalets, and statues,” as Simon describes it, and “dominating a magnificent view over the city,”154 it 154.  Cited in Levin, Republican Art and Ideology, 180–81.

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Fig. 35  The Salle des Fêtes, Palais du Trocadéro. The Salle des Fêtes, with an organ, was a large concert hall within the Palais du Trocadéro that could seat nearly 5,000 people. Unfortunately, the same grand dimensions that lent themselves to grandiose music requiring a large number of performers also created an enormous echo in the hall, leading critics to denounce its acoustical flaws.

symbolically embodied the social order republicans envisaged for their nation. Providing a contained, ordered, and open sense of space, it offered both a fixed point of view and an occasion for interactive participation. Inside, as if there might be an aural equivalent to this visual spectacle, the main hall could seat 5,000 listeners, surrounded by scenes of workers. Conceived to showcase works for huge instrumental and choral forces, the hall’s enormous size indicated republicans’ intent, not only to make music available to the greatest number of “the people,” but also to harness music’s capacity to express grandeur with the sheer volume of sound. The first official concert featured Félicien David’s magnificent Le Désert. While the 1878 Universal Exhibition advanced republican agendas in compelling ways, the official French concerts, sadly, had little success.155 The limitation of one 155.  Henri Blaze de Bury, “Les Concerts du Trocadéro,” Revue des deux mondes 28 (1 August 1878): 680, bemoans the “sad role that our French music plays at the Trocadéro,” its symphonic

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work per composer (the vast majority of them still living) ensured a broad representation of perspectives and styles, but also suggested the weight of the Moral Order. Audiences could again hear Gounod’s Gallia and remember how far the country had come since the tragedies of 1871. Religious music, such as Mass movements by Thomas, a Requiem by Lenepveu, and other works by Dubois, Lefebvre, and the aristocratic amateur René de Boisdeffre, appeared in almost every concert. The final awards ceremony featured 1,700 people singing Thomas’s Laudate Dominum. Some new works, such as Delibes’s La Mort d’Orphée—written for and recently premiered by the amateur choral society directed by Guillot de Sainbris—and Godard’s programmatic Symphonie gothique, suggested new directions in French music. However, this array also entailed mediocrity and the fact that the sonorous acoustics of the huge hall, resonating like a cathedral, only worked for grand music meant that most composers submitted fragments of large works. One after another, these made for a disjointed listening experience.156 In contrast was the unforeseen popularity of an equal number of organ concerts featuring the new Cavaillé-Coll instrument. These seemed more appropriate to the space and featured a coherent repertoire drawn from or inspired by baroque masterpieces. They often attracted a full house, creating a craze for organ music that lasted for decades. Significantly, the Exhibition offered a temporary respite from conflicts near and far. Although its banners read “Peace and Work,” it opened and closed amid precarious stability at home and abroad. Political chaos had erupted in May 1877 when Gambetta’s attack on clericalism led to the president dissolving the government and later appointing Simon, the Exhibition organizer, as prime minister. In September 1878, Gambetta gave another speech calling the “clerical spirit” a “social threat,” in response to which the royalist and clerical press called for “counterrevolution.”157 In addition, if the Exhibition drew attention to previous French national festivals, not everyone saw them as a revolutionary invention. Edouard Drumont pointed to older fairs, such as the Foire Saint-Germain, dating from 1176, where, among other things, Europeans gathered to admire products from China.158 If the imperial festivals of the Restoration, July Monarchy, and Second concerts eliciting “no interest” and the hall often deserted, with whatever public left listening only out of respect for the artists. De Bury preferred the concerts given by foreign orchestras. 156.  Blaze de Bury objected that while various European orchestras had to perform in this space, the premiere French orchestra, the Société des concerts du Conservatoire, remained in its regular home on the rue Bergère, thereby making comparison impossible (ibid., 686). 157.  This was led by Comte Albert de Mun. See Eugène Spuller, Hommes et choses de la Révolution (Paris: Alcan, 1896), chap. 16. 158.  Edouard Drumont, Mon vieux Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1878).

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Empire seemed “banal and boring,” certain large gatherings under the Ancien Régime—the Procession of Saint Geneviève, royal entrées, and the wedding of Louis XIII in the Place des Vosges—had exhibited the character and mass enthusiasm of national festivals.159 Arguments in France over the relationship between the present and the past thus remained as heated as national politics. Internationally, too, the Exhibition began and ended amid conflict. All spring, as countries were preparing their contributions to the Exhibition, the major European powers were preoccupied with the Treaty of San Stefano. Great Britain, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Italy, Russia, and France argued for renegotiation. During the Exhibition that summer, they convened the Congress of Berlin to broker another treaty. Meanwhile, personal threats against European monarchs rocked the continent. Between May and November 1878, the leaders of Germany, Spain, and Naples suffered attempts on their lives.160 In such a context, the 1878 Exhibition had to demonstrate a widespread will for peace and cooperation. Within France some considered the whole idea of universal exhibitions “useless,” since their products already served as “lessons and models” all over Europe. With its museums, annual painting salons, sumptuous stores, and thousands of boutiques, Paris was “a permanent exhibition.” Others saw France as “calling other nations to these peaceful battles . . . to declare their triumph,” their superiority, even if “victories in work never erase defeats in war.”161 However, this exhibition, the largest that France had ever mounted, gave locals and visitors alike opportunities to recognize a culture extending beyond national borders, its competitions making of modern Europe a kind of “expanded Greece.”162 The Exhibition’s juries, which awarded 30,000 medals, consisted of foreigners as well as French jurors, in proportion to their nations’ participation, sharing in the distribution of pride and prestige. When it came to celebrating the Third Republic’s first national festival on 30 June, the organizers invited friends and adversaries alike to participate in the festivities and hoped that old disagreements would “melt into joy and pride.” With songs, fireworks, and the flags of all nations flying high throughout Paris, the Journal officiel reported, “For this beautiful day, Parisians, provincials, and foreigners seem to form one great family.”163 159.  Edouard Drumont, Les Fêtes nationales de la France (Paris: Baschet, 1879), iv. This large-format volume features elegant lithographs. 160.  Démy, Essai historique sur les expositions universelles, 225–26, 284–85. 161.  Henry Houssaye, “Voyage autour du monde à L’Exposition universelle,” Revue des deux mondes 28 (15 August 1878): 801–2. 162.  Henri Baudrillart, Les Fêtes publiques (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), 16. 163.  Démy, Essai historique, 271.

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Contradictions and Paradoxes Simon, Ferry, and the others recognized that these values were not universally compelling. Beneath their apparently coherent moral, pedagogical, and aesthetic agendas lay contradictions. These undermined republicans’ efforts in the 1870s at achieving unity, coherent national identity, and renewed pride in French traditions, putting off their realization until the 1880s. At the same time, they suggest the compromises and cooperation a country needs when it sees itself as integral to a larger entity, Western culture.

Germany France’s relationship with Germany was fraught with contradictions during the 1870s. Prussia, as Renan pointed out, functioned like a society under the Ancien Régime, and so losing the war meant defeat, not only by a stronger neighbor, but also by a system of values that republicans detested.164 And yet, as Allan Mitchell has shown, Bismarck did everything he could to reconcile with the French after taking two of their provinces. He contributed to Gambetta’s election campaign in 1877 and, after the republicans took control, sought détente in a variety of ways.165 As we have seen, Germans were receptive to French music, and not only to the operas of Gounod and Thomas, which were applauded all over Europe during this period. Germans also performed the more progressive composers influenced by German aesthetics, Berlioz and Saint-Saëns, and major works of theirs shunned in France. In 1876, for example, the court theater of Weimar gave the world premiere of Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict, which was followed by the premiere of SaintSaëns’s Samson et Dalila the next year. (The Imperial Opera of Berlin planned doing Dalila in 1877 and taking it to Vienna.) As the Berlin opera was preparing its premiere of Tristan in 1876, performers there also presented Saint-Saëns’s Le Rouet d’Omphale, two weeks before the Société des concerts did it in Paris on 27 February 1876. Critical opinion of French music similarly had positive moments. In 1876, the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung published a series of articles about Saint-Saëns, praising his symphonic poems in part because of their resemblance to “tendencies” among young German composers. The Deutsche Rundschau printed an article by Ferdinand Hiller, the director of the Cologne Conservatory, full of envy for French musical institutions, French talent, and French hospitality to foreigners. Hiller 164.  Renan, Réforme intellectuelle et morale, 38, 74–75. 165.  Allan Mitchell, The German Influence in France after 1870: The Formation of the French Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), esp. 177–85.

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noted that French performers knew and played Beethoven and Mendelssohn much better than their German counterparts, and that Germany had no match for the Paris Conservatoire.166 Some Germans apparently had no problem recognizing and supporting the most progressive aspects of France and Germany simultaneously. Likewise, while holding up Auber as a quintessentially French composer, in part because he never looked to the Germans for inspiration,167 many French envied Germany and wanted to emulate things German, especially German strength, discipline, and education. Some saw these as responsible for the powerful German military and its dominance over the French in 1870. France also bought many German goods, importing more from than it exported to Germany in 1876, with this ratio peaking from 1879 to 1883. Claude Digeon argues that such envy contributed to the educational reforms of the late 1870s, specifically to the orientation toward moral and civic education, both liberal and Protestant, to replace Catholic education. For the majority of intellectuals, it was “imperial and Catholic France” that had been defeated in 1870.168 In the musical world too, it escaped no one that Goethe, whom Renan considered “the most complete personification of Germany,”169 had inspired the most popular French operas, Faust and Mignon. These works posed the problem of acclimatizing German authors in France. Critics appreciated how they accomplished a synthesis between the stereotypical oppositions serious/light and deep/ superficial associated with German versus French culture, although focusing on the charming rather than on the fantastic, dreamlike qualities of the original novels.170 In bringing together German and Italian influences in Mignon—or what a Milanese reviewer called “Italian facility, French grace, and German severity”171—Thomas incorporated the best in each school. In classical music concerts, despite the nationalist spirit that led to a renaissance of French music after the war, few would take aim at the German masters, who continued to be performed, particularly Beethoven. Critics praised the orchestras of Pasdeloup and Colonne for performing Berlioz and living French compos166.  Parts of these articles, translated into French, were reprinted in “Nouvelles diverses,” Ménestrel, 5 March 1876, 109–10, and “Camille Saint-Saëns jugé par la presse allemande,” Ménestrel, 12 March 1876, 116–17. 167.  Th. De Lajarte, “Société des compositeurs de musique,” Ménestrel, 7 January 1872, 45. 168.  Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959), 333–34. See also Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 169.  Renan, Réforme intellectuelle et morale, 101. 170.  See discussion of the early reviews in Coudroy-Saghaï and Lacombe, “Faust et Mignon face à la presse,” 104–8. 171.  Filippo Filippi writing in Perseverranza, cited in Ménestrel, 14 May 1876, 190.

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ers on their orchestral concerts. However, both, for the most part, performed more German music than French on their programs in the early 1870s. For his first concert national in 1873, Colonne framed Berlioz and Bizet with Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Max Bruch, the old and the new in French and German orchestral music. Showing how an active listener might compare them, Arthur Pougin was quick to point to how “elevated” and “very serious” the Bruch violin concerto seemed following the “refined qualities, elegance, and incomparable delicacy” of Bizet’s “charming” L’Arlésienne. Mendelssohn’s Athalie overture elicited praise for “such a pure design and noble character.”172 Other concerts gave listeners opportunities to hear Massenet’s Scènes pittoresques after Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (particularly interesting inasmuch as Massenet incorporated tunes he had collected in Germany), premieres of Saint-Saëns’s Rouet d’Omphale and Guiraud after Mendelssohn, Dubois after Handel. Although some critics urged composers to “free themselves from foreign influences as soon as possible, to be themselves and not the reflection of anyone else,”173 others, along with Hippolyte Taine and Renan, considered the emulation of German “virtues” indispensable in helping French musicians and listeners become more serious about their art.174 These included the notion of using culture to elevate humanity, as well as a healthy respect for German “science” or structure, the “power” of German harmonies, and new forms of music drama. Michael Strasser has argued that the young composers’ new music society, the Société nationale, was intended, not only as a forum in which to premiere new French work, but also an “instrument for the moral and intellectual renewal of French society along the German model.”175 For his part, Bourgault-Ducoudray looked to Luther for his role in promoting the merits of choral music and “rendering the utility of music clear as an elevating and civilizing force,” not a luxury but a “sun of truth.”176 Because Bach seemed “too difficult, too Protestant, too chromatic, and ultimately too German to be pressed into service as a popular nationwide repertory,” as Katharine Ellis explains, Handel was the German composer the French most 172.  A. P. [Arthur Pougin], in Ménestrel, 16 November 1873, 407. 173.  Ed. Mathieu de Monter, “Revue de 1872,” Revue et gazette musicale, 5 January 1873, 4. 174.  Michael Strasser, “Virtue, Reform, and ‘Pure Music’ in Second Empire Paris” (paper delivered to the 16th Congress of the International Musicological Society, London, 16 August 1997). 175.  Ibid. See also Michael Strasser, “The Société nationale and l’Invasion germanique” (paper presented to the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Phoenix, Arizona, 2 November 1997). 176.  “Rapport de M. Bourgault-Ducoudray” (6 November 1880), in Rapports sur l’enseigne­ ment du chant dans les écoles primaires (Paris: Ministre de l’instruction publique, 1881), 23–25.

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successfully assimilated during the 1870s.177 Handel, a cosmopolitan and himself an assimilator, had worked in three countries.178 In the period immediately following the Franco-Prussian War, his clear diatonic harmonies, direct language, and “grandiose majesty” comforted a society suffering a crisis of self-confidence and anxiety over its virility. As Bourgault-Ducoudray observed listening to his Acis and Galatea, “the ear never experiences indecision or doubt.” Some saw Handel’s music as a symbol of “determination, personal and collective resistance in the face of attack, and permanence.”179 Republicans like Pougin as well as clerical monarchists like the archbishop of Paris embraced Handel. In December 1874, the president’s wife patronized an additional performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus. Partly to dissociate him from Germany, reviewers portrayed Handel as beyond time and nation, a composer who expressed “immutable feelings, who speaks not to the men of an era, but to humanity.” Beethoven, they noted, called him “the master of masters.”180 They praised Acis and Galatea as a model of grace and charm, while finding strength and grandeur in Judas Maccabaeus and the Messiah. Ménestrel was reporting on Handel performances all over Europe (e.g., Hercules, Samson, and Israel in Egypt in Berlin and Leipzig; Judas Maccabaeus in Brussels; Samson in London), and Lamoureux hoped that his concert society, L’Harmonie sacrée, would be a serious competitor to similar organizations in Germany and England for international prestige. He told the minister of public instruction, religion, and fine arts that in putting on oratorio concerts, a genre in which the French had long been inferior, his ambition had been “national as well as artistic.” Using discourse that drew heavily on values central to moderate republicans as well as conservatives of the Moral Order, he argued that Handel’s music could “transform public taste, raise its ideal, and use the pure and noble pleasures of this great art to exercise a decisive influence on our intellectual and moral development.”181 Handel’s music could purify taste, wean people off light music, with 177.  Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 213, 239. 178.  Handel’s music was particularly popular in English festivals at the Crystal Palace beginning in 1857. See Michael Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 179.  Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 214, 218–19, cites and discusses BourgaultDucoudray (1872) and Germa (1866). 180.  Lucien Augé, “La Fête d’Alexandre,” Ménestrel, 23 March 1873, 133, and 2 February 1873, 80. In his “Le Judas Macchabée de Handel,” Ménestrel, 4 October 1874, Arthur Pougin calls Handel’s musical beauties “the newest, the most powerful, and the most varied” and this work “one of the most perfect and most admirable” of its kind (348–49). 181.  Lamoureux, letter of 19 November 1875 asking the Minister for use of the Opéra to put on further oratorio concerts, published in Ménestrel, 28 November 1875, 413.

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its decadent tendencies, and encourage a taste for serious music. Critics pointed to the enthusiastic reception of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast by “virgin” audiences two years earlier as evidence that French taste was “becoming more refined and ennobled.” In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, many French looked to Handel’s music to revive French spirit, especially his popular chorus “See, the conqu’ring hero comes” (“Chantons victoire”) from Judas Maccabaeus. On 18 November 1870, Bourgault-Ducoudray included it in his concert for the wounded; in 1875, Lamoureux juxtaposed it with Gounod’s Gallia to celebrate French glory and promote French patriotism. Collections such as Henri Gautier’s Manuel musical des écoles (1877) and Le Trésor musical des écoles (1877) reproduced it for schoolchildren. In April 1874, Paris orphéon singers performed it.182 When this chorus was included on an otherwise all-French program for the final awards ceremony of the 1878 Exhibition, and the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah in a festival of French music on 9 January 1879, the assimilation was complete.183 French composers sympathetic with this agenda took note of French receptivity to Handel and incorporated Handel-like choruses in their music, including opera (e.g., Delibes’s Le Roi l’a dit and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila). Composers also wrote new oratorios, such as Théodore Dubois’s Le Paradis perdu, and hybrid works such as Massenet’s drame sacré Marie-Magdeleine. Handel’s oratorios also spawned interest in German approaches to music and drama. Preparing his readers for Wagner, Adolphe Jullien published multiple long installments in La Revue et gazette musicale on Goethe and music in 1873, and Schiller and music in 1874. In the early 1870s, major composers began to write mélodrames, music for plays, a genre popular in Germany (e.g., Mendelssohn and Schumann), but previously embraced only by minor composers in France. As Jullien pointed out, although he had little taste for “constant battle” between the two genres, works such as Bizet’s L’Arlésienne, Massenet’s Les Erinnyes, and Gounod’s Jeanne d’Arc represented “serious efforts to acclimatize a genre that mixes drama with music.”184 When it came to Wagner, however, Franco-German relations continued to be 182.  Revue et gazette musicale, 26 April 1874, 134. 183.  Excerpts from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell were the only other non-French music at the 1879 concert. In her Interpreting the Musical Past, Ellis points out that provincial choral societies also performed Handel’s works, such as in Dijon (1874 and 1876) and Aix-en-Province (1877 and 1879) (69–70). She attributes his subsiding popularity at the end of the 1870s to less need “to fight hard for Republican causes” after republicans came into power (247). 184.  Adolphe Jullien, “Théâtre de la Gaîté,” Revue et gazette musicale, 16 November 1873, 363– 64. See also Jacqueline Waeber, En musique dans le texte: Le Mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005), and Peter Lamothe, “Incidental Music in France, 1864–1914” (PhD

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strained.185 How to reconcile the desire for musical progress, which many French writers and musicians associated with Wagner, with lingering hatred of contemporary Germany and desire for revanche? Few French could forget the hateful stance Wagner had taken toward the French in his farce Eine Kapitulation (1870; 1873) satirizing the besieged Paris of 1870. In it, Wagner takes aim at Victor Hugo, Jules Simon, Gambetta, and Offenbach by name, although in the end, from his perspective, his own compatriots appear still more ridiculous.186 Successes in 1875 for Lohengrin in London and in 1876 for both Lohengrin and Tannhäuser in London and the Ring in Bayreuth turned the tide temporarily. But with Wagner perceived as in fashion, old anxieties returned. At orchestral concerts in 1876, his music, which had been forbidden in state-supported theaters in France but generally well received in concert halls, aroused audience resistance and political demonstrations (fig. 36). Efforts to depoliticize Wagner failed.187 This forced Pasdeloup to stop playing Wagner at the Concerts populaires from 1877 to 1879. Between 1877 and 1878, the public also reacted in their consumer purchases, and German imports dropped 74 percent.188 Receptivity to Wagner’s music in France only returned after President Mac-Mahon resigned in January 1879 and the strength of the Republic was assured. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2007). The verb acclimater was also used in conjunction with French incorporation of Handel and Bach’s music into French concerts. Ménestrel, 5 May 1872, 191, 23 March 1873, 135, 20 October 1878, 380, and 12 January 1879, 51. In chapter 7, I discuss this concept further. 185.  Wagner’s music also met with hostility in Germany during this period. In 1876, German reception of Tristan in Berlin was mixed, with the “old quarrels” between Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians rearising in all their intensity. Some compared their “battle” to that with which Tannhäuser was received in Paris in 1861. See “Nouvelles diverses,” Ménestrel, 2 and 9 April 1876, 141, 149. 186.  Wagner’s comments and the full text translated into French were later published in Revue wagnérienne, 8 October 1885. 187.  As in a review of the first performance of the Funeral March from Wagner’s Götter­ dämmerung, critics often pleaded with the public to use purely artistic criteria in evaluating “anything that came from the human brain” and to “let art that brings us closer to divinity rise above the bloody quarrels that tear humanity apart.” See “Un Scandale,” Journal de musique, 4 November 1876, 1–2. 188.  According to the Tableau décennal du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères, 1877–1886, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888), the value of German imports declined significantly from 72 million francs in 1877 to 19 million in 1878, averaging 27 million from 1877 to 1886. These figures contradict those of the German scholar Walther Hoffman, cited in Allan Mitchell, The German Influence in France, 193, who sees far less of a decline as a result of protectionist tariffs, that is, a constant import rate of 30 million during 1877–78 and a drop from 34.5 million in 1879 and to 25.5 million in 1880.

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Fig. 36  “M. Pasdeloup not being careful enough on Wagner’s marches [steps, marches].” Caricature by Cham, Charivari, 12 November 1876, reproduced in Adolphe Jullien, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1886). Most French audiences were introduced to Wagner’s music through orchestral fragments. His marches from Lohengrin and Tannhäuser were particularly popular beginning in the late 1860s. However, after the Franco-Prussian war, when Wagner became politicized for satirizing the French, Pasdeloup was caught in the middle between those who admired his music and those who vehemently protested its performance. This humorous image captures the surprise and dismay of Pasdeloup, whose defense of the German’s music led to political demonstrations and Wagner being removed from his orchestra’s programs.

The Ongoing Significance of the Catholic Church While republicans continued to band together around the unifying theme of anticlericalism, some of them blaming the Prussian defeat on the country’s religion, the Catholic Church remained an influential force in France, even in the public domain. According to the 1872 census, 98 percent of all French were Catholic, 1.6 percent Protestant, .14 percent Jewish, and .23 percent other, and Paris remained the “greatest Catholic center” in the world in terms of its Catholic population, the Church’s wealth, and its influence. Between 1872 and 1880, the country’s annual budget for religion remained at more than 50 million francs.189 Missionaries in the colonies were partners in France’s project to civilize the heathen.190 Religious orders taught in more than two-fifths of public elementary schools and Catholic bishops sat on the Conseil supérieur and academic committees of the universities. A law of 1875 permitted the creation of free Catholic universities.191 Perhaps most disturbing to republicans, many children continued to attend Church schools. The musical world largely did not support republican anticlericalism. Gounod continued to write religiously inspired music, including a new opera, Polyeucte (1878), which celebrates the triumph of faith and charity over paganism. The biggest grossing orchestral concerts fell on Good Friday each year. Every major orchestra presented a program that evening. Such concerts created the impetus for new religiously inspired works that would automatically receive wide public attention and demonstrated the continued significance of music with religious or quasi-religious texts for the French public, a conclusion in harmony with the Moral Order. On Good Friday 1872, for example, the Société des concerts performed the republican Lenepveu’s new Requiem. In 1874, alongside fragments of Rossini’s Stabat mater, the Concerts Pasdeloup premiered part 1 of a Stabat mater by the republican historian and composer Bourgault-Ducoudray.192 The popularity of Handel’s oratorios suggests that we distinguish the sacred 189.  For more on the influence of the Church, see Gabriel Hanotaux, Contemporary France, France (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), 2: 669–86, and Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Reberioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 78, 356. 190.  Many considered missionary action a prelude to colonial possession or vice versa. From 1816 to 1870 twenty-two new missionary orders were founded in France, and two more between 1871 and 1877. Moreover, from 1872 to 1882, offerings collected in church for the missionaries rose to more than 40 million francs. Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: Table ronde, 1972), 13–16, 35–37. 191.  Mayeur and Reberioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 78, 79. 192.  Bourgault-Ducoudray’s entire Stabat mater was performed earlier that day at the La Trinité church and Rossini’s complete work at Saint-Eustache.

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of French Catholics from that of German and English Protestants. While some listeners had trouble with Bach’s Protestantism, Katharine Ellis argues that Handel’s music “was received in largely non-Christian terms,” some works being described as having the grandeur of a Greek temple and others embraced as militaristic allegories.193 When it came to French musicians, however, although some espoused anticlerical ideas, virtually none have been documented as Freemasons.194 Bizet was a confirmed anticlerical, but Thomas wrote motets as well as two Masses, and Gounod not only twenty-one Masses, twelve of them after 1870, but also numerous Latin liturgical works. In his Marie-Magdeleine (1872) and Eve (1875), Massenet, a republican, played with the interest in religion under the Moral Order by exploring voluptuous eroticism in a biblical context. This shows the extent to which official composers were willing to blur the boundaries between the secular and the sacred.195 Meanwhile, Saint-Saëns, a composer perhaps most associated with combative republicanism, and who rose to power at the beginning of the Third Republic,196 composed over twenty motets, taught at the Ecole Niedermeyer, and participated in concerts organized there under the patronage of the comtesse de Paris (the wife of the Orléanist pretender to the French throne), the archbishop of Paris, and other royalist aristocrats. Moreover, both Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré, his student there, held the post of organist at the Madeleine, one of Paris’s most prestigious churches. Delibes held a church organ job in the 1860s. In the 1860s through the 1880s, so did Théodore Dubois, who became the Conservatoire’s director in 1896 and wrote a great deal of religious music. Most of the staunch republicans who won prominent positions in state schools and sat on the juries of prestigious competitions played the organ and wrote at least some Church music. The reality of republican anticlericalism was thus full of paradox. In describing Fauré, one of his students, Emile Vuillermoz, sheds light on how republicans may have adapted to a world still attached to the Catholic Church. For both Vuillermoz and later Michel Faure, Fauré represented opportunist republi193.  Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 214–17. 194.  According to Jean André Faucher’s Dictionnaire historique des francs-maçons (Paris: Perrin, 1988), the youngest French composers who were Freemasons—Spontini (d. 1851) and Meyerbeer (d. 1864)—died before 1870. Other than Liszt (d. 1886), there were no late nineteenth-century composers in this group, only a few songwriters, such as Aristide Bruant (d. 1925). 195.  In 1880, Massenet also wrote a large “sacred legend” on the Virgin Mary, La Vierge. 196.  Michel Faure, Musique et société, du Second Empire aux années vingt: Autour de SaintSaëns, Fauré, Debussy et Ravel (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 60.

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canism. Like those who founded the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, he was opposed to aesthetic dogmaticism, open to a range of aesthetic perspectives, and willing to contest the authority of the Academicians who sat on the jury of the Prix de Rome (as he did in 1905 when it came to his student Ravel). Fauré’s music, full of harmonic “conquests” contributing to the “progress” of Western harmony, was “the perfect incarnation of measure, tact, and the refinement of French taste,” Vuillermoz wrote.197 While Fauré composed many religious works, including the beautiful Requiem, on which he worked for decades (1877, 1887–93, 1900–1901), he often changed the liturgical texts to emphasize human feelings. In the Requiem, for example, by replacing the “Dies Irae” with “In paradisum,” he deleted references to the terror of death, presenting it instead as “a happy release, an aspiration to the happiness of [the] beyond.” Fauré could thus express religious sentiment while challenging conventional Christian orthodoxy.198 With a “likeable skeptic’s nonchalant flexibility masking the secret obstinacy of an Ariégois from the mountains,” Vuillermoz suggests, “this nonbeliever, without any sectarianism or intolerance, made it through a great religious school with the most affable serenity and professionally frequented the most varied ecclesiastical places without losing any of his independent spirit. . . . The requirements of his profession led the eminent organist to compose religious music. He did it with tact and discretion. . . . Gabriel Fauré knew how to find a Church language with an elevated spirituality, calm nobility, and confident abandon that, without needing faith, gives us a perfectly theological expression of hope and charity.”199 This distanced attitude toward religion may very well have been appropriate. As his biographer Jean-Michel Nectoux has observed, music and religion at the Madeleine were hardly very spiritual. Both could function as the context for the social occasions of the aristocratic faubourg Saint-Honoré—receptions for heads of state, funerals of well-known people, and grand weddings, some of them subsidized by the government. Moreover, when the tastes of the clergy so dictated, secular music predominated there and Latin texts were superimposed on excerpts from operas such as Gounod’s Faust and later Massenet’s Thaïs. Fauré referred to his job there as “the work of a mercenary.”200 197.  Emile Vuillermoz, Histoire de la musique (Paris: Fayard, 1973), 366, 373. 198.  Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–92, 196. Caballero suggests that Fauré’s beliefs evolved toward atheism at the end of his life (196). On Fauré’s religious doubts, see also Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: Les Voix du clair-obscur (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). 199.  Vuillermoz, Histoire de la musique, 362, 370–71. 200.  Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré, 45–47.

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Supporting Music amid Political Divisiveness As political sentiment, even among republicans, remained divided in the late 1870s, support for music remained complicated. Reactionary conservatives believed in authority and coercion. In the arts, they usually supported the Académie, its traditional values, and the example of the Italian masters represented by the Italianinfluenced work of Bouguereau in painting and Thomas in music. Moderate conservatives had more faith in an individual’s conscience in the pursuit of social and political order. On the Left, radicals and radical-socialists privileged individual freedom with some protectionist intervention from the state in pedagogical, artistic, and cultural affairs. More extreme leftists considered state intervention a necessary condition for free expression and industrial growth. 201 Each year during the annual budget discussions in the Chambre des députés, debates raged particularly when it came to subsidizing the Opéra and OpéraComique. Some saw them as the country’s pride and glory, and the two subsidies as “given for the purpose of public utility” (dans le but d’utilité publique). As Deputy de Tillancourt put it, no one wanted to take away people’s freedom to hear “light works, operettas shown on secondary stages, chansonnettes produced in cafésconcerts that have the privilege of attracting the greatest number of spectators.” But, he added, “more than ever it is up to the state to react against these aberrations of national taste in placing next to these light and trivial works examples of high literature and music that are much more elevated.”202 Other deputies objected to the huge expense, which ultimately benefited few, considering it “absolutely useless” and “contrary to the rules of a healthy political economy.”203 As republicans came to dominate politics in the late 1870s, some of the more socialist-minded advocated a separate and more accessible Opéra populaire, a municipal theater presenting opera almost everyone could afford. Political conflict affected private music societies as well. On 30 July 1879, hoping to persuade it to renew its annual subsidy of 40,000 francs to these societies, Emile Beaussire reminded the Chambre that they contributed significantly to the “morality” and “public education” of listeners, especially in the départements, 201.  These characterizations come from René Rémond, La Droite en France (Paris: Aubier, 1963), and Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), as discussed in Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, 281–82. For a more recent perspective on these differences, see Jean-François Sirinelli, ed., Histoire des droites en France, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 202.  M. de Tillancourt, discussion in the Chambre des députés concerning the fine-arts budget, Journal officiel, 15 February 1878, 1577. 203.  Jean David, discussion in the Chambre des députés concerning the fine-arts budget, Journal officiel, 30 July 1879, 7752.

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where there were few opportunities to hear music. But because of recent “political disagreements,” “rich people who used to be honored to encourage music have not blushed in retracting their help to avoid being in contact with adversaries of their opinions and objects of their spite.” Contributions to these organizations had decreased dramatically. Likewise “for certain political reasons,” including merely playing the “Marseillaise,” some local governments had stopped their subsidies to music societies. 204 Thus when it came to small private organizations as well, many felt the need for state intervention to affirm the general interest of the people. Contradictions also permeated republicans’ notions about the public utility of music. They ardently wished to counteract both the popularity of cafés-concerts and the decadence and indifference to the arts under the Second Empire. They understood that music could shape mœurs, just as mœurs inevitably shaped music. Ironically, however, while they appreciated music for its moral value, its abstract and acoustic qualities captured their interest far more than its capacity for semantic meaning or explicit signification. With society in flux and yearning for regeneration, they recognized in music a form of order and harmony. Along with understanding musical form as capable of helping people imagine an ideal society, they focused on classical principles—clarity, balance among contrasting forces, and closure. When it came to encouraging experimentation, they turned to timbres, not forms, unlike in the visual arts. Considering clear form and unusual timbres as quintessentially French, more than any particular kind of moral expression, suggests a subtle paradox in their values. There were others too. While the 1878 Exhibition wanted to foreground French progress, national theaters during those months programmed no new works. The Opéra held back its only new work of the year, Gounod’s Polyeucte, until 4 October. 205 Free performances at the Opéra featured Rossini’s popular Guillaume Tell. As much as republican leaders recognized and attempted to regulate the arts’ contributions to education and the country’s social and economic progress, they also accepted the arts as a form of escape. Thomas and Massenet aimed to find the juste milieu between distracting and expressing elevated ideas perhaps, as Hervé Lacombe suggests, because some of the public sought no change, demanding to be entertained, while others would follow composers into unknown territory. Jullien reproached Thomas for compromising too much with his Mignon to win public approval, for rendering characters too charming and not ideal enough to last. 206 Also, paradoxically, as much as republican composers like Saint-Saëns, Massenet, 204.  Journal officiel, 30 July 1879, 7754. 205.  Given its poor reception, this turned out to be a good decision. 206.  Adolphe Jullien, Goethe et la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880), 267–69.

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and Delibes wanted to democratize the taste for music, they had no problem with accepting recognition by aristocrats and royalty, sometimes even titles. Some feared music’s power of influence. As Maxime du Camp put it in 1879, the government believed that “theatrical works listened to by a large crowd, subject to a sort of electrifying movement [commotions électriques], exercise a quick and communicative influence a lot more profound than that of a book or a newspaper, which only ever affects isolated individuals.” Recognizing this, politicians wished to exercise surveillance. Although the government abolished censorship in 1870, under pressure from Mac-Mahon’s Moral Order administration, it reinstated some control over popular entertainment.207 The committee controlling the city of Paris prize also had strong opinions. It would only support the symphony, perceived as the most abstract of musical genres, and disallowed any explicitly political character in the lyrics or program. Likewise, concert organizers at the 1878 Exhibition forbade any political lyrics, probably trying to avoid confronting France’s internal political conflicts on the international stage. Thus, while music was expected to transcend politics, its inherent abstraction and potential to influence people could be bent to the needs of politics. Part of this paradox lay in the gap between republican ideals and political reality.

France in the World In some ways, these contradictions expressed France’s strength. French music’s distinction embodied and expressed France’s distinction, which had long been understood as a product of geography and history. With Thomas seeking the juste milieu between pleasing and elevating, and Massenet the “harmonious fusion” of Italian and German influences, 208 many French felt they assimilated the best qualities in others. From Victor Hugo’s perspective, the 1867 Exhibition challenged France to be more than a country: “As Athens became Greece and Rome Christendom, you France become the world.”209 Yet music, together with the exhibitions, also helped the French to understand the compromises required for European prosperity. If, for some, identity coalesced in music and musical practices could be used to assert superiority over one’s neighbors, for others, music’s 207.  See the minister’s limitations on the number of works that could be performed in cafésconcerts and the necessity of having an author’s permission to perform theatrical works there, published in “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 8 December 1872, 14–15, and François Caradec and Alain Weill, Le Café-concert (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 63–64. 208.  Lacombe, citing an interview with Massenet (1884), in Voies de l’opéra français, 284. 209.  Cited in Robert Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions (Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1993), 152.

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malleability, the ability to perform it in various languages and adapt it to various contexts, ideally fitted it for a role in exchange, commerce, and diplomacy. Music, then, functioned as both a form of identity and a form of difference. Free trade and open communication made this possible, encouraging the export and import of goods, including artworks. Commodification neutralized politics, while competition leveled traditional hierarchies and stimulated progress. From a republican perspective, competition also clarified the benefits of democracy. Constant press reporting, not only on French music abroad, but also on Handel, Wagner, and other foreigners at home knitted together European cultures despite their differences, reminding them of tastes they shared. Admiration of French music and cultural expressions of friendship laid a foundation for mutual recognition and mutual trust. This was important, as Renan pointed out, for 1871 reminded the French that “the goal of humanity is more than the triumph of one race or another. All the races are useful. All in their own way have a mission to accomplish. The disappearance of France among the great powers would be the end of European equilibrium.”210 French politicians were aware that her allies needed a strong France, and that the success of French music in foreign theaters contributed to their neighbors’ prosperity as well as that of France. Through culture, nations were interdependent. This study of music suggests that the dynamics of nation building in France involved, not only articulation of a national identity in music, but also participation in a global culture. The massive investment in universal exhibitions and the extensive exporting and importing of music supported Renan’s notion of Europe as a “confederation of states linked by a common idea about civilization.”211 While Western culture per se was not yet theorized in music, French politicians and the public ascribed great importance to the reception of French music abroad. In this sense, they perceived the strength of the nation as the result, not only of the strength and distinction of its national culture and its capacity to compete successfully in the marketplace of commodities and ideas, but also of its value abroad. The French desire to feel superior probably masked the desire to have France’s art, science, and industry serve as models for others, just as foreigners’ creativity had been for the French. Along with shared preoccupations with refined, “pure” sound and musical progress, this circle of mutual influences, particularly in opera, 210.  Renan, Réforme intellectuelle et morale, 96–98. 211.  Ibid., 123. Whereas in his Music in European Capitals, Heartz finds a shared taste for the style galant among eighteenth-century Europeans, a result of the Enlightenment’s “quest for knowledge and openness to the world at large” (xxii), here I am referring to something more general, that which distinguishes the art music of western Europe from that of Asia or Africa.

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reinforced a certain coherence in western European art music and contributed to its presence beyond the continent, for example, in Odessa, Cairo, and Australia. Through music, one came to understand Western culture as the dynamic product of national distinctions and international competition, national pride and international cooperation. Under the Moral Order, the French had seen how music could help them contemplate their complex past, come to grips with their differences, and rebuild their status abroad. However, in 1880, Minister of Fine Arts Antonin Proust admitted that “the arts are still considered more ornament [agrément] than utility.”212 With the country behind them and Europe’s prosperity linked to that of France, the time had come for republicans, now less focused on compromise, to turn their ideals into laws, look beyond Europe for new relationships, and pursue forms of glory reflective of the emerging nation. Not surprisingly, they expected music to embody its hopes and dreams, expressing as well as transcending the nation’s new distinction.

212.  Proust, Art sous la République, 26.

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P a r t t h r e e • Instituting Republican Culture

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5 • Imagining a New Nation

through Music New Traditions, New History

The musical world felt only a cool breeze (un léger froid) when the devastating crisis of 16 May 1877 threatened to return France to a constitutional monarchy.1 After intense conflict erupted between republicans and reactionary politicians over the latter’s close ties with the papacy, President Mac-Mahon purged the government of republican administrators and brought back the union of conservatives, led by the duc de Broglie. Yet increasing openness to republican values in the music performed on French stages suggested an impending disintegration of the Moral Order and the dawn of a new political era. Performances that winter and spring featured works embodying republican ideals of struggle and growth. These can be seen as a musical counterpart for the emerging “sanction of public opinion” that would give republicans a majority in elections that October and allowed them to install a new order two years later. 2 On 28 January 1877, for example, Colonne premiered Saint-Saëns’s La Jeunesse d’Hercule, a tone poem about the young hero who, in the conflict between pleasure and duty, chooses “the path of struggle and combat” leading to “immortality.”3 Through Hercules, a Greek symbol of stoic virtue, strength, and heroism, SaintSaëns signals the importance of virile energy and creates a French equivalent for those qualities in Handel’s Hercules, a work performed frequently across Europe in the 1870s. Borrowing the rondo structure of his own Le Rouet d’Omphale, written in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, in which Hercules’ strength is 1.  Despite the political chaos, musical life maintained a semblance of normalcy. As leaders of the republican opposition met in the Grand Hôtel, inevitably plotting how they could regain their influence, across the street at the Palais Garnier, Massenet’s new opera Le Roi de Lahore earned huge receipts. At 8 Place de l’Opéra, amid cries from the boulevard hailing the populist hero Léon Gambetta, a private concert went on as scheduled in the salon of the Daily Telegraph, although between performances by Conservatoire faculty, the host sent telegrams to London. Ménestrel, 20 May 1877, 194, 198. 2.  Philip Nord, The Republican Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 191–92. 3.  From the composer’s program note.

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encircled and subdued by Omphale’s charms, Saint-Saëns moves Hercules’ music from the B theme to the A theme and inverts the narrative, celebrating the victory of strength over weakness. The work begins with the tentative emergence of the Hercules theme in the strings, then its gradual development. This time the hero’s lyrical effusiveness rises majestically over the woodwinds, echoing Omphale’s spinning music, and stands up energetically to the aggressive bacchanal music in the woodwinds that “tempts” him. Pushing it away, the strings quiet them in a strong, recitative-like gesture that brings the music back to a measured calm. After returning to the opening material, the music turns assertive and proud, punctuated by the brass, the work’s “struggle” ending with the “triumph” of the hero. If the Hercules of Le Rouet d’Omphale can be seen as representing both Victor Hugo’s beloved people, enslaved by a weak, effeminate monarchist government (reprising the identification of Hercules with the common people during the Revolution), or the republican spirit, seething for change, 4 the hero of La Jeunesse d’Hercule may be a metaphor for the young Republic’s victory over Second Empire decadence, reminiscent of the revolutionaries’ victory over Ancien Régime effeminacy.5 After the republicans won their first majority in the Chambre the previous spring, the country was ready to settle on a new identity. Gone was the time when many feared virile works as “suspect” and preferred amusement. Politicians began to call for work that “returns to a more male and proud ideal,” that “instructs and strengthens the people and gives France the moral grandeur befitting a democracy.”6 A week after the republicans won reelection that fall, La Jeunesse d’Hercule returned to the concert stage at the Cirque d’hiver. In February 1877, Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust, a work known for its extreme difficulty, emerged unexpectedly as a blockbuster. At the 1846 premiere, the public had been indifferent. However, when both the Concerts Pasdeloup and the Concerts Colonne gave the 2½-hour work complete for the first time in thirty years, critics called it “not a victory, but a triumph.” When Ernest Reyer praised the performers for rendering its many nuances with “perfection” and the ensemble for its “intelligence beyond all praise,” this was all the more impressive 4.  As Lynn Hunt explains in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Uni­­versity of California Press, 1984), the meaning of Hercules fluctuated for the French, depending on whether he was understood to represent the king or the people, a mighty “Colossus” or a “life-sized brother to Liberty and Equality” (104). 5.  See Jann Pasler, “Crossdressing in Saint-Saëns’ Le Rouet d’Omphale: Ambiguities of Gender and Politics,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Lloyd Whitesell and Sophie Fuller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 191–215. 6.  M. Robert Mitchell, discussing Turquet’s letter to theater inspectors (25 February 1879) in Chambre des députés, Journal officiel, 19 May 1880, 5390.

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because Colonne’s chorus included humble workers from choral societies who had to rehearse at night in the basements of brasseries. Reyer also complimented the audience for being able to follow this long, complicated work, requiring great imagination, without the aide of costumes and scenic effects. If it had been possible, Colonne would have encored every number, for “never has a work excited such an enthusiasm, a justified enthusiasm.”7 Responding to audience demand, on five more consecutive Sundays, his orchestra repeated it to ever-increasing crowds. If one can judge by how much money these concerts made—five of them broke the Concerts Colonne record for ticket sales—the public was ready and eager to grow through the challenge of listening to complex music. Judged superior to those by Pasdeloup, Colonne’s performances put his orchestra on a firm financial foundation and showed Parisians that it was capable of competing with the Conservatoire’s prestigious Société des concerts, long considered without rival. After a decade of slowly permeating Paris concerts, they also solidified the struggling genius’s place in the musical world. 8 Interest also turned to another struggling musical titan associated with freedom and progress, Beethoven. Beginning three days before the political crisis that May, Ménestrel began a 26-part series on his early years. If, as republicans believed, art could influence one’s perception of the world and shape one’s behavior, then the programming of certain pieces, and the manner in which they engaged audiences, mattered. Narratives of struggle, difficult music that required listeners to struggle to follow it, and composers whose lives testified to the benefits of overcoming adversity were significant. Under the Second Empire, many composers had feared “exhausting” their listeners with “music that was difficult to understand.”9 With the republicans building a constituency for a new form of government, those sympathetic to their goals may have hoped that this kind of music could instill attitudes the public would need to stand up to the monarchists and embrace change. After the success of the 1878 Exhibition, music and concert life had become widely infused with republican values. On 5 January 1879, when the Senate was 7.  Ernest Reyer, Journal des débats, 30 March 1877; Henri Cohen, Art musical, 22 February 1877; Ménestrel, 25 February 1877; and Art musical, 8 March 1877. After the third performance, major articles were written about Berlioz’s work by Auguste Morel in Ménestrel, 4 March 1877, 108–9, and Ernest Reyer in the Journal des débats, 13 March 1877, both reviewing the work’s history and original reception. See Jann Pasler, “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne,” in Le Concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914 (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002): 218–20. 8.  For Berlioz’s reception after 1870, see Leslie Wright, “Berlioz’s Impact in France,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 253–68. 9.  Camille Saint-Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1885), 292.

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up for reelection, and the republicans hoped to win control over all branches of government, the Société des concerts programmed Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette. Was this a way to induce the public to reconsider the country’s differences? Selections began with the musical rendition of street-fighting between the rival families in the introduction and ended with Romeo at the tomb, with the oath of reconciliation sung by a triple chorus. That afternoon, the Concerts Pasdeloup premiered excerpts from Charles Lefebvre’s Judith, depicting a woman’s “virtuous crime,” putting love for her country above all else. And Louis Lacombe announced the premiere of his Chants de la patrie: Hommage à la France, a republican-inspired collection of folk tunes from various French provinces that documented their common heritage. In February and March, Ménestrel published another twentytwo articles on the “joys and suffering” of Beethoven’s life.10 Music thus could be useful in helping audiences to imagine a new, republican national future. After the republicans came to power, taking over the Senate and the presidency—Mac-Mahon resigned on 30 January, succeeded by the républicain opportuniste Jules Grévy—the musical world mirrored the country’s increasing embrace of the following four elements: Egalitarianism: On 15 January 1879, women musicians were in the limelight when a quartet, led by the brilliant violinist Marie Tayau, presented a concert uniquely devoted to recent music by the vicomtesse de Grandval, the country’s most prestigious female composer. Then, in 1880, she and Augusta Holmès each won a prestigious composition prize, their works praised for their virility as well as their charm.11 In 1880, a Protestant couple, Henriette and Edmund Fuchs, started Concordia, a new choral society for girls and women, as well as men, from the haute bourgeoisie. French heroes: In Lyon, on 8 February 1879, Saint-Saëns premiered his new opera Etienne Marcel, based on the story of a popular hero from a fourteenthcentury French rebellion. With it, Saint-Saëns returned to historical opera in the tradition of Meyerbeer and anticipated Jules Ferry’s call for works based on French history and French heroes. After its medieval guilds seek freedom from the king, and Etienne as provost of Paris leads a revolt, the work ends with the ensemble “For our rights and privileges, we will fight till the end, so 10.  See Ménestrel, 9 February 1879, 81–83; 16 February 1879, 89–90; and 2 March 1879, 105–6. In some issues, Victor Wilder examines Beethoven’s sketches to study the “mystery” of his creativeness and the elaboration of his ideas. 11.  Grandval won the Institut’s Concours Rossini for her oratorio La Fille de Jaïre, and Holmès took second prize in the city of Paris competition for Les Argonautes for orchestra, chorus, and soloists.

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that our regained liberties finally break the yoke that weighs on our breasts.”12 Begun in 1877 during the reconstruction of the Hôtel de Ville (city hall), burned down during the Commune, and heavily subsidized by the government, the opera has been understood as a musical response to the Commune, the political crisis brought on by 16 May, or possibly both.13 French music, especially by living composers: From December 1878 to April 1879, the government subsidized a magnificent festival at the Hippodrome circus and racetrack in Paris, with a “symphonic and choral army” of 460 presenting six concerts of mostly recent French music, with composers conducting their recent work (fig. 37).14 These were meant to educate as well as stimulate French pride. Some ten to twenty thousand people attended, all classes under a vast glass enclosure in which “the voices and instruments resonated as in an enchanted palace.” Reviewers thought foreigners would envy this as “the most beautiful, the most vast, and the most sonorous in the world” and considered the concerts “a new era for those interested in grand music.”15 On 10 October 1880, in advance of his regular concert season, Colonne also put on a Festival-National of French music at the Trocadéro. And that year, the Société de musique française was founded. 12.  The Lyonnais public at the premiere knew the story and so the aristocracy stayed away, their seats being taken by “administrative and military authorities,” including the president of the Conseil municipal and the head of the police, as well as professors, musicians, and the local press. Edmond Stoullig, “Le Monde des théâtres,” Le National, 10 February 1879. 13.  Steven Huebner in his French Opera at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 214, and Hugh MacDonald in his entry on the opera in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie et al. (New York: Grove, 2001), suggest that the work was inspired by the Commune; in his Camille Saint-Saëns (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2004), Jean Gallois argues for it as a response to the political meltdown of May 1877 (219–20). In his Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), Brian Rees suggests, “the libretto made clear that rebels fall out among themselves, but lacked a decisive political message, royalist or republican. The descending fifths, which play a prominent part, indicate that political revolt spirals downward . . . but heroes and villains are found in both camps” (225–26). 14.  This included Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Delibes, Joncières, Fauré, Weckerlin, Guiraud, Godard, Salvayre, and Reyer, large works such as Le Déluge (1876) and Le Tasse (1878), and smaller genres like marches. Massenet, in one of his rare appearances in this role, twice conducted excerpts from act 3 of his Le Roi de Lahore (1877), once in juxtaposition with Delibes’s charming ballet Sylvia (1876). Even though he had been Offenbach’s collaborator, and was his successor as director of the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1875, Albert Vizentini, the organizer, pointedly avoided programming music by Offenbach, who was associated with Second Empire decadence. Music from the French past was also performed, including the oath of reconciliation chorus from Roméo et Juliette. 15.  Their sixth concert, all-Gounod, was transferred to the Trocadéro to allow the Hippo­ drome to prepare for its upcoming equestrian season. Later, on 9 May, Vizentini conducted some of these same works in the opening performance of the Concerts Besselièvre in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées (Ménestrel, 11 May 1879, 191).

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Fig. 37  Hippodrome de Paris, Grand Festival program, 11 February 1879. The nineteenth century saw several hippodromes [racetracks] constructed in Paris. The third, called the Hippodrome de l’Alma or the Hippodrome de Paris, held approximately 6,000 spectators and was in use from the time of its construction, 1877, until 1892.

Secularism: Patriotic music began to permeate the annual Good Friday concerts. On 20 April 1879, Colonne started out with Saint-Saëns’s “Marche héroique,” composed during the siege of Paris in memory of his friend the painter Henri Regnault, who was killed. On Good Friday 1881, Colonne’s orchestra again performed this march, while Pasdeloup presented Bizet’s Patrie! overture and Gounod’s Gallia. The juxtaposition of patriotic works with religiously inspired works suggests that the concert organizers wanted audiences to feel a connection between the suffering of Christ on the Cross and the courage of the French people. Meanwhile, that spring, Lully’s music from the Ancien Régime—earlier fêted at the occasional performance—was only to be heard in music history classes at the Conservatoire, where Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray portrayed the composer as cosmopolitan, rather than associated with Louis XIV.16 Such developments underline the utility of musical taste as a barometer of rising republican sympathies. But with the republicans in the majority came new challenges. What would it mean to assure the continuity of their values over the long term? New laws were indispensable, as well as new freedoms and more equality. The republicans also needed to permeate and shape the country’s mœurs with the spirit of republicanism, which would “lead everyone to conduct themselves voluntarily as the law would command.”17 This meant turning their secular ideology into the country’s official culture. If politics implies, not only actions and policies construed to shape the nation, but also attitudes about how the country should be governed, values underlying human relationships, what and with whom people associate, what they hold dear, and to what they aspire, then to the extent that music and participation in the musical world expressed these, or elicited shared feelings about them, music had the capacity to be deeply political. Republicanism could be shaped, not just by institutions and administrators, but also by composers, performers, and concertgoers in their choice of music and what meanings to draw from it. Republicans thus looked to music and concert life to contribute to the realization of republican ideals. To inculcate republican values and make music accessible to all classes, politicians added music to school curricula and reformed state-subsidized 16.  “Lesson of 13 March,” Ménestrel, 23 March 1879, 133. Whereas Vizentini had put on Lully at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in the mid 1870s, he dropped the composer after his new ThéâtreNational-Lyrique opened. See H. Lavoix fils, “Les Vieux Maîtres de l’opéra français,” Revue et gazette musicale, 27 October 1878, 347–49, and Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138. 17.  See chapter 3 above and Jules Simon, Le Devoir (Paris: Hachette, 1867), 187–88.

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musical institutions. As the republicans became more confident, fewer looked abroad for models of strength—Katharine Ellis attributes Handel’s subsiding popularity at the end of the 1870s to there being less need “to fight hard for Republican causes” after the republicans came into power.18 Certainly, those promoting a return to organicism in art, such as the deputy and later Minister of Fine Arts Antonin Proust, perhaps to embody their dream of unity and coherence in the emerging republican nation, saw in Wagner’s music useful strategies that could be adapted to French taste. But many also turned to French traditions for inspiration, perhaps emboldened by Marmontel’s contention that French music had matured to a point where French composers should “break away from the influence of foreign style.”19 Rather than juxtaposing la musique ancienne et moderne as distinct styles, republican historians and concert organizers began to focus on assimilating and integrating French masterpieces from the past. Music thus helped the French reconceive their history in ways that not only acknowledged a greater role for revolutionary traditions but also began to trace an evolutionary path from the past to the present. This gave rise to a specifically republican narrative of French identity.

Enacting Change at Schools and the Opéra Between May 1877 and January 1879, despite the concerted efforts of conservatives to dismiss republican mayors, shut down republican bars, Masonic lodges, and clubs, and counteract republican ideas with propaganda, republicans grew increasingly strong, not only in Paris but in most départements. They turned out to be good organizers and used the parliamentary system to their advantage. Ironically, they also claimed to be the “guarantors of peace and commercial prosperity,” painting their opponents as wanting “a return to an impossible past” and risking war with Italy and Germany over an assertion of the pope’s authority. 20 Historians have pointed to the republicans’ success, not just with the peasants and working-class people, but also with the bourgeoisie. As Jean-Marie Mayeur explains it: The conflict of 16 May [1877] was first of all a conflict of ideas about the place of the Church in society, and the line of ideological division did not coincide 18.  Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 247. 19.  Antoine-François Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale et considérations sur le beau dans les arts (Paris: Heugel, 1884), 424–25, 438. 20.  Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914, trans. J. R. Foster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 30.

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with the social classes. The social significance of 16 May was that, as in 1879 and 1830, it set up in opposition to each other the privileged few, who clung to a static, hierarchical conception of society, and the third estate as a whole, who accepted democracy—democracy defined, it is true, not as equality of means but as equality of opportunity. 21

Not only did the republicans win both a majority in the Senate and the presidency in 1879, but the legislative elections in fall 1881 returned even more republicans. Few, most of them Bonapartists, were left to represent the three autocratic traditions and regimes that had dominated the nineteenth century. 22 No longer forced to make compromises with royalists and clericals, the republicans could begin to infuse their values more deeply into French society. They had three goals: to break down class differences, to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church, and to lay the foundations for a lasting democracy by taking steps to ensure more liberty, equality, and fraternity. The country was hopeful. Symbols of the old monarchy began to fall, one by one. In 1882, the Palais des Tuileries was finally torn down. The Legitimist pretender, Henri, comte de Chambord, who had been invited back to Paris by his supporters in fall 1882, died in August 1883, leaving Philippe, comte de Paris, the Orléanist pretender, as the only claimant to the throne. Gambetta’s Republican Union, an important liberal opportuniste faction, kept up the pressure to modernize and briefly took control from 14 November 1881 to 30 January 1882. The compromises it reached with Jules Ferry and the more cautious républicains opportunistes set the foundations for a new republican orthodoxy. As in the 1870s, many looked to music and concert life to endorse these changes and to contribute to their impact through reforms in music education and policies at the Opéra, as well as concerts.

New Freedoms and Educational Reforms Turning republicanism into the dominant culture entailed reaching as many people as possible. But how to do this? And how to ensure more rights and freedoms for all? Through their most important asset, their control of the Chambre, the republicans pushed through important reforms, passing laws that laid the foundations for republican mœurs throughout the country. As a newly elected majority, it was the republicans’ first order of business to 21.  Ibid., 37. See also 28–41. 22.  That is, the Legitimists, Orléanists, and Bonapartists. René Rémond, La Droite en France (Paris: Aubier, 1963), 154.

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limit the influence of the Church, which controlled most education in the country, including important centers of musical education. On 29 March 1880, the government passed a law putting religious orders under its authority, which forced many of their members into exile. Perhaps in response to this, that same year, the Ecole (Niedermeyer) de musique classique et religieuse dropped the last part of its name and later, to keep a state subsidy, secularized its curriculum. Then, in anticipation of legal problems in removing clergy from the schools or in forcing religious orders to become state-approved associations, in January 1882, the republicans removed authority over religion (les cultes) from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and transferred it to the Ministry of Justice. 23 In November, the Chambre also abolished financial support for cathedral choir schools, although in late December, Jules Simon protested in the Senate, and a colleague read a letter from Gounod arguing that these institutions had historically trained some of the country’s leading composers and remained the only schools teaching singing in the provinces. 24 These decisions allowed the republicans to diffuse the power of the Church over education and the arts and to appoint ministers of public instruction and fine arts susceptible to supporting a wider range of perspectives. In the musical world, the Good Friday concerts continued to stimulate the composition of new religious works, 25 but increasingly drew huge crowds through 23.  These fears were justified, for in March 1882, the Benedictines refused to submit to the state’s authority and had to be expelled from Solemnes. From then until the end of the century, even if it returned periodically to Public Instruction and the Fine Arts, responsibility for religion shuttled back and forth between the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior. See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historique_des_gouvernements_de_la_France (accessed 25 August 2008). At the same time, resistance to this dismissal could be felt profoundly in the musical world. Interest in chant was growing both within France and across Europe. At Milan’s international congress on liturgical music in September 1890, one of six days focused on plainchant. Five representatives came from France. In May 1882, the General Assembly of the Catholic Church voted to teach plainchant in all seminaries and to create a central plainchant school attached to Catholic universities in Paris and the provinces. Congresses encouraged studies and theoretical publications, regularly reported on in Ménestrel (e.g., 27 August 1882, 308–10, 3 September 1882, 316–18, and 1 October 1882, 348–49). Among these was Dom Pothier’s Mélodies grégoriennes (1880). 24.  Gounod’s letter to the Senate is reproduced in Ménestrel, 31 December 1882, 37–38. 25.  For example, two new oratorios, Henri Maréchal’s La Nativité and Raoul Pugno’s La Résurrection de Lazare, were premiered at Good Friday concerts in 1879; on this occasion in 1881, Berlioz’s Tristia, David’s Le Jugement dernier, and Benjamin Godard’s “Marche funèbre”; and in 1882, Gaston Salvayre’s La Vallée de Josaphat, Théodore Gouvy’s Requiem, Gounod’s Cantique, and Wagner’s “Das Liebesmahl der Apostol.” One reviewer noted that such premieres, guaranteed large audiences at such concerts, justified the state subsidies that Colonne and Pasdeloup received. Ménestrel, 20 April 1879, 167.

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famous soloists, such as Marie-Hélène Brunet-Lafleur and Jean-Baptiste Faure, and new music with unusual instrumental colors. A new secular spirit could be seen particularly in the inclusion of new exotic, often erotic music. On 26 March 1880, selections from act 3 of Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, with its exotic Bacchanale, and act 3 from Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore, with its Indian paradise, preceded Gounod’s Messe de Sainte-Cécile and fragments of Berlioz’s Requiem on the program of Colonne’s Concert spirituel (fig. 38). 26 Saint-Saëns and Massenet conducted their works, but Gounod stayed away. One critic surmised that his music might appear “pale” in this company; in fact, it was not particularly well received. 27 The same concert was repeated on Easter Sunday afternoon. Similarly, at the 1881 Good Friday concert, after beginning with Saint-Saëns’s “Marche héroïque” as in 1879, Colonne presented the premiere of the prelude and finale of Tristan und Isolde. In an 1882 concert spirituel, Colonne featured opera singers in large vocal works by Gluck, Berlioz, and Massenet (again, fragments from Le Roi de Lahore), with a Bach concerto as an interlude (fig. 39). Lamoureux included a good deal of Wagner, including most of act 3 from Lohengrin. When Colonne brought a cannon on stage for Berlioz’s “Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet” (Tristia, no. 3) in 1883, the astonished audience demanded an encore. Critics worried that the secularization of the Good Friday programs of the major orchestras was so complete by then that they would no longer be “sufficiently satisfying,” given the quasi-religious context. 28 In July 1880, the republicans began to relax political censorship. Striking down the extremely repressive laws that had forced so many cafés around the country to close when local prefects suspected political protest brewing, the Chambre voted almost unanimously to allow anyone with “two and a half francs to spare and a clean civil record” to open a café. Café culture, after all, had supported republicanism under the Moral Order. The possibility of censorship would remain, but only to protect the “public order.” Theaters would have “absolute liberty in what concerns political, philosophical, social, and religious questions.”29 This decision, along with fewer restrictions on strikes and demonstrations, “altered both the content and the genre of political expression,” as Susanna Barrows tells us, and expanded the political 26.  Selections from Samson et Dalila returned at Colonne’s Good Friday concerts in 1886 (from act 2, Dalila’s air and the famous love duo) and in 1887 (the “Danse des prêtresses”). 27.  Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1880) (Paris: Ollendorff, 1881), 709. 28.  Ménestrel, 25 March 1883, 134. 29.  Undersecretary of state in the Chambre des députés, Journal officiel, 19 May 1880, 5393.

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Fig. 38  Concerts Colonne, Concert spirituel program, 26 March 1880. Audiences at this Good Friday concert were delighted to hear Saint-Saëns and Massenet conduct their own works. What impressed them most in Saint-Saëns’s music was the lively Bacchanale from Samson et Dalila, brilliantly orchestrated, and they asked for an encore of Massenet’s Incantation. In Gounod’s Mass, they preferred the Sanctus. Everyone was profoundly moved by the Dies Irae in Berlioz’s Requiem, which ended the concert by “electrifying” the entire hall. Ménestrel, 4 April 1880.

Fig. 39  Concerts Colonne, Concert spiritual program, 7 April 1882. Again, the choices for this concert suggest that audiences were increasingly interested in listening to more than religious music on Good Friday.

arena.30 Laws such as one granting new freedom to the press, on 29 July 1881, also paved the way for more public expression of opinion, leading to a proliferation of new newspapers and journals representing diverse political views and addressing a wide array of subcultures.31 Other laws, on 30 June 1881, permitted public meetings without authorization, previously not guaranteed under Napoléonic laws, and, on 24 March 1884, recognized the legality of professional unions and other kinds of “associations.”32 This not only helped alternative political groups function, but also encouraged the proliferation of all sorts of music organizations. The republicans also took on public instruction. Beginning in February 1879, to encourage more freedom of thought, held necessary in any society whose government claimed to reflect popular consent, and to create a shared culture on the national level, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts Jules Ferry pushed through the greatest educational reforms in French history.33 Seeking to do away with the distinction between the liberal education given the elites and the utilitarian one given workers, the republicans began the process of using education to form citizens with a law on 6 December 1879. Like a 1795 decree of the Convention, this law required elementary schools to include “moral and civic instruction.”34 Paul Bert (1833–86), the law’s author and later minister of public instruction under Gambetta, believed that since the nation was “not a simple juxtaposition of individuals bound by material interests and police laws, but a collective individuality with its own reasons for existence and life principles,” children should be taught what had made France 30.  Susanna Barrows, “‘Parliaments of the People’: The Political Culture of Cafés in the Early Third Republic,” in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 94–95. 31.  These included the first socialist daily for workers, Le Cri du peuple, as well as publications for French youth (Mon Journal [1881–1914]), night-life enthusiasts (Chat noir [1882–89]), and even fans of Wagner (Revue wagnérienne [1885–88]). 32.  In his Republican Moment, Nord points out that religious organizations were not covered by this law and still required to seek authorization to meet (137). For more on the new laws, see Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 81–84. 33.  Ferry was minister of public instruction and fine arts from February 1879 to November 1881, again from January 1882 to August 1882, and from February to November 1883. 34.  The “Loi sur l’organisation de l’instruction publique du 3 brumaire an IV [25 October 1795]” calls for teaching “republicans morals” in primary schools. See Albert Duruy, L’Instruction publique et la Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1882), app. 2, p. 375. Note that this concept of moral instruction also permeated the definition of education in the 1881 edition of Emile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française, where it is not only the “ensemble des habilités intellectuelles ou manuelles qui s’acquièrent” but also the “ensemble des qualités morales qui se développent.” The other subjects mandated in primary schools, according to the 1881 law, were reading and writing, language and French literature, geography and history, especially those of France, natural sciences, dessin, and gymnastics, as well as military drill for boys and knitting for girls.

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great: “at what price its suffering, through what bloody turns of event France became a nation and recently acquired civil and religious freedom, what splendor it has given the world, what famous and useful men it has produced, what generous ideas it has always championed. Let them learn to honor those who were great, revere those who suffered for progress and truth, love the social state these people set in motion, work to defend it and make it better, hate fanaticism and scorn tyranny. In this way, love of patrie and liberté will warm the hearts of young citizens.”35 In part inspired by Talleyrand’s advocacy of free education for both sexes, in part by a study of the American public school system, new laws in 1881 and 1882 required all children to attend public elementary school from 6 to 13 and provided for this without charge (previously, many children had been sent to work in factories or the fields at a very early age). Construction of public schools all over the country followed, creating competition with private schools. 36 Later laws called for gradually replacing clergy and nuns working in public schools with lay teachers, and set up schools to train women for such positions. 37 Ferry also reformed who ran the elementary and secondary schools (inspectors and school principals) and what was taught.38 To ensure that the new regulations were written from a republican perspective and by professionals, he reorganized the Conseil supérieur 35.  Paul Bert, L’Instruction civique à l’école (Paris: Alcide Picard & Kaan, n.d.), 6–7. 36.  Between 1877 and 1889, some 19,000 primary schools were built and 8,000 more rebuilt. Some compared these to the new secondary railroad lines, in that they brought all forms of civilization to the distant reaches of the country. See Eugen Weber, “La Formation de l’hexagone républicain,” in Jules Ferry, fondateur de la République, ed. François Furet (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985), 226. 37.  In 1879, a law was passed whereby each département should have at least one school to train women for teaching in elementary schools, and in December 1880, women were given access to state-supported secular secondary schools. The curriculum of these schools would range from moral instruction and French to history, math, drawing, and music. The young deputy for whom the bill was named, Camille Sée, convinced anticlerical republicans that educating women in their own lycées (college prep high schools) would decrease the influence of the Church. These laws were also meant to penetrate the home, the site of children’s earliest education, where most republicans thought women belonged. Lycées would train women, in Sée’s words, to be “the mothers of [republican] men,” or, as more recent scholars have concluded, “agents of republican propaganda.” The first women’s lycée opened in 1882. By the following year, there were twenty-nine. See Jean Rabaut, Histoire des féminismes français (Paris: Stock, 1978), 171– 79; Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche (Paris: Des Femmes, 1989), 58; Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (Paris: Des Femmes, 1977), 353, 368–69, 394; and Françoise Mayeur, L’Enseignement secondaire des jeunes filles sous la Troisième République (Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1977). 38.  For an analysis of these reforms, see Antoine Prost, “Jules Ferry, ministre de l’instruction publique ou de l’administration de la pédagogie,” in Jules Ferry, fondateur de la République, ed. Furet, 161–69.

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de l’instruction publique as he had the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, excluding from it people not involved in education, especially ministers of religion, and providing for the election of some members by their colleagues. 39 To support these changes, the government increased spending on education from 6.6 percent of the national budget in 1873 to 12.5 percent in 1882. 40 Along with these laws, the republicans proposed what they called a “modern pedagogy,” an attempt to reshape how one learned. 41 Echoing Bert’s concerns in a 1880 speech to 250 school principals, Ferry called for “exciting and evoking spontaneity in the student” rather than teaching by rote, helping students “to find their own moral development [à lui faire trouver]” rather than “imprisoning them in fixed rules.” He hoped to replace memorization with the development of judgment and initiative in students and, by demanding a more interactive teaching style, to turn instructors into educators. Félix Pécaut, a school inspector, who defined education as “an art of judgment more than instruction in memory and the surface of things,” regarded examination and judgment as republican alternatives to Catholic belief and obedience.42 Bert’s civic instruction manual consists of dialogues meant to “make the student speak, provoke his questions, and help him discover the answers by his own reasoning.”43 After the teacher had read them, students were expected to copy down and recite the “summary” that followed. 44 The first was a story explaining military service and la patrie. Such teaching entailed going beyond the revolutionary concept of useful knowledge to forming human beings and instilling society’s customs (mœurs). Although these dictation exercises undoubtedly did little to encourage students to find their own voices, at least the ideal was conceptualized. 39.  Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 87. 40.  Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat sous la IIIe République: Le Système des beaux-arts 1870–1940 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1992), 212. Note that it had been only 2.8 percent of the national budget during the Second Empire. Furthermore, even if the French population had grown by more than a third since the 1790s, the number of students in secondary schools only increased by 8 percent (Duruy, Instruction publique et la Révolution, 25–26). 41.  For Duruy’s attempts to reform pedagogy in the 1860s, see Sandra Horvath-Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education: Liberal Reform in the Second Empire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). 42.  Félix Pécaut, Le Temps, 22 February 1872, and 30 September 1878, and in id., Etudes au jour le jour sur l’éducation nationale, 1871–79 (Paris: Hachette, 1879), 35, 287. 43.  Bert, Instruction civique à l’école, 4. 44.  For example, on 23 January 1883 when he was twelve years old, the composer Florent Schmitt took this dictation in his class on moral instruction, suggesting how instructors linked freedom with patriotism: “Freedom is the totality of our rights; in freedom is found the love of freedom. We must love our country first because we are born here and then because she watches over our safety; in effect civil society protects us.” Bibliothèque nationale, Musique, Florent Schmitt, class notes, dossier Schmitt, Rés. F. 1641 (2), 32.

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This explicit emphasis on judgment, perhaps modeled on the self-instruction encouraged in the 1870s, and the attempt to make it part of the official method of state-supported instruction were important from the perspective of teaching the meaning of public utility. Not only would learning judgment give individuals an internal sense of order and empower them to act, absent an absolute authority like the Church or the king, it would also help them determine the relative value of their own needs and desires versus those of the society. In other words, judgment, as Ferry saw it, was a prerequisite of virtue, or what made individuals see public interests as more important than private ones. Judgment was the fruit of a civic morality that substituted the state for God. Textbook reform was central to these changes, as was a new law in 1880 that no longer dictated what books to teach, but rather let individual teachers choose from among those on an approved list. 45 This was thought to develop their sense of judgment and encourage initiative. Also crucial was teaching about France. A sense of the patrie that would help “you read your soul and come to know yourself”46 was sorely missing in French schools. Michelet had called on “national tradition” as the “substance” of education. But, unlike in Switzerland and the United States, where schools taught the greatness of their past, the country’s institutions, and civic morals, in France, the long history of absolutism, the divine right of kings, and revolutions made teaching about the French past problematic. 47 Manuals written for teachers in public schools reflected a fiercely republican ideology, contributing to the Republic’s appearance of legitimacy and social unity, and also revealing the significant extent to which history could be and was “invented,” depending on who was speaking and to whom. Instilling patriotism was a central goal. Manuals recast history in a republican mold, particularly in their representations of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and the Revolution—two aspects of France’s history that situated, if not defined, the country’s national identity. Mona Ozouf explains how in the earlier public school manuals of the Moral Order, the class struggles that resulted in the Commune had been depicted, not as a social revolution, but as a republican insurrection against a royalist assembly. In the 1880s manuals, 1789 was presented as the birth date of the nation, when it 45.  The new pedagogy also affected how individual authors were taught. In Essai sur une réforme des méthodes d’enseignement. Nouveau procédé pour étudier les classiques: Horace, L’Art poétique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880), François Gouin proposed a way to help students understand Horace before they copied him down. 46.  Jules Michelet, Nos fils (1870; rpt., Geneva: Slatkine, 1980), xiii–xiv. 47.  On 27 June 1871, Félix Pécaut wrote in Le Temps, “Aucune partie de l’enseignement, dans nos écoles primaires ou secondaires, ne se rapporte à la patrie.” See his Etudes au jour le jour sur l’éducation nationale, 1871–1879 (Paris: Hachette, 1879), 279–80.

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stopped being a kingdom and became a patrie and a “moral entity.” Before that date, these manuals focused on what had led up to the Revolution and praised heroes like Joan of Arc who had put the country ahead of their own interests. Afterwards, they emphasized the paths opened up by the Revolution. 48 A very popular text used since 1877, and officially sanctioned after 1882, Le Tour de France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie (Two Children’s Journey Around France: Duty and Country), by G. Bruno, traces the travels of two Alsatian orphans seeking a lost uncle. Along with its moral lessons, it introduced children, not only to each province of the nation, suggesting along the way what all shared, but also to the notion of loving la grande patrie as a surrogate parent. 49 In some ways, this book was an exercise in overcoming difference and otherness as a prelude to becoming citizens. The mythic construction of national identity here not only “prophesies the disappearance of political parties” but posits citizenship as a “form of cultural conversion” or assimilation, substituting homogeneity for strangeness.50 Manuals written for teachers in private schools, by contrast, give another twist on the Revolution, over whose meaning clericals and royalists disagreed profoundly with republicans. In a manual from 1884, for example, Abbé Gaultier reduces discussion of the Revolution to a few paragraphs, leaving it out almost altogether. It is also interesting to note how, as the country’s self-image and its most pressing issues evolved, depictions of history in these manuals change. In his study of a manual by Ernest Lavisse, Pierra Nora shows how the 1876 edition condemns everything about the Revolution after the death of the king, that of 1884 explains the death of the king, and, with a return to monarchy having become a virtual impossibility after 1889, that of 1895 turns Louis XVI into a traitor. Later editions of public school manuals, reflecting the antiwar spirit in the country, also shift to portraying the “Marseillaise” as a song of brotherhood rather than war. And at the end of the century, with many fearing anarchist attacks, most of the manuals speak very little, if at all, of the Terror. In his 1901 private school manual, Abbé Gagnol goes so far to assert that the fight over whether public schools should be secular—one of the most significant accomplishments of the Third Republic— 48.  Mona Ozouf, L’Ecole de la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 188–91. 49.  Le Tour de France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie: Livre de lecture courante, by G. Bruno [Augustine Fouillée] (Paris: Belin, 1877), was in its 120th edition by 1884. For an analysis, see Jacques Ozouf and Mona Ozouf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, I: La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 291–321, and Nord, Republican Moment, 235. 50.  M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 132–33.

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was still an open issue.51 What was taught in late nineteenth-century France was therefore as problematic as assertions of a unified political identity. In 1881, republicans also pressed for reform of basic musical education. Some did not forget that many adults also needed basic musical skills. Under the initiative of Ferdinand Hérold (senator, préfet of the Seine, and son of the famous composer), the city of Paris opened its first music course for adult females, thereby providing women with what had hitherto been an exclusively male privilege. The republicans’ primary musical educational goal, however, was making music required in elementary and nursery schools (écoles maternelles). The process had begun in September 1880, when the government asked Saint-Saëns to form a committee to study the question. Its members, seven of whom sent reports to the minister, recognized the benefits of music as a moralizing medium among the masses and pressed for music instruction to begin at age six, as in Germany and the United States, to develop a musical instinct in children. Unison and two-part singing of choral music were of primary importance, “for this alone can produce this warmth of soul and this spirit of cohesion that together produce the vigor and moral wellbeing of a country.” Also important were repetition and progression. Moreover, if art was still “too often an object of luxury . . . a commodity that varied according to one’s purse—an art for the poor and an art for the rich,” and if “the purpose of great art is to unite the heart of a nation [faire l’unité dans le cœur d’une nation],” then schools should bring the classes together through by having their pupils sing the same repertoire. Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray and Albert Dupaigne saw particular “utility” in having children sing old folk tunes from the French provinces and encouraged instructors to collect them. From shared local pride might come shared national pride.52 To get away from singing German songs, Dupaigne also called on French poets to create national popular songs. The committee called for more teachers and new music to be written for the schools, particularly simple music, but also music that showed “distinction, originality, and grandeur,” in other words, masterpieces that would deserve to become popular.53 An eminent music pedagogue who had not participated in the minister’s committee, Anatole Loquin, concurred with the need for music in the schools and the study of masterpieces. However, most certainly not a republican, he suggested that 51.  See Ozouf ’s study of these school manuals between 1870 and 1913 in her Ecole de la France, 185–249, and Pierre Nora, “Lavisse, instituteur national,” in Lieux de mémoire, ed. id., I, 1: 246–89. 52.  “Rapport de M. Bourgault-Ducoudray” (6 November 1880), in Rapports sur l’enseigne­ment du chant dans les écoles primaires (Paris: Ministre de l’instruction publique, 1881), 17, 26, 28. 53.  Albert Dupaigne, “Mémoire (novembre 1878),” ibid., 78, 87–88.

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children start with famous plainchant, such as the Tantum Ergo, arguing that it had given birth to European popular music. He also proposed study of “exquisite melodies” from the seventeenth century. From his perspective, children should consider music something “essentially noble, serious, almost religious” that would “awaken in their hearts serious, generous ideas.” Not surprisingly, he reiterated committee members’ objections to music performed by the orphéons and wished to produce a new generation, trained on great music, who would “stay home wisely to make good music for their own satisfaction.”54 With music in the schools, the republicans shifted their attention from orphéons to pedagogy, and eventually new manuals were drawn up. As with the new textbooks, the government let individual teachers choose from among those on an approved list. This was particularly important when it came to a numeric way of teaching singing, the Method Galin-Paris-Chevé. Amand Chevé won acceptance for it as an alternative to methods teaching traditional notation in the public schools by responding directly to Bert’s concerns. The Galin-Paris-Chevé method, he argued, taught students to correct their own mistakes and relied on intelligence rather than memory.55 The two most frequently used song collections in the 1880s were Delcasso and Groos’s Recueil de chant (Strasbourg, 1867) and Danhauser’s Les Chants de l’école (1881–83).56 The former dated from the Second Empire and included a good number of German songs, albeit with French lyrics, progressing musically from one to the next. Adolphe-Léopold Danhauser, the principal inspector for music in Paris primary schools (1878–94) and a solfège teacher at the Conservatoire, wrote the latter in response to the new guidelines. Radically different, its ten volumes of music ranged from Lully and Beethoven to contemporary composers, and from folksongs to patriotic tunes. It became so popular that the city of Paris eventually distributed free copies to local schools. Most songs—unaccompanied for one voice to encourage unison singing—are very upbeat, associating republican values with joyful feelings. Like textbooks of the time, these try to instill love of country and willingness to go to war. Some lyrics recall Jules Simon’s association between love 54.  Anatole Loquin, L’Enseignment primaire de la musque en France (Paris: Richault 1885), 32, 34, 39, 41. He was a member of the Académie de sciences, belles lettres et arts de Bordeaux, the author of harmony manuals and Les Mélodies populaires de la France: Paroles, musique et histoire (1879), and a contributor on music to Littré’s dictionary. 55.  Amand Chevé, Rapport sur l’enseignement du chant dans les écoles primaires (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1881), 9. 56.  Michèle Alten, La Musique dans l’école de Jules Ferry à nos jours (Paris: EAP, 1995), 79. For an overview of French music manuals used between 1885 and 1887, see her chapter 4 and my Useful Music (forthcoming).

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of family and love of country—“the patrie is the home of our childhood.” Using music and words, they also give a perspective on past history and present-day concerns. One song from the Revolution by Grétry celebrates an old hero, Roland de Roncevaux, and encourages people to die for their country. Many are texts by Arrenaud promoting France and its glories, written for tunes by composers ranging from Lully, Mozart, and Beethoven to Théodore Dubois. Words to an old Alsatian air call for reunification of Alsace-Lorraine with France; another uses a simple, upbeat melody from a contemporary winner of the Prix de Rome, Henri Maréchal, to recount the life of an Alsatian orphan who, amid “racial” conflict with the Germans who now dominated her classroom, remained faithful to France. Others encourage local pride and travel throughout France. Recalling Le Tour de France par deux enfants, an easy-to-remember song, “Nos grandes villes,” teaches children about cities all over the country. The opening notes rise gradually through leaping intervals and crescendo at Paris, the “colossal capital.” Next comes praise for Lyon and its silk, Marseille as the “pride of sailors,” Lille with its industry, and other towns and ports (ex. 7). The song implies a hierarchy among French cities and articulates the reasons for their importance. Folk melodies from Holland and Sweden in this volume give an idea of mœurs outside France, perhaps as a stimulus for comparison. Among other manuals used for singing in the public elementary schools, Marmontel’s La Première Année de musique (1887) solved the problem of separate instruction in singing and solfège by including both. It also took examples from living French composers, including Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Delibes, thereby raising the level of what children learned to sing and promoting pride in their contemporaries. A later manual reflecting a pedagogical ideology similar to that of the instructors’ manuals, Chants populaires pour les écoles, with thirty-two short, strophic songs gathered or composed by the musicologist Julien Tiersot, won a competition for such compilations. It begins with a French air from the fifteenth century about Joan of Arc, a “radiant example” of self-sacrifice and patriotism. The seven stanzas by Maurice Bouchor depict Joan as everything any late nineteenth-century Frenchman could want—a shepherdess from Lorraine, a virgin guided by God, a heroine who saved the king, a saintly martyr for la patrie, and a “radiant model” to be “embraced in our hearts.” Joan’s song sets the tone for the little volume, which seeks consolidation around shared values and something for everyone. Old anonymous French airs—a musical equivalent of la patrie—are interspersed with songs by French masters from the past (such as Jannequin), and especially folk melodies from each region of the country. This addresses the same concerns as Le Tour de France par deux enfants. There are also tributes to the Imagining a New Nation through Music

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role of music in providing escape from the world of one’s troubles. In the end, the humble young beauty gets her man and they dance, forgetting all else. Bert’s pedagogical philosophy also applied beyond school practices. Even those teaching piano began to experiment. In introducing his Exercices de mécanisme, Mathis Lussy states that he “wishes to be useful” in offering a “new, rational” way of teaching piano. His goal was to incite personal initiative in students by providing not only everything young pianists needed to know, but also opportunities to invent, to write their own exercises. Students were to play the exercises in different scales, tonalities, and qualities of expression. The idea was to teach, not just piano technique, but also Imagining a New Nation through Music

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the “science of music” and the “development of a feeling for the art.”57 Lussy hoped his method would “contribute to the progress of the true and the beautiful.” It was so popular that its use spread to Germany. A letter from a teacher in southern Germany, published in Berlin’s Deutsche Musiker Zeitung in 1882, points out that while Germany had innumerable piano methods (“like grains of sand at the sea”), many of them competent, Lussy’s Exercices filled a real gap. Through such books, the French republicans spread their new pedagogical ideas not only throughout France, but also abroad.

Reevaluating Luxury and the Question of Opera Just as important to reconsider was the Opéra. For a certain social class, such an “institution of luxury, which luxury upholds, and which is made only for it,” recalled the days when the aristocracy had flourished.58 In the Palais Garnier, its new home after 1875, conceived in the 1860s to reflect an emperor’s glory and to entertain the very rich, it continued to serve as a meeting place for the elites, a place to see and be seen (figs. 40–41). Given the huge cost of its extravagant productions and intermittent fires, politicians were forever revisiting why the Opéra should be kept afloat, particularly during the annual parliamentary budget discussions. In 1872, some argued that the “very rich” should pay for their pleasures, especially in tough times when the state was forced to tax necessities.59 When the republicans came into power in 1879, many of them wished to challenge this association of the Opéra with luxury and its wealthy subscribers. In order to begin to tear down class differences, they sought to provide more equality of access to the country’s resources, 60 including more equitable distribution of the country’s musical wealth. This meant both reevaluating the meaning of luxury and taking on “the question of opera.” In his Histoire du luxe (1878–80), the first such study in France, Henri Baudrillart 57.  Mathis Lussy, Exercices de mécanisme à composer, à ecrire, et à exécuter par l’élève (Paris: Heugel, 1878), 5, 11–14. This volume won a silver medal at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition. Lussy also wrote a Traité de l’expression musicale (1874), published in several editions throughout the 1880s. 58.  See Octave Mirbeau, Des artistes, 2nd ser. (Paris: Flammarion, 1924), 253, 259–60, and the discussion of this public in Jann Pasler, “Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera,” 19th-Century Music 10, 3 (Spring 1987): 243–64, and in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 59.  Some suggested that since Parisians were the primary beneficiaries, they should pick up more of the expense. Monarchists countered that to represent the national interest, national theaters should not be dependent on making money. See Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 44, pp. 405–14. 60.  See Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Essai sur la répartition des richesses (Paris: Guillaumin, 1881).

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goes beyond earlier notions of luxury as “the use of rare and expensive things.”61 He redefines the word to refer to anything that is experienced as superfluous, including inexpensive items that all classes might possess (such as a mirror or a vase). This diffuses the association of luxury with the rich. In pointing to various forms of public luxury (monuments and temples) in Egypt and the Orient, as well as in ancient Greece and Rome, in democracies as well as monarchies, Baudrillart also detaches the concept from the Ancien Régime and nostalgic elites. In contradicting the philosophical notion of the necessary and the superfluous as diametrically opposed, he furthermore argues for an integral relationship between them as two ends of a continuum. What might otherwise seem useless, he points out, have served as important sources of “work, revenue, power, instruction, and development.” Abuse of the superfluous can lead to recognizing something’s utility. The useful can take on the character of the necessary as the product of progress. 62 Anticipating his critics, Baudrillart asserts that luxury is not equivalent to corruption or the cause of all social ills. Even in cities, where the gap between the excessive luxuries of the rich posed a stark contrast with the extreme depravation of the poor, there was no evidence that people were less virtuous than in the countryside. Cities could stimulate virtue as well as vice. In some cultures and periods, luxury made life easier, healthier. Still, Baudrillart agrees that abusive consumption of luxury could be the sign of a moral weakening. 63 Significantly, Baudrillart refuses to consider art a luxury because it derives from entirely different principles, including disinterestedness and the search for perfection. Certainly, there were periods in French history, such as under the Regency, when the arts had been called to serve decoration. But, in general, Baudrillart sees luxury as an accessory to art. Art can be degraded by “bad luxury,” sometimes by valuing matter over form. Like Rousseau, he considers too much ornament in simple things a distraction, but not in anything intended to convey grandeur. Echoing the revolutionaries’ belief that music was the school of patriotism and virtue, he sees music as a “national luxury” to encourage. While private luxuries, the domain of individuals, risk stimulating egoism and eliciting jealousy, public luxuries serve to “diminish the distance” between the haves and the have-nots. In this sense, public luxuries support democracy. As they spread the taste for the beautiful in all classes, they inspire admiration and the desire for something better 61.  J.-B. Say, Traité de l’économie politique (Paris: Deterville, 1803), bk. 4. 62.  Henri Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe privé et public depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, 4 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1878), 1: 60, 87–88, 164; 4 (1880): 3. Baudrillart was a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and, beginning in 1866, held the chair of economic history at the Collège de France. 63.  Ibid., 1: 68–70.

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Fig. 40  The Palais Garnier (Paris Opéra), exterior.

than oneself, which gives rise to disinterestedness and devotion. All democracies had supported theater as a public luxury, he points out. Although opera can involve all kinds of frivolous distractions, it is also “the highest expression of the lyric genius.” Baudrillart ends his four volumes by calling for an Opéra populaire that, with the same advantages as the aristocratic Opéra, but without “the somewhat frivolous splendor,” would invite the masses to experience “noble pleasures.”64 This treatise was part of a larger effort by republicans to support French opera. At stake was access to (1) the state-funded opera houses by those of lesser means, and (2) musical institutions by the country’s young composers and singers from the Conservatoire. To advise them, the Chambre convened a committee composed of five deputies and senators, five members of the Institut, and three others. On 18 January 1879, Senator Ferdinand Hérold published their report, which reviewed the previous Théâtres-Lyriques created to address the first need mentioned above with modestly priced productions, and why they had all failed, including the one that had folded in 1877. Whereas later critics pointed to the problem of being in the wrong neighborhood, far from where most workers lived, Hérold blamed the state for setting up competition among its own institutions. 65 The committee 64.  Ibid., 4: 103–8, 513, 534, 720–24. 65.  Frédérique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne (Liège: Mardaga, 1991), 395.

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Fig. 41  The Palais Garnier, Great Staircase. Construction on the Palais Garnier began in 1861, but due to a number of setbacks—not the least of which was the Franco-Prussian War—the opera house was not inaugurated until 1875. Perhaps the most striking architectural feature of the building is the opulent Great Staircase, where people came to “see and be seen.”

rejected the revitalization of this theater, as well as the idea of funding a new Opéra populaire to perform standard repertoire for the largest possible audiences with low-cost tickets. Their solution was to propose funding low-cost performances at the Opéra and Opéra-Comique on nights when they were otherwise closed. As for creating a new théâtre-école to put on productions by young French composers, Imagining a New Nation through Music

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they acknowledged its importance and proposed adding a new hall for this use as an annex to the Conservatoire. In addition, they recommended that the state fund the production of a certain number of works by young French composers each year in these state institutions. Whereas they had agreed with Ferry and the moderates among them on the importance of education, including music education, Gambetta’s more populist group of républicains opportunistes, the Republican Union, clashed with the former over these recommendations, exposing serious rifts in the opportuniste majority. Consequently, changes came slowly. Antonin Proust, a Republican Union member of this committee, close friend of Gambetta’s, and the deputy in charge of reporting on the arts budget in the Chambre, advocated more state intervention. In his memoir L’Art sous la République, he endorses Victor Hugo’s view of national theaters as “one of the branches of the people’s education.”66 Agreeing with Hugo that theater could influence “the morality of the people,” Proust used this as an argument for giving the minister direct control of the Opéra. Given the financial success of the Palais Garnier at its 1875 opening and during the 1878 Exhibition, Proust proposed that, in exchange for its huge subsidy—the largest in Europe—the Opéra be run by a delegate of the minister; the state would bear all risks, in return for all the profit. The committee agreed, in part because they worried about what might happen if commercial interests drove artistic choices. However on 13 April, Ferry, the new minister, believing in the merits of financial motivation, vetoed the committee’s recommendation. On 24 May, he appointed Auguste Vaucorbeil, a composer and politically connected administrator acceptable to conservative Opéra subscribers, as its directeur. 67 He would still have to get the authorization of the minister for any new works produced there, but Vaucorbeil and any investors whom he could involve would assume all financial risks and benefits. This decision, respecting the utility of the Opéra for its traditional patrons and leaving its fate in their hands, demonstrates the extent to which Ferry was unwilling to interfere and trusted private enterprise. Republican Union opportunistes also differed with Ferry over the need for a 66.  Antonin Proust, L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 79. As well as an arts administrator, Antonin Proust was secretary to Gambetta during the Franco-Prussian War, an amateur painter, and author of numerous essays about art. 67.  Unlike his predecessor who had little musical training, Vaucorbeil had studied music at the Conservatoire under Cherubini and taught vocal ensembles there from 1871 to 1879. He was known for being affable, distinguished, and experienced, having served as commissioner of subsidized theaters and, in 1878, inspector of fine arts. See Patureau, Palais Garnier, 49, 54. However, after he took charge of the Opéra, Lamoureux resigned as conductor, citing inability to work with him.

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separate Opéra populaire, which had been debated since March 1870. 68 On 25 March 1879, Proust wrote to La République française: “To me it is intolerable that the state should create an Opéra populaire (as recently proposed) alongside the current Opéra and say, contemptuously, this one is for les petits, that one is for les grands. On the contrary, I think that everyone should be able to enter our great subsidized theaters without it being necessary to subsidize inferior theaters for those who don’t have the privilege of wealth. In fact, the state has enough authority to change the constitution of the Opéra, the only theater still inaccessible to those of modest incomes.”69 In spite of these objections, Undersecretary of State Edmond Turquet went around this committee and petitioned the city of Paris to co-fund an Opéra populaire (in addition to a new dramatic theater for the classes populaires). In July 1879, the celebrated architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc weighed in before the Conseil municipal of Paris. He did not object in principle to an Opéra populaire, but only asked that it be distinct from the Opéra in repertoire, performers, and cost spent on sets.70 After much debate and with the support of Ferdinand Hérold, in November 1882, the city voted to spend 500,000 francs to build an Opéra populaire in the Place de la République, which was to open in October 1883. Five-sixths of its 4,000 seats were to cost very little, so that families would be able to afford to spend an evening together there. It was argued that there were 100,000 working-class families who might take advantage of this. In addition, bourgeois families would be able to afford the luxury of a box there for the price of a single seat in the Palais Garnier. The aim was to help democratize well-established French and Italian opera and operetta, in particular, to produce ballets to show the lower classes models of “grace and beauty.” The government’s requirement that it put on twenty new acts per year led to presenting some important Paris premieres, such as Victor Massé’s La Nuit de Cléopâtre and Saint-Saëns’s Etienne Marcel. Many hoped that these performances would create competition with the cafés-concerts and introduce a wider range of people, not only to more serious music, but also to more French contemporary music.71 68.  Ed. Viel, “Projet d’un Opéra populaire” (1870) discussed in Ménestrel, 21 December 1873, 21. Extensive discussion was published in Ménestrel, 1 December 1878, 3–4; 8 December 1878, 11; 15 December 1878, 19; 26 January 1879, 67–70; 2 February 1879, 75–78; 30 March 1879, 139; and 20 April 1879, 163. 69.  Reproduced in Ménestrel, 30 March 1879, 139. These arguments are directed against the paternalistic approach to providing music for the masses under Napoléon III. According to Steven Huebner (personal communication), the creation of popular opera was a long-standing concern in the nineteenth century. 70.  Ménestrel, 20 July 1879, 268. 71.  Georges Grison, “L’Opéra populaire,” Figaro, 15 March 1882; Ignotus, “L’Opéra populaire,” Figaro, 29 November 1882; Ménestrel, 12 November 1882, 398, and 4 February 1883, 78.

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In June 1879, Proust took on the Opéra’s Cahier des charges, the contractual agreement between the minister and the theater’s director that laid out what the state expected in return for its financial support.72 Significantly, he began by reaffirming the Opéra’s utility as “the museum of music” and its responsibility to maintain its superiority over provincial and foreign theaters in its choice of works, performers, and set designs, thereby supporting its traditional function for the elites as well as the nation. However, perhaps thinking of a kind of musical analogue to the free Sundays at the annual painting Salon, which were open to everyone and resulted in an intermingling of classes,73 he also called for putting on a dozen annual performances with low-cost seats. Moreover, he called for the Opéra to produce at least two new works per year. These could include translations of foreign operas, as well as one short work every two years by a French winner of the Prix de Rome. Failing to do so, the director would be taxed 5,000 francs per act.74 These proposals were incorporated into the Cahier. Ferry and Vaucorbeil accepted these changes in principle, but in practice, the Opéra was allowed to carry on as before. Between 1881 and 1884, the institution continued to put on only one new opera annually.75 Its first “new” work in March 1880 was Verdi’s Aida (1871), already known to Parisians from performances in Italian at the Théâtre-Italien in 1876 and in French at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1878. Until he stepped down in 1884, Vaucorbeil gave no performances free or with reduced-price tickets.76 By contrast, in January 1880, Léon Carvalho, director of the Opéra-Comique, initiated Sunday matinée performances for families, and that May, he promised “popular performances” one Monday each month with low-cost tickets (from 50 centimes to 3.5 francs). In fall 1881, when Gambetta took over the government from Ferry, the Repub­­ lican Union’s power temporarily peaked. Arguing for bringing all artistic administrations under the same government, Gambetta created a separate Ministry of Fine Arts and put Proust in charge. Sensitive to the utility of the arts for industry as well 72.  In the spirit of transparency, the new Cahier des charges de l’Opéra was published in the press. See Revue et gazette musicale, 29 June 1879, 210–14, and 6 July 1879, 218–22. The minister’s approval was required for all works performed. 73.  See Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), fig. 47 (p. 140). 74.  For a discussion of these changes, see Ménestrel, 29 June 1879, 243–46, and Patureau, Palais Garnier, 58–69, 405. 75.  The first article of the Opéra’s 1879 Cahier des charges stipulated that translations of foreign works and revivals entailing considerable scenic transformations could count toward the two new works that had to be produced every year. 76.  Popular performances at the Opéra did not happen to any appreciable extent until the 1890s. See Patureau, Palais Garnier, 407.

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as the articulation of French taste, this administration focused on modernizing the country. It also aimed to serve as an intermediary between the fine and industrial arts. Whereas in 1875, Wallon had wished to elevate the arts by treating them as the equals of the sciences and literature, Proust wished to blur the distinction between the fine and applied arts, the artist and the artisan. He proposed a complex series of reforms in teaching art that included disassociating it from literature and science to stress unity within the arts. This new alliance between art and craft also had important implications for aesthetics and prepared the way for an art whose value lay less in its logical structure and the morals it taught than in the pleasures it afforded its perceivers. When Gambetta lost power a little over two months later, this short-lived ministry disbanded, not to be revived until André Malraux’s Ministère des affaires culturelles in 1959 under the Fifth Republic.77 However, when Gambetta died on 31 December 1882, Ferry decided to reach out to his followers, appointing Bert, Proust, and a few radicals to his government.78 Even if the country was not ready for the changes and state intervention they proposed, Gambetta’s followers thus continued to exert substantial power over the arts. Proust remained as reporter for the fine arts on the budget committee of the Chambre; René Goblet, a radical Freemason, became minister of public instruction, religion, and fine arts in 1885, and then prime minister in 1886; and Eugène Spuller, a friend of Gambetta’s, served as minister of public instruction, religion, and fine arts in 1887. Such dissension within the ranks of the republicans in power should temper the thought of republicanism as monolithic. Management of the state’s most expensive cultural institution and a genre that represented France abroad was so important to the nation that the “question of opera” forced republicans to come to grips with critical differences in their definitions of democracy and their visions for the future. Republicans coming into power had to make decisions about a wide range of investments, and opera became a nexus for debate on the risks and benefits of private enterprise versus state intervention. Ferry’s laissez-faire attitude reflected the concerns of a man who believed in competition and envisaged democracy as putting power in the hands of the people rather than the government. Proust argued that the forces of democracy, including competition, could not operate 77.  Proust went on to become president of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs in 1882, succeeding the marquis de Chennevières. See Antonin Proust, “Le Salon de 1882,” Gazette des beaux-arts 25 (1882): 539; id., Art sous la République; Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-desiècle France (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 118–120; and Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat, app. 17, p. 356. 78.  Jérôme Grévy, La République des opportunistes, 1870–1885 (Paris: Perrin, 1998), 288–92.

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without governmental help. To democratize the experience of elite cultural forms, he and his successors advocated access of the masses to high art and of composers to performances of their work. They did not worry that their idealistic aspirations did not address questions such as the extent to which the public wanted to hear more new music, especially by lesser-known composers, or the lower classes yearned for the privilege of attending the Opéra, or that if they could get in, they got much out of it. Still, however the challenges at the heart of a democratic society are defined by those espousing market laissez-faire or top-down policies, these positions have continued to impassion and divide the French down to the present, even since the opening of the Opéra Bastille in 1989, originally intended to provide affordable tickets to the masses but now charging what the market will bear.

Renarrating the Revolution In the early 1880s, as part of the consolidation of their power, besides granting new rights, freedoms, and equalities, republicans also sought new ways to encourage national solidarity. Rethinking French traditions was crucial in the process of helping French citizens imagine a common identity. As Ernest Renan put it, the “cult of ancestors”—a heroic past, great men, glory—is one of the foundations of a national consciousness.79 When the republicans came into power, they needed a new history. Republican historians—mostly Protestants, Jews, and Freemasons— used historical narrative to lay a framework that made the new regime seem like the result of a logical development since the Revolution. 80 The Revue historique, founded by Gabriel Monod in 1876, promoted an anticlerical perspective that supported Ferry’s decision to exclude clergy and nuns from public school teaching. At the same time, Ferry, who wished to reignite a sense of family among the French, understood the need for connecting with prerevolutionary France and frequently referred to the country as their “old mother” with her “old history” “full of kings and great ministers.”81 History became increasingly important in the curricula of secondary schools and at universities in part because it provided this sense of 79.  Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” reproduced in Raoul Girardet, Le Nationa­ lisme français (Paris: Colin, 1966), 65–66. 80.  Among the most important, Henri Martin, a disciple of Michelet’s, published seventeen volumes on the history of France before 1789 (1861–62), seven on the history of its common people (1867–83), and eight more on French history since republicans had come to power (1878–83). 81.  Ozouf, Ecole de la France, 405.

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continuity. At Gambetta’s funeral in December 1882, Monod carried a banner proclaiming, “History is the key science.”82 When it came to the arts, however, there was again dissension among republicans, this time over the value of looking to the past. If Ferry believed that French history, especially the grandeur and suffering of the Revolution, should inspire modern art, Minister of Fine Arts Antonin Proust, a collector, scholar, and advocate for Manet and Courbet, felt that the contemporary world should be the focus of artists. Art should represent aspects of life associated with all those in the Republic, including the classes populaires. In painting, this translated into Proust’s support for naturalism as opposed to idealism, subjects drawn from the present more than the past, and what some considered the vulgar and the ordinary over the grand and the beautiful. 83 But in the realm of music, before realism found expression in the operas of Alfred Bruneau (several of them with librettos by Emile Zola), left-wing republicans looked to the Revolution for inspiration. Republicans hoped that their speeches, publications, statues, festivals, and music celebrating the dreams and sacrifices of their revolutionary predecessors would inspire a revival of revolutionary ideals. Beginning in 1881, the Société de l’histoire de la Révolution took the lead in stimulating research on the subject. The first issue of its journal, La Révolution française, reiterated the Declaration of the Rights of Man—not yet fully guaranteed in French society—and reminded the French that equality was the basis of all justice, distinctions being permissible only when based on “communal utility.”84 Scholars concentrated on locating and reproducing period documents. At first they wanted to establish the traditions, and in 1883, the journal launched a competition for monographs on the “men of 1789.” Especially for left-wing republicans, a contemporary agenda permeated this attention. François-Alphonse Aulard, who became editor of La Révolution française in the late 1880s, was fascinated with how rhetoric could affect listeners. He singled out the speeches of Danton. Whereas Robespierrist historians had condemned Danton for the September massacres, Aulard looked to him as a precursor of Gambetta, the most powerful orator of his generation. Danton, like Gambetta, had believed in free public education and, with contagious enthusiasm 82.  Charles Sowerine, France since 1870: Culture, Politics, and Society, (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 51–52. 83.  Antonin Proust was a childhood friend of Manet’s, who painted a portrait of him. He purchased Courbet’s paintings, hoping to hang them in the Louvre. For more on this controversy, see Michael Orwicz, “Anti-Academicism and State Power in the early Third Republic,” Art History 14, 4 (December 1991): 581–83. 84.  Carnot, “Unité de la Révolution française,” La Révolution française 1 (1881): 3–5.

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and great eloquence, could mobilize the nation against the enemy. 85 Republicans looked to men like Danton to inflame renewed patriotism and rouse them to take back Alsace and Lorraine from the Prussians. They published the speeches of all the great revolutionary orators and in 1891 erected a monument to Danton in the Place de l’Odéon. Teaching was a fundamental part of this project. In July 1885, Aulard created a course at the University of Paris on the history of the French Revolution. He believed there was “moral utility” in studying the Revolution, inasmuch as it demonstrated “the hereditary aptitudes of the race.” The French would learn about themselves: their instincts, qualities, and capacity for struggle, useful in building and defending the new Republic. 86 In March 1891, the government instituted a chair at the university on this subject and appointed Aulard. His annual course, always on different topics, lasted through the turn of the century and resulted in a staggering number of publications. 87 Erecting statues and renaming city streets (sixty-three in Paris), as the revolutionaries had decided in 1793, extended pedagogy into the public sphere. These were not simple affairs. Republicans differed over which revolutionaries to commemorate. 88 And since putting up statues required government decrees, committees, and money, they could take years to erect. The statue of Rousseau in the Place du Panthéon (fig. 17) is a case in point. In 1790 and 1794, the government had decided to commission a bronze statue of Rousseau for a public place, but this never materialized. In 1848 and 1878, this was proposed again. Committees were formed in 1882 and 1885, and finally a competition was announced. The work was completed in 1887, but not put up until 1889. The choice of Rousseau, as opposed to Voltaire, was significant. Although republicans and royalists alike considered both “fathers of the Revolution,” they tended to essentialize these philosophers, the first representing reason, the second feelings; put another way, Voltaire, the advocate of religious freedom, personified the bourgeoisie (or for Victor Hugo, humanity), 85.  The publication of F.-A. Aulard’s L’Eloquence parlementaire pendant la Révolution: Les Orateurs de l’Assemblée constituante (Paris: Hachette, 1882) and his Notes sur l’éloquence de Danton (Paris: Charavay frères, 1882), together with Duruy’s Instruction publique et la Révolution (1882), coincided with Gambetta’s short-lived government. See also Mona Ozouf, “Danton,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 213–23. 86.  François-Alphonse Aulard, Etudes et leçons sur la Révolution française (Paris: Alcan, 1907), 1: 6–7. 87.  Aulard’s volumes on each era of the Revolution, replete with primary documents, have become so important they can be found in numerous American libraries. 88.  Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 39.

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Rousseau, with his Contrat social, the people. In 1889, intellectuals gathered to defend Rousseau and locate his influence in politics, education, and music. At the statue’s dedication, an official clarified that the people he’d come to personify were not those who “demand bread and circus games,” but those who “demand instruction for their children, work for their fathers, protection for the weak.” In 1889, the republicans saw themselves as realizing his political dream of a new world and a new people; socialists took him as inspiration to attempt still greater reforms. 89 Commemorating Rousseau’s music was another matter. A new edition of his opera Le Devin du village was published in 1878. But few in France held his music in much esteem. Rousseau had defended the merits of Italian over French music and criticized Rameau. Attributing this to his lack of technical training, Arthur Pougin brushed it aside in 1889, pointing to the grace of Rousseau’s melodies and the eloquence of his music, characteristically French traits. The music critic Oscar Comettant argued that Rousseau’s concept of melody influenced his texts, particularly the notion that “sounds never have more energy than when they are the effect of colors,” a suggestion of the importance of timbre. Debussy, who may have been sympathetic to this, disdained Rousseau’s “naïve aesthetic,” preferring Couperin’s grace.90 Despite the growing fascination for self-conscious naïveté in the music of Erik Satie and the paintings of Henri (le Douanier) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s music never aroused the interest of more than a few scholars during the Third Republic. Yet in one way, Rousseau did innovate. He invented a musical notation system that would make it much easier for people to learn music. Although most professionals considered this “pure folly,” Galin, Paris, and Chevé adapted the idea of a number system “to give the working classes a practical way to read music without having to spend ten years studying it.” By 1889, this Rousseau-inspired method had become popular, state-sanctioned, and used by a number of amateur choruses, one of which performed Rousseau’s music at the dedication of his statue.91 To help inculcate revolutionary ideas and traditions, republicans agreed above 89.  See the various essays and speeches in Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui, ed. John Grand-Carteret (Paris: Perrin, 1890), 191, 456, 522, 557–58, 552. Although he was from Geneva, they saw him as French “by imagination, aesthetic sensibility, and respect for literary form” (ix). For a contrary view, see L’Evénement, 28 June 1878, cited in Olivier Ihl, La Fête républicaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 104. 90.  Oscar Comettant, “De l’influence de la musique sur le style littéraire,” in Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui, ed. Grand-Carteret, 409–10; Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 240. 91.  Arthur Pougin, “Rousseau musicien,” in Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui, ed. Grand-Carteret, 352, 359, 364. Pougin later expanded this into a book, Jean-Jacques Rousseau musicien (Paris: Fischbacher, 1901). Julien Tiersot also wrote a book, J.-J. Rousseau (Paris:

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all on the need to revive national festivals. Festivals could help create fraternity, inscribe new meanings on public spaces, especially in Paris, and reinvent the crowd, turning attention away from its capacity for violence and mobilizing it for the mass participation of citizens in republican rituals.92 Music could bring people’s voices and hearts into union and discipline their movements. Inevitably, the fêtes nationales conceived by republicans incorporated the emblems and music used during the Revolution, especially the “Chant du départ” and the “Marseillaise.” The conservative newspaper Le Figaro refused to associate these celebrations with the nation, considering them celebrations of cities rather than the people.93 But, with them, republicans were reappropriating a source of their legitimacy and evoking the principle of succession.94 The first republican national holiday on 14 July 1880 was in some ways a culmination. Although republicans refused to acknowledge its Bonapartist predecessor and now (in certain areas) covert competitor, what they envisaged borrowed important aspects from the Second Empire’s Saint-Napoléon festivals, celebrated on August 15: the desire to disguise conflict, display civic concord, and build nationalist sentiment by gathering the masses in joyous celebration and by encouraging them to both remember and forget the past. Because of their nature, parades, music, and fireworks would make the experience enjoyable, while connecting local and national political cultures.95 Harking back instead to the ideology underlying revolutionary festivals, in November 1875, Edouard Charton proposed a special structure within the Ministry of Public Instruction, Religion, and Fine Arts to organize fêtes publiques as “elements of public education.” Since the Moral Order forbade public celebrations, perhaps fearing that revolution might emerge from the festive spirit,96 this was not approved. However, a law passed in early 1876 permitted public banquets. Eating together, followed by toasts and music, offered a prelude to the political sociability envisaged in festivals. 97 Then, in 1877, Félix Alcan, 1912), in which he situates Rousseau the musician and his music in French musical history and goes further than Pougin in refuting those who believed that Rousseau had not written Le Devin du village (270–73). 92.  James Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early Third Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), chap. 4, sees festivals as part of the attempt to “tame Paris” after the Commune. 93.  Ibid., 71–72. 94.  Ihl, Fête républicaine, 112, 114. 95.  Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. 25, 74–75, 221–23, 235. 96.  Charles Rearick, “Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977): 437. 97.  Journal officiel, 25 January 1877, 734, cited in Ihl, Fête républicaine, 98–99.

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the funeral of the popular politician Adolphe Thiers, first president of the Third Republic, included a public ceremony. The people lining the streets of the parade proved that a crowd could be respectful, even calm, and in 1878, the government organized a centennial celebration of Voltaire’s death, the first revival of a revolutionary-style festival.98 The conservative government then organized a fête nationale on 30 June that included, not only a massive concert at the Tuileries gardens with 800 performers and Colonne conducting, but also concerts by amateur groups in every neighborhood of Paris.99 When republicans captured the majority in 1879, they passed a law establishing their own fête nationale, which radicals insisted take place on 14 July. Alfred Roll’s huge painting Le 14 Juillet 1880: Inauguration du monument à la République, commissioned by the government, depicts how successful that first celebration was from a republican perspective (fig. 42). All classes mingle, well-dressed bourgeois alongside workers and street urchins. Olivier Ihl finds it significant that these masses are not in movement on streets, as in Claude Monet’s two paintings celebrating 30 June 1878, Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Montorgueil, but rather peacefully assembled around the statue of La République—a symbol of the nation. A child at the center suggests that this is a place where something can be learned and the future prepared. Everyone seems joyful. They are listening to a small orchestra (a clarinetist, violinist, and cellist) and dancing to the music. Some are singing. A military regiment parades by, accompanied by its band. Unlike paintings of government officials that day, this one suggests that the people are the star of the show, and that such festivities could take place anywhere in France.100 In the early 1880s, the state mandated that local governments fund national festivals, despite opposition from nobles and clergy. This was a way of ensuring that festivals spread republican values and inspired local as well as national pride. Some French sought to reengage with their revolutionary past specifically through its music. They hoped to understand this tradition better and use music to legitimate forms and expression associated with the people.101 From 1873 to 1900, Ménestrel published over three hundred articles on revolutionary topics (see 98.  Given the press attention, Ihl calls this more of a fête de papier (Fête républicaine, 104). 99.  M.M., “La Musique pendant la fête nationale,” Revue et gazette musicale, 7 July 1878, 211–12. 100.  Over the years, however, with critics of the republicans often using 14 July to protest against the Republic and police needing to break up counterdemonstrations, “the idea of the entire nation uniting in fraternal jubilation remained an elusive dream in the Third Republic” (Rearick, “Festivals in Modern France,” 445–46). 101.  Laura Mason sees the “legitimation of the popular . . . linked to universal male suffrage and the radical social programs of 1793 and 1794” as one of the principal legacies of the

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Fig. 42  Alfred Roll, Le 14 Juillet 1880: Inauguration du monument à la République (ca. 1881), Petit Palais Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

app. C), suggesting a deep sympathy for the topic. Arthur Pougin, who wrote many of these, believed that music was the result of particular circumstances that needed to be understood.102 He concentrated on theaters and biographical studies of composers. After his thirty-seven articles on Cherubini that appeared in 1881–83, perhaps in response to the biography competition, he published sixty-six installments on Méhul from 1883 through 1885. An ardent anti-Wagnerian, he may have been hoping to draw attention to French tradition as Wagner’s music increasingly invaded French concert halls. Pougin’s multi-installment series, “Un Grand Revolution in the nineteenth century. See Mason, Singing the Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 219. 102.  Arthur Pougin, “Les Vrais Créateurs de l’Opéra français,” Ménestrel, 25 July 1875, 266.

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Théâtre à Paris pendant la Révolution,” dominated the front pages of Ménestrel for forty-two weeks from late 1886 through 1887, limiting discussion of the contentious Paris premiere of Lohengrin to four weeks. Revivals of revolutionary music abounded in the late nineteenth century, particularly certain songs. Not surprisingly, after being banned during the Second Empire as a song that would ferment revolution, then sung by crowds of 50,000 people during the Commune, and kept alive at the cabaret l’Eldorado as a reminder of the need for revenge against the Germans, the “Marseillaise” returned to the streets, banquets, and family reunions across the country in the 1870s. With the original text, or new ones evoking current passions, it served as an emblem of republicanism, controversial because often eliciting fury from monarchists. After the republicans came to power in the late 1870s, the music of the “Marseillaise” reemerged in patriotic songs urging people to vote, military band transcriptions, and public ceremonies, alongside “patriotic alleluias” celebrating republican victories, sometimes ironically with Latin texts.103 People alluded to the same effects that had impressed revolutionaries: its powerful influence on crowds, its call to “patriotism, courage, honor, disinterestedness, and all the civic and military virtues,” its exaltation of liberty and independence, and especially its irresistible music, whose “energy” infused the hearts of all who heard it and united them in shared sentiment. However, it was not so much as a song of war that it appealed to them, but rather as a song of brotherhood ( fraternité) and “universal peace,” as well as the “sacred song of a new religion,” namely, patriotism. Over the objections of monarchists worried about its inflammatory lyrics, the Chambre claimed it as the French national hymn on 14 February 1879.104 Thereafter, numerous composers harmonized it for piano and other instruments, some incorporating it into their own music (cf. Saint-Saëns’s Hymne à Victor Hugo [1881]), although an official version did not emerge until 1887. In 1882, Rouget de Lisle’s hometown erected a statue in his honor as composer of the song. Méhul’s “Chant du départ,” written for the fifth anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, also grew immensely popular in transcriptions for piano and for military band, especially after 1877. When republicans brought down de Broglie’s 103.  For example, the refrain of “La Marseillaise des nations” is “Aux urnes, bons français /  Former vos bulletins / Soyons les nouveaux Marseillais / Marchons tous aux scrutins!” The “Alleluia patriotique de 1877” begins with Latin words for the Latin hymn, “O filii et filiae” and ends with “Vive la République / Elle est à nous / cette fois pour toujours,” set to a bourrée from Auvergne. 104.  See essays by Jules Michelet, Edouard de Marcère and M.-E. Brun, as well as the excerpts from discussions in the Chambre des députés reproduced in Frédéric Robert, La Marseillaise (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1989), 254–55, 301–2, 319–22.

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conservative government in fall 1877, new political songs, such as “Le Chant du triomphe de 1877,” were set to the “Chant du départ.” After 1879, thousands of workers and schoolchildren sang it at various festivals and many more transcriptions popularized it in diverse venues. The Opéra staged the “Chant du départ” for the festivities of 14 July 1883. And in 1885, when a plaque was put up honoring Méhul in Paris, it was his only work cited.

Reinterpreting Grétry and Méhul No composers of the revolutionary era benefited more from renewed interest in France’s revolutionary past than Grétry and Méhul, even though they represented distinct, even opposed, political positions. It was not a question of reviving forgotten works as much as of using popular ones to serve new purposes. Anyone studying solfège at the Conservatoire had learned technique through the music of Cherubini, Gossec, and, to a lesser extent, Méhul, in Edouard Batiste’s Solfèges (revised 1865–69). Operas by Grétry and Méhul continued to be performed at the Théâtre-Lyrique in the 1860s, and their melodies were also heard in excerpts by military bands and school choruses. If Grétry’s music spoke to nostalgic monarchists in the 1870s, Méhul grew increasingly popular in the late 1870s and 1880s by reason of his association with republicans. Whereas Gustave Chouquet criticized Grétry for lacking the talent for forceful music that could stir revolutionaries,105 he and other republicans credited Méhul for understanding that the country wanted to hear “virile songs” expressing patriotism and inspiring courage. In contrast with Grétry’s exquisite music of “noble and well-to-do manners,” Méhul had a “male conception” of music and a “male genius.” He was the Jacques-Louis David of dramatic music, following in the tradition of Gluck.106 Méhul's powerfully dramatic expression of human passions was capable of exciting “vigorous emotion” in listeners, “moving the masses down to their guts, giving birth to emotion in all hearts.” Arthur Pougin praised Méhul as “one of the most original” French composers, “he who best sums up the French genius, this genius of clarity, vigorous concision, elegance, and beautiful language.”107 105.  Gustave Chouquet appreciated how Grétry resisted imitating Pergolesi, but felt he lacked sufficient knowledge of harmony and instrumentation. Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873), 148, 150, 184. 106.  Michel Brenet [Marie Bobillier], Grétry: Sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1884), 93, 227; Arthur Pougin, Méhul (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889), 47, 50, 282; Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France, 184. 107.  Pougin, Méhul, 51, 365.

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Increasingly, republicans performed Méhul’s music. Bourgault-Ducoudray included two excerpts from Méhul’s Joseph in his 18 November 1870 choral concert for the wounded, alongside his own “Hymne à la liberté,” his “Chant républicain,” and the “Marseillaise.” In 1873, the Conservatoire included a tenor air from Joseph in a final exam, and Ménestrel published a romance from Méhul’s opera Ariodant (1799) perhaps because the public, coming out of the Franco-Prussian War, might be sensitive to its theme of hatred and vengeance. Colonne included an air from Joseph in a concert national in 1874. Then, in February 1879, only days after the republicans won a majority in the Senate and the presidency, Méhul’s music was included in a big state-supported festival of French music at the Hippodrome (fig. 37). It returned on 23 February at the Concerts Pasdeloup, on 14 July in a reception for the Chambre, and on 20 July in an organ concert at the Trocadéro. That same year Offenbach inserted Méhul’s “Chant du départ,” sung by soldiers, in the finale of his new operetta La Fille du tambour-major (The Drum-Major’s Daughter), which premiered that December. This evidently helped revive Offenbach’s slumping career, making him “great” again, as a critic explained, “like the drum-major of the story,” and thereby acceptable among republicans.108 As with Richard Cœur de Lion in 1873, the Opéra-Comique’s choice to revive Méhul’s Joseph in 1882 was possibly a response to current politics. Gambetta had just formed a populist government. Radicals embraced Méhul as a composer of humble origins who, despite ill health, had had a major impact on his times, especially with his “Chant du départ.” Méhul’s opera Joseph (1807), written at a time when there was a fashion for theatrical subjects from the Bible, and thereafter linked with families and Catholicism, was another model of patriarchal authority. It preached the values of love and family with simplicity and clarity, while also articulating strength and grandeur in human terms the people could understand. The opera was not unknown: after revivals in 1826 and 1851, the Théâtre-Lyrique presented it thirty-seven times in 1862–63, and the Opéra-Comique again in 1866. Five excerpts from Joseph on filial love and devotion had been included in song collections destined for French schoolchildren in the 1860s and 1870s,109 and

108.  Jean-Claude Yon, Jacques Offenbach (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 598–99. La Fille du tambour-major was later performed ninety-five times at the Théâtre Folies-dramatiques in its first six months. 109.  Pougin, Méhul, 246–47. See, e.g., Edouard Batiste, Solfèges du Conservatoire, 8 vols. (Paris: Ménestrel, 1865–69); L’Abbé J.-M. Tissot, L’Alphabet musical (Geneva: Grosset & Trembley, 1871); H. Gautier, Manuel musical des écoles (Paris: Gautier, 1877), La Lyre enfantine, 4 vols. (Paris: Gautier, 1879–80), Les Chants du pensionnat (Paris: Gautier, 1882); Adolphe-Léopold Danhauser, Les Chants de l’école, 10 vols. (Paris: Lemoine,

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transcriptions for piano, violin, or military band made these widely available. In 1875, Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin’s study of Méhul’s four versions of the romance showed what a careful composer he was. Although it had long been a favorite of the Germans, performed in Munich (1875), Berlin (1875–76), and Vienna (1878), this reprise brought renewed attention to Joseph in Paris, a new edition, and more transcriptions. For republicans to embrace this opéra biblique, they had to avoid its religious nature, excerpts such as “Dieu d’Israël,” and music drawing on plainchant.110 Instead, seeing its potential for reviving a specifically French opéra-comique, so Italianized since Daniel Auber, Pougin describes how Méhul had crafted a new aesthetic, depicting passions in human drama rather than abstract sentiment as in lofty tragedies. Pougin saw Joseph as an a stunning example of how to paint human character in sound: “the memories and sadness of Joseph, the guilt and repentance of Simon, the candor of Benjamin, the suffering of old Jacob, his anger, and joy.”111 He also humanizes Méhul as “full of generosity, nobility, and goodness,” someone capable of “touching the heart in speaking to the mind.”112 Joseph’s biblical subject, simple style, and feeling for nature helped give the sense that revolutionary composers could compose politically neutral, even pacifist works, music admirable for its abstract qualities, which could be enjoyed by anticlericals as well as Catholics. The work was revived again in 1886–87. Over time, the reception of these two composers became less predictable, thanks in part to new biographies of Grétry and Méhul in the 1880s. Earlier, Gustave Chouquet had expressed reservations about Grétry’s talent and capacities, calling him more intuitive than knowledgeable, and his music inferior to that of Philidor, Monsigny, and Gossec.113 But striving for accuracy, Marie Bobillier

1881–83); Léopold Dauphin, Petite anthologie des maîtres de la musique depuis 1633 jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Colin, 1886). See also discussion of these in my Useful Music (forthcoming). 110.  In their Histoire de l’Opéra-Comique: La Second Salle Favart, 1840–1887 (Paris: Flam­­ marion, 1893), Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe point out that organizers of the 1882 production of Joseph nonetheless replaced drame lyrique, which had been used in previous productions, with Méhul’s original indication, opéra biblique, without explaining whether this was in a spirit of authenticity or as a way to differentiate it from contemporary works influenced by Wagner’s drame lyrique. They also restored the introduction to the original third act, previously thought too difficult. Joseph’s success helped convince the government to renew Léon Carvalho’s contract as director for another seven years (341–45). 111.  Ibid., 282–83. 112.  Ibid., 382. 113.  Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France, 148.

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softened the composer’s image as a royalist and elitist by examining his musical contributions to the Revolution. While Chouquet dismisses Grétry’s Guillaume Tell (1791) as an example of why “elevated subjects” and “vigorous dramatic conceptions” did not work for him, Bobillier suggests that the composer identified with the libretto—“completely appropriate at the time”—and its expression of “hatred for oppression and love for liberty.” Although his two daughters were ill, indeed dying, he threw himself into the work. It remained in theaters throughout the Revolution, sometimes offered free to the people. Grétry’s one-act opera La Rosière républicaine (1794), commissioned for the Festival of Reason, she noted, was the first of several works explicitly inspired by the Revolution, although shunned by its original Opéra audiences. She also points out that, together with Méhul and Gossec, Grétry was one of six chosen to join the Institut in 1795.114 Similarly, in his biography of Méhul, perhaps to reorient perceptions of the composer and elicit support among nonrepublicans, Pougin plays down Méhul’s numerous political activities during the Revolution and devotes substantial space to his Joseph, selections of which were sung in church.115 Tiersot strenuously objected, noting Méhul’s revolutionary sympathies and musical participation in many fêtes, and made a point of depicting Méhul as a secular composer who refused to go to church, a Freemason when he wrote Joseph.116 In reality, then, Méhul’s association with populist republicans and Grétry’s with monarchists should not be essentialized. Méhul’s music became a staple of official ceremonies, and excerpts from Joseph appeared, not only in school manuals and orphéon competitions, but also in orchestra programs, all over Paris. An air from Joseph was also performed in a chamber concert of the composer-run Société nationale in 1884, otherwise known for new music, an orchestral concert of the prestigious Société des concerts in 1885, and a private soirée at Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe’s salon in 1887. Interest in Méhul thus came from a range of both popular 114.  Ibid., 213–15, 220–24, 234; Chouquet, Histoire de la musique dramatique en France, 150. Later, conservative scholars were less generous about his revolutionary-inspired music. In his Grétry (Paris: Laurens, n.d.), Henri de Curzon recounts the success of his Guillaume Tell, but criticizes La Rosière républicaine as “repugnant” (67–69). In his L’Esprit de la musique française (Paris: Payot, 1917), Pierre Lasserre assumes that the composer had to write such music to subsist. Lasserre judged Guillaume Tell as unequal and La Rosière as insincere (48). For a recent study of La Rosière républicaine, see Elizabeth Bartlet, “Grétry and the Revolution,” in Grétry et l’Europe de l’Opéra-Comique, ed. Philippe Vendrix (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), 65–66. 115.  Pougin, Méhul, 247–85. 116.  Julien Tiersot, “Méhul musicien des fêtes nationales et civiques,” La Révolution française (October–December 1919), 416–45.

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groups and musical and social elites, reflecting equally mixed political views. Another work, the overture from Méhul’s Le Jeune Henri (1791; 1797)—called the hunting symphony and also popular earlier in the century—was performed not only by orchestras but also by military bands and by the Bon Marché department store’s wind band during the 1889 Universal Exhibition. Such performances signify the appeal of his music to all classes of French society, as does the publication of his music in magazines for middle-class amateurs (Mélomane and Petit Piano), social elites (Figaro musical), and music professionals (Ménestrel). Lemoine’s publication in 1882 of Méhul’s Mass, his only important religious work, suggests that clerically minded conservatives could be attracted to his music. The inclusion of his music in a provincial collection of royalist songs, with lyrics about “Christian virtues,” testifies to the ongoing appeal of this music, even for royalists.117 The reception of Grétry also grew increasingly complex. Some performances suggest that the elitist associations attached to his Richard Cœur de Lion were wearing away. In 1880, it returned to the Opéra-Comique, and the Conservatoire included a song from it in its annual vocal exams. In 1887 and 1893, the employee wind band of the Bon Marché performed excerpts in its outdoor summer concerts. It might appear that the fifty-two performances of Richard Cœur de Lion at the Opéra-Comique in 1886 reflected the monarchist resurgence in the 1885 elections. That season, however, the Opéra-Comique presented Richard Cœur de Lion in repertoire with Joseph.118 This suggests that by the late 1880s, both works were perceived as French masterpieces to be kept alive alongside operas by Auber and Boieldieu. Such music helped republicans both to construct a past that many could embrace and to see more nuance in that past. Historians may be right that the monarchist resurgence in the mid 1870s enabled republicans to revive the “counterrevolutionary myth,” pointing to monarchists as hostile to the Revolution, while portraying themselves as neutral and pacifist.119 However, as we saw in concerts of musique ancienne et moderne under the Moral Order, the reception of Méhul and Grétry in the 1880s intimates an emerging consensus about what was valuable in French culture. Consensus may have been difficult to forge and, in the beginning, limited in its validity, but, ironically, in shedding its political connotations, this music could serve a political function, encouraging a sense of fraternity. Perhaps this may explain why music critics of the time rarely mention politics. 117.  Recueil de chants royalists (Angers: Gastineau-Ganier, 1882), nos. 75 and 108. 118.  Grétry’s L’Epreuve villageoise was also revived there in 1888. 119.  Gildea, Past in French History, 36.

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Reconceiving Music History Lectures, publications, and especially concerts had significant utility in helping the French become conscious of their illustrious past as a nation and their heritage. Performances breathed life into the mœurs of earlier times. In the 1870s, the French did not lack for opportunities to hear old masterpieces, sometimes juxtaposed with contemporary music. What they did not yet have, however, was a clear sense of music history—an understanding of development from one musical style to the next, progress narratives such as those being formulated by republican historians, or even a sense of the major figures. In 1878, Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray was appointed the first professor of music history at the Conservatoire and began a series of lectures for students open to the public. With them, he aimed both to “emancipate the taste” of his listeners and to come to some consensus on the “true instincts of their race,” particularly important for young composers if they were to form a strong, cohesive national school. He believed that knowledge of the past “renders the mind more flexible and more open,” protecting one’s judgment from prejudices and routine. He hoped that by showing the “spectacle of continual change and transformation” it would become evident that things were not what they seemed, and that progress was possible. The focus of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s lectures—which were often accompanied by performances of little-known musical treasures—was on style. “Le style, c’est l’homme” (the style is the man), he contended.120 In his initial lecture, he outlined his plan to begin with French music history, arguing that France had been “the musical initiator of Europe,” and that in studying its history, they would be studying “the origin of all schools that have developed in Europe since the Middle Ages.” The reason he could make such exaggerated assertions, he suggested, was because French style was the product, not only of French soil and French genius, but also of what the French had assimilated from their predecessors, their neighbors, and those who had settled in France. The most important of these were the Greeks. From them, the French had inherited “qualities of clarity, precision, logic and the supreme good sense, which in art is called measure.” Proceeding chronologically, he would next turn to the Middle Ages. If plainchant and modern harmony came from the Italians, he claimed that medieval discant, or early polyphony, originated in France, as did comic opera, the first example being Adam de la Halle’s Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, 120.  Marmontel considered style not as innate but as acquired over time, that is, something a composer develops “by reflection and through a comparative study of the masters” (Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 107).

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fragments of which were performed during his lecture. Turning to the French chanson, he described how France had appropriated the Flemish Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prés as French. Then, moving on to opera, he would discuss the influence of working in France on the Italian Lully and the German Gluck. For him, Lully was above all a European, while Rameau was the quintessential Frenchman. By spring 1880, Bourgault-Ducoudray had reached the French Revolution—Méhul, Gossec, Cherubini, and their contemporaries. Complementing his discussion of their theatrical music, he elucidated the “considerable role” music had played in revolutionary festivals. Bourgault-Ducoudray brought the past alive by giving the public as well as Conservatoire students a sense of the context in which this music was composed and performed. Very popular and often reported in Ménestrel, his lectures thus set a new foundation for understanding French music history.121 They also established the importance of assimilation in the evolution of the country’s music. In 1883, Ménestrel’s reviewer remarked that never had the Conservatoire’s lecture hall had a larger nor more sympathetic audience than for his lectures. Until the Histoire de la musique (1885) of Henri Lavoix fils, there were no good overviews of French music history from a republican perspective in print.122 Bourgault-Ducoudray never published his lectures, except for excerpts in Ménestrel. However, scores of early music were increasingly available in piano-vocal transcriptions. The Conservatoire librarian Weckerlin was committed to making this music accessible. In his multivolume collection Echos du temps passé (1853–57), he had published short excerpts for piano from Adam de la Halle to Rameau. Later, he published editions of entire works, in 1878, a piano-vocal score of the first French ballet, Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx’s Le Balet comique de la royne (1589), in Théodore Michaelis’s series Les Chefs-d’œuvre classiques de l’opéra français, and in 1885, one of the first collections of printed music, Ottaviano Petrucci’s Harmonici musices Odhecaton (1501). In the 1880s, these were followed by new piano-vocal editions of French operas by Lully, Rameau, Grétry, and many others. These enabled the general public to get to know this music in their homes (figs. 43–44). 121.  The citations in these two paragraphs come from L. Bourgault-Ducoudray, “Cours d’histoire de la musique, séance d’ouverture,” Ménestrel, 1 December 1878, 2; 8 December 1878, 9, 12; 15 December 1878, 18; 22 December 1878, 26; 28 March 1880, 132; and 7 January 1883, 46. 122.  The most important music history at the time was François-Joseph Fétis, Histoire générale de la musique depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Didot, 1869–76). Félix Clément’s Histoire de la musique religieuse (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1861; 1878) presented a Catholic perspective. In her Interpreting the Musical Past, Ellis considers d’Indy’s preface to his edition of Les Eléments (1883) a “version of French operatic history intended to quash all thoughts of a musically dominant Germany” (132).

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Fig. 43  Rameau, Dardanus, ed. Charles Poisot (1880). Fig. 44  Lully, Armide, ed. Théodore de Lajarte (1878). The series Les Chefs-d’œuvre classiques de l’opéra français was the result of collaboration among conservatives such as Charles Poisot and republicans such as Bourgault-Ducoudray. Their aim, Poisot wrote, was “to see, at the theater and in the schools, the masterworks of Lully, Rameau, and Gluck take their place in the teaching of art lyrique, just as Corneille, Molière, and Racine have long held theirs in French theater.” To this end, the editions included not only opera excerpts long popular but also more rarely performed music, such as the Trio des Songes and the Monster’s music from Dardanus, heard at the historical concerts at the Opéra in 1880 and the Concerts Pasdeloup in 1881.

In the 1880s, perhaps inspired by the example of Lavoix’s Concerts Cressonnois (1878) and performances at Bourgault-Ducoudray’s lectures, organizers began to think explicitly of concerts as a form of history.123 In May 1880, Vaucorbeil initiated a series, “Concerts historiques de l’Opéra.”124 Even if he envisaged this as more like concerts under the Moral Order than a history lesson, it did present an opportunity to focus on the major composers, as well as transformations of style and orchestration over “six eras.” The first concert featured an hour of short excerpts (mostly airs, choruses, and ballet music) from the founders of French opera—Lully (Alceste, 1674), Rameau (Les Fêtes d’Hébé, 1739), Gluck (Iphigénie en Tauride, 1779), and Grétry (Anacréon, 1797)—as well as the finale of Rossini’s Moïse (1827) and, after intermission, a premiere of a new French work, Massenet’s La Vierge (1880), the third in his feminine trilogy, with the composer conducting. Dates and short program notes with performance histories were included on the programs. Adolphe Jullien entertained these juxtapositions seriously, but criticized Vaucorbeil’s choices. For him, the strength of the Lully selections overpowered those by Rameau, giving an incorrect impression of history. And after the duo from Gluck’s Iphigénie, he would have preferred an analogous duo from Piccini’s Iphigénie. His review helped readers understand how Massenet’s music could fit into such a concert by comparing to Handel’s the composer’s application of the same formula to various parts of the Bible.125 However, from Jullien’s perspective, Massenet suffered from the comparison—his music was too mannered, too human. Subscribers fought over the chance to attend this performance, but many left during the last half. Few attended the second performance. A critic blamed this on the public’s resistance to hearing excerpts and works that were not staged.126 Vaucorbeil lost 20,000 francs and canceled the series. In 1881, Pasdeloup revisited this concept at the end of his subscription series of Concerts populaires de musique classique. Subtitled programme historique, his concert of 3 April featured the same composers as at the Opéra (fig. 45). This 123.  In his last program note for the Concerts Cressonnois (24 March 1878), Lavoix fils reminded listeners of other precedents as well—Dihler’s historical concerts in Nuremberg in 1643, those of Fétis in 1832, and the numerous revivals by various amateur choral socie­ ties, such as those directed by the prince de la Moskowa, Guillot de Sainbris, and BourgaultDucoudray. 124.  Article 68 of the 1879 Cahier de charges provided for the possibility of giving concerts at the Opéra. Patureau, Palais Garnier, 260. See also the short review in Ménestrel, 30 May 1880, 203. 125.  Adolphe Jullien, “Théâtre national de l’Opéra,” Revue et gazette musicales, 30 May 1880, 171. 126.  Julien Torchet, “Concerts historiques de l’Opéra,” L’Orphéon, 11 June 1880; Patureau, Palais Garnier, 260–61.

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Fig. 45  Concerts Pasdeloup program, 3 April 1881. This concert both laid out a chronology and encouraged listeners to acknowledge continuities in French music history over a hundred year period. In placing the Frenchman Rameau’s dances and masquerade, both visually and aurally, at the center between the lyric tragedies of the Italian Lully and the German Gluck, Pasdeloup was also commenting the nature of French music, the result of both assimilating foreign traditions and using lightness and grace to balance dramatic severity.

time, however, they were presented in an explicitly instructive manner, with the names of Lully, Rameau, and Gluck and dates of their works gracing the top of the program. In featuring musique ancienne, the reference to classical music in their name was omitted. So that audiences could compare them and judge their relative value, just as they did with musique ancienne et moderne, Pasdeloup chose settings from the same passages of Quinault’s Armide by Lully and Gluck, interspersing selections from Rameau’s Les Fêtes d’Hébé, Dardanus, and La Mascarade de Versailles, and the same singers performed the airs, duos, and ensembles. He also brought in a harpsichord. Rameau’s dances functioned as a kind of interlude between the two Armides. Audiences filled the hall, and critics were thrilled, while reaching different conclusions from the juxtapositions. Ménestrel’s reviewer found the Lully utterly “boring” and lacking all liveliness, its massive forms, melodic langueur, and sadness “no longer capable of moving us.” In contrast, he found the Gluck “grandiose” and “always lively.” The Rameau excerpts were the most successful. Figaro’s Charles Darcours, enjoying the Lully more, commented on the “progress” that had been accomplished by the time of Rameau in vocal writing and various instrumental procedures.127 Responding to audience and critics’ request, Pasdeloup reprogrammed them on 10 April, adding an extra concert to the season, this time “spiced” up with more modern composers, Berlioz and Wagner, and ending with a premiere, vocal selections from Die Meistersinger (fig. 46). Listeners could compare airs, ensembles, and choruses from the two Armides with those from Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust; eighteenth-century dances with Berlioz’s “Ballet des sylphes”; male solos and ensembles from French music with those of Die Meistersinger; and Berlioz’s “Marche hongroise” with the march from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Ménestrel pointed out that the concert not only demonstrated “what prodigious evolution” had been accomplished in music between these two periods, but also reminded listeners of their two contemporaries’ indebtedness to Gluck.128 That same day, the amateur choral society Concordia also performed trios from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, Les Fêtes d’Hébé, Dardanus, and Hippolyte et Aricie, along with some of his harpsichord music. Rameau was fast becoming known as one of the “fathers” of French music.129 On 22 January 1882, Pasdeloup assembled another programme historique, but this time focused on the “classical symphony,” with J. S. Bach, Gossec, Haydn,

127.  H. Barbedette, Ménestrel, 10 April 1881, 149; Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 13 April 1881. 128.  Ménestrel, 17 April 1881, 159. 129.  Ménestrel, 3 April 1881, 144.

