Falstaff Angleterre, et de Thomas: Hamlet , la reine Gertrude Ay mi dame de valour. Sonata Prima a Sopran Solo. Fantasia pour Violon sans Basse, B-Dur. Sarabande, partita 2, BWV Concerto, G-Dur, 1er movement. Sonatine pour Violon, op. Cliquez sur les images pour les agrandir. Descendez sur la page lire les articles. Au Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles , elle obtint sa licence avec distinction. Fax02 54 Il a obtenu alors le Bachelor's puis le Master's degree en piano avec prof.
Sofia summer, Euroclassical, Ein podium voor de Passie. Elle est en trois mouvements: Extraits du film de Boris Lehman , avec Fanny Tran au piano. Toutefois, le dernier film de B. Voici leur programme complet: La Vergine e smile a la Rosa. Bach and Locatelli appears to have been featured faute de mieux,35 but for pianists and violinists with a superabundance of newer repertory it was only at the turn of the twentieth century that Bach-playing, for instance fugues for women pianists only, and solo sonata movements for violinists , was required of them.
In that was not unusual; many of his They were, effectively, concerts behind closed doors. Moreover, having begun performing his beloved Bach in , for reasons that are unclear he stopped doing so, whether at concerts held at his house, or at subscription concerts, with two performances of accompanied sonatas with Ferdinand Hiller in The case of Chopin is even clearer cut: Fauquet, La musique de chambre, See Fauquet and Hennion, La grandeur de Bach, Fauquet and Hennion, La grandeur de Bach, BWV, which Chopin played in public with Hiller and Liszt, is a different matter altogether and is discussed in chapter 2.
He also taught Bizet. It is rather like reading a simple but touching Eglogue after a Virgil epic: MF 7 October , — Choron and Fayolle, Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, vol. Martine, De la musique dramatique, 68— Two tenaciously held concepts resulted: He could not have known how prophetic his words were in respect to the terms of post attempts to revive this music.
Respect for the historic nature of the music was, however, essential. In any case, before the criteria by which all such choices were made were largely predictable: Two versions of this piece are bound together, one in note form. See Simms, Alexandre Choron, Choron thought the manuscript contained the complete oeuvre.
Unsurprisingly, it received formal blessing. Most important of all: It will prove that for a long time France had the best and the only school of music in existence. It accords with that of Choron in his manuscript writings on early French music, and also with his rationale for preparing the Dictionnaire historique des musiciens with Fayolle. Had it appeared, though, I doubt that it would have prompted a change in practice, since activity in reformist Catholic circles was making a performed revival of Franco-Flemish polyphony increasingly unlikely.
For most of the century no one was predisposed to like the sacred music of this period, which had neither the allure of the truly medieval nor the mythologized purity of the Counter Reformation. Culture shaped practice in a very particular way. On the Ultramontane side, see Franklin, Nineteenth-Century Churches; for a summary of how Ultramontane ideas stimulated interest in medieval music manuscripts and their transcription, see Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments, 15— See chapters 5 and 6. Where he did not reconceptualize music history as it was then understood, he expanded on and consolidated the models of others not least Choron , taking ownership of them in the process.
From onward, when he set up the Revue musicale, his work became a gateway to history that few could afford to avoid. A paradox lies at the heart of the matter. More lecture-recital than concert, the format served to illustrate stylistic differences through comparison and to demonstrate teleology. And if his concerts inspired interest in early music generally A planned repeat of programme two, scheduled for 12 May and postponed twice, never took place.
A second concert projected for did not take place. His was not so much an exercise in audience conversion to early music as a crash course in the art of separating the stylistic wheat largely Italian and German music after from the chaff largely French music, of any era. He also provided his own documentary record. Self-serving reviews including summary lectures appeared in the Revue musicale, their subjectivity rendering them historiographically invaluable because of the breathtaking candor with which he evaluated each piece. Later in the lecture he turned to the question of Lully and Rameau in comparison with Pergolesi, Carissimi, Scarlatti, and Keiser.
I have streamlined as much as possible the complex and inconsistent numbering systems used in this periodical. Characteristically, when it came to the sacred music, his reasons had to do with style, not context. This piece is by Josquin Desprez, the greatest artist of his century and the master of all the musicians who became distinguished later. You will not like this piece very much, because it consists almost entirely of mechanical working-out and because its harmonic practice is too remote from what you are used to hearing.
Nevertheless, if you are minded to consider that it was composed nearly years ago, you will admit that it is not devoid of merit. I thought I should offer it to you as a point of departure and comparison. In a striking example of the slippage between Flemish and French that was to characterize discussion of these composers in France and Belgium throughout the century see chapter 5 , both essays discussed the composers whom Choron featured in his history of the French school.
And it is this attitude, together with its implications, that distinguishes him most strongly from Choron, with whom he otherwise had much in common. With obsessive determination he sought to revolutionize music education, not just in Paris, but throughout France. But they also put the spotlight on a portion of the choral repertory unknown to Parisian concertgoers at the time: Choron did not altogether neglect more modern music, by Mozart, Haydn, Graun, Neukomm, Schneider, and Cherubini—his museum vision was driven by a desire to conserve classics of all ages.
