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  • Das Mittelalter im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Kompositionsgeschichte in Frankreich by Stefan Morent
  • Mattias Lundberg
Das Mittelalter im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Kompositionsgeschichte in Frankreich. By Stefan Morent. (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, bd. 72.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013. [200 p. ISBN 9783515102940. i42.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Stefan Morent sets out in this book to examine how the Middle Ages were understood, interpreted, and explored artistically in nineteenth-century French musical culture, with special emphasis on repertoire rather than on discourses concerning musical aesthetics and literature. As a German scholar, Morent takes something of an outsider’s position in relation to types of metahistorical topics that throughout the twentieth century have otherwise been addressed mainly in French and Belgian scholarship.

The book (which was also Morent’s Habilitationsschrift at the University of Tübingen) is centered around three case studies, providing one chapter each on compositional contexts and processes in the music of Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie. These chapters draw on a number of works wherein Morent (and others) [End Page 692] have identified allusions to medieval repertoires and compositional techniques, alongside more abstract reverberations of music from the Middle Ages. One may be surprised to find that composers such as Maurice Emmanuel and Charles Koechlin are not represented among the case studies, given the preponderance of such medievalisms in their works. It is possible that Morent has decided to deliberately focus on French composers who have, in later historiographical contexts, been regarded as “major,” rather than others for whom historical perspectives were at the core of their creative interests. Louis Niedermeyer figures in all chapters, as one would expect, whereas Joseph d’Ortigue and François Auguste Gevaert do not appear at all— surely their importance in Paris must have been considerable. Even so, Morent’s choice of case studies gives the book a specific angle, as it links certain elements of perceived “Frenchness” exactly to the medievalist elements. This ought to be of considerable interest to scholarship on the three composers studied.

In the first case study, Morent argues in a number of analyses that Fauré’s works— mainly the Requiem op. 48, which is his main case here—present an integrated scope of harmony, where modal and tonal/functional aspects have formed a synthesis. Modality thus augments the exhausted possibilities of functional harmony and moves in a completely different direction than chromatic surface-layer elaborations of strong tonal progressions, common in much coeval German and Austrian music, and which occasionally may appear similar to the modal features in Fauré. In order to make a comparative evaluation, Morent inserts an excursus wherein Fauré’s writing is contrasted with (among other things) a “bipolar” relationship of tonal and modal features in medievalist works by Franz Liszt. This is an interesting observation which could undoubtedly, backed up with further argument and analysis, be extended to a broader hermeneutical stratagem for a particular “French” style of nineteenth-century musical medievalism. One must, however, ask whether Liszt’s education in a pedagogical-cum-aesthetic paradigm that predates, by at least thirty-five years, Fauré’s boarding at the École Niedermeyer in the 1850s, is not as important as (or in fact more important than) the fact that this paradigm was Viennese.

In a chapter on Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Morent draws attention to the importance both of Charles Bordes’s Schola Cantorum and to the scholarly and musical environment of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. This chapter might have benefitted from a wider scope of analysis and not being so strictly focused on Pelléas et Mélisande; Morent seems to admit that the historicisms here are vague, often exemplified in declamatory elements from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music and music theory, rather than from medieval repertoire.

Out of the three cases analyzed in detail, the final study on Erik Satie is the most cursory. Some very good points are made here, but sometimes Morent risks being at the same time too brief and too specific. As a case in point, I am not entirely convinced by a description of the progression f#–g–e–d at...

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