6 The Revolution and Romanticism to 1848
Political and cultural context
On 14 July 1789 a republican crowd stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison in Paris. Until the formation of the Third Republic in 1870, France’s government lurched from constitutional monarchy, to republic, to empire, back to monarchy and so on, finally settling on a republic. The first constitutional monarchy failed early on; Louis XVI was guillotined on 21 January 1793, an event which ushered in the First Republic. The Reign of Terror began on 6 September 1793 with the formation of the euphemistically named Committee of Public Safety and ended on 27 July 1794. Thousands were killed and massive damage was inflicted. The Terror was followed by the Thermidorian Reaction, which reversed the trend, inaugurating the slow process of ending the Revolution.1
Under the constitution of 1795 the legislature was divided between two bodies that, respectively, initiated legislation and passed resolutions into law. Severely damaged by military disasters, the Directory – a small group of members to which the executive was entrusted – failed to realise a stable republican order; as a result, the conditions allowed Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power. From the establishment of the Consulate after the Brumaire coup d’état in 1799, which ended the Directory, and the start of the Napoleonic Empire in 1804, Napoleon rapidly consolidated the changes the Revolution had made.2
By the early nineteenth century, musical and political institutions were strong enough to withstand the sometimes bloody paroxysms that followed. Napoleon’s demise led to a restoration of a constitutional monarchy in 1814. Louis XVIII was succeeded in 1824 by the reactionary Charles X, who headed a government that abolished the freedoms of the press and reduced the electorate. This inspired the July Revolution of 1830, which brought Louis-Philippe I to the throne. His liberal, bourgeois policies were not sufficient to stem demands for a larger electorate and parliamentary reform, and in 1848 crowds barricaded the streets; Louis-Philippe followed Charles X in abdicating and fleeing to England; the short-lived Second Republic was under way.
The Revolution asked how and for whose benefit society should be ruled, and challenged the role of the arts in ways that were novel (though anticipated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–78). In the last years of the ancien régime the musical highpoints were the grands motets at the Chapelle Royale, the tragédies lyriques of Rameau and Gluck and the symphonies of Haydn, Johann Stamitz and François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829) at the Concert Spirituel.3 Not all of these suited the anti-religious world of the Revolution: the Concert Spirituel ended in 1790 after sixty-five years and the Chapelle Royale was suspended in 1792.4
While noting discontinuities, it is also important to stress continuities. In 1856 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘unbeknownst to themselves, [the French] had taken from the Ancien Régime most of the feelings, habits, and ideas that guided the Revolution which destroyed it … they had built the new society out of the debris of the old’.5 Even secularism, which constituted a striking discontinuity for musical institutions, had precedents in Enlightenment thought. Robespierre’s pursuit of a cult of the ‘supreme being’ – one of several attempts to create a ‘bourgeois non-Christian morality’, which maintained ‘the apparatus of ritual and cults’ – had its origins in Rousseau.6 After 1789 operatic and concert life soon picked up almost where it had left off, without Rameau and motets, but with Gluck and several major initiatives, which redirected the arts towards the ascendant bourgeoisie (hence the rehousing of the royal art collection and confiscated church art for public access – 537 paintings – in the Louvre in 1793).
During and out of the highly disparate movements of the eighteenth century and the Revolution, French Romanticism struggled to free itself from conservative forces, like the musical and architectural tastes of Napoleon, who favoured tuneful Italian music and classical architecture. It was perhaps in literature – in the works of English poets like Shelley and Byron – that the impact of the Revolution had its first resonance. Rousseau was vital: his influence, specifically his ‘emotional individualism’, is felt in the work of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre and François-René de Chateaubriand, who transmitted it to Victor Hugo and George Sand.7 Even though the surging espousal of the individual’s freedom from tyranny might have been contradicted by purges and the police state, the rhetoric lived on in the arts. Paradoxes abound, for the irrationality of religious observance was displaced temporarily by a Cult of Reason, which is perhaps more evocative of the Enlightenment than of Romanticism. Chateaubriand cultivated the colourful and picturesque without binding himself to accuracy, hence the allure of the exotic and oriental in much of the art and music of the period. Literary French Romanticism first peaked in 1830 with Hugo’s Ernani, in which drama mirrors life: ‘Decorum was banished and the wildest and weirdest scenes were portrayed without restraint.’8 Romantic poets show a freedom in their forms and expression, which we find echoed in Hector Berlioz (1803–69), and especially in the spontaneous lyricism of Liszt’s and Chopin’s music.