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Fig. 46  Concerts Pasdeloup program, 10 April 1881. “Redemandé” means that the audience asked to hear this concert again. Pasdeloup’s ex­­tension of chronology another hundred years allowed him, not only to create a historical context for Berlioz and Wagner’s music, but also to suggest a foundation for the contemporary taste for it.

Mendelssohn, and Beethoven. The concert, which listed composers’ names and dates across the top of the program as in 1881, was unusual not only for its chronological presentation, but also for its concentration on orchestral music, using no singers until the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.130 Unfortunately, audiences were not intrigued by the experiment and preferred that Sunday to go hear Berlioz elsewhere. Then, in late May 1883, the comte de Chambrun hosted a series of private salon concerts, “Les Séances de musique historique,” including a performance of comparable sections of Armide by Lully and Gluck, done at the opera in 1880. In December 1884, the Société des concerts also gave audiences the chance to compare two versions of the chorus “Voici la charmante retraite” from Armide by Lully and Gluck.131 However, I’ve not found another program with explicitly historical comparisons until the 1890s. Concerts were an important form of public pedagogy, but neither elite Opéra subscribers nor the music-loving masses were as yet interested in explicit history lessons in the concert hall. Still, concerts conceived historically in the early 1880s provided occasions for contemplating why it was important to look back on their country’s past and what values the contemporary French shared with their predecessors. Appreciating France’s musical history could contribute to new notions of the present and future. However, there would be a price to be paid for this retrospection.

Chansons Populaires and National Identity A separate and somewhat distinct attempt to understand France’s history and promote a shared sense of the nation’s past arose with the increased attention to the country’s chansons populaires, indigenous folk songs kept alive especially in rural parts of the country.132 In an effort to rebuild a sense of national identity, in 1884 130.  This concert consisted of an orchestral suite by J. S. Bach, Gossec’s Symphony La Chasse (The Hunt), two movements from Haydn’s Symphony no. 29, two movements from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9. Darcours was less interested in this concert and was surprised to find how well Gossec sounded in this company, “winning the competition” in part because the orchestra was not up to the interpretive difficulty of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. See his “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 25 January 1882. 131.  Ménestrel, 27 May 1883, 207. 132.  Inspired by the Germans and the English, the French had been collecting chansons populaires in their own provinces since the 1830s and beginning in 1852, under decree from Napoléon III, as part of building political support and social harmony in the provinces. An early example is Vicomte Hersart de la Villemarqué, Barzaz Breiz: Chants populaires de la Bretagne (1839). While at first most of these were poems, after 1860 increasingly they collected songs. For a fuller discussion of this genre and its meaning in the 1880s and 1890s, see Jann Pasler, “Race and Nation: Musical Acclimatization and the Chansons Populaires in Third Republic France,” in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 147–67.

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the minister of public instruction and fine arts proposed teaching “the old folk airs of the French provinces” to schoolchildren.133 In 1885, modeled on the English Folklore Society, the Société des traditions populaires was formed to promote the genre. With the advent of two specialized journals, Mélusine (1877, 1884–1900) and the Société’s Revue des traditions populaires (1886–1919), edited by Gaston Paris, a medievalist at the Collège de France, folklorists’ focus shifted from collecting and classifying this repertoire over decades to analyzing it. As Weckerlin pointed out, chansons populaires had long been thought to express a country’s “type, its special physiognomy, particular rhythms, and other characteristics” because they remained relatively “stationary,” although putting on “new clothes” over time. 134 Two concerts the Société sponsored in 1885 at the Cercle Saint-Simon historical society supported these assumptions (fig. 47). In the first, Gaston Paris presented chansons populaires from throughout Europe, in the second, those from the French provinces. By including folk songs from the Flemish and Basque regions as well as Alsace, this program also shows how large they understood the country to be, with southern Flanders extending into France’s Nord region, the northern Basque country into the southwest, and Alsace with its people, considered to have been illegitimately appropriated by Germany, still part of the French nation. Because of the oral tradition, many were convinced that this repertoire contained unmediated truths about the past. For this reason, much of the scholarship concentrated on what its poetry communicated about the mœurs of the inhabitants where the songs were collected. As Bourgault-Ducoudray explained in a lecture before one of the Société’s concerts on 26 February 1887, their melodies, too, had great “historical value,” in that they “permit us to go back to the origins of music.”135 Tiersot considered folk melodies a form of “primitive music” and believed that they played a large role in the evolution of music, serving as the basis of harmonic construction. He boldly claimed that the sung parts of Le Jeu de Robin et Marion were not compositions by Adam de la Halle, but chansons populaires of diverse genres.136 133.  Cited in Bernadette Lespinard, “La Chanson française,” in Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIX siècle, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 240. 134.  Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, La Chanson populaire (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1886), 3. This monograph was dedicated to Director of Fine Arts Albert Kaempfen. In addition to those in his Echos du temps passé (1853–57) and his book with Champfleury, Chansons populaires des pro­ vinces de France (1860), Weckerlin also collected and published chansons populaires from the Alps (1864) and Alsace (1883) and published a volume on examples of this repertoire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1887). 135.  “Les Chansons populaires au Cercle Saint-Simon,” Revue des traditions populaires, 25 March 1887, 137. 136.  Julien Tiersot, “Bibliographie de la chanson populaire française,” Revue musicale (1904), 618.

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Fig. 47  Société des traditions populaires program, 3 June 1885. Collecting, publishing, and harmonizing chansons populaires involved people from the regions as well as Paris, and from all walks of life, amateurs as well as professionals. As such, the genre was ideal for encouraging collaboration among French throughout the country and creating a sense of national coherence through shared concerns.

In response to a competition for the Prix Bordin, established by the Institut de France in 1885 for the best comprehensive study of the genre, Tiersot collected chansons populaires from all the French provinces and analyzed them in his Histoire de la chanson populaire en France (1889). His method was to seek analogies more than differences among the variants, and his conclusions were significant. He understood these songs as reflective of the interests and style of no one class— “only the chronicles through which the people conserve their memory of past times”—and as moving from one social class to the next, generally starting out in intellectual circles and gradually taken over by the lower strata. Moreover, except in the Basque country, he found “the sum total of the chansons populaires identical from one end of the country to the other.”137 The notion of a shared tradition of song intrigued republicans who were seeking ways to make the French feel as one people, yet speaking many languages, and fed the government’s desire for a reification and codification of the French past. This led it to increase its sponsorship of grants for travel (missions) to encourage the collection of chansons populaires at home and abroad. Many agreed that these models of simplicity and clarity offered a way for the French school to preserve its individuality. Numerous musicians began collecting these songs, integrating them into their music, or writing songs modeled on them. In 1885, Delibes collected them en route to Hungary, planning to use them in his next composition, and the librarian Henri Lavoix fils received a mission to collect them in Nordic countries, linked to the French through their alleged Celtic roots. In 1886, Comettant did the same there, and in 1889, Charles Bordes was funded to collect them in the Basque country. Thomas had incorporated a Swedish song into his Hamlet, and Edouard Lalo indigenous songs into his Rapsodie norwégienne (1878) and Concerto russe (1879). Bizet had shown what could be done with a provençal chanson populaire in his L’Arlésienne (1872), as had SaintSaëns in his Rapsodies sur des cantiques bretons (1866) and Lalo in his Le Roi d’Ys (1875–81), with songs from Brittany. In the 1880s, such incorporations increased. Using melodies from the French provinces, Widor paid homage to Brittany in his ballet La Korrigane (1880), Massenet composed his Scènes alsaciennes (1882), and Saint-Saëns his Rapsodie d’Auvergne (1884). Augusta Holmès published her own Chansons populaires (1883), for which she wrote both text and music. Vincent 137.  Julien Tiersot, Mélodies populaires des provinces de France (Paris: Heugel, 1888), dedicated to Gaston Paris, and Histoire de la chanson populaire en France (Paris: Plon, 1889), v, vi, 1, 287, 356–59.

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d’Indy built his entire Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886) around the thematic transformation of a single tune heard in his ancestors’ mountains, and later composed a Fantaisie sur des thèmes populaires français (1888).138 In 1887, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, and the singer Pauline Viardot (who had provided Tiersot with songs she had collected in central France) became members of the Société des traditions populaires. While conservative elites, unlike republicans, wished to use them to preserve regional languages and dialects and to assert regional identity as distinct from national identity, chansons populaires represented a past that composers and musicians, regardless of their political agendas, could use to nourish an appreciation for the simple and the naïve, seen as crucial aspects of the French temperament.

e After they came into power in 1879, republicans engaged in a wide range of idealistic, optimistic, and sometimes pragmatic strategies to promote their values and ensure the longevity of their influence. In seeking to break down class differences, counteract the power of the Church, and secularize French society, they included music in schools, hoping it would help the French transcend illiteracy and divisiveness. Seeking to ensure greater equality of opportunity, they endeavored to make elite institutions, including the Opéra, more accessible to diverse audiences and and to living composers. Certain assumptions underlay these ideas: that the middle and lower classes were interested in and capable of taking advantage of broader access to the country’s serious art music; that education could prepare them for it; and that public opinion would applaud republicans’ attempts to reward composers other than those popular among the elites. In any case, republicans hoped that music would awaken people from complacency, detach them from old ways of feeling and thinking, elevate taste, and encourage perseverance, tolerance, and virtue. Republicans also looked to music history to stimulate new ways of thinking about French identity. Encouraging a taste for music from the revolutionary period, particularly Méhul, not only reengaged the public with revolutionary times but also ironically helped those of various political persuasions to find some 138.  Ironically, given d’Indy’s conservative politics, this harks back to the revolutionary J.-B. Leclerc, who, in his Essai sur la propagation de la musique en France, sa conservation, et ses rapports avec le gouvernement (1796), writes of composers during the Revolution who incorporated mountain airs from the French provinces into their theatrical works, making hardly any changes to them (16).

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common ground. Revisiting other French traditions, including music of the Ancien Régime and indigenous folk song, shed light on the origins of French temperament and the development of French taste. Coming to an integrated appreciation of the French past as more than the succession of difference thus laid an important foundation for getting beyond conflict and envisioning consensus.

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6 • An Ideology of Diversity,

Eclecticism, and Pleasure

Along with a renewed sense of history that made the Republic seem natural and inevitable, the republicans needed policies that would promote consensus and progress as they construed it. Laws and institutions could only go so far. As they put their ideals into practice without need for compromise with the monarchists, a new republican ideology began to coalesce. Based on fundamental republican values, it was secular, its method was based on rational judgment, and at its core were liberty, equality, and fraternity. Republicans agreed on the need to extend these rights to increasing numbers of people. Furthermore, their acceptance of their own internal differences reinforced the value they ascribed to diversity and eclecticism in the arts. Yet, while many conservative and moderate republicans maintained a belief in the ideal of heroism and the importance of grandeur, the experiences of which help people feel something greater than themselves, progressive republicans, perceiving French needs differently, increasingly rejected metaphors of struggle and strength, preferring instead the celebration of peace and well-being. In this context, as artists, scholars, and politicians were rethinking the merits of French society under both the Revolution and the Ancien Régime, a new aesthetic emerged, which was far less conservative than we have been led to believe. In contrast to the intelligentsia in Germany who, as Norbert Elias explains, conceived the ideals of serious music in opposition to “worldly aristocratic values,”1 progressive populists in France began to look with new appreciation to the power of grace and charm. What might seem like a concern for music’s surface was not seen as antithetical to a concern with organic structure. No longer opposing duty with pleasure and willing to appropriate qualities associated with the Ancien Régime, they wished to democratize pleasures previously associated with the court and the salons, bring aristocratic ideals to the masses, and make aesthetic pleasure a goal 1.  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, cited in David Gramit, Cultivating Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 122.

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of public policy. It was not that the moral and didactic potential of music became unimportant, but that the aesthetic pleasure associated with serious art music should be made available to more people. With this focus on pleasure and charm came a revival of interest in feminine values and new debates over what was distinctive in French music. These drew attention to a relationship between music and its listeners rooted in aural pleasure as much as emotional and imaginative stimulation, and an enhanced understanding of music’s contribution to the public interest.

Cultivating Aesthetic Tolerance After Jules Ferry became minister of public instruction and fine arts in 1879, and Antonin Proust the head of an interim Ministry of Fine Arts in 1881–82, there were important differences from what Jules Simon and the Académie had supported in the early 1870s. While they, too, understood the political and economic contributions music could make to the Republic at home and abroad, Ferry and Proust wished to diffuse the power of traditional elites, show more receptivity to new trends, and encourage individualism and originality. These agendas had an important impact on musical life. Ferry was adamantly opposed to the Moral Order. Although he appreciated grandeur and idealism, he was an anticlerical positivist and pragmatist, resistant to dogma of all sorts. He also believed in the entrepreneurial spirit. As a counterforce to the weight of academic traditions, an extension of the representation institutionalized in the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, and a way to serve the varied interests of the expanding middle class, he was determined that there be aesthetic diversity and that individual initiative should prevail. In his speeches, he stressed “independence,” “individuality,” and artists’ “revolt” against conventions. “Liberty in art” and “individualism” became the new republican ideology. 2 This may not have resulted in a particular republican aesthetic; however, as Michael Orwicz has pointed out, it enabled the state “to represent itself as the liberator of artists’ professional concerns, safeguarding art and culture in the interests of the nation at large by constructing its aesthetic values against the Académie des Beaux-Arts, rhetorically produced as the symbol of a pre-Republican order.”3 2.  Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61–62. 3.  Michael Orwicz, “Anti-Academicism and State Power in the Early Third Republic,” Art History 14, no. 4 (December 1991): 573–74. The fact that the minister of public instruction and fine arts changed twelve times between 1879 and 1889, representing a wide range of republican political factions, contributed to Ferry’s plan (586n3).

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This had many implications. Following up on a proposal from Proust in 1879, Ferry created funding for missions to support artists and composers visiting countries other than Italy. To expose them to a wider range of influences, he proposed that winners of the Prix de Rome spend time in Spain and Flanders in addition to Rome. 4 He also encouraged the formation of artists’ organizations and their professionalization. Most significant, in 1880, the state abandoned the official Salon system and put the government-sponsored annual exhibitions under the control of all artists who had previously exhibited at the Salon. With this, the Salon was turned into a democratically controlled “Republic of the arts.”5 Artists in sympathy with the secularism of the new government began to receive recognition for painting the “spectacle of everyday life,” whether in a realist or impressionist style. Some, including Mallarmé, saw this as an aesthetic counterpart to republican politics in that it challenged the status quo of history and genre paintings and represented a wider range of subjects. 6 Such actions should disabuse us, then, of the notion of the Third Republic state as homogeneous, repressive, and, in the words of Tamar Garb, “holding onto centralized control of exhibition forums in the name of a conservative academicism.”7 When the official Salon system collapsed, having become a kind of “Tower of Babel” that exhibited an extreme variety of styles, the Salon was replaced by small gallery shows and exhibitions put on by new artist societies, such as the Société des artistes français and the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs, founded in 1881 and 1882, the former declared of public utility on 11 May 1883. 8 These gave artists a wide range of exhibition opportunities and made them more sensitive to the demands of the market. As Garb points out, “Independent exhibitions, far from being viewed as rebellious gestures on the part of artists, were actively encouraged, and the more diverse they were, the better.”9 Dealer-critics became increasingly powerful and artists were transformed into small businessmen and entrepreneurs.10 4.  “Concours et expositions,” Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, 14 June 1879, 184, cited in Mainardi, End of the Salon, 62. 5.  See Mainardi, End of the Salon, Jane Mayo Roos, Early Impressionism and the French State (1866–1874) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 223, and Philip Nord, The Republican Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 188. 6.  Roos, Early Impressionism and the French State, 217. See also Philip Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2000). 7.  Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 24. 8.  Garb focuses on this organization (ibid.). See also Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Art et Etat sous la IIIe République: Le Système des beaux-arts 1870–1940 (Paris: Sorbonne, 1992), 128. 9.  Ibid., 25. 10.  Mainardi, End of the Salon, 135–36.

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In the musical world, Ferry’s tolerance for diversity and unwillingness to promote an official doctrine also had important consequences. After 1879, while they were expected to “represent all schools,”11 the two state-subsidized opera houses were allowed to continue to pursue different policies. Whereas the OpéraComique was becoming increasingly open to new approaches to musical form and beauty (discussed in the next section), the Opéra maintained its conservatism as well as its ties to traditional elites, including members of the Académie. Gounod’s Faust and Thomas’s Hamlet continued to attract audiences—Hamlet reaching its 200th performance there in February 1883—just as they did abroad, although with only a slight decrease in the number of cities performing them (see app. B). From 1881 to 1884, the Opéra put on only one new opera annually, which was invariably by an Academician (Gounod, Thomas, Saint-Saëns). From a republican perspective, composers should be free to write as they chose.12 One critic reviewing Thomas’s Françoise da Rimini (1882) compared him to Grétry, in that he likewise possessed an “eclectic talent searching to maintain a balance between Italy and Germany, the past and the future.” Subscribers resistant to Wagner’s innovations appreciated Thomas’s fidelity to older forms, his sincerity, and the strength of his convictions. They thought these his “right,” after all. “Defend our ideas and our principles, nothing better, but leave to each the freedom of his own tendencies.”13 Reviewers of the Antwerp performances in 1884 appreciated Thomas’s “conscientious skillfulness” in working with the Dante legend, which he helped make accessible to more people. Yet the work had only limited success there and abroad. Its last performance at the Opéra was in December 1884.14 When it came to ballet at the Opéra, its director, Auguste Vaucorbeil, wanted more of the genre that traditional audiences loved. After seeing new ballets at the 11.  See the first article of the Opéra’s 1879 Cahier des charges. 12.  For republicans such as Félix Pécaut, the republic, the “triumph of the modern principle,” did not exclude “any traditional influences compatible with freedom,” which applied to all kinds of human activity. Pécaut, Le Temps, 8 January 1873, reproduced in id., Etudes au jour le jour sur l’éducation nationale, 1871–79 (Paris: Hachette, 1879), 3. This should be understood, however, in the context of the Opéra in which pragmatic concerns, as Steven Huebner points out in French Opera at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), often took precedence over “composer authority and coherence of artistic vision” (222). 13.  Cited in H. Moreno [Henri Heugel], “Semaine théâtrale: Françoise da Rimini devant les critiques musiciens,” Ménestrel, 30 April 1882, 173. 14.  In June 1876, Vienna, Milan, Saint Petersburg, and London were already negotiating for the rights to perform Françoise da Rimini. Vienna hoped to give its premiere around the same time as Paris. Unfortunately for Thomas, these performances never seemed to materialize. After the Paris premiere, the work did well in Antwerp (1883–84), Ghent (1884–85), and later Rome (1888); only airs were performed New York (1886) and Berlin (1887). See Ménestrel, 18 June 1876, 229, and 9 March 1884, 117.

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Opéra shrink gradually from seventeen in the 1840s to five in the 1870s, he commissioned and produced three new ballet-pantomimes between 1880 and 1883, turning to established, respected composers, as had been the case long ago.15 In choosing Charles-Marie Widor, Edouard Lalo, and Théodore Dubois, Vaucorbeil also showed openness to new voices at his theater, at least in the ballets they produced. All three were known, but for other genres—Widor for his organ music, Lalo for his quartets and orchestral music, Dubois for his religious music. Still, they well understood what Opéra audiences wanted: charming, gracious music. Widor and Dubois turned to the French provinces for their material. Widor’s La Korrigane (1880) brings to life religious festivities in Brittany, while Dubois’s La Farandole (1883), set in Arles, uses popular melodies recalling southern France. Not surprisingly, these works were deemed “very French.” Dubois, known for being a “severe musician,” was praised for putting “some sun into his motives” as well as for the elegance of his score, the originality of his orchestral effects, and the grace and delicacy of certain passages.16 Both ballets stayed in the Opéra’s repertoire for several years, La Korrigane reaching fifty performances by 1885. Lalo’s Namouna (1882), by contrast, created a scandal. Years ahead of his time, the composer called for saxophones placed around the theater, including in the boxes, and the press, convinced that the work was overly influenced by Wagner, panned it in advance. After three performances, Vaucorbeil had the instruments return to the stage, and the twelve performances that followed took place calmly.17 Spies has pointed out distinct social and political messages in the libretti used in the two state theaters between 1879 and 1883. At the Opéra-Comique, the common people had long been treated in more sympathetic, nuanced ways. Heroes in new works were typically “leaders of peasant revolts who fell in love with seigneurs’ daughters, or aristocrats’ sons who joined the republican army when their fathers refused to let them marry peasant girls.” These libretti concern not only the subordination of “personal honor to the national interest,” but also the replacement of “allegiance to local or royal dynasties” with “devotion to the state, usually a republic.”18 15.  Ballets by major composers that premiered at the Opéra include Méhul’s Daphnis et Pandrose (1803) and Persée et Andromède (1810), Hérold’s La Somnambule (1827), Halévy’s Manon Lescaut (1830), and Adam’s Giselle (1841) and Le Corsaire (1856). 16.  Cited in H. Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale: Nouvelles, opinion de la presse sur La Farandole,” Ménestrel, 30 December 1883, 36. 17.  J.-M. Fauquet, “Namouna,” in Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIX siècle, ed. id. (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 850–51. After this, the work became known in a version for two orchestral suites. 18.  André Michael Spies, Opera, State, and Society in the Third Republic, 1875–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 8.

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By contrast, at the Opéra, this shift toward libretti sympathetic to democracy and social progress did not take place until 1883. Its libretti continued to reflect the concerns of its elite subscribers, many of them aristocrats and political conservatives. In Thomas’s Françoise da Rimini, for example, the bourgeoisie is still “cowardly.” However, in Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII (1883), which alludes to a five-act tragedy by the revolutionary poet M.-J. Chénier, “the common people play a responsible parliamentary role” (albeit to support their king after his excommunication, which one critic found reprehensible). In Gounod’s Sapho (1851), revised for 1884, they are “heroic revolutionaries.” With Ferry reluctant to use the Opéra as an instrument of propaganda, new works at the Opéra between 1879 and 1883, therefore, did not function in “the nation’s image” as they may have previously, or might have if the Republican Union had prevailed.19 With significant differences between the political and social content of works at the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, it is thus difficult to speak of state influence, intervention, or control in any simple way. Ferry’s attitudes also encouraged broadening the base of musicians receiving prestigious prizes, more equitably distributing the symbolic capital of reputation and public performances. Three examples illustrate this. In 1880, the competition for the City of Paris prize in music composition came down to the choice between conservative music by an established man, Alphonse Duvernoy’s La Tempête, and progressive music by a struggling woman, Augusta Holmès’s Les Argonautes. Both choices were unorthodox. Neither composer had competed for the Prix de Rome, unlike Dubois and Godard, winners of the 1878 prize. Duvernoy, although he had studied harmony at the Conservatoire with Bazin, had won first prize in piano and made his career as a pianist, while Holmès had never entered the Conservatoire. She had studied composition privately with Franck. Many appreciated Les Argonautes. Darcours called it “one of the most original and most interesting pieces produced in recent years.”20 Some jurists were drawn to its Wagnerian harmonies, while others applauded Holmès’s inversion of the myth. Her Jason calls on heroic courage to overcome love itself: “I don’t love you. I love only glory.” They appreciated its message, that to achieve a very high ideal, one must renounce everything that makes ordinary people happy. 21 When, to the surprise of many, Argonautes took only second prize, this “scandal” resulted in

19.  On this point I agree with Spies, ibid., that Jane Fulcher’s model for the July Monarchy in The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) does not apply to the early Third Republic. 20.  Charles Darcours [Charles Réty], “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 27 April 1881. 21.  Saint-Saëns, “Les Argonautes,” Le Voltaire, 26 March 1881.

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extensive and generous critical attention followed by important performances by Pasdeloup in 1881 and the Société des concerts in 1884. 22 This established Holmès as a major composer. Conscious openness to the need for innovation and individuality in the arts eventually permeated the Académie des beaux-arts as well as the jury of the City of Paris prize. In 1884, Academicians gave the Prix de Rome in composition to Debussy, a student of a respected but only modestly successful composer, Ernest Guiraud, best known for ballet and light opera. Debussy was his first student to win the prize, and his musical style was hardly academic. If, in 1883, he was criticized for having an “overly accentuated inclination toward seeking originality,” in 1884, his “personal nature” and “exuberant individuality” were appreciated and his rivals were dismissed for having “no personal character” or using oldfashioned forms. 23 The next year, the arch-conservative Gounod wrote a piece about death and transfiguration, Mors et vita, setting a text from the Apocalypse of St. John, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). In 1885, the jury of the City of Paris prize was as divided over the winner as in 1878 and 1880, only this time, the successful competitors—Vincent d’Indy and Georges Huë—both represented “modern tendencies” and both successfully negotiated an alliance between Wagner and Berlioz, composers gaining widespread acceptance with Paris concert audiences. Both were also students in Franck’s organ class at the Conservatoire, suggesting increasing openness to Franck’s influence on French composers. Yet whereas Huë was also in Reber’s composition class there and had won the Prix de Rome in 1879, d’Indy, an aristocrat of means, studied composition only privately and with Franck. The jury again represented diverse aesthetic preferences: previous winners Godard, Dubois, Holmès, and Hillemacher; Conservatoire professors Delibes, Guiraud, Dubois, and Franck; member of the Institut Saint-Saëns; Lefebvre; the conductors Colonne and Lamoureux; plus the rest appointed by the prefect. Augusta Holmès was responsible for presenting, analyzing, and organizing the performance of d’Indy’s Le Chant de la cloche. When after eight votes, d’Indy prevailed, it was 22.  See the discussion in Jann Pasler, “The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès,” Women and Music 2 (Fall 1998): 17–19, and in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 27 June 1883, and 2 July 1884. See also Jann Pasler, “State Politics and the ‘French’ Aesthetics of the Prix-de-Rome cantatas, 1870– 1900,” in Musical Education in Europe (1770–1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges, ed. Michel Noiray and Michael Fend (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 2: 585–622.

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because the jury found La Cloche “original” with a skillful symphonic part that “reveals real personality.”24 Based on Schiller’s dramatic poem Das Lied von der Glocke (1799), which relates the casting of a bell by a master craftsman to the possibilities of human life, La Cloche reflects d’Indy’s enthusiasm for Germany (which he had visited three times), Wagner’s music, medieval times, and German Volkslieder.25 The story of an artist misunderstood and not recognized until his death may have recalled his feelings for César Franck, to whom he dedicated the work. Over the years d’Indy fashioned himself as the disciple of Franck and Franckisme as an oppositional current in French music. 26 Choosing d’Indy was significant, not only because he was the first winner not to have studied composition at the Conservatoire, but also because he was an aristocrat, and most aristocrats restricted their musical activities to private settings. If the republicans saw their legitimacy in public opinion—an informed opinion of citizens aware of larger issues, not just their personal preferences—and if the government was trying to turn aesthetic diversity into a policy, then it should be no surprise that after 1879, they did not stand in the way of the musical world becoming increasingly open to new voices, the most significant of these being Wagner. After audience resistance and demonstrations had led to his music being banned in 1877 and 1878, it reemerged in performances in Paris in 1879. The lack of resistance to the Tannhäuser march and chorus at the Hippodrome’s otherwise all-French concert on 11 February 1879 (see fig. 37) led Pasdeloup to add Wagner to the program of virtually every concert that spring. 27 When in April 1880, Pasdeloup promised to do the complete Lohengrin, the hall was packed to capacity. Although the publishers could not provide the score, and performance of the fragments had problems—forgetting the trombones in the overture, needing to start over Wolfram’s romance, and less than ideal singing—audiences, with only 24.  F. Hattat, “Rapport au nom du jury classant des partitions,” in Ville de Paris, Concours pour la composition d’une symphonie avec soli et chœur (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1885), 1–5, and “Nouvelles diverses,” Ménestrel, 8 February 1885, 79. 25.  D’Indy had seen German Volkslieder at the Bibliothèque nationale. 26.  For an analysis of this prize and d’Indy’s oppositional self-identity, see Jann Pasler, “Deconstructing d’Indy, or the Problem of a Composer’s Reputation,” 19th-Century Music 30, 3 (2006): 230–56, and in id., Writing through Music. 27.  The first review of this concert in Ménestrel, 16 February 1879, made fun of the Tann­ häuser march as a pastiche of Weber, and pointed to the originality of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre as the concert’s highlight. Only later, when Pasdeloup performed the first act of Lohengrin again in April 1879, did reviewers note, “The hour of calm has finally come. The storms have passed and this music will be listened to and judged without taking sides, impartially.” “Lohengrin à Paris,” Journal de musique, 26 April 1879, 1. Victor Wilder’s review in Ménestrel, 18 May 1879, was also sympathetic.

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some protests, demanded encores. 28 In November, after repeating these fragments, however, Pasdeloup had to gesture desperately and for five minutes as he cried out for people to stop the tumult. Some insisted, “Bravo! encore! . . . Art has no country . . . no frontiers,” while others insisted, “Get the Prussians out! No! Not a second time!” Two to three hundred people noisily stomped out when Pasdeloup recommenced. 29 Although proposed Wagnerian productions remained controversial, objections to Wagner as a German critical of the French were increasingly challenged by those who saw Wagner’s harmonies and new approach to musical form as fruitful models of a music of the future. By 1882, Parisians had heard performances of music from all periods of his life. A stunning example of the emerging fascination for Wagner came in fall 1882. Only months after Bayreuth produced the premiere of Parsifal, Paris orchestras rushed to begin their fall season with its Prelude, chosen perhaps because it was the most appreciated segment of the opera in Bayreuth.30 On the afternoon of 22 October, Lamoureux, Colonne, and Pasdeloup performed it simultaneously (fig. 48). The first two placed it in the company of Berlioz and Beethoven, thereby raising the stakes on the perception of its greatness; the third surrounded it with Rameau and Bizet, eliciting judgment based on national differences. Most of its listeners were not familiar with the opera’s motives and their iconic meaning. Nonetheless, many received the prelude with enthusiasm, including elites. Critics underlined how the work embodied contemporary French values, some closely linked with republicanism. Charles Darcours called the Prelude a good harmony lesson, “calm and clear,” while Victorin Joncières praised the combination of intense expression and profound thought with simplicity. At the Concerts Lamoureux, Victor Wilder, who translated the Ring, also praised its clarity and grandeur, “achieved by the most natural and simple means.” According to a less sympathetic reviewer, the audience at the Concerts Colonne found the work more of a curiosity. Its public appreciated the Prelude’s clarity and rich orchestration—again what it shared with French music—but overall, people were “disappointed.” This critic was quick to point out that in his Roméo et Juliette, their hero Berlioz had “invented Wagner without knowing it.” The reviewer of the Concerts Pasdeloup was just glad there had been no demonstrations. As was often the case 28.  “Concerts et auditions musicales,” Revue et gazette musicale, 11 April 1880, 117. 29.  Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1880) (Paris: Ollendorff, 1881), 704. 30.  Parsifal was protected by copyright, and until 1913, it could only be performed in Bayreuth. The prelude was among the few extracts that Wagner allowed to be played elsewhere, according to Annegret Fauser (personal communication).

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Fig. 48  Concerts Pasdeloup program, 22 October 1882. Pasdeloup performed his premiere of the prelude from Wagner’s Parsifal preceded by eighteenth-century French dances by Rameau, representing French secular traditions, and followed by Bizet’s patriotic overture Patrie, written during the Franco-Prussian War. This suggests he wished listeners to hear the Wagner framed with reminders of French identity.

with performances of Wagner there, his “resolved adversaries” had clashed with his “fanatical partisans,” but this time only at the end of the performance.31 It is important to reiterate that when the republicans began to enact their own agendas in the early 1880s, they did not start out ideologically with the kind of conservatism for which they were later criticized. Proust wished to replace the Académie’s standards with those of contemporary artists. He supported new trends in painting, including depictions of everyday life. Ferry’s aesthetic tolerance and desire to support individual initiative put into practice a kind of ministerial laissez-faire. Consequently, the relative stasis of the Opéra’s repertoire and its administrators’ reluctance to support new aesthetic developments should not be blamed on the republican government but on Vaucorbeil, his investors (who often got involved with artistic decisions),32 and the Opéra subscribers themselves, many of them traditional elite foes of the republicans. When Vaucorbeil died in 1885, the government appointed two co-directors with different backgrounds, and change ensued. Pierre Gailhard, a 36-year-old opera singer who had trained at the Paris Conservatoire, was from the working class; Eugène Ritt had amassed a fortune as a successful theater director.33 Gailhard and Ritt immediately embraced a more republican-inspired strategy, commissioning a new work from a Wagnerian, Gaston Salvayre, and putting on four new operas: one by a little-known winner of the 1866 Prix de Rome, Emile Pessard, major new works by Ernest Reyer and Massenet, and Verdi’s Rigoletto. Reyer’s Sigurd (1884) was the most adventurous, although planned and partially written years earlier.34 Such variety served republicans’ desire not only to give public support to French prizewinners along with major composers, but also to cater to public enthusiasm for Verdi. At the Société des concerts in 1885, the appointment of Jules Garcin as conductor brought similar change. A supporter of Bizet and Massenet as well as one of the founders of the composers’ association, the Société nationale, Garcin imposed more new works by living French composers, including Charles Lenepveu, Fauré, and Augusta Holmès, and performed some Wagner alongside the classics.35 31.  Darcours’s and Joncières’s reviews are cited in Georges Servières, Richard Wagner jugé en France (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1886), 249; the others are in Ménestrel, 29 October 1882, 383. See also Ménestrel, 22 October 1882, 375. 32.  Patureau cites from the correspondence from Vaucorbeil’s investors to show the extent to which they influenced artistic as well as financial decisions at the Opéra. See her Palais Garnier, 93. 33.  Ibid., 46–53. 34.  Huebner, French Opera, 186, considers this “the first French opera with an extended system of leitmotifs.” 35.  D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 278.

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The French described this taste for variety as eclectic. Cousin had earlier used it to argue for not discarding the past but using it as a “source of truth and renewal,” and for embracing the juste milieu as a way to avoid extremes. Jules Simon, a student of Cousin, reinterpreted his ideas from a republican perspective. 36 For the opportunistes, éclectique likewise connoted an openness to influences from the past as well as present; yet it also meant opposed to the systematic, to dominance by one element, to the principle of exclusion. It signaled an appeal to all, not something with a strong doctrinaire coherence. Pécaut saw it as characteristic of republicans’ notion of secular education, not promoting one church or one philosophy.37 In French music, éclectique came to signify inclusive, especially of the new. Eclecticism was explicitly valued by republicans during these years, admired in composers and enjoyed by audiences attending concerts.38 In part, the term reflects the importance the republicans attached to public opinion as an aspect of democracy. As Pougin explained, the public was by nature eclectic by virtue of its varied tastes. 39 In his Eléments d’esthétique musicale (1884), the pedagogue and pianist Antoine Marmontel describes “the spirit of eclecticism, selection, and the ease of assimilation” 36.  Eclecticism (from Greek eklektikos, selective, picked out) was first practiced by certain Greek philosophers and by Romans such as Cicero who chose from among various philosophical beliefs those that seemed most reasonable to them. Victor Cousin promoted this approach in his Lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, trans. O. W. Wight (New York: Appleton, 1854), adding that philosophical systems are usually true in what they affirm but false in what they deny. Although he noted a resemblance between Cousin’s eclecticism and republican opportunism, Simon criticized Cousin’s eclecticism as full of holes and contradictions. See his Victor Cousin (Paris: Hachette, 1887), 65–68. For how this philosophy manifested itself in the taste for variety and ornament in architecture, see François Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism, trans. Charles Lynn Clark (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 387– 401. In her Musical Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Katharine Ellis suggests that eclecticism provided “philosophical justification” for the mid-century revival of early music (35–36). 37.  Pécaut, Le Temps, 20 November 1871, in id., Etudes au jour le jour, 1871–79, 45. 38.  A spirit of eclecticism underlies openness to the very broad aesthetic range of composers who won prizes in the Prix de Rome competition in the 1880s (e.g., Bruneau, Charpentier, Debussy, Dukas, Leroux, Pierné, Vidal), unusual in its history. The adjunct jury members during this decade may also have contributed to this, with Guiraud and Delibes serving in 1884, Franck in 1885, and Lalo in 1886. When the jury recognized both Debussy and Charles René in 1884, Charles Darcours noted that it could not have been more “eclectic” (“Notes de musique. Le Prix de Rome,” Figaro, 2 July 1884). However, in his Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Carl Dahlhaus missed the positive value associated with musical eclecticism in France, referring to it as something composers “degenerate into” (37) or would be accused of, such as a “technical perfection applied to a stylistic patchwork” (289). 39.  Arthur Pougin, Verdi: Histoire anecdotique de sa vie et de ses œuvres (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1886), 263.

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as characteristic of French artistic tastes and suggests that these are interrelated. He traces them back to the influence of the Romans on the Gauls. He also notes that the predispositions of a people have an “undeniable” influence on its artistic progress, along with education. The French “passion for eclecticism” made them receptive to German and Italian masterpieces while remaining French, “able to fuse schools and styles without renouncing their own originality.” In reviewing French music history, he points to Auber as eclectic in that he was influenced by both Mozart and Rossini, and to Bizet, who studied and appreciated foreign music but whose “spirit, heart, and dramatic feeling” remained French. 40 Saint-Saëns, in his first piece of theatrical criticism, likewise wrote of the French “love for eclecticism in music” as an explanation for why the public supported both the Théâtre-Italien and German repertoire at the Salle Ventadour. “Paris will not be the capital of the arts unless all schools, all countries are represented with dignity,” Saint-Saëns concluded. 41 Among French composers alive at the time, Saint-Saëns perhaps best exemplified the eclectic spirit. Not only was he a consummate pianist and organist, but he was often praised for being independent of all musical schools and able to write in all forms, from chamber music and piano concertos to symphonies, tone poems, and opera. In Henry VIII, for example, he synthesized the influence of Gounod and Wagner, traditional phrases and form with leitmotifs, and showed how leitmotifs could serve the “quotidian verisimilitude” of a historical libretto. 42 Some melodies were frank, others grandiose. In 1886 he wrote works as different as his monumental Third Symphony for organ and his playful fantasy, the Carnaval des animaux. Although his “gods” were Beethoven and Mozart, Saint-Saëns was known for being self-consciously eclectic, as well as “democratic, wanting to be popular and, if need be, knowing how to make concessions to public taste.”43 In 1883, Gounod pointed out that Saint-Saëns also had a “prodigious capacity for assimilation: he could write at will à la Rossini, à la Verdi, à la Schumann, à la Wagner; he knew them all deeply, which is the surest way not to imitate any of them.” Having no system, following no clique, and refusing to pose as a reformer, 40.  Antoine Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale et considérations sur le beau dans les arts (Paris: Heugel, 1884), 39, 417–23, 437. Marmontel taught piano at the Conservatoire from 1848 until he retired in 1887. 41.  Saint-Saëns writing in the newspaper Le Bon Sens, cited in Henri Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 2 July 1876, 244. 42.  One critic saw this synthesis as “merely another manifestation of eclecticism.” See Huebner’s analysis in his French Opera, 222–30. 43.  Louis Besson, “Henry VIII,” L’Evénement, 4 March 1883 and Camille Saint-Saëns, Introduction to Harmonie et Mélodie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1885), xxi. The composer had eclectic tastes in not only music, but also friends, who ranged from republicans to aristocrats.

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Saint-Saëns was simply a “musician of the highest order [de la grande race]; he draws and paints with the freedom of a master’s hand.”44 Whereas the Opéra recycled the same handful of works in a season “like the wooden horses of a merry-go-round,” and the Opéra-Comique did the same with a few more, orchestras offered enormous variety in their concerts. 45 Programs with mixed genres had long been characteristic of Pasdeloup’s Concerts populaires. In its weekly Sunday afternoon concerts, the Concerts Colonne, like its predecessor, juxtaposed symphonies and choruses, marches and operatic airs, balancing orchestral works and soloists, the German classics and French contemporary music. The identical typefaces on the early programs implied no hierarchy among the works performed, although later the huge font size used for the names of famous opera stars betrayed the orchestra’s use of such singers to help them stay profitable. A reviewer for Ménestrel praised Colonne’s programming as éclectique in that it offered listeners “all the masters.”46 Unlike Lamoureux, who devoted entire concerts to Wagner’s music, Colonne, a Jewish republican, was particularly careful to balance his audience’s exposure to Wagner with new French works and Berlioz. Especially for their first and immediately subsequent performances of Wagner’s music, Colonne shaped its reception by performing French music before and after it. For example, before five excerpts from Tannhäuser, including the Venusberg scene, on three successive concerts in fall 1881, he performed either David’s Le Désert, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, or Benjamin Godard’s Le Tasse, the latter two also in five parts, these concerts followed by a two-concert Berlioz festival featuring Les Troyens, part 2. 47 In other words, Colonne’s eclecticism made him open to performing a wide range of music, but not without thinking seriously about how to present this variety in a way that gave audiences contexts for understanding it. 44.  Charles Gounod, “Camille Saint-Saëns, à propos d’Henry VIII,” Ménestrel, 8 April 1883, 149. 45.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 13 April 1881. 46.  H. Barbedette, Ménestrel, 19 December 1886, 22. A concert organization founded in 1892 by the aristocratic Eugène d’Harcourt took on the name Concerts éclectiques populaires for its inexpensive Sunday evening concerts. 47.  Furthermore, at Colonne’s first performance of Wagner’s “Ride of the Walkyries,” on 23 January 1881, he encircled it with premieres of French concerti featuring well-known soloists (Louis Diémer’s Piano Concerto no. 2 and Camille Sivori’s Concert-Stuck for Violin), followed by the “Dance of the Priestesses” and the “Bacchanale” from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila. As it went on to four more performances that spring, Colonne preceded it with French premieres of works by Théodore Dubois and Charles-Marie Widor, as well as music by Saint-Saëns and Bizet. In October 1882, he premiered the prelude from Parsifal with Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette. In contrast, in December 1881 Pasdeloup performed act 3 from Tannhäuser between a Beethoven piano concerto and a Meyerbeer overture.

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If eclecticism had the advantage of preventing audience “fatigue,” it was also a programming tactic to stay receptive to audience and performer taste, as well as to shape it. The Concerts Colonne, a private organization whose continued existence depended on strong box-office receipts, understood that relying on last-minute ticket sales more than traditional subscriptions allowed the orchestra to adapt efficiently to the ever-changing needs and desires of its public. As such, it continually reevaluated the balance between old and new work, vocal and instrumental music, foreign and French composers, entertainment and education. As a democratic self-organization in which profits (dependent on its receipts) were shared by its member-performers, new works were chosen by an administrative committee of orchestra members, and occasionally the whole orchestra voted on repertoire decisions. 48 The state recognized the public utility of these concerts by awarding them regular subsidies beginning in 1875. That both Ferry in government and Colonne in the marketplace espoused diversity and eclecticism suggests that the emerging republican ideology was complex and not opposed to market forces, but indeed supportive of them. The occasional pejorative use of the word at the time can be attributed in good part to its association with republican values.

Redefining Music’s Utilité Publique Given this elevation of diversity and eclecticism in the early 1880s, there emerged a new understanding of what was significant about music’s French qualities and its potential utility. Its capacity to instill love of country and articulate certain ideals remained important for republicans seeking to form a nation. Music also remained for them a potential source and symbol of national pride, an art commanding respect and glory at home and abroad. However, after heady days filled with idealism when they came into power, in the early 1880s, the country fell into a major economic recession. After challenging foreign dominance over banking for four years, the very profitable Union générale bank crashed in January 1882, wiping out its investors and leading to a decline in industrial production and prices. The price of wheat was also falling, and France’s grapevines and vineyards had been devastated by the Phylloxera aphid. Proust’s ministry and the international market for luxury goods had drawn increasing attention to the role the arts could play in 48.  For fuller discussion of these issues, see Jann Pasler “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne,” in Le Concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914, eds. Hans-Erich Bödëker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002): 209–40.

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national prosperity. The recession further encouraged people to think of the arts as something that could help boost the market economy at home as well as abroad. With the public never “so serious and so eager” to attend concerts, as Darcours remarked in 1881, music was in a good position to contribute to the recovery. The number of concerts was growing so rapidly—Darcours mentioned several hundred in a few weeks—that critics could not keep up; in 1882, Ménestrel referred similarly to an overwhelming “invasion” of concerts. 49 Orchestral concerts in Paris alone brought in over 500,000 francs in winter 1881–82.50 In this context, despite their varying political positions, many republicans came to agree on something important with aesthetic as well as economic implications. Instead of looking to music for what it promised beyond itself—its capacity to serve as a model of social mœurs, an embodiment of harmonious order, and a medium in which audiences could encounter their differences and come to learn what they shared—they began to address music’s capacity to be satisfying in and of itself. What did this mean to them, and how was it political? Some art historians have denied that the republicans encouraged any specific aesthetic, arguing that they concentrated on institutional reform, using art to promote national education and industrial prosperity.51 While this is true, in the early 1880s, I do find certain values promoted by republicans, not the slightly modernized classicism tied to academicism in the 1870s, but rather a new focus on grace and aesthetic pleasure. The psycho-aesthetician Charles Henry, a left-leaning socialist, took this so seriously that in 1885, he proposed that the science of art could “and must spread pleasure in and around us.” To the extent it did so, he believed, it served “an immense social function in these times of oppression and hollow conflict.”52 A cult of pleasure began to challenge the taste for glory as well as listeners’ expectations of art music, how they listened, and to what they ascribed meaning. Music had long been associated with pleasure since Rousseau defined it as “the art of combining sounds in a way that is pleasing to the ear,” and for years Larousse reinforced this in his Grand Dictionnaire.53 But in the 1880s, pleasure became linked with certain aesthetic, ideological, and ethical considerations. In his 1884 treatise 49.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 23 February 1881; Ménestrel, 19 March 1882, 123. 50.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 3 May 1882. 51.  Mainardi, End of a Salon, 84, 134. 52.  Charles Henry, “Introduction à une esthétique scientifique,” Revue contemporaine 2 (August 1885): 442, cited in Robyn Roslak, “Symphonic Seas, Oceans of Liberty: Paul Signac’s La Mer: Les Barques (Concarneau),” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, 1 (Spring 2005): n. 45. 53.  Pierre Larousse prioritizes Rousseau’s definition of music in his Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Grand dictionnaire universel, 1972), 11: 720.

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Eléments d’esthétique musicale, Marmontel focused on aesthetic pleasure, defining its “essential condition” as the ability to “listen to a work of art for its own sake.” For him, the goal of music was not to “transmit precise and distinct ideas to the mind, but rather to give sensations”; “there is no pleasure more lively than admiring the creative inventions of an inspired musician who opens new horizons before us,” he declared. Of course, such aesthetic jouissance required a special education of the ear, the ability to analyze one’s sensations, and an intellectual effort that few besides musicians and connoisseurs could easily make. Marmontel, a republican who believed in the influence of education on mœurs and the “brotherhood of races,” was writing to promote the appreciation of universal qualities in musical beauty.54 Others took pleasure seriously as an explicit emanation of their progressive republican politics. When Edouard Lockroy proposed to the Chambre in April 1881 that it was time for the state to get beyond creating “an aristocracy of artists” for “an aristocracy of amateurs,” he argued that art should not serve “the pleasure of only a chosen few.”55 In reviewing the Salon of 1882, Proust linked aesthetic satisfaction to the pleasure a work elicited. Describing the “school of the pleasing [l’école de l’agréable]” as a manifestation of his politics, the “center-left of art,” he, like Lockroy, was implying that this pleasure should be made broadly available.56 Such statements suggest that republicans sought to break down class differences not only by making elite musical forms available to all classes, such as through an Opéra populaire, but also by encouraging the experience of aesthetic pleasure associated with these elite forms in a wide range of listeners. Whether this was realistic or not, given what skills it took to experience such pleasure, was not their concern. What was so innovative about this attitude at the time is that it threw into question the assumption that pleasure was a questionable pursuit in such serious domains as high art and, because it depended on an individual’s personal experience, the antithesis of anything purporting to have public utility. The logic by which aesthetic pleasure could become a goal of public policy, something to encourage and assimilate into republican mœurs, is not obvious. First, it meant disentangling the concept from its association with popular song and the popular culture of the cabaret and café, scorned by most politicians for their decadence. For Proust, the focus on pleasure was part of his effort to build bridges between the arts and crafts (more than between what we now call high and low culture). Second, and ironically, it meant reviving interest in an 54.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 147, 149, 259, 417, 441. 55.  Mainardi, End of a Salon, 83–84. 56.  Antonin Proust, “Le Salon de 1882,” Gazette des beaux-arts 25 (1882): 545.

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aesthetic that harked back to the aristocratic salon culture of the Ancien Régime and resonated with those wishing to revive it—most of them adversaries of the republicans. To understand this we must remember that while in the 1870s, the republicans promoted anything that would energize citizens, impress them with French strength and grandeur, and inspire patriotism—preoccupations of their revolutionary predecessors—when their power was secured in the 1880s, they no longer feared much of what the revolutionaries had fought against. With the end of the Moral Order and laws in place to constrain the influence of the monarchists and the Catholic Church, they could begin to assimilate the aristocratic French past as part of their project of constructing a new history. Ferry’s policies supporting eclecticism and diversity of expression also set a framework for integrating what the revolutionaries had previously disdained, and for investigating a national identity based on feminine as well as masculine qualities. Third, to explain the nature of aesthetic pleasure, its advocates looked to the eighteenth century, especially its decorative arts. Unlike the fine arts, these genres were not expected to teach and elevate. Both Proust and elite figures such as Edmond de Goncourt and the marquis de Chennevières found pleasure particularly in the decorative arts, whose purpose they understood as “seduction.”57 This interest was not inconsequential. Intellectuals and cultural leaders of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs, under Proust as president, beginning in 1882, believed that “a feeling for the decorative” was characteristic of French art and should be encouraged “for the greatest glory of the country.”58 In their journal La Revue des arts décoratifs in the early 1880s, they explained the utility of this revival. Numerous articles explored the transformation in French taste as reflected in the decorative arts from “grandeur” and “solemnity” during the time of Louis XIV to the “grace of private pleasure” under Louis XV. In this, the rococo period, when France was “the most delicate and playful nation in Europe,” artists emphasized seductive grace and coquettishness with as much skill as that used previously in grandiose historical works. Art became more “organic, exotic, and erotic,” or, as one critic put it, “feminized.” This historical transformation served as a model for the shift in values they envisioned in contemporary French society, likewise from grandeur to grace.59 To understand why republicans might want to elevate and revive interest in 57.  Antonin Proust, L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 161, and Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 119, 341n67. 58.  Proust, “Salon de 1882,” 539. 59.  For more discussion of these ideas, see Silverman, Art Nouveau, 119–25.

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grace, we must understand what it meant at the time. Writing of late nineteenthcentury Austria, Carl Schorske links what he calls the “culture of Grace” with the aristocratic “wish to cultivate and manifest in style the individual’s personality and grace in the world”—a transparency resembling that which Rousseau envisaged between music and character. For him, the “Baroque culture of Grace, exalting the life of feeling and beauty” contrasted with the “Enlightenment culture of the Word,” which “nurtured the rigorous pursuit of ethics and truth.”60 This binary opposition, however, is not altogether applicable in France. In French, the word has multiple uses and subtle variations in meaning. When applied to how one accomplishes a task, it is synonymous with ease or facility (as it is in music with ease or facility of expression and suppleness)—Littré’s Dictionnaire (1881) calls it, inter alia, the “quality of a style in which elegance is tied to facility.” When associated with people, grace is associated with desire and desirability, “what pleases in attitudes, manners, and speech” (Littré). In Mignon after Philine has seduced Wilhelm with her vocal virtuosity, he implores her, “say one word in response to this heart in love, réponds de grâce [answer, please].” According to Littré, grace is also “what one grants others in order to be pleasing or useful, without being obliged to do so.”61 In other words, it is an advantage or favor given another sometimes deriving from the giver’s generosity, kindness, or beauty. This reference to utility underlines the aspect of service associated with grace, which is also implied in another of his definitions, “the benevolence a person accords to another.” Grace can also mean a disposition that tends to grant favors including pardon. In mythology, the three Graces were the gods who personified the gift of pleasing. For many Catholics, it was also the effect of the seven sacraments—God’s favor—which brought one closer to Him and, it might be hoped, to godliness, certainly a form of the truth. By identifying grace as a quintessential French value, French critics and politicians were not only pointing out a profound desire in the French to please and be pleasing, but also recognizing an innate power in this desire. This could come from the relationship between the good and the beautiful as well as its potential to attract a public, making money and reputations. Proust’s focus on blurred distinctions between the fine and applied arts contributed to a reconsideration and revaluation of the aesthetic power of grace, otherwise associated with the French rococo. It also parallels a renewed interest in contemplating the seductive qualities of music, what draws listeners to music 60.  Carl Schorske, Thinking with History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 11–12. 61.  Le Petit Robert gives this as the first definition of the word grâce, but drops the connection to usefulness.

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rather than what impresses them or has the potential to teach them. With this came new categories of value, as well as a more intimate relationship between music and its listeners quite distinct from that encouraged by the expression of grandeur and heroism, and beyond what can be expressed in words. In this context, musicians and critics began to think of charm as a category of judgment with serious connotations. Charm had long been associated with women, whether the naïve charms of a Mignon or the manipulative charms of a Judith. This fascinated composers in the late 1870s. But in the 1880s, the term became more generally associated with the power of music. As Saint-Saëns once put it, charm helps music penetrate the listener, insinuating itself into the veins. Charm was also a way of talking about how music addressed the ear, not just the mind or the emotions. In 1880, the critic Oscar Comettant explained what it meant to be under a work’s charm as “belonging entirely to the music . . . my appetite excited and burning to know the entire score.”62 Charming listeners was thus very different from offering models of moral behavior. To the extent that music charmed a listener, it drew the listener to it, eliciting desire for it. Charm then might render the listener submissive in a certain way, perhaps submissive to whatever meanings might be embodied in it or attached to it. 63 But feeling desire rendered the listener an active participant in the aesthetic process and the production of pleasure.

Delibes’s Graceful Charm For those, such as Proust and the Union centrale, who believed the aristocratic French past to be the best model for studying French grace and charm, there was the music of the French baroque. As Katharine Ellis points out, concerts of this music, performed increasingly in the late 1870s and early 1880s, tended to ignore the grand moments of the operas, preferring to feature the lighter keyboard and dance music. 64 Critics helped focus audience attention on this music’s grace and charm. In 1878, Lavoix fils remarked that the dances in Lully’s Armide were “imprinted with charming elegance”; in 1880, Gouzien, reviewing the Opéra’s concert historique, pointed to the “many feminine graces” in the music; in 1881, Ménestrel’s reviewer 62.  Oscar Comettant, reviewing Jean de Nivelle in Le Siècle, 15 March 1880, cited in H.M., “Léo Delibes: La Partition de Jean de Nivelle jugée par les musiciens,” Ménestrel, 21 March 1880, 123. 63.  This language was also used to talk about how Indian songs recounting the Ramayana have “grace and sweetness” and people in the Orient “submit to the charm of song.” See, e.g., Jacques Grosset, Contribution à l’étude de la musique hindoue (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1888), 7–12. 64.  Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 144.

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found Rameau’s music, as performed by the amateur chorus Concordia, “full of an exquisite charm and grace” and presented these traits as “altogether French.”65 Tastes were changing. With the Republic solidly established, these feminized traits no longer disturbed those who might earlier have championed strength and virility in such music as Handel’s oratorios. Performances of this music offered musical models of charm and grace for a wide variety of audiences, nourished a taste for these qualities, and encouraged the notion that they were quintessentially French. Whereas baroque dances may have served to transport listeners to “an era in which the rigaudon, the gavotte and the passecaille flourished,”66 for some composers, I would argue, it served as a historical precedent for values they wished to encourage in the present and a standard to which new music could be compared. Saint-Saëns, for example, may have incorporated a pavane in Etienne Marcel and old Scottish airs in Henry VIII as signs of earlier eras, but when he incorporates a minuet and gavotte into his Septet (1880), their integration into a large chamber work suggests a deeper engagement with the French past, which goes beyond their capacity as signifiers to the past. 67 In many ways, Léo Delibes and his music were just what Proust was advocating in the contemporary world. His spirit was free and independent, with no prejudices and, with his ties to the world of popular culture, he was the quintessential eclectic, looking to both the present and the past for inspiration. His searching nature and originality surpassed those of other composers in “the avant-garde of the modern French school.” At the same time, his style was broadly accessible, interesting to connoisseurs as well as ignorants. 68 Delibes’s music offered an example of how “light grace” and an “inexhaustible facility” could be learned from popular culture and Offenbach (with whom he was close) as well as from Auber and Adolphe Adam. 69 Unlike his peers in the world of art music, Delibes had his start on the boulevards. There, he developed a reputation for writing operettas and musical comedy that combined “natural grace” and a “very French clarity” with great skill and interesting, original ideas.70 His 65.  Ménestrel, 3 April 1881, 144. 66.  Guide musical, 29 May and 5 June 1879, cited in Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, chap. 4. 67.  This work was commissioned by Emile Lemoine, director of an amateur music society, La Trompette. 68.  Critics cited in H.M., “Delibes,” 122–24. 69.  Marmontel calls Auber “of all our French composers, the most eminently French from the perspective of spirit, natural grace, elegance, charming ideas, and scenic skill” (Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 423). 70.  H.M., “Delibes,” 122–24.

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work as choral conductor at the Opéra led to writing two ballets, La Source (1866) and Coppélia (1870), which remained very popular for years, La Source enjoying its fifty-sixth performance on opening night of the Palais Garnier in 1875. After these, he composed Le Roi l’a dit (1873), his first opéra-comique, setting a libretto by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille that had also been offered to Offenbach. In 1876, the Opéra produced Delibes’s third ballet, Sylvia.71 Hearing it, one critic wrote, “Everything he does has something new and personal in it, distinction and charm, every page, even a polka, is exquisite. . . . The artist ennobles everything he touches.”72 The next year, with his “graceful and popular muse” recognized as “essentially French,” Delibes won the Légion d’honneur. It is possible that the success of Delibes’s ballets helped persuade Vaucorbeil to increase the presence of this genre at the Opéra in the early 1880s and to commission other composers with musical backgrounds in nonoperatic music. In 1880, Delibes had a hit that changed the course of his career and helped turn grace and charm into highly valued musical attributes. On March 8, the Opéra-Comique presented his Jean de Nivelle, putting forth its best efforts since Mignon in 1866. The libretto, again by Gondinet and Gille, recalls a very popular fifteenth-century tale. Jean II, the eldest son of the duc de Montmorency was known for having refused to take up arms against the duc de Bourgogne, disobeying his father’s orders. For centuries, Jean had been satirized in popular songs, as either “the dog” who flees when you call him or the son treated by his father like a dog, although he was later transformed into a hero in war songs popularized by Napoléon’s army. In 1874, two prominent authors drew fresh attention to this character. Paul Verlaine titled the sixth of his Ariettes oubliées “C’est le chien de Jean de Nivelle.” And in his Opuscules sur la chanson populaire, J.-B. Weckerlin devoted a chapter to variants of the seventeenth-century song about Jean. With these songs, Weckerlin could show how the oral tradition once functioned and how the same song could be found throughout the country.73 As noted earlier, 71.  Berton composed a pastoral on this subject for Fontainbleau in 1765. 72.  Julien Torchet, review of Sylvia in Orphéon, 15 March 1880. Le Roi l’a dit and Sylvia were performed in Vienna soon after their Paris premieres and, together with Delibes’s other ballets, throughout the 1870s and early 1880s. Le Roi was also performed in Antwerp, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Prague (see Table B-6). For a short study of these works, see Jean-Claude Yon, “Delibes avant Lakmé,” in Lakmé, L’Avant Scène Opéra, no.183 (1998): 62–67. 73.  Most looked back to the version in Jacques Mangeant, Recueil des plus belles chansons des comédiens français (Caen, 1615). See Paul Verlaine, Romances sans paroles (1874), J.-B. Weckerlin, Opuscules sur la chanson populaire (Paris: Bauer, 1874), 2: 2–8, and “Jean de Nivelle,” in the repertoire of the Grenadiers du 8e de ligne of the French army under Napoléon. The song is still alive in a version recorded by the Baltimore Consort on their CD La Rocque ‘n’ Roll (DOR-90177).

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such a project supported the republicans’ idea of the nation as coherent, despite internal differences of language—a pressing concern to many with the republicans assuming power in 1880. Gondinet and Gille’s version of the story offered Delibes all the pastoral scenes Opéra-Comique audiences might expect, along with scenes more typical of grand opera. Jean, not getting along with his father, flees his duties for the countryside, where he dresses up as a shepherd and flirts with the peasant girls. One of them, Arlette, although engaged to a local boy, falls in love with him, not knowing he is the son of a duke. After her song leads to the reconciliation of Jean and his father, and Jean suffers some misadventures, he reluctantly joins the duc de Bourgogne and takes on the king of France in battle. Afterwards, however, he renounces glory and grandeur and, returning to Arlette’s humble village, resolves to live out his days with her. The story stimulated Delibes to explore a new style, combining graceful charm with compelling drama. After the premiere, Adolphe Jullien, no republican, was sympathetic to the difficulties of turning a heroic poem into an opéra-comique, but found the constant effort of a composer “struggling against his own nature” to be tiresome.74 However, Ménestrel gave Jean de Nivelle unprecedented attention, publishing two long compilations of reviews in various journals and newspapers and reproducing piano and vocal excerpts for their readers.75 From conservatives such as Comettant to Wagnerians like Victor Wilder, critics embraced the work, particularly the way it merged the “healthy traditions of the French lyrical art” with the “ingenuities” and harmonic refinements of modern music.76 Arthur Pougin praised Delibes’s “great concern for form, absolute respect for his art, and rare distinction in the work’s construction”—values upheld during the Moral Order—and CharlesMarie Widor appreciated how, with certain aspects indebted to grand opera, it was “more profound” than ordinary opéras-comiques. Most critics, however, stressed the work’s “clarity” and “grace” and took pains to explain the source of the music’s 74.  Adolphe Jullien, “Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique,” Revue et gazette musicale, 11 March 1880, 81–82. 75.  Heugel, Ménestrel’s publisher, made twenty-two separate excerpts of the opera available for sale that month. Although Heugel used the magazine to promote the music he published, the extent of these reproduced reviews was relatively rare. Typically, of course, such compilations would play down negative comments. In their collection of reviews, Léo Delibes, Jean de Nivelle: Dossier de presse parisienne (Weinsberg, Germany: Lucie Galland, 2006), Bérengère de l’Epine and Pauline Girard point out that Delibes began to be considered more seriously in the period leading up to this premiere (iv–v). 76.  “Semaine théâtrale: Jean de Nivelle,” Ménestrel, 14 March 1880, 114–17; H.M., “Delibes,” 122.

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Ex. 8  Delibes, Jean de Nivelle (1880), act 3. In this duo, Jean comes upon Arlette among the soldiers and wants to stay and protect her, musically reinforced by his assertive crescendo and choral accompaniment. After asking him to leave [ partez de grace], she implores him not to worry about her even if she is a “poor girl without country or family.” With music that captures Arlette’s unstable ex.8 Pasler.UCP resoluteness as well as her sadness, Delibes accompanies her pleading with softly repeating Eƒs in the clarinets, off the beat, and doubles her undulating song with the violas.

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“charm.” For the composer Victorin Joncières, its “secret” lay, not only in the music’s clarity and originality, but also in its “delicate details, original harmonies, and shimmering sonorities” (ex. 8). Other composer-critics also pointed to the work’s sound. Some called it elegant, an aesthetic quality Littré mentions in his definition of grâce and that Le Petit Robert defines as recognizable in “forms whose perfection is made of grace and simplicity,” as well as a certain “purity of style,” which are characterized by “harmony” and an “ease” of expression. More than melody or harmony, it was the effects created by new and unusual uses of the orchestra that critics saw as primarily responsible for the work’s charm. Ernst Reyer pointed to how the “muffled sounds of the horn lent a mysterious charm to Jean’s recitative,” Widor to how Arlette’s cavatina in act 2 “borrowed a singular charm from the penetrating sonority of the English horn.” Saint-Saëns found Delibes’s orchestration “exquisite, disdaining the banality of easy effects Di v e r si t y, E c l e c t ic ism , a n d Pl e a su r e

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and instead ceaselessly seeking and finding new things that charm the ear as much as they interest it.” For him, the orchestration was “perfection.” Another critic claimed, “what seduces in this score is that it seems to have been written for musicians more than the public, even if it gives the latter an extreme pleasure.”77 “Charming details” and “seductive sonorities”—in other words, the music’s surface sensations—thus had certain advantages. The very French combination of clarity and charm discouraged no one, offering “a smile for naïve listeners and a wink for smart ones.” It allowed listeners to judge for themselves the extent of a work’s charm. That charm was elusive and difficult to explain also had benefits. Critics’ admissions that the “secret charms” of this music did not reveal themselves on one hearing made a strong argument for getting audiences to multiple performances. Critics’ powerlessness to communicate in words the impression the music made on them drew attention to its distinction. Vague references to Delibes’s use of “all kinds of recherches séduisantes” stimulated listeners’ curiosity. According to Ménestrel, some amateurs brought their scores to the performances to follow it “in the English manner,” with music in hand, perhaps so they might understand better how the composer had produced the work’s charm. Those who thought Delibes was writing more for musicians than the general public pointed out that art music was supposed to raise the level of the ordinary listener’s experience.78 In this sense, the opera contributed to republicans’ educational aspirations for the populace. Although some republicans allegedly feared some kind of jinx connecting the music of Delibes to political disaster, as on 24 May 1873, when the premiere of Le Roi l’a dit coincided with elections that gave the monarchists a majority,79 Jean de Nivelle had immediate and broad appeal. It recalled a popular old French folktale and embodied an eclecticism encompassing elements from both grand opera and opéra-comique, lyricism and modern harmonies, masculine bravoura and feminine charm. While Aida was playing at the Opéra, it earned unprecedented receipts at the Opéra-Comique and within ten months had reached its hundredth performance. The work’s economic success brought attention to grace and charm as compelling aspects of serious French art music. In the context of rising Wagnerism, 77.  These reviews are reproduced in H.M., “Delibes,” 121–25. 78.  “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 21 March 1880, 124; Edouard Garnier, “Léo Delibes et la musique dramatique moderne à propos de Jean de Nivelle,” Ménestrel, 19 December 1880, 21. 79.  In their Jean de Nivelle, L’Epine and Girard reproduce a fictional essay from the royalist Le Gaulois, 9 March 1880, that portrays the new president, Jules Grévy, as purportedly anxious over whether the composer’s opera might bring “bad luck” (10–12). Yet elsewhere they clarify that the audience was indeed “no less agitated by passionate debates” about a new anticlerical policy just proposed by the new minister of public instruction, Jules Ferry. This was being discussed by the Senate, which that month called for the dissolution of the Jesuits (xviii).

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Delibes was praised for his “native qualities” as a composer of the race gauloise, for innovating while respecting tradition, for preparing the future while connecting to the glorious past. With his “phrases full of stylishness [coquetterie]” that never lapsed into bad taste, some described his talents as “Parisian.”80 Within a week of its premiere, Vienna, Budapest, and Dresden had already signed contracts to produce it, and numerous German journals had published flattering reviews of the “charming score,” especially its orchestration. By May, it was being translated into Russian, and soon it was being done in German, Hungarian, Danish, Swedish, and Italian, in some cases as grand opera with recitatives; in Moscow, in a café-concert. 81 Ménestrel mentioned foreign productions of the work more often than Hamlet— twenty-one times in 1880 (eleven cities), and thirty-one more in 1881 (eight cities) (see table B-9). Abroad Delibes was called a “composer-charmer” and judged a new model of the “purely French composer.” In 1881, he was rewarded by appointment as composition professor at the Conservatoire, succeeding Henri Reber.

Democratizing Pleasure Pleasure, of course, had not been absent from the French bourgeois world. The freedom many contemporaries felt to indulge in sensual pleasure is documented in late nineteenth-century French painting and fiction. In his 1884 novel A rebours (Against the Grain, or Against Nature), Joris-Karl Huysmans explores his protagonist’s experimentation with hyperaesthesia and fascination with beautiful objects. From the pleasure of decorating his house with a boudoir full of mirrors and installing a cricket in a cage to stimulate his memory of the past, to the pleasure of exotic flowers, intense smells, and the equally intoxicating power of poetry, Des Esseintes takes the reader on a voyage of sensual discovery. In the 1880s, pleasure was also part of with the cultural work republicans began to expect of music. If the intellectual pleasures described by Huysmans and Marmontel were out of reach for many listeners, especially the lower classes, the sensual pleasures of sound were more accessible and equally important experiences republicans wished to cultivate 80.  Wilder and Joncières cited in H.M., “Delibes,” 122; “Saison russe,” Ménestrel, 8 January 1882, 44. 81.  In Belgium that fall, the public could attend the Opéra-Comique version with spoken dialogue in Brussels and the version with recitatives in Antwerp, allowing Belgians to “compare the two versions and follow their preferences” (Ménestrel, 15 August 1880, 293). The French premiere of the grand opera version, however, did not take place until that November in Nantes. On the Russian café-concert version, done without permission, see Ménestrel, 5 September 1880, 317. See also “Nouvelles diverses,” Ménestrel, 21 March 1880, 125; 23 May 1880, 198; 19 December 1880, 21.

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broadly in the population. The value ascribed to these acknowledges a new social position for the bourgeoisie, who had a pronounced taste for boulevard theater and operetta, cabarets and cafés. Focusing on the sensual pleasures that could be expressed in serious art music was another way to break down the association of high art with noble sentiment and grandeur and served as an aesthetic counterpart to the democratization of elite institutions. The importance of pleasure entailed redefining the utility of art music. Certainly, as Richard Leppert points out, pleasure is an “awareness of the difference it allows, momentarily, from ordinary experience.”82 But no longer was beauty understood primarily as a way to help people transcend everyday life and imagine a harmonious social order, as under the Moral Order. If the pleasure of sensation, and particularly sounds, takes place in time and is perceived by the body as well as the heart and mind, then a music that tantalizes with aural pleasure encourages the listener to embrace the present, to enjoy it. Such music celebrates a sense of being that is no longer at risk or in dire conflict, as the republicans felt with the Third Republic solidly in their hands. Unlike the music of grandeur and heroism, music of sensual pleasure engages listeners in a kind of playfulness that acknowledges nuances in the familiar and tolerates the unexplainable. If they can, at times, anesthetize people to critical modes of perception, the pleasures of charm and grace can also help them explore a kind of freedom and inventiveness not possible within the mental constraints imposed by most kinds of work. In this sense, they could be liberating. As in the decorative arts movement, this suggests that there were social values inherent in what induced aesthetic pleasure, and that these could be democratic rather than aristocratic. As Gabriel Tarde put it, social evolution begins and ends in play. 83 Moreover, unproductive luxuries (such as music) make up the whole charm of life, he argues, and are responsible for “all the grandiose or minuscule innovations which have enriched and civilized the world.”84 From this perspective, pleasure could be part of a rigorously secular republican morality that found meaning in leisure activities, a way to connect private experiences with the social good. 82.  In his “The Social Discipline of Listening,” in Le Concert et son public, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michel Werner (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002), Richard Leppert notes that pleasure is experiential, involving “consciousness and intentionality.” The very identity of the bourgeois subject, he argues, hinges on the fact that pleasure produces desire, particularly the desire for “a totality of body and mind that hardly exists except in the imagination” (463–64). 83.  Cited in Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late NineteenthCentury France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 374. 84.  Ibid., 365.

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It also meant considering pleasure differently than in Gounod’s Faust, looking beyond his and Saint-Saëns’s music for their models, and espousing composers with different ideals without returning to the silliness associated with operetta, especially during the Second Empire. Remember, in his La Jeunesse d’Hercule (1877), Saint-Saëns’s hero turns away from pleasure. And as a critic, Saint-Saëns had written a column for Le Voltaire on 31 July 1879 in which he explained: “Music is not an instrument of physical pleasure. Music is one of the most delicate products of the human spirit.” The younger generation felt differently, perhaps in part because their careers blossomed, not during the decadence of the Second Empire, but during the Moral Order of the Third Republic. Delibes was not the only composer whose music was increasingly appreciated for the pleasure of its inherent charms and who was in a position to promote this aesthetic in his composition classes at the Conservatoire. Massenet, professor there since 1878, was also linked to the emerging cult of pleasure. He had long been appreciated for understanding feminine charm and being able to capture it in his music. In his feminine trilogy—Marie-Magdeleine (1873), Eve (1875), and La Vierge (1880)—he explored feminine seduction as well as the sensuality and quasi-eroticism of religious devotion (even if this may have inflamed Catholics). 85 Hérodiade (1881) also took on the power of charm as its subject. Unsympathetic critics—some of them Franckistes, d’Indystes, or Wagnerians with different agendas—have done a disservice to our understanding of Massenet’s career in faulting him for writing music that would “produce pleasure in his listeners” and win over an audience. In the early 1880s, I would argue, this was viewed as an achievement, although not one that always resulted in “career advancement.”86 After all, when Vaucorbeil took over the Opéra’s direction in 1880, Massenet suffered. Vaucorbeil removed Le Roi de Lahore from their repertoire and rejected Hérodiade because he 85.  In La Vierge, praised for its “touching grace,” Mary is “intoxicated by an unknown charm” as she ascends to heaven. Eric Goldstrom has pointed out that the enrapturing experience makes her divine. As a result of La Vierge’s impieties, Massenet had a sort of minor excommunication imposed on him. For a detailed study of the connections between the sacred and the sensual in these oratorios, see Erik Goldstrom, “A Whore in Paradise: The Oratorios of Jules Massenet” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998). See also Torchet’s review of the premiere in Orphéon, 11 June 1880. 86.  In his French Opera, Huebner begins his chapter on Massenet with an anecdote Vincent d’Indy recounted in his diary, in which he claimed that Massenet told the young man he composed only “trifles for the public.” Later, Huebner cites a little-known critic in 1887 who believed that Marie-Magdeleine, which indeed led to a lot of exposure in Paris, “was not about faith, but about winning an audience” and claimed that the composer “prostituted himself with a pretence of holiness while writing saccharin, theatrical music merely to produce pleasure in

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found its plot incoherent. 87 Music expressing erotic obsessions was not a ticket to sure success. The Opéra-Comique was more receptive to Massenet as well as to the new aesthetic elevating grace, charm, and pleasure. Beginning in January 1884, his Manon had almost as many performances in its first twelve months as Jean de Nivelle. In many ways, like Delibes’s Le Roi s’amuse! (1882)—six dances dans le style ancien composed for Hugo’s play—the work is a nod to Proust and the Union centrale, which had advocated studying models of grace and charm from the Ancien Régime. It is set in eighteenth-century France following the death of Louis XIV, that is, precisely during the transition in public taste from grandeur to the “grace of private pleasure.” Throughout the score, Massenet incorporates references to musical ornaments and dance rhythms used during the Ancien Régime. In act 3, especially, he uses an opening minuet and the occasion of a performance by the Opéra’s dancers within the performance to try his hand at capturing what was so pleasurable to the king about such dances. In four short interludes (called entrances), he plays with symmetrical patterns, dramatic oppositions, and grace-note ornaments inspired by this music—easily accessible forms of musical pleasure (ex. 9). With the dancers performing in period attire and the set design a reconstruction “à la Viollet-le-Duc,” reviewers appreciated this “restitution of the fêtes galantes of our great-grandfathers.”88 This taste for the rhythms and forms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dances grew increasingly in the 1880s and 1890s. The composer did not, however, stop with this plaisir de souveraine. 89 Manon, whose libretto by Gille and Henri Meilhac was based on the abbé Prévost’s novel Manon Lescaut (1731), takes as its central focus, not just musical pleasure, but also pleasure as enjoyed by all classes and in its many forms. The work begins with his listeners” (25, 34). Many of the critics Huebner cites represent aesthetic perspectives linked with d’Indy whose music never had much audience appeal. Huebner himself refers to Massenet’s achievements of the late 1870s—the period of Le Roi de Lahore at the Opéra and its very good run abroad—as “career advancements” (45). 87.  Meanwhile, a year before Massenet’s Hérodiade was completed, three Italian towns vied for its premiere. It was performed in Brussels, Geneva, Milan, London, Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and Berlin before coming to the Théâtre-Italien in Paris on 1 February 1884. Ménestrel, 18 July 1880, 262. The public in Hamburg was so enthusiastic that the work was done twentyfive times there, Torchet reported in Orphéon, 23 January 1883. 88.  “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 27 January 1884, 68, and review in La France, 21 January 1884, cited in Huebner, French Opera, 72. As examples of pastiche, Huebner points to the double-dotted rhythms in the act 1 sextet, the figuration in Lescaut’s act 1 aria, “Regardezmoi bien,” the minuet that accompanies much of the dialogue in act 3, and the Gavotte mélodie, drawn from one of his own earlier songs, “Sérénade de Molière” (French Opera, 60). 89.  This is how the characters in Manon describe the opéra-ballet they are about to see (pp. 244–46 in the piano-vocal score).

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Ex. 9  Massenet, Manon (1884), act 3, minuet, second entrance. This minuet demonstrates Massenet’s integration of eighteenth-century dance styles into ex.9 Pasler.UCP Manon, visible in both the frequent use of elaborate ornaments in the melodic line, as well as double-dotted rhythms in the bass.

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the pleasure of food and drink. As patrons approach dinner at a hotel restaurant, they fawn “with joy” over the vintage wines and the dishes, one of them a “work of art.” Next comes the pleasure of travel. Manon, just a “poor girl” from the provinces, sings with excitement about her first trip, even though she is en route to a convent, placed there for having too great a taste for pleasure. We first hear her singing hesitantly with off-beat accents, but vivaciously, alternating between tears and laughter and finding “everything seductive.” When Des Grieux lays eyes on her, the focus shifts to the pleasure of sexual attraction. While it is Manon’s physical beauty that draws him, for her, it is his voice and his words of ardent tenderness that she finds “pleasure in hearing.” As if speaking for the composer and his hopes, she explains, “In charming my ears, these charm my heart.” The pleasure of love is suggested by their short duet when their lines rub against one another, Di v e r si t y, E c l e c t ic ism , a n d Pl e a su r e

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her F’s against his G’s, and then come together into brief unison on C (ex. 10). The words here are important. Manon’s experience is of “intoxicating fevers” that lead to “happiness,” while Des Grieux’s ecstasy comes from contemplating her as his “mistress,” the “mistress of his heart.” The pleasures of love for her, at this point, are sensual, whereas for him they are emotional. After this comes the pleasure of escape to Paris, which leads to two long lines of unison singing and to Manon’s “sensuous outburst,” a reiteration of her vision of a life devoted to pleasure. In the middle of the opera, after she admits to being “weak and fragile” when Des Grieux’s rivals promise her a life of luxury, Manon turns to other pleasures associated with a young woman, especially vanity. The first time we hear her sing with delicate ornaments and long fioraturas is in her self-congratulatory air in which she celebrates her own beauty. This is followed by a gavotte Massenet added after the premiere, delicate music that advises women to profit while they are young. In act 5, rhyming désirs with plaisirs, Manon hopes that “all her desires” are for “pleasures.” Preferring the pleasures of gold above all, she pushes Des Grieux to gamble with what is left of their money in the hope of returning to a life of luxury. In the end, the pleasure of an apology and the pleasure of forgiveness revive the couple’s love, but Manon dies of shame. If one were to concentrate only on the end, this could seem a morality tale, a warning to women not to abandon virtue for pleasure. However, unlike in Carmen or Prévost’s novel, Manon is not depicted as dangerous or particularly sexual. She describes herself as “beautiful, young, and graceful.” With claims like “There’s no voice with an accent so sweet, no one with more charm and tenderness,” Massenet takes pains to make her music appealing to audiences as well as Des Grieux. When she introduces herself, it is with a gentle melodic curve and repeated eighth notes that charm with their simplicity. In these ways, she resembles Mignon. Her appeal comes from her youth (she is only sixteen) and vitality. Since Des Grieux experiences a coup de foudre (love at first sight), she needs no manipulation to win his heart. The only seduction scene comes later, when she tries to persuade Des Grieux to leave the seminary, and it is not typical. Manon begins in a “sorrowful and supplicating” tone and a spirit of humility, appealing for pardon from God and then Des Grieux (ex. 11). Her lines begin forte and descend repeatedly from F flat, one after another, almost hypnotically, but without the chromaticism of Dalila’s “Respond to my tenderness.” Then, entreating Des Grieux to come back to her, she asks him to listen to her voice. Her melody, sung “with a great and very caressing charm,” calms to pianissimo and reverses to repeated ascending lines. Des Grieux reiterates these same passages at the end of the opera when he implores

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Ex. 10  Massenet, Manon, act 1, duet of Manon and Des Grieux. These few quiet measures, following Des Grieux’s forte declamations that Manon is the ex.10 Pasler.UCP “mistress of his heart,” create a brief moment of repose for the two lovers, in which they reflect on the nature of their love.

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her to recall the caress of his voice, and as they engage in their final duet just before she expires. In this way, the music echoes “memories full of charm” in the lovers and becomes engraved in the listener’s imagination. Audiences expecting transparency between music and character must have been confused by Manon. Her music shares grace and tenderness with that of Mignon— attributes that, along with charm and delicacy, even politicians from Gambetta’s progressive Republican Union insisted that women cultivate in the 1880s. 90 At 90.  In his speech at a women’s lycée, “Inauguration du lycée Racine à Paris,” in Au ministre de l’instruction publique 1887: Discours, allocutions, circulaires (Paris, 1888), Eugène Spuller declared, “La femme doit garder de grâce, de charme, et de délicatesse” (249).

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Ex. 11  Massenet, Manon, act 3, duet of Manon and Des Grieux. In the beginning of the act 3 duet, Manon begs God’s forgiveness for her love of Des Grieux, culminating on a fortissimo high B as she attempts to raise her voice “to the ex.11 Pasler.UCP heavens.” Then she admits her own cruelty and culpability, seducing her lover from the role of a supplicant. ten. Y Y -C C ! Y YY h h h C Y h C Manon

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the same time, the music expresses self-conscious sensualism tinged with vanity. Manon falls in love and promises herself to a man, but never marries. For both men and women, the options seem to be pleasure or religious abstinence—marriage is mentioned explicitly only once and as the “duty” expected of a man. In drawing audiences into the work, Manon may not have offered audiences a clear model of what to be or not to be, but she did lead them to contemplating and perhaps vicariously enjoying a huge array of pleasures, especially musical pleasure. In doing so, Massenet democratized pleasure, validating it in the bourgeois world and spreading this taste throughout the population.91 This aesthetic emphasizing grace and charm was also evoked to judge composers, even in works of grandeur and nobility. In an 1885 review of Cléopâtre, a “lyric scene” by Duvernoy, the winner of the 1880 City of Paris Prize, for example, Charles Darcours praised the music’s “grace and charm” but said that Duvernoy could have foregrounded these better if he had chosen a less overpowering subject.92 These values permeated other musical contexts as well and affected the tastes of all classes, as documented by the choral society journal, Nouvelle France chorale. In 1883, this paper reported that elite audiences at the Opéra were less receptive to the “grandeur of the proportions and the nobility of the architecture” in Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII than to its “melodic abundance” and the “aptness of the instrumental color.” They particularly stressed such values in choral music. Reviewing Massenet’s Narcisse (1878), a female chorus written for the Société chorale Guillot de Sainbris that in some ways foreshadows the concerns of Manon, they praised its “charming grace” and “original harmonies”—“everything is imprinted with simplicity and proceeds sweetly; it’s like a hesitant soul, submitting to the irresistible attraction of a seduction.” To explain the popularity of the music of the vicomtesse de Grandval, which the Sainbris chorus also performed, they pointed to her “gift with melody, that is, charm and invention,” noting, “with these one is sure to please.” Reviewers for Nouvelle France chorale encouraged the working-class and petit-bourgeois men of the Société chorale Le Louvre to widen their repertoire to include small choruses “that require qualities of charm and grace to which audiences appear always very sensitive.”93 These values were 91.  Carmen and Don José “produced their theatrical pleasures . . . as players outside the bourgeois order,” but Manon performed “within an opéra-comique social frame that assimilated ‘la note voluptueuse’ with the social propriety of powder and minuets,” Huebner concludes (French Opera, 72). 92.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 8 April 1885. 93.  Nouvelle France chorale, 27 April and 9 December 1883, and Hippolyte de Vos, ibid., 16 February 1884.

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also found in chansons populaires, whose simplicity had earlier denied the genre any aesthetic merit. By 1886, they, too, were being praised for the “charm of their free inspiration” and their “naïve grace.” To elevate the “primitive form” of these songs, which Tiersot found the “most lively and characteristic,” he praised it as “also the most charming.”94 Pleasure even began to permeate the language of elementary school manuals. Whereas in the 1870s popular solfège manuals defined music as “the art of expressing feelings of the soul by the combination of sounds,” or as “a language that serves to express feelings, the art that moves by communicating with the soul,” in his La Première Année de musique, solfège, et chants (1885), Marmontel called music “the art of producing and combining sounds for the pleasure of the ear.”95 Many music pedagogues long believed that it was important for children to experience the pleasure of singing before they had to learn theory. But Marmontel here introduced the notion of aural pleasure into his definition of music. Part of the emphasis on aural pleasure by republicans was to secularize music and to recognize it as the result of work and the stimulus of a physical experience. Pleasure in music, as Marmontel uses it, is the product of abstract sounds with acoustic properties. This was not just a premodernist attempt to deromanticize the genre and to elicit admiration for the composer. Teaching children the value of aural pleasure was also part of helping them to learn to listen in a very French manner, with particular attention to “beautiful and pure sonorities.”96 With grace, charm, and the aesthetic pleasure they produced, republicans saw ways that music could get inside listeners, not just “charming our intelligence, touching our heart, and infiltrating our soul,”97 but also appealing through its sensuality to the body. To the extent that aural pleasure is something distinct from the communication of feelings, it could create desire for itself. Viewed cynically, the taste for charm and pleasure could create a potential imbalance between people’s needs and desires, or could function as a sort of carrot to get listeners, especially 94.  Gabriel Vicaire, “Nos idées sur le traditionnalisme,” Revue des traditions populaires 7 (25 July 1886): 189. Julien Tiersot, too, points out the “charm” of this repertoire in his annotations in id. and Vincent d’Indy, Chansons populaires du Vivarais et du Vercors (Paris: Fischbacher, 1892), 4, 8. 95.  D. Bargallo, Petite solfège (Paris: 1876), 1; Camile de Vos, Enseignement du chant et solfège à l’usage des écoles et sociétés chorales et instrumentales (Paris: Nouvelle France chorale, 1878), 1; Antoine Marmontel, La Première Année de musique, solfège, et chants (Paris: Colin, 1885), 1. 96.  In his La Deuxième Année de musique, solfège, et chants (Paris: Colin, 1891), Antoine Marmontel expands on his 1884 comment, clarifying that the goal of music is to “charm the ear by the production of beautiful and pure sonorities” (21). 97.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 261.

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children, to ingest material—namely, the lyrics—that they might otherwise reject. Yet to the extent that one’s heart, mind, and body vibrated in sympathy, this kind of music could have a particularly powerful effect. The combination of desire and belief in this music’s value led to what Gabriel Tarde called consumption. This was not the shallow and immediate gratification of preexisting tastes we normally associate with consumption, but it nevertheless fanned the market for this music by a circular process of mutual reinforcement. 98 Unlike the Opéra, which lost over 500,00 francs between 1881 and 1884, the Opéra-Comique made a profit. After trailing in receipts behind three popular theaters in the 1870s—the Gaîté, Porte-Saint-Martin, and Variétés—in 1881, it rose to third, after the Opéra and Théâtre-Français (the Comédie-Française). Investors received a 32 percent return, and even more in 1882. In 1883–84, with Lakmé, Manon, Die Zauberflöte, and a reprise of Carmen, which reached its hundredth performance there that June, the Opéra-Comique made 270,000 francs.99 In 1884–85, it surpassed the Théâtre-Français to become the second highest grossing theater in the country. With these successes and the focus on pleasures shared with a wide public came gradual acceptance of this art music as a commodity with economic utility for the country. Consequently, in the 1880s, the “daily seduction of success” was no longer perceived as the problem Gounod had earlier feared.100 When government administrators addressed Conservatoire students in the 1880s, they emphasized music’s capacity to be satisfying in and of itself. In 1886, Minister Albert Kaempfen told students to “love the art for its own sake, for the power and charm inherent in it.”101 They also recognized the commercial success of music by Delibes and Massenet, the two major composers teaching at the Conservatoire. In his 1883 speech, Director of Fine Arts Kaempfen praised Delibes’s Lakmé for “seducing everyone” and becoming “beloved” from its first performance. The following year, he lauded Massenet’s Hérodiade and Manon as “victories” in terms of attracting audiences for “never has the taste for music been as lively as during our time. 98.  As Williams points out in Dream Worlds, 360–61, Tarde defines consumption as desire in combination with belief (or judgment). See also Gabriel Tarde, “La Croyance et le désir: Possibilité de leur mesure,” Revue philosophique 10 (August 1880): 150–80. 99.  “Courrier des théâtres,” Figaro, 19 November 1884. 100.  Institut de France, “Rapport de Gounod,” in “Procès verbaux des séances de l’Académie des beaux-arts,” 13 May 1876, Académie archives, registre 2E, 14. 101.  Albert Kaempfen, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beauxarts: Séance publique annuelle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1886), 8. Kaempfen, a Swiss lawyerjournalist, edited L’Illustration before becoming director of fine arts from 1882 to 1887 and director of national museums in 1887.

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It is spreading with a marvelous speed.” Minister of Public Instruction, Religion, and Fine Arts Eugène Spuller likewise recognized in 1887 how popular classical music had become and, in mourning the fire at the Opéra-Comique, promised not to deprive the French too long of its “loftiness, grace, and sweetness.” By 1888, Director of Fine Arts Gustave Larroumet had turned the achievements of Delibes and Massenet into an aesthetic dictum, telling students to aspire to “charm” and “elegance” and to “conquer” audiences for the sake of the music as well as the prestige and prosperity of the country. The next year, recognizing the power inherent in the cultivation of these feminine values, he called them “permanent qualities of our race.”102

Exploring Uncharted Territory In the 1880s, along with new traditions and new histories, diversity and eclecticism, charm and pleasure, republicans continued to embrace progress as integral to their new ideology. What interested them was not so much the progress that resulted from facing difficulties—the kind that expressed republicans’ hopes and desires when in the minority under the Moral Order. Rather, it was progress that was possible when one was in power: experimentation and new ideas that broke the barriers of conventional expectations to explore uncharted territory. These were the keys to greater influence in the world, a potentially long-lasting legacy. As such, they made culture an important component of public policy. Enough of the French public had a taste for novelty and innovation that composers felt empowered to take some risks. To those for whom Germany represented progress, it was a question of assimilating German strengths. In the 1870s, this had meant trying to equal the grandeur of Handel, as Saint-Saëns attempted in parts of Samson et Dalila and elsewhere. In the 1880s, especially after he died in 1883, it was Wagner whose innovations presented new models of musical progress. Scholars such as Steven Huebner have shown how French composers of opera, including Massenet in his Manon, responded to the challenge of Wagner’s growing popularity by incorporating Wagnerian motivic, harmonic, and formal procedures. What has not been entirely understood, however, is that the republican ideology of diversity, eclecticism, and pleasure created a receptive context for French Wagnerism. It encouraged experimentation, and Massenet thought audiences would appreciate artistic experimentation. At the same time, other than 102.  Gustave Larroumet, Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 4 août 1888 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888).

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diehard Wagnerians, most composers continued to aim for clarity and charm in their melodies and a certain French distinction in their orchestration. As Massenet once told his students, “Go far, very far, as far as you can, but follow the great road.” Experimentation should go hand in hand with tradition.103 From Marmontel’s perspective, with French composers in the 1880s “lively and original enough to exist on their own” and with France now among the “first rank” of musical nations, the time had come for the French to look to their own roots for inspiration.104 Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most important French traditions that laid a foundation for the generic experimentation of Delibes and Massenet was the Revolution. Much as Grétry, Méhul, and Cherubini did in their music, Delibes constructed a hybrid work with Jean de Nivelle by including sections of dramatic music. “Charming” sections with “delicate details” and pastoral tunes are interspersed with “grand pages,” inspired drama depicting battle scenes and heroic grandeur.105 With its elements of grand opera, Delibes pushed on the boundaries of contemporary opéra-comique. Like Delibes, Massenet also looked to his revolutionary predecessors for ways to renovate the genre. He was particularly interested in melodrama—spoken text with orchestral accompaniment invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Pygmalion (1770) and used in revolutionary-era works such as Méhul’s Ariodant (Opéra-Comique, 1799). With far more extensive and diversified melodrama than in works by his eighteenth- or nineteenth-century predecessors, Massenet uses it eighteen times in Manon, whenever the characters speak as opposed to sing. Sometimes it is there for local color, such as the dance music from the hotel ballroom or the choral singing of the Magnificat in the seminary. Such sections enabled the composer to create continuity in a genre otherwise made of distinct numbers. With recurring motives and certain developmental strategies in these sections, Massenet also forged a new way to unify opera, a French counterpart to what Wagner accomplished with his leitmotifs.106 As Huebner has pointed out, this was unprecedented in opéras-comiques. Louis de Fourcaud, writing for the royalist readers of Le Gaulois, criticized Manon’s eclecticism as “neither opéra-comique nor drame lyrique.” However, Massenet himself called it a “harmonious fusion” of two systems, Latin-inspired melody and Teutonic drama, within a genre long consid103.  Cited in Huebner, French Opera, 71. 104.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 425. 105.  Reyer and Joncières cited in H.M., “Delibes,” 122–23. 106.  For two complementary analyses of this work from this perspective, see JeanChristophe Branger, ‘Le Mélodrame dans Manon de Jules Massenet,” in Paul Prévost, ed. Le Théâtre lyrique en France au XIXe siècle (Metz: Editions Serpenoise, 1995), 239–77, and Huebner, French Opera, 63–71.

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ered “eminently national.”107 In 1888, the minister of public instruction and fine arts made him an officer of the Légion d’honneur for his combination of “boldness and measure, originality and tradition, that are the essence of the French spirit.”108 A deepening understanding of chansons populaires encouraged composers in another important way, especially if they believed that what characterizes great art is less how a work is put together (mise en œuvre) than the intrinsic value of the musical idea.109 Bourgault-Ducoudray’s fruitful studies of the genre in Greece (1876) and Brittany (1885) clarified how chansons populaires could help revive Western art music by offering, not only models of simplicity and clarity from the origins of French music, but also a wider range of musical scales and rhythms, long forgotten in Western art music.110 Convinced that the major and minor modes could lead to no further musical progress, Bourgault-Ducoudray believed that “all modes, ancient or modern, European or foreign, insofar as they are capable of creating an impression, must be admitted by us and can be used by composers.” Not only would this “increase the domain of musical expression and furnish new colors to the musical palette,” it would also resolve the age-old problem of how “to be new while remaining simple.”111 Whereas it had been fashionable to dismiss the aesthetic value of such music, folklorists agreed that these songs were “useful,” capable of opening a world of “unprecedented sensations” and inspiring a “second youth” in contemporary poetry and music.112 Bourgault-Ducoudray experimented with the Greek modes in his own instrumental and vocal works. Sometimes adding chordal harmonies to his transcriptions, based on the melody’s mode, he aimed to show that the Greek modes were compatible with modern music and could be explored and incorporated for the sake of French musical progress. Convinced by his arguments, Théodore Dubois incorporated Greek modes in his “Chanson lesbienne” (1880), and Delibes did so too in Jean de Nivelle. Saint-Saëns found the modal qualities of the opening of act 2 of Jean de Nivelle daring—Delibes was “scorning tonality”—and Reyer was impressed by the march in act 3, which was entirely in the Hypodorian mode.113 107.  Massenet (1884) cited in Huebner, French Opera, 69–71, and Hervé Lacombe, Les Voies de l’opéra français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 284. 108.  Larroumet, Discours, 4 August 1888. 109.  L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray, Trente mélodies populaires de Basse-Bretagne (Paris: Lemoine, 1885), 16. 110.  L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray, Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’Orient (Paris: Lemoine, 1876), and Trente mélodies populaires de Basse-Bretagne, 16. Figaro (9 December 1885) marked the latter’s publication by reproducing one of the Breton songs. 111.  L. A. Bourgault-Ducoudray, Conférence sur la modalité dans la musique grecque, Palais du Trocadéro, 8 September 1878 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1879), 47, 48. 112.  Vicaire, “Nos idées sur le traditionnalisme,” 189–90. 113.  Cited in H.M., “Delibes,” 122.

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This choice was significant. In his numerous lectures, Bourgault-Ducoudray pointed out that he found the Hypodorian frequently in the chansons populaires of Brittany as well as Greece. He also heard it in the music of Berlioz, Gounod, Thomas, and Saint-Saëns.114 The Hypodorian mode was virile, male, full of vigor and health, “very esteemed by the ancient philosophers who believed that it inspired the cult of force and the feeling of duty.” In using the Hypodorian in a march specifically indicated as “French” (ex. 12), Delibes clearly wanted to call on the power associated with the mode; he may also have agreed with BourgaultDucoudray that these modes should be associated with the Aryan race. This would give the French a kind of birthright to return to them as a source of renewal.115 From the late 1870s to the early 1880s, music exemplified a shift in republicans’ concept of French society’s needs and in the sources to which they looked for inspiration. In 1877, works such as Saint-Saëns’s La Jeunesse d’Hercule, an apt metaphor for the Republic, articulated the country’s need for masculine strength, willingness to struggle, and devotion to duty in its citizens. A significant figure for revolutionaries as well as republicans, Hercules was a fitting character around whom to weave a narrative of opposition between pleasure and duty, which contemporaries audiences may have heard as an opposition between the decadence associated with the Second Empire and the need for civic virtue under the Third Republic. Jean de Nivelle presented a different image of national values in 1880. After its battle scenes, Jean turns his back on glory to return to a simple but charming villager. Likewise whereas Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem impresses audiences with its triumphal grandeur, Delibes’s music charms with delicacy, grace, and “shimmering sonorities.” With its libretto based on an old popular legend enjoyed all over the country, Jean de Nivelle helped focus public attention on the merits of a shared tradition in the distant French past and paralleled republican attempts to 114.  The Hypodorian mode, used in many folksongs, is a musical scale from ancient Greece that uses the intervals of the Dorian tetrachord (semitone-tone-tone), but begins a fourth below, that is, with a single tone, followed by two Dorian tetrachords (on the piano, from A to A on the white notes). Bourgault-Ducoudray compared it to the Western minor scale, which he called an “effeminate Hypodorian” because of the raised seventh. See his discussion and examples from ancient Greece, Brittany, and French contemporary music, including the fugal section that opens part 2 of Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ; the cadence at the end of the “Invocation à la nature” in La Damnation de Faust; the beginning of the “Roi de Thulé” romance in Gounod’s Faust; a cadence in the “Chanson des fossoyeurs” in act 5 of Thomas’s Hamlet; and Saint-Saëns’s Noces de Prométhée in Bourgault-Ducoudray, Conférence sur la modalité, 10–21. 115.  Ibid., 13, 21. See also the preface to his Trente mélodies populaires de Basse-Bretagne, in which, because of the presence of “identical characteristics in the primitive music of all indo-European peoples,” Bourgault-Ducourday associates the modes with the Aryan race and dates their origin back to the time when it was in its infancy, before “all the branches of this race” dispersed (15).

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Ex. 12  Delibes, Jean de Nivelle, act 3, “Marche française.” During this march, French soldiers pass by, and Jean shrinks back, terrified, when he notices the French banner and is reminded of his duty. This leads to nostalgia about his ex.12 Pasler.UCP country. This passage is notable musically for its use of modality, visible here from the lack of sharps in the melody and the cadence on G major.

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begin to construct a new history. In incorporating elements of grand opera and opéra-comique, it signaled republicans’ interest in integrating aspects of the French temperament rather than opposing them, as had been the case during the Moral Order. Likewise, politicians and historians interested in seeing evolutionary progress in the country’s past began to forge a concept of national identity that incorporated aspects of the Ancien Régime. As for Jean, it was not the grandeur of the French kings that interested them, for courageous revolutionary heroes provided ample examples; rather, it was the charm and grace previously associated with aristocratic salons that was seen as important in French music. In 1884, Massenet’s Manon left aside all narratives of opposition in favor of exploring a cult of pleasure. This was not a falling back to Second Empire excess but rather, as I read it, part of republicans’ desire to democratize the experience of charm and grace. Republicans theorized this as bringing the pleasures of elite art forms to the masses, but in effect this revival of interest in feminine values led to a more balanced and accurate concept of French identity based on feminine as well as masculine aspects, grace and charm as well as strength and grandeur. Moreover, grace and charm provided a way to penetrate the private as well as public consciousness of the people, contributing to the inner cultivation of citizens at home and in society. In this context, whether opera or ballet, for instruments or the voice, music was understood as a way to learn the power of charm, to practice it, and to promote it as culturally valuable. This focus on charm and pleasure had a significant impact on how the French 398

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thought about music. Many French were fascinated with the nature of sound, its timbre (considered its “individuality” or “personality”), and its “vague, indefinite” aspects, which Marmontel saw as responsible for music’s charm. In the 1880s, there was renewed interest in acoustics and orchestral sound colors and in exploring the physical effects of sound on listeners. In his 1884 aesthetic treatise, returning to concepts embraced in the late 1860s, including Hermann von Helmholtz’s acoustics, Marmontel defined music as “the art of creating impressions through combinations of sounds.” He hypothesized that it is “through the mysterious assimilation of the nerves with certain effects of resonance that music affects our bodies.” In other words, it is through stimulation of the nerves that music “penetrates us . . . gives us emotions . . . and transports us to an ideal world.”116 Critics too felt that an invisible current linked the conductor’s baton with his listeners and that at concerts the conductor “plays directly on the nerves of the two thousand.”117 Such notions also influenced understanding of how colors affected the viewer. In 1888, Charles Henry, inspired by Helmholtz, devised a chromatic circle of colors as a way of promoting a new way of painting based on the juxtaposition of complementary colors. He believed that colors, like sounds, could elicit feelings and sought to show that some colors, such as red, were more pleasurable than others. Going further than Marmontel, he argued that “the phenomena known under the name of optical illusions, consonance, dissonance, modes, and harmony are particular cases of subjective functions common to all nervous reactions—contrast, rhythm, and measure.”118 Composers too began to explore the musical implications of acoustic principles, especially resonance. In Le Roi malgré lui, which premiered at the Opéra-Comique on 18 May 1887, Emmanuel Chabrier parodies the “Blessing of the Swords” from act 4 of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots with sequences of unprepared and unresolved seventh and ninth chords—Ravel later said that this work “changed the direction of 116.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 9, 94, 105, 144–146, 275. Marmontel was not the first Frenchman to make these points after Helmholtz published his book Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music) in 1863. In Les Phénomènes de la musique (1868), Adolphe le Doulcet, marquis de Pontécoulant, also focuses on sounds as the frequency of vibrations, the “impressions” they make them on the ear, and the importance of nerves in musical perception. “Since nerves are the source of movement and feeling, when they are set in motion or moved they must transfer their state to the parts [of the body] that they enervate,” he explains (47). He calls music “the most active, fruitful, powerful, and general agent of pleasure” (39). 117.  Camille Mauclair, La Religion de la musique (Paris, Fischbacher, 1928), 14–15. 118.  Charles Henry, Le Cercle chromatique (Paris: Verdin, 1888), 5, cited in Roslak, “Symphonic Seas, Oceans of Liberty.” See also Charles Henry, “Loi d’évolution de la sensation musicale,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 11 (July–December 1886): 81–87, id., La Théorie de Rameau sur la musique (Paris: A. Hermann, 1887), and id., Wronski et l’esthétique

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harmony in France.”119 In his Printemps, written that same year, Debussy explored his love of distant overtones and nonresolving chords. Although Academicians attacked his music’s “impressionism,” Debussy defended it, remarking, “pleasure is the law.”120 This did not mean that he embraced surface details for their own sake, but rather that he needed new compositional freedoms in order to translate into music his own sensibilité, what Marmontel defines as “that special predisposition of our nervous system.”121 Just as art critics saw impressionist painting as a “physiological revolution of the human eye” and sensations as the means to new experiences of reality, the young music critic Emile Vuillermoz understood the potentially transformative effect of such music on the listener’s nervous system. “[T]he progressive refinement of our nerves [by this music] leads us to think that this is the path of musical progress,” he enthusiastically predicted in one of his earliest essays praising Debussy (1899).122 Of course, progress in music could be conceived of in many ways—through modes abandoned since the Middle Ages, new rhythms, unusual instrumental sonorities, and even new kinds of physiological effects on listeners. To the extent that some of these were like any other primary materials waiting to be harvested, their use implied a kind of colonization. Often, in the 1880s and 1890s, this resulted in musical hybrids, animated by the French taste for eclecticism and capacity to assimilate, which Marmontel explains as a product of their history as a people who had endured successive invasions.123 However, attitudes to progress were also affected by France’s imperialist expansion, the role that external politics played in the republicans’ desire for national integration and enhanced legitimacy, and the progress envisaged through the assimilation of foreign resources, including music.

musicale (Paris: A. Hermann, 1887), and José Arguelles, Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Aesthetic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Paul Signac later applied Henry’s ideas to painting. 119.  Alan Gillmor analyses this work, particularly its influence on the Sarabandes of Erik Satie, in his Erik Satie (New York: Norton, 1988), 20–21. 120.  From conversations between Debussy and Guiraud ca. 1889 annotated by Maurice Emmanuel and reproduced in Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. 1 (London: Cassel, 1962), app. B, and “Entretiens inédits d’Ernest Guiraud et de Claude Debussy (1889– 90),” in Inédits sur Claude Debussy (Paris: Comoedia-Charpentier, 1942), 25–26. I’m grateful to Brian Hart for helping locate the source of this citation. 121.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 81. 122.  See Jann Pasler, “Impressionism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2000), 12: 90–94. 123.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 39.

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7 • Musical Hybridity and the

Challenges of Colonialism

In fall 1873, Saint-Saëns escaped to sunny Algiers. Some thought it was for his health’s sake. He also had to finish sketching his new opera, Samson et Dalila. Algeria had been occupied by the French since 1832. Two years before SaintSaëns’s visit, a major influx of new settlers had arrived, including Communards and displaced Alsatians and Lorrainers, tripling the French presence in Algerian towns.1 Military control gave way to civil administration, and with the territory now officially assimilated to France, life began to replicate the rhythms of the homeland. Music performed by military bands and in new theaters built by the French contributed to this, such as Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, performed at the Théâtre d’Alger in April 1876. French opera served to remind settlers of their roots, expressing French mœurs and encouraging French pride. As elsewhere in European empires, opera provided a context for colonists to distinguish themselves from the natives. 2 Music, along with trade and commerce, also brought together the various Europeans living there—Spanish, Italian, and Maltese. 3 In 1878, an Italian musician organized Algiers’s first classical music society (which at first put on more Italian and German than French music). 4 Performing and listening to Western music provided settlers with a sense of the culture they 1.  In 1876, of a total population of almost 3 million in Algeria, there were roughly 200,000 French and 190,000 other foreigners. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (1874), 3rd ed. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1886), 338. 2.  In Cairo, where it would have been a “true miracle to see a turban” in local theaters, the audience for Verdi’s Aida (1871) also consisted mostly of Europeans. See the review by F. Filippi, excerpted in Arthur Pougin, Verdi: Histoire anecdotique de sa vie et de ses œuvres (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1886), 227. 3.  These groups became naturalized French in 1889. The urban organization of Algiers reinforced the dichotomy between European and indigenous peoples. J. L. Miège, “Algiers: Colonial Metropolis (1830–1961), in Colonial Cities, ed. Robert Ross and Gerard Telkamp (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 174–76. 4.  “Palestrina, Pergolese, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, etc.” were listed as its early repertoire in Revue et gazette musicale, 14 April 1878, 116.

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shared, its assumed superiority, and an ongoing connection to the outside world. Anthropologists interested in this settler culture began to write about this region as giving birth to a “new Mediterranean race,” a vigorous and virile product of the intermingling of Europeans and locals willing to embrace France. 5 Later some believed that because Latin civilization had flourished there in ancient times, “France was merely repossessing what was hers by hereditary right.”6 We do not have access to letters Saint-Saëns may have written, but we do have his musical impressions, melodies he collected during this first visit and later incorporated into his Suite algérienne (1880). Although the composer had already written his exotic-inspired Mélodies persanes (1870) and “Désir de l’Orient” (1871), the Suite points to actual experiences in the “French Orient,” thereby resembling Félicien David’s popular Le Désert (1844). The score of each movement begins with descriptive phrases that set the scene, as in opera, encouraging listeners to focus their imaginations in a particular way rather than indulge in some vague Orientalist dream. The prelude, with its undulating patterns suggesting the waves of the sea, begins with the perspective of someone arriving in the port of Algiers by boat and what one might have heard, including the ubiquitous call to prayer, “Ali Allah! Mohammed rassoul Allah!” (sic). The “Rhapsodie mauresque” is set in a Moorish café amid dancing, its instrumentation an attempt to capture the flutes, rebabs, and tambourines of the accompanying music (ex. 13a). The inspiration for “Rêverie du soir” comes from a desert oasis near Blidah. The languid qualities of the music, perhaps associated with nomadic Arabs, may have embodied for French listeners the charm of a race that some French people felt had “run its course” and, compared with European civilization, was “moribund.”7 To suggest the French military presence in Algiers, Saint-Saëns frames the fourpart work with buglelike horn patterns in the opening prelude and at the end of the “Rhapsodie,” then a bombastic, exuberant French military march that closes the Suite (ex. 13b). Beginning in the strings before they move to the rest of the orchestra, the composer conceived its “warrior accents” (in assertive C major) as an explicit contrast to the “bizarre rhythms” and “languorous Oriental melodies” that they 5.  Léon Faidherbe and Paul Topinard, “Instructions sur l’anthropologie de l’Algérie,” Bulletin de la Société de l’anthropologie de Paris 8 (1873): 603–59, and other texts are discussed in Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: Tauris, 1995), 157, 196–97, 209–10. Other Europeans in Algeria were “useful auxiliaries,” as well as being most easily assimilated, according to Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation, 330–31, 336. He believed that racial mixing was inevitable and that some mixed races were great ones. 6.  Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 200–201. 7.  Ibid., 157–58.

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ex.13a Ex. 13  Pasler.UCP Saint-Saëns, Suite algérienne (1880). a. “Rhapsodie mauresque.”

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follow, especially when reinforced by military drums and cymbals. One critic saw the march as embodying “the justice and benefits of our domination,” perhaps a reference to the disciplined coordination and coherent structure that the French may have perceived as their contribution to colonial life, here represented by the march’s closed form, ABA. He added, “Without any heavy boasting, its certitude of being invincible bursts forth with radiant ease, firm nonchalance, and vivaciousness.”8 8.  Emile Baumann, Les Grandes Formes de la musique: L’Œuvre de Saint-Saëns (Paris: Editions littéraires et artistiques, 1905), 299. Just after the closing of the 1889 Universal Exhibition, the Concerts Lamoureux used this march possibly to reassert French national pride at the end of their first two concerts of the season, following a duo from Bizet’s Pêcheur des perles, the Bohemian dance from Godard’s Tasse, and Saint-Saëns Rêverie.

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Because the Orient here is more than a function of the composer’s imagination, this music begs a number of questions. Was the composer attempting to stimulate curiosity and interest in the colony while reassuring listeners of French dominance there, or merely paying tribute to his own impressions? Was he writing to encourage escape, albeit an imaginary or vicarious one, creating a fantasy on which listeners can project their own desires?9 Or was he pointing to a people living in incommensurable differences, a region in transition, albeit contained by the French? At its premiere in Paris in December 1880 (and in other performances soon thereafter), audiences ignored the prelude and “without enthusiasm” politely applauded the march whose straightforward duple patterns and clear tonal progressions may have seemed too predictable in this context. Gone were the days when the public would have unanimously celebrated the French military presence there, as they did in Thomas’s Le Caïd (1849). Most preferred what they could relate to already more than Saint-Saëns’s musical response to colonialist realities, the startling contrasts in urban life. They appreciated the variety of orchestral colors, typically enjoyed in Saint-Saëns’s music, here deployed to enliven melodic repetition. The timbres inspired by Arabic music showed how engaging with the Other’s difference could push on the boundaries of Western sound, a musical benefit of colonial expansion. Listeners also savored the “exquisite charm” of the “Rêverie du soir,” consistently calling for an encore. With its “love song” in the solo viola, its loose sense of the bar line, and its unusual use of the orchestra, this movement suggested the elusive beauty and sense of freedom one might experience far from European civilization. Critics compared the “Rêverie” with Orientalist music by Glinka, Reyer, and David. This was appropriate, because the work was written entirely outside Algeria and through the lens of the composer’s memory.10 However, opinion was mixed when it came to the “Rhapsodie mauresque.” The first half of the movement is based on a theme that sounds like violinists practicing a scale, carefully moving up and down five notes. This is then treated contrapuntally, emblematic of Western classical music in Saint-Saëns’s march “Orient et Occident,” as woodwind melismas recalling Arab music try to interrupt. The second half, however, incorporates Arabic melodies, at first in the woodwinds and percussion, then echoed (and assimilated) by the strings. The two Arabinspired sections play with duple versus triple meter patterns and juxtapose various modes (A-Mixolydian, E-Dorian, B-Aeolian, D-Mixolydian, and A-Dorian with 9.  Ralph Locke, “Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East,” 19th-Century Music 22, 1 (Summer 1998): 21. 10.  Jean Bonnerot, C. Saint-Saëns: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Durand, 1922), 98.

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D-major scales and a D-Major coda (see ex. 13a). As Ralph Locke has pointed out, this “contrasting sequence of moods and meters” refers to those of North African vocal and instrumental ensembles that played nu–ba, multimovement music originating in Andalusia;11 but it also suggests how Arab and Western musical practices can coexist and collaborate. While one critic found this piece “constantly interesting,” one of the composer’s best, another judged Saint-Saëns as “often more inspired” than here. A third critic found this movement “terribly noisy” and hard to understand on first hearing.12 The work’s mixed reception in 1880 suggests that French audiences were divided on the merits of assimilated melodies and cultural coexistence, with some no more enthusiastic than were indigenous Arabs and many settlers about assimilation itself.13 As with Thomas’s Hamlet in Vienna in 1878, the backdrop of current events in 1880 may also have lent meaning to the Suite algérienne. With France’s privileged position in Tunisia secured after the Treaty of Berlin, merely drawing attention to Algeria may have been useful, reminding listeners of the colony’s strategic importance, whether they supported assimilation or not. Kroumirs in Tunisia had allegedly been threatening Algeria and its Christian residents. After Jules Ferry formed his government in September 1880, pressure mounted to intervene. Although monarchists and left-wingers advised against it, moderate républicains opportunistes supported Ferry’s doing so. In spring 1881, and while the Suite was still being performed in orchestral concerts, the French in Algeria invaded Tunisia and in May 1882 it became a French protectorate. Three months later Tonkin (northern Vietnam) followed.

It is no accident that significant new efforts to extend the nation’s geographical borders took place when France was reforming education.14 Unlike the Germans, who defined their citizens based on ethnocultural identity and excluded those 11.  Locke, in “Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers,” considers the “Rhapsodie mauresque” the “most artistically successful evocation” of “non-Western music-making before Colin McPhee’s gamelan-inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936)” (40). 12.  Reviews of the premiere on 19 December 1880 by the Concerts Colonne: A.M., “Con­ certs et soirées,” Ménestrel, 26 December 1880, 31; Revue et gazette musicale, 26 December 1880, 414; and Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1880) (Paris: Ollendorff, 1881), 715. For a review of the Concerts Pasdeloup performance the following week, see H. Barbedette, “Concerts et soirées,” Ménestrel, 2 January 1881, 38. 13.  Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 172, 205. 14.  In 1886, the year of the final law on secular primary education, Ferry assigned Paul Bert, who wrote some of these documents, to Indochina.

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without German ancestry, French republicans had an expansive definition of citizenship with important implications. Central to this was their belief in the possibility of assimilation, the capacity of people, especially when helped by education, to adopt new mœurs, whether the working classes back home or the colonized abroad. Considered an advanced stage of colonialism, after occupation and exploitation of the natives, assimilation entailed imposing French laws and institutions—the Code Napoléon, French education, and (after 1889) military service—on indigenous peoples. The idea was not to ignore racial and religious differences or to address the economic needs of the colonized, but rather to try to build some kind of “moral community” based on living under the same economic and social regime.15 As these hopes materialized, they assumed the colonies would demonstrate the universalism of republican values. With their power consolidated and redefining what was useful to the nation, in the early 1880s, républicains opportunistes looked to colonial expansion and exploitation of colonial resources as major means of stimulating national prosperity. France was the new Rome, the product of assimilating ancient Greek and Roman traditions through the Gauls and German traditions through the Franks. Aiming to enlarge French territory by filling countries like Algeria with Frenchmen who would “possess and cultivate” it,16 French administrators hoped to create a “new France” functioning in the image of the patrie. Expanding the borders of the nation would create new markets crucial for nation’s economic growth, more jobs, and an alternative power base with claims to glory strong enough to replace those of the aristocratic French dynasties. France needed the colonies to maintain its position within Europe. The realities of colonialism, of course, conflicted with these ideals and complicated the category of citizen. Convincing the nation that imperialist expansion was worth the costs and that the assimilation of new French men and women was desirable or possible presented major challenges. Many colonizers did not want their power usurped by indigenous voters.17 And just as some listeners resisted leaving their mental armchairs to appreciate how non-Western resources could enrich French music, few Algerian Muslims were willing to repudiate their rights to Islamic law to become French citizens. Moreover, the very people the French thought most capable of assimilating, the Kabyles (a Berber people indigenous to northeastern Algeria), participated in an unexpected but massive insurrection in 15.  François Bernard, “Introduction” to Les Colonies françaises: Petite Encyclopédie coloniale, ed. Maxime Petit (Paris: Larousse, n.d.), ix. 16.  Lucien-Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1869), 418–19. 17.  See James Lehning, To Be a Citizen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), chap. 7.

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1871, which some compared to the Commune. The Kabyles, many of whom had blond hair, were thought to be distantly related to Europeans, possibly the Celts, and, with their sedentary, farming culture preserved in the mountains, this “sister population” espoused a way of life that resembled the French more closely than that of nomadic Arabs.18 The French felt betrayed. After the suppression of hostilities and general disarmament, increasing anti-Arab sentiment led to closing bilingual Franco-Arabic elementary schools created during the Second Empire, thereby removing one of the most powerful forces for assimilation.19 Contemporaries and historians were mute on the irony of cutting back on “universal” education in Algeria just as it was being expanded at home. Many republicans clung to the utopian ideal upon which the new identity of France rested, however, and expected music to infuse energy into the colonial process. Just as some proposed that “all cultivated men in Algeria” should know Arabic (and all Arabs, French), sympathetic musicians saw music and musical practices as languages to be shared. In June 1872, Algerian administrators invited choruses and wind bands from throughout France and Switzerland to compete with local ensembles in a huge orphéon festival. Algerian reviewers praised this as “a symbol of light and prosperity,” initiating a “new era on the African soil.” From the perspective of a major Parisian critic who came to serve on the jury, such a gathering signaled to the French back home that Algeria was not just a “site of battles, arid, sterile, and forever bent on war.” Music was helping to “solve the problem of assimilation,” whether this meant indigenous people identifying as French, or mostly other Europeans. As such, music was not just part of the mission civilisatrice, with the orphéons promoting “art, union, charity, order, and work”; it was a form of public instruction, the only thing, many thought, that could prepare a “fusion of races.”20 From a republican perspective, music also had an important role to play at home, combating lack of interest in the colonies, inciting curiosity, and helping to 18.  Francisco Salvador Daniel contended that because Kabyle songs often used the Phrygian mode, as Plutarch described it, the Kabyles were descendents of “the great aryan family of the Pelasgians, the first inhabitants of Phrygia [in west-central Anatolia].” Since the latter had spoken “Cabiric or Gallic,” the presence of this mode and these languages in French chansons populaires meant that the French and the Kabyles had similar ancestors. See Salvador Daniel, La Musique arabe, ses rapports avec la musique grecque et le chant grégorien (1863) (Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1879); Paul Lacome, “Les Chants de la race cabirique ou gallique d’après Salvador Daniel,” Revue et gazette musicale, 14 November 1880, 361–63, and 5 December 1880, 387–88; and Jann Pasler, “Theorizing Race in 19th-century France: Music as Emblem of Identity,” Musical Quarterly 89, 4 (Winter 2006): 472–74. 19.  Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation, 413–14. 20.  Em. Mathieu de Monter, “Alger: Fêtes musicales,” Revue et gazette musicale, 26 May 1872, 163–65, and 2 June 1872, 171–72.

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“sell” the French public on their benefits. Other than at the Universal Exhibitions, most people had no contact with those whose lands France was invading and colonizing. But after the republicans came into power in the late 1870s and 1880s, exotic fantasies permeated stages and concert halls. 21 Besides new operas, such as Emile Paladilhe’s L’Amour africain (1875), Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (1877) and Verdi’s Aida (premiered in Cairo in 1871 and performed in Paris in 1876, 1878, and 1880), there was the revival of Félicien David’s Le Désert, with its musical depictions of Middle Eastern natural beauty, its evocation of dancing women, and its exotic melodies, one of which is marked, “rêverie du soir.”22 The first official concert of the 1878 Exhibition featured it and the Concerts Colonne performed it twice each year in 1877, 1881, 1883, and 1885. French Orientalism could be useful even if it only created an illusion of difference and its relationship to the exotic Other was superficial. Feeding the desire for exotic fantasies drew attention to the colonies, particularly to the extent that these fantasies suggested analogies with French culture and the universality of human feelings. However, they also led to simplified positions on complicated issues that may have contributed to prejudice, arrogance, and support for unenlightened policies. Those defiantly opposed to imperialist conquests, embracing protectionism, or focused on the recession beginning in January 1882, also looked to music. Most Frenchmen understood the inevitability of war in Europe and the urgency of maintaining a competent army. Music inspiring militaristic patriotism had broad appeal, 21.  These went back to Napoléon’s Egyptian expedition and to the taking of Algiers in 1830. As commonly used, the French word exotique is a nonspecific reference to foreign others, based on the perception of difference. Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 5th ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1881), defines it as “Qui n’est pas naturel au pays.” In his Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), Peter Mason defines “exotic” as necessarily displaced, its perception involving translation, characterized by sameness within difference, and resulting from a process of exoticization. It is “produced inside discourse” while suggesting something resistant to assimilation (163 and chap. 8). Exotic is distinct from Oriental, which refers to a certain part of the world and a scholarly discourse of description and discovery about it, sometimes involving a desire for accuracy and verisimilitude. The term “Orientalist,” as Edward Said has pointed out in Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), implies a power relationship and the assertion of superiority. Lumping many cultures under the exotic allows for “dreaming,” but often excludes recognition of specific cultural differences. For recent essays that explore this, see Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). 22.  In his “La Musique française et l’Orient: A propos du Désert de Félicien David,” Revue internationale de musique française 6 (November 1981): 36, Jean-Pierre Bartoli argues that David, the “founder of a new school of exoticism,” sought to explore analogies rather than differences between the musical cultures of the Orient and the Occident, particularly the “poetry” of the former. Besides the incorporation of Arabic melodies and textures, what was new were songs and theatrical works in which the plot was vague or nonexistent.

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especially for the Ligue des patriotes, a new consortium of both radical republicans and monarchists, the far Left and far Right. The Ligue wanted music to help fire up the country for revanche against Germany and looked to songs, both new texts to popular songs performed at cafés-concerts and songs written for children, to help with this. Clashes with the Ligue led to a new government in 1885, after elections almost wrested control from the opportunistes. This forced reconsideration of what was in the country’s general interest. The flexible concept of utility allowed people to express their differences, often through music, and the French government to address them without turning to revolution.

Musical Fantasies Fueling Colonialist Desire As with the thirst for ever-growing global commerce, imperialist expansion was driven by nationalist desire, especially that of French republicans to increase their influence on others, their economic and military power, and their own pride. Ferry and Gambetta agreed that a “politics of energy” was better than “standing still.”23 Both before and after 1870, the republicans considered colonization the best way to spread French civilization. This idea of bringing “fraternity and assistance” to oppressed peoples dated from the 1790s. Saint-Simonians rationalized it as a way to extend the human family and create a “mystical union of the west and the east.”24 More accurately, it seemed the only way to assure France’s survival as a great nation. Under the Second Empire, the country had increased its size and power by annexing Nice and Savoy, acquiring New Caledonia, Senegal, and Cochin China (southern Vietnam), establishing a protectorate over Cambodia, and building the Suez Canal. In the 1870s, French explorers continued to investigate new parts of the world, but besides a treaty that provided for a poorly defined protectorate in Tonkin in 1874, initial exploration of the Sahara, and the suppression of insurrections in Algeria, colonial efforts were minimal. France’s foreign policy focused in large part on the “Question of the Orient”—the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in Europe—and its attempted resolution in the Treaty of Berlin (1878). 25 23.  Juliette Adam cited in Charles-Robert Ageron, “Jules Ferry et la colonisation,” in Jules Ferry, fondateur de la République, ed. François Furet (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1985), 194. 24.  Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: La Table ronde, 1972), 17–20. 25.  The Treaty of Berlin gave independence (and more land) to Montenegro and Serbia, some of Romania to Russia, Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austrian occupation (over Serbia’s objection), Cyprus to England, and France a privileged position in Tunisia, previously under Turkish rule.

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When the republicans came to power, some of them aspired to further colonial acquisitions. The abbé Raboisson had reminded the French that historically they had been excellent colonizers—hadn’t Alsace once been taken from Germany and wasn’t it now far more attached to France than Ireland to England or Hungary to Austria? In 1880, the king of Tahiti abdicated and what had been a protectorate became a French colony. That same year the Chambre voted 1.3 million francs to begin a Trans-Saharan railroad from Senegal to the Niger River. And in a series of articles in the Journal des débats, the conservative republican journalist and traveler Gabriel Charmes argued for turning attention to the Mediterranean. He reminded everyone that France had “other frontiers than the Vosges” and that “more damage than the amputation of the eastern provinces” was at risk in the Mediterranean. 26 Ferry’s occupation of Tunisia—“the only great undertaking the international situation would permit a defeated France”—led some to think that his colonial policies in 1880–81 were primarily a response to circumstances. Ferry resigned, but returned to power in 1883, establishing a French Department of the Colonies. By 1884, military expeditions in Tonkin and the Congo were part of his government’s larger goal of “laying the foundations for a French empire” in the Far East and Africa. “If France wants to remain great,” as Ferry once explained, shifting definitions of national greatness from internal to external criteria, “she must carry her language, her mœurs, her flag, her arms, her thought to wherever she can.” A new “France in formation” was the “guarantee of her national future” (fig. 49). 27 As Ferry presented it, the utility of the colonies was practical, strategic, psychological, symbolic, and above all economic. Colonies would increase the number of French citizens and give France a presence and an influence abroad. After the humiliating loss to Prussia, imperialist successes would distract “eyes fixed on the blue line of the Vosges,” revive French pride, and renew confidence in its military. They would show the French military to be capable and strong. Although it was eventually recognized that people loved and defended their own mœurs, Ferry saw it as his government’s duty and responsibility to continue the attempt to civilize “inferior races” as a way to maintain his country’s status as a great nation. He, like many others, agreed that “the people who colonize the most are the leading people; if they aren’t today, they will be tomorrow.”28 A lawyer and spokesman 26.  Girardet, Idée coloniale, 29–32. See also Abbé Pierre Raboisson, Etude sur les colonies et la colonisation au regard de la France (Paris: Challamel, 1877), 65–67. 27.  Ageron, “Jules Ferry et la colonisation,” 194–99. Ferry presented the most complete definition of his colonial policy in a speech to the Chambre on 28 July 1885 and in his book, Le Tonkin et la mère-patrie (1890). See his Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, 5 vols. (Paris: Colin, 1895–98). 28.  Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation (1874), cited in Girardet, Idée coloniale, 28.

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Fig. 49  L. C. Desormes, “Marche de l’armée française au Tonkin,” arranged for military band (1885). In addition to being a composer, Desormes was the conductor at the Folies-Bergère. Wettge, the arranger, was conductor of the Garde républicaine.

for the growing bourgeoisie, Ferry also took a pragmatic perspective. Providing potentially new primary materials to enhance French productivity and expanded markets for French products, the colonies helped him address his voters’ commercial needs and desires. Because he believed that “nations are only great by the activity they develop,” he considered colonial policy “the daughter of industrial policy.” With the country in a major recession beginning in 1882, this was particularly important. Ferry considered export “an essential part of public prosperity” and competition with rivals at the very core of imperialist motivations. 29 With its capacity to arouse desire, and an emerging aesthetic that elevated desires to the status of needs, music was in a good position to induce sympathy for the republicans’ positions on progress, race, assimilation, and Western culture. Music and musical instruments had long documented human migrations, making French imperialism seem normal instead of aberrant. During periods of conflict and aggression abroad, music, musicians, musical instruments, performance contexts, and images of these put a human face on the imperialist process for a public with a need to know that increased as the French sought to take more and more colonies.30 As such, they helped to produce knowledge and inflect attitudes about the exotic Other, sometimes in concrete and specific ways.

Staging Imperialist Desire Travel literature, theater, and music had long fed French interest in distant cultures, cultural analogues for explorer accounts shaped to serve Western purposes. Jules Verne’s fictional Voyages extraordinaires, with an average of sixty illustrations per novel, brought the pretense of realism to tales of the exotic Other. As they oscillated between truth and romantic fantasy, these encouraged the illusion that Westerners controlled as they explored exotic locales, an attitude that perhaps the settlers also 29.  Jules Ferry, Le Tonkin et la mère Patrie (Paris: V. Howard, 1890), 40–41, and Girardet, Idée coloniale, 47–50. Much debate has surrounded the question of whether France’s colonies ultimately benefited the country. For a similar view on the preeminence of economic arguments in Ferry’s policy, see Raymond Betts, Assimiliation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 3. For more on the economic interdependence of France and the colonies and French colonial businesses, see Robert Aldrich, Greater France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), chap. 5. See also the statistical analyses that show the complexities of exports/imports in Jacques Marseille, “Les Relations commerciales entre la France et son empire colonial de 1880 à 1913,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1994), 286–307. 30.  For more on the use of images to serve imperialist propaganda, see Thomas G. August, The Selling of the Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890–1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985).

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shared. Beginning in 1877, the Journal de voyages, oriented to a public of adolescents, further popularized this taste for adventure stories. So did theatrical productions such as Jules Verne and Adolphe d’Ennery’s Le Tour du monde en 80 jours, among the best-attended of the decade. Premiered in 1874 at the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin, it was later performed over 400 times in a row at the Théâtre du Châtelet.31 This story in a prologue, five acts, and fifteen tableaux follows a man’s struggle with the elements and people around the world. Audiences were able to compare visually a wide range of different cultures—all reduced to short vignettes—and marvel at the Western traveler’s ability to move between and negotiate such differences. The short interjections of J.-J. Débillemont’s tonal music built of simple, repeating eight-measure themes grounded this experience in a Western perspective. His “Marche des rajahs,” processional music at a Hindu royal cemetery before a cremation, captured the tone of the “funeral psalmody interrupted at equal intervals by drum and cymbal strokes” mentioned in the novel and called for in the play to accompany the Hindu priests; it also presented an easily recognizable Western structure—merging the ternary form of a military march with classical variation form, its repeating theme building in volume, rhythmic complexity, and registral density to a climax (ex. 14). The syncopated tune “La Malaisienne” accompanied the songs and dances of the Malay festival just before the travelers cross the ocean to San Francisco. With its frequently changing volume from soft to loud, it captured some of the unpredictability associated with foreign Other. The lilting and gracious “Valse indienne” was an odd piece to accompany the travelers’ encounter with native Americans who threatened to kill them. Perhaps Débillemont was expressing popular French sympathy with the subjects of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels.32 Although waltzes may have been unusual in such works, marches, emblems of Western domination, inevitably accompanied them. In 1879–80, for example, A. Belot’s Vénus noire, an explorer’s tour of central Africa, featured, not only a ballet des nègres with the queen of the amazons, but also a snappy “Marche de la caravane” composed by Alexandre Artus, the conductor at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Like other such marches, this one repeated the same tune over and over as it “explored” different registers and densities, ending with an assertive coda to be played proudly ( fiermento) as if the voyagers were content and self-satisfied with 31.  Offenbach may have been poking fun at this in Le Voyage dans la lune (1875), a féerie (extravaganza) in twenty-four tableaux. 32.  See the descriptive comments at the beginning of tableau 4, scene 2; tableau 7; tableau 10, scene 4 of Le Tour du monde en 80 jours in A. d’Ennery and Jules Verne, Les Voyages au théâtre (Paris: Hetzel, 1874).

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Ex. 14  J.-J. Débillemont, “Marche des rajahs,” for Jules Verne and Adolphe d’Ennery, Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (1874).

what they had traversed. Such productions did much to give the illusion that foreign cultures were accessible and comprehensible, wherever the Westerner’s gaze might wander, as did the display of exotic products and portraits of brave explorers in the foyer of the Théâtre du Châtelet during the performances. With Russia gaining new influence in the Balkans after the Treaty of Berlin and Ferry’s government focused on imperialism, the hit of the 1880s at the Théâtre du Châtelet was another pièce à grand spectacle. Verne and d’Ennery’s Michel Strogoff premiered there on 17 November 1880, reaching 100 performances by 1888. In five acts and sixteen tableaux, this play based on the 1876 novel features not explorers, but armies and a heroic lieutenant of the czar. Russia was becoming a powerful colonial power with unquestionable military superiority. In 1876, it had annexed the Central Asian territories and there pretended to abolish slavery, anarchy, and despotism. Michel Strogoff focuses on a fictional invasion of Russian Siberia by the Tartars, as well as the trials and personal courage of Strogoff who travels from Moscow to the steppes of Siberia to save his country. To explain why Verne represents the Tartars as aggressors after they, in fact, had been conquered, Chris Bongie suggests that “the barbaric Other . . . is both that which is doomed to disappear in the progressive light of a liberalizing modernity and that which must be represented as having not yet been surpassed.” For Strogoff to experience a kind of voyage of initiation, he needed to encounter a radically different world. Besides the torture scene, what communicates the distinction of this world is the fête tartare with its “absolutely charming” songs and dances. Bongie proposes that Verne included them because “this cultural shell is all that will survive of barbarism once its political power had been definitively quelled.”33 Both Massenet and the house composer Artus wrote incidental music, but neither wrote a bacchanale or songs for the fête tartare, a ballet that begins the ninth tableau. The cover of Artus’s “Marche triomphale” may suggest a performance by veiled, bare-legged women at the fête, carrying swords and shields and bowing before their leader, but the exuberant maestoso music, again built of eight-measure phrases, functions to display Tartar pride before the captured Strogoff (fig. 50). 34 Massenet contributed military music to accompany the Russian soldiers: an “Air de la retraite” for the 33.  Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 51, 64–66. 34.  The dancers look like men in the engraving accompanying the play, whereas on the cover of the Artus score, based on the same image, the dancers are indisputably female, with long diaphanous veils extending from their foreheads to their feet, their arms and torsos from the waist down visible from the side and back. French audiences must have preferred their exotic dancing by women rather than men.

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Fig. 50  Alexandre Artus, “March triomphale” from Jules Verne and Adolphe d’Ennery’s Michel Strogoff (1881).

fifes and drums of the czar’s grenadiers and a “Fanfare” for the chevalier-gardes (a cavalry of the Russian imperial guard consisting of nobles). Most French exotic spectacles were constructed around stereotypical binary oppositions, a replication of the dichotomy of self/Other projected onto another culture. This was not just a convention of the genre, it also reflected “racial policy” in the colonies, where the French played up differences between neighboring indigenous groups, pitting one against another (such as the Kabyles and the Arabs) to accumulate power and diminish the possibility for unified resistance. 35 Opera, in particular, also proved an ideal realm in which to “make the native seem like us by giving her a ‘voice,’ ” for, as Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, “if the subaltern can speak, then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more.”36 Probably because of the “essential untranslatability” of whatever actual non-European music Parisians might have been able to hear, operas probably did a much better job of inculcating this illusion than did occasional visits by indigenous musicians. Whether composers or librettists wished to criticize the assimilationist theory, promote it, or play with ambiguities and complexities inherent in the ideal or the practice, they could construe Oriental characters in their operas as belittling, resisting, or embracing Western cultural influences, and the French colonial presence as representing contamination, enrichment, or some amalgam of the two. Whereas an operetta like Charles Lecocq’s La Jolie Persane (1879) tended to address social questions at home, in this case, divorce, and Olivier Métra’s balletpantomime Yedda (1879) used the story of a Japanese peasant assimilating into the upper class through marriage as the pretext for wishful thinking about change in France, 37 some operas and opéras-comiques addressed colonial situations. When Gounod’s Le Tribut de Zamora was not ready, Vaucorbeil chose Verdi’s Aida as his first new production at the Opéra in 1880, with Gabrielle Krauss in the title role.38 In some ways, this constituted official assimilation of an Italian composer whose opera had earlier been reviewed as specifically Italian 39—an interesting choice 35.  Aldrich, Greater France, 106. 36.  Cited in Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 35–36. 37.  Yedda was the only new work produced at the Opéra in 1879. 38.  French audiences already knew Aida from its premiere in Italian at the ThéâtreVentadour in 1876 and in French at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1878. 39.  In Revue et gazette musicale, 30 April 1876, Paul Bernard compares Aida with Verdi’s other operas and concludes his long review, “One felt as if transported to sunny Italy” (139). See also 1880 reviews cited in Karen Henson, “Exotisme et nationalités: Aida à l’Opéra de Paris,” in L’Opéra en France et en Italie, 1791–1925, ed. Hervé Lacombe (Paris: Société française de musicologie, 2000), 290.