He was also open enough to modern music to commission a piece for mixed voices and organ from The year saw no concerts, possibly because of the Paris cholera outbreak, but doubtless also because Choron could not afford to pay the extra singers he had engaged in order to bring his choir for the —31 season up to —30 levels; concerts thereafter were sporadic.
The article was originally published in La quotidienne in May Such attention to presentational matters went unnoticed by reviewers but may have underpinned their largely warm reactions to the music itself. More than that, it was a scaled-down Handel, with only a keyboard and bass accompaniment the school had no orchestra. Both, however, failed in the attempt. In the Flammarion, , letter The oxymoron of the novelty of early musics—especially those dating from before c.
Others took up the challenge. In Philippe Musard, the conductor and composer of fashionable galops and contredanses, did something unprecedented. He tried, via Handel, to effect a change in the musical taste of his promenading audience of shop attendants, clerks, and upper-class refugees from high-class concerts. It was to feature a massive singers. RM April , — RM [June] , Nothing less than the national revitalization of singing, both in and outside church, would do.
Democracy began at home: Choron has achieved with his teaching system should attract government attention all the more because this learned musician has brought it about with children taken indiscriminately from among a population that is poor and, unfortunately, ill-suited to music and to the arts in general.
We know, however, of one series of public concerts: It will do nothing for the musical civilization of the masses. If Handel became contrast, his basses from Picardie learnt quickly, but lacked musical talent. Across Europe the recipe was now becoming standard: He presented his society to Campos, La Renaissance introuvable? But, at least at the outset, he also tried to integrate the Society within a network of Catholic musical societies under the aegis of the Roman Cecilian movement.
Moskova set aside audience seats in the Salle Herz for interested clergy ripe for conversion to the Ultramontane musical cause. Support from outside was widespread: In this Ultramontane environment, then, early French music thrived, but according to familiar ideological patterns. Sacred music of the same vintage was unacceptable. In March he suggested the inverse experiment: But in May he mused that perhaps there had been noble dissent at the idea of singing such ungrateful music.
In effect, from the moment when composers gave themselves themes to treat in imitation. By the s, the staples of the concert spirituel had been eclipsed by a new, and predominantly older, Italianate sacred repertory presented throughout the concert season in secular surroundings: The original article was published in La quotidienne, June Campos mentions the Geneva and Niort examples in La Renaissance introuvable? The 11volume collection was entitled Collection de musique vocale religieuse et classique.
For a summary contents list, see Campos, La Renaissance introuvable? The regions did not always take their cue from the capital; sometimes they rebelled, or provided precedents. Nevertheless, perceptions of regional ignorance abounded, sometimes fueled from within. Their tale is of a France whose regions are hopelessly backward, parochial, and dominated by musical incompetents who prefer to write for the church than the theatre because they are thereby insulated from public expressions of hostility towards their efforts.
Internal evidence indicates that the memoir dates from at the earliest. Nevertheless, in his own general area of the Midi he would indeed have found and doubtless been depressed by evidence of the survival of French eighteenth-century traditions long abandoned in Paris.
They were still sung liturgically in the provinces but were threatened with obsolescence as the amateurs who sang them became too aged to continue. JD 25 July , n. Laurens gives , Almanach du Comtat , Messiah, Judas, and Israel. Bach, whose music Laurens even planned to edit in its entirety until he realized how complicated the source work would be; and his library was eclectic in the extreme, even including Purcell and the English madrigalists and a sizeable amount of instrumental chamber music, from viol consorts to concerti grossi.
And while his activity was later to be hailed as a prophetic example of decentralization, in the s and s it could only be perceived as regressive. Fragmented though it is, much of the information about regional performances of early music that reached press sources concerns the liturgical music used for major religious festivals. RMRPC 3 , 49— The discussion of Lalande is on pp. Strasbourg, though, enjoyed a particularly rich and historically varied musical life.
From the s, Rouen, too, proved to be a major centre for early music, and it would continue to be so at least until the late s. His father and grandfather were composers; his love of the French clavecinistes, whose works he would later edit, derived from his exploration of the family music collections. For the second programme, he played Scarlatti and C. Similarly, they are important for their openness to other French musical traditions. He was a pupil of Ockeghem, the famous Flemish composer. Despite the arid use of counterpoint in his works, which was imposed on him by the tastes of his time, we can see regular harmonic progression and elegant interlacing of parts in his style, and a freedom of melodic usage.
If one takes oneself back to the time when he was writing, and if one thinks of the limited resources at his disposal, one cannot but admire the nature of this great genius. JR 6 March , n. This page intentionally left blank 2 — When a novelty threatens to alter the balance of cultural power by becoming mainstream, voices are likely to be raised in protest. So it was with early music in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. As I have argued elsewhere, some objections were practical: Must the music simply be boring?
