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Critical Allusion and Critical Assessment: Berlioz's and Reyer's Reviews of Bizet in the Journal des débats

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2021

Lesley A. Wright
Lesley A. Wright*
Affiliation:
University of Hawai‘i
*
Email: wright@hawaii.edu
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Abstract

Respected as one of four ‘feuilles de qualité’ in nineteenth-century France, the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published articles by some of the most talented writers/critics of its time. In ‘feuilletons’, large articles that ran across the bottom of the first and second pages, these authors gave perceptive critiques in high-quality prose and provided their readers with relief from the political news discussed on the page above. In January 1858 literary critic Hippolyte Rigault asserted that modern criticism communicated not just through forthright judgements but also through innuendo and nuance. A sophisticated readership could then be expected to take up the task of understanding the allusions and filling in the blanks. Like Rigault, Hector Berlioz (music critic of the Débats from 1835 to 1863) and Ernest Reyer (from 1866 to 1898) used both text and subtext to convey their assessments. This study, with the goal of examining how shades of approval and disapproval could be alluded to or directly revealed, traces how they wrote about their younger contemporary Georges Bizet in the years following Rigault's article.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: French Criticism , August 2022 , pp. 237 - 254
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 In his study of the nineteenth-century French press, Bellanger, Claude (Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3 (Paris: PUF, 1972): 316)Google Scholar classifies the Journal des débats as a ‘feuille de qualité’, along with Le Temps, Le Gaulois and Le Figaro. (Ange-) Hippolyte Rigault (1821–1858), also professor of rhetoric at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, began to write for the Journal des débats in 1853 where his column ‘Revue de quinzaine’, published in 1857–58, was much discussed.

2 Hippolyte Rigault, ‘Revue de quinzaine’, Journal des débats (hereinafter JD), 21 January 1858.

3 With his attack article, ‘Notre critique et la leur’, Le Réveil, 2 January 1858, Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808–1889) had rankled fellow journalists. A colourful figure and former dandy, later called the ‘Connétable des Lettres’, he became known for expressing forceful opinions. Replying to Barbey d'Aurevilly and to Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac (director of Le Réveil) before Rigault wrote his feuilleton were Edmond Texier, ‘Revue hebdomadaire’, Le Siècle, 10 January 1858; Léo Lespès, ‘A M. Granier de Cassagnac’ and ‘Échos de Paris’, Le Figaro, 10 January 1858; and Charles Monselet, ‘Théâtre du Figaro, XIII. Quatre hommes et un caporal’, Le Figaro, 14 January 1858.

4 See Barbey d'Aurevilly, ‘Les honnêtes gens du Journal des Débats’, Le Réveil, 30 January 1858. Reprinted in d'Aurevilly, Barbey, Les Œeuvres et les hommes: Journalistes et polémistes, vol. 15 (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1895): 91–101Google Scholar.

5 Rigault, ‘Revue de quinzaine’, JD, 6 February 1858.

6 On Berlioz's language and the influence of Chateaubriand, see Douche, Sylvie, ‘Berlioz critique et juge des Requiem de Cherubini et de Mozart’, in Berlioz, homme de lettres, ed. Zaragoza, Georges (Dijon: Éditions du Murmure, 2006): 93–7Google Scholar. On Reyer's language and literary friends, and the influence of Théophile Gautier, see Émile Henriot, Preface to Reyer, Ernest, Quarante ans de musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1909): ii, xviGoogle Scholar.

7 Kolb, Katherine, ‘Hector Berlioz’, in European Writers, vol. 6, ed. Barzun, Jacques (New York: Scribner's, 1985): 785Google Scholar.

8 Reibel, Emmanuel, L’Écriture de la critique musicale au temps de Berlioz (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005): 226–7Google Scholar.

9 Reyer's young friend Henriot (in Reyer, Quarante ans de musique, v) asserts that if politeness or friendship compelled Reyer to mask his opinion, he preferred to keep quiet. On the conflicts of interest that resulted when journalists were also librettists, composers or theatre administrators, see Emmanuel Reibel, ‘Carrières entre presse et opéra au XIXe siècle: du mélange des genres au conflit d'intérêts’, Médias 19 [on line], Publications, Olivier Bara and Marie-Ève Thérenty, eds, Presse et opéra aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, Nouveax protocoles de la critique à Paris et en province, posted: 28/02/2018, http://www.medias19.org/index.php?id=23962.