Music for the Revolutionary state
Institutions associated with the court found themselves vulnerable, particularly in the wake of the monarchy’s collapse in August 1792. This was true of the Catholic Church, which had been intimately connected with the monarchy. At the most extreme point in the Revolution the church was disestablished and churches were closed, which led first to the Cult of Reason (c. 1792) and then to Robespierre’s attempt to establish the Cult of the Supreme Being as a new state religion (he was appalled by the rejection of divinity by many of his fellow revolutionaries).9 For many musicians, this break was ruinous. What had been a traditional sphere for music-making and an important source of income simply disappeared, effectively halting the composition and performance of sacred music during the 1790s. With careers and education went infrastructure: thousands of organs were destroyed or left to rack and ruin, choirbooks were lost, countless manuscripts of early music vanished with the closure of the great monastic libraries, and many buildings were destroyed or damaged.10
At first religious music of a traditional kind was still heard, albeit in quite different circumstances. Gossec, already well known for his stage music, symphonies, religious works and much else, became one of the most prolific composers for the Revolution. In 1790 he wrote a Te Deum pour la fête de Fédération, which marked the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Mass was also celebrated. It was held outdoors on the Champ de Mars, then outside Paris, which had been specially adapted for 400,000 spectators. Gossec’s Te Deum is for three-part male choir, wind and percussion; it employed a chorus of a thousand and a large orchestra.11 Stylistically it is typical of the ceremonial music of the 1790s in its robust homophonic style with martial rhythms and simple cadential formulas regularly punctuating the phrases. Reflections of the past abound, though, for instance in the orchestral passepied (a French court dance, faster than the minuet) that precedes the ‘Te gloriosus’ section (bar 204).12
The fête was the harbinger of many such outdoor occasions. By means of ‘Revolutionary hymns’, large groups of people directly participated in the mass musical performances of the festivals, celebrating the membership of everyone present in the civic body, in an acknowledgement of their conversion from subjects of a king into citizens of the state. These ceremonies included symbolic rituals such as the planting of Liberty Trees, the erecting of statues of Goddesses of Liberty and the burning of effigies of Ignorance, all accompanied by wind bands and choruses that sometimes exceeded a thousand musicians.13 The festivals thus became secular liturgies in which Revolutionary hymns replaced sacred genres. Rousseau had adumbrated the character of these events in his Lettre sur les spectacles, in which he proposed open-air festivals in which the public came together en masse. As for the character of the hymns, they had to succeed as propaganda, which meant that the composer was required to ‘respect the poetic stresses of the refrain and first couplet, while the poet … would have to see that his verses scanned regularly’.14
The music for these events, used in conjunction with arrangements of popular patriotic songs like J. Rouget de Lisle’s Hymne à la liberté (La Marseillaise), ‘Ah, ça ira’ and La Carmagnole,15 formed the musical foundation of the Revolutionary festivals.16 Intended for performance at vast outdoor gatherings, these works were exceptionally grand in scale but necessarily simple in composition. An entire generation of composers was called upon: the more productive composers included Charles-Simon Catel (1773–1830), Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), Gossec, Louis-Emmanuel Jadin (1768–1853), Jean-François Le Sueur (or Lesueur, 1760–1837) and Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817).17Méhul’s Le chant du départ (words by Marie-Joseph Chénier), a hymne de guerre, is characteristic. Unlike many others, it outlived its era and is still played by the French army. It was first performed at a concert by the choirs and orchestra of the Institut National de Musique on 4 July 1794 in the Jardin National (Tuileries). Additional musicians were recruited from Paris theatres.18 It is strophic, with music for the first verse and chorus; there are seven verses, each of which gives voice to a character in the Revolutionary struggle: a deputy of the people, a mother of a family, two old men, a child, a wife, a young girl and three warriors, who conclude that ‘by destroying the notorious royalty/the French shall give the world/peace and liberty’. Like La Marseillaise, it is in C major with a simple, extremely direct melody that nevertheless briefly expresses doubt in itself by glancing at the tonic minor (on the words ‘Kings drunk on blood and pride’ in the first verse).