Must it appeal to certain social classes doubtless a jibe at wealthy amateurs? The answers to such rhetorical questions were irrelevant: But early music appeared as its 1. See my Music Criticism, Even certain music historians advised against putting history into practice, arguing effectively that their writings were intended to aid understanding, not to encourage performance.
Perverse though it might seem, this was one logical extension of the museum culture underpinning the concert historique: Performance of the works themselves was unnecessary. Such arguments, which were regularly aired in the s and 60s, were a response to the accelerating integration of selected early musics into concert life. Such integration is most clearly observed in the transformation of the piano repertory during a period when concerts built around a single pianist but which nevertheless featured a mixture of ensembles and soloists gave way increasingly to solo piano recitals featuring a variety of musical styles extending from Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti to Chopin, Rubinstein, and, eventually, Brahms.
The society had nothing to do with Cecilianism; it was an entirely secular concert society in both its incarnations. Important revivals took place: But the situation was unexpectedly complex, and more frequent performances of French music, even after , did not necessarily signify a markedly increased appreciation of or sensitivity to musical heritage. Anthologies, Adaptations, Monuments Important as Veuve Launer was in the dissemination of early music during the 14 years of her business —53 , she was not alone. Most mid-century publishing houses included a proportion of such music in their catalogues, whether directly or as supplements to music journals.
Di Grazia, Concert Societies, —55, including repertory list. Discussed in detail in chapter 4. Discussed in detail in chapter 7. They reissued her Couperin harpsichord edition in , and thereafter expanded her list considerably. Other evidence also points to a thriving industry. Transcriptions and fantasias also tell us a great deal about the marketability of particular pieces.
The work was adopted by the Conservatoire and approved by the Institut de France. The total of nine pieces was made up entirely of Baroque music: A second piano version is noteworthy: Marketing strategies suitable for cheap sheet music were less sustainable for multivolume projects, many of which continued to depend on oldfashioned subscriptions. Nevertheless, three key collections illustrate the increasing ambition that came with enhanced commercial backing: Camille Stamaty, Concerts du Conservatoire. Manuscript copies in BNF Musique: It is to be found, with other contrafacta and alongside genuine and fake works, in one of the key sacred anthologies of the period: Echos du monde religieux, 7 vols.
Paris, Flaxland etc, — In the Archives du chant the Delsartes presented an eclectic mix of French, Italian, and German music ranging from harmonized plainchant and old French chansons to sacred music by Palestrina, Lassus, Jommelli, Couperin, and Haydn, and operatic music by Lully, Monsigny, Rameau, and Mozart. Their subscriptions represented high-level interest in and probably enthusiasm for the movement to replace the operatic pastiches and improvized fauxbourdon of French liturgical music with repertory based around Counter-Reformation and stile antico traditions.
Their successes reached as far as Moscow and Calcutta but centered on Paris 54 percent of sales , the French regions 22 percent , England 8 percent and Belgium 6 percent. By contrast, German cities hardly featured Leipzig and Berlin each yielded a single subscription. Common to the Delsarte and Farrenc lists were members of the Rothschild family, the Norwegian pianist and early music enthusiast Thomas Tellefsen, Pauline Viardot, Broadwood and Schott.
The advertizing methods used by the Delsarte and Farrenc camps reinforce this idea. Both mounted concerts—effectively concerts historiques for demonstration purposes— featuring the music their anthologies contained. Couperin, Handel, Rameau, J. Bach, Porpora, Padre Martini, C. That competition is itself suggestive of increased momentum in the practice of early music.
I shall return to that repertory in a moment. However, it was the sudden appearance of pianists playing Handel, Scarlatti, French clavecinistes, and—particularly—J. Bach stood at the center of his musical universe.
The second frontispiece is more explicit: But the pedestal is there to support the main image, in which, against a backdrop of organ pipes and It is perhaps not surprising: I have found nothing antedating the July Monarchy. But in an unprecedented thing happened: It seems as though these performances had little immediate impact; there was certainly no rush of copycat performances.
A third important category included the fugues for harpsichord and organ and isolated dance movements. The larger-scale harpsichord works were virtually unknown in performance: Other categories of keyboard music regularly played in concerts—toccatas, preludes, dance movements, and fugues—were presented either on a standard piano or a pedal-piano, the latter being used in particular by Alkan and Lemmens in the s.
I have argued elsewhere that early keyboard music in general was viewed in mid-nineteenth century France with some ambivalence, as of subprofessional An earlier performance, projected for March , seems not to have taken place. The fact that in the s and s a disproportionate amount of such music was being played in public by women pianists only made matters worse, suggesting to those who subscribed to stereotypes of womanhood that this music was facile, shallow, and undemanding.
Were they not using music respected for its compositional skill as an excuse for foisting their immature performing talents on a gullible audience? But specialists, such as Mongin, could not escape. Yet the opposite—intense expressivity, or explicit virtuosity—was also suspect. Free of associations of subprofessional status or excessive delicacy, and despite its fugues which had their rightful place in church , Massart and De Malleville appear to be the only women who played such works in the professional realm during this period, the latter mostly alongside her teacher.
