French Music Since Berlioz (review)

The English musicologists Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter, both specialists in French music, have put together a broad survey of classical music in France since 1870 in a group of twelve essays by eleven scholars, all of them English. Described by the editors as a "mosaic," the collection mostly excludes jazz and popular music (Deborah Mawer's chapter on French music in the 1930s is an exception) and also attempts to move beyond or away from the usual emphasis on French music's close relationship with literature and the visual arts to concentrate more on "the social and political context of music" (p. xix). In the historical period after Berlioz this approach makes good sense, since his death in 1869 corresponded almost exactly with the Franco-Prussian War, with Wagner's unfortunate anti-French article "Une capitulation," and with the fall of the Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic. Whether there is any special need to sacrifice the conventional alliance of French music with the sister arts is perhaps debatable, but in any event the contributors to this volume take that shift with varying degrees of seriousness. One surely cannot discuss Debussy or Chausson without invoking literature and art. Messiaen, who mostly wrote his own texts, is another story, and how that story relates to society and politics is not made immediately obvious. Nor is the story of Pierre Boulez's appointment by the government of President Pompidou to run the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM) in 1978, a move that removed Boulez from the sphere of an international conducting career and made him into a kind of high-level researcher and functionary.

So the social and political context comes and goes in French Music Since Berlioz. Some chapters are more chronicles than anything else—useful annotated lists, in a way, but not especially informed by any broader socio-political understanding of the works, despite Richard Langham Smith's just remark in chapter 5 that "a list of operas alone, with a few comments on their relative merit, is neither the story nor the history" (p. 117). Thomas Cooper's piece on opera from 1870 to 1900, for example (chap. 2), takes us chronologically through the repertoire staged at the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, from L'Africaine to Reynaldo Hahn's now forgotten L'île du rêve, with only Wagnerism and exoticism evoked as context. Cooper occasionally wades into deeper social waters, as for example when he suggests that Alfred Bruneau's operas declined in popularity as his support for Dreyfus became widely known. One wants to ask whether Vincent D'Indy's operas, by contrast, grew in popularity because of his virulent anti-Semiticism, something one instinctively doubts (Jane Fulcher has explored D'Indy's anti-Dreyfusard position and its influence on his music in her book, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfuss Affair to the First World War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]). A chronicle is not the place, however, for exploring in depth the ambiguities inherent in the effect of a composer's social and political views on the success or failure of his music.

Timothy Jones (on nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music) and Nigel Simeone (on church and organ music) also tend toward the annotated list of works. Jones does provide some critical and analytical details, in addition to narrating the founding of various concert venues—Colonne's and Lamoureux's concert series, which would later be associated with the Conservatoire and the Schola Cantorum respectively, as well as the Société nationale de musique—which helped to make French instrumental music possible. Jones is indeed more willing than most to be critical of the works he collocates as inherently significant in his essay. Both Franck's Symphony in D minor and Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony...