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  • Proust écrivain de la musique: l'allégresse du compositeur by Cécile Leblanc
  • Jennifer Rushworth
Proust écrivain de la musique: l'allégresse du compositeur. Par Cécile Leblanc. (Le Champ proustien, 3.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 647 pp., ill.

While much has been written on the topic of Proust and music, this weighty book has two innovative and exciting aims: firstly, to situate Proust's novel within contemporary writing about music, particularly of a journalistic nature; and secondly, to demonstrate that Proust himself participated in this milieu, showcasing the author not only as an 'écrivain de la musique' (the titular phrasing) but more specifically as a 'critique musical'. Cécile Leblanc puts an end to speculation about the extent of Proust's musical competencies, establishing his familiarity and fluency with music and with writing about music in various guises: as a listener, a concert-goer, a reader, and a writer. The first part assesses Proust's musical formation and listening experiences within the family, in private salons, at public concerts, and via the new technologies of the théâtrophone and the pianola. The second part situates Proust in relation to debates concerning how and by whom music should be discussed. Here Proust's writing is shown to share certain traits with music criticism of the time, stylistically and thematically. Importantly, in this middle section Leblanc argues that Proust's [End Page 590] experience of music criticism—both as a consumer and a producer thereof—was a 'point de passage essentiel' (p. 242) in the genesis of the Recherche. In the third and final part, Leblanc analyses the function of composers mentioned by Proust in and out of the Recherche, in particular Wagner, Beethoven, Chopin, and César Franck. She also situates Proust further in relation to other contemporary writers about music, both critics (starting with Reynaldo Hahn) and novelists (ending with Romain Rolland). The author's comparison of Proust to other musical novels is quite lacunose and unsatisfactory, and remains an area ripe for further investigation. In the end, Leblanc claims that Swann resembles a music critic of the nineteenth century, while the narrator is more modern in his approach. This is an interesting and a productive retelling of the Swann–narrator relationship, and one that also resonates with current work on listening in Proust's novel more broadly. Much of the success of this volume lies in the richness and variety of its source materials: newspapers and magazines that Proust read; Proust's correspondence and correspondents; his earlier writings about music; drafts and manuscripts of the Recherche; the inimitable Recherche itself. It is regrettable that amid Leblanc's extensive reading she fails to take much account of anglophone criticism on her topic (to which lament I might add the misattribution of an article on p. 599). Still graver is the author's willingness to shore up the long-standing identification of Vinteuil with Franck, an identification that overlooks the purpose of choosing to describe the imaginary music of an ultimately fictional composer. Nonetheless, in reading Proust alongside his contemporaries Leblanc provides a very welcome and masterful polyphonic portrait of French musical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result, daunting in length and scope, calls for a return to the Recherche with renewed and invaluable appreciation of its musical contexts and concerns.

Jennifer Rushworth
St John's College, Oxford
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