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given the large Italian colony in Paris and the second largest number of immigrants at the time being Italian workers. However, the work had French roots. The scenario was concocted by a French Egyptologist, Auguste Mariette, and adapted by Camille Du Locle, later director of the Opéra-Comique. 40 Moreover, Pougin, and more recently Karen Henson, have argued that French music had the greatest influence on the work. 41 Reinforcing this interest in French Orientalism, Colonne programmed excerpts of Samson et Dalila and Le Roi de Lahore in his Good Friday and Easter concerts the same week as the Opéra’s premiere of Aida, and, after critics noted the similarity to Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, the Opéra later that fall ran it in repertoire with Aida. Its exotic subject inspired a “dazzling” spectacle, and Henson and Locke underline the enormous impact made by the sets and costumes, the result of “archaeological research.”42 As in other exotic French spectacles and operas, such as Félicien David’s Lalla Roukh, the relationship of music and visual design calls on audiences to negotiate the coexistence of realistic display and imaginative projection, to see grandeur, exotic beauty, and passionate characters and, with the help of music, to feel their meaning. 43 What elicited particular attention was the Triumphal March of act 2 with its brilliant display of costumes and orchestral colors à la Meyerbeer. For the 1880 production, the Opéra had Adolphe Sax make replicas of Egyptian-inspired trumpets (with two pistons instead of one) to play the pitches more accurately, although, as Locke points out, the “bizarre and blaring sound” of those used in earlier performances may have helped to code the Egyptians as “technologically primitive.” Hearing these, Parisians clamored for an encore in the middle of the premiere and, in honoring this, everyone in the 40.  See Ernest Reyer, “Voyage au Caire,” reprinted in Notes de musique (Paris: Charpentier, 1875) and the correspondence in Verdi’s Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans Busch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978). 41.  Pougin, Verdi, 266, and Henson, “Exoticisme et nationalités,” 266–67, 291–94. Henson refers to G. Bertrand as a critic who saw orientalism as “particularly cultivated by the French” (292–93). She also points out that Du Locle commissioned Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse jaune and Bizet’s Djamileh and Carmen (266–67). Earlier, in his “Voyages au Caire,” Reyer had pointed to similarities between the nostalgic father-daughter duo in Aida and the analogous scene in Mignon, and between Aida’s introduction, the prelude to Lohengrin, and the second part of Les Troyens (193, 198). 42.  Ibid., 279–85 and Ralph Locke, “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ Is Aida?” Cambridge Opera Journal 17, 2 (July 2005): 116–22. See the catalogue, Voyage en musique: Cent ans d’exotisme. Décors et costumes dans le spectacle lyrique en France (Boulogne-Billancourt: Centre culturel de Boulogne-Billancourt, 1990). 43.  In describing Lalla Roukh, Camille Bellaigue writes of the “transposed impressions” effected by “music’s strange ability to translate sights into sounds and visual spectacles into harmonies!” “Un Siècle de musique française,” Ménestrel, 29 May 1887, 201.

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procession had to go out and come back in. 44 This unprecedented repetition, possibly planned, suggested that spectacle was arguably more important than plot, and that music was part of spectacle. As Locke has noted, Aida raised the question of what it means to establish and maintain an empire—issues of class and the dynamics of power—but it does so in a setting displaced from any relationship to France. This would presumably allow for dreaming without the responsibility of taking a stand on French colonization. That Aida and other such works could be interpreted in so many different ways (Locke proposes nine distinct readings) may have encouraged audiences to draw parallels between various situations of imperial domination. Here ancient Egypt could represent itself or the Middle East or imperialist Europe. 45 In rendering stereotypes transparent, especially with music that could convey cultural differences with or without “conventional exotic topoi,” Locke suggests, Verdi “allows audience members to make implicit connections to social structures and traits of character of their own time and place.”46 Indeed, I would argue, since in the colonies the French tended to look to indigenous peoples as their collaborators, victims of previous invaders who had driven them from the coast into the mountains (e.g., Kabyles in Algeria, Chams and Penong-Piaks in Vietnam, Cambodians in Indochina), the depiction of the Ethiopians as “primitive but vital” may have resonated with some. French colonialists considered these groups as survivors of “powerful nation[s] from the past” that had earlier colonized these lands: the Kabyles as descendents of the Celts; the Cham and Penong-Piak people as “the debris of a great Malay nation that, before recorded history, played an important role in Indo-China.”47 In other words, the opera could support identification, not only with the powerful, but also with the powerless, the conquered, the weak, especially if the latter were descendents of a once powerful civilization. From this perspective, French audiences may have associated themselves with the Ethiopians and the Egyptians with the Prussians in their attack on the French in 1870–71, a connection Verdi himself once made. 48 In recognition of his success, a week after 44.  H. Moreno [Henri Heugel], “Aida à l’Opéra,” Ménestrel, 28 March 1880, 130–32; Ralph Locke, “Aida and Nine Readings of Empire,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 3, 1 (2006): 63– 65; and Henson, “Exoticisme et nationalités,” 285. 45.  Locke, “Beyond the Exotic,” 106–7, and “Aida and Nine Readings,” 45–72, esp. 49. 46.  Locke, “Beyond the Exotic,” 119, 131. 47.  Petit, Colonies françaises, 347. As Charles Lemire puts it in “Aux monuments anciens des Kiams,” Le Tour du monde 68 (1894), “Oppressed excessively by the Annamese they [the Chams] saw liberators in us.” Translated in Cities of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Vietnam, ed. Walter Tips (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999), 179. 48.  In “Aida and Nine Readings,” Locke points out that Verdi was a “deeply committed anti-imperialist” (56, 71–72).

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Aida’s premiere at the Opéra, at a celebratory dinner with President Jules Grévy, Jules Ferry, and other politicians, Verdi upon Ferry’s recommendation was named a grand officier of the Légion d’honneur. 49 Delibes’s Lakmé, the opéra-comique that perhaps best represented republicans’ attitudes to the colonies, was composed in 1881–82 and reached the stage in April 1883. Two months before its premiere, Jules Ferry returned as the head of the government and renewed attention to colonial conquests in the Congo, Madagascar, Tonkin, and Tunisia. Whereas Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (1877), set in India at the time of the Muslim invasion, could have taken place anywhere in the Orient and virtually at any time, Lakmé’s portrayal of English colonialists in contemporary India reflected desire for a more realistic idea of the foreign Other.50 With an extraordinary budget of more than 80,000 francs, every effort was expended, as with the Opéra’s Aida, to make the exotic Other viscerally present: appropriate costumes and hair styles borrowed from images of Indian goddesses, replicas of Indian statues, and musical instruments that exactly reproduced those an Indian rajah had sent to the Conservatory museum.51 Delibes also musically represented the Other as accurately as he could in the ballet of the bayadères and the famous Bell Song.52 Moreover, the opera’s depiction of natives as uneasy and plotting a revolt may have suggested a perspective on the problems in Tunisia that contributed to Ferry’s resignation two years before. Rather than taking a harshly critical perspective on the participation in this revolt, Lakmé suggests a sympathetic view of the rebellion, perhaps in part because the colonialists are English, France’s competitors. Since Queen Victoria had been proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, rivalry with England abroad had led to Anglophobia. In 1879, during the war between the British and the Zulus in South Africa, the French press expressed admiration for the Zulus, whose king encouraged revolt among his people and 49.  Pougin, Verdi, 274. 50.  Le Grand Mogol (1877), Edmond Audran’s first opera-buffa, also depicted colonists in India, including a Parisian dentist and his sister, who falls in love with an Indian prince. After the dancing of the bayadères when the love affair is thwarted, she agrees to marry a local Englishman. The work became widely popular after its Paris premiere in 1884. An orchestral fantasy based on it was performed in Haiphong on 8 June 1889, where French colonialists may have identified with the story. Later that year, a famous singer debuted in a production of Le Grand Mogol before the governor-general and mayor. Claude Bourrin, Le Vieux Tonkin (Saigon: Aspar, 1935), 184, 200. 51.  These details appear in Un Strapontin de l’orchestra, “La Soirée théâtrale: Lakmé,” Figaro, 15 April 1883. 52.  According to Julien Tiersot in his Notes d’ethnologie musicale (Paris: Fischbacher, 1905), Delibes benefited from the help of an informant in writing the dances in act 2, one of which seems to use a mode transcribed by Fétis (73–74).

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attacks on the neighboring British colony of Natal. 53 In July 1882, when the English took control of it, disputes began over the Suez Canal. This context may have predisposed French audiences to sympathy for Lakmé’s Orient and its people’s desire to rebel against foreign occupation. 54 Admitting the strengths and courage of the colonized in any case made the conqueror seem all the more powerful, as with Verne’s Tartars. The nature and character of Lakmé would have reinforced this sympathy; she resembles Thomas’s Mignon. The idea for the opera came to the librettists of Jean de Nivelle upon hearing an American, Marie Van Zandt, sing the role of Mignon in Thomas’s opera.55 To create a work especially for this “child with a strange but captivating style,” whom they found “charming and bizarre,” they suggested that Delibes adapt Pierre Loti’s famous novel Le Mariage de Loti (1880), which, although set in Polynesia, features an English sailor (Loti himself) who falls in love with a local beauty but eventually leaves her. Already at the age of six, Van Zandt had reportedly lived the idea underlying Lakmé, that is, “savage passion in contact with our European civilization.”56 With her “exotic” background and “childlike graces,” she was the ideal singer to premiere Lakmé. When he meets her, Gérald refers to her “look of a child.” She describes her own music as “a naïve song.” When she tells of the forest where the lovers might hide at the end of act 2, she sings innocently (the score says “mysteriously”), almost entirely in eighth notes and gently arching lines to a hushed, relatively static accompaniment, as might Mignon (see ex. 4 and ex. 15). When dying, she loses her voice; it reduces to a single pitch, reminiscent of Mignon when she sings of not knowing from where she came. Lakmé is sincere and self-effacing; she takes her own life when she thinks she has been betrayed. 53.  Either the French were sympathetic to the Zulus and curious to see a “race” capable of standing up to the English, or the English were anxious to exhibit how civilized the people could be under their influence, for they sent a group of five Zulus from the colony of Natal to Paris that same year. They “were exhibited” at the Folies-Bergère and depicted in the press both as performers, with their weapons and shields, bare-chested, and with feathers rising from their heads, and among the theater’s well-dressed public. 54.  Also possibly predisposing some French to identify with Lakmé’s people was their belief, unmentioned in reviews but nevertheless an ongoing interest of many French, that their musical roots could be traced back to India and its Aryan civilization. See, e.g., Henry Woollett, Histoire de la musique depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Monde musical, 1909), 1: 37–39, 46, 54, 70. 55.  Un Strapontin, “Lakmé.” Van Zandt had performed in Mignon and Faust all over Europe in the early 1880s. 56.  In an evocative but possibly highly apocryphal story, Van Zandt once charmed some Amerindians who came out to hear her vocalises in a Massachusetts forest and took her for “a supernatural being.” Subsequently, she was raised in England. Ibid.

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The opera thus is not about the conquests of the exotic woman, for her charms involve no overt manipulation. Rather, both the man and the woman are occasions for a voyage imaginaire, that is, a love that begins in their imaginations, mutually, before they meet. After listeners are drawn into the dream by the lullaby-like duet of Lakmé and Mallika, Gerald begins to be filled with “the fantasy of delusions” to which he both defiantly resists as well as tentatively indulges. Lakmé, sensing immanent change in the nature around her and accompanied by open octaves and fifths, anxiously moves between E major and E minor as she asks herself, repeatedly, why she feels strangely happy. Their mutual anxiety culminates in their first duet, in which both discover its source and echo the same ornamented descending octaves, cadencing on “love.” Under the charm of her Berceuse in the forest, which Lakmé herself refers to as “sweet” and “naïve,” Gerald falls asleep. When his English friends come to get him, they cry out, “Awake, dreamer, awake!” and Lakmé, before expiring and in a hauntingly beautiful moment, thanks Gerald for having given her “the sweetest dream that one can have under this sky.” James Parakilas interprets both Lakmé and Carmen as “dreams about the dreamers, men (almost never women) who test their dreams of escaping into a different life and who bring down the curtain by proving to themselves—and the audience—that the dream is false and escape is impossible.”57 The ending certainly makes this interpretation plausible—Lakmé vanishes “far from this world” as the curtain drops; hopes expressed for her “eternal life” most likely applied to the fate of the opera as well. However, the mutuality of the characters’ dreaming—Lakmé’s as well as Gérald’s—adds a twist to the conventional story. In addition to depicting the typical exotic woman’s enchantment of the foreigner, charming him with her voice, particularly in the Bell Song, the opera focuses on Lakmé’s fascination with Gerald. The dream of colonialists, as expressed by Lakmé, was that the exotic Other desired them as much as they were desired by Westerners, that they were similar enough to understand and be understood by non-Western peoples, and thus could engage in reciprocal relationships with them.58 Moreover, Gérald and his companion Frédéric both note early in the opera, “Everywhere women are the same, happily, so happily.” This observation establishes a rationale for their mutual feelings, also underlying Aida and Samson et Dalila. If people are the same and love is universal, when Lakmé uses stylistically Western tunes with no Orientalist inflections to express this love, European music 57.  James Parakilas, “The Soldier and the Exotic: Operatic Variations on a Theme of Racial Encounter,” Opera Quarterly 10, 2 (Winter 1993–94): 41. 58.  Leroy-Beaulieu describes colonization as a “permanent exchange of influences, a reciprocity of services . . . in a word, a mutual dependence” (De la colonisation, xvi).

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Ex. 15  Delibes, Lakmé (1883), act 2, “Dans la forêt près de nous.” Here Lakmé describes a nearby forest where she and Gerald can escape detection amid the exotic bamboo, vines, and flowers. Her melodic line is made up of almost entirely ex.15 Pasler.UCP eighth notes over a repetitive figure in the orchestra, giving the music a simple, almost childlike character that supports perceptions of both Lakmé and Marie Van Zandt.

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too seems universal (ex. 15).59 It is as if Western music—and, by inference, Western culture—are the only ones that could be imagined as shared. The story also proposes that the West was as mysterious, alluring, and dangerous to Easterners as the East was to Westerners. This suggests that something other than conquest was going on in the colonies, that the Other—or at least certain others—was attracted to the potential of assimilation. The audience at the premiere (which included Antonin Proust, various military officers, and intellectuals involved in the colonial policy discussions) may also been pleased with another of its themes. Toward the end, only a few measures of a military march are enough to induce Gérald to depart. Duty, honor, and devotion to one’s country are as strong a 59.  Ibid., 48. In his “Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers,” Locke notes that certain passages sung by Aida too are “free of Otherizing accent” and might “cause us to feel as if we ourselves were Aida” (129).

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force as mutual love—it is the old duty/love theme of French classical drama and Simon’s perspective on it rearticulated in an East-West plot. With all that the opera implies about personal freedom, sensuality, and sexuality, finally patriotism turns out just as motivating and important. Such works raise an important question: were they meant to promote particular attitudes to the colonies or to reflect prevailing perceptions? I would suggest they probably did a little of both. Offering a certain utility from the perspective of imperialists, exotic spectacles, whether for elites or bourgeois audiences, used the luxury of spectacle to play into Westerners’ fascination with power, 60 while helping them consider cultural differences and the possibility of mutual desire between Self and Other. This is in part because their “charm” coaxed audiences into dreaming, escaping reality as well as, in a certain sense, themselves—arguably just as important to French audiences as metaphysical transcendence was to Germans. The attempt at portraying realism or “historical truth” in the sets and costumes articulated differences rendering possible this escape. At the same time, it was crucial that the stories involve comprehensible stereotypes on whom French listeners could project both similarity and difference. As Homi Bhabha has pointed out, stereotypes recognize differences, though in a fixed, reified form, as well as disavow these differences. Their ambiguity ensures their replicability, predictability, and thus understandability. 61 Exotic spectacles and their stereotypes create a framework for understanding the Other as a function of one’s categories, allowing their use for a purpose. Temporary escape and communal experience of exotic stereotypes could have cemented a sense of Self shared by all present, regardless of their social and political differences, molding an audience into a microcosm of the nation regardless of what listeners identified with. Everyone would have enjoyed the thrill of an imagined adventure, followed by the self-satisfied pride of return to the comforts of home. This would have reinforced white European ethnocentrism. Exotic libretti also had utility for composers. Exotic subjects inspired not only picturesque dramatic characters, but also rich orchestral colors, expanding the palette of musical sounds—an important form of musical progress for the French. 62 Moreover, libretti that joined fiction and reality left room for composers to dream, to pick up 60.  Herbert Lindenberger, Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 274–75. 61.  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), chap. 3. 62.  For more on the utility of exotic music for composers and listeners, see chapter 10 below.

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where the poet left off,63 as Debussy later appreciated in Maeterlinck. Metaphorical stories encouraged this. Simple plots also helped, allowing the music “its superiority.”64 In the end, as a Lakmé reviewer put it (substituting “beautiful” for “sweet” in Lakmé’s final song), it is music more than story—the varied and evocative orchestration, suave melodies, and fluidity—that gives “the most beautiful dream that one can have under our sky.”65 Killing off the woman in these operas is a way to end the dream, not necessarily comment on the impossibility of racial intermarriage, assimilation, or universals. 66 Moreover, as noted in chapter 6, the qualities associated with exotic women like Lakmé are often those many wanted to associate with French music, especially its “exquisite, penetrating charm, which delightfully lulls its listeners, sending them on a journey to dream’s ethereal realms.”67 Not surprisingly, in 1884, Delibes was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts and Lakmé was soon being performed both all over France and abroad. Reviewers of the London production not only found that the role fitted Van Zandt “like a glove,” especially the agility of her voice and the “purity” of her intonation—the ultimate accomplishment for a Western singer—they also called Lakmé the “personification of French opéracomique,” a genre in which the French excelled without much foreign influence. 68

Music and Colonial Assumptions Under the republicans, music was used to support three assumptions that underlay French imperialism. The first of these was the idea that human beings could understand one another because they were fundamentally the same (essentially reflecting the monogenist view that all the races descended from one). 69 French 63.  Paul Bernard, commenting on Louis Gallet’s libretti in “Théâtre National de l’Opéra: Le Roi de Lahore,” Revue et gazette musicale, 6 May 1877, 137. Furthermore, in comparing Le Roi de Lahore with Aida, Bernard observed that while Verdi is more “nervous,” Massenet is more “dreamy.” 64.  Review of Lakmé in Amiens, Ménestrel, 1 February 1885, 71. In her Unsung Voices (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991, Carolyn Abbate argues that voice transcends plot in the Bell Song (5–6). 65.  Un Strapontin, “ Lakmé.” 66.  In such an opera, I also do not hear these endings as using death to contain the power of women, as Catherine Clément suggests in her Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 67.  Review of Lakmé in Amiens. 68.  T. Johnson, summarizing various reviewers in “Chronique de Londres,” Ménestrel, 14 June 1885, 221. 69.  In Greater France, Aldrich discusses other assumptions: that conquest was legitimate and that the colonies should serve France, help solve national problems, and provide fields of opportunities (91–93).

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anthropologists of the time measured and compared the physical characteristics of foreign visitors to Paris, especially those who were part of ethnographic exhibitions. While polygenists believed in a separate origin for each human race and argued that the nature of a people was fixed and homogeneous, not alterable by education or intelligence, monogenists, many of them republicans, focused on universal traits, which they sought to identify throughout the globe. They saw racial diversity as a result of migration and adaptation to shifting circumstances. This was important. It underlay their belief in the potential of the environment to influence people and in the ability of people, through education and reason, to adapt and change. Just as they hoped to use these to turn the classes populaires into French citizens, republicans believed that people from other cultures too should be able to assimilate. To enjoy the benefits of laws assuring liberty, equality, and fraternity, one had only to learn the language and accept a French way of life. Such an idea also formed the basis of their assimilationist colonial policy—its hopes, illusions, and ultimately its cruel naïveté. Besides music and exotic spectacles, musical instruments and images of them reinforced republicans’ assumption of universals in the world. In 1879–80, Johannes Weber studied ancient monuments, early texts, and other documents from various nations for recurring instruments. Having acknowledged that the Arabs had introduced the two-stringed rebab to Europe, he nonetheless pointed to a Latin text documenting the use of similar stringed instruments in Brittany in the sixth century. An obelisk in Constantinople showed him organs already there in the fourth century. Although Weber was careful to describe their different names, scales, and functions, he used Western categories such as drum, trumpet, flute, guitar, and harp to facilitate comparison and act as a framework for understanding.70 This reduced the Other to varieties of the same. Although he found harps and other plucked and bowed string instruments from eastern Europe to South America and from Africa to Indonesia, no instrument was more widely used than drums.71 Images of drums, in fact, dominate the popular magazine L’Illustration. Defying any rigid notion of cultural distinction, these appeared in engravings and photographs from the military exercises, folk music, and orchestras of all European nations to the fields and festivities of Africa and 70.  Johannes Weber, “Ethnographie des instruments de musique,” Revue et gazette musicale, 16 November 1879, 371–72, through 29 February 1880, 65–67. 71.  Perhaps recognizing this, E.-M. de Lyden was quick to point out not only the provenance of drums in France, but also their importance to Louis XIV and his musicians. He also discusses the two drums used in the French military. See his “Le Tambour,” Ménestrel, 4 July 1880, 241–43, and 11 July 1880, 249–50.

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Southeast Asia.72 Regardless of the drum’s size, how it is held and performed, and what it is made of, these images document similarities in shape and function from one culture to the next. Everywhere, these hollow resonators, when struck, call people together or give rhythm to their movements. Shared by diverse classes, ethnicities, and cultures, such instruments allude to the existence of a musical universal—sound of a certain nature serving the same basic function virtually everywhere—and what Saussure called the first principle of assimilation, the fundamental unity of the human race.73 As France was acquiring new colonies, the use of Western instruments by indigenous people in the French colonies may have given readers back home confidence in the possibility of assimilation. For example, among its images of Madagascar, a French protectorate since 1885, L’Illustration represents two Western-style military drums, snare and bass, played on the hips as in France, plus three Western-style violins (fig. 51). This appropriation of Western instruments for a parade on 14 July 1893, the French national holiday, documented Africans’ assimilation of French customs on Nossi-Bé, an island off the northwest coast of Madagascar, which a treaty opened to French commerce in 1860. Intent on modernizing his country, the Madagascan king supported the establishment of Catholic missionaries and the French Navy there. Assimilation of Western musical instruments suggested latent respect for French culture.

Second (and related to the first assumption) was the idea that resources were neutral, interchangeable, and transportable, that they could function outside their original context, whether they were plants, animals, people, or music. All that was needed to assimilate those from outside France was “acclimatization,” or their habituation to new conditions of existence. To acclimatize an individual or race of whatever species, as Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire explained it, meant to remove it from its place of origin and imprint on its organization modifications 72.  In H. Robert Cohen’s Les Gravures musicales dans l’Illustration (Québec: Presse de l’Université Laval, 1982–83), drums (tambours) appear 92 times from 1864 to 1899 associated with non-Western music (33 times), Western military scenes (21), Western folk music (14), and Western classical music (24). See also Jann Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129, 1 (Spring 2004): 24–76. 73.  Even Léopold de Saussure, who criticized this idea in his Psychologie de la colonisation française dans ses rapports avec les sociétés indigènes (Paris: Alcan, 1899), sees assimilation as based on this belief (31).

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Fig. 51  “Nossi-Bé: Queen Binao and her sister Kany visiting the residence on 14 July,” L’Illustration, 2 September 1893.

that rendered it able to exist and perpetuate its species under these new conditions.74 The purpose of bringing exotic plants and animals to France was not just to understand the mechanism of racial diversity, but also to determine which species could acclimatize to France and what economic and social utility they could serve, particularly for agriculture and industry. The capacity of something to acclimatize was also a fundamental prerequisite for free trade, something the republicans made possible by law in 1880. It meant that the French could appropriate foreign ideas and products for their use-value. Some hoped that this might lead to innovation, possibly new commodities. Others wished to use ethnic specimens to awaken curiosity and generate support for colonialism. Faced with the distance and difference of foreign cultures, it was important, therefore, to emphasize what transcended the constraints and particularities of foreign cultures and had potentially universal utility. Instruments provided great examples of acclimatization, whether in press images or museums, particularly the Musée d’ethnographie, created in 1880. One could compare, for example, the vertically held Tunisian “violin,” played with a bow, and the plucked, vertically held instrument used in Bosnian dance orchestra, or the marimbas of West Africa and their congénères in Indonesia and Indochina. Cultural confusions aside, these allowed readers to see family resemblances among instruments and musicians within three regions—Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe. They also drew attention to possible transnational movement, whether of religion (Islam in Tunisia and Bosnia) or culture (Europe to Argentina), and suggested how local traditions could affect instrument design and performance. Collectors and scholars of chansons populaires showed how the acclimatization of a melody might work. Occasionally, they changed an interval to make a dominant cadence and inevitably added harmony and other accoutrements of Western art song, including instrumental introductions, interludes, and codas. Julien Tiersot “dressed them with the clothes of harmony,” so that in “transporting them into a context so different from their natural context” they would not be too dépaysé (like fish out of water) and could be admitted “into a world that would not accept them in their bare simplicity.” That Tiersot listed himself on concert programs as the author of the chansons populaires he published recognized their status as musi74.  Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Acclimatation et domestication des animaux utiles (Paris: Maison rustique, 1861). The French systematically began to experiment with trying to acclimatize species foreign to France in 1848. Declaring that only half the globe had been developed for useful exploitation, in 1860, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire created a zoo (distinct from the Jardin des Plantes) that specialized in acclimatization as well as the creation of racial hybrids: the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation.

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cal hybrids.75 In the accompaniment to his transcriptions of chansons populaires from Greece and Brittany, Bourgault-Ducoudray based the harmony—what he called the “conquest of the modern races”—on the melody’s mode and imitated its rhythms and changing meters. He also added performance instructions, extensive accompaniments, and sometimes interludes that made them like art songs, easily accessible to Western audiences. His goal was to show that modes were compatible with modern music and could be acclimatized, explored and incorporated for the sake of French musical progress. 76 Acclimatization had tangible benefits, but also predictable limitations. “Definitively acclimatized,” Aida entered the Opéra’s repertoire.77 If borrowed melodies and their Western accompaniments seemed incompatible at first, new sounds and original effects could arise from their combination. But while most composers who incorporated French chansons populaires into their works used them as signs to their origins, those who borrowed from the vast repertoire of indigenous song from throughout the world were often content to acclimatize exotic modes or exotic tunes to suit Western purposes without acknowledging their presence.78 It was enough of a tour de force to accompany these melodies with a “rational succession of chords.”79 In seeking themes “to bend under their laws and force [them] to enter into the framework of their compositions,” they proceeded like colonialists. To the extent that those themes resisted acclimatization, they suggested the realities of colonial life. In general, non-Western modes, melodies, and timbres in Western settings gave rise to what Homi Bhabha calls the “inbetween”—the “zone of intersection” that results in “unresolved and unresolvable hybridity.”80 While racial theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau considered hybridization a prelude to racial degeneration, Saint-Saëns in his “Rhapsodie mauresque” showed what can be accomplished through hybridity, even if this rendered the work difficult to understand. After juxtaposing timbres, themes, and temperaments, the last third of the work insis75.  Julien Tiersot, Mélodies populaires des provinces de France 1 (Paris: Heugel, 1888), 1; and 4 (1911), 3. 76.  See Jann Pasler, “Race and Nation: Musical Acclimatization and the Chansons Populaires in Third Republic France,” in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 147–67. 77.  Pougin, Verdi, 262. 78.  Whether Bizet was inspired by Arabic, Greek, or Phrygian music, or was unconscious of the connection, Lacome found the mode asbein, “le mode du diable,” sung by Carmen in his opera. “Chants de la race cabirique ou gallique” (cited n. 18 above), 387. 79.  Henri Quittard, “L’Orientalisme musical: Saint-Saëns orientaliste,” Revue musicale, 1 March 1906, 113. 80.  Bhabha, Location of Culture, 4.

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tently superimposes two meters and suggests two modes, the triple meter theme in D-Mixolydian over the static duple meter accompaniment in A-Dorian. As if to foreground his Western skills, he also accompanies the theme with itself in similar and contrary motion in a way that recalls counterpoint, a genre absent from Arab music (see ex. 13a). Elsewhere overt modal differences between a theme and its accompaniment “give the illusion of a melody without accompaniment.” This metric and tonal “indecision” and “uncertainty,” together with the “compromise” we accept because of the “rational succession of the chords,” is a kind a metaphor for the cultural coexistence of colonialism. 81 Because acclimatization ignores the effects of displacement and disjunction on objects themselves and their meaning, borrowed exotic melodies often lose their most distinctive characteristics when combined with Western musical procedures. Making possible new uses of nonWestern music inevitably entailed removing meaning—tradition and history— ascribed by previous users and replacing this with new meaning. In this sense, musical borrowings reduced varieties of difference to the category of difference, sometimes collapsing into the binarism of Self-Other. To the extent that new uses fixed the borrowed object, its commodification could derail music’s capacity to signify in meaningful ways.

To support a third assumption underlying French imperialism—the idea of France and the French as superior despite their humiliating losses in 1815 and 1870—they needed an Other who was clearly inferior. 82 In the 1880s, the French focused on what constitutes Western civilization in a global context. They saw themselves as its greatest representative and its guardian. In 1882, Ferry said his mission was not to “realize the impossible fusion of the races, but to promote or awaken among other races the superior notions of which we are guardians.”83 Influenced by social Darwinism, they embraced the concept of racial evolution and racial atavism, predicting that less advanced races could revert to the uncivilized behav-

81.  Quittard, “Orientalisme musical,” 107, 111–12. 82.  This idea was well-developed by the 1860s when the French came to see their colonies as a reflection of their military and economic power and the victory of civilization over barbarie. See Jacques Thobie and Gilbert Meynier, Histoire de la France coloniale, vol. 2: L’Apogée (Paris: Colin, 1991), 519–36. 83.  This was written in his preface to Les Affaires de Tunisie (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1882); cited in Serge Bernstein, “Jules Ferry,” in Léo Hamon, Les Opportunistes: Les Débuts de la République aux républicains (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1991), 267.

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ior of their ancestors. 84 Defining and proving this was as elusive as the concept itself. Despite little knowledge and understanding of distant cultures, explorers’ accounts served the French well, producing objects of knowledge for Western consumption and reinforcing stereotypes about so-called primitive cultures. In illustrations accompanying memoirs, adventure novels, and magazines, modestly dressed or half-naked non-Westerners, more often than not living in nature and fighting with spears and other simple arms, suggested civilizations limited in their development. When juxtaposed with Westerners’ exquisitely tailored clothes, luxurious salons and theaters, and massive, well-armed militaries, they seemed to call out for the “civilizing” influence of their colonizers. 85 By providing extreme contrasts with their own culture, whether in the distant reaches of the West (Argentina and provincial Russia) or in Indochina and the west coast of Africa, such images reinforced the claims of social Darwinism, the purported survival of the fittest. They also encouraged the French to believe in the second principle of assimilation, the absolute value of all things Western, independent of time and place. Almost everything about Western musical instruments seemed to suggest their superiority. In arguing for a “logical and uniform,” that is, evolutionary development of music, Johannes Weber and others used them to posit a hierarchy of race and culture. Instruments and their scales alluded to a culture’s “progress” and relative status as if there were various “degrees” of civilization, a tenet held by both monogenists and polygenists. Because of the value Weber assigned to melody over sonority and rhythm, stringed instruments come out on the top, percussion at the bottom. Similarly, Gustave Chouquet, curator of the Conservatoire’s musical instrument collection, contended that “percussion and wind instruments were less important” because “man, proceeding from simple to complex,” made these first, and people still use them widely “in savage countries all over the world.”86 Weber also signaled how the melodies of “savage people,” very short and formed of a small number of repeated notes, resemble those of “European peasants.” Yet, 84.  Peter Baugher, “The Contradictions of Colonialism: The French Experience in Indo­ china, 1860–1940” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1980), 7. 85.  Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 14. Conklin notes that the French of the time associated bare feet and minimal clothes with “savagery” and were proud that Africans coming to the 1889 exhibition left France “fully shod,” considering this “civilization in the making.” 86.  Gustave Chouquet, Le Musée du Conservatoire national de musique: Catalogue descriptif et raisonné (Paris, 1875; suppl. 1884), 198, 243.

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contradictions abound, such as Weber’s praise for Arabs and Indians who used far more modes (scales) than Westerners did. 87 In images of French musical performance, the large orchestras, elegantly dressed players, and sophisticated concert halls would also have suggested Western superiority, especially to those living in the colonies. The juxtaposition in L’Illustration (31 May 1879) of an image of a near-naked “Annamite” playing an unusual bamboo mouth organ (the kén pé) with one of a charity ball with orchestra at the Hotel Continental in Paris is a case in point (fig. 52). 88 As in many salon performances in the city, crystal chandeliers, carved wood paneling, and stylish exquisitely tailored clothes of the audience members as well as the performers at the ball are evidence of great skill and beauty. Imported, portable palm trees suggest Western domination over the natural order. Those attending such performances and able to afford these luxurious forms of beauty are unambiguously white and upper-class. Throughout L’Illustration, the opulence of similar-looking, Greekinspired theaters all over Europe and as far away as Constantine, Algeria (1883), and Odessa (1887) document the extent of European power and achievement. In this context, the image of the musician wearing only a loincloth, a cape, and some jewelry, which accompanied an article by a military captain who traveled to Annam in 1876, acknowledges certain realities that perhaps contributed to the arguments for French intervention. The Indochinese musicians depicted in L’Illustration (25 October 1884) (fig. 53), amid the Sino-French war in Tonkin just after Annam and Tonkin had become French protectorates, are quite different and suggest a certain civilization. The performers are fully clothed and wear discreet hats; they are playing stringed instruments and woodwinds, suggesting instrumental coordination required in ensemble-playing and special skills needed for correct intonation. Their sound was most likely relatively quiet and refined, requiring close listening, possibly sophisticated audiences. Nothing suggests the primitivism, sensuality, decadence, or danger often associated with exotic Others in nineteenth-century France. The Chinese deity in the background and the close resemblance of these musicians to 87.  Weber, “Ethnography,” notes that Rabindranath Tagore took this as proof of Indian superiority over Europeans (66, 372, 377). 88.  Described as a “Moï” or “savage,” but never discussed in the article in which he appears, this image is of the most primitive musician in L’Illustration between 1870 and 1900. This man, from near Ba-truc (province of Hué) in the mountains between Annam and Laos, was probably one of the Malais, a race conquered by the Annamites and dispersed into the forests and the mountains west of Annam (central Vietnam). The image strongly resembles a photograph of “Khas savages” from Laos published in L’Illustration (1903) and a photograph of a Penong-Piak, the largest of this group, reproduced in Petit, Colonies françaises, 347.

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Fig. 52  “Savage on the outskirts of Ba­­truc,” L’Illustration, 31 May 1879; from M.  Dubreuil de Rhin, Le Royaume d’Annam et les An­­namites (Paris: Plon, 1879).

Fig. 53  “Buddhist ceremony in a pagoda,” L’Illustration, 25 October 1884; from Charles Lemire, L’Indochine: Cochinchine française, royaume de Cambodge, royaume d’Annam et Ton­­kin, 3rd ed. (Paris: Challamel aîné, 1884).

Chinese musicians published earlier in L’Illustration (20 September 1873) would have been important to French imperialists who argued that annexing Indochina, for the French a “little China,” would get them access to China itself. The extreme difficulties the French had in trying to assimilate the Indochinese made it important continually to remind the French public why the land was worth the expense and effort.

Although much related to music seemed to support the inevitable migration of people and their cultures, the colonized’s potential desire to assimilate, the capacity and desirability of their resources to be acclimatized in French contexts, and the ultimate superiority of French culture, the collusion was not ideal, and music expressed this. The binary oppositions that make for dynamic form and good classical structures in Western music—whether in the ternary ABA of a march or the male-female duos in opera—mask the realities of identity. Stereotypes suppress not only accuracy, but also variety. While the costumes and sets of exotic spectacles occasionally captured something authentic about a foreign culture, music ensured insulation from anything substantially different. With its large orchestras and complex harmonies clothing all sound, music inevitably denied much specificity or materiality to whatever may have been signaled or acclimatized. More often than not, audiences were encouraged merely to experience an imaginary exotic Other, not given a venue in which to know it as something distinct from their imagination or from other Others.

Songs Inspiring Resistance Mapping the nation onto its empire represented not only France’s biggest commitment in the early 1880s, but also its most problematic. Not all French agreed with the attempt to assimilate non-Westerners and the diversion of resources from the country’s other needs. The colonies turned out to be a difficult testing ground for the republican theory of “universalism.” Treating the natives as equals was neither a simple nor a self-evident proposition. Some doubted whether other races could learn to behave like the French. In 1883, Armand de Quatrefages, a leading monogenist, recognized that in acclimatizing, a race could degenerate, that is, lose or modify the character most appreciated in it. Acclimatization represented the victory of milieu over an organism. But this never took place without a more or less violent struggle, which necessarily led to loss for both individuals and

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generations. 89 In an 1884 study of Arab civilization, Gustave Le Bon argued that assimilation would never be possible, since the French and Arab races were too dissimilar.90 Writing about Saint-Saëns’s frequent adoption of Oriental melodies in his work, a critic similarly threw his hands up at the possibility of true assimilation: “European music, Oriental music, these are two distinct, often opposed organisms, in any case, as far one from the other as Aryan languages are from Semitic ones.” Attempts to incorporate Oriental melodies ended up in distortion, and this problem was “insurmountable.”91 Some who benefited from France’s colonialism, such as Pierre Loti, the pen name of the French naval officer Julien Viaud, began to think that bringing French civilization to exotic Others was not entirely good. In his Le Mariage de Loti and later Madame Chrysanthème, based on a diary he kept in Japan in 1885, he reiterates the age-old lament that, with the increasing presence of Western civilization abroad, old customs and traditions were beginning to disappear, rendering exotic travel less interesting (meaning perhaps less useful as a resource for the Western imagination). To the extent that France’s “civilizing mission” tended to ignore national and racial differences, it minimized the very things that seduced Loti and fueled his desire. Whether and for what purpose to call the French back to arms stimulated perhaps the greatest political differences in the early 1880s. Those who preferred to concentrate on revanche, an unusual combination of radical republicans, conservatives, and monarchists focused on recovering Alsace and Lorraine, protested Ferry’s imperialist projects bitterly and with some success. Georges Clemenceau, a leader of the radical republicans whom Ferry called intransigeants, had clashed earlier with Ferry while he was mayor of the eighteenth arrondissement. As deputy from Montmartre, beginning in 1880, Clemenceau used La Justice, a newspaper he directed, to attack Ferry. After Ferry’s Tunisian politics provoked internal revolt, in 1881, he forced the prime minister’s resignation. Fear of Germany colored this rejection of imperialist ventures. Germany’s potential threat was growing. In 1882, it formed the Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy, and in 1883, it embarked on its own colonial efforts in Southwest Africa. After Ferry again became prime minister, in October 1884, he began negotiations

89.  Quatrefages, “Acclimatation des animaux et des plantes,” Magasin pittoresque 2, 1 (1883): 373–75. 90.  Gustave Le Bon, La Civilisation des arabes (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884). 91.  Quittard, “Orientalisme musical,” 108–9.

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with Germany. However, his adversaries objected.92 Resistance to Ferry reached a new peak during the Sino-French war in northern Tonkin (August 1884 to April 1885) when the French suffered heavy losses. On 11 December 1884, the monarchist Duc Albert de Broglie, a former Moral Order prime minister, argued in the Senate: “Colonial policy is a luxury forbidden to a weakened France . . . a luxury and an excess of power for a nation that overflows with force and prosperity. For a nation momentarily weakened, it’s a burden that puts a strain on [the country] and could lead to ruin both for the colony and the metropole.”93 It is ironic that to lambaste a government policy with which he disagreed, a conservative supporter of the Opéra would employ the word “luxury,” often used by the Left to argue against the need for the Opéra’s huge subsidy. The following month, Paul Déroulède, a friend of Gambetta’s, published an article in Le Drapeau (10 January 1885) making a similar argument about the implications of France’s weakness: To colonize usefully, one needs not just an excess of men and merchandise, but also, an excess [trop-plein] of glory. Undisputed supremacy cuts short any debate and resolves conflicts. . . . We have lost face in the world, as the Chinese expression puts it, and the mask of exotic conquests won’t give this face back to us. Colonies [seem like a] compensation for [our] lost provinces and an immediate remedy for our industrial and commercial crisis. [But what they cause us is] the dispersion of our military forces, our absence in Europe, the installation [intronisation] of Germany in France, the renunciation of our rights, and the abandonment of our French in Alsace-Lorraine.94

In his address to the Chambre on 30 July, the radical Clemenceau went further, taking on Ferry’s notion of “inferior races” as the justification for colonization. If the colonized were inferior because we had been able to conquer them, then analogously, “are we an inferior race to the Germans because we lost to them?” Were we arguing for “the power of force over that of right [la Puissance de la force 92.  Monarchists thought Ferry had fallen into a “Prussian trap.” Clemenceau accused him of being Bismarck’s “protégé,” though in fact he exercised great prudence and refused a proposed alliance with Germany against England. Raymond Poidevin, “La Politique extérieure de Jules Ferry, 1883–85,” in Jules Ferry, fondateur de la République, 212–17. 93.  Reprinted in Charles-Robert Ageron, L’Anticolonialisme en France de 1871 à 1914 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973), 64. 94.  Ibid., 67–68.

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sur le Droit]”? “The history of France is a lively protest against this. The genius of the French race is to have generalized the theory of rights and justice, to have understood that the problem of civilization is to eliminate violence in men’s relationships with one another.”95 Compelling objections to French colonialism thus came from the monarchist Right as well as the radical Left.

Militaristic Patriotism and the Ligue des Patriotes Opposition to Ferry galvanized under the leadership of Déroulède (1846–1914),96 who represented a powerful and motivated wing of the republicans, faithful to the spirit and the traditions of 1848 and devoted to the Jacobin patriotism of Gambetta. Déroulède was known as a playwright and poet obsessed with revanche. He once defined it as “a war of wounded pride and envious hatred that a conquered people wish to wage against their conqueror.”97 Before the Prussians invaded France, he had predicted as much in “Le Clairon,” popularized in 1869 by the singer Mme Amiati at the café l’Eldorado.98 Considering himself only someone “sounding the bugle” (sonneur de clairon), he wanted to keep “fervor” alive and “forgetfulness from entering our hearts.”99 Admired for its revanchist spirit and heroic sentiment, his first volume of poems, Chants du soldat (1872), became one of the country’s best-selling, reaching its eighty-ninth edition by 1882 (fig. 54). Déroulède’s subsequent volumes of poetry—Nouveaux chants du soldat (1875), Marches et sonneries (1881) and later Refrains militaires (1888)—were also reprinted numerous times. In them, he tries to instill a cult of glory, respect for strength, military heroism, duty to one’s country, hatred for one’s enemies, and self-sacrifice. Ferry made his poetry required reading in primary schools. Gounod set two of these poems to music, “En avant!” (1875) and “Vive la France” (1878). The former, an allegro marziale for solo and chorus, inspires people to push forward in spite of death.100 The latter describes soldiers marching, “having duty as their guide,” and predicts revanche—“if hatred 95.  Ibid. 96.  Juliette Adam and her radical republican journal La Nouvelle Revue also played an important role in this resistance to colonialism. 97.  Paul Déroulède, “Discours de Cahors, 15 avril 1884,” in Le Bâtonnier Chenu, ed., La Ligue des patriotes: Son programme, son passé, son avenir (Paris: Sirey, 1916), 91. 98.  François Caradec and Alain Weill, Le Café-concert (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 72. 99.  Déroulède, from “A mes amis,” in his Marches et sonneries (Paris: Charles Lévy, 1881); extract in Figaro, 29 June 1881. 100.  Bourgault-Ducoudray set “En avant” for a three-voice chorus of children or women as part of a series, “Chants d’education et de récréation.”

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Fig. 54  Paul Déroulède, Chants du soldat (1872), patriotic poems set to music by Marmontel.

is already born, strength will be born.” President Mac-Mahon had commissioned this patriotic song for the 1878 Paris Exhibition, because there was no national anthem at the time.101 The Garde républicaine band performed it as a march for the opening ceremonies, and workers later sang it as a chorus.102 Déroulède’s play L’Hetman, first performed at the Théâtre de l’Odéon on 2 Feb­­ruary 1877, was also a huge success, performed seventy-three times in its first season and earning the highest receipts ever for the theater. This story of a Cossack leader who led an uprising against Polish oppressors struck a chord in French audiences, as did his virile, if somewhat brutal, style. After its final line calling for vengeance, “No matter the dead, freedom reigns,” long and frenetic applause followed this, coming from all branches of high society and a great number of officers.103 Massenet wrote incidental music, including Cossack patriotic songs (now lost) and a fanfare for the Cossack attack. While Gambetta was prime minister, in January 1882, Bert created a Com­ mission d’éducation militaire to promote military and patriotic values in the primary schools. This committee included Déroulède, the future French president Félix Faure, and the distinguished republican historian Henri Martin. When these men resigned out of frustration in mid-March, they began to conceive of a private association to promote their goals. Only weeks after Gambetta left office, on 18 May 1882, they met at a gymnastic society meeting and proposed a Ligue des patriotes. Déroulède gave what now appears like a prepared speech about French wanting to “develop the moral and physical strength of the nation.”104 Although its members were sympathetic to Gambetta, a member until his death in January 1883, and were intent on recovering Alsace and Lorraine, in its early years, like all other associations, the Ligue promised to concern itself with neither politics nor religion.105 It 101.  See also fig. 33, the discussion on p. 278 above, and Frédéric Robert, La Marseillaise (Paris: Pavillon, 1989), 91–92. 102.  Saint-Saëns too was attracted to Déroulède’s texts. He once improvised music for a comedy, La Blouse et l’habit, or Le Fils de la Révolution, based on words written by Paul Ferrier in conjunction with Déroulède. This was performed during musical evenings in the painting studio of Léon Glaize, a well-known portraitist. Watson Lyle, Camille Saint-Saëns (New York: Dutton, 1923; rpt., 1970), 68. 103.  Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique (1877) (Paris: Ollendorff, 1878), 183. 104.  There are differing views as to the origins of the Ligue. See Bertrand Joly, Déroulède: L’Inventeur du nationalisme français (Paris: Perrin, 1998), 66–68, and Peter Rutkoff, Revanche and Revision: The Ligue des patriotes and the Origins of the Radical Right in France, 1882–1900 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 24–25, 32. 105.  Having studied the Ligue’s archives and Déroulède’s correspondence, Raoul Girardet stresses this in his “La Ligue des patriotes dans l’histoire du nationalisme français,” Bulletin de

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attracted an unprecedented alliance of conservatives and radicals, royalists and Bonapartists, wealthy and ordinary folk for whom “patriot was the family name.” Martin served as its first president and three deputies—Faure, Alfred Mézières, and Edmond Turquet—were its vice presidents. Other politicians who joined were the radical republicans Clemenceau and Georges Leygues.106 The Ligue also included women and petit bourgeois Parisians disenchanted with economic recession, fearing socialism, and jealous of gains made by Jewish and non-French industrialists.107 The group worked like other associations, run by a small committee that met weekly. What the Ligue considered of greatest utility to the country was an expanded sense of sacrifice (more than Ferry was willing to espouse) and strengthened military education. Déroulède articulated their goals in his first speech and subsequently in his treatise De l’Education militaire (1882). First, inspired by Paul Bert and believing that “a country can be invaded and threatened in ways other than by soldiers,” and that “the arming of hearts is more necessary than that of the arms,” he advocated moral education.108 This should have three components: patriotic (“which makes one passionately love one’s country”), military (“which makes one serve patiently and willingly”), and nationalist (“which is the exact knowledge of the interests and needs of the entire nation”).109 Second, admiring the “vigor and flexibility” of those in gymnastic and fencing societies, he called for physical education. He wanted gymnastic classes to become a national institution, for gymnastic champions were becoming recognized as “useful to the country” in terms of enhancing its prestige and glory. Third, he wanted education in military values and virtues to begin two years before military service. In the introduction to his De l’Education militaire, Déroulède explains: la Société d’histoire moderne (1958): 3–6. However, such a phrase was a requirement of all associations requesting official recognition, including concert and choral societies. Because they also wished to stockpile arms and organize patriotic festivals, considered a state function, the government refused to grant them official recognition. Over the years, they were thus tolerated without being authorized. See Joly, Déroulède, 71. 106.  Leygues was elected to the Chambre in 1885; he served as minister of the Navy eleven times and was minister of public instruction and fine arts in 1894–95 and 1898–1902. 107.  As Brian Jenkins explains in his Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 (New York: Routledge, 1990), an urban populist Right emerged in the 1880s because of the focus on bourgeois concerns in the opportuniste government, the parliamentary character of its regime (which enabled antirepublican majorities to return to power after the revolutions of 1848 and 1870), and the républicains opportunistes’ inability to harness revanchiste sentiment (89–91). 108.  Jean-François Sirinelli considers Paul Bert the original inspiration for the Ligue and sees the Ligue’s original goals as very close to those of the Ligue de l’enseignement républicaine et laïque. See Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France, vol. 1: Politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 522. 109.  Le Bâtonnier Chenu, ed., Ligue des patriotes. 35–41; Rutkoff, Revanche and Revision, 32.

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It’s a question of transforming the youth of our schools into a legion of brave Frenchmen, of arming them from childhood on with the bundle [ faisceau] of male feelings and virile habits that make up the true soldier. This means [inspiring] the cult of the flag, which fortifies the love of the patrie, the taste for arms, which never takes away from the taste for books, the respect for discipline in which unity of effort and equality before duty is born, and, finally, pride in the name of France, with all the force that is necessary to be well and the courage it takes not to let oneself perish.110

Underneath this preoccupation was the fear that the young who had not experienced war would lose the vigor and “virile feelings” so necessary for a good army and that “the most courageous qualities of our race would disappear.” For this reason then, he considered the “bitterness of our defeats and our weakening” as “useful” motivation in building the country’s future army. To aid in this education, Déroulède called for two new national festivals, one on 29 April honoring the anniversary of Joan of Arc’s deliverance of Orléans (occupied by the Prussians in 1870), the other on 20 September reminding the French of the defeat of the Prussians at Valmy in 1792. With these, the French would be celebrating the first French patriot and the first victory of the republican army.111 He also pointed out that the country needed new schoolbooks oriented toward exciting patriotism and bravura. And he argued for engaging the help of music and patriotic poetry. Along with its gymnasiums, he thought that the secret to Germany’s strength was the songs taught in its schools. French parents should sing appropriate popular songs, beginning with the cradle, and vocal music should accompany scholarly excursions and gymnastic exercises. Noting, “patriotism will find in them a very good instrument of propaganda and training,” he asked the minister to encourage the writing of popular music and the organization of choral societies. He also proposed a competition and prize for the best collection of ten to twenty patriotic and popular songs to be used at home and in schools. As he envisaged it, this would include stories about French history and songs from other countries as a way to learn about what motivated their patriotism. Déroulède considered such songs “a kind of musical rallying [ralliement] that would follow our little Frenchman from the school to the barracks and from the barracks to the battlefields” (see ex. 16).112 110.  Paul Déroulède, De l’éducation militaire (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1882), 3. 111.  Ibid., 16. 112.  Déroulède, De l’éducation militaire, 9–18.

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Ex. 16  Oscar Petit and Charles Manso, “La Légende du petit tambour,” Chants scolaires du nord de la France (1885). This song tells the story of a “little drummer” who grows up dreaming of fighting for his homeland. The verses, each with an accompanying picture, show the patriot at various ages: first, at only five years old; then, ten; finally going to war in the third verse at age twenty; and “bravely dying” in the last verse.

One such volume by Félix Bayle, Recueil de chants patriotiques-faciles (1883), was written for girls’ and boys’ primary schools.113 In its preface, the author ex­­plains that poetry alone has only limited effect on children, but joined with music, their enthusiasm explodes and the effect is irresistible. He believed that when music reaches the ear, it imprints strongly on the memory.114 All the texts are by Déroulède, including “La Femme française,” the longest (ex. 17). This monophonic song without accompaniment elaborates on one of the poet’s most important themes: the utility of women. In two stanzas in C major and with snappy 113.  In her La Musique dans l’école: De Jules Ferry à nos jours (Issy-les-Moulineaux: EAP, 1995), Michèle Alten notes that Déroulède’s songs were included in many school song collections up through 1900 (80). 114.  Félix Bayle, Recueil de chants patriotiques-faciles (Paris: Colombier, 1883), iii, iv.

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Ex. 17  Félix Bayle, “La Femme française,” Recueil de chants patriotiques-faciles (1883). Here the composer uses the recurring note C' to suggest connections between woman, ex.17 Pasler.UCP - page 1 of 2inpages French, and love-making stanza 1, and between mother, instinct, and procreation in stanza 2, and the recurring rhythms of “femme” with hope, France, and soul.

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dotted rhythms, it tells women not to love their men if they aren’t willing to go to war and attacks mothers whose sons “walk effeminately toward their virile duty” for not knowing how to create good progeny.115 Such ideas hark back to Méhul’s “Chant du départ” and his own L’Hetman, in which the mother tells her son that “duty demands” that he leave his lover behind to take up arms and “die, for there must be blood.” In his book on the Ligue, Déroulède notes that his colleagues were particularly interested in having women as members, “because it is women who make sons.” More important than caring for the wounded, women should see their role as “giving heart to our future soldiers,” meaning the courage to love one’s country above all else.116 Even if she held a different attitude toward Germany through her enthusiasm for Wagner’s music, Augusta Holmès, who later dedicated two songs to Déroulède, was sympathetic to this notion of how women should understand war.117 In her first major work, the dramatic symphony Lutèce (1878), for which she wrote text as well as music, the Gauloise does not try to seduce or entreat when the interests of love and duty collide. In part 1, she happily explains, “Rejoice country. Your sons give their blood. I give my husband.” After comparing the blood of French heroes with French wine, in part 3 she sings exuberantly and with dotted rhythms, “The blood of heroes rejuvenates . . . saves cities . . . fertilizes devastated fields . . . For the blood of heroes and the mothers of still more audacious sons, the most beautiful country will be reborn.” With this work, Holmès suggested that the country’s salvation depended on women’s fertility as mothers. Support for the Ligue’s ideals, particularly la revanche, grew steadily in the musical world. In Bourgault-Ducoudray’s Hymne à la patrie (1881) for mixed chorus with children, six choral groups echo back and forth, “Let us have only one spirit—Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” and finally come together to proclaim, “Sound the fanfares, warriors . . . we will be avenged, we will be conquerors!” In 1882, Charles Lenepveu, another Conservatoire professor, wrote Velléda, an opera about war between the Gauls and the Romans, premiered at Covent Garden. And in 1881, 1883 and 1888, the Académie chose Geneviève, Le Gladiateur, and Velléda, libretti about militaristic patriotism, for the Prix de Rome competitions. 115.  In this context, “virile” clearly means willing to go to war, and “effeminate” its opposite. 116.  Paul Déroulède, Le Livre de la Ligue des patriotes (Paris: Bureau de la Ligue et du drapeau, 1887), 6. Many French leaders agreed that women’s primary duty to society was to have children. 117.  “Le Chevalier au lion” (1898) and “Ogier le Danois” (1900). Both concern heroes who desire revenge, salvation for their country, and glory.

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Theatrical entertainments too echoed this military ethic, particularly in works oriented to families. The Opéra populaire opened with the patriotic Roland à Roncevaux (1864) by Auguste Mermet, himself from a military family, and it was performed there throughout winter of 1883–84. The work not only introduced the “Chanson de Roland,” the oldest French epic, from the eleventh century, it also commemorated a military defeat Charlemagne’s army suffered in the Pyrenees, later used to motivate young Frenchmen to join the Crusades. That winter the Cirque d’hiver put on Les Volontaires de 92, another military epic with four tableaux, the third one set in Egypt. The performance, a “Lilliputian drama,” featured 200 children dressed in French military uniforms and squadrons with thirty ponies accompanied by artillery, fanfares, and military music.118 On 3 September 1884, Déroulède’s “Le Soldat” appeared in Le Figaro in a setting by André Wormser for a four-voice military chorus. It follows an exhilarating call and response form, with the refrain, “the soldier,” answering all kinds of challenges to which the soldier must rise.119 Backed by the radical republicans and capitalizing on a spirit of revanche against Germany that continued to inflame much of the country, Déroulède and the Ligue thus mounted a growing challenge to the républicains opportunistes. Ironically, he had much in common with them. Like Ferry, Déroulède was deeply patriotic and moved by the example of the French revolutionaries. His talents as a man of the theater more than a politician enabled him, like Gambetta, to rouse people. He believed that service to the nation should be the purpose of each individual. However, between 1882 and 1887, as secretary-general of the Ligue, he gave 300 speeches in Paris and the provinces, attempting to redirect French attention away from colonial expansion and refocus it on an alternative path to recovering French pride, taking back Alsace and Lorraine. People sometimes smiled at his militarist texts, but they also appreciated his chivalrous loyalty to the cause, his honesty, and his hopefulness.120 The Ligue considered these of “national utility.”121 Like the républicains opportunistes, Déroulède also understood the power of music to 118.  Charles Darcours [Charles Réty], “Courrier des théâtres,” Figaro, 16 January 1884. 119.  Between 1876 and 1895, a good number of minor composers set this song to music, often involving a choral setting of the refrain and building to a triumphant climax. BourgaultDucoudray composed a version for a chorus of two female or childrens’ voices, to be sung “with enthusiasm and largeur.” 120.  P.-B. Gheusi, Cinquante ans de Paris: Mémoires d’un témoin, 1889–1938 (Paris: Plon, 1939), 124. 121.  Many of these were published in the newspaper Le Drapeau to which Déroulède made regular contributions, or in his Livre de la Ligue des patriotes.

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influence people and the importance of reaching children at an early age. Using the very same means and strategies that his adversaries were putting in place to disseminate their hopes and ideals—education, music, and the theater—he hoped to reach a larger public. By 1885, he and the Ligue had become a political force to contend with.

e While Parisians in 1885 were delighting in myriad exotic spectacles in both elite and popular venues—Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine at the Opéra, Lakmé at the OpéraComique, Edmond Audran’s Indian opéra-bouffe, Le Grand Mogol, at the Gaîté, an African contortionist at the Folies-Bergère, and a comic pantomime with horses about the Congo at the Hippodrome—another crisis in Tonkin caused further division among republicans. Ferry was again removed as prime minister.122 Then the moderate opportunistes lost in the October elections, leaving no one with a majority, and almost equal voice to the radicals and the conservatives (what was left of the royalists, the Bonapartists having virtually disappeared).123 The legislature deadlocked, making further reform impossible and requiring an alliance with radicals on the Left. In January 1886, Charles de Freycinet formed a government with four opportuniste ministers, two radicals, and two from the extreme Left, a rising force in French politics. After expelling French princes and their heirs in May, banning them from the army and government office, and after completing the project of secular primary education in October, the government’s priorities within the country shifted decisively. Because most French saw economic growth as integral to the public good and agreed on the need to foster new markets, after enlarging the country in North Africa and Indochina, the new government turned to promoting economic liberalism. Whereas Ferry’s opportuniste government had focused on individual initiatives and small firms, the new government concentrated on large business interests. To the extent that these encouraged the spread of prosperity, they became associated with the national good. Fascinated with or fearful of the Other, the marketplace in some ways emerged as more productive than government in diffusing conflicting notions of what was 122.  In March 1885, a French general was forced to retreat from a Chinese army at LangSon. French anxiety over this turned out to be exaggerated. A treaty with China was soon signed, leaving Annam and Tonkin to become French colonies. 123.  Republican representation in the Chambre des députés fell from 383 to 201, and the anticolonial Right picked up over 100 seats.

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in the country’s best interest. Still, the conflict over the merits of assimilation and resistance continued for many years—during World War II, with Vichy collaborators and the French resistance, and today with internationalist-oriented conservatives espousing positions diametrically opposed to those of protectionist nationalists. The issue of who qualifies as a French citizen has never been more controversial.

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8 . Useful Distractions

and Economic Liberalism in the Belle Epoque

To prepare for a concert its employees offered to friends, family, and customers on 28 November 1885, the Bon Marché department store cleared out the merchandise on its main floor and installed a platform for 400 performers in the middle (fig. 55). To give the illusion of a huge luxurious salon—a “bewitching palace”—they covered the floor with magnificent Oriental rugs, hung opulent draperies, and set out massive exotic plants.1 The date was chosen to coincide with the exhibition of new coats just before the end-of-year sale. Six thousand invitations were sent out to customers, including Baroness de Rothschild. Employees were also invited, although the store made a conscious effort to control where they would sit. Two thousand green tickets were distributed to male employees for seats behind the platform, including over eight hundred for inspectors, wives of the musicians, and their guests; two to three hundred pink tickets went to female employees for seats on the upper floors, which functioned as balconies. Four thousand free programs were printed. Advertisements appeared in over twenty newspapers, ranging from L’Orphéon and L’Echo des orphéons, which reported on the activities of amateur music societies, to the mass-circulation Petit Journal; to Gil Blas, Le Temps, and Figaro, papers aimed at the middle and upper classes; and to Le Gaulois, newspaper of the aristocracy. If one is to judge by over fifteen reviews of this concert, Parisians took such events seriously. The concert itself was the fruit of music courses the Bon Marché provided for its employees, showing them what could be gained from hard work and discipline. For this occasion, the organizers invited stars from the Opéra and the most popular café-concerts to perform between their choruses and wind-band fantasies, 1.  Henri Bourgeois, “Nouvelles: Concert au Bon Marché,” L’Orphéon, 5 January 1886, cited in part in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869– 1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 172–73. I am indebted to Miller most especially for the clue, offered in his appendix, that the store’s archives included a trunk with concert programs and related materials, which I was subsequently able to consult.

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Fig. 55  Winter concert in the Bon Marché department store, 1887. Concerts were held in the main hall of the store, with the merchandise cleared out and Oriental rugs and palm trees brought in to decorate a makeshift stage. The upper floors functioned as balconies.

a practice begun in 1883. With art songs and operatic excerpts juxtaposed with comic ditties, and marches placed alongside romances, the result was eclectic in the extreme (fig. 56). Both in theaters and concert halls and in private salons, performances in the 1880s frequently mixed the serious and the popular. In this sense, they resembled the experience of the city and its department stores. Since Bon Marché employees typically performed in at least half the works put on in the store’s concerts, performance was a way of mediating class and cultural differences among professionals and amateurs and among rich and poor on stage and in the audience. Through musical performance, republican values could permeate, not just commerce, but also the private domain, as suggested by the concert’s salon décor. On summer Saturday evenings, the store’s wind band, the Harmonie du Bon Marché, gave performances, resembling military-band concerts in length and repertoire, in the square outside. These, too, attracted a mixed crowd of bourgeois and working-class listeners, young and old (fig. 57). Concerts drawing people to commercial venues thus made art music—even operas and symphonic poems by living French composers—available to the masses as well as the elites. Just as 452

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Fig. 56  Bon Marché concert, 28 November 1885. The performance mixed amateurs and professionals, classical and café-concert fare, serious and humorous music.

Fig. 57  Wind band concert in the square outside the Bon Marché, where up to six thousand people attended. The goods sold at the Bon Marché as advertised on the storefront behind the musicians (rugs, lace, silk) and the numbers of top hats, fashionable women, and well-dressed children attending suggest that the concerts attracted the middle and upper classes, but round hats and simply dressed women suggest that some in the audience were workers.

consumer goods in department stores became “instruments of instruction and politics,” such concerts could play a role in promoting more understanding among the classes and, ultimately, social change. 2 French attitudes to the commercial were distinctly different from those of German musicians, who largely rejected the public utility of the light and the frivolous. The marketplace was ideal for blurring the boundaries between the useful and the frivolous, the needs and desires of elites and ordinary people. Whereas earlier theorists like A.-C. Quatremère de Quincy, secretary of the Académie des beaux-arts, had advocated clear distinctions between the artistic and the commercial—in part to protect a connection between art and the moral ideas underlying its purpose—republicans of the 1880s did not find it degrading to esteem art for its commercial value. Their beliefs in the merits of competition and the marketplace were based on the belief that every individual was equal in some sense, regardless 2.  Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28.

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of class or status. This reinforced republicans’ desire to democratize pleasures. Although conservative politicians continued to prefer “noble” pleasures and railed against the nefarious influence on mœurs of popular genres, such as the caféconcert, they were not averse to allowing market forces to operate. Whether it was indirect encouragement or, more likely, an increasing taste for art music among city-dwellers, circuses, cabarets, skating rinks, and the zoo began to include this music. The zoo saw its revenues rise when it added low-cost concerts. For some, this was an explicit ploy to provide an element of education attractive to families. From a republican perspective, it lent an air of public utility to these performances, whether the music was listened to attentively or not. Because much of this commerce was concentrated in the middle of cities and improvements in transportation networks made it available to much of the urban population, this was the beginning of a period of greater consumption, entertainment, and gaiety—the belle époque.3 In bringing people together and encouraging sociability among the classes, commercial culture had important public utility, even if its pleasures and distractions defined the limits of that concept.

Department Stores The rise of department stores during the 1880s exemplifies the impact of this new focus on economic growth. Other scholars have examined the operation of these stores and the shopkeeper movement that sprang up in reaction to them. 4 What interests me is how they bring into relief both the strengths and weaknesses of the republican ideology, and in a way resembling concerts at the time. Although the grands magasins started during the Second Empire, they did not grow into the massive structures they subsequently became until the 1880s. Aristide Boucicaut took over Au Bon Marché (meaning good, or cheap, prices) in 1852. The Magasins du Louvre followed in 1855, and the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, Au Printemps, and La Samaritaine in the 1860s. Whereas prices in shops typically reflected what storeowners could get, and commissions were paid rarely and only on faulty or older merchandise, Boucicaut initiated fixed pricing marked directly on the objects, was able to accept small profit margins, because he purchased directly from manufacturers, and paid virtually all sales employees commissions to encourage competition and productivity. Other stores followed suit. As Philip 3.  See Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), and Louis Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Paris: Laffont, 1980). 4.  Miller, Bon Marché, and Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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Nord explains, “economies of scale, rational bureaucratic organization, [and] a symbiotic relationship with industry and innovative merchandising” accounted for their success.5 Needing to expand in the 1880s, Boucicaut acquired virtually an entire city block and hired Gustave Eiffel to build a large complex of new buildings that, besides the massive new space for the store itself (built of iron and glass), included facilities for employees as well as its delivery horses. This opened in 1887. Similar structures, also occupying a city block, were built for the other department stores Le Louvre (1879) and Au Printemps (1889). As Nord puts it, their elaborate façades “dazzled the stroller, the potential shopper, with an opulence and grandeur which the new Opéra house itself could scarcely match.”6 Whereas in the 1870s, turning away from Orléanist commercial interests, republicans looked to small shopkeepers to build the nation, in the 1880s, they embraced department stores as partners in promoting the growth of the economy. These played an important role in increasing demand for French goods. Also, like concerts, they were expected to help democratize access to many things previously considered luxury goods. The stores’ shelves displayed the widest possible range of items for the lowest possible price. Everyone could browse free of charge. In the beginning, the idea was to tempt women of the petite bourgeoisie into buying quasi-luxury items that previously they might not have been able to afford. (This group was not that socially distant from the employees themselves; certainly the wives of the store’s managers would have qualified.) In the 1860s, Boucicaut added ready-to-wear clothing; with his larger store in 1872, perfume, Oriental rugs, deluxe furniture, a travel-goods counter, and the beginning of a long line of trademark items such as gloves. By the 1880s, the Bon Marché’s target was the bourgeoisie. Understanding that the grande bourgeoisie rarely set foot in stores, Boucicaut published catalogues and began to do home deliveries. His goal was “to facilitate the possession of all that can be useful and agreeable at the most attractive price, without leaving aside good taste and true elegance.”7 In providing the lower as well as middle classes with some experience of luxury, if only in cheap imitations, these stores helped break down the association of luxury with the upper class, and in this they were perhaps more effective than 5.  Nord, Shopkeepers, 61. Emile Zola immortalized life at the Bon Marché in his novel Au bonheur des dames (1883). See also his Carnets d’enquête: Une Ethnographie inédite de la France, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Plon, 1987). A dossier of Zola’s notes is in the Bibliothèque nationale, Département des Manuscrits, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, ms. 10278, folios 1 to 64; folios 175 to 210 on the salespeople. These notes are based on sixty-four visits to the store and an array of insider interviews. Other notes contain similar study of the Magasins du Louvre. 6.  Nord, Paris Shopkeepers, 71. 7.  Baillé, “Le Bon Marché,” Moniteur de l’Exposition de 1889, 3 March 1889.

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the few low-cost tickets to opera productions. After all, if France was the world leader in the production of such goods, then why should only its elites benefit from the gracious and elegant designs of French industry? Experiencing these objects, even without purchasing them, had the potential to elevate one’s taste, just like the classical music at the concerts populaires. In this sense, the traditional meaning of consommer as achieving or accomplishing something came together with a meaning added in the nineteenth century, purchasing something for one’s use. Through their consumption of leisure goods, individuals achieved an identity with a certain class or lifestyle. Contemporary theorists, such as Gabriel Tarde, credited imitative consumer behavior with the democratization of taste. The Bon Marché’s sponsorship of concerts should be understood as another context in which to promote consumption associated with upper-class lifestyle, especially when the store brought in Opéra stars to perform with their employees. Like these concerts, department stores offered pleasure to all classes. Women could engage in escape-filled flânerie just like the bohemian men immortalized in Baudelaire’s poems. Safe within the confines of the store, they could experience the city in miniature, almost like a universal exhibition, large and well-organized, with merchandise set in rows on shelves precisely positioned and in perfect order. 8 Shopping became a kind of self-indulgent private entertainment. There it cost nothing to experience the jouissance of touching and looking, though, as one reviewer put it, “one might leave as exhausted as after having heard a long symphony by Berlioz.” An aesthetic of charm, sensuous fabrics, delightful designs, and objects eliciting desire encouraged purchases, not just for the utility they might serve, but also because they were satisfying in and of themselves. People ridiculed such stores for being “full of temptations,” but by 1881, they attracted over 90,000 visitors annually and, like the Opéra, were a magnet for foreigners, as well as the residents of fancy suburbs.9 Moreover, in antithesis to the specialization of smaller shops, the enormous eclecticism and diversity of merchandise in these stores continually confronted the shopper with the new and the unfamiliar. Just like at concerts, this variety 8.  Moreover in her Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Vanessa R. Schwartz notes that one of the pleasures of modern life was participation in a culture in which representations became interchangeable with reality (10–11). 9.  Ignotus, “Les Grands Bazars,” Figaro, 23 March 1881. In his Paris Shopkeepers, Nord points out that while the economic downturn of the early 1880s affected sales of luxury items, it had no impact on the sale of French ready-made clothes. Between 1878 and 1894, these rose from 10.4 million francs to 74.5 million (154). At the Bon Marché, total sales rose from 47 million francs in 1877 to 150 million in 1893 (159).

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broadened the interests and the tastes of the expanding middle class but also risked overwhelming them. The huge number of objects for possible purchase also put to work the most casual flâneur or flâneuse’s sense of judgment. To purchase, they had to evaluate and compare. They had to choose whether to indulge their nostalgia for older styles or take a risk on the newest fashion. With their exhibits of goods from abroad, including the Far East, these stores served as places to encounter foreign cultures, albeit in the form of fabrics and trinkets. Department stores also contributed to serious problems at the heart of the emerging consumerism. Store browsing offered the lower and middle classes both a temporary escape from reality and a new kind of freedom. Yet they encouraged the vanity and self-obsession that characterize Manon in Massenet’s opera, the exact opposite of a concern for the public good. If contemplating gracious designs elevates one’s taste, playing with trinkets encourages banality and the collection of objects without any utility whatsoever. It would be interesting to know if other forms of collecting also reflected the desire to possess something more than to use it, such as the cumbersome monthly or bimonthly volumes of musical scores to which music amateurs subscribed (such as Mélomane, Paris-Piano, and Album musical) or those run by serious music professionals (such as Le Journal de musique and La Musique des familles) (fig. 58). Certainly, most bourgeois and aristocratic women were expected to play the piano, but how much of this music they actually played is unclear. Consumption, therefore, was complex. The high value large stores ascribed to competition also had its downside. Through his paternalism and support for such benefits as the employee music societies and, beginning in 1876, an employee contingency fund, Boucicaut was able to balance any rivalries among his employees caused by his use of sales commissions. But at the Magasins du Louvre, where, according to Zola, everyone only thought about money, life was more cut-throat. Those who suffered most from this atmosphere were the shopkeepers put out of business by the big stores. Competition did not benefit small and medium-sized businesses. The shops that survived served the upper classes, offering exclusivity and high quality more than bargain prices. Those who sold textiles, clothing, and accessories such as perfumes, shoes, and flowers, as Zola tells it, were driven to bankruptcies, deaths, and suicides. The struggles of the petits commerçants versus the department stores turned into the shopkeeper movement in the 1880s, with small business owners espousing radical republicanism and later the nationalist campaigns led by Paul Déroulède.10 10.  Nord discusses this nationalism, “plebeian, violent, and antiliberal,” as foreshadowing the fascist movements of the 1930s. Paris Shopkeepers, 433–43.

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Fig. 58  Paris-Piano, 1 January 1892. This chic woman carrying a musical score in an elegant rolled case seems to suggest that music is something she treats herself to when she’s not with her children. Each issue of Paris-Piano included previously unpublished studies, opera fantasies, dances, and operettas, all of “average difficulty.” Each was also accompanied by an autograph letter by a composer and a chronicle of theater, concert life, and fashion.

They demonized as reactionary monopolists those running the department stores, including Boucicaut and others who practiced profit- and power-sharing and espoused republican ideas.11 As Nord points out, the Haussmannization of Paris created the conditions for this emerging political conflict. It transformed Paris from a city of autonomous, picturesque neighborhoods with arcades and shoplined streets serving local clientele into a centralized metropolis organized by boulevards facilitating easy movement throughout much of the city.12 When the government began to support big business, not only Paris, but also the regions and the colonies saw a boom in the numbers of theaters and cafésconcerts, as well as private orchestras, all competing like department stores to serve the public. This further democratized access to music of all kinds, facilitated its assimilation by all classes, and increased the demand for more performers, including women, many of whom were able to make a living from music for the first time. However, as with department stores, prosperity was not without its costs. If competition encouraged good quality, it also caused smaller or less robust businesses, including orchestras, to fold. Republican leaders were aware that if competition was “the soul of commerce and industry,” it could also weaken them.13 Competition additionally gave rise to increasing consumerism that risked pandering to the lowest common denominator, compromising the artistic product, and lowering quality. The political and economic liberalism that led to more economic growth thus inevitably planted the seeds of reaction.

Competition in the Musical World With the shift from education to commerce and finance as the primary focus of government policy came a decline in support for traditional opportunist values with significant impact on the arts. This also blurred the differences between national and commercial interests. The radical minister of commerce from January 1886 through May 1887, Edouard Lockroy, was chosen as minister of education and fine arts from April 1888 to February 1889.14 He chose as his director of fine arts, Gustave Larroumet, a conservative from the university who had written on 11.  Madame Boucicaut came from the working class—she was a laundress—and when her husband died in 1882, instead of hoarding the profits of the store, she shared governance as well as profits and created a retirement fund for her employees. 12.  Nord, Paris Shopkeepers, 32, 97–98, and chap. 3. 13.  Eugène Spuller, from a 1881 speech, published in Education de la démocratie (Paris: Félix Alban, 1892), 257. 14.  Lockroy had been deputy from the eleventh arrondissement from 1881 to 1885, and thereafter deputy from the Seine.

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Molière and Marivaux. In his first speech at the Conservatoire in August 1888, Larroumet explained that the government intended to maintain France’s “national superiority” in the arts. With theater (especially opera) a state institution in France, its leaders would never put into jeopardy “the charm, elegance, and preeminence of the French spirit” for the sake of a “barbaric economy.” The French could be “Athenians and Spartans” but they’d never be Béotiens (Boetians, i.e., hicks). However, his speech began with a focus on commerce. Asserting that theaters abroad were “tributaries” of French theater “making business with our dramatic genius,” he said that public powers had a responsibility to make sure that foreigners not forget “the first law of commerce, that is, to pay for what one takes.”15 With commerce and export a major public concern in the mid-1880s, the state was determined to encourage the creation of more inventions and innovations for which the French could collect royalties. This meant they had to improve protection of trademarks, patents, and copyright. To the extent that music was treated like an industrial commodity, these laws had significant implications for composers and music publishers. The revolutionaries had passed laws in 1791 to protect French authors and composers from having their works stolen, used, or reproduced, without payment of royalties. But the history of trying to enforce them, particularly in the provinces and abroad, was complicated and uneven. And certain debates continued for decades, such as whether music was like personal property that belonged to one’s family in perpetuity. After a congress on the subject during the 1878 Universal Exhibition, a committee convened to study the problem anew. Bardoux presented the committee’s recommendations to the Senate in 1884 and more debate ensued—would this encourage an artist to try to get rich instead of pursue the cult of beauty? In fall 1885, Ménestrel published ten articles on the history of intellectual property rights in France.16 New laws were passed in 1883 and 1886, but their enforcement in distant places like Australia remained a challenge. Larroumet recognized that another significant engine of economic growth was imitation. Whereas Ferry had earlier stressed the importance of artistic individuality, and this had led to the flourishing of diverse talents and eclectic perspectives, he told Conservatoire students to focus on learning skills, beginning with imita15.  Gustave Larroumet, Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 4 août 1888 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888); reproduced in Ménestrel, 12 August 1888, 258–60. 16.  Amédée Boutarel, “La Propriété intellectuelle,” Ménestrel, 16 August 1885, 292–95, through 25 October 1885, 372. Boutarel notes that the Jules Simon contributed a preface to a volume on this subject.

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tion. From his perspective, originality, especially in the arts, could not be taught. Students should look to the classical tradition for their models. Some composers teaching at the Conservatoire had made successful careers by imitating their predecessors. Charles Lenepveu most likely would not have gotten his job without his debt to Ambroise Thomas. In particular, Larroumet pointed to imitators of Pasdeloup’s concerts populaires in regional France. Since the early 1870s, beginning with Toulouse and Bordeaux, more than a dozen regional concerts populaires, sometimes performing in circuses, had offered inexpensive concerts to thousands of people, helping them develop the taste for “true music”—both the classics and the music of living French composers. As Pougin remarked, “The movement [Pasdeloup’s concerts] started in Paris soon spread, not only throughout France, but also abroad, not just to Europe, but also to the New World, and it can be said that it has now taken over the entire universe.”17 As in the 1870s, the government wanted to promote competition. But instead of serving as sites of public education and national glory, art exhibitions became opportunities for artists to show off their work and find buyers. State support was reduced to sponsoring the venues and acquiring the best work. Free competition was considered a way to raise standards, and the state’s role to be that of protecting national interests and individual rights. This did not mean that the government was happy with all that was being produced. When the Salon des indépendants opened on 1 May 1884, President Grévy refused to inaugurate it because, among the 400 artists who exhibited there, too many were intent on “dishonoring French art.” Without juries or prizes, it quickly became a place for the avant-garde. Since the government did not purchase avant-garde works, the interest of capitalists who became major collectors, such as Albert Chauchard, owner of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, was important. 18 Impressionists began to make a living from their art in the 1880s, although they did not yet earn as much as official painters. By the 1880s, the idea of buying and trading art, of viewing art as a commodity and an investment of fluctuating value, was becoming part of the republican ideology.19 Competition among orchestral concerts and quality of performances increased in the 1880s, attracting all classes as well as provincials and foreigners. 20 In 1881, 17.  Arthur Pougin, “M. Pasdeloup et les Concerts populaires,” Ménestrel, 11 May 1884, 188–89. 18.  Christophe Prochasson, Les Années électriques (1880–1910) (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 75, 94, 101. 19.  Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 23–26. 20.  In 1880, state subsidies for concert organizations became a question of their “degree of perfection.” The Senate and Chambre des députés refused a request to subsidize the Concerts

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modeling on the orchestras of Pasdeloup and Colonne, both Edouard Broustet and Charles Lamoureux created new ensembles of ninety musicians. Whereas Broustet’s orchestra performed off-season (May to December) on Sunday evenings, Lamoureux competed directly with Pasdeloup and Colonne on Sunday afternoons. All three orchestras provided alternatives to those unable to afford or obtain tickets to the prestigious concerts of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire. Programs were listed a week in advance in all the major music publications and reviewed regularly, giving audiences a chance to make informed choices, compare their experiences with those of the critics, and hear about what they missed. The recession that began in January 1882, however, had a significant impact on this growth, for when people had less money, they became more careful about how they spent it. Commenting on the 1884–85 orchestral concert season, the music critic Charles Darcours lamented the decrease in overall concert attendance, at first blaming it on people’s “political, military, and financial” preoccupations and on competition with popular theaters giving daily performances, as if in troubled times, audiences felt they needed the diversion of the latter. He wondered if part of the problem in attracting audiences was that, unlike the regular subscribers of the concerts of the Société des concerts, who “applauded Beethoven, Haydn, and Mendelssohn with more enthusiasm than ever,” the audiences of the other orchestras were unhappy that their conductors were slow to renew their repertoires. Parisians were “more eager for new things than able to appreciate them,” he admitted, but they wanted to hear more new works. 21 The drop in attendance also led to a rumor that Lamoureux might have to let his musicians go, which he later denied. Yet there was a risk in overstimulating audiences. Too much novelty not only led to too little coherence, but also made it hard to maintain quality performances. New works required more rehearsal time than was often possible. In contrast, multiple performances of the same works gave musicians opportunities to know and play them better and facilitated the orchestra’s development of a distinct interpretation. Building and keeping an audience while negotiating a balance between familiar and unfamiliar works was challenging. Besselièvre because they were not good enough, preferring to give more to the Concerts Colonne for new music. Revue et gazette musicale, 5 December 1880, 389, and Charles Darcours [Charles Réty], “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 24 November 1886. 21.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 8 April 1885. On 23 February 1887, Darcours observed likewise, “people are becoming enamored with new works by our composers more easily today than earlier and welcoming them without prejudice.”

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Competition among Orchestras In many ways, competition between the Paris orchestras played out as it did in the retail market for clothes and other items. The Société des concerts functioned like other providers of luxury to those of means. Like the shops in the best neighborhoods, they had nothing to fear from competition because they had a loyal constituency. Subscribers purchased virtually all their tickets in advance and, many of them were aging and had inherited their seats from their families. Attendance at these concerts, like wearing expensive clothes, had a social cachet. Although the organization was known for its conservative repertoire, when Jules Garcin took over as principal conductor in 1885, this audience was willing to support more premieres each season in part because the Société maintained its commitment to big works with text, most new works were by established composers such as Gounod, Franck, Lalo, and Saint-Saëns, and it put on French premieres of older masterpieces, such as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in 1888. 22 When the Concerts Pasdeloup was started in 1861, its orchestra performed some of the same music as the Société des concerts, but in a functioning circus on an eastern boulevard (see fig. 19). Only half the performers had prizes from the Conservatoire, but they were good—Colonne played violin there in the 1860s. Like the early department stores, Pasdeloup aimed to attract a large and socially diverse public, his target audience at first also being the petite bourgeoisie, many of whom had never heard such music before and would never have been able to afford the Société des concerts (fig. 59). The cost of most seats made them accessible to workers, with the better ones priced to attract members of the bourgeoisie unable to obtain tickets to the Société des concerts. Pasdeloup’s success was such that “before the war people had to get their ticket by Wednesday; if they wanted premieres or good seats, they needed to subscribe a year in advance.”23 After 1872, influenced by nationalism and the competition offered by the Concerts Colonne, founded in 1874, Pasdeloup increased the number of premieres by French composers. His organization was a tremendous success, winning a hefty subsidy from the government (20,000 francs) in 1878 to support a chorus, and earning Pasdeloup enough money to purchase a mansion in the countryside. Sadly, however, increased competition in the early 1880s forced Pasdeloup to fold his orchestra in 1884. Unlike Boucicaut, who eventually moved the Bon 22.  D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 278. Garcin had been the principal second violinist there and a second conductor since 1881. He also taught violin at the Conservatoire. 23.  Adolphe Jullien, “La Retraite de M. Pasdeloup,” Le Français, 3 June 1884.

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Fig. 59  Jules Pasdeloup on the cover of La Musique des familles, 12 November 1885.

Marché into new, large, and luxurious quarters, he was unable to grow or leave the Cirque d’hiver in its working-class milieu and suffered like the shopkeepers who went bankrupt, abandoning the same class of clientele. He had been able to hold his own throughout the 1870s, sometimes performing the same repertoire as his competitors on the same days or the following week, but the opportunity to compare two performances of the same work eventually worked to his disadvantage. As the quality of Pasdeloup’s conducting came under scrutiny, the reputation of the Concerts Colonne grew. Colonne’s multiple performances of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust in 1877 demonstrated his orchestra’s incontestable technical and musical superiority. By 1882, Colonne was making more money than Pasdeloup, though Pasdeloup did better than Lamoureux his first season and also better than Broustet at the Cirque des Champs-Elysées. 24 In January 1883, Colonne turned away people at the door, while Pasdeloup played for a partially empty hall. That fall, Pasdeloup was forced to sell his organization to stockholders. His orchestra’s short-lived revival in 1886 failed, obliging some listeners to return to the cafésconcerts for their diversion. 25 Ironically, everyone from critics in Ménestrel to his program annotator Charles Malherbe thought that although Colonne “continued the work of Pasdeloup,” he gave it “more importance and more éclat.”26 Colonne played much of the same repertoire, also presented eclectic programs, and drew some of the same public. However, like the Bon Marché in its new premises, Colonne’s orchestra played in a large theater in a good neighborhood with far fewer low-priced seats. And like Boucicaut, he understood how to market his product to the growing bourgeois market, especially to women. He tracked and responded to his public’s tastes like an expert in sales, forging a succession of strategies—some borrowed from predecessors, some novel—that ensured the orchestra’s growth and survival. 27 While continuing to draw audiences through large works with chorus and super-star 24.  Figaro, 3 May 1882, noted that of the approximately 500,000 francs spent on Sunday concerts during the 1881–82 season, the Société des concerts earned the most, averaging 8,000 francs per concert and an estimated 140,000–150,000 francs; in twenty-two concerts, the Concerts Colonne averaged 6,060 per concert, earning 133,000 francs; in twenty-four concerts, the Concerts Pasdeloup averaged 4,765 francs, earning 114,461 francs; in twenty-three concerts, the Concerts Lamoureux averaged only 2,700 francs, earning 62,000; and in twenty concerts, the Concerts Broustet averaged 1,700 francs per concert, earning 30,000–35,000 francs. 25.  Eva M., “Les Concerts populaires à Paris,” Musique des familles, 25 March 1886, 180. 26.  Charles Malherbe, “Edouard Colonne,” Revue musicale S.I.M., 15 April 1910, 219. 27.  See Jann Pasler, “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne,” in Le Concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002), 209–40.

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soloists, Colonne also took advantage of the growing interest in music and education, especially among women, and in fall 1885, he announced a new approach to concert programming. That season he would offer music from all periods and schools to “form a complete summary of the history of music” (fig. 60). 28 Program notes began to grow lengthy, providing information one might find in a music history textbook. Women rewarded Colonne with their support. By 1884–85, the number of women who were honorary members (donors with the right to attend dress rehearsals) had grown to almost equal that of men (364 vs. 388). Perhaps in response to this concert season, these numbers increased in October 1885 to 470 women and 435 men. Lamoureux took note of how Colonne’s orchestra was thriving, while Pasde­ loup’s had collapsed. Unlike Colonne, whose orchestra was an association with members sharing the risks and benefits, he ran his orchestra as an entrepreneur. Like Pasdeloup, he bore all the responsibility. In his first season, 1881– 82, Lamoureux had earned half what his competitors made that year and lost 100,000 francs of his own money. Eventually, he knew that his orchestra’s survival depended on leaving the Château d’Eau theater in the Place de la République and moving to a better neighborhood. Like the shopkeepers who sold to the wealthiest Parisians, he also saw a niche in attracting elites who preferred to mingle predominantly with members of their own class. He understood these audiences, having conducted at both the Société des concerts and the Opéra. In 1885, this led him to negotiate with the recently built, vast and sumptuous Eden-Théâtre for his performances, right next to the Paris Opéra. Before this could begin, he had the promenoir (standing area behind the seats) and upper balcony removed and made adjustments to improve the acoustics. When his fall season opened, the theater was left with virtually no cheap seats. The public responded so enthusiastically to this change of venue that people purchased some tickets in advance, an uncommon practice at the time. In the mid 1880s, Lamoureux also added a “Petit Bulletin” to his programs for additional information from the conductor, especially when it came to Wagner or his plans to perform him. In the critic Hugues Imbert’s words, while “Pasdeloup worked for the musical education of the poor, Lamoureux worked for that of the rich.”29 As with the department stores, the challenge of competing increasingly encouraged distinction, or what retailers called specialization. Venue and neighborhood were important in attracting a public, but not alone, since the urban geography 28.  Program notes for the Concerts Colonne, 1 November 1885. 29.  Hugues Imbert, “Charles Lamoureux,” Portraits et études (Paris: Fischbacher, 1894), 76.

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Fig. 60  Concerts Colonne program, 6 December 1885. In this year, the first in which Edouard Colonne explicitly organized his concerts as a “form of music history,” both his season and his first concerts began with Beethoven symphonies (some also ended with Beethoven). In addition, in fall 1885, program notes grew very lengthy, running to more than 1,200 words. Most of this space was dedicated to the Beethoven symphony, highlighting that composer’s central position in the mission of the concerts.

permitted easy movement in the city. In 1885, high-quality performances could be expected of all the top Paris orchestras. That left programming and other issues. Although Colonne and Lamoureux performed much of the same repertoire, sometimes during the same season, there were subtle, significant differences. As ­Colonne was starting his orchestral history of music, Lamoureux boldly performed entire Wagnerian acts despite knowing this would require an effort of the imagination in the absence of the stage. After giving four performances of act 1 of Lohengrin in February and March 1882, he presented a work little known to Parisians, act 1 of Tristan und Isolde in March 1884 and February 1885, then act 2 (incomplete) in March 1885, with act 1 again in 1887. In 1886 and 1887, his orchestra performed act 1 (incomplete) of Die Walküre.30 Certainly, Colonne also performed Wagner regularly in his concerts beginning in 1880: he helped popularized the “Ride of the Valkyries” through fifteen performances from 1881 through 1885.31 Ironically, although a Jew, his premiere of the religious scene from Parsifal, with two performances in 1884, predates by two years that of Lamoureux. However, Colonne did not perform entire acts until the mid 1890s. He made his reputation performing difficult large works, but those of Berlioz. Lamoureux made it (and his fortune) with Wagner. Moreover, when conducting other works, critics often felt he did not bring the same conviction to them as he did to Wagner’s music.32 Colonne and Lamoureux also had different styles and expectations of the concert behavior expected of listeners (fig. 61). Lamoureux was known as an authoritarian conductor who demanded military-like discipline and obedience from his “instrumental army” and respect from his audience. Long Wagnerian acts required audiences to sit still in their seats for long periods, much more than any symphonic work. For Lamoureux’s target audience of elites, this was not a problem. Opéra attendance may have accustomed some of them to this kind of restraint. The silence in the hall and the reverence of the listeners led to the perception that these concerts were like a “Wagnerian rite,” with Lamoureux “officiating” for “the faithful” who had a “beatific and bored air about them.” Moreover, to avoid clashes between those with conflicting tastes, particularly with Wagner, and keep concerts from becoming too long, he made it a policy of not honoring requests for encores. Meanwhile, Colonne conducted with “persuasion” more than authority, and his concerts “never fatigued the listener,” 30.  Wagnerians criticized Lamoureux in 1885 when he performed excerpts but not the entire act 2 of Tristan. Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 11 March 1885. 31.  For other examples, see chap. 6, n. 47. 32.  This was even true of Mendelssohn, for whom he also professed great admiration. See Amédée Boutarel in Ménestrel, 19 December 1886, 22.

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Fig. 61  Edouard Colonne and Charles Lamoureux, from photographs, ca. 1890. Charles Simond, Paris de 1800 à 1900 d’après les estampes et les mémoires du temps (Paris, 1900). Both conductors had begun as violinists and had played for the Conservatoire orchestra. Critics often commented on their different temperaments. Colonne “leads the artists” while Lamoureux “directs” them, one wrote. Colonne’s repertoire remained eclectic, like that of Pasdeloup; that of Lamoureux became increasingly “exclusive.” H. Barbedette, Ménestrel, 3 and 17 April 1892.

although some were lengthy. Colonne’s programs constantly varied with “ a little ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ here, a little Rapsodie there, as contrasts.” His public was more “democratic” with “the impetuous fits of crowds, but also their generous instincts.” As one critic explained, “don’t expect this public to give a great show of dignity and reverence appropriate to listening to Wagnerian preludes; it applauds what amuses it, it yawns at what bores it, and it is right to do so. 33 In contrast to Lamoureux, he also tended to honor audience requests for encores, which helped determine future programming. Not surprisingly, Colonne’s concerts were more of a hit with families. In 1891–92, the magazine La Vie de famille produced their programs (fig. 62). The distinction required by the market thus had costs as well as benefits. Whereas Pasdeloup had reached out to a wide diversity of listeners as an alternative to the small and narrowly defined public of the Société des concerts, and whereas Colonne had built on Pasdeloup’s formula for success for more bourgeois 33.  H. Barbedette, Ménestrel, 19 December 1886, 22, and 4 March 1888, 79.

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Fig. 62  Hector Berlioz on the cover of a Concert Colonne program (1892). The magazine Le Vie de famille published the programs of the Concerts Colonne in 1891–92. Berlioz was a favorite composer of Colonne’s, whose orchestra did more to popularize his music than any other musical ensemble during the fin-de-siècle.

concertgoers, Lamoureux wished to attract the rich and those with increasingly sophisticated tastes. Like art exhibitions after 1880, some organized for elites by new circles and artists’ societies, and open only to members and their guests, the Concerts Lamoureux built an audience by restricting access rather than making his concerts available to the masses. As in elegant gallery and society shows, as Patricia Mainardi points out, “aesthetic and social protectionism often operated together.”34 While Colonne’s concerts embraced the republican value of eclecticism and, without sacrificing quality or programming, succeeded in attracting increasing numbers of women and their families, Lamoureux’s concerts helped build a constituency for alternatives to the ideals of the opportunistes and radical republicans, and contributed to the development of an aesthetic counterculture.

Expanded Performance Opportunities, Including for Women As people acquired a taste for orchestral music, one could find it in more and more places, from hotels, gardens, and circuses to theaters and exhibition halls to brasseries. In summer 1887, for example, grands concerts of orchestral music were presented in Paris every Thursday evening in the courtyard of the Palais Royal, concerts-promenades of somewhat lighter fare the other evenings for a mere 50 centimes. During the annual exhibition of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs from 12 August to 6 December 1887, Jules Danbé, the conductor of the Opéra-Comique orchestra, organized and conducted 100 consecutive daily concerts of orchestral music. These concerts took place in the middle of the Palais de l’industrie, where people could hear the music as they strolled through the show. What is surprising is that the programs, offered free of charge, had almost no repetition, unless audiences asked for a work to be done again. The orchestra performed little-known works, including the occasional premiere, along with masterpieces. Three days a week it presented grands concerts, some featuring distinguished soloists. In 1889, a brasserie in the Latin Quarter (rue de Tournon) began a nightly series of classical music, the Concerts Rouge. A handful of Conservatory graduates presented transcriptions of symphonies as people sipped their drinks. The repertoire changed nightly. In addition, there were the Sociétés philharmoniques, with amateur performers and sometimes professional conductors. These continued to spring up, such as in Lyon in 1884 and in Hanoi in 1889. By 1893, there was one subtitled 34.  Patricia Mainardi, The End of the Salon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 142.

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“Progress” in the city of Boufarik, Algeria. And by 1889, critics also noted that “music has never occupied such an extensive place” in private salons. “Even an entire opera does not frighten them.”35 The extraordinarily large number of performance opportunities interested more people in becoming professionals and helped build careers. As Tamar Garb puts it, “the modernist construction of the true artist as disinterested and disenfranchised marginal figure, unconcerned with the vulgar operations of the market” is inaccurate, as is the “cliché of the bohemian artistic identity.” In 1888, a female artist explained, “the legend of the down-at-heel artist with a threadbare cardigan and smashed up hat is a good story which doesn’t hold true anymore. . . . In our society, artists are spoiled, honored, and for the most part rewarded. . . . Between Meissonnier who sells his pictures for 100,000 francs and a poor painter who makes paintings in standard measurements, there is the same difference that we find between the bird-seller and the rich cloth merchant,” referring to Mme Boucicaut, the owner of the Bon Marché after her husband died in 1878.36 Obviously, the market rewarded some more than others. Among musicians, opera singers had the highest incomes. They were the most mobile emblems of musical luxury, and anyone who wanted to give the allure of luxury had to feature them and bear the cost. Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe paid 5,000 francs to three of the city’s top singers—Jean-Baptiste Faure, JeanAlexandre Talazac, and Marie-Hélène Brunet-Lafleur—to perform with her and her friends at a salon concert on 8 May 1881, with 4,000 francs going to Faure alone. 37 Faure’s fee was enormous—the equivalent of one-third of the Conservatoire director’s annual salary. Singers were also the most apt to migrate between diverse venues. Faure, who received 2,000 francs for each appearance at the Concerts Colonne that year, was Colonne’s highest paid soloist for the decade. 38 Mme Brunet-Lafleur also had a second career singing at orchestral concerts in the 1880s and later married the conductor Lamoureux. In 1883, the Bon Marché hired her to sing for more than two thousand people at a concert with its employees within the store. In 1885 the Bon Marché engaged, among others, the most famous and best-paid opera singer of his generation, Jean-Baptiste Faure, to sing, as well as the very popular café-concert performers Paulus (Jean-Paul Habens) and Thérésa (Emma Valladon) (see fig. 56). In her salon from 1886 through 1889, Comtesse

35.  Ménestrel, 15 April 1889, 54. 36.  Garb, Sisters of the Brush, 25. 37.  Archives of Comtesse Greffulhe, Archives privées, Archives nationales, Paris. 38.  Archives of the Concerts Colonne, Paris.

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Greffulhe, too, juxtaposed popular and serious genres, such as string quartet movements and an air from Parsifal with humorous monologues, especially by Coquelin Cadet. A career as an instrumentalist was also becoming increasingly viable, not only for men but for women. The number of violin candidates applying to the Paris Conservatoire soared, rising 50 percent from 1878 to 1882, perhaps in response to the increasing taste for orchestral music and the growth in orchestra positions. The Conservatoire responded by accepting 64 percent more violinists. And whereas no female violinists won Conservatoire prizes from 1876 to 1878, after the republicans came to power in 1879, females began to win, taking from 25 to 37 percent of these prizes between 1879 and 1885. 39 Women increasingly also earned prizes in cello, organ, harp, and piano. Some thought women would also sign up for woodwind instruments if they were allowed to do so, noting that this was already done in England and that the French were behind the times. 40 Darcours was particularly taken with the growing number of women who wanted to study piano at the Conservatoire. Whereas in the 1870s, 160 to 170 women, on average, competed for these positions, this number jumped to 223 in 1881. The critic wished to draw national attention to this phenomenon. In his regular column in Figaro in fall 1886, he pointed out that while 1,200 young musicians competed for only 200 places at the Paris Conservatoire and the largest applicant pool in one area were singers—255 for 43 places, evenly divided among females and males—the largest single category of aspirants were the 200 female pianists. Only 30 of them were accepted, as compared 13 of the 37 male contenders. Women thus represented 84 percent of the pianists competing to enter the Conservatoire. The admittance statistics also suggest that while women and men were being equally prepared for vocal careers, the Conservatoire was willing to train more female pianists than males by a factor of almost two to one. 41 Furthermore, as Darcours observed, for the past few years, female pianists at the Conservatoire had shown “more developed aptitudes than their male competi39.  The number of violinists competing for entrance to the Conservatoire rose from 57 in 1878 to 88 in 1882, and the number accepted grew from 17 to 28 during this period. By 1885, there were 106 violinists competing and 37 accepted. In 1879, female violinists took 3 of the 8 prizes awarded, the number rising to 7 out of 23 in 1880, and 9 out of 34 in 1885. 40.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 17 November 1886. 41.  While the number of male pianists seeking entrance to the Conservatoire also rose slightly in the early 1880s (from 46 in 1878 to 51 in 1881), it declined steadily thereafter, reaching 36 male piano candidates in 1886. It is possible that males felt discouraged at the growing acceptance of women as pianists and the competition they may have provided. Additionally, while half as many young women as men were accepted to study harmony—a stepping-stone

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tors” and this may have been due to the fact that “a lot more work” was demanded of them than of the young men, and they took it seriously. 42 This is interesting because everyone has assumed that the Conservatoire’s intent was to prepare virtuosos for performing careers, whereas many of these women probably ended up teaching piano. At Darcours’s prompting on 29 July 1885, during the slow summer when there were no important premieres to publicize, Figaro reproduced what music female pianists and harpists had sight-read in their end-of-the year exams at the Conservatoire. 43 The next year on 4 August 1886, it published Massenet’s “exercise” that male pianists had sight-read, juxtaposed with Delibes’s exercise for female pianists (ex. 18). This gave readers a chance to compare the standards used to judge the two sexes. Although both exercises are in D-flat major (5 flats), the differences are stunning and would have been obvious without performing them. Massenet’s work for the young men consists of a series of chords, to be played très modéré, soutenu, repeated throughout the piece at various dynamic levels and interspersed by expressive descending passages. The tone is ponderous and the dynamic and registral changes frequent. At the work’s climax, the chords move to the outer registers of the piano and build from ppp to fff, demanding strength and assertiveness from the performer. Delibes’s work for the young women, a quick allegretto, consists mostly of a single line that begins in the bass and rises in arpeggios divided between the two hands before making its descent and beginning again. This lilting quality calls for a delicate touch and use of the pedals to render the sound fluid. In the middle, the piece modulates briefly, as it does in the Massenet, but here the pianist must follow the changes at a much more rapid pace. Other than a brief crescendo at the climax, the work is to be played softly ( p) throughout. The contrasts between these two exercises suggest that the composers believed in gender differences and wished to test these: in male pianists strength and expressive flexibility, in female pianists dexterity and gracefulness. Broadening the base of musicians receiving state-subsidized musical training and thereby increasing the competition to composition and a life as a composer—almost double the number of young women were accepted to study solfège, preparation for becoming music teachers. These figures come from Constant Pierre, Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), 874–75, 878, 884. 42.  Charles Darcours, “Notes de musique,” Figaro, 17 November 1886. He also points out that this disparity in workload also characterized other advanced classes, including those teaching harmony, and that Théodore Dubois was the only professor to “maintain an equilibrium between the two sexes.” 43.  Given the date of publication, I am assuming these were the pieces used in students’ final exams, rather than those similar to what would be used in the fall entrance exams.

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Ex. 18  Massenet and Delibes, “Deux morceaux de lecture à première vue,” Figaro, 4 August 1886. Here Figaro provides an unusually direct demonstration of the differing qualities expected of performers depending on their sex.

thus may have raised standards and encouraged more diversity of participation, but was not without problems.

Theater and Popular Entertainment Despite resistance from some composers and playwrights, the world of theater and popular music thrived under the government’s economic liberalism. Many were happy to offer the public all the novelty and stimulation they could possibly desire. More and more theaters began to stay open over the summer and profited handsomely for it, with receipts rising 84 percent from August 1884 to August 1886. 44 The press tracked how much each theater earned each year, who was doing well, and who was not. From the lists published annually, one could see that while receipts were up with Lakmé at the Opéra-Comique and at eight other Paris theaters in 1883, they were down at the Opéra, the Théâtre-Français (the Comédie-Française), and at nine others. Theaters on the Right Bank boulevards continued to do well, but their profits fluctuated, sometimes by as much as 50 to 200 percent. After a dip in annual receipts at the top twenty-four Paris theaters in 1884 and 1885, the major theaters’ receipts rose by 10 percent in 1886–87 and continued to grow in the 1890s. 45 By making audiences aware of these fluctuations, administrators were held accountable to their investors, and audiences could compare their own individual tastes—what they were willing to pay for—with the preferences of others. Given the interest in regularly publishing these figures, one wonders if watching who and what were successful may have tantalized people into venturing beyond their normal haunts. In the case of readers outside Paris, this information helped them keep abreast of current fashions in the capital and may have encouraged the progressive among them to put pressure on local theaters and concert organizers. Popular entertainment also contributed to the democratization of demand. This did not just mean that the lower classes got into establishments previously reserved for the bourgeoisie, albeit in the upper seats, but also that the appeal of “democratized theater,” or “theaters of the poor”—the cafés-concerts—was spreading to all social classes. 46 They charged no admission fee, making their money on drinks. “Family cards” provided discounts to encourage people to bring their children to 44.  Ménestrel, 12 September 1886, 330. 45.  Total receipts for Paris theaters in 1883 were 18,903,430 francs; in 1884–85, 17,335,330; in 1885–86, 17,471,502; and in 1886–87, 19,234,798. Ménestrel, 4 November 1883, 389; 12 July 1885, 254; and 31 July 1887, 279. 46.  Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, 83.

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Sunday afternoon matinées-spectacles. With 400 to 500 seats on average at cafésconcerts, and bigger ones holding 1,500, these establishments often earned over 100,000 francs per month. 47 This was possible because the status of cafés had changed. In the 1870s, like earlier in the century, the government had feared such places as breeding grounds for political dissent, protest, and subversion. In setting curfews on drinking, making drunkenness a crime, and closely surveying such establishments, the Moral Order government attempted to “enforce total control over one’s public behavior.” This got worse after 16 May 1877, which gave new life to political songs and increased censorship. Susanna Barrows suggests, however, that when the republicans took over government, surveillance was reduced to practical matters, and the focus of police records shifted from politics to mœurs, specifically “Eros.”48 If political songs thrived at cafés-concerts—and the numbers of songs collected at the Bibliothèque nationale testify to their continuing popularity—it is perhaps because these songs helped to educate the lower classes about politics and engage them in it, providing an expressive outlet even when critical of the government. Popular songs such as “Au Tonkin” (June 1887), for example, questioned whether cholera should be risked and French blood shed to make money for the opportunistes and to demonstrate French courage. 49 Still, as others have shown, fear of critique continued to play a role in what lyrics were approved, and a good number of them were expected to support the republican ideology. Songs that begin like “Je ne suis qu’un simple ouvrier / Qui ne demande qu’à s’instruire; / Lorsque j’ai quitté l’atelier / Mon plus grand bonheur c’est de lire,” elevated republican virtues and the lower classes’ need to celebrate their respectability; 50 others glorified the nation and national memory. If the genre had begun as a means of resistance and helped keep alive the desire to take back Alsace and Lorraine, it also became part of republicans’ project to shape morals and behavior.51 47.  Caradec and Weill, Café-concert, 68, 82–85, 94, 102–4, and Concetta Condemi, Les Cafés-concerts (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1992), 68, 83–84. 48.  Susanna Barrows, “‘Parliaments of the People’: The Political Culture of Cafés in the Early Third Republic,” in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. id. and Robin Room (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 89, 95. Condemi notes that in 1887 one song, “Professeur de piano,” was forbidden to be sung because of its obscenity (Cafés-concerts, 49). 49.  “Si vous avez lancé la France / Dans c’ pays, c’est pour fair’ vot’ sac / . . .  / Pour montrer qu’ vous n’avez pas l’trac.” Jules Jouy, Chansons de l’année (Paris: Bourbier & Lamoureux, 1888), reproduced in Pierre Barbier and France Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons: La IIIe République de 1871 à 1918 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 65–68. 50.  Another example is “Les Bienfaits de l’instruction,” reproduced in Barbier and Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons, 56–58. 51.  Condemi, Cafés-concerts, 50–57, 176.

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Scholars have also pointed to the fact that cafés-concerts rationalized leisure, contributing to social control, and, especially for women, provided the social mobility that the republicans favored. Classes mixed in these places. Despite this, in the Chambre’s annual discussions about the Opéra’s subsidy, politicians often referred to the increasing appeal of the cafés-concerts as something that the state must endeavor to counteract. As under the Moral Order, they continued to fear that those raised on “porno art” would become “degenerate citizens.”52 This led conservatives to support the Opéra populaire and the Sunday orchestral concerts as a way to attract families to art music—“the great popularizer of healthy and fruitful emotions.” In the mid 1880s, the government grew more tolerant. Since the person responsible for censoring songs and theater was the minister himself, and since the radical ministers who came to power beginning in 1886, such as Edouard Lockroy, were sympathetic to the working people and espoused freedom of expression, tolerance encouraged the growth of such businesses.53 In Paris, Montmartre became a center of nightlife with the opening of Rudolphe Salis’s Le Chat Noir (1881–85), Aristide Bruant’s Le Mirliton (1885), Le Divan Japonais (1886), frequented by the famous singer Yvette Guilbert, and La Cigale (1887). The artistic cabaret Chat Noir, known for the artists and writers who frequented it and the small literary journal they published, attracted well-off snobs and foreign aristocrats on the “chic day,” Friday evening, the bourgeoisie and working class on other days.54 It offered theatrical sketches, songs, and, between 1886 and 1896, nightly shadowpuppet shows. The latter could be quite complex, involving dozens of tableaux and musical accompaniment. First performed on 28 December 1887, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, for example, incorporated citations from Gounod’s Faust, Delibes’s Sylvia and Le Roi s’amuse, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” and Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers.55 This suggests that the audience was familiar enough with this music to understand its appropriateness in the narrative. While some attacked such venues for their politically satirical songs and “vulgar” entertainment, others 52.  Figaro, 15 March 1882. 53.  From 1881 to 1897, censors did not bother most poet-singers in cabarets. In 1888, a small majority in the Chambre des députés even voted to stop funding the censors. In vetoing this, Minister Lockroy explained that he would not enforce censors’ recommendations except in extreme cases. Ménestrel, 7 October 1888, 327. 54.  Sarah Bernhardt, Coquelin Cadet, François Coppée, and Jean Moréas were among those who came on Fridays. Some of the most distinguished writers of the time contributed to the Chat Noir’s publication, including Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas. 55.  Steven Whiting, “Music on Montmartre,” in The Spirit of Montmartre, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (New Brunswick, N.J.: Zimmerli Art Museum, 1996), 184–85.

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praised them for liberating both composers and the public from narrow views about music. In this sense, they were useful to musical progress. According to guides at the time, by 1890, there were around 200 cafés-concerts in Paris. A hierarchy dependent on their location was implicit, with the most luxurious ones situated in the best neighborhoods. The best-known were L’Alcazar d’hiver, L’Eldorado, and La Scala, all close together in the tenth arrondissement. Performances in cafés, cabarets, and music halls also spread to working-class neighborhoods, such as the Ba-Ta-Clan in the eleventh arrondissement and the Pépinière near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where they became more sensationalist. The success of a star such as Paulus, who mimed his songs, was such that in 1883, he was able to afford a house in Neuilly, complete with servants and a chauffeur. Other French cities, not only in the regions but also the colonies, enjoyed similar institutions. In 1880, Marseille acquired its own Alcazar, where Yvette Guilbert debuted in 1885. Algiers had a café-concert called Eldorado-concert. In the 1880s, musical revues were also being produced at the Café-concert de la Rotonde in Saigon, the Hôtel des colonies in Haiphong, and the Café de Paris in Hanoi. Beginning in 1888, Hanoi started its own Eldorado-Parisien (alias the Café du Commerce), replete with fourteen loges and 150 orchestra seats. It featured two performers reputedly from the Alcazar in Paris and other traveling troupes. Although the former borrowed their repertoire from Paulus, adding the occasional operatic air (e.g., from Lucia di Lammermoor), they also wrote their own comic scenes and songs, such as the famous “La Tonkinoise.” They also did benefit performances for those wounded in military conflict. As a local critic put it in 1885, with so many people dying of cholera and in other epidemics, laughing could be useful for one’s health.56 Most performances started out with some “curiosity”—a magic act, an acrobat, and occasionally regional songs and dances. An orchestra of typically thirty musicians then performed popular classics and favorite selections from the Opéra before turning to the newest waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas. Chansons, often new ones, dominated the second part of their programs and the occasional operetta or vaudeville the third part. This succession of genres led to the designation spectacle de curiosité.57 Playing on the public’s taste for eclecticism and different varieties of pleasure, theaters too functioned as variable-use spaces, perhaps to maximize their clienteles and interest them in having new experiences. Possibly following the example of the 56.  From L’Avenir du Tonkin, cited in Bourrin, Le Vieux Tonkin, 132, 148. 57.  Condemi, Cafés-concerts, 68, 84–85.

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festival of French music at the Hippodrome in 1878–79, in 1881, the Folies-Bergère hired an orchestra with prizewinners from the Conservatoire and put on a series of classical music concerts. Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Delibes chose the programs, which featured German classics as well French contemporary music. Surprisingly, the audience at these was quiet, understanding what this music expected of them. From 1883 to 1893, the Eden-Théâtre, decorated in an ornately “Hindu” style, also presented concerts, opera, and operetta, along with ballets and variety shows (figs. 63–64). Lamoureux’s orchestra performed there on Sunday afternoons, and in March 1886, it put on Gounod’s most recent religious works, La Rédemption and Mors et Vita. On other days, the public was more likely to hear exotic spectacles such as the pantomime-ballet Un Théâtre au Japon, with music by Mariotti, in December 1885, and the ballet-fantasy Brahma by Costantino dall’Argine, in summer 1886. In fall 1886, as audiences entered the “Eden chapel” and prepared themselves for the “Wagnerian service” officiated over by Lamoureux 58—note that Wagner was on every program until January—they had to walk through an exhibition by “Les Incohérents,” a group of caricaturists, writers, musicians, and actors formed in 1882, most of them regulars at Le Chat Noir (fig. 65). Championing “French gaiety threatened by the pessimism invading the end of the century,”59 this show made fun of contemporary politics, society, symbolism, and art of all kinds. They ridiculed General Boulanger for another proposed reform, asking that all cavalry remove their hair, and took aim at the war in Tonkin with an image of a drunken Frenchman, his bottle of rum raised as he patted a large pig. Other images made biting reference to the seventy Ceylonese just exhibited at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and to the Hottentot Venus, here portrayed with her curvaceous behind covered in black chocolate. Exhibitors also parodied paintings that aspired to the sublime, such as a recently prize-winning Passage de Vénus devant le soleil transformed into a worldly Parisian “eclipsing the sun” of a gold coin. 60 The point was to make people laugh. This exhibition was up for two months daily, beginning on 17 October, and open until midnight, with other ones there in 1889 and 1891. The satires, parodies, and critique of all forms of solemnity, aesthetic and otherwise, must have provided concertgoers with quite a contrast from their experience of Lamoureux’s self-consciously serious programs. Audiences clearly enjoyed these juxtapositions, for the theater’s earnings in 1886–87 made it 58.  Ménestrel, 7 March 1886, 111. 59.  Anatole France, cited in Arts incohérents, académie du dérisoire, ed. Luce Abélès and Catherine Charpin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992), 8. See also the discussion in chapter 9. 60.  Arts incohérents, ed. Abélès and Charpin, 8, 58, 61, 68.

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Fig. 63  The Eden-Théâtre, Paris, ca. 1886.

Fig. 64  Eden-Théâtre interior. The Eden Théâtre, with its Hindu-inspired décor, presented an alternative to traditional Paris theaters during the 1880s. Located near the Opéra, it catered to the same elite audiences, but it was later less successful financially and survived only until the early 1890s.

Fig. 65  Exhibition of the Incoherent Arts at the Eden-Théâtre, 17 October 1886. Invitation drawn by Henri and Edme Langlois. Musée national des arts et traditions populaires, Paris.

the fourth largest-grossing theater in Paris, just after the Opéra-Comique, and it remained among Paris’s most successful theaters for the next few years. In the late 1880s, cafés-concerts and music halls began to call their performances pièces à grand spectacle (Chat Noir), concerts-spectacles (e.g., Thérésa at the Alcazar d’hiver), spectacles-concerts, spectacles variés (e.g., the Folies-Bergère), or concertsspectacles variés (e.g., Paulus at La Scala). The idea was to attract by an art of “infinite contrasts,” reflecting recent hits with English-style music hall at the Alcazar beginning in March 1886 and later with the new genre of revues à grand spectacle61 at the Folies-Bergère, taken over that November by the brothers Isola, both magicians and also owners of La Scala. Their revue, Place au jeûne, which mixed ballet with “girls” from central Europe, music, comic interludes, and commentary on current politics, succeeded beyond all expectations. For many years thereafter, a typical performance at the Folies-Bergère involved a large, motley array of acts, including performers from foreign countries (figs. 66 and 67). Usually, this 61.  The term revue à grand spectacle was not used until 1893, when Joseph Oller opened the Olympia and some cafés-concerts began to convert into music halls.

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Fig. 66  Folies-Bergère program cover, 1894.

Fig. 67  Folies-Bergère program, 3 December 1888. The Folies-Bergère often featured ballets with music by its conductor L. C. Desormes and acts of various sorts, including here Japanese acrobats.

meant one or two large works (ballets or pantomime-ballets) and from three to eight short acts before and after these, such as dancing soloists, jugglers, acrobats, clowns, comics, trained dogs, trapeze artists, ventriloquists, wrestlers, bicyclists, foreign and exotic performers, and the occasional dancing elephants, every night at 8:30, with Sunday matinées for families! As one reviewer explained it, the secret to this theater’s success was its “preoccupation with the new,” changing programs before they “cease to please.” In 1891, Jules Bois put it another way, “One has to be protean, take on all forms and persist in none,” otherwise audiences felt “fatigue, ennui, and aversion.”62 Part of the Folies-Bergère’s mystique may have come from the vast circular ambulatory area directly behind the boxes and the main seating area with its bar painted by Manet in 1881–82. There, as people continued to watch the performances, they could circulate, smoke, and, after a certain period, pick up prostitutes. The garden, too, with its boxes and elegant galleries conducive to moments of isolation, had its appeal in winter as well as summer. Although some of the seats

62.  Rearick cites Bois in Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, 78.

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cost as much as those at orchestral concerts (5 francs), most were unreserved and cost only 2 francs. Those of modest means could attend and the bourgeoisie could afford to come often, the result being that almost 500,000 people enjoyed the Folies-Bergère in 1879. Much of the hall was well-lit, facilitating people-gazing among the wide mix of classes. 63 In 1888, a music critic credited its success with a new form of attendance it encouraged: What pleases is that nowhere else is one so flattered in one’s instincts as a free man. It is the sum of all one’s freedoms: freedom of looks [d’allures], smoking, drinking, and conversation without fear of bothering one’s neighbors or the spectacle; freedom to sit down when you are tired of walking around and to walk around when you are tired of sitting; freedom to leave boring shows and to pay attention only to interesting ones; freedom to flee à l’anglaise [without being noticed] at the first symptom of yawning. . . . In short, all this constitutes the most democratic and at the same time the most elegant of pleasures. 64

Whereas in 1887, when it first appeared among the top twenty-four theaters, the Folies-Bergère had receipts of only 216,000 francs, by 1889, it was earning over a million. For most of the 1890s, it was among the top eight Paris theaters; after 1896, it climbed to the top four, after the Opéra-Comique. 65 Loïe Fuller thrilled audiences there, and gypsy orchestras played in the interior garden during intermissions. Even the well-known and respected Wagnerian music critic Catulle Mendès wrote a four-act pantomime for the Folies-Bergère, Chand d’habits (1896). Since its inauguration in 1893, the Eldorado-concert in Algiers, holding 800, had aimed similarly to attract families and, whenever possible, brought in visiting acts from the Folies-Bergère in Paris. Other attractions with music also drew crowds. While most French towns, including Algiers, had circuses, Paris had three and a hippodrome (racecourse), all of which had house orchestras. While the Cirque d’hiver in eastern Paris was for ordinary people with less refined tastes—the target public of the Concerts 63.  In Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, chap. 4, Rearick discusses the social constituency of this theater as well as other popular venues of the time. He also clarifies that “though music halls drew much larger and more socially diverse audiences than the cabarets or classic theaters, they were not yet forums of mass culture. . . . Within the urban population itself, social barriers and privilege remained strong and poverty widespread” (84, 94–95). 64.  Un Monsieur de l’orchestre [Arnold Mortier], “Aux Folies-Bergère,” Figaro, 19 October 1888. Note this is apparently the same person who, for years, wrote society-oriented reviews of opera premieres for the same newspaper. 65.  The Folies-Bergère had also earned over a million francs in ticket sales in 1878, the year of the Universal Exhibition, but averaged 580,000 francs per year from 1875 to 1877.

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Pasdeloup, which performed there on Sunday afternoons (1861–84)—the Nouveau Cirque (founded in 1886 on the centrally located rue Saint-Honoré) attracted the chic, especially on Friday nights. It was a favorite rendezvous for elegantly dressed young men, as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec suggests in his painting At the Nouveau Cirque: The Dancer and Five Stuffed Shirts (1892). This circus was the most comfortable and presented less predictable fare than other circuses, such as starting out with orchestral selections by composers such as Delibes. Like certain theaters, it also sought to make money through multiple uses, charging people admission to swim in its enclosed pool when the circus was not playing. By the early 1890s, its earnings put it among the top eight Paris theaters. The Hippodrome (which opened in 1877 on the Place de l’Alma, in the elegant eighth arrondissement) could house the largest crowds, 8,000 seated and 15,000 total, which made the mixing of the classes inevitable. In the 1880s, its earnings from equestrian spectacles, clowns, and African fantasies were modest, but by 1891, after successful performances of works by composers of art music, Lalo’s Néron and Widor’s Jeanne d’Arc, it rose to be the fourth most popular “theater” in Paris. No one seemed bothered by the size of such crowds, for when seated at performances, they became a public. Of these popular venues, the zoo (Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation) was the most serious about offering a consistent mixture of light and serious music to its public. Each year on Thursday and Sunday afternoons from April through September in the 1870s and 1880s, it presented fifty concerts in its outdoor kiosk. Besides the price of entry to the zoo (1 franc), concert admission cost only from 20 centimes to 1.5 francs. Louis Mayeur, director (1872–93) and a clarinetist and saxophonist at the Opéra, brought the prestige of the Opéra and the assurance of quality performances. Because the zoo’s administration demanded that performers be selected from members of the Société des concerts, the Opéra, and OpéraComique, anyone who could afford the price of admission to the zoo could thus hear some of the city’s finest musicians. The Sunday concerts presented eight to ten works, starting with a march, ending with a light work such as a dance, and including opera fantasies and overtures. In the early 1880s, the most frequently performed were by Mayeur, Auber, Sellenick, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi, and Strauss, with some Massenet and others. They also produced spectacular free color programs suggesting human interactions with the elephants, camels, and exotic birds there, or stories in which they are featured. For the concert of 30 September 1886 featuring two explicitly Orientalist compositions (a fantasy from Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore and Bazille’s “Marche turque”), the illustrator depicted a range of Orientalist scenarios one might imagine while hearing the music (fig. 68). In the context of the foreign animals, plants, and exotic people Economic Liberalism in the Belle Epoque

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Fig. 68  Program for the forty-third concert of the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 30 September 1886. This full-color program for a concert at the Jardin zoologique includes depictions of exotic flora, fauna, and inhabitants, reflecting the Orientalistic subject material of the day’s concert. Many of these same animals and peoples could have been seen at the zoo, suggesting a close connection between the music and its environment.

audiences might be encountering at the zoo, these concerts functioned, then, not only as light entertainment, but also as another form of discovery, although premieres were rare. Urban culture, whether banal or stimulating, thus had significant utility for republicans. Entertainment at concerts, cafés, theaters, and parks brought people together in nonpolitical ways. This elicited a new form of sociability. When large and socially diverse crowds gathered as spectators, “the pleasures of looking” involved performing a new collective identity. As Vanessa Schwartz eloquently puts it, looking (and listening) together, “in, and thus as, the audience, they became ‘Parisians.’ ”66 One could say the same for audiences in other French cities and towns, including, as noted earlier, in the colonies: performances reinforced their identity as French. For the most part, this culture also helped cities prosper, and the recession that had begun in 1882 began to subside in 1886. It had other consequences as well. Competition spurred higher standards, variety, and distinction, as well as broader access to experiences of which some people had previously been deprived. Competition also rewarded experimentation and innovation, encouraging a taste for the new and a tolerance for diverse perspectives—valuable in a country that idealized progress. These made it easier for the public to acquire a taste for art music by living French composers. The immense appeal to French of all classes, not just of popular songs and music accompanying boulevard entertainment, but also of art music made organizers want to include it in virtually every venue from the theater and racetrack to the Folies-Bergère. Art music was used to introduce circus acts, to animate cabaret shadow plays, and to attract people to department stores and the zoo. For republicans who wanted this music’s influence to reach a broad swathe of the population, this was heartening. Yet capitalism and market forces led to excesses and raised troubling concerns. In 1886, Edmond Drumont published La France juive. Playing on anxieties caused by the bankruptcy of the Union générale in 1882 and the risk-averse behavior of French banks since then, he denounced Jewish bankers and encouraged antiSemitism among the workers and petit bourgeoisie, who suffered from international capitalism and its monopolistic practices. 67 In 1887, there was government corruption. When his son-in-law was accused of selling Légion d’honneur titles, President Grévy was forced to step down. In the theatrical world, intense com66.  Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque; Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 39, 44. 67.  Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Braziller, 1986), 28.

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petition for a public resulted in similar kinds of entertainment all over the city, each using the latest craze to vie for clientele. With more and more spectacles conceived to seduce public taste and feed the whims of fashion, the public was in a position to tyrannize over directors, authors, and composers. Moreover, the meaning of art music performed and experienced in such a variety of contexts and surrounded by such different genres was not evident. When music functioned as background or accompaniment to entertainment, some of it very banal, could its elegance and grace still elevate people? Did such contexts affect the way people heard and understood the music? Did they induce a hybridity of perception, demanding something different from the listener from one presentation to the next, or encourage partial rather than focused attention? Did these issues, together with the commodification of music and the musical experience that resulted from incorporating music in such places, influence composers’ approach to how or what they wrote? This widespread embrace of art music, unprecedented in French history, demonstrates the importance of music in French culture. But it was not long before the broad accessibility and desirability of this music contributed to a reaction against the idea that music should be useful in the ways envisaged by the républicains opportunistes.

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P a r t f o u r • Shifting Notions of Utility Between the Nation and the Self

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9 • Music as Resistance

and an Emerging Avant-garde

In the late 1880s, no song spoke more to the French imagination or made so palpably clear the political power of music than “En revenant de la revue” (Returning from the Review) (figs. 69–70). On 14 July 1886, Parisians swarmed the Longchamp stadium to cheer General Georges Boulanger and the return of troops from Tonkin. After fighting in Kabylia (Algeria), Italy, Indochina, and the FrancoPrussian War, Boulanger had commanded the forces occupying Tunisia in 1884 and reinstituted the draft, thereby democratizing the army. Recently appointed minister of war, he was the darling of the Ligue des patriotes, personifying la patrie and national honor. Paul Déroulède considered him the only minister Germany feared. With his blond beard and charismatic nature, he seemed the idol many were seeking.1 That evening at the Alcazar d’été, Paulus performed one of his favorite songs, a vigorous march tune taken from a ballet at the Folies-Bergère. This time he substituted a new ending, rhyming “admirer” with Boulanger. As he sang, he pretended to gallop on an imaginary horse, holding his hat on the end of his cane. The public, many of them Boulanger admirers, went wild. Only after numerous repetitions would they let him leave the stage. 2 Soon people were imitating him. While at the Eldorado the beloved singer Thérésa popularized Déroulède’s “Le 1.  Those who had grown up on La Tour de France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie by G. Bruno [Augustine Fouillée] (Paris: Belin, 1877) would have associated blond hair with the Gauls, whom some considered the original French. This text was responsible for the popular phrase “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois.” See M. Martin Guiney, Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 131–33. 2.  César Desormes, conductor at the Folies-Bergère, composed the ballet; Paulus commissioned two others to write lyrics for an excerpt he liked. The singer performed this numerous times before that fateful evening when he changed the verses “Moi, j’ faisais qu’admirer / Tous nos braves petits troupiers” to “Moi, j’ faisais qu’admirer / Notr’ brav’ général Boulanger.” See Paulus [Jean Paul Habans] and Octave Pradels, Trente ans de café-concert: Souvenirs recueillis (Paris: Société d’édition et de publications, 1908), 4–6. To hear this song sung in 1908, go to: www.chanson.udenap.org/enregistrements/peheu_en_revenant_de_a_revue_1909.mp3 (accessed 30 May 2008).

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Fig. 69  Sheet music cover of L. C. Desormes’s marching song “En revenant de la revue” (1886).

Fig. 70  One of the many reproductions of the popular song “En revenant de la revue.”

Bon Gîte” and “La Bonne Vieille” from his Chants du soldat, the director of the Divan japonais reported that “every time an artist was about to begin his act, the entire audience on cue began to sing: ‘En r’venant de la r’vue,’ punctuating each couplet with shouts of ‘Long live Boulanger!’ ”3 For years, the song could be heard all over the country, and as far away as Hanoi. Political and economic liberalism allowed some people to thrive, but it also led to a malaise in the country, one that many saw Boulanger as best equipped to address. The petite bourgeoisie, experiencing a rise in the overall cost of living with a decline in wages, felt threatened by big business, mass culture, and organized labor. Fearing foreign competition, particularly with Germany, they blamed free trade and became protectionist. 4 Suspicious of progress and industry, high finance, and symbols of modernity, they saw the department stores as “agents of internationalism.” Seeing a contradiction in the support of the républicains opportunistes for monopolies in the context of their desire to broaden access to the nation’s resources and help people prosper, this group formed a resentful offshoot of radical republicans. The popular nationalism they espoused evolved into a troubling paradox, a political alliance that began in the spirit of Jacobin patriotism and migrated gradually to the Right. “En revenant de la revue” addressed this new spirit, roused it, and contributed significantly to the popularity of General Boulanger, a rising political leader who came to represent the most significant threat to the Third Republic. Serving as a form of political resistance, especially during the Revolution, popular songs had long functioned as propaganda among the working classes. Throughout the 1870s, those sympathetic with republicanism used songs in cafés-concerts to keep alive the spirit of revanche and build momentum for a regime change. Patriotic songs performed there helped forge a republican identity during the repressive Moral Order. Frédéric Robert has documented the extent to which elements of the “Marseillaise” permeated many songs performed at the Eldorado and the Alcazar, implanting its message of French pride and resistance to the Germans well before it was declared 3.  Jehan Sarrazin, Souvenirs de Montmartre et du quartier latin (1895), cited in Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 341. 4.  The export of many French goods had been falling even before the recession of the early 1880s. Fear intensified that Germany was surpassing France, and that France would no longer be able to compete with its neighbor. In May 1883, Déroulède called for boycotts of German goods and objected to the “peaceful invasion” of German workers, counting some 50,000 in Paris and 500,000 in France. These positions helped attract to the Ligue more petit commerçants who began to feel abandoned by the republican mainstream when the radicals like Spuller refused to acknowledge the commercial crisis.

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the national anthem.5 When Boulanger, “General Revanche,” later ran for office, advocacy of revanche returned in café-concert songs, this time to fan enthusiasm for a republican opponent. Unsurprisingly, with political freedom of expression now the law, songs could again be used openly for spreading ideas critical of the regime in power. Striking workers plotting demonstrations met in halls such as the Alcazar. 6 But “En revenant de la revue” went further. It helped mobilize people into a crowd, not to engage in violent resistance, but to vote, albeit against the parliamentary republic. The song contributed to the movement, Boulangism, that linked the emergence of mass culture to that of mass politics.7 At the same time, Boulangism’s success revealed the vulnerability of liberal democracy. An antirationalist, antihumanitarian, and xenophobic nationalism arose in association with Boulanger, building on that of Déroulède and Drumont. 8 Whereas large crowds in revolutionary festivals and the crowd of a spectacle brought together by culture could be useful for its social binding, crowds bound by political criticism of the status quo could be threatening, particularly when roused by strong, charismatic personalities such as Déroulède and Boulanger. Boulanger also appealed to titled aristocrats, who saw him, like Marshal MacMahon, as capable of preparing a return of monarchy. Monarchists had already made significant gains in the 1885 elections and the far Left and the Right had come together on amnesty for Communards in spring 1886. Royalists were taken with Boulanger’s desire to revise the constitution, and so when he put himself on the ballot throughout the country, many contributed to his campaigns. Financing as well as publicity became major factors in the elections. At first nostalgic and later perhaps hopeful for victory, monarchists began to have costume parties in which they dressed up in period attire and danced to music inspired by that of the Ancien 5.  Frédéric Robert, La Marseillaise (Paris: Pavillon, 1989), 212, 218–26. Boulanger was particularly interested in the “Marseillaise.” As minister of war, he asked for one version of it, with the same orchestration and in the same key, to be performed by all military bands. A committee (chaired by Ambroise Thomas) was formed to choose among 200 arrangements, and the general took part in making the choice. Ménestrel, 6 February 1887, 78. 6.  In his To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), James Lehning describes one such meeting for two to four hundred people (107). 7.  Ibid., 157, 160. 8.  This included future leaders of the new Right, such as Maurice Barrès (b. 1862), a Boulangist deputy elected from Nancy in 1889, and Charles Maurras (b. 1868) who saw the role of Boulangism as “reconciling old France with democracy in socialism.” Hostile to the positivists of the new university whom they considered too intellectual and too rationalist, they believed in instinct and feelings. Raised with revanche as their generation’s duty, they used nationalist sentiment to appropriate the moral authority previously claimed by Freemasons. See Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 74–5.

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Régime. Just as powerful as “En revenant de la revue” for the petite bourgeoisie, newly composed pavanes and minuets captured the imagination of the aristocracy, quite possibly fueling their desire for political change. Increasingly, many French, especially social and intellectual elites, were also troubled by the materialism, mediocrity, and consumerism of the modern world. As a disillusioned critic noted, “The dominant characteristic of the esprit public had become crude chauvinism, mixed with sentimental inanity and self-satisfied ignorance. Cafés-concerts were at their peak. Paulus and Déroulède reigned over the crowds and met their aesthetic needs. . . . But minds saturated with naturalism felt an emerging need . . . a need for something else, without knowing exactly what that might be.”9 Some looked to satire to channel their critique, others to the sublime—a domain beyond all comparison, beyond comprehension—especially as represented in Wagner’s music. With this, alongside electoral change in 1885 and economic liberalism, came a renaissance of idealism, a desire to escape the period’s near exclusive concern for reality, the real, and the possible in order to entertain the metaphysical and the mysterious, the strange and the obscure, even if this meant tolerating, even enjoying, the barely comprehensible. This trend was particularly evident in literature and the visual arts with Mallarmé, Huysmans, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and others. While the growing socialist movement both imagined and advocated more idealistic goals for society, many among the elites who felt constrained by positivist rationalism or bourgeois morality, and who were distressed by republican hypocrisies and republican pandering to the lowest common denominator, embraced these new values as a way to seek distinction from the masses. For many espousing aristocratic or aristocratic-like values, culture became a tool to appropriate for different needs and desires than those of the republican state, with music perhaps the most capable of covert as well as explicit resistance to ideological domination. The roots of modernism, I argue, begin here10—not just in antibourgeois resistance, but in fascination with music for the mind that would challenge that of sentiment, in the self-exploration this music enabled, and in the obscure realms of the 9.  Cited in Adolphe Retté, Le Symbolisme: Anecdotes et souvenirs (Paris: Vanier, 1903), 158–59. 10.  An early use of the word “modernist” appeared in La Revue moderniste (December 1884–February 1886), which published music reviews by a Wagnerian, Hippolyte Mirande, poems about the Rose-Croix, and works by Charles Morice. Debussy expressed his interest in this journal in a letter of September 1886 to Emile Baron from Rome, in Claude Debussy, Correspondance, ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 52. Roger Shattuck, in The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), observes: “The twentieth century could not wait for a round number; it was born, yelling, in 1885” (4).

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unknown it suggested. While these new currents might appear as a return to art for art’s sake, inspired by Baudelaire, led by the symbolists, and in part responding to Wagner, I see this as a reconception, an appropriation of music’s utility for nonrepublican purposes. From the perspectives of the other arts, especially poetry and painting, music became a model, a window onto the nature of inner experience, intuition, and the creative process itself. To the extent that music could nurture and serve the private aspirations of individuals rather than the public ones of the state, it had the capacity to promote new values associated with rising countercultures, be they political or apolitical.

Reviving Memory of the Ancien Régime As it did in 1873 when a return to monarchy seemed inevitable, music and musical taste again functioned as a barometer of political sentiment after the 1885 elections threw into question opportunists’ continued control of government, raised hopes and fears about rising monarchist support, and led to new alliances. A notable instance of this came after four thousand people attended a royalist festival on 14 May 1886 celebrating the marriage of Amélie, daughter of the comte de Paris, to the future king of Portugal. For a month thereafter, republicans discussed exiling the pretenders to the French throne; they passed a law to this effect in June.11 Around the same time, the Opéra-Comique agreed to produce Emmanuel Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui about an exiled king who yearns to return to his homeland. The story was based on Henri de Valois, fourth son of Catherine de’ Medici, who was made king of Poland against his will. At the premiere on 18 May 1887, critics noted that audiences heard several allusions to the “present situation.”12 As with Delibes’s Le Roi l’a dit in 1873, the work, originally conceived as an operetta, uses humor and wit to make light of a monarch, this one displaced from his own 11.  The Bonapartist pretender went to Switzerland; the comte de Paris and the duc d’Orléans, to Great Britain. Philippe Levillain, “Les Droites en République,” in Histoire des droites en France, vol. 1: Politique, ed. Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 190. During this time, in his song “L’Expulsion,” from Chansons du Chat Noir (Paris: Heugel, n.d.), Mac-Nab asked why French royalty could not marry in France and advocated expelling others too—priests, police, and anybody who exploited workers. In his song, Montéhus concluded, “Socialism, that’s the future.” See Pierre Barbier and France Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 83–85. 12.  According to Auguste Vitu in Figaro, 19 May 1887, when Antonin Proust saw the conspirators’ in Chabrier’s opera drawing straws to decide who would kill the king, he said they might just as well have been members of the budget committee deciding who would “porter le coup fatal” to get rid of René Goblet as head of government. In fact, Goblet had just relinquished his position on 17 May.

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country. Besides ridiculing the Polish people and a king who loves France “like a mistress,” the work is full of conspiracies, including a Polish one in which a disguised Henri participates to avoid being crowned. If many listeners found the libretto too complicated, this was perhaps a reflection of how complicated France itself was in the mid 1880s. People were disgusted with intrigues and political defections, the Legitimist pretender in the 1880s, Henri V, was not strong or particularly courageous, and many feared insurrection and the anarchy it would bring, or socialism. Although Le Roi returned to the stage that November and the following March, eventually receiving twenty performances, the work did better abroad than in France. Wagnerians were surprised that one among them would choose to write a light comedy using conventional forms. Baron Vincent d’Indy, however, wrote Chabrier to say “how much your monarch pleases me.”13 More than the story, however, it was the music that appealed, although the eclectic mixture of serious and light, lyrical and comedic, parody and pastiche, confused critics.14 For amusement and distraction, the characters in Le Roi malgré lui engage in dances: a bourrée from Chabrier’s birthplace, Auvergne (suggesting his own nostalgia), as well as a pavane, choral waltz, mazurka, and barcarole. According to his biographer Roger Delage, Chabrier studied and made copies of old dances at the Bibliothèque nationale to serve as inspiration.15 Yet along with music signaling the sixteenth century, such as a French chanson recalling Clément Jannequin, modern harmonic innovations abound in Le Roi malgré lui—unresolved and accented ninths in the prelude that set the tone for Henri’s desire to leave, leaping ninths later used to express hatred, parallel ninths animating the choral waltz, and musical metaphors for duplicity and disguise. Still, some critics felt the work showed too much fantasy and lacked la juste mesure.16 The political situation grew more heated in 1887 with two developments that contributed to the rise of an active political resistance associated with Boulanger. First, in April 1887, accusations of spying on the French border rekindled xenophobic panic and paranoia about Germany. The arrest of a French customs officer, 13.  Cited in Roger Delage, Emmanuel Chabrier (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 388. 14.  In his “Chabrier” entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie et al. (New York: Grove, 2001), Steven Huebner points to “patter singing, an italianate canon of confusion, show-stopping roulades, serious love music in post-Wagnerian chromatic language, an elegiac modal pavane, and a driving choral waltz” as representative of the work’s eclecticism. See also the analysis in his French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism and Style (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 18. 15.  Gaillards, courantes, sarabandes, and passepieds. Delage, Chabrier, 397. 16.  Both the Wagnerian Louis de Fourcaud and the anti-Wagnerian Camille Bellaigue made such objections. See Ménestrel, 20 November 1887.