As well as enabling commissions for new music, the festivals created a demand for musicians, especially wind players, to support the choruses. This demand led to the establishment of the Institut National de Musique in 1793, under Bernard Sarrette, which became a source of such musicians. The Institut was absorbed into the Conservatoire de Musique, established by the government in 1795.
The restoration of religious music
Napoleon recognised that efforts to replace Catholicism had put the government in an adversarial position with a large section of the population. His negotiations with the papacy brought an end to that conflict, at least officially, by means of the 1801 concordat with Pope Pius VII. But this was no simple return to the pre-Revolutionary status quo, for Napoleon used his political and military strength in conjunction with the weak position of the papacy to restore the church to a position of spiritual prominence, without returning its former property and power.19 Nonetheless, the normalisation of worship in France inaugurated a new era of sacred music composition. So when the Chapel of the Tuileries palace was reopened in 1802 with Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816) as its director, composition of works for the Catholic liturgy was once again sanctioned by the French state. The choice of Paisiello revealed the First Consul’s pronounced preference for Italianate musical styles. Shortly before the proclamation of the Empire in May 1804 Paisiello retired and was replaced by Le Sueur, who had earned a reputation prior to the Revolution as an innovative composer of sacred music.20 Le Sueur’s work on behalf of the imperial chapel reflected his fondness for simple textures for use within highly resonant spaces; the repertoire also reflected the emperor’s taste and his limited patience for extended liturgies.21 A Mass in this context could consist of any piece of music that set a religious text, including small-scale oratorios or cantatas. Le Sueur survived Napoleon’s fall and continued as surintendant of the Chapel under the Bourbon Restoration. By then age forced him to share the burdens of the job, first with Jean-Paul-Gilles Martini (1741–1816) and then, after Martini’s death in 1816, with Cherubini.
Although better known today for his music for the stage, Cherubini was arguably the most influential composer of French sacred music of the nineteenth century. His operatic successes of the 1790s were not repeated during the Empire, and from 1805 to 1815 he experienced bouts of depression related to a loss of inspiration.22 Towards the end of this period Cherubini became intrigued by the possibilities of sacred music, and through his work for the restored Bourbon rulers he found a new creative outlet, to which the public responded enthusiastically. Characteristic of his innovative and dramatic approach is his use of a tam-tam at the opening the Dies irae of his first Requiem (C minor), written for the 1817 anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI.23 His religious works draw on the broad synthesis encountered in the music of Haydn and Mozart, where symphonic, operatic and religious styles happily coalesce (Cherubini must have known and valued Mozart’s Requiem, for he conducted its Parisian premiere in 1804). While Cherubini’s sense of drama is clearly evident, so is his skill at counterpoint, honed when he was still a young musician working in Italy. In his best works from this period, he approaches the setting of text soberly, at times limiting vocal lines to the recitation of a single pitch, compensating for the lack of vocal lyricism by means of ostinato figures in the instrumental accompaniment that provide the necessary interest and momentum.
Cherubini’s tenure at the court came to an abrupt end with the Revolution of 1830 and the establishment of the July Monarchy. The new king, Louis-Philippe, wanting to emphasise the bourgeois qualities of his reign, disbanded the entire Chapel in order to disassociate himself from his Bourbon predecessors. In doing so, he brought the tradition of courtly sacred music in France to an end, though not the production of religious music in general.
Cherubini’s coronation Masses and first Requiem were composed for occasions of grandeur and political significance. Not surprisingly, a work like the Requiem was soon receiving concert performances. Paradoxically, this development bespeaks continuity with the ancien régime, not rupture: the Concert Spirituel had taken grands motets for chorus and orchestra conceived for chapel services and ‘gradually turned [them] into a sort of fashionable sacred music’ outside their original setting.24 Some sacred genres also acquired national or political significance. This was true of Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts (Requiem, 1837). Written as a government commission, it is a stunning achievement in which the composer explored space and sound through the deployment of a large choir and orchestra, with four brass groups, one positioned at each corner of the auditorium. The extravagant effects of this massive work have precedents in the Revolutionary works of Le Sueur (among others), for his Symphonic Ode of 1801 also ‘employed four separate orchestras, each one stationed at a corner of the Invalides’, which was Berlioz’s venue as well.25
Berlioz wrote his Te Deum (1849) without a commission, but with similarly large-scale performance in mind; the use of an organ gave him another architectural element to deploy in, for example, the epic counterpoint of the opening movement, which recalls Handel’s blend of fugal and homophonic writing. The statuesque qualities of the music owe much to the ambitious use of the brass in doubling vocal lines.
