The National Conservatoire System

Discussion of the educational situation in Paris prepares the main arguments of chapters 1 and 2 in relation to nationalized and independent conservatoires in the provinces. Here, the soft power of the state-financed Paris Conservatoire (founded 1795) is contrasted with the more haphazard attempts of the privately funded Schola Cantorum (founded 1896) to act as a centralizing force. After the Revolution the cathedral choir school (maîtrise) system was initially replaced by the Paris Conservatoire alone, but the need for a deconcentrated national system of succursales was keenly felt. However, the Paris Conservatoire’s pedagogical approach could not immediately be imposed on provincial institutions, and some municipalities guarded their independence. A mixed economy of resistance and compliance resulted in a general trend towards homogenization (unity in uniformity) but more decentralist variety and ambition than the government ministry overseeing them found ideal. The Schola Cantorum showed similar centralizing tendencies but could not achieve significant institutional traction.

The New Franco-Italian School of Singing

The nineteenth-century web of teachers, singers, and teacher-singers suggests that coloratura can be examined from the perspective of treatises produced by vocal pedagogues. In addition to vocal instruction, the treatises provide clues as to interpretation, by recommending and describing vocal articulations and styles corresponding to melodic styles and role characterizations. This chapter examines pedagogical treatises in conjunction with musical scores and the careers of individual singers, attempting to trace ideas of coloratura articulation and florid-lyrical expression. The Paris Conservatoire endorsed certain teacher-singer lineages and sought to merge French and Italian traditions into a new school of singing led by three pedagogues: Laure Cinti-Damoreau, Gilbert-Louis Duprez, and Manuel Garcia II. The study reveals a bifurcation between singing styles that carries over from vocal pedagogy to the operatic stage. This division between agile, florid singing and declamatory, sustained singing heralded our modern, more familiar vocal categories, such as the coloratura soprano.

Towards ‘Rediscovery’

Throughout the period c1830-c1870, there were plans of various sorts to bring Gluck back into the theatre but none were successful. Gluck’s compositions for the stage found their way back to the theatre in different ways, ranging from short coherent sequences of numbers to complete acts in concerts to occasional semi-staged performances given by the pupils of the Paris Conservatoire.

Henriette Renié: A Threefold Legacy

In 1810, Sébastien Érard patented a double-action mechanism that would dramatically alter the trajectory of the pedal harp. While this invention granted the harp a newfound voice in orchestral music, the harp still struggled to gain ground as a solo instrument. The harp’s increased complexity necessitated that harpists themselves explore the instrument’s abilities and demonstrate these to the musical world. It is to one such harpist, Henriette Renié, that the harp owes much of its credibility as an instrument worthy of the solo stage. From her prodigious beginnings at Paris Conservatoire, Renié’s concerts captivated musicians and the public alike. Her spirit on stage exuded a love of the harp and indeed, of beauty itself. Finding existing literature to be somewhat limited, Renié gifted the harp repertoire with significant works that showcased the harp’s virtuosic abilities and inimitable qualities. Yet, her influence might not have been so widespread had it not been for her love of teaching. Committed to cultivating a love of the harp in each of her students, Renié instructed numerous harpists, including Mildred Dilling, Marcel Grandjany, and Susann McDonald. This article demonstrates Mlle. Renié’s vital role in the advancement of the harp as a solo instrument by drawing on biographical information, interview transcriptions, student testimonials, and score study. Renié heralded the harp’s potential for the entirety of her career, and her legacy rightly serves as an inspiration to today’s harpists. In surveying the impact of her performances, compositions, and teaching, it is clear that Mlle. Renié’s mastery of the harp was outmatched only by her love for it.

Transcribing Greece, Arranging France: Bourgault-Ducoudray’s Performances of Authenticity and Innovation

Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910), composer, folklorist, and long-time professor of music history at the Paris Conservatoire, dedicated intense energies to the propagation of ancient Greek modes as a modern resource for French composition. Instigated by his 1875 folk-song collection mission in Greece and Anatolia, Bourgault-Ducoudray’s attraction to Greek modes was bolstered by ideological commitments to Aryanism (nourished by his relationship and correspondence with philologist Émile Burnouf), and further reinforced by his observation of “Greek modes” in Russian and Breton folk song. This article examines how Bourgault-Ducoudray translated his quasi-philological analyses into an artistic agenda through techniques of transcription, arrangement, and composition. Beginning with a close reading of his important collection, Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’Orient (1876), a continuity is established between his transcriptive and compositional practices, with particular attention paid to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s performances of authenticity through calibrated scientific and artistic rhetoric. I then turn to the reception of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s collection by two composers—Alfred Bruneau and Camille Saint-Saëns—who rearranged his Greek songs in different contexts. Treating the songs with remarkable plasticity, they appropriated Bourgault-Ducoudray’s authority to enhance representations of “oriental” and “ancient” worlds, negotiating a balance between scholarly research and artistic integrity. The article concludes by returning to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s work in the 1880s—a period during which the musical and ideological ambitions of his song arrangements were magnified to an operatic scale—culminating in a rereading of his Thamara (1891) in light of his ethnic nationalism.

