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Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2021
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- Type
- Introduction
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: French Criticism , August 2022 , pp. 207 - 215
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Teresa Cascudo, ed., Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017). Following the editor's ‘Introduction’ (ix–xxiv), its chapters include a wide range of topics, as the following list suggests: Katherine Ellis, ‘Music Criticism, Speech Acts and Generic Contracts’ (3–22); Guillaume Bordry, ‘Barnum et les Romains: Critique, claque et réclame dans les Soirées de l'orchestre d'Hector Berlioz’ (23–32); Sylvia Kahan, A Critic's Progress: Émile-Mathieu de Monter's Musical Reporting of the Paris 1867 and 1878 Exposition Universelles for the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (33–58); Nancy November, ‘The String Quartet in Early Nineteenth-Century Performance and Criticism’ (255–68); Maria Teresa Arfini, Beethoven e Mendelssohn nel pensiero di Adolf Bernhard Marx (269–80); and Rainer Kleinertz, ‘Richard Wagners offener Brief über Franz Liszts Symphonische Dichtungen (1857) und die Komposition von Tristan und Isolde’ (473–94). This volume proceeded from a 2015 conference organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini and the Palazzetto Bru Zane. A profile of Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism appears in Nineteenth-Century Music Review 17/1 (2020): 120–24, contributed by Michael Strasser.
2 The Journal of Music Criticism (2017–), edited by Luca Lévi Sala and published annually by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, accepts contributions in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German. Its Volume 3 (2019), guest-edited by Mark Everist and titled ‘Perspectives on the French Musical Press in the Long Nineteenth Century’, focuses on French music criticism. Among the issue's five articles are Jennifer Walker, ‘« Les grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache» and the Parisian Press’ (109–31), and Lesley Wright, ‘The Parisian Press on Werther in Vienna’ (133–50).
3 The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), features 35 essays within its 842 pages. Those which provide helpful context for the present project include Charles Dill, ‘Music Criticism in France before the Revolution’ (62–80), Mark Pottinger, ‘French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth-Century, 1789–1870’ (127–46), Delphine Mordey, ‘Critical Battlegrounds in the French Third Republic’ (344–70), Mark Berry, ‘The Feuilleton and Beyond: Criticism in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria after the Second World War’ (590–608), and Christopher Brent Murray, ‘Music Criticism in France since the Second World War’ (648–670). See the profile of The Cambridge History of Music Criticism in a forthcoming issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review, contributed by Richard Taruskin.
4 Relevant articles involving music criticism in Nineteenth-Century Music Review include Ralph P. Locke, ‘Nineteenth-Century Music: Quantity, Quality, Qualities’, 1/1 (2004): 3–41; Kerry Murphy, ‘Race and Identity: Appraisals in France of Meyerbeer on his 1891 Centenary’, 1/2 (2004): 27–42; Sylvie Douche, ‘Music in France in the Years 1911–1913 According to Jean Chantavoine: Independent Thinking and Political Constraints’, 1/2 (2004): 67–88; Alexandra Wilson, ‘Music, Letters and National Identity: Reading the 1890s’ Italian Music Press’, 7/2 (2010): 101–18; Stella Kourbana, ‘The Birth of Music Criticism in Greece: The Case of the Historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’, 8/1 (2011): 85–100; Mark Pottinger, ‘Wagner in Exile: Paris, Halévy and the Queen’, 12/2 (2015): 253–84; Jessica Payette, ‘Post-Wagnerian Klangempfindungen: The Premieres of Maeterlinck Operas in Vienna’, 12/2 (2014): 285–317; Paul Watt and Sarah Collins, ‘Critical Networks’, 14/1 (2017): 3–8; Michel Duchesneau, ‘French Music Criticism and Musicology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: New Journals, New Networks’, 14/1 (2017): 9–32; Paul Watt, ‘Musical and Literary Networks in the Weekly Critical Review, Paris, 1903–1904’, 14/1 (2017): 33–50; Noel Verzosa, ‘Realism, Idealism and the French Reception of Hanslick’, Vol. 14/1 (2017): 51–64; and Florinela Popa, ‘Aspects of Nationalist Propaganda in the Late Nineteenth-Century Romanian Musical Press’, 14/3 (2017): 339–65.