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Guillaume Schnaebelé, and a German soldier’s assassination of a French hunter in French territory—predecessors of the Dreyfus Affair—fueled the ire of the Ligue des patriotes, which turned increasingly anti-immigrant. “National independence from foreigners” emerged as one of its highest priorities.17 Boulanger impressed everyone by calling for a general mobilization of the troops. This apparently caused Bismarck to back down from confrontation, but led to Boulanger’s dismissal from government. On 27 June, Déroulède called a meeting of the Ligue at the Cirque d’hiver to protest Boulanger’s dismissal and acclaim Boulanger as Gambetta’s heir. That December, when President Grévy resigned, the Ligue wanted Boulanger back in the government. Second, on 27 August 1887 the comte de Paris published a manifesto demanding a vote on whether the people yearned for monarchy. After Grévy’s resignation, the comte’s friends spoke to him of the general, and a consensus emerged.18 When in spring 1888, Boulanger ran for election throughout the country, the duchesse d’Uzès spent over 3 million francs (6.6 million euros in today’s currency) to subsidize his campaigns.19 The comte de Dillon, the Ligue’s treasurer, also contributed, as did the prince de Polignac. 20 With this help, that of the Ligue, and the many songs written in support of him, in 1888 and 1889, Boulanger emerged the victor in Paris and five other départements. Hopes invested in Boulanger, however, did not last for long. When Déroulède engineered a coup d’état by which the 17.  These attitudes were already present in Déroulède’s 1877 play L’Hetman. It begins with a Ukrainian Jew, Samuel Chmoul, described not only as “able, eloquent and ingenious,” but also two-faced—a spy and traitor. By the late 1880s, Déroulède was thought to be someone who saw traitors everywhere. In 1887, he wrote a column on “German Spies” in Le Petit Parisien. 18.  In The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), Robert Gildea analyses how the baron de Mackau argued the advantages of Boulangism to the comte de Paris, saying it could “transform royalism from a movement of chiefs without Indians into a genuine populist enterprise” (303–4). William Irvine, “Royalists and the Politics of Nationalism,” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France, ed. Robert Tombs (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), cites a letter from 10 February 1888 in which a confidant of the comte’s wrote to Mackau proposing a secret meeting with the comte to discuss “an imminent monarchist restoration” (113–14). On 2 January 1888, the Bonapartist pretender, Prince Napoléon Victor, also received Boulanger, whom he saw as a “stepping-stone in the acquisition of power.” See Bernard Ménager, “Nationalists and Bonapartists,” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France, 137. 19.  The duchesse actually sold her mansion on the Champs Elysées to support his campaign. An excellent account of the importance and role of politics in her life is Patrick de Gmeline, La Duchesse d’Uzès, 1847–1933 (Paris: Perrin, 1986), esp. 91–122. 20.  Sternhell, Droite révolutionnaire, 74. In February 1889, Maurice Barrès introduced Polignac to workers as one their new recruits. See also Jacques Chastenet, La République des républicains, 1878–1893 (Paris: Hachette, 1954), 205, and Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 3. When Déroulède became the Ligue’s president in 1888, he appointed a new board of directors, half of whom had links to Boulanger.

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general would take over the presidency, Boulanger refused. 21 Eight months later, Boulanger went into exile, and the following year, he committed suicide. In March 1889, the Ligue was banned and royalists lost face as the party of demagoguery and disorder, their ambitions at returning France to a monarchy destroyed. From 1886 to 1889, then, the potential for regime change set the stage for those disenchanted with the status quo to appreciate music’s ideological utility anew. A broad range of composers—conservatives such as d’Indy, republicans such as Saint-Saëns, and even composers known for popular music—increasingly wrote sarabandes, gavottes, pavanes, and minuets. While for some, these were most likely a response to a rising fashion, for others, they presented opportunities to show how old musical forms could profitably be enjoyed in contemporary contexts, a metaphor, perhaps, for how the monarchy could be integrated and might thrive in the modern world.

The Dance Craze With Legitimists allied with Orléanist royalists but unable to mount a serious opposition, and some willing to join a new alliance with an emerging republican Right, 22 few in 1886 anticipated an actual return to monarchy or a Third Empire. Still, after Amélie’s spectacular wedding, a taste for reviving Ancien Régime festivities began to spread, along with the music and dancing associated with them.23 Perhaps picking up on interest in Lully’s and Rameau’s dances heard at the Opéra, the concerts populaires, and private salons in the early 1880s, together with new editions of this music (see chap. 5), d’Indy, in his Suite dans le style ancien (1886), composed dances modeled on those that thrived under Louis XIV—a prelude, entrée, sarabande, menuet, and ronde française—setting them for two flutes, trumpet, and strings.24 As he honors the structures and rhythms associated with these dances, he adds new charm through the 21.  Boulanger cited personal reasons (his mistress). Chastenet, République des républicains, suggests that this was tantamount to Hercules finding his Omphale, that is, losing his strength to the charm of a woman (192). 22.  Edouard Drumont, in La Fin d’un monde (Paris: Albert Savine, 1889), bemoans the monarchists’ inability to articulate an effective opposition (319). After the comte de Chambord died, he suggests, many legitimists were uninterested in joining forces under the comte de Paris, preferring instead to “amuse themselves, . . . dress up, dance, and love (393). Maxime Lecomte, in Les Ralliés: Histoire d’un parti, 1886–1898 (Paris: Flammarion, 1898), 66–83, reproduces documents from August 1886 arguing to establish an alliance between monarchists and conservative republicans. 23.  Moreover, in March 1887, the Opéra-Comique revived Grétry’s Epreuve villageoise (1784). 24.  Entrées can be found in Lully’s Armide and Rameau’s Dardanus, sarabandes in Gluck’s Armide, and minuets and rondos in much music by Lully, Gluck, and Rameau. In his opéra-comique Attendez-moi sous l’orme (1882), d’Indy had earlier sought to explore “human feelings in those

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way the melodic lines interact and the chromatic harmonies that result. The prelude’s slow tempo invites the listener to savor these in the two solo flutes, moving in tonally unstable parallel thirds and in seconds in contrary motion. In the menuet, d’Indy creates rhythmic interest by alternating two measures of hemiola (three quarter beats) with two measures in 6/8. D’Indy’s sarabande, which was well received at the Société nationale on 13 March 1887, borrows the genre’s stately pace and accented second beat, but in incorporating minor ninths and major sevenths as color around the repeated Ds (ex. 19), he shows how flexible and adaptive the dance can be in modern “clothes.” In 1887, possibly inspired by the prelude to Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui, Erik Satie composed three sarabandes also with unresolved seventh and ninth chords. 25 Simultaneously, aristocrats began to perform old dances, sometimes in period costumes, wigs and all, especially the stately pavane from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the elegant minuet that first appeared at the court of Louis XIV. As in the seventeenth century, when the king himself danced publicly, and when children and gentlemen were expected to practice dance daily, it was believed that learning the “measured, studied, and composed” gestures and attitudes of dance would not only discipline the body but also physically encode values associated with the Ancien Régime. 26 In 1887 and 1888, L’Illustration published three images of this new fashion, showing couples dancing the pavane and minuet (figs. 71–73). The magazine included the score of a minuet for piano “inspired by melodies from yesteryear,” in case readers wished to reenact the experience. To explain this new fashion, it noted: Whether from Italy or Spain (and dictionaries disagree), the pavane has just made a triumphant return to the realm of fashion, full of frequent revolutions. The minuet, which is younger and more typically French, shares in

with wigs and powder,” although he and others were not entirely satisfied with the results (letter to Adolphe Jullien, 21 February 1882, F-Pn, Opéra). Vicomte Alexis de Castillon (d. 1873), too, earlier wrote a dance suite with a sarabande, revived at the Société nationale in January 1886. 25.  See Alan Gillmor, Erik Satie (New York: Norton, 1988), 20–21. In his Satie the Bohemian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Steven Whiting, however, thinks that Satie had already been exploring such harmonies (66). Robert Orledge, in his Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), argues for the influences of Victor-Dynam Fumet, the pianist whom Satie replaced at the Chat Noir in 1887, and of Gregorian chant (34–38). Satie’s Sarabandes undoubtedly influenced the Sarabande Debussy first published in the Grand journal du lundi (17 February 1896) and later his Pour le piano (1901). See André Hoérée, “Préface,” in Claude Debussy Images (oubliées): Three Pieces for Piano (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Theodore Presser, 1977). 26.  See, e.g., Philippe Beaussant, Versailles, Opéra (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 34–39, and Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Festive Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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Ex. 19  Vincent d’Indy, Suite dans le style ancien (1886), “Sarabande.” In this Suite, d’Indy experimented with traditional eighteenth-century dance forms but injected his own characteristically complex harmonic progressions into each movement. The “Sarabande” contrasts sections of comparative simplicity, such as the one below and those in which the double-dotted melody is carried by a solo flute with pizzicato string ex.19 Pasler.UCP accompaniment, with more contrapuntally complex sections for the strings alone, where the melody appears in canon between the first violin and the viola. Flute I

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this. . . . The return to truly artistic traditions is a comforting sign. Besides, society’s newly found passion for the pavane and the minuet is not an isolated event. It is one among a number of new instances of a renewed taste for traditional elegance. . . . Even in the theater, in several recent ballets, this yearning to be charmed rather than amazed, which is typical of the French spirit and even more of the Parisian spirit, has been in evidence. The minuet was still almost a novelty—an ancient novelty—two years ago, when Victor Hugo’s grandchildren danced it in costume with Alphonse Daudet’s son. 27

For royalists such as the duchesse d’Uzès, these dances were a way not only to rediscover their “lost joy,” but also to educate their children in the mœurs of the Ancien Régime. In March 1887, L’Illustration reproduced drawings of children 27.  “Nos gravures . . . le Menuet,” L’Illustration, 8 January 1887, 28–29.

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Fig. 71  Dancing the minuet in period costumes, L’Illustration, 8 January 1887. The text that accompanies this illustration explains the vogue for eighteenth-century dances: “The duchesse d’Uzès, that typical Parisian woman, felt the need to renew the usual elements of aristocratic parties and to attempt more than ever to fill this thirst for artistic sensations that consumes us at the turn of this century. . . . This was the source of this new fashion. Other salons followed.”

dancing pavanes and minuets. Real clothes belonging to the host’s grandfather, together with the direction of the dances by the Opéra’s maître de danse, assured an experience purporting to have some authenticity. 28 By April, this taste spread to masked balls at the Opéra where dancers began the evening by performing a pavane and passepied from Emile Paladilhe’s opera Patrie (1886). For republicans, the taste for bringing a modern perspective to old dances, which continued through 1900, reinforced interest in earlier models of French charm and grace, as discussed in chapter 6. Delibes’s six dances dans le style ancien composed for Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse, at the Comédie-Francaise in 1882, contain a gaillard, pavane, madrigal, and passepied. The Société des concerts performed a sixteenth-century pavane that December. Saint-Saëns, who incorporated pavanes 28.  “Nos gravures . . . Une soirée chez M. de Lesseps,” L’Illustration, 26 March 1887, 208, 216. Ferdinand de Lesseps was the creator of the Suez Canal. In 1880, he founded a company to construct the Panama Canal, which was funded by French bonds beginning in 1888. Later, he was condemned for the scandal surrounding it.

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Fig. 72  Dancing the pavane, L’Illustration, 26 March 1887. At the home of Ferdinand de Lesseps, eleven children, ranging in age from 5 to 16, donned old-fashioned clothes and reenacted pavanes and minuets under the direction of the Opéra’s dancing master, M. de Soria. The two youngest, “Jacques, 3 ½ years old, and little Giselle . . . 16 months old . . . seemed bored and preferred sleeping to dancing.”

Fig. 73  Sarabande in “Reveillon mondaine,” L’Illustration, 22 December 1888. The sarabande was danced at Christmas Eve parties in 1888.

into his historical operas Etienne Marcel (1879) and Henry VIII (1883), also included a minuet and gavotte in his Septet (1881) and another pavane in his Prosperine (Opéra-Comique, 1887), a work praised for its charm and grace. 29 Pavanes in Gaston Salvayre’s Egmont (1886) and Paladilhe’s Patrie (1886), as well as the minuets in Massenet’s Manon (1884), function as musical echoes of the French past. The young composer Georges Marty concluded that even the Académie might be open to such dances and in 1885–86 included a minuet, the first movement of his Suite for orchestra, as one of his Envois de Rome. Figaro reproduced a minuet from Godard’s Suite de danses anciennes et modernes (31 August 1887). In 1887, when the comte de Paris was advocating a return to monarchy, not only the composer-conductor Gabriel Marie but also popular composers like Aimé Girod and Emile Girard composed pavanes for piano, the latter entitled “Souvenir d’autrefois.” The Bibliothèque nationale houses many pavanes from the period, most them signifying the Ancien Régime, but no more so than in 1887 when nine were published.30 A sixteenth-century pavane was even included that year in a collection of children’s choruses. 31 Among the most famous is the Pavane for orchestra and chorus by Gabriel Fauré. Although he had begun the work in August 1887 with Jules Danbé’s orchestra in mind, he told the comtesse Greffulhe that he had written it for her salon. That September, he asked her cousin Robert de Montesquiou to write words for the chorus. Fauré’s Pavane, which the Concerts Lamoureux premiered on 25 November 1888, was finally danced and performed at the countess’s garden party in the Bois de Boulogne on 21 July 1891.32 Many other composers also wrote pavanes and suites in the next decade.33 Whether performed in period costumes or listened to in concerts, whether in aristocratic salons or popular settings, the Opéra, the Société nationale, or the Folies-Bergère, these dances electrified the imagination. They showed how contemporary music could embody fruitful relationships with the past, whether 29.  M. Savigny, “Les Théâtres,” L’Illustration, 26 March 1887, 216. Possibly this work was influenced by Lully’s Prosperine, republished by Michaelis. 30.  In the Bibliothèque nationale, I found twenty-three pavanes published in France between 1875 to 1886, and sixty-six more published from 1888 through 1900—most of them “memories of past times,” whether associated with the Medicis, Henri II of Navarre, or Henri III, whether written “in the style of Louis XIV,” or parts of “salon fantasies” to be danced in recreating eighteenth-century fêtes galantes. 31.  Chœurs d’enfants composed or transcribed by Adolphe-Léopold Danhauser (Paris: Lemoine, 1887), 2. 32.  Gabriel Fauré to Comtesse Greffulhe, ca. 29 September 1887, in Gabriel Fauré Correspondance, ed. Jean-Michel Nectoux (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 131–32. 33.  The young Paul Vidal (Prix de Rome, 1883) wrote a pavane in 1888. Widor included one in his Jeanne d’Arc (1890). See also chapter 11, n. 121.

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through imitation, appropriation, or assimilation. While some functioned as symbols of an earlier era with the power to help people identify with it, others like Fauré’s Pavane, written for an aristocrat with republican sympathies, were attempts to bring a modern perspective to an old tradition. They suggested that the past had a value that could inform present-day thinking, including its music, that progress was not merely a continuous process of linear evolution but something that could turn back on itself in order to propel itself forward. 34 In this sense, the utility of these dances was cultural, sometimes countercultural, rather than moral, educational, or commercial. Like republicans, aristocrats increasingly looked to the arts as a way to assure the continuity of their traditions.

Wagner’s Threatening Allure Wagnerism invades us, inundates us. In my classes at the Conservatoire, my students think about it constantly when speaking among themselves, and even talk with me about it. What are we supposed to do, those of us from another generation? Remain indifferent, insensitive to a universal movement, or change with the times, modify our ideas, our style, in short, our art? Léo Delibes 35

In 1885, besides the fall of Jules Ferry, the death of Victor Hugo, symbol of the Third Republic, marked a major transition in French culture. Hugo had symbolized republican resistance to Napoleon III, and his return to France in 1870 signaled the end of the Second Empire. Some compared him to Gambetta in that both were committed to a republic of democracy, not violence.36 His poetry of family values, of combat and liberation, expressed with great force and clarity, his concept of literature as a social act, of art for the sake of progress, and of theater through which the writer could “take charge of souls,” and his insistence on bringing art to the masses—these earned him canonization.37 On 27 February 1881, France celebrated his eightieth birthday with Jules Ferry bringing him a bust of the Republic and thousands of Parisians parading before his house all afternoon. For the occasion, Saint-Saëns 34.  See Jann Pasler, “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in The Late Romantic Era, ed. Jim Samson (London: Macmillan, 1991), 389–416. 35.  Delibes in conversation with Lalo, ca. 1888, cited in Joël-Marie Fauquet, “Le Folklore breton dans Le Roi d’Ys, un antidote contre Wagner?” L’Avant-Scène opéra Le Roi d’Ys 65 (July 1984): 20. 36.  Gildea, Past in French History, 37. 37.  See La Gloire de Victor Hugo: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1er octobre 1985– 6 janvier 1986, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1985), and Priscilla Clark, Literary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 145–149, 156.

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wrote a Hymne à Victor Hugo for huge orchestra and chorus, organ, eight harps and trumpets, using a motif attributed to Beethoven, the poet’s favorite composer.38 In eastern Paris, they named the boulevard that links the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation for him. When he died, the long shadow of this French Hercules was lifted and many began to conceive of art’s social utility differently. As frustration with the positivist and secular rationalism of the républicains opportunistes grew, a number of “movements” critical of the artistic agendas of republicanism emerged in elite and popular culture. The Ligue des patriotes had shown that the French could appreciate an authoritarian leader and that they understood the appeal of the irrational. Listeners sick of materialism flocked to the Concerts Lamoureux, whose conductor promised escape from bourgeois banality and commercialism. Along with those in high-priced seats, there were many students, especially from the Ecole de médecine, driven by a “thirst for the infinite” to counteract the “precise and the concrete” aspects of life. They sought to overcome the strictures of measure and proportion and get beyond the limits of the individual to immerse themselves in the “hereditary aspects of a race.” Wagner’s music offered a kind of “sonorous and celestial manna.”39 Beginning in 1882, virtually all Lamoureux’s concerts featured it; some gave premieres of French works inspired by Wagner. 40 On 2 March 1884, the public sat spellbound “in a religious silence” for an hour and a quarter as he treated them to the French premiere of the first act of Tristan und Isolde. If the work preached redemption through love, this was not the love of family that would lead to love of country, as envisaged by republicans. Rather it was love as a passion. The desire this music aroused was certainly as sensuous (and, arguably, as sexual) as the music of Delibes and Massenet. But it also called on the unfathomable, the uncontainable, and the incommensurable. As Nietzsche described it, Wagner derived his power from Dionysus, not the Apollo whom the French government had for so long idolized. In trying to describe the experience of this premiere, Ménestrel’s reviewer found that the traditional method of judging through comparison, as promoted by republicans, simply did not work. Because nothing resembled the way the voice and the 38.  While Hugo was alive, a wide range of composers set his poetry to music—not only Saint-Saëns, but also Berlioz, Bizet, Fauré, Franck, d’Indy, and Massenet. 39.  Léon Daudet, who attended the 1887 Paris performance of Lohengrin, saw the taste for Wagner’s music as part of the reaction against the “evolutionist materialism” that had become overwhelming since 1885. Many of his cohorts at the Ecole de médecine sought “refuge” at the Concerts Lamoureux. See Daudet, “Devant la douleur,” in Souvenirs et polémiques, ed. Bernard Oudin (Paris: Laffont, 1992), 228–30. 40.  For example, Lamoureux presented the prelude to Chabrier’s Gwendoline on 22 November 1885 and d’Indy’s Le Chant de la cloche on 28 February 1886.

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orchestra were equals in Tristan, the work could not be seen as superior to this or that. Any attempt at analysis would “lessen the emotion and spoil the pleasure.” The only way to evaluate such music was in its own terms, its own logic. This meant understanding Wagner’s theory and how Tristan was the “culmination” of the system worked out in the Ring.41 The next year, an international collection of writers and intellectuals who patronized the Concerts Lamoureux started the Revue wagnérienne (1885–88) to do just that: “explain the lyrical works of Wagner to the public” and, for those who knew it already, turn them into connoisseurs. Each month, they reviewed all performances of Wagner in France and published essays by their members, including Mallarmé and Huysmans. In their first issue, sold at the Concerts Lamoureux, the royalist music critic Louis de Fourcaud revisited the notion of a Wagnerian logic, appropriating a concept long associated with republican values to suggest, counterintuitively, that Wagner brought “a return to logic” along with “human truth.”42 Many of them also met and performed Wagner together as a group called the Petit Bayreuth (fig. 74). One should not take this to mean that republicans rejected Wagner. To the extent that Wagner’s music represented musical progress with its high-minded tone, extreme chromaticism, and innovative dramatic form, those with eclectic tastes were open to what the French might learn from it. Republican composers were among the many French who, along with Lamoureux and aristocrats such as Winnaretta Singer (the future princesse de Polignac), the comtesse de Pourtalès, and the comtesse Greffuhle, traveled to Bayreuth. In 1876, Saint-Saëns heard the Ring there, and in 1882, with Delibes, Salvayre, and Guiraud, the premiere of Parsifal. Anti-Wagnerian critics, such as Camille Bellaigue, too made the trip in 1886, and in 1888, when Debussy first attended, some 120 French went to Bayreuth. 43 As noted above, in the decade following Wagner’s death in 1883, French composers began to assimilate what they found important in his music. Besides permeating music by Wagnerians like d’Indy and Chabrier, Wagnerian leitmotifs characterize Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII (1883) and Massenet’s Manon (1884). Steven Huebner 41.  Eugène Briqueville, “Tristan et Yseult aux Concerts Lamoureux,” Ménestrel, 9 March 1884, 116. Of course, critics did use Wagner as a basis for comparison, especially those unsympathetic to his music. For example, in reviewing a concert on 27 March 1892, H. Barbedette compares the adagietto from Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor to the prelude from Lohengrin as examples of “the true and the artificial, the spontaneous and the recherché.” 42.  Louis de Fourcaud, “Wagnérisme,” Revue wagnérienne, 8 February 1885, 8. Note that the editorial staff of the journal included not only the founder Edouard Dujardin, but also the Polish pianist Téodor de Wyzewa and the British political theorizer Houston Stewart Chamberlain. 43.  In his Le Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (Paris: Delagrave, 1900), Albert Lavignac lists those French who attended Bayreuth performances between 1876 and 1899. By 1896, over 700

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Fig. 74  Petit-Bayreuth program, 31 May 1885. “Petit-Bayreuth” was the name adopted by a group of dedicated Wagnerians who got together to discuss and perform his works. The group included among its members Chabrier, d’Indy, Chausson, and Humperdinck, the last of whom arranged Wagner’s works so that they could be performed by the group’s small orchestra.

calls these a “clearer invitation to listen for motivic connections of a rudimentary developing-variation type than previous French repertory.”44 Beginning with Pasdeloup in the 1860s, conductors endeavored to educate their audiences to the merits of Wagner’s music by multiple performances. Some took its difficulties as challenges that, as with Berlioz’s music, would stretch their conducting capacities, performers’ skills and coordination, and audiences’ ability to tolerate expressive intensity and imagine drama without the stage. For example, were attending. Not everyone loved what they heard. For a listener who found the whole experience fascinating, but much of the music boring, see Albert Wolff, Voyages à travers le monde (Paris: Victor-Havard, 1884), 259–343. 44.  The immense question of Wagner’s reception and influence on French composers has been treated extensively, most recently and thoughtfully by Huebner in his French Opera, vii, 66, and Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz, eds., Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 1999).

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to draw opera-lovers to his premiere of the religious scene from Parsifal in 1884, Colonne repeated it in the middle of a program featuring the popular baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure. Although this audience remained unimpressed, the work entered Colonne’s repertoire, appearing four more times in spring 1887. In a review of these performances, Edouard Dujardin, editor of the Revue wagnérienne, commented on how much better Colonne got over time. Whereas in 1884, he had had problems with tempos and the movement of the chorus, in 1887, he got everything right. In April, Dujardin also waxed enthusiastic about his performance of the Flower Maidens’ scene from Parsifal, “an extraordinarily difficult work” requiring not only “absolute precision,” but also “superior musical intelligence.”45 Two months earlier, the amateur choral society Concordia had also taken it on for the challenge of singing in twelve parts, its most demanding work to date. Wagner’s success with orchestral audiences, the reintroduction of Wagner at the Société des concerts in 1884 after a fourteen-year hiatus, and the literature defending his music gradually convinced state officials to support a production of Lohengrin.46 In late summer 1885, the Opéra-Comique director Carvalho and its conductor Jules Danbé traveled to Vienna to hear the opera. There they consulted with the conductor Richter on what they would need to mount their own production. They also stopped in Munich, where they heard it again and got further instructions from Wagner’s widow. 47 Unfortunately in December their project fizzled due to organized press resistance; however, in February 1886, 45.  Edouard Dujardin, “Notes et nouvelles,” Revue wagnérienne, 15 February 1887, 3, and 15 April 1887, 67. For more on the reception of Lohengrin, see also Kelly Maynard, “The Enemy Within: Encountering Wagner in Early Third Republic France” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2007). 46.  Even if Lohengrin evoked a riot of different responses at the Concerts Pasdeloup in 1868, it was a favorite among French musicians and writers. In 1861, Baudelaire compared the experiences of Berlioz, Liszt, and himself to its overture in the first installment of his famous essay “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Ruff (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 510–23. In 1858, Flaxland published the opera for piano and voice in French; in 1868, Saint-Saëns transcribed the religious march from Lohengrin for piano, violin, and organ. According to the future director of fine arts Henry Roujon, the writer Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, one of the first Wagnerians of his generation, often sang all the parts of Lohengrin for his literary friends while accompanying himself on the piano. (See Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-garde [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993], 96–97.) An Italian production was mounted at the Théâtre-Italien in 1878 but the premiere in French, privately supported, took place in Nice on 21 March 1881. Angelo Neumann, director of the Prague theater, tried to bring a German production to Paris in 1882. To encourage this, Lamoureux conducted its first act four times beginning on 12 February 1882. In 1884, the Société des concerts reintroduced the marches from Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, earlier removed for reasons of “high propriety” after the Franco-Prussian war. See D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 271. 47.  Nicolet, writing in Le Gaulois, cited in Ménestrel, 13 September 1885, 327.

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the Eden-Théâtre decided to stage it, albeit without a state subsidy. Playing on the controversy over French protectionism, on 25 February 1886, the L’Alcazar introduced popular audiences to a parody of it, Lohengrin à l’Alcazar. Meanwhile, both Lamoureux and Colonne prepared listeners with fragments, as did the wind band of the Bon Marché department store, and on Good Friday 1886, Lamoureux treated his audience to an all-Wagner concert at the Eden-Théâtre. 48 Still, there was also public outcry that Wagner’s music was simply not French. Admitting that Lohengrin had a “great nobility of expression” and that the stories of Tristan and of Parsifal and his son Lohengrin came from Brittany, some nevertheless saw everything Wagner wrote after Lohengrin as “the contrary of the French spirit.” Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians clashed over whether his work embodied clarity or not and whether its unending melodies represented an evolutionary concept of melody or exceeded the boundaries of French rationalism. 49 If music’s utility was believed to lie, in part, in helping audiences to explore, understand, and embrace French temperament and mœurs, with Wagner it was feared to be too powerful: it could overwhelm French values and cause the French to lose sight of something essential in the French spirit. Therefore, despite the republicans’ hubris about France’s ability to assimilate differences from abroad, adversaries thought Wagner’s music could (and should) never be acclimatized in France. Those very republicans who believed in the benefits of assimilation, supporting education of the lower classes and the colonized, became anxious about the meaning of assimilation when it came to the music of their enemy. Whereas earlier many had felt that France could learn much from the German educational system, the German choral tradition, and the Germany army, and whereas in the 1870s, French audiences had successfully assimilated Handel’s music, Wagner was seen differently. There were other objections as well. After traveling to Munich and Bayreuth in 1886, the amateur singer and co-founder of Concordia, Mme Henriette Fuchs, published a 357-page book on Wagner. Like others, she was “enthralled by the strange, troubling charm of this sensual and intoxicating music” and found it difficult to analyze her impressions. Nonetheless, four evenings of “sung monologues” seemed “monotonous.” She particularly objected to the “gradually diminishing role of the voices”—the duos, trios, quartets, and choruses—until their “obliteration” and to the “preponderance of the orchestra, as both symphonic and melodic 48.  Fantasies on Lohengrin by L. Girard for wind band were published in 1869 and 1884. The Bon Marché’s Harmonie performed the prelude and nuptial march from Lohengrin on 20 June, 27 June, 4 July, and 8 August 1885; the Concerts Lamoureux did fragments on 7 February 1886, and the Concerts Colonne excerpts on 21 March 1886. 49.  See, e.g., H. Barbedette, “Concerts et soirées,” Ménestrel, 21 December 1884, 23.

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agent.” From her perspective, in seeking theatrical illusion, Wagner “sacrificed the beauty of singing, the purity of the vocal line, and the charm of voices in juxtaposition.” Mme Fuchs also protested the human truths that his characters purportedly represented, finding that they lacked any moral sense, which she defined in republican terms as an internal struggle between duty and passion. Even if Lohengrin was a symbol of Christian purity, she found his character and feelings obscure. She also faulted Wagner for refusing to acknowledge the influence of French music (Berlioz) and French concerns (the relationship between music and poetry).50 Amid calls for more protectionism by the Ligue des patriotes, especially vis-àvis Germany, a host of concerned composers and worried publishers went further, viewing Wagner and anything related to him as threats. As Wagner’s popularity grew, Saint-Saëns, nationalist and classicist to the core, led the resistance. Annegret Fauser has called him “a fervent Wagnerian who changed into a bitter anti-Wagnerian.”51 Earlier, he had been very enthusiastic, performing Wagner’s music in Paris, visiting Wagner in 1876, and promoting him in the French press. Although he, like Mme Fuchs, criticized the subordination of the singer to the work as a whole (Gesamtkunstwerk), he tried to keep an open mind, encouraging a Czech impresario to bring a production of Lohengrin to Paris in 1881 and declaring Die Walküre “the Theater of the Future.” However, on 25 October 1884, in a widely reproduced speech at the Académie des beaux-arts, he began to object, pointing to a crisis in music. Without mentioning Wagner, he criticized Germans’ “increasing disdain for melody,” worried about the possibility that this might “consign melody to the least importance,” and asked whether the French have “enough influence to stop this movement.”52 The next year, when the Revue wagnérienne was created, he published this speech in a collection of essays, Harmonie et mélodie. In it, he expressed admiration for Wagner’s music, but pointed to Wagnerians’ intolerance 50.  Henriette Fuchs, L’Opéra et le drame musical d’après l’œuvre de Richard Wagner (Paris: Fischbacher, 1887), 146, 212, 264, 323. 51.  Annegret Fauser, “Nationality and Wagnerism: A French Dichotomy?” (paper presented at the Eighth International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, Surrey, UK, 1994). She argues that the two were friends until the early 1880s when Wagner developed a distaste for Saint-Saëns’s newer works such the Danse macabre—“a nothingness”—and was offended when Hans von Bülow, writing on Samson et Dalila, explained, “Saint-Saëns was the only composer capable of profiting from Wagner’s theories without letting himself be carried away.” Other scholars too have analyzed the composer’s complex attitudes toward Wagner, most recently, Stephen Studd, Saint-Saëns: A Critical Biography (London: Cygnus Arts, 1999), 138–41, 148–49, and Jean Gallois, Camille Saint-Saëns (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2004), 175–78, 245–48. 52.  Camille Saint-Saëns, “Causerie sur le passé, le présent, et l’avenir de la musique,” Ménestrel, 26 October 1886, 377–79. This essay also appeared in L’Avenir musical, a journal for music educators.

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for other music and claimed he could never embrace the “Wagnerian religion.” “I’m an eclectic,” he explained, “I love my liberty passionately and cannot bear to have admirations imposed on me.” Anxious about the impact of Wagneromania in France, he implored young French musicians to “stay French, be yourselves, of your time and your country. The future is yours.”53 During the controversy over whether the state-subsidized Opéra-Comique should produce Lohengrin, he claimed that the welcome Germany had shown French musicians was not comparable to the French infatuation with German composers such as Mozart and Weber.54 Such sentiments caused quite a stir. During his German concert tour in January– February 1886, many Germans reacted with anger. Even if he pleaded that he was “enough of an artist to be no enemy of any artwork,” several towns feared public disturbances (such as those associated with Wagner’s music in Paris) and canceled his performances.55 In spring 1886, d’Indy considered retaliation against Saint-Saëns: putting together a tour of the Concerts Pasdeloup in Germany and the AustroHungarian empire in which he would conduct nothing by his colleague.56 Then, that November, d’Indy and Ernest Chausson staged a coup at the composers’ league, the Société nationale, hoping to alienate Saint-Saëns and take control of the organization. When Saint-Saëns heard that they had voted 42 against 26 to introduce foreign music into concerts that had been entirely for music by living French composers, he resigned as president. His eclecticism had reached its limits and his desire to protect his musical peers superseded his openness to foreign influences.57 With this, he became dangerously close to sharing the intolerance he associated with Wagnerians. Tensions reached a climax in 1887 over the Paris premiere of Lohengrin, galvanizing another debate about music in France. Politics inevitably permeated the discussions. On 28 March, Le Temps reminded Parisians that Wagner hated France. Hatred for Wagner was linked with the desire for revenge; hope for return of the two provinces was revived when the people of German-occupied Alsace-Lorraine elected 53.  The introduction from Harmonie et mélodie, dated March 1885, was reproduced in Ménestrel, 16 August 1885, 289–90, and 23 August 1885, 297–99. 54.  See Georges Servières, Richard Wagner jugé en France (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1886), 292. 55.  Letter from Saint-Saëns to Angelo Neumann, reprinted in Ménestrel, 14 February 1886, 86. Ménestrel also printed correspondence concerning the cancellation of his concerts in Cassel, Dresden, and Bremen and the postponement of Henri VIII in Prague. According to Ménestrel, 21 February 1886, 95, Hanslick defended him, and his concert in Vienna went on as scheduled. His performance in Prague was hailed as a triumph. See also Yves Gerard, “Introduction” to Saint Saëns: Regards sur mes contemporains (Paris: Bernard Coutaz, 1990), 11–12. 56.  Gallois, Camille Saint-Saëns, 245–46. 57.  In January 1888, Saint-Saëns became president of the Société des compositeurs, another organization devoted to helping French composers.

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only French-sympathetic candidates. Then the newspaper Le Gaulois interviewed various composers on Wagner. Gounod saw Wagner as France’s national enemy, but thought his music should not be judged according to the man. Delibes wondered why Paris was the only civilized capital where Lohengrin had not yet been performed. Yet most composers queried believed that “given our mœurs, our impressions, and our aptitudes,” there could never be a “complete naturalization” of Wagner’s music in France. Joncières hoped that those who borrowed “precious materials” from Wagner would hold firm to “essential qualities of the French genius, clarity and precision.” Ernest Reyer summed up their feelings: “his country is not ours.”58 In an attempt to incite resistance, on 19 April, the editor of La Revanche, whom Lamoureux had recently taken to court for prejudice, printed a translation of Wagner’s incendiary 1870 farce Eine Kapitulation, which makes fun of the répu­ blicains opportunistes.59 Schnaebelé, suspected of espionage, was arrested across the border on 21 April, and on 23 April, a member of the Ligue des patriotes tried to blackmail Lamoureux to prevent the sale of a pamphlet caricaturing Wagner. With German troops on the eastern frontier, mutual insults, and other “incidents,” many felt that war with Germany was imminent. 60 The nation was in crisis, and the prime minister advised cancellation of the opera (fig. 75). 61 The premiere was postponed. Only after Schnaebelé was set free on 30 April did Lamoureux go forward with Lohengrin, as Ménestrel’s editor had predicted, performing it uncut on 3 May at the Eden-Théâtre and charging extraordinarily high ticket prices, 25 or 50 francs per seat, 500 for a box. 62 58.  Interviews in Le Gaulois, reproduced in Revue wagnérienne, 15 April 1887, 104–109. 59.  When the Revue wagnérienne published this comedy on 8 October 1885 (in the same issue as its review of Saint-Saëns’s Harmonie et mélodie), it included Wagner’s explanation: he had published it, not to ridicule Parisians, but to show that, by comparison, the Germans were even more ridiculous (228–33). 60.  Lannes de Montebello, French ambassador at St. Petersburg, letter to French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, 14 February 1897, Archives de la Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris, N.S., 33, Russie: Politique étrangère. 61.  Martine Kahane and Nicole Wilde, Wagner et la France (Paris: Herscher, 1983), 65–69. 62.  H. Moreno [Henri Heugel], “Semaine théâtrale: L’Ajournement de Lohengrin,” Ménestrel, 1 May 1887, 171. For a Wagnerian critic’s take on what held up this performance and how it turned out, see Adolphe Jullien’s 1887 reviews in his Musique (Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1896): 234–48, and Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1892): 86–102. For a less sympathetic perspective from one who would have preferred Berlioz’s Les Troyens, see Amédée Boutarel’s articles in Ménestrel: “Epilogue: A la question ‘Lohengrin,’ ” 1 May 1887, 169–71, and “Lohengrin,” 8 May 1887, 177–79, and in La Musique des familles: “Finissons-en! . . . ,” 21 April 1887, 210–11, “Lohengrin,” 28 April 1887, 218–19, and “L’Ajournement de Lohengrin,” 5 May 1887, 226–27. See also Elaine Brody, Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870–1925 (New York: Braziller, 1987), 49–51, and Manuela Schwartz, “‘La Question de Lohengrin’ zwischen 1869 und 1891,” in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme, 107–36.

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Fig. 75  Anti-Wagner propaganda, April 1887. This caricature takes aim at Lamoureux, who had recently conducted Lohengrin in Paris, de­picting the conductor as a monkey offering Wagner a plate of French gold that derived from not only his artist’s rights but also the government subsidy that helped make them possible.

The performance took place without incident. However, although there was police protection outside and no protest within the hall, nationalist demonstrations outside the theater the next day alerted everyone to a potentially serious disruption of “public order.” General Boulanger, as minister of war, had stood up to the Germans, and his sympathizers felt emboldened. To explain his motivations for performing Wagner, Lamoureux mustered all the republican-sounding arguments he could: he was caught between the huge expenses he had personally incurred to prepare the work, his “duty” as a “patriot,” and what he saw as the “interests of 516

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the country,” that is, “the cause of progress.” By this, he meant the need to “reveal to France a new art, one whose essence is absolutely superior” and could lead to “a considerable élan that would perhaps [otherwise] have never been known.”63 Regardless of these arguments, the minister feared the still very pronounced associations that many felt between Wagner’s music and pro-German politics and ordered all subsequent performances halted indefinitely. A critic in Le Petit Journal put this in explicitly patriotic terms: “It is good to love music; it is preferable to love one’s country.”64 The decision was full of ironies. Republicans promised more freedom of expression and less censorship and yet when faced with the threat of disturbance to “public order,” they resorted to the repressive tactics of the Moral Order. They believed in private enterprise and laissez-faire economics, especially after 1885, yet chose to squash the individual initiative shown by Lamoureux, who had spent his own money on the production. They advocated the prosperity that performances produced, but allowed politics to trump economics. They trusted public opinion, then began to deny it when Wagner’s music became popular. Ultimately, I suspect, the international diplomatic situation weighed heavily. Also, republicans may have worried that Wagner was becoming a new dogma and might squelch French diversity and eclecticism. From this perspective, the minister may have found the work potentially destructive of what his government hoped music could be. Possibly in response to his cancellation of Lohengrin, Colonne stopped performing Wagner for ten months, presenting nothing between the Flower Maidens and religious scenes from Parsifal on 8 April 1887 and the overture of Tannhäuser on 22 January 1888. Lamoureux continued to include Wagner in every concert, but decided to comfort nationalist anxieties by presenting Bizet’s dramatic overture Patrie and making room for plenty of Berlioz, Massenet, and Saint-Saëns. For all their differences, French Wagnerians were not totally adverse to the republicans’ artistic agendas, and ironically shared more with conservative opportunistes than with modern radicals. For both Wagnerians and the opportunistes, music was more than a “pleasant art of passing, frivolous distraction”; 65 it should involve reflection and could elevate listeners by expressing grandeur and national character, or what some called “race.” However, Wagnerians and conservative opportunistes differed on the nature of music’s significance and the kind of model it offered society. These republicans looked to music as a metaphor for the order 63.  Lamoureux’s letter in response to the minister is discussed in Boutarel, “Epilogue: A la question ‘Lohengrin.’ ” 64.  Blaise Thiberté, “Causerie,” Petit Journal, 6 May 1887. 65.  Saint-Saëns, “Causerie,” 377.

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and harmony they envisaged in French society, an alternative to that found in religion. Music, a context for experiencing these, albeit through the imagination, was part of building a new notion of collective identity through shared tastes. In 1885, socialists agreed: “If art is social, it is collective. . . . it carries the conceptual imprint of human collectivity.”66 French Wagnerians also appreciated how concerts brought people into a special “communion”: “a thousand people gathered together, inspired by the same cause to close their eyes and undergo the same intense emotion, can each feel absolutely alone and yet identified by this inner feeling with all their neighbors, who have thus become truly one with them.” While Marmontel thought of this as the “triumph of music,” the poet Paul Valéry called it “the ideal religious state, the oneness in feeling of a living multitude.”67 Listening to the overture to Lohengrin led Baudelaire to theorize that in such a context, music “suggests analogous ideas in different brains.”68 In a sense, such experiences realized what the revolutionaries had sought in their festivals, although not in the service of civic goals. Where Wagner’s music went beyond the wishes of republicans to see music create community was in the nature of the inner experience it stimulated, the hopes, desires, and aspirations it addressed in listeners. In listening to Lohengrin, Baudelaire experienced an “ecstasy composed of pleasure and knowledge.” Catulle Mendès found that this music made one “suffer with it as much as he who wrote it,” reflecting that pleasure and pain were sometimes very close. 69 For many, it became a kind of substitute for religion. French Wagnerians’ particular affinity for Parsifal derived in part from its allusions to Christian rituals. “It is reserved for Art,” Wagner wrote, “to save the spirit of religion by recognizing the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation.”70 Living in a culture whose government increasingly disdained religion, those French attracted to Wagner’s music yearned for an experience of the sublime, while recognizing it to be beyond their ability to grasp or understand it. Works 66.  Jean Lombart, “Les Formes de l’art et le socialisme,” Revue socialiste, January 1885, 331–32. 67.  Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 259; Paul Valéry, “At the Lamoureux Concert in 1893,” in his Occasions, trans. Roger Shattuck and Frederick Brown (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 199. 68.  Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner,” 513. 69.  Ibid., 514. Catulle Mendès first visited Wagner and saw his operas in Munich in 1869. His Richard Wagner (Paris, 1886) was the first full-scale biography of the composer in French. See Huebner, French Opera, 255. 70.  Richard Wagner, “Religion and Art,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ellis, vol. 7 (London: Broude Brothers, 1897), 213.

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such as the overture to Lohengrin offered a “vista on a higher world.”71 Some looked to this music for intense, unequaled pleasure (jouissance), but others were seeking transcendence. Unlike republicans who hoped that the self-cultivation encouraged by playing and listening to music would help form good citizens, who in turn would nurture the growth and perfection of society, French Wagnerians considered music a form of contemplation stimulating self-growth for its own sake. Huysmans understood Tannhäuser as an “allegory of Evil struggling with Good,” but interpreted this as “the symbol of our internal hell in opposition to our internal heaven.”72 Edouard Schuré saw Parsifal as representing a “transcendent idealism,” “the aspiration of a spiritual being for purity, goodness, perfection that alone can ennoble one’s internal nature and draw one toward the heights of spirituality and divine intelligence.” While Baudelaire was impressed with how Wagner could “translate all that is excessive, immense, and ambitious in the spiritual and natural man,” comparing his music to opium, Schuré admired the way Wagner attempted to balance and reconcile the passions with the superior intellect.73 Camille Mauclair later put these ideas more simply: at concerts “each person prays to his own god and has his own dreams.” Listeners sought “contrasts, triumph and defeat, the mastering and the abandonment of self”: “I come to flee who I am to discover who I want to be.”74 Such notions led to a cult of the self in some ways resembling that practiced in politics by Déroulède and Boulanger, albeit for different reasons. With the fiasco of Lohengrin in 1887, Wagner’s music underlined a conflict in French audiences between their private and public needs and desires. Republicans looked to music to teach judgment and help audiences come to grips with their differences, but Wagner’s music became a passion demanding total submission and could lead to intolerance. Republicans expected music to help diffuse political and social tensions, but Déroulède’s patriotic extremism and Wagner’s music excited these and threatened the public order. Music’s utility was handcuffed, unable to negotiate the needs of self and other, the desire for order and progress. To indulge their fascination with Wagner’s music, French listeners eventually had to ignore the public concerns associated with his music and distance themselves from his politics. In arguing for putting on Lohengrin, critics from several newspapers 71.  Edouard Schuré, “Les Concerts du dimanche et les maîtres symphonistes—Beethoven, Berlioz, Richard Wagner,” Revue des deux mondes 62 (March 1884): 814. 72.  Joris-Karl Huysmans, “L’Ouverture de Tannhäuser,” Revue wagnérienne, 8 April 1885, 61. 73.  Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner,” 514; Edouard Schuré, “Parsifal,” Revue wagnérienne, 8 November 1885, 270. 74.  Camille Mauclair, La Religion de la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1928), 26, 41.

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agreed that “art has no country” and “patriotism has nothing to do with art.”75 Such sentiments threw into question the role of politics in the arts.

Art beyond Politics, Music of and for the Mind In the 1870s, the républicains opportunistes made their thoughts on this notion clear: art should aspire to universal significance. In 1876, when government officials had banned Wagner from French concerts for reasons of public order, the city of Paris decided to sponsor a prize for the best symphony. City officials considered it “the purest and most abstract form of music.” Composers were to express “feelings of the highest order” without dealing with politics or religion. In the mid 1880s, several French composers returned to the genre. Fauré, whose first symphony dates from 1866–73, composed his Symphony in D minor in 1884.76 In late 1885, Saint-Saëns accepted a commission from the London Philharmonic Society. Lalo and d’Indy also began symphonies in 1886. Scholars have pointed to the indebtedness of Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony to Liszt, to whose memory the work is dedicated, specifically Liszt’s notion of thematic transformation.77 The work uses a returning, cyclical theme, the first such experiment in a French symphony, notably predating d’Indy’s Symphonie cévenole and Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, begun in early fall 1887.78 Saint-Saëns also expands the modern orchestra, adding not only more woodwinds and brass, but 75.  A. Boutarel, “Epilogue: A la question ‘Lohengrin,’ ” and H. Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale: L’ajournement de Lohengrin,” Ménestrel, 1 May 1887, 169. 171. These articles were written after Lohengrin was postponed from 30 April to 3 May. 76.  Fauré must not have been happy with the symphony for, after performances at the Concerts Colonne on 15 March 1885 and that fall in Anvers, he destroyed most of it, reusing some of the Andante in a subsequent work. 77.  Brian Hart discusses the influence of not only Liszt, but also Schumann in his “The French Symphony after Berlioz: From the Second Empire to the First World War,” chap. 16 of The Symphonic Repertoire, vol. 3b: The European Symphony from 1800 to 1930, ed. A. Peter Brown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). See also Ralph P. Locke, “The French Symphony,”in The Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 175–76, and Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 289–90. 78.  According to Joël-Marie Fauquet, Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony made a “strong impression” on Franck, who purchased the score before he began writing his own Symphony in D Minor. It was also the first of three symphonies that premiered in Paris that winter, followed by Edouard Lalo’s Symphony in G Minor on 13 February and d’Indy’s Symphonie cévenole on 20 March. See Fauquet, César Franck (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 717–18.

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also a piano and organ, and challenges traditional tonal progressions. But when it comes to form, he combines the four traditional movements of a classical symphony into two movements, beginning with a sonata allegro.79 In addition to these other influences and motivations, I see Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony as a direct response, if not specifically to Wagner, then to Wagnerism in France. Written in the style of English program notes at the time, the analysis of his Third Symphony, distributed in English at the London premiere on 19 May 1886 and in French at the Société des concerts in Paris on 9 and 16 January 1887, presented an opportunity to one-up the specialized treatment French concert societies were giving to Wagner’s music. Programs at the Concerts Colonne in February and March 1884, for example, included musical examples for the first time: three leitmotifs in Parsifal (fig. 76). 80 And the program for Tristan at the Concerts Lamoureux in March 1884 contained the longest written commentary on any music in such a publication in Paris. Saint-Saëns went further with an unprecedented eight-page analysis and twenty-one musical examples, several of them from six to twelve bars long, most indicating instrumentation. 81 In focusing on the feelings expressed in the symphony, Saint-Saëns, whether consciously or unconsciously, seems to take on the way Wagner was presented to the orchestral audiences. Although there are no explicit symbols associated with these feelings, many sound like those described in the notes for the religious scene (act 1) and Good Friday scene (act 3) of Parsifal at the Concerts Colonne in 1884, possibly written by Dujardin. 82 After the symphony’s “somber and agitated” first theme, “various episodes lead to a gradual calm,” an “extremely calm and contemplative” theme in the adagio (no. 7), and a coda “with a mystic character” alternating between Dƒ major and E minor (no. 9). Such sentiments echo the “mystic nourishment” of the sacred banquet in Parsifal, where, after an introduc79.  Saint-Saëns also combined leitmotifs and traditional forms in his opera Henry VIII. See Huebner, French Opera, chap. 13. 80.  It is also interesting to note that in his 100-page tome, Parsifal et l’opéra wagnérien (Paris: Fischbacher, 1883), Edmond Hippeau reproduces these same musical examples (38–39). 81.  “Programme analytique de la 3me symphonie en ut mineur”; also published as “Une nouvelle symphonie de Camille Saint-Saëns,” Ménestrel, 2 January 1887, 36–38, a week before its French premiere. The numbers below refer to the themes cited in the analysis. The only other similar publication of the period was a seven-page “analytic and thematic” analysis of d’Indy’s Wallenstein, complete with musical examples, sold during its performance by the Concerts Lamoureux on 22 December 1889, 9 March 1890, and 9 November 1890. It is possible that d’Indy and the Concerts Lamoureux produced this in response to the brochure on Saint-Saëns’s symphony. 82.  See the notes for concerts on 10 February and 2 March 1884. Dujardin translated Wagner’s libretto for these performances.

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Fig. 76  Concerts Colonne program, February 1884. Here for the first time the program notes included musical examples to help guide the listener through Wagner’s Parsifal. They reproduce three of the major recurring leitmotifs in the opera, with a description of the meaning of each.

tion to the “panorama of sites” Parsifal has traversed, the Grail Knights await him with “serene and calm hearts.” The symphony’s adagio theme, beginning on Aƒ in rising thirds, may be an allusion to the opening of the Last Supper theme (Aƒ–C–Eƒ), Wagner’s symbol of the “promise of salvation,” albeit without the syncopations and extended allure—this is the first musical example in Colonne’s program. Thereafter follows a “struggle” in the symphony between a “fantastic” motive and an “austere” one, with the first (no. 12) characterized by syncopated rhythms and modulations through several keys, interrupted by an “expressive 522

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phrase” (no. 13), and the second (no. 14), slow and deliberate, using the same opening intervals (major second, minor third) as in the theme of the Holy Grail, the second of Colonne’s musical examples. A similar “struggle” can also be found in the confrontation between the evil seductress Kundry and Parsifal in act 2. In Saint-Saëns’s symphony, it ends with the “defeat of the worrisome and diabolical element,” just as it does in Wagner’s opera with Parsifal baptizing Kundry before the Good Friday scene. The next phrase in Saint-Saëns’s symphony “rises to the summits of the orchestra, floating as in the azure of a purified sky, and after a vague reminiscence of the initial theme, a maestoso [no. 15] announces the triumph of the calm and elevated idea,” a transformation of the initial theme, and eventually a final episode (no. 18) with a “tranquil and pastoral feeling.” Likewise, at the end of the religious scene in Parsifal, leitmotifs from the opening theme return and in the Good Friday scene, the main theme (the fourth in Colonne’s notes) pushes upward as Parsifal, in a forest under the rising sun, contemplates “all creatures, now redeemed and purified, . . . celebrating their day of innocence,” an earthly equivalent of the azure symbolizing the absolute, transcendental, and ideal. 83 Did Saint-Saëns, a good classicist, mean to deliver a classical response to the concerns of Wagner and French Wagnerians? The final words of the analysis drive the point home. Eschewing any description of feelings, it explains the “natural logic” of his final rhythms, in which the rhythm of three-bar phrases becomes one big measure in three half-note beats, or twelve quarter-notes. While the London audience was somewhat perplexed by the work’s innovations, the conservative public of the Société des concerts was delighted. Pougin pointed to the “clarity of ideas,” “richness of their developments,” and “elegantly severe style,” calling it a work of very high order. 84 At the premiere, Gounod reputedly referred to Saint-Saëns as “the French Beethoven.”85 He had succeeded in appropriating the orchestral splendor and feelings associated with Wagner’s music, while creating a classical work of French clarity. As Kern Holoman reports, Ambroise Thomas asked the orchestra for an unprecedented third performance because, “given the invasion of German music,” it “so honors the French school.” The Société asked him to compose another symphony, but Saint-Saëns never returned to the genre. 86 With Prosperine (1887) and two more operas in the next six years, he sought to counter Wagner’s influence with a very French balance of 83.  Deak explains the azure in his Symbolist Theater, 70. 84.  Arthur Pougin, “Concerts et soirées,” Ménestrel, 16 January 1887, 54. In his SaintSaëns, Studd points out that the English public received it “respectfully rather than enthusiastically” (153). 85.  Brian Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), 265. 86.  Holoman, Société des Concerts, 280. The extra concert took place on 13 March 1887.

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melody, declamation, and orchestra. 87 Later in his Musical Memories, he asserted that as art music is “sufficient unto itself,” “in its self-sufficiency lies its heights of greatness.”88 By 1887, notions associated with Wagner also began to influence how audiences heard music previously thought to be distinctly French. For example, when Lakmé was performed in Brussels in late 1887, while one critic compared it to an eighteenth-century pastel, another commented, not on its extraordinary charm, but on how the work expressed “dreamy poetry, the ideal, the azure.” Lakmé herself is “a child of the country of the ideal” to which she “transports” Gerald. “When the realities of the world appear to him, she understands that life is no longer possible and dies.” Musically, what impressed Belgians were its melodic ideas, rich and varied sonorities, complicated harmonies, and the orchestra’s important role—all associated with Wagner. A response so different from the one the work had received earlier, with the physicality of feminine and musical charm here replaced by the elusiveness of dreams and an imaginary ideal, shows us how the contingencies of taste and context affect musical meaning. 89

Symbolist Idealism French Symbolists took another perspective on art beyond politics in their focus on music as thought, with new implications for the utility of music. Before he wrote about the merits of Wagner’s music in 1861, Baudelaire, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, saw the “world of the mind” divided into “pure intellect, taste, and moral sense.” He was drawn to pure intellect, that which aims at truth. Then, in Tannhäuser, Baudelaire found the model for a new kind of art: in functioning as symbols of ideas, Wagner’s melodies stimulate the imagination to perceive hidden connections or “correspondences” between ideas and sense perceptions. He concluded that listening to, reading, or viewing art inevitably involves drawing the listener into a creative activity paralleling that of the artist. Music became for Baudelaire a key to the imagination, its power resembling magic. Music reveals the scale of human feelings while addressing our thought and, with its recurring melodies, exercising our memory.90 This insight led many writers to become self87.  Camille Saint-Saëns, “Prosperine,” Ménestrel, 17 April 1887, 156. 88.  Saint Saëns, “Art for Art’s Sake,” Musical Memories, translated in Studd, Saint-Saëns, 295–97. 89.  One reviewer noted that before writing Lakmé, Delibes had traveled to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal. These reviews are cited in H[enri] M[oreno], “Lakmé à Bruxelles,” Ménestrel, 5 December 1887, 3–5. 90.  Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner,” 521. Here, he is, in part, citing Liszt.

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conscious theorists of their own practice, and “modern writing” henceforth to be “inseparable from its reflections upon itself.”91 Mallarmé, one of Baudelaire’s spiritual successors, sought to push the importance of pure thought further, ultimately rejecting both the beautiful and the useful. In his essay “Sur le Beau et l’Utile,” Mallarmé criticized the beautiful for being “gratuitous” and “turning into ornament,” and the useful, in addressing “mediocre needs,” for “expressing an inelegance” (the absence of elegance was considered a serious shortcoming by many in France). In their place, he envisioned “a direct implementation of the idea, to please and serve, from which emerges an impression, very modern, of truth.” This did not mean “naming” objects—which is “to abolish three-quarters of the pleasure” of figuring something out little by little—but “suggesting” them—“therein lies the dream.” As he later put it, “language in the hands of the crowd serves the function of a currency, easy to use and direct; however, in the poet’s hands, it is turned, above all, into dream and song.” 92 Such a philosophy led to self-conscious obscurity rather than clarity in Mallarmé’s writing, inspired by the “obscure sublimity” he experienced at concerts. His friends noted that the poet had a passion for music, which he considered a “sacred pleasure,” finding in it a “secret analogy with nature.”93 He particularly enjoyed performances of symphonic music at the Concerts Lamoureux. They stimulated his thinking and the beginnings of a poem, 94 and he sought to “transpose” into words the whole set of relationships he heard in music.95 Like Baudelaire, he looked to music as a model that would help him reclaim poetry’s 91.  Richard Sieburth, “1885, February, Symbolists Poets Publish La Revue wagnérienne,” in New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 791. 92.  “Le Beau et l’Utile, ayez ce terme moyen, le Vrai. Le Beau, gratuit, tourne à l’ornement, répudié: l’Utile, seul ou qui l’est, alors, à des besoins médiocres, exprime une inélégance. Façonner, exactement, veut, chez l’artisan, une espèce d’oubli quant à l’usage, autant que du bibelot—seulement la mise en œuvre directe de l’idée, comme objet se présente, pour plaire et servir, causant une impression, toute moderne, de vérité.” Stéphane Mallarmé, “Réponses à des enquêtes,” in Igitur; Divagations; Un coup de dés, ed. Yves Bonnefoy (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 392, 400. 93.  Ibid., 250. “Plaisir sacré” is an essay in which Mallarmé describes his experience of an orchestral performance. See also Henri de Régnier, Figures et caractères (Paris: Mercure de France, ca. 1901), 117, 129, 135–36. Régnier finds both the nature of his genius and his chosen style characterized by obscurity. 94.  According to Régnier, Mallarmé often took notes during performances. The short paragraphs that make up “Crayonné au théâtre” in Igitur; Divagations; Un coup de dés, 177–238, were thus appropriately titled. 95.  “Nous en sommes là . . . un art d’achever la transposition, au Livre, de la symphonie ou uniment de reprendre notre bien: car ce n’est pas de sonorités élémentaires par les cuivres, les

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oral origins in incantations and charms. Rejecting the invasion of politics in everything, Mallarmé considered Wagner’s music drama a form of poetry at its most ideal. Although he may have been introduced to it in the 1860s by the composer Augusta Holmès, a good friend for decades, 96 it was not until his essay on Wagner in the Revue wagnérienne that he articulated its importance to him, a “challenge to poets whose duty he [Wagner] usurped.” With the addition of music that “blurs the color and lines of the characters with the timbres and themes, creating the rich atmosphere of Dreaming,” he found that the convergence of the arts in Wagner’s music created what he called “festivals” within each listener—a term appropriated from the huge communal experiences of the Revolution to describe desirable private experiences. Like Saint-Saëns, Mallarmé construed the value of music to lie, not in the myths it might accompany on stage or elicit in one’s imagination, but in its abstraction, a music of and for the mind. As Wagner had realized an alliance between music and drama, Mallarmé sought to create one between music and language, what he called the two sides of an idea. This, he hoped, would lead to a state of pure contemplation or the “azure,” the “infinite.” 97 Under Mallarmé’s influence at his famous Tuesday salon from 1883 until he died in 1898, there emerged a self-consciously anti-utilitarian avant-garde. Inspired by Mallarmé who advised guests to hone their own individual voices, this group sought glory through “internal satisfaction” and self-esteem rather than public approbation. In September 1886, wishing to get beyond the connotations associated with literary decadence—nihilism and eccentricity—Jean Moréas published a manifesto naming the group symbolists. As Patricia Mathews has pointed out, this group of writers, poets, and painters challenged the core of the republican ideology—universal secular education, art education, nationalism, and imperialism—although without unmasking the “mechanisms of social power and authority” underlying them. They attacked republican pedagogy for stifling intuition, constraining the imagination with conventions, overwhelming students with cordes, les bois, indéniablement mais de l’intellectuelle parole à son apogée que doit avec plénitude et évidence, résulter, en tant que l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout, la Musique.” From “Crise de vers,” in Mallarmé, Igitur; Divagations; Un coup de dés, 250. 96.  In her Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), Rosemary Lloyd traces the poet’s relationship with Augusta Holmès from the 1860s through the 1890s and her role in introducing him to Wagner’s music (150–52). She also documents his connections with the composers Chabrier, Chausson, and Debussy. 97.  Mallarmé, Igitur: Divagations: Un coup de dés, 169, 172, 218–26, 359, 392, 400–401. Mallarmé published “Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poète français” in the Revue wagnérienne, 8 August 1885. His comments about Wagner in “Crayonné au théâtre” (218–21) suggest that he attended the premiere of Lohengrin at the Eden-Théâtre in 1887.

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knowledge that encumbered the mind, and ironically, given their goals, impeding any sense of the universal. They prioritized spirituality over rationality and materialism, anarchism over positivism, although not necessarily expressed politically. In the place of history, they accorded value to the primitive, natural world beyond civilized society; instead of progress based on an evolutionary development from the past, they looked to the future as a blank slate, “the idealized realm of the Absolute.” Symbolist painters saw themselves as seeking a truer reality than the realists and a more ideal one than the academics.98 Construing their poetry as the “enemy of teaching, declamation, false sensibility, and objective description,”99 symbolist poets hoped to revive appreciation of the naïve and the spiritual and to put people in contact with a prescient state of being. Through intuition and divination they looked for correspondences through which ideas would be revealed. Seeing the world in a new way, they sought aesthetic expression representing “esoteric affinities with primordial ideas.”100 This involved translating the mobility, relativism, and dynamism of the mind. The young critic Albert Aurier called art and poetry “les Inutilités Vitales,” what differentiated humans from monkeys; yet he and others, some of them left-wing anarchists, understood that if art could transform consciousness, it could transform the individual and thus society.101 Wagner’s music remained an inspiration to this group, although with their most radical innovations, the symbolists went beyond it. In 1886, confronting both naturalists and romantics, who inevitably confused reality in art with their interpretation of it, Gustave Kahn defined their new orientation: “The essential aim of our art is to objectify the subjective (the externalization of an idea), instead of subjectifying the objective (nature seen through the eyes of a temperament).” From this came the idea of a work of art as an equivalent of a sensation, that is, not the reproduction of reality, but a translation of it in artistic terms involving abstraction. This encouraged artists to deform objects, to exaggerate “according to the needs of the Idea to be expressed” so as to “begin to live with a life that is no longer our life of contingencies and relativities, but a splendid life . . . the life of Art, the being of Being.”102 To escape the conventions of meter and rhyme and forge a new kind of poetry, free verse, Kahn, Henri de Régnier, and other symbolists looked to the way music 98.  Patricia Mathews, Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7, 22–24, 39–41, 215–17. 99.  Jean Moréas, “Manifeste du symbolisme,” Figaro illustré, 18 September 1886. 100.  Ibid. 101.  Mathews, Passionate Discontent, 14, 39. 102.  Gustave Kahn, from l’Evénement (1886), and G.-Albert Aurier, from “Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin,” Mercure de France 2 (1891), reproduced in Herschel Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 50, 89–93.

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is organized. Kahn composed his verse based, not on counting syllables, but on phrases, stress patterns, vocal sounds, and pauses in the thought. Like Wagner, he also incorporated more assonance and alliteration in lieu of rhyme schemes.103 Except for “Un coup de dés” and his prose poems, Mallarmé was not willing to eschew the power of the classical twelve-syllable alexandrine. Still, in a letter to Kahn, he noted the “considerable charm” of free verse and pointed out that it would allow “anyone who is at all musical” to “create his own personal and unique metrics,” a kind of “immediate and unmediated consumption of thought.”104 In 1886, René Ghil published his Traité du verbe, proposing a quirky theory of “verbal instrumentation” and an elaborate system linking letters of the alphabet with instruments. Mallarmé wrote a preface. Music also inspired new approaches to painting. Criticizing republicans’ preoccupation with reason, in 1885 the psycho-aesthetician and color theorist Charles Henry explained, “I believe in the future of an art which would be the reverse of any ordinary logical or historical method, precisely because our intellects, exhausted by purely rational efforts, will feel the need to refresh themselves with entirely opposite states of mind.”105 In studying the feelings generated by various sounds, he and painters such as Paul Signac (who applied his theories to painting) embraced the idea of contrast as integral to art from a new perspective. In proposing that intense dynamism results from contrasting colors in close juxtaposition, Henry agreed with républicains opportunistes on the importance of contrasts, but did not see them as something for the artist to reconcile. Henry reconceived the republican notion of comparison as a way to interact with the arts, removing its role as a prelude to judgment. Because they put the burden of resolution on the viewer, contrast and comparison could produce harmony. This was important in society as well as in art, for he saw contrast as representing social difference and individual autonomy. However, addressing them was only the first step. Artists also had to understand the language of art as the language of correspondences, horizontal correspondences between the senses and vertical correspondences between ideas (as experienced in Baudelaire’s poetry and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk). Associations and analogies, Henry observed, make possible an art that objectifies the subjective: “Among the actual symbolists, several have 103.  Kenneth Cornell, The Symbolist Movement (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), 62–63. 104.  Cited in Lloyd, Mallarmé, 189–90. 105.  Charles Henry, “Introduction à une esthétique scientifique,” Revue contemporaine, August 1885, cited in Robyn Roslak, “Symphonic Seas, Oceans of Liberty: Paul Signac’s La Mer: Les Barques (Concarneau),” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Spring 2005.

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understood, more or less vaguely, that outside of the logical boundaries of ideas there could be associative images inseparably founded on purely subjective laws. This is borne out in the fact that there can be intimate relationships between the hearing of certain sounds, the vision of certain colors, and the feeling of certain states of the soul.”106 Such relationships could be a metaphor for a world based on cooperation rather than struggle and competition, even, as Robyn Roslak points out, cooperation in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. “Theoretically then,” she writes, “the more senses a work of art could . . . stimulate in a viewer, listener, or reader, the more socially beneficial (and thus socially useful) its role would be. ‘Musical’ or ‘symphonic’ painting, with its allusion to harmonious progressions of sound and its supposed power to suggest an idea[l] on multiple sensory levels without resorting to the literal or the mundane, was a promising prospect in this regard.”107 Seeking analogies among one’s senses thus became a new method of relating to art. Whereas the comparative method (which depended on distinguishing differences as well as similarities) enabled rational judgment, the perception of sensory analogies (which relied on similarities alone, or correspondences) led to intuitive understanding and, ideally, to an experience of inner harmony. To anarchists like Henry and Signac, an art of analogy promised deliverance from their disillusionment with society. Music was thus extremely useful, indeed critical, to the thinking of the avantgarde from Baudelaire and Mallarmé to Henry and Signac. It helped them to understand the power of suggestion, link sensations and ideas, and theorize an art of analogy. Although this notion of the useful points to personal and aesthetic as opposed to public utility, the use of music here did have political implications. Music enabled them to redefine the republican agenda: the freedoms they needed, the kind of selfgrowth they envisaged, and the nature of the progress they sought to achieve. And it was part of a reciprocal relationship between the arts and literature that eventually pushed on the boundaries of French artistic identity. It gave rise to new definitions of French charm and, in reaching for the sublime, new forms of artistic pleasure. For some, music suggested new ways of fusing poetics and politics. As with the republican view of the world, however, there were contradictions and ironies in the symbolists’ counterdiscourse. On the positive side, symbolists stressed the importance of creativity. Téodor de Wyzewa, citing Wagner, noted 106.  Ibid. Recent developments in neuroscience support the idea that synesthesia exists in the brain as neural connections between areas that control colors, sounds, language, etc. See, e.g., V. S. Ramachandran and Ed Hubbard, “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes,” Scientific American 288, 5 (May 2003): 42–49. 107.  Ibid.

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that to see and to hear was to create something in oneself. One had to create “the holy world of a better life . . . . To know that we create it, that is the aim of art.”108 Yet the education the symbolists espoused was individualistic and antisocial; moreover, it ignored the benefits they themselves had derived from their formal education. And although they saw art as a powerful discourse to help change society, they did little to challenge the patriarchal social order that undervalued women and subordinate groups. Because they felt that the public corrupted what it encounters and could tyrannize over an artist with its tastes and tendency to accept mediocrity, the symbolists wished to address only the few, nurturing an “aristocracy of sensibility” in themselves and their audiences.109 Mallarmé’s essay on Wagner, a kind of prose poetry, was extraordinarily difficult to understand, making the point that poets should require significant effort of their readers and never lower themselves to broad accessibility. As Mendès put it, readers should be like fauns in search of nymphs, pursuing ideas to see what they produced and understanding that “the exasperation of desire will increase the delights.”110 In some ways, this hermétisme was an aesthetic counterpart of the aristocracy. And, as Patricia Mathews has shown, this elitism was not that different from that espoused by older conservatives such as Gustave Ollendorf, director of museum administration, who in 1883 called for art to “remain the patrimony of a small elite.” Yet for all their emphasis on the need for the artist to isolate him- or herself from society and retreat from the world to concentrate on art, the symbolists shared an intense collectivity. They used magazines, such as La Revue wagnérienne, La Vogue, La Pléiade, and later La Plume, to publish their works and generate discussion, theaters for interdisciplinary collaborations, and salons or cafés such as Chat Noir for reciting their poetry. These redefined community as support-structures for an intellectual elite. Crucial in their critique of republicanism, as Frantisek Deak points out, they “provided alternative possibilities for disseminating art as well as for creating alternative social life and entertainment.”111 As such, they extended the notion of community from a social to a cultural entity. Their politics too embodied paradoxes. The symbolists’ notion of society in decline and the need for transcendence, while construed as politically progressive, started out in the 1880s close to the nationalism of the Ligue des patriotes. Mallarmé 108.  Téodor de Wyzewa, “Notes sur la peinture wagnérienne et le Salon de 1886,” Revue wagnérienne, May 1886, 101–2. 109.  Mathews, Passionate Discontent, 21, 40, 43. 110.  Catulle Mendès, La Légende du parnasse contemporain (Brussels: Brancart, 1884), 296. 111.  See Retté, Symbolisme, and Deak, Symbolist Theater, 136–37. Deak comments, “It is probably the absence of this kind of affiliation among artists that leads to the fragmentation of contemporary artistic life and makes it so markedly different from life at the turn of the century.”

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was enthusiastic about Boulanger in 1887 and voted for him in 1889.112 The symbolists’ cult of the self and antirationalist embrace of intuition paralleled those of conservatives such as Maurice Barrès, who frequented the bohemian and anarchist circles of 1890.113 Mathews sees the greatest irony of all in their rejection of capitalism, which “posed a greater threat to symbolist notions of the self than did individual government policies and was at the root of much of their pessimism about bourgeois society.” Symbolists may have associated utility with marketability and scorned the fact that art had become a form of commerce. But most of them were “rentiers living off unearned income and having nothing to do but contemplate.” The market thrived on just the kind of distinctions and taste for change that they advocated.114

Intuition and R adically New Concepts of Music Claude Debussy, who attended the Bayreuth performances of Wagner in 1888 and 1889 and Mallarmé’s Tuesday salon beginning in 1890, was notable among musicians in the late 1880s for drawing upon both Wagner and symbolist ideas. As early as 1885 when he was twenty-three, he felt “obliged to invent new forms.”115 Although, like Saint-Saëns, he did not like cliques, rejected the dogma associated with Wagner’s music, preferred personal freedom to any musical system, and advocated moving “beyond Wagner” (après [after] and not d’après [in the manner of] Wagner, as he later put it), the influence of Wagner, especially Tristan and Parsifal, on Debussy’s music has been well documented.116 Debussy also shared much with the symbolists. As he wrote in a letter in 1885, echoing Baudelaire, he wanted to create music “supple and chaotic enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of 112.  Lloyd, Mallarmé, 210. 113.  Barrès promoted a cult of self in his early novels such as Sous l’æil des barbares (1888) and Un Homme libre (1889). 114.  Mathews, Passionate Discontent, 14–15, 43–45, 239n81. She concludes, “The failure to circumvent capitalism is less a sign of the inadequacy of Symbolism as a counterdiscourse than of the success of capitalism in absorbing and commodifying its antagonists” (45). 115.  Debussy, letter to Henri Vasnier, 19 October 1885, in Claude Debussy: Correspondance, 1884–1918, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Hermann, 1993), 38. 116.  His friend the writer Pierre Louÿs wrote that Debussy envisaged writing an article titled “Concerning the Futility of Wagnerism” after he returned from his second trip to Bayreuth in 1889, even though later, both during and after writing his opera Pelléas, he “loved to quote certain lines from Parsifal” and Louÿs “remained convinced that Parsifal and Tristan engendered more from Debussy than did the Russians.” Cited in Marcel Dietschy, A Portrait of Claude Debussy, trans. William Ashbrook and Margaret Cobb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 53–54. Many scholars have examined the influence of Wagner on Debussy’s music. See esp. Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner (London: Eulenberg, 1979).

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the soul, to the whims of reverie.”117 He called it “a mysterious mathematics whose elements participate in the Infinite.”118 Debussy once told his teacher that he was drawn to symbolist poetry because of its emphasis on suggestion, “only hinting at what is to be said,” so that he could “dream his dream” alongside the poet’s.119 He set five of Verlaine’s poems to music in 1882–83, Mallarmé’s “Apparition” in 1884, Verlaine’s Ariettes oubliées in 1885–87, and the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire in 1887–89.120 Just as the poems sacrifice logic and clarity to analogy and lyricism, Debussy’s music follows its own logic, which a critic of the time called “more eloquent than that of reason.”121 His songs clarify the poems through critical readings, establishing a chain of connections that reveal the poem’s hidden relations and unite the many sensations into a mot total, neuf, étranger.122 The Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, as well as Debussy’s later setting of Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande, reflect the intersection of Wagnerian and symbolist aesthetics.123 The first of the set, “The Balcony,” composed in January 1888, just before Debussy went to Bayreuth, recalls Wagner’s continually changing chromatic harmonies and cites the Tristan chord. At the same time, its harmonies, melodies, and rhythms not only echo the poem’s formal structure, built of refrains and stanzas, and respect its alternating rhyme scheme, but also follow the words closely, embodying their syntactical parallelisms. Music reveals the poem’s complex analogies. Through a narrator standing on the balcony, Baudelaire explores the realm of memory, reliving past times there. This results in a series of disconnected 117.  In her “Debussy, Mallarmé, and ‘Les Mardis,’ ” in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane Fulcher (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), Rosemary Lloyd compares this with Baudelaire’s similar assertion in a preface to his prose poems (260). See also Barbara L. Kelly, “Debussy’s Parisian affiliations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29–33. 118.  Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 171. 119.  “Conversations with Ernest Guiraud (1889–90),” reproduced in Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. 1 (1962; rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 205. 120.  For an analysis of these songs from a symbolist perspective, see Stefan Jarocinski, Debussy: Impressionnisme et symbolisme, trans. Thérèse Douchy (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 134–43. 121.  Louis Laloy, “Musique moderne: Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas,” Revue musicale, October 1902, 407. Laloy considered the Baudelaire settings Debussy’s most important work besides Pelléas. 122.  Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” 252. 123.  The literature on Debussy’s opera is considerable. See, e.g., David Grayson, The Genesis of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1986); Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Debussy Perspectives, ed. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (forthcoming). For a fascinating study that goes in new directions, see Antokoletz, Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bartok (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55–181.

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temporal settings. To link stanzas one and three in which the narrator speaks in the present and future tenses, Debussy moves harmonically by fifths in the direction of the sharp keys and uses two refrains with a similarly descending melodic curve spanning a wide register with many expressive nuances (a); to link stanzas two and four narrated in past tense, harmonic movement stays closer to C major and introduces flats, while its two refrains follow a gradually ascending curve in a narrow register with almost no dynamic nuances (b) (ex. 20a–b). Since it is the contour of these lines that recurs, not the exact pitches, meaning comes from configuration rather than tonal functionality. With this concept of musical line as arabesque, constructed of abstract linear principles, Debussy experiments with a radical new concept of melody that allows him to break down the implications inherent in pitch successions and build associations between musical ideas in new ways.124 In the last two stanzas, as Baudelaire brings together the poem’s principal images (“vows,” “perfumes,” “kisses”), as he connects past, present, and future and turns reflexive rumination into an aesthetic appreciation of the experience, Debussy creates a musical reconciliation of the song’s previous ideas. With a musical refrain that starts out like b and ends in the shape of a, but inverted to follow an ascending pattern (ex. 20c), Debussy brings together the musical arabesques associated with the previous stanzas. Music’s role, then, is not only a connective one, the “syn” of the poem’s synaesthetic process, but also a musical equivalent of the poem that in turn expects the listener to connect its disparate parts and multiple meanings. By March 1889, when he wrote the last of the set, “The Fountain,” Debussy’s style was beginning to change. In it, he again intensifies the effects of the poem’s strophic form, sets the text sensitively and accurately, and links the poem’s images with recurring musical motives that help the song cohere and elicit a synaesthetic response from listeners. However, an aesthetic of turning-in-place replaces the movement implied in tonal progressions. Debussy plays with oscillating figures and static harmonies that stop the motion to allow the listener to concentrate on the 124.  As early as Diane au bois (1884), a short play by Théodore de Banville that reputedly served as an important source for Mallarmé’s “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” Debussy began to work with musical contour. He sought “une phrase d’une belle froideur, n’éveillant aucune idée de passion” to identify Diane. Keeping its shape constant, he transformed the phrase in other ways to show her gradually falling in love. Debussy, letter to Vasnier, 24 November 1885, in Claude Debussy: Correspondance, 1884–1918, ed. Lesure, 40. He also wrote a series of piano pieces entitled Arabesques (1888–91). In her article “Lakmé’s Echoing Jewels,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna, 1800–1920, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), Gurminder Bhogal analyzes the functional use of ornament in Lakmé, specifically her “opening arabesque melody.” In fact, Lakmé could be one source of Debussy’s notion of the arabesque. The main theme of his Prix de Rome–winning cantata L’Enfant prodigue (1884) is a short motive, an exotic melisma reminiscent of Lakmé, introduced in the prelude.

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ex.20a b Pasler.UCP Ex. 20 &Debussy, Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (1890), “Le Balcon.” a.  Melodic curve a in the refrain of stanzas 1 and 3.

mf

20a

20a 20b

20b

g

> g g T S TU C C C C C C g W B C jh h h h h mfMè - re des sou - veg - nirs, maîtres >C -C se desg maîg - tres - ses,g C C g S C U C C C T ! C T S pp - h - g h - g C - g C - g - jh - g - g h - h C - g C - g W B h S S R b. ! Melodic in C the of stanzas MèC curve - re C bdes sou -refrain C ve -C nirs, C 2 andC -4. C se desC maîC - tresC - ses, C maîtres il - lu - mi - nés par l’ardeur du char - bon. ppLes- soirs -g -g -g -g -g -g -g -g S S R ! C C C C C C C C C C C C S

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ex.20a & b Pasler.UCP

!

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Les

C

g

C

C

soirs il - lu - mi - nés

par

l’ardeur

du char - bon.

ex.20c Pasler.UCP

c.  b/a' in the refrain of stanza 6.

T !

p-

-g

C

Ces

!

S

YC

ces

C

ser

C

S

T C

- ments,

XC

bai

J

-

WC

ces

C C

sers

in

WC -

fi

g C

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par - fums, Tempo (Andante con moto)

BO

-

S

nis,

patterns suggested by the water’s movement—something Wagner did only in the opening of Das Rheingold. Vladimir Jankélévitch sees the fountain as an opportunity for exploring the “relative stability of the instable,” “immobility in perpetual movement,” and “movement for its own sake.”125 The alternating seconds and flourishing arpeggios depict not only the élan-retombé of the fountain and the love affair, but also the va-et-viens of the poem as it alternates between the lovers and the nature outside their union. Recurring hypnotic quintuplets and sextuplets help elevate listeners into a dreamlike state to experience, through the imagination, the moment when the lovers merge with the enchanted night, with its reflecting moon, echoing fountain, and murmuring trees. When Fauré first heard these songs, he declared the 27-yearold Debussy a genius. They also attracted the attention of the symbolist writers. In 1890, Debussy began work on an opera, Rodrigue et Chimène, with the Wagner­­ian writer Catulle Mendès.126 However by 1892, when he set to music 125.  Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1976), 78–79, 124, 127. 126.  See Richard Langham Smith, “Rodrigue et Chimène: Genèse, histoire, problèmes d’édition,” Cahiers Debussy 12–13 (1988–89), 67–81.

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Mallarmé’s “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” there is no hint of Wagner’s breathless melodies or bombastic orchestration. Debussy’s music begins with an improvisatory-sounding solo for flute, a instrument Wagner tended to neglect. It descends chromatically (recalling Dalila’s “Réponds à ma tendresse” from Samson et Dalila) and undulates between the tritone C# and G, its gradual acceleration from 9/8 to 4/8 groups giving the work its opening momentum. From its three motives, he derived the entire piece.127 With their general contour remaining constant, Debussy again showed his skill in transforming motives, stretching them out, interpolating notes, changing intervallic and rhythmic relationships, emphasizing one part over another, and writing them retrograde and in diminution or augmentation while still making them sound the same.128 Throughout his rhythms and modulations too are fluid and flexible. In this way, his is music of pure thought, or what David Code calls a “musical equivalent to the conflict between speech and writing.”129 Mallarmé said it prolonged the emotion of the poem and “set its scene more vividly than color.”130 Although a taste for sonorities characterizes much French music of the time and links Debussy’s music with radical republican concerns, symbolist ideas encouraged the composer to focus on sonorities for their own sake. In 1887, Gounod, not realizing that he was using terms associated with symbolists like Gustave Kahn, complained that Debussy had a tendency to explore strange and exaggerated musical colors to such an extent that he forgot “precise construction and clarity of form.”131 Like the poets, Debussy was drawn to sonorities, not just for the aural pleasures they offered, but also for the freedoms they encouraged in his composi127.  For a recent fascinating analysis of the piece that suggests a close relationship between music and poetry, see David Code, “Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music ‘après Wagner’ in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, 3 (2001): 493–554. Code sees the contrasts between the flute and the strings as paralleled in the poem by the “form-defining contrasts between seeing and feeling” in the poem. He furthermore argues that, just as the faun in the poem is “the symbol of the challenge the poem poses to the reader” (see n. 110 above), the music challenges audiences with a “conflict between its seductive seemingly immediate sensuous pleasures and the esoteric syntax that, in securing those pleasures, demands analytical scrutiny to be fully understood.” Code sees this as Debussy’s answer to “the challenge of writing music après Wagner (508–9). 128.  John Ringgold, “The Linearity of Debussy’s Music and Its Correspondences with the Symbolist Aesthetic Developments before 1908” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1972), 319. 129.  Code, “Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé,” 542. 130.  For Debussy’s memory of Mallarmé’s response, see Claude Debussy, Lettres à deux amis (Paris: Corti, 1942), 121. See also Jean-Michel Nectoux, Mallarmé: Un Clair Regard dans les ténèbres: Peinture, musique, poésie (Paris: Biro, 1998), 164–72. 131.  In his 1887 report as secretary of the Académie des beaux-arts on Debussy’s envoi from Rome, “Printemps,” cited in François Lesure, Claude Debussy (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 96, Gounod associates these problems with impressionist painting rather than symbolist free verse.

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tional process. Sonorities, as opposed to pitches in the tonal system, do not imply or determine how they may be used, what may follow them or be combined with them. They tend to focus the listener on the present.132 Treated as sonorities, individual notes, dissonances, and unresolved chords can evoke one another through their resonances, their “magical attraction” sometimes supported by instrumental colors. Jankélévitch sees such chords as “hiding a fundamental tonality, a latent tonality, an understood but forgotten tonality, an inaccessible system of reference that is their secret life. . . . Debussy perceives their secret affinities” but also leaves to the listener responsibility for “filling in the discontinuities.”133 In his focus on arabesque lines, static harmonies, and sonorities, Debussy challenged republican notions of beauty. His music has form, measured proportions, and formal closure, but they are neither conceived in conventional terms nor articulated with traditional means. In Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, for example, he synthesizes sonata form, song form (ABA'), variation, and as Code has suggested, fugal elements. He makes ambivalent their dividing points, thereby defying traditional analysis and rendering the perception of form ambiguous.134 His music achieves reconciliation, balance, and interlocking connections among its parts, yet subtly and not obviously. Moreover, his forms do not necessarily exemplify a dynamic process in motion toward a stable resolution. Debussy was less interested in progress as a teleological or evolutionary movement forward than in what could be learned from returning to the acoustic essence of sound. Although this brought a new kind of simplicity to his music, the composer was not motivated by making music accessible. Indeed, like Mallarmé, espousing an “aristocracy of sensitivity,” he had little interest in the utility of the arts for the masses, going so far as to tell his teacher that he did not believe that music could be learned.135 In a letter, Debussy went further, asserting that “music really ought to have been a hermetical science, enshrined in 132.  In his Debussy et le mystère de l’instant, Jankélévitch adds, “L’attachement de Debussy au plaisir de la sonorité, non moins que son aversion pour les théories livresques, explique sans doute ce primat de l’immédiat” (196). 133.  Ibid., 101–2. 134.  There have been widely divergent opinions as to the Faune’s form and where its sections begin and end. See, e.g., William Austin, “Toward an Analytical Appreciation,” in Debussy: Prelude to the “Afternoon of a Faun,” ed. William Austin (New York: Norton, 1970); Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 85–86; Richard Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and more recently Matthew Brown, “Tonality and Form in Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” Music Theory Forum 15, 2 (1993): 127–43. 135.  “Conversations with Ernest Guiraud (1889–90),” reproduced in Lockspeiser, Debussy, 1: 207. In Musica, July 1906, Debussy explained, “Art is absolutely useless to the masses. . . . One does not command the masses to love beauty.” Debussy, Monsieur Croche, 193.

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texts so hard and laborious to decipher as to discourage the herd of people who treat it as casually as they do a handkerchief. Instead of spreading music among the populace, I propose the foundation of a ‘Society of Musical Esotericism.’ ”136

Humor, Absurdity, and Satire Critique through humor, long a staple of French entertainment, was another way the French expressed dismay with republican ideology. Georges Fragerolle, a composer who worked at the Chat Noir, began to promote what he called fumisme. “Fumistes” were those who, using skepticism and humor, made art for art’s sake with no social or humanitarian agenda. Phillip Dennis Cate has called it “politically incorrect” art, whose only purpose was to counteract the pomposity and hypocrisy of modern life. An example of this was Eugène Bataille’s portrait of the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe (1887). Fragerolle’s spirit also permeated the literary journal Le Chat Noir, which published political spoofs and used parody and the absurd “to put the establishment—political, social, or artistic—on edge.” As Cate explains, “part of this fumiste process was also the promotion of itself and the Montmartre artistic community as the one, true regenerative force in French culture”—a kind of ideal society in contrast to real Paris.137 Another group initially associated with Le Chat Noir, “Les Incohérents,” also practiced caricature and satire. In their songs, balls, and exhibitions between 1882 and 1893, they poked fun, not only at political scandals, but also at French mœurs, fashionable people, and solemnity of all kinds.138 Their leader Jules Lévy pointed out, “Seriousness wears one out, gaiety regenerates.”139 In August 1882, 136.  Letter to Ernest Chausson, 3 September 1893, in Debussy Letters, ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols, trans. Roger Nichols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 51. 137.  Phillip Dennis Cate, “The Spirit of Montmartre,” in id. and Mary Shaw, eds. The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875–1905 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Zimmerli Art Museum, 1996), 23, 27, 38. 138.  The Musée d’Orsay put on an exhibition about the Incohérents from 25 February to 31 May 1992 and produced an accompanying text, Arts incohérents: Académie du dérisoire, ed. Luce Abélès and Catherine Charpin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992), complete with chronology, bibliography, and essays by Abèles and Charpin. Among the participants were Rodolphe Salis, Emile Goudeau, Georges Auriol, Alphonse Allais, Mac-Nab, Coquelin Cadet, Charles Cros, Eléonore Bonnaire, Caran d’Ache, André Gill, Henry Gray, Alfred Jullien, Ponvoisin, Jules Chéret, and esp. Jules Lévy, who founded a publishing house to promote their work and edited their publications. Besides those at the Eden-Théâtre, they held balls and exhibitions at the Folies-Bergère, Casino de Paris, Folies-Marigny, Moulin-Rouge, Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, and throughout the provinces. See also the discussion in chapter 8 above. 139.  Jules Lévy, “Manifeste de l’Incohérence,” Courrier français, 12 March 1883, cited in Arts incohérents, ed. Abélès and Charpin, 78.

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Les Incohérents set up their first exhibition at a fundraiser given by the Concerts Besselièvre on the Champs-Elysées. Seeking to abolish logic and common sense as well as provide an alternative to pessimism, they also took on the nature of art itself. One work was entitled, Beefsteak with Spinach, Painting on Porcelain. Another consisted of a painting on a man’s back. Some fabricated their watercolors out of saliva or seltzer water, their oil paints out of coconut oil or chocolate. There were also works made of perishables, such as little balls made of fresh white bread glued on the faced of a “convalescent” to suggest boils, and everyday objects, such as a chimney sweeper’s head coming out of a stovepipe.140 The juxtaposition of incongruous, absurd images with art music delighted the fashionable public, who returned to two more “Contre-Salons” that fall. They also attended benefits and showed up at subsequent events at a temple of high art, the Eden-Théâtre, where the Concerts Lamoureux performed Wagner. Among the numerous works they exhibited in 1882, a completely black painting by Paul Bilhaud entitled Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit (“Negroes fighting in a cellar, at night”) became the inspiration for a series of monochromatic paintings by Alphonse Allais, editor in chief of the Chat Noir weekly and frequent spoof artist, who made one of pure white. In their 1883 exhibition, he attached a blank piece of paper to the wall with the explanation, “Born in Honfleur of French, but honest parents. Student at the Abnormal Inferior School: 3, place de la Sorbonne. No. 3: First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather. (Acquired by the State.—I am the State.)”141 This was followed in their 1884 exhibition by the red painting entitled Tomato Harvest on the Shore of the Red Sea, by Apoplectic Cardinals and a musical score, “Great sorrows are mute: Incoherent funeral march” (ex. 21). It contained a blank staff with 24 bars but no notes, only the tempo indication, lento rigolando. In 1897, Allais published a collection of these, Album primo-avrilesque (April foolish album), including the “Funeral March.” This time he prefaced it with performance instructions: “Great sorrows being mute, the performers should occupy themselves with the sole task of counting the bars, instead of indulging in the kind of indecent row that destroys the august character of the best obsequies.”142 Such works were precursors of Alfred Jarry’s nonsensical play Ubu Roi (1896) 140.  Ibid., 69–73. 141.  “Ecole anormale inférieure” is a play on the country’s prestigious Ecole normale supérieure; “L’Etat, c’est moi” is an allusion to a statement by Louis XIV. Luce Abélès, “Naissance des Arts incohérents: Une Conjoncture favorable,” and Catherine Charpin, “Le Magasin incohérent,” in Arts incohérents, ed. Abélès and Charpin, 21, 70. 142.  These are reproduced in Cate, “Spirit of Montmartre,” and Steven Whiting, “Music on Montmartre,” in The Spirit of Montmartre, ed. Cate and Shaw, 8–9, 31, 158. See also Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 80–81, n. 52. This work is a kind of precedent to John Cage’s 4'33".

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Ex. 21  Alphonse Allais, opening measures of “Funeral March” (1884).

as well as Dadaist, Surrealist, and Fluxus art. They also shed light on the attitudes, music, and drawings of Erik Satie, a fellow Honfleurian and friend of Allais’s, who played piano at the Chat Noir from December 1887 to 1891.143 Scholars have shown how deeply Allais’s bluffing practices and audacious attitudes affected Satie, a “musical Allais” who also assumed many irreverent pretenses and refused to be taken in by success with the establishment.144 The composer too liked to shock with humorous titles (e.g., “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear”). Beginning with Gnossiennes (1889–91), he replaced the typical performance instructions in Italian like cantando or dolce with ironic or absurd suggestions to the performer in French. These included, “Wonder about yourself,” “Don’t be proud,” “Counsel yourself cautiously,” and “Think right” (see ex. 22). (These continued in Le Fils des étoiles [1892] and Pièces froides [1897], later developing into narrative commentaries on musical conventions used in Avant-dernières pensées [1915].) However, Allais and the Chat Noir were not the only stimuli for such ideas. Wagner too served as a foil for Satie’s imagination, one largely overlooked by Satie scholars. In performance instructions such as those noted above, I would argue, Satie was also parodying the self-seriousness of Wagner and Wagnerians, taking 143.  Thereafter Satie played at the Auberge du Clou and the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. 144.  Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 80–85, and Gillmor, Satie, 65–70.

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aim at what performers were supposed to be thinking of when playing this music and how listeners behaved at Wagnerian concerts. By the mid 1880s, when enthusiasm for Wagner’s music had turned admirers into a sect and concerts into pseudoreligious rituals, audiences were expected to contemplate the symbols represented in the music—such as the holy banquet resembling Christ’s Last Supper in Parsifal— and, inspired by the redemption and salvation promised therein, use it to pursue their own internal purification. This required the utmost concentration, silent and still composure during long Wagnerian acts performed without benefit of the stage, and, some thought, the abandonment of will and reason. Satie’s instructions bring attention to the ethical ramifications associated with performing and listening to music and to the paternalistic nature of composition during these times. In his music too, Satie seems to have taken on what Wagner explored in Parsifal, removing the emotional, religious, and idealistic associations. At the same time, he plays with simplicity and stasis and pushes listeners’ tolerance for lengthy works to the limits. Perhaps in part a product of his status as an outsider, someone with little compositional training,145 Satie reduced his musical materials to a minimum. This allowed him to forge an original perspective on simplicity, distinct from the lightness of café songs or the naïveté of chansons populaires and, ironically, both serious and musically important. His Gymnopédies (1888) borrow the waltz rhythms of the café-concert without the sentimentality. Simplicity here means achieving effect with the fewest musical means. Three pieces emanate from a single musical idea. Working with short musical ideas with few formal implications also gave him new freedoms. The first Gnossienne (1890) consists of three ideas, essentially only four notes each (table 3 and ex. 22). Doing away with bar lines and key signatures, Satie uses a four-beat ostinato in the left hand to ensure continuity through a regular pulse, while the right hand juggles extensions of two melodic formulae, an initial one (a) and a cadential one (b). Their repetition makes up three distinctive phrases—two antecedents, x and z, and one consequent, y—and organizes the piece into two sections, each having two parts consisting of two elements. Just as none of the motives has any true “middle,” neither does the piece, every element of which is either a beginning or an end. Musical stasis arises when, with the same musical ideas penetrating every level of the work’s construction, there is no conflict, no structural tension, and thus no structural motion. Instead, there 145.  From 1879 to 1882 and in 1885–86 Satie was enrolled in piano classes at the Conservatoire, where he was perceived as “not ordinary” and very weak at sight-reading. In 1883–84, he audited a harmony class there. He never won a prize. His father, Alfred, was also a self-taught composer and published his “Picking-Clause Polka” in Mélomane, 30 June 1888. Archives nationales, AJ37 239.2, and Gillmor, Satie, 9–12, 16–17.

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ex.T3 Pasler.UCP

Table 3.  Analysis of Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1

YY ! YY S

melodic formulas:

C C XC

C

g

C

a antecedent

XB

C

XB

g

C

b1 consequent

C

g

C

g C

B

b4 cadential

A

form:  X X Y Y, Z Z Y Y /  X' X' Y Y, Z Z Y Y X = a1 b1 a1 b2 a1 b3 b 4 Y = b5 b5 b 4 Z = a2 b6 b4 X' = a1 b1' a1 b2 '

Ex.22  Satie, Gnossienne no. 1 (1890), first published in Figaro musical, September 1893. This piece perhaps refers to dances of an imaginary past and, with its absence of bar lines, recalls the music of Louis Couperin. While a waltz, mazurka, gavotte, and bourrée (the last dedicated to d’Indy) appeared in the magazine’s principal selection of instrumental scores, Satie’s work was classed with “Variety and Musical Curiosities,” ex.22 Pasler.UCP - page 1 of 2 pages along with a Basque war song, music commemorating the Franco-Russian alliance, and a posthumous Pater noster by Liszt. Leut. YY YY S C C X C ! B p B # YY Y S B Y A a1 X

Y S ! Y YY

g

B B

BB C

B

f # YY Y S Y A Y ! Y YY

# YY Y S Y A

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is intensification, deepening awareness of one idea or state of mind rather than constant movement from one to the next. In Wagner’s Parsifal, these values appear as the goals of a man’s life and are identified with the holy man and salvation, but only in the music for the temple of the Holy Grail does “time becomes space.” In Satie’s music, they penetrate the compositional process and create a kind of musical décor as static as the paintings by Puvis de Chavannes he so loved. By taking simple ideas, reduced to the fewest details, and by repeating rather than developing their essential traits, Satie was able to experiment with a new approach to musical form.146 With Vexations (1893), Satie explicitly takes on the notion of music as something that can contribute to a sense of harmony or serve as a model for progress as linear evolution. The work consists of the constant repetition of a short succession of 6/3 chords over a 13-beat theme, whose only logic is the systematic alternation between diminished fifths and diminished and augmented fourths (ex. 23). Whereas chords built of intervals of a fourth dominate the act 1 prelude to Le Fils des étoiles, where they serve a mystical function, here Satie treats them and the diminished fifths (tritones) as novel ways to harmonize a bass theme. The effect is to assimilate them as acceptable, as might a good republican looking for new material with which to expand one’s harmonic horizons, although much more boldly than Théodore Dubois allows for in his Notes et études d’harmonie (1890).147 This tongue-in-cheek exercise, which Steven Whiting compares to verbal games practiced at the Chat Noir, was to be introduced in “the greatest silence and with serious immobility” before being performed 840 times (or 168 times, depending on how one construes Satie’s repeated motive).148 Whiting thinks that, given this and the fact that it was never published, Satie wrote it for himself, perhaps to calm himself after a souring 146.  For a discussion of the importance of simplicity and stasis in Satie’s music, see Jann Pasler, “Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: The Emergence of a New Musical Logic” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1981), chap. 8, “A New Concept of the Musical Object: The Musical Instant.” 147.  In reissuing Henri Reber’s classical tonality treatise, Dubois expanded it to include discussion of the use of diminished fifths and the preparation/resolution of dissonant chords. 148.  Whiting, in his Satie the Bohemian, 179–80, and “Serious Immobilities: Musings on Satie’s Vexations” (paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Washington, D.C., 27 October 2005), analyses the piece as a quatrain holorine, a poem whose rhymes include entire lines and therefore end up being nonsensical. Successions of chords often sound the same, although they are written differently, and the second harmonization of the theme is a mirror image of the first. Chat Noir poets used them to satirize the eloquence of Parnassian poetry. In Art News Annual, 1958, John Cage explained: “To be interested in Satie one must be disinterested to begin with, accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited claptrap” (cited in Orledge, Satie, 259). In 1963, Cage organized a full performance of Vexations.

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Ex. 23  Satie, Vexations (1893). This work consists of 34 chords to be repeated 840 times. The thirteen-beat bass theme, reiterated at the bottom of the example and used twice here in its entirety with the same harmonizations, albeit in different forms, consists of eleven chromatic notes expanding upex.23 andPasler.UCP down from middle C. The missing note, G#, comes once in the right hand in the thirteenth chord.

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affair with Suzanne Valadon. For performers who take the 840 repetitions of the entire work, which could last for from twelve to twenty-four hours, this turns the experience of music into a dialectic of listening and nonlistening.149 The piece may have been influenced by the surfeit of genres in popular venues that undoubtedly turned music into a background phenomenon or demanded only partial attention. Its radical implications were not understood until the twentieth century.

e Increasingly, rational thought came under attack for its limits on human understanding. Science had “reduced, assimilated, identified, everywhere invented repetition.”150 People began to question the predicable recurrence of comparable 149.  See Nancy Perloff ’s review of Whiting’s Satie the Bohemian in Music and Letters 81 (May 2000): 328. 150.  Jacques Rivière, “Introduction à la métaphysique du rêve,” Nouvelle revue française, 1 November 1908, 255.

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phenomena and look beyond what is knowable through the scientific method. In 1889, Henri Bergson attacked his culture’s “mechanistic” conception of nature: “Mechanism . . . assumes that the materials which it synthesizes are governed by necessary laws, and although it reaches richer and richer combinations . . . yet it never gets out of the narrow circle of necessity within which it first shut itself up.”151 The world of the unconscious suggested to him and others another reality, one characterized by mystery and magic. So, too, did Jean-Martin Charcot’s experiments in hypnosis at the Salpêtrière hospital, in which he explored the heightened suggestibility of trance. In this context, music’s utility was ripe for reconsideration. Since the republicans were in control, the country had spent considerable attention on its collective concerns—the need to train citizens, build a coherent esprit public, and expand France’s presence abroad. The republican ideology never really addressed the inner domain of humans, particularly their spirituality. Republicans hoped people would achieve self-growth through education and educational practices such as musical performance. But beyond encouraging these activities, they theorized little how this worked. And to the extent that republicans validated the public aspects of music and music-making and focused on music’s capacity to express and inspire collective feeling, they undervalued and failed to understand what music contributed to one’s internal universe. Ironically, virtually everyone found music a mystery. For Hugo, sounding remarkably like the symbolists, “Music is the art of the vague . . . it satisfies a feeling for the infinite, the ineffable . . . . It begins where reason leaves off. It needs the distant, the dusky, the moonlight, the floating and the veiled. It moves one obscurely.”152 Although Saint-Saëns believed that art should be both “useful and moral,” he saw music as the “most mysterious” of the arts, one that makes up an ideal sphere.153 In the late 1880s, as avant-garde writers, painters, and musicians grew frustrated with the demands of expressive clarity and the limitations of traditional form, they turned to music because of its pleasurable obscurity rather than the order it could impose on sound. Whether approached with great seriousness by Wagner or humorously by Satie, music became a practice directed at the self, 151.  Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. R. L. Pogson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 140. 152.  In his Livre d’or de Victor Hugo, Emile Blémont claims to have copied these words from Hugo. They are cited in Julien Tiersot, “Le Centenaire de Victor Hugo,” Ménestrel, 2 March 1902, 66. 153.  Saint Saëns, “Art for Art’s Sake,” Musical Memories, trans. in Studd, Saint-Saëns, 295–97.

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rather than the community, and one enabling self-exploration, that most murky of domains. Its abstractions allowed one to contemplate, not only one’s internal universe, but also the creative process itself. In his attempt to understand the nature of intuition, Debussy shifted the burden of musical expression from sentiment to nature and the imagination, exploring musical equivalents for memories, fugitive impressions, and the “mystery of an instant.” This music suggested that the intuitions of the unconscious proceeded by evocation, subtle connections, and analogies. In addition to stimulating sensuous auditory pleasures, as well as deep emotional and spiritual experiences, music was thus increasingly valued for the charm of its obscurity and what its mysteries offered the imagination. It could provoke the listener to be creative and thereby contribute to growth in inner awareness. Saint-Saëns had to admit that the public’s emerging “taste for the mysterious and the incomprehensible” prepared it for the invasion of strangeness at the Universal Exhibition of 1889. He attributed the success of the Annamite theater and other exotic performances to these attitudes. Wagner’s music contributed as well. As Saint-Saëns pointed out, most people who went to Bayreuth did not understand German, knew little about music, and did not want to understand. They just came to be “hypnotized.”154 This was not necessarily a problem for republicans if the desire to be enchanted by the unknown made people more tolerant of difference and open to learning from it.

154.  Cited in A. Héler, “Drame lyrique et drame musical,” L’Art musical, 31 January 1890, 10.

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10 • The Symbolic Utility of Music

at the 1889 Universal Exhibition

More than a year before the opening of the largest exhibition yet mounted, French officials issued a special invitation to Dinah Salifou, king of the Senegalese Nalous since 1877.1 Those in the know considered Senegal, France’s oldest African colony, one of the world’s great colonial establishments, the launching site for expeditions into Africa’s interior, even if the French public remained largely indifferent and some hostile to further colonialism. 2 Over three decades, General Louis Faidherbe had established ports, schools, banks, a newspaper, telegraphic lines, and a museum. Among his closest allies were the Nalous. 3 Dinah Salifou believed it in their mutual interest to collaborate with the French. Indeed, from 1884 to 1887, French forces assisted the Nalous in a vicious civil war. Dinah Salifou felt both flattered at the invitation to come to Paris and anxious because of a cousin who might (and, in fact, did) usurp his power while he was away. 4 Still, intent on reinforcing close ties with the French, he agreed, and his hosts did not let him down. Upon his arrival in early July, the Gare de Lyon was decked out with flags, speeches followed, and the crowd made him feel admired. They also paid him the honor of listening to his musicians perform, astounded by what they heard. At his posh hotel, a journalist and a photographer from L’Illustration documented the king’s entourage—his two wives, brother, son, and two nephews, the 1.  Focusing on common people from the colonies who were brought in to build and animate the artificial villages at the Exhibition, scholars have ignored elites who were also invited. A royal contingent from Hué, Annam, also came with its villagers. 2.  Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 3rd ed. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1886), 485–86, 494, and Louis Faidherbe, Le Sénégal: La France dans l’Afrique occidentale (Paris: Hachette, 1889), addressed these very concerns. 3.  The kingdom of the Nalous dated from 1754. In 1845, they agreed to stop the sale of slaves in their territory in return for money, arms, and tobacco from the French. Later Dinah Salifou allowed French and English factories to be built. According to l’Illustration, there were fifty to sixty thousand Nalous at the time. 4.  Thierno Diallo, Dinah Salifou, roi des Nalous (Dakar: Nouvelles éditions africaines, 1977).

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Fig. 77  Henri Thirait, “The African king Dinah-Salifou, the queen, and his entourage” (engraving based on a photograph by Paul Boyer, with the background removed), L’Illustration, 6 July 1889.

prime minister, and two balafon performers, seated in front of them (fig. 77). The only other depiction of the king on this trip, on the ship coming to France, also shows a musician directly behind him carrying a large lutelike instrument, the kora. Such images are quite different from what we find in the rest of the French press. While Senegalese villagers in their artificial village at the Exhibition are never shown performing music, 5 music seems to have been central to this king’s identity. Indeed what Westerners called griots, hereditary praise-singers, had been members of royal retinues since the seventeenth century. Here they are not sexualized, like many other black performers in the French imagination, nor wildlooking and “close to nature,” as in an image of a balafon player elsewhere, 6 but dignified—no surprise, perhaps, to French readers of the time since the Senegalese were considered the most evolved of the region. Like most non-Western music performed during the 1889 Exhibition that 5.  Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, N.Y.: Uni­versity of Rochester Press, 2005), points out that the only instrument in depictions of the Senegalese villagers is a drum, “tucked away in the upper center of the silversmith’s hut” and “either ignored or perceived as environmental sound by exhibition-goers” (246–48). 6.  Cf. the balafon player on the cover of La Musique des familles, 5 January 1889.

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served to entertain and distract listeners who knew little about it, the balafon in this engraving is an emblem of cultural identity. Its music undoubtedly served to please and comfort the king, like Western monarchs who patronized musicians, such as Louis XIV.7 But the instrument was also symbolic, to the king a reminder of his home and to Westerners the “national instrument of Senegal.” Because some French believed the arts manifested the soul of a civilization, they would have seen the “great sweetness” of its tone and its appropriateness for “the frequently melancholic melodies of men still close to Nature” as signifying the Senegalese people. 8 When the king’s musicians performed several times in the Senegalese village, the French ethnographer Julien Tiersot found their music more complex than a song of a few repeated notes performed for him by one of the villagers; yet he criticized balafon music for being almost exclusively rhythmical and lacking any melodic themes.9 Senegalese music thus would have reinforced the stereotype of a primitive people who might benefit from French contact. At the same time, its association with “nation” gave the illusion of a stable regional identity, ignoring vague borders and fluctuating structures of power. With the 1889 Universal Exhibition, Jules Ferry’s imperialism and the resistance to it made it important to go beyond celebrating competition and the benefits of democracy. Like the 1878 Exhibition, through music and musical instruments (along with architecture, art, furniture, food, industrial and agricultural products), that of 1889 could produce knowledge about national identities in the West. But if France were to serve as a model for others, the 1889 Exhibition also had to engage the general populace more broadly on nation-states beyond the West, distinct political entities with whom the French might share values and make alliances or that could be fought over, conquered, and administered. Through comparison of similarities and differences, visitors were thus encouraged to think in terms of racial distinctions and the relative status of various cultures, as if they represented various “degrees” of civilization. At stake, as the 1889 Colonial Congress made clear, was the expansion of the white race. Whatever nation could establish itself all over the globe would probably one day be the greatest.10 Far more extensively and self-consciously than before, this exhibition therefore not only reinforced the notion of a modern Western culture (as centered in Paris), 7.  This king recalls Duke Ascanio Sforza who traveled with his court musician, Josquin des Prés. 8.  See Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples (1894; New York: Arno, 1924) and Edmond Bailly, “Ethnographie musicale: Le Balafo,” Musique des familles, 5 January 1889, 93. 9.  Julien Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889), 102–3. 10.  E. Monod, L’Exposition universelle de 1889 (Paris: Dentu, 1890), 2: 451.

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but also, and significantly, posed the question of a world culture. Deflecting attention away from internal differences within France, French organizers wished to examine the world’s past as far back as humans could imagine it, trace an evolutionary path from the past to the present, and encourage people to think of the future in global terms. In this context, the search for origins needed to go beyond Western civilization; the question of race was far more complex than what was played out in Alsace and Lorraine; and the notion of nation was not just a dynamic of regional struggle with one’s neighbors. The rising public interest in evolutionary theories, the massive growth in geographical and anthropological societies, and imperial expansion in the 1880s made it essential to consider history, race, and nation as beyond the time and place of individual cultures. Underlying these agendas were important questions. What did people around the world share? Were there universals commonly embraced by all humans? The 1889 Exhibition provided the ultimate testing ground for republican monogenism, even in music. While polygenists thought it highly unlikely that direct contact with Westerners at the Exhibition or elsewhere could have much influence on people of color, monogenists disagreed.11 To encourage wide comparisons between people, their mœurs, artistic practices, and relative progress, French officials extended invitations, not only to their own colonies, but also to twenty-eight countries outside Europe.12 Participants had to finance their own contributions and determine how they would depict and position themselves. A panorama in the shape of a globe representing the earth overlooked the various national pavilions and villages on the Esplanade des Invalides, reminding everyone of their interconnectedness. Some countries brought music, especially those who had long traditions associated with the nation, still vibrant in the present. The dancers, actors, and musicians from Java and Vietnam were among the most popular attractions. Others, like Mexico, eschewed music, perhaps because that of their ancestors, the Aztecs, had disappeared and because they wished instead to “publicize a modern image of the nation in order to attract immigrants and investment.”13 When he went around taking notes on various non-Western musics, Tiersot was particularly focused on the presence of harmony. But, I argue, it was the French aesthetic of charm and grace, together with 11.  Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Remarques sur L’Exposition du centenaire (Paris: Plon, Nourrit: 1889), chap. 7. 12.  These included Japan, Persia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, Turkey, and sixteen Latin American countries, the latter perhaps to reinforce French interests being threatened there by other powers and with a view to understanding more about the site of the future Panama Canal. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 18. 13.  Ibid., 19.

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French taste for ever-new sonorities, that made investing in music, especially exotic music, pay off, according to republican criteria. These performances brought people together in shared experiences of the bizarre and unknown, and some suggested new ways of hearing, a form of progress little anticipated by organizers. In many domains, although the Exhibition was an enormous “school of ideas” and some performances had commercial value, what officials esteemed most highly was the symbolic utility of all cultural displays, from the Eiffel Tower to music. In other words, it was not just knowledge they wished to produce, including knowledge as a form of power, but also a way of thinking and perhaps an ethics to go with it. In the symbol, concept supersedes materiality and physicality, even if that concept is inevitably mediated by assumptions and stereotypes that could vary from spectator to spectator. The symbolic is contingent, contingent on the connections it is used to make, but nevertheless persistent and productive of meaning. It articulates an identity, something beyond itself, while reducing the complexities of reality. That Dinah Salifou felt betrayed by the French when they installed a rival to lead a neighboring tribe, and that he returned home to chaos and a massacre, were realities absent from the image he was there to project. Where the symbolic can have utility, possibly surpass an object’s expected or functional utility, is when it implies or affects not just beliefs and values, but also actions. The symbolic can be used to strengthen desires reflective of larger situations, such as colonial expansion or its cessation. The Exhibition’s large number of retrospectives expressed this preoccupation, as did music, conceived as more than entertainment. To the extent that they had symbolic utility, people, objects, products, and practices could serve as emblems of pride, prestige, and even nation, especially if nation was not yet a stable concept. For republicans, the Exhibition as a whole legitimized the Third Republic, its success momentarily overshadowing the realities of internal dissent, troubling corruption, and rising socialism. The Exhibition made republicans proud and at last confident of their future. However, for pessimistic monarchists who feared racial degeneration from crossbreeding, the Exhibition drew attention to great flux in the world, “new duties” that the French must assume, and a potential “crisis in history” that might result from the “fusion of men and ideas.”14

Republican Values on Display The state-sponsored 1889 Universal Exhibition, in preparation since November 1884, testified to the power of liberal republicanism, affirming the value of eclecti14.  Vogüé, Remarques, 190.

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cism and diversity and linking commerce with national glory. Its pretext was to commemorate 1789—an exhibition that showed the Third Republic to be the guardian and heir of the French Revolution. Much of it took place on the Champ de Mars below the Eiffel Tower, once the site of many revolutionary festivals. This was not unproblematic, for many differed over whether the Revolution had been the result of 1789 liberalism or 1793 radical actions. Monarchists abroad suspected that organizers planned to glorify the violent downfall of the French monarchy. To assuage worried officials, political meetings and revolutionary memorabilia were banned from the Exhibition and the only dates officially commemorated were from 1789–93.15 Instead, as Janet Horne has explained, organizers concentrated their efforts on portraying the Revolution as the “beginning of the modern era,” one of the “industrial ‘motors’ of industrialization and all of the material wealth on display at the Exhibition one of its consequences.” The Exhibition would showcase a country not “torn apart by ideological divisions, but, rather, one united by the fruits of material progress.”16 Prime Minister Ferry was determined to rally support for the Republic by showing how advanced French society had become under the leadership of the républicains opportunistes, the result of assimilating the innovations of science, industry, and technology.17 Yet, ironically, in some ways the 1889 Exhibition tested the limits of republican idealism, especially when it came to “official” art.

Learning through Symbols Three principles motivated the organization of the Exhibition, each of them involving music in significant ways. The most important was the idea of instilling a broad sense of fraternity into an unprecedented number of people.18 Whereas fraternity had long been a republican ideal, France was still a country deeply divided along social, economic, and political lines. It needed more mutual understanding both within the country and with its neighbors and colonies. Ferry, long preoc15.  In effect, four of the five anniversary dates that the Exhibition commemorated—5 May, 20 June, 14 July, and 4 August—were all related to 1789 and the fifth, 21 September 1792, signaled the beginning of the First Republic. For a discussion of this emphasis on 1789 as opposed to 1793, see Mona Ozouf, L’Ecole de la France (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 149. 16.  Janet Horne, “Presenting Modern France: The Rhetoric of Reform at the 1889 Universal Exhibition,” in Unfinished Revolutions: Legacies of Upheaval in Modern French Culture, ed. Robert Denommé and Roland Simon (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 146, 154. 17.  True to his radical republican perspective, Antonin Proust argues in his L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892) that this progress resulted not from government subsidies but rather private initiative (63). 18.  There were 419,759 admissions, with 1, 2, or 5 tickets sold per admission.

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cupied by the need for national unity, hoped to attract all kinds of people, not just foreigners, but also rural and minority people from the French provinces. Yet the reality was that, although the 1889 Universal Exhibition was conceived for the whole world, not just as a place for Western nations to play out their struggle for superiority through nonviolent competition, at first most European nations refused official participation, objecting to the celebration of 1789. Germany forbade its people to participate, other than a small group from Alsace-Lorraine. Although Britain, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia, Spain and others later allowed private contributions from their countries, and royalty with their families came from virtually every European country, including Russia, as well as from Senegal and Persia, official delegates were from younger nations such as Greece and Serbia, the United States, and secular republics like Switzerland.19 The Exhibition provided a utopian place for peaceful encounters and a renewed sense of the esprit public, even if, for many, entertainment, amusement, or distraction formed the basis of its appeal. While Italy and Germany were plotting against France, it was an occasion to deepen relationships with France’s allies, especially Russia, and display to the world the extent of French fraternity. 20 As in revolutionary festivals, parades and performances played an important role in encouraging great masses of people to transcend their differences. Pascal Ory recounts a procession preceding a banquet of French mayors: as 15,200 mayors from all over the country marched from the Louvre to the Champ de Mars, reputedly 700,000 spectators looked on. 21 At this and other such parades, the “Marseillaise” was inevitably performed. The “musical symbol of the nation” was “the acoustic signature of the Republic;” as “ritual object” it could also be heard performed by the Javanese anklung. 22 Hoping to revive the revolutionary sense of collective empowerment, republicans also sponsored huge concerts by neighborhood and provincial groups under the banner of one nation. Whether 850 children singing a capella, 1,600 chorists under the direction of the Opéra conductor, or 700 military band players, what is remarkable is that many of these presented music by France’s most illustrious living composers—Thomas, Gounod, SaintSaëns, Delibes, and Massenet (fig. 78). For the performers, these were challenging on every level. But for the public, it did not take imagination or sophistication to 19.  Adolphe Démy, Essai historique sur les expositions universelles de Paris (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1907), 393–402. 20.  Ibid., 416–19, 433–45. 21.  Pascal Ory, “Le Centenaire de la Révolution française,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 1: La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 540–41. Fauser, Musical Encounters, puts that number as 11,182 (108). 22.  Fauser, Musical Encounters, 109–10.

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Fig. 78  French choral societies’ festival program, 25 August 1889. This Sunday afternoon all-French concert in the Salle des Fêtes at the Trocadéro included 1,600 singers from numerous amateur choruses, accompanied by the wind band of the Bon Marché department store and led by the Opéra’s conductor. Unfortunately, the famously poor acoustics of the hall did not favor such a concert.

experience the pleasures of such performances. The sheer power of their sound was palpably physical. In these contexts, then, music served, not just as a metaphor of social harmony, but also as a medium for it. Organizers’ second principle was education and their methods of encouraging learning not only comparison, but also symbols. Like its predecessors, the Exhibition laid out products of all kinds, including musical instruments and music instruction manuals, to glorify the worker and the industrial revolutions and to help everyone learn about new ideas, innovations, and new products. Edison’s phonograph made quite a stir for its ability to capture fine musical details. Visitors were expected to compare what they encountered with what they knew already and other things on display. There were also speeches, lectures, and sixty-nine international conferences, including the first two socialist congresses, the first international congresses on women’s rights and feminine institutions, and the first international photography congress. It was hoped that the enormous spectrum of knowledge would generate excitement, encourage improvements in people’s lives, and generate a sense of what was distinctive about French products. To raise more awareness about French heritage as part of national identity, they introduced a new concern for history. In addition to a centenary exhibition on the Revolution, a number of panoramas (circular paintings) depicted the French past, such as those on Joan of Arc, the Taking of the Bastille, and the History of the Century. The latter featured Victor Hugo placed between allegorical figures representing work and defense of the country and a chronological succession of hundreds of notable people between 1879 and 1889. 23 Of particular interest was a set of buildings along the Seine spanning from one side of the Champ de Mars to the other: a fascinating array of dwellings from ancient times to the present, in one country and another, that suggested the impact of evolution and race on culture. In this “History of Human Habitation,” conceived and designed by Charles Garnier, architect of the Opéra, prehistory was defined as life before a definable culture, history as a succession of cultures in time and space, and the dividing line between the Orient and Occident set by the limits of the Roman Empire. As they wandered from one structure to the next, visitors could compare civilizations—prehistoric and primitive, western and eastern, past and present—through where people lived. They could examine the impact of migrations and the influence of climate while imagining themselves in time-travel. The grottos of the Troglodites and the earliest huts came first, followed by constructions before Christ by the Egyptians, Assyrians, and 23.  On panoramas, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Finde-siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 4.

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Fig. 79  Building the 1889 Universal Exhibition, L’Illustration, 29 December 1888. In the foreground, one of the last primitive (early Bronze Age) dwellings in the History of Human Habitation exhibit; next to it are the Egyptian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Hindu pavilions. In the rear, the Eiffel Tower in the process of construction.

others (fig. 79). Those of the Germans and Gauls were perhaps ironically the most primitive of this group. Next followed the history of Western construction from the Romans through the Renaissance, Byzantine construction, and Islamic architecture; and finally contemporary housing in China and Japan, the traditional structures of the Eskimos, various native Americans, and the people of equatorial Africa (lumped 556

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into one category). Sometimes the shapes, round or square construction, elicited comparison, sometimes the materials, stone, wood, or iron, sometimes the size. A monogenist critic suggested that such models taught “the same principles were active in the creation of material culture of all ages.”24 Although the cultural juxtapositions were often odd, this exhibition forced visitors to confront the plethora of civilizations, compare the relative benefits of each, and begin to draw conclusions about French civilization, especially with the Eiffel Tower looming high over them all. In part because of the role it played in the exhibition of cultures, music was one of the main attractions, offering innumerable opportunities to reflect on national and cultural differences. Although few commented on this, “listening was an inescapable experience” at the Exhibition; as Annegret Fauser has shown, “townscape and soundscape were inextricably intertwined.”25 Besides concerts associated with the pavilions, various cafés, and piano manufacturers, there were daytime performances of singers and pianists, many of them little-known, at the Pavillon du gaz, 26 alongside major ensembles from France and abroad at the Palais du Trocadéro. Concerts organized by various national groups allowed audiences to ascertain the extent to which national musics had distinct characteristics. In two conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, the large Russian orchestra impressed with its original colors and the music’s incorporation of Russian folk songs, although some found the works excessively long. However, possibly because they excluded vocal music—a rarity in Paris—these concerts failed to attract a substantial public. Orchestral works presented by the Spanish seemed influenced by Massenet, while those by the Americans showed a strong neoclassical German influence. National characteristics were more perceptible in the choruses. The all-male Russian national chapel choir made a hit with their epic songs as did choral societies from Finland, Norway, and Spain. Tiersot especially admired the Norwegians, attributing their success to the mixture of social classes among its chorists, something he predicted would never happen in France. 27 24.  Emile Monod, L’Exposition universelle de 1889 (Paris: Dentu, 1890), cited in Miriam Levin, Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1986), 82. 25.  Fauser, Musical Encounters, 6–9. This excellent, richly illustrated book addresses some of the same themes as this chapter. 26.  La Musique des familles sponsored a Sunday afternoon series there. Highly eclectic, one in late September juxtaposed a Beethoven march, Schubert impromptu, Kalkbrenner sonata, songs by Augusta Holmès, Weber, Rameau, and gypsies from Moscow, and an excerpt from the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre. 27.  Julien Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques: Promenades à l’Exposition de 1889 (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889), 56. On the national concerts, cf. Fauser, Musical Encounters, 42–58.

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Exclusively French music was performed at the concerts offered by French orchestras. Five major Paris orchestras (Lamoureux, Colonne, the Société des concerts, the Opéra-Comique, and the Opéra) participated between May and September, each increasing its numbers to over 200. Lamoureux presented music by eight living French composers, Colonne twelve of them. The state-subsidized Société des concerts represented the country’s musical elite, members of the Institute, with Delibes’s dances dans le style ancien and Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, an ideal choice in that it reconciled past and future. The OpéraComique balanced opera selections by dead French composers with those by living ones, including Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle and Saint-Saëns’s Prosperine. True to its conservative practices, old masterpieces dominated the Opéra’s program, with excerpts from Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore, Thomas’s Françoise da Rimini, and Paladilhe’s Patrie being the most recent. Throughout the Exhibition, there were also ensembles such as the amateur chorus Concordia (on 28 May), chamber music concerts, organ concerts at the Trocadéro, the Concerts Colonne’s Saint-Saëns Festival on 31 May with Mme Krauss and Paderewski, and a benefit performance in June of Handel’s Messiah sponsored by the Société philanthropique, the first public event organized by Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe. Some were expensive, with ticket prices for the Saint-Saëns Festival ranging from 2 to 60 francs. The Messiah netted over 25,000 francs, twice what the Opéra took in on a good night. Such concerts prove that elites attended the Exhibition as well as everyone else. This long litany of concerts elicited the word “official.” On the positive side, this signaled genuine respect. At the top of the monument before the Gallery of the Liberal Arts, Auber and Berlioz were included in the list of eight “great men.” “Here’s something that gives an idea of the progress of music in the contemporary period,” Tiersot proudly observed. 28 But some, not happy with all the choices, made fun of the idea of “official music,” the public utility they were meant to serve, and especially the gigantic Palais du Trocadéro where they were held. A critic observed, “In spite of a holy horror of all that is official—especially Official Art, that monstrous product of a hyperadministrative civilization—I dared last Thursday night to spend two hours in that building of public inutility where the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique made itself heard officially.”29 One should note that “official” here meant officially sanctioned rather than the reflection of an official doctrine, for each orchestra made its own choices and tried to address the tastes 28.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 1. A first version was published in Julien Tiersot, “Promenade musicale à l’Exposition,” Ménestrel, 26 May 1889, 165. Other essays in this series were published in subsequent issues. 29.  Durand, “La Musique à l’Exposition,” Musique des familles, 14 September 1889, 380.

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of its constituencies.30 The main complaint was exactly what one might expect from committees consisting of those embracing a wide range of aesthetic concerns: too much variety and too little coherence or progression in the presentation of works. This made fruitful and enlightening comparison difficult. There were other problems as well. Unlike at the 1878 Exhibition, the French orchestra concerts presented only works that had already been heard. In addition, these concerts were perceived as overly long, and stringing the excerpts together without a break, as Colonne performed them, did not help matters. Moreover, performing fragments out of their original context made for limited meaning. Still, critics had to admit that, although these concerts may not have been very exciting for Parisians, few complained. The audience of “braves gens who had come from the four corners of France” was “so happy to hear their favorite airs performed for once in all their grandeur.”31 In general then, as for music festivals at the Exhibition, the purpose of these concerts was an aural kaleidoscope of the state of French music—a “retrospective” of music by forty French composers, twenty-eight living and twelve dead, with every genre represented. Works by Georges Marty, William Chaumet, Emile Bernard, Gaston Salvayre, and Charles Lenepveu alongside the Hillemacher brothers, Victorin Joncières, Charles-Marie Widor, Augusta Holmès, Charles Lefebvre, Alphonse Duvernoy, and Vincent d’Indy testify to the goal of broad representation. With the music of certain composers recurring in these concerts, however, one can begin to consider the question of an emerging republican canon despite the stylistic eclecticism. As in the Exhibition festivals, pride of place was given to Auber, Berlioz, and Bizet, then to Adam, David, Gounod, Thomas, Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Delibes, and Massenet. Most were either Academicians or Con­ servatoire professors. This canon was reiterated in the awards ceremony for 25,000 on 29 September, which began with 800 musicians and singers of the Société 30.  Likewise, when the government decided that each of the state-subsidized theaters should present a free performance on Sunday night, 5 May, the Opéra put on Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and the Opéra-Comique, Massé’s Les Noces de Jeannette and Rossini’s Barber of Seville, audience favorites, but older works having nothing to do with the Exhibition’s nationalist agenda. 31.  Durand, “Musique à l’Exposition.” See also Ch. G., Art musical, 15 September 1889, 131, and 30 September 1889, 139, who notes that the opera concerts of the festival “benefited from the turmoil of the almost too unwieldy crowd that rushes for pleasure wherever it is offered,” this despite only a “slight success, artistically speaking,” because of “having to program works sometimes of little interest.” For those who could attend, for the six months of the Exhibition, the Opéra put on mostly well-established favorites: Gounod (Roméo et Juliette [29 times], Faust [13]), Thomas (La Tempête [16], Hamlet [10]), Meyerbeer (Les Huguenots [10], L’Africaine [9], Le Prophète [5]), Verdi (Aida [9], Rigoletto [8]), Halévy (La Juive [9]), Saint-Saëns (Henry VIII [8]), Paladilhe (Patrie [5]), Delibes (Coppélia [5]), Rossini (Guillaume Tell [5]), and Massenet (Le Cid [3]).

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des concerts performing Saint-Saëns “Marche héroique,” listened to respectfully “in a religious silence.” For the delegates’ procession anticipating the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in recent years, the orchestra played the march from Thomas’s Hamlet, the Apotheosis of Berlioz’s Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, and the Soldiers’ Chorus from Gounod’s Faust. Delibes wrote a new fanfare for it. The event, conceived to excite enthusiasm for “the workers of the world,” ended with the finale of act 2 from Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore.32 Representing France here were its musical masterpieces. No one thus could have gone home without hearing French contemporary music. The historical aspects of music at the Exhibition complemented this display of official culture. In the history of work exhibition, several rooms featured old musical instruments—lutes, woodwinds, keyboards, and strings, including a replica of an Egyptian harp at the Louvre. Tiersot, who could imagine how these had been used in music from Lully to Meyerbeer, found it one of the “most instructive” of the Exhibition. In a Latin Quarter venue where two concerts of musique ancienne et moderne were organized by the Conservatory professors, Louis Diémer and Jules Delsart, visitors could hear such instruments played—specifically the harpsichord, viola da gamba, and viola d’amour. This allowed audiences not only to compare the music of their French contemporaries (Lenepveu, Lalo, Widor, Lefebvre, and Godard) with that of their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors (Rameau, Couperin, Leclair, Daquin, Berteau, and Marais), but also to experience the “charm and sweetness” of old instruments alongside the precision of modern ones. Critics considered these concerts among “the most artistic” of the summer.33 Because republicans were fascinated with the potential of medieval modes to renovate French music, not surprisingly the International Congress of Popular Traditions presented a concert of chansons populaires—thirty-three songs, some excerpted from French volumes published by Weckerlin, BourgaultDucoudray, and Tiersot, others from Finland, Russia, Greece, Scandinavia, and Great Britain. Such juxtapositions encouraged listeners to compare melodies and rhythms from across Europe and the French provinces, some of them with very distant origins. 34 32.  Arthur Pougin, “La Distribution des récompenses à l’Exposition universelle,” Ménestrel, 6 October 1889, 316–17, and A.H., “Exposition universelle. Distribution des récompenses,” Art musical, 30 September 1889, 137–38. 33.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 6–10; Ch. G., “La Musique à l’Exposition,” Art musical, 31 May 1889, 76, and 15 June 1889, 83. 34.  Tiersot had prepared the music public with thirty-seven articles on the history of French chansons populaires in Ménestrel, 26 February 1888–3 February 1889 (later published as a book).

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Ironically, it turned out to be difficult to mount a proper musical celebration of the Revolution. Three small works were resurrected at the Opéra-Comique, 35 but no large ones and, strangely, no Méhul. For the centenary concert on 14 July, military bands were in charge. In his long review, Tiersot did not mention a single piece they performed. Instead, he bemoaned that no decent music was submitted in a state-sponsored competition for a cantata to commemorate the Revolution and that contemporary musicians were “completely uninterested in the traditions of these times. . . . For the most part, they would not deign to express a collective feeling and look down on the decorative power of music, rejecting any notion of ‘official art’ or any attempt in this sense.”36 When the cantata competition failed to produce a winner, in October 1888, Augusta Holmès, an Irishwoman fully assimilated into the French musical world, approached the city of Paris proposing her own Le Triomphe de la République: Ode triomphale, an explicit allusion to Gossec’s Le Triomphe de la République (1793), composed to commemorate the founding of the Republic. 37 In fact, Holmès was ideal for the task at hand, having composed several large patriotic works: Irlande (1882), Pologne! (1883), and Ludus pro patria (1888). The latter, a symphonic ode for chorus and orchestra subtitled “Admiration for the Country,” was one of the few new works the Société des concerts performed in 1888, and it was wellreceived. Moreover, Holmès’s embrace of Wagnerism and friendship with the symbolists gave her the appearance of a progressive. Impressed with the proposal, the government dedicated a staggering 300,000 francs for the production. No performance at the Exhibition was more symbolic of the nation than Holmès’s Ode. Inspired by the colossal festivals of ancient Greece and the Revolution, as well as Berlioz’s music for the 1844 Exhibition of Industry (involving 1,022 performers), it was envisaged to be performed outdoors, free, and for as many people as possible. She called for 1,200 players, including an orchestra of 300 (with over 40 brass and 4 harpists) and 900 singers drawn from Paris schools and 35.  Paisiello’s Barbier de Séville, Dalayrac’s Raoul de Créqui, and his La Soirée orageuse; Devienne’s Visitandines was rehearsed but never staged. Fauser explains that these and three other opéras-comiques, representing the years 1788–94, were originally intended to be performed at the Grand Théâtre de l’Exposition, but that the hall proved too small. Apparently, they were not a financial success and were replaced by the standard repertoire, Carmen or Mignon. The organizer of the series, Paul Lacome, had published Les Fondateurs de l’opéracomique: Transcriptions pour piano et chant (Paris: Enoch, 1878). For a fuller analysis, see Fauser, Musical Encounters, 79–92. 36.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 48–53. 37.  See also Fauser, Musical Encounters, 110–38, and Jann Pasler, “The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès,” Women and Music 2 (Fall 1998): 21–23, and in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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amateur choruses, including three from working-class Belleville. 38 Holmès wrote the poem and the music, designed the costumes and sets, and took part in the casting. Colonne conducted. Numerous rehearsals were required, and the workers singing in the choruses had to learn their parts by heart—a daunting requirement. For the event, transferred to the Palais de l’Industrie for fear of bad weather, the exhibition hall was transformed into a theater with 22,500 seats. Reputedly, 30,000 people attended the first performance on 11 September, celebrating the victory at Valmy and the birth of the First Republic. The second on 12 September was for schoolchildren, and the third on the 14th free to the public. Two more followed for the benefit of charities. These concerts, all full, made so much noise that reputedly the hall was damaged and later had to be demolished. Like Gossec’s Le Triomphe de la République with its marches and choruses, the Ode triomphale consists of a series of allegories with utopian implications around an “altar of the fatherland,” draped with the French flag, recalling the first national festival held on 14 July 1790. After a triumphal march, static choruses, each led by an allegorical figure, celebrate the grandeur of various aspects of the country, including diverse classes and ages. Dramatic juxtapositions result from the different meters and instruments associated with the characters on stage. The wine growers and harvesters, for example, alternate and finally come into unison as they sing of “the bread and wine, the flesh and blood of France.” The soldiers and the sailors then do the same, followed by the workers (accompanied by percussive string playing), artists (who “tell the universe of your glory”), scientists (who “help man resemble God”), lovers, youth, and children. These choruses symbolize the union of all the forces in the nation. After them, a funeral march concludes with a figure veiled in black, carrying chains and symbolizing grief (or Alsace, as some understood her). Each group bows to her as she passes. Then, the veil tears and a woman dressed in the three French colors appears, singing, “O people . . . I come to your call. . . . Come to me you who suffer for justice.” The chorus responds, “Glory to you, sacred Liberty, glory, the Republic!” The symbolism of such figures was both powerful and evocative, especially to the mostly French audiences.39 For the central character representing the French “motherland,” Holmès called for a woman with long blond hair (fig. 80). Except for one redhead and a dark-haired Bacchus and Minerva, Holmès intended that all the principal performers have blond 38.  The choruses included Le Choral de Belleville, Le Choral Chevé de Belleville, La Lyre de Belleville, Le Choral du Louvre, Les Enfants de Paris, Le Choral Chevé Polytechnique de Montmartre, Les Amis de la rive gauche, and four others. 39.  See Fauser, Musical Encounters, 121n57.

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Fig. 80  “The Invocation of Liberty” on the cover of L’Illustration, 14 September 1889, a scene from Augusta Holmès’s Ode triomphale at the Palais de l’Industrie, 11 September 1889.

hair. Amphitrite was to be “very white, and very blond, pale blond,” Apollo a “very tall, very young, and very blond,” and the lovers “blond, white, and beautiful.” The land too, full of wheat, was described as a “blond plain.” Reinforcing these images, the children were to be dressed in white. The racial implications of Holmès’s explicit depiction of ideal people as white and blond, even if most French are not, resonates with Déroulède’s Le Livre de la Ligue des patriotes (1887) and Georges Vacher de Lapouge’s L’Aryen et son rôle social (1889), which argues for the superiority of whites with blond hair. The decision to sponsor such a work suggests that conservative tendencies had begun to permeate republican ideology. Although Holmès did her best to create a unifying symbol, replacing two central figures standing for Alsace and Lorraine with one representing the “universal Republic,”40 many critics used the Ode as an opportunity to express their political opinions about the Republic, rejecting or embracing the poem and music for nonmusical reasons. Republicans praised it for being “excellently decorative, a kind of musical fresco . . . in which all the details, all the effects are organized to support the final apotheosis, the triumph of the republican idea, so great, so generous, and still so incompletely practiced.”41 Meanwhile, Boulangist papers attacked the composer for glorifying the Republic and Catholic ones for parodying the words of Christ. In the musical world, Saint-Saëns called Holmès “our muse.”42 Pougin found that the symbolism impeded movement and was responsible for the antitheatrical nature of the work, but he appreciated its grandeur. 43 A critic in La Nation, focusing on Holmès’s extensive use of unisons and phrase repetition and the newfound clarity that resulted, reported: “It’s neither Gluck nor Berlioz, nor Beethoven, nor Wagner. It’s Augusta Holmès and it’s really something. . . . The characteristic of this art is its absolute and magistral simplicity, sought and found. The music of Augusta Holmès is simple, beautiful, and bare like one of the marble goddesses.”44 While some found this a sellout to a less severe and more pleasing aesthetic than in her earlier works, a critic for Le Progrès artistique concluded, “One hopes that this serenity will open a new path in our national art.”45 Such recogni40.  Fauser notes that it is not clear whether this change was Holmès’s idea or a request from Exhibition organizers (ibid., 129). 41.  A. Landely, “Le Triomphe de la République: Ode triomphale,” Art musical, 15 September 1889, 129–30. 42.  Le Rappel, 12 September 1889. 43.  Ménestrel, 15 September 1889, 292. 44.  Minotoro, writing in La Nation, excerpted in Fêtes du Centenaire: Ode triomphale exécutée au Palais des Champs-Elysées le 11, 12, 14, 18, 21 septembre 1889, poème et musique d’Augusta Holmès, Opinions de la presse (Paris: Durilly, 1889). 45.  Ibid.