10 Gérard Condé, ‘Berlioz critique’, in Berlioz écrivain, Béatrice Didier, Cécile Reynaud, Peter Bloom, et al. (Paris: Association pour la diffusion de la pensée française, 2001): 59.

11 In ‘La Critique musicale: Castil-Blaze et Berlioz’, in Le Livre du centenaire du ‘Journal des débats’ (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1889): 437, Reyer mentions irony as one of Berlioz's most important tools. Adolphe Jullien, who shared duties for music criticism with Reyer from 1893 and filled the position from 1898 to 1928, mentions his two predecessors’ use of irony, circumlocutions, manoeuvrings, and double meanings in his biographies of them: Hector Berlioz. Sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Librairie de l'art, 1888): 335–51, which was dedicated to Reyer, and Ernest Reyer (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1909): 91–110.

12 For this frequently cited passage see, for example, André Hallays, ‘Hector Berlioz: Critique musical’, La Revue de Paris 10 (1 April 1903): 581.

13 Reibel, Emmanuel, ‘Les feuilletons de Berlioz: une leçon de critique?’, in Berlioz: Homme de lettres, ed. Zaragoza, Georges (Dijon: Éditions du Murmure, 2006): 61–74Google Scholar.

14 de Curzon, Henri, Ernest Reyer: sa vie et ses œuvres (1823–1909) (Paris: Perrin, 1924): 187Google Scholar (‘l'art du sous-entendu le plus adroit et le plus spirituel du monde’).

15 Henriot (in Reyer, Quarante ans de musique: xi) gives the date 13 September 1859 for this quote and notes that in his criticism Reyer gladly used ‘je’ and spoke of himself. Henriot finds this preferable to the hypocrisy of ‘so-called impersonal judgement’ (i.e., third person). On the use of first, second and third person, see also Kolb, Katherine, ‘Rhetoric and Reason in French Music Criticism of the 1830s’, in Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, ed. Bloom, Peter (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1987): 537–51Google Scholar.

16 Reyer, ‘Opéra-Comique’, JD, 2 December 1866. Reyer donated his personal collection of feuilletons to the Paris Opéra library (F-Po, RES 2542 [1–3]).

17 Reyer, ‘Opéra-Comique’ (‘je sais reconnaître le beau partout où il est réellement … ; l'amour du beau ne m'empêche point de convenir que le joli est aimable’).

18 See ‘Reyer's Literary Style’, in Elizabeth Jean Lamberton, The Critical Writings of Ernest Reyer (PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1988): 90–99.

19 See Hervé Lacombe, ‘Georges Bizet’, in Dictionnaire Berlioz, ed. Pierre Citron and Cécile Reynaud, with Jean-Pierre Bartoli and Peter Bloom (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

20 See Hector Berlioz, Letter 2729 (27 May 1863), Correspondance générale, vol. 6, 1859–63, ed. Hugh Macdonald and François Lesure (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). At this time Bizet was also composing Les Pêcheurs de perles, commissioned by early April for rehearsals beginning in August. Macdonald (in Bizet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 73) suggests that Bizet may also have continued working with Berlioz past June in rehearsing Les Troyens à Carthage despite the pressing demands of his own opera.

21 The Journal des débats did not review Bizet's competition-winning opéra bouffe, Le Docteur Miracle, in April 1857, but Étienne-Jean Delécluze (1781–1863), a painter and art critic, mentions his Prix de Rome cantatas in his 1856 and 1857 reports on the annual public meeting of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

22 All the Débats reviews are available at Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr). The related search engine and user interface at ‘RetroNews: Le site de presse de la BnF’ (www.retronews.fr) has been an essential tool in pulling up comments in the press that might easily have escaped notice. The annotated multi-volume edition of Berlioz's music criticism, La Critique musicale, edited by H. Robert Cohen, Yves Gérard, Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1996–) is nearing completion. And Nizam Kettaneh is in the process of preparing and posting annotated texts of Reyer's criticism at www.ernestreyer.com.

