La Dramaturgie de Gustave Charpentier by Michela Niccolai (review)

In nearly 450 pages of text, Michela Niccolai has taken the lid off Charpentier studies. Adapted from her doctoral thesis, this book, in imaginative ways, has delved into the life and career of this ‘one-hit wonder’ of French musical and cultural life, and Niccolai has marshalled innumerable and diverse archival documents to bolster her arguments and lay open her case. But her case for what? The rehabilitation of Charpentier in the French musical canon? I would suggest that is only part of what she is trying to do, for her work on social history of the period, and her (rather partisan) framing of Charpentier’s ideological as well as practical involvement in utopian socialist movements within the French Third Republic, throw this character into high relief and demonstrate the composer’s importance in French cultural life during the pre-Second World War period. Indeed, this is probably the easier case to argue and she does it infinitely well.

Niccolai sets out her agenda in the introduction: she does not deal in any detail with the overstated aesthetic confrontation between Debussy and Charpentier (or at least that orchestrated by their respective supporters), nor with Charpentier’s Wagnerism, nor with his literary output. She is interested in unexplored archival documents read in the light of the sociology of the working classes during the Third Republic. The book is constructed in four parts: the first is widely contextual; the second concentrates on the premiere of Louise; the third is dedicated to Charpentier’s social action, and particularly the creation of the Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson; the fourth deals with Charpentier’s fascination and engagement with new popular media such as recordings and film. The book is completed by nearly 100 pages of invaluable appendices, source lists (pertaining to both musical and scenic aspects of the works) that practically constitute a ‘catalogue raisonné’ for the composer, a full bibliography, and an index. The book is stuffed so full of archival detail, unpublished source documents, and quotations, not to mention carefully chosen contextual information (all of which creates copious lengthy footnotes), that we sometimes lose our way a little in Niccolai’s argument, which is diluted in this sea of detail. Nevertheless, all documents presented are pertinent to and inform her argument, creating a level of thick description that is admirable and perspicacious.

The first section gives us much background and contextual detail in a swift succession of ideas, not all of which are strictly relevant straight away, but we’re in for the long haul and over the following 300 pages, all is revealed! The state and location of archival documents; Charpentier, Montmartre, and the cafés-concerts; Charpentier’s involvement with the anarchist movement; his presidentship of the Musicians’ Union and his interest in Zola and the Théâtre Libre are all briefly discussed. More detail is given on the creation of Popular Universities that flourished at the very end of the nineteenth century (and up until the First World War), and which provided structured and educational leisure activities for the working classes by proposing a rehabilitation of popular culture at the same time as a revision of cultural hierarchies. We, of course, realize that this is a prelude to the third section of the book about the Conservatoire populaire de Mimi Pinson but this is never made explicit; hence the rather free-floating nature of contextual detail. The last (unnumbered, as throughout) chapter of this section deals with the Revolutionary-style pageant the ‘Vachalcade’, which gave birth to Charpentier’s Le Couronnement de la Muse, which in turn ended up in truncated form as part of his opera Louise. Adolphe Willette, artist, friend, and collaborator at the infamous Chat Noir cabaret, asked Charpentier to provide a spectacle for the end of the Vachalcade festivities in 1897. This mid-Lenten carnival with allegorical floats appealed to Charpentier, and ten years after the first performance of his Couronnement, the composer suggested that the...