Le Concours du prix de Rome de musique (1803-1968) (review)

The Prix de Rome was a prominent feature in France's cultural landscape for over a hundred and fifty years. Julia Lu and Alexandre Dratwicki's monumental volume provides the first comprehensive source of information on the competition's history and function, from its origins to its unraveling. The editors have solicited work from thirty-two contributors, a healthy mix of long-respected experts and promising young scholars. Their collective archival research and analyses make Le Concours du prix de Rome de musique a dazzling chorus of differing cultural perspectives and research traditions. The collection's nuanced contributions move beyond tired caricatures to reveal an institution that was in constant, sometimes astonishing, evolution.

The studies are grouped together to form five sections arranged in loose chronological order. There are also two introductory essays: the first explains the arrangement of the book; the second provides an excellent general history of the Prix and its major changes. An epilogue contains two important historical texts by Henri Rabaud and Pierre Lalo that offer opposing early-twentieth-century views of the competition. Space limitations make it impossible to address every contribution here. A number of interesting chapters will unfortunately go unmentioned, for which I present my apologies to their authors.

In the first section on the Prix's beginnings in the early nineteenth century, Marie-Pauline Martin opens by discussing music's initially marginal role in an Institut de France dominated by the pure sciences. Julia Lu takes up where Martin leaves off, detailing the emergence of a Prix de Rome in music, tracing how early ideas for a composition prize were initially conceived by the Conservatory's first director, Bernard Sarrette, as early as 1796. When the music prize was finally created in 1803, it was placed under the control of the Institut's Academy des Beaux-Arts, as were the older prizes in painting and sculpture. Benoît Dratwicki addresses the esthetic origins and gradual consolidation of the strange academic form that was the Prix de Rome cantata, something between Rousseau's cantate française and an Italian opera scene. This chapter, like many others that follow, also reads as a defense of the variety and individuality of the cantatas written over the course of the Prize's existence.

Jean-Claire Vançon's masterful contribution is one of the strongest in the volume, ranging well beyond the domain of the Prix de Rome to provide insight into the musical, social, and historical reasons that counterpoint exercises were part of the Prix de Rome competition. Vançon's reflections explore Cherubini's composition program at the Conservatory, the "circular relationships" between the Conservatory and the Academy, and the history of harmonic and contrapuntal instruction in nineteenth-century France. Along the way, Vançon also notes that to a certain degree, it was the Academy's imposition of the fugue in the Prix de Rome that solidified the genre's reputation as an academic form. He concludes with the observation that fugue is at once a school, a practice, and a symbol of the Academy's prestige and difference.

In turn, Bernadette Lespinard considers the choruses with orchestral accompaniment that competitors had to compose along with the fugue in the first round concours d'essai from 1831 onwards. This part of the competition is often ignored in favor of the splashier final-round cantatas. Although these choruses were never sung or played, Lespinard rightly suggests that they could tell much about Conservatory teaching practices, and her article takes a first step toward such considerations.

To close the first section, Julia Lu turns to the cantata libretti, addressing the critiques and clichés that have stuck over the years: namely their inevitable link to classical subjects and Berlioz's old zinger noting that they always begin with a sunrise or a sunset. Lu shows how cantata libretti, while often of poor literary quality, variously...