La vie musicale sous Vichy (review)

La vie musicale sous Vichy. Sous la direction de Myriam Chimènes. Brussels: Editions Complexe, 2001. [420 p. ISBN 2870278640. C—28.81.] Music examples, illustrations, index.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the musical life of Nazi Germany, with scholars such as Michael Kater and Pamela Potter contributing much to our understanding of how Nazi policies and attitudes affected the German musical world during the dark years of the Third Reich. It seems only natural that the focus of this investigation would eventually be widened to include those countries that fell under Nazi domination either before or during the Second World War.

During the same period that scholarly interest in musical life under the Nazis has increased so dramatically, France has been engaged in an earnest, if somewhat belated, examination of its wartime history, an examination that was launched in 1987 when the sensational trial of Klaus Barbie (the so-called Butcher of Lyon) raised uncomfortable questions about the attitudes and actions of both the French people and their government during the war.

La vie musicale sous Vichy, the fruit of a 1999 conference on "Musical Life in France During the Second World War," owes its existence to the confluence of these two distinct yet equally important trends. Reflecting the efforts of scholars from France, Germany, Austria, and the United States, the twenty-one articles in the collection cover a wide variety of topics and are arranged under four headings: politics, institutions, practices and distribution, and cities. Indeed, the collection's title might be considered a bit misleading, as many of the articles deal with the effects of policies instituted not by the Vichy government, but by the German occupiers. As might be expected in such a diverse collection, a variety of approaches are on display and, to a certain extent, the quality and usefulness of the essays varies as well. All are well-documented, however, and some have been illustrated with various charts, musical examples, and reproductions of title pages. Those essays that were not originally written in French have been translated into that language, and as is usual with French publications, the index includes only proper names of individuals. Ably edited by Myriam Chimènes, the collection recently received the Prix Thorlet from the Académie des Beaux Arts.

Many of the articles provide vivid portrayals of French musical life under both the Occupation and Vichy governments. Alexandra Laederich, for example, writes about the various effects of the war on Parisian concert societies and details their struggles with issues of personnel, finances, and repertoire; other authors offer similar glimpses into the wartime musical life of Rennes, Marseille, and Bordeaux. Cécile Méadel provides an overview of French radio broadcasting during the war, and Philippe Morin discusses how the French recording industry responded to problems created by the new political circumstances, as when the suppression of recordings by Jewish artists created significant gaps in the catalogs of major companies.

Other articles reveal unsettling truths about the actions of various French officials. In one of the book's most poignant essays, for example, Jean Gribenski describes the gradual and systematic expulsion of Jews from the Paris Conservatoire, pointing out that the institution's director, Henri Rabaud, seemed to go out of his way to alert Nazi officials to the presence of Jewish professors and students in his institution, and was perhaps a bit too eager to know what action those officials wanted him to take to address the situation. Myriam Chimènes gives us an intriguing summary of Alfred Cortot's career during the occupation, aptly describing his passage from Pétainism to collaboration as being guided by "a strange mélange of opportunism and blind naïveté" (p. 52; my trans.).

The popular music scene is not neglected. We learn from Ludovic Tournès, for example, that jazz flourished in France during the war, and discover how its popularity forced the authorities to struggle with ways to define the music and...