23 Reyer, [Untitled], JD, 4 June 1875.

24 At the Institut, Berlioz would also have encountered this work, one of the yearly submissions required of Rome prize winners.

25 Berlioz, ‘Théâtre de l'Opéra’, JD, 26 January 1863.

26 Berlioz, ‘Théâtre-Lyrique’, JD, 8 October 1863. Premiere Théâtre-Lyrique, Paris, 30 September, 18 performances.

27 M.[arie] Escudier, ‘Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial. Les Pêcheurs de perles’, La France musicale (4 October 1863) (‘ce fameux bienfait qui n'est jamais perdu … qui est la providence des victimes d'opéra comique’). In Georges Bizet, Les Pêcheurs de perles: Dossier de presse parisienne (1863), ed. Hervé Lacombe (Heilbronn, Germany: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 1996): 86.

28 Ellis, Katharine, ‘The Criticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Bloom, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 161Google Scholar.

29 Reibel, L’Écriture de la critique musicale au temps de Berlioz: 348.

30 Murphy has identified two categories of praise in Berlioz's writings; see Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988): 53–5. For the more enthusiastic category, he uses such words as ‘genius’, ‘majestic’, ‘original’, ‘forceful’, ‘vigorous’ and ‘imaginative’. The second is more restrained, with set phrases like ‘melodic charm’ and ‘distinguished harmony’ as well nouns or adjectives like ‘taste’, ‘grace’, ‘clear’, ‘vivacious’ and ‘delicate’. ‘Pretty’ was a cue that Berlioz did not particularly admire a piece and the use of other words in this second category of praise may disguise Berlioz's lack of response to the music.

31 Berlioz may be letting Bizet know that he recognizes this as reworked material from Don Procopio, one of Bizet's Rome compositions, but he refrains from mentioning other self-borrowing that he might well have noticed, too. See list of self-borrowings in Hugh Macdonald, Bizet Thematic Catalogue.

32 Stricker, Rémy, Georges Bizet (Paris: Gallimard, 2005): 85Google Scholar. For Bizet's later assessment of his score see Edmond Galabert, Introduction, in Bizet, Georges, Lettres à un ami (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1909): 42–3Google Scholar.

33 Cairns, David, Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness, 1832–1869, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2000): 701Google Scholar.

34 Holoman, Kern, Berlioz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 568Google Scholar.

35 Holoman, Berlioz, 568–9.

36 Bizet attended these rehearsals of Les Troyens and reported on them enthusiastically to Reyer. See Ernest Reyer, ‘Revue musicale. Georges Bizet’, JD, 13 June 1875 (obituary).

37 See Berton, Pierre, ‘Georges Bizet’, in Souvenirs de la vie de théâtre (Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1913): 228Google Scholar, and Lacombe, Hervé, Georges Bizet: Naissance d’une identité créatrice (Paris: Fayard, 2000): 398Google Scholar.

38 Reyer, ‘Théâtre-Lyrique’, JD, 6 January 1868. Premiere Théâtre-Lyrique, Paris, 26 December 1867, 18 performances. Reyer undoubtedly knew the author, for Jules Henry Vernoy de Saint-Georges was not only a prolific librettist and playwright but also president of the powerful Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques for most of the 1860s.

39 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 31 May 1872. Premiere Opéra-Comique, Paris, 22 May 1872, 11 performances.

40 Joseph Méry (1797–1866) was a prolific author who wrote the libretti for Reyer's one-act opéra-comique Maître Wolfram and, with Émilien Pacini (1811–1898), for his two-act opera, Érostrate (1862).

41 The next month (19 June 1872) Reyer would give supportive, in-depth coverage (eight columns) to La Princesse jaune, a one-act opéra-comique by Saint-Saëns, using more conventional structure and prose.

42 Mina Curtiss, Bizet and his World (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1958): 325.

43 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 10 October 1872. Premiere Théâtre du Vaudeville, Paris, 30 September 1872, 19 performances.

44 Reyer's colleague at the Débats, Janin, was silent about L'Arlésienne while it was on the stage, but did remark, after the production had ended, that he had seen ‘ce drame insensé du Vaudeville’ (‘La Semaine dramatique’, JD, 28 October 1872).