The grandiosity of Berlioz’s Requiem and Te Deum was only one expression of the way in which sacred music was evolving in nineteenth-century France. A Romanising liturgical drive was under way, but the move towards the adoption of plainchant was slow. We see the process in the work of the Benedictine monks of the abbey at Solesmes, in northern France, where the monks inaugurated a project aiming to restore ‘authentic’ Gregorian chant through scholarly scrutiny and comparison of disparate sources. Some forty years after its dissolution and partial destruction, a local priest, Dom Prosper Guéranger, embarked on a revival of Benedictine monastic life in what remained of the old abbey in 1833. A key component of this was the restoration of Gregorian chant. The goals of this abbot and his zealous group of Benedictines were clearly antiquarian and closely associated with the historicist impulses evident in the first half of the nineteenth century; they also revealed a desire to rehabilitate contemporary life through the recuperation of a lost spirituality that they believed would renew France as a Catholic nation.26 The reforms, however, were not widely accepted until the 1890s (around the time of the foundation of the Schola Cantorum), because of the withholding of texts, which restricted access to a few abbeys. It was a slow process, but by the start of the twentieth century, Counter-Reformation polyphony, with Palestrina at the forefront, was deemed second only to Gregorian chant ‘as an appropriate vehicle for the Catholic liturgy’.27
Enthusiasm for sacred repertoires of the past was not limited to the monks of Solesmes. Music educators like Alexandre-Étienne Choron (1771–1834) made significant contributions to the study and performance of early sacred music in the first half of the century.28 In addition to being an author, publisher and committed teacher (and concomitantly founder of the Institution Royale de Musique Classique et Religieuse, which was revived by Niedermeyer – see Chapter 7 below), Choron exhibited an abiding interest in the reclamation of music from before 1800. At a time when very little music of the past was readily available, he published music of Renaissance and Baroque composers and actively participated in the Palestrina revival through his programming of Palestrina’s music in concerts devoted to historical works.29 These performances were surprisingly successful and helped encourage a taste for a cappella performance.30 The staunch classicist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), composer, teacher, critic and one of the foremost music scholars of the period, applauded Choron’s efforts and started his own series of concerts historiques in the 1830s. Thus both men cultivated an interest in historical performance of sacred music that continued to develop and flourish later in the century at the École Niedermeyer and eventually the Schola Cantorum.31
Concert life
Concert life continued after the Revolution, although with at first fewer opportunities to hear instrumental and vocal music in a concert setting than hitherto. Life was chaotic, but musicians ‘hobbled along’,32 often unpredictably: in 1791 an orchestral concert was announced for the Cirque National in the inner courtyard of the Palais Royal, ‘where a young woman was to “perform a pianoforte concerto”; a ball was to follow the concert’.33 With the increasing importance of the piano – an instrument that could play operas, symphonies and solo works, and accompany any instrument – tiny venues turned into concert halls, as the violinist Pierre Baillot lamented.34
Paris theatres maintained much of the ancien régime’s momentum of concert-giving. The Feydeau theatre orchestra played symphonies, concertos and overtures during theatrical evenings. The concerts became fashionable and were the subject of ‘at least two short comedies’, in one of which a perfumed dandy remarks to a lady, ‘I don’t enjoy myself, or even exist, except at a concert.’35Jean Mongrédien reproduces a typical programme: a Haydn symphony, a Viotti violin concerto, an Italian aria, a Viotti piano concerto, an excerpt from Cimarosa’s Le sacrifice d’Abraham, a Gluck overture, a symphonie concertante by Devienne and Mengozzi’s Air savoyard. This was given on 8 January 1797, one of a dozen concerts in the autumn–winter season.36 Similar programmes were produced at other theatres, including the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, as well as in various pleasure gardens.37
In 1798 the influential Concerts de la rue de Cléry began their subscription series in which the music of Haydn was prominently programmed, often with two symphonies per concert. The emphasis on Haydn provides a connection with pre-Revolutionary musical life (he had been popular at the Concerts de la Loge Olympique, for example).38
