scholarly journals Critical Responses to Nineteenth-Century French Music

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
James William Sobaskie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Music ◽  
Critical Responses

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.

scholarly journals The Music of Power:

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-734 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Everist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
French Music ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Stage Music ◽  
Opera Houses

Music for the stage has always been embedded in a network of power relationships between states, impresarios, librettists, artists, entrepreneurs, and composers. This article seeks to understand and explain how these relationships functioned in the period when French music drama was subject to a system of licenses, 1806–64. At the center of the inquiry are institutional structures and their relationship to those responsible for both the creation and the cultivation of stage music in the period. They explain the context for the cultural agents and products not only of the main opera houses in nineteenth-century Paris—the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Théâtre-Italien—but also of the host of smaller, shorter-lived institutions that supported and promoted opera during the period.

Music, Bacchus, and Freedom

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-176
Author(s):  
Hedy Law
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
French Music ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Freedom Of Action

Nietzsche points out in The Birth of Tragedy (1872, rev. 1886) that modern Dionysiac music began with Beethoven’s symphonic music and matured in Wagner’s music drama. Yet his account fails to explain a convention of Bacchus in pre-nineteenth-century music. This chapter provides a corrective by explaining the relationships among music, Bacchus, and freedom in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music. With the use of Euripides’s Bacchae, the section “Bacchus and Pentheus” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Nietzsche’s essay “The Dionysian World View,” this article relates the themes of musical deviance and political defiance, liberation and destruction, and orgy and regeneration to the ideas of positive and negative freedoms as well as freedom of action and freedom of motion. This article thus contextualizes d’Alembert’s De la liberté de la musique of 1759 by arguing that representations of Bacchus enable music and the body to construct freedom as an embodied concept.

The opera of the film? Eugen d’Albert’s Der Golem

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-166
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN GOOSE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Audience Appeal ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTAlthough Eugen d’Albert’s later works were a staple of new opera during the Weimar Republic, they have since been considered at best partially successful attempts to adapt his earlier and more successful ‘verismo’ idiom to the new post-war aesthetics. His 1926 opera Der Golem, however, helps to challenge this reputation. Its similarities to one of the most famous early German films, Robert Wegener’s 1920 Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, point to an intriguing relationship with one of musical modernism’s most controversial nemeses: the cinema. An analysis of critical responses to d’Albert’s opera, read in the context of characteristic early twentieth-century debates about popularity, shows how Der Golem encouraged more complex responses to mass appeal than the clear rejection often attributed to better known figures of modernism. Although the opera both flirts with and problematises different modes of audience appeal – most notably in an early scene, which has a direct parallel in Wegener’s film – its reception avoids easy alignment with mass culture. Der Golem’s unmistakeable debt to its modernist context suggests that narratives of modernism should be able to account for d’Albert’s post-war works, rather than treating them as a throwback to the nineteenth century.

"Rien de la tonalite usuelle": Edmond de Polignac and the Octatonic Scale in Nineteenth-Century France

2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 097-120
Author(s):  
Sylvia Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Symphonic Poem ◽  
French Music ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Modes Of Limited Transposition ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Shed Light

The reification and theorization of the octatonic scale, arguably one of the principal organizational devices of twentieth-century music, have been long in coming. Rimsky-Korsakov was the first to describe the scale, in an 1867 letter, discussing its use as a Leitmotiv in the symphonic poem Sadko. Stravinsky used the collection as the basis for many of his groundbreaking works, especially The Rite of Spring, but never acknowledged the fundamental role that the "Rimsky-Korsakov scale" played in his compositional technique. It took another thirty years for Messiaen to identify the collection as one of the "modes of limited transposition." And another twenty years would pass before Arthur Berger, in a 1963 article, coined the name "octatonic scale."The post-Berger generation of scholars, beginning with van den Toorn and Taruskin, have continued to shed light on the functional and formal uses of the octatonic scale. Taruskin has traced the influence of Schubert's and Liszt's use of harmonic progressions based on mediant and diminished-seventh relations on Rimsky-Korsakov, who in turn influenced a whole generation of early modernist Russians. However, the fact that Rimsky-Korsakov never wrote down in any systematic way the theory underlying the scale that bore his name--in the same way that he codified his theories of orchestration--meant that its presence in early modernist compositions, although used frequently and conspicuously by his followers, remained obscure to those outside his circle. Therefore, the presence of the octatonic collection in the music of non-Russian early modernist composers cannot be easily explained, and the sources of influence are harder to trace. Interestingly, it appears that an important historical link between nineteenth- and twentieth-century octatonic composition--a link with particular implications for the presence of octatonicism in early modernist French music--is found in the music and theoretical writings of Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834--1901), an aristocrat and amateur French composer, who, in 1879, penned not only the first pervasively octatonic composition, but also what appears to be the first treatise on octatonic theory; he went on to write several other compositions based on the "gammes chromatico-diatoniques." In 1894 one of PolignacÕs contemporaries, musicologist Alexandre de Bertha, wrote and lectured extensively about his "discovery" of the "gammes enharmo-niques." In this article, I examine the reception of the works and ideas of Polignac and Bertha by contemporary critics and composers, and PolignacÕs role as an important precursor of modern octatonic theory.