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tion helped Holmès win her first official honor from the French government that year, becoming a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.

The “Great Theater” of the Past, Present, and Future Progress was the third principle underlying the Exhibition and, as elsewhere, republicans used two methods to promote it, competition and assimilation. The best examples of progress were the Exhibition’s two main buildings, the Gallery of Machines and the Eiffel Tower. Commissioned to embody the government’s idea of a new public environment, they were to reflect the achievements of engineering and suggest new forms of beauty appropriate for the modern age. As construction in stone was thought to have reached “the limits of its usefulness,” they were built of iron beams. The former, with both iron and glass panes, covered the largest space ever—337 by 1,378 feet—housing some 16,000 machines. The latter, a vertical equivalent, rose over a thousand feet. The tower had no functional utility; what was important to the Exhibition organizers was its symbolism, which its 1,792 steps and iron from occupied Lorraine embedded in its structure. Moreover, as in a panorama, “through the astonishment of space, it plunges into the mystery of time,” writes Roland Barthes. “To perceive Paris from above is to imagine a history.”46 Georges Berger, the director of works for the Exhibition, thought of it as a metaphor for the ascent of man and Gustave Eiffel, its creator, as an arch of triumph of the modern age showing man’s victory over new materials. 47 Others saw it as a symbol of the republican social ideal, as well as French superiority “before which colonial peoples would stand in awe” and “be convinced that their societies benefited from the guidance of their French rulers.”48 However, as Miriam Levin has pointed out, academic painters and architects, including Garnier, denounced its modern aesthetic and the socioeconomic values it symbolized. The writer 46.  Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1979), 11. 47.  Eiffel also pointed to all possible scientific uses the Eiffel Tower might serve (ibid., 6). 48.  Eiffel considered the Tower both symbolic and socially transformative, a place where all could meet; see Miriam Levin, “The Eiffel Tower Revisited,” French Review 62, 6 (May 1989): 1058–61, and Dana Hale, “Races on Display: French Representations of the Colonial Native, 1886–1931” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1998), 39. Some visitors, indeed, such as AhmadZaki, took the Eiffel Tower to represent the achievement of the French people. Other Ottoman and Egyptian visitors were interested in what the fairs could teach them about improving living conditions in their own countries. See Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 47, 49.

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J.-K.  Huysmans too found it “the emblem of an age dominated by the passion for gain.”49 Having symbolic utility thus was not always as advantageous to the republicans as it might seem. Through the ritual of competitions, also symbolic, organizers brought together diverse people, treated as equals engaged in comparable activities, to produce a republican message: work hard and you will be rewarded, regardless of who you are and where you came from. As evidence of the value of workers’ clubs and self-help activities, visitors could see the fruits of their efforts in various musical competitions. Sundays and Mondays were reserved for competitions by groupes populaires. These included two for village bands and choral societies from all over the country, another for school bands (with 850 children), and others for fanfares and musiques d’harmonie (wind bands), French military bands, and foreign military bands (see fig. 78). These often challenged performers, demanding that they take on serious art music. In an international competition for the best municipal wind band, ensembles played transcribed movements of Beethoven and Mendelssohn symphonies, Massenet’s program music, and Bizet’s Patrie! in hopes of winning four prizes ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 francs. With musiques pittoresques, a way of describing nonurban, orally transmitted music associated with people, some of them illiterate, from various regions of France and other countries, the Exhibition drew attention to the continuity of the past in the present and expressed the republican desire to integrate rural and urban France. Organizers saw in it the origins of national as well as regional identity. Some of the country’s most illustrious contemporary composers, including Emile Paladilhe, Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, and Gaston Salvayre, sat on the jury of a competition on 4 July for regional instruments and regional air populaires, the first half devoted to France, the second half to foreign countries. All other music (such as opera fantasies and café-concert songs) was excluded. The idea of French peasants in their local dress competing with one another on Bourdonnais cornemuses, Provençal tambourines, and Auvergnat vielles in a big Paris concert hall on the same day was a republican utopia, a symbol of the nation in all its diversity. For many, hearing this music was a novel experience. Since some performers purported to “represent a civilization,” especially those from eastern Europe, visitors were drawn, as with the chansons populaires, to compare instruments, con49.  Huysmans thought the Eiffel Tower “disconcertingly ugly and not even enormous.” His essay, “Le Fer” (1889), is reprinted in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, The Expanding World of Art, 1874–1902 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 74–78. See also Levin, Republican Art and Ideology, 16–18, and Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 2–4.

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template influences and origins, and draw conclusions about their relative progress from one region to another. However, performers themselves were not always as focused on the same notion of authenticity as were organizers and critics. Tiersot, for example, objected to the first French prize being given to a bagpipe player influenced by modern music, and “not the best kind.”50 In the foreign categories, a first prize went to a gypsy orchestra that offered its rendition of the Hungarian “Rákóczy March,” setting up an interesting comparison with Berlioz’s arrangement of it, later performed in the military band festival.51 A Hungarian women’s orchestra won third. With their unusual sonorities, the five-hour event presented a kind of exoticism within European countries that was new to most visitors.52 The Exhibition was conceived of as a platform for such gatherings as well as a symbol to visitors from around the world—not just of France’s technological strength and productivity since the Revolution, but also its openness to foreign cultures. To demonstrate the desirability of French colonial assimilation and their achievements, colonial administrations spent a fortune making sure the colonies were brilliantly represented. It undoubtedly escaped no one that the colonial pavilions were on the Esplanade des Invalides, directly across from the imposing War Ministry, linked to the Champ de Mars by a train along the Quai d’Orsay. As the president put it at the awards ceremony, the point was “the grand cause of peace and humanity.”53 In its eccentric, eclectic juxtapositions of foreign people and products, organizers wished to suggest that France was capable of assimilating the largest variety of cultures ever brought to the West. No exhibition had been as successful, though not so much in the realm of politics—not only did so many European countries refuse to participate officially, but the 34,000 French exhibitors outnumbered those from the rest of the world by 6,000.54 With Berger as director, an open-minded man in charge of the foreign sections of the 1878 50.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 26. 51.  Tiersot calls Berlioz’s version of the “Rákóczy March” “heroic and long-breathed,” emblematic of French struggles during the Revolution, and the Hungarian version, “though belligerent and vivacious,” music “over in a minute and whose revolutionary zeal does not last,” reflecting Hungary’s continued domination by the Austrians. See Fauser, Musical Encounters, 256, 274, and 252–78. 52.  In his review of music at the Exhibition, Musiques pittoresques, Tiersot judged most of this music “not very interesting” except for the colorful costumes and instruments that went along with it (24–30). In “La Musique à l’Exposition,” Musique des familles, 13 July 1889, Flamen compared them with one another and pointed out what would have been new to Parisians (306–7). 53.  Quoted in its entirety in A.H., “Exposition universelle, distribution des récompenses,” Art musical, 30 September 1889, 138. 54.  Holt, The Expanding World of Art, 69.

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Exhibition, the colonies became its main focus. Of the 6.8 million francs spent, 35 percent went to this aspect of the exhibition, much of it for constructing pavilions and bringing exotic people to the capital.55 Much has been said about race as spectacle in such exhibitions. On the Esplanade des Invalides and in the gardens of the Palais du Trocadéro, organizers juxtaposed pavilion after pavilion as emblems of national and colonial identity. Earlier exotic spectacles such as Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en 80 jours and Michel Strogoff had taken Parisians on a whirlwind adventure abroad in their imaginations. Magazines such as L’Illustration and, in the months before the Exhibition, La Musique des familles, fed their curiosity about foreign people, their instruments, and their music.56 Now a certain reality promised, although still limited and heavily mediated. Moreover, developments abroad and reporting on it probably helped shape French attitudes to these exhibitions. Annam had become a French protectorate in 1884, and in December 1888, L’Illustration devoted significant coverage to the graduation ceremony of the Annamite literati, who after completing exams would become privileged civil servants of the state. Whereas this class had long criticized the French and their influence on indigenous culture, these images suggest that hostilities had subsided and given way to “a frank and lasting friendship.”57 The next month an engraving of the ex-king of Annam—who gave up his kingdom to his brother after battling the French, fleeing, being captured, and then imprisoned in Algiers—would have clarified power relations under the protectorate, especially after its suggestive placement next to an image of Stella, dressed as a soldier, in a reprise of Offenbach’s La Fille au tambour-major. The publication of music in advance of the Exhibition also helped establish the terms of visitors’ understanding of non-Westerners. In January 1889, L’Illustration published a Tahitian choral hymn, transcribed for piano and two singers, which it presented as “authentic,” dating from before the arrival of Europeans and still sung by the natives. The title, Hyménée (H¯ımeni, in Tahitian), however, refers to a kind of multipart choral singing influenced by Protestant missionaries (fig. 81). 55.  Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, and Jacques Thobie, Histoire de la France coloniale: Des origines à 1914 (Paris: A. Colin, 1991), 638. Of this, 48 percent went to exhibitions of Algeria and Tunisia (with shared funding coming from Paris and the colonies). After them, Indochina took up the greatest space with its pavilions for Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Annam-Tonkin and a pagoda of the gods of Hanoi, an Annamite theater, and a Tonkinese village. 56.  For example, La Musique des familles published lithographs of Africans performing the balafon and the gorah on the covers of its 5 January and 9 March 1889 issues and accompanied these with long explanatory essays by Edmond Bailly. 57.  J.S. “Nos gravures,” L’Illustration, 15 December 1888, 440–41, 448.

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Fig. 81  Cover of “Hyménée, hymne tahitien,” transcribed for piano by Jules Cres­son­ nois, L’Illustration, 5 January 1889. The readers of L’Illustration were concerned about the authenticity of exotic songs. To put their minds at ease, the text accompanying this image informs us that the source of this song is “two travelers back from Oceania with a collection of Tahitian songs and legends,” and that the “hyménée [choral song] that we provide today is one of the prettiest pieces in the Tahitian repertoire; needless to say, this refreshing melody and text are scrupulously authentic.”

Throughout the 1880s, those living near the major European zoos, including the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation in Paris, could have seen exhibitions of exotic peoples, such as the Tierra del Fuegians and Ceylonese, but only one group at a time. The 1889 Exhibition brought to Paris as much of the world as possible and in passive, peaceful cooperation. Some pavilions consisted of imitations of local structures—an Angkor Wat temple, a white Tunis palace, a Senegambian log house—in the manner of the Venetian and the Paris hotels in Las Vegas today; others merely borrowed elements. Many had tall towers flying flags to identify them. There, although the marketplace was a less exclusively decisive factor than in Las Vegas today, foreign products were marketed and sold in boutiques and ethnic restaurants. Exhibited to be experienced as stereotypes and compared as one might the various dwellings of the History of Habitation and the life groups of the History of Work exhibits—that is, according to their evolutionary state as emblems of race, ethnicity, and culture—non-Western people were displayed in constructed villages. These showed visitors how they lived, their labor potential, and their reaction to whites. It is noteworthy that the Senegalese village contained not only a mosque and structures like those in which the indigenous people have lived over time, but also, at its entrance, a replica of a military tower with a French flag flying, such as Faidherbe built all over the country—a fascinating architectural example of the cultural coexistence and power relationships on which Saint-Saëns commented musically in his “Rhapsodie mauresque.” The liveliness of these installations and their performances, some of which charged admission, was assured by 203 Indochinese, 61 Senegalese, 20 Congolese, 11 Tahitians, and 10 Canaques from New Caledonia, in addition to representatives from non-French colonies. In this sense, as one observer pointed out, the Exhibition was “more universal than any of its predecessors.” Visitors marveled at the differences between tiny Javanese dancers, small, beardless Annamites and Tonkinese, and tall Senegalese, “who looked like giants.”58 The placement of the Social Economy exhibit near by, with its focus on working-class culture and the working-class family, allowed for comparison between the various kinds of activities practiced by exotic peoples in the colonial villages and those of the “Cité sociale,” a “grandiose workers’ village.”59 Reputedly, French workers attending the Exhibition befriended those from other countries 60—a kind of analogue of the fraternité and sociabilité with which French dignitaries received the Senegalese king, but not necessarily how the majority of 58.  Olga Flinch, Paris of Today (New York: Cassell, 1891), 252, 260. 59.  For more on the Social Economy exhibit, see Horne, “Presenting Modern France.” 60.  Vogüé, Remarques, 174–75.

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Fig. 82  Caran d’Ache caricature, from Grosclaude, “Almanach prophétique pour 1889,” L’Illustration, 1 December 1888. Exotic visitors to the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation view “authentic” Parisians, “arrayed in their native costume,” who exhibit “their primitive habits: smoke cigarettes, draw their swords, read stock exchange reports, and discuss politics with animation.”

visitors reacted to those of other races. The experience of similarity and difference could be exhilarating or disconcerting. While most reports of exotic peoples noted how curious but interesting the experience was, Hugues Le Roux was among those asked who the spectacle was, and who was watching whom? (fig. 82). He spent extended time in these villages, devoting “even days to black people and odd days to yellow ones,” and ended up feeling very embarrassed. The visitors did not realize, for example, that the Senegalese spoke French and thus understood the comparisons people made of them to “monkeys” and “monsters.” They resented being exhibited like savages in huts when back home they had houses, train stations, and railroads and their “health committee” would never allow such living quarters. 61 In other words, while the exhibitions made visitors feel as though they were learning something by encountering the real 61.  Hugues Le Roux, “Psychologie exotique,” L’Exposition de Paris de 1889, 27 July 1889, 170. Evidently, one of his main informants was the head of the Senegalese village, Samba Laobé Thiam.

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thing, exotic objects were often fragments without meaning when out of context, and exotic people, there to play a part, were not always who they seemed.

The Utility of Exotic Music By including various forms of non-Western music at the 1889 Exhibition, organizers evidently wished to contain, if not to impose an order on, something whose very existence defied containment because largely beyond Western comprehension. For most people, however, concerts served as escape from the problems of daily life and the vicissitudes of political life. This was especially true of exotic music, alluring precisely because little understood. For those seeking to “dream,” exotic music provided the seduction of difference almost for its own sake. As Peter Mason has pointed out, “it is the very act of discovery which produces the exotic” and “produces it in varying degrees of wildness or domestication.”62 Between the Javanese dances accompanied by gamelan, Arab belly dances or nu–ba performances, Annamite theater, Romanian cabaret, Finnish minnesingers, Hungarian gypsies, and others, there were nine options every evening. This did not count performances in the various cafés and restaurants, such as by an orchestra of Russian women. 63 Such music was obviously not like what audiences might hear in the pièces à grand spectacle written in Western forms, performed on Western instruments, and therefore little touched by actual difference. It was distinct from what most listeners knew, and more mysterious than anything they could have imagined. Played on instruments by living performers, it was the real thing. At the same time as it “aroused the curiosity of the public eager for novelty,”64 such music challenged listeners, and in some ways far more than “Great Art.” While exotic music was part of what shaped visitors’ understanding of different peoples, their incomprehension of it risked leading to increased disparagement and intolerance of little-known people. 62.  Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1–2. See also Sindhumathi K. Revuluri, “On Anxiety and Absorption: Musical Encounters with the Exotique in Fin-de-Siècle France” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007). For the difference between “exotic” and “oriental” at the time, see chapter 7, n. 21, above. 63.  Critics occasionally discovered imposters recognized as members of the Colonne and Lamoureux orchestras or graduates of the Paris Conservatory. As far as their music was concerned, Tiersot thought there was no problem: “it is very easy to distinguish what is authentic from what is not. The art of pastiche has not yet been pushed very far” (Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 69). 64.  Arthur Pougin, Le Théâtre à l’Exposition universelle de 1889 (Paris: Fischbacher, 1890), 89.

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For the musically attuned listener, the exotic performances offered much more and were in some ways more useful than any official music. Hungarian gypsy music was a hit, from Tiersot’s perspective, in part because, “not playing on the beat,” it seemed to express “the absolute liberty inherent in the gypsy’s nature,” freedom being a trope republicans never stopped promoting. 65 Likewise for Arab music— “so different from our own that it seems always new.” Such music was already known, especially since the 1878 Exhibition, and it had been heard since then in brasseries, cafés-concerts, and chic salons. Yet while reviewers in 1878 appreciated it and were “seduced by this unknown,” their attempts to explain it were limited. Gypsy music remained “an incomprehensible mystery,” and Arab music something strange “made of monotonous sonorities against which bizarre melodies occasionally stand out, rising to the most inhuman peaks of the vocal scale.” Ménestrel’s reviewer in 1878 compared Arab scales with those of the ancient Greeks, but went no further, getting lost in reverie about Greek civilization. 66 In 1889, critics gave exotic music closer attention. To help visitors understand the character of certain Arab music, Tiersot pointed to Saint-Saëns’s successful assimilation of an arabesque in his Rêverie arabe. As Annegret Fauser points out, musical exoticism “provided the referential framework against which the actual music of the ‘Other’ could and would be judged.”67 But not always. Tiersot was particularly taken with the “exercises” of the Aïssaoua, Moroccan Sufis who used music to go into trance. 68 He found that the songs, rhythm, and “musical noises” driving their bodies into contortions had a powerful effect on the nerves of the spectators as well as the performers, and compared this with the power of music as understood by the ancient Greeks. 69 Javanese dance and Annamite theater drew so much attention that it is possible to see what kinds of assumptions, preconceptions, and values listeners brought to their experiences, whether republican or monarchist, Wagnerian or anti-Wagnerian. Unlike in the case of some of the other exotic exhibits, instead of speaking to the primitivism of these art forms vis-à-vis their Western counterparts, many critics recognized their “undeniable” value. In the case of the Javanese spectacle, this 65.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 61–66. 66.  Paul Lacome, “Exposition universelle de 1878: Les Musiciens arabes,” Ménestrel, 21 July 1878, and his “Exposition universelle de 1878: Les Musiciens tsiganes,” Ménestrel, 8 September 1878, 330. 67.  Fauser, Musical Encounters, 144. 68.  According to Louis Vignon, La France dans l’Afrique du Nord (Paris: Guillaumin, 1887), the Aïssaoua were not hostile to the French in Algeria, instead often “useful” in serving French interests (244–45). 69.  Tiersot, “Promenades musicales à l’Exposition,” Ménestrel, 22 September 1889, 299, and 29 September 1889, 308.

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elite genre was associated with the Javanese courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. But, more than the spectacle, Paris fell in love with “the innocence and purity of these frail and delicate beings” (fig. 83). Visitors saw them as embodying their own “cult of youth, grace, and beauty” and the republican musicologist Arthur Pougin deemed them the “lionesses of the exotic part of the Exhibition.”70 Yet Pougin considered “Annamite” theater the “high point” of the Exhibition. The nomadic (rather than court-based) ensemble from Saigon gave eight performances per day for five months and charged as much as an orchestra concert in Paris. Although he and others could not understand the language and considered its music “frenetic,” albeit occasionally expressive—its “noisy orchestra” consisting of “piercingly loud, dissonant instruments”—Pougin saw Annamite theater as “the revelation of an unknown, strange, and brilliant art that strikes one by its novelty and sincerity as well as its naïve peculiarity.” Its forms, in particular, he found “very interesting, very intelligent, very complicated,” the four spectacles episodes of one long epic. While Pougin, an anti-Wagnerian, carefully avoided any comparison with Wagner,71 many others leapt at the occasion. Vicomte Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, who preferred the Javanese court ballerinas to Annamite popular theater, reported that Wagnerians discerned leitmotifs in the Vietnamese music and considered the Vietnamese epic a kind of “Oriental Niebelungen.”72 The republican Tiersot, also a Wagnerian, avoided this comparison, while giving substantial attention to the particularities of the instruments and music. Instead, Tiersot called the arrangement, repetition, and prolongation of a certain number of melodies improvisation.73 Among those who analyzed what they heard at exotic performances and published their conclusions,74 Tiersot was the ideal scholar to present these to the public. He recognized that they not only “transport us as far as possible from our civilization,” they also served as “an occasion to study the musical forms specific to races for whom art is understood differently than ours.”75 Tiersot’s attitudes thus went beyond the typical ethnocentrism of the time. An expert in chansons populaires, he was open to what could be learned from the music of peoples who, on the surface, seemed less sophisticated and he had experience transcribing nontraditional melodies and finding similarities in disparate repertoire. To get inside infor70.  As Tiersot explains in Musiques pittoresques, although the theater became known as Annamite, in fact the musicians were all Cochinchinese, from the south (13). 71.  Pougin, Théâtre, 88–99. 72.  Vogüé, Remarques, 177. 73.  Tiersost, Musiques pittoresques, 15. 74.  For example, see Edmond Bailly, “Musique pittoresque: Au kampong javanais,” Musique des familles, 15 June 1889, 274–75. 75.  Tiersot, “Promenades musicales à l’Exposition,” Ménestrel, 26 May 1889, 165.

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Fig. 83  L. Ratz, Danses et marches javanaises (1889), transcribed for piano. The first piece uses the five-note pelog scale (C# E F# A B). This music was sold at the Javanese kampong on the Esplanade des Invalides and was later reproduced in Figaro musical, February 1893.

mation, Tiersot spent time with the musicians of various cultures and interviewed (he italicizes the word) them through an interpreter. This provided him with “more complete information” than would be available by merely attending a public performance. It also allowed him to take down musical examples “dictated by an indigenous musician” and to compare what he heard in the “sweetness of a beautiful June morning” to the “furor” of notes that were otherwise “indiscernible” the night before. After spending a few mornings with the Javanese musicians, they The 1889 Universal Exhibition

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let him sit on stage among the instruments all day during a performance. There, he was able to observe the musical behavior and “sonorous combinations,” while trying his best to “act like a Javanese” himself (“me javanisant de mon mieux”).76 Tiersot’s essays, at times full of respect and admiration, are the most detailed of those published during the Exhibition. His efforts to describe these musics as rationally and objectively as possible were laudable, even if they revealed the limitations of the comparative model of reasoning. Tiersot was aware of this problem, admitting that “by comparison alone with our theatrical productions, it is hard to give an exact idea of the genre of pieces of which Le Roi de Duong offers us a curious example.” Yet he could not help but make such comparisons with Western analogues. Annamite instruments are either “a kind of oboe,” a flute that “sounds like all flutes,” or a stringed object whose sound “closely resembles that of the French viol.” Their orchestra plays a role “like that which our orchestra plays in pantomime or melodrama.” Javanese gongs sound “like the great bell of a cathedral.” Such comments helped orient readers, though they led critics to conclude that “these sonorous engines seem a little miserable next to European products by instrument makers.”77 He also resorts to comparison in attempting to explain musical style. Some Javanese music, for example, proceeded like “certain classical overtures.” Many such comments, however, veil genuine differences. And if Tiersot makes fun of fellow critics who compared the characters of the Javanese tales to those in Salammbô or the Magic Flute and their contemplative and immobile qualities to those of Parsifal, he does some of the same. While admitting that Easterners understood harmony very differently, he doubted there were “any rules concerning the combination of simultaneous sounds.” He compares one of their chords to a ninth chord as one might hear in Tristan and says one piece gave the impression of being in D minor throughout. And their counterpoint he compares with that of Josquin des Prés or Palestrina in taking a tune, like “L’Homme armé” used in Masses, and “proceeding from identical principles.”78 Such observations suggest that the experience of exotic music involved more than merely voyeurism of “primitive” people” that generally had the effect of reinforcing the viewer’s sense of superiority. In many ways, Tiersot’s conclusions support important republican agendas—not just using music to shed light on the nature of racial difference, but also exploring the potential of monogenist claims 76.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, specifically mentions this kind of contact with musicians from Annam and Java (13, 17, 35–36, 43). 77.  Croquenotes, “Exposition universelle: Théâtre Annamite,” Musique populaire, 19 October 1889, 5. 78.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 12, 13, 31, 37, 43, 45.

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about racial origins, republicans’ faith in progress, and their universalist ideology. Even if these musics seemed “an inferior art,” Tiersot proposes that we consider them as reflecting earlier stages of the evolution in which all cultures participated: “we should not pay less attention to them because they show us new aspects of music and, in all truth, are closer to [music’s] origins than is our art of today, which is so complex and refined.” In listening to music from black Africa, Oceania, and the Far East, he found particularly significant lessons. The two Senegalese balafon players accompanying the king on his visit to the Exhibition played harmonies, suggesting more musical progress than might otherwise characterize the music of their drums. However, Tiersot concluded that the balafon harmonies resulted from improvisation or chance. Yet when the Pahouin singers from the Congo, the Canaques from New Caledonia, and the Tahitians produced harmonies from their simultaneous voices, they seemed quite conscious of what they were doing. This led him to surmise that harmony, “which we like to consider as the conquest of the modern genius,” has much older traditions outside the West, has existed independently of the ancient art of Greece and Rome, and “seems to have stayed stable since its origins.” Although Westerners were “reduced to the practice of homophonic singing, vocal harmonies probably existed in the practices of distant races for a long time.” Tiersot understood that these conclusions, which he interpreted as a “real discovery,” had important implications for the history of music. Harmony is “not the exclusive product of complex mental work, but, on the contrary, something natural to mankind, even savages or primitive people; its rights in the realm of Art are equal to those of melody.”79 Many of Tiersot’s observations made music seem like a cultural universal, especially in his discussion of music by Africans. Little of the public heard this music at the Exhibition, perhaps because it was considered too primitive. Tiersot got Africans to perform for him privately and dedicated his last essays to their music. Here he points to the omnipresence of the drum “used by all people on earth” and the prevalence of isochronous rhythm in dances of the Pahouins, Arabs, Spanish, and American Indians in the Buffalo Bill show. He finds what he considered the “primordial form” of lyric poetry, the epic song glorifying a hero, even in Senegal. His analyses of the vast array of musics presented at the Exhibition suggested that the intervals of Western scales can be found almost everywhere. 80 He even 79.  Tiersot, “Promenades musicales à l’Exposition,” Ménestrel, 6 October 1889, 316; 13 October 1889, 324–26; 20 October 1889, 332. Fauser, Musical Encounters, also underlines the importance of Tiersot’s conclusions (251–52). 80.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 1–2, 37, and Constant Pierre, in a review of Tiersot’s book in Musique populaire, 29 March 1890, 187–88.

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acknowledges the participation of women as composers outside the West. In his analysis of Tahitian music presented at the Exhibition, he concentrates on a triumphal song for chorus composed by a woman with olive and chocolate-colored skin. As for France with Augusta Holmès’s Ode triomphale, Tahiti chose this work to represent itself before the French president. In expressing love, it connects the Tahitian king with the French Republic. Such recurrences of musical elements and musical talents from one culture to the next implied that “in spite of apparent differences of the most striking kind, man resembles himself everywhere.” Some of Tiersot’s observations also support the notion that non-Westerners had assimilated European influences, such as a march form in a Javanese song that recalled for him similar songs in America and England more than the “original mélopées” of Far Easterners. Behind such thoughts lay the hope that Western listeners might be able to understand and assimilate the music of different cultures, just as France hoped to assimilate the people of its colonies. Exotic music also encouraged audiences to hear music, even sound, in new ways. Ironically, it was not only the increased taste for the mysterious and the unknown that predisposed certain listeners to be open to it, but also the French aesthetic of charm and grace. As de Vogüé put it, “an instinct pushes us to look for an unknown corner of the world, and we imagine it charming because not yet associated with the preoccupations we bring with us.”81 Marmontel pointed out, furthermore, that it is often the “vague, indefinite” aspects of sound that charm us. 82 Reviewers inevitably cited this, even when they said little else about the music. Although some observers admitted to being “hypnotized” by the “monotonous and melancholic mélopée” of the Javanese spectacle, many experienced exotic music as “lacking in neither charm nor poetry.”83 It could seem like noise and not embody traditional beauty, yet be charming and poetic. It could please the ear. It could stimulate the imagination. Listening for charm and grace mitigated perception of the “bizarre” and allowed audiences to enjoy the aural pleasures of this music and the new horizons it opened up. In this context, whether they considered it primitive, bizarre, or just curious, “music” became quite ambiguous, encouraging people to entertain broader definitions of it. Tiersot stresses this point throughout his essays. In some ways, he continues to espouse Rousseau’s definition of music as what is pleasing to the ear. 81.  Vogüé, Remarques, 1. 82.  See chapter 6, n. 116, above. 83.  Franc Jourdain, “Le Kampong javanais à l’Exposition,” L’Exposition de Paris de 1889, 17 August 1889, 212–13. Pougin, Théâtre, writes similarity of Javanese music as “not always being without sweetness and without charm” (112).

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He has trouble with the role of percussion in exotic music except in Javanese genres where it is “perfectly musical” because played “more softly.” He finds that the violent feelings expressed by cries in Annamite singing “have nothing musical about them” and is puzzled by the unclear relationship between the parts of this music, which he thinks reveals a musical nature that is “remarkably little harmonious.” And yet, other qualities in exotic music required that his notion of the pleasurable expand beyond conventional Western preoccupations. He insists on the “musical character” of what he thinks of as Annamite improvisation, clarifying that it is not invented on the spur of the moment but based on the development of preexisting melodies. Although it may remain on the same syllable and note for an extended period, he is also intent on calling Annamite singing music. 84 In addition, exotic music drew listeners’ attention to non-Western philosophies of sound and music and to possible connections between music and nature. Because many French believed in a relationship between music and place, some mused about possible connections between exotic music and where it was composed and practiced, as if “primitive” environments gave rise to “primitive” music. The mystic writer, magazine editor, and composer Edmond Bailly took a different perspective. In preparing for the Exhibition by researching various exotic peoples and their instruments and writing on them in La Musique des familles, he had come across references to sound in essays written by travelers in exotic places like Africa, Oceania, and the South Pole. This led him to thinking about sound per se in all its variety and effects on the human listener. During the final months of the Exhibition, every week from 31 August to 5 Oc­­ tober, Bailly published a series of articles called “Le Monde sonore” (The World of Sound), subtitled “Sound, harmony of the spheres, voices of nature.” The first begins with an acoustician’s definition of sound as “movement that becomes audible at a distance. . . . Every sound, every noise announces a movement.” One of these is “psychic sensation, that is, the emotion the phenomenal movement evokes in our soul.” Movement, in turn, also creates sound and “the projection of light across space.” Writing eighty years before John Cage, Bailly observes, “the complete absence of any sound [manifestation sonore] does not exist on our planet any more than radical darkness or absolute cold.” There are “microscopic ambient sounds” everywhere—ranging from the planetary ones evoked by Greek philosophers to those made by the earth, animals, and even plants. In his third article, dedicated to “vegetal harmonies,” especially those recounted by explorers in foreign lands, he quotes Jean Rambosson’s book Histoire et légendes des plantes 84.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 14–17.

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utiles et curieuses (1868), which suggests that, depending on the form of their leaves, the color and texture of their flowers, fruit, and the roughness of their branches, plants produce different sounds when interacting with the wind, decrescendos or diminuendos, solos and tuttis. Such sounds have influenced the kind of instruments made by people living near them, their use of these instruments, and the tuning. Moreover, because it seems that “nature’s music resonates only in the minor mode,” people who live near nature tend to sing in minor modes. Bailly also describes the different songs produced by birds in various regions around the world. Citing Michelet and anticipating Olivier Messiaen’s study by over sixty years, he describes bird and animal cries in the “forest of the new world” from an idealist, Orientalist perspective: “these brilliant and sustained modulations are heard less frequently in our climates; here they are replaced by more solemn and more measured songs.” Lastly, Bailly discusses different sounds produced in different climates, ranging from the humid tropics to the northern glaciers, and under extreme conditions, including storms at sea, volcanoes, and earthquakes. He speaks metaphorically of the effect of these sounds on us: they recall “the first stages of creation” or “bestial splendor.” He also explains their source in the steam and gaseous fluids produced. These articles are interspersed with various reviews of performances at the Exhibition, including one on musical exoticism. They prepared readers for such works as Bourgault-Ducoudray’s Rapsodie cambodgienne, which the Concerts Lamoureux premiered the following January. This tone poem in two parts gives musical form to the floods that inundate Cambodia each year. The composer calls this the “Genius of the Earth” confronting the “Genius of the Waters.” In their reviews of the Rapsodie, Bailly and others questioned whether BourgaultDucoudray got the musical themes from indigenous musicians at the Exhibition or dreamed them up after visiting the Annamite theater or Javanese village. 85 Exotic music, together with what was written about it, led some composers to reconsider traditional Western notions of melody, harmony, and especially rhythm. While at the 1878 Exhibition, Liszt and François Gevaert were taken with the improvisations of the gypsies, in 1889, it was Debussy who may have drawn the most benefit from listening carefully and assimilating what he heard. According to a friend, he spent “many fruitful hours” at the Javanese kampong. Like others, he brought his own preoccupations to the experiences, particularly his interest in resonant sonorities, fluid rhythms, musical ways of creating “immobil85.  Edmond Bailly, “Concert Lamoureux,” Musique populaire, 23 January 1890, 112; H. Bar­ be­dette, Ménestrel, 26 January 1890, 30.

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Fig. 84  “Angklung musicians at the Universal Exhibition,” L’Illustration, 6 July 1889. Visitors to the Javanese pavilion were met by the angklung ensemble, which accompanied them to the pavilion’s main theater with marches played on the drum and the angklung, a lightweight instrument made from bamboo. Each angklung produces one pitch, produced by rapidly shaking the instrument.

ity in perpetual movement,” and new forms of musical logic. Since he was already familiar with pentatonic and whole-tone scales, having incorporated them into his cantata L’Enfant prodigue and Printemps (1887), what fascinated him especially were the sonorities of the angklung, the “percussive rhythmic complexities of the gamelan,” and the effect these produced (fig. 84). In October, just as the 1889 Exhibition was closing its doors, Debussy began a work for piano and orchestra, inspired not only by the contemporary interest in large cyclical works, such as Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, but also by the musical sonorities, rhythms, and formal processes of Javanese music. Pointing to similarities with the use of a folk tune as cyclical theme in d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886), Richard Mueller has argued that in his Fantaisie, Debussy modeled a cyclical theme on a Javanese theme. Tiersot, who transcribed it, found that this tune was developed with more logic and clarity than many others and, recurring throughout a dance, gave continuity despite the tempo changes. Debussy’s theme captures the accent at the end of the ostinato and the symmetry of pitch groups in the Javanese model. Mueller also believes that the tremololike ostinato sonority of the angklung rattles accompanying the players’ The 1889 Universal Exhibition

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processional march, which Tiersot transcribed as chords resembling those in Wagner’s music, influenced certain ninth chord formations in the Fantaisie and rhythmic patterns associated with oscillating octaves. In the Fantaisie’s finale, the cyclic theme returns as an ostinato. As Mueller explains, “The effect of repeating an ostinato in an orchestral sonority that is in a continual state of flux is the quality of Javanese music that Debussy tried to capture. 86 It is surprising then that just before the work was to be performed, Debussy withdrew it and forbade publication. Moreover, in 1890, he made extensive changes on an engraved print, deleting the very Javanese elements he had previously assimilated. Because he went on to reuse the Javanese-inspired cyclical theme in a Tarantelle styrienne for piano (1890) and two Verlaine songs (1891), Mueller suggests that the problem was not with the Javanese influence on his thinking per se, but both the attempt in the Fantaisie to recreate the effect of Javanese music too literally and the failure to maintain the authenticity of the original by burying it in a series of variations. Assimilation, to be valuable and to take hold, needed the kind of critical distance he would soon learn from the symbolists.

The Exhibition in Retrospect Republicans must have been pleased that this public display of their values—fraternity, education, and progress—went so well. If, as in revolutionary festivals, it suggested a world of coexistence, if not equality, in which everyone had a role, it was also one in which there was freedom of movement amid metaphorically charged, disparate spaces. In its organization, the Exhibition achieved a balance between structuring the perception of order and assuring the perception of progress, particularly in the displays of industrial products. With the exotic performances, organizers catered to the public’s increasing taste for the mysterious, the sensational, and the unknown, while inferring a world larger and more complex than the imagination could conjure up. Exhibitors and performers were there to compete as well as show off, but the organizers gave out over 33,000 awards, so few went home empty-handed. Electricity allowed visits day and night. 86.  Richard Mueller, “Javanese Influence on Debussy’s Fantaisie and Beyond,” 19thCentury Music 10 (1986): 157–86. See also Roy Howat, “Debussy and the Orient,” in Recovering the Orient: Artists, Scholars, Appropriations, ed. Andrew Gerstle and Anthony Milner (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1994), 45–81, and Fauser, Musical Encounters, 195–206. Fauser argues that the spectacle as well as the music appealed to Debussy, and sees Mélisande as modeled in part on the Javanese dancers (203). She also points to his fascination with Vietnamese theater as “embryonic music drama,” and Tiersot’s analysis of leitmotifs therein (194–95).

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Visitor receipts doubled those of the 1867 Exhibition, a third more than in 1878. Business prospered during the Exhibition, too, especially theater receipts despite the relative lack of new works. 87 Within France, the Exhibition reinforced the centrality of Paris and its capacity to produce a sense of nation. The exposure to French products also encouraged exports and sympathy with French republicanism. 88 The French went home proud of what republican ideals had brought the country. If the Exhibition did not create a thirst for more imperialist adventures, it did seem to validate and vindicate their usefulness, showing the French the fruits of their investments. 89 Politically, the republicans reaped much from Exhibition’s success. People enjoyed the respite from divisive controversies, and the Boulangist threat was averted, with the general tried and condemned that August. Eugénie Buffet, a popular singer and militant Ligue member, was condemned to fifteen days in jail for having cried, “Long live Boulanger!” in one of her performances during the Exhibition when President Sadi Carnot passed by.90 In the October elections, Déroulède was elected to the Chambre des députés, but, with the economy gradually recovering,91 Boulanger’s supporters gained few of the Right’s seats and opportunistes recaptured control of the Chambre.92 Unfortunately, this success was tainted by the accusation that the Rothschilds had contributed millions to an opportuniste minister of the interior and had 35,000 Romanian Jews brought in and naturalized so that they could vote republican. This exacerbated the association of the republicans with the growing influence of banks and industry.93 87.  Earnings were 10,417,344 francs in 1867, 13,074,927 in 1878, and 15,276,860 in 1889. “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 10 November 1889, 359. Theater receipts rose 50 percent over those during the 1867 Exhibition and 17 percent over those of 1878. 88.  Rome, for example, mounted a production of Paladilhe’s Patrie later that fall. 89.  The commissioner of the Colonial Exhibit, Louis Henrique, concluded: “After seeing the 1889 colonial display, who is not astonished that only two or three years ago there were bitter disputes about the utility of the colonies? The least suspecting visitors have been seized with enthusiasm by the spectacle before their eyes; the skeptics have been obliged to face the facts. . . . In a word, the trial of colonialism was concluded by the tribunal of public opinion in 1889.” From E. Monod, L’Exposition universelle (1890), cited in Robert Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions (Cambridge, UK: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1993), 179. 90.  François Caradec and Alain Weill, Le Café-concert (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 95. 91.  Industrial production rose 5 percent, and wages 3 percent. 92.  Brian Jenkins, Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 (New York: Routledge, 1990), 95; Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic, 1879–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 486; Peter Rutkoff, Revanche and Revision: The Ligue des patriotes and the Origins of the Radical Right in France, 1882–1900 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 49. 93.  Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 305.

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It is ironic, then, that with all its optimism, the 1889 Exhibition challenged what could be learned through the comparative method. With thriving “primitive” cultures shown to coexist with more “civilized” ones, the History of Habitation constructions threw into question the republican belief in the evolutionary development of human culture and probably led to as many false as tenable conclusions. The Eiffel Tower and Gallery of Machines were popular more for their “thrilling vistas” than their didactic content. To the extent that the “sensual pleasures of consumption” began to take precedence over the “abstract intellectual enjoyment of contemplating the progress of knowledge,”94 the French were forced to reconsider the opportunistes’ notions of the moral and educational utility of music, as well as the radicals’ desire to democratize aesthetic pleasures. Exotic displays may have been amusing and entertaining, too, and some of them were commercially successful, but it is questionable whether they implanted the seeds of a desire for assimilation. When it came to music, certainly, the performances succeeded in bringing together ensembles that had never made music together, and in attracting large numbers of listeners, introducing many to music they’d never heard before. However, as Tiersot points out in his final review, devoting so much energy and money to creating big effects that would impress crowds, such as the day when twenty-four military bands played together, had its disadvantages. Organizers tended to concentrate on the superficial aspects of things, what he and others called the pittoresque, not just in music but in everything, and this led to neglecting serious music that might otherwise have elevated listeners.95 Inevitably, the huge motley performances were often mediocre. And, perhaps most troubling, pleasing a crowd was not the same as addressing a public. The Exhibition offered the masses an abundance of pleasurable distractions competing for their attention. But to what end? When a public was seduced by novelty, they understood it in a context, often through comparison. It is not clear what crowds of visitors, many from out of town, got out of the festivals, competitions, and official orchestral concerts, whose value was largely symbolic more than educational, and symbolic of achievement more than of progress pointing to a new future. The merits of eclecticism had reached their limits. Virtually all concerts of Western music were mixed bags, incoherent juxtapositions leading to dizzying effects rather than enlightenment. Ironically, given their unfathomable appearance to Westerners, the huge array 94.  Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 59–60. 95.  Tiersot, “Promenades musicales à l’Exposition,” Ménestrel, 20 October 1889, 332.

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of exotic musics had the capacity to be more instructive. Tiersot learned much from them. Certainly, they were suggestive of ethnic/racial predispositions and racial origins, and Tiersot found documentary evidence therein with radical implications for the history of music. However, it is not clear how the general public digested this exposure. For those not repelled by the challenge of listening in new ways, the Exhibition’s performances presented a surfeit of originality and charm. But did audiences grasp the distinctions enough to compare them or just enjoy their effect? Did they relate what they heard to what they learned from seeing performers’ living quarters, food, and other products? Did they make connections and contemplate mutual influences? Was authenticity critical to their enjoyment or merely supplemental? There were limits to what could be learned from such music or experienced. Republicans who wished music to instruct or communicate a message through charm were stymied. Overwhelmed by the spectacle of such diversity, Deputy Lockroy complained that the whole thing resembled the Folies-Bergères, whose succession of spectacles was intended to evoke the imagination and stimulate pleasures for their own sake.96 When leaving the Exhibition one night after hearing the Russian national chorus, one visitor was less interested in learning than grateful for having been lifted out the present: I must leave this sweet vision of the legendary and sacred Orient and re­ immerse [myself ] in the milieu of practical people who vote, coachmen, city police, garçons in cafes, the guys that take the mud off your shoes [décrotteurs], all of them citizens, and—instead of the brave Nikititch or the plaintive Ivoutchka [from the National Russian chapel choir]—I have to listen to M. Ferry or General Boulanger talk on and on. The ordinary things of indigestible modern life appear even more cruel, and still, how sweet these pastoral escapes, among the flowering paths of the dream! 97

Losing oneself in exotic music, even if it did not elevate one to some imaginative azure, as Wagner’s music did, solved the problem of the banality of everyday life, albeit only temporarily. While the collection and organization of representatives of all times and all places assumed that visitors could understand these exhibitions, exotic music made it clear that understanding of the exotic Other was partial at best, if not a total illusion. There was also the risk that total incomprehension of 96.  Levin, Republican Art and Ideology, 210. 97.  Georges Saint-Mleux, “Exposition universelle. Exotisme,” Musique des familles, 28 September 1889, 395.

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this music would lead to increased disparagement and intolerance of little-known people. Two composers seem to have benefited most from the Exhibition, Saint-Saëns and Debussy. Not only did his omnipresence in official concerts catapult SaintSaëns to great fame, so did his reputation for the ease with which he assimilated a wide range of styles, ranging from the German classics to Algerian music. During the final month of the Exhibition, the classically oriented critic Camille Bellaigue gave a lecture on Saint-Saëns in which, echoing Gounod in 1887, he compared the composer to Beethoven. Saint-Saëns’s frequent travels to North Africa and the Far East had also made him unusually receptive to exotic music. In Tiersot’s essays on the Exhibition concerts, Saint-Saëns is the only French contemporary to whose music he refers in discussing exotic music, and the only one whose opinions about it he cites.98 Saint-Saëns may have been wrong to think of Javanese music as Hindu (Java is majority Muslim and the performers at the Exhibition were from Surakarta and its Muslim court), but he upheld the idea of music that “deliciously charms the ear,” a “music of dreaming.” Orchestral audiences had long enjoyed the seductive colors and original rhythms of the “Bacchanale” and the “Dance of the Priestesses” from his Samson et Dalila, which both Colonne and Lamoureux put back on their programs just after the closing of the Exhibition in fall 1889.99 Public fascination with exoticism and Saint-Saëns’s elevated status in the musical world most likely led to the decision to give the French premiere, at long last, of his Samson et Dalila. In December 1889, Henri Verdhurt announced he would inaugurate a new theater in Rouen with the opera the following March and take it to the Eden-Théâtre in Paris that October. Debussy was still virtually unknown to the public in 1889, having recently returned from his postgraduate years in Rome. But thanks to the Exhibition, he integrated the stimulus of exotic music with the symbolist fascination with sonority, developing important musical ideas in his first major works. In his case, it was his perspective as an outsider who had never traveled beyond Europe or apparently studied exotic music that served him well. Not privy to the principles underlying this music, he was left on his own to digest what he heard. Unlike Tiersot who marveled at instances when he heard harmony in non-Western music, Debussy 98.  Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques, 46–47, and “Promenades musicales à l’Exposition,” Ménestrel, 22 September 1889, 299. 99.  The Concerts Lamoureux performed Saint-Saëns’s “Dance of the Priestesses” on 17 November 1889, not having done it since 1884, and the Concerts Colonne played it on 15 December, for the first time since 1887.

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focused on the particularity of its sonorities, its timbre. Early ethnomusicologists considered this, rather than pitch, “the most apparent quality of the sound” and that which had the most immediate effect on the listener.100 Constantin Brailoiu claims that Debussy in fact owes less to Javanese scales than to their orchestral sound and unusual instrumental combinations.101 Mueller’s conclusions aside, this insight is born out in Debussy’s response to hearing an Annamite woodwind and drum at the 1889 Exhibition (fig. 85 and ex. 24). Although much of the French public found the piercing sound of this woodwind extremely unpleasant—one called it “a kind of flute whose sound enters your ear like a rotary drill”—Debussy appreciated how these two instruments expressed as much as an entire orchestra. He became interested in decomposing sound and using timbres in their pure state.102 The opening flute solo of his Faune should be understood as, in part, an idealized response to the challenge posed by this music. So, too, should his Nocturnes, a work that also brings together symbolist ideas and exotic influences. Its original title came from “Scènes au crépuscule” (1892) by the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier.103 Pushing his interest in individual timbres further, in 1894, Debussy wrote that in Nocturnes, he envisaged dividing the orchestra into separate groups, clearly distinguished in sound and function.104 Contrasting timbres would delineate musical ideas. Nocturnes surpassed Faune in the use of ostinati. Whereas those in Faune maintain their rhythms but change their pitches to accommodate what was harmonically called for in the melody, in Nocturnes, they consist of the same notes as well as rhythms and Debussy treats them as motives. Moreover, in “Sirènes,” he superimposes numerous, simultaneous 100.  In his Esthétique musicale (1921), Ernest Closson writes, “Chacun perçoit de prime abord une sonorité particulière, n’identifierait-il point le corps qui l’a produite, instrument, voix, ou phénomène naturel.” Cited in André Schnaeffner, “Le Timbre,” in La Résonance dans les échelles musicales, ed. Edith Weber (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1963), 216. 101.  Cited in Schnaeffner, “Timbre,” 216. 102.  Later, he wrote to Victor Segalen, “Musicians do not know how to decompose sound, the pure given. . . . I am trying to use each timbre in its pure state . . . We have learned too much about mixing timbres without using them for what they are [les faire jouer avec leurs valeurs mêmes].” Annie Joly-Segalen and André Schaeffner, eds., Segalen et Debussy (Monaco: Rocher, 1962), 107. On Debussy’s interest in timbre as sonority, see Mark DeVoto, “The Debussy Sound: Colour, Texture, Gesture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179–96, esp. 183–85. 103.  In “Debussy, Mallarmé, and ‘Les Mardis,’ ” in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane Fulcher (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 258–59, Rosemary Lloyd points out that Régnier, “one of Mallarmé’s most devoted disciples,” was the person who got permission from Maeterlinck for Debussy to set Pelléas et Mélisande to music. 104.  Debussy, letter to Henri Lerolle, 28 August 1894, cited in Maurice Denis, Henri Lerolle et ses amis (Paris: Duranton, 1932), 30.

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Fig. 85  Engraving from Louis Bénédictus, “Charivari annamite,” Les Musiques bizarres à l’exposition (Paris: Harmann, 1889).

Ex. 24  Louis Bénédictus, “Charivari annamite,” Les Musiques bizarres à l’exposition (1889). This miniature book of transcriptions made available in Western notation various music that visitors may have heard at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. Performers of this music for the Annamite Theater are instructed to “play as loud as possible”—the only dynamic level marked in the piece is fortissimo ( fff ), and this while the melody is often extremely dissonant with the drone bass. Jules Lemaître observed: “most discordant charivari [mock serenade] of lunatic amateurs would seem like a celestial harmony after this. . . . It is music for torturers, made to accompany the agony of prisoners who have had sharp reeds forced under their fingernails” (Figaro, 8 July 1889).

rhythmic ostinati, forging an equivalent for the multiplicity of simultaneous lines, or what he called “twining counterpoints,” in Javanese music wherein various instruments perform different elements of a balungen, or melodic framework, at varying rates (ex. 25). Comparing the complexities of Javanese music with those of Palestrina, he later explained, “Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises, which they listen to with great care. . . . Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint that make Palestrina seem like child’s play.”105 The polyrhythmic divisions of the measure in “Sirènes” with up to nine different rhythmic ostinati not only suggest the innumerable rhythms of the sea,106 they fuse to create a new sonority (ex. 26). By the time Debussy completed this masterpiece (1897–99), short motives, distinct timbres, and rhythmic ostinati had become important elements of his own personal style.107 Debussy’s ability to integrate symbolist and exotic influences during this period was probably encouraged, if not also shaped, by his association with Bailly. The very month his series on sound ended, Bailly founded another journal and a publishing house to support occultist and symbolist work, the Librairie de l’art indépendant.108 The salon he held in his office attracted some of the leading symbolists of the time. In this context, Debussy, a regular there from 1890 to 1894, developed his new theory about music. Connecting sensations associated with exotic music, symbolism, and the occult, he proposed that music should express “the mysterious correspondences between nature and the imagination.”109 Exoticism thus contributed to a cult of sonority, a kind of analogue to the symbolist cult of self, with significant implications for early modernism. 105.  Revue musicale S.I.M., 15 February 1913, in Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy, ed. François Lesure and trans. Richard Langham Smith (1977; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 278. For further analysis, see Jann Pasler, “Timbre, Voice-leading and the Musical Arabesque in Debussy’s Piano Music,” in Debussy in Performance, ed. James Briscoe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999): 225–55. 106.  Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1962), 108. 107.  See the analysis of these aspects of Nocturnes in Jann Pasler, “Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: The Emergence of a New Musical Logic” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1981), 282–95. 108.  During this period, Bailly distributed Debussy’s Cinq Poèmes de Baudelaire when it was first published and published his Damoiselle Elue in a limited luxury edition. 109.  Debussy used this expression in his explanation of what he was seeking to accomplish in his Pelléas, which he began to think about in 1893. See his “Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas,” in Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 61.

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Ex. 25  Louis Bénédictus, “Danse javanaise,” Les Musiques bizarres à l’exposition (1889). In this transcription of a Javanese dance, characterized by a two-measure repeating melodic pattern, the superimposition of numerous shorter rhythmic ostinati, of half-notes in the bass and sixteenth-notes in the soprano, resembles that of Debussy’s “Sirènes.”

Ex. 26  Debussy, Nocturnes (1897–99), “Sirènes.” The aural effect of these nine repeating rhythmic patterns, two per measure, results from the simultaneity of note durations ranging from dotted quarter notes to triplet thirty-second notes.

e From the Eiffel Tower to the Javanese performances, the symbolic utility of Exhibition displays was of crucial importance in getting visitors to think of certain achievements, including music, as infused with republican hopes and ideals. The Exhibition’s success suggested that republicanism had become an official culture. This recognition served to shift French focus from a vague but devoted sense of la patrie to an articulate sense of nation. Whereas the former was broad enough to appeal to distinct, warring factions, the latter called for a unity coextensive with the Third Republic. On 21 September, the government unveiled the mold of a new statue symbolizing France, called Le Triomphe de la République (The Triumph of the Republic). As in the case of Holmes’s Ode, it did not win the government-sponsored competition for such a work to be placed in front of City Hall. However, the municipal council of Paris liked the statue so much that officials commissioned it for the Place de la Nation where it still stands. With monarchist aspirations dissipated after the demise of General Boulanger, agreement on the nature of the nation-state grew more plausible. As the world grew smaller and conflicts abroad proliferated, presenting a united front to the world—a coherent national identity—was becoming a necessary prerequisite for making diplomatic agreements and political alliances in international contexts. At the same time, this need for self-definition raised the stakes on whose voices would determine that identity. With neither the radical Left nor the Catholic Right content, and any true consensus on the national interest remaining elusive, this led to increased friction with those espousing conflicting ideals and fueled the emergence of distinct countercultures nurturing alternative ideologies. Music’s contribution to the Exhibition was significant in this regard. Under­ standing of its public utility had evolved, along with perception of the country’s needs and desires, away from serving primarily a moral and educational role in forming citizens and contributing economically to the country’s prosperity. What was increasingly important was the symbolic capacity of music. Musical instruments and a broad array of musical practices expressed and embodied national identity and a nation’s commitment to progress. It was ironic, then, that from the perspective of musical progress Javanese and Vietnamese music proved more useful than official French concerts and, more than any French music, was compared to Wagner as the representative of musical progress in the West. Organizers’ focus on standard repertoire rather than new pieces suggests that the ideology of progress at home was beginning to be compromised, particularly among the emerging republican Right. The 1889 Universal Exhibition

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After the Exhibition, instead of embracing eclecticism and diversity while promoting growth and change, republicanism in the 1890s became, for moderates and conservatives, an ideology to maintain and protect. As we shall see in the next chapter, in response to socialist idealism and anarchist attacks, this led to various alliances between republicans and traditional elites, including Catholics and aristocrats. Not all of the latter were interested in the utility of music for the public good, as defined by republicans. Yet they did understand the merits of music’s symbolic utility and, like republicans, turned to it as a weapon for self-defense, self-promotion, and the preservation of their own values amid a new round of controversy over what it meant to be French.

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11 • New Alliances and New Music

By 1890, the Third Republic had survived for twenty years, the longest period without political upheaval in France’s history since before the Revolution. The 1889 Exhibition had proven to the world France’s commitment to progress and made its people feel confident and proud. Plans were afoot to forge a military alliance with Russia that would shift the balance of power in Europe, giving France the capacity to stand up to Germany. Yet republican leaders were anxious about social tensions, government corruption, and the rise of socialism. Crime, syphilis, alcoholism, and suicide increased as the nation’s birthrate declined. In 1892, a scandal erupted over the Panama Canal concerning bribes to ministers and deputies. The républicains opportunistes fell from power, and socialists blamed the financial world. In 1893, almost fifty socialists, including Jean Jaurès, entered the Chambre des députés, and more, municipal councils. Besides their May Day demonstrations and calls for union strikes, socialists threatened republican values. In cities such as Marseille, they cut funding of the local Conservatoire, ignoring the fact that many students were from poor families and intended to pursue careers in music.1 Meanwhile, anarchists, individualists hostile to institutions, protested throughout France with random acts of violence—in 1893, one boldly threw dynamite into the Chambre. To make matters worse, these movements were growing across Europe, and in 1894, an Italian anarchist assassinated the French president, Sadi Carnot. The concept of public utility faced its greatest challenge. In this context, from the establishment’s perspective, deviance of any kind could be dangerous, even artistic deviance. The conservative music critics rejected Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande (begun in 1892) when they found his music full of “disorder” and “confusion,” “the notes merely repelling and detesting each other.” Arthur Pougin and Camille Bellaigue deemed him the “head of the 1.  Ménestrel, 2 October 1892, 319.

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anarchists in music.”2 As we know, the musical world split under the pressure of the Dreyfus Affair, although composers rarely got involved in politics. Supporting Emile Zola’s defense of Dreyfus, Alfred Bruneau stood by his collaborator and continued to set Zola texts to music. On the other side, d’Indy joined the Ligue de la patrie française with Jules Lemaître, François Coppée, and others who believed in “values higher than the individual: God, the Nation, the Army, the State, the party.”3 However, the emergence of musical modernism had little to do with the response to Dreyfus per se. Debussy, arguably the most musically progressive of his generation, was probably anti-Dreyfusard. 4 D’Indy, conservative and antiSemitic, was admired by socialists. To find “human grandeur” and “moral truth” in music, the Revue socialiste looked, not to the wind band music of the people, but to d’Indy’s opera Fervaal, a “social drama.”5 Debates over the nature of French music and the notion of the musically progressive were infused with politics, but did not play out along predictable antagonisms, in part because the political world itself after 1890 was still less characterized by clear binary oppositions than before. Why, then, were the 1890s one of the richest, most exciting, and most productive periods of French music history? To understand this, we must examine other powerful cultural forces that both predated the Dreyfus Affair and influenced music and its meanings throughout the fin de siècle. Here, it is not Debussy’s oftcited disdain for republican values or moderate republicans’ desire for stability amid such turbulence that orients the inquiry. Rather, I explore changes in the nature of both the Left and the Right as they impacted music and the musical world. At stake were certain cherished notions of Frenchness, especially as understood by those controlling the Académie des beaux-arts, the two opera houses, and the Conservatoire. Certainly, this establishment was a conservative force that promoted a canon, some of it long beloved. When Mignon was given its one2.  Jann Pasler, “Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera,” 19thCentury Music 10, 3 (Spring 1987): 262, rpt. in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3.  Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Braziller, 1986), 541. See also Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 4.  James Ross, in his “Crisis and Transformation: French Opera, Politics, and the Press, 1897–1903” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1998), chap. 4, presents a nuanced view of Debussy’s attitudes toward the affair, citing his ironic comments and arguing for a lack of political engagement. 5.  Alphonse Richard, discussed in Jann Pasler, “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in The Late Romantic Era, ed. Jim Samson (London: Macmillan, 1991), 389, and James Ross, “D’Indy’s ‘Fervaal’: Reconstructing French Identity at the ‘fin de siècle,’ ” Music and Letters 84, 2 (May 2003): 215–17, 221.

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thousandth performance on 13 May 1894, free to the public, fifteen hundred people were turned away at the door. 6 Tunes from the work, especially “Connais-tu le pays où fleurit l’oranger,” had become so popular that they were sung at weddings and village ceremonies throughout the country.7 In 1890, Saint-Saëns himself called progress a leurre (delusion, also a trap). 8 He disdained those who wished to “question everything for the sake of questioning because this is the taste of the day, because modernism wants it so.” He argued that the general public’s “resistance” to change was a crucial moderating force and an “essential aspect of civilization.”9 But the Académie’s values were not the same as the government’s.10 As in the early 1880s, when Jules Ferry had sought to counterbalance their power with reforms and more openness to private enterprise, in the 1890s, a new generation of republican leaders took steps to ensure a commitment to progress. As in the mid 1870s, however, no one political group could act on its own. Arguably the most important context for change came from complex new alliances, as moderate republicans reached out to both radicals and conservatives, including monarchists, ex-monarchists, and Catholics. Leaders of such alliances realized that decisions and actions impacting the musical world would set a context for exploring not only shared interests, but also shared visions of the future.

Mandating Change Supporting new music and living French composers was central to reforms promoted by alliances on both the Left and Right, because both radicals and certain conservatives shared an intense desire for change and regeneration. It was as if new music could help people transcend their political differences and focus on the future. Of course, the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique were expected to maintain their traditional repertoire. But some criticized their directors for running these 6.  “Le Millième de Mignon à l’Opéra-Comique,” Art musical, 17 May 1894, 154. In 1891, Manon received its one hundredth performance there and Carmen its five hundredth. 7.  Julien Tiersot, “Mignon et la chanson populaire,” Ménestrel, 20 May 1894, called two songs from Mignon and one other the “only works of contemporary music that penetrated the countryside.” He credits their “natural, intimate, and spontaneous accents” and “simple, clear feelings” (155–56). 8.  Michel Faure, Musique et société du Second Empire aux années vingt (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), notes that republicans were becoming disillusioned that their institutions and freedoms had not done away with social antagonisms (99). 9.  Cited in A. Héler, “Drame lyrique et drame musical,” Art musical, 31 January 1890, 10. 10.  Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Phaidon, 1971), discusses the differences and conflict between academic and official art throughout the nineteenth century (15–21).

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organizations in a bourgeois manner, more preoccupied with saving money than with trying something new.11 To combat stagnation and respond to complaints— theater being an “institution of general interest” that had constantly to be called into question, and criticism being eminently “useful”—when he came into office in 1890, the radical minister Léon Bourgeois called for reform.12 In 1891, he altered the Opéra’s mandate (Cahier de charges). Whereas it had formerly been officially expected to function as a museum (the Louvre of music), it was henceforth to achieve its distinction based on its “choices, variety, and talents.” Bourgeois specifically authorized the Opéra to perform, not just grand opéra and ballet, but all kinds of drames lyriques, thereby making space for Wagner.13 Besides calling annually for world premieres of two new works by French composers, he addressed a long-standing desire of French composers in requiring its director every other year to produce a work by a Prix de Rome winner.14 In 1891, again after a good deal of public consternation, the Opéra finally put on Wagner’s Lohengrin. Before it opened, as far away as Germany, the public knew that Boulangists were threatening the Opéra with “patriotic” demonstrations by up to 3,000, inside and outside the theater, if Lohengrin was performed.15 Police arrested over 500 protestors, but Lamoureux and his musicians prevailed. After the Opéra’s production of Die Walküre in 1893, Wagner soon became its most frequently performed composer, surpassing Meyerbeer and Gounod.16 In 1892, Bourgeois also amended the OpéraComique’s Cahier de charges to require ten new acts per year, all of them by French composers, with no one represented by more than one work.17 11.  Charles Darcours [Charles Réty], “Le Mois musical,” Figaro musical, January 1892, 2. 12.  Léon Bourgeois, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beauxarts: Séance publique annuelle, 3 août 1892 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1892). The son of a clock manufacturer, Bourgeois studied law and became a natural conciliator; he was minister of public instruction and fine arts (1890–93), leader of the radical republicans (1893–98), and head of government (1895–96). A Freemason who rejected the dichotomy between utilitarian and classical education, he sought to reform both vocational and university education. 13.  Ministère de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts, Théâtre nationale de l’Opéra: Cahier de charges (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891). 14.  The minister would chose this work from a list of five presented by the Académie des beaux-arts. 15.  Telegrams between 8 and 14 September 1891 from the critic Drumont to various newspapers in Berlin and Cologne. Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris, Affaires diverses politiques, Allemagne, 1891. 16.  In the 1890s, while Gounod’s Faust remained the most frequently performed work at the Opéra, Wagner’s Lohengrin was second and Die Walküre seventh. Meyerbeer’s Huguenots came in fourth, but his Le Prophète disappeared from its repertoire between 1894 and 1897, and his Robert le diable and Halévy’s La Juive after 1893. 17.  The Opéra-Comique could also produce a translation of a foreign opéra-comique, but only once every other year, and it would not count as a new work.

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Finding that the Conservatoire did not reflect “current necessities” either, and in 1892, calling for more varied instruction reflecting “the evolution of our democratic mœurs,” Bourgeois appointed a committee to respond to public critique and propose changes.18 This came on the heels of a speech at the school the previous August in which his director of fine arts, Gustave Larroumet, observed, “Music and theater, like painting, sculpture, and literature, are going through a period of transition and crisis. I’m one of the first to recognize a need for innovation [nouveauté] . . . the desire for innovation is the necessary stimulus of each generation.”19 The radical deputy Antonin Proust also felt that the Conservatoire “no longer responds to our current needs.” But beyond reforming student training, he also called for changing the system whereby government subsidies were awarded. Pointing to how the English system recognized and rewarded merit, he proposed seeing results before writing checks, and, specifically, more private initiative in the arts. 20 Even, the conservative director of fine arts Henry Roujon told students in 1895 that “immobility” at the Conservatoire would be “death” to the institution. 21 While, as in the early 1880s, radical republicans took important steps to modernize the country, others, too, including monarchist and republican aristocrats, began to invest in musical progress in view of its public utility. Pondering this, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu linked luxury to “the taste for novelty and change,” seeing it, not as “immoral and useless,” but as “legitimate, commendable, and useful.” For him, the function of wealth was to serve as “one of the principal agents of human progress” and “father of the arts.”22 The wealthy could commission products and invest in what looked useful, even if its value had not yet been ascertained. Because the state tended to be rigid, inflexible, and biased, private entrepreneurs were in a better position to take risks, which could result in progress in the arts as well as in science, industry, and agriculture. Leroy-Beaulieu also argued that private enterprise was better suited to “public luxuries” than state-subsidized institutions. 23 18.  “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 3 April 1892, 111, and Léon Bourgeois, speech at the Conservatoire reproduced in Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 7 August 1892, 251. 19.  Gustave Larroumet, Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du 3 août 1891 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891). 20.  Antonin Proust, L’Art sous la République (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 62–63, 76. Proust was appointed the head of the reform committee for music at the Conservatoire in 1892. 21.  Henry Roujon, Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle, 3 août 1895 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1895). 22.  Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “Le Luxe: La Fonction de la richesse,” Revue des deux mondes 126, 1 (1 November 1894): 78, 88–90. 23.  Ibid., 97–98, and id., “Le Luxe: La Fonction de la richesse,” Revue des deux mondes 126, 2 (1 December 1894): 555–73.

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With investment strategies borrowed from business and finance, people of means could organize self-sufficient institutions that promoted whatever they chose. With their political ambitions severely curtailed after 1889, many monarchists looked to culture, not only to preserve their values, but also to help them imagine and enact change. Meanwhile, the haute bourgeoisie in finance and big business saw culture as a way to integrate with the aristocracy through shared taste. New musical societies such as Société des grandes auditions built a constituency of these groups that was similar in terms of members’ social class, although mixed in terms of their politics. In investing their own money in premieres and the production of major works ignored by the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, members were betting on the future and a national legacy they intended to help shape. With both the Left and the Right focused on the merits of new music, not surprisingly market-driven organizations, such as the Concerts Colonne and the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation, began to put on more contemporary music than ever before, especially works by living French composers. While Lamoureux concentrated on Wagner, giving fewer French premieres, Colonne put on twentynine premieres in both 1890–91 and 1891–92, 83 percent of them by living French composers. 24 Moreover, he gave 35 percent of these new works multiple performances. In fall 1893, the Jardin zoologique initiated a Wednesday night orchestral series addressed to those interested in the “progress of art.” These concerts too featured a good deal of new music by young French composers. The interest in contemporary French music even permeated wind bands. Ensembles, such as that of the Bon Marché department store, popularized transcriptions of new works sometimes before their premieres in national theaters, often in Saturday evening concerts in the square outside the store (fig. 86). In the 1890s, 47 percent of the repertoire of the Bon Marché wind band was by living French composers. 25 Military bands in the colonies presented more contemporary music than what audiences could hear in local theaters or played by amateur ensembles. As Bruneau wrote in January 1892, listeners were open to the modern, feeling the “need for the new, the not-yet-heard, and the not-yet-seen.” 24.  Counting works called premières auditions (which meant first performances for their audiences), Colonne premiered 144 works in the 1890s, the vast majority of these by living French composers. In 1893, Lamoureux and a group of fifteen composers founded a new association, “Concerts de l’école moderne,” specifically to give second performances of premieres done by the Concerts Lamoureux. It is not clear how long this lasted. Ménestrel, 7 May 1893, 150. 25.  Jann Pasler, “Material Culture and Postmodern Positivism: Rethinking the ‘Popular’ in Late Nineteenth-Century French Music,” in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 442–48.

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Fig. 86  Bon Marché wind band program for its concert in the square outside the store on 21 July 1894. This ensemble first performed a wind-band transcription of Samson et Dalila on 6 June and 25 July 1891, seventeen months before it was produced at the Paris Opéra. From July 1892 through 1894, there were over sixty-one military-band performances of Samson et Dalila in more than a dozen Paris parks.

Gone is the day when Carmen was dragged down to the bottom of inkwells [i.e., got terrible reviews] and when every decent family was called on to censor it. The wind of progress that has been spreading over all things has swept away the old witty clichés of yesteryear, inciting young reviewers to replace facile pleasantries with detailed, thoughtful, and benevolent study of the works at hand. . . . The masses think that, as everything keeps changing, so should our music, as long as it remains French. . . . Never have the masses been so curiously attracted to modernity, and never has their education been so complete in this respect. 26

Such attitudes served as a tremendous stimulus to composers and provided innumerable opportunities for performances of their works. What motivated this pronounced interest in new music throughout the 1890s? What did people expect from it? And what impact did this have on composers’ musical choices? Publics, patrons, and composers negotiated both the fear of change and the perceived necessity for it. This meant facing intense differences over the nature of French society, with some people demanding more social evolution and others banding together in resistance. In this context, people of all political persuasions looked to music to articulate continuity with the French past as well as help them envision the future. As a way of reinvigorating French music, composers responded by integrating musique ancienne et moderne. By the century’s end, there was more agreement on the value of French traditions than one might have expected, given the fault lines of the Dreyfus Affair.

The New Left’s Hopes In the late 1880s, as fear mounted for a return to monarchy, the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts reached out to the musical establishment. Directors of Fine Arts Gustave Larroumet in 1888 and Henri Roujon in 1891 embraced the conservatism of the Académie des beaux-arts. 27 While they understood the importance of innovation and explained that students should “welcome and benefit” from Wagner, they also believed that “instruction, by definition, can only take place far from revolutions in taste.” Stressing personality or originality at the Conservatoire, they concurred, should not be major educational goals. Larroumet

26.  Alfred Bruneau, “La Jeune Musique française,” Figaro musical, January 1892, 5. 27.  They both later became members of the Académie des beaux-arts.

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encouraged students to “assimilate the simplest and most modest elements . . . to learn before practicing their art.” Yet, even as he and Roujon preached the importance of “understanding” and “accepting” French traditions, 28 they also considered those taught at the Conservatoire “too recent, too exclusively from the middle of the century, without taking into account the origins of French music . . . Lully to Gluck and Philidor to Méhul.” Building on republicans’ new histories, Larroumet and others sought to integrate more “classical repertoire” into studies. 29 When Léon Bourgeois became minister in 1890, he supported this agenda in part to encourage solidarity among the French. He also thought that “in view of its past and in the interest of its future,” the Conservatoire needed reform. 30 So in putting together a committee to study possible changes at the Conservatoire in 1892, Bourgeois invited, not only ten politicians and four establishment composers (Guiraud, Massenet, Reyer, and Thomas), but also Vincent d’Indy, associated with the monarchists. Perhaps he hoped d’Indy would challenge his cohorts and push more vigorously for change.31 D’Indy too supported the study of more masterpieces from the distant French past. At the same time, Bourgeois had his own notions of what aesthetic might emerge from these reforms. In his 1892 speech at the Conservatoire, he referred to the qualités maîtresses de la musique française in Ernest Reyer’s Salammbô, not as charm, elegance, or grace, but rather as the “clarity of style, sincerity of thought, and spontaneous character of the inspiration.”32 He told young composers to develop “simplicity” and “naturalness” in 28.  For an analysis of the speeches they and other ministers gave at the Conservatoire, see Jann Pasler, “State Politics and the ‘French’ Aesthetics of the Prix-de-Rome Cantatas, 1870–1900,” in Musical Education in Europe, 1770–1914: Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges, ed. Michel Noiray and Michael Fend (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), 2: 585–622. 29.  Larroumet reiterated ideas from his 1891 speech in an essay (August 1895) published in his L’Art et l’Etat en France, 271–73. Likewise, the republican deputy Agénor Bardoux pointed to the importance of teaching declamation students the classical repertoire in theater, inasmuch as it embodied the “simplicity, appropriateness, and measure” that constitute “the essential qualities of our national genius.” “Rapport présenté au nom de la sous-commission de déclamation,” in Constant Pierre, Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), 391. 30.  Bourgeois, cited in Ménestrel, 7 August 1892, 251. 31.  Before making the appointment, in January 1892, Bourgeois made d’Indy a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. During this period, unlike the image we tend to have of him today, d’Indy was known as a “dedicated and conscientious worker, never uncompromising or closedminded . . . excessively modest and welcoming to all, above any kind of scheming.” Henri Eymieu, Etudes et biographies musicales (Paris: Fischbacher, 1892), 30. 32.  Gustave Larroumet, in his Discours prononcé par le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle, 2 août 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), also points to the “spontaneity of the French genius” as one of its primordial qualities.

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their music.33 Because such words signified le peuple, Bourgeois’s aesthetic of simplicity and spontaneity may have been politically motivated. 34 For the sake of national “solidarity,” republicans needed to regain the petit bourgeoisie’s interest and trust, lost to the idealistic promises of the Ligue des patriotes and the charms of General Boulanger. The winner of the 1893 Prix de Rome in composition, André Bloch (a Massenet student and son of a rabbi), responded explicitly to Bourgeois’s 1892 speech. His Antigone (1893) articulates this aesthetic of simplicity and clarity of expression, although in utterly banal ways. Simple tremoli in the introduction’s timpani hark back to those in 1870s cantatas, as does the thin orchestration, with two woodwinds per part. Accompaniments either double the vocal parts, or consist of endlessly recurring rhythmic patterns. The voices articulate the downbeat, and in the trio, the same rhythms alternate every other measure. Even the handwriting is awkward—such a contrast from Bruneau’s precise hand and Debussy’s elegant one.35 Such music defies the increasing influence of Wagner. Yet it also exposes serious limitations in the radical Left’s musical aesthetic and notions of musical progress.

Reenacting Revolutionary Practices Beginning in 1892, the Left also sought to build unity among republicans through agreement on the merits of the revolutionary past. The Opéra-Comique produced two works glorifying peasant revolts, another on the military victories of 1794, and two on the First Republic’s military heroes.36 This meant also getting to know the repertoire that had so powerfully affected revolutionary crowds and had led to a “national school” of composition as strong as German and Italian music. Republican music scholars hoped that the revival of revolutionary music might inspire a regeneration of French music in touch with the people. 33.  Bourgeois, cited in Ménestrel, 7 August 1892, 251–52. 34.  Without this political connotation, other new works, such as Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, produced by Lugné-Poë at the Théâtre Libre in May 1893, and later Debussy’s opera also embraced a certain simplicity in terms of a reduction in artistic means of expression. 35.  The Académie later criticized Bloch’s first Envoi de Rome, a quartet, for its “childlike simplicity that deprives it of any interest.” His melodies also were found to be “pale and a little banal.” “Rapports sur les envois de Rome en 1895,” Archives de l’Académie des beaux-arts, carton 131. 36.  Delibes’s Kassya (1893), Lalo’s La Jacquerie (1895), Benjamin Godard’s La Vivandière (1895), Albert Cahen’s La Femme de Claude (1896), and Camille Erlanger’s Kermaria (1897). André Michael Spies, in Opera, State, and Society in the Third Republic, 1875–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), also sees the staging of Zola and Bruneau’s L’Attaque du Moulin, which suggested 1793 rather than 1870, as tied to interest in the Revolution at its centenary (61–65).

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Hoping to elicit nostalgia for revolutionary festivals and recapture some of their power, the republicans staged a huge festival in Paris on 22 September 1892 (a date that resulted from a compromise). 37 Ménestrel announced the program and the eleven participating amateur ensembles. 38 It opened with a performance of the “Chant du départ” at the Panthéon by Opéra singers and the National Guard wind band. Everyone joined in on the refrain. As in 1792, Figaro reported, “men and women, singing in unison, seemed to have only one voice.” Next came a procession through the streets to various sites for speeches, music performances, and collective singing (fig. 87). Near the Opéra, unfortunately, coordination went awry, as groups from various Paris neighborhoods simultaneously performed the “Marseillaise,” the “Chant du départ,” and selections from Augusta Holmès’s Ode triomphale, written for the 1889 Exhibition. Still, elsewhere one could hear new transcriptions of music by Gossec, Méhul, Gounod, and Adam. 39 Paris theaters put on free or cut-price matinées, the Comédie-Française presenting Valmy and the “Marseillaise” along with Molière’s Malade imaginaire, and the Théâtre de Belleville, IX Thermidor. The Opéra-Comique included performances of the “Marseillaise” and “Chant du départ.” As during the Revolution, Charles Rearick reminds us, organizers of such events “hoped somehow to erase class antagonisms and, as though by magic, to carry a happy unity over into daily life.”40 However, its organizers lacking in imagination and ignoring the anxieties of the time, the event failed to generate much enthusiasm. 41 Two weeks later, the town of Givet erected a statue of Méhul, whose “Chant du départ” had nonetheless so excited listeners in Paris in September (fig. 88). Not only did Thomas, Massenet, and Joncières show up to give speeches, so did Léon Bourgeois and Paris music critics. Bourgeois used the occasion to promote his idea of “solidarity.” He found in Méhul’s warrior song “the entire history of the great Republic . . . the first Republic that has shown us our goal, our path, and our duty.” Arthur Pougin pointed to the virility of the song as important in its role in national education. Julien Tiersot hailed it as “the beginning of a national art.” Both critics 37.  Radical socialists wished to celebrate the anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries and removal of the king on 10 August 1792. Républicains opportunistes preferred to commemorate the centennial of the First Republic on 21 September, when the Convention had abolished the monarchy and universal male suffrage began. Others, such as Déroulède, wanted to remember the French victory at Valmy on 20 September 1792, which some have seen as initiating French nationalism. Olivier Ihl, La Fête républicaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 129–30. 38.  “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 18 September 1892, 303. 39.  Ménestrel, 25 September 1892, 310, and L’Illustration, 1 October 1892. 40.  See Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), chap. 5. 41.  Charles Rearick, “Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977): 451–52.

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Fig. 87  Revolutionary-inspired festival in Paris, 22 September 1892. L’Illustration, 1 October 1892. Here, traversing the Place de la République, the procession, led by two drummers, features numerous floats, including, in the distance, one called “Le Chant du départ,” after Méhul’s famous song. The latter was featured on the cover of L’Illustration that week.

used it to lay claim to a new French superiority in European music at the time, and called for something similar again. 42 Scholars used these occasions to investigate the revolutionary predecessors of French theater and the Conservatoire and to excavate the history of revolutionary festivals (see app. C). In 1892, Aulard devoted an entire volume to the cults of Reason and the Supreme Being. Like Robespierre, he thought the Revolution’s festivals showed “how rapidly the public spirit forms and spreads,”43 especially through its music. In almost every issue of Ménestrel from December 1893 through September 1894—forty in all—Tiersot assembled detailed descriptions of revolutionary festivals from period documents, hoping that such festivals and their “national music” might serve as an “example and lesson.”44 Because they 42.  “Inauguration de la statue de Méhul,” Ménestrel, 9 October 1892, 322–25. 43.  François-Alphonse Aulard, Le Culte de la raison et le culte de l’être suprème (Paris: Alcan, 1892), 321. 44.  His book from these essays won the Prix Kastner-Bourgault and 2,000 francs for the best publication examining the influence of music on the development of civilization.

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Fig. 88  Statue of Méhul in Givet in the Ardennes, his birthplace, inaugurated 2 October 1892. L’Illustration, 1 October 1892.

understood revolutionary music as a reflection of and key to understanding l’esprit populaire, Tiersot and Constant Pierre also published scores, most of which were either lost or existed only in parts, to establish a musical tradition on which their contemporaries could build. 45 Unfortunately, outside of certain circles, little of this music was performed. Some revivals addressed specialists, such as those organized by Constant Pierre for the Société de l’histoire de la Révolution française. 46 Singers from the Opéra, 45.  In his “Quelques hymnes et faits de la Révolution,” Ménestrel, 28 August 1898–25 September 1898, Constant Pierre notes that in fifteen years he had gone through 300 boxes of archives, 1,000 volumes of memoirs and newspapers, transcribed for piano 120 vocal and instrumental works, and catalogued around 3,000 hymns and songs. See his La Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales (1893), Le Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales (1895), Musique des fêtes (1899), Les Hymnes (1904), and Julien Tiersot, Les Fêtes et les chants de la Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1908) as well as the essays in Ménestrel noted in app. C. 46.  Ménestrel, 28 March 1897. Three programs survive from these Soirées littéraires et musicales: 13 March 1897, 26 March 1898, and 28 April 1900. In April 1897, Constant Pierre also organized “reconstructions” for the Association of Parisian Journalists.

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Opéra-Comique, and Conservatoire there performed mostly lesser-known revolutionary songs by Méhul, Gossec, Catel, Jadin, Cherubini, Martini, Lesueur, Piccini, and Lefèvre alongside poetry and comic scenes (fig. 89). The historical reconstruction of Gossec’s “Marche lugubre,” conducted by Tiersot in Romain Rolland’s play Le Triomphe de la Raison at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on 21 June 1899, accompanied the funeral procession of Marat to lend an air of authenticity and truth to the performance. 47 In the late 1890s, with the country divided by the Dreyfus Affair, Robert Gildea suggests, radical republicans kept the memory of the Revolution alive to justify the position of the Dreyfusards. In literature, the point may be accurate. Aulard, their “in-house historian,” continued to publish volumes of old documents, and Rolland “transformed the debate between justice for an individual and the national interest” in plays on revolutionary subjects—not just Triomphe de la Raison and Les Loups, set in 1793 (1898), but also Danton (1900) and Le Quatorze Juillet (1902). 48 However, just as in the late 1790s, the public wearied of republican festivals. Some complained about their “lack of originality.”49 Others felt that festivals were losing their connection to the “popular soul.” Revolutionary enthusiasm erupted momentarily with the inauguration of Dalou’s monumental statue Le Triomphe de la République in the Place de la Nation in 1899, followed by a banquet and concert at which music by Gossec and Méhul alternated with Berlioz and Saint-Saëns.50 Radical republicans maintained an association with the Revolution to help them come to power in 1902. However, socialists used the Revolution to express their discontent. Interrupting the inauguration by singing the revolutionary “Carmagnole” and the “Internationale” (written by a Communard in 1871), they saw it as a bourgeois revolt and sought to focus on class struggles rather than the Rights of Man and the Citizen.51 When it came to Méhul and Grétry, the discourse was far less political, and if this music served a political function, it was not to divide but rather to unite. First, in the 1890s, Méhul and Grétry offered audiences opportunities to relate to a heritage the country shared. In 1892, the committee to reform teaching at the Conservatoire 47.  Act 3 incorporated a rondo from Gossec’s opera Triomphe de la République (1793) and his “Chant patriotique” (1793). See Ménestrel, 18 June 1899, 199. The work includes a blond woman as Reason and a role for le peuple, who participate in the drama and sing songs. 48.  Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 40–41. 49.  L’Illustration, 13 July 1901, cited in Ihl, Fête républicaine, 355. 50.  See the program in Ménestrel, 19 November 1899, 376. 51.  Jean Jaurès wrote a Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française in 7 vols. See Gildea, Past in French History, 46–48.

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Fig. 89  Société de l’histoire de la Révolution française soirée program, 13 March 1897. At this concert, organized by Constant Pierre, singers from the Opéra, Opéra-Comique, and Conservatoire performed revolutionary songs alongside poetry and comic scenes. The first work, Gossec’s “Chant du 14 juillet” (1790), was a prototype for other such songs, including the “Marseillaise.” Besides this and Méhul’s “Chant du départ” (1794), most of the other songs were written between 1796 and 1798, which might suggest that in the late 1890s, amid anarchist attacks, the Société wished to divert attention from the violent aspects of the Revolution.

included both composers on the list of those whose works all young composers should know and analyze.52 And in 1892–93, when Richard Cœur de Lion returned to the Opéra-Comique, Figaro musical, a publication with largely upper-class readers, reproduced excerpts from revolutionary works: Méhul’s Stratonice (1792) and Grétry’s La Rosière républicane (1794). Indeed it was becoming increasingly possible to embrace both composers with or without dwelling on their politics. 52.  Vincent d’Indy, “Projet d’organisation des études du Conservatoire” (1892), reproduced in Pierre, Conservatoire, 376.

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Second, both composers, despite their differences, were valued for foreshadowing current musical values. Radicals particularly admired Méhul, from humble roots and of uneven health, who, a precursor to modern art, had brought polyphony into the theater.53 But in his report on French music in the official concerts of the 1900 Exhibition, the radical republican Alfred Bruneau praised both Méhul and Grétry as predecessors and in language that would have elicited sympathy from diverse constituencies, political and otherwise. Appealing to Wagnerians, Bruneau contends that Grétry invented the leitmotif to unify a long complex dramatic work.54 At the same time, pointing to values embraced by republicans, he notes that Grétry also envisioned a theater without boxes, like the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which would thereby have deemphasized social hierarchies among the public, and that Grétry believed in liberty and truth. Bruneau and others also perceived Méhul from a contemporary perspective. Referring to his revolutionary works for multiple orchestras and multiple choruses, Bruneau saw Méhul as a predecessor of Berlioz. With his Joseph, produced in two versions in late spring 1899—at the Opéra with new recitatives replacing its spoken dialogues, 55 and at the Opéra-Comique in its original version—critics also compared Joseph’s severe beauty with that of Franck’s Panis Angelicus and “one of those beautiful antique marble sculptures to which we give respect and veneration.” Joseph too benefited from contemporary admiration for Gluck’s music, enjoying an important revival in the 1890s.56 At the Opéra, Joseph balanced virile and tender, austere and human elements, while at the Opéra-Comique, it expressed “freshness, grace, and beauty.”57 Above all, however, as with Grétry, critics pointed to Méhul’s sense of 53.  René de Recy, “Chronique musicale: La Statue de Méhul,” Revue bleue, 12 December 1892, 475–76. 54.  Alfred Bruneau, La Musique française (Paris: Charpentier, 1901), 47. Gaston Carraud, writing in Petit Poucet, no. 21 (1900), also echoes earlier Wagnerians who saw Grétry as a precursor of Wagner’s. 55.  Armand Silvestre wrote the lyrics and Bourgault-Ducoudray the music for these recitatives. Some critics, such as Hugues Imbert, acknowledged Bourgault-Ducoudray’s “desire to assimilate his writing to that of Méhul.” This led to borrowing themes from the opera and Méhul’s solfège exercises; however, others rejected his tampering with this masterpiece to get it staged at the Opéra. 56.  Gluck’s Orphée was first performed at the Opéra-Comique on 6 March 1896 and repeated fifty-seven more times that season, becoming its most frequently heard work. The Concerts Colonne took part in the interest in this work, performing a scene from it on 27 March 1898. Orphée remained among the most popular works performed at the Opéra-Comique through 1900. 57.  See Alfred Bruneau, “Les Théâtres,” Figaro, 28 May 1899; Henri Gauthier-Villars, “Les Premières,” Echo de Paris, 28 May 1899; Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps, 20 June 1899; and Hugues Imbert, “Joseph,” Guide musical, 18 June 1899.

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drama and passion as anticipating Wagner. One cited Wagner’s letter of 16 March 1870 to Champfleury in which he claims Méhul as among his “mentors” and calls Joseph a masterpiece he planned to produce himself one day.58 Yet, if Méhul and Grétry’s dramatic music laid a strong foundation for the drame lyrique, few nineteenth-century composers took inspiration from revolutionary festivals or their music. After Berlioz—the most important heir to this tradition with his orchestration of the “Marseillaise,” “Hymne à la France,” and Symphonie funèbre et triomphale—the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War had revived interest in patriotic music and its utility for the nation. Still, such works as Gounod’s Gallia, Saint-Saëns’s “Marche héroïque,” and Franck’s Paris were few and far between.59 Despite Tiersot’s and Pierre’s many publications, few composers responded explicitly to this tradition. Besides Holmès’s Ode triomphale (1889), Massenet and Henri Litolff wrote incidental music for Revolution-inspired plays that expressed “all the anguish, convulsions, and patriotic hopes of this period.”60 Gustave Charpentier’s Le Couronnement de la Muse (1897), conceived for outdoors (the Place Blanche in Montmartre) and involving amateur choruses, real street cries, and marching bands, alone resembles a revolutionary festival. Unlike most such festivals, it addresses working-class aspirations. 61 On the surface it’s all gaiety, a festival of youth celebrating pleasure. At the center are two allegorical characters, the Muse and Beauty. It begins with a “march-parade” through a vegetable market, with merchants hawking their products and a distant fanfare accompanying the procession of the Muse. A “Ballet of Pleasure” follows, with popular dances and an exuberant bacchanale, Beauty’s dance, and her Crowning of the Muse, “daughter of the people,” a proletarian woman representing the workers of Montmartre. A poet then celebrates her as “our soul in the form of a flower.” Unlike many others, Charpentier was aware that festivals usually ignored the “eternal suffering and anguish” of the poor, but he saw the petits miséreux as “symbolizing the Future.” In the opening march, “to explain the bitter irony of human gaiety, alas, incapable of making us forget eternal misery,” he incorporates the theme of his song, “the dream of universal happiness,” while mocking it, asking for dynamic oppositions 58.  Wagner, letter to Champfleury, cited in Guide musical, 28 May 1899. 59.  Tiersot, Fêtes, viii. 60.  “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 19 November 1899, 376. See Massenet’s overture to Edouard Noël’s play Brumaire: Scènes historiques de l’an VIII (1799) (1899) and Henri Litolff ’s overture to Robespierre (1892). 61.  Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, 1–24. For an excellent analysis of the context for this work and its use in the composer’s opera, Louise, see Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 455–61.

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and exaggerated nuances. 62 In the final scene, Pierrot interrupts the cries of joy with gestures that remind everyone of human suffering. However, even he listens when the chorus then calls on the Muse, the “eternal hope of mankind,” to bring universal happiness. The work ends symbolically, with her reaching out to the crowd, now in fraternal union through music. Huebner sees this as “a celebration of the salutary effect of Art and Beauty on le peuple.”63 It was a huge success and was repeated at the centennial celebration of Michelet’s birth in 1898. Charpentier’s opera Louise, into which he incorporated it, revisits these same musical and social issues, but did not spawn imitators. Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and others conceived works for outdoor arenas in southern France, such as Orange’s ancient Roman theater and Béziers’s bull-fighting arena (see fig. 97). Choral unison singing abounds in Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire (1898), composed for Béziers, with the orchestra often doubling the singers. With huge choral sections for 200 singers (most of them workers and local artisans) and three orchestras of 250 instrumentalists with eighteen harps and thirty-five trumpets (some belonging to local military bands), the composer was forced to think of sound production and a conscious simplicity of means as had revolutionary composers. The patron who had commissioned the work and transformed the arena for the performances saw this as an opportunity for artistic democratization. 64 When reviewers deemed the work a populist response to Wagner and the venue the “French Bayreuth,”65 it was because the composer appealed to the “taste of the crowd” and, in attracting ten to twelve thousand enthusiastic spectators, offered a republicaninspired alternative to the elite and fashionable public who frequented Bayreuth. Various government ministers traveled to performances in subsequent years not just in support of this effort at artistic decentralization, but also, Brian Rees suggests, because they saw the participation of so many local people and military bands as an opportunity to bridge the growing divide between citizens and the military and, amid social divisiveness over the Dreyfus Affair, to encourage civic patriotism. 66 62.  These two notes appear on pp. 13 and 17 of the piano-vocal score. The song, Charpentier notes, is from his Impressions fausses. 63.  Huebner, French Opera, 434. 64.  Brian Rees, in Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), suggests that the work’s patron, Castelbon de Beauxhostes, conducted his own band, La Lyre bitteroise, and considered municipal bands and choral societies as a good social alternative to trade unions (326). Ironically, Léon Kerst, writing for this class in the Petit Journal, 10 November 1898, did not like the work when he later heard it in Paris. 65.  Gustave Samazeuilh, “Les Fêtes de Béziers,” in Le Guide musical, 1898; “Après les fêtes,” La Liberté, 18 April 1898. 66.  Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns, 332.

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The only venue where the revolutionary aesthetic thrived was in military band concerts. There festivals remained vitally significant in recalling the French military’s glorious past. Perhaps for this reason, in 1903, Le Petit Poucet, addressed to the mass audiences of military-band performances, published a twelve-part series on revolutionary festivals as the predecessors of military-band concerts in city parks. Included were descriptions from revolutionary-era newspapers, period engravings, and, for the first time in this journal, musical scores, reduced for piano from Constant Pierre’s publications: Gossec’s “Marche lugubre,” “Hymne à Voltaire,” and “Peuple, éveille-toi,” as well as three popular songs, “Ça ira,” the “Carmagnole,” and an excerpt from a Dalayrac opéra-comique. Le Petit Poucet reminded readers that the Paris Conservatoire had begun as a school for military musicians organized by Sarrette, conductor of the National Guard, the interpreter of music performed during the festivals. Focus was on the Festival of Federation (1790) through the first Festival of Freedom (1792), when exuberant popular participation had played a large role, before the government imposed rigid formats. The magazine’s editor underlined the role music played in the revolutionary project of fraternité and stressed the experience of equality encouraged by festivals, perhaps to make the classes populaires feel part of a glorious history—a critical part of republicanism. 67

The New Right’s Progressism in Politics and Music With the demise of General Boulanger, the success of the Exhibition, and the October 1889 elections, France’s monarchists had to acknowledge defeat. 68 Marquis Henri de Breteuil, a monarchist deputy, aristocrat (and Marcel Proust’s Marquis de Bréauté), ended his long diary with the results of the elections. On 4 October, he writes, “Having never thought that a courant d’opinion could restore monarchy in our country, I was convinced that a daring coup was our only chance. But that card played, I do not see anything in front of us except a somber future going nowhere.” On 7 October, his final words: “The results of the vote give 130 seats to republicans and 50 to conservatives or Boulangists. . . . The republican majority consists therefore of 366 deputies and the opposition 210, of whom 43 Boulangists.”69 After 67.  Henri Radiguer, “Les Jours d’enthousiasme: Les Fêtes et la musique de la Révolution,” Petit Poucet nos. 3–12 (1903), esp. 3: 1–3 and 12: 3. 68.  This was also encouraged by the deaths of the “Prince Napoléon” (first cousin to Napoléon III) in 1891 and the comte de Paris in 1894. 69.  Marquis Henri de Breteuil, Journal secret, 1886–1889 (Paris: Mercure de France, 2007), 348.

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many pages of thoughtful notations on his diplomatic and political activities, no commentary. Just the numbers. For someone so hopeful, so engagé, this must have been devastating. In March 1890, a new political group, the Constitutional or Independent Right, came into being. Its members opposed radical anticlericalism and progressive income taxes, but accepted democracy, existing institutions, and the nation.70 Moderate republicans reached out to this new Right, recognizing that they shared with it a deep concern about socialism. Their ralliement (reconciliation) had religious as well as international dimensions, the latter inasmuch as they sought monarchists’ help in their foreign relations. This rapprochement, however, was not just politically motivated. As Debora Silverman points out, it was also a “manifestation of a more general effort by bourgeois republicans to find a basis for unity with the older aristocratic forces, an ongoing quest to solidify the ranks of one elite.”71 With music an important way to explore and express commonalities, this emerging alliance had a significant impact on the musical world of the 1890s.

An Ironic Religious Revival The process of building this alliance was, ironically, greatly facilitated by two Catholic leaders, Cardinal Lavigerie, the archbishop of Algiers, and Pope Leo XIII himself. On 12 November 1890, the cardinal told the visiting French Navy that with the country on the brink of disaster (i.e., socialism), everyone had to pull together. He then toasted the French Republic. Parisian monarchists and religious leaders were stunned and strongly objected. The following May, the pope, in his manifesto Rerum novarum, rejected socialist demands concerning public property 70.  Founded by Jacques Piou, a monarchist deputy, Boulanger supporter, and friend of the comte de Paris, this group included such diverse members as Prince d’Arenberg, Paul LeroyBeaulieu, and Francis Magnard, editor in chief of Le Figaro. See Philippe Levillain, “Les Droites en République,” in Histoire des droites en France, vol. 1: Politique, ed. Jean-François Sirinelli (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 198. Robert Kaplan, in Forgotten Crisis: The Fin-de-Siècle Crisis of Democracy in France (Oxford: Berg, 1995), analyzes the wealthy’s fear of revolution between 1893 and 1897, as based, in part, on whether deputies would replace consumption taxes, viewed as inequitable, with income taxes that would touch the wealthy and thus “destroy” civilization as they knew it. Kaplan sees not the Dreyfus Affair, but the wealthy “few” feeling threatened by the non-wealthy “many” of universal suffrage and the conflict over graduated income taxes as “the most intense political crisis in the history of the Third Republic” (5, 7). Paul LeroyBeaulieu’s 1894 essay defending luxury and explaining the social function of wealth, discussed above, addresses this concern. 71.  Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 48.

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but called on the state to practice Christian social justice. Then on 16 February 1892, in his text Au milieu des solicitudes, he told French Catholics to devote themselves to peace. This was a way of asking them to accept the French Republic, to change its anticlerical laws, but from within. Because the pope was believed to be infallible, although many still rejected this idea, numerous Catholics bowed to his wishes. Among these was the prince d’Arenberg, who, although elected as a monarchist deputy from 1877 to 1881 and again in 1889, ran as a republican in 1893. In December 1892, the government responded to this new openness of the Catholic Church by moving les cultes (religion) from the Ministry of Justice, where it had been since 1888, back to the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. In many ways, the musical world provided a medium for both resistance and public reconciliation of the republicans with Catholics. Interest in chant skyrocketed. Congresses on religious music in September 1892 in Grenoble and in July 1895 in Rodez and Bordeaux led to resolutions recommending free courses in Gregorian chant in each French town and an annual competition for its performance. Dom Mocquereau published his five-volume Paléographie musicale (1889–96), with photographic facsimiles of old chant, as well as an inexpensive Liber Usualis (1896) to make chant available to the general public. Some presented chant as a way to attract people to church to reestablish “this union and solidarity among the classes that is the first condition of social peace.”72 In the early 1890s came not only regeneration in liturgical music but also new acceptance of religious music in secular contexts. In 1891 and 1892, Figaro reproduced short excerpts of this music to draw attention to performances, some in very distinguished venues: on 4 March 1891, the Agnus Dei from Bach’s Mass in B minor, performed at the Société des concerts; on 10 June 1891, an air from Handel’s Israel in Egypt, just after being produced by the Société des grandes auditions at the Trocadéro; on 22 July 1891, a Mozart Ave Verum; and on 13 April 1892, a Palestrina motet, the latter pointing to the Holy Week repertoire at the Eglise de Saint-Gervais. The latter was particularly important, for in some ways the Holy Week performances too were a revival of a kind of festival—“ceremonies” associated with the Sistine Chapel. The choir at Saint-Gervais, under the direction of d’Indy and Charles Bordes, sang its repertoire over five days—Palestrina, Victoria, and long litanies, to which they added Josquin des Prés, Lassus, Handel, and Bach to accompany matins and lauds each day and a Mass on Holy Thursday. Camille Bellaigue found “more poetry and emotion in the liturgy of Holy Week than in all the repertoire of the Opéra.” With the singers invisible in an upper gallery, their songs about divine and 72.  “Le Chant grégorien jugé par l’Univers,” Revue du chant grégorien, 15 October 1892, 34.

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human suffering seemed to “float in the atmosphere, like light veils, or resembled the atmosphere itself, because one only breathed in harmony.” Unaccompanied, they reminded listeners that there is “no intermediary more direct or more pure between the soul and God than the voice.”73 Catholics welcomed this celebration, some of them perhaps initiated into the religious cult of music by Wagner’s Parsifal. Mallarmé, Gounod, and Sâr Péladan could also be seen attending. Performances by the choir quickly became fashionable as evidenced by numerous elegant carriages parked outside the church, despite the working-class neighborhood (fig. 90).74 Certain republican critics, too, appreciated the performances. Although Tiersot recognized that Palestrina had broken all ties in music to secular forms, he considered his genius “pure and sincere” and enjoyed his music’s “truly primitive simplicity.” In 1892, Figaro fanned the enthusiasm by publishing a Victoria motet from the choir’s repertoire, and in 1893, a Lassus Kyrie from a new collection of “primitive religious masters,” edited by Bordes. When the young composer Déodat de Séverac first heard this choir, he experienced its religious music as a “real revelation,” strong enough “to bring men of superior minds back to religion.” He wrote to his sister: “Huysmans, who is one of most eminent writers and a man of wonderful talent, would have remained a sectarian enemy of Catholicism had he not had the good fortune to hear this Gregorian chant and the Palestrinian masters!”75 Ironically, composers got heavily involved in religious music after the pope’s Rerum novarum, as if it constituted an invitation to revive music for the Church. On 28 January 1892, the Société nationale, under d’Indy as president, collaborated with the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais in a concert at their church (fig. 91). The performances took place in the context of a religious ceremony, the “Benediction of the Blessed Sacrement” (Salut du Saint-Sacrement). The presence of the Eucharist, brought out especially for the occasion, diminished the secular nature of the typical concert experience and legitimated the performance of religious music.76 This concert, which suggests a particularly interesting relationship between new and old religious music, included four premieres of motets and Mass movements by Société members before motets by four old masters. New music thus sets the context 73.  Camille Bellaigue, “Revue musicale: La Musique sacrée pendant la semaine sainte,” Revue des deux mondes 111 (1 May 1892): 221, 223. 74.  Julien Tiersot, “La Semaine sainte à l’Eglise Saint-Gervais,” Ménestrel, 24 April 1892, 132–33. 75.  Séverac, dated “Monday.” Stelly Delecourt Collection, Lille. 76.  Thierry Favier and Jean-Yves Hameline (personal communication, 15 May 2008) have furthermore suggested that holding such a concert in a church, and particularly in the context of a religious service, was a way of avoiding payment of rights to living composers and the poor tax, while still charging for tickets.

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Fig. 90  Fan-shaped program of a Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais benefit concert, 22 October 1899. On the back of this fan, beautifully decorated with flowers and a little girl, is the program of works by ten composers, including Palestrina mass movements, Victoria motets, Jannequin and Lassus chansons, chansons populaires transcribed by Tiersot, the finale of Carissimi’s oratorio Jeptha, airs by Bach and Weber, and movements from Mendelssohn’s violin concerto.

for hearing old music. The division of the concert into three parts—“before the benediction, during the benediction, and after the benediction”—suggests a narrative situating new music as fitting preparation for the holy ceremony to come, and Palestrina’s music (the sole work in part 3) as the only music worthy to follow it. In 1894, Bordes, joined by some Church leaders, the organist Alexandre Guilmant, and d’Indy, started a religious music society, a “propaganda society for the revelation of religious masterpieces,” to reform liturgical music.77 This led to the composition and publication of numerous new motets, cantiques, and other religiously inspired 77.  Catrina Flint de Médicis, “The Schola Cantorum, Early Music, and French Cultural Politics from 1894 to 1914” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2006), discusses the complexities of Catholicism after 1892 as they impacted the beginning of the Schola Cantorum. She points out that most of the Schola’s early support came from bishops and archbishops in French provincial cities rather than in Paris, which had proportionately far fewer Catholics (225–33).

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Fig. 91  Societé nationale with the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais concert program, 28 January 1892. In ceremonies such as the “Benediction of the Blessed Sacrement” (Salut du Saint-Sacrement), what took place before and after the “Benediction” was open. In this case, part one included an orchestra and solos by a tenor, a baritone, and a cellist. In contrast, during the “Benediction,” a priest in ceremonial vestments officiated, assisted by a deacon and using incense. In between choral motets and Gregorian chant, he would give a sermon, pray to the Eucharist and for the pope, and offer a final blessing.

works by Bordes, d’Indy, and others, many setting Latin texts.78 Two years later, this group and some aristocratic supporters, such as the composer Prince Edmond de Polignac, turned this into a “School of Music responding to modern needs”—I read this to mean the “modern needs” not only of young musicians, but also of their elder supporters. The “mission” of this Schola Cantorum, another so-called propaganda society, included reviving forgotten musical traditions and religious music (including Gregorian chant, Palestrina, and chansons populaires), creating new music inspired by it, and teaching the “elements of modern art.” Carlo Caballero argues that Fauré was among those resistant to the Schola, perhaps because of the “historical injustice” of such claims, which ignored the teaching and practices of the Ecole Niedermeyer, where he had studied. René de Castera tried to dismiss these predecessors who performed the “Palestrinan repertory before Saint-Gervais,” because, in admitting “in their broad eclecticism, ephemeral works beside immortal ones,” their practices were “far from pure.” In this context, the word “eclecticism” signified far more than diversity and a certain attitude toward the past, and had political implications suggesting critique of republicanism. “Among certain scholistes,” Caballero notes, it was associated “not just with aesthetic integrity but with ideas about ethnic and national purity.” D’Indy tied eclecticism to the “deleterious influence of Jewish art” (Meyerbeer?). In a 1922 interview, Fauré, firmly embracing the concept and echoing Saint-Saëns’s words in 1885, declared, “I am an eclectic in the province of music, as in all others.”79 Perhaps above all, the Schola’s priorities constituted a challenge to the importance of theatrical studies and the development of virtuosi at the Conservatoire. There, the institutional hierarchy articulated by state subsidies resulted in an analogous hierarchy among musical genres. Although it increasingly recognized the value of other genres, the Conservatoire was dedicated to producing composers of opera. Moreover, in the provinces, elementary schools were required to devote two hours a week to singing, while instrumental study was relegated to private lessons. Composers were not in a position to undermine this hierarchy, for reputations and royalities accrued from writing operas, not instrumental music, and music publishers, motivated by financial return, reinforced this situation. 78.  For example, d’Indy wrote six Latin motets, beginning with Deus Israël (1896) and Sancta Maria (1898). This included publishing anthologies of Josquin, Palestrina, Lassus, and other primitifs, as well as harmonizing Gregorian masses and writing new musical “paraphrases” of texts used in Catholic services. 79.  Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 179, 292nn38–39, also discusses Fauré’s “distance from the Schola” in the composer’s approach to chant in his music, and in differences over the ultramontane politics of liturgical music.

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To spread their “gospel,” the Schola built branches all over the country and rapidly became a serious rival of the Paris Conservatoire. The regional Scholas did not entirely threaten the centralization of power in Paris, for there were also regional music conservatories. If these followed directives from Paris and were subject to regular review by national inspectors, probably the Schola branches took inspiration from the Paris Schola as well. However, this alternative educational system did train a different type of student (many of them young aristocrats from the regions), introduced new audiences to their repertoire, and created a context for touring musicians and ensembles. By 1903, the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais had traveled to more than 100 French towns and boasted they were in demand abroad. Such concerts led to the growth in student numbers at the Schola (from 21 in 1896 to 300 in 1904) and the formation of related choral societies in the regions. The Schola’s “lieutenants,” as they were called, formed a veritable “discipleship” (apostolat), assembling hundreds in the performance of the masterpieces by such composers as Palestrina, Bach, and Rameau. This religious movement among Catholic conservatives may seem to have been a major affront to the republican establishment, but one should note that, after Massenet declined, the minister appointed not another opera composer as director of the Conservatoire in 1896, but Théodore Dubois. Dubois, a modest, hardworking man and committed republican, was best known for his oratorio Les Sept Paroles du Christ (1867), performed widely on Good Friday for decades. As organist at the Madeleine (1877–96), he also composed eight Masses, including one in the style of Palestrina (1900), and more than seventy motets. Well before it was taught at the Schola, in 1884, Dubois published L’Accompagnement pratique du plainchant. Differences between the Schola and the Conservatoire did exist—free versus official, Catholic versus secular, private versus public. And certainly d’Indy used the Schola to implement reforms he had proposed for the Conservatoire. But many of these oppositions have been exaggerated. The Schola functioned as a professional school, albeit not for producing opera composers, and received a state subsidy as such. Like the Conservatoire, the Schola promoted its traditions and values with similar means and taught students just as rigorously, even if these students, a certain number of them aristocrats like d’Indy, did not need to make a living from their art. 80 In other words, the musical impact of the religious revival can be seen as a response to the political rapprochement between the new Right and the moderate republicans, embraced in the republican establishment as well as in institutions set up to contest its hegemony. 80.  See Jann Pasler, “Deconstructing d’Indy, or the Problem of a Composer’s Reputation,” 19th-Century Music 30, 3 (Spring 2007): 230–56, and in id., Writing through Music.

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International Alliances and the Politics of Culture Also motivating the ralliement alliance was republicans’ desire for French aristocrats’ help with monarchist support abroad and important diplomatic agreements. Most pressing was the need for a military alliance with Russia. Czar Alexander III wanted French aid in russifying Russia’s western provinces—which would antagonize Germany—and in standing up to Britain in Central Asia and the Far East. France sought a counterforce to Germany and the Triple Alliance and help in regaining Alsace-Lorraine. Tensions grew in the late 1880s, with increasing border incidents, espionage, and mutual insults, and 1889 brought rumors of impending war. 81 Some have argued that the pope recognized the French Republic in order to push the Russians into that alliance, many of them Catholics. French monarchists had been courting the czar throughout the late 1880s, welcoming an alliance with an autocrat as a way of restraining republican policy and possibly preparing the way for a return to monarchy. 82 The marquis de Breteuil did much to facilitate communication and good will between the Russian czar and French republicans, helping arrange the first French loans in 1888. 83 Just before the Franco-Russian alliance was solidified, Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe also did her part. After a long stay in Paris (August to November 1891), the Grand Dukes Vladimir and Alexis, brothers of the czar, went hunting at Rambouillet with French President Carnot and then at Bois-Boudran, the Greffulhes’ elegant provincial château. Vladimir, a painter and future court patron of Diaghilev’s projects, enjoyed it so much he remained with the countess for the evening. 84 Such friendly rapport undoubtedly laid the foundations for Countess Greffulhe’s subsequent patronage of various Russian artistic exports to Paris. 85 Republicans also sought monarchist backing in their imperialism. After Déroulède was elected in 1889 and kept up pressure on those making colonial policy, a new force arose. Whereas earlier most monarchists scorned overseas 81.  See the extensive documents of the Affaires politiques divers for 1887–91 in the archives of the Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris. 82.  Georges Michon, L’Alliance franco-russe, 1891–1917 (Paris: Delpeuch, 1927), 20. 83.  See his Journal secret. Furthermore, in 1881, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, met with Léon Gambetta, the prime minister, and the marquis de Breteuil at the Château de Breteuil, anticipating the Entente cordiale between England and France, eventually signed on 8 April 1904. 84.  La Vie de famille, 29 November 1891, paints this portrait to suggest an emerging friendship between the czar’s family and the French. 85.  These included a concert of Russian music in 1892, the five historic concerts of Russian music in 1907 and, beginning in 1909, the Ballets Russes.

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expansion, after 1892, both Prince d’Arenberg and Comte Greffulhe subsequently became members of the Groupe colonial in the Chambre. Perhaps seeing French economic as well as political interests growing there, this group took an active role in French imperial expansion in Africa. 86 Thereafter, the socialists presented the only serious opposition to colonialist politics. 87 The ideal of political reconciliation was difficult to realize. In the 1893 elections, ralliés candidates did not do well, reactionaries lost considerable seats, and the socialists quadrupled their number. With Jules Ferry’s death in 1893, and numerous républicains opportunistes discredited by the Panama Canal scandal, moderate republicans, many of them from the younger generation, then regrouped under a new political doctrine, progressisme. Willing to eschew some of Ferry’s idealism, they sought to incorporate the monarchist Right and the Catholic Church. Responsive to this, the Independent Right became the Republican Right and called for an “open, tolerant, and honest Republic.”88 Eugène Spuller called for an esprit nouveau that aspired to “reconcile all citizens” bonded by “good sense, justice, and charity.” The Republic’s seal in the 1890s reflects this idea: on the cartouche is a ship, symbolizing the Republic, under rows of fleur-de-lis and a crown. As Debora Silverman points out in her penetrating study of art and politics from 1889 to 1900, “the image and legend of the ship of state skillfully navigating the rough waters was appropriate for a Republic whose strength in this decade lay in its very resiliency, its capacity to chart a fluid course, shifting and gliding according to changing conditions of political winds and weather.”89 Such an image can still be seen on each of the lampposts illuminating the Pont Alexandre III, inaugurated in 1900 to commemorate the Franco-Russian alliance. A more malleable terrain in which to seek similarities and compromise, to assert values and assure their survival, was culture. As Silverman suggests, a striking cultural analogue to political progressism was the Union centrale des arts décoratifs. Formed in 1864 to revitalize the arts and crafts, “to industrialize art for a broad public,” after 1889, its social composition, ideology, and programs changed to reflect the confluence of politicians, cultural leaders, and educators from among 86.  Prince d’Arenberg was president of the Committee for French Africa, the Suez Canal Company, and the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranean railway, as well as vice president of a mining company. See C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, “The Groupe colonial in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1892–1932,” Historical Journal 17, 4 (1974): 837–66. 87.  Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, and Jacques Thobie, Histoire de la France coloniale: Des origines à 1914 (Paris: A. Colin, 1991), 640. 88.  Jacques Piou’s manifesto of the republican Right appeared in Figaro, 8 January 1893, and is reproduced in Robert Gildea, France, 1870–1914 (London: Longman, 1996), 98–99. 89.  Silverman, Art Nouveau, 45, 48; see also 322n6.

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the republican administration as well as the aristocracy.90 Under leadership of the progressist deputy Georges Berger, elected to the Chambre after successfully directing the 1889 Universal Exhibition,91 the Union centrale sought to revive the “distinguishing features of the French race.” Instead of seeking, in Silverman’s words, “to democratize art,” it aimed to “aristocratize the crafts.” Its members agreed that assuring the quality of French goods was France’s best defense against the rapid ascendancy of German and American industrial power. As Silverman puts it, “The quality of French artisans’ work, not industrial technology, would provide the basis for French economic invincibility.”92 Despite their political differences, members agreed that the aristocratic French past was the best model for studying inherently French characteristics such as elegance and grace. Progressivist politics engaged aristocrats in increased support of music, perhaps to ward off attacks by radical republicans on inherited wealth. Several of the women on the Women’s Committee of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs— republicans and monarchists, aristocrats and bourgeoises—became among the most important music patrons of the day: Comtesse Greffulhe, Madeleine Lemaire, Princesse Bibesco, Comtesse René de Béarn, and Duchesse d’Uzès. 93 They subscribed regularly to the Opéra and held concerts in their homes, where they sometimes performed. In the 1890s, these women also took an increasingly active role in musical societies, founding new ones.94 Elisabeth de Caraman-Chimay, Comtesse Greffulhe, perhaps best represents the musical benefits of progressiste politics. In 1890, after her successful production 90.  The republican deputies Antonin Proust (president in 1882), Raymond Poincaré, Eugène Spuller, Léon Bourgeois, Paul Doumer, and René Waldeck-Rousseau, the arts administrator Gustave Larroumet, and the museum inspector Roger Marx all supported the aims and purposes of the Union centrale. Ibid., 135–40. 91.  Georges Berger (1834–1910) was an engineer by training. He served on the parliamentary committee for fine arts and was reelected to the Chambre des députés in 1893, 1898, and 1902. 92.  Silverman notes, “by 1896, France had descended from the 1885 rank of second most powerful industrial producer to that of fourth. . . . Between 1885 and 1895, heavy industrial production quadrupled in the United States and tripled in Germany while France’s output increased by only one-fourth. . . . In 1895 France alone among the major European nations had fewer industrial exports than in 1875 and 1883.” Art Nouveau, 52–53. 93.  One of the most important activities of this Women’s Committee was to organize and take part in its exhibitions beginning in 1892. Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, for example, contributed to the 1895 Exhibition. Although Madame de Saint-Marceaux, who held one to the most important music salons of the 1890s, apparently did not serve on the Women’s Committee of the Union centrale, she participated in its 1892 exhibition. 94.  In 1890, all of this group except Duchesse d’Uzès (a staunch monarchist and Boulanger supporter) founded the Société des grandes auditions musicales de France, and in 1895 Duchesse d’Uzès was founding member of the Société des instruments anciens.

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of Handel’s Messiah during the 1889 Exhibition, a benefit for the Société philanthropique, she was determined to create her own musical society. Although noblewomen were allowed to organize charity events, normally they were proscribed from having any direct contact with theater directors, conductors, or musicians. In renting the hall and hiring the performers for a public event, Greffulhe had broken through the barriers of her class and gender. Earning a huge profit fueled her ambitions.95 Six months later, she approached the executive committee of the Société nationale, a composers’ organization.96 Suggesting that with her help they could take on larger, more expensive projects, she proposed merging the Société nationale and the Société philanthropique. Her friend Fauré, organist at her church, the Madeleine, and the Société nationale’s secretary, was enthusiastic. Perhaps feeling a threat to his emerging power as the Société nationale’s president, d’Indy, however, was reluctant to take on greater financial responsibilities. He explained that the Société’s statutes made such collaboration impossible.97 Not deterred, Greffulhe gathered friends and family from the world of business and finance, assembled honorary and advisory committees with some of the country’s most prestigious musicians, and then put out a call for subscribers and contributors to what she called the Société des grandes auditions musicales de France (Great Musical Performances Society of France). Her intent, both patriotic and educational in nature, was to “attract all who love art and France” and “to fortify the musical education of everyone from the most humble to the most fortunate.”98 The Société’s grandiose name and her promise to perform “first and foremost great composers from yesteryear”99—complete works never before done in their entirety in France— appealed to titled aristocrats focused on past French glories.100 The patriotic tone of 95.  Anne de Cossé Brissac, La Comtesse Greffulhe (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 84–85. For a more extended discussion of Greffulhe’s musical activities, see Jann Pasler, “Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation,” in The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700– 1914, ed. William Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 221–55, and in id., Writing through Music. 96.  The Société nationale had about 250 members in the 1890s and produced eight or nine concerts per year. Composers were expected to bear the costs of concerts of their music except when their administrative committee decided otherwise. Women were welcome in the society but could not serve on any committees. 97.  Gabriel Fauré to Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, 3 February 1890, and Vincent d’Indy to Greffulhe, 17 January 1890. D’Indy attached the statutes of the Société nationale to this letter to serve as a model for the organization she was conceiving. Comtesse Greffulhe Archives, Archives nationales, Paris (hereafter cited as CGA). 98.  Cited in a review of their first concert in Liberté, 16 April 1890. Clipping in CGA. 99.  Cited in Figaro, 26 May 1890. Clipping in CGA. 100.  Baron Adolphe de Rothschild and the princesse de Scey-Montbéliard, for example, made substantial donations.

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her announcements and her projected French premieres of Berlioz and new French works drew support from republicans. Membership in the Société thus included the same political mixture as that characterizing the Union centrale des arts décoratifs after 1889 and many of the same people. Two monarchists on the Union’s administrative council in the 1880s and 1890s, Charles Ephrussi and the comte de Ganay, served on its administrative council.101 Princesse de Broglie, vice president of its Women’s Committee, also served as a dame patronesse of the Société.102 At the same time, Georges Berger, the republican president of the Union, wrote, “In reading your name as president of the Société des grandes auditions de France, I’m rushing to become a permanent subscriber.”103 Félix Faure, the future French president, interested as he was in any society “able to elevate and ennoble the country,” was enlisted as well.104 The press understood that “this society is not a reunion of dilettantes confined in a corner of our divided social world,” but rather an “eminently national association,” one serving a “public need” and having “public utility.”105 In comparison with the state-supported theaters, which, because of “the apathy of government and the workings of government,” were increasingly considered “useless [inutile] to the artistic cause,” the Société des grandes auditions was also praised by the magazine Art musical for being “eminently useful” and by the monarchist newspaper Le Gaulois explicitly for its “national utility.”106 With such a response, it took the countess only six weeks to raise 163,000 francs—the equivalent of 20 percent of the state’s annual Opéra subsidy and 50 percent of the state’s annual Opéra-Comique subsidy. This overwhelmingly receptive response to a woman who had previously only 101.  Ephrussi was one of the organizers of the First Women’s Exhibition in 1892, and Comte de Ganay was the Union centrale’s vice president in the 1890s. 102.  Albert de Broglie, her brother, was the French prime minister under the Moral Order. 103.  Georges Berger to Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, 7 May 1890, CGA. Perhaps inspired by Greffulhe, recognizing women’s efforts to “realize the beautiful in the useful,” especially “the moral beauty represented by their charitable tendencies,” Berger called on more women to be involved in the arts as an “act of patriotism.” See his “Appel aux femmes françaises,” Revue des arts décoratifs 16 (1896): 97–98. 104. Gabriel Fauré, letter to Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, 13 June 1890, reporting his visit to Félix Faure on Greffulhe’s behalf (CGA). Faure, president of the Republic from 1895 to 1899, evidently thought of himself more as an aristocrat and an emperor than as the bourgeois son of a chair maker. His behavior earned him the nickname “Le Président Soleil [The Sun President].” See Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 596. 105. Liberté, 16 April 1890; Henri Moreno [Henri Heugel], “Semaine théâtrale,” Ménestrel, 13 April 1890, 114. “Il faut que tout Paris contribue au succès de cette fondation éminement française; ce n’est pas une question de personnes en effet; ce n’est pas une question d’école; c’est une question d’utilité publique”(Figaro quoted in Moreno, “Semaine theatrale,” 115). 106.  Art musical, 15 April 1890, 51; Art musical, 31 August 1890, 21; and Gaulois, 24 May 1892.

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run salon concerts at her home begs explanation. She hailed from a powerful family. Greffulhe’s father was the Belgian minister of foreign affairs, and her husband was the wealthy grandson of a man whose financial backing of the Bourbons had led to a title. She had strong connections to both monarchists and republicans—titled aristocrats, the haute bourgeoisie, and the republican establishment. Many appreciated her extraordinary beauty and intelligence, falling under the sway of her charm. Her brother-in-law, Prince d’Arenberg, president of the Société philanthropique, became a member of her administrative committee, as did Prince Pierre de Caraman-Chimay and Prince Edmond de Polignac. Comtesse d’Haussonville (wife of the representative of the comte de Paris), Comtesse de Pourtalès, Princesse Joachim Murat, and many other monarchists agreed to serve as dames patronesses. Given this entourage, Comtesse Greffulhe’s republican political sympathies were perhaps surprising. Yet through her husband’s campaign to become deputy, she had befriended moderate republican political leaders, including Jean Casimir-Perier, another future French president.107 Her interest in all things modern, including symbolist poetry and Wagner, contributed to her reputation as a progressive woman in an era when the “new woman” was rising to demand a greater role in society. The Société des grandes auditions signals the rising power and interest of the aristocracy in the musical world after 1889. Class differences were becoming increasingly fluid, defined more in terms of money than of title. By the end of the century, anyone could buy or assume a title without fear of breaking the law. Concert attendance allowed for the expression of taste and the display of distinction but, with the masses attending concerts and, more rarely, opera certain days a week, the upper classes felt they needed their own venues. Part of Greffulhe’s success came from the allure of elitism and prestige with which her productions were surrounded. The musicians she hired—the Concerts Lamoureux, the Concerts Colonne, and soloists from the Opéra—were first-rate and, as we have seen, Lamoureux had long been a favorite among the elites. That the cost of attending the Société’s concerts was double that of the Colonne’s concerts meant a substantial concentration of wealthy in the audience, undoubtedly also part of the appeal. Calling on fashion, a liminal area between private desire and public display, Greffulhe successfully interested the upper classes in “serious art,” something, as the monarchist music critic Louis de Fourcaud snidely observed, “for which they had rarely had any concern.”108 107.  Casimir-Perier was elected president after Sadi Carnot’s assassination in 1894. 108.  Louis de Fourcaud, “L’Art dans les deux mondes” (13 June 1891). Clipping, CGA.

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From the perspective of its public utility, perhaps more important was the extent to which musical performances became a medium for reconciliation among social elites, a context for transcending political differences. With broad participation in the Société by republicans and monarchists, progressives and reactionaries, their concerts gave social elites a sense of themselves as a group with shared values, not just a class divided by old rivalries or antagonistic to republicans. Attending concerts allowed them to perform a shared identity. This philosophy permeated the Société’s programming. Although some of their early choices may have reflected what works were successful in attracting the elites to musical performances in En­gland (Handel and Bach oratorios), in their original fund-raising letter, Greffulhe underlined her commitment to new French music. She promised to start with the French premiere of Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict, followed by a festival dedicated to Saint-Saëns’s music.109 In 1892, the Société sponsored a competition for two new one- or two-act dramatic works110 and scheduled a production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens. The press appreciated this commitment. Implicitly referring to the suffering of French princes in exile since 1886, Figaro praised the Société’s “public utility” in ending the “exile” of French composers whose operas were premiered abroad.111 On 2 June 1892, the Société showed its support of the Franco-Russian alliance by putting on a concert at the Trocadéro. Gabriel Marie shared the podium with the Muscovite Alexander Ziloti in performing music by Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others. Greffulhe also wished to produce Wagnerian operas, which opera officials were reluctant to support. Encouraged by Minister Léon Bourgeois, in December 1892, the countess requested and received permission from Cosima Wagner to produce the French premiere of Tristan und Isolde at the Opéra-Comique.112 She also proposed to Léon Carvalho, director of the Opéra-Comique, two eighteenth-century 109.  CGA. The Saint-Saëns festival never materialized, nor did a projected performance of Le Déluge after 1900. The composer felt the organization was too international in nature for him to get involved. 110.  According to the announcement in Figaro musical, July 1892, the Société would also produce the winning work. Apparently, this project never materialized. 111.  Among those works cited are Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (Weimar), Massenet’s Hérodiade (Brussels) and Charles Lenepveu’s Velléda (London), ironically all by republicans. Still, the republican editor of Ménestrel did not find that Comtesse Greffulhe’s advisory committee represented enough eclecticism to be a truly national project and feared the esprit de coterie associated with the Société nationale. Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale,” 114–15. 112.  D’Indy advised Greffulhe on how to approach the director of the Opéra-Comique, Carvalho, and suggested singers for each role. For the details on why this never came to pass, see Pasler, “Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur,” 240–41.

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Fig. 92  Société des grandes auditions promotional flyer for the 1893 season. Despite its advertisement for the opera, Cosima Wagner prevented the society from giving the French premiere of Tristan und Isolde until 1899. The society’s conditions of membership are noted at the bottom: founding memberships cost 1,000 francs, or 100 francs annually, with the right to four tickets for each work performed; an annual subscription of 25 francs entitled one to a single ticket for each work.

works—André Grétry’s Les Avares and Pierre Monsigny’s Le Déserteur.113 He agreed to produce them if she both underwrote the performances and subsidized a new production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (fig. 92). With its interest in old and new music, tastes associated with both conservatives and progressives, the Société emerged as a cultural analogue to the political realignment and progressivism of the early 1890s. As musical organizations run by aristocrats grew in strength and number, the presence of their differing agendas began to diffuse the power of the state, its values, and its traditional subsidies. Out of such societies emerged a counterculture to bourgeois culture, a counterforce to the establishment that questioned, challenged, and offered alternatives to state institutions as it occasionally worked with them. In implementing her own agendas, Greffulhe blurred the lines between individual and institution. With its money and connections, the Société des grandes auditions wielded a power resembling that of the state. As such, in vaunting its public utility and promoting its work as patriotic, this music society claimed the prestige associated with the nation. The growth and importance of such music organizations in the 1890s is a little known but significant corollary to the renaissance in French music at the time. Inspired by the patriotic call of their leaders, French elites joined musical societies and attended concerts as never before. People of varying hopes and dreams turned to music not merely as an “absinthe” to help them displace their desire for power or forget their lack of it, but also as a means of imagining change through the metaphor of music. Through Greffulhe, the Société des grandes auditions became a context in which not only gender but also politics, class, and nation could be articulated in new ways.

Revisiting Musique ancienne et moderne In the 1890s, the republicans controlled the government and alliances between traditional adversaries arose, not from the need to tolerate coexistence of conflicting political values, but from the importance of solidarity in face of new threats to the Republic. Under this ralliement, the musical world again created contexts for listeners to explore new relationships between the past and present through musique ancienne and musique moderne. But this time the taste for musique ancienne was 113.  The Théâtre de L’Athenée had performed the latter work in fall 1873, and the OpéraComique on 3 November 1877, but then it was forgotten. See Pougin, Ménestrel, 18 June 1893: 194–96.

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closely linked to the taste for musique moderne. That is, instead of juxtaposing the old and the new as distinct, composers and concert organizers found ways in which the two could be integrated within the same music, metaphors for both the nation under the ralliement and the social integration elites were seeking in French society.114 In some ways, the attraction to Wagner helped motivate this look backward and forward in French music. Wagner challenged French listeners’ perceptions of their musical needs and desires. Addicted to its packaging of the sublime, its excesses, and its delights, social and intellectual elites gravitated to Wagner’s music in increasing numbers. Numerous anti-Wagnerian manifestos of vanquished Boulangists and press headlines like “The Country in Danger” warned of sinister consequences should the Opéra take Wagner into its repertoire. But resistance to Wagner’s music was a losing battle in the 1890s. Large numbers of the elites made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth, as did the most important French composers and conductors, directors of the Paris opera houses, and the future Conservatoire director Théodore Dubois. Many of the first patrons of the Société des grandes auditions were among the earliest such pilgrims; the Polignac and Montesquiou families—with representatives on the society’s first Administrative Committee— sent someone virtually every year. This group and the provincial aristocrats who controlled the regional opera houses made performing Wagner at the Paris Opéra virtually risk-free. Not only could the Opéra administration wait for Wagner’s works to be premiered either in a provincial opera house or in some other Paris theater, paid for with private funding, but the Opéra was guaranteed an audience for Wagner’s music. Between 1891 and 1894, Lohengrin had over a hundred performances at the Opéra, most nights earning the maximum receipts. Wagner was soon perhaps the only composer in France, besides Massenet, whose popularity was assured by market-driven forces, political and aesthetic considerations aside. Wagnermania also forced the Opéra to open its doors to French music inspired by Wagner. Again with the help of Comtesse Greffulhe,115 in December 1893, just after Die Walküre, the Opéra put on Chabrier’s Gwendoline, premiered in Brussels in 1886 and in Lyon that April. Audiences were enthusiastic and Catulle Mendès spoke of the composer, his intensity, and his talent in terms usually reserved for Wagner—“beyond comparison with any other modern musician.”116 Reviewers 114.  For an expanded study of this genre, see Jann Pasler, “Forging French Identity: The Political Significance of la musique ancienne et moderne” (paper presented at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Washington, D.C., 28 October 2005). 115.  Huebner, French Opera, refers to a letter of July 1892 from Greffuhle in which she promoted the work to the new Opéra director (266). 116.  Catulle Mendès, “Emmanuel Chabrier,” Echo de Paris, 27 December 1893.

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noted the Wagnerian references in this Celtic drama to the duo in Tristan, but also underlined Chabrier’s originality and the music’s quintessential French qualities of clarity and sincerity.117 When it came to exploring and defining French identity in other genres, music of the French past emerged as eminently useful, particularly in the context of new music. Marmontel’s manual of singing exercises for second-year music students, which sold 200,000 copies in its first years, begins with an illustrated history of music, including discussion of biographies, instruments, and genres, but then goes on to include excerpts of contemporary music.118 From 1891 to 1893, Figaro musical each month published one hundred pages of music des maîtres anciens ou modernes. This included forgotten works in their original form—“the pure masterpiece”— as well as new, unpublished works.119 The magazine considered these not only in the “public interest,” but also in the “national interest.”120 In addition, along with motets by Palestrina and Victoria, a Kyrie by Lassus, and airs by Grétry, Monsigny, Gluck, and Handel, the newspaper Figaro reproduced new music modeled on old music by contemporary French composers. In 1896, for example, the Conservatoire composer Widor wrote a Composition dans le style ancien expressly for Figaro. Other composers, too, took an interest in such juxtapositions. Under d’Indy’s leadership beginning in 1890 (and with Greffulhe and some of her administrative committee as supporters), the Société nationale increasingly included musique ancienne, particularly Bach, with premieres of new works. Building a relationship to music of the distant past meant articulating a heritage of which contemporary composers were the heirs. As both republicans and conservatives increasingly looked to French tradition as the basis of French cultural identity, the taste for musique ancienne became important in the perception and creation of new works. Young Turks like Debussy 117.  See, e.g., Henry Bauër, “Les Premières Représentations,” Echo de Paris, 29 December 1893, and Scudo, “Nos Théâtres,” Echo du Rhône, 20 April 1893. Having earlier premiered Massenet’s Wagner-influenced Esclarmonde, the Opéra-Comique produced his Werther in 1893, after its premiere in Vienna. For the nature of Wagner’s influence on these works, see Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 62–78, and Steven Huebner, “Massenet and Wagner: Bridling the Influence,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, 3 (1993): 223–38. 118.  A. Marmontel, La Deuxième Année de musique, solfèges et chants (Paris: Colin, 1891). 119.  In February 1891, Figaro musical published music for a ballet, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, performed by a women’s orchestra in Louis XV–period clothing; in October 1891, a Saint-Saëns minuet and Rameau gavotte; in October 1892, Vieilles gavottes françaises; and in September 1893, a Satie Gnossienne, as if dances from an imaginary past, alongside bourrées, contes d’autrefois, and gavottes (see ex. 22). 120.  Introductory statement, Figaro musical, October 1891, 1.

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and Ravel, popular composers like Louis Ganne and Desormes,121 and even the powerful establishment figure Saint-Saëns borrowed the forms of musique ancienne, clothing them in modern rhythms and harmonies. Saint-Saëns’s dance suite for piano (1892) features a prelude and fugue, a menuet, a gavotte, and a gigue, which, given the cover image, suggests the eighteenth century (fig. 93). Rees compares Saint-Saëns’s menuet to a waltz, and his gavotte to a polka, as in Godard’s 1887 suite, with its polka and waltz.122 The gavotte adopts the meter and preference for upbeats in eighteenth-century gavottes, but on the second beat, like the Sarabande of d’Indy’s Suite, emphasizes seventh and ninth chords. At the same time, unlike in d’Indy’s Suite, the reference here seems to be Bach—considered at the time to be the father of Western music123—perhaps more than music of the French Ancien Regime. In the gigue, Saint-Saëns imitates many Bach gigues in triple meter that start off with an extended, almost rhapsodic solo in the right hand, followed by its imitation in two other parts, as if in a fugue, and in part 2 present the theme in the left hand at the dominant and with melodic inversion. A crucial difference, however, comes in the nature of Saint-Saëns’s theme, which traces chordal arpeggios. When in counterpoint with itself, this results in chordal movement more than linear arabesques. Moreover, the imitation in part 2 takes place on the tritone, that is, from the major triad on C to a diminished triad on F#. Composers at the time took inspiration from old vocal music as well. The Catholic composer Charles Bordes apparently modeled his “Madrigal à la musique” on a Palestrina madrigal.124 During this period, both conservatives and republicans also took part in making new editions of early music. D’Indy prepared one of Monsigny’s Le Déserteur for Greffulhe; Saint-Saëns worked on a revised score of Gluck’s Armide and edited music by Lully and Charpentier, both performed in 1892, and later 121.  In his Suite bergamasque (ca. 1890), Debussy included a passepied (advertised by the publisher as a pavane) and a minuet. The passepied may have been inspired by one in Delibes’s Airs de danses dans le style ancien (1882; 1885). Besides his Menuet antique (1895), perhaps inspired by Chabrier’s Menuet pompeux (1881), Ravel also wrote his Pavane pour une infante défunte (1900), commissioned by Princesse Edmond de Polignac and performed often at salons. See also Godard, Suite de danses anciennes et modernes (1887), dances by the popular composers Louis Ganne (Pavane à danser [1892]) and Desormes (Pavane Henry III [1895]), and dance suites dans le style ancien by Albéric Magnard (1889) and Georges Enesco (1898). 122.  Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns, 290. 123.  According to Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach: L’Amour de la muique en France au XIX siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2000), Bach was one of Saint-Saéns’s favorites, and Saint-Saëns was among those who had most transcribed Bach’s music at the time, including two gavottes (85–86). 124.  These two madrigals were performed on 15 February 1896 at the Société nationale, their texts juxtaposed in the program.

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Fig. 93  Saint-Saëns, Suite pour le piano, op. 90, cover (1892). In submitting this Suite to his publisher, Auguste Durand, Saint-Saëns asked that the cover make reference to the period of Louis XV with a female musician playing the harpsichord (letter of 14 No­vember 1891 from Algiers, Bibliothèque Gustav Mahler, Paris).

Rameau.125 Reviving interest in a work popular in the mid 1870s, Gabriel Fauré wrote new incidental music for Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Recognizing the merits of this emerging genre for a range of composers, in May 1894, the Société des grandes auditions sponsored a particularly interesting program of recent French music in the newly opened Palais d’hiver, a giant greenhouse with moveable chairs, at the Jardin zoologique. Greffulhe hired Colonne and five famous opera singers (fig. 94). Colonne most likely chose Penthésilée, the new symphonic poem by the young radical republican Bruneau that his orchestra had premiered in 1892. The rest of the program, from the repertoire of the Société nationale, reflects the deepening influence of musique ancienne and its utility for composers. Included were works written in old modes (Pierre de Bréville’s Hymne de Vénus, in the Phrygian mode), as well as old forms (Fauré’s madrigal and Pavane for orchestra, Charles Bordes’s Dansons la gigue, and Magnard’s Suite dans le style ancien). These suggest a kind of musical ralliement between the aesthetic values of past and present. In 1895, as radical politicians called for solidarity in the populace and more 125.  According to Sabina Ratner, “Saint-Saëns,” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie et al. (New York: Grove, 2001), “Saint-Saëns restored Lully’s music to Le Sicilien, ou L’amour peintre, staged at the Comédie-Française in 1892, and Charpentier’s music to Le Malade imaginaire, performed at the Grand-Théâtre, Paris, later that year.”

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Fig. 94  The program of a concert of modern French works sponsored by the Société des grandes auditions at the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation, 29 May 1894. Promenade concerts, free with admission, were held five afternoons a week at the zoo, beginning in March 1893, in “a huge salon,” 50 by 25 meters, “that gives the impression of eternal springtime since the temperature is always mild, the trees always green, and the big plants always full of new flowers.” This performance would have been unusual in that it was neither organized by the zoo nor put on by its in-house orchestra.