45 Although Reyer specifies 24 numbers, there are actually 27, some of them extremely brief. See the critical edition of L'Arlésienne, ed. Hervé Lacombe (Paris: Choudens, 2010).

46 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 17 November 1872.

47 Reyer also made brief but positive comments on the collection Vingt mélodies (JD, 25 January 1874) and the overture Patrie (JD, 15 March 1874).

48 See Dean, Winton, Bizet (London: Dent, 1975): 119–20Google Scholar, Lacombe, Hervé, Bizet (Paris: Fayard, 2000): 687–8Google Scholar and others.

49 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 14 March 1875, Premiere Opéra-Comique, Paris, 3 March 1875, 48 performances in 1875–76. For more on the travels of Bizet's masterpiece during its first 70 years see ‘A Carmen abroad – The When and Where of Carmen Performances, 1875–1945’, www.carmenabroad.org/.

50 See the Introduction and 35 reviews in Georges Bizet ‘Carmen’: Dossier de presse parisienne (1875), ed. Lesley Wright (Weinsberg: Lucie-Galland, 2001). Parts of this publication are reproduced as FMC Collection 15, at ‘France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789–1914’, www.fmc.ac.uk. For the early performance history of Carmen, see Christoforidis, Michael and Kertesz, Elizabeth, Carmen and the Staging of Spain: Recasting Bizet’s Opera in the Belle Époque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

51 Elizabeth Lamberton explains Reyer's emphasis on the toned-down libretto as his attempt to answer the negative reviews that were frightening off the public from buying tickets; see The Critical Writings of Ernest Reyer, 426–7.

52 Reyer, [untitled], JD, 17 March 1875.

53 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 13 June 1875.

54 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 21 November 1875.

55 See a discussion of the Parisian critics’ strategies to maintain their authority with readers despite their response in 1875 in Wright, Lesley A., ‘Rewriting a Reception: Thoughts on Carmen in Paris, 1883’, Journal of Musicological Research 28/4 (2009): 282–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Carvalho directed the Opéra-Comique from 1876 to 1887 and again from 1891 to 1897. See Wright, Lesley, ‘Carvalho and the Opéra-Comique: l’art de se hâter lentement’, in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1830–1914, ed. Fauser, Annegret and Everist, Mark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 99–126Google Scholar.

57 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 29 April 1883.

58 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 10 November 1883.

59 On the Odéon production of May 1885, just short of the tenth anniversary of Bizet's death, see Peter Lamothe, Theater Music in France, 1864–1914, (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2008): 68–90. In 1885 Reyer does not critique L’Arlésienne again but points to Carmen's success abroad, which had led to its revival in Paris and 300 performances at the Opéra-Comique, and hopes for a similar fate for L'Arlésienne (see ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 24 May 1885).

60 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 3 March 1889 (report from Monaco, 27 February). More than a month later, on 20 April 1889, Edoardo Sonzogno used I Pescatori di perle to open his short opera season during the 1889 Exposition universelle at the Salle de la Gaîté in Paris. Reyer, who was absent from Paris, later writes that he regretted missing Emma Calvé's performance as Léïla. The public was apparently cold toward Bizet's opera, even after the first-act duet; for this he blames the libretto, which he thinks the Italian language must have rendered completely incomprehensible (see ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 2 June 1889). In April 1893, Reyer's colleague Adolphe Jullien reviewed Carvalho's revival of Les Pêcheurs de perles, which the director had premiered 30 years earlier.

61 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 9 November 1890.

62 Reyer, ‘Revue musicale’, JD, 9 November 1890. A fund-raising campaign to commission and erect a Bizet monument had recently begun. Though earlier plans called for Alexandre Falguière's marble statue to be placed in the Parc Monceau, the Bizet monument would eventually be installed in the Opéra-Comique (Salle Bizet).

63 Rigault, ‘Revue de quinzaine’, JD, 21 January 1858.

64 I would like to thank Ralph Locke for his valuable suggestions and comments on this text. And thanks are due as well to Peter Bloom for his discerning remarks on an earlier draft.