Two - Song and Memory in the ‘Terrible Year’

Summary

Our generation, too, had its hopes! And towards the end of the [Second] Empire, we believed ourselves to be within reach of the great spiritual surge for which we had spent a decade in preparation. Was it the fault of our generation if, at the very moment it took flight, its wings were crushed by the bludgeon-stroke of 1870?

—Louis-Xavier de Ricard

It is hard to overstate the trauma that Parisians lived through in the twelve months that followed the declaration of war in July 1870. These catastrophic events—the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune—have typically occupied little more than a couple of sentences in most biographies of the composers who lived through them. This is partly because few sources survive to document their movements, experiences, and memories; partly because the Année terrible prompted few compositions of lasting significance; and partly because the composers with whom this study is concerned were still so young, with the greater part of their career and output still well ahead of them. Yet the impact of this ‘terrible year’ cannot have been other than profound: most of them lived through the privations of the Siege; all lost friends and acquaintances; most served in military units; most fled the Commune; and all returned to a city devastated by fire, shelling, and the deeper and more permanent scars of a bloody conflict that had seen some twenty thousand residents killed by their compatriots.

These shared and overlapping experiences became part of the narrative forged by this group of composers, one that helped to define their relationships, their experience, and their sense of history in the years that followed. Decades later, in November 1914, Fauré received a letter from his old friend André Messager: ‘Oh! My poor friend, how often this war has led my thoughts to the subject of the other one, that of ‘70! Your departure in [the uniform of the] voltigeurs! And Clignancourt and the Commune and all the rest! And to think that it was all a bagatelle compared with what we’ve seen over the past four months!’

In the summer of 1871 the composers who reconvened in Paris were no longer simply companions in an artistic voyage of discovery, but fellow survivors of extreme physical hardship and emotional distress.