French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 1789–1870

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Mark A. Pottinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
French Music

Reverie, Schmaltz, and the Modernist Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-363
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kieffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
French Music ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Harmonic Language

Abstract In a review of 1895, Henry Gauthier-Villars described Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as “musique de rêve,” a descriptor that has been attached to Debussy’s style ever since. Partly because of the importance of the Prélude within his compositional development, the distinctive sound of Debussy’s “dream music” has often been understood as a response to the hermetic and difficult literary style of French Symbolists, especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé. Yet Gauthier-Villars’s appellation of “musique de rêve” also invoked a specifically sonic (and largely forgotten) set of cultural reference points, an aural backdrop crucial for understanding Debussy’s early style in the 1880s and early 1890s—the widespread cultivation of the topos of reverie in French music in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Settings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé by Debussy and his young contemporaries around 1890 were infused with signifiers of dream and reverie that trace back to salon genres of the 1870s and that cross-pollinated with the harmonic language of the newly fashionable valse lente in the early 1880s. Hearing Debussy’s early works in the context of this reverie topos and its aural kinship to the popular valse lente sheds light on the extent to which the radical idiosyncrasy so vaunted by modernists was constantly evolving in tandem with—and could never truly free itself from—an aural culture defined by mass production, repetition, and cliché.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-232
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

This brief epilogue addresses the relationship—historical and present—between the exclusivity of the priestly performing persona and the development and perpetuation of canonical compositions. The author suggests that the two reinforce each other; Clara Schumann’s status as a priestess was informed by her selection of certain repertoire, but at the same time her “restrained” performance of the pieces helped mark them as serious works worthy of preservation. Jumping to today’s world of performance, the author analyzes the rhetoric in a New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini comparing two young pianists. The juxtaposition of these sources suggests that some nineteenth-century values of priestly performance, such as “seriousness” and “modesty,” still inform music criticism today.

French Music Criticism and Musicology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: New Journals, New Networks

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Michel Duchesneau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
French Music ◽  
Through Diffusion

This article examines the efforts of French musicologists to create a specialized journal at the turn of the twentieth century that would clearly associate music criticism and musicology. Using as case study a set of music journals, from La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales to the Mercure musical and the Revue S.I.M. that followed, I establish the connections that brought together the nascent musicological milieu, the musical press and the artistic affinities among the principal actors in their attempt to create a new network of music critics guided by musicological exigencies. Jules Combarieu, Romain Rolland, Louis Laloy, Jean Marnold, Émile Vuillermoz and Jules Écorcheville are some of the musicologists engaged in this project between 1900 and 1914. But historical contingencies make this project a relative utopia, and requirements of the young musicology hardly meet that of a music criticism divided between disciplinary tradition and the necessity to support contemporary music. After the war, with the founding of a new Revue musicale, René Prunières, prudently, would not hire musicologists to develop a music criticism. Instead, he took up the characteristically Republican project of promoting musical culture, and thus responding to the interests of both the cultivated bourgeoisie and the musical, literary and artistic milieus through diffusion of music knowledge.

Feminist Revolutionary Music Criticism and Wagner Reception

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie McManus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
German School

Abstract Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto's lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women's rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women's journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women's movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women's rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.

Propaganda and Reception in Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism: Maurice Schlesinger, Henri Herz, and the Gazette musicale

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-60
Author(s):  
Shaena B. Weitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Central Component ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
History Of

In the mid-1830s, Henri Herz (1803–88) was an internationally renowned pianist, but his reputation today, for the most part, is that of a second-rate musician who wrote trivial variations on opera themes. This enduring picture of Herz was painted first in France in 1834 by the Gazette musicale. The Gazette’s campaign has been understood by modern scholars as a conspicuous moment in a broad aesthetic shift away from French salon music and toward high German Romanticism, and the Gazette has garnered praise for its prescience. But a closer examination of the Gazette’s articles, the events surrounding the coverage such as a pistol duel and a libel case, contemporary correspondence, and Herz’s publishing record indicate that the Gazette’s negative treatment of Herz was not an organic assessment of his output, but rather a revenge scheme orchestrated by the Gazette’s owner and Herz’s former publisher, Maurice Schlesinger (1798–1871). As a case study, the Gazette’s Herz campaign exposes the endemic corruption of the nineteenth-century press that has been portrayed as an unseemly rarity rather than a central component of historical criticism’s production. But taken more broadly, the Gazette’s articles on Herz highlight limitations in the history of reception. This article turns to media studies to explore the problematic relationship between propaganda and reception and shows how the Gazette, and other nineteenth-century journals, are still manipulating our cognition.

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