George Sand et les Arts: Actes du colloque international organisé du 5 au 9 septembre 2004 par l'association "Château d'Ars, Centre du Romantisme." (review)

This volume about George Sand and the arts contains the proceedings of a conference organized by a regional association in the region of Berry under the impetus of the then mayor of the town of La Châtre, near Nohant where Sand spent so many years. Because of the dual nature of the proceedings – a regional initiative with elements of a scholarly conference – the proceedings include both papers of a scholarly nature with documented references and inclusion of new material and presentations that are more casual in tone and less original in content. American scholars may be disappointed to find that almost none of the presentations show any awareness of the considerable research already published in English. However, the theme of the volume and the inclusion of papers on little known works or aspects of Sand's production are a welcome introduction to a larger sample of Sand's activities and works.

Although the volume includes one presentation on Sand and Delacroix (one of the participants was a painter with an interest in the different portraits that have been made of Sand), the volume focuses on Sand's relation to music and theater with separate clusters of articles on opera and puppet shows. General readers who are not already familiar with the scholarship available about music in Sand will discover the range and the depth of Sand's musical interests and her musical expertise. Odette Goncet's overview mentions key elements of Sand's interest in music, in particular her interest in folk songs, which is not surprising considering her almost anthropological interest in folk tales and other popular regional traditions. Similarly, by mentioning the diverse musicians and composers in whom Sand was interested, Goncet points to another aspect of Sand's engagement with the arts and literature as an international phenomenon. This openness to and interest in both the regional and in the foreign deserve to be further investigated. Ileana Mihaila's article on Consuelo and eighteenth-century work on music also points out the rigorous and thorough documentation behind the novel and Sand's unusual understanding of the major trends in music at the time (with an early interest in ethnomusicology as well as foreign musical traditions, rejected in France). The article by Liliane Lascoux on the meaning of the contralto voice for Rossini and Sand as a metaphor for an ideal androgynous woman is intriguing as a starting point and indicates the need to analyze the whole corpus of Sand's works to systematically trace the use of the term and to determine when it is used in conformity with existing collocations. The talk on Sand and Chopin presents information that is already well known. But Olga Kafanova shows the importance of musical structure and musical allusions in La Dernière Aldini and the interest that the novel held for Russian writers such as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky.

The article by Simone Bernard-Griffith on theatricality in the short story "La Marquise" (1832) studies the relations between theater and passion, arguing that the escape into the illusion of theater is a pre-condition for the development of a passionate love. Bernard-Griffith traces the beginning of Sand's interest in the Don Juan myth in "La Marquise" and argues that Sand, by adding references to the veiled goddess Isis, is rewriting Molière's Don Juan in pagan rather than religious terms. Gérard Chalaye also comments on Sand's use of the myth of Don Juan, but in a later novel Le Château des désertes (1853). Through his analysis of Sand's advocacy of improvisation, which allows the actor to become an author, Chalaye studies how Sand rewrites the Don Juan story, in particular, how she interprets...