In fin-de-siècle France, the battle between the Third Republic and the Catholic Church was at the center of French politics. Fearing Catholic influence, the Republic created a national system of secular education, expelled thousands of members of religious congregations, and in 1905 separated church from state in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair. In the midst of this period, in 1890, Parisian audiences flocked to Noël, a critically acclaimed musical puppet show presenting the birth of Christ put on by the Petit-Théatre des Marionnettes. In her new book, Jennifer Walker shows how Noël was more than a charming and eccentric product of the symbolist avant-garde. For Walker, Noël was just one among many musical performances in this period that created a cultural space where the secular and the sacred came together, providing a counterpoint to the political battles that occupy the foreground in historical accounts of the early Third Republic.
Walker opens with a chapter that reviews the debates over the nature of sacred music that ran throughout the nineteenth century. Plainchant, revived at the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes under the direction of Dom Guéranger in the 1830s, was vigorously defended by ultramontane music critics as the purest form of sacred music. By the end of the century, however, the polyphony of Palestrina had emerged as an acceptable alternative, and Félix Huet, the organist at the cathedral of Notre Dame, proposed modernizing plainchant by allowing for organ accompaniment. Walker illustrates the emergence of this middle ground by examining several of the Contes Mystiques (1890), religious texts set to music by a number of contemporary composers. Here Walker establishes a pattern of combining an analysis of music criticism with a more technical description of the music in question. Historians with some rudimentary training in music should be able to make sense of Walker's musicological analysis. In her treatment of Fauré's En prière, for example, Walker includes selections from musical scores to show how melodic simplicity combined with a modest use of chromaticism to create “a musical aesthetic in which the combination of tradition with modernity validated both music and text as equally religious” (49).
The Contes Mystiques were written to be performed in the private spaces of Parisian salons. In Chapter Two, Walker brings us into the world of the Petit-Théatre des Marionnettes, where shows like Noël were presented to the public. These performances contributed to a musical ralliement, mirroring the political ralliement of the 1890s, the attempt of some Catholics and Republicans to reach an accommodation. Although the Dreyfus Affair put an end to this political process, Walker shows how the musical ralliement continued to play a significant role in French cultural life. Republicans distrustful of the Catholic Church could find in Noël, for example, an evocation of the Provençal crèches, puppet shows that told the story of Christmas and which were deeply embedded in French cultural tradition. Not all attempts at musical ralliement succeeded. In Chapter Three, Walker probes some examples of critical and commercial failures, such as La Légende de Sainte Cécile (1892), another production from of the Petit-Théatre des Marionnettes. Both Republican and Catholic critics regarded this work as religiously insincere, a melodramatic human story placed in a musical setting that included jarring dissonance.
Walker extends her argument in Chapter Four by moving from theatrical performances to a series of concerts presented in a functioning Catholic church. Archbishop Richard and some Catholic critics were concerned about Eugène d'Harcourt's series of five religious oratorios performed at St. Eustache. But overall they were a popular and critical success, suggesting that the Republic could “retain its Catholic roots, embrace its modernity, and identify itself as simultaneously sacred and secular” (192). This blend of sacred and secular is even clearer in the musical programs presented at the Universal Exposition of 1900, the subject of Chapter Five. At a high point of tension between Church and State, the government sponsored concerts officiels, which included a performance of Théodore Dubois's oratorio Le Baptême de Clovis. In its celebration of the conversion of the Frankish king to Catholicism, this piece recalled the close historical relationship between the Church and the French state. Walker's final chapter moves us into the opera house, through an analysis of Jules Massenet's Griséldis (1901). This opera revolves around the life of a poor shepherdess in the Middle Ages whose saintly virtue and marital fidelity allow her to resist the seductive temptations of the devil and to save her son from his pirate captors. Walker places the opera within the context of anxious debates about the growing independence of women, the problem of the “New Eve.” Griséldis was a major success, presenting a model who combined feminine loyalty to husband and devotion to family, values shared by Catholic and Republican men, with traditional Catholic piety. In her Conclusion, Walker shows briefly how the musical ralliement managed to survive the attempt of Pius X in 1903 to limit religious music to plainchant and Palestrinian counterpoint. Her argument here, and more generally as well, fits nicely with Steven Scholesser's treatment of Olivier Messiaen in Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris (University of Toronto Press, 2005)
On a conceptual plane, Walker's book would have profited from a clearer distinction between Catholic culture and the institutional church. Republicans were open to aspects of Catholic culture, mediated through music, a generosity of spirit that did not extend to the Church. This caveat aside, Walker's excellent book adds to the literature in which the sacred and the secular are understood as intermingling as well as battling in the modern era. Ruth Harris's Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York: Viking, 1999) stands as a landmark work in this development. Just as I was reading Sacred Sounds, a special issue of French Historical Studies dedicated to “Music and French History” arrived on my desk. Her work fits nicely into this emerging historiography that links musical performances and criticism to political and cultural history. Sacred Sounds is particularly valuable because it demonstrates the surprising role of religious music in generating a French Republican culture.