5 ‘Popular periodicals’ are publications whose articles address general audiences, avoid technical terminology, omit scholarly documentation, and lack external peer review.
6 Nineteenth-Century Music Review regularly profiles new digital resources instrumental to music criticism research. For instance, see Katherine K. Preston, ‘Digital Databases for English-Language Newspapers in the United States’, 13/1 (2016): 105–11; Heather Platt, ‘The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music: An Introductory Overview’, (forthcoming); and Estelle Joubert, ‘RIPM: A Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1760–1966)’ in this issue.
7 For example, see the final article in this issue, ‘“Distant Reading” in French Music Criticism’, by Estelle Joubert, which demonstrates the functionality of Voyant and enables online readers to view and manipulate search results.
8 See Ralph Locke's comments regarding the perception of ‘mediocrity’ associated with French music within the first article of this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review. See also Ralph Locke's ‘Introduction’ to the special double issue, ‘Music in Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Musicological Research 13/1–2 (1993): 1–2, as well as its articles by Stephen Heubner, Lesley A. Wright, Andrew G. Gann, Hugh Macdonald, Daniel Albright, and Louise Goldberg. This essay collection captures the emergence of a determinedly advocative attitude among English-speaking French music specialists at the end of the twentieth century and represents a stimulating precedent for the present project.
9 While research on the music of Hector Berlioz, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel found favour within most musicological communities during the twentieth century, inquiry involving other French composers received significantly less collegial encouragement within many musicological circles during that time. Indeed, pursuit of then-lesser-known French figures often met with disinterest and condescension, even from other French music specialists. For instance, as recently as three decades ago, the English-language translation of Jean-Michel Nectoux's magisterial biography of Gabriel Fauré began with a personal reflection: ‘I have often been asked, during the many years I have spent in research on Fauré, the basic question: why Fauré? The way this question was asked often contained, as well as curiosity, a touch of astonishment, even of regret, that I should have devoted so much time and effort to a man still often considered as a marginal or minor composer’; Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, trans. Roger Nichols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): xvii. Fortunately, circumstances change when a compelling cause attracts an able advocate who makes a convincing case. Esteem for Gabriel Fauré's music has risen dramatically in the last four decades, due in no small part to Nectoux's voluminous publications, intellectual leadership and generous collegiality, which have fostered interest and nurtured understanding worldwide. The two Fauré-focused articles in this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review reflect this still-expanding influence. They also remind that the English-language version of Nectoux's superb biography of Fauré is long overdue for a revised edition for service to several generations of twenty-first-century readers.
10 It would be impossible to provide a satisfactory survey of noteworthy English-language research on nineteenth-century French music from the last 50 years within a single footnote, even if the list were limited to a specific area such as opera. However, some landmarks should be mentioned here, including Brody, Elaine, Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870–1925 (New York: George Braziller, 1987)Google Scholar; Fulcher, Jane F., French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Pasler, Jann, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More references to significant literature appear in footnote 12 of this Introduction, as well as elsewhere in this issue.