David Walter

After obtaining first prize in oboe and chamber music at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, David Walter won international prizes in Ancona, Prague, Munich, Belgrade, and Geneva. He is a founding member (1980) of the Quintette Moragues. At twenty-nine years old, he was appointed the youngest-ever oboe and chamber music professor at the Paris Conservatoire. In this interview, he examines the relationship between being a conductor and being a performer. He talks about ensemble playing skills and those specific to chamber music. Walter discusses competitions, teaching, “schools” of oboe playing, and finding your own voice. He shares artists who inspire him, reminiscences on his career, and his activities outside of music.

Ernest Chausson

Amédée-Ernest Chausson (b. 1855–d. 1899) was born in Paris to a wealthy contractor and his wife. Although he obtained a law degree in 1876, music was his true passion. He entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied briefly with Jules Massenet and then with César Franck. Between 1879 and 1883 he made several journeys to Bayreuth and became an ardent Wagnerian. He served as secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique from 1886 until his death. Chausson and his wife, Jeanne, maintained an active salon that drew many prominent figures from all the arts, and he developed close relationships with many of them, most notably the young Claude Debussy. Despite his happy family life (which included five children) and comfortable surroundings, as a composer Chausson was beset with crippling self-doubts. Struggling to express his feelings with as much emotional honesty and satisfying artistry as possible, he continually found himself “erupt[ing] with rage at seeing how what I can do is so far from what I would like to do, from what I seem to hear in my head” (from a letter of 1884). Friends ascribed the melancholy in his music to this obsessive search for what Vincent d’Indy called “the better,” to a profound empathy with the suffering of others, and to deep apprehension that critics would dismiss him merely as a wealthy amateur imitating Franck and Wagner—as indeed many did. Despite his insecurities, Chausson composed notable chamber and orchestral works, a substantial body of mélodies, and one opera, Le roi Arthus. Most observers believed that Chausson finally achieved his own voice in the late 1890s, especially in the Piano Quartet of 1897. Tragically, however, his career ended soon thereafter, on 10 June 1899: riding a bicycle at his country estate, he apparently lost control going down a hill and crashed head-first into a wall. Pierre Louÿs’s eloquent condolence letter to Mme. Chausson summed up the general reaction: “There was never a more excellent man . . . I was struck, each time, by the . . . admirable goodwill that radiated through each gesture. At every moment of his life, he felt compelled to bring happiness to people. Everyone loved him.” As his student Gustave Samazeuilh wrote, Chausson “will occupy an eminent place in the history of French music; a just recompense for a life devoted totally to the good, to work, and to the Ideal.”

Childhood in Lodève and Montpellier

Georges Auric was born in 1899 in Lodève, France, to a family of hoteliers. Three years later, his family moved to nearby Montpellier, the principal city of the Languedoc region in southern France. The year 1907 would prove to be transformative for the Aurics. During the Viticulture Revolt, the largest demonstration of Third Republic France took place virtually on the Aurics’ doorstep, launching his father’s brief political career. Meanwhile, Auric began studying piano at the Montpellier Conservatoire with Louis Combes, who introduced the young musician to modernist music and literature in addition to facilitating Auric’s acceptance into the Paris Conservatoire in 1913.

Germaine Tailleferre

Germaine Tailleferre (b. 1892–d. 1983) was a prolific composer of symphonic, chamber, film, and radio music who participated actively in French and international musical life for more than six decades. Tailleferre is most commonly remembered as the sole female member of Les Six, but her association with that group was relatively brief in the broader context of her career. Displaying early brilliance as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, Tailleferre won all the major prizes in her disciplines—Premier Prix in Harmony, Counterpoint, and Accompaniment—but never had the opportunity to compete for the Premier Prix in composition due to the suspension of the competition during the First World War. After leaving the Conservatoire, she studied with Charles Koechlin and Maurice Ravel. The latter in particular inspired her early efforts to imbue her music with neo-Baroque and neoclassical qualities. Tailleferre’s devotion to Ravel in the early 1920s, and her independence from the more capricious, experimental aesthetics pursued by Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Georges Auric, led her away from the sphere of Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie, who had helped usher Les Six into existence. In her first full-length ballet, Le Marchand d’oiseaux, composed for the Ballets Suédois in 1923, and in her Concerto for Piano commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac in 1924, Tailleferre demonstrated a propensity for pastiche and emulation, combining allusions to J. S. Bach, Chopin, Poulenc, and Stravinsky. From the beginning through the end of her career, many works reveal her attachment to perpetuum mobile rhythms and Bachian counterpoint. Although her music was widely performed in the 1920s and 1930s, and although she continued to earn accolades throughout her life, including one of the first state commissions from the French government (1938), the Prix de l’Académie des Beaux Arts (1973), and the Grand Prix Musical de la Ville de Paris (1978), her writings and her friends’ reminiscences reveal Tailleferre to have been extraordinarily modest. Due in part to her modesty, Tailleferre left behind far less music criticism and autobiographical writing than most other members of Les Six. Indeed, after Louis Durey, who left Les Six in 1921, Tailleferre is the next most meagerly documented member of Les Six, as a comparison between this article and those of her peers will attest. (See the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles “Arthur Honegger”, “Francis Poulenc”, and “Darius Milhaud”.) And those sources that do treat her output focus disproportionately on her interwar works to the exclusion of the many works she produced later in life, including Paris-Magie (1948) and Concerto de la fidelité (1981). But numerous sources touch on her contributions to French music and on her relationships with artists, composers, patrons, impresarios, and others.