Mlle Marchand and Mlle Danvier. It was also, for all that there were women organists Conservatoire-trained, and even titulaires , a male-dominated music. Bach without the stigma, as it were. And it was on this modest scale that they introduced Paris audiences to two works which, from onwards, were to be the Bach warhorses of the virtuoso organ repertory, holding audiences of up to seven thousand people enthralled: The music of Handel, Couperin, Rameau, and Scarlatti regularly reached the concert stage, even more commonly via female hands.
Critical responses were mixed, alternately lauding and condemning the French repertory for its picturesque and decorative character. Both were markers of a rococo prettiness and, concomitantly, a lack of gravity. For the pedal piano, I know of only one example of a woman playing Bach a prelude and fugue in a public concert before Annette Falk, as part of a concert given by the Maurin-Chevillard quartet on 10 February But if the music could induce nostalgic reverie such problems appeared to vanish.
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- Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France.
Though less well represented in concert life, string music proved more acceptable, perhaps because string-playing, being an almost entirely male activity, lacked the disruptive element of overtly gendered associations. Thereafter the concert repertory narrowed, effectively, to variation sets: The Bach concertos made no real impact on the concert repertory until the s. With the exception of the chaconne, the same holds for the solo works.
There was no hint of encouragement to ornament the opening movement of Op. Yet detailed ornamentation was to be avoided, even when historical precedent suggested it might be used, and even though it might contribute to the element of virtuosity inherent in the work. But it simultaneously reinforced the expectation that Bach The violinist in question here was Henri Vieuxtemps.
The exception merely reinforced the image of the norm. The Popularization of Early Choral Music Audiences who heard these piano and violin repertories came overwhelmingly from the leisured classes. Even sheet music covering this repertory was expensive. With the exception of effusive language to welcome the pedal-piano, rhetorics of regeneration and public education are absent from reviews of instrumental repertories performed during the period.
From the outset, Paseloup included small doses of early music in programs otherwise based around the Viennese classics and, before long, Wagner. Unsurprisingly, he included the established Here, the exigencies of paying a chorus militated against his popularizing instinct: Their choral music was not revived in France with equal speed, consistency, or enthusiasm.
Bach in particular posed multiple problems. Pasdeloup had known certain Handel oratorios from his youth: While old staples of Italian choral music by Leo, Durante, and Jommelli gradually disappeared from concert programs, and even that of Marcello faded somewhat, editions and performances of Handel increased beyond measure.
In —65 the publishers E. Despite an announcement in August that mentioned auditions, and despite numerous subscription It also followed a model that was becoming increasingly common in SecondEmpire Paris: In this respect, however, Paris lagged well behind certain of the French regions. He cited as key the oratorios of Bach, Handel, and Haydn, and the a cappella music of the late sixteenth century. From to the early s, no early music was featured.
The pamphlet was also published independently. Nevertheless, few Parisians would have known much about Alsatian musical traditions. The same was true of Niort: Among Catholic societies, that distinction went to the prince de la Moskova, himself a successor to Choron. The choir was renowned for singing Sistine Chapel repertory even after , when its repertory changed somewhat and for singing largely to its own kind: While sympathizing in general, the author reminds Kreutzer that Niort had boasted such a society for 20 years — It was only those who saw the potential for wider social action who were disappointed, not least because it seemed to give too few public performances to make an impact.
This was the aristocracy at play. But the whiff of exclusivity persisted. See Loth, Notice sur M.
Formulaire de recherche
JR 28 January , n. Two events in Paris are of particular importance: As reported unsigned in La France chorale henceforth FC 2 no. To at least one of the participating societies this was a familiar work: Emile Mathieu de Monter, a staunch supporter of the popularization of early sacred music, was sterner. The same was true of the septet from Les Huguenots.
Denis Morrier
Scandalized in any case by the thought of this work being sung other than on its appointed day of the Church year the concert was on Easter Saturday , he was no less shocked by what he heard: From that point, noise, uproar, scandal, not to mention disillusionment! In soliciting their co-operation, Bourgault-Ducoudray made a radical attempt to bolster a choir of wealthy amateurs with one comprising artisans and laborers.
His credentials for such a task were impeccable: The immediate inheritor of this legacy was Charles Lamoureux. In meticulous detail, he described how many extra singers he would need, where the orchestra would be placed, how he would organize rehearsals, and how he would go about obtaining a translation. The project was rejected by six votes to two.
The St Matthew Passion rather more than half of it followed in March and April , with multiple Critics were, with few exceptions, bowled over by the prospect of a French choral tradition in the making. Estimates placed the outlay for his St Matthew Passion alone at one hundred thousand francs fully a third of his outlay for Lohengrin in Pasdeloup, too, found it almost impossible to break even if a professional concert involved a paid choir.