11 For example, British music has elicited considerable amounts of research in recent times, increasing significantly beginning around the end of the twentieth century. See the Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies series, Volume 1, ed. Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), and Volume 2, ed. Bennett Zon and Jeremy Dibble (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), plus Volume 3, ed. Peter Horton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), all three of which were reissued by Routledge in 2019. Chapters in each volume draw significantly upon contemporary criticism, providing models and stimulus for many scholars. See also the recent collection, British Music Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850–1950, ed. Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton (Martlesham: Boydell, 2018); within that collection, consider Bennett Zon, ‘Spencer, Sympathy and the Oxford School of Music Criticism’ (38–63), Harry White, ‘Making Symphony Articulate’: Bernard Shaw's Sense of Music History’ (102–17), and Julian Horton, ‘Analysis and Value Judgement: Schumann, Bruckner and Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis’ (123–53). Of course, Nineteenth-Century Music Review also has cultivated research on British musical criticism from early on. For examples see Ian Taylor, ‘A Period of Orchestral Destitution?: Symphonic Performance in London, 1795–1813’, 2/1 (2005): 139–68; Erin Johnson-Hill, ‘Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833)’, 9/2 (2012): 255–93; Charles Edward McGuire, ‘John Bull, Angelica Catalani and Middle-Class Taste at the 1820s British Musical Festival’, 11/1 (2014): 3–31. Insightful investigations of Irish music criticism also have been appearing in recent decades, documenting vibrant musical cultures and articulate commentary. For instance, Irish Musical Studies 9 – Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), features several chapters that interpret contemporary musical criticism, including Harry White, ‘Cultural Theory, nostalgia and the historical record’ (15–35), and Michael Murphy, ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’ (252–77). Similarly, several inspiring essays may be found in Irish Musical Studies 12, ed. Kerry Houston, Maria McHale and Michael Murphy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019), including: Catherine Ferris, ‘Newspapers, Music and Politics in 1840s Dublin: A Case Study in Bias, Editorial Style and Selective Reporting’ (33–44); Paul Rodmell, ‘Richard Michael Levey, Annals of the Theatre Royal, Dublin (1880)’ (64–74); and Maria McHale, ‘“Dublin Can Still Justly Boast of Being a Music-Loving City”: Joseph Holloway and Opera in Dublin, 1880–1922’ (239–52). See also Roy Johnston with Declan Plummer, The Musical Life of Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Maria McHale, ‘“Hopes for Regeneration”: Opera in Revivalist Dublin, 1900–1916’, in Music Preferred – Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2018), 203–16; and Maria McHale, ‘Opera as Gaeilge: Revivalism and Reception in fin-de-siècle Irish Opera’, in Opera and Print Culture, ed. Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming). Reception studies also have begun to appear in Nineteenth-Century Music Review; see Timothy M. Love, ‘Irish Nationalism, Print Culture and the Spirit of the Nation’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 15/2 (2018): 189–208. Finally, two doctoral theses – Derek Collins, ‘Concert Life in Dublin in the Age of Revolution’, (PhD Diss., Queen's University Belfast, 2001), and Catherine Ferris, ‘The Use of Newspapers for Musicological Research: A Case Study of Dublin Musical Life, 1840–44’ (PhD Diss., NUI Maynooth: 2011) – are of particular interest for their interpretation of musical criticism. I thank Maria McHale for sharing information incorporated within the foregoing citations.
12 Significant contributions to the study of French music criticism in the ‘long nineteenth century’ include Christian Goubault, La critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984); Ralph P. Locke, Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Kerry Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1988); Katherine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: ‘La revue et gazette musicale de Paris’ 1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Everist, Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824–1828 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Barbara Kelly, ed., French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008); Katherine Kolb and trans. Samuel N. Rosenberg, eds, Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism, 1824–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Michel Duchesneau, ‘French Musicology and the Musical Press (1900–14): The Case of La revue musicale, Le mercure musical and La revue musicale SIM’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140/2 (2015): 343–69; Mark Everist, Opera in Paris from the Empire to the Commune (London: Routledge, 2018); Barbara Kelly and Christopher Moore, eds, Music Criticism in France: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018); Clair Rowden, Opera and Parody in Paris, 1860–1900 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). Additional sources appear in the documentation accompanying the principal articles of this special issue.
13 For more on the ‘France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789–1914’ network, which was initially known as the ‘Francophone Music Criticism, 1789–1914’ network, see www.fmc.ac.uk. On its Collections page (www.fmc.ac.uk/collections/), the FMC website currently avails 26 text collections – over 3,000 digitally edited and searchable documents – relating to mostly nineteenth-century French music and musical culture, including collections of reviews, each group prefaced by a helpful overview.
14 For more on the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique romantique française, visit https://bru-zane.com/en/.
15 Gallica is available at www.bnf.fr/en/gallica-bnf-digital-library. For an introductory review see Michel Duchesneau, ‘Gallica: The Online Digital Library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 11/2 (2014): 337–47. A supportive site called RetroNews (www.retronews.fr) affords special access to the contents of Gallica's collection of journals and newspapers via an advanced and customizable search engine particularly well suited to reception research.
16 For more details regarding the music of Gabriel Fauré, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, ed, Gabriel Fauré: Catalogue des œuvres, Gabriel Fauré Œuvres complètes, Série VII, Vol. 1 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2018), which has been reviewed by Heather de Savage in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2020, FirstView, doi:10.1017/S1479409820000051.