The performances organised by the Conservatoire were the most prominent concert series of the early 1800s. Growing out of ‘public exercises’ for students in the 1790s, under the First Empire they quickly grew in scope and esteem. The conductor for many Conservatoire concerts was a former pupil, François-Antoine Habeneck, who proved to be a driving force.39 After the series ended in 1824, Habeneck established the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in 1828. This series was responsible for some of the most important musical premieres in nineteenth-century France, including Beethoven’s symphonic works. The first music played in the 1828 series was the ‘Eroica’, a duet from Rossini’s Sémiramis, a new work by Joseph Maillard illustrating a piston-valved horn he had helped design, a violin concerto by Rode and three works by the Conservatoire director Cherubini, including portions of his 1824 Mass for Charles X (all concerts included a chorus).40Berlioz spoke about the significance of the programming of Beethoven in his Mémoires, claiming that ‘they opened before me a new world of music’.41 These performances ushered Beethoven’s symphonic works into the French concert repertoire and inspired emulation by Berlioz and other composers.42 The audience for these concerts was from the upper bourgeoisie and nobility, who were nothing if not loyal. Lists of subscribers clearly indicate the well-heeled character of the attendees, whose subscriptions to the concert series were passed on to family members from one generation to the next.43 For the audiences, the concerts represented exclusivity in terms of both social profile and musical values.44
The seriousness that greeted the Conservatoire’s concerts was matched by the growing interest in chamber music from the period of the Restoration and after.45 The concerts organised by the violinist Pierre Baillot were influential. Starting in 1814 (and finishing in 1836), he organised performances that helped transform chamber music from an amateur pastime into a body of work intended for serious contemplation.46 The audiences attracted to the chamber music performances, like those for the Conservatoire concerts, were a wealthy mix of aristocrats and the upper middle class, but Baillot performed less Beethoven than the Conservatoire performers, preferring the quartets and quintets of Haydn, Mozart and Boccherini. A sextet arrangement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony was nevertheless played six times, as was his String Quartet in G, Op. 18 No. 2. But while several of Beethoven’s late quartets were never played, all of Haydn’s Op. 76 featured at least once, and No. 2 in D minor seven times.47 More recent compositions were also performed, including works by Cherubini, Hummel and Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824). Within a few decades, several additional concert series dedicated to chamber music were founded by musicians inspired by Baillot.48
Outside Paris the picture of concert life is much less clear (see Chapter 17 below). In the eighteenth century, a number of provincial concert series, often organised by local music societies, were to be found in centres such as Bordeaux and Lille.49The interest in concert activities was, in part, supported by the number of virtuoso performers who toured Europe, stopping briefly in smaller towns in between longer stays in major urban centres. Nonetheless, even large regional capitals like Lyons and Marseilles could not compete with Paris. As a centre of European instrument building and music-making, Paris was attractive to many performing artists who stayed there for varying periods of time, performing in any number of venues within the capital.50
It was Rossini who inspired Paganini and many others through the brilliance and virtuosity of his vocal writing. In the years after the demolition of Napoleon’s empire he was Europe’s most famous composer, and he lived in Paris.51 Although virtuoso musicians were to be found throughout Europe, their concentration in Paris was a product of that city’s high status as a focal point of musical culture. Many nineteenth-century musicians traced their determination to develop their virtuosity back to the influence of Paganini in his Parisian concerts.52 A veritable flood of pianist-composers came to Paris and adopted the new instruments of Erard and Pleyel. They included Dussek, Steibelt, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Liszt, Thalberg, Hiller, Heller, Léopold de Meyer and Chopin. To sample what they did, it is worth itemising Chopin’s first concert in Paris, on 26 February 1832, for it gives a distinct flavour of what audiences expected and received. Liszt, Mendelssohn and around a hundred others assembled in the rooms of Pleyel et Cie (significantly, a piano manufacturer, emphasising the link between industry and concertising53) to hear Beethoven’s Quintet in C, Op. 29, a vocal duet, Chopin playing his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor with orchestral parts played by string quintet, Chopin and five other pianists in Kalkbrenner’s Introduction, March and Grande Polonaise for six pianos, an opera aria, an oboe solo and finally Chopin playing his ‘La ci darem’ Variations, similarly accompanied.54 Although concert programmes typically mixed orchestral, chamber and vocal music, increasingly it was the piano that was heard throughout, either in concertos or as a member of a small ensemble, as here.