Two characters were central: It was only for the performance of Acis that Deroye succeeded in realizing a longcherished ambition—to perform such repertory with orchestra. For the score and parts had been lent by the only conductor in Paris who insisted on using the original Handel: The same point is stressed in E. As such, these were remarkable events in a society where rules governing the social mixing of the sexes, in particular among the petit bourgeoisie and lower classes, seemed intractably strict.
But he saw the possibility of annexing oratorio, presented in concert, to the repertory of liturgical music. They generated the same levels of enthusiasm in Aix as had the Handel performances at Dijon, although they lacked the element of social integration. Whether Poisot and Deroye would have been able to fuse their societies of women and men is, of course, another matter. Yet despite the historical links between Cecilianism and Ultramontanism, the relationships between such activity and cardcarrying Ultramontanism were not straightforward.
A sense of Catholic heritage more generally appears to have been just as important. At Rouen, for instance, early Italian sacred music was encouraged by Archbishop Blanquart de Bailleul — , himself a staunch Gallican. Stronger evidence for a full-scale Palestrinian revival comes from that cluster of cathedrals in the east of the country: Two were particularly prominent: Claude, an acquaintance of both Danjou and Morelot, was the driving force behind the introduction of the music of Palestrina, Victoria, Bach, and Handel at the cathedral.
But both men probably supervised the in-house production of choir-books containing a selection of their own a cappella music alongside generous helpings of Palestrina. By the cathedral had adopted the Roman rite under the guidance of the Ultramontane Bishop of Langres, Mgr Parisis served — The histories of two other revivalist cathedrals—Moulins and Autun— are closely linked. June was a turning point: Lacour recommended that Duvois emulate them. The collection was entitled Liber motetorum ad usum ecclesiae cathedralis molinensis. Missing at both Langres and Moulins, however and probably elsewhere, most of the time , was the music of early French traditions.
That might be expected at Langres, but perhaps less so at the more eclectic Moulins. We know little about the longevity or revival of the French grand motet or of the music of the French Baroque organists in liturgical contexts. There must, however, have been outposts of a kind of musical Gallicanism. Carpentras, in a limited way, was one such. As Marbot indicated in , Aix was another.
But since Musica sacra was an avowedly Ultramontane publication we should perhaps not expect detailed coverage of cathedrals that retained seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music in their liturgies. Yet it was also indicative of a larger-scale phenomenon: F21 Liasse 8. Rather, the sense of a challenge to prevalent cultural attitudes arose from the density of largely unrelated events preceding the Franco-Prussian War. In the process he was able to dispense with 56 bars of conversation between Pluto and Mercury, and a short air, while compressing Editors of postwar publications either followed, or actively tried to neutralize, this trend.
Two champions—Adolphe Adam and Charles Poisot—stand out. Yet that apologia is as important for its sense of compromise as for its passages of eulogy. But Adam was explicit: Adam recounts the story as part of his Rameau biography of included in Adam, Derniers souvenirs, 63— Adam, Derniers souvenirs, In introducing his material to buyers, Poisot uttered thoughts that were to become leitmotifs of pro-Rameau writing in the next decade: I should like to express a wish in ending this already over-long preface; it is that the French government should do for the works of Rameau that which George III of England has done for those of Handel; that which a committee of German artists is now doing, in Leipzig, for the works of the immortal J.
French music journals had always published reports of musical activities in neighboring countries; yet during this period those reports ceased to have the neutral tone of reportage. It was simply too risky. Quite by accident, the timing was opportune for those who wished to make grand statements about competing cultures: Anti-Wagnerian Parisian journalists grasped the nationalist baton and ran with it, pitting a French national hero against an arrogant German invader; in Dijon, however, such national symbolism had no purchase whatever.
They remained unnamed, as did the hapless pianist: Nothing should be taken to extremes, not even the most salutary of musical reactions, and I think that retrogradist pianists are wrong in their wish to make harpsichord music heard at any price. Of course, there are some very beautiful pieces; but they are not all beautiful, and, as with works of all eras, there are some very mediocre ones. Does the fault lie with the performance or the composition? Nevertheless, it is a fact that the Couperin and Rameau pieces were received with a frostiness whose irreverence merits note.
Nous ne savons [pas]. By contrast, there were already signs in the s that French Baroque music was more palatable when suitably repackaged. Henry Cohen remarked in the Chronique musicale of that new interest in writing orchestral suites marked a renewal of eighteenth-century ideas. However, that very year proved that such a transformation was indeed possible, given the right circumstances and the right repertory. It offered a spectacular example of how a single individual who seized an opportunity could change entrenched perceptions, attract a brand new audience, and render the supposedly scholastic the object of frenetic enthusiasm—all within a few years.
Chronique musicale henceforth CM , 3 no. For a detailed examination of this phenomenon in precisely these terms, see Morris, The Wellsprings of Neo-Classicism in Music. This page intentionally left blank 3 — Few could have predicted the impact of the six organ recitals that Alexandre Guilmant organized for the Exposition Universelle of He was central to many of the stories of early music in the late nineteenth century in France: His solo concerts ran uninterrupted from to , and then from to Guilmant was central to a further change in emphasis in the history of early music: Despite increasing interest among instrumentalists, the early and middle years of the century had seen revivals of early music centre mostly around choral repertories: The increase in instrumental activity did not mean that choral endeavors were relegated to second place.