Fig. 95  Concerts de l’Opéra program, 9 February 1896, published by L’Illustration.

tolerance of differences, the musical establishment addressed this taste as well as criticism that so many French premieres were taking place abroad. As in 1869 and 1880, the Concerts de l’Opéra in 1895 and 1896 presented a series of programs featuring both musique ancienne and musique moderne.126 Held on Sunday afternoons, these were billed as new music concerts featuring premieres by young as well as established composers, Prix de Rome winners alongside those who had never won the prize, as suggested by the photos on the covers (fig. 95). Each performance consisted of three parts. At the center, danses anciennes took up all of part 2, a metaphor 126.  Two young composers, Georges Marty and Paul Vidal, conducted these concerts. The latter won the conducting position at the Opéra. See Elinor Olin, “Les Concerts de l’Opéra: New Music at the Monument Garnier,” 19th-Century Music 16, 3 (Spring 1993): 253–66.

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Table 4.  Concerts at the Opéra and the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation, 1895–96 Concerts de l’Opéra 29 December 1895

Zoo concerts 29 December 1895



Part 1

Le Borne, Le Temps de guerre, première audition

Rossini, Guillaume Tell, overture

Piccini, Iphigénie en Tauride, air, recitative Marty, Le Duc de Ferrare, extract, première audition

Part 2: Danses anciennes

Rameau, Zoroastre, sarabande

Delibes, Airs de danses dans le style ancien, gaillarde, [pavane], Scène du bouquet, Lesquercarde, madrigal, passepied

Fauré, Pavane Lully, Ballet du Roi, gavotte

Monsigny, chaconne, passepied

Handel, Minuet in D Rameau, Dardanus, rigodon Rameau, Castor et Pollux, passepied



Part 3

Pierné, Nuit de Noël 1870, première audition

Gounod, Hyme à Sainte Cécile

Spontini, La Vestale, act 2 finale

Meyerbeer, Struensée, polonaise Gounod, Polyeucte, orchestral suite (continued)

for their importance (table 4). Up to twenty dancers with four soloists in period costumes performed these dances. Fauré’s and Paladilhe’s pavanes came between dances by Rameau, Destouches, and Lully, as if modern aesthetic equivalents. Possibly organizers counted on the fashion for these dances to attract audiences. And they were right. If some reviewers felt their appeal was too “decorative,” they also noted that audiences asked for encores of the dances in part 2, finding them the “most exquisite” part of the program because of the “elegant French choreography” that recalled the “aristocratic formula of old court dances.”127 Other 127.  H. Fierens-Gevaert, “Chronique de la semaine: Les Concerts de l’Opéra,” Guide Musical, 24 November 1895, 893–94.

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Table 4  (continued) Concerts de l’Opéra 9, 16 February 1896

Zoo concerts 9 February 1896



Part 1

Silver, Poème carnavalesque, première audition

Bizet, Patrie, overture

Lefebvre, Sainte Cécile, première audition Huë, La Belle au bois dormant, première   audition

Part 2: Danses anciennes

Destouches, sarabande

Rameau

Paladilhe, Patrie, pavane

Campra

Rameau, Les Fêtes d’Hébé, musette

Grétry

Gluck, Orphée, menuet Rameau, Castor et Pollux, passepied



Part 3

Bourgault-Ducoudray, L’Enterrement d’Ophélie

Saint-Saëns, Concerto for piano in g

Bourgault-Ducoudray, Rapsodie cambodgienne Gluck, Alceste, act 1, scene 2

Lefort, Suite à la hongroise, violin and orchestra

Grandval, Mazeppa, triumphal chorus

Rubenstein, melody in F Liszt, Rapsodie no. 6 Bizet, Carmen, suite for orchestra

juxtapositions, more thematic, were equally provocative, such as on 17 November 1895, when an excerpt of d’Indy’s new opera Fervaal (with Fervaal ready to die to save the country) was premiered alongside the prelude of Franck’s Rédemption, a scene from Gluck’s Alceste, and Gounod’s Mors et Vita.128 These performances were so successful that twenty-one were given over two years. They also had imitators. On the same Sunday afternoons, the Jardin zoologique structured its 128.  With another shared theme, the concert on 29 December 1895 began with the premiere of Fernand Le Borne’s Le Temps de guerre and ended with Gabriel Pierné’s Nuit de Noël 1870. Set in wartime on Christmas eve, both recall a distant church bell, the former signaling triumph and peace, the latter initiating a moment of “fraternal appeasement” between French and German soldiers, who simultaneously sing an old carol on the battlefield.

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orchestral concerts in the same manner, juxtaposing old dances and French contemporary music, albeit without many premieres (see table 4). As at the Opéra, contemporary dances dans le style ancien, such as Delibes’s Airs de danses, appeared uniquely in part 2 with other old dances, such as ones by Rameau, Campra, and Grétry, whereas other recent music came in parts 1 and 3. This kind of programmatic imitation recalls the performance of Parsifal’s prelude by three major Paris orchestras on the same Sunday afternoon in October 1882. Numerous concert organizations recognized the appeal of such juxtapositions.129 In 1891 the Société de géographie performed musique ancienne on period instruments alongside musique moderne. Also in 1891, the Société de musique nouvelle presented concerts historiques, with Bach, Destouches, and Schütz next to Scriabin, Massenet, and other living composers. Such juxtapositions could also be found at the Concerts Colonne,130 in concerts at the Théâtre Ambigu in 1897–98, in salon concerts such as those of the marquise de Queylard in 1896, and in the concerts populaires de musique vocale ancienne et moderne of the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais. Possibly inspired by the séances historiques the Concerts d’Harcourt offered on Thursdays in 1895, the Concerts Colonne began a new series on Thursday afternoons from 1897 to 1901, conceived explicitly as a “music history course.” Part 1 was dedicated to musique ancienne and part 2 to musique moderne, with Beethoven dividing the periods. Three new concert societies specializing in this were also founded—the Société des qua­ tuors anciens et modernes (1891), La Sonate ancienne et moderne (1896–97), and the Cercle artistique de musique ancienne et moderne (1898). Interest in musique ancienne and new music inspired by the style ancien continued through the end of the century. The elegance and grace of this music reinforced the mœurs of the upper classes and became associated with a certain fashionable snobisme.131 Noting that composers such as Rameau were becoming popular among the middle class, in 1896 Pougin referred to his music as bon marché (cheap), while still a significant source of national pride (fig. 96).132 The taste for this music 129.  This was equally true of poetry, as with the Samedis populaires de poésie ancienne et moderne, organized by Gustave Kahn and Catulle Mendès in 1897. 130.  On 24 January 1892, at the Concerts Colonne, Louis Diemer played Couperin and Rameau on the harpsichord surrounded by premieres of new works by Pauline Viardot and Benjamin Godard. 131.  Adolphe Jullien, Journal des débats, 24 May 1896, criticized audiences at concerts of the Société des instruments anciens for applauding this music like a paid claque. See Catrina Flint de Médicis, “Nationalism and Early Music at the French Fin de Siècle: Three Case Studies,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 1, 2 (2004), 47, and Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 91–96. 132.  Arthur Pougin, referring to Rameau in Ménestrel, 24 May 1896, cited in Flint, “Nationalism and Early Music,” 51.

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Fig. 96  Engraving of Rameau on the cover of La Musique populaire, 25 January 1890.

grew so strong that between 1898 and 1903, L’Illustration published numerous such pieces. They ranged from sarabandes, minuets, and gavottes—one of them a pantomime-mélodie with photographs of how it should be danced—to medieval carols, a fifteenth-century song mise en musique by Pauline Viardot, a “modern” madrigal as well as one dans le style ancien in d’Indy’s Etranger, and other music dans le style ancien such as in Enesco’s Suite, Tiersot’s Andromède, and the prelude of Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire. Debussy’s Sarabande appears in their 9 November 1901 issue, to be performed avec une élégance grave et lente. By 1902, musique ancienne had become a criterion for judging contemporary music, including that of Debussy and Dukas.133 Fascination in the late 1880s with old dances as nostalgic reminders of the Ancien Régime thus intensified in the 1890s. Increasing interest in the past led republicans and royalists alike to search for ancestors long before the eighteenth century. Many embraced Palestrina as the origin of Western harmony, Gregorian chant as the origin of Western music, and ancient Greece as the origin of Western civilization. Incorporating these diverse definitions of musique ancienne made old music relevant to a wide range of contemporary musical concerns. The performance of musique ancienne with musique moderne remained integral to many French concerts, from those of the Schola Cantorum and Princesse de Polignac’s mid-century salon to Boulez’s Domaine musical in the 1950s.134 These juxtapositions root French identity in a relationship to the past. They also suggest the important role music can play in negotiating differences over that past and in coming to agreement on its value. In this sense, ancien is not just what the French inherited, but also what they made for themselves of their inheritance. At the same 133.  For example, Louis Laloy, in “La Musique moderne,” Revue musicale, October 1902, compares Debussy’s text setting to those of Gregorian chant, early motets, Bach chorales, and Gluck’s drama. 134.  This fashion continued in garden parties at Versailles and the Bois de Boulogne organized by the Sociéte des grandes auditions in 1908 and 1909. In her “Performing Autonomy: Modernist Historiographies and the Concerts of Nadia Boulanger” (paper presented at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Washington, D.C., 30 October 2005) and her “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993), Jeanice Brooks discusses a similar organization of Boulanger’s concerts for the princess, for example, in pairing Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem with Heinrich Schütz’s Auferstehung in 1936 and with excerpts from Rameau and Monteverdi in 1937 (441–45). Jesus Agila, in Le Domaine musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine (Paris: Fayard, 1992), discusses how Boulez chose to pair old with new works with a view to suggesting the “roots of contemporary music.” Interested in their “formal rigor” and “complexity,” in the 1950s, he juxtaposed his own Structures for piano, book 1, with Bach’s Art of the Fugue; Stockhausen’s Kontrapunkte with Bach’s Musical Offering; Stravinsky’s Symphony of Wind Instruments with Gabrieli’s Canzone; Nono’s Canti with the Mass of Notre Dame (152–54).

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time, juxtapositions within the same work imply an “encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present,” as Homi Bhabha writes of border cultures in the postcolonial world. Their purpose is not just to express continuity of past and present, whether for social or aesthetic reasons, but to renew the past, “refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.” For the French, then as today, this music suggests that “the ‘past-present’ can be part of the necessity, not [just] the nostalgia, of living.”135 As such, musique ancienne et moderne represents and embodies an identity that is never singular, even when construed as a prescription for the future.

e If concern about decadence and commitment to the new could be found among radical republicans as well as moderate and progressive monarchists, if both the Left and the Right looked to the past to revive ideals and refine aesthetic identity, and if both understood the potential for music to further cultural diplomacy, particularly with France’s allies, then some aspects of modernism can be understood as widely embraced in French culture of the 1890s. The public at large was hooked on l’inédit—the unpublished, the previously unheard, although this often meant more of the same in new clothes. The whims and seductions of fashion kept competition lively and the musical market thriving. And if the poetic conception and musical realization of Debussy’s opera differed too much from what most of the public was accustomed to, the chercheurs de l’inédit appreciated how works like Pelléas articulated French values in new ways. As the next decade proceeded, Camille Mauclair went so far to call the French “mania for the new” a “prejudice,” particularly in the years before World War I.136 Anything “new” would sell, as if innovations would give the French an edge in conflict with their neighbors. In some ways, fashion posed a challenge to art as utility unless “art constitutes in and of itself a superior form of utility.”137 The struggle over French identity, however, was resolved neither by political alliances nor by various ways of negotiating a role for past values in the present. New private institutions challenged institutional sources of republican power— 135.  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 7. 136.  On the marketing of modernism by fashion, see Pasler, Writing through Music, 411– 12; Nancy Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), chap. 1; and Mary Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 137.  Adrien Mithouderd, “Déclaration,” Occident, February 1902, 120.

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especially centralization and a hierarchy of genres. Some promoted alternatives. Conflict remained, deepening the fault lines of difference although hostility between competing groups contributed to building cooperation, cohesion, and solidarity within them. While both taught music from the past, conflicting notions of progress even permeated the educational philosophies of the two principal music schools. The Conservatoire’s director, Dubois, espoused the idea of art as evolutionary, with each step forward necessarily built on the preceding one. By contrast, d’Indy, in his speech at the inauguration of the Schola Cantorum in 1900, explained art as a spiral that always rises, but turns back on itself to propel itself forward.138 Ironically, perhaps because of d’Indy’s politics and his desire to root contemporary music in relationship to the distant French past through chant and the chansons populaires, the Schola did not take a lead in the avant-garde. Still, for others, such as Debussy, aristocratic pretensions and the need for distinction strongly influenced the forms modernism took in France. As we reflect on how the modernist aesthetic grew dominant, it is important to understand whose and which interests it addressed, as well as what was left behind.

138.  For fuller discussion of these differences, see Pasler, “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” 389–416. Albert Lavignac, La Musique et les musiciens français (Paris: Delagrave, 1895), also writes of art as an “ascending spiral” that moves closer and closer to its ideal (439). The idea of a structural spiral recalls cyclical form in the music of d’Indy’s teacher César Franck. However, it describes Debussy’s music more than Franck’s, in that Debussy’s return to musical material never involves exact repetition. Roy Howat, in Debussy in Proportion (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), argues that Debussy’s form is sometimes spiral in his use of Golden Section proportions. For cyclical form in his late sonatas, see Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

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12 • The Dynamics of Identity

and the Struggle for Distinction

Despite what musical juxtapositions of the old and the new might imply about common values in France, the notion of a common Self at the end of the nineteenth century remained painfully elusive. The republican project of composing citizens was an attempt to give people the desire and the mechanisms to “find the same self in myself and in others . . . to encounter myself as what I share with others.” The “common will” as the “expression of my common self”—Rousseau’s definition of political society1—implies the unity and coherence of a common identity. Such a concept was crucial in a society whose people thought of the Self in terms of its distinction from the Other. I have shown how music contributed to a common Self through stimulating shared physical and imaginary experiences, how changes in musical tastes and practices expressed the dynamic nature of national identity under democracy. However, French identity was more complex than so far addressed, and not entirely resolvable through idealistic ambitions, education, new histories, or music and performances reconciling the Ancien Régime and the Revolution, the old and the new. Moreover, as monarchist political power receded and the empire expanded, the national self-imagining took on new forms. To rise to the challenge of world leadership and aspire to new levels of national glory, the French had to come to agreement on who they were as a nation. Not only did fierce competition with their imperialist neighbors call for it, so did rancorous divisions within French society. The Dreyfus Affair was tearing apart families and long-term friendships divided over anti-Semitism, traditional France versus progressive secularism, and, for some, the needs of the state versus the rights of the individual. Was France a collective community whose needs and desires were addressed through various forms of public utility that spoke to the common interest? Or was it fast becoming a nation of individuals pursuing their 1.  See chapter 1, n. 56, above, and Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (1994), 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

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own interests?2 On what basis could a people so diverse think of themselves as sharing any identity? Radicals like Léon Bourgeois called out for solidarity. But on what basis could this be experienced? What bridged the public and the private in ways that brought people together? Those still focused on retrieving the lost provinces put their faith in militarism, as they would need consensus to return to war. The theme of revanche, promoted in everything from children’s books and salon songs to public monuments and opera, continually reminded citizens of an unresolved wound to every French man and woman’s pride. 3 Catholicism still linked a majority of the population, but its utility in the secular world remained widely questioned. After anarchist attacks, ordinary people who would normally have experienced their commonality in everyday life became fearful, especially of crowds. Intellectuals did little to help. Fanning this angst, many decried the general decadence of French society. Music played a significant role both in engaging people in the debates and in giving them a medium in which to enact their connections dynamically. As the French increasingly looked to the origin of their nation for the foundation of what they shared as a people—racial and cultural origins that long predated the eighteenth century—music helped them come to grips with a history characterized, not by homogeneous coherence, but by invasions, conflict, and accommodation. Were they only the product of assimilation, their music the juste milieu between Italian and German music, or was there something distinct that could be heard in their music, traces of predecessors who resisted assimilation? If gender differences and female allegories continued to help clarify what the people valued as a nation, what happened in music when extraordinary resistance to the French in West Africa by the Dahomean amazons and the emergence of the “new woman” threw into question traditional gender hierarchies? And what impact did elites’ need 2.  The reactionary Academician Ferdinand Brunetière complained in Education et Instruction (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1895) that instruction was increasingly becoming the “contradiction” of education, devolving into something for “the sole utility of the person studying.” Competitions were partly to blame in that they encouraged individualism, the “victory of individual trajectories over social trajectories.” To solve this problem, he recommended teaching God again in schools as among those ideas that “bring us together and unite us” (20, 25, 29, 34, 51, 59). Calling on reform of pedagogical methods, Léon Bourgeois reiterated that the goal of instruction should not be to fill the mind with knowledge, but to make it capable of acquiring knowledge and judgment, and that the “effect of education should be to give men the habit of thinking about humanity” (L’Education de la démocratie française: Discours prononcés de 1890 à 1896 [Paris: Edouard Cornély, 1897], 118, 163, 171). 3.  Richard Thomson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889–1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 223.

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for distinction from the masses have on their musical tastes, their relationship to music, and the meanings they heard in it? Such questions lead us to examine how, through their music, the French, particularly at the end of the century, engaged with identity from the perspective of race, gender, and class. Given the complexity of these issues and how they changed over time, my analyses here are intended to be suggestive more than definitive—windows onto huge fields—serving to introduce my next books, wherein I take up these subjects in more depth.

R ace and French History In chapter 7 and elsewhere, I have argued that music, musical instruments, performing situations, and images of these—often associated with race, ethnicity, class, gender, and culture—helped people become aware of their positions in the debates about identity and nation. In the 1890s, as the French were attempting to expand their empire in West Africa and Madagascar, musical images in magazines such as L’Illustration reinforced a sense of superiority in their readers. Western instruments undergoing innovations—such as Pleyel’s double piano (1898) and the gramophone (1898)—were juxtaposed with African drums and woodwinds that seemed primitive by comparison and unchanging over generations. 4 All French could be proud of such advances and the civilization that made them possible. So, too, of French music. In Conservatoire speeches in the 1890s, Georges Berger saw French music as deriving its verve from the “genius” of the French “race,” just as French wines derived their vigor from the French earth. Georges Leygues later told students to “do battle for the glory of the race.”5 An imperialist construct and product of colonial consciousness, race was understood to signify culture, people, or nation as well as connection to one’s ancestors. While abroad it could be used to denigrate peoples perceived as inferior, at home, it meant something to protect. When used in conjunction with language, customs, morals, and artistic practices, race suggested the existence of national characteris4.  Jann Pasler, “The Utility of Musical Instruments in the Racial and Colonial Agendas of Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129, 1 (Spring 2004): 24–76, esp. 72–73. 5.  Georges Berger, Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beauxarts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 6 août 1897 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897); Georges Leygues, Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 4 août 1894 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1894), and Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 1 août 1901 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1901).

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tics. It engendered self-esteem. As such, race was useful not just in distinguishing the Self from the Other, but also in understanding if there was anything unified or coherent in the nation. Debates were complicated and contradictory then as today. Both Renan and Taine saw an aptitude for philosophy and science, a love of the beautiful and the sublime, and a capacity for political and military organization as distinctive of the French race. In the 1890s, Gustave Le Bon popularized the idea that the soul of a race is reflected in its beliefs and traditions—“the inheritance of all its ancestors”—and that the arts manifest the soul of a civilization, which, as a polygenist, he construed as fixed. 6 The question of the soul functioned as a synonym of race, particularly when comparing the French soul with the German one. However, not everyone agreed. Saint-Saëns considered the soul an invention, and thinking, something that could be influenced by nature and such things as alcohol.7 For the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, race connoted the collective consciousness of a people, dependent on their past memories, but the “daughter, not the mother, of its acquired characteristics.” Disciples of Frédéric Le Play likewise saw race not as “a cause, but a consequence”: “the roads that peoples have followed” created their diversity. 8 Underlying all this were fierce disagreements between monogenists and polygenists, republicans and monarchists, over the merits of assimilation at home and abroad. Who were the French, and could they, through their laws and customs, “elevate” their colonized peoples? Or did inherent racial differences prevent the impact of democracy? History taught that resistance is always a part of the story, that if assimilation promotes growth, resistance is necessary to protect identity.9 If most French agreed that race differentiated them as a nation, they struggled with what constituted their “distinguishing features.” Artistic practices had enormous utility in defining these, in part because the instincts of a race were thought to affect the nation’s artistic progress.10 Yet what constituted national style depended on how these attributes were interpreted and the purposes to which they were 6.  Ernest Renan, in Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1863), 502–3, Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, 1876–96), and Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples (1894; New York: Stechert, 1924), 37, 126. 7.  Camille Saint-Saëns, Problèmes et mystères (Paris: Flammarion, 1894). 8.  Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois d’imitation (Paris: Alcan, 1890), 21n1. See also Tarde and Ed­­ mund Demolins, cited in Pierre-André Taguieff, The Force of Prejudice: Racism and Its Doubles, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 75. 9.  For an extended study of these issues, see Jann Pasler, “Theorizing Race in 19th-Century France: Music as Emblem of Identity,” Musical Quarterly 89, 4 (Winter 2006): 459–504. 10.  Antoine Marmontel, Eléments d’esthétique musicale et considérations sur le beau dans les arts (Paris: Heugel, 1884), 418.

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put. Class played an important role. In the 1880s, as we have seen, members of the social and political elite in the Union centrale des arts décoratifs, in looking to the aristocratic French past, considered elegance and grace as quintessentially French. Similarly, folklorists, studying old poetry and indigenous popular songs for clues about the common people and the taste and customs of earlier times, also encountered lightness, charm, and grace, albeit in naïve forms. They saw in these songs models of “simplicity and clarity” as well as “moral values” of continuing relevance: “gaiety for those living in constant misery, idealism for those overcome by reality.”11 In the 1890s, the fashion for Wagner and Ibsen led to the use of vague, but starkly opposed notions: south versus north, sun versus fog, clarity versus mystery. To combat the powerful influence of Wagner’s music—what Debussy called “an unacceptable formula for our race,” musicians were encouraged to cultivate “clarity, elegance, and sincerity of expression” in French music as qualities “inherent in the race.”12 Calling on the language of colonialism, Bruneau both assumes a consensus and allows for foreign influence: “Our music must change just like the rest, provided it remains French and applies to the particular genius of our race the international conquests from which it has both the right and the duty to benefit.”13 Preoccupation with race had an important impact on French perception of their past and made the very notion of identity complex and troubling. In his 1892 essay on the origins of the “Marseillaise,” Julien Tiersot describes the war between “revolutionary France” and “monarchical Europe” as a “war of races.”14 Here the music scholar’s focus on the conflict between other Europeans and the 11.  Gabriel Vicaire, “Nos idées sur le traditionnisme,” Revue des traditions populaires, 25 July 1886, 189; “Les Chansons populaires au Cercle Saint-Simon,” ibid., 26 February 1887, 138. 12.  Albert Lavignac, La Musique et les musiciens français (Paris: Delagrave, 1895), 432; Debussy, Revue musicale S.I.M., 1 November 1913, reproduced in Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 241. Likewise, in order for French composers not to be “taken over” by German influences, the music critic Jean d’Udine advised, “We must reconcile the qualities of the Latin races and those of the North” (“Les Grands Concerts,” Courrier musical, 1 January 1902). See also Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse on Music (1870–1914),” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001), 80. 13.  Alfred Bruneau encouraged French composers to do lyric drama à la française, that is, with clarity and logic (“La Jeune Musique française,” Figaro musical, January 1892, 5). As Steven Huebner points out in “Naturalism and Supernaturalism in Alfred Bruneau’s Le Rêve,” Cambridge Opera Journal 11, 1 (March 1999), Bruneau called his own collaboration with Zola a drame lyrique, but depicting “lived experience and celebrating its ‘real life’ and ‘humanity’ ” (81). See also Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14.  Julien Tiersot, “Rouget de Lisle, Chapter II, La Marseillaise (suite),” Ménestrel, 17 April 1892, 121.

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French, joined in their singing of the “Marseillaise,” deflects attention away from France’s internal war between the monarchy and the people. But if race could help the French think of themselves as a people, it also meant they had to come to grips with being a “mixed” race. Celts, Gauls, Romans, and Franks, southerners and northerners, the people and the nobility, colonized peoples and émigrés, each formed part of the fabric of identity developed over the centuries. Some French, particularly republicans, saw these cultural collisions as nourishing, inducing progress; others, especially those nostalgic for the Ancien Régime, insisted on certain continuities as responsible for “the genius of the race.” In this context, music, in its ability to embody and recall the past, was understood as particularly useful. It could shed light on various racial myths embedded in French identity. Henry Lavoix fils opens his 1891 history of French music with the assertion, “Each people has the music associated with its genius.” Borrowing from foreign schools can “enrich” its artistic heritage or have negative effects, but music “always keeps the mark of [a people’s] taste, tendencies, and, in a word, race.” Already in his first chapter, however, the notion of race is hardly simple. Pointing to the “successive upheavals endured by populations living between the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the ocean” and undoubtedly aware of histories by Amédée Thierry, Henri Martin, and Jules Michelet on the contributions of various groups to French identity,15 he notes, “Each people who lived in Gaul . . . left traces of their passage in the music as in the language.” Because the Gauls were “crushed by their conquerors and then became Romans,” leaving little behind of their art and music, Lavoix looks first to the Celts. Although they practiced the oral tradition, Druid bards left some “primitive music,” including the “oldest melody of Gallic or Celtic origin.” As for other groups, Lavoix points to musical instruments. From the Greeks and Romans came lyres, cithares, flutes, trumpets, drums, and organs; from the Celts and Gauls, harps and the crowth, a predecessor of the violin; from the Gallo-Romans, the pipe organ.16 They document layers of assimilation, supporting the notion that France, the “fruit of conquest,” emerged from the successful integration of outsiders and their various influences.17 15.  Amédée Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois (Paris: Didier, 1859); Henri Martin, Histoire de France (1844; Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1874); Jules Michelet, Histoire de France (Paris: Lacroix, 1876). 16.  Henri Lavoix fils, La Musique française (Paris: Picard, 1891), 6, 15–16, 30–33. 17.  Eugen Weber, “Gauls versus Franks: Conflict and Nationalism,” in Nationhood and Nationalism in France, ed. Robert Tombs (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 15. An excellent summary of the debates over when and with which people the history of France began can be found in Krzysztof Pomian, “Francs et Gaulois,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, III: Les France, vol. 1: Conflits et partages, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 41–105.

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If France was the product of assimilation, of ancient Greek and Roman traditions through the Gauls, then of German traditions through the Franks, some saw this as part of their strength as a people. Paul Broca, a polygenist and the founder of French anthropology, considered France an example of “eugenesic hybridity,” the result of mixing that did not lead to degeneration or lack of vigor and virility, but instead was “indefinitely prolific.”18 Republicans looked to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome as predecessors of their republic, Greco-Roman ideas as the source of all enlightened thought. Fustel de Coulanges, historian at the Sorbonne, began his six volumes on the history of French political institutions with the Roman conquest. He, like Martin, saw the French as sons of the Gauls by their birth and character, of the Romans by their education. In addition to the notion of the public interest, Romans had brought national unity and centralized government, order and discipline, to a diverse people of various origins and languages who lived in constant instability.19 Important from the perspective of the model this suggested for French colonialism, Coulanges argued that it was not that the Romans demanded submission and obedience, but that the Gauls were smart enough to recognize that civilization was “better than barbarism.” If they became Romans “not by blood, but by institutions, customs, language, arts, beliefs, and all ways of thinking,” it was because these allowed for more freedom and more progress. In any case, since the Gauls “belonged to the same great race as the Greeks and Romans . . . Roman civilization was not foreign, it was that of their race.”20 Such ideas helped shape the thinking of republicans in the early Third Republic and returned, in an 1890 edition, to remind the French of what they owed to these predecessors. French archaeological expeditions at the time, particularly at Delphi, the discovery of an ancient Greek “Hymn to Apollo” in 1893, and French support for reviving the first modern Olympics in 1896 brought renewed public attention to the connections between France and ancient Greece. While Puvis de Chavannes painted images recalling the classical beauty of the Greeks, Saint-Saëns’s music in the 1890s echoed the concern that embracing classical traditions could help counteract decadence. 21 The fiercely independent Saint-Saëns believed that artists should look for nourishment, not only in their 18.  Paul Broca, Recherches sur l’hybridité animale en général et sur l’hybridité humaine en particulier (Paris: Claye, 1860), 609–17. 19.  Martin, Histoire de France, 203; Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1875), 3. 20.  Coulanges, Histoire des institutions, 1: 137–38. 21.  Saint-Saëns’s interest in ancient Greece and Rome might have been encouraged by his regular séjours in North Africa, which some settlers saw as originally part of a Latin Mediter­ ranean diaspora. See chapter 7, n. 5, above.

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Fig. 97  The Théâtre antique in Orange, L’Illustration, 11 August 1894. The Théâtre antique d’Orange in southern France, the best-preserved ancient Roman theater in Europe, was restored in the nineteenth century. Its over 100-meter façade contributes to the theater’s excellent acoustics, and it can hold as many as 10,000 spectators. In 1894, Saint-Saëns contributed a “Hymne à Pallas Athénée” to the festival there, and in 1901, he conceived his opera Les Barbares for it. Today the theater hosts an opera season each July called Les Chorégies.

dreams, but also in “the living record of the past.”22 He composed work after work based on ancient Greek tragedies or Greek myths—Phryné, a comedy from fourth-century b.c.e. Athens, performed at the Opéra-Comique in 1893, incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone at the Comédie-Française in 1893 and later at the ancient Roman theater in Orange, and “Hymne à Pallas Athénée” written for the festival at Orange in 1894 (fig. 97). Through simplicity of means and the beauty of forms, he suggested the importance of Greek culture and its ongoing relevance to contemporary French society. Chant-like declamation and choral unison singing embodied his understanding of Greek mousike–, words whose rhythms implied dance steps as well as musical declamation. On the front page of Figaro, the composer explained how the producers of Antigone had rejected Mendelssohn’s incidental music as being “too modern.” He saw the play as an occasion to write 22.  Emile Baumann, Camille Saint-Saëns et “Déjanire” (brochure extracted from the Nouvelle Revue; Paris: Durand, 1900), 7.

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music that did not depend on the “seductive resources” to which listeners were accustomed. If the choruses “slowed down or dampened the action,” this was to be expected. 23 After seeing how Le Rouet d’Omphale, frequently performed, was praised in the 1890s for its “clarity and simplicity that constitute the Greek genius,”24 in 1898, Saint-Saëns composed a third work about Hercules, Déjanire (1898), music for a tragedy by Louis Gallet based on Sophocles and Seneca. Emile Baumann, in an extensive review, compared its melodies to “the anonymous songs coming from the beginning of the race,” the music “pure and wise,” although he does not accept the idea that Greek music could interject “new blood,” being too tied to “the soul of the old Orient.” Saint-Saëns uses the Aeolian mode in the first act and borrows popular tunes from contemporary Greece for Hercules’ wedding; however, with his “incorruptible blood” complementing simplicity of means, other themes are “so nobly balanced that they become the image of order and strength” (ex. 27a and b). As Bauman sees it, Saint-Saëns is thoroughly “Gallo-Roman.” The composer aimed, not to “revive antique art” or express nostalgia for ancient times, but to create an “ideal, symbolic, and spontaneous adaptation.”25 This is a kind of “thirdness,” beyond past and present, suggestive of Homi Bhabha’s attitude to the past. Gustave Larroumet, critic and member of the Académie des beaux-arts who had attended the first Olympics and toured Greece, commented likewise. While he acknowledged how Déjanire surpassed ancient art, he found the work infused with “Greco-Roman spirit” and praised it as “without precedent.” In uniting “Greek sobriety with Latin splendor,” the work resembled the region where it was premiered, “Narbonnaise Gaule, where the civilizations of Athens and Rome were united.”26 In the 1890s, the Gauls also captured the imagination of French composers, particularly republicans. Historians associated the Gauls with the third estate, the people, and the Franks, who had brought monarchy to France, with the aristocracy. 27 As Martin and Thierry put it, “their spirit is always in us, their vices and 23.  C. Saint-Saëns, “Les Chœurs d’Antigone,” Figaro, 28 November 1893. In his C. SaintSaëns: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Durand, 1922), Jean Bonnerot notes that in Antigone, the composer also adapted a popular melody collected by Bourgault-Ducoudray in Greece, imitated a final chorus from a Pindar hymn, and borrowed a section from Euripides’ The Trojan Women (150). 24.  Review of a Concert Lamoureux performance, Ménestrel, 21 February 1892, 62. The Con­certs Colonne also performed Le Rouet d’Omphale five times from 1890 to 1892. 25.  Baumann, Camille Saint-Saëns et “Déjanire,” 2–4, 7, 11, 18. 26.  Gustave Larroumet, “Chronique théatrale,” Temps, 4 September 1899. 27.  On differences between the Gauls and the Franks, see Martin, Histoire de France, 133– 35, 208–11.

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ex.27a Ex. 27  Pasler.UCP Saint-Saëns, Déjanire. a.  Act 1: Violins in unison accompany the entrance of Iole in Aeolian mode. Andante (80 = C )

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virtues preserved in the heart of the French people.”28 Renowned for their taste for adventure, their bravery, and their impetuous, intelligent spirit, the ancient Gauls were celebrated as conquerors who had dominated Europe as far as Greece. Their warrior spirit allowed them to maintain their identity despite invasion and later occupation by the Romans and the Franks. This ability to resist complete domination, in spite of defeat, was crucial to those who wished to revive French pride after 1871 and kindle the desire to return to war. The Gallic myth served to unify the French people and justify their imperialism. Saint-Saëns wrote incidental music for Vercingétorix (1893), about the Gallic leader who stood up to Caesar, as did the choral conductor Duteil d’Ozanne in 1892. 29 Bruneau began an opera about him, but left only a fragment. Republicans considered Vercingetorix, a Gallic warrior of the people, as the first hero in French history, not Clovis, the king who united the Frankish tribes and converted himself and the country to Catholicism. In 1879 Vercingetorix was added to school history books as a way to assert a French past before Clovis and to encourage resistance to 28.  Ibid., 1; Amédée Thierry, Histoire des Gaulois, vol. 2 (Paris: Didier, 1859), 551–52. 29.  Vercingétorix, a play by Edouard Schuré with music by Duteil d’Ozanne, conductor of the choral society Euterpe, was performed at the Théâtre d’Application (Ménestrel, 27 March 1892, 103).

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ex.27b Ex. 27  Pasler.UCP (continued) b.  Act 4: Just before Hercules dies, this music for orchestra suggests his “heroic destiny.”

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the new Caesar, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm.30 Earlier in 1882, Charles Lenepveu, a Conservatoire professor, had written Velléda, an opera about war between the Gauls and the Romans. Through the voice of the Gauls, it expresses French desire for revenge against the Prussians. Similar themes developed in Augusta Holmès’s Lutèce (1878), also set during Gallo-Roman wars, recur in many of her songs in the 1890s, including “La Guerrière” (a woman warrior with blond hair) (fig. 98), “Ne nous oubliez pas” (as if sung by the dead), and “Marche gauloise.” As with Lutèce, their message is clear: the “sons of the Gauls” must march again, taking up arms, this time against the Germans. Music should infuse virility and “hatred in their hearts.” Interest in another Gallic hero, Amadis de Gaule, fellow chevalier and purportedly friend of Parceval, revolved more around chivalry and love. In 1892, perhaps inspired by Gobineau’s a 20,000-verse poem about the famous Gallic knight, 31 the Académie des beaux-arts chose Amadis as the libretto for the Prix de Rome competition; circa 1895 Massenet wrote a “legendary opera” on Amadis. 32 These works, set in Brittany with its Druid monuments, also speak to fascination with the Celts and the French racial past; for Gobineau, this included an idealism associated with the last white hero. Other musical works fed French fascination with Frankish rulers before Clovis, not to glorify heroes but to dwell critically on their barbarism, as if an implicit critique of early German culture. After the Nouveau Cirque presented a show in 1892 about Le Roi Dagobert, a nautical pantomime with clowns that reached two hundred performances that year, in 1895 came Hervé’s Chilpéric, an opérette-bouffe on the Frankish king who murdered his first wife to marry Frédégonde, 33 and SaintSaëns’s and Dukas’s completion of Frédégonde (1895), an opera begun by Guiraud before he died. If schoolchildren were taught that the Romans had civilized the “rude Gauls” and the Franks had rejuvenated the “decadent Gallo-Romans,” Saint-Saëns/Dukas/Guiraud take a more critical perspective in their Frédégonde (originally called Brunhilda). Focusing on the ferocity of rival Frankish aristocrats, locked in power struggles, they concentrate on the theme of hatred. Civil 30.  Christian Amalvi, “Vercingétorix dans l’enseignement primaire, 1830–1940,” in Nos ancêtres les Gaulois, ed. Paul Viallaneix and Jean Ehrard (Clermont-Ferrand: Université de Clermont-Ferrand II, 1982), 352. 31.  Comte Arthur de Gobineau, Amadis: Poème (Paris: Plon, Nourrit, 1887). Lully (in 1683) and Handel (in 1715) also wrote music based on Amadis de Gaule. 32.  From 1885 to 1895, Chausson worked on Le Roi Arthus, an opera that claims the Arthurian legends as distinctly French, even as it borrows much from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. 33.  Chilpéric, at the Théâtre des Variétés, featured a Wagnerian overture, operatic parody, and a Merovingen ballet (Petit Journal, 6 February 1895).

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Fig. 98  Augusta Holmès, “La Guerrière” (1892). This image of a female warrior, resting, but with her sword ready to strike, expressed Holmès’s revanchiste sentiments, calling on women to take part in the return to war.

war between eastern and western France had erupted because of mutual aversion between two queens.34 Henri Martin referred to Frédégonde as a Frankish Medea, beautiful but atrocious. Perhaps alluding to contemporary France, with staunch assertiveness and four-square chordal harmonies, one of the kings in Frédégonde sings, “Austrasie needs a king who will give it back its old force.”35 With France torn by the Dreyfus Affair, Saint-Saëns returned to the Gauls and the Romans in Les Barbares (1901), set in first-century Orange and originally intended for the ancient Roman theater there. This time, however, he sought to portray how a people can rise above conflict associated with invasions.36 Unlike in Frédégonde, where he uses tritones and tonal ambiguity to express hatred, there is “no trace of barbarism” in the music of Les Barbares. Instead, listeners found it “noble and pure,” transparent “like crystal,” and serene as the composer concentrates on the human aspects of the drama and endeavors to create “simple and classic beauty,” resembling that of Gluck.37 After the Gallo-Romans repel 300,000 northern barbarians and free the city, thanks to the love of a Gallo-Roman woman for a German commander, a provençal farandole follows. To reinforce the connection to contemporary France, although the Gallo-Roman ballet begins in the Lydian mode, it continues in ways that the public recognized as “French, and even Parisian.”38 Brian Rees sees the work as about both social solidarity among the Gauls, united “against northern German threats,” and “civic reconciliation,” as if it aimed to bring “Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, republicans and reactionaries together under the banner of art.”39 Social and political elites, including the 34.  Much of Martin’s Histoire de France, vol. 2, concerns civil war between the Franks. Brun­­hilde is “from the most barbarous part of Gaul,” but possesses “all tastes and opinions of Roman civilization,” while Frédégonde, queen of the most civilized region, “draws her force from the depths of her barbarism . . . joining the absence of all moral feeling to a frightful energy” (51). 35.  Frédégonde was also the subject of Samuel Rousseau’s Merowig (1892), a drame lyrique about the son of Frédégonde and lover of Brunhilde, a play by Alfred Dubout at the Théâtre-Français in 1893, and the Prix de Rome libretto in 1897. In 1898, the Opéra produced Paul Vidal’s opera La Burgonde, about Attila the Hun’s attraction to a Burgundian woman, who, taken by force as his wife, later assassinates him. In 1911, Lili Boulanger returned to Frédégonde, but her cantata has been lost or was destroyed. 36.  Thierry, in Histoire des Gaulois, points out that the Gauls were among many peoples the Greeks referred to as “barbarians” (1). 37.  André Corneau, “Les Barbares,” Matin, 24 October 1901, and Camille Bellaigue, “Revue musicale,” Revue des deux mondes 6 (15 November 1901): 467. 38.  Bellaigue, “Revue musicale,” 468. 39.  Brian Rees, in Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), points out that Maurice Barrès also called Communards and socialists “barbarians” (347).

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French president, attended the premiere en masse and critics, whether reactionary, conservative, bourgeois, or socialist, embraced it wholeheartedly. 40 Some French refused to see Gallo-Romans as the original French race, especially those who opposed democracy and the Republic as not indigenous to France. Those who looked instead to the Celts sought to forget a past characterized by assimilating various invader cultures. Under Roman rule, the Celts had withdrawn to the northwest coast (Brittany) and the mountainous center of the country (Auvergne). Since the Romans focused on urban centers, the Celts were able to resist the Romans and later the Germans. Celtic language, culture, and music remained distinct, some of it up to the nineteenth century. 41 Some saw the Celtic tradition, that which resisted assimilation, as responsible for the French character. As Edouard Schuré put it, “the Celtic soul is the deep interior soul of France.” A similar sentiment may have motivated the composer Vincent d’Indy to write his opera Fervaal. A contemporary reviewer saw the main character as “a Celtic hero glorifying the French race” and Steven Huebner calls it “an allegory about the founding of France out of the Celtic spirit.”42 Perhaps reflecting interest in French racial origins in Brittany, in the 1890s the region attracted many musicians as well as painters like Sérusier and Gauguin, who was from Brittany. When the Loti character in André Messager’s opéra-comique Madame Chrysanthème (1893) dreams of home, he sings a song about Brittany. The newspaper Figaro chose this excerpt to reproduce, so as to attract audiences, although the work is set in Japan. The same year, Cécile Chaminade wrote a “Chanson bretonne” as part of her Romances sans paroles, suggesting that the topic had become fashionable. In the 1890s, French musicians also looked to the chanson populaire for what it could teach them about their racial origins. 43 Carried over time through the oral tradition, the notes of a folk song were thought to be remnants of resistance to outside influences and the impact of urban civilization, pointing to a time 40.  Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Les Barbares,” Petite République socialiste, 25 October 1901; Catulle Mendès, “Les Barbares,” Journal, 24 October 1901; Louis de Fourcaud, “Musique,” Gaulois, 24 October 1901. 41.  See Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La Musique primitive conservée par les montagnes,” Annuaire du Club alpine française (1884): 4–5, 9; Julien Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire en France (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit, 1889), 187; and Gaston Paris, La Poésie au Moyen Age (Paris: Hachette, 1885), 48. 42.  Huebner, French Opera, 324–26. 43.  For a more extended discussion, see Jann Pasler “Race and Nation: Musical Acclimatisation and the Chansons Populaires in Third Republic France,” in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 147–67.

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before assimilation and hybridization. In the mountainous center of the country, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Tiersot, and d’Indy found music of a “more primitive and less civilized character,” as well as the “pure and most complete” version of certain French chansons populaires.44 Tiersot saw a version of “La Pernette” from the Ardèche, thought to be one of the country’s oldest songs, as representing “the force of tradition” that “imposes itself so imperiously on the people’s spirit that, despite any disdain the inhabitants of a region might feel toward this old thing, they could never forget it completely. . . . It alone survives to teach successive generations what the ancestors sang.” Such songs were in the blood of the race, and numerous generations would keep on repeating them. 45 From the persistence in such music of not only certain melodic modes, but also distinct rhythms resembling those of ancient Greece, Bourgault-Ducoudray argued that Greek influence on this repertoire was greater than that of the Catholic Church. Liturgical modes, after all, had lost their rhythmic character. From this, he concluded that the origins of French music were secular (ex. 28). 46 To the extent that “La Pernette” resembled a Gregorian alleluia, d’Indy, however, argued that the origins of French music lay in religious rather than secular music. 47 To trace the emergence of a distinctly French music, Lavoix, too, in his history of French music, looked to chant, but he had a different interpretation of the relationship of chant to such songs. He argues that, although Roman chant, the “foreign chant” of “conquest,” dominated Gaul after the Roman invasion, and Charlemagne had subsequently tried to prohibit any other kind from being sung, Gallican chant remained alive through hymns. What distinguished this chant was its suppleness, which Lavoix attributed to the influence of French popular music. Disagreeing with Fustel de Coulanges who saw the founding of France in the synthesis of the Gallic and Roman spirits, Lavoix claimed, “our nationality began to form” only after Gaul “ceased being Roman or German.” This music historian thus considered the French troubadour as the “father of our composers” and his secular songs as the beginning of “French music.” By the twelfth century, Lavoix found in them aspects he identified as quintessentially French: “grace” in melodic phrases and an instinct for “appropriateness [justesse] in expression.”48 44.  Tiersot, “Préface,” in Vincent d’Indy, Chansons populaires recueillies dans le Vivarais et le Vercors, ed. Julien Tiersot (Paris: Fischbacher, 1892), 2. 45.  Ibid., 2, 29, 32, 39. 46.  Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La Musique primitive,” 5, 8; Julien Tiersot, Chansons popu­ laires recueillies dans les Alpes françaises (Savoie et Dauphiné) (Grenoble: Falque & Perrin, 1903), 500–501. 47.  Pasler, “Race and Nation,” 160–67. 48.  Lavoix, Musique française, 16–17, 34–39.

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Ex. 28  Bourgault-Ducoudray, “Gwer ar véchantez,” Trente mélodies populaires de la Basse-Bretagne (Paris: Lemoine, 1885). Bourgault-Ducoudray found Greek modes and rhythms in the chansons populaires of Brittany. In northern Brittany, where the “race is more serious and more reflective,” many songs used the Hypodorian mode, associated with the “serene virility and nobility” of Apollo. In adding chordal harmonies to his transcriptions, based on the melody’s mode, he aimed to show that the Greek modes were compatible with modern music and could be explored and incorporated for the sake of French musical progress, a kind of musical ex.28 Pasler.UCP colonization. After the harmonizations of each song, Bourgault-Ducoudray reproduced the original, giving a short analysis and notating who sang it for him and where.

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Implicitly racial arguments were brought in to underline the unforeseen consequences of hybridity, in the sense of a “mixing” or “fusion” of unlikes, and to promote the preservation of a certain essence in French music. Debussy criticized the influence of the Belgian Franck’s “sentimental rigor” on Ernest Chausson’s “natural talents of elegance and clarity”: “To think that the particular qualities of a race’s genius can be transmitted to another race without harm is an error that has often perverted our music because, with unsuspecting enthusiasm, we adopt formulas in which nothing French can appear. It would be better to confront these [qualities] with our own, to see what we lack, and to try to recover this without changing anything in the rhythm of our thought. In this way, we shall enrich our patrimony.”49 In his review of the Opéra’s controversial decision to produce 49.  Claude Debussy, S.I.M., 15 January 1913, reproduced in id., Monsieur Croche, 220. Questions of racial mixing arose amid French anxiety about the impact of an increase in European immigrants on social stability. For many, including Alfred Fouillé in “Dégénérescence? Le passé et le présent de notre race,” Revue des deux mondes 131 (1895), the “question of race was intimately

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Wagner’s Lohengrin in 1891, Jules Ruelle, a critic and translator of operatic libretti, went further. He asserted that humanity has nothing to gain from a “universal mixture. . . . The conquest of which we dream—absolute fusion—will be the ruin or the impoverishment of one of the great forces of humanity.”50 Sounding like Gobineau, who had claimed that “fusions” necessarily corrupt and degrade the qualities of pure races, and that people “degenerate in proportion to the mixtures they submit to and the quality of these mixtures,”51 Ruelle was trying to undermine republican universalist claims as well as the appeal of Wagner. In 1898, Saint-Saëns’s views on the evolution of contemporary music suggest similar preoccupation with racial thinking, along with imperialist power relations and hostility toward Germany. In describing as “hybrid genres” recent concert and theatrical music, the composer expresses anxieties similar to those who attributed decadence in French society to racial hybridity. Previously in the “musical empire,” he writes, two “kingdoms”—concert halls and theaters—functioned as if two nations with different “climates” and “customs [mœurs].” Music was “often the vassal, sometimes the slave” in theatrical productions. It took “vengeance for these humiliations through the overture, an intrusion of concert music in the world of the theater.” In more recent years, the symphony had become the rival of the genre that previously dominated it. Having been “invaded” by symphonic music, the theater was now taking its “vengeance.” What remained after combat and “defections” was a “compromise that leaves nothing as it used to be,” a “mixing” that had led to “confusion,” “crisis,” and “chaos,” out of which would emerge a “new order.” Although Saint-Saëns admits that the “new forms” forged by Liszt and Berlioz and French “ode-symphonies” influenced by Handelian oratorios produced some “curious, interesting” works, he worries about “precious energies wasted” by those who follow only their own inclinations and “get lost in potholes

tied to that of the population” (816). No mention of Jews or Jewish immigrants in Fouillé’s article suggests that they did not dominate discussions about race, as musicologists such as Jane Fulcher have recently inferred. Instead, Fouillé was disturbed above all by the influx of Belgians, who constituted more than half of all immigrants, followed by Italians (813, 813n1). Debussy reputedly criticized Zola (of Italian descent) as non-French (Rees, Saint-Saëns, 329). This was very ironic, because Belgians, such as César Franck, assimilated well into French culture, and Brussels’s Théâtre de la Monnaie premiered many French operas at the fin de siècle. 50.  Jules Ruelle, “Lohengrin,” Art musical, 30 September 1891. 51.  Comte Arthur de Gobineau, in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, in Œuvres, vol. 1 (1853; Paris: Gallimard, 1983), too, wrote about the “antagonisms and mixtures of hybrid forces” in various races. He concluded that the white race was a “crossbred conglomeration” with, nevertheless, “specific distinctive traits.” But “successive invasions, commerce, colonies, peace and war” had led to “disorder” (281–84, 345, 813).

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from which they can never get out.” He predicts “anarchy” ahead. Imagining a critique “the Orient” might have of “the Occident,” Saint-Saëns chides the West for its “instability, impossibility of conserving a form, a style, for any length of time, and obsession with seeking the new at all cost, without aim or reason.” Coming from a composer known for eclecticism in his artistic production, his capacity to assimilate various styles, and his talent for “harmonizing” Italian and German tendencies and creating dramatic “hybrids” such as Ascanio that borrow from both Wagner and traditional operatic forms, 52 such an attitude is highly ironic. It does, however, point to increasing conservatism among older republicans, especially those apprehensive about change, whether political or musical.53 That SaintSaëns’s career continued to thrive—in 1901, the composer was elected president of the Académie des beaux-arts—suggests that the intellectual elite supported the retrenchment in art music to classical values and “noble pursuits” such as “pure beauty,” perhaps because they were associated with the white race.54 During the 1890s, in particular, ideological struggles within France were fought, not only through diametrically opposed notions of monogenism and polygenism, but also through complex, contradictory, and sometimes arbitrary interpretations of their own ancient history. Musicians took part in the dialogue and debates through the subjects they set to music, as well as the manner in which their music took on the question of “distinctive characteristics.”

Listening through Women Nowhere is the comparison between the 1870s Moral Order and the 1890s ralliement more suggestive than in the female allegories embraced by composers and musical institutions. Unlike in art nouveau, which elevated “female interiority” and the rococo style as the “national patrimony,”55 these were not about women who developed private worlds of leisure, but those who listened to the public call 52.  C. Saint-Saëns, “Le Mouvement musical,” Monde musical (30 June 1898), 73–74; Baumann, Camille Saint-Saëns et “Déjanire,” 10; Georges Servières, Saint-Saëns (Paris: Alcan, 1923), 180. 53.  In the elections of the 1890s, socialists picked up increasing numbers of seats. 54.  Renan, in his Histoire générale des langues sémitiques, distinguished the Aryan and Semitic races from the “inferior” ones by their ability strive for an ideal, their “transcendental capacities signifying the nobility of man” (504). He associated the urge for noble elevation, a yearning to go beyond material reality, with advanced civilization, its abstraction distinguishing it from “primitive” musics. 55.  Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1989), chap. 8, 293, 296.

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of duty and could inspire national sacrifice. Foremost were Joan of Arc and the biblical Judith.56 In the early 1890s, theaters revived works from the 1870s on these subjects and premiered major operas written during that period. The context for understanding them, however, changed significantly. Renewed interest in Joan of Arc anticipates the ralliement, in that she represented concerns the conservative establishment shared with Catholic monarchists and republican moderates as well as musicians’ desire to reach out to these constituencies. This time there were no immanent invader/occupiers to fear or bemoan, and Joan was not the mystic represented in Gounod’s Jeanne d’Arc, although Sarah Bernhardt’s revival of it in Paris on 18 May 1890 had far greater success than Gounod’s opera had had in 1873. 57 Anticlerical rejection of religious hysterics forced reconsideration of the Joan of Arc mythology; so did medical preoccupation with hallucinating ecstatic states as a form of hysteria and a sign of nervous degeneration. With less emphasis on her possession by religious ecstasy or her function as “patron saint” of the invaded, she became a symbol of national reconciliation. During a period of increasing conflict between Catholics and anticlericals, monarchists and socialists, various incarnations of the Right and the Left, Joan of Arc shared something with them all. Major composers, including those teaching at the Conservatoire, dedicated works to the heroine.58 In 1886, Charles Lenepveu wrote a three-part “lyrical drama,” in 1887, Gounod composed a mass honoring her for Reims Cathedral, and in 1888, Théodore Dubois did an orchestral march, commissioned for the erection of a statue of Joan in Reims. Lenepveu preaches a return to old values, the utter predictability of both text and music suggesting his disdain for originality in contemporary culture. Joan of Arc helps him to take such a stand. In a musical pantomime at the Hippodrome in 1890, Charles-Marie Widor likewise drew attention to Joan’s peasant background and religious faith. Repeated references in music and text recall France’s past, particularly the “Rondel de Charles d’Orléans” and “Pavane guerrière,” reproduced in Figaro that July. The work also suggests the depopulation problem—fewer births than deaths. A mixed chorus sings simultaneously and in counterpoint: “War is a little expensive to the world, but it is love that will pay the bill. When one has depopulated the earth, then one must repopulate it.” That summer the Musée Grévin mounted wax reenactments of the Vision de 56.  See also the return of Hercules in Déjanire, discussed above. 57.  The Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin performed Gounod’s Jeanne d’Arc 136 times in 1890. 58.  In his extensive study of musical settings of the Joan of Arc story, Jeanne d’Arc et la musique (Orléans: Herluison, 1894), Emile Huet documents thirteen such works from between 1886 and 1893, not counting five “patriotic songs” for cafés-concerts.

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Fig. 99  Henri Callot, color lithograph for Jeanne d’Arc (1900), shadow puppet theater, with music and text by Georges Fragerolle.

Jeanne d’Arc and in January 1891, the Théâtre du Châtelet premiered Joseph Fabre’s five-act Jeanne d’Arc with incidental music by Benjamin Godard. In many ways, Joan of Arc served to keep alive the spirit of revanche. Libretti set to music by Gounod, Lenepveu, Widor, and Godard all drive home the need for sacrifice to return to war. “Arm your hearts and enflame them with hatred for the foreigner,” Gounod’s chorus sings as the dotted rhythms of the accompaniment drive the momentum relentlessly forward. “The country is beautiful! I must live and die for her,” Joan exclaims in Lenepveu’s drama; “See the great pity that is the kingdom of France. Go offer yourself to the king and deliver the country,” the voices tell her in Godard’s drame historique. At the Chat Noir, Fragerolle’s Jeanne d’Arc (1900), for puppet theater, also promoted Joan’s utility in inspiring future soldiers. Recalling Mermet’s 1876 opera, figure 99 depicts Joan in the sky burning at the stake before a marching army. Widespread interest in Joan of Arc in the late 1880s and early 1890s, especially at the Conservatoire, suggests a change in aesthetics there. Such a boy-woman, a garçon in pants—with nothing resembling female sexuality or gender, least of all a body—was a far cry from the alluring females of Massenet and Delibes or reputed softness in the music of Guiraud, composers who began teaching there a decade The Dynamics of Identity

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earlier. In the hands of the new generation, their female subject of preference, Joan of Arc, delivers a message about authority. The integration of marches in this music contributes to the masculinization of her image and the force associated with her.59 Another female image popular in the 1870s, Judith, was also embraced in the early 1890s. She too was a woman willing to put duty to country over personal interests, but did this through her seductive charms. Between 1889 and 1891, Dubois and Bourgault-Ducoudray composed operas based on the Judith story. Frédérique Patureau suggests that the Opéra chose to produce BourgaultDucoudray’s Thamara in December 1891, not just to fulfill its requirement to perform a certain number of works by Prix de Rome winners, but also as a counterbalance to Lohengrin, first performed there in September 1891. 60 But with Wagner’s opera entering the Opéra’s repertoire soon thereafter, this was even more true of two other new productions, also Judith narratives: Ernest Reyer’s Salammbô, based on Flaubert’s novel, and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila. By the time the Opéra produced them, Salammbô in May and Samson et Dalila in November 1892, they were already widely known. French musical institutions were not receptive in the 1870s—the latter premiered in Weimar in 1877—although excerpts for voice, piano, and orchestra were popular in salons and concert halls. But, beginning in 1890, successes elsewhere put pressure on the Opéra. 61 Still, one might ask, why three works on Judith in 1892, and in repertoire with Aida and L’Africaine with which they were sometimes compared?62 The reception of these operas in the 1890s sheds light on this question. Earlier transcribers, concert organizers, and critics focused on Samson et Dalila excerpts characterized by their charm—the famous duo, the bacchanale, and the dance of the priestesses. With their exotic timbres and rhythms, these were often performed in contexts foregrounding charm as crucial to French musical distinction. In the 1890s, this changed. One critic praised Thamara for its “vigor” and “very noble style,” its 59.  I analyze these works on Joan of Arc more fully in my next book, Useful Music. 60.  Bourgault-Ducoudray had waited for such an opportunity since winning the Prix in 1862. Although this was his first grand opera, it earned more that Faust and Aida in its first performances. Frédérique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne, 1875–1914 (Liège: Mardaga, 1991), 251. 61.  Salammbô was premiered on 10 February 1890 at Brussels’s Théâtre de la Monnaie and Samson et Dalila had its French premiere on 3 March at Rouen’s Théâtre des Arts and on 31 October 1890 at Paris’s Eden-Théâtre. Before its premiere at the Opéra, regional theaters in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Dijon, Montpellier, and Monte Carlo staged Samson et Dalila and military bands played transcriptions in Paris gardens all summer into late fall. See also chapter 4 above. 62.  Victor Wilder, “Premières représentations,” Gil Blas, 2 November 1890.

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“power, “large line,” and “search for strength of expression.”63 Another admired “grandeur” and “nobility” in Salammbô and Samson et Dalila.64 Whereas in the 1870s its oratorio-like elements led to rejection by the Opéra director, in the 1890s many preferred the severe style of act 1 of Samson et Dalila, with its four-square choruses, inspired by Bach and Handel. Reviewers praised “the purity of its lines” and compared the choruses “of grand allure” to those of ancient Greece. 65 Barbadette’s language recalls the republican values stressed by Minister Léon Bourgeois, the “admirable purity and extraordinary simplicity of the language” that seemed to arise “spontaneously.” With its “archaic and simplistic forms,” Samson et Dalila was hailed as a defense of French tradition, a bearer of “the real truth.” Salammbô, likewise, was “inspired by the true, healthy national traditions of our clear, pure genius.”66 Critical attention also shifted to these works’ masculine aspects, sometimes suggesting an incipient misogyny. Pougin calls Salammbô “male.” Bellaigue emphasizes the “virile poetry” and “male severity” of Samson et Dalila. He sees “trouble” already in the first act appearance of Dalila. 67 Reyer explains that Samson et Dalila is not just about an exotic seductress, it overflows with choruses and music for men. As in Antigone, the vigorous male choruses may have functioned to subdue, “cut off the emotionally moving effects” of the drama, counterbalancing Dalila’s seductive appeal and the love tragedy. 68 Reyer focuses entirely on the “Jewish Hercules” and how he resists Dalila’s charms, “always master of his secret.”69 Perhaps in response to such interest, excerpts transcribed for piano or military band turned to more scenes with Samson and male choruses.70 The shift to perceiving these operas as representations of strength and masculine virility is reinforced by the focus on Judith characters as executors of social or 63.  Jules Ruelle, “Thamara,” Art musical, 31 December 1891, 185–86. 64.  Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Samson,” Ménestrel, 9 November 1890, 354–56, and 27 November 1892, 379–80; Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Salammbô,” Ménestrel, 22 May 1892, 164. 65.  Léon Kerst, “Samson et Dalila,” Petit Journal, 4 March 1890; H.B. [Henri Bauër], “Premières représentations,” Echo de Paris, 2 November 1890, and 25 November 1892; Ernest Reyer, “Samson et Dalila,” Journal des débats, 9 November 1890; Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Samson” (1892). 66.  Bauër, “Premières représentations”; H. Barbedette, “Revue des grands concerts,” Ménestrel, 3 April 1892, 109; Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Salammbô,” 164. 67.  Camille Bellaigue, in a review of Saint-Saëns’s oeuvre, Figaro, 26 January 1889. 68.  Gabriel Lefeuve, “Les Chœurs d’Antigone” (unidentified press clipping, ca. 25 November 1893, Bibliothèque nationale, Musique, Fonds Montpensier). 69.  Reyer, “Samson et Dalila.” 70.  Jann Pasler, “Contingencies of Meaning in Transcriptions and Excerpts: Popularizing Samson et Dalila,” in Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 170–213.

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divine will. Thamara, Salammbô, and Dalila are strong in part because, like Joan of Arc, they listen to the voice of authority—high priests, their fathers, their country’s elders, or the gods themselves—and because they embody beliefs, especially belief in God (gods) whose voices they “obey” without question. Pougin considers Dalila “a ferocious fanatic” who stands for religion, not women. Salammbô is more complicated because when she kills herself at the end, one wonders whether this is the price of not only love, but also racial mixture, she being white and her lover a “young barbarian.” In spite of their courage and singular role in liberating or saving their countries, the dependence of these women on others underlines the role of patriarchy in these operas. At the same time, as these women’s actions may have elicited an admiration for their personal strength, albeit an ambiguous one if the women die, the female figures also teach self-sacrifice for the greater order, one of the principal values of the Republic. But if, with the new attention to Samson and the male choruses, the Hebrews could be viewed and thus identified with as proto-Christians, as Ralph Locke suggests, then Samson’s God-ordained destruction of the temple after Dalila’s betrayal “would have been understood as an act of liberation” especially if Dalila, as a Jewish Judith, may have evoked anti-Semitic sentiments.71 By the work’s one-hundredth performance at the Opéra in 1897, one critic could only write of Dalila as “treacherous,” her voice, “hypocritically affectionate, adding charm to the troubling song of the seductive courtesan.”72 The context in which Judith enacts her charms—political conflict threatening war—was particularly relevant in the early 1890s. Three political forces may have motivated new critical perspectives on her. Each would have entailed rethinking the utility of the feminine as an allegory for the nation.

First was the Franco-Russian alliance, needed to strengthen the French and eventually help them recover their land lost to Germany. In August 1891, French and Russian diplomats agreed to consult one another if peace was endangered. To commemorate the occasion, French artists allegorized their nation as female, but this time her strength came from her partnership with a man. Gustave David’s “Franco-Russian hymn” “Salut à la Russie” (1891), dedicated to Alexander III, uses visual design, lyrics, and music to signal the budding friendship between the partners (fig. 100). 71.  Ralph Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila,” Cam­­bridge Opera Journal 3 (November 1991): 263, 282. Locke also addresses the problem of whether to read the Philistines and Dalila as “Other” or “us” (285–93) and suggests that the music sometimes subverts these binary paradigms. 72.  Victorin Joncières, “Revue musicale,” Liberté, 21 June 1897.

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Fig. 100  Gustave David, “Salut à la Russie” (1891). This “Franco-Russian hymn,” for voice and military band, was performed in Brest on the occasion of a Russian Navy visit in October 1891. It begins with the “Marseillaise” and ends by saluting the Russians in the name of fraternity.

The sheet music cover depicts an unarmed Russian male shaking hands with an armed French female, quite different from the country as traditionally represented by statues of La Liberté or Marianne. Here she has a shield at her back and sword at her side, her flag unfurled and blowing in the wind. Their expressions are stern and their flags off to the side reveal a scene with battleships in the distance. A text explains that this song was composed for the Russian Navy’s visit to Brest in October 1891. Arms, dynamism, and symbolic strength appear on the side of France, and the association of masculinity with Russia is an apt counterbalance. Text and music complement and extend these ideas. The piano introduction in G  major starts with the first phrase of the “Marseillaise,” allegro, followed by the last three measures of the Russian hymn, andante. When the words begin, the music shares many rhythmic and melodic aspects with the “Marseillaise,” but in G minor. Both music and the three stanzas of text suggest that the antecedent, the context of the issue, is French but troubled. In the refrain, the music shifts to G major and the context turns to resolution as the singer acclaims, “holy Russia, our France, and the future!” The melodic goal of the song and its most powerful moment comes on “Russia.” Gender and music are thus used to suggest complementarity between the two countries, but only because the female figure is heavily armed. France is still female, but a female warrior. French theaters gave audiences many ways to reflect on Russian strength and celebrate this alliance, which served as a cause around which to rally. Narratives enhanced Russia’s image as an emblem of power, or brute force, embraced as if a newfound extension of French strength. Beginning in May 1891, the Hippodrome put on Skobeleff, a grande pantomime with 250 singers and wind-band players, elevating a Russian general who made a name in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877– 78. The popular military play Michel Strogoff (1880) reached its one-hundreth performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet by February 1892, and remained there all summer. Its Kronstadt scene was particularly appreciated—Kronstadt being where alliance papers were first signed. A wax exhibit on Kronstadt mounted at the Musée Grévin in spring 1892 was up for more than a year. In December 1892, the Théâtre Montparnasse put on Russes et Français. Concerts provided contexts for both mutual learning and collaboration. Rus­ sians performed French music for the French Navy in Kronstadt—including Saint-Saëns’s march from his Suite algérienne and Berlioz’s Marche troyenne—while military bands across France played the Russian hymn. In spring 1892, besides the Société des grandes auditions’ concert of Russian music, even the Eldorado featured a Russian chorus. Exchanges intensified in 1893 during negotiations for the formal political agreement. When the Russian Navy visited Toulon and 668

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Paris and diplomats signed a military convention to cover aggression by one of the Triple Alliance, the Opéra hosted a gala and Colonne put on a Russian music festival. In January 1894, when French politicians ratified the alliance, state funds at the Opéra-Comique produced the Russian composer Cui’s Le Flibustier.73 In November 1896, even though attendance was poor and they lost a good deal of money, Colonne sponsored two more concerts with premieres of Russian music, this time with help from the Russian conductor Winogradsky. To the extent that these performances encouraged mutual respect, they helped France feel like one of the great powers again. With this, the country became preoccupied with recovering an image of itself as virile, which we have seen in the revival of revolutionary music, interest in the Gauls, and even perceptions of Rameau during this same period.74 Annegret Fauser suggests how this preoccupation with virility makes its way into opéracomique, where, in his Phryné (1893), Saint-Saëns attempts to “masculinize” the genre through the use of twelve-syllable alexandrines, the “noble” verse of classical French tragedy.75 It also permeates his incidental music for Antigone (1893), with its declamatory choruses for fourteen old men. Musicians thus responded in various ways to the challenge offered by the alliance to develop French virility as preparation for possible return to war.76

The second factor encouraging reconsideration of female allegories of France, particularly strong females representing North Africa and the Orient, were military defeats in Africa from 1890 to 1893. These preoccupied many French just as they were getting to know Salammbô and Samson et Dalila on stage or in public parks. The premiere of Samson et Dalila started thirty minutes late because there was so much talk in the corridors, specifically about news of Dahomey dominating the press.77 Dahomey (renamed Benin in 1975) was important to the French because it 73.  I shall examine the musical implications of the Franco-Russian alliance more fully in my book Music, Race, and Colonialism in Fin-de-siècle France. 74.  Lavoix, Musique française, points out that within the grace of Rameau’s music is “always something of the virility of the strong” (116). Fauser, in “Gendering the Nations,” notes that Renaissance music was also praised at the time for its “virile qualities” (85). She links this interest in virility with the perception of France as the “new Rome” (80). 75.  Fauser, “Gendering the Nations,” 87. 76.  On the crisis in French masculinity in the 1890s, see Annelise Maugue, L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle (Paris: Rivages, 1987), and Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 77.  Bicoquet, “La Soirée parisienne: Samson et Dalila,” Echo de Paris, 25 November 1892.

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provided access from the Gold Coast to the lower Niger River, an area that they, in competition with the British, were determined to control. However, sub-Saharan West Africa proved more challenging than anticipated. Particularly humiliating were the Dahomean warriors, many of them female “amazons” reminiscent of their ferocious counterparts in ancient Greece. Along with scenes of human sacrifice in Dahomey, these women with beaded chest-plates, sometimes raising the heads they had cut off, dominated magazines and the mass illustrated newspapers during French attacks there. In 1892, L’Illustration reported that this enemy was ten times more numerous than the French, more fearsome, and better organized than predicted. Perhaps in an effort to diffuse French fear, in March 1891, just a year after the first Dahomean war,78 the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation presented twentyfour Dahomean female warriors, sixteen males, and two musicians. Parisians were reportedly stunned that the women, aged 15 to 23, were much taller than the men and seemed unpredictable, capable of both sleepy nonchalance and warrior excitement.79 Figaro illustré, which featured them on its cover that month, photographed their “warrior exercises” in the greenhouse among tropical plants. The press was captivated, all the more so because of the amazons’ successful resistance to the French military. Critics found their drum music powerful, controlling their movements and encouraging their extraordinary animation. In fall 1892, when, using new rifles and 20-inch bayonets, the French stepped up their efforts to force the Dahomeans into submission, the amazons were reported to have fought the hardest and, until the end, constituted a significant force. 80 In mid-November 1892, only ten days before the Opéra’s premiere of Samson et Dalila, the French marched successfully on Abomey, and the Dahomean leader fled. The director of the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin knew that the Paris public wanted to celebrate this victory at the theater. Upon hearing the news, he telegrammed from London that his company should immediately begin rehearsals of a new production, La Prise d’Abomey, written earlier anticipating its capitulation and later titled Au Dahomey. 81 This pantomime à grand spectacle, which opened in December, featured ten tableaux, including warrior dances by the amazons, who 78.  See the press coverage discussed in William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). In reality, the greatest losses on the French side were Senegalese tirailleurs. 79.  “Les Dahoméens au Jardin d’Acclimatation,” Figaro illustré, March 1891, xi. 80.  See Stanley Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 81.  Pédrille, “Foyers et coulisses,” Petit Journal, 17 November 1892.

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drew large audiences. Ménestrel’s reviewer found the work, with its constant bugle music and gunfire meant to elicit patriotism in the spectators, only a pretext to “bring before our eyes the black troops of King Béhanzin and our brave soldiers going from one victory to the next.”82 It attracted everyone from the marquis de Breteuil, Baron de Rothschild, and the Russian Prince Orloff to the minister of the Navy, and was soon performed in Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Nancy, and Reims. 83 When the Théâtre du Châtelet decided to revive La Prise de Pékin (1861), its author altered the play so that the two final tableaux would focus on the conquest of Dahomey. 84 By the end of 1892, while Dalila and Salammbô entertained audiences at the Opéra, grands spectacles on the Dahomey conquest dominated two major theaters. As real battles continued in Africa, Parisians continued to watch plays on Dahomey and more Dahomean amazons were brought in for mock battles, perhaps an attempt to build good will toward establishing a colony there. 85 Writing on Saint-Saëns’s Antigone in November 1893, a reviewer noted that Sophocles’ success with the play had led to being named general of the Samos expedition; he then asks readers to imagine the minister of war dispatching Saint-Saëns to Dahomey and telling him to “bring back Béhanzin.”86 Concerts also expressed this fascination. On 20 November 1892, only three days after French soldiers entered Abomey, Colonne’s orchestra presented a musical portrait of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons of antiquity. This “queen with the virile heart,” best known for her role in the Trojan war, led her troops on the Trojans’ side in the last years of their doomed struggle. Because the Amazons represented the inversion of Greek civilization, they were treated ambivalently by Greek writers as desirable while threatening. They later came to be associated 82.  Ménestrel, 18 December 1892, 403. 83.  Pédrille, “Foyers et coulisses,” Petit Journal, 15 November 1892, 25 and 28 December 1892. 84.  Pédrille, “Foyers et coulisses,” Petit Journal, 10 December 1892. 85.  French fascination with the Dahomean Amazons continued for another year. On 1 February 1893, a spectacle entitled Les Français au Dahomey premiered at the Cirque d’hiver. At the Casino in April, Dahomeans performed battles and sacrificial ceremonies to an admiring public, who found “their songs, dances, and hand-made objects so original and interesting”(Petit Journal, 16 April 1893). The Palais des arts presented their sacrificial ceremonies twice daily. In May, on the Champ de Mars, the Amazons held war games with one another, giving Parisians the opportunity to study how they fought and might have engaged French soldiers. In June, there was a “whites versus blacks” footrace, in which Parisians could attempt to beat the Dahomeans in a fifty-meter dash, with five winners earning substantial cash rewards. In August, the Musée Grévin mounted an exhibition on General Dodd at Kana, which remained on view all fall. 86.  Léo Claretie, “La Première d’Antigone” (unidentified press clipping, ca. 25 November 1893, Bibliothèque nationale, Musique, Fonds Montpensier).

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with barbarism and bestiality. 87 Bruneau’s symphonic poem begins with a march punctuated “with savage accents” and features a theme with three tritones, musically suggesting a character tainted with dissonances. In the poem inspiring the work, Catulle Mendès inverts the Orientalist paradigm. After she succumbs to her passion for Achilles, Penthesilea seems to have lost her strength and stature, if not also her Amazonian dignity. Achilles spears her and, in the end, it is he, far more than she, who represents beauty and strength. Some critics were distressed at Bruneau’s “disdain for the rules of musical grammar” and pointed out that audiences at the premiere preferred the simplicity of Le Rouet d’Omphale to the “complication” of Penthésilée. 88 When the realities of real amazons threatened France’s strength and virility, allegories that upset traditional Western binaries of strong versus weak in gender roles became highly problematic. Composers began exploring women motivated by resentment or hate. Composition students practicing for the Prix de Rome competition set Medée to music in 1891 and 1893, and Academicians chose libretti on Frédégonde (1897) and Sémiramis (1900), the latter, legendary queen of Assyria, here deprived of her heroic stature through banal domestication. D’Indy too wrote incidental music for Mendès’s Médée (1898). In a way, these are not women at all, but repressed aspects of society, those that risk being out of control, beyond language and rationality. 89

The third force most likely affecting this poetic and musical treatment of strong female characters was the new status of independent women with priorities other than those of the home. Discussions of the femme nouvelle pervaded the Paris press in the 1890s, depicting her as a woman in pants (culottes), smoking, sometimes riding a bicycle (her “technological partner”), and always commanding others. For some, she was a hommesse, a female-man, “rigid, austere, and riddled with the appetitive combativeness of professional mobility.”90 For others, she represented 87.  In the Amadis de Gaule stories, however, the woman warrior, often portrayed as the barbarian Other, evolves into a female knight, characterized by the pursuit of chivalric glory. Alison Taufer, “From Amazon Queen to Female Knight: The Development of the Woman Warrior in the ‘Amadis Cycle,’ ” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1988), 8, 58–81. 88.  Henry Eymieu, Monde musical, 20 November 1892, 232, and Amédée Boutarel, “Paris et départements,” Ménestrel, 20 November 1892, 375. 89.  I develop these themes more fully in Useful Music. 90.  Silverman devotes chapter 4 of her Art Nouveau to this idea, 63–74, and gives an excellent bibliography. See also Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-deSiècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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the new technology, with its similar capacity for inverting roles and ignoring gender differences. After the first international congresses on women’s rights and feminine institutions in 1889, this “army of Amazons” grew in number.91 New groups formed and, by the Congrès général des sociétés féministes in May 1892, aristocratic and bourgeois women alike were involved. This included archconservatives such as the duchesse d’Uzès and wives of prominent republicans. They shared belief in women’s increasing access to higher education and professional careers. Perhaps to get people thinking about the movement’s implications, in December 1892, the Eldorado music-hall produced a fantaisie-revue called “Dans 100 ans” (In one hundred years), with the first tableau, set in 1992, “the century of women.” With women increasingly in the labor force, however, public alarm mounted that women were taking over “men’s jobs” and not staying home to have children. In 1892 and 1895, the government stepped in to pass a law limiting women’s work to twelve hours per day and forbidding their employment after 9 p.m. Although a protective measure, it kept women from better paid work and, in music, restricted participation in evening concerts. When it came to women singing Gregorian chant, in fall 1895, the Rodez Congrès de musique religieuse ruled that men and children should always be given preference.”92 Despite this resistance, women’s involvement in the musical world grew, but not without difficulty. After extended discussion in the Chambre des députés, female artists won entry into the Académie des beaux-arts in 1896, but not the ability to compete for the Prix de Rome until 1902. Female composers had to wait until 1903. Still, women began earning first prizes in counterpoint and fugue in 1889, 1891, 1892, and 1897, preparing them to become composers. Grandval, Chaminade, and Holmès had vigorous compositional careers in the 1890s. The Concerts Colonne featured women’s music in fifteen concerts in 1889–92. Holmès had sixteen performances there in the 1890s, more than Charpentier, d’Indy, Fauré, Widor, and Dubois. Elsewhere I have shown how Holmès achieved her success by engaging the social and musical stereotypes of her day and negotiating the complexities and ironies of gender.93 With so many works on heroic tales of war, she was a patriot, like Joan of Arc, although she did not look to others’ voices for her inspiration. Critics praised her music’s vigor and virility. Yet, after the Opéra’s production 91.  Gaston Choisy, “Le Féminisme en Europe,” Revue bleue, January–June 1900, 271. 92.  “Vœux rélatifs au chant grégorien,” Petit Piano, 15 September 1895, 4. 93.  Jann Pasler, “The Ironies of Gender, or Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès,” Women and Music 2 (Fall 1998): 1–25, and in id., Writing through Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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of La Montagne noire (1895),94 Holmès’s virile patriotism and musical boldness came under attack. Bauër said that the “struggle of femininity and brute force, of Mars and Venus” was an allegory they had “simply seen too much.”95 With virility taking on new meaning in the 1890s, Holmès was put down for wanting to act, write, and be respected like a man. By the end of the century, she was told to “renounce any more attempts to venture into such high places.” Gender panic underlies the critic’s tone: “This music give me the impression of being transvestite. She is woman and wants to wear the pants of man. Oh, ladies, be mothers, be lovers, be virgins. . . . But don’t try to be like men. . . . You will not succeed in replacing us, not entirely.”96 As scholars have recently noted, many women composers preferred to adapt rather than confront societal norms, writing more music for salon entertainment than for large public performances.97 Chaminade’s Les Amazones (1888), a dramatic symphony full of battle music with warring male and female choruses, was ignored after one performance. Critics remarked about her music’s vigor, but it was Chaminade’s charm and grace that assured her reputation. In the increasingly misogynist 1890s, she retreated to writing almost exclusively small forms, including sixty-four melodies, while concertizing as a pianist. 98 As the number of French women in feminist organizations rose from fewer than 1,000 in 1896 to somewhere between 20,000 to 25,000 in 1901, women began to be associated with the demise of French society, and it became increasingly difficult to consider feminine strength as something positive, even as a metaphor. As Bram Dykstra suggests, women came to be seen as “the monstrous goddess of degeneration.”99 With the country in the grips of depopulation—France’s growth rate from 1872 to 1911 was a mere 10 percent, as compared with European Russia’s 78 percent, Germany’s 58 percent, Great Britain’s 43 percent, the Austro-Hungarian empire’s 38 percent, Italy’s 30 percent, and Spain’s 20 percent—women were called 94.  For an analysis of this opera, see Karen Henson, “In the House of Disillusion: Augusta Holmès and La Montagne noire,” Cambridge Opera Journal 9 (November 1997): 233–62, and Pasler, “Ironies of Gender.” 95.  Henri Bauër, “Premières représentations,” Echo de Paris, 10 February 1895. 96.  Boîte à musique, “Mlle Augusta Holmès,” Courrier musical, 10 March 1900, 4. 97.  Florence Launay, Les Compositrices en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2006), and Annegret Fauser, “La Guerre en dentelles: Four Women, the Prix de Rome and French Cultural Politics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 83–129. 98.  Lélio, “Mlle Cécile Chaminade,” Musique populaire, 23 August 1890, 358; Marcia Citron, Cécile Chaminade, a Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 10; and see also id., Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 144–59. 99.  Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 324–25.

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upon to be fertile mothers.100 Females thus could no longer function as allegories for the nation in the same way.

At the end of the century, the Opéra-Comique took the lead in presenting new kinds of female figures, albeit those with deep musical connections to French tradition. As in Greek tragedy, the characters in Pelléas et Mélisande (1893–95) are haunted by destiny. However, rather than fight against fate, they submit to it. Love here is neither a counterpart to power and grandeur nor what women can use to enable their social mobility. Through Mélisande, Maeterlinck and Debussy explore the exhaustion of the seductive female’s utility, depicting instead a fragile woman without will or agency, such as in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. 101 When they first meet, we hear Mélisande’s crying and Golaud’s cough, punctuated by pizzicato strings, Debussy here refusing musical expressivity. In some ways, Mélisande is like Mignon, a “poor child” of unclear origins who comes by boat from a foreign land, innocent and fearful. As in example 4a from Mignon, Mélisande’s vocal lines remain as close as possible to actual speech, following the flux of feelings, and keep any lyricism to a minimum. When confessing her love in act 4, she whispers, barely audible. Outer stillness hides inner drama, more often expressed in the orchestra than by the singers. Danger in the opera, unlike in those with the strong women discussed above, does not come from Mélisande’s voice or actions, but from the sounds of nature heralding the arrival of Golaud and the fate of the lovers. In her long unaccompanied solo on her hair at the beginning of act 3, Maeterlinck and Debussy give us a rare window onto Mélisande as she contemplates her own beauty without benefit of orchestral commentary or enhancement (ex. 29).102 In some ways, this dreamy oscillating lullaby recalls Ophelia’s mad song in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. Both women, blond and fragile like tender flowers, celebrate their voices with music unlike elsewhere in the operas. Both do this at moments of discontinuity, as they look back over their lives, feeling strangely free. Both use music to enter a dreamlike state, its instability suggested in the unsettlingly way 100.  For a study of the preoccupation with depopulation and fertility in the Bruneau-Zola collaboration Messidor (1897), see Steven Huebner, “Zola the Sower,” Music and Letters 83, 1 (February 2002): 75–105. 101.  Richard Langham Smith, “Debussy and the Pre-Raphaelites,” 19th-Century Music 5, 2 (Autumn 1981): 95–109. 102.  Because Melisande’s “alien birdsong” is unaccompanied, Carolyn Abbate, “Debussy’s Phantom Sounds,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10, 1 (March 1998), sees it as “hyper-realistic beyond any operatic norm,” yet shocking, defamiliarizing the “orchestral continuum” that precedes and follows it (89–90).

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Debussy sets “mes cheveux” both on and off the beat of the repeating folklike melody. The off-stage chorus in Hamlet suggests the presence of divine voices, as if Ophelia thinks she is going to heaven. After a pause, marked by a fermata (a kind of halo), Mélisande, sounding almost like a clarion call with her dotted rhythms, directly invokes her patron saints, three archangels—Saints Daniel, Michael, and Raphael. These recall the angelic voices heard by Joan of Arc, a reference to the French medieval past. The solo culminates in the strangest and most useless of revelations: “I was born on a Sunday, Sunday at noon.” As Catherine Clément points out, this was not just the Lord’s day, but also the hour of pagan madness in southern Italy.103 If Ophelia was mad and Mélisande a witch, as Clément suggests, it is perhaps because they are women who evoke questions more than answers. Debussy did not care if the intellect moyen could not understand a thing, as Léon Kerst warned his populist readers.104 He was looking to create a new ideal, one that used women and their charms, not as a metaphor for the social order or French identity, but as a conduit to a new kind of music. Debussy’s great innovation was to conceive of all the elements of music—the textures, rhythms, and harmonies— as melody, an arabesque in constant metamorphosis, like Bergson’s time of the unconscious, synonymous with the beauty of nature and the human soul.105 In his “Sirènes,” from Nocturnes (1897–99), Debussy left words behind altogether, treating the female voices as disembodied, pure musical timbre (see ex. 26). Of course, audiences continued to enjoy Mignon, Manon, Carmen, and Lakmé, which remained on stage throughout the 1890s. As Kerst remarked to explain the choice of Manon to open the Opéra-Comique’s 1892 fall season, “people go to what charms them.”106 When Loïe Fuller, an American pioneer of modern dance, first presented her “serpentine dances” at the Folies-Bergère in November 1892, the press admitted they had never seen such enthusiasm in the Parisian public. Yvette Guilbert, at the Concert-Parisien throughout 1892, also inevitably received multiple curtain calls from a “charmed public.” And for years the wax Javanese dancers attracted visitors to the Musée Grévin. But with misogynist sentiment growing, this was mostly diversion and bourgeois entertainment. In works that elevate workers to the status of the republican Marianne, Cléo de Mérode pre103.  Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 113–14. 104.  Jann Pasler, “Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera,” 19th-Century Music 10, 3 (Spring 1987), 250, and in id., Writing through Music, 192. 105.  For fuller discussion, see Jann Pasler, “Mélisande’s Charm and the Truth of Her Music,” in Debussy Perspectives, ed. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (forthcoming). 106.  Léon Kerst, “Paris au théâtre,” Petit Journal, 2 September 1892.

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Ex. 29  Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, act 3, Mélisande’s solo. Inex.29 this Pasler.UCP strangely haunting scene, Mélisande sings to herself, without orchestral accompaniment, as she combs her long hair in front of the window below which Pelléas will soon appear.

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sented a different kind of feminine ideal as the Muse in Charpentier’s Couronnement de la Muse (1897), and as did Mary Garden in his Louise (1900).107 Although few middle-class spectators at the Opéra-Comique would have identified with Louise—whose revolt against her parents has been read as anarchist rejection of family and state control108—the success of these works persuaded Charpentier to found a Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson in 1902. There working women could study music and dance. Charpentier aimed to “raise the prestige of the working woman, bring her out of the shadow and silence where some have wished to relegate her . . . allow her to participate in all the joys and all the enchantments of life.”109 If some critics worried that these Mimi Pinsons would lose their freshness and naïveté to professionalism, or their exposure to grandiose ideas might make them unfit for marriage,110 such institutions, part of the université populaire move107.  The socialist writer Camille Mauclair celebrated the opera for “bringing the battles and desires of the ‘humble’ onto the prestigious operatic stage” (Mauclair, Grande Revue, April 1902, 141). Cited in Jane Fulcher, “Charpentier’s Operatic ‘Roman Musical’ as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair,” 19th-Century Music 16, 2 (Fall 1992): 176. 108.  James Parakilas, “Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera,” 19th-Century Music 16, 2 (Fall 1992): 191. 109.  Charpentier, cited in Mary Ellen Poole, “Gustave Charpentier and the Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson,” 19th-Century Music 20, 3 (Spring 1997): 241. 110.  Ibid., 248–50.

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ment, offered the possibility of self-improvement, self-realization, and possibly social mobility. Charpentier thus engaged the French in contemplating the utility of a working-class woman to what has been called “village nationalism.”111

Fusion versus Distinction Within the nation, the product of lived and imagined experiences, class remained the deepest fault line at the fin de siècle. If the French had similar ancestors and were of the same race (in the sense of sharing inbred cultural values), if they studied the same school manuals and served in the same military, and if they attended the same concerts, albeit in different seats, nothing could take away from the fact that they lived different lives, determined perhaps above all by their class. The Dreyfus Affair may have raised serious questions about who and what was French.112 But the divisions emerging from it were unpredictable, rendering imperceptible any coherence in the responses. Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards came from all classes. Robert Kaplan has argued that the Affair separated people within, not between, class lines, with the most important division coming between two prestigious salons run by women.113 Other ways of thinking about identity at the time, however, reinforced class differences. As noted above, the debates about race—the Gauls versus the Franks—associated the former with the people and the latter with the aristocracy. While sweetly innocent girls or playfully seductive courtesans performed for the Opéra-Comique’s largely bourgeois audience, in opera, strong female figures, sometimes queens, played for the Opéra’s aristocratic patrons. By class here, I mean not only the differentiations of social status, but also the tastes, values, and mœurs associated with them. The upper class included the rich and the famous, capitalists and landowners, those who were born into it, purchased a title (a rampant practice in the 1890s), or were associated with high intellectual or artistic achievement.114 Classes were not fixed. A composer from the working class, like Debussy, might identify with the aristocracy and promote its interests. 111.  Parakilas, “Political Representation in Opera,” 191. 112.  Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics & Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 113.  Robert Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis: The Fin de siècle Crisis of Democracy in France (Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1995), 163. See chapter 11, n. 70, above, on why he believed the progressive income tax debate fell along class lines much more than the Dreyfus Affair. Income tax was not law until 1914. 114.  Christophe Charle, in his A Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Miriam Kochan (Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1994), and id., Les Elites de la République, 1880–1900 (Paris: Fayard, 2006).

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As we have seen, the musical world could be used to reinforce the permeability and fluidity of class. But, while republicans continued to argue for reducing class differences through broad accessibility to art music, increasingly in the 1890s, elites wished to see the musical world more divided along class lines. Fear of crowds stirred up widespread anxiety about class differences and threw into question the notion of the country as a collective community. General Boulanger’s rise to power had unveiled the dangers of mass culture. Socialist demonstrations, union strikes, and erratic anarchist attacks led many, including republicans in government, to think of large groups of people as “instinctive, fierce, and dark”—potentially dangerous to the public order.115 Conservatives worried about the “moral contagion” of crowds, their capacity to hypnotize people. Gustave Le Bon felt that crowds de-civilized people, rendering them primitive, barbaric, like drunks, and feminine in their contradictions and fickleness. He attacked not just “criminal crowds” but also “electoral crowds,” noting their credulity and lack of critical spirit. Giving the vote to the masses, who were driven by sentiment more than reason, he argued, risked great harm to society.116 Like Robespierre, Le Bon thought the only good crowd was controlled, thinking as one, like people watching military parades (as in Alfred Roll’s Le 14 Juillet 1880 [fig. 42]) or the faithful at church. With the Boulanger affair posing a threat to democracy, both conservatives and liberals saw ignorance as the “worst social danger” facing the country. The best defense against the power of demagogues was an educated populace.117 The Société nationale des conférences populaires was founded and public lectures emerged as a popular form of leisure among all social classes. By the end of the century, there were “popular universities” for adults in every neighborhood in Paris, various Sociétés d’instructions populaires, and an expansion of public libraries. In the schools, republican educators focused on unity through shared morals. La morale became synonymous for solidarity, or a commitment to the social whole, as well as civilization, implying the beliefs, values, and standards worthy of emulation. La morale was what united all good citizens and suggested ways to assimilate the lowly and the foreign. 115.  Gustave Geffroy, La Vie artistique (1895), cited in Thomson, Troubled Republic, 97. Charle, Social History, implies an anxiety about crowds among the middle class, which he defines as “everyone who tried to escape from the masses (workers or peasants), without being sure that they would attain undisputed bourgeois status” (178). 116.  Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (French original, 1895; London: Benn, 1896). 117.  Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 1880–1914 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1986), 257.

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Fig. 101  Concert at the Café Rouge. Photograph in F. Berkeley Smith, How Paris Amuses Itself (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1903). Audiences sat at tables drinking wine and other spirits during performances by a small orchestra, who played on an elevated platform at the back of this brasserie. Hats were permitted, unlike on the main floor in theaters.

Across the country, many composers, patrons, and state officials continued to believe that music should support this educational agenda. Art should not be a luxury inaccessible to the poor. Some saw them as a potentially fresh audience.118 Recognizing that while up to 120,000 male workers sang with orphéons in regular competitions, few working-class women had such opportunities, free music classes were increasingly offered to females between the ages of 15 and 25.119 Orchestras also began to perform for a wider range of audiences. Beginning in 1889, a fivemusician orchestra played nightly for students and locals at the Left Bank Café Rouge (fig. 101). In 1893, the government required the Opéra to offer low-cost Saturday performances for families (fig. 102). Other new low-cost concerts for the masses included Eugène d’Harcourt’s Concerts populaires eclectiques, beginning in 1892, the Concerts Lamoureux’s Festival populaire in 1895, and their Concerts populaires beginning in 1898. All over France, people recognized that “concerts have a mission to accomplish . . . they are educators and it is they who have the honor of forming musical taste.”120 More and more, concerts were explicitly orga118.  Poole, “Gustave Charpentier and the Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson,” 251. 119.  Ménestrel, 20 November 1892, 375. For example, beginning in 1897, Edmond Bailly’s Œuvre d’éducation musicale de la femme. 120.  Fernand Drogoul, “Lettre de Marseille,” Courrier musical, 26 November 1899, 7.

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Fig. 102  Working-class music lovers at the Opéra during a free performance, L’Illustra­ tion, 15 July 1899.

nized as a form of popular education. In 1896, Catulle Mendès lectured on works by Berlioz and Wagner at a Colonne concert.121 In 1897–98, Colonne programmed an entire season in a “rational and instructive way.” In performing overtures, symphonies, and concertos by Schumann, Beethoven, and Wagner at each concert, he hoped that “the transformation of material, the progress of style, the influence of a period, and the action of time would give attentive listeners opportunities for comparison and study.”122 Concerts also had another important utility: ideally, they transformed the heterogeneous crowd into a peaceful, disciplined public. Associating the “crowd” at concerts with their revolutionary predecessors, some still saw it as “authentic,” driven by “generous instincts” and clear judgments that, if sometimes erroneous, were at least “sincere.”123 In his 1894 speech at the Conservatoire, Minister Leygues reiterated the revolutionaries’ association of power with music, saying that “nothing acts so powerfully on the crowd and makes its heart beat more quickly” than music. He told Conservatoire students that their “role” was to bring “the crowd in direct communication with both old and new composers.” Through identification with the “strong moral emotions, generous passions, lofty thoughts, and heroic gestures” expressed therein, the crowd could be transformed, its dreams realized in sound.124 The sociologist Gabriel Tarde called the resulting entity a public, a “purely spiritual collectivity, of which the cohesion is entirely mental.” To the extent that music expressed “spiritual desires,” at concerts it made us “touch each other at our highest points, like the trees of the forests.” Music’s “moral effect” promoted “moral unity” among its listeners. When music reflected tastes and these tastes expressed inner desires, people listening to or performing it came to resemble one another internally. If Tarde was right in believing that “unseen and mental imitation lessens psychological distance between superior and inferior,” then shared musical experiences contributed to the democratic process.125 Of course, publics were not all the same. At concerts, they could have distinct needs and desires. Some resembled crowds. For audiences who went to purchase 121.  See the program of 3 April 1896 reproduced in Jann Pasler, “Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne,” in Le Concert et son public: Mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Patrice Veit, and Michael Werner (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2002), 233. 122.  Charles Malsherbe, “Les Concerts de L’Association artistique” (Concerts Colonne program notes), 17 October 1897. 123.  H. Barbedette, Ménestrel, 19 December 1886, 22; Paul Delsemme, Un Théoricien du symbolisme: Charles Morice (Paris: Nizet, 1958), 174. 124.  Leygues, Discours . . . 4 Août 1894, and Roujon, Discours . . . 3 Août 1895. 125.  Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 356.

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sensations, as Léon-Paul Fargue once put it, music resembled alcohol or drugs, ensuring escape and stimulating exaggerated enthusiasm. After the construction of its Palais d’hiver in 1893, the Jardin zoologique, explicitly addressing the diversity of its potential publics, organized three distinct concert series. On Sundays, its Concerts populaires, performed in the main hall, presented “easy and likeable music” by well-known masters. Four afternoons a week, zoo patrons were invited to promenade concerts in the Palmarium, a huge greenhouse, where they could “relax in the shade of the trees with their children while they conversed with their friends or did some work.” For its Wednesday evening series of newer music for a more “initiated” public, the zoo increased the size of its orchestra to ninety musicians, invited guest soloists, including opera singers, and raised ticket prices. The organizers hoped that this public would “take pleasure in the historical part of their programs,” as well as works by young composers. After 1889, believing the future of their world to be threatened, aristocrats and those of all classes with aristocratic pretensions grew weary of public taste, some seeing it as tyrannical and inevitably mediocre.126 For them, the issue was not dissension but “distinction,” that is, from the crowd,127 a way to escape that most despicable of bourgeois sins, mediocrity. Tarde explained this impetus as “a need for individual divergence, for de-assimilation,” that arises after the “demands of the envious” have led to “more equality.” At that point, he predicted, “society is ever more ‘parceled out’ in small pieces rather than stratified in large layers.”128 Aristocrats have historically used musical taste and patronage to differentiate themselves from their peers. At the turn of the century, “distinction” was not merely a personal issue for patrons nor the composers in their midst. Many were preoccupied with glory and the survival of prerevolutionary values. At stake was the national cultural identity through which their international peers and future generations would judge and remember them. Their positions and actions in the musical world were of critical importance in challenging bourgeois culture and in stimulating musical change. 126.  Delsemme, Théoricien du symbolisme: Charles Morice, 174. 127.  The republican Félix Pécaut, in his Quinze ans d’éducation (Paris: Delagrave, 1902), disagreed with those who conceived of distinction as having “a certain elevation in ideas or feelings,” which he calls an effect rather than a cause. “To distinguish oneself,” he writes, “is the fact of detaching oneself from the anonymous crowd with one’s own idea, feeling, language, or physiognomy.” Anyone can claim such distinction, the “flower” of which would be the kindness with which one gives of oneself voluntarily to others (168–69). See also Pierre Bourdieu in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 128.  Gabriel Tarde, Les Lois d’imitation (1890), cited and discussed in Williams, Dream Worlds, 357.

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We have seen how the Concerts Lamoureux and Comtesse Greffulhe’s Société des grandes auditions made their concerts an exclusive affair through ticket pricing and, to some extent, repertoire, how they brought together the haute bourgeoisie and aristocratic elites through shared tastes. The Schola Cantorum of Bordes, Guilmant, and d’Indy, too, wished to be associated with exclusivity. In its small hall, after 1900 it attracted intellectual and social elites to hear rarely performed music in an atmosphere of almost religious reverence.129 In the 1890s, all kinds of cults and secret societies were formed in response to this need for detachment from the masses, including private music societies.130 Inspired in part by the rituals in Parsifal, some engaged in practices replicating its initiation, quest, and redemption myths, resulting in alternative kinds of mysticism, medievalism, and even churches. Seeing art as satisfying needs previously served by religion, Sâr Joséphin Péladan, founder of his own Rosicrucian sect, recast aspects of religion as art. People actively realizing idealism in their everyday lives he considered aristocrats by reason of the nobility of their souls. Ironically, given his quasi-aristocratic values, Péladan’s aim was in fact not that dissimilar from that of populists like Charpentier or Zola, who also made myths out of everyday life. Like them, he believed art and music could redeem decadent society.131 Not surprisingly, however, those who could embrace life as art were those of means. Rosicrucians had to pay 20 francs—four times the cost of the most expensive ticket at the Concerts Colonne—to hear Palestrina, Satie, and Franck at the soirées of the Ordre de la Rose † Croix (fig. 103). Such exclusivity gave rise to snobisme and snobs practicing an “art of personality.”132 In his 1897 novel Maîtresse d’esthètes, the Wagnerian music critic Willy (Henri Gauthier-Villars), Colette’s husband, explored the ambitions of a young female snob, “Ysolde,” who wanted to be “beautiful and useless.” Snobs enthusiastic about Debussy’s opera became known as “Pelléastres,” also parodied in a novel.133 Distinction, whether tentatively real or merely imagined, was far more important among elites than identity, which implied more homogeneity than they were willing to admit. Some sought in their musical practices to reinstate the social and political differences the republicans had struggled to break down through 129.  Catrina Flint de Médicis, “Nationalism and Early Music at the French Fin de Siècle: Three Case Studies,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 1, 2 (2004): 53. 130.  See Jules Bois, Les Petites Religions de Paris (Paris: Chailley, 1894). 131.  Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-garde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 121–31. 132.  Ibid., last chapter. 133.  Jean Lorrain, Pelléastres (Paris: Méricant, 1910). Excerpts first appeared in Le Journal, 22 January 1904.

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Fig. 103  Flyer advertising five Soirées de la Rose † Croix concerts, beginning on 17 March 1892. The Ordre de la Rose † Croix put on concerts of works by Palestrina, Wagner, Satie, Franck, and Franck’s students, among others. The narrative of Satie’s Le Fils des étoiles, premiered here, is one of initiation.

education and the promotion of patriotism as “the spirit of the national family.”134 Distinction reinforced the comparative status inherent in class constructs and a certain hierarchy. The preoccupation of elites with distinction affected how and to what they listened. In the late 1880s and 1890s, elegance became increasingly valued, associated with the quality and desirability of French luxury items.135 Fine Arts Minister Gustave Larroumet promoted elegance in both music and the visual arts. He praised Ambroise Thomas for his “sense of measure, clarity, and elegance, without which nothing, not even music, would be French.”136 As we have seen, Debussy, too, considered elegance to be quintessentially French. According to the Petit Robert dictionary, it is not only defined by “harmony” and an “ease” of expression, but is also tied to fashion, what is “chic” and “distinctive.” As such, elegance is generally associated with the upper classes, people who have a life of “ease” and can afford to keep up with the new. Associated with “good taste and distinction, accompanied by ease and style in moral or intellectual matters,” the word stands for not just “good taste” in art and fashion, but also quality in breeding and life. Perhaps the most significant impact of this concern with distinction was the relationship some elites, especially intellectuals, sought with music. In the 1880s, the aura of “great solemnity” associated with Good Friday performances began to extend to other concerts. Wagnerians, in particular, compared the concert experience to rituals in part because Wagner’s music encouraged audiences to listen in silence, “as if to the word of God . . . abandoning will and reason.”137 Silence would distinguish such listeners from the natural spontaneity associated with ordinary people, as well as from passionate outbursts increasingly troublesome for their resemblance to crowd behavior. Increasingly in the 1890s, critics, composers, and patrons also began to encourage contemplative listening, resembling what Rose Subotnik has called structural listening.138 Looking to the music of César Franck, J. S. Bach, and Palestrina—composers whose reputations greatly expanded among French listeners in the 1890s—listeners were told to concentrate 134.  Félix Pécaut, L’Education publique et la vie nationale (Paris: Hachette, 1897), 362. 135.  As Debora Silverman writes in Art Nouveau, “With its national resources of elegance and its reputation as the mecca of taste, fashion, and luxury, France would compensate for industrial deceleration with civilizing graces” (52–53, 111–118, 186–89). 136.  Gustave Larroumet, Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 4 août 1888 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888), Discours prononcé par M. le Ministre de l’Instruction publique et des beaux-arts: Séance publique annuelle du samedi 3 août 1889 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1889), and “Le XVIIIe siècle et la critique contemporaine,” Revue des arts décoratifs 17 (1897): 128. 137.  Saint-Saëns cited by A. Hélier, Art musical, 31 January 1890, 10. 138.  Rose Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 277–83.

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on the formal ideas and the perception of certain laws in such music, not their own personal responses to it, be they emotional or imaginative. “Elegant dilettantes,” music lovers, and professionals thus began to see music as something, above all, to admire. As such, it was not reducible either to the banal concerns of everyday life or the aspirations of the country, but construed as a superior kind of experience, the result of the mind in possession of itself. As one might imagine, most people had a hard time replacing sentimental or imaginative listening with this kind of aesthetic perception. Like religious practice, it depended on removing the self as the center of one’s practice, and focusing on something absent, the composer’s concerns. For those capable of doing this, listening based on reflection constituted an ascetic practice and implied a new morale resembling that espoused by the Stoics, whose ideas came back into fashion at the end of the nineteenth century. A hierarchy in listening styles emerged and was assumed to map onto class.139 For those who “love music without trying to understand it,” Albert Lavignac proposes, music is “simply a sensual pleasure, a fashionable diversion . . . essentially frivolous and superficial.”140 But those who see it as “an analysis of emotions and procedures through which emotions are produced” can experience music as “pure and infinite,” eliciting an “intellectual jouissance” (substituting mental for sexual pleasure).141 As discussed in chapter 4, “pure” in such contexts connotes not only elevated ideas and music without story or program, but also extreme refinement, such as associated with the upper classes. Increasing interest in musical abstractions appeared even in musical manuals for young children. In his Deuxième Année de musique (1891), Antoine Marmontel deleted “for the pleasure of the ear” from his 1885 definition of music, leaving only “the art of producing and combining sounds . . . beautiful and pure sonorities.”142 This notion of music as intellectual and “pure” inevitably encouraged distinctions among listeners. “Easy music, operettas and [the] café-concert,” as Lavignac put it, is for “the others,” those who “cannot understand anything.” In contrast, “performances of elevated art” should be for “the enlightened public, those who have acquired a special intelligence through a certain amount of study and can take full advantage of it.”143 139.  I discuss these listening styles more fully in Useful Performance (forthcoming). 140.  Lavignac, Musique et les musiciens français, 441. 141.  Ibid. 142.  Antoine Marmontel, La Deuxième Année de musique, solfège, et chants (Paris: Colin, 1891), 20; cf. chapter 6 above, p. 392. This resembles Maurice Denis’s definition of art as a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. Quite possibly in shifting critical attention away from sound qualities to structural ones, various kinds of exotic music at the 1889 Exhibition contributed to this new orientation. 143.  Lavignac, Musique et les musiciens français, 438, 441.

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Alfred Fouillé, a theoretician of French secondary education, saw social implications in this approach to beauty, “almost the only cult” that could replace religion, which was “daily losing its power.” In calling the “cult of the beautiful,” “the disinterested love of what is great, the habit of thinking and acting for the community, and not only for ourselves—a habit that was considered as the greatest of the virtues by the ancients,” Fouillé sounds republican. However, the beautiful for him was distinct from the useful, and he saw utilitarian education, which he associated with the lower classes, as threatening to replace “moral instruction of the good and the beautiful.” The consequences of this position were significant. Fouillé considered study of “the good from the point of view of beauty, and no longer that of utility or social necessity” as what was needed to create “enlightened minds” and an “enlightened class worthy to be the directing class.” There could be no “national evolution,” Fouillé asserted, without such elites.144 In other words, beauty has social value, particularly since he attributes France’s greatness to its “artistic sense and superiority of taste.” However, the benefits of its study should accrue to elites and future elites, not all French men and women. Such attitudes evolved hand in hand with some composers’ increasing desire to rid themselves of constraints tied to writing for the general public. Critics like Jullien pointed out that works that had stood the test of time had often been initially rejected. Program notes at concerts pointed to examples of this. Some composers understood that to have artistic integrity, they needed to sacrifice public opinion. Debussy, among the most vocal on this, went further. Although he knew that “true glory can come only from the masses,” in 1903, he opposed the Republic’s efforts to increase the artistic education of the public at large: “the most useless thing in the world. . . . How, indeed, can anyone claiming to have some degree of artistic education be prevented from thinking himself at once able to take up art? This is what makes me think that too great a diffusion of art will only lead to greater mediocrity.” Unlike d’Indy, who wanted to convert as many as possible to his aesthetic values, Debussy, resembling Mallarmé, felt that “the masses can no more be ordered to love beauty than they can be persuaded to walk around on their hands.”145 To follow the implications of Debussy’s preferences would mean to deny art music to all but connoisseurs. 144.  Alfred Fouillé, Education from a National Standpoint, trans. W. J. Greenstreet (New York: Appleton, 1892), 105–7, 116, 119, 207. In an 1895 speech, Bourgeois, L’Education de la démocratie française, countered that moral instruction was at the heart of civic education in France. Recalling the importance revolutionaries had given to feeling, he noted the importance of “developing not only the idea, but also the feeling of good and evil.” The “cultivation of feeling” should be pursued patiently and methodically (165, 172). 145.  Debussy on Music, trans. and ed. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977), 141, 165.

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Not only fear of mediocrity, but also aspirations to superiority underlay the pursuit of distinction. Michel Faure sees such elitism as a product of Debussy’s social ambitions (Debussy left his humble background and his first wife after the success of Pelléas to marry a wealthy banker’s wife).146 Yet the composer claimed he had “little desire to be enormously successful or tumultuously famous.” From another perspective, one could argue that elitism served his need for independence and helped him to resist compromising his artistic ideals. If he once remarked to an interviewer that “in art there is an aristocracy that one should not compromise,” most likely he did not mean art in the service of some “gilded segment”—“it has gone wrong when it becomes a Luxury-Religion that excludes those with more goodwill than cash”—but rather art at its best, embodying its highest ideals. Like d’Indy, to whom he ascribed “high ideals and an individual approach,” Debussy esteemed most “the power of beauty itself.” In defining music as “a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are a part of Infinity,” he elevates music to the status of the sublime and implies that the composer has access to what no ordinary mortals know. Later, he advocates preserving this state: “The beauty of a work of art is something that will always remain mysterious; that is to say one can never find out exactly ‘how it is done.’ At all costs let us preserve this element of magic peculiar to music.”147 Debussy’s ultimate independence came in the way he posed his music as quintessentially French, detached from the limitations of his own society because part of the current of history. Those reacting against the accessibility of art music gravitated to the “pure” and an intellectual experience of beauty that anticipated modernist attitudes. They bemoaned the domestication of music by new media and the ease with which so much could be transcribed and performed in diverse contexts, such as opera excerpts performed by military bands or reproduced mechanically by music boxes. Music foregrounding timbral distinction and timbral purity, such as Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, seemed to address these concerns in that it discouraged transcriptions for other instruments. Such music widened the gap between listeners who could hear this music in its intended form and those who could not. Contempt for music with immediate appeal, when perceived as a manifestation of artistic degeneration, encouraged that which took more effort to understand—an attitude espoused by the symbolists.148 This raised troubling questions about whether French music should embrace 146.  Michel Faure, Musique et société du Second Empire aux années vingt (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 82. 147.  Debussy on Music, 111, 165, 199, 224, 279. 148.  Flint de Médicis, “Nationalism and Early Music,” 49. See also chapter 9 above.

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simplicity or complexity. If part of Lakmé’s appeal was its music’s “simplicity” and “frankness,” if Saint-Saëns chose to “dominate” his strength and “control” his technique to produce the “strange simplicity” associated with the ancient Greeks, if Charpentier preferred simple songs for his Mimi Pinsons, if critics praised Palestrina’s music for its “primitive simplicity,” and if Satie and later Cocteau preferred the simple to the highly refined, it was partly because simplicity was understood as an “essential quality of the French genius.”149 Tiersot and others connected this to the origins of French music and the chanson populaire. Yet those such as Fétis and Renan saw the capacity for complexity as distinctive of the Aryan race. And French composers as diverse as Bruneau and d’Indy preferred musical complexity, although this was not well received by audiences. Music of extreme virtuosity, difficulty, complexity, and dissonance created vastly different experiences for connoisseurs and untrained listeners, but also allowed composers to foreground their mastery. Perhaps frustrated with listeners’ interpretive freedom, such composers wished to regain control of the musical experience and musical meaning. To the extent that their music challenged listeners’ expectations, it encouraged new forms of listening.150 Sometimes, the demands of surface could replace those of form. Values perceived as anarchic—immediacy, spontaneity, discontinuity—enabled composers to capture the present. In the context of the Universal Exhibitions, all this was very ironic. Despite their purported primitiveness, at least as music from the pre-industrial age, and his own interest in the origins of music, we’ve seen that what impressed Tiersot most about Javanese court music and Vietnamese popular theater was, not their simplicity, but their rhythmic complexity. And some, such as Debussy, looked not only to the timbres and modes of non-Western musics for inspiration, but also to their complex musical processes. Cracks in Western power structures, with both the failure of assimilation in the colonies and the rise of the modern independent woman, might have made it important for composers to flaunt their capacity to 149.  Henri Bauër, “Premières représentations” (2 November 1890); Emile Baumann, Les Grandes Formes de la musique: L’Œuvre de Saint-Saëns (Paris: Editions littéraires et artistiques, 1905); Poole, “Gustave Charpentier and the Conservatoire Populaire de Mimi Pinson,” 246. 150.  In Jann Pasler, “Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes: The Emergence of a New Musical Logic” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1981), I discuss how Stravinsky’s early ballets, written for the Parisian public, create moments of disjunction that superimpose an imaginative expectation of more of the same, with the brutal physical reality of hearing something different, that is, the clash of expected continuity with perceived discontinuity. Stravinsky takes charge of our experience in a way that is arguably more invasive and far more controlling than any music of unendliche Melodie. In Germany, as Walter Frisch points out in his German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), Nietzsche developed a related concept of double consciousness.

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control complex musical materials. As composers began to make recordings of their own music, fixing their interpretations for posterity, such practices also affected concepts of authority in music. Eventually, desire for permanence, as opposed to sensation and imaginative projections, prepared the way for a return to classical values, albeit in modern clothes. At the end of the century, focus on distinction also played out ironically when associated with national differences. As foreign conductors began to perform in concert halls as well as theaters, pitting French music against an increasingly wide array of foreign music, performances encouraged respect for differences. The Concerts Colonne hired Richard Strauss, from the Munich Opera, on 28  November 1897; Felix Mottl, who conducted all Wagner, on 13 February 1898 and 26 February 1899; Hans Richter, conductor of the Viennese Imperial Opera, on 3 April 1898; Siegfried Wagner on 25 March 1900; and Oskar Nedbal, principal conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, who introduced French audiences to Czech music, on 26 March 1901. In 1899, Colonne traveled to conduct French music in Russia, Barcelona, and Milan. By juxtaposing a concert of music by twelve French composers with one featuring music by fourteen foreign composers, seven of them premieres, Colonne wanted his listeners to understand both the “international, cosmopolitan” context for music as well as what made French music distinct within it. In the years that followed, the Société des grandes auditions, too, presented concerts to build bridges between nations, sometimes explicitly as a form of cultural diplomacy. Comtesse Greffuhle’s belief in “the fraternity of nations and people” and in “all men as brothers of the same blood,”151 as well as her desire to enhance mutual understanding, resulted in her sponsoring concerts of music by composers her foreign peers thought were the most representative of their countries. This not only brought the aristocracy’s concern with distinction into the international realm, it also led to performing difficult foreign music, including that of Mahler and Schoenberg.152 Such musical practices suggest that amid the emergence of nation-states was a deepening awareness of a culture Europeans shared. This may have relied on old aristocratic networks, rooted in monarchies, but was increasingly based on social and aesthetic values, as well as on race. Focus on national distinction in music, then, contributed to the growing internationalism of the emerging modernism. 151.  Notes for an international conference hall in Paris, 30 March 1907 (Comtesse Greffulhe Archives, Archives nationales, Paris). 152.  I discuss this in more detail in Jann Pasler, “Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation,” in Writing through Music.

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From the Useful to the Healthy As public taste, when tied to mass culture, became suspect, some began to reevaluate the social function of art, calling into question the culture of utility, and utility as a central value in French culture. Fouillé worried about education becoming too utilitarian to form future elites. In 1902, concern about the “too modest” pieces composed by winners of the Prix de Rome even led to questioning “the utility” of the French Academy’s Villa Medici in Rome, where composers could write full time for several years funded by the French government.153 Other concerns also challenged the preeminence of public utility as a way to think about the common good. Gobineau had associated the useful with white people “in a larger, more elevated, more courageous, more ideal sense” than with others, and as his reputation soared in the first decade of the new century, his racist anxieties about racial mixing fueled widespread anxiety about depopulation, racial degeneration, and the demise of civilization.154 In this context, intense debate about the responsibility of the republican state to its citizens led to a new criterion of social value: hygiene, or what would contribute to the health of mind, body, and society. Pasteur’s research, the seven Instituts he founded overseas between 1891 and 1914, and regular reporting on cholera deaths in the press raised awareness of the importance of hygiene and hygienic practices at home and abroad.155 Le Bon kindled fear of crowds by referring to their power of contagion.156 The critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, who saw the pathology of society in medical terms and reconceived the idea of the body politic along the model of medical science, depicted the press as equally capable of spreading epidemics of the mind.157 Besides these proto-monarchist thinkers, republican reformers such as Léon Bourgeois recognized that class privileges were no defense against contagious disease, and that “epidemics of social hatred” were as dangerous as those of tuberculosis or typhoid fever. In 1894, he told the Ligue française de l’enseignement that “minds need hygienists and doctors as much as bodies do.”158 Félix Pécaut agreed, redefining education as the “health of the spirit” and calling on the government to form “healthy and perceptive minds,” and for 153.  Mercure de France, May 1902, 536. 154.  Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, in Œuvres, 1: 341, 347–48. 155.  For example, in the populist newspaper Le Petit Journal, the reporting on deaths by cholera appeared on almost every page throughout 1893, sometimes next to music news and reviews. 156.  Le Bon, Crowd, 124. 157.  Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 81. 158.  Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986), 26.

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“hygiene for the mind as well as the body.” In 1902 he compared the “feeling of the beautiful” to a “nice climate that favors the growth of good germs.”159 If improving hygiene came to be seen as integral to the civilizing process, the goal was not just to preserve the French race, but also to perfect it.160 Conservatives and republicans alike looked to music to contribute to physical and psychic healing. As concerts came to be considered a form of “nutrition,” food metaphors began to permeate musical discourse, articulating taste and used to evaluate works for their contributions to one’s health. Whereas the “German pasta” of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was “without shape or flavor, unfolding like an eternal macaroni, heavy and indigestible for the stomach of the drowsy listener,” SaintSaëns’s music offered “artistic nutrition” that was “simultaneously substantial and light.”161 In promoting one kind of new music over another, one reviewer criticized Debussy’s Faune for being “enervating, almost unhealthy music, although delicious, like rare game [ gibier] a little tainted [ faisandé]” (the adjective faisandé was also used in literature and society to mean something corrupt, decadent). In contrast, the Fantasy by Guy Ropartz, one of Franck’s students, seemed “more pure, a healthier beauty.”162 Claiming healthy benefits was a way to promote certain kinds of music. “Christian chant is the healthy body in service of a healthy soul,” writes the Solesmes monk Dom Mocquereau; “The musical bread of the Church . . . is the nutrition of the most elevated minds as well as the least cultivated souls.”163 To attack music they did not like, critics called it “antihygienic”164 Possibly in an attempt to scare people away, some referred to the rising popularity of Debussy’s opera as an “epidemic,” as if like cholera and other diseases. While at first hygiene was construed as a way to ensure better living conditions for the lower classes, Janet Home observes, “questions of public hygiene challenged and ultimately altered the relationship between the individual and the government by slowly discrediting the liberal notion of the ‘night watchman state,’ ” charged only with surveillance.165 Moving beyond conflicts within the 159.  Pécaut, Education nationale et la vie nationale, 64; id., Quinze ans d’éducation, 139. 160.  Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 61, 146. 161.  Barbedette, Ménestrel, 12 March 1893, 81. 162.  Marcel Boulestin, “Correspondance de Bordeaux,” Courrier musical, 31 December 1899, 7. 163.  Dom Mocquerau, “L’Art grégorien,” Revue du chant grégorien, 15 April 1897, 159– 61. Such reasoning was applied later even to the dancing of Irene and Vernon Castle and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. 164.  Eugène d’Harcourt, “La Reprise de Pelléas,” Figaro, 31 October 1902. 165.  Janet R. Home, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée social and the Rise of the Welfare State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 2002), chap. 6.

The Dynamics of Identity

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medical community over the vast sewage project in Paris begun by Haussmann, Léon Bourgeois looked to prevention, which he called the “directing principle of social hygiene.”166 With prevention in mind, in 1902, the government passed public health legislation, setting uniform standards throughout the country. In 1904, a veritable “social hygiene movement” emerged, promoted by governmentrecognized associations. Such interest led to free medical care for the poor, pension subsidies, and ultimately a complex welfare system. Prevention, however, was a far different process than debating the relative public utility of goods and services and negotiating people’s conflicting needs and desires. The focus was more narrow, less flexible, more top-down. And it encouraged an increasing gap between experts and those they were engaged to protect. If we are composed of what we consume, the focus on healthy nutrition built on the notion of “composing” the citizen. But in addressing the nation’s vitality, the discourse of health, which concerned control as well as nutrition, put emphasis on protection rather than empowerment. Such a position turned the state into a protective patriarch. When this idea was extended to moral hygiene, as in the debates over prostitution or even the effect of certain music, it had the potential for repression. To the extent that this discourse, permeating popular as well as scientific thinking, associated deviance with criminality and, inspired by Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, suggested that aspects of the environment could contribute to national weakness and degeneracy,167 the focus on hygiene not only led to an increase in sports associations, possibly contributing to the eventual decrease in the number of orphéons and other amateur music societies after 1900.168 It also forced reevaluation of music and what it contributed to the decline as well as the health of the nation.

166.  Ibid., 249. 167.  See esp. Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). 168.  Henri Maréchal and Gabriel Parès, Monographie universelle de l’orphéon (Paris: Delagrave, 1910), 310, and Philippe Gumplowicz, Les Travaux d’Orphée: Deux siècles de pratique musicale amateur en France (1820–2000), 2nd ed. (Paris: Aubier, 2001), 209.

694

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Shifting Notions of Utility

C o da

When focus on the health of the country transformed the national dialogue, the republican ideal of public utility found other forms, just as aristocratic values arguably survived in modernist music. Expropriation laws have continued to clear the way in France for new public buildings, parks, and high-speed trains. Tourism and nuclear energy became public services. And in July 1987, to recognize nonprofit work serving the country’s general interest, laws were passed concerning “foundations of public utility.” This enabled banks, companies producing luxury goods, and other private organizations to receive tax and other advantages for patronage of the arts, culture, the environment, and various social services.1 But the legacy of public utility from early Third Republic France extends well beyond such economic interests. French officials still conceive of their public institutions as working in the service of citizens. The community, the nation, and even, to some extent, public institutions are consubstantial with the people itself, not a force inhibiting individual freedom. As socialists, in some ways functioning as successors of opportuniste and radical republicans, clash with far-Right conservatives of the Front National, and, at least on this question, with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pro-business views, debates over the luxury versus the utility of goods and social services remain heated. Nonetheless, most French continue to believe in beauty and culture as integral to their country. Modern monuments in Paris associated with successive presidents—Georges Pompidou’s Centre national d’art et de culture near the oldest part of the city, François Mitterrand’s huge new Bibliothèque nationale in its working-class east, and Jacques Chirac’s Musée du quai Branly, devoted to non-Western indigenous art, in its wealthier west—attest to the ongo1.  A recent example is a nonprofit foundation, “30 million d’amis,” dedicated to fighting against the abandonment of domestic pets. Its logo, featured prominently on billboards in the Paris Métro throughout summer 2008, includes, in large letters, “reconnue d’utilité publique.”

695

ing concern with siting public institutions in a way that challenges insular tastes and increases their access to those most in need of other perspectives. 2 The Third Republic laid a foundation for how music could help “compose” citizens, forging a relationship to the nation and one another based on the republican principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Three ongoing concerns hark back to this period: the desire to assure accessibility to the arts for all citizens, the use of music and musical practices to build community and help people explore what they value as a people, and faith in music’s capacity to revitalize and help us imagine change because we have heard it. The first goes to the heart of all public utilities: the right of all people to have their basic needs met. In the United States, the electricity and water companies today have a monopoly on this concept. But in France, where music has long been recognized as a powerful and empowering medium that can electrify crowds and nourish body as well as soul, 3 orchestras continue to receive state subsidies. Public support of music is analogous to public health insurance, something assured in many European nations, but still contested in the United States. Ironically, perhaps, if we think of government as centralized control, French socialists today, like their republican predecessors, encourage popular participation in culture and refuse to see culture as handed down from on high or associated with the distinction of socially privileged or highly educated elites. Ongoing support for the contemporary music research at the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique in Paris, however, suggests that conservatives and progressives alike continue to see value in high culture and intellectual musical practices, in part because of their currency in the realm of international exchange. Music also helped the French to navigate the flux of a complex and dynamic national identity. As those at the fin de siècle came to grips with themselves as a hybrid people with eclectic interests, the product of both assimilation and resistance to various invader cultures, France offered an alternative to both the ethnic model of identity found in Germany and Japan and that based on shared philosophical ideals such as in the United States, a model particularly valuable in today’s world. If there is coherence in the French nation, it derives from both a certain sense of the public interest, that which anything of public utility serves, and shared culture. Music, an integral part of this, can be perceived as autonomous and 2.  Various public cultural festivals and institutions, such as the Théâtre national populaire, the Festival d’Avignon, and the Cinémathèque française, have also addressed this. 3.  On the aesthetic power of music to “play with life’s depths, the extremes of passion, simulating the complexities of thought, and seeming to stir nature itself,” see Paul Valéry, “At the Lamoureux Concert in 1893,” in his Occasions, trans. Roger Shattuck and Frederick Brown (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 198–99.

696

.

Coda

“pure,” its practice possibly bringing grace to the individual, or an expression of “universal” taste, be it through certain forms or abstractions inherent in the human mind. As I’ve shown, it also has the potential to play a significant role in debates over identity, reinforcing one position or another or helping people reconcile what stands in the way of social solidarity. Moreover, some of the subjects that attracted composers at the fin de siècle maintained their appeal in the twentieth century, when, for example, Canteloube composed an opera on Vercingétorix (1933) and Honegger an opera on Judith (1926) and an oratorio on Jeanne d’Arc (1938). Through works such as these, music can unite or divide, musical tastes articulating the boundaries of communities. As differences of class increase in our globally interconnected, finance-driven world and as religious practices drive wedges into our societies, creating deepening fissures, music’s broad accessibility makes it possible to create dialogue, as it did between monarchists and republicans under the Moral Order and the ralliement, to promote tolerance and understanding, and, whenever possible, to enable consensus without repression. Like citizenship, it can serve as a medium for enhancing self-awareness. If, as I have here suggested, music could help people address their differences and assure survival of their values, this depends on a public of active listeners, active in defining the context for what was written and what it could mean. If such listening engages one in comparative judgment and empathetic, imaginative engagement, music continues to help us face the unfamiliar, the Other in its many guises, as well as to consider what we share. Finally, for those seeking it, the Third Republic has shown how music can be a regenerative force, expressing a society’s hopes and dreams. In the wake of war, this could entail regeneration through the sheer energy and vitality of the country’s music and music making. But as French citizenship is complex, multidimensional, and ambiguous, today, with so many immigrants and their children in the country, even more so than before, this could be construed differently depending on a person’s politics and other beliefs. Regeneration might entail confronting and reconciling the new with the old, the promise of change through assimilation of difference or hybridization with the need to preserve a native culture whose perceived purity is threatened by eternal influences. What is crucial here, as I have tried to show, is that, if an aspect of music is public taste, as understood in the late nineteenth century, then, in adapting to people’s needs and desires as they shift, musical meaning itself can change over time. Composers like Debussy attacked the Republic for clinging to older types of expression. But even if republicans called for an allegiance to the common good, higher principles than unfettered individualism, and sought an alternative to the constraints of religion, for the most part, and especially when Coda

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697

it came to art music, they tried to foster freedom of expression, some of them, such as Ferry, promoting innovation far more than the artistic establishment. When progress is a central tenet, as it was for both republicans and monarchists in the Third Republic, music and musical progress can serve as a metaphor for a people’s aspirations and an emblem of pride and glory at home and abroad. Music, like other forms of public utility, clarifies what people value as individuals and a nation. Understanding music’s utility, I have suggested, also entails looking beyond the impact of the great works to the dynamic flow of musical life. While scholars are just beginning to examine elite institutions such as the Opéra, I have found just as important organizations not dependent on and protected by large state subsidies, ranging from orchestras, necessarily sensitive to market pressures, to workingclass choruses and wind bands. Because I believe that much is to be learned from study of more than the tastes and practices of elites, whether from the establishment or the avant-garde, those with money or talent, I have opened small, but, I hope, evocative windows on the musical tastes and practices of amateurs as well as professionals. Only by examining a wide range of music-making contexts— including public schools, department stores, gardens, hotels, and brasseries—can we understand the extent to which the performance of music contributes to forming communities, microcosms of what states hope to forge in the nation. If we believe that there is something lost in leaving culture entirely to the free market, the concept of public utility is still relevant as a way of helping people negotiate their conflicting needs and desires, especially in the increasingly diverse and complex societies in which we live. The Nazis may have rendered problematic the use of music for public purposes, and contemporary advertising has made us leery of music’s capacity to manipulate and exploit our desires. At the same time, the enormous growth of the Fête de la musique, now taking place all over the world, reminds us of music’s power not just to “foster self-knowledge and the formation of groups,” but also to “reconcile the imaginary and the political through musical performance.”4 With this book, I hope to encourage dialogue about music’s role in democracy.

e If I end this book as I began it, with challenges to music’s utility, let me also give the last word to Ravel. When faced with the worst devastation his generation had 4.  “25 années de Fête de la musique: Un Bref historique,” in 25e Fête de la musique: Dossier de presse (Paris: Fnac, 2006), 3, 8.

698

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Coda

suffered, World War I, the composer defied himself in his La Valse, the very form he had earlier mocked as “useless.” Unlike Gounod’s Gallia, written to revive a people devastated by defeat, La Valse (1906–20) involves no chorus and no projections of musical strength. Instead, I hear it as an ode to Western civilization, a reminder that out of the ruins of violence and destruction life will reemerge. The piece begins ominously with disturbing inarticulate noise, the almost inaudible rumblings of muted double basses for thirty-nine measures alternating oscillating seconds superimposed over diminished fourths on E. The first sense of a pulse comes from other double basses in measure 5, articulating those same seconds on a low E and F, downbeat, upbeat, rest. Gradually the harp and timpani fill in the space left by the third-beat rest, and low bassoons, then violas, utter short, erratic melodic fragments, yearning, dreaming of another time, another place, though still very deep and unsettling. It is as if Ravel is pulling music out of the mud of the battlefields.5 As energy builds in the violas, their momentum propelled by woodwind arabesques, the orchestral melody, gorgeously colored with harp glissandi, gradually becomes more sensual, more like a Viennese waltz, the tutti strings carrying the listener ineluctably forward. It’s like fragments of pleasurable memories trying to be light-hearted, bearers of our desire, interrupted but ever returning again. Full-blown, goose-bump-raising melodic expression breaks through in the strings with a tune reminiscent of one in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier,6 but this comes reinforced by oddly triumphant outbursts of the percussion, a kind of internal violence. The oboe’s solo, echoed by the strings, then recalls the syncopated rhythms and large leaps of the Valses nobles et sentimentales, nonchalant and charming, its cadence completely expected, but not when the fortissimo timpani and a full brass chorus interrupt to punctuate these moments of arrival. If at first they sound celebratory, their outbursts, later citing Beethoven, remind the listener that the waltz here is not a frothy dessert. Eventually, the listener cannot help but be caught up in the alternations between rhythmic and melodic drive, but the momentum doesn’t progress very far without a reminder of the opening chaos. Music may be celebrating life here, but there is a dark undercurrent, as if memory of the war will not retreat, even in a waltz, as music will not retreat amid war and human destruction. Ravel wanted this work, set in 1855 Vienna, to be danced by couples, twirling 5.  Such an interpretation depends on a performance that respects the dynamic restraint Ravel calls for in the bassoon entries of waltz fragments (marked piano or mezzo piano). 6.  J.-C. Branger, “Ravel et la valse,” Ostinato rigore 25 (2005): 156.

Coda

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699

like whirling dervishes in a “fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.” Maybe he thought seeing the waltz, a counterpart to hearing it, would remind listeners of the contradictions of desire and destruction. We want to be taken in, to be taken away, to be possessed by this music. But this is not art for art’s sake. I hear it as a powerful critique of war that plays on our desire for waltz as culmination, as it was in Debussy’s Ile joyeuse, La Mer, and Jeux, and in Ravel’s own music, but does this to seduce us into feeling the price of war, the sacrifice of what we share as Westerners. The end places the listener at the center of the nightmare, caught in the waltz rhythms, as in Saint-Saëns Danse macabre, yet overwhelmed by the blasting power of the horns, perhaps recalling military horns. The brass imitations of the waltz theme sound like daggers, the final strikes of the gong, the hypnotic pounding of devastation. At the end, Ravel does not let us off or allow us to go back to our easy chairs or our nostalgia. The music pummels us as it transports us. Ravel, a wartime ordnance truck driver who lost friends in battle and then his mother, admitted that La Valse was no longer “musical entertainment, but musical testimony, or even a musical alarm call.” Its final rhythm is that of fatality, the waltz reduced to convulsions and dementia. With the distance of time, Ravel admitted that one might hear in it the horrors of war in 1870 or Vienna in 1919, but recommended instead that the listener concentrate on “the ascending progression of sonorities.” He even once denied that it expressed “a dance of death” or a “struggle between life and death,” preferring that it be heard as an “an ecstatic dance, a turning of more and more passionate and exhausting dances, almost hallucinating, suggested uniquely by the waltz.” Whether Ravel intended the work as a way to exorcise the war and the death of his mother, a sarcastic allegory of Western society, a nostalgic comment on a loss shared by all of Europe, or an adieu to a form of life and music in the midst of disappearing, we shall never know.7 But what is certain is that this music was hardly the expression of a “useless” occupation.

7.  Ravel cited from various sources in ibid., 155, 157, 158, 159; Ravel, letter to Ernest Ansermet, 20 October 1921, in A Ravel Reader, ed. Arbie Orenstein (New York: Columbia Press, 1990), 212.

700

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A p p e n d i x a • Important Political and Musical Events in the Early Third Republic

Date 1870 16 July

Political History

Music History

The National Assembly declares war on Prussia

4 Sept.

Napoléon III surrenders; the Third Republic is formed

autumn

Prussian army besieges Paris, which suffers famine

1871 5 Jan.

German bombardment of Paris

18 Jan.

At Versailles, Bismarck proclaims the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, German emperor

28 Jan.

Capitulation of Paris

13 Feb.

400 royalists, 30 Bonapartists, and 200 republicans elected to the Assemblée nationale

1–3 Mar.

German occupation of central Paris

26 Mar.

The Commune is constituted, followed by civil war

10 May

Frankfurt Treaty: France cedes Alsace and the north of Lorraine to Germany, promises to pay an indemnity of 5 billion gold francs over 3 years

27–28 May

The Commune is crushed

Edouard Colonne’s Concert National series Gounod, Gallia: Lamentation; Saint-Saëns, Marche héroïque

Société nationale founded

(continued)

701

Date

Political History

1872

Music History

150,000 people from Alsace and Lorraine abandon their land and come to France

Saint-Saëns, Le Rouet d’Omphale; Bizet, L’Arlésienne; concerts begin at the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation

The German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian emperors sign an agreement creating the Three Emperors’ League

500th performance of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at the Opéra

Bizet, Patrie; Gounod, Jeanne d’Arc; Founding of the Bon Marché department store choral society and wind band

1873

24 May

Marshal Mac-Mahon is appointed chief of state and the “Moral Order” government is installed; the duc de Broglie, as prime minister, prepares a return to monarchy

16 Sept.

The last German soldier leaves France; obligatory military service is initiated

Sept.–Oct.

Delibes, Le Roi l’a dit

Concerts Colonne founded; revival of Grétry’s opera Richard Cœur de Lion

1874

A poorly defined treaty gives France a protectorate over the Tonkin Delta region

Revival of Jannequin, “La Bataille de Marignan”; 100th performance of Hamlet in Paris; L’Harmonie sacrée founded

1875

A new Opéra opens, designed by Garnier; creation of the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts

Bizet, Carmen

30 Jan.

A new republican constitution is adopted; Bismarck, alarmed, initiates an intimidation campaign in the German press Saint-Saëns, Le Déluge

1876 Mar.

702

340 republicans (vs. 55 conservatives) take over the Chambre des députés

.

appendix a

Date

Political History

Music History Saint-Saëns, La Jeunesse de Hercule, Samson et Dalila; Massenet, Le Roi de Lahore; Berlioz, Damnation de Faust at Concerts Colonne and Concerts Pasdeloup

1877

16 May

Crisis in government and de Broglie returns as prime minister

1878

Paris Universal Exhibition; Treaty of San Stefano signed

500th performance of Mignon in Paris; first City of Paris prize: Godard, Dubois tie; Concerts Cressonnois; Bourgault-Ducoudray begins his music history lectures at the Conservatoire

1879

Mac-Mahon resigns; Jules Ferry proposes a law forbidding clergy from teaching in the public schools; Bismarck signs a secret alliance with Austria against Russia

Saint-Saëns, Etienne Marcel; festival of French music at the Paris Hippodrome

1880

Jesuits expelled from France; amnesty for Communards

Verdi’s Aida at the Opéra; Holmès, Les Argonautes; Delibes, Jean de Nivelle; Saint-Saëns, Suite algérienne; the choral society Concordia founded

14 July

First celebration of Bastille Day, first national holiday

1881 12 May

Bardo Treaty institutes a French protectorate over Tunisia

16 June

Free primary education established

Nov.

Ferry resigns over attacks on his colonial policy; Gambetta creates a Ministry of the Arts

A. Danhauser, Les Chants dans l’école

(continued)

political and musical events

.

703

Date

Political History

1882

Music History Concerts Lamoureux founded; revival of Méhul’s Joseph at the Opéra-Comique

Mar.

Ferry’s law restricting clergy from public education, law on compulsory secular primary education passes

May

Triple Alliance formed between Germany, Austria, and Italy; Paul Déroulède publishes De l’éducation militaire, founds the Ligue des patriotes; new colonies acquired in Africa

1883

Germany embarks on colonial efforts in southwest Africa

21 Feb.

Ferry becomes prime minister for the second time, renews imperialist efforts in the Congo, Madagascar, Tonkin, and Tunisia

Opening of the Opéra-Populaire

Apr.

Delibes, Lakmé; revival of Carmen at the Opéra-Comique

1884

Massenet, Manon; Wagner, Act 1, Tristan und Isolde at the Concerts Lamoureux; Concerts Pasdeloup folded

1885

Disaster at Lang-Son (Tonkin)

Revue wagnérienne founded; Massenet, Le Cid

30 Mar.

Ferry deposed; elections return 200 conservatives and 380 divided republicans to the Chambre

D’Indy and Huë win City of Paris prize

1886

General Boulanger appointed minister of war

Desormes, “En revenant de la revue”; Paladilhe, Patrie at Opéra; Lenepveu, Jeanne d’Arc; Saint-Saëns resigns from the Société nationale; Saint-Saëns, Third Symphony; d’Indy, Symphonie cévenole

704

.

appendix a

Date

Political History

Music History

1887 Feb.

Creation of the Indochinese Union

The Conservatoire receives a Javanese gamelan; Chabrier, Le Roi malgré lui; Fauré, Pavane

Apr.

Schnaebelé Affair; FrancoGerman tension; Boulanger threatens war, later dismissed

Paris premiere of Lohengrin

Sept.

President Jules Grévy’s son-inlaw caught selling official titles, leading to Grévy’s resignation in December; Comte de Paris convenes representatives of the monarchists

1888

France lends Russia 125 million rubles; 50,000 French arms sold

Lalo, Le Roi d’Ys

1889

General Boulanger and Paul Déroulède elected deputies

Massenet, Esclarmonde; Julien Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire; Satie, Gnossiennes

May–Oct.