Situated between the public and private performing worlds was the salon culture, which reappeared in Paris in the early nineteenth century following a brief hiatus during the early years of the Revolution. Private recitals given in the homes of aristocrats and the haute bourgeoisie offered a semi-public showcase for professional performers and talented amateurs from the upper classes.55 Some salon concerts received notice in the press, a celebrated example being the pianistic ‘duel’ between Liszt and Thalberg that Princess Cristina Belgiojoso organised as a benefit for Italian political exiles in 1837. But most of these social and musical events were not so widely advertised, being more private affairs.56 They featured solo and chamber works, freely mixing operatic arias and virtuosic piano solos with more modest vocal romances, and later, after mid-century, mélodies.57 These concerts served purposes of social advancement for their hosts, afforded certain amateurs a venue for performance and provided professional musicians with a significant supplemental means of income.
Instrumental music
Introduction
Between 1789 and 1830, the year of the Symphonie fantastique, there is a remarkable dearth of enduring music, apart from Berlioz’s early works. Cherubini’s overtures have lingered, as has some of his chamber and choral music; thanks to David Charlton, Méhul’s symphonies are becoming better known; and foraging for forgotten concertos and chamber music by, for example, adventurous recording companies like CPO and Naxos has resurrected more from this obscure period. Yet the record shows that music was as widely composed, played and listened to in this period as in any other, and a huge amount was published, especially in Paris. Although France was primarily in love with opera, Mongrédien has done much to alert us to the rich musical experience of the period.58 Representative works of a few key genres of instrumental music up to the end of the monarchy are discussed in the following paragraphs.
The symphony
Having found the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart just as congenial as their forebears before the Revolution, French audiences and composers after 1789 seem to have been reluctant to furnish competition. This is surprising, for before the Revolution hundreds of French symphonies were composed and published, not least Gossec’s; between 1790 and 1829 only fifty-seven were published.59Méhul left traces of a symphony from 1797 – just two movements – but in spite of his acknowledgement that the public needed no new symphonies because of their devotion to the perfect specimens of Haydn and Mozart, he wrote four more in the years 1809–10 ‘to accustom the public little by little to think that a Frenchman may follow Haydn and Mozart at a distance’.60 All four of Méhul’s complete symphonies are of interest. They earned approbation at the time, as witnessed by a review in the Journal de Paris (25 May 1809), which noted ‘Pure, melodious themes, brilliant passages, ingenious transitions’, and of the slow movement of No. 3 in C the anonymous author wrote, ‘it is one of those epoch-making pieces of which one does not grow tired’.61No. 4 in E is described by David Charlton as ‘an achievement of profound and entertaining utterance’.62 The first movement of No. 4 is of Classical proportions and follows late Haydn and Mozart in omitting a second-half repeat. The music is full of incident, especially in some startling harmonic digressions and prolific contrapuntal activity, though it lacks the individual melodic character of a Romantic symphony. But the slow movement is original, devoting its first fifty-six bars to a long-breathed, striking melody for (two?) solo cellos accompanied by pizzicato basses. The second movement, a minuet, recalls Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E, Op. 14 No. 1. Given that the French symphony was to establish its independence through the adoption of cyclic techniques, it is intriguing to find Méhul incorporating the opening of the first movement’s slow introduction motif G♯–B–E–D♯ unambiguously into the finale from the beginning of the exposition transition.
That these attractive symphonies were not taken up in concerts indicates a museum culture in which canonised works, often by non-French composers, were preferred to novelties closer to home, no matter how appealing. Berlioz suffered a similar fate: his music pleased French audiences and critics at the time, but struggled to find an afterlife. Charlton blames the ‘public’s preference for gaiety and spectacle and … conservatism’.63
Berlioz was studying at the Paris Conservatoire in the late 1820s, having started part-time study there earlier in the decade. By the time he won the Prix de Rome in 1830 he