17 Investigations of cultural transfer have increased dramatically in recent decades. For instance, see David Large and William Weber, eds, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Steven Heubner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist, eds, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). Nineteenth-Century Music Review has presented a variety of transnational studies, including: Christina Fuhrmann, ‘Continental Opera Englished, English Opera Continentalized: Der Freischütz in London, 1824’, 1/1 (2004): 115–42; Janice B. Stockigt, ‘A Study of British Influence on Musical Taste and Programming: New Choral Works Introduced to Audiences by the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, 1876–1901’, 2/2 (2005): 29–53; Marian Wilson Kimber, ‘Victorian Fairies and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream in England’, 4/1 (2007): 53–79; Nancy Yunhwa Rao, ‘Chinese Opera in Turn-of-the Century Canada: Local History and Transnational Circulation’, 11/2 (2014): 291–310; Therese Ellsworth, ‘The British Isles and Beyond: The Performance of Instrumental Music by William Sterndale Bennett during the Long Nineteenth Century’, 13/2 (2016): 233–55; Valentina Sandu-Dediu, ‘The beginnings of Romanian Composition: Between Nationalism and the Obsession of Synchronizing with the West’, 14/3 (2017): 314–37; Haiganus Preda-Schimek, ‘Modelling the Public's Taste: Local Habits, Ethnic Pluralism and European Music in Bucharest (1821–1862), 14/3 (2017): 391–416.
18 See Koechlin, Charles, Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Plon, 1927), later translated into English by Leslie Orrey (London: Dobson, 1945)Google Scholar.
19 The term ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ originates in the writings of American sociologist Gary Alan Fine; see his ‘Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding’, The American Journal of Sociology 101/5 (1996): 1159–93, which is cited by Christopher Moore. Marianne Wheeldon explored the concept in her chapter, ‘Debussy's “Reputational Entrepreneurs”: Vuillermoz, Koechlin, Laloy and Vallas’, in Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy, ed. Barbara Kelly and Christopher Moore (Martlesham: Boydell, 2018): 219–44.
20 This process of refining Fauré's image would continue steadily during the twentieth century, spurred by the publication of Philippe Fauré-Fremiet's intimate biography of his father, Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1929), and by a volume of the composer's own music criticism, Opinions musicales (Paris: Rieder, 1930), selected and edited by Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi. In subsequent decades, Fauré research would be sustained by a multiply revised study by Vladimir Jankélévitch initially called Gabriel Fauré et ses melodies (Paris: Plon, 1938), and then by the first English-language biography of the composer, Norman Suckling's Gabriel Fauré (London: Dent, 1946), which was part of The Master Musicians series. Later, a collection of Fauré's letters to his wife Marie, Lettres Intimes, ed. Philippe Fauré-Fremiet (Paris: La colombe, 1951), and a book of recollections by Marguerite Long, Au piano avec Gabriel Fauré (Paris: Julliard, 1963), added greater fullness to the composer's portrait. Despite such illuminative work, many musicians still erroneously dismissed Fauré as a ‘salon composer’ during these decades.
21 For instance, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Fauré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972; rev. 1995), Jean-Michel Nectoux, ed., Gabriel Fauré: His Life Through His Letters, trans. J.A. Underwood (London: Marion Boyars, 1984) – especially its closing essay, ‘Fauré The Innovator (pp. 341–9) – and Nectoux, Jean-Michel, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, trans. Nichols, Roger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. For more recent contributions, see Jean-Michel Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: Les voix du clair-obscur, 2nd edn, rev. (Paris: Fayard, 2008); Nectoux, Jean-Michel, ed., Correspondance suivie de Lettres à Madame H. (Paris: Fayard, 2015)Google Scholar, and Nectoux, Jean-Michel, ed., The Correspondence of Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré: Sixty Years of Friendship, trans. Jones, J. Barrie (London: Routledge, 2018)Google Scholar.
22 For these predecessors, see ‘Schubert Familiar and Unfamiliar: New Perspectives’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 5/2 (2008), and ‘Schubert Familiar and Unfamiliar: Continuing Conversations’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 13/1 (2016).
23 See Sobaskie, James, ‘Introduction’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 5/2 (2008): 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.