French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (review)

French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War. By Jane F. Fulcher (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 291 pp. $60.00

In recent years, leading musicologists have allied themselves with cultural history, focusing on the critical reception of music and the ways in which prevailing cultural and political discourses shaped how music was understood. In this rich and well-documented work, Fulcher argues that musical taste in France evolved in tandem with the country's republican politics. For her, the meaning of a piece of music in France of the early twentieth century was more a function of the discourse that surrounded it than of any inherent qualities of the composition itself. Her study thus includes little formal analysis of the music, suggesting that political culture was so important as to make formal analysis almost beside the point.

The one detailed analysis that Fulcher undertakes--of Gustave Charpentier's opera Louise (1900)--is beautifully done and vital to her story. Fulcher shows, for example, how Charpentier's use of crude intervals and jerky rhythms at key moments emphasized the unsubtle, harsh character of the opera's hero. Far from demonstrating poor technique, as certain critics maintained, Charpentier's "garish orchestration" in these places heightened the dramatic effect of his work (83). Those hostile to Charpentier's "Dreyfusard republic" were so eager to condemn the composer's work that they mistook as bad music sections of the opera crucial to its overall meaning.

But, as Fulcher shows, right-wing critics, led by the aristocratic composer Vincent D'Indy, succeeded in imposing their own meaning on Charpentier's work. Such "naturalistic" opera, D'Indy wrote, was unrefined, didactic, and worst of all un-French. It ignored the religious roots of genuinely French musical traditions, turning instead to foreign and, in particular, to Jewish-inspired work. D'Indy wanted French musicians to look to their own indigenous masters, though his allegiance to Richard Wagner and to German symphonic music required some explanation.

Despite these difficulties, Fulcher argues, conservatives managed to seize control over the discourse on music in the early years of the new century. They convinced members of the mostly elite music-going public of the value of religious music and of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French composers whose work had not been "corrupted" by the Revolution and by Jewish figures such as Giacomo Meyerbeer and Jacques Offenbach. Central to D'Indy's project was the Schola Cantorum, a private music school established as an alternative to the National Conservatory, the Republic's official training ground for France's musical elite.

Also fundamental to the conservatives' success, Fulcher writes, was the rightward drift of the Republic after 1905. An increasingly conservative Republic dropped its support for the "Dreyfusard" music of Charpentier and Emile Zola's collaborator Alfred Bruneau and helped legitimize the nationalist discourse of right-wing music critics like D'Indy. By the eve of World War I, Fulcher maintains, the triumph of a nationalist and traditionalist taste in music mirrored the triumph of right-wing nationalism in parliament, press, and government.

The problem with this argument is that it oversimplifies the political history of the period. Musical taste may have become progressively more conservative after 1900, but the Republic's political evolution was far more complex. The left-leaning "Dreyfusard" government that Fulcher takes as representing the essence of republican thought, as its steady-state before sliding to the right, was a short-lived phenomenon (1899-1905) unrepresentative of the Third Republic as a whole. Most governments before and after it hewed to the center, with the exception of the largely conservative cabinets of the 1890s. Conservative nationalists did, indeed, seem victorious with the election of Raymond Poincaré as president in 1913. But after a few months, a cabinet loyal to Poincaré fell to a...