The period contained its fair share of choral milestones: But the Second-Empire phenomenon of concert societies largely dedicated to early music was replaced by a preference for a much more broad-ranging repertory on the model of Lamoureux, whose Handel and Bach choral performances of the early s had given way, by , to an oratorio repertory focused on living French composers: Massenet, Gounod, and Franck in particular.
In Paris, the exception to this new eclecticism in choral society programming was Bordes and his Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, who focused almost exclusively on music before Their bringing of a host of Bach cantatas to Parisian attention in the s was of paramount historical importance. See Di Grazia, Concert Societies, Italian music gave way to that of Germany and, to a limited extent, France. Handel and then Bach completely displaced Marcello for early choral music and dominated early instrumental music. Palestrina remained a model, but interest in Lassus and other FrancoFlemish or Spanish sacred polyphonists increased dramatically.
There were renewed attempts to rehabilitate French stage music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at least in print. Each revival brought with it considerable intellectual and cultural baggage, some of it appropriated publicly by reformers, some of it remaining just under the surface of the rhetorics used by contemporary writers. The religious history of the period is fraught. Nevertheless, as local histories attest, it was precisely during this period— and up to the formal separation of Church and State in —that a limited 3. Act II was performed complete alongside excerpts from all other acts.
The Schola Cantorum founded placed itself at the centre of that activity. The Virtuoso as Propagandist: Guilmant was one such, Gigout another. The repertory for these occasions was necessarily wide, routinely including an improvisation and a couple of pieces by the featured organist. It was probably for that reason that certain pieces soon became regular inauguration fodder: Guilmant took part in the inauguration of the restored Saint-Sulpice organ in and then gave a solo recital on it on 2 May.
He began with a Handel concerto which Antoine Elwart considered too slight to show off the instrument fully. Then came the centrepiece: Elwart went into raptures: The audience was transported. He understood that, in a vast building, chords need time to develop fully; and the bass passagework he played on the pedal-board was rendered with perfect clarity.
Let us console ourselves with the thought that its musical education will gradually improve. Following the time-honored custom of leaving concerts before 4. With some prescience, Elwart predicted that Guilmant, who had burst onto the Paris scene the previous year, would soon return as a titulaire. Tant pis pour le public. Neither was public coolness toward Bach consistent. The pricing structure accounts for much: His top ticket price was 3F; his lowest a mere 50c.
Moreover, to provide variety both he and Gigout included instrumental and vocal solos in their programs. The recipe proved irresistible: It is hardly surprising, then, to see Guilmant expand his project in , when he sent press releases to Paris musical journals advertising a series of concerts, with orchestra this time, based around the Handel organ concertos. The perils of working with the press are well illustrated by the discrepancies in the coverage of this concert: Bach is characterized by his complex writing, dominated by great thoughts, without concern for outward effect or for audience opinion.
Handel is characterized by clarity of thought; he is greatness in simplicity. Both had, therefore, a highly-developed sense of beauty; but this feeling revealed itself within them in entirely different ways. Lists for names , names , and names are in the BNF Musique: There was no question, however, that such music could hold seven thousand people enthralled; nor that the same pieces could be repeated year after year to public acclaim.
Biographical accounts reaching back into late eighteenth-century Germany Gerber and England Burney , of course, helped sustain that image. Both were rooted in the demonstration of technological excellence in an industry in which French manufacturers were rapidly gaining ascendancy, as their piano-making forebears had done for several decades until the shock of their defeat by Steinway of New York at the Exposition Universelle of For most of his concert career, Guilmant played both Baroque and modern repertories on brand new or recently restored organs designed for large spaces: French industrial supremacy produced turbocharged Bach.
Yet during the same period much of the animus against pianists and Baroque harpsichord repertory also evaporated, to be replaced by either benign acceptance or a more sharply focused brand of criticism, often aimed at performance style. Women and pedal pianos still did not seem to mix: His repertory during the nineteenth century stretched from Loeillet and Daquin to Liszt, Brahms and his own works; and although he never abandoned the piano for clavecin music he was unusual in his championing of the harpsichord. He was also beloved of chamber musicians, with whom he played much of his early music repertory.
By the late s it was becoming commonplace for pianists to include a short item by Handel, Bach, or Scarlatti or, more usually, two of the three in solo recital programs. On these concerts, see Fauser, Musical Encounters, chapter 1. The Pleyel harpsichord gave him considerable control over timbre and dynamics. Similarly, his approach to Bach was oblique. Indeed, it seems that he simply did not play fugues. His core Bach repertory consisted of chamber pieces in which he acted as joint soloist or accompanist: As a performer, in the last decades of the century he had a virtual monopoly on this music.