Paris Universal Exhibition

Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques; Bourgault-Ducoudray, Rapsodie cambodgienne

1890

The second Workers’ International; in Algiers, Cardinal Lavigerie toasts the Republic; beginning of a realignment policy among Catholics and republicans

Widor, Jeanne d’Arc; Société des grandes auditions musicales de France founded; d’Indy becomes head of Société nationale; Debussy, Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire

1891

Pope Leo XIII publishes his Rerum novarum advocating a more socially conscious Catholicism; Panama Canal financial scandal; construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad begins

Saint-Saëns, Africa; BourgaultDucoudray, Thamara; Bruneau, Le Rêve; Lohengrin at the Opéra

23 July

Official visit of French Navy ships to the Russian naval base at Kronstadt (continued)

political and musical events

.

705

Date

Political History

1891 (continued) 27 Aug.

Music History

Franco-Russian diplomatic agreement signed; more loans to Russia at 3% 100th performance of Manon at the Opéra-Comique

Nov.

Opéra premieres of Reyer’s Salammbô and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila; Bruneau, Penthésilée; Chanteurs de SaintGervais founded

1892

Numerous anarchist attacks; return to agricultural protection­ ism; French war with Dahomey

17 Aug.

Secret Franco-Russian military agreement signed

1893

More anarchist attacks; 50 socialist deputies elected; French troops enter Timbuktu; Dahomey becomes French protectorate

Aug.

Foundation of the Union coloniale française

Oct.

Russian Navy visits Toulon and Paris

1894

Czar Alexander III dies; Japanese win war in Korea against the Chinese

1,000th performance of Thomas’s Mignon at the Opéra-Comique; Massenet, Thaïs; Schola Cantorum founded

22 Dec.

Alfred Dreyfus trial; he is found guilty of treason

1,000th performance of Gounod’s Faust at the Opéra

1895

Madagascar accepts a French protectorate

Guiraud, Frédégonde; Holmès, La Montagne Noire; Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

1896

Czar Nicholas II and his wife visit France; the first modern Olympic Games in Greece

Dubois appointed director of the Conservatoire; Gluck, Orphée at the Opéra-Comique d’Indy, Fervaal; Bruneau, Messidor; Charpentier, Couronnement de la Muse

1897

70 6

Revival of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs des perles at the Opéra-Comique; Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Opéra; Satie, “Vexations”; Chabrier, Gwendoline

.

appendix a

Date

Political History

Music History Saint-Saëns, Déjanire

1898 13 Jan.

Zola publishes his letter “J’accuse,” arguing for Dreyfus’s innocence

Oct.–Nov.

British-French tension over the Fashoda affair; founding of the nationalist journal Action française Méhul’s Joseph at the Opéra

1899 Jan.-June

Foundation of the Ligue de la patrie française; nationalist demonstration in Auteuil; a royalist strikes the new president

7 Aug.–9 Sept.

Second Dreyfus trial

1900

Déroulède condemned and exiled for 10 years; Paris Universal Exhibition; inauguration of Alexandre III bridge and the first Métro line

Debussy, Nocturnes; Charpentier, Louise

1902

Public health legislation

Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande; Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson founded

sources: Raoul Girardet, ed., Le Nationalisme français, 1871–1914 (Paris: A. Colin, 1966), and Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic, 1879–1992, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).

political and musical events

.

707

A p p e n d i x B . References in Ménestrel to Performances of French Operas Abroad, 1872–1888

Data from weekly discussions in Ménestrel referring to intentions to perform, negotiations, performances, and reviews of French works abroad. Bracketed items are premieres mentioned in Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera, 1597–1940 (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1943), but not discussed in Ménestrel and so not counted in the figures below. Cities are organized by how many mentions they have in Ménestrel, in descending order, and alphabetically by city and by country within each category.

Table B-1.  Gounod, Faust (premiered Paris Théâtre-Lyrique, 1859; revived Paris Opéra, 1869) 39 premieres abroad, 1860–1871; new premieres after 1871 in bold

Year

No. references

No. countries

No. cities

1872

7

6

7

Brussels, The Hague, Hamburg, Rome, St. Petersburg, Venice, Vienna, [L’viv (in Polish)]

1873

7

6

7

Berlin, London, Prague, Rome, St. Petersburg, Turin, Vienna, [Zagreb (in Croatian)]

1874

12

4

6

Berlin (5), St. Petersburg (2), Vienna (2), London, Moscow, Munich

1875

13

5

5

Vienna (5), St. Petersburg (3), Berlin (2), Brussels (2), Liverpool

1876

16

7

12

Vienna (3), St. Petersburg (2), Stockholm (2), Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Liège, London, Madrid, Moscow, [Helsinki (in Finnish)]

708

Cities named

Table B-1.  Gounod, Faust (continued) Year

No. references

No. countries

No. cities

1877

25

7

10

1878

19

6

7

Vienna (6), London (4), Brussels (4), St. Petersburg (2), Berlin, Budapest, Philadelphia

1879

6

4

4

London (2), St. Petersburg (2), Madrid, Monte Carlo

1880

16

8

10

London (3), St. Petersburg (3), Berlin (2), New Orleans (2), Genoa, Lisbon, Madrid, Monte Carlo, Rome, Venice

1881

14

8

9

St. Petersburg (4), London (2), Berlin (2), Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Monte Carlo, Weimar, [Caracas]

1882

14

5

10

St. Petersburg (2), Florence (2), Naples (2), Rome (2), Bologna, Genoa, Monte Carlo, New York, Rome, Vienna, [Manila]

1883

11

7

9

Brussels (2), New York (2), Barcelona, Genoa, Florence, London, Monte Carlo, Moscow, St. Petersburg

1884

12

9

12

Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Geneva, Lisbon, London, New York, Madrid, Naples, Rome, St. Louis, St. Petersburg

1885

8

5

8

Amsterdam, Berlin, Dresden, Lisbon, Milan, Monte Carlo, Munich, Wiesbaden

1886

14

7

12

Berlin (2), London (2), Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Liège, Lisbon, Magdeburg, Milan, New York, Pavia, Stockholm

1887

8

4

6

Berlin (2), Brussels, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Vienna

1888

19

8

15

Berlin (2), Darmstadt (2), Dresden (2), Mannheim (2), Brussels, Carrara, Cologne, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Melbourne, Munich, New York, St. Petersburg, Schwerin, Vienna

Cities named London (5), Brussels (5), Vienna (4), St. Petersburg (4), Moscow (2), BadenBaden, Boston, Budapest, The Hague, Liège

performances of french operas abroad

.

70 9

Table B-2.  Gounod, Roméo et Juliette (premiered Paris Théâtre-Lyrique, 1867; Paris Opéra-Comique, 1873; revived Paris Opéra, 1888) 12 premieres abroad, 1867–1871; new premieres after 1871 in bold

No. references

Year

No. countries

No. cities

Cities named

1872

4

2

2

St. Petersburg (3), Brussels, [Budapest]

1873

1

1

1

Venice, [Madrid]

1874

9

4

5

Milan (3), St. Petersburg (3), Berlin, Hanover, Vienna

1875

3

3

3

Berlin, Milan, Vienna

1876

3

1

1

Vienna (3)

1877

10

5

7

London (3), St. Petersburg (3), Vienna (3), Berlin, Brussels, Leipzig, Moscow

1878

4

4

4

Budapest, Brussels, London, St. Petersburg

1879

1

1

1

London, [Helsinki]

1880

2

2

2

London, St. Petersburg

1881

6

6

6

Berlin, Bologna, Budapest, London, New Orleans, St. Petersburg

1882

4

2

2

St. Petersburg (3), Brussels, [Mexico City]

1883

1

1

1

London

1884

1

1

1

London

1885

5

2

3

Brussels (3), Antwerp, St. Petersburg

1886

5

5

5

Lisbon, London, Ostend, Santiago (Chile), Stockholm

1887

3

2

3

Brussels, Milan, Padua, [Buenos Aires]

1888

4

3

3

Brussels (2), Amsterdam, Bristol, [Copenhagen]

710

.

Appendix B

Table B-3a.  Thomas’s Mignon (premiered Paris Opéra-Comique, 1866) 13 premieres abroad, 1867–1871; new premieres after 1871 in bold

Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1872

40

10

17

Italy: Rome (8), Florence (5), Venice (3), Turin England: London (5), Liverpool Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (3), Trieste Belgium: Antwerp (2), Brussels (2) Russia: St. Petersburg (3), Moscow Germany: Cologne Netherlands: The Hague Sweden: Stockholm (in Swedish) United States: New York Poland: Warsaw

1873

28

8

16

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (4), Budapest   (in Hungarian) Belgium: Brussels (2), Liège (3) Germany: Dresden (3), Berlin, Leipzig Russia: St. Petersburg (2), Moscow, Riga (in German) Italy: Genoa (2), Venice United States: New York (2), Chicago England: London (2) Sweden: Stockholm (in Swedish) [Poland: Warsaw (in Polish)]

1874

35

6

14

Russia: St. Petersburg (6), Moscow (3) Italy: Florence (3), Palermo (3), Genoa (2) United States: New York (3), Philadelphia (2)   Baltimore, Washington, D.C. Germany: Berlin (5), Dresden England: London (3), Brunswick Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna

1875

20

6

8

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (7), Prague Belgium: Brussels (4) England: London (4) Italy: Florence, Milan (in Italian) Germany: Berlin United States: New York (in English) [Spain: Barcelona (in Italian)] (continued)

performances of french operas abroad

.

711

Table B-3a.  Thomas’s Mignon (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1876

31

9

15

Italy: Milan (6), Florence (2), Turin (2) Spain: Barcelona (4), Madrid (2), Valencia Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (4) Russia: St. Petersburg (2), Moscow England: London (2) Germany: Frankfurt, Stuttgart Monaco: Monte Carlo Sweden: Stockholm United States: New York

1877

19

7

11

Spain: Madrid (3), Barcelona Russia: Moscow (2), St. Petersburg (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (3), Budapest Belgium: Brussels (3) Italy: Milan, Parma England: London Portugal: Lisbon (in Italian)

1878

24

9

15

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (6) Germany: Breslau, Dresden, Hamburg, Munich,   Stuttgart Belgium: Brussels, Ghent, Liège Portugal: Lisbon (3) (in French) England: London (2) Russia: St. Petersburg (2) Italy: Naples Switzerland: Geneva United States: Philadelphia

1879

46

10

20

England: London (8), Liverpool (2), Aberdeen,   Dundee, Leeds, Newcastle; Scotland: Edinburgh   (in English) Italy: Naples (7), Bologna (3), Florence Spain: Barcelona (3), Madrid (2) Belgium: Brussels (3) United States: New York (in French) (2), Philadelphia Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (2) Ireland: Dublin (2) (in English) Russia: St. Petersburg (2) Denmark: Copenhagen (in Danish) Germany: Berlin [Mexico: Mexico City (in French)]

712

.

Appendix B

Table B-3a.  Thomas’s Mignon (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1880

44

11

19

England: London (8) (in English), Birmingham,   Brighton, Manchester Italy: Naples (7), Milan Russia: St. Petersburg (6) Germany: Cologne (2), Berlin, Stuttgart United States: New York (3), New Orleans Denmark: Copenhagen (in Danish) (3) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Prague, Vienna Belgium: Brussels (2) Spain: Madrid (2) Ireland: Dublin Portugal: Lisbon [Norway: Christiana (Oslo) (in Norwegian)]

1881

27

10

14

Spain: Barcelona (6), Madrid England: London (6) Italy: Milan (2), Genoa, San Remo, Turin Germany: Berlin (2) Portugal: Lisbon (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Budapest Belgium: Antwerp Monaco: Monte Carlo Russia: St. Petersburg United States: New York [Argentina: Buenos Aires]

1882

29

8

18

Italy: Bologna (3), Naples (3), Florence, Genoa, Milan Germany: Berlin, Danzig, Darmstadt, Hanover,   Karlsruhe, Kassel, Königsberg Australia: Melbourne (3) England: London (3) Russia: St. Petersburg (3) Spain: Madrid (2) Cuba: Havana United States: New York [Switzerland: Zurich] (continued)

performances of french operas abroad

.

713

Table B-3a.  Thomas’s Mignon (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1883

18

6

14

Italy: Rome (2), Milan (2), Genoa, Vicenza Germany: Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Munich United States: New York (3) Spain: Barcelona, Madrid Austro-Hungarian Empire: Prague English provinces [Malta]

1884

19

9

12

Italy: Rome (3), Milan (2) Naples (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Trieste (3), Prague England: London (2) Monaco: Monte Carlo Poland: Warsaw Portugal: Lisbon Spain: Barcelona Switzerland: Geneva United States: St. Louis

1885

20

6

14

Italy: Livorno (3), Turin (3), Milan (2), Parma, Savona Russia: St. Petersburg (2), Moscow Germany: Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich England: Glasgow, London Belgium: Brussels Spain: Barcelona

1886

24

9

16

Italy: Milan (3), Genoa (3), Aquila, Faenza, Florence,   Gubbio, Padua Germany: Berlin (2), Frankfurt (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (2) England: London (2) Belgium: Brussels Chile: Santiago Monaco: Monte Carlo Russia: St. Petersburg Sweden: Stockholm

714

.

Appendix B

Table B-3a.  Thomas’s Mignon (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1887

20

5

13

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (3), Budapest (2),   Tyrol Italy: Naples (2), Como, Padua, Turin Germany: Frankfurt (2), Cologne, Mannheim Belgium: Brussels (3) England: London [Netherlands: Amsterdam]

1888

23

7

18

Germany: Frankfurt (2), Leipzig (2), Berlin, Bonn,   Dresden, Frankfurt, Kassel, Mannheim Italy: Milan (2), Turin (2), Bologna, Naples, Rome Portugal: Lisbon (2) Belgium: Antwerp Greece: Athens Ireland: Dublin Spain: Barcelona

Table B-3b.  Summary of Mignon References by Country Country

1872–1880

1881–1888

Italy



62 (21.6%)



61 (37.6%)

England



47 (16.3%)



16 (10%)

Austro-Hungarian Empire



35 (12%)



12 (7.4%)

Russia



33 (11.5%)



8 (5%)

Germany



25 (9%)



34 (21%)

Belgium



24 (8.3%)



7 (4.3%)

United States



21 (7.3%)



6 (3.7%)

Other



40 (14%)



  Total



287



18 (11%) 162

performances of french operas abroad

.

715

Table B-4a.  Thomas, Hamlet (premiered Paris Opéra, 1868) 4 premieres abroad, 1869–1871; new premieres after 1871 in bold

Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1872

32

10

17

Belgium: Brussels (7), Liège (3) Russia: St. Petersburg (in Italian) (5) England: London (in Italian) (4), Liverpool Italy: Florence (2), Genoa, Milan Germany: Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig Austro-Hungarian Empire: Prague (in German), Vienna Poland: Warsaw Spain: Barcelona Sweden: Stockholm United States: New York (in Italian) [Algeria: Algiers (in French)]

1873

26

7

13

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (in German) (10),   Budapest Germany: Berlin (3) (in German), Bonn Belgium: Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Liège England: London (3) Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg Italy: Venice United States: New York

1874

15

6

7

Russia: St. Petersburg (5), Moscow Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (5) Germany: Berlin (3) Belgium: Antwerp England: London Netherlands: The Hague

1875

5

3

3

Belgium: Brussels (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (2) Italy: Milan [Switzerland: Geneva (in French)]

1876

33

11

17

.

Appendix B

716

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Trieste (4), Vienna (2) Italy: Venice (in Italian) (5), Milan Spain: Barcelona (4), Madrid (2) Netherlands: The Hague (3), Amsterdam Belgium: Antwerp, Liège England: London (2) Germany: Berlin, Frankfurt

Table B-4a.  Thomas, Hamlet (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1876 (cont’d)

33

11

17

Sweden: Stockholm (2) Argentina: Buenos Aires (in French) Monaco: Monte Carlo Russia: St. Petersburg

1877

34

7

16

Austro-Hungarian Empire: Budapest (6), Vienna (3),   [Ljubljana (in German)] Belgium: Brussels (4), Antwerp, Liège Italy: Venice (2), Milan (2), Florence, Parma Russia: St. Petersburg (5), Moscow England: London (3) Netherlands: The Hague, Utrecht Spain: Barcelona, Madrid

1878

27

8

14

Russia: St. Petersburg (6) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (5) Italy: Rome (3), Milan, Naples Germany: Berlin (2), Dresden, Baden Belgium: Brussels, Ghent, Liège England: London (2) Portugal: Lisbon Spain: Madrid

1879

29

8

13

Italy: Rome (4), Florence (3), Bologna, Milan, Naples England: London (5) Spain: Madrid (4) Russia: St. Petersburg (2), Moscow Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (2) Belgium: Brussels (2) Germany: Berlin (2) United States: New York

1880

19

10

13

Italy: Florence (3), Turin (2), Naples, Rome Russia: St. Petersburg (3) Portugal: Lisbon (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Budapest Denmark: Copenhagen Germany: Berlin Netherlands: Rotterdam Spain: Barcelona Switzerland: Geneva United States: New York (continued)

performances of french operas abroad

.

717

Table B-4a.  Thomas, Hamlet (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

1881

17

8

12

Italy: Milan (2), Florence, Turin Portugal: Lisbon (3) Russia: St. Petersburg (2), Moscow Germany: Cologne, Stuttgart Spain: Barcelona (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Budapest Monaco: Monte Carlo Netherlands: The Hague [Denmark: Copenhagen]

1882

25

9

12

Spain: Barcelona (9), Madrid (3) Italy: Genoa (3), Milan (2) Germany: Leipzig, Mannheim Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna England: London Monaco: Monte Carlo Netherlands: The Hague Portugal: Lisbon Russia: St. Petersburg

1883

19

8

11

Spain: Madrid (5), Grenada Italy: Bologna (3), Rome (3), Naples Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna England: London Germany: Berlin Monaco: Monte Carlo Russia: St. Petersburg United States: New York [Mexico: Mexico City (in French)]

1884

11

7

10

Spain: Madrid (2), Barcelona Belgium: Antwerp, Brussels United States: Cincinnati, New York Italy: Rome Monaco: Monte Carlo Portugal: Lisbon Switzerland: Geneva

1885

14

7

9

Italy: Naples (2), Milan, Rome Spain: Barcelona (3), Madrid Monaco: Monte Carlo (2) Austro-Hungarian Empire: Budapest

.

Appendix B

718

Table B-4a.  Thomas, Hamlet (continued) Year 1885 (cont’d)

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named, by country

14

7

9

Netherlands Portugal: Lisbon Switzerland: Geneva

1886

5

4

4

Portugal: Lisbon (2) Belgium: Brussels Brazil: Rio de Janeiro England: London

1887

8

4

6

Italy: Rome (2), Genoa, Milan Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (2) Netherlands Switzerland: Geneva

1888

20

7

11

Italy: Rome (5), Milan, Turin Belgium: Brussels (3), Antwerp (2) Germany: Leipzig (2), Frankfurt Austro-Hungarian Empire: Vienna (2) Argentine: Buenos Aires Russia: St. Petersburg Spain: Barcelona

Table B-4b.  Summary of Hamlet References by Country Country

1872–1880

1881–1888

Italy



42 (19%)



32 (27%)

Austro-Hungarian Empire



41 (19%)



8 (6.7%)

Russia



32 (14.6%)



6 (5.6%)

Belgium



30 (13.7%)



8 (6.7%)

England



20 (9%)



3 (2.5%)

Germany



19 (8.7%)



8 (6.7%)

Spain



15 (7%)



27 (22.7%)

Other



  Total



20 (9%) 219



27 (22.7%) 119

performances of french operas abroad

.

719

Table B-5.  Bizet, Carmen (premiered Paris Opéra-Comique, 1875; revived 1883) Premieres abroad in bold

No. No. references countries

Year

No. cities

Cities named

1875

7

2

2

Vienna (6) (in German), London

1876

4

2

2

Brussels (2), Vienna (2), [Antwerp, Budapest (in Hungarian)]

1877

7

4

5

St. Petersburg (3) (in Italian), Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, Vienna

1878

10

6

6

London (5) (in Italian), Dublin, Ghent, New York (in Italian), St. Petersburg, Vienna, [Philadelphia (in Italian), Stockholm (in Swedish)]

1879

9

4

4

London (3) (in English), Hanover (2), Naples (2), Vienna (2), [Melbourne (in English)]

1880

20

6

8

New York (5), Berlin (4), Naples (3), Florence (2), London (2), Milan (2), St. Petersburg, Vienna, [Geneva (in French), Hamburg and Prague (in German)]

1881

9

6

6

Barcelona (2), Genoa (2), St. Petersburg (2), Berlin, London, Stockholm, [Buenos Aires, Malta (in Italian), Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Zurich (in German)]

1882

12

6

7

London (4), St. Petersburg (3), Cairo, Hanover, Liège, Naples, Vicenza

1883

5

3

4

Rome (2), Milan, New York, St. Petersburg, [Riga (in German), Santiago (Chile) (in Italian)]

1884

11

5

6

London (4), Naples (2), Rome (2), St. Louis, St. Petersburg, Trieste, [Temesvár (Timi¸soara in Romania) (in German)]

1885

15

4

11

Milan (3), Naples (2), Livorno (2), Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Palermo, St. Petersburg, Turin, Vienna, Wiesbaden, [Lisbon (in Italian), Tallinn (in German)]

1886

15

6

14

London (2), Berlin, Genoa, Hamburg, Hanover, Kassel, Leipzig, Milan, Moscow, Munich, Rome, Santiago (Chile), Venice, Vienna

720

.

Appendix B

Table B-5.  Bizet, Carmen (continued) Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

1887

10

2

7

1888

23

5

16

Cities named Berlin (3), Frankfurt (2), Bremen, Genoa, Hamburg, Padua, Rome, [Amsterdam (in Dutch), Copenhagen (in Danish)] Berlin (3), Hamburg (2), Kassel (2), Leipzig (2), Mannheim (2), Rome (2), Barcelona, Bologna, Bremen, Dresden, Florence, Frankfurt, Munich, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Vienna

Table B-6.  Delibes, Le Roi l’a dit (premiered Paris Opéra-Comique, 1873) Premieres abroad in bold

Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named

1873

3

2

2

Antwerp (2), Vienna

1874

4

1

1

Vienna (4) (in German), [Karlsruhe (in German), Prague (in German and Czech)]

1876

0

0

0

[Riga (in German)]

1877

5

2

2

Vienna (4), Berlin, [Budapest (in German), Copenhagen (in Danish), Ljubljana, Stockholm (in Swedish)]

1878

1

1

1

Copenhagen

1882

3

1

2

Vienna (2), Prague

1883

0

0

0

[Temesvár (Timis¸oara in Romania) (in German)]

1885

0

0

0

[Zagreb (in Croatian)]

1886

2

2

2

Dresden, Ostend

1887

3

1

2

Dresden (2), Mannheim

1888

10

4

5

Brussels (5), Mannheim (2), Esterházy, Rome, Vienna, [Warsaw (in Polish)]

performances of french operas abroad

.

721

Table B-7  Massenet, Le Roi de Lahore (premiered Paris Opéra, 1877) Premieres abroad in bold

No. No. Year references countries 1876

No. cities

Cities named

1

1

1

Vienna

1877

6

3

6

Brussels, Budapest, Naples, Rome, Turin

1878

14

3

7

Turin (in Italian) (5), Bologna (2), Rome (2), Vicenza (2), London, Venice, Vienna

1879

16

7

10

1880

6

3

3

Madrid (in Italian) (2), Brussels (2), London (2)

1881

3

3

3

Barcelona, Budapest, St. Petersburg

1882

4

3

3

St. Petersburg (in Italian) (2), Lisbon, Prague

1883

1

1

1

Naples, [New Orleans (in French)]

1884

5

3

4

Geneva (2), St. Petersburg, Venice, Verona, [Lisbon (in Italian)]

1885

4

3

4

Messina, Modena, Munich, Vienna

Madrid (4), Milan (3), Munich (in German) (2), Bologna, Budapest (in Hungarian), Buenos Aires (in Italian), Genoa, Liège, London (in Italian), Pisa, [Prague (in Czech), Rio de Janeiro]

1886

2

2

2

Venice, Vienna

1887

2

1

2

Milan, Naples

1888

1

1

1

Barcelona

722

.

Appendix B

Table B-8.  Massenet, Hérodiade (premiered Brussels, 881; revived Paris Théâtre des Italiens, 1884) Premieres abroad in bold

Year

No. No. references countries

No. cities

Cities named

1880

3

1

3

Naples, Rome, Turin

1881

9

3

3

Brussels (7), Geneva, Milan

1882

14

6

6

Brussels (6), Milan (4), Budapest, Hamburg, London, Prague

1883

8

4

6

Brussels (2), Vienna (2), Berlin, Budapest, Hamburg, Milan

1884

5

2

2

Geneva (4), Liège

1885

3

2

2

Monte Carlo (2), Brussels

1886

5

5

5

Frankfurt, Geneva, Lisbon, Venice, Vienna

1887

1

1

1

Brussels

Table B-9.  Delibes, Jean de Nivelle (premiered Paris Opéra-Comique, 1880) Premieres abroad in bold

Year 1877

No. No. references countries 1

1

No. cities 1

1878

3

2

2

1880

21

7

11

1881

31

6

8

Cities named Vienna Vienna (2), Dresden Stockholm (4) (in Swedish), Copenhagen (3), Vienna (3), Brussels (2), Budapest (2), Moscow (2), Antwerp, Dresden, Milan, Prague, Rome Vienna (9) (in German), Budapest (7) (in Hungarian), St. Petersburg (6) (in Italian), Brussels (2), Copenhagen (2) (in Danish), Geneva (2) (in French), Madrid (2), Prague

performances of french operas abroad

.

723

A p p e n d i x C • Selected Publications

on Revolutionary Music after 1870

Table C-1.  Articles Year

Author, title

No. articles

In Mnestrel 1873

Adolphe Jullien, “Les Origines du Conservatoire: Sarrette et Cherubini”

1

1877

Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, “Trois Lettres inédites”

1881–83

Arthur Pougin, “Cherubini”

37

1883–84

Pougin, “Méhul, part 1”

44

1885

Pougin, “Méhul, part 2”

22

1

1886–88

Pougin, “Un Grand Théâtre à Paris pendant la Révolution”

46

1891

Pougin, “Une Famille d’artistes, les Saint-Aubins”

14

1891–92

Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale: Les Théâtres il y a cent ans”

2

1892

Anonymous, “L’Inauguration d’un monument de Méhul”

1

Julien Tiersot, “Rouget de Lisle, poète et musicien”

18

Pougin, “La Première Distribution des prix au Conservatoire de musique”

1

Pougin, “Les Théâtres il y a cent ans, août 1792”

1

Paul d’Estrée, “La Première Parodie de la Marseillaise”

1

1893–94

Tiersot, “Les Fêtes de la Révolution”

40

1895

Tiersot, “Les Origines du Conservatoire”

10

Constant Pierre, “Les Anciennes Ecoles de déclamation”

724

6

Table C-1.  Articles (continued) Year

Author, title

No. articles

In Mnestrel (continued) 1898

Pierre, “Sur quelques hymnes et faits de la Révolution”

5

Tiersot, “La Musique au 14 juillet”

1

Tiersot, “Sur les chants de la Révolution française”

2

1898–99

Pougin, “La Comédie française et la Révolution”

20

1899–1900

Pougin, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau”

25

1900

Anonymous, review of Pierre, Musique des fêtes de la Révolution

1

In Le Petit Poucet 1903

Henri Radiguer, “Les Jours d’enthousiasme: Les Fêtes, la musique”

9

In Other Publications 1875

J.-B. Weckerlin, “Les Quatre Versions de la romance de Joseph, opéra de Méhul,” Revue et gazette musicale de Paris

1

1878

Anonymous, “L’Histoire d’un hymne [the ‘Marseillaise’],” Journal de musique

2

1880

Julien Tiersot, “La Musique dans les fêtes nationales,” La Réforme

2

1884

Tiersot, “Les Chansons de la Révolution”; “La Musique dans les fêtes de la Révolution,” Nouvelle Revue

2

1886

Amédée Boutarel, “Les Origines politiques du Conservatoire de musique et de déclamation,” Musique des familles

2

Tiersot, “La Musique de l’époque révolutionnaire,” Bulletin du Cercle Saint-Simon

1

1903

Anonymous, “Procès-verbaux du comité d’Instruction publique et de la Convention nationale,” Revue musicale 3

1

1919

Tiersot, “Méhul, musicien des fêtes nationales et civiles,” Révolution française

1 320

total

publications on revolutionary music

.

725

Table C-2.  Books Year

Author, title (place of publication is Paris unless otherwise noted)

1884

Michel Brenet [Marie Bobillier], Grétry: Sa Vie et ses œuvres

1889

Julien Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire Arthur Pougin, Méhul: Sa Vie, son génie, son caractère

1891

Pougin, L’Opéra-Comique pendant la Révolution de 1788 à 1801 d’après des documents inédits et les sources les plus authentiques

1892

Tiersot, Rouget de Lisle: Son Œuvre, sa vie

1893

Constant Pierre, Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales de la Révolution française Henri de Curzon, Musiciens du temps passé (chapter on Méhul) Pierre, B. Sarrette et les origines du Conservatoire

1895

Pierre, Le Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales et du Conservatoire Pierre, Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française

1899

Tiersot, Trois chants du 14 juillet sous la Révolution; avec portraits et musique de Gossec et Méhul 1900

Pierre, ed. Le Conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation: Documents historiques et administratifs

1901

Pougin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, musicien (first published in Turin, 1895)

1902

Pougin, La Comédie-Française et la Révolution: Scènes, récits et notices

1903

F. Hellouin, Gossec et la musique française à la fin du XVIIIe siècle

1904

Pierre, Les Hymnes et les chansons de la Révolution

1908

Tiersot, Les Fêtes et les chants de la Révolution française

1912

Tiersot, J.-J. Rousseau

726

.

appendix c

Table C-3.  Works by Grétry, Méhul, and Gossec (selected) Year

Composer, title

Edition/publication

1873

Grétry, Richard Cœur de Lion (piano-vocal score)

Paris: Heugel; offered to subscribers of Ménestrel (December)

1882

Méhul, Joseph

new edition, Leipzig: C. F. Peters

1899

Méhul, Joseph

new edition with recitatives by Bourgault-Ducoudray

Excerpts Published in the Music Press Méhul, romance, Ariodant (1799)

Ménestrel, 16 March

Ch. Neustedt, pianoforte excerpt, Richard Cœur de Lion

Ménestrel, 7 December

Grétry, “La Fièvre brûlante,” Richard Cœur de Lion

Ménestrel, 14 December

Grétry, “La Fièvre brûlante”

Mélomane, 17 September

Grétry, march, Deux Avares

Journal de musique, 30 September

Grétry, medley, Richard Cœur de Lion

Journal de musique, 7 October

1878

Grétry, hymn, Guillaume Tell

Journal de musique, 13 July

1882

Méhul, romance, Joseph

Figaro, 7 June

1873

1876

Méhul, romance, Joseph

Ménestrel, 24 December

Méhul, “Entre-acte-ballet,” Joseph

Ménestrel, 31 December

1889

Grétry, popular hymn, Guillaume Tell

Musique des familles, 7 September

1892

Méhul, air, Stratonice (1792)

Figaro musical, February

Méhul, romance, Ariodant (1799)

Figaro, 5 October

1893

Grétry, excerpt, La Rosière républicaine (1794)

Figaro musical, January

1895

Gossec, “Marche lugubre”

Petit Piano

1903

Gossec, “Marche lugubre”

Petit Poucet

Les Chansons populaires de la Révolution

Petit Poucet

Gossec, Hymnes à Voltaire

Petit Poucet

Gossec, “Peuple, éveille-toi”

Petit Poucet

publications on revolutionary music

.

727

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I l l u stratio n s

Figures 1. Map of Paris, 1889  6 2. The Arc du Carrousel with view up to the Arc de Triomphe, after 1883  10 3. The Obelisk, Place de la Concorde, with Eiffel Tower in the background  12 4. The Avenue de l’Opéra  13 5. The Pont des Arts facing the Institut de France  15 6. The Pont des Arts facing the Louvre  15 7. The Pont Alexandre III  16 8. The Place de la République  18 9. The Arc du Carrousel in front of the Tuileries Palace, before May 1871  21 10. Au Printemps department store, Boulevard Haussmann  22 11. The exterior of the Centre Pompidou  43 12. The Grande Arche at La Défense, as seen from the Arc de Triomphe  44 13. Close-up of the Grande Arche  45 14. The Opéra de la Bastille  46 15. The Cité de la musique  47 16. Concerts Pasdeloup program, 1998–99 season  76 17. Engraving of statue of Rousseau (1889)  96 18. Jacques-François Swebach-Desfontaines, watercolor of the 1790 Fête de la Fédération  109 19. John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver, about 1879–80  160 2 0. The thousandth performance of Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon  184 21. Emmanuel Frémiet, statue of Jeanne d’Arc, rue de Rivoli, Paris  192

729

22. Rehearsal of the choral society and wind band of the Bon Marché department store employees  200 23. Félix Régamey, “La Situation politique en France (November 1873)”  207 2 4. Concert-Danbé program, 22 January 1874  221 25. Harmonie Sacreé program, 27 March 1875  224 2 6. Concerts Cressonnois program, 3 March 1878  227 27. Edouard Manet, Faure in the Role of Hamlet (1877)  232 28. Engraving of the inauguration of the statue of Berlioz, 1886  245 29. Célestine Galli-Marié as Mignon (1866)  247 30. Christine Nilsson as Ophelia  250 31. Gabrielle Krauss as Semiramide  250 32. Marie Van Zandt as Lakmé  251 33. Gounod, “Vive la France” with lyrics by Paul Déroulède  279 34. The Palais du Trocadéro  280 35. The Salle des Fêtes, the Palais du Trocadéro  281 36. “M. Pasdeloup not being careful enough on Wagner’s marches [steps, marches].” Caricature by Cham, 1876  290 37. Grand Festival at the Hippodrome program, 11 February 1879  306 38. Concerts Colonne, Concert spirituel program, 26 March 1880  312 39. Concerts Colonne, Concert spiritual program, 7 April 1882  313 4 0. The Palais Garnier, exterior  326 41. The Palais Garnier, Great Staircase  327 4 2. Alfred Roll, Le 14 Juillet 1880 (ca. 1881)  338 43. Title page, Rameau, Dardanus (1880)  347 4 4. Title page, Lully, Armide (1878)  347 45. Concerts Pasdeloup program, 3 April 1881  349 4 6. Concerts Pasdeloup program, 10 April 1881  351 47. Société des traditions populaires program, 3 June 1885  354 48. Concerts Pasdeloup program, 22 October 1882  367 49. L. C. Desormes, “Marche de l’armée française au Tonkin” (1885)  412 50. Alexandre Artus, “March triomphale” (1881)  417 51. “Nossi-Bé: Queen Binao and her sister Kany visiting the residence on 14 July (1893)  429

730

.

Illustrations

52. “Savage on the outskirts of Batruc” (1879)  435 53. “Buddhist ceremony in a pagoda” (1884)  435 54. Paul Déroulède, Chants du soldat (1872), patriotic poems set to music by A. Marmontel  440 55. Winter concert in the Bon Marché department store from the store’s agenda, ca. 1887  452 56. Concert of the Bon Marché’s Société chorale, 28 November 1885  453 57. Wind band concert in the square outside the Bon Marché  454 58. Paris-Piano, 1 January 1892  459 59. Jules Pasdeloup on the cover of La Musique des familles (1885)  465 6 0. Concerts Colonne program, 6 December 1885  468 61. Edouard Colonne and Charles Lamoureux, from photographs, ca. 1890  470 62. Hector Berlioz on the cover of a Concert Colonne program (1892)  471 63. The Eden-Théâtre, Paris, ca. 1886  482 64. The Eden-Théâtre, interior  482 65. Exhibition of the Incoherent Arts at the Eden-Théâtre, 17 October 1886  483 6 6. Folies-Bergère program cover (1894)  484 6 7. Folies-Bergère program, 3 December 1888  485 68. Program for the 43rd concert of the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, 30 September 1886  488 6 9. Desormes, “En revenant de la revue,” sheet music cover (1886)  494 7 0. Desormes, “En revenant de la revue”  494 71. Dancing the minuet in period costumes, L’Illustration, 8 January 1887  504 72. Dancing the pavane, L’Illustration, 26 March 1887  505 73. Dancing the sarabande, from “Reveillon mondaine,” L’Illustration, 22 December 1888  505 74. Petit-Bayreuth program, 31 May 1885  510 75. Anti-Wagner propaganda (April 1887)  516 7 6. Concerts Colonne program, February 1884  522 7 7. “The African king Dinah-Salifou, the queen, and his entourage” (1889 engraving by Henri Thirait)  548 7 8. French choral societies’ festival program, 25 August 1889  554 7 9. Building the 1889 Universal Exhibition  556

Illustrations

.

731

8 0. Augusta Holmès’s “The Invocation of Liberty” on the cover of L’Illustration, 14 September 1889  563 81. Cover of “Hyménée, hymne tahitien” (1889)  569 82. Caran d’Ache caricature, “Almanach prophétique pour 1889”  571 83. L. Ratz, Danses et marches javanaises (1889), transcribed for piano  575 84. “Angklung musicians at the Universal Exhibition” (1889)  581 85. Engraving from Louis Bénédictus, “Charivari annamite” (1889)  588 86. Bon Marché wind band program for its concert in the square, 21 July 1894  601

87. Revolution-inspired festival in Paris, 22 September 1892  606 88. Statue of Méhul in Givet, inaugurated 2 October 1892  607 8 9. Société de l’histoire de la Révolution française soirée program, 13 March 1897  609 9 0. Fan-shaped program of a Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais benefit concert, 22 October 1899  617 91. Societé nationale with the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais concert program, 28 January 1892  618 92. Société des grandes auditions promotional flyer for the 1893 season  628 93. Saint-Saëns, Suite pour le piano, op. 90 (1892), cover  633 94. The program of a concert of modern French works sponsored by the Société des grandes auditions at the Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation, 29 May 1894  634 95. Concerts de l’Opéra program, 9 February 1896  635 9 6. Engraving of Rameau on the cover of La Musique populaire,25 January 1890  639 97. The Théâtre antique in Orange (1894)  650 9 8. Augusta Holmès, “La Guerrière” (1892)  655 9 9. Henri Callot, color lithograph for Fragerolle, Jeanne d’Arc (1900)  663 100. Gustave David, “Salut à la Russie” (1891)  667 101. Concert at the Café Rouge (1903)  680 102. Working-class music lovers at the Opéra during a free performance (1899)  681 103. Flyer advertising Soirées de la Rose † Croix concerts (1892)  685

732

.

Illustrations

M u si c a l E x amp l es

1. Gossec, “Hymne à l’Etre suprême,” popular version (1794)  118 2. Gossec, “Invocation” (1791) for chorus and symphonic orchestra  121 3. Gossec, “Marche lugubre” (1790–91)  125 4. Thomas, Mignon (1866), act 1: (a) Recitative, Wilhelm and Mignon; (b) “Connais-tu le pays où fleurit l’oranger”  180 5. Thomas, Mignon, act 2, “Je suis Titania la blonde”  182 6. Saint-Saëns, Le Déluge (1876), part 2  241 7. A. Danhauser, Les Chants de l’école (1881), “Nos grandes villes”  322 8. Delibes, Jean de Nivelle (1880), act 3  381 9. Massenet, Manon (1884), act 3, minuet, second entrance  387 10. Massenet, Manon, act 1, duet of Manon and Des Grieux  389 11. Massenet, Manon, act 3, duet of Manon and Des Grieux  390 12. Delibes, Jean de Nivelle, act 3, “Marche française”  398 13. Saint-Saëns, Suite algérienne (1880): (a) “Rhapsodie mauresque”; (b) “Marche militaire française”  403 14. J.-J. Débillemont, Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (1874), “Marche des rajahs”  415 15. Delibes, Lakmé (1883), act 2, “Dans la forêt près de nous”  424 16. Oscar Petit and Charles Manso, Chants scolaires du nord de la France (1885), “La Légende du petit tambour”  444 17. Félix Bayle, Recueil de chants patriotiques-faciles (1883), “La Femme française”  445 18. Massenet and Delibes, “Deux morceaux de lecture à première vue,” Figaro (4 August 1886)  476 19. Vincent d’Indy, Suite dans le style ancien (1886), “Sarabande”  503 2 0. Debussy, Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (1890), “Le Balcon”  534

733

21. Alphonse Allais, “Funeral March” (1884)  539 22. Satie, Gnossienne no. 1 (1890)  541 23. Satie, Vexations (1893)  544 2 4. Louis Bénédictus, “Charivari annamite” (1889)  589 25. Louis Bénédictus, “Danse javanaise” (1889)  591 2 6. Debussy, Nocturnes (1897–99), “Sirènes”  592 27. Saint-Saëns, Déjanire: (a) act 1; (b) act 4  652 28. Bourgault-Ducoudray, Trente Mélodies populaires de la Basse-Bretagne (1885), “Gwer ar véchantez”  659 29. Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande, act 3, Mélisande’s solo  677

734

.

Musical Examples

I l l u stratio n Cre d its

Thierry Ardouin: Figure 15 Tildy Bayar: Figures 11, 13, 14 Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: Frontispiece; figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 21, 34, 35, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 78 Bibliothèque nationale de France: Example 18; figures 20, 24, 25, 26, 37, 47, 62, 74, 75, 89, 90, 91, 95, 103 Bon Marché department store: Figures 22, 55, 56, 57, 86 Cabinet des Arts Graphiques, Musée Carnavelet: Figure 18 Concerts Colonne: Figures 38, 39, 60, 76 Countess Greffulhe Archives: Figures 92, 94 Duke University Libraries: Figures 51, 52, 53, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88, 97, 102 Musée national des arts et traditions populaires: Figure 65 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Figure 19 Museum Folkwang, Essen: Figure 27 Orchestra Pasdeloup: Figure 16 Jann Pasler: Figures 3, 7 Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris: Figure 42 Ch. Reutlinger: Figure 29 Marina H. Rukarijekic: Figure 12

735

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures, tables, and musical examples. Works are listed under the author or composer’s name (unless cross-referenced there to the title). Abbate, Carolyn, 33–34, 675n abstraction: listening styles and, 686–87; symbolist interest in, 526, 527 absurdism: Les Incohérents, 481, 483, 537–39 academic prizes, 65n Académie des beaux-arts: before 1870, 57n, 61n; 1870s, 193, 195, 196n, 294, 359; 1880s, 361, 364, 426, 602; 1890s–1900s, 602, 661, 692. See also Conservatoire; Prix de Rome Académie française, 165, 168n accessibility of art: artistic controversies about, 688–90; Debussy’s views, 536–37, 676, 688– 89; hierarchical listening styles, 686–87; symbolist views, 525, 530, 536–37. See also obscurity access to music, 204; concerts populaires and, 201–2; department store concerts, 452, 454; festivals’ impact on, 134; government support for big business and, 460; Lamoureux’s elitism, 472; opera, 139, 267–68, 324, 326–30, 332; orchestral expansion and competition, 462–63; republican efforts to expand, 326– 30, 357; working classes, 139, 324, 326–30, 332, 680–82. See also democratization of the arts; musical participation acclimatization, 428, 430–32, 436–37, 512 acoustics, 242–43, 398–400; Bailly’s “World of Sound” series, 579–80 active citizens/citizenship, 112, 129, 154n active listening, 163, 203, 204, 230 Adam, Adolphe, 209, 211, 378, 559, 605; Le Corsaire, 258, 362n; Giselle, 258, 362n Adam, Juliette, 439n Adam de la Halle: Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, 345–46, 353 adaptation, 427. See also acclimatization

Adorno, Theodor W., 40, 82–83n, 96, 122, 170–71n adult education/instruction, 101, 191; amateur choral societies as, 198–99; music courses, 319; useful knowledge, 81 Aeolian mode, 651, 652 aesthetic autonomy, 61, 63, 64–65, 106, 237, 497–98; fumisme, 537. See also aesthetic utility; musical autonomy; symbolism aesthetic countercultures, 497–98, 545–46; elite musical culture as, 467, 472, 501–7, 629, 684; humor, satire, and absurdism, 481, 483, 537– 44; symbolism as, 497–98, 526–27, 528, 531. See also distinction; modernism; symbolism; Wagner in France aesthetic diversity, 359, 365, 489; in arts administration, 269–70; Ferry’s promotion of, 359– 61, 363, 372, 461; foreign music on French concert programs, 365–68, 371–72; opera programming, 361–63. See also eclecticism; musical hybridity; musical innovation and originality aesthetic elitism, 64, 530, 688–90; concert organizations and venues, 467, 472, 626, 684; Debussy, 536–37; symbolist, 530, 687. See also distinction aesthetic judgment. See critical judgment; taste; taste elevation aesthetic pleasure, 358–59, 373–77, 383–85; as artist’s goal, 59n, 90, 169n, 213, 235, 295, 296, 385; aural, 384, 392, 546, 578–79, 687; democratization of, 358–59, 374, 383–84, 391, 398, 455; utility and, 59–60, 384. See also charm; grace aesthetics: aesthetic qualities associated with nations, 646–47; ancient Greek ideas about,

737

aesthetics (continued) 58–60, 62n, 219; French ideas about, 61–65, 239; German ideas about, 61, 62; Charles Henry’s ideas, 373, 399, 528–29; honesty/ dishonesty, 175–77; idealist/anti-materialist aesthetics, 497–98, 508; imagination and, 57, 60, 86, 204; Marmontel on, 176; teaching of, 197. See also beauty aesthetic utility, xi–xiii, 56–65, 67n; beautyutility synthesis, 57–61, 67n; Debussy on, 92, 536–37; rejections of, 59n, 61–65, 237, 536–37; republican views of, 237–38; SaintSaëns on, 545. See also aesthetic autonomy; musical utility Africa: British colonialism in, 421–22; Dahomean wars in music and theater, 669– 72; at 1889 Exhibition, 547–48, 570, 571, 577; French colonialism in, 410, 411, 622, 669–70, 671. See also French colonialism; specific colonies Agila, Jesus, 640n agrément. See charm Agulhon, Maurice, 128n Aida (Verdi), 401n, 409, 424n, 426n, 431; at 1889 Exhibition, 559n; in 1890s repertoire, 664; at the Opéra, 330, 382, 418–21 Aïssaoua Sufi music, 573 Albanel, Christine, 49 Albani, Emma, 255, 256 Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, 621n L’Alcazar, 480, 483, 493, 495, 512 Aldrich, Robert, 426 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 59n, 61n Alexander III, 621, 666 Alexis, Grand Duke, 621 Algeria, 401–2, 407–8, 409n, 573n; at 1889 Exhibition, 568n Algiers: cafés-concerts in, 480; Eldorado-concert, 480, 486 Allais, Alphonse, 538, 539 allegory, 127–28, 129, 136; in Holmès’s Ode ­triomphale, 562, 564. See also female allegories alliances, 38; cultural reflections of, 622–23, 633–38; Franco-Russian, 14, 553, 595, 621, 666–69; political, of 1870s, 164–66, 167, 168, 183, 236; political, of 1880s, 309; political, of 1890s, 594, 597, 614, 620, 621–23, 629 Alphand, Alphonse, 19 Alsace, Alsace-Lorraine, 167, 173, 354, 411; in Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 562; interest in recovering, 437, 441, 621; loss of, 17, 78, 163, 317, 321, 334. See also Franco-Prussian War; revanche

738

.

Index

Alten, Michèle, 444–47 Amadis de Gaule, 654, 672n amateur choral societies (orphéons), 79, 167, 169, 197–201, 207. See also choral groups amateur musical groups and practices, 26, 35, 38, 89–90; benefits for participants, 89–90, 199; competitions, 89–90, 198, 199, 201, 271, 566; current era, 48n; Fête de la musique, 47–49, 698; operatic repertoire, 267; orchestras, 218; Sociétés philharmoniques, 472–73. See also amateur choral societies; military bands; musical participation; wind bands amazons of Dahomey, 670–71 Amélie, Princesse, 498, 501 American Indian dances, 577 American music, at 1889 Exhibition, 557 American musical tastes, xii–xiii n American music education, 89, 319 American progressivism, xii–xiii n American public education, 315, 317 Amiati, Mme, 439 anarchism, anarchists, 527, 529, 595, 609, 644, 679; in Charpentier’s Louise, 677; musical anarchy, 595–96, 661, 690 Ancien Régime: aristocrats and opera, 257; court patronage and musical life, 134–35, 205, 213, 214; decadence/corruption, 66, 143, 176n; education, 98; festivals, 283; republican assimilation of values of, 375, 398; revival of dances, 496–97, 501–7; revolutionary/postrevolutionary criticisms of, 66–67, 143, 153, 176n. See also musique ancienne ancient Greece and Rome. See Greco-Roman civilization Andalusian music, 406 angklung ensemble, at 1889 Exhibition, 581 Anglophobia, 421–22 Annam, 434, 435, 449n, 568. See also Indochina; Vietnam Annamite music and theater at 1889 Exhibition, 546, 573, 574, 579, 588, 593; Debussy and, 582n, 587; transcription, 588, 589 anticlericalism, 127n, 164, 167–68, 282, 291; 1890s opposition to, 614; French composers, 292. See also secularism anti-immigrant sentiment, 495n, 500, 659–60n Apollo, Hypodorian mode and, 659 Arabic music and influences, 408n, 409n, 427, 434, 573, 577; in Saint-Saëns’s Suite algérienne, 405–6, 431–32 Arc de Triomphe, ii, 9, 10, 45 Arc du Carrousel, 9, 10, 21 architecture, 1–2; beauty-utility synthesis in,

57–58; at Universal Exhibitions, 276, 555–57, 556, 570. See also Paris geography, architecture and monuments; public architecture Arenberg, Prince d’, 614n, 615, 622, 626 aristocracy, and aristocrats: arts patronage in 1890s, 600, 622–29; drawing and, 195; 1870s songs and drama satirizing, 206, 207, 209; Tocqueville on, 205n. See also aesthetic elitism; distinction; elites aristocratic musical participation, 166, 199, 213, 221, 620, 683; 1880s vogue for Ancien Régime dances, 496–97, 501–7; opera, 257, 265. See also distinction; elite musical participation aristocratic politics: Boulangism, 496; political alliances, 1890s, 614, 621–23. See also monarchism Aristotle, 58 art. See aesthetic entries art exhibitions: commercialization of, 462; Les Incohérents, 481, 483; salons, 196, 273, 330, 360, 462 art for art’s sake, 61, 64–65, 106, 498. See also aesthetic autonomy artistic deviance, 595–96. See also aesthetic countercultures; musical innovation and originality artistic identity, 529, 530; marginality, xiii, 473 artistic struggle, 243–44 artists’ organizations: state encouragement of, 360. See also specific organizations art music: and elites, 82; and moral superiority, 177, 239; new venues, 455, 472, 480, 486, 487–89, 490; popular appreciation of, xiv, 35; serious/popular programming juxtapositions, 452 art nouveau, 661 arts administration, 162n, 268, 330–31; Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 268–70; 1870s, 294–96, 328–30, 331, 351; 1880s, 74–75, 330–32, 359–61, 368, 374–75, 460–62, 597, 602; 1890s, 598–600, 602–4, 622–23; Ferry’s views and influence, 331–32, 363, 368, 375; Larroumet’s views, 394, 461–62, 599, 603; Proust’s views and influence, 330–31, 331–32, 360, 368, 374–75; revolutionary era, 136, 154, 162. See also arts funding; specific institutions arts commerce, 57n, 454–55, 460–61, 462, 531; results of competition, 489–90. See also commerce and industry; competition; musical commerce arts education, 75, 193–94, 238n, 246, 269, 270; dessin, 194–96, 203, 246, 260n; Proust’s pro-

posed reforms, 331. See also arts administration; music education; specific institutions arts funding: current, 43, 47n, 696; 1890s changes, 595, 600, 625, 629; influence of the Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 269. See also opera funding; state arts support; specific institutions and organizations Artus, Alexandre, 414, 416, 417 Aryan music, 397, 422n, 564 Asian music, 125, 377n Assemblée nationale, 1, 10–11, 130 assimilation/integration, artistic, 346, 349, 369–70, 400, 418–19, 647n; musique ancienne et moderne, 498–99, 501–7, 602, 629–33, 638–40; and non-Western music, 437, 578, 582, 585; and Wagner’s music, 512, 515; Western instruments in non-Western colonies, 428. See also musical hybridity assimilation/integration, social, 162, 318, 398, 400, 450; acclimatization and, 428, 436– 37; colonialism and, 406–8, 424, 427, 428, 436–37, 646, 690; colonized peoples’ desire for, 425, 436, 649; de-assimilation urge, 683; doubts about possibility of, 436–37; economic utility of, 430; through education, 191, 407, 408; and 1889 Exhibition, 567–72, 584; elite, in 1890s, 627, 629, 630; French “race” as product of, 648–49; through law, 407; through military service, 189–90, 407; through music, 162, 205, 229–30, 408; as republican ideal, 398, 400, 406–8; theatrical treatments of, 418–19; Western cultural universality and, 424, 433. See also distinction Association des artistes musiciens, 76 associations, 314. See also specific organizations atavism, 432–33 Auber, Daniel, 169n, 183, 285, 342, 344, 378; on 1880s programs, 487; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559; foreign influences in, 370; honored at 1889 Exhibition, 558 Auberge du Clou, 539n Au Bon Marché. See Bon Marché department store audience behavior, 160–61, 163n, 204; concerts as pseudo-religious rituals, 518–19, 540, 684, 686; expectations of different orchestras, 469–70; responses to Wagner, 289, 469, 518– 19, 540, 546; revolutionary opera and theater, 137, 204n. See also listening; reception audience diversity, 205, 470, 472; boxless theaters and, 610; cafés-concerts, 477, 479; 1890s, 680–82; elitism and exclusivity, 472, 626, 684; Folies-Bergère, 485–86; popular

Index

.

739

audience diversity (continued) ­entertainment and cross-class sociability, 455, 489; targeted programming in 1890s, 469–70, 683; women, 202, 467, 472. See also family audiences audiences, 34; orchestras’ competition for, 464–72; performer/audience boundary, 137; significance of shared musical experiences, 87–88, 682. See also family audiences; specific musical genres, composers, and concert organizations Audran, Edmond: Le Grand Mogol, 421n, 449 Aulard, François-Alphonse, 95n, 97, 170–71n, 333–34, 606 Au Printemps, 1, 22, 455, 456 Aurier, Albert, 527 Austria, Triple Alliance, 437, 621, 669 authority: absence of, 230, 317; female allegorical symbols of, 128, 129. See also government-citizen relations; obedience; sovereignty Auvergne, music of, 657, 658 avant-garde, xiii, 28, 36, 462; symbolism as, 526– 27. See also musical innovation and originality azure, 523, 524, 526 Bach, J. S., 35, 640n; echoes in Saint-Saëns, 240, 665; in 1870s, 220, 226, 273, 286, 289–90n; in 1880s, 311, 350, 352n; in 1890s, 615, 617, 620, 631, 632, 638, 686 Bailly, Edmond, 579–80, 590, 680n Bailly, Jean Sylvain, 135 Baker, Keith, 162–63n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 39–40n balafon, 548, 549, 577 balance, 240. See also contrast(s) ballet, 329, 346, 631n; at the Opéra, 361–62, 379; performed abroad, 257, 258–59, 261, 264, 265; at popular venues, 481, 483, 485. See also specific composers Ballets Russes, 621n Balzac, Honoré de, 24 bands. See military bands; wind bands banks, 583, 595; Union générale crash, 372, 489 Banville, Théodore de, 533n barbarians, barbarism, 416, 656, 671–72, 679 Barbedette, H., 213, 371, 470, 509n, 512, 665, 682, 693 Barbier, Jules: Francesca da Rimini, 178; Mignon, 179; Jeanne d’Arc, 187, 188, 242, 252 Bardoux, Agénor, 177, 603n baroque music. See musique ancienne; specific composers

740

.

Index

Barrès, Maurice, 496n, 500n, 531, 656n Barrows, Susanna, 311, 314, 478 Barthes, Roland, 565 Bartlet, Elizabeth C., 103n, 115n, 138n, 140n, 142n Bartoli, Jean-Pierre, 409n Bastille, 8, 17, 107–8; Opéra, 46 Ba-Ta-Clan, 480 Bataille, Eugène, 537 Batiste, Edouard: Solfèges, 340 Batteux, Charles, 58nn, 62 Baudelaire, Charles, 24, 28, 457, 528, 532n; aesthetic views, 64–65, 498; correspondences notion, 86–87, 524; Debussy settings of, 532– 34, 534; on Wagner, 511n, 518, 519 Baudrillart, Henri, 132, 161, 260n, 324–26 Bauër, Henri, 665, 674, 690 Baumann, Emile, 404, 650, 661, 690 Bayle, Félix, 444; “La Femme française,” 444– 47, 445–46 Bayreuth festival, 366, 509, 524n, 531, 546, 612, 630; Festspielhaus, 610 Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, 455 Bazin, François, 167, 269n, 278, 363 Béarn, René, comtesse de, 623 Beaujoyeulx, Baltasar de, 346 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 67, 214, 215, 216; Tartare, 214–15 Beaussire, Emile, 294–95 beauty: Cousin’s ideas, 62–64, 237; Javanese dancers as embodiment of, 574, 578; Kant on, 61; Mallarmé on, 525; music and, 36, 53, 148; perception of, 59, 61, 86; republican ideas of, 237–38; teaching appreciation of, 197; truth and, 176; utility and, 1, 57–65, 237–38, 688. See also aesthetic entries Beauxhostes, Castelbon de, 612n Becq, Annie, 61n Beethoven, Ludwig van, 233, 245n, 285, 566; in Danhauser’s song collection, 320; on 1870s programs, 218, 228, 239; on 1880s programs, 350, 371n, 463, 464, 468, 557n; on 1890s programs, 638; German admiration for French interpretations of, 285; Victor Hugo’s admiration for, 508; Ménestrel series on, 303, 304; Saint-Saëns’s admiration for, 370; and Wagner, 366, 509n. works: Fidelio, 265; “Hymn to Joy,” 48; Missa Solemnis, 464; Symphony in C minor, 161, 509n; Symphony No. 9, 352 Béhanzin, king of Dahomey, 670, 671 Belgian immigrants, 659–60n Bellaigue, Camille, 419n, 499n, 509, 586; on

Debussy, 595–96; on Holy Week music, 615–16 Bellini, Vincenzo, 265 Bell Song (Lakmé), 421, 423 Belot, Adolphe, Vénus noire, 414 Benedictines, 310n Bénédictus, Louis, 588, 589, 591 Benin. See Dahomey Benjamin, Walter, 24 Benois, Alexandre, 259 Bentham, Jeremy, 56, 71 Berger, Georges, 565, 567–68, 623, 625, 645 Berger, Karol, 219–20n Bergson, Henri, 545, 676 Berlioz, Hector, 27, 63, 151, 214, 243–45, 471, 660; coloristic orchestration and, 242; on 1870s programs, 217, 218, 226, 286, 287; on 1880s programs, 350, 351, 517; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559, 567; on 1890s programs, 80, 608, 625, 627; German performances of, 284; honored at 1889 Exhibition, 558; Hypodorian mode in, 397; musical complexity, 244; reception of, 243– 44, 302–3, 312, 364; revolutionary themes and influences in, 611; Rolland on, 29n; and Wagner, 366, 513 517. works: “Ballet des sylphes,” 350; Béatrice et Bénédict, 284, 627; L’Enfance du Christ, 242, 243, 244, 397n; Hamlet Funeral March, 124n, 311; “Hymne à la France,” 611; “Marche hongroise,” 240, 350; Marche troyenne, 668; “Marseillaise” orchestration, 48, 611; music for 1844 Exhibition of Industry, 561; “Rákóczy March,” 567; Requiem, 311, 312; Roméo et Juliette, 244, 304, 366, 371; Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, 244, 560, 611; Tristia, 310n; Les Troyens, 371, 419n, 627. See also La Damnation de Faust Bernard, Paul, 418n, 426n Bernhardt, Sarah, 479n, 662 Bert, Paul, 174, 175, 314–15, 316, 320, 323, 406n; and Commission d’éducation militaire, 441; as Ligue des patriotes inspiration, 442 Beulé, Charles, 248, 249n, 259–60 Bhabha, Homi, 425, 431, 641, 651 Bhogal, Gurminder, 533n Bibesco, Princesse, 623 biblical subjects. See religious themes Bibliothèque nationale de France, 45, 270n, 499, 506n, 695 Bismarck, Otto von, 284, 438n, 500 Bizet, Georges, 27, 262, 264, 265, 286, 368; anticlericalism, 292; on 1870s programs, 218, 220, 228; on 1880s programs, 371n; on 1889

Exhibition programs, 559; foreign influence in, 370; Rolland on, 29n; and Wagner, 366, 367. works: L’Arlésienne, 222, 223, 286, 288, 355; Béatrice et Bénédict, 284, 627; Djamileh, 419n; La Jolie Fille de Perth, 262; Patrie! overture, 307, 367, 517, 566, 637; Les Pêcheurs de Perles, 247, 404n. See also Carmen Blanc, Charles, 193n, 239 Blaze de Bury, Henri, 279, 281–82nn Bloch, André, 604; Antigone, 604 blondness, 493n, 562, 564 Bobillier, Marie (pseud. Michel Brenet), 134, 138, 343 Boccherini, Luigi, 215 Bocquillon-Wilhelm, G.-L., 197 Boieldieu, François Adrien, 344; Dame blanche, 251–52; Fête du village voisin, 222 Boileau, Nicolas, 58 Boime, Albert, 19–20, 597n Boisdeffre, René de, 282 Bonapartists, 161, 166, 309, 441n, 449. See also Third Republic politics Bongie, Chris, 416 Bon Marché department store, 455–56, 458, 460, 464, 466; concerts at, 34, 219, 451–52, 452, 453, 454, 457, 473; music courses for employees, 451; orphéon and wind band, 199, 200, 344, 452, 512, 554, 600, 601 Bonnerot, Jean, 651n Bordes, Charles, 355, 615, 616, 617, 619, 684; Dansons la gigue, 633; “Madrigal à la musique,” 632 Borodin, Alexander, 627 Bouchor, Maurice, 321 Boucicaut, Aristide, 455–56, 458, 460, 464, 466 Boucicaut, Mme, 460n, 473 Bouguereau, William Adolphe, 294 Boulanger, Georges, 481, 493, 495–96, 500, 501; anti-Wagner demonstrations and, 516; exile and death of, 501, 583; Mallarmé’s support for, 530–31 Boulanger, Lili, 656n; Foundation, 76n Boulangism, Boulangists, 495–97, 499–501, 583, 604, 613, 614n, 679; Holmès’s Ode triomphale and, 564 Boulez, Pierre, xiii, 43, 46, 53; Domaine musical, 640; on futility of nonserial music, 55–56 Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis-Albert, 202, 566, 635, 664n; choral society of, 169, 199, 201, 220, 221, 268n, 288, 341; at Conservatoire, 185n, 307, 345–46, 347; folk music scholarship, 353, 396, 397, 431, 658, 659; gavotte reviewed by Hanslick, 233; on Handel, 201,

Index

.

741

Bourgault-Ducoudray (continued) 287; on Luther, 286; on music education, 85n, 87n, 88–89, 106, 319; music history lectures, 185n, 345–46; on public taste, 90–91; settings of Déroulède, 439n, 448n; on Universal Exhibition committee, 233n, 278n. works: L’Enterrement d’Ophélie, 637; Hymne à la patrie, 447; Rapsodie cambodgienne, 580, 637; recitatives for Méhul’s Joseph, 610n; Stabat mater, 291; Thamara, 664–66 Bourgeois, Léon, 167n, 598, 603–4, 623n, 644; educational views, 598n, 644n, 688n; and French premiere of Tristan und Isolde, 627; on hygiene, 692, 694; at Méhul statue dedication, 605 bourgeois culture and values, xiii, 79n, 168, 170, 308–9; aesthetics and, 64–65, 169; instillation of (embourgeoisement), 204; Opéra and Opéra-Comique criticized for, 597–98; in operas of Thomas, 183; resistance to, 89, 497, 629, 683. See also distinction; popular entries bourgeoisie, 383–84, 456, 489, 679n; operatic portrayals of, 362–63; private investment in the arts, 600; Voltaire as personification of, 334 bourgeois musical participation: amateur choruses, 169, 198–99; concert and theater audiences, 464, 466–67, 678. See also popular entertainment bourgeois musical tastes, 35, 169n, 638–40 bourgeois politics, 167; 1880s, 442, 495; political alliances, 1890s, 604, 614 bourgeois women, in feminist organizations, 673 Boutarel, Amédée, 461n, 469, 515n, 672n Boyd, Malcolm, 103n, 112n, 116n, 127n Brahms, Johannes, 233 Brailoiu, Constantin, 587 Breteuil, Henri de, 613, 621, 671 Bréville, Pierre de, 54n; Hymne de Vénus, 633 Briqueville, Eugène, 508–9 Brittany, 657; Breton folk music, 351n, 356, 396, 397, 659 Broca, Paul, 649 Broglie, Albert de, 165, 301, 438, 625n Brooks, Jeanice, 640n Broustet, Edouard, 463, 466 Brown, Steven, 82–83n Bruant, Aristide, 292n, 479 Bruch, Max, 286 Bruneau, Alfred, 369n, 600, 602, 604, 652, 690; on Méhul and Grétry, 610; on musical progress, 647; realism in, 333; Zola and, 333, 596,

742

.

Index

647n. works: L’Attaque du Moulin, 604n; Messidor, 675n; Penthésilée, 633, 672 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 644n Brunet-Lafleur, Marie-Hélène, 311, 473 Bruno, G.: Le Tour de France par deux enfants, 318, 321 Buffet, Eugénie, 583 Bülow, Hans von, 513n Caballero, Carlo, 619 cabarets, 455, 479–80. See also cafés-concerts Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, 539n Café Rouge, 680, 680 cafés, 25, 311. See also cafés-concerts cafés-concerts, 294, 295, 460, 477–80; ambivalence and disapproval, 169, 177, 329, 455, 478, 479; audience diversity, 477; political songs, 493–96; regulation and taxation, 258, 296n, 478 Cage, John, 55, 543n, 579 Cahen, Albert: La Femme de Claude, 604 “Ça ira,” 106, 108n, 133, 187, 210, 613 Cairo, French opéra-comique in, 253 Cambert, Robert, 213 Cambodia, 410, 420. See also Indochina Campra, André, 215, 637 Canaques, at 1889 Exhibition, 570, 577 Cantelli, Marilu, 21n Canteloube, Joseph, 697 Caraman-Chimay, Elisabeth. See Greffulhe, Elisabeth, comtesse de Caran d’Ache, 571 Carissimi, Giacomo: Jepthé, 216, 617 Carlyle, Thomas, 35 “Carmagnole,” 608, 613 Carmen (Bizet), 247, 388, 391n, 393, 419n, 637, 676; escapism in, 423; foreign performances, 262–63, 264, 265, 720–21; non-Western modality in, 431n; reception of, 235–36, 262– 63, 602 Carré, Michel: Francesca da Rimini, 178n; Mignon, 179 Carvalho, Léon, 330, 511 Castera, René de, 619 Castillon, Alexis de, 501–2n Cate, Phillip Dennis, 537 Catel, Charles-Simon, 608; “Bataille de Fleurus,” 105, 117n, 124; “Hymne à la victoire,” 116–17; Wallace, 228 Catholic Church, 85n, 94, 102, 166, 202n, 291; church attendance, 131; 1890s rapprochement with republicans, 614–15, 620, 621; as employer of musicians, 236, 292, 293; and

Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 564; Joan of Arc and, 186; and Moral Order coalition, 165; republican legal reforms, 309–10; Schola Cantorum and, 617n; teaching of plainchant, 310n. See also religion; religious music; secularism Catholic education, 77, 98, 100n, 285, 291, 316 Cavaillé-Coll organs, 260–61, 282 Celts, 657; Celtic music, 648 censorship, 252; popular entertainment, 296, 478, 479; republican relaxation of, 164, 296, 311, 314, 479; revolutionary era, 136; Wagner bans, 290, 517, 520 Centre national d’art et de culture (Centre Pompidou), 42, 43, 695 Certeau, Michel de, 24 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 75n, 499, 526n; Gwendoline, 508n, 630–31; Menuet pompeux, 632n; Le Roi malgré lui, 399–400, 498–99, 502 Chailley, Joseph, 65n, 257n Cham, 290 Chambord, Henri, comte de (Henry V), 159n, 165, 168n, 206, 210, 309, 499, 501n Chambrun, comte de, 352 Chaminade, Cécile, 657, 673, 674 Champ de Mars (Champ de la Réunion), 8; as festival site, 108, 109, 110, 113, 131n; as ­Universal Exhibitions site, 275, 550, 552, 555, 567 Cham people, 420 Champs-Elysées, 8, 9–10, 14, 20, 226n, 305n, 466, 538 change. See musical innovation and originality; musical progress; progress “Chanson de Roland,” 321, 448 chansons populaires, 352–56, 379–80, 657–58; in art music, 355–56, 431; Bourgault-Ducoudray’s scholarship, 353, 396, 397, 431, 658; at 1889 Exhibition, 560; as hybrids, 430–31; modality in, 408n, 431, 658; simplicity and charm in, 355, 356, 391–92, 396; Tiersot’s scholarship, 353, 355, 356, 430–31, 658 chant, 272, 502n, 615, 640; in music history, 345, 658; teaching of, 310n, 319–20, 620; women as performers of, 673 “Chant du départ” (Méhul), 48, 104n, 122, 140, 150; echoes in “La Femme française,” 447; echoes in Gounod’s Jeanne d’Arc, 187n; as exhortation to duty, 116, 129; popularity of, 105, 117; republican revivals of, 339–40, 341, 605–6, 609 Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, 615–17, 617, 618, 620, 638

character, character building, 95, 150, 152, 153, 191. See also civic virtues; virtue characterization, musical, 177–78, 179, 181, 255, 266, 342, 675–76 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 545 charity, 202n; “rights of the poor” tax, 258, 616n Charlemagne, 90, 448, 658 Charles the Bold, 213 Charles V, 213 Charlton, David, 210n charm, 358, 359, 586, 674; in Ancien Régime dance music, 504; in architecture, 58; as Conservatoire value, 393–94; in Delibes, 380–82; effect on listeners, 153, 377, 382; feminine associations of, 179, 377; in folk songs, 392; Horace on, 59–60; in Massenet, 222, 385–91, 426; in non-Western music, 578, 585; as quintessentially French, 382, 647; in revolutionary-era music, 153, 377–78; utility and, 59–60; works praised for, 287, 391–92, 405, 426, 664 Charmes, Gabriel, 411 Charpentier, Gustave, 216, 369n, 632, 673, 677, 684, 690; Le Couronnement de la Muse, 611–12, 676–77; Louise, 611n, 612, 677; Le Malade imaginaire, 633n Charreire, P., 104–5 Charton, Edouard, 193, 194n, 238, 336 Chastenet, Jacques, 501n Chateaubriand, François René, 57 Le Chat Noir (cabaret), 479–80, 481, 483, 498n, 530, 537, 543; Jeanne d’Arc puppet show, 663; Satie at, 502n, 539 Le Chat noir (periodical), 314n, 479n, 537, 539 Chausson, Ernest, 514, 659; Mallarmé and, 526n; Le Roi Arthus, 654n Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 58, 60n, 104, 127, 132, 153n, 172n, 363; on Conservatoire funding, 144; on educational potential of theater and opera, 135; as lyricist, 116, 117n, 127n, 131n; Timoléon, 187 Chennevières, Philippe de, 246, 269, 271, 278, 331n, 375 Cherubini, Maria Luigi, 234, 252, 328, 338, 340, 395, 608; Les Deux Journées, 209–10; Médée, 151 Chevé, Amand, 320, 335, 562n children: citizenship rights, 112; participation in amateur choral societies, 198, 199. See also primary education Chirac, Jacques, 47n choral groups: in Algeria, 408; competitions and festivals, 89–90, 155, 198, 199, 201, 273, 566;

Index

.

743

choral groups (continued) contemporary music programming, 222; at 1889 Exhibition, 553, 554, 557; in Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 561–62; repertoire and programming, 201, 216, 218, 288, 341, 350, 391; republican music education and, 320; state support for, 197, 268n. See also amateur choral societies; choral groups, by name choral groups, by name: Bon Marché, 34, 199, 200, 219, 451, 452, 453; Bourgault-Ducoudray, 169, 199, 201, 220, 221, 268n, 288, 341; Concordia, 304, 350, 378, 511, 558; Euterpe, 652n; Guillot de Sainbris, 169, 185n, 198– 99, 216, 218, 282, 391; Le Louvre, 221, 391; Saint-Gervais, 615–17, 617, 618, 620, 638; Schola Cantorum, 620 choral music, 117, 120, 282, 288, 310; commissioned by orphéons, 199; contemporary, inspired by musique ancienne, 632; German, in France, 286–88; grace and charm in, 391; new secularism in, 311; non-Western, 577, 578; republican commissions and competitions, 169, 277; republican era, 183, 185–86, 187, 188; for revolutionary festivals, 108, 114–15, 124. See also religious music; specific composers choral singing, 34, 84, 87–88, 95n; patriotic songs, 104, 106; teaching of, 60–61, 84n, 86, 319. See also singing; singing instruction Chouquet, Gustave, 208, 243, 433; on Grétry, 340, 342, 343 church concerts, 615–17, 617, 618 Cicero, 69, 172–73, 369n La Cigale, 479 circuses, 455, 486–87 Cirque des Champs-Elysées, 466 Cirque d’hiver, 302, 448, 464, 466, 486–87, 671n Cité de la musique, 46–47, 47 citizenship: categories of, 112, 129, 154n; children as apprentice citizens, 100–101; choral singing as metaphor for, 88; colonialism and, 406–7; education and, 100–101, 202–3; French notions of, 79; music and, 85–86, 94–95, 96, 133, 163, 203–4, 230; viewed as cultural integration, 318; women’s, 112, 154 City of Paris prize, 273, 274, 364–65, 391; 1878, 274–75; 1880, 304n, 363–64; prohibition of political/religious content, 296, 520 civic education, 60, 174, 285, 314–15, 317, 688n civic virtues, 98, 100–101; music’s power to develop, 84–86, 143–44, 147–48 Civil Code of 1804, 73

74 4

.

Index

civilization, 92–93, 432n; evolutionary views of, 432–33, 527, 549, 550, 566–67; symbolist views of, 527. See also mission civilisatrice clarity, 239, 295, 345, 647. See also musical clarity; obscurity class differences. See social divisions classical civilization. See Greco-Roman civilization classicism, 239, 266–67, 373 class juxtapositions, in Paris geography and architecture, 3, 8, 18–20, 24 Clemenceau, Georges, 437, 438–39, 442 Clément, Catherine, 426n, 676 Clément, Félix, 346n Closson, Ernest, 587n club goods, 111, 134, 267 Cochin China, 410, 435. See also Annamite music and theater; Indochina; Vietnam Cocteau, Jean, xii n, 690 Code, David, 535 Code Napoléon, 407 Cohen, H. Robert, 428n Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 70 collecting, 458; art, and commodification, 462; folk songs, 352n, 353, 354; music ephemera, 36–37; state arts acquisitions, 270 collectivity, collective identity, 78–79, 84, 643– 44; music and, 87–88, 545; private-shared interests fusion, 71, 77; public utility concept and, 67–68, 70–71, 72, 73–74, 78–79; race and, 645–46; shared experiences, 87–88, 103, 518; shared mœurs and values, xiv, 3, 172. See also community; crowds; interconnectedness; unity Colonial Congress (1889), 549 colonialism, 400; British, 421–22; in literature and theater, 414–18, 568. See also French colonialism colonial utility, 411, 413, 583n colonized peoples. See indigenous peoples Colonne, Edouard, 208, 337, 364, 372, 470; as conductor, 469–70, 470, 691; marketing skills, 466–67; as orchestra member, 464, 470. See also Concerts Colonne color: Charles Henry’s chromatic circle, 399; in Impressionist painting, 243n; mode and, 396; orchestral, 242–43, 266, 399, 425 Comédie-Française, 11, 14n, 248. See also under theaters comedy: at cabarets and cafés-concerts, 480, 481. See also opéra-comique; parody and satire Comettant, Oscar, 175–76, 198, 335, 355, 377 commerce and industry, 147, 235, 257–58, 297;

acclimatization and, 430; anti-monopolist politics, 458, 460, 495; banks and big business, 372, 449, 456, 460, 489, 583, 595; colonialism and, 413, 430; commercial culture, 454–55; competition in, 458, 460; and 1889 Exhibition, 552, 565–66, 567; French-German trade relations, 285, 289, 495; luxury and taste as hallmarks of, 246, 259–60, 457, 623; Simon on, 259–60. See also arts commerce; economic liberalism; economic prosperity; economic utility; musical commerce; Universal Exhibition entries commissions, 270; éducation militaire, 441; for 1878 Universal Exhibition, 277–78; for revolutionary festivals, 114; vieux Paris, 42 Committee for the Protection of Monumental Perspectives, 42 Committee of Public Instruction, 100, 103n, 104n, 136; and Conservatoire, 142, 147, 148; and revolutionary festivals, 110n, 112, 116, 117n Committee of Public Safety, 5, 105, 112, 129 common good. See public good common will: public utility concept and, 70, 72, 79; in Rousseau, 68n, 69, 71–72, 95n, 98, 106, 643 communal singing: in republican-era festivals, 605; in revolutionary festivals, 96, 106, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 114–15, 126–27, 130 community: music’s capacity to create, xiv, 87– 89, 199, 518; and symbolists, 530. See also unity comparison, comparative judgment, 163, 219– 20, 222–23, 228, 230, 270, 697; Charles Henry’s reconception of, 528; non-Western music, 576; at Universal Exhibitions, 275– 77, 549, 550, 555–57, 566–67, 584; Wagner’s music and, 508–9. See also competitions; mixed concert programs competition, 454, 460–72; in arts and entertainment, results of, 489–90; competition/cooperation opposition, 529; as democratic trait, 89, 297, 331–32; department stores and, 455, 458; theatrical, in the revolutionary era, 135, 139. See also musical commerce competitions, 27, 54n, 235, 270–75, 363–65, 462; for amateur choral societies, 89–90, 198, 199, 201; composition, 268n, 271–72, 273–75, 277–78. 304; Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts and, 269; Conservatoire entry and graduation, 272; criticisms of, 644n; at 1878 Exhibition, 277–78; at 1889 Exhibition, 561, 566; revolutionary era, 105n; sponsored

by Société des grandes auditions, 627; state subsidies for, 268n; valorization of, 72, 79, 271; won by women, 304, 474. See also City of Paris prize; Prix de Rome composers, 27–29; as church organists, 292, 293; as conductors, 305, 311, 348; and Dreyfus Affair, 596; harmony studies as career preparation, 474–75n; royalties, 258. See also women composers; specific individuals compromise and consensus, 357, 358; music’s capacity to promote, xiv, 32, 89–91, 201, 697; public utility concept and, 68–69. See also alliances; juste milieu compulsory activities: military service, 189– 90; school attendance, 74, 192, 315; singing instruction, 196n, 197 Comte, Auguste, 190, 236 concert attendance, 202, 463; as identity performance, 627; programming and, 372, 463 concert experiences, 34, 87–88, 682–83; Wagner audiences, 518, 540, 546. See also audience behavior; listening Concert National, 208–9, 341 concert organizations, 230, 314; founded in 1890s, 600, 623, 638; private funding, 166– 67, 208, 295; public utility status for, 75–77; state funding, 202, 216n, 294–95, 310n, 372n, 462–63n. See also amateur choral societies; amateur musical groups; specific organizations Concert-Parisien, 676 concert programming, xiv, 223; attendance and, 372, 463; 1870s, 285–86, 291–92; 1880s, 368– 69, 371–72, 470, 472, 474; at 1889 Exhibition, 558–60, 593; 1890s, 600–602, 615–17, 633–40, 668–69, 683. See also historical concerts; mixed concert programs; repertoire and programming; Wagner programming; specific concert organizations concerts: at circus and zoo, 36, 455, 486–89, 488; economic value, 373; at 1889 Exhibition, 553–55, 554, 557; as elite social events, 134; expanded venues and performance opportunites, 472–77; opera singers as soloists, 473; performance quality, 462, 463, 466, 469; popularity, 1880s, 373; program notes, 227, 228, 348, 467, 468, 521; 1789–1814, 113, 129, 131, 134; ticket sales, 373, 466n; Universal Exhibitions, 277–82. See also popular concerts; specific concert organizations, venues, composers Concerts Besselièvre, 305n, 462–63n Concerts Broustet, 463, 466

Index

.

745

Concerts Colonne, 223, 240, 242, 268n, 463, 626, 633; audiences, 466–67, 469, 470, 472; Berlioz programming, 302–3, 466, 469, 471; competition, 464, 466–70; concerts spirituels, 311, 312–13; contemporary French programming, 305, 600; David’s Le Désert, 409; 1870s programming, 244, 285–86, 301, 302– 3, 341; 1880s programming, 305, 311, 409, 466–67, 469; at 1889 Exhibition, 558, 559; 1890s programming, 610n, 638, 651n, 669, 671–72, 673, 682, 691; exotic programming in honor of Aida, 419; Faure as soloist, 473; Fauré symphony at, 520n; Festival-National, 305; foreign conductors at, 691; historical concerts, 467, 468; programming style, 371– 72, 469, 470; programs reproduced, 312–13, 468, 471, 522, 634; Saint-Saëns programming, 586; and secularism, 311; Société des grandes auditions concerts, 626, 633, 634; state funding, 310n, 372, 463; Wagner programming, 366, 371, 469, 510–11, 512, 517, 521. See also Colonne, Edouard Concerts Cressonnois, 226, 227, 228, 229, 348 Concerts Danbé, 216, 225, 268n, 472, 506; ­January 1874 concert, 212, 220–22, 221 Concerts de l’Opéra: 1880s historical concerts, 347, 348, 377; 1890s programs, 635–37, 636 Concerts d’Harcourt, 638 Concerts du Grand Hôtel, 221 concerts historiques. See historical concerts Concerts Lamoureux, 366, 404n, 466n, 521; audiences, 467, 472, 508, 626, 684; at EdenThéâtre, 481; at 1889 Exhibition, 558; 1890s programming, 580, 600, 651n, 680; Fauré’s Pavane, 506; founding and competition, 463, 467, 469–70, 472; Mallarmé’s attendance, 525; programming style, 371, 469, 470; Saint-Saëns programming, 586; Wagner programming, 311, 366, 371, 467, 469, 481, 508–9, 511n, 512, 517, 521. See also Lamoureux, Charles Concerts Pasdeloup, 75–76, 159–61, 201, 246, 463, 464–66; audiences, 159–61, 464, 470, 486–87; competition, 464–66, 470, 472; demise of, 464, 466; 1860s programming, 217, 464; 1870s programming, 160–61, 218– 19, 222, 223n, 244, 285–86, 289, 290, 302, 303, 341; 1880s programming, 307, 347, 348–52, 349, 351, 364, 371; Haussmann’s support for, 166–67; programs reproduced, 349, 351, 367; proposed German tour (1886), 514; state funding, 202, 310n, 464; Wagner programming, 289, 365–66, 367, 511n. See also Pasdeloup, Emile

746

.

Index

Concerts populaires eclectiques, 680 concerts populaires. See Concerts Pasdeloup; popular concerts Concerts Rouge, 472, 680 concerts spirituels, 311. See also Good Friday concerts Concordia, 304, 350, 378, 511, 558 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 65–66n Condorcet, marquis de, 98n, 99, 202n, 236 conductors: composers as, 305, 311, 348; foreign, in France, 691 conflict negotiation: music for, 89–90, 697. See also compromise and consensus Congo, 411, 421 Congress of Berlin, 283 Conklin, Alice, 433n Conseil municipal de Paris: Opéra populaire authorization, 329. See also City of Paris prize Conseil supérieur de l’instruction publique, 315–16 Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 193–94, 268– 70, 291, 359 conservatism, conservative values, 89; in the provinces, 105; masculinity/virility, 152 conservatives. See Moral Order coalition; rightist politics; Third Republic monarchism; Third Republic politics Conservatoire, 8, 46, 162n, 393–94; library, 141, 346; musical instrument museum, 141, 270n; musique ancienne at, 307, 340; origins of, 73n, 141–44, 145–46, 613; revolutionary era, 141– 49; and revolutionary festivals, 126–27, 144, 145; Satie at, 540n; Schola Cantorum as rival to, 619–20; utility of, 146–49. See also Société des concerts du Conservatoire Conservatoire administration and pedagogy: acoustics, 242–43; Dubois’s directorship, 620, 642; 1890s reforms, 599, 602–4; gender disparities, 474–75, 476; German admiration for, 285; Larroumet’s speeches, 394, 461–62, 602; republican reforms, 327–28; singerinstrumentalist integration, 146; Thomas’s directorship, 183, 185; Vaucorbeil, 328n Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson, 677 Conservatoire professors, 185n, 272, 364, 559, 560; Bourgault-Ducoudray, 345–46, 348; Delibes, 383; Dubois, 475n; Lenepveu, 447, 654; Massenet, 385; Thomas, 183, 185 Conservatoire students, 672; diversity of, 474– 75, 477; women, 474–75 Constitution: 1791, 72; 1791, articles set to music, 116; 1791, citizenship categories in, 112; 1793, 128; 1875, 168, 188, 215

Constitutional (Independent) Right, 614, 622 consumerism, consumer goods, 453–54; antimaterialist aesthetics, 497–98, 508; and art collecting, 462; and entertainment, 455; rise of department stores, 456–60; Univer­ sal Exhibitions displays, 276–77, 555, 570, 582 contemplative listening, 686–87 contemporary life, as inspiration for the arts, 333, 360, 368 contemporary music: appreciation/reception of, 35–36, 225–26, 489, 600, 602; composition competitions to encourage, 271–72, 273–75, 277–78; early music influence on, 226; 1870s, 217–18, 225–26, 278, 282, 305; 1880s, 371n, 463; at 1889 Exhibition, 553, 554, 558, 559–60; 1890s, 600–602, 616–19, 633–38; IRCAM, 42–43, 696; juxtaposed with musique ancienne, 633–38; and national pride, 217, 218, 305; and private musical organizations, 80; for public music education, 319, 321, 332; reprogramming of new works, 223, 600; at Société des concerts, 368, 561; at Société des grandes auditions, 625, 627; state support for new opera, 327–28, 329, 368, 598. See also mixed concert programs; premieres; specific genres, concert organizations, venues contradictions and paradoxes, 32, 284–98; anticlericalism and religious music, 291–93; in France-Germany relations, 284–90; state arts support amid political conflict, 294–96; in symbolism, 529–31 contrast(s), 151, 239; mixed concert programs, 218–19, 222; musical, 181, 240, 242; music hall spectacles, 483, 485; symbolist views of, 528. See also differences cooperation: vs. struggle and competition, 529. See also peace and cooperation; ralliement Coppée, François, 479n, 596 copyright. See intellectual property law Coquelin cadet (Ernest-Alexandre-Honoré), 474, 479n Corneille, Pierre, 174, 188, 347 correspondences, 86–87; in Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, 532–34; symbolists’ interest in, 524–25, 528–29, 590 corruption, 66, 693; and Ancien Régime, 66, 143, 176n; and foreign influence, 147, 660; government, 489, 551, 595. See also decadence; moral corruption Coudroy-Saghaï, Marie-Hélène, 179n countercultures. See aesthetic countercultures; resistance

counterpoint, 240, 405, 432; in non-Western music, 576, 590 counterrevolution, 146, 152; Third Republic monarchism and, 166n, 216–17, 344 Couperin, François, 335, 560, 638n Couperin, Louis, 541 court patronage, 134–35, 213–15; Senegal, 548–49 Cousin, Victor, 61n, 62–64, 77, 83n, 174n, 237; on eclecticism, 369; Jules Simon on, 64n, 369n Covent Garden, 232, 255, 259, 447 Cowart, Georgia, xviii, xx, 205, 502 craft(s), 622–23; dessin education and, 194, 195; fine arts and, 331, 374. See also decorative arts creativity, creative process, 529–30, 546 Cressent, Anatole, 272n; Foundation, 272 Cressonnois, Jules, 226, 569. See also Concerts Cressonnois critical judgment: comparison in, 219–20; development of, 199, 203–4; governments’ role in, 277; musique ancienne as standard for, 640; and program notes, 227, 228, 348, 467, 468, 521; Wagner’s music and, 508–9. See also comparison; judgment Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de, 61n crowds, and crowd behavior, 102–3n, 111, 337, 496, 679, 686, 692 Cui, César: Le Flibustier, 669 cult of self. See individualism; self-exploration cultural coexistence: musical echoes of, 406, 432. See also musical hybridity cultural differences: racial distinctions and, 549; and Universal Exhibitions, 275–77, 549, 550, 555–57, 566–67; vs. universalism, 433, 523– 24, 549–50. See also differences; diversity cultural diplomacy, 233, 235; progress and, 297– 98, 641, 691. See also French music exports; French opera abroad cultural hegemony, 35, 79, 178–79nn cultural integration. See assimilation/integration, social cultural superiority. See French cultural superiority cultural universalism, 423–24, 433, 549–50. See also universalism culture: concepts/definitions of, xiii n; social role of, xiv Culture Ministry, 11, 43, 47 Dadaism, 539 Dahlhaus, Carl, 369n Dahomey, Dahomean wars, 669–70, 671 Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie, 215, 613; Raoul de Créqui, 561n; La Soirée orageuse, 561n

Index

.

747

dall’Argine, Costantino: Brahma, 481 Daly, César, 1–2 La Damnation de Faust (Berlioz), 240, 275, 350, 397n; 1870s, 263–64, 275, 302–3, 466; 1880s, 350; initial reception of, 244 Danbé, Jules, 221, 225, 472, 506, 511. See also Concerts Danbé; Opéra-Comique (theater) dances, 58n, 226, 350, 377, 577; in contemporary opera and theater, 386–88, 499, 504, 506; in contemporary orchestral music, 540, 541, 631n, 632; danses anciennes, in 1880s, 496–97, 501–7; danses anciennes, in 1890s, 635–40; in revolutionary festivals, 131. See also ballet; Javanese music and dance Danhauser, Adolphe-Léopold, 320, 506n; Chants de l’école, 320–21, 322–23 Daniel, Francisco Salvador, 408n Danton, Georges Jacques, 333–34 Daquin, Louis-Claude, 560 Darcours, Charles (Charles Réty), 350, 352n, 363, 366, 373, 391; on concert attendance, 463; on gender disparity at Conservatoire, 474–75, 476 Daudet, Léon, 508n David, Félicien, 405, 559; Le Désert, 281, 371, 402, 409; Le Jugement dernier, 310n; Lalla Roukh, 419 David, Gustave: “Salut à la Russie,” 666–68, 667 David, Jacques Louis, 57n, 110, 340 Deak, Frantisek, 511n, 530 Débillemont, J.-J.: Le Tour du monde en 80 jours, 414, 415 Debussy, Claude, xiii, 27, 30, 54n, 426, 497n, 604, 642, 678, 686; on aesthetic utility, 92, 536–37; at Bayreuth, 509, 531, 532; elitism of, 28, 688–89; as innovator, 400, 532–34, 546, 595–96, 676; Mallarmé and, 526n, 531; melody in, 533, 534, 535; on musical assimilation, 659; non-Western influences in, 581–82, 586– 90, 591–92; politics of, 596; Prix de Rome, 364, 369n; on rhythm, 151–52; Rolland on, 29n; on Rousseau’s music, 335; spiral form in, 642n; style ancien in, 631, 632n, 640; symbolist influences on, 89, 531–37, 586–87, 590; Wagner and, 89, 531, 647; and Zola, 659– 60n. works: Arabesques, 533n; Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, 532–34, 534, 590n; Damoiselle Elue, 590n; L’Enfant prodigue, 533n, 581; Fantaisie, 581–82; Ile joyeuse, 700; Jeux, 700; La Mer, 700; Nocturnes, 587, 590, 591–92; Pour le piano, 502n; Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 534–35, 536, 587, 689, 693; Le Printemps,

748

.

Index

400, 581; Rodrigue et Chimène, 534; Sarabande, 502n, 640; Suite bergamasque, 632n; Tarantelle styrienne, 582; Verlaine songs, 582. See also Pelléas et Mélisande decadence, 66, 97; 1890s concerns about, 644, 649–50; and popular taste, 177, 287–88, 374; and Second Empire, 154, 252, 295, 302, 305n. See also corruption decorative arts, 195, 270, 325, 375, 622–23 degeneration, racial, 431, 436–37, 659–60nn, 660 Delage, Roger, 499 Delcasso, L., 320 Delibes, Léo, 233n, 234, 278n, 292; at Bayreuth, 509, 524n; charm in, 380–82; commercial success, 393; and democratization of taste, 295–96; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 554, 558, 559; election to Académie, 426; and Folies-Bergère concerts, 481; folk music collecting, 355; at Hippodrome festival, 305n; influence on Tchaikovsky, 259; performed abroad, 233; on prize juries, 364, 369n; as quintessentially French, 383; on Wagner, 507, 515. works: Airs de danses dans le style ancien, 632n, 636; Conservatoire sight reading exercise, 475, 476; Coppélia, 258–59, 265, 379, 559n; Kassya, 604; La Mort d’Orphée, 282; Le Roi l’a dit, 209, 211, 288, 379, 382, 721; Le Roi s’amuse!, 386, 479, 504, 558; La Source, 257, 379. See also Jean de Nivelle; Lakmé; Sylvia Delphi, 649 Delsart, Jules, 560 de Man, Paul, 2–3n, 31–32n, 37n democracy, 309; characteristics and views of, 33, 83, 89, 91, 205n, 331–32; music’s potential roles in, 696–98; social needs satisfaction in, 66. See also universal suffrage democratic values, 30, 83; vs. distinction, 684, 686; in opéra-comique, 138. See also republican ideology and values democratization of taste, 456–57 democratization of the arts, 269–70, 360–61, 363–64, 679, 696; access to opera and theater, 326–30, 357; aesthetic pleasure and, 358–59, 374, 383–84, 391, 398, 455; vs. avantgarde innovations, 36; and competition, 489; boxless theaters, 610; elites against, 679; opera subject matter, 362–63; public luxuries and, 325–26; and public taste, 295–96; and salons, 360. See also access to music; distinction; musical commerce democratizing force, music as, xii–xiii n, xv n,

83–92, 95; conflict negotiation and identity construction, 89–90, 95; consensus building, 90–91; promotion of solidarity and community, 86–89, 96, 123; Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire, 612. See also citizenship; civic virtues Denis, Maurice, 687n DeNora, Tia, 91n, 122n, 177n department store choruses, 199, 200 department stores, 454, 455–58; politicized views of, 458, 460, 495. See also specific stores depopulation and fertility, 447, 662, 674, 675n, 692 Déroulède, Paul, 278, 438, 439–49, 496, 497; Boulangism and, 493, 500–501; and Ligue des patriotes formation, 441; musical settings of, 439–41, 444–47, 448, 493, 495. works: Chants du soldat, 439, 440, 493, 495; “Le Clairon,” 439; De l’Education militaire, 442– 43; “La Femme française,” 444–47, 445–46; L’Hetman, 441, 447, 500n; Le Livre de la Ligue des patriotes, 447, 448n, 564; Marches et sonneries, 439; Nouveaux chants du soldat, 439; Refrains militaires, 439; “Le Soldat,” 448 Desan, Suzanne, 130n Désaugier, Marc-Antoine, 120 Descartes, René, 59, 67, 71 desire/desires, 63, 64, 70; and colonial relations, 423, 425, 436; shared, promotion of, 79; in Wagner, 508. See also charm; needs satisfaction; seductiveness desire to please, 235, 376 Desormes, Louis César, 412, 485, 493n; “En revenant de la revue,” 493, 494, 495–96; “Marche de l’armée française au Tonkin,” 412; Pavane Henry III, 632n dessin arts and education, 194–96, 203, 246, 260n Destouches, André, 215, 636, 637, 638; Callirhoë, 216, 225 deviance, 595–96, 694 Diaghilev, Serge, 621 Diderot, Denis, 66, 67 Diémer, Louis, 371n, 560, 638n differences: the common and, 95; comparison and juxtaposition, 219–20, 223, 225, 228; laws and mœurs as mitigations of, 171–72; music as expression of, 297; music as mediation of, 34–35, 48–49, 452; public utility as justification of, 333; regional, 356; seductiveness of, 437; stereotypes and, 425. See also assimilation/integration; compromise and consensus; contrast(s); diversity; Self/Other distinction; social divisions

Digeon, Claude, 285 Di Grazia, Donna, 223n Dill, Charles, 61n Dillon, comte de, 500 Dinah Salifou, 547–48, 548, 551 Directory, festivals under, 130–31 disease, anxieties about, 692 dishonesty, artistic, 175–76 disorder, 64, 162n, 172, 262–63. See also order; political conflict/disagreement distinction, 642, 644–45, 679, 683–91; accessibility vs. complexity debate, 92, 688–90; elite preoccupation with, 683, 684, 686; Fouillé’s educational views and, 688; hierarchical listening styles, 686–87; national differences and, 691; private cults and societies for, 684; and social divisions, 684, 686 Le Divan Japonais, 479, 495 diversity, 358, 643–44; of consumer goods, 457– 58; mistrust/suppression of, 146; in musical participation, 205; public utility and, 79–80; racial, 426–27; in revolutionary France, 146; student, at Conservatoire, 474–75, 477. See also aesthetic diversity; assimilation/ integration; audience diversity; eclecticism; tolerance; unity Donizetti, Gaetano, 265, 487 Dorian mode, 56n, 397 Doucet, Camille, 234 Doulcet, Adolphe, 84n, 90, 177n, 399n drama, integration of music and, 187, 526. See also characterization; opera; theater; specific works drames lyriques, 139, 340, 342n, 611, 647n drawing education. See dessin dreaming, dreaminess, 423, 425–26, 524, 525, 526, 586. See also escapism Dreyfus Affair, 500, 596, 608, 612, 614n; social impact of, 32, 643, 678 Drumont, Edouard, 131n, 282, 489, 496, 501n drums, 427–28; in marches, 120, 123–24, 125; in non-Western music, 577, 579, 587; in revolutionary festivals, 113 Dubois, Théodore, 278n, 282, 286, 620, 630; and City of Paris prize, 274–75, 363, 364; at Conservatoire, 185n, 218, 292, 475n, 620, 642; in Danhauser song collection, 321; on 1880s programs, 371n; on 1890s programs, 673; Judith opera, 664; religious music, 292, 362, 620. works: L’Accompagnement pratique du plainchant, 620; “Chanson lesbienne,” 396; La Farandole, 362; Joan of Arc march, 662; Notes et études d’harmonie, 543; Le Paradis perdu, 275, 288; Les Sept Paroles du Christ, 620

Index

.

749

Dubouchet, Pierre, 104n Dubout, Alfred, 656 Du Camp, Maxine, 92–93, 296 Dufay, Guillaume, 346 Dugan, C. N., 106 Dujardin, Edouard, 509n, 511, 521 Dukas, Paul, 369n, 640; completion of Guiraud’s Frédégonde, 654, 656 Du Locle, Camille, 419 Dumas, Marie, 216n Dupaigne, Albert, 196–97, 319 Dupavillon, Christian, 48 Durand, Auguste, 633 Duruy, Albert, 99n, 131 Duteil d’Ozanne, Abel, 652 duty: “Chant du départ” as exhortation to, 116, 129, 153; as dramatic subject matter, 187–88; duty/pleasure opposition, 358–59, 397–98; female symbols of, 186–89, 661–66; of government, 69–70; individual, 64, 67–68; love and, 172–74, 188, 318, 320–21, 424–25, 447; republican educational reforms and, 318; Simon on, 171–74, 320–21. See also female allegories; patriotism Duvernoy, Alphonse, 559; Cléopâtre, 391; La Tempête, 363 Dvoˇrák, Antonín: Dimitrij, 265 Eagleton, Terry, 170–71n early music. See musique ancienne eclecticism, 358, 368–72, 395–96, 400; in concert programming, 368–69, 371–72, 470, 472, 474, 680; at 1889 Exhibition, 584, 585; 1890s criticisms of, 619; Fauré on, 619; d’Indy on, 619; in music, 370–71, 378, 395– 96, 499, 586; in popular entertainment, 479, 480; Wagnerism and, 514 Ecole de chant de l’Opéra, 141–42 Ecole de musique classique et religieuse. See Ecole Niedermeyer Ecole libre des sciences politiques, 202–3 Ecole nationale des arts décoratifs, 195, 270 Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, 195, 269n Ecole nationale du dessin pour les jeunes filles, 195–96 Ecole Niedermeyer, 226, 272, 292, 310, 619 Ecole royale de chant, 141–42, 146 economic ideology and policy, 430, 449, 456, 460 economic liberalism, 297, 430, 449, 495–96 economic prosperity and progress, 147, 235, 246, 257, 260; arts commerce and, 460–62; colonialism and, 407, 413; 1880s recession,

750

.

Index

372–73, 409, 413, 442, 457n, 463, 489, 495n; at 1889 Exhibition, 552, 565, 567, 593; and French industry, 623n; large businesses and, 449, 456; republican promises about, 308 economic utility/value, 65–66; of arts and arts education, 194, 195, 246, 372–73, 454–55; of French music exports, 235, 246, 257–58, 259– 60, 265, 297 Eden-Théâtre, 467, 481–83, 482, 483, 538; Lohengrin premiere at, 511–12, 514–17, 519–20 Edison, Thomas, 555 education: arts in, 60–61, 65; Catholic, 77, 98, 100n, 285, 291, 309–10, 316; classical texts and influences, 56, 60; definitions of, 99nn; feelings in, 101–2, 688n; Fouillé’s views, 688, 692; health/hygiene, 692–93; vs. instruction, 99–100; and revolutionary research, 141; selfinstruction and self-improvement, 190, 199, 201, 316; theater as, 135–36, 140, 328; and Universal Exhibitions, 276–77, 278, 555–57, 584– 86; université populaire movement, 677–78, 679; useful knowledge concept, 81, 99–100, 316. See also dessin arts and education; music education; primary education; public education; republican educational reforms; revolutionary public instruction; taste elevation educational access: for women, 195, 269n, 315n; for working classes, 191 educational utility, 74–75, 97–98, 99–101, 172, 692; choral singing, 60–61, 167 education manuals, 94n, 174, 317–18 effeminacy: associated with monarchism and Empire, 148, 153, 154, 302; in music, 148, 153; and war, 447 egalitarianism, 33, 89–90, 193; competition and commerce and, 454–55; competitions and, 271; in education, 314; in musical access, 324, 332; public luxuries and, 325–26; as revolutionary ideal, 112, 304, 309, 333. See also social inequalities Eglantine, Fabre d’, 176n Egypt: French colonialism in, 409n, 410; French opéra-comique in, 253 Eiffel, Gustave, 456, 565 Eiffel Tower, 8, 9, 12, 556, 557, 565–66, 584 L’Eldorado, 339, 439, 480, 493, 495, 668, 673 Eldorado-concert (Algiers), 480, 486 elegance, 169n, 266, 502, 503, 638; elite associations of, 123, 214, 686; as quintessentially French, 261, 266, 647, 686; vs. utility, 525; valorization of, 271, 394, 686; works praised for, 160, 286, 362, 377, 381

elementary education. See primary education Elias, Norbert, 358 elite musical participation, xiv, 82, 472, 600, 626; amateur choral societies, 169, 198–99, 220–21; concert audiences, 134, 467, 472, 656–57, 684; opera associations, 34, 134–35, 138, 257, 265, 267–68, 324; urge for distinction, 679, 683–91. See also aristocratic musical participation; salon concerts elites, xiv, 8, 614, 644–45, 678; colonial, 401; constituencies, 164–66; cultural hegemony, 35, 79, 178–79nn; 1880s disillusionment among, 497; 1889 Exhibition attendance, 558; identity performance in 1890s, 627, 629, 630; internal divisions, 31, 32; and luxury , 66, 325, 456–57; Paris residential patterns, 7, 8– 9, 11, 19; women, in feminist organizations, 673. See also Ancien Régime; aristocracy; distinction; social divisions elitism. See aesthetic elitism; distinction Ellis, Katharine, 5n, 63n, 201n, 213, 216nn, 217, 346n, 638n; on Bach in France, 286; on early music performance in nineteenth century, 156n, 218, 225, 377; on eclecticism, 369n; on Handel, 287, 288n, 292, 308 eminent domain, 73–74 emotional responses to music, 59, 87, 104–5, 124, 133–34, 136, 175–76; Wagner, 518 emotional unity, 102–7, 150 emotions. See feelings empathy/sympathy, 87, 102n, 173, 697 Empire, 154, 166; imperial festivals, 131n. See also Napoléon I emulation, 199 energy, 95, 140, 153, 276; in music, 122, 153. See also vitality Enesco, Georges, 632n, 640 England: Anglophobia, 421–22; British colo­ nialism, 421–22; French-British relations, 621n Enlightenment thinkers: as models of music criticism, 214; on social utility, 56–57, 59, 67 Enlightenment values, 376 Ennery, Adolphe d’, 414, 416; Michel Strogoff, 416–18, 568, 668 Entente cordiale, 236, 621n Ephrussi, Charles, 625 l’Epine, Bérengère de, 380n, 382n L’Epine, Ernest, 274, 278n equality. See egalitarianism Erlanger, Camille: Kermaria, 604 eroticism, 311, 375; in Massenet, 209, 292, 385 escapism, 295, 322–23, 497, 508, 683; exoticism

in music and, 423, 425, 572, 585; store browsing as, 457, 458 esprit publique. See public spirit ethnic identity, 406–7, 696 ethnocentrism, 425 ethnographic exhibitions: caricature in L’Illustration, 571; at 1889 Exhibition, 568– 72; of people, 422n, 427, 481, 568, 570, 670, 671n; symbolic utility of, 551, 584 Euterpe, 652n exclusivity, 467, 472, 684. See also elite entries exoticism, 311, 375, 409, 572; colonialism and, 418, 420; as insulation from reality, 425, 436; in modality and melody, 431; in music at 1889 Exhibition, 567, 572–82; in opera and theater, 251, 409, 414, 416–26, 436, 449, 664; travel/exploration themes, 413–16, 568; zoo concerts and, 487–89. See also ethnographic exhibitions; non-Western music; Orientalism experimentation. See musical innovation and originality exploration themes, 413–16, 568 exports. See French music exports expropriation of property, 73–74, 695 Faidherbe, Louis, 547, 570 familial love: patrie and duty associated with, 172–74, 318, 320–21. See also fraternity family audiences: concerts, 159, 455, 470, 472, 557n; opera and theater, 183, 215, 216, 329, 330, 448; popular entertainment, 455, 477– 78, 485 family magazines, 37, 81, 238n. See also specific magazines Fargue, Léon-Paul, 3–4, 8, 23, 25, 163n, 683 fascism, 458n, 698 fashion, 246, 686 Fauquet, Joël-Marie, 35, 520n, 632n Faure, Félix, 167, 441, 442, 625 Fauré, Gabriel, 27–28n, 28, 75n, 292–93, 368, 673; on Debussy’s Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, 534; on eclecticism, 619; at Hippodrome festival, 305n; Proust on, 54n; and Schola Cantorum, 619; and Société des grandes auditions founding, 624. works: La Bonne Chanson, 54n; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme incidental music, 633; madrigal, 633; Pavane, 506, 507, 633, 636; Requiem, 293, 640n; Symphony in D minor, 520 Faure, Jean-Baptiste, 311, 473, 511; as Hamlet, 231, 232, 234, 247, 257 Faure, Michel, 33, 292–93, 597n, 689

Index

.

751

Fauser, Annegret, xx, 58, 154, 366, 510, 548n, 553n, 557n, 561n, 562n, 564n, 567n, 573, 577n, 582n, 631n, 647n, 669, 674n; on listening, 557; on Wagner, 513 Faust (Gounod), 179, 187n, 198, 285, 385, 397n; early reception of, 253; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559n, 560; excerpted in cabaret shows, 479; foreign performances, 231, 253, 254–55, 262, 361, 708–9 Favier, Thierry, 616n feelings, 58, 59, 61–62, 127–28, 238, 496n; in education, 101–2, 688n; emotional unity, 102–7, 150; intellect/passions balance in Wagner, 519; intellect/sentiment opposition, 151, 203, 383, 496n, 497–98, 584; marches’ evocation of, 122–23; mistrust of, 101, 129– 30, 135; music as imitation of, 58; music for exploration of, 524–25; music for expression of, 106, 114; sound color and, 242–43. See also aesthetic pleasure; emotional responses to music; pleasure; sensory responses female allegories, 644, 661–78; Debussy’s Mélisande, 675–76; 1870s, 186–89; 1890s, 661–78; fragile women, 675–76; Frédégonde, 654, 656; Joan of Arc, 186–88, 189, 321, 662–64, 697; Judith, 188, 189, 664–66, 697; Liberty, 126, 128, 136; misogyny and, 674– 75; women warriors, 654, 655, 666–68, 667, 670–72; working-class women, 676–77 female musical participation: amateur singers and musicians, 169, 198, 199n, 273, 458; as consumers/audiences, 202, 467, 472; 1890s, 673–74; music education, 146, 319, 474–75, 680; music teachers, 273, 474–75n, 475; professional musicians, 460, 474–75, 623, 673; revolutionary era, 136n, 146; singers, 146. See also women composers femininity, 152, 153, 154n, 359, 375; ascribed to music, 153, 154; charm and grace as, 377, 378; in decorative arts, 375; effeminacy associated with monarchism, 148, 153, 154, 302; in French identity, 398; feminism: femme nouvelle, 672–73, 674–75, 690 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 7n Ferry, Jules, 167, 168, 174, 304, 382n, 507; arts administration views and influence, 331–32, 363, 368, 375; Clemenceau and, 437, 438– 39; and colonialist interventions, 406, 410, 411, 413, 421, 449; on Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 269n; death of, 622; educational views and reforms, 99n, 191, 197, 314, 315– 16, 317; on mission of colonialism, 432; as model of tolerance, 359–61, 698; negotiations

752

.

Index

with Germany, 437–38; opposition from Déroulède and Ligue des patriotes, 439, 448–49; on progress, 236, 237n; and Verdi’s Légion d’honneur, 421; and views of France’s past in republican art and education, 332, 333 fertility and depopulation, 447, 662, 674, 675n, 692 festivals, 112, 132–34; at 1889 Exhibition, huge concerts, 553–55, 554, 561–65, 584; during the Empire, 155; at Hippodrome, music, 305, 306, 341, 365; imperial, 131n, 282–83; Ligue des patriotes’ proposals for, 441–42n, 443; modern Fête de la musique, 47–49, 698; Napoléon I, celebration of, 131n, 166, 336; national, in the colonies, 428, 429; as opportunities for protest/conflict, 132n, 336–37; orphéon competitions and, 89–90, 155, 198, 199, 201; republican national, 155, 283, 335–37; republican revivals of revolutionary, 335–37, 605– 6, 608, 613; Victor Hugo’s eightieth birthday, 507–8; for wedding of Princess Amélie, 498, 501. See also revolutionary festivals Fête de la musique, 47–49, 698 fêtes galantes, 138 Fétis, François-Joseph, 63n, 346n, 348n, 690 Le Figaro, Figaro musical, 272, 336, 344, 350, 352n, 448, 614n; Dahomean amazons in, 670; on Folies-Bergère, 486; on gender disparity at Conservatoire, 474–75, 476; Godard’s minuet in, 506; Joan of Arc music in, 662; music published in 1890s, 616, 631; praise for Société des grandes auditions, 627. See also Darcours, Charles Finance Ministry, 11, 44–45 Flaubert, Gustave, 24, 664 Fleuret, Maurice, 48 Flint de Médicis, Catrina, 617n Fluxus, 55, 539 Folies-Bergère, 412, 422n, 449, 483–86, 676; classical music concerts, 481; programs reproduced, 484, 485 folk music, 319; in art music compositions, 304, 355, 365, 581; in Russian music, 557; scholarship, 353–55, 379–80, 396; taught in primary schools, 319, 320, 321, 352–53; at Universal Exhibitions, 278, 560, 566–67. See also chansons populaires; dances; non-Western music foreign music: on 1880s programs, 365–68, 371– 72; on 1890s programs, 691; state encouragement of, 360. See also assimilation/integration, artistic; musical hybridity; non-Western music; specific countries and composers foreign musicians, 147, 234, 249; conductors,

691; singers, 231, 249, 250–51. See also specific individuals foreign performances. See French music exports; French opera abroad; specific composers foreign relations: 1890s, 614, 621–22, 623; French-Russian, 14, 595, 621, 666–69. See also French colonialism; French-German relations; international politics form, 36, 61, 238, 239, 545. See also clarity; musical form Foucault, Michel, 38, 40, 65–66n Fouillé, Alfred, 659–60n, 688, 692 Fourcaud, Louis de, 269n, 395, 499n, 509, 626 Fragerolle, Georges, 663 Framéry, Nicolas-Etienne, 215 Francfort, Didier, 29–30n Franck, César, 75n, 185n, 199, 369n, 642n, 659; and 1880 City of Paris prize, 363, 364, 365; 1880s, 464; 1890s, 684, 685, 686. works: Panis Angelicus, 610; Paris, 611; Rédemption, 209, 637; Symphony in D Minor, 520 Franco-Prussian War, 17, 31, 78, 183, 285; French colonialism and, 411, 438; Gambetta in, 164n; impacts on French culture, 32, 145, 161, 190–91, 234, 284; musical settings of, 637n; reparations paid by France, 163, 165, 248; songs about, in school manuals, 322; Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation, 160, 289, 515. See also revanche Franco-Russian alliance, 14, 595, 621, 666–69 Franks, 651, 652, 654, 656, 678 Franz Josef I, 231 fraternity, fraternity promotion, 95, 174; at 1889 Exhibition, 552–55, 570; music’s capacity for, 87–89, 96, 133, 155, 344; republican era, 172, 174, 190; revolutionary festivals and, 106, 108, 111–12, 613. See also community; unity Frédégonde, 654, 656, 672 Freemasons, Freemasonry, 167–68, 292, 343, 598n free trade, 297, 430, 449 free verse, 527, 528 Frémiet, Emmanuel: statue of Jeanne d’Arc, 192 French colonialism: acclimatization notion, 428, 431, 432, 436–37; assimilation debates, 436–37, 646; cultural superiority and, 432– 36, 549; domestic opposition to, 436–39, 622–23; economics/commerce and, 407, 413, 430; 1880s, 406, 410–11, 413, 436–39, 449; 1890s, 621–22, 690; and exoticism in opera, 418, 420; Groupe colonial, 622; justifications for, 410, 411, 413, 438–39, 652; monogenism and, 426–28; music’s capacity

to promote, 408, 413; in political songs and popular entertainment, 478, 481; pre-Third Republic, 401, 409n, 410; racial policy in the colonies, 418; republican ideology of integration, 406–8; resistance in the colonies, 644; Universal Exhibition of 1889 and, 549, 583n; utility of, 411, 413, 583n. See also indigenous peoples; mission civilisatrice; specific regions and colonies French colonies: cafés-concerts in, 480, 486; colonial exhibits at 1889 Exhibition, 567–72, 583n; musical life in, 401–2, 408, 428, 472– 73, 600; religious missions, 291; Sociétés philharmoniques in, 472–73 French cultural superiority, 3, 234, 246, 296–97; artistic and musical, 249, 605–6; BourgaultDucoudray on, 345; colonialism and, 432–36, 549; Eiffel Tower as symbol of, 565; opera and theater as ambassadors of, 248, 249; purity and, 267; race as marker of, 645–48; and Universal Exhibitions, 275–76. See also French music exports; French opera abroad; mission civilisatrice French-German relations, 437–38, 495, 499– 500, 595, 621; anti-German feeling expressed as anti-Wagnerism, 514–17; economic relations, 285, 289, 495; French admiration and envy, 285; German participation in Universal Exhibition, 276n, 553; musical relations, 284– 90. See also Dreyfus Affair; Franco-Prussian War; German music; Prussia; revanche; Wagner in France French identity performance/construction, 3, 79, 398, 643–44, 648, 696–97; chansons populaires and, 352–56; colonialism and, 420, 425; as Conservatoire funding rationale, 143; cross-class sociability and, 489; French history in, 90, 555; in Jean de Nivelle, 397–98; masculine/feminine balance in, 398; music history and, 345, 352, 356–57, 631, 640–41; music’s roles in, xii, xiv, 86–90, 91, 107, 228–29, 296, 518, 696–97; and modern Fête de la musique, 48; Paris’s centrality in, 583; public utility concept and, 78–79; republican political legitimacy and, 593; revolutionary heritage and, 94–97; role of festivals and opera in, 107; Self/Other distinction and, 425, 643; social divisions and, 678; Universal Exhibition representations of, 276; virility and strength in, 668, 669. See also assimilation/integration; French origins French military: colonialism and, 411. See also military entries

Index

.

753

French music: Berlioz as model of, 244–45; Conservatoire and, 146–47, 149; contrasting styles in, 274–75; Delibes as quintessentially French, 382, 383; elegance in, 636; folk music in, 353, 356; foreign appreciation of, 266; historical consciousness in, 308; national pride/ regeneration and, 235, 295; quintessentially French aesthetic qualities, 266–67, 295, 378, 636, 647, 690. See also assimilation/integration, artistic; French music exports; specific aesthetic qualities, genres, composers French music exports, 246–68, 284; advantages of foreign success, 262–66; attractions for foreign audiences, 235; ballet, 258–59, 261, 264, 265, 379n; Berlioz, 244; criticism of foreign premieres, 627, 635; economic value of, 235, 246, 257–58, 259–60, 265; French press coverage, 253; instrument trade, 260–61; international culture/politics and, 233–34, 266–68, 296–98; musical influence of, 265; music pedagogy, 261–62, 324; noneconomic value of, 266; operetta, 252–53; orchestral music and performers, 261, 266; reception of, 231, 233, 259, 260–61, 264, 265; royalties, 258. See also French opera abroad; specific composers; Appendix B French opera abroad: advantages of foreign success, 262–66; in the colonies, 401; 1870s, 234–36, 247–48, 251–58, 284; 1880s, 361, 379n, 383, 386n, 426, 499; as international commodity, 258, 267; nonelite access to, 268; premieres abroad, 264, 284, 627; as public good, 267–68. See also French music exports; specific composers; Appendix B French origins, 190, 648–58; Celtic, 657; explored in music and theater, 649–57; Frankish, 649, 654, 656; Gallo-Roman, 649– 54, 656–57, 658; as result of assimilation, 648–49, 657 French provinces: cafés-concerts in, 480; composition competitions, 273; concerts populaires, 462; growth of republican strength in, 308; Mignon’s popularity in, 597; music dissemination by republican government, 105; music education in, 146; opera, 246–48, 252, 262, 264, 664n; primary educational materials about, 318, 321, 322–23; relations with Paris, 5, 248–49; Schola Cantorum branches, 620; Sociétés philharmoniques, 472–73; state arts funding for music in, 294–95. See also regional music Freycinet, Charles de, 206, 449 Frisch, Walter, 690n

754

.

Index

frivolity, 66, 170, 252; and festivals, 132; and French culture, 159, 213, 252; music as frivolous activity, 95 Front National, 192 Fuchs, Edmund, 304 Fuchs, Henriette, 304, 512–13 Fulcher, Jane, 29–30n, 34n, 162n, 363n, 659–60n Fuller, Loïe, 486, 676 Fumaroli, Marc, xiii n fumisme, 537 Furet, François, 30, 163 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 78, 173, 649, 658 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 31–32n, 219–20n Gagnol, Abbé, 318–19 gaiety, 322–23 Gailhard, Pierre, 368 Gallet, Louis, 240, 426n, 651 Galli-Marié, Célestine, 247, 247, 255, 263 Gallois, Jean, 305n Gambetta, Léon, 164, 167, 168, 277, 621n; anticlericalism, 282; arts administration and, 328–29, 330–31; Bismarck and, 284; and crisis of May 1877, 282, 301n; death and funeral of, 331, 333; educational reform and, 314–15, 328, 441; on egalitarianism, 193; and French colonialism, 410; Ligue des patriotes membership, 441; politics of, 410, 439, 507; as prime minister, 309, 314, 330–31, 341, 441; Republican Union, 309, 328–29, 330–31, 341; in Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation, 289 gamelan music, 581 Ganay, comte de, 625 Ganne, Louis, 632 Garb, Tamar, 360, 473 Garcin, Jules, 368, 464 Garden, Mary, 677 Garde républicaine, 412, 441 Garnier, Charles, 555, 565 Gauguin, Paul, 657 Gauls, Gallo-Roman civilization, 190, 370, 407, 493n, 648, 649, 657, 678; explored in music, 651–54, 656–57 Gaultier, Abbé, 318 Gauthier-Villars, Henri (Willy), 684 Gautier, Henri: school music manuals, 288 Gautier, Théophile, 64–65 gavottes, 631n, 632 Gebrauchsmusik, 82, 83 Geffroy, Gustave, 679n gendered rhetoric, 152–54; gender ascribed to music, 153–54. See also gender roles

gender inequality, 71n; at Conservatoire, 474– 75, 476 gender roles: strength/weakness opposition in, 672; women as inspiration to duty, 129, 152, 447; women as mothers, 129, 315n, 446–47, 674–75. See also female allegories; femininity; virility Genet-Delacroix, Marie-Claude, 41n, 162n, 169n, 194n, 195n, 237, 238n, 269–70, 273, 294, 316, 324n, 360n Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Isidore, 428, 430 Gerhard, Anselm, 151 German music, 233, 236, 240; in America, xii– xiii n, 557; on 1860s–1870s concert programs, 160, 208, 217; foreign critical opinions, 265; French-German musical relations, 284–90; German influences in French music, 346n, 370, 394–95, 647n; German songs in public schools, 319, 320; Hanslick on, 259; harmony and, 147n; influences on French composers, 346n, 370, 394–95; influences on French symphonic writing, 520; melody, 256; performed in France, 285–90, 291; taught in French schools, 84. See also specific composers German musical culture: choral singing in, 88; French-German musical relations, 284–90; music education, 84, 85, 88, 89, 196n, 261– 62, 319; rejections of lightness/frivolity, 454; taste and judgment, 219–20n Germany: aesthetics, 61, 62; colonialism, 437; economic power, 623; immigration, 495n; d’Indy’s interest in, 365; national identity in, 406–7, 696; Universal Exhibition participation, 276n, 553. See also Franco-Prussian War; French-German relations; Prussia Gessele, Cynthia, 112n Gevaert, François-Auguste, 219–20, 580 Ghil, René, 528 gigues, 632, 633 Gildea, Robert, 97n, 164–65n, 500n, 608 Gille, Philippe, 379, 386, 422 Girard, Emile, 506 Girard, Pauline, 380n, 382n Girardet, Raoul, 441–42n Girod, Aimé, 506 Glazunov, Alexander, 557 Glinka, Mikhail, 160, 405, 627 glory, 234. See also military glory; national glory; national pride Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 188, 234, 340, 346, 656; Ancien Régime associations, 135; 1870s interest in, 208, 213, 215, 220, 226, 239; on 1880s programs, 311, 348, 349, 350,

352; 1890s interest in, 610, 628, 629, 631; in revolutionary era, 129, 135, 136, 140; in revolutionary festivals, 129. works: Alceste, 637; Armide, 129, 350, 352, 501–2n, 632; Iphigénie en Aulide, 136; Iphigénie en Tauride, 348, 628, 629; Orphée, 610n, 637 Gobineau, Arthur de, 431, 654, 692 Goblet, René, 331, 498n Godard, Benjamin, 305n, 363, 364, 560, 638n; Jeanne d’Arc incidental music, 663; “Marche funèbre,” 310n; Suite de danses anciennes et modernes, 506, 632n; Symphonie gothique, 282; Le Tasse, 275, 305n, 371, 404n; La Vivandière, 604 Goehr, Lydia, 33, 34 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 285, 288; Wilhelm Meister, 179, 182–83 Goldstrom, Eric, 385n Goncourt, Edmond de, 214, 375 Gondinet, Edmond, 209, 379, 422 the good, 63, 102. See also public good Good Friday concerts, 242, 291, 312–13, 419, 512, 686; secularization of, 307, 310–11 good taste, 686. See also distinction; popular taste; taste entries Gossec, François-Joseph, 114, 130, 142, 144, 153, 340; on 1870s programs, 226, 228; on 1880s programs, 350, 352n; 1890s revivals of, 605, 608; on foreign musicians, 147; marches, 123–24, 125–26. works: “Le Chant des ouvriers,” 322; “Chant du 14 juillet,” 114, 116n, 609; “Chant patriotique,” 608n; “Chœur à la Liberté,” 115n; “Hymne à l’Etre suprême,” 116, 117, 118–20; “Hymne à Voltaire,” 613; “Invocation,” 120, 121–22; “Marche lugubre,” 105, 123–24, 125–26, 130, 150, 608, 613, 727; L’Offrande à la liberté, 115, 136n; “Peuple, éveille-toi!,” 117, 120, 613; Symphonie de chasse, 228, 352n; Te Deum, 108, 114, 123; Thésée, 228; Le Triomphe de la République, 136, 561, 562, 608n Gossin, Pierre-François, 101 Gouin, François, 60n, 317n Gounod, Charles, 27, 167, 178, 186n, 199, 397, 441n; as Academician, 361, 364; as competition judge, 274–75; on Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 269n; on Debussy, 535; 1870s reputation and French performances, 170, 217–18, 228; on 1880s programs, 464, 481; at 1889 Exhibition concerts, 553, 554; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559; on 1890s programs, 605; and Folies-Bergère concerts, 481; foreign appreciation and performances, 264,

Index

.

755

Gounod, Charles (continued) 265; at Hippodrome festival, 305n; musical influence of, 27, 370; at Opéra, 598; orchestrations, 242; religious music, 292, 311, 364, 481; on Saint-Saëns, 370–71; and state choir school funding, 310; and Thomas’s appointment to Conservatoire, 183n; on Universal Exhibition committee, 278n; on Wagner, 515. works: “Ave Maria,” 208; Cantique, 310n; Chants du soldat, 278; “En avant!,” 439; Gallia: Lamentation, 185–86, 187n, 222, 224, 282, 288, 307, 611, 699; Jeanne d’Arc, 187, 188, 242, 252, 288, 662, 663; mass honoring Joan of Arc, 662; Messe de Sainte-Cécile, 311, 312; Mireille, 253; Mors et vita, 364, 481; Philémon et Baucis, 257; Polyeucte, 178n, 291, 295, 636; La Rédemption, 481; Reine de Saba, 187n; Roméo et Juliette, 253, 263, 559n, 710; Sapho, 363; Struensée, 636; Le Tribut de Zamora, 418; “Vive la France,” 277–78, 279, 439, 441. See also Faust Gouvy, Théodore: Requiem, 310n government: role of, 56–57, 69–70, 161. See also citizenship; state entries government-citizen relations, 101, 103; colonialism and, 406–7; notions of sovereignty, 72, 78, 105–6; republican concern with, 164, 170–71. See also citizenship; duty; patrie grace, 229, 233, 358, 375–76, 647, 674; ballet as model of, 329; composers praised for, 287, 335, 349, 362; in Delibes, 259, 380; and feminine characters, 188; and Javanese dancers, 574; in Manon, 389; in Mignon, 179, 255; in musique ancienne, 349, 377–78, 504; in non-Western music, 578; as quintessentially French, 261, 266, 285, 322; service/utility and, 376; in troubadour music, 658 Gramit, David, 85 Grand-Carteret, John, 96 Grande Arche de la Fraternité, 43–44, 44, 45 grandeur: and Ancien Régime, 209, 215; conservative valorization of, 358; and high art, 384; in music, 148, 151, 186, 215, 222, 229, 253, 273, 281, 517, 665; ornament and, 325; preRepublican valorization of, 148, 150–51, 154; in revolutionary festivals, 124, 132; and shift to grace, 375, 386, 397–98 Grandval, vicomtesse de, 304, 391, 637, 673 Great Tradition, 193 Greco-Roman civilization, 640, 649; Amazons, 671–72; Greek eclecticism, 369n, 370; Greek influences in education, 56, 60, 196; influence on French aesthetics, 58–60, 62n, 219, 345;

756

.

Index

influences on revolutionary festivals, 111; musical instruments, 648; notions of duty, 173; operatic treatments, 137, 649–51; Rome as model for colonialism, 407, 649; Stoicism, 687. See also Greek modes; Greek music Greek modes, 56, 396–97, 408, 633, 651, 656, 659 Greek music, 651; ancient, 133, 396–97, 649, 650, 651, 658 Greffulhe, comte de, 622, 626 Greffulhe, Elisabeth, comtesse de, xvii, xix, 507, 623n, 625–26, 629, 631, 632, 633, 684; Messiah benefit at 1889 Exhibition, 558, 623–24; Russian music patronage, 621, 627; salon concerts of the 1880s, 343, 473–74, 506; and Wagner, 509, 626, 630. See also Société des grandes auditions Gregorian chant. See chant Grétry, André-Ernest-Modest, 139, 144, 151, 395; on education, 71n; 1860s–1870s interest in, 210–12, 215, 226, 228, 340, 341–42; 1880s interest in, 342–43, 344; 1890s interest in, 608–11, 631, 637; on historical repertoire, 140–41; on music’s power to influence, 104n, 122; in republican song collections, 321; scores and transcriptions, 346; Thomas compared to, 361; ties to Ancien Régime, 134–35. works: Anacréon, 348; Les Deux Avares, 215, 629, 727; L’Epreuve villageoise, 138, 501n; Guillaume Tell, 139, 343, 727; Lisbeth, 140; Mémoires, 71n, 104n, 122, 140–41, 147n; Richard Cœur de Lion, 127, 135, 210–12, 215, 344, 609, 727; La Rosière républicaine, 343, 609, 727 Grévy, Jules, 167, 304, 421, 462; and Jean de Nivelle, 382n; resignation of, 489, 500 griots, 548 guerre de chansons, 95n Guilbert, Yvette, 479, 480, 676 Guillot de Sainbris, Antonin, Choral Society, 169, 185n, 198–99, 216, 218, 282, 391 Guilmant, Alexandre, 225–26, 260–61, 617, 684 Guiraud, Ernest, 262, 268n, 286, 305n, 364, 536; at Bayreuth, 509; on Conservatoire reform committee, 603; on prize juries, 364, 369n; on Universal Exhibition committee, 278n. works: Brunhilda/Frédégonde, 654, 656; Carnaval, 228; Madame Turlupin, 228 Gumplowicz, Philippe, 198 gymnastic classes, 442 gypsy music, 278, 486, 557n, 567, 573, 580 Halévy, Fromental, 264; La Juive, 187n, 249, 559n, 598n; Manon Lescaut, 362n

Hameline, Jean-Yves, 616n Hamlet (Thomas), 183, 184, 242, 247, 356, 397n; at 1889 Exhibition, 559n, 560; Ophelia’s mad song, 675–76; performed abroad, 231, 234, 256–57, 258n, 265, 361, 401, 716–20; singers, 232, 250 Handel, George Frideric, 141, 378; 1870s performances and views of, 208, 218, 222, 225, 226, 236, 286–88, 291; 1890s interest in, 615, 631; influences in French music, 288, 394, 665. works: Acis and Galatea, 287; Alexander’s Feast, 201, 218, 222, 288; Hercules, 301; Israel in Egypt, 615; Judas Maccabaeus, 218, 222, 287, 288; Messiah, 222, 224, 287, 288, 558, 623–24; Samson, 222 Hanoi: cafés-concerts, 480; echoes of French architecture, 22 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 19n, 164–65n, 168n Hanslick, Eduard, 63, 231, 233, 259 Harcourt, Eugène d’, 680 Harmonie du Bon Marché, 452, 512n, 554, 600, 601. See also Bon Marché department store L’Harmonie sacrée, 222, 223, 224, 287. See also Lamoureux, Charles harmony: in architecture and space, 20, 26; associated with order and calm, 87, 88, 196, 238n; in Satie, 543. See also musical harmony Harrison, Carol, 199n Hart, Brian, 520n Hartmann, Georges, 208 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène: and Concerts Pasdeloup, 166–67; and Parisian public works, 9, 17–18, 21, 24, 74, 460, 694 Haussonville, comtesse d’, 626 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 129, 228, 350, 463 health and hygiene, 692–94 Heartz, Daniel, 257n, 297n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 62 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 399 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 69, 71 Hénard, Eugène, 6–7n, 41–42 Hennion, Antoine, 35, 199n, 201, 632n Henri IV, 74n, 79, 207 Henri V (comte de Chambord), 159n, 165, 168n, 206, 210, 309, 499, 501n Henrique, Louis, 583n Henry, Charles, 373, 399, 528–29 Henson, Karen, 419 Hercules: French views of, 301, 302, 397, 501n, 665. See also Saint-Saëns, Camille (Déjanire; La Jeunesse d’Hercule; Le Rouet d’Omphale) hermétisme, 530, 536–37. See also obscurity heroism, 28–29, 234, 318, 358; French, as dra-

matic/musical subject, 186–88, 304–5, 448, 652–54; as musical style, 186; in music and song, 321, 384; in opera and drama, 301–2, 304–5, 448. See also struggle Hérold, Ferdinand, fils, 319, 326, 329 Hérold, Ferdinand, père, 264; La Somnambule, 362n Hervé (Florimond Ronger), 252; Chilpéric, 654 high culture: valorization of, 696. See also art music; distinction Hillemacher, Lucien, 364, 559 Hillemacher, Paul, 559 Hiller, Ferdinand, 284–85 Hindemith, Paul, 82 Hinton, Stephen, 82–83n Hippodrome, 449, 487, 662, 668; 1879 music festival, 305, 306, 341, 365 historical concerts: of chansons populaires, 353, 354; 1870s, 226–29, 348n; 1880s, 347, 348– 52, 353, 354, 467, 468; at 1889 Exhibition, 560; 1890s, 607–8, 609, 633–38. See also mixed concert programs historical utility, 55 history and historical consciousness, 2–3, 27, 30, 90, 644; Bourgault-Ducoudray on, 345; at 1889 Exhibition, 555–57, 570; folk song preservation and, 352, 355, 356; in French music, 308, 378; national pride and, 208; in opera and drama repertoire, 140–41, 211–12, 216; in Paris geography and architecture, 2–3, 7, 11, 14, 41–42, 191–92; in political songs, 206; progress and, 226; republican reinventions of, 317–18, 332; in schools and pedagogy, 317–19; Tocqueville on, 205n. See also French origins; musical continuity; music history; musique ancienne; Revolution; revolutionary entries Holmès, Augusta, 28, 154, 274n, 304, 368, 447, 673–74; and City of Paris prize, 304n, 363–64; critical recognition, 363–64, 564; on 1880s programs, 557n; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559; symbolists and, 526, 561; Wagner and, 363, 561. works: Les Argonautes, 304n, 363–64; Chansons populaires, 356; “La Guerrière,” 654, 655; Irlande, 310n, 561; Ludus pro patria, 561; Lutèce, 447, 654; “Marche gauloise,” 654; La Montagne noire, 673–74; “Ne nous oubliez pas,” 654; Ode triomphale, 561–65, 563, 605, 611; Pologne!, 561 Holoman, D. Kern, 523 Holy Week concerts: 1890s, 615–16. See also Good Friday concerts Home, Janet, 693

Index

.

757

Honegger, Arthur, 697 honesty: in the arts, 175–76. See also truth Horace, 60; Ars poetica, 58–59, 59–60, 90 Horne, Janet, 202n, 552 Hôtel de Ville (Paris), 1, 19n, 305 Hottentot Venus, 481 Howat, Roy, 642n Huë, Georges, 364, 635, 637 Huebner, Steven, xx, 11n, 305n, 329n, 361n, 370n; on Bruneau, 647n, 675n; on Chabrier, 499n, 630n, 631n; on Charpentier’s Couronnement de la Muse, 611n, 612; on Gounod’s Faust, 179n, 253; on d’Indy, 657; on Massenet, 385–86nn, 391n, 394, 395, 396n; on Reyer’s Sigurd, 368n; on Saint-Saëns, 521n; on Wagner’s influence, 509–10, 518n Hugo, Victor, 57, 61–62, 94, 278, 296, 334, 507–8; on educational value of theater, 328; in 1889 Exhibition panorama, 555; musical settings of, 508n; on music’s anti-rationality, 545; Le Roi s’amuse!, 386, 479, 504; in SaintSaëns, 302, 339, 507–8; in Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation, 289 Human Habitation exhibit, 1889 Exhibition, 555–57, 556, 570, 584 humor: in Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui, 498–99; as countercultural aesthetic, 537–44; in Satie, 539, 543–44. See also parody and satire Hungarian music, at 1889 Exhibition, 567, 573 Hunt, Lynn, 30, 130n, 143n, 302n Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 497, 509, 519, 566, 616; A Rebours, 383; “Le Fer,” 566n hybridity: eugenesic, 649; of the French “race,” 648–49, 657. See also assimilation/integration; musical hybridity; racial mixture hygiene, 692–94 “Hyménée, hymne tahitien,” 568, 569 hymns: liturgical, alternatives to, 123. See also patriotic music; revolutionary songs; and under composer (Beethoven; Berlioz; Bourgault-Ducoudray; Bréville; Catel; Gossec; Méhul; Saint-Saëns) “Hymn to Apollo,” 649 hypnosis, 545 Hypodorian mode, 396–97, 659 Ibsen, Henrik, 647 idealism, 31, 164; countercultural aesthetics and, 497, 527, 537, 684; in painting, 333; symbolist, 497, 527 ideas: intuition and, 527; symbolist notions of, 527. See also intellect identity, identity construction: elite, in 1890s,

758

.