scholarly journals Dialogues of Cultures

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
Adalyat Issiyeva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Direct Study ◽  
French Music ◽  
Russian Literary

The influence of the Saisons Russes, with its utterly Orientalist appeal in defining French modernism and Western avant-garde culture in general, is widely known and discussed by many researchers from multiple perspectives (Schaeffner 1953, Garafola 1989, Davis 2010, Bellow 2013). Less emphasised to date is the fact that Russian Orientalism emerged from European stimuli and, in many respects, its very existence is indebted to French Orientalism. As the famous Russian Orientalist Vasily Bartol’d complained, “The Orient’s neighbour, Russia, despite its geographical proximity, often preferred reading shoddy Western books on the Orient to a direct study of the Orient” (Bartol’d 1925, p. 295). 1 This occurred as a result of the nineteenth-century travels of many Russian literary men, painters, and linguists to Europe (notably to France and Germany) to study with famous Orientalists. This paper contextualizes French Orientalism within nineteenth-century Russian culture and considers how French musical Orientalism was negotiated in Russian writings from the period. Despite the critical views of Russian musicians toward French music with oriental subjects, the music nevertheless resonated with Russian compositional practices and some of its devices were used occasionally to depict not only the Orient, but Russia itself.

John Philip Sousa's ‘Red Indians’: A Case Study of Race in Music

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Michael V. Pisani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
The Way

To discover that one of popular music's most famous and enduring composers wrote a march-characteristic called ‘The Red Man’ immediately arouses curiosity about the nature and substance of such a work, the reasons for writing it, and how audiences received it. John Philip Sousa composed ‘The Red Man’ in 1910 for his world tour and, like much of his music, it is still played and recorded today. I will attempt to answer these questions by examining this lesser-known but highly distinctive Sousa composition in detail. That necessarily involves seeing the piece through a variety of lenses. Since the way in which audiences listen to music has fundamentally changed in a hundred years, the closest we can come to hearing the piece through ears of 1910 is to explore a variety of critical responses from the time published in newspapers in different countries. Since these accounts are written in a stylistic language considerably different from the way modern critics write about music, the responses need to be seen in context. Many were rooted in notions of race and ethnicity prevalent among the middle- and upper-class audiences for which Sousa composed. Moreover, Sousa's audiences listened with a host of associations that accrued during the nineteenth century and are lost to us today. This was enhanced by the type of programmes on which ‘The Red Man’ was performed, which encouraged the perception of music through a national or exotic lens, or through the filter of a narrative. The musical language of this ‘Indian’ piece is hardly unique, since it owes many of its metaphors to Sousa's contemporaries. For all his originality, Sousa was also an expert assimilator. There isn’t space here to examine every derivation in this work, but by exploring a few of them we can learn much about his music and his audiences.

The Supernatural as the Author's Sphere: Jinghua Yuan's Reprise of the Rhetorical Strategies of Honglou Meng

T oung Pao ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-161
Author(s):  
Ying Wang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Honglou Meng ◽  
Cao Xueqin ◽  
Li Ruzhen

AbstractThis study investigates the similarities between Li Ruzhen's nineteenth-century novel Jinghua yuan and Cao Xueqin's eighteenth-century masterpiece Honglou meng in terms of their artistic experimentation, by its focus on Li's appropriation of Cao's rhetorical strategies. It places the two novels in the context of vernacular literature in the mid- and late Qing period and attributes the disappearance of the "pseudo-oral" narrator in both novels to the dramatization of the narration and the establishment of a supernatural realm as the sphere of the author. The rhetorical strategies employed in Honglou meng, and subsequently evoked in Jinghua yuan, are not, as this study intends to show, the sporadic engagements of the supernatural seen in earlier novels. Instead, they are sophisticated mechanisms at work in both the model and its imitation. In comparing the similarities of rhetoric in these two novels, this essay emphasizes Li Ruzhen's artistic creativity by highlighting his critical responses to Honglou meng and his ingenuity in re-using Cao Xueqin's techniques. Cette étude examine les similitudes entre deux romans, le Jinghua yuan composé au 19e siècle par Li Ruzhen et le chef-d'œuvre de Cao Xueqin, le Honglou meng, qui date du siècle précédent, concernant leurs aspects expérimentaux dans le domaine artistique; pour ce faire elle se concentre sur la façon dont Li Ruzhen s'est approprié les stratégies rhétoriques de Cao Xueqin. L'article replace les deux romans dans le contexte de la littérature vernaculaire d'au milieu et de la fin des Qing, et attribue la disparition du narrateur "pseudo-oral" dans les deux œuvres à la dramatisation de la narration et à l'instauration d'un domaine surnaturel constituant la sphère de l'auteur. Comme entend le montrer cet essai, les stratégies rhétoriques employées dans le Honglou meng et reprises plus tard dans le Jinghua yuan ne se limitent pas à des interventions sporadiques du surnaturel comme dans les romans plus anciens. On a au contraire affaire à des mécanismes sophistiqués mis en œuvre tant dans le modèle que dans son imitation. La comparaison des similitudes rhétoriques dans les deux romans permet de mettre l'accent sur la créativité artistique de Li Ruzhen en mettant en lumière sa réponse critique au Honglou meng et l'ingéniosité avec laquelle il reprend à son compte les techniques de Cao Xueqin.

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