Moreover, foreign pianists tended to limit themselves to the trinity of Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti; the equivalent French repertory lay stubbornly outside the international canon. His approach trapped clavecin music in the stereotypically feminized mould of the exquisite miniature and arguably militated against any larger cause, patriotic or otherwise.
Moreover, he played a fraction of the clavecin music he edited, and avoided the big pieces. As Arthur Pougin reported: His predilections were well understood: For this concert 8 January Lamoureux had reduced ticket prices in order to attract a wider public.
French musicians knew, not least from modern compositions, what a French dance suite was. Their concerts of the late s generally contained four items at most, principally complete sonatas. A similar series the following year began on 30 April with the Sonata in B minor. In they became more daring, with a series featuring one composer per concert.
Here, in the last years of the century, they dominated the solo items, sometimes even playing two concertos each in a single performance. The need for completeness was also one of the main sources of frustration for those, such as Arthur Pougin, who hoped for a revival of French Baroque stage music: Van Waefelghem and Delsart played adapted seventeenth-century instruments; the violinist Remy possessed a quinton of around the same period.
Emery-Desbrousses, the sounds he produced appeared nostalgic: It began in with a simple arrangement, played by the oboist Louis Bleuzet, to which were added four harps in January His concert of 24 March was open to the public, but he also invited guests by means of a personally topped and tailed letter printed to match the program and folded into it. Significantly, after some aggressive nationalism in reports of their concerts at the Exposition Universelle of , reviews revealed not a hint of reverence for the music, or even pride in the fact of its being French.
This was idealist, escapist entertainment of a kind enshrined in the Vieux Paris medievalism of the Paris Exposition. No, but in the s that, at last, did not matter. In fact, in its replication of old salon culture, it offered a precious taste of that civilization.
The rococo could be embraced once more. On the nationalist tone of adopted by Adolphe Jullien and Charles Darcours, among others, see Fauser, Musical Encounters, chapter 1. Program for a Louis van Waefelghem concert of 24 March Finesse, grace, elegance, purity—he possesses all the requisite qualities to captivate an audience. If you like spiritism, go and hear our striking virtuoso. You will feel yourself transported to the past. Nevertheless, it took until the s for such attitudes to become common in musical discourse and to be celebrated in the concert arena.
Only then could enthusiasm for large-scale Bach and the French dance miniature coexist. There is no evidence that the society ever put on a complete, large-scale work in the manner of Choron, Bourgault-Ducoudray, or Lamoureux. That task was taken on by Fuchs herself, who with her husband, Edmond, set up the choral society Concordia in Their performances were both expensive and exclusive.
Instrumental soloists were rare, unless they came from the school itself; but a recurring name is that of Charlotte Tardieu de Malleville, who played Scarlatti and the French harpsichord repertory, sometimes on a harpsichord, at concerts of the s. Honorary members included several early music revivalists and sympathizers: Although the statutes allowed prospective members to be put forward by any two members of the society, a list from reveals that almost all the performing members since had been recommended by one or other of the Fuchses Anon. Lamoureux did not follow his St Matthew Passion of with other complete performances of largescale Bach choral works but increasingly limited himself to two early choral pieces: Two institutions were closely involved: Between its inception and , the society had presented just three works: Deldevez presented these extracts once more, at Easter the following year, and then gave them up until A complete Mass in B minor was scheduled for the concerts spirituels of but had to be abandoned because the choir was under prepared.
Thereafter, the work was repeated in , , and While Bordes never put on the large-scale works, he achieved critical mass with the smaller ones. The entire concert scene, in other words. Where Concordia might manage three concerts in a year, the Chanteurs gave around twenty in Paris alone, sometimes giving completely different programs on successive days.
In addition, they undertook regional tours that were extensive and equally crowded. The story of the provinces is patchier. Nevertheless, several towns had regular concert series at which early music was featured, if only occasionally: Angers, Rennes , Concerts Classiques See Bordachar, Charles Bordes, Other centres emerged more strongly, Lyon in particular. But nothing is likely to reveal a density of Bachian activity comparable to that of the very area of France that was no longer French: Those traditions strengthened after Protestant and Catholic traditions coexisted: The St John Passion appeared astonishingly early, in , thereby preceding by some years the French premiere of In Paris, critical responses to Bach were mixed; but all were tinged with the recognition that a cult was in the making.
For Bellaigue, whose provocative text caused several critics to express moral outrage surely the reaction he wanted , Bach worship had taken over Bach appreciation. Hyperbole seemed the best antidote: Of all the great musicians, the greatest, perhaps, that is to say he without whom music itself would not exist, the founder, the patriarch, the father, the Abraham, the Noah, the Adam of music, Johann Sebastian Bach, is the most tedious.
Handel comes only afterwards. Read through one of his concertos, especially the Concerto for Three Pianos horrible Trinity! La Passion selon Saint Mathieu! Since the sun has dark spots, he wrote that the sun has dark spots. Il a eu la hardiesse de dire tout haut ce que la plupart entre nous pensent tout bas. And it was itself, like Wagner-bashing, an indication of the strength of Bach fervor. How is it to be explained? Possibly, not least because of the shared passion for both Bach and Wagner among music-lovers which Robert also noted, and to which Bellaigue had referred indirectly by yoking them together.