Index

627; ethnic notions of, 406–7, 696; geography and, 38; and ideology, 170; politics in, 30; Self/Other distinction and, 425; stereotypes and, 425, 436. See also French identity performance/construction; national identity ideology: perspectives on, 170–71n. See also republican ideology and values; revolutionary ideology and values Ihl, Olivier, 337 illiteracy. See literacy L’Illustration: ethnographic exhibition caricature, 571; Givet monument to Méhul, 607; Human Habitation exhibit in, 556; musical instruments in, 427–28, 429; musique ancienne in, 502–4, 504, 505, 640; non-Western musicians in, 428, 429, 434–36, 435, 547–48, 548; pre-1889 Exhibition coverage, 568, 569; scene from Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 563; working-class opera attendees, 681 imagination: aesthetics and, 57, 60, 86, 204; exoticism and, 436; music and, 63, 86, 524, 546 imaginative listening, 204–5, 697 Imbert, Hugues, 467 imitation, 85, 461–62 immigrants, 418–19, 495n, 500, 649n imperial festivals, 131n, 282–83 imperialism. See colonialism; French colonialism impressionist music, 124, 400 impressionist painting, 19, 243, 400, 462, 535n improvisation, heard by Tiersot in non-Western music, 574, 577, 579 Les Incohérents, 481, 483, 537–39 income taxes, 614, 678n Independent (Constitutional) Right, 614, 622 India, British intervention in, 421 Indian music, 377n, 397, 422n, 434 indigenous architecture, at 1889 Exhibition, 555– 57, 556, 570 indigenous peoples: amazons of Dahomey, 670–71; French identification with, 420, 425; French views of/relations with, 402, 406– 8, 420, 423–24, 427, 432–33, 548; operatic portrayals of, 421–22, 423; popular images of, 428, 429, 433, 548, 568, 645, 670. See also ethnographic exhibitions; Self/Other distinction individual interests. See private interests individualism, 69n, 173, 238; artistic, 359, 461; conservative, 531; criticisms of, 644n; symbolist, 524–25, 526–27, 530, 531 individual rights and freedoms, xiii, 84, 294;

duty and, 174, 189; republican expansion of, 307, 309–14, 496. See also censorship individual utility. See personal utility Indochina, 420; French difficulties in, 436, 449; at 1889 Exhibition, 568n, 570; musicians in L’Illustration, 434–36, 435. See also Cambodia; Vietnam; specific colonies industry. See commerce and industry Indy, Vincent d’, 28, 346n, 541, 559, 690; on artistic progress, 53, 226; on Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui, 499; and chansons populaires, 355– 56, 658; on Conservatoire reform study committee, 603; and Dreyfus Affair, 596; as early music editor, 632; on eclecticism, 619; 1885 City of Paris prize, 364–65; on 1890s programs, 673; Massenet and, 385–86n; religious music, 619n; as Saint-Gervais choir director, 615; and Saint-Saëns’s anti-Wagnerism, 514; and Schola Cantorum, 617, 619, 620, 642, 684; and Société des grandes auditions, 624, 627n. works: Attendez-moi sous l’orme, 501– 2n; Le Chant de la cloche, 364–65, 508n; Deus Israël, 619n; L’Etranger, 640; Fantaisie sur des thèmes populaires français, 356; Fervaal, 596, 637, 657; Médée incidental music, 672; Sancta Maria, 619n; Suite dans le style ancien, 501–2, 503, 632; Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (Symphonie cévenole), 355–56, 520, 581; Wallenstein, 521n the infinite, 63, 508, 545, 689 inner experience, music and, 89, 497, 498, 518, 545. See also self-exploration; spirituality innovation: in the arts, 1890s calls for, 597–602; Lenepveu and, 662; in painting, 368; popular tolerance for, 641. See also musical innovation and originality; novelty Institut de France, 7, 14, 15, 141–46, 153; Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts and, 269; revolutionary composers in, 343. See also Conservatoire Institut des sciences et des arts, 1, 146, 150. See also Institut de France Institut musical, 198 Institut national de la musique, 73 instruction, 85n, 95, 100, 688; competitions as places of, 271, 273; definitions, 99–100; department stores as, 454; importance to republicans, 190, 194, 203; popular societies of, 679; vs. education, 99–100, 316, 644n. See also education; public instruction; revolutionary public instruction; self-improvement; singing instruction instrumentation and orchestration: Aida, 419–

20; contrasting styles of, 274–75; Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 381–82; innovations and experimentation, 235, 242–43, 362; military music, 145; orchestras reduced for early music, 215; Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, 520–21; Wagner, 535 instruments: ethnographies and hierarchies of, 427, 430, 433–34, 645; non-Western, 427–28, 430, 548, 549, 576, 577, 587, 645; trade, 260– 61; at Universal Exhibitions, 276, 555, 560, 566–67; Western, in the colonies, 428, 429; Western, origins of, 648; wind, rise of, 144– 45, 147. See also specific instruments integration. See assimilation/integration intellect: intellect/passions balance in Wagner, 519; intellect/sentiment opposition, 151, 203, 383, 496n, 497–98, 584; sensory-intellectual correspondences, 524–25, 528–29 intellectual development, 60n, 99; French influence abroad, 248; music and, 84, 86, 287 intellectual property law, 258, 267, 461, 616n intellectuals, 285, 335, 375, 497, 678; anti-intellectualism, 496n; musical practices, 686–90, 696; Wagnerism, 509, 530, 630 interconnectedness, 30, 38, 169, 230, 644; aristocratic ties through opera, 257; music’s power to promote, 86–89, 133; symbolist notions of correspondences in art, 528–29; at Universal Exhibitions, 276, 550 International Congress of Popular Traditions, 560 international culture: French music/music exports and, 266–68, 296–98; and national distinction in music, 691; Universal Exhibitions and, 283, 296, 549–50; Western cultural universality/superiority, 423–24, 433, 549–50 “Internationale,” 608 international politics: French music exports and, 233–34; national identity and, 593; ralliement alliance and, 621–22; Universal Exhibition of 1889 and, 553; Universal Exhibitions, 282–83, 553. See also foreign relations interpretation of music: imaginative listening and, 204–5. See also listening; musical meaning intolerance, and Wagner, 513–14, 519, 531 intuition: responses to music, 546; symbolist embrace of, 527, 529, 531 Invalides, 14; as 1889 Exhibition site, 550, 567. See also Champ de Mars IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique), 42–43, 43, 696 Irvine, William, 500n

Index

.

759

Isola brothers, 483 Italian immigrants, 418–19, 659–60n Italian music, 265, 285, 345, 370, 418–19; melody, 147n, 256. See also specific composers Italy, Triple Alliance, 437, 621, 669 Jacobins, 94–95, 111n, 136n, 152, 155, 161n Jaëll, Alfred and Marie, 261 Jameson, Fredric, 170–71n Jam, Jean-Louis, 127n Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 534, 536 Jannequin, Clément, 220, 499, 617; La Bataille de Marignan, 212, 221, 222 Japan, 276, 437, 485, 550n, 556, 696; in music, 125, 418, 481, 657 Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation, 75, 430n; 1870s–1880s concerts, 455, 487–89; 1890s concerts, 600, 633, 634, 636, 637–38, 683; ethnographic exhibitions, 481, 570, 571, 670 Jarry, Alfred: Ubu Roi, 538 Jaurès, Jean, 595, 608n Jauss, Hans Robert, 2–3n, 31–32n Javanese music and dance, at 1889 Exhibition, 479, 550, 553, 575, 581, 593; Debussy and, 580–82, 587, 590; reactions to, 573–74; SaintSaëns and, 586; Tiersot’s investigations, 575– 76, 578; transcriptions, 575, 591 Jean de Nivelle (Delibes), 3, 257, 379–83, 381, 398, 397–98, 558; foreign performances, 723; Hypodorian mode in, 396–97; musical hybridity in, 395, 398 Jeanne d’Arc. See Joan of Arc, in music and drama Jenkins, Brian, 130n, 442n Jennings, Jeremy, 66n Jews, 291, 332, 659–60n; ambivalence and antiSemitism, 442, 489, 500n, 583, 643; in drama, 500n, 665–66; as musicians and conductors, 371, 469; in republican government, 31. See also Dreyfus Affair Joan of Arc: in music and drama, 186–88, 189, 242, 252, 288, 321, 487, 506n, 662–64, 697; Paris statues of, 191, 192; proposed national festival honoring, 443 Johnson, James, 36, 133, 137 Joncières, Victorin, 187, 226, 305n, 559n; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 381; at Méhul statue dedication, 605; on Universal Exhibition committee, 278n; on Wagner, 515; on Wagner’s Parsifal prelude, 366. works: Dimitri, 265 Josquin des Prés, 346, 549n, 576, 615 Le Journal de musique, 176, 264, 458 judgment, 85, 86, 316–17; aesthetic, development

76 0

.

Index

of, 163, 199, 203–4, 223; citizenship and, 230, 317; vs. intuitive sensory understanding, 529; role of comparison in, 219–20; shopping and, 457–58. See also comparison; critical judgment; musical taste; popular taste; taste Judith, in music and drama, 188, 189, 228, 304, 664–66, 697 Jullien, Adolphe, 161n, 187, 213–15, 275, 348, 688, 724; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 380; Hector Berlioz, 245; Lohengrin reviews, 515n; and Mignon, 295; on popularity of early music, 638n; writings on German music and drama, 288 juste milieu, 235, 295, 369 Kabyles, 407–8, 420 Kaempfen, Albert, 353n, 393 Kahn, Gustave, 527–28, 638n Kant, Immanuel, 58n, 61, 62, 63, 238 Kaplan, Robert, 614n, 678 Kerst, Léon, 612n, 676 Kolb, Katherine, 27–28n Krauss, Gabrielle, 249, 250, 418, 558 Kroen, Sheryl, 131n Laborde, M. de, 246 Lacombe, Hervé, 169, 178, 179n, 295 Lacombe, Louis, 304 Lacome, Paul, 213, 243n, 431n, 561n La Fayette, Gilbert du Motier de, 108, 142 Lajarte, Théodore de, 213, 347 Lakmé (Delibes), 251, 265, 393, 421–25, 424, 426, 449, 524, 676, 690; Debussy and, 533n Lalo, Edouard, 228, 356, 362, 520; on 1880s programs, 464, 560; on Prix de Rome jury, 369n. works: Concerto russe, 355; La Jacquerie, 604; Namouna, 362; Néron, 487; Rapsodie norwégienne, 355; Symphony in G Minor, 520n Laloy, Louis, 532n, 640n Lamoureux, Charles, 261, 364, 463, 467; as conductor, 469, 470; L’Harmonie sacrée, 222, 223, 224, 287; and Lohengrin premiere protests, 515–17, 516; marriage to Brunet-Lafleur, 473; and Vaucorbeil, 328n; as Wagnerian, 509. See also Concerts Lamoureux Lang, Jack, 47–48 language: colonialism and, 408; and music, Mallarmé’s integration of, 526; regional diversity, 146, 189, 356. See also song texts; text languor/passivity, 143, 148, 153 La Reveillière-Lépeaux, Louis Marie, 130, 131, 151 Larousse, Pierre, 99n, 373

Larroumet, Gustave, 74–75, 194, 460–62, 623n, 686; on Conservatoire education, 394, 461– 62, 602–3; on innovation, 599; on spontaneity, 603n Lasserre, Pierre, 343n Lassus, Orlande de, 226, 615, 616, 631 Lavigerie, Charles (cardinal), 614 Lavignac, Albert, 185n, 509–10n, 642n, 687 La Villemarqué, Hersart de: Barzaz Breiz, 352n Lavisse, Ernest, 318 Lavoix, Henri, fils, 211n, 212, 227, 228, 346, 348n; on chant and the troubadours, 658; folk music collecting, 355; on Lully’s dances, 377; La Musique française, 648–49 law: administrative, autonomy of, 268; in colonies, 407; intellectual property, 258, 267, 461; public health, 694; public utility concept in, 69–71, 73–77, 695; republican reforms, 307, 309–10, 375; as source of order, 171, 172 Le Bon, Gustave, 437, 646, 679, 692 Le Borne, Fernand, 636, 637n Leclair, Jean Marie, 215, 560 Leclerc, Jean-Baptiste, 130, 133, 356n Lecocq, Charles: La Fille de Madame Angot, 252–53; La Jolie Persane, 418 Lefebvre, Charles, 282, 364, 559, 560, 635; Judith, 188, 228, 304; Sainte Cécile, 637 leftist musical practices, 1890s, 602–4; revivals of revolutionary music, 604–8 leftist politics: 1870s, 294; 1890s, 595, 603–4, 608, 622. See also anarchism; socialism; Third Republic politics Légion d’honneur recipients: Delibes, 379; d’Indy, 603n; Holmès, 565; Massenet, 243, 396; Strauss, 233; Verdi, 421 Légion d’honneur scandal, 489 Legitimists, 159n, 165, 166n, 206, 309. See also Third Republic politics Lehning, James, 162–63n, 496n Leith, James A., 102n leitmotifs: in French music, 368n, 370, 395, 509, 523; and Grétry, 610; in Vietnamese music, 574; in Wagner’s Parsifal, 521, 522, 523 Lemaire, Madeleine, 623 Lemaître, Jules, 589, 596 Lenepveu, Charles, 185n, 218, 282, 368, 462; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559, 560. works: Jeanne d’Arc, 662, 663; Requiem, 291; Velléda, 447, 627n, 654 Leo XIII (pope), 614–15, 616, 621 Leppert, Richard, 384 Le Roux, Hugues, 571–72 Leroux, Xavier, 369n

Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 423n, 599, 614n Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 504n, 505 Lesure, François, 55n lethargy/languor, 143, 148, 153 Letzer, Jacqueline, 136n Levin, Miriam, 12, 194, 239n, 276n, 565 Levinson, Jerrold, 230n Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 40 Lévy, Jules, 537 Leygues, Georges, 27, 442, 645, 682; on Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 269n liberty, 144, 172, 359; musical innovation as metaphor for, 242 Liberty figure, as revolutionary symbol, 126, 128, 136 Liber Usualis (Mocquereau), 615 Librairie de l’art indépendant, 590 libretti: prizes for, 272, 273; royalties for, 258. See also subject matter Ligue de la patrie française, 596 Ligue des patriotes, 410, 441–49, 508, 513, 515; anti-immigrant sentiment, 495n, 500; banning of, 501; and Boulanger, 493, 500–501, 583; establishment politics and, 410, 439, 448–49; founding, 441; membership and supporters, 441–42, 447, 458, 495n, 604; official status, 441–42n; patriotic songs and singing instruction, 443–47, 444, 445–46 listening, 36, 557; active, 163, 203–4, 230, 697; aural pleasure, 384, 392, 546, 578–79, 687; comparative, 219–20, 222–23, 228, 697; contemplative, 686–87; emotional responses to music, 59, 87, 104–5, 124, 133–34, 136; hierarchical styles, 686–87; imaginative, 204–5, 697; musical complexity and, 690; to nonWestern music, 572, 578; power of charm, 377, 382, 398; sensory correspondences, 524– 25, 528–29, 546; value of practicing, 85, 86 Liszt, Franz, 292n, 520, 524n, 580, 637, 660 literacy, 26, 175, 190 literature: exploration themes in, 413–14, 568; purposes of, 58–60, 61–62; and symbolists, 497, 524–26, 527–28, 529. See also specific writers Litolff, Henri, 611 Littré, Emile, 100, 314n, 376, 409n liturgical music, 123, 292, 615, 617, 658; prizes, 272; women as performers, 673. See also chant; religious music Lloyd, Rosemary, 526n, 532n Locke, John, 101 Locke, Ralph, 406, 419, 420, 424n, 666 Lockroy, Edouard, 167n, 374, 460, 479, 585

Index

.

761

logic, 345. See also clarity; rationalism Lohengrin (Wagner), 339, 508n, 511n; audience and critical reactions, 289, 290, 512, 513; on 1880s orchestral programs, 311, 365–66, 419n, 469; at Opéra, 598, 630, 659–60, 664; Paris premiere, 514–17, 519–20, 526n Lohengrin à l’Alcazar, 512 Loquin, Anatole, 319–20 Lorraine. See Alsace, Alsace-Lorraine Loti, Pierre, 422, 437; Madame Chrysanthème, 437, 657; Le Mariage de Loti, 422, 437 Louis XIV, 5, 21, 104, 192n, 214, 375, 502; Dumas’s play about, 212; 1880s vogue for dances of, 496–97, 501–7 Louis XV, 152, 375 Louis XVI, 10, 20, 21, 113, 151, 605n; period clothing, 631n, 633 Louis XVIII, 165 Louis-Philippe, 164, 165–66, 192n Louvre, 5, 6, 11, 14, 15, 44; Ecole du, 270 Le Louvre (choral society), 220, 221, 391 Louÿs, Pierre, 531n love: duty/patriotism and, 172–74, 188, 189, 318, 320–21, 424–25, 447; pleasures of, in Massenet’s Manon, 387–88; in Wagner, 508 Loyer, François, 2n Lucas, Colin, 102–3n, 111n Lucca, Pauline, 256 Lugné-Poë, Aurélien, 604n Lully, Jean Baptiste, 141, 142, 188, 234, 346; in Danhauser’s song collection, 320, 321; 1870s performances and views of, 213, 215–16, 218, 222, 226, 307; on 1880s programs, 348, 349, 350, 352; 1890s interest in, 632, 636; scores and transcriptions, 346, 347. works: Alceste, 222, 348, 637; Armide, 350, 352, 377, 501–2n; Ballet du Roi, 636; Prosperine, 506n; Le Sicilien, ou L’amour peintre, 633n Lussy, Mathis, 323–24 Luther, Martin, 286 Luxor Obelisk, 9, 11, 12 luxury, 66–67, 93, 324–26, 384, 599; and elites, 66, 325, 456–57; and French colonialism, 438; and French industry, 246, 259–60, 457; opera and, 236, 324, 473; public, 324–26, 599; republican notions of, 237, 324–26; revolutionary festivals and, 132 luxury goods, and democratization, 456–57 Lydian mode, 656 MacDonald, Hugh, 305n Mackau, baron de, 500n Mac-Mahon, Patrice de, 165, 168, 170, 226, 282;

762

.

Index

and Gounod’s “Vive la France,” 277–78, 441; resignation of, 289, 304 Mac-Nab, Maurice, 498n Madagascar, 421, 428 Madeleine church, 11, 292, 293, 624 madrigals, 262, 632, 633 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 179, 426, 604n, 675 Magasin de musique à l’usage des fêtes nationales, 105n Magasins du Louvre, 455, 456, 458, 462 magazines. See music press; popular press; specific magazines Magnard, Albéric, 632n, 633 Magnard, Francis, 614n Mahler, Gustav, 691 Mainardi, Patricia, 472 Malais, 414, 434n Malherbe, Charles, 342n, 466 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 28, 360, 479n, 497, 525–26, 688; Debussy settings of, 532, 535, 536; politics of, 530–31; as Wagnerian, 509. works: “Apparition,” 532; “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” 533n, 534–35; “Un Coup de dés,” 528; “Crayonné au théâtre,” 525n, 526n; “Plaisir sacré,” 525n; “Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poète français,” 526n, 530; “Sur le Beau et l’Utile,” 525 Malraux, André, 331 Manet, Edouard, 333, 485; Faure in the Role of Hamlet, 232 Manon (Massenet), 386–91, 387, 389, 390, 393, 395, 398, 458, 676; minuets in, 506; Wagnerian influences in, 395, 509 Manso, Charles, 173n, 444 Marais, Marin, 560 marches, 240; colonial era, 402, 404–5, 412, 414, 416–18; in Joan of Arc music, 664; revolutionary era, 120, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 144, 151, 152; Wagner’s, in France, 289n, 290. See also under composer (Allais; Artus; Bazille; Berlioz; Débillemont; Déroulède; Desormes; Godard; Gossec; Holmès; Saint-Saëns; Wagner) “March of the Kings,” 223 Maréchal, Henri, 310n, 321 marginality, of artists, xiii, 473 Marie Antoinette, 134–35, 213, 214 Marie, Gabriel, 627 Mariotti: Un Théâtre au Japon, 481 Marmontel, Antoine, 197, 345n, 631; on aesthetic truth, 176; on Auber, 378n; on charm, 578; on eclecticism and assimilation, 308, 369–70; on listening, 203–4, 687; on shared concert experiences, 518. works: Chants du soldat,

440; La Deuxième Année de musique . . . , 392n, 631, 687; Eléments d’esthétique musicale, 369–70, 373–74, 378, 399; La Première Année de musique . . . , 321, 392 Marnat, Marcel, 54 “Marseillaise,” 106, 114, 129, 133, 609; Berlioz’s orchestration, 48, 611; at Conservatoire’s first concert, 144; at 1889 Exhibition, 553; at 1892 festival, 605; military use of, 142; as national anthem, 115, 130, 339, 495–96; in “Salut à la Russie,” 666, 668; theatrical performances of, 115n, 136n; in Third Republic, 278, 295, 318, 339, 495; Tiersot’s essay on, 647–48 Martin, Henri, 441, 442, 648, 649, 651–52, 656 Martini, Giovanni Battista, 131n, 608 Marty, Georges, 506, 559, 635n, 636 Marx, Roger, 623n masculinity. See virility Maslan, Susan, 204n Mason, Laura, 95n Mason, Peter, 409n, 572 Massenet, Jules, 27, 199, 247, 368, 385–91, 566; and aristocratic recognition, 295–96; commercial popularity of, 160, 385, 393, 630; as competition judge, 274–75; as conductor of his works, 305n, 311, 348; on Conseil supérieur des beaux-arts, 269n; at Conservatoire, 185n; on Conservatoire reform study committee, 603; and democratization of taste, 295–96; 1870s performances in France, 209, 247; 1880s programming, 368, 385–86, 487, 559; at 1889 Exhibition concerts, 553, 554; on 1890s programs, 638; eroticism in, 209, 292, 385; on experimentation, 394, 395; interest in folk music, 356; at Méhul statue dedication, 605; performed abroad, 261, 264; religious music and themes, 292, 348, 385; Spanish music influenced by, 557; state subsidies, 268n; on Universal Exhibition committee, 278n. works, 228, 236; Brumaire incidental music, 611; Le Cid, 559n; Conservatoire sight reading exercise, 475, 476; Les Erinnyes, 288; Eve, 222, 223, 224, 385; Hérodiade, 247, 264, 385–86, 393, 627n, 723; L’Hetman incidental music, 441; Marie-Magdeleine, 209, 225, 243, 288, 292, 385; Méduse, 218; Michel Strogoff incidental music, 416, 418; Narcisse, 391; opera about Amadis de Gaule, 654; Scènes dramatiques d’après Shakespeare, 222; Scènes pittoresques, 286; La Vierge, 292n, 348, 385. See also Manon; Le Roi de Lahore masses, mass culture. See bourgeois entries; peasantry; popular entries; working class entries

Massé, Victor, 329, 559n materialism, 64, 508; anti-materialist aesthetics, 497–98, 508; and Eiffel Tower, 565–66; symbolist opposition to, 527, 531. See also consumerism Mathews, Patricia, 526–27, 530, 531 matinées classiques, 216n Mauclair, Camille, 36, 519, 641, 677n Maureau, Télémaque-Charles, 173 Maurras, Charles, 496n Mayeur, Jean-Marie, 308–9 Mayeur, Louis, 261, 487 Maynard, Kelly, 511n McClary, Susan, 262n McPhee, Colin, 406n mediation, through music, 34–35, 48–49, 86– 90, 452 mediocrity, rejections of, 497, 530, 683. See also distinction Méhul, Etienne-Nicolas, 138–39, 148, 340–42, 343–44, 395, 561; 1890s revivals of, 605–6, 608–11; Givet monument to, 605–6, 607; Wagner on, 611. works, 117; Ariodant, 341, 395, 727; “Chant National du 14 juillet 1800,” 124, 153–54; Daphnis et Panrose, 362n; Euphrosine, 139; “Hymne à la liberté,” 322; Le Jeune Henri, 344; Joseph, 242, 252, 341–42, 343, 344, 610–11, 725, 727; Persée et Andromède, 362n; Stratonice, 609; Timoléon, 187. See also “Chant du départ” Meilhac, Henri, 386 melodrama, 138n, 288, 395 melody, 122, 176, 196n; acclimatization of, 430– 31; in Debussy, 533, 534, 535; folk melodies, 353; hierarchical notions of, 433; in Mignon, 179–82, 180–81, 182, 256; national character in, 147n, 256; in non-Western music, 431, 581; in Wagner, 512, 513 Mélomane, 344, 458; composition competition, 271–72 memorization, 85, 316 memory: collective forgetting, 140; as dramatic theme, 211–12; musical meaning and, 36; music and, 90, 524. See also history and historical consciousness Mendelssohn, Félix, 222, 233, 286, 288, 469n, 566, 650; on 1880s programs, 350, 463; German admiration for French interpretations, 285. works: Athalie overture, 286; Midsummer Night’s Dream, 352n Mendès, Catulle, 518, 530, 631, 638n, 682; Chand d’ habits, 486; Médée, 672; “Penthésilée,” 672; Rodrigue et Chimène, 534

Index

.

763

Ménestrel, 181n, 213, 239, 344, 350, 427n; analytic notes for Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, 521; on Arab music, 573; Beethoven series, 303, 304; coverage of BourgaultDucoudray’s music history lectures, 346; coverage of Mignon and other French music abroad, 254, 255, 256, 263; coverage of revolutionary music, 338–39, 341, 606, 724–27; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 380; intellectual property rights series, 461; on Société des grandes auditions, 627n; on Wagner’s Tristan, 508–9. See also specific writers Mermet, Auguste: Jeanne d’Arc, 187–88, 663; Roland à Roncevaux, 448 Mérode, Cléo de, 677 Merriam, Alan, 82–83n Messager, André: Madame Chrysanthème, 657 Messiaen, Olivier, 580 Method Galin-Paris-Chevé, 320, 335 Métra, Olivier: Yedda, 418 Meurthe, M.-H. Boulay de la, 84n Mexico, at Universal Exhibition of 1889, 550 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 63, 151, 234, 242, 292n; Beulé on, 249n; on 1880s programs, 371n, 487; at Opéra, 179, 598; performed abroad, 264. works: L’Africaine, 187n, 242, 251, 419, 449, 559n, 664; L’Etoile du Nord, 265; Les Huguenots, 222, 249, 265, 399, 559n, 598n; Le Prophète, 249, 559n, 598n; Robert le Diable, 249, 251, 598n Michaelis, Théodore, 346–47 Michelet, Jules, 4, 154n, 171, 580, 648; on education, 97–98, 317; on Festival of the Federation, 108; on Revolution and its legacy, 98, 107, 111–12 middle class. See bourgeois entries Mignon (Thomas), 179–84, 180–81, 182, 247, 250, 251, 285, 376, 676; Aida and, 419n; echoed in Musique d’ameublement, 54; foreign performances, 253, 254–57, 258, 263, 711–15; Lakmé and, 422; thousandth performance, 184, 596–97 Milhaud, Darius, 55n; Musique d’ameublement, 54–55, 92 militarism, 644; in music and theater, 69, 447– 48, 668. See also Ligue des patriotes; revanche military bands, 35, 36, 142, 613; at 1889 Exhibition, 553; repertoire, 115n, 124, 145, 267, 344, 600, 613; in revolutionary festivals, 110, 111, 141, 142, 145; and Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire, 612; Sarrette’s Paris National Guard, 110, 126, 141, 142, 605, 613. See also wind bands military education, 442–43

764

.

Index

military glory: in music and theater, 145, 212, 447–48; Parisian monuments as symbols of, 14, 17 military music, 142–44, 145, 149–50, 153; colonial era, 416–18. See also marches; military bands; specific works military service, 189–90, 493; in the colonies, 407. See also duty military strength/weakness: French admiration for German strength, 285, 443; French colonialism and, 438; Russian alliance and, 595 military victory celebrations: revolutionary festivals, 110, 113, 116; Valmy commemorations, 443, 562, 605n military virtues, 152 Miller, Michael B., 451n Mill, John Stuart, 190 ministries: of culture, 11, 43, 47, 331; of education, 11, 196, 269, 310, 331, 336, 615; of education, jurisdiction over arts, 154, 162; of fine arts, 330–31, 359; other French, 11, 44–45, 162 minuets, 501, 502–3, 504, 506, 632 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel, 102, 111 misogyny, 665, 673–74, 677 missionary activities, 291 mission civilisatrice, 408, 410, 411, 432–33; doubts about, 437. See also assimilation/integration, social; civilization Mitchell, Allan, 284 Mitterrand, François, 3n, 44 mixed concert programs, 217–29, 371–72; art music/popular music juxtapositions, 452; Bon Marché concerts, 452; choral society programming, 222; comparative listening and taste development, 163, 219–20, 222– 23, 230; 1870s, 212, 220–22, 221, 226, 227, 228, 348; 1870s, 217–29; French/German juxtapositions, 285–86, 508; as history lessons, 219, 222; old/new juxtapositions, 1880s concerts historiques, 348; old/new juxtapositions, 1890s concerts, 616–17, 633–38; old/ new juxtapositions, after 1900, 640; old/new juxtapositions, significance, 217, 223, 225– 26, 228–29; patriotic and religious works juxtaposed, 307; programming for simultaneous performances of Parsifal prelude, 366, 367; taste for contrast and, 218–19; valorization of contemporary music (1870s), 217–18 Mocquereau, Dom, 615, 693 modality, 396–97, 398, 408n, 431; in chansons populaires, 408n, 431, 658; color and, 396; in Eastern music, 431n, 433, 573, 575, 581;

Greek modes, 56, 396–97, 408, 651, 656, 659; hierarchical notions of, 433; Western, 577 moderate republicans. See opportunist republicans modernism, 29, 32, 36, 53, 473, 596, 641, 642, 689; audience openness/appreciation, 600, 602, 641; internationalism and, 691; in music, 36, 596, 695; in Revue moderniste, 497n; roots of, 32, 53, 92, 497, 497n; sonority and, 590; symbolism and, 497–98, 590 modernity, 44, 345, 361n, 416, 497, 504, 525, 537, 549–52, 565, 585, 600, 602; and monarchy, 501; symbols of, 495; and writing, 525 modes. See Greek modes; modality; specific modes mœurs, 83, 163, 171–89, 229, 307; colonial assimilation and, 407; education to instill, 316; music’s capacity to influence, 175–77; opera as embodiment of, 177–78; popular culture as threat to, 177; republican perspectives on, 171–75, 189 Molière, 215, 347, 605; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 216, 633 monarchism, 20, 32; before the Commune, 165; Cousin, 63–64; Grétry as royalist, 211; popular rebellions of the nineteenth century, 167; royalist symbolism in revolutionary song texts, 116, 127. See also Third Republic monarchism monarchs, monarchy: 1870s assassination attempts, 283; Franks as source of, 651; nonWestern, at 1889 Exhibition, 547–48, 548; public utility and, 70, 71. See also Ancien Régime; monarchism; Third Republic monarchism; specific monarchs Monet, Claude: Impression, Sunrise, 243n; Rue Montorgueil, 337; Rue Saint-Denis, 337 Monod, Gabriel, 332, 333 monogenism, 426–28, 550, 576 Monsigny, P.-A., 215, 240n, 631, 638; Le Déserteur, 215, 629, 632 Montesquieu, 85, 171 Montesquiou family, 630 Montesquiou, Robert de, 506 Montigny-Rémaury, Caroline, 261 Montmartre, 8, 479 monumentality: in music, 25, 27, 30; in private architecture, 21 monuments: conservation of, 270; in Paris, 1–2, 3, 9, 23, 24, 41–42, 191, 192, 192n. See also specific buildings and monuments moral corruption/degeneracy, 66, 177, 325, 694 moral discipline, 85

la morale, as social solidarity, 679 moral education, 59, 65, 133, 688; festivals as, 112–13; and Ligue des patriotes, 442; republican emphasis on, 285, 314–15; singing as, 60–61, 167, 319; in theater, 328 moral hygiene, 694 Moral Order coalition, 165–68, 183, 192, 209, 495; art music under, 217, 218, 223, 225, 229, 230, 236; conservative taste and, 170, 177; end of, 308–9, 375; entertainment regulation and censorship, 165, 296, 478; Ferry’s opposition to, 359; patriotism and, 170, 186; public celebration prohibition, 336 moral order concept, and Freemasons, 167n moral personality, Rousseau’s notion of, 70, 72 moral progress, 237, 239. See also mœurs moral utility, 58–59, 60–61, 62, 65; of music, 60– 61, 133, 151, 162, 239 Moréas, Jean, 479n, 526 Morhange, Jean-Louis, xviii, 145n, 202n Morice, Charles, 497n Moroccan Sufi music, 573 Mottl, Felix, 691 movement: music and, 122, 133–34, 151; sound and, 579. See also dance; rhythm Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 265, 321, 370, 514, 615; on 1870s programs, 213, 218, 233, 243; Ménéstrel series on, 239. works: Don Giovanni, 231n; Die Zauberflöte, 393 Mueller, Richard, 581–82, 587 Mun, Albert de, 282n Murat, Joachim, Princesse, 626 Musée d’ethnographie, 430 Musée du Quai Branly, 47n, 695 Musée Grévin, 662–63, 668, 671n, 676 museums, 75, 141, 162n, 196; in modern Paris, 42, 43, 47. See also specific museums music: Aristotelian notion of, 58; broad definitions of, 578–79; evolutionary notions of, 433–34, 577; social role and value of, xiv–xv musical autonomy, 82–83, 373, 393, 524 musical canon, 32–33, 35, 559–60, 586, 596–97 musical clarity, 239, 242, 265, 535, 545; Bourgeois’s call for, 603, 604; in Chabrier’s Gwendoline, 631; in Delibes, 378, 380; in Dubois, 275; in folk music, 396; in Holmès, 564; as quintessentially French, 261, 266, 382, 523; in Saint-Saëns, 651; in Thomas, 686; Wagner and, 240, 512, 515, 523 musical commerce, 36, 82–83n, 461–72; com­ petition among orchestras, 460, 462–63, 464–72; marketplace value of eclectic programming, 372; opera as international

Index

.

765

musical commerce (continued) commodity, 258, 267; value of French music exports, 235, 246, 257–58, 259–60, 265, 297; Wagner’s popularity in 1890s, 630. See also popular entertainment; specific musical genres and venues musical complexity, 169, 208, 689–90; Berlioz, 244, 303; in non-Western music, 690; responses to, 54n, 124, 303 musical continuity, 345, 640–41; in programming juxtapositions, 219–20, 225, 228, 350. See also music history; musique ancienne musical contrasts, 181, 240, 242, 436 musical form: contemplative listening for, 686– 87; cyclical/spiral forms, 581–82, 642n; Debussy’s innovations, 536, 642n; non-Western music, 574, 576, 577, 579 musical genres: hybrid, Saint-Saëns on, 660–61; and national character, 147n; mixing on concert programs, 48, 219, 222. See also mixed concert programs; specific genres musical harmony, 56n, 95, 122, 345, 431, 640; Conservatoire students of, 474–75n; in Fauré, 293; German music, 147n, 286; and Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui, 399–400, 499; non-Western, 576, 577, 580; Tiersot on, 577 musical hybridity, 400, 431–32, 437, 659; Debussy on, 659; in Jean de Nivelle, 395, 398; musical meaning and, 432; racialized critiques of, 659–61; Saint-Saëns on, 660–61; in Saint-Saëns’s Suite algérienne, 405–6, 431–32 musical innovation and originality, 29, 243–45, 295, 394–400; accessibility and, 690; admiration/support for, 29, 30; ambivalence/ intolerance, 595–96, 660–61; audience appreciation of, 243; Berlioz, 243–45; Chabrier, 399–400, 499, 630–31; chansons populaires and, 396; competition jury responses to, 363–65; Debussy, 400, 532–34, 546, 595–96, 676; Delibes, 378, 381–82; harmonic, 499; instrumentation and color, 235, 242–43, 399, 425; Massenet, 395–96; modal, 396–97, 398; openness to, 1880s, 359, 363–64; public taste and, 688; revolutionary music as foundation for, 395–96; role of the old in, 640–41; in Rousseau’s music, 335; Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, 520–23; Satie, 540–43; Wagner, 394, 395, 509, 517. See also contemporary music; musical progress musical instruments. See instruments musical meaning, xvii, 33–38, 84, 91, 97, 155, 177n, 178, 204, 217, 225, 295, 307, 373, 524, 533, 596, 645, 690; constructed/received in

766

.

Index

performance, 34, 220, 223, 230, 490; hybridity/borrowing and, 432. See also interpretation of music musical notation, 320, 335 musical participation, 34–35, 48–49, 204, 644; benefits of, 89–90; current era, 48; by elites, 198–99, 622–29; orphéons, 89–90, 198; perceived value of, 86; revolutionary festivals, 111, 112, 113–14, 130; Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire, 612; social divisions and, 679; by women and girls, 136n, 146, 169, 198, 199n, 273. See also access to music; amateur musical groups; aristocratic musical participation; democratization of the arts; specific social groups musical progress, xiv, 92, 297, 345; and national progress, 31, 235, 237, 242, 629; Bruneau on, 647; Chouquet on, 208; competitions and, 271; 1890s calls for, 597–602; innovation and, 394–95, 400; linear notions of, 208, 642; Massenet as model of, 243; and non-Western music, 593; and politics, 596; Saint-Saëns on, 597; spiral notions of, 226, 506–7; Wagner’s music as, 289, 516–17. See also musical innovation and originality musical simplicity, 169, 208, 242, 689–90; ­Bourgeois’s promotion of, 603–4; in Debussy, 536; in folk music, 355, 356, 392, 396, 690; in Holmès, 564; innovation and, 396; in Mignon, 179, 180, 256; patriotic songs, 116, 123; in Saint-Saëns, 651, 656, 672, 690; in Satie, 540 musical taste, 26, 304–7; amateur, 199n, 201; bad, as social problem, 177; competition and, 36; conservative, as beneficial, 597; for contemporary music, 35–36, 489; for eclecticism, 369–70, 372, 514; elite vs. popular, xiv, 35, 295–96; foreign, for French opera, 254, 708–23; for grace and charm, 391, 392– 94; juste milieu, 295–96; middle and lower class, 35; modernism/avant-garde and, 36; and mœurs, 177; musical complexity and, 124; for musique ancienne, 631–35; politics and, 215; Second Empire, 32; wide appeal of Grétry and Méhul, 343–44. See also popular taste; repertoire and programming; taste entries musical universalism, 577–78 musical utility, xi, 56, 73, 82–93, 140, 295, 545; current era, 697; in education, 60–61; education/taste elevation, 329, 479, 680–82; 1880s, 372–73; 1889 Exhibition and, 593; 1890s, 627; embodiment of values, 26, 27, 174–75, 697–98; French regard for, 82–83;

German notions of, 82, 83; health and healing, 693; modernist appropriation of, 497–98; opportunist republican views of, 517–18; overviews, 82–84, 91–92, 95–97; physical benefits, 84; rejections of, 54–55, 92; symbolic, 593, 594; for symbolists, 524–25, 529; in La Valse, 699–700. See also political utility of music music appreciation. See popular appreciation of music music criticism: 1890s views of revolutionary songs, 605–6; health metaphors in, 693; intolerance for “deviance,” 595–96; politics in, 344; public taste and, 205–6; reception of French music abroad, 231, 233, 259, 260–61, 264, 265, 284; reviews of department store concerts, 451; reviews of historical concerts, 348, 350, 352n; role of comparison, 220. See also specific critics and composers music education, 31, 60–61, 84–86, 162n, 196– 97, 319–24; and amateur choral societies, 198–99; centralized in Paris, 146; citizenship and, 85–86; competing notions of progress, 642; Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson, 677–78; employee courses, 451; French pedagogy abroad, 261–62; French vs. German, 84–85, 88–89, 196n; Plato on, 56; prizes and competitions, 272–73; and religious music, 272, 310, 619–20; republican pedagogy, 261–62, 319–24, 335, 392; revolutionary era, 103–7, 146, 150–51; Schola Cantorum as educational institution, 619–20, 642; school music manuals, 288, 320–23, 392; secularizing legal reforms and, 310; social inequalities and, 88–89; state funding for religious, 310; virtue and, 148–49. See also Conservatoire; judgment; singing instruction music halls, 483, 485, 486n. See also FoliesBergère music history: assimilation in, 346, 349, 370; Bourgault-Ducoudray’s lecture series, 345– 46, 348; chansons populaires in, 658; chant in, 658; Chouquet on, 208; 1890s interest in, 631–40; French identity and, 345, 352, 357, 631, 640–41; exhibits and concerts at 1889 Exhibition, 560; Lavoix fils on, 648, 658; religious music in, 658; Tiersot’s studies of nonWestern music and, 577, 585. See also musical continuity; music scholarship musicians: expanded performance opportunities in 1880s, 473–74; non-Western, in popular illustrations, 428, 429, 434–36, 435; professional, women as, 460, 474–75. See also musi-

cal participation; non-Western music; specific individuals music patronage. See patronage music press, 36–37, 297; competition sponsorships, 271–72; coverage of French music abroad, 253; politics in, 32. See also music criticism; specific journals music publication, 276, 458, 459, 619; competition winners, 272; early music in 1890s, 632–33; French music and methods published abroad, 251, 261–62; Lohengrin, 511n; by revolutionary government, 105, 116n, 144; revolutionary music in republican era, 607, 611, 613, 727 music scholarship, 212–15, 239, 345–51; author’s approach, 38–39; chansons populaires, 352–56, 396, 397, 657–58; chant, 615; Chouquet’s work, 208; ethnography of instruments, 427– 28; folk music, 353–55, 379–80, 396; French, foreign admiration for, 261–62, 284–85; modern reputations of Third Republic composers, 28–29; public taste and, 205–6; revolutionary music, 97; Tiersot’s studies of non-Western music at 1889 Exhibition, 574–79, 582, 585; Tiersot’s work on revolutionary festivals, 606–7; valuable works listed, 29–30n, 41– 42n. See also music history; specific authors music teachers, 272, 273, 474–75n, 475 musique ancienne, 217–29, 501–7, 629–41; Ancien Régime associations of, 148, 153, 205; antimonarchy criticism in, 216; assimilation by later composers, 498–99, 501–7, 602, 629–36; availability in scores and transcriptions, 346, 347; dances, 1880s vogue for, 496–97, 501– 7; dances, in Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui, 499; echoed in Manon, 386; 1870s criticism and scholarship, 213–15; 1870s programming of, 210–12, 215–17, 225, 239, 307; 1890s popularity, 638–40; French identity and, 356–57, 640–41; grace and charm in, 377–78; juxtaposed with musique moderne, 91, 217–19, 221, 225–26, 228–30, 308, 344, 350, 560, 602, 629– 31, 633–38, 640–41; opera, 250, 346–50, 632, 633n, 637; performance organizations, 638; at Société des grandes auditions, 627, 628; suites, 501–2, 503, 506, 632n, 633; valorization of, 506–7, 631; wind instruments in, 144. See also historical concerts; mixed concert programs; music history; revolutionary music; specific composers, genres, and organizations La Musique des familles, 458, 465, 557n, 568, 585; Bailly’s series on “The World of Sound,” 579–80

Index

.

767

musique moderne, 227, 265, 364, 520, 567, 650; compatibility with modes, 396, 431, 659; harmonies in, 380, 382, 499, 502; juxtaposed with musique ancienne, 91, 217–19, 221, 225– 26, 228–30, 308, 344, 350, 506, 560, 602, 630–31, 633–38, 640–41; juxtaposed in performing ensembles, 218, 600, 638. See also contemporary music Les Musiques bizarres à l’exposition, 588, 589, 591 musiques pittoresques competition, 1889 Exhibition, 566–67 Mussat, Marie-Claire, 198 mystery, 545–46; in non-Western music, 578. See also obscurity myth of counterrevolution, 216–17, 344 Nägeli, Hans Georg, 84, 85n naïveté, 335, 356, 392 Nalou people, 547, 551 Napoléon I, 9–11, 21, 145, 192n, 273, 409n; on music, 151. See also Empire Napoléon III, 21, 74, 165, 192; and Paris redesign, 9, 19; promotion of patronage, 166 Napoléon IV (Louis Napoléon), 166 Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (“Prince Napoléon”), 613n Napoléon-Victor, Prince, 400n, 498n nation, vs. patrie, 190 national character, 150n; folk songs and, 353; genre and, 147n; in music, 147n, 149, 517, 557; race and, 438, 646; and Universal Exhibitions, 276. See also cultural differences national glory/glorification: colonialism and, 407, 410, 411, 438; Conservatoire as locus of, 141; through art and music, 91, 100, 108, 149, 234, 248, 372; through Paris and its monuments, 4, 14, 45. See also national pride national identity: cultural universalism and, 550; emerging concept of “nation,” 551, 593; fluid nature of, 79; France vs. Germany, 406–7; music and, 549, 593; public utility concept and, 78–79. See also citizenship; French identity performance/construction National Institute of the Sciences and the Arts, 100 nationalism, 80, 205; anti-Wagner sentiment and protest, 289, 290, 514–17, 519–20, 598. See also Boulangism; Ligue des patriotes; national glory; national pride; patriotism national musics, 147n, 149; at 1889 Exhibition, 557; as expression of national character, 147n, 149, 517, 557. See also French music national pride, 174–75, 372; arts and, xii; colo-

768

.

Index

nialism and, 411; contemporary music and, 217, 218, 305; Gallic myth and, 652; historical consciousness and, 208; Ligue des patriotes’ efforts to cultivate, 443; and opera, 141; works associated with, 115, 404n. See also national glory; patriotic music; revanche national regeneration, 189, 226, 234, 597; music as aid in, 188–89, 295, 298; revolutionary concern with, 100–101, 111n, 112, 123 naturalism, 333, 647n naturalness, 603–4 nature: aesthetics and, 58, 65, 219; natural sounds and music, 579–80 Nectoux, Jean-Michel, 293 needs satisfaction, 92–93, 99–100; arts’ capacity for, 57–58, 59n, 62–63, 238; utility as, 56–57, 64n, 66, 70, 79, 81, 696. See also utility néo-libéralisme, xiv Netherlands, French organs in, 260–61 Neufchâteau, François de, 147–48, 149, 275 Neumann, Angelo, 511n New Caledonia, 410, 570, 577 Nicolet, Claude, 74n, 173n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 690n Nilsson, Christine, 231, 249, 250, 253, 255 nobility (aesthetic), 139, 267, 286, 340, 656, 665 Noël, Edouard, 267n, 311n, 611n Noiray, Michel, xx, 59n, 138, 139 nonserial composers, 55–56 non-Western music, 125, 377n, 405, 431, 690; assimilability by Western composers and listeners, 437, 578, 582, 585; audience reception, 572, 585; authenticity of, 569, 572n, 585; Dahomean amazons, 670; at 1889 Exhibition, 547–48, 548, 550–51, 572–82, 584–87, 590, 593; evolutionary notions, 433–34, 577; harmony in, 576, 577, 580; influences in Debussy, 581–82, 586–90, 591–92; influences in Saint-Saëns, 402, 405–6, 586; instruments in, 427–28, 430, 548, 549, 576, 577, 587, 645; modality, 396–97, 398, 408n, 431; obscurity/ difficulty of, 572; in popular press, 434–36, 435, 547, 548, 568, 569; Tiersot’s scholarship, 574–79, 582, 585; Weber’s ethnography of instruments, 427–28; women composers, 578. See also exoticism; musical hybridity; specific regions and types of music Nora, Pierre, 30n, 37, 39, 49n, 318 Nord, Philip, 31, 314n, 455–56, 457n, 458n North Africa: French colonialism in, 400–401, 406, 410; French fascination with, 276, 280. See also Algeria; French colonialism; Tunisia Nossi-Bé, 428, 429

nostalgia, 215. See also musique ancienne Notre-Dame Cathedral, 5, 130 Nouveau Cirque, 487, 654 novelty: in revue programs, 485; taste for/appeal of, 572, 574, 584, 599, 641, 661 n¯uba, 406 oaths, revolutionary, 103, 106, 108, 109; in opera, 136 obedience, 68n, 85, 98, 102n, 316, 666; Joan of Arc as symbol of, 186, 187–88 Obelisk of Luxor, 9, 11, 12 obscurity: in Debussy, 535–37, 676; of nonWestern music, 572, 578, 585–86; symbolist, 525, 530. See also accessibility; clarity; mystery Offenbach, Jacques, 32, 201n, 216n, 234, 247, 379; Delibes and, 378; Hippodrome festival and, 305n; performed abroad, 233, 252; republican/public views of, 252; in Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation, 289. works: La Fille du tambour-major, 341, 568; La Grande Duchesse, 252; Orphée aux enfers, 479; Le Voyage dans la lune, 414n official music, at 1889 Exhibition, 558–59 old/new juxtapositions: within concerts, 217–29, 348, 616–17, 633–40; within musical works, 640–41; significance of, 217, 223, 225–26, 228–29. See also mixed concert programs Olsen, Donald, 2n, 38n Olympic games, 649, 651 opera, 27, 141, 178, 208, 345–46; and elites, 34, 134–35, 138, 257, 265, 267–68, 324; audience response to, 136, 137; censorship, 136; colonialism and, 401; coloristic orchestration, 242; composition competitions, 272; Conservatoire and, 147, 619; educational value of, 135–37, 140; 1870s criticism and scholarship, 213–15; on 1880s historical concert programs, 347, 348–50, 349, 351, 352, 377; on 1880s zoo concerts, 487; at 1889 Exhibition, 559nn; exoticism/Orientalism in, 409, 418–26; foreign composers and influences, 234, 285; Grétry and Méhul’s influence on, 611; Massenet’s innovations, 395–96; militarism in, 447; musical characterization in, 178, 179, 181, 255, 266, 342, 675–76; musical taste and, 169n; opéra ancien, 250, 346–50, 632, 633n, 637; politicized stories, 362–63; premieres abroad, 264, 284, 627, 708–23; private productions, 80; in the provinces, 247, 251; public debate about, 135; realism in, 235–36; scores and transcriptions, 346, 347, 380n;

Wagner’s innovations, 394, 395, 509. See also French opera abroad; operetta; revolutionary opera; specific composers Opéra. See Paris Opéra opéra-comique (genre), 90, 252–53, 669; as characteristically French, 138; Delibes’s innovations, 395; 1870s performances and programming, 216n; Lakmé as personification of, 426; revolutionary-era, 138–41, 342–43, 561; social criticism in, 138. See also opera; specific composers Opéra-Comique (theater), 11, 14, 75, 394, 419; attempted Lohengrin premiere, 511, 514; audiences, 677; Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui at, 399–400, 498–99; Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle at, 379–83; 1870s repertoire, 170, 179, 183, 209–12, 215, 221, 235–36, 629n; 1880s repertoire, 362–63, 386, 393, 477, 501n, 506; 1889 Exhibition concerts, 558, 559n, 561; 1890s administrative reforms, 597–98; 1890s repertoire, 598n, 604, 610, 627–29, 650, 669, 676; finances and funding, 139, 248, 294, 393, 477; Grétry’s Richard Cœur de Lion at, 210, 344, 609; low-cost performances, 327, 330; Méhul’s Joseph at, 341–42, 344, 610; revolutionary era, 134, 139, 140; Société des grandes auditions productions at, 627–29. See also opera; opéra-comique Opéra de la Bastille, 46, 46, 332 opera funding, 66–67, 83; republican era, 162, 213, 216, 248, 251n, 326–32; revolutionary era, 135, 136, 138, 139n Opéra populaire, 268, 294, 326, 327, 328–29, 448, 479 opera repertoire: 1870s, 177–85, 209–12, 215, 235–36; 1870s contemporary, 249, 251, 264– 65, 295, 330; 1880s, 341–42, 344, 362–63; 1880s contemporary, 330, 361, 368, 418n; 1890s, 676; pairings, 263; Opéra vs. OpéraComique, 362–63; revolutionary era, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140–41. See also French opera abroad opera singers, 255, 267; in concerts spirituels, 311; Faure, 231, 232, 234, 247, 257; foreign, in France, 231, 249, 250–51; professional training for, 141–42, 146; status and fees, 258, 263, 371, 473–74. See also specific singers operetta, 252–53, 385. See also specific composers opportunism, 164–65n opportunist republicans, 80, 165–66, 167, 170– 75, 309; and banks and big business, 583; colonialism and, 406, 407; declining support for, 460, 508; 1885 election losses, 449; 1890s

Index

.

769

opportunist republicans (continued) progressisme, 622; 1892 fall from power, 595; Fauré as model of, 292–93; Ligue des patriotes’ opposition politics, 410, 439, 448–49; in Moral Order, 167–68; and opera funding, 328–29; Panama Canal scandal, 622; Republican Union, 309, 328–29, 330–31, 341; and Tunisian intervention, 406; Wagner and, 517–18. See also Ferry, Jules; Moral Order coalition; republican entries; Simon, Jules; Third Republic politics Orange, Roman theater at, 650, 656 oratorio societies, 222, 224, 287. See also amateur choral societies; choral groups; choral music; societies, choral orchestral color, 242–43, 266, 399, 425. See also sonority orchestral music, 129, 131; composition competitions, 268n, 272, 273, 274–75; French, abroad, 261, 266; German, in France, 285– 86; the symphony, 131, 350, 352, 520–23. See also specific composers orchestras: amateur, 218; circus, 486–87; competition among, 460, 462–63, 464–72. See also concert entries; specific organizations and conductors orchestration. See instrumentation and orchestration order, 31, 93, 140, 155, 164; beauty and, 237, 238; conveyed by music, 176, 196, 295; disorder, 64, 162n; laws and mœurs as sources of, 171– 72; moral order concept, 167n; in music, 87, 88, 105, 242; music as metaphor for, 517–18, 519 Ordre de la Rose † Croix, 684, 685 organ concerts, 260–61, 282, 558 organicism, 308, 375 organists, anticlerical composers as, 292, 293 organized labor, 495, 496 organs, organ building, 260–61, 648 “O Richard, O my king” (Richard Cœur de Lion), 210, 211 Orient, Orientalism, 405, 409, 419n. See also exoticism; non-Western music originality, 462. See also musical innovation and originality Orléanists, 165–66, 168, 206, 309. See also Third Republic politics Orléans, Louis Philippe Robert, duc d’, 498n Orledge, Robert, 502n ornament, 123, 325, 369n, 525; in Lakmé, 533n; in Manon, 386, 387, 388 orphéons. See amateur choral societies

770

.

Index

Orwicz, Michael, 359 Ory, Pascal, 553 Osborne, Michael, 73n Other. See Self/Other distinction overture, 2, 660 Ozouf, Mona, 149n, 317–18; on festivals, 111n, 112–13, 126n, 128n, 134 Paderewski, Ignacy, 558 Paganini, Niccolò, 244 Pahouin dances, 577 painting: contemporary subject matter, 333; fumisme, 537; impressionism, 19, 243, 400, 462, 535n; Salons, 196, 273, 330, 360, 462; state support for innovation, 368; symbolism, 527–28. See also visual arts; specific painters Paladilhe, Emile, 228, 269n, 566; L’Amour africain, 409; Patrie, 504, 506, 558, 559n, 637 Palais de l’industrie, 472; Holmès’s Ode triomphale at, 562 Palais des Tuileries, ii, 9, 20, 21, 58, 309 Palais du Trocadéro, 280–81, 280, 281; Colonne Festival-National, 305; 1889 Exhibition concerts, 554, 558 Palais Garnier, 11, 13, 14, 324, 326, 327; construction of, 18, 260, 327. See also Paris Opéra Palais Royal, 5, 11; concerts, 472 Palestrina, Giovanni da, 208, 226, 576, 590, 632, 640, 690; 1890s interest and performances, 615, 616, 617, 620, 631, 684, 685, 686 Panama Canal, 504n, 595, 622 parades and processions: republican-era, 553, 560, 605; revolutionary festivals, 106–7, 108, 110, 113, 114, 120 Parakilas, James, 210, 423 Paris, 2, 4, 26; author’s experiences in, xi, 40; cafés, 25; Clemenceau in government, 437; cultural centrality of, 4–5, 248–49, 583; everyday experience of, 23–26; Fête de la musique, 47–49, 698; Germans in, 495; as home of bohemia and avant-garde, xiii; Italians in, 418–19; as “permanent exhibition,” 283; relations with provinces, 5, 248–49; rise of department stores, 455–60; share of arts funding, 248–49 Paris, Gaston, 353 Paris, Philippe, comte de, 159, 165, 253, 614n; and Chambord’s death, 309, 501n; death of, 613n; 1887 monarchist manifesto, 500, 506; exile of, 498; and royalist politics of 1870s, 165, 210n Paris Commune, 19, 20, 94, 163–64, 166n, 192n;

Communard amnesty, 496; Communards as barbarians, 656n; Etienne Marcel and, 305; and “Marseillaise,” 339; in republican educational manuals, 317 Paris geography, architecture, and monuments, 1–25, 41–47; arrondissements layout, 5–7, 6; arts institutions, 8, 11, 14, 695–96; beautyutility synthesis in, 57–58; Berlioz statue, 245; bridges, 14–17, 15, 16; building design regulation, 20–21, 23; churches, 5, 11, 166n; class divisions, 3, 8, 18–20, 24; department stores, 22, 456; Eiffel Tower, 565–66, 584; expansion and Haussmann’s redesign, 9, 11, 17–20, 21, 24, 74, 166–67, 460; fortifications, 6; historical consciousness in, 2–3, 7, 11, 14, 41–42, 191–92; map, 6; monumentality, 21, 23, 25; Napoléon I’s impact on, 9–11; and national pride, 2, 4, 10, 20; and negotiation of everyday life, 23–25; neighborhood character, 7–9, 18–19, 460; neighborhood theatrical venues, 466, 467, 469, 479, 480; parks and gardens, 19–20; public transportation, 19; Revolutionary sites and monuments, 17, 20, 46, 593, 608; state symbols and institutions, 5, 6, 10–11, 14, 20, 44–45; street names, 191, 334, 508; streets, avenues, and boulevards, 6–7, 9–10, 17, 21–22; symbols of progress in, 7, 8; twentieth-century, 42–49. See also specific streets, buildings, and monuments Paris National Guard, 110, 126, 141, 142, 605, 613 Paris Opéra, 8, 11, 13, 14, 36, 324–32, 326, 327; ballet at, 361–62, 379; contemporary repertoire, 368, 418n, 598; 1870s repertoire, 170, 179, 215, 249, 251, 264, 295, 301n; 1880s repertoire, 361–62, 385–86, 418; 1889 Exhibition performances, 558, 559nn; 1890s criticisms and reforms, 597–98; 1890s repertoire, 598, 610, 656n, 664; elite associations, 134–35, 361, 368; fire of 1874, 213; free/low-cost performances, 267–68, 327, 330, 680; funding, 1870s, 248, 251n, 294, 326–30; funding, 1880s, 330–32, 393, 477; funding, 1890s, 598; Gailhard-Ritt codirectorship, 368; Lamoureux as conductor, 467; masked balls at, 1880s, 504; Méhul’s Joseph at, 610; as museum of traditional music, 249, 330, 598; public utility as funding rationale, 75, 294; republican reforms at, 324–32; revolutionary era and legacy, 126–27, 134–38; training of singers for, 141–42; Vaucorbeil’s directorship, 328, 330, 361–62, 368, 385–86; Wagner at, 598,

630, 659–60, 664. See also Bastille; Concerts de l’Opéra; opera; Palais Garnier Paris Orphéon, 197, 218 Paris prize. See City of Paris prize parody and satire, 497, 537–44; in Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui, 498–99; example, 54n; La Grande Duchesse, 252; Lohengrin à l’Alcazar, 512; opéras-comiques, 343; in popular entertainment of 1880s, 479, 481; in Le Roi l’a dit, 209; Satie, 539–40; satirical songs of 1870s, 206; Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation, 160, 289, 515 Parsifal (Wagner), 371n, 469, 518, 524n, 540, 543, 684; Debussy and, 531; echoes in SaintSaëns’s Third Symphony, 521–23; French composers at Bayreuth premiere, 509; on orchestral concert programs, 366–68, 367, 511, 517; Satie and, 540, 543 Pascal, Blaise, 102n Pasdeloup, Jules-Etienne, 159, 161n, 167, 290, 351, 465; as conductor, 466. See also Concerts Pasdeloup Pasler, Jann, 40n;“Boretzian Discourse and History,” 39n; “Concerts Colonne,” 372n, 466n; “Conflicting Notions of Progress,” 507n, 596n, 642n; “Contingencies of Meaning in Samson et Dalila,” 264, 665n; “Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur,” 257n, 624n, 691n; “Crossdressing in Le Rouet d’Omphale,” 302n; “Debussy, Stravinsky, and the Ballets Russes,” 543n, 590n, 690n; “Deconstructing d’Indy,” 365n, 620n; “Democracy, Ethics, and Commerce: Concerts Populaires,” 201n; “Forging French Identity: La musique ancienne et moderne,” 223n, 630n; “Impressionism,” 400n; “The Ironies of Gender: Augusta Holmès,” 274n, 364n, 561n, 673n; “Mélisande’s Charm,” 676n; “Musical Instruments in Racial and Colonial Agendas,” 428n, 645n; “Pelléas and Power,” 596n; “The Politics of L’Initiation à la Musique,” 27–28n; “Prix-de-Rome Cantatas,” 603n; “Race and Nation: the Chansons Populaires,” 352n, 431n, 657n; “Rethinking the ‘Popular,’ ” 267n, 600n; Writing through Music, 39n, 641n passepieds, 632n passion, 63, 102, 135; in Wagner, 508 passive citizens, 112, 129, 154n passive listening, 203 passivity/languor, 143, 148, 153 Pasteur, Louis, 692 pastoralism, 138, 208

Index

.

771

patents. See intellectual property law paternalism, 79, 169; and patronage, 166, 202, 329n; in Thomas’s Mignon, 179, 255; in Wagner, 540 patriarchy, patriarchal values: health discourse and, 694; reflected in strong female characters, 666; symbolists and, 530 patrie, 111, 173, 174, 190; army and, 190; devotion to, 98, 109, 133; republican public education and, 317–18, 320–21; utility/public utility and, 78–79, 101. See also citizenship; duty; government-citizen relations; patriotism patriotic education: Ligue des patriotes’ calls for, 442–43. See also patriotism patriotic music, 144, 185–89, 409–10, 611; to balance Wagner, 517; French heroes in, 304–5; Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 561–65, 605, 611; juxtaposed with religious works, 307; in primary education, 322–23, 341; prizes for songs, 273, 277–78, 279; promoted by Ligue des patriotes, 410, 443–49; revanche reflected in, 447, 495. See also Ligue des patriotes; political songs; revolutionary music; revolutionary songs; specific works patriotism, 29; conservatism and, 211; Joan of Arc as symbol of, 186–88, 189; Judith as symbol of, 188; music and, 84–85, 137; in public education, 315, 316, 317–18, 320–21, 439, 441; republican perspectives on, 173, 174–75; republican revival of, 170; rhetoric’s power to arouse, 333–34. See also duty; national pride; patrie; patriotic music patronage: Ancien Régime, 134–35, 213–15; aristocratic, in 1890s, 600, 622–29; opera and the aristocracy, 257; paternalist, 166, 202, 329n. See also state arts support Patureau, Frédérique, 368n, 664 Paulus (Jean-Paul Habens), 473, 480, 483, 493, 497 pavanes, 502, 504, 505, 506, 507, 632n, 633, 636, 662 peace and cooperation, 308, 339, 344, 358; and 1878 Exhibition, 283; and 1889 Exhibition, 553, 567, 582. See also compromise; political conflict peasantry, 163; politics of, 165, 167, 210, 308 Pécaut, Félix, 84n, 85n, 86n, 87n, 88n, 100n, 102, 172n, 176n, 190, 196, 203n, 206, 316, 317n, 361n, 369, 683n, 686, 692–93 pedagogy, republican, 190–93, 316–18, 644n; music, 261–62, 319–24, 335, 392; revolutionary history, 332, 334; symbolist views of, 526–27. See also education; republican educa-

772

.

Index

tion; republican educational reforms; revolutionary public instruction Péladan, Joséphin, 684 Pelléas et Mélisande (Debussy), 531n, 532, 590n, 604n, 641, 677, 684; Mélisande’s characterization, 582n, 675–76; reception of, 595–96 Penong-Piak people, 420 perception of art, 59, 61, 86; Bailly’s “psychic sensation,” 579; horizon of expectation concept, 2–3n; music, 59, 86–87; sensory correspondences, 524–25, 528–29, 546. See also aesthetic entries; listening percussion, in non-Western music, 577, 579 percussion instruments, 433. See also drums Perec, Georges, 5n, 38 performance(s), 34; competition and variety, 25–26; as cooperative experience, 87–88; ephemeral nature of, 25; non-Western, popular images of, 434–36, 435; perceived value for performers, 86; “rights of poor” tax, 258, 616n. See also audience entries; concert experiences; musical participation; repertoire and programming; specific musical genres and performance organizations performance organizations. See concert organizations; specific organizations and venues performance venues, 27; locations of, 466, 467, 469, 479, 480; new, and art music, 455, 472; proliferation of, 460. See also specific venues performers: amateur/professional distinction, 199; and audience, boundary, 137; French, abroad, 261. See also opera singers Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 141, 340n “La Pernette,” 658 Perrin, Emile, 196n Perrin, Pierre, 213 personal utility, 67, 70, 101, 174, 192–93 Pessard, Emile, 368 Petipa, Marius, 258 Petit, Oscar, 444 Petit-Bayreuth, 509, 510 Petit Palais, 14, 16 Le Petit Poucet, 613, 725, 727 Petrucci, Ottaviano: Harmonici musices ­Odhecaton, 346 peuple/people, 94, 172; Gauls and, 651, 678; Rousseau personifying, 334–35; third estate, 309, 651. See also popular entries Philidor, François Danican, 213, 340n, 342, 603 Philip le Bel, 74n phonograph, 555 Phrygian mode, 56n, 408n, 633 physicality of music, 103, 399, 400; Bailly’s

“psychic sensation,” 579; charm and pleasure, 387, 392, 398; as electrical, 105, 135, 149; power to excite/exalt, 104, 140, 144, 296; rhythm and movement, 122–23, 133–34, 151; singing, 84, 197. See also sensory responses pianists: amateurs, 458; at Conservatoire, 474– 75, 476 piano pedagogy, 323–24 Piccini, Nicolas, 608; Iphigénie en Tauride, 348, 636 Pierné, Gabriel, 369n; Nuit de Noël 1870, 636, 637n Pierre, Constant, 97, 105n, 110, 149, 607, 609; musical examples from, 118–19, 121–22, 125– 26; on revolutionary songs, 116, 117, 124, 127, 131, 725–26 Pingaud, Bernard, 42–43n Piou, Jacques, 614n pitch, vs. timbre, 587 Pius IX (pope), 186 Place au jeûne (Isola revue), 483 plainchant. See chant Planquette, Robert, 252 plants, Bailly’s “vegetal harmonies,” 579–80 Plato, 56, 83, 104, 172, 196 play, playfulness, 384 plays. See theater; specific composers pleasure, 384; beauty and, 59n, 61; Debussy on, 400; desire to please, 235, 376; vs. duty, 358– 59, 397–98; and Massenet’s Manon, 386–88; and Saint-Saëns’s Jeunesse d’Hercule, 301, 385; shopping as, 457. See also aesthetic pleasure; charm Poe, Edgar Allan, 524 poetry: Baudelaire on, 65; Horace’s Ars poetica, 58–60; and music, in Debussy, 533–34, 535; music as inspiration for, 525–26, 527–28; Samedis populaires de poésie ancienne et moderne, 638n; symbolist, 525–26, 527–28; symbolist, Debussy settings of, 532–36, 582, 587. See also literature; specific poets Poincaré, Raymond, 269n, 623n pointillism, 151 Poisot, Charles, 347 Polignac, Edmond, prince de, 500, 619, 626 Polignac family, 630 Polignac, princesse de (Winaretta Singer), 509, 632n, 640; Foundation, 76n political compromise and alliances: 1870s, 164–66, 167, 168, 183, 236; 1880s, 309, 449; 1890s, 594, 597, 614, 620, 621–23, 629 political conflict/disagreement: and 1878 Exhibition, 283; 1890s threat of war, 666–69; and

festivals, 132n; and musical juxtapositions, 224, 225, 229; and song texts, 116; state arts support and, 294–96; theaters as locus for, 137, 139, 140. See also protest; Third Republic politics political culture, 162–63n political liberalism, reactions to, 495–96 political participation: republican efforts to increase, 203; by women, 112, 128–29, 154n. See also universal suffrage political resistance, 593; domestic opposition to colonialism, 436–39, 622–23. See also anarchism; Boulangism; Ligue des patriotes; protest; Third Republic monarchism political songs: at cafés-concerts, 478, 479n, 493–96; of 1870s, 206, 207, 209, 339–40; of 1880s, 478, 479n, 493–96; “En revenant de la revue,” 493, 494, 495–96; settings of Déroulède, 439–41, 440, 493, 495; socialist songs, 608. See also revolutionary songs; song texts; specific composers political utility, 66; of colonialism, 411, 413; of public festivals, 106, 108, 109, 111–13 political utility of music, 83–92, 237; articulation of consensus and compromise, 90–91; collective identity construction, 89–90, 107, 518; for colonialism, 408, 413; cultural integration, 162, 205, 229–30, 408; at 1878 Exhibition, 280–82; emotional unity, 104–5, 106, 150; internalization of public virtues, 84–86, 133, 143–44, 147–49, 452; for Ligue des patriotes, 448–49; mediation of differences, 34–35, 48–49, 86–90; national glorification, 108; opera and opéra-comique, 135–37, 139–41; public festivals, 114, 116, 133; public instruction, 103–7; revolutionary, overview, 95–97; Third Republic, overviews, 83–84, 91–92, 154, 161–63, 169, 217, 307, 357. See also democratizing force, music as; patriotic music politicization of music: at 1889 Exhibition, 558; Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 564–65; opera programming of 1870s, 209–15; Wagner, 288–89, 514–17, 519–20, 598, 630. See also patriotic music; political songs polygenism, 427, 550 polyphony, 345, 610 Pont Alexandre III, 14, 16, 17, 622 Pont des Arts, 14, 15 popular appreciation of music, xii, 230, 373; benefits of, 26, 161–63; contemporary music, 35– 36, 225–26, 489, 600, 602; festivals and, 134; mixed concert programs and, 219–20; opera, 329n; Universal Exhibitions as educational

Index

.

773

popular appreciation of music (continued) opportunities, 276–77, 278. See also musical taste; taste elevation popular concerts (concerts populaires), 129, 134, 159, 161, 201–2; competition among orchestras, 460, 462–63, 464–72; 1890s, 680–82, 683; in provinces, 246–47, 462; revolutionary precursors, 129, 134. See also zoo concerts; specific concert organizations popular culture: commercialization of entertainment, 455; department stores, 456–60; fear of/ambivalence about, 177, 497, 679, 683; musical progress and, xiv, 92. See also distinction; popular taste popular entertainment, 1880s–1890s, 477–90; art music’s place in, 490; audience diversity, 455, 477, 479, 487, 489; cafés-concerts and cabaret, 477–80; circus and zoo concerts, 486–89, 488; earnings and profitability, 478, 486, 487; Eden-Théâtre, 481–83, 538; femininity in, 673, 676–77; Les Incohérents as, 481, 483, 537–38; inspired by Dahomean wars, 669–72; music halls and FoliesBergère, 483–86; programming, 479, 480–81 popular music: ambivalence about, 295, 320; conservative attitudes toward, 455; current era, 47n, 152; and Delibes, 378–79; of Revolution, 105; serious/popular programming juxtapositions, 452; taught in public schools, 319–20; at Universal Exhibitions, 278. See also folk music popular press: musique ancienne in, 639, 640; non-Western music in, 434–36, 435, 547, 548, 568, 569; useful knowledge in, 81 popular taste, xiv, 35, 90–91, 683; artistic contempt for, 92, 295–96, 688–90; decadence and, 177, 287–88, 374. See also distinction; popular culture; taste entries popular university movement, 677–78, 679 positivism, 64, 194, 236, 497, 508; of Ferry, 359; symbolist opposition to, 527 Pougin, Arthur, 97, 162n, 286, 462, 605; on Aida, 419; on Debussy, 595–96; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 380; on Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 564; on January 1874 concert, 220, 222; on Méhul, 138, 340, 343; on musique ancienne, 139, 187, 213, 222, 335, 338–39, 342, 638; on non-Western music and theater at 1889 Exhibition, 574; on revolutionary music and theater, 724–26; on Samson et Dalila, 666; on Wagner, 338 Pourtalès, comtesse de, 509, 626 power: German, French admiration for, 285;

774

.

Index

of women, 152, 154n. See also strength; weakness power of music, 149–50, 296, 682, 696–98; to imbue values, 26, 27, 174–75. See also political utility of music power relationships: colonialism and, 420, 422; political culture and, 162–63n pragmatism, 168; of Ferry, 359, 413 premieres, 264, 284, 559, 600, 627; foreign, 264, 284, 627, 635, 708–23. See also contemporary music; specific composers Prendergast, Christopher, 19n, 24 press, 36–37; censorship relaxation, 314. See also music press; popular press; specific journals Prévost, Abbé, 386, 388 primary education, 229; dessin in, 195, 246; patriotism in, 315, 316, 317–18, 320–23, 439, 441; republican ideas about, 172; revolutionary emphasis on, 77, 98, 100–101; singing instruction, 196–97, 319–23, 352–53, 392, 619. See also education; public education; republican education; revolutionary public instruction the primitive, primitive peoples, 267; evolutionary notions of culture and civilization, 432– 33, 527, 549, 550, 577; in popular illustrations, 428, 429, 434, 435; symbolist views of, 527. See also indigenous peoples; Self/Other distinction principe moderne, vs. principe ancien, 206 Printemps department store, 1, 22, 455, 456 private arts support, 295, 599–600, 695; Hartmann and Concert National, 208; Haussmann and Concerts Pasdeloup, 166–67. See also patronage; salon concerts; salons private enterprise: calls for private initiative in the arts, 599; trust in, 328, 331, 517, 597 private interests: public interest and, 71, 77, 148, 149, 150, 189; public utility concept and, 70–71, 73–74. See also private realm; self-interest private organizations: as expressions of exclusivity, 684; public utility concept and, 73, 75–78, 695. See also specific organizations private realm: music for internalization of public virtues, 84–86, 143–44, 147–49, 452; revolutionary ambivalence about, 152. See also inner experience; self entries private schools, 315, 318. See also Catholic education Prix de Rome competitions and winners, 14, 368; Académie’s jurisdiction and influence, 193, 274, 293; Bourgault-Ducoudray, 664n;

1870s, 188, 273–74, 321, 330, 360, 363–64; 1880s, 364, 369n, 447, 506n, 533n; 1890s– 1900s, 604, 654, 656n, 672, 692; Opéra’s charge to perform winners’ works, 330, 598, 664; winners on 1890s programs, 635; women as competitors, 673 Prix du Salon (Prix de Paris), 274n prizes. See competitions; specific prizes programming. See concert programming; repertoire and programming; specific theaters and orchestras program notes, 227, 228, 348, 467, 468, 521 progress, xii–xiii n, xiii, 31, 236–37, 400; artists as leaders, xiii; Berlioz as emblem of, 245; cultural diplomacy and, 297–98; and education, 190; Eiffel Tower as symbol of, 8, 565–66; and 1889 Exhibition, 552, 565, 567; hierarchical/evolutionary notions of, 433–34, 549–50, 576–77, 642; historical consciousness and, 226; individual contributions to, 67; linear notions of, 208, 229, 236, 642; moral, 237; national, music as metaphor for, 235, 629; personal utility and, 67; as republican value, 236–37, 243–44, 301, 394, 593; spiral/ cyclical notions of, 7, 226, 229, 507, 642; symbolist views of, 527; Universal Exhibitions and, 277, 566–67; usefulness and, 53; and wealth, 599. See also economic prosperity and progress; musical progress progressisme. See progressivism progressivism, xii–xiii n; 1890s, 622–23, 627– 28, 629 propaganda, 65, 96, 103–4; music as, 103–4, 495. See also political utility entries property rights, public utility concept and, 73–74 prosperity. See economic prosperity protectionism, 409, 450, 495; aesthetic, 472, 513 protest: cafés as locus of, 311, 478; festivals as opportunities for, 132n, 336–37; Paris Lohengrin premiere, 289, 290, 514–17, 519–20, 598 Protestantism, 31, 240, 286, 291–92 Proust, Antonin, 196n, 226, 238n, 269n, 298, 308, 359; on aesthetic pleasure, 374; on Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui, 498n; and contemporary inspiration, 333, 368; and 1890s Conservatoire reforms, 599; interest in dessin and decorative arts, 196n, 331n, 375, 623n; at Lakmé premiere, 424; on Universal Exhibition of 1889, 552n; views on arts administration and funding, 328, 330–32, 363, 368, 375, 552n Proust, Marcel, 54n, 613

Prussia, 163, 284. See also Franco-Prussian War; French-German relations; German entries Psautier d’Oxford, 65–66 public architecture, 1–2, 2n, 3. See also specific buildings and monuments public education: Catholic influence in, 291, 309–10; in the colonies, 407, 408; compulsory school attendance, 74, 192, 315; economic progress and, 246; 1870s reforms, 285; Ligue des patriotes’ reformism, 442–43; teachers’ roles and powers, 74n, 85, 317. See also music education; republican education; republican educational reforms; revolutionary public instruction public funding for the arts. See arts funding; state arts support public good, 69, 134, 161; public utility concept and, 70, 73, 78 public goods, 69n, 111; opera as, 267–68 public hygiene, 692–94 public instruction, 97–98, 100–101, 314–16; and the arts, 103–5, 135, 143, 149, 162, 408. See also civic education; instruction; revolutionary public instruction public interest: private efforts serving, 73, 75– 77; private interests and, 148, 149, 150, 189; public utility and, xii, 69, 72, 78 public luxuries, 324–26, 599 public opinion. See reception public/private boundary: festivals and, 132; music and, 133; public utility concept and, 71–72, 73–74, 78 public service, 74–75, 77, 168, 695; arts as, 194, 195, 268; training for, 202–3 public spaces: festival enactment in, 106–7, 111, 133; orphéon kiosks, 198. See also Paris geography, architecture and monuments; specific locations public spirit (esprit publique), 97, 101, 106, 130– 31, 154–55, 545; marches’ evocation of, 123; musical experiences and, 230; music education and, 149; Opéra’s evocation of, 137–38; republican revival of, 170 public support of arts, 32, 162, 696. See also arts funding; state arts support public utility concept, xii, 33, 68–82, 70; and 1880s–1890s nationalism, 80; commerce/ wealth and, 257–58; current expressions of, 695–96; and distinction/inequality, 333; diversity and, 79–80; education and, 73, 74– 75, 77, 101; 1890s ambivalence about, 692; festivals and, 134; in French law, 69–71, 73– 77, 695; health discourse and, 692–94;

Index

.

775

public utility concept (continued) hidden agendas, 81–82; 333; national identity and, 78–79; overviews, 68–69, 82; power and influence of, 77–82; private organizations and, 73, 75–78, 625; public interest and, xii; roots of, xii, 56–57, 68; as standard of value, 80–81; and state arts support, 73, 74–75, 143, 144, 169, 259–60, 294; state authority/ actions and, 69–70, 72–78, 79; vs. vanity/ self-obsession, 458. See also aesthetic utility; economic utility; educational utility; moral utility; musical utility; political utility; utility public utility declarations, 73, 75–77, 695n Pugno, Raoul: La Résurrection de Lazare, 310n purity, 266–67, 297, 381, 687; works praised for, 266–67, 275, 286, 651, 665 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 543, 649 Quatrefages, Armand de, 436 Quatremére de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome, 57–58, 59n, 62, 86–87, 106, 219, 454; and Ecole royale de chant/Conservatoire, 142, 146 Queneau, Raymond, 23 Raboisson, Pierre, 411 race, 408, 645–48; colonialism and, 402, 645–46, 647; evolution and atavism, 432–33, 576– 77; and Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 562, 564; monogenist view of, 426–27, 550; in music, Lavoix on, 648; polygenist view of, 427, 550; policy in the colonies, 418; as spectacle, in ethnographic exhibitions, 568; utility of, 645–46. See also ethnic identity; French colonialism; French origins race blindness, 178–79n race rhetoric, 645, 647–48 racial degeneration, 431, 436–37, 659–60nn, 660, 692 racial mixture/hybridization, 267, 431, 432, 659; the French as product of, 648–49, 657; racialized critiques of musical hybridity, 659–61; in Salammbô, 666 racial purity, 267 racial superiority, 645, 661n; blondness and, 562, 564 Racine, Jean Baptiste, 210, 216n, 347 radical republicans/republicanism: 1880s, 458, 460, 495–96; and 1880s nationalism, 410, 437, 448, 495–96; 1890s, 599, 608, 610, 623, 641; protectionist/anti-monopolist politics, 458, 460, 495; shopkeeper movement, 458, 460; views of women, 152. See also Bour-

776

.

Index

geois, Léon; Bruneau, Alfred; Clemenceau, Georges; Proust, Antonin; Third Republic politics “Rákóczy March,” 567 ralliement of 1890s: artistic, 622–23, 633–38; political, 614, 620, 621–23, 629 Rambaud, Alfred, 94 Rambert, Francis, 47n Rambosson, Jean, 579–80 Rameau, Jean Philippe, 141, 335, 346, 350, 639; charm and grace in, 377, 378; dances, 350, 367, 377, 501n, 631n; on 1870s programs, 215, 218, 220, 228; on 1880s programs, 348, 349, 350, 557n, 560; 1890s interest in, 620, 632– 33, 636, 638–40, 669; scores and transcriptions, 346, 347; Wagner paired with, 366, 367. works: Castor et Pollux, 228, 350, 636, 637; Dardanus, 228, 347, 350, 636; Les Fêtes d’Hébé, 348, 350, 637; Hippolyte et Aricie, 350; Les Indes galantes, 228; La Mascarade de Versailles, 350; Zoroastre, 636 rationalism, reason, 61, 93, 190, 269–70, 508; emotions and, 101–2, 135; vs. music, 105, 545–46; rejections of, 527, 528, 531, 544–45 Ratner, Sabina, 633 Ravel, Maurice, 4n, 27, 28, 30, 65, 293; on Chabrier’s Roi malgré lui, 399–400; style ancien in, 631–32, 632n. works: Daphnis et Chloé, 53; Jeux d’eau, 53; Menuet antique, 632n; Pavane pour une infante défunte, 632n; Scarbo, 53; Shéhérazade, 53; Sonatine, 53; La Valse, 698–99; Valses nobles et sentimentales, 53–54, 699 realism: in opera, 235–36; and exotic settings, 419, 425; symbolist objections to, 527 Rearick, Charles, 132n, 486n, 605 rebab, 402, 427 Reber, Henri, 183n, 226, 364, 383 reception: of art music in popular contexts, 490; contemporary music, 35–36, 489, 600, 602; emotional responses to music, 59, 87, 104–5, 124, 133–34, 136; excitement/exaltation as response to music, 104, 140, 144, 296; power of charm, 377, 382, 398; revolutionary opera and theater, 136, 137, 204n. See also audience entries; perception of art; specific composers reconciliation, 91, 209–10, 223, 697; Church and republic, in 1890s, 614–15, 620, 621; 1890s progressisme as, 622; France associated with, 235; Franco-Prussian, 284; Joan of Arc as symbol of, 662. See also assimilation/integration; compromise; political compromise; ralliement of 1890s

Rees, Brian, 305n, 612, 632, 656 refinement, 267, 293 Régamey, Félix, 207 regeneration: and music, 84–85, 697; La Valse as symbol of, 698–99. See also national regeneration regional identity, chansons populaires and, 356 regional language differences, 146, 189, 356, 380 regional music, 146; at 1889 Exhibition, 566. See also chansons populaires Régnier, Henri de, 65, 525nn, 527–28; “Scènes au crépuscule,” 587 religion, 85n, 174, 644; church attendance, 131; concerts as pseudo-religious rituals, 518–19, 540, 684, 686; government jurisdiction over, 309–10, 615; moral utility concept and, 59n; public utility concept and, 73, 74, 77; religious purpose in art, 63, 65; secular alternatives to religious rituals, 108, 109, 123, 172; in Third Republic, 166, 291. See also anticlericalism; Catholic Church; secularism religious education, 100n, 644n religious music, 166, 291–93; after secularizing reforms, 310–11; Catholic Church as employer of musicians, 236; competitions, 272; in Concert National, 208–9; 1890s, 615– 20, 632, 638; liturgical, 123, 292, 615, 617, 658; in music history, 658; Schola Cantorum, 617, 619–20, 640, 684; scholarship, 346n; training in, 272, 310, 619–20; at Universal Exhibition of 1878, 282; women as performers, 673. See also chant religious rapture, 385, 662 religious themes, 185, 188, 189, 341, 385; in Parsifal, 518, 521–22, 523, 540, 541, 616 Rémond, René, 166nn Renan, Ernest, 78, 99n, 297, 646, 690; on German society and culture, 284, 285, 286; on race, 267, 661n Renouvier, Charles, 67n repertoire and programming, 35; amateur choral societies, 201, 216, 218, 288, 341, 350, 391; Ancien Régime music in 1870s, 210–17; excerpts, 219, 222, 559; as expression of taste, 205–6; German music in France, 285–90; historical consciousness in, 48, 206, 211–12, 219, 222, 228, 229; military bands, 115n, 124, 145, 267, 344, 600, 613; patriotic songs as mandatory, 115n; popular entertainment, 479, 480–81; republican political struggles and, 301–5; revolutionary themes in 1890s, 604. See also concert programming; contemporary music; mixed concert programs;

opera repertoire; specific institutions and organizations républicains opportunistes. See opportunist republicans republican education, 74, 94, 189, 190–93, 202– 3; Bourgeois as reformer, 598n, 644n; dessin, 194–96, 203, 246; 1890s calls for reform, 598n, 644n; history, 317–19, 332–33; music, 196–97; patriotism in, 315, 316, 317–18, 320– 23, 439, 441; pedagogy, 190–93, 316–18, 334, 526–27, 644n; symbolist views of, 526–27, 530; valorization of arts, 193–94. See also music education; republican educational reforms republican educational reforms, 314–24, 356, 449; art education, 331; at Conservatoire, 599, 602–4; education spending, 316; music pedagogy, 319–24, 335, 392; pedagogical, 316–18; school construction and compulsory attendance, 314–15; secularization, 310, 315, 318–19, 332, 357; women’s education, 315n. See also Ligue des patriotes republican ideology and values, xiv, 31, 49, 167– 68; aesthetic utility, 65; and arts institutions, 67n; consolidation of power reflected in, 375, 394; diversity and eclecticism, 369–70, 594; duty and sacrifice, 64, 67–68; egalitarianism, 304, 309; 1880s, 375, 394; and 1889 Exhibition, 552–53, 555, 565, 567, 582, 593; 1890s, 593, 622; Horace as model of, 60; individualism, 85–86, 359; integration, 398, 400, 406–8; “Marseillaise” as emblem of, 339; musical culture and, 92; practical implementation of, 94–95; principe moderne, 206; progress, 236–37, 243–44, 301, 394, 593; public utility notion and, 68–69, 78; reflected in music after 1878, 304–8; secularism, 307, 308–9, 369; shifts and refinements, 358, 593–94; strength, 188–89, 358, 397; struggle, 301, 303, 358, 394; symbolist opposition to, 526–27; sympathy and transparency, 176–77; transmission through education, 191. See also democracy entries; specific values republican politics. See Third Republic politics; specific political constituencies republican reforms of 1880s, 307, 309–32; at Opéra, 324–32; relaxation of censorship, 311, 314; secularizing, 309–10, 375. See also republican educational reforms Republican Right, 622 Republican Union, 309, 328–29, 330–31, 341 requiems: Berlioz, 311, 312; Fauré, 293, 640n; Gouvy, 310n; Lenepveu, 291

Index

.

777

resistance, xiii, 37, 450; Gauls as model of, 652; music and, 26–27; political songs as, 495, 496. See also aesthetic countercultures; political resistance; protest Reské, Mlle de, 249 resonance, 399–400. See also sonority revanche, 186, 278, 290, 644; anti-Wagnerism and, 514–15; Gallic myth and, 652; Ligue des patriotes and, 410, 437, 439, 448; in music and theater, 447–48, 495–96, 654, 655 La Revanche (newspaper), 515 “Réveil du peuple,” 130, 140 reviews. See music criticism; music press; specific critics and composers Revolution, 72, 94–95, 332–44; associations with violence and disorder, 94–95, 97, 108, 161n, 609; 1889 Exhibition as commemoration of, 552; influence on Berlioz’s music, 244; oratory of, 332–33; in primary education, 317–19, 332; public discourse about, 97n; as republican influence and inspiration, 94–97, 154–56, 161, 164, 333; socialist views of, 608; in universities and secondary schools, 332, 333–34. See also counterrevolution; republican entries revolutionary festivals, 106–34, 172, 725; after Robespierre, 129–31; choral and orchestral performances, 108, 110, 113, 117, 120, 131; communal singing, 96, 106, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 114–15, 126–27, 130; compulsory attendance, 131; decline of, 131; drums in, 113; echoed by Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 561–64; Festival of Freedom, 613; Festival of Reason (Festival of Liberty), 126–27, 128; Festival of the Federation, 8, 108, 109, 114, 613; Festival of the Foundation of the Republic, 131n; Festival of the Supreme Being, 112, 117, 126–27; legacy of, 112, 132–34; military bands in, 110, 111, 141, 142, 145; military victory celebrations, 110, 113, 116; music composition for, 144; music publication/distribution for, 105, 116n, 144; music’s role in, 113–14, 346; nineteenthcentury composers’ responses to, 611–12; physical sites of, 106–7, 111, 130; political uses of, 106, 108, 109, 111–13, 613; popular participation, 111, 130, 613; public debate about, 134; public utility concept and, 134; republican-era revivals and scholarship, 335–37, 605–8, 613; republican-era views of, 282–83; spectacle in, 124, 126, 127; spontaneity, 111; state support for, 105, 114. See also revolutionary music revolutionary ideology and values, xiii, 49, 72, 77, 100, 154–55; character, 150; devotion to

778

.

Index

country, 133, 174n; festivals’ capacity to promote, 111–12; liberty, 144; public instruction and, 98; public spirit, 154–55; transparency, 103, 137, 143, 150, 176. See also egalitarianism; fraternity; patrie revolutionary music, 113–27, 724–25; choral music, 114, 115, 124; on 1870s programs, 226, 227; at 1889 Exhibition, 561; festival music as national property, 144; folk music in, 356n; as foundation for innovation, 395–96; influences on nineteenth-century composers, 611–12; marches, 120, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 144, 151; military music, 142–44, 145, 149–50, 153; opéra-comique, 138–41; popularity with military bands, 612; republican revivals of, 1880s, 337–40, 357; republican revivals of, 1890s, 604–11, 613; role in festivals, 113–14, 346; spatial effects in, 124; Universal Exhibition of 1798, 277n. See also musique ancienne; revolutionary songs; specific composers revolutionary opera, 106, 107, 134–38, 140–41, 214–15; in 1870s, 629n; funding, 135, 136, 138, 139n; republican revivals of, 1890s, 609, 610–11, 627, 629. See also specific composers revolutionary public instruction, 77, 97–107, 131; connotations of “instruction,” 98–101; Conservatoire in revolutionary era, 141–49; and festivals, 112–13, 114; French language, 146; goals, 98, 99–101; implementation, 100; music education, 103–7, 146, 150–51; opera/ theater and, 135–36; primary education, 77, 98, 100–101; Talleyrand on competition, 271 revolutionary sites and monuments, in Paris, 17, 20, 46, 593, 608 revolutionary songs, 104, 105, 114–20, 133; allegory in, 127–28, 129; commemorating military events, 150; communal singing in festivals, 96, 106, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 114– 15, 126–27, 130; decline of, 131; 1890s views of, 605–6; examples, 118–20, 121–22; lyrics, 114, 116, 120, 127–28, 133, 140; republicanera scores and transcriptions, 607, 611, 613; republican revivals of, 115, 130, 339–40, 341, 605–6, 607–8, 613; in republican song collections, 321–23; structure and simplicity of, 116, 123; of Thermidor government, 130; “war of songs,” 95; written for professional performers, 117, 120. See also specific songs La Révolution française, 5n, 333 Revue et gazette musicale, 253n, 288, 418n, 426n, 427, 462–63n Revue historique, 332 La Revue moderniste, 497n

revues, 483, 485 revues à grand spectacle, 483, 485 Revue socialiste, 596 Revue wagnérienne, 314n, 509, 513, 515n, 526, 530 Reyer, Ernest, 244, 245, 302–3, 305n, 405, 603; on Aida, 419n; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 381; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559; on Samson et Dalila, 665; on Wagner, 515. works: Salammbô, 188, 603, 664–66, 669; Sigurd, 368 rhetoric, 58n, 103, 333–34 rhythm, 56n, 133–34, 151–52, 176; isochronous, 577; marches and, 122, 123, 152; in nonWestern music, 577, 580, 581, 587, 590; polyrhythms, in Debussy, 590 Rich, Adrienne, 39n Richter, Hans, 511, 691 Ricoeur, Paul, 33n rightist politics, 495, 496n, 593; 1870s, 294; 1890s, 613–14, 621–23. See also Boulangism; Ligue des patriotes; Third Republic monarchism; Third Republic politics “rights of the poor” tax, 258, 616n Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 557, 627 Ritaine, Evelyne, 49n Ritt, Eugène, 368 rituals, revolutionary uses of, 96, 103; alternatives to sacred ritual, 108, 109, 123, 172; oaths, 103, 106, 108, 109, 136 Robert, Frédéric, 441n, 495 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 10, 129, 143, 679; on festivals, 111n; funeral of, 130; on patrie, 173n; and patriotic hymns, 117n, 118, 127; and women’s political participation, 112, 128. See also Terror Robespierre (play), 611n rococo, 375, 376 Rodez Congrès de musique religieuse, 673 Le Roi Dagobert, 654 Le Roi de Lahore (Massenet), 409, 421, 426n; at 1889 Exhibition, 558, 560; at Opéra, 301n, 385; on orchestral programs, 305n, 311, 419, 487; performed abroad, 263, 385–86n, 722 Roll, Alfred: Le 14 Juillet 1880, 337, 338, 679 Rolland, Romain, 26, 29n, 31, 244, 245n, 608 Rollin, Charles, 60, 61 Romani, Roberto, 150n romanticism, 238, 239; aesthetics of, 61–62 Rome, Roman civilization: in French history and character, 649; as model for French colonialism, 407, 649; theater at Orange, 650, 656. See also Gauls, Gallo-Roman civilization rondos, 240, 301, 608n, 501

Ropartz, Guy, 693 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 71n Rosicrucianism, 684, 685 Roslak, Robyn, 529 Ross, James, 29–30n, 596n Rossini, Gioacchino, 234, 250, 253, 265, 370, 487; The Barber of Seville, 559n; Guillaume Tell, 249, 288n, 295, 559nn, 636; Moïse, 348; Stabat mater, 291 Rothschild family, 583, 624n, 671 Rouget de Lisle, Claude Joseph, 115n, 339. See also “Marseillaise” Roujon, Henry, 511n, 599 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 61, 66, 69, 91n, 95n, 96, 725–26; on artistic utility, 59n; on capacity for judgment, 203; on character, 150; on common will/self, 69, 71–72, 95n, 98, 106, 643; as composer, 335, 395; on dessin, 196n; on education, 94n, 98; on feelings, 101, 135; influences of, 96, 131, 171; on music, 95, 335, 373, 578; on ornament, 325; Paris statue of, 96, 334–35; on public utility and sovereignty, 71–72, 78, 105–6; as republican and socialist inspiration, 334–35; on theater, 59n, 135. works: Contrat social, 335; Le Devin du village, 335; Emile, 98; Pygmalion, 395 Rousseau, Samuel-Alexandre, 656n royalism, royalists. See monarchism royalties, 258, 461; church concerts and, 616n Rubenstein, Anton, 637 Ruelle, Jules, 659–60 Russian music, 160–61, 668–69; at 1889 Exhibition, 557; Greffulhe’s patronage, 621n, 627; Stravinsky, 690n Russia, Russians, 14, 17, 410n, 416, 553; in drama, 416–18, 668; Franco-Russian alliance, 14, 595, 621, 666–69 Sacchini, Antonio, 214, 215 sacred music. See religious music Sadi Carnot, Marie François, 595, 621 Said, Edward, 409n Sainte-Marie-Madeleine church, 11, 292, 293, 624 Saint-Gervais choir, 615–17, 617, 618, 620, 638 Saint-Marceaux, Madame de, 623n Saint-Mleux, Georges, 585 Saint-Napoléon festivals, 166, 336 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 27, 169, 269n, 364, 481, 632–33; as Academician, 361; on aesthetic utility, 545; and Bach, 632n; at Bayreuth, 509; on charm in music, 377; and Beethoven, 586; coloristic orchestration, 243; as conductor of

Index

.

779

Saint-Saëns, Camille (continued) own works, 305n, 311; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 381–82, 396; and democratization of taste, 295–96; Déroulède settings, 441n; eclecticism and hybridity, 370–71, 378, 586, 660–661; on 1870s programs, 217, 218, 220; on 1878 Exhibition committee, 233n, 278n; on 1880s programs, 464, 517; 1886 German concert tour, 514; on 1889 Exhibition, 546; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 553, 554, 558, 559; on 1890s programs, 608; exoticism/ Orientalism in, 437; folk music interest, 355, 356; foreign appreciation and performances, 233, 261, 266, 284; Greek modes and themes in, 397, 650–651, 652, 656; on Holmès, 564; on musical progress, 597; on music and aesthetic pleasure, 385; and music education, 60, 319; non-Western influences in, 402, 405–6, 586; in North Africa, 401, 649n; religious music, 292; Société des grandes auditions, proposed festival at, 627; Société nationale presidency, resignation from, 514; on soul (of a race), 646; style ancien dances in, 504, 506, 631n, 632; transcriptions, 511n; on Wagner, 513–14, 546; Wagnerian influences in, 370, 521–23. works: Antigone incidental music, 650–51, 665, 669, 671; Ascanio, 661; Ave Verum, 222; Les Barbares, 650, 656–57; La Blouse et l’ habit, or Le Fils de la Révolution, 441n; Carnaval des animaux, 370; cello concerto, 233; Concerto for Piano in C minor, 233; Concerto for Piano in G minor, 637; Danse macabre, 54, 228, 243, 261, 365n, 513n, 700; Déjanire, 612, 640, 651, 652–53; Le Déluge, 240–42, 241, 263–64, 305n; “Désir de l’Orient,” 402; Etienne Marcel, 247, 304–5, 329, 378, 506; Frédégonde, 654, 656; Harmonie et mélodie, 513, 515n; Henry VIII, 363, 370, 378, 391, 506, 509, 521n; Henry VIII, at 1889 Exhibition, 559n; “Hymne à Pallas Athénée,” 650; Hymne à Victor Hugo, 339, 507–8; La Jeunesse d’Hercule, 301–2, 385, 397; “Marche héroïque,” 307, 311, 559–60, 611; Mélodies persanes, 402; Musical Memories, 524; Noces de Prométhée, 397n; Orient et Occident, 405; Phryné, 650, 669; La Princesse jaune, 419n; Prosperine, 506, 523, 558; Psaume XVIII, 209; Rapsodie d’Auvergne, 356; Rêverie arabe, 573; Le Rouet d’Omphale, 284, 286, 301–2, 651, 672; Septet, 378, 506; Suite algérienne, 402–6, 403–4, 431–32, 570, 668; Suite pour le piano, 632, 633; Symphony No. 2 in A Minor, 266–67; Third Symphony, 370,

780

.

Index

520–23, 558; Variations for Two Pianos on a Theme of Beethoven, 261; Vercingétorix incidental music, 652. See also Samson et Dalila Saint-Simonianism, 168, 190, 410 Salieri, Antonio, 214, 215; Tartare, 214–15 Salle des Fêtes, Palais du Trocadéro, 281, 281, 554 salon concerts, 640; 1880s, 343, 473–74, 501, 504, 506; 1890s, 638 salons: Bailly, 590; Mallarmé, 526, 531 Salons (de peinture), 196, 273, 330, 360, 462; Salon des indépendants, 462; Salon des refusés, 273 Salvayre, Gaston, 305n, 368, 509, 559, 566; Egmont, 506; Richard III, 264; La Vallée de Josaphat, 310n Samson et Dalila (Saint-Saëns), 188, 222–23, 236, 243, 264, 284; band transcriptions and performances, 601, 664n, 665; echo in Debussy, 535; on 1880s concert programs, 311, 312, 371n, 419, 586, 664; foreign performances, 627n; French premiere, 586, 664n, 670; Handel influence in, 288, 394, 665; at Opéra, 664–66; Paris premiere, 664n, 669; reception of, 664, 665; von Bülow on, 513n sarabandes, 400n, 501, 502, 503, 505, 632, 640 Sargent, John Singer: Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver, 160 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 695 Sarrette, Bernard, 141–44, 146, 153, 613 Satie, Erik, 27, 28, 335, 684, 685, 690; Allais and, 539; Cage on, 543n; composers influenced by, 55; influences on, 55n, 502n, 539, 540–43. works: Avant-dernières pensées, 539; Le Fils des étoiles, 539, 543, 685; Gnossiennes, 539, 540–43, 541–42, 631n; Gymnopédies, 540; Musique d’ameublement, 54–55, 92; Pièces froides, 539; Sarabandes, 400n, 502; Sonatine bureaucratique, 54n; Vexations, 55, 543–44, 544 satire. See parody and satire Saussure, Léopold de, 428n savagery. See atavism; primitive Sax, Adolphe, 242, 419 saxophone, 242, 362; Mayeur’s method, 261 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 65nn Say, Léon, 257n La Scala (café-concert), 480, 483 scales. See modality; specific modes Scey-Montbéliard, Princesse de, 624n Schelling, Friedrich, 62, 85n Schiller, Friedrich, 288, 365 Schmitt, Florent, 316n

Schnaebelé, Guillaume, 499–500, 515 Schoenberg, Arnold, 691 Schola Cantorum, 617, 619–20, 640, 684 schools. See education; public education; republican education; revolutionary public instruction Schorske, Carl, 376 Schumann, Robert, 160, 288, 520n Schuré, Edouard, 211, 519, 652n, 657 Schütz, Heinrich, 638, 640n Schwartz, Vanessa, 38, 457n, 489 science: health and hygiene, 692; public utility concept and, 73. See also rationalism Scriabin, Alexander, 638 Second Empire, 154, 163n, 238n, 295; and decadence/hedonism, 154, 170, 252, 295; early music societies during, 218n; education during, 98, 194; French expansion under, 410; musical tastes, 32, 169; orphéons during, 197; royalist view of, 206; Saint-Napoléon festivals, 166, 336; Victor Hugo and, 507 secularism, 307, 308–9, 317, 332, 508, 644; eclecticism and, 369; 1890s decline of, 613– 20; secular music in Good Friday concerts, 307, 311. See also anticlericalism; Catholic Church; religion seductiveness, 374, 376–77, 388, 393. See also charm Sée, Camille, 315n Seine River, 7; Paris bridges, 14–17, 15, 16 self-exploration, 497, 498, 545–46, 697; symbolists’ focus on, 524–25, 526–27, 531; Wagner’s music and, 519 self-improvement, 190, 199, 201, 317, 677–78 self-interest, 174; collective interest and, 67–68 self-obsession, and consumerism, 458 Self/Other distinction, 170–71n, 416, 418, 646; music and, 405, 413, 414; mutual desire, 423, 425; stereotypes, 420, 425; superiority and, 432. See also exoticism; indigenous peoples Sellenick, Adolphe, 487 Senegal, 410, 547, 551; Dinah Salifou, 547–48, 548, 551; at 1889 Exhibition, 547–48, 548, 570, 571, 577 sensory responses: Bailly’s “psychic sensation,” 579; sensory correspondences, 524–25, 528– 29, 546 sensualism, in Manon, 388, 391 sentiment. See feelings serpents, 123 Sérusier, Paul, 657 Séverac, Déodat de, 616 shared musical experiences, 87–88, 682. See also

choral singing; concert experiences; festivals; singing Shattuck, Roger, xiii, xiii n, 55n, 497n shopkeeper movement, 458, 460 Signac, Paul, 528, 529 Silver, Charles, 635, 636, 637 Silverman, Debora, 614, 622, 623n, 672n Silverman, Max, 79n Silvestre, Armand, 610n Simon, Jules, 164–65, 167, 168–69, 171n, 282, 461n; on art and beauty, 237–38, 238–39; and choir school funding, 310; on Cousin, 64n, 369n; on duty, 171–74, 320–21; and opera funding, 248; support for orphéons, 197; Thomas and, 183; and Universal Exhibitions, 171n, 192–93, 276, 277; in Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation, 289; writings of, 171–75 simplicity, 647. See also musical simplicity sincerity, 603; musical, 631 singers, 146; as concert draws, 310–11; at Conservatoire, 474; non-Western, at 1889 Exhibition, 577; in Wagner, 512–13. See also opera singers; specific artists singing, 34, 84, 87–88, 196; communal, in festivals, 96, 106, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 114–15, 126–27, 130, 605; of patriotic songs, 104, 106, 114–15; physicality of, 84, 197; unison, 95n, 106, 117, 319, 605, 612, 650. See also revolutionary songs; singing instruction singing instruction, 60–61, 84n, 86, 196–97; compulsory, 196n, 197; French methods abroad, 261; Ligue des patriotes proposals for, 410, 443–47, 444, 445–46; professional training, 141–42, 146; in public primary schools, 196–97, 319–23, 352–53, 392, 619 Sirinelli, Jean-François, 442n “La Situation politique en France” (caricature), 207 Sivori, Camille, 371n skating rinks, 455 Skobeleff, 668 slavery/dependence, 143, 147, 153 Small, Christopher, 205 snobbism, 684. See also distinction sociability, 38, 93n, 336; among classes, 201, 455, 489 social Darwinism, 432, 433 social decline, 66, 672, 692; health discourse and, 692–94; symbolist notion of, 530 social divisions, 643–44; and boxless theaters, 610; cross-class sociability, 201, 455, 489; and distinction, 684, 686; and Dreyfus Affair, 32, 643, 678; 1870s, 161; 1890s anxieties about,

Index

.

781

social divisions (continued) 678–79; 1890s changes, 626; fluidity of, 489, 678–79; folk songs and, 355; mediation through music, 34–35, 48–49, 86–90, 452; political inclusion as republican ideal, 31; reflected in listening styles, 687; reflected in Saint-Saëns’s Barbares, 656; in 1791 Constitution, 112. See also social inequalities Social Economy exhibit, 1889 Exhibition, 570–71 social hygiene, 692–94 social inequalities: gender, 71n; luxury as symbol of, 66–67; music education and, 88–89; revolutionary notions of, 66, 82. See also egalitarianism; social divisions socialism, socialists, 497, 498n; admiration for d’Indy, 596; as barbarian, 656n; Catholic Church and, 614–15; congresses at 1889 Exhibition, 555; fears of, 165, 442, 499, 595, 614, 679; at inauguration of Triomphe de la République monument, 608; moderate and conservative responses to, 594; Rousseau as inspiration to, 335; views of the Revolution, 608. See also Paris Commune social utility, 66, 101; of government, 69–70. See also public utility concept; utility Société des concerts du Conservatoire, 303, 343, 463, 464; audiences, 159, 463, 464, 470; Colonne and Lamoureux as musicians at, 470; 1870s programming, 185n, 217–18, 218–19, 244, 284, 291, 303–4; 1880s programming, 364, 368, 464, 561; 1889 Exhibition concerts, 558, 559–60; 1890s programming, 615; elite associations of, 159, 464; Garcin as conductor, 368, 464; Lamoureux as conductor, 467; Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony at, 523; Thomas as president of, 185; ticket sales figures, 466n; Wagner programming, 511 Société des grandes auditions musicales de France, 80, 600, 623n, 624–29, 630, 633, 684; 1894 zoo concert, 633, 634; foreign music programming, 691; 1900s concerts, 640n; Russian music at, 668 Société nationale de musique, 75, 90, 268n, 368; d’Indy-Chausson coup at, 514; 1880s concert programs, 343, 501–2n, 502; 1890s interest in musique ancienne, 631; founding and purpose, 90, 217, 286; Saint-Gervais concert of 1892, 616–17, 618; and Société des grandes auditions founding, 624; women in, 624n societies, arts and music: Société des artistes français, 75, 360; des compositeurs, 268n, 272, 514n; des concerts de chant classique,

782

.

Index

75; pour l’exécution des quintettes anciens et modernes, 218n; des instruments anciens, 623n, 638n; musicale indépendante, 54n; musicale russe en France, 76n; de musique française, 305; de musique nouvelle, 638; philharmonique, 218, 472–73; des quatuors anciens et modernes, 638; Sainte-Cécile, 218n; des traditions populaires, 353, 354, 356; des trios anciens et modernes, 218n. See also choral groups societies, other: Société de Géographie, 638; de l’histoire de la Révolution, 333; nationale des conférences populaires, 679; philanthropique, 558, 624, 626 society, state equated with, 79, 268 Soirées de la Rose † Croix, 684, 685 solfège students, at Conservatoire, 474–75n solidarity, 644; music’s capacity to promote, 87– 89, 96, 123. See also unity songs: non-Western, Tiersot’s analyses of, 577, 578; taught in republican primary schools, 320–23. See also hymns; political songs; revolutionary songs; song texts song texts, 114, 116, 120, 133, 140; allegory in, 127–28, 129; censorship and prohibition, 278, 296, 478, 479n; and music, relationship, 266; political, 116, 127, 210, 278, 296, 478; settings of Déroulède, 439–41, 444–47, 448; taught in public schools, 173, 320–21 sonority, 590, 689; in Debussy, 535–36, 580, 581–82, 586–87, 590; in non-Western music, 573, 581–82. See also timbre soothing music, 147, 148 Sophocles, Antigone, 671; Saint-Saëns’s incidental music, 650–51, 665, 669, 671 Soubies, Albert, 342n soul, race and, 646 South Africa, 421–22 Souvtchinsky, Pierre, 55 sovereignty, 72, 78, 105–6 Spanish music, at 1889 Exhibition, 557, 577 spectacle: 1889 Exhibition concerts as, 553–55, 554, 561–65, 584, 585; in opera, 136, 140, 419–20, 425; in revolutionary festivals, 124, 126, 127. See also exoticism; grandeur spectacles (spectacles de curiosité, spectacles-concerts, spectacles-variés), 480, 483–85, 670–71 Spies, André Michael, 178, 362, 363n, 604n spiral/cyclical notions of progress, 7, 226, 229, 507, 642 spirituality, 63, 65, 527 Spitta, Philipp, 262 Spivak, Gayatri, 418

spontaneity, 108, 603, 604, 686, 690 Spontini, Gaspare, 292n, 636 Spuller, Eugène, 94, 152n, 167n, 195n, 198, 237, 331, 389n, 394, 460n, 495n, 622, 623 stasis, in Satie, 540, 543 state, society equated with, 79, 268 state actions: nationalization of industry, 74; public utility concept and, 69–70, 72–78. See also arts administration; arts funding; state arts support state arts support, 14; commissions, 114, 270; current era, 43, 47n, 696; France vs. America, xii–xiii; opera, 66–67, 83; political views of, 294; popular music, 47n; public debate about, 80, 132; public utility and, 73, 74–75, 143, 144, 169, 259–60; vs. state control, 133; Universal Exposition concerts, 278. See also arts administration; arts funding; competitions state arts support, revolutionary era, 132, 133; festival music, 105, 114; opera, 135, 136, 138, 139n; opéra-comique, 139 state arts support, Third Republic, 162, 235, 238, 246, 268; choral singing, 167, 201; competitions, 462; concerts, 202, 216n, 294–95, 372n, 462–63n; decline of direct subsidies, 270; 1890s changes, 597–99, 625, 629; for folk music collecting, 356; for Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 561, 564; opera and theater, 162, 213, 216, 248, 251n, 259–60, 326–32, 479; political divisiveness and, 294–96; religious music school, 310, 620; Salons, 273, 462; secularizing reforms and, 310; socialist cuts, 595; travel grants for artists, 356, 360; under Ferry and Proust, 326–32, 360–61, 363–64, 368; visual arts, 194–96, 203, 246, 270. See also competitions; Universal Exhibition entries; specific arts organizations state authority: festivals as locus for, 133; Louvre as seat of, 5, 6; Parisian physical expressions of, 3, 5, 6, 11, 14, 20; public utility concept and, 69; and republican governments, 94–95 state interests, public utility concept and, 70, 74n. See also political utility state-sponsored competitions. See competitions state-subsidized institutions: Paris locations of, 8, 11, 14, 42–43; state influence on, 154. See also Conservatoire; Paris Opéra; state arts support stereotypes, 153, 420, 425, 433, 436 Stoicism, 173, 687 Strasser, Michael, 286 Strauss, Johann, 233, 487

Strauss, Richard, 691, 699 Stravinsky, Igor, 151, 152, 690n; The Rite of Spring, 152 strength: duty and, 187–88; feminine, negative view of, 674; in French self-image, 668; obedience and, 666; as republican ideal, 188–89, 358, 397; of Saint-Saëns’s Hercules, 301–2, 397; woman warrior figures, 654, 655, 666–68, 667, 670–72. See also heroism; military strength/weakness; struggle; virility; weakness string instruments, 433; female Conservatoire students, 474 Strong, Tracy, 61n, 68n, 95nn, 106 struggle: vs. cooperation, 529; individual/artistic, 92, 243–45, 301, 303; as republican ideal, 301, 303, 358, 394 Studd, Stephen, 523n style galant, 297n subject matter: ancient Gaul, 652, 654; ancient Greece, 649–51; contemporary life as, 333, 360; exotic, in opera, 425–26; French heroes and heroism, 186–88, 304–5, 448, 652–54; militarism, 447–48; opera and choral music in republican era, 178, 183, 184, 185–89, 209–12; Opéra vs. Opéra-Comique, 362–63; patriotic, in republican era, 185–89; reconciliation, 209–10; revolutionary, in 1890s theater, 604; revolutionary opera, 136, 137, 140, 214–15. See also female allegories; religious themes; specific composers sublimity, 61, 63, 497, 689; in Wagner, 508, 518–19 Subotnick, Rose, 686 Suez Canal, 410, 422, 504n Sufi trance music, 573 suites. See under composer (Debussy; d’Indy; Godard; Magnard; Saint-Saëns); see also musique ancienne Sulzer, J. G., 61 Supreme Being, in revolutionary festivals, 606 Surrealism, 539 Sylvia (Delibes), 305n, 379, 479; performed abroad, 258–59, 261, 264, 265 symbolism, symbolic utility, 551, 566; Eiffel Tower, 565–66; 1889 Exhibition displays, 571–72, 584, 593; Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 561–65; of music, 593, 594. See also allegory symbolism, symbolists, 28, 65, 89, 498, 524–31; anti-utilitarianism of, 525, 526–27; Bailly, 579–80, 590; central ideas of, 497, 524–27; contradictions and paradoxes, 529–31; in Debussy, 89, 531–37, 586–87, 590; Greffulhe

Index

.

783

symbolism, symbolists (continued) and, 626; Holmès and, 561; Mallarmé, 525– 26; music’s utility for, 524–25, 529; in painting, 527–28; Wagner and, 526, 527, 528 symmetry, 57, 239 sympathy/empathy, 87, 102n, 176n symphony, 131, 350, 352, 520–23. See also orchestral music; and under composer (Beethoven; Berlioz; Fauré; Franck; Godard; Gossec; d’Indy; Lalo; Saint-Saëns) synesthesia, 529n Tagore, Rabindranath, 434n Tahiti, 411; at 1889 Exhibition, 570, 577, 578; hymn in L’Illustration, 568, 569 Taine, Hippolyte, 286, 646, 692 Talazac, Jean-Alexandre, 473 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de, 98– 99, 142, 194, 271, 315 tam-tam, 124, 125 Tarde, Gabriel, 384, 393, 457, 646, 682, 683 taste: democratization of, 457; formation of, 201, 205–6; for grace and charm, 375, 386, 392– 93; for novelty, 572, 574, 584, 599, 641, 661; shared internationally, 235, 265–66; symbolist view of, 524. See also critical judgment; musical taste; popular taste taste elevation, 169, 177, 195, 201, 220, 294, 357; and access to art music, 329, 479, 680; amateur choral groups and, 197, 199; Berlioz and, 244–45, 303; and citizenship, 169, 202; comparative listening and, 219–20, 222–23, 228; competition and, 489; Debussy’s views, 688; Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle and, 382; development of critical judgment, 163, 199, 203–4; German music for, 286, 287–88; public luxuries and, 325–26. See also critical judgment taxes: income, 614, 678n; “rights of the poor,” 258, 616n Tayau, Marie, 304 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 259, 627 technology, technological progress, 623; and 1889 Exhibition, 552, 565, 567; femme nouvelle and, 672–73 Te Deums, 108, 114, 115, 123 La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 479, 631n Terror, 94, 101n, 136, 148, 209, 609; in educational manuals, 318; opera and theater during, 135–36, 137, 138n, 215. See also Robespierre text: in Gounod’s Gallia, 185–86; in Massenet’s Manon, 388; in opera, 177, 178; and music, relationship in Debussy, 532–34, 535; Satie’s

784

.

Index

humorous titles and performance instructions, 539; in Wagner, 528. See also song texts textbooks, 317, 443; music manuals, 288, 320– 23, 392 theater: access expansion/democratization of, 326–30, 610; Ancien Régime, in 1870s, 215, 216; attendance and profits in 1880s, 477, 481, 483; as cultural ambassador, 248; Déroulède’s L’Hetman, 441, 447, 500n; educational value of, 135–36, 140, 328; 1889 Exhibition receipts, 583; 1890s revivals of revolutionary, 605; elite associations of, 135; German influences in, 285, 288; inspired by Dahomean wars, 670–71; militaristic subjects, 448; music composed for (mélodrames), 288; pleasure-utility tensions in, 59n; as public luxury, 326; results of competition, 489–90; Rolland’s plays on revolutionary subjects, 608; Saint-Saëns on music’s role in, 660; teaching of classical repertoire, 603n; travel/ exploration themes in, 413–14, 568. See also Annamite music and theater; cafés-concerts; censorship; opera; specific venues theaters, 434; Paris locations, 8, 11, 14, 46; proliferation of, 460 theaters, by name: Ambigu, 638; Athenée, 629n; Belleville, 605; Château d’Eau, 467; Châtelet, 414, 416, 663, 668, 671; Feydeau, 130, 134n, 139; Gaîté, 215, 216, 252, 305n, 307n, 393; Libre, 604n; Montparnasse, 668; Odéon, 212, 215, 248, 441; Œuvre, 608; Orange (antique), 650, 656; Porte-Saint-Martin, 414, 662n, 670–71; Théâtre-Français (ComédieFrançaise), 393, 477, 504, 605, 650; ThéâtreItalien, 264, 330, 386n, 511n; Théâtre-Lyrique, 211, 251n, 262, 307n, 326–27, 330, 340, 341, 418n; Vaudeville, 140; Ventadour, 418n. See also Eden-Théâtre; Opéra-Comique; Palais Garnier; Paris Opéra theatricality, 176n. See also spectacle themes: thematic transformation in Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, 520, 521–23. See also leitmotifs; religious themes; subject matter Thémines, M. de, 32n, 212 Thérésa, 473, 483, 493, 495 Thermidor government, 129–30 Thierry, Amédée, 648, 651–52, 656n Thiers, Adolphe, 164, 193, 337 Thirait, Henri, 548 third estate, 309, 651 Third Republic: beginnings of, 94; denigrations of, 31; official establishment, 168; Revolution as influence/inspiration, 94–97, 154–56, 161,

164. See also republican entries; Third Republic monarchism; Third Republic politics Third Republic monarchism, and monarchists: and colonialist policy, 406, 438, 439; “counterrevolutionary myth,” 216–17, 344; crisis of May 1877 and, 301; 1870s, 161, 165–66, 168n, 206, 210n, 216–17, 301; 1880s, 449, 496–97, 498, 500–501, 593, 613–14; 1889 Exhibition and, 552; 1890s, 599, 600, 602, 613–14, 621– 22; and Germany, 438n; and “Marseillaise,” 339; political compromise and, 165–66, 168n; pretenders exiled, 449, 498; Richard Cœur de Lion and, 210, 212, 344; satire against, 206, 207, 498–99; symbolic dismantling of, 309. See also aristocracy entries Third Republic politics, 1870s, 164–68; alliances and compromise, 164–66, 167, 168, 183, 236; and ancien/moderne programming juxtapositions, 223, 225–26, 229; arts administration and funding, 270, 294–96, 326–30; conflict and dissension, 155, 161–62, 206, 207, 229, 294–96; consolidation of power, 301–9; Constitution of 1875, 168, 188, 215; crisis of May 1877, 282, 301, 308–9; economic policy, 297; 1878 Exhibition and, 282; monarchism, 161, 165–66, 168n, 206, 210n, 216–17, 301; political-artistic controversies, 212–13; political constituencies, 164–66; political legitimacy, 162, 170. See also Moral Order coalition Third Republic politics, 1880s, 375, 394, 449–50; alliances and compromise, 309; arts administration and funding, 330–32; colonialism and, 406, 410, 411, 413, 436–39; consolidation of power, 308–9, 375, 394; economic policy, 430, 449, 456, 460; 1889 Exhibition and, 549, 551, 552; emergent conservatism in late 1880s, 564, 594; Gambetta’s Republican Union, 309, 328–29, 330–31, 341; and Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 564–65; Ligue des patriotes’ opposition politics, 410, 439, 448–49; monarchism, 449, 496–97, 498, 500–501, 593, 613–14; radical republicanism, 458, 460, 495–96. See also anarchism; Boulangism; French colonialism; Ligue des patriotes; revanche; socialism Third Republic politics, 1890s: alliances and compromise, 594, 597, 614, 620, 621–23, 629; arts administration and funding, 598, 600, 620; challenges and anxieties, 595; Churchgovernment rapprochement, 614–15, 620, 621; colonialism and, 621–22; conflict and dissension, 662; economic policy, 673; leftist politics, 595, 603–4, 608, 622; monarchism, 599, 600, 602, 613–14, 621–22; Panama

Canal scandal, 595, 622; religious revival and, 614–15, 620; rightest politics, 613–14, 621–22; Sadi Carnot’s assassination, 595. See also anarchism; Franco-Russian alliance; socialism Thomas, Ambroise, 27, 183, 184, 239, 253, 294; as Academician, 361; choral music, 183; as Conservatoire director, 183, 185; on Conservatoire reform study committee, 603; 1870s performances and status, 170, 217–18, 282; at 1889 Exhibition concerts, 554; on 1889 Exhibition programs, 559; foreign appreciation of, 264, 265; Hypodorian mode in, 397; Larroumet on, 686; Lenepveu and, 462; on “Marseillaise” committee, 496n; on Massenet, 243; at Méhul statue dedication, 605; orchestrations, 242; and popular taste, 295; religious music, 292; on Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, 523; on Universal Exhibition committee, 278. works: Le Caïd, 184, 405; Françoise da Rimini, 361, 363, 558; Laudate Dominum, 282; Psyché, 257; La Tempête, 559n. See also Hamlet; Mignon Thuriot, Jacques-Alexis, 144 Tiersot, Julien, 60–61, 75n, 97, 106, 146; 1889 Exhibition reports, 549, 550, 558, 560, 561, 567, 573; folk music scholarship, 115n, 353, 355, 356, 430–31; on Lakmé, 421n; on Méhul, 343; on Mignon’s popularity, 597n; on Palestrina, 616; race rhetoric in “Marseillaise” essay, 647–48; and revival of interest in revolutionary music, 606–7, 608, 724–26; on revolutionary festivals, 107, 108, 109, 129; on revolutionary songs, 114–15, 116, 117, 127, 130, 605; on Saint-Saëns’s Rêverie arabe, 573; studies of non-Western music at 1889 Exhibition, 574–79, 582, 585, 690. works: Andromède, 640; “Cendrillon,” 322–23; Chants populaires pour les écoles, 321–23; Musiques pittoresques, 567n, 573, 574–79; “Quatre-vingt-douze,” 322; “Salut, drapeau,” 322 Tillancourt, M. de, 294 timbre, 295, 335, 405, 587, 689; purity of, 256, 266, 267. See also sonority Tocqueville, Alexis de, 64, 69, 83, 87, 205n tolerance, 48, 91, 131, 164; Ferry as model of, 359–61; music as tool for, 229, 697. See also intolerance Tonkin, 406, 410, 411, 421, 434, 438, 449; music related to, 478, 480. See also Indochina; Vietnam Torchet, Pierre-Louis, 197n

Index

.

785

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 487 Toute la Grèce, 137 trademarks. See intellectual property law tradition. See history; musical continuity; musique ancienne trance, 545; Sufi music, 573 transcendence, Wagner’s music and, 89, 519 transparency, 103, 137, 143, 150, 176–77, 189 Trans-Saharan railroad, 411 travel themes, 413–16, 568 treaties: Berlin, 406, 410; San Stefano, 233, 283 Le Triomphe de la République: statue, 17, 593, 608. See also under Gossec; Holmès Triple Alliance, 437, 621, 669 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 531, 576, 630–31; in Berlin, 284, 289n; French premiere, 627, 628; on orchestral programs, 311, 469, 508–9, 521 Tronchon, Henri, 61n troubadours, 658 Trouilleux, Rodolphe, 19n truth, 40, 53, 175–77, 524 tuba corva, 123, 124 Tuileries gardens, 19, 110; festivals and concerts in, 129, 155, 198 Tuileries Palace, ii, 6, 9, 20, 21, 58, 309 Tunisia, 406, 410n, 411, 421; at 1889 Exhibition, 568n Turquet, Edmond, 269n, 329, 442 Udine, Jean d’, 647n uncertainty, 33, 230, 432 unconscious: aesthetic interest in, 545. See also intuition Union centrale des arts décoratifs, 195, 331n, 375, 386; 1890s, 622–23, 625; free concerts during 1887 exhibition, 472; Women’s Committee exhibitions, 623n, 625n Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs, 360 Union générale bank crash, 372, 489 unison singing, 95n, 106, 117, 319, 564, 605, 612, 650 United States. See American entries unity, unity promotion: allegories in Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 562; 1889 Exhibition and, 552, 553–55; and elite identity, 1890s, 627; emotional, 102–7, 150; music’s capacity for, 34–35, 48–49, 86–89, 682; and orphéons, 201; public spirit and, 101n; through republican education, 189, 191; through republicanera music and concerts, 161, 185, 189, 202; through republican festivals, 605; through republican military service, 189–90; revolutionary festivals and, 108, 109, 111; revolu-

786

.

Index

tionary music and, 96, 104, 123, 133, 150, 155; through shared morals, 679 Universal Exhibition of 1878, 275–83; music at, 277–83, 288, 296, 409, 580; organizers, 171n, 233, 278, 567–68; political censorship, 296; theater and opera during, 295, 328 Universal Exhibition of 1889, 80, 171n, 192–93, 546, 547–95; awards ceremony, 559–60; benefits for Saint-Saëns and Debussy, 586–92; cantata competition, 561; colonial exhibits, 567–72, 583n; as commemoration of Revolution, 552; Eiffel Tower, 565–66, 584; elite attendance, 558; European participation, 553, 567; European royalty at, 553; French music at, 553–55, 554, 558–61, 593; historical concerts at, 560; historical exhibits, 555–57, 570, 584; Holmès’s Ode triomphale, 561–65; Human Habitation exhibit, 555–57, 556, 570, 584; influences on French composers, 580– 82, 586–90; musical competitions at, 566–67; non-European participation, 550–51; nonFrench Western music at, 557, 558, 567; nonWestern music at, 547–48, 548, 550–51, 572– 82, 584–87, 590, 593; non-Western royalty at, 547–48, 548, 551, 553; non-Western visitors to, 565n; republican hopes for, 549–50, 551– 52, 593; and republican values, 552–53, 555, 565, 567, 582, 593; retrospectives at, 551, 559; revolutionary music at, 561; Social Economy exhibit, 570–71; success of, 582–86, 593 Universal Exhibitions, 246n, 275, 297; music in, 31, 198, 277–82, 288, 296; Paris 1798, 277n; Paris 1867, 167, 275n, 277, 296; Simon’s involvement in, 171n, 192–93, 276, 277; Vienna 1873, 256. See also Universal Exhibition of 1878; Universal Exhibition of 1889 universalism, 436, 520, 527; assumptions about, 423–24, 427, 428; cultural, 423–24, 433, 549– 50; musical, 256, 423, 427–28, 577–78 universal suffrage, 84, 162–63, 191 université populaire movement, 677–78, 679 University of Paris, 7, 334 upper classes, 678. See also aristocracy entries; elite entries useful knowledge, 81, 99–100, 316 usefulness. See utility/usefulness uselessness, 55, 92, 325; of consumerism, 458; symbolist anti-utilitarianism, 526–27. See also luxury; utility/usefulness utilitarianism, 56; symbolist anti-utilitarianism, 525, 526–27 utilité: definitions and connotations, 65–68. See also utility

utility/usefulness, 53, 55–58, 65–68, 70; beauty and, 1, 57–65, 237–38, 688; of commercial culture, 455; Cousin’s ideas, 62–64, 77; English connotations, 56; French definitions and connotations, 65–68; grace and, 376; instruction and, 99–100; Levin on, 276n; meaning and, 91n; moral, 58–59, 60–61, 62, 65; national glorification, 234; personal, 67, 70, 101, 174, 192–93; pleasure/charm and, 59– 60, 384; as satisfaction of needs, 56–57, 64n, 66, 70, 79, 81, 696; science and, 73; symbolic vs. functional, 551. See also aesthetic utility; educational utility; musical utility; political utility; public utility concept utopianism, 31, 111n, 168, 238n Uzès, duchesse d’, 500, 503, 504, 623, 673 Vaillant, Derek, xii–xiii n Valadon, Suzanne, 543–44 Valéry, Paul, 518, 696n Valmy commemorations, 443, 562, 605 value: public utility concept and, 80–81; utility and, 65, 70 values: music’s power to embody, 26, 27, 174–75, 697–98. See also mœurs; republican ideology and values; revolutionary ideology and values vanity, 388, 391, 458 Van Zandt, Marie, 249, 251, 422, 424, 426 variety: in concert programming, 219. See also eclecticism; mixed concert programs Vaucorbeil, Auguste, 215, 328; ballet commissions, 361–62; at Conservatoire, 328n; at Opéra, 328, 330, 361–62, 368, 385–86, 418 vegetal harmonies, 579–80 venues. See performance venues; theaters; specific venues Vercingetorix, 652, 697 Verdhurt, Henri, 586 Verdi, Giuseppe, 234, 265, 368, 420–21, 487; Rigoletto, 368, 559n. See also Aida Verlaine, Paul, 28, 379, 479n, 532, 582 Verne, Jules, 413, 414, 416, 568; Michel Strogoff, 416–18, 568, 668 Vernon, Richard, 68n Viardot, Pauline, 261, 356, 638n, 640 Victoria, Tomás Luis de, 616, 631 Vidal, Paul, 75n, 369n, 506n, 635n; La Burgonde, 656n Vietnam: cafés-concerts in, 480; French colonialism in, 406, 410, 420, 568. See also Annam; Cochin China; Tonkin Vietnamese music and theater. See Annamite music and theater

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de, 511n violence, Revolution’s associations with, 94–95, 97, 108, 161n, 609 violinists, at Conservatoire, 474 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 2n, 329 virility, 152, 153, 302, 674; and Hypodorian mode, 397, 659; in French identity, 398; in French self-image, 669; masculinity ascribed to music, 124, 153; masculinization of female allegories, 663–64, 665–66; in Méhul, 340; musical evocations of, 123, 124, 139, 145, 154; as value of Ligue des patriotes, 443, 447; women composers praised for, 304, 672; works praised for, 665, 673. See also strength virtue, 62, 149, 150, 173n; Baudelaire’s view of, 65; education for, 98, 100–101, 143–44, 147– 48; music education for, 84–86, 143–44, 147– 49; sympathy and, 176n; truth and, 176–77; utility and, 56, 59, 71. See also civic virtues visual arts: dessin, 194–96, 203, 246, 260n; Les Incohérents, 481, 483, 537–38; innovation in, 295; state support, 270, 273; symbolism in, 497; in Universal Exhibition of 1798, 277n. See also decorative arts vitality, 123. See also energy Vitu, Auguste, 187, 498n Vizentini, Albert, 305nn, 307n Vladimir, Grand Duke of Russia, 621 vocal music. See specific composers Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de, 574, 578 voice: purity of timbre, 256, 266, 267; role of, in Wagner, 512–13; woodwinds’ resemblance to, 145n voice training, professional singing schools, 141–42, 146 Les Volontaires de 92, 448 Voltaire, 58, 67, 117, 131, 215, 334–35; centennial celebration, 337; Gossec’s settings of, 117, 120, 121–22 Vos, Camille de, 151 voting. See universal suffrage Vuillermoz, Emile, 27–28n, 29, 292–93, 400 Wagner, Cosima, 511, 627, 628 Wagner, Richard, 211, 214, 265, 289n, 342n; on art and religion, 518; Bayreuth festival, 366, 509, 524n, 531; and Berlioz, 513; on creativity, 529–30; as innovator, 233, 394, 395, 509, 517; on Méhul, 611; melody in, 512, 513, 535; musical style, 240; orchestrations, 535; qualities associated with, 497, 512–14, 518–19, 524, 526, 531, 539–40; and Saint-Saëns, 513–14; Vietnamese music and, 574. works: Eine

Index

.

787

Wagner, Richard (continued) Kapitulation, 160, 289, 515; Funeral March (Götterdämmerung), 289n; “Das Liebesmahl der Apostol,” 310n; Die Meistersinger, 350; Das Rheingold, 534; “Ride of the Valkyries,” 469, 479; Der Ring des Nibelungen, 290, 509; Siegfried, 233, 693; Tannhäuser, 289, 290, 350, 365, 371, 511n, 517, 519; Die Walküre, 469, 479, 598, 630. See also Lohengrin; Parsifal; Tristan und Isolde Wagner, Siegfried, 691 Wagnerian influences in French music, 89, 92, 236, 394–95, 509–10, 531; Chabrier, 630–31; Debussy, 89, 531; Holmès, 363; Massenet, 394, 395, 509; Saint-Saëns, 370, 509, 521–23; Satie, 540–43 Wagner in France, 308, 497, 498, 507–20, 630– 31, 647; artistic anxieties and controversies, 512, 513–14, 517; audience reception, 89, 288–89, 290, 365–68, 469, 508, 511, 516; before Franco-Prussian War, 289, 290; champions and admirers, 447, 509, 513–14, 516–17, 518–19, 574; contemporary explanations of allure of, 508n, 509, 518; Delibes on, 507; detractors and critics, 338, 509, 509– 10n, 512–13, 514–16, 517, 574, 630, 660; and Eden-Théâtre, 481; in 1890s, 598, 600, 602, 604; elite attraction to, 630–34; government censorship, 290, 517, 520; Greffulhe’s interest, 509, 626, 627, 628, 630; at Opéra, 598, 630, 659–60; Petit-Bayreuth, 509, 510; protests and anti-Wagnerism, 289, 290, 514–17, 519–20, 598; religion and, 518–19; republican ideology and, 517–18; reviews, 365n, 366, 508–9, 509n, 511, 515n; Saint-Saëns’s musical responses to, 520–24; Saint-Saëns’s views on, 513–14, 546; and Satie’s parodies, 539–40; state support for opera, 511, 630; symbolists and, 526, 527, 528; “Wagnerian logic” notion, 509; Wagnerians’ politics and values, 517; Wagnerism as pseudo-religion, 518–19, 540, 684, 686. See also Revue wagnérienne; Wagner, Richard; Wagnerian influences in French music; Wagner programming Wagner programming, 80, 219, 338, 365–68, 511–12; Colonne, 366, 371, 469, 510–11, 512, 517, 521; Lamoureux, 311, 366, 371, 467, 469, 481, 508–9, 511n, 512, 517, 521; Pasdeloup, 217, 289, 365–66, 367, 511n; Société des grandes auditions, 627, 628. See also Wagner: works Wallon, Henri-Alexandre, 194, 269, 331 waltzes, 414, 632; Ravel, 53–54, 699–700

788

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Index

war: 1890s threat of, 644, 666; operatic treatments of, 652, 654, 656–57; La Valse as response to, 699–700. See also foreign relations; Franco-Prussian War; militarism; revanche Watteau, Jean Antoine, 138, 208 weakness, 302; of colonized/conquered peoples, 420; duty and, 187–88; military, and French colonialism, 438. See also effeminacy; femininity; strength; virility wealth: aristocratic concerns about, 614, 623; and class in 1890s, 626; postrevolutionary ideas on, 66–67. See also economic prosperity Weber, Johannes, 196n, 427, 433–34 Weber, Karl Maria von, 218, 514; on 1880s programs, 557n; on 1890s programs, 617 Weber, Max, 102n Weber, William, 218 Weckerlin, Jean-Baptiste, 213, 218, 305n; as Conservatoire librarian, 346; folk song scholarship, 346, 353, 379–80; study of Méhul, 342; on Universal Exhibition committee, 278n West Africa, French colonialism in, 669–70. See also Dahomey; Senegal Western cultural universality/superiority, 423– 24, 433, 549–50 Wettge, Gustave, 412 Whiting, Steven, 502n, 543–44 Widor, Charles-Marie, 362, 662, 673; on Delibes’s Jean de Nivelle, 380, 381; on 1880s programs, 371n, 559, 560. works: Jeanne d’Arc, 487, 506, 662–3; La Korrigane, 362 Wilder, Victor, 211, 304n, 366 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 652, 654 Williams, Rosalind H., 393 wind bands, 144–45, 147, 167, 198; competitions at 1889 Exhibition, 566; contemporary repertoire in 1890s, 600, 601; Gossec’s Te Deum for, 123; Wagner repertoire, 512. See also Bon Marché; military bands wind instruments, 144–45, 147, 433. See also woodwinds; specific instruments Winogradsky, Alexander, 669 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 91n women, 129, 146; in Académie des beaux-arts, 673; artistic involvement, as patriotic, 625n; in café audiences, 479; educational access, 195, 269n, 315n; feminism and the femme nouvelle, 672–73, 674–75, 690; in Ligue des patriotes, 442, 447; under Napoléon I, 154; political participation, 112, 128–29, 154n; portrayal in opera, 426; in revolutionary

France, 112, 128–29, 136n, 152–53; as scholars, 38–39; teacher training for, 315; traits and functions associated with, 152, 153, 389. See also female allegories; female musical participation; femininity; gender entries women composers, 136n, 673–74; non-Western, 578; Société nationale membership, 624n; vicomtesse de Grandval, 304, 391, 637. See also Chaminade, Cécile; Holmès, Augusta women’s organizations, 128n, 673 women’s rights: congress at 1889 Exhibition, 555; feminism and the femme nouvelle, 672–73, 674–75, 690; restrictions on employment, 673 woodwinds, 145n, 147; Annamite woodwinds, 576, 587; woodwind studies at the Conservatoire, 474. See also wind instruments words: ritual use of, 103. See also song texts working class: anti-Semitism among, 489; in Charpentier’s operas, 611–12, 676–77; education access, 191; Paris residential and work patterns, 18–19; republican politics of, 308; Social Economy exhibit at 1889 Exhibition, 570–71. See also popular entries; social divisions

working-class musical participation, 34–35, 48, 89–90; access to art music and theater, 139, 324, 326–30, 332, 464, 680–82; cafés-concerts, 480; Charpentier’s conservatory, 677–78; as concert audiences, 159–61; musical tastes, 35; orphéon participation, 198 World’s Fairs. See Universal Exhibition entries World Wars: First, 698–99; Second, 450 Wormser, André, 448 Wyzewa, Téodor de, 509n, 529–30 xenophobia, 496, 499–500; Wagner’s reception in France and, 512, 517 xylophone, 243 Zeldin, Theodore, 163n Ziloti, Alexander, 627 Zola, Emile, 333, 456n, 458, 596, 659–60n, 684; L’Attaque du Moulin, 604n; Messidor, 675n zoo concerts, 36; 1870s and 1880s, 455, 487–89; 1890s, 600, 633, 634, 636, 637–38, 683. See also Jardin zoologique d’Acclimatation Zulu rebellion, 421–22

Index

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789