Some Bach performers, instrumentalists especially, thought not. At a Colonne concert, the latter clearly milked the central ritornello movement of the E major concerto for all it was worth. For the audience it was much more seductive. The latter was not a claim restricted to the elite press. Only one question remained. Bordachar, Charles Bordes, See De Castera Ed. The two Marais churches of Saint-Gervais and Notre-Dame des Blancs-Manteaux were, for the rest of the century, the central proponents of Palestrinian liturgical music in Paris, sometimes combining forces.
Toward the end of , for instance, NotreDame des Blancs-Marteaux programmed the following: The services with sermon cost 1F and 2F; funding for came from subscriptions of 50F and 30F and on-the-door tickets costing between 50c and 2F. The programs devised by Bordes and Dukas for these two concerts of early music are historically important: Given its relatively narrow Catholic and liturgical aims, the Schola and its supporters represented a wide spectrum of musical and political opinion. Other writers included Alongside De Boisjoslin, who managed the all-important news column, they each, in their different ways, contributed to the propagation of a moderate Ultramontane musical ideology in which Gregorian chant as taught at Solesmes and Palestrinian polyphony whether original or pastiche were paramount.
This latter form of dissemination, with which the Schola achieved considerable success, brings the nineteenth-century historical cycle back to the beginning: But their silences speak louder. Autun, Langres, and Moulins. Neither was there any real acknowledgement of the Cecilian work of the Toulousain Aloys Kunc — , or his successor, as editors of Musica sacra —84, — F21 , box 1.
The propaganda element is clear: Michel Brenet betrayed some discomfort on this score in an encomium of to Bordes. The Tribune presented a slightly less selective history of the regeneration of Catholic church music in France, and there was no aggressive sectarianism in the propaganda which De Boisjoslin provided. In memoriam , 13— Marty regularly presented Palestrinian and French sixteenth-century repertory at examination time. As though to prove the point, on the same page he printed news of M.
The Gabrieli motet had appeared as a music supplement to the April edition. But instead Handel was brushed aside. This is especially counterintuitive given that Guilmant was a Schola founder and Bourgault-Ducoudray a president. Personal taste may have played its part. Guilmant had to replace him. Discussed in chapter 7, Such consideration for regional One gains an insight into this acceleration from studying the exhaustive bibliographical work carried out by Jean Peyrot shortly before World War I. His card index of references, arranged by composer, repeatedly shows the same pattern of increasing local attention, especially for composers of the FrancoFlemish school.
Fulcher has shown that the chanson populaire had, for different reasons, been something of a political pawn since the s. Nothing was said in print or, it seems, in surviving correspondence; but, along with Lully, Rameau, and Charpentier, these composers were doubtless too overtly Gallican to form part of the approved Schola repertory.
The practice was, however, contested. Semaine religieuse, 12 no. Dumont, who had reputedly insisted on retaining plainchant roots in his masses, was a different matter; and the only known Messe royale, in its various modernizations, was consistently applauded by Ultramontanes.
But neither edited the motets. The Ramiste Charles Poisot edited both editions, which are undated but before and c.
Raphaëlle LEGRAND | IReMus
New work on folk song also helped. In concert, the chanson triumphed in the hands of Lassus especially. His lightness of touch, freshness, and vitality—all perceptible despite the contrapuntal texture—delighted reviewers and audiences alike. For a fuller discussion, see chapter 5. It is a slight, unpretentious work, simple and delicate, with a certain aura of artlessness, but full of exquisite grace. The melodic line undulates and glides like a harmonious sigh.
The fallout from both was considerable. Culture, to0, came under scrutiny as a potential source of national weakness. The pained reevaluation of central aspects of French life thus extended widely, from the nature of masculinity and the need for better military training to the value of education and culture, and, in Republican minds at least, the welding of the French people into a cohesive nation sharing a single language and celebrating a common sense of heritage inculcated in young citizens from their earliest school days.
Neither would there be anything to compare with s evangelizing for Handel oratorio as a cultural, educational, and morally strengthening activity for the adult population. But culture is not the same as practice, and heightened symbolic value does not necessarily make a repertory acceptable for professional or other public use. Comparisons with contemporary attitudes towards historical stage plays are necessary here.
On the musical side I cannot agree with Charles B. Pougin, for instance, whom Paul presents as on the anti-Rousseau side — , was no right-winger, but a radical Republican; Republican too were other Ramistes, including Johannes Weber and Julien Tiersot. It is genuinely sad that the present generation is condemned to ignorance of a single work by Lully, Campra, Rameau, or Destouches, these fathers of the French lyric stage.
There was every reason, then, for postwar musicians to call for the elevation of French operatic models dating from a period when German opera did not appear to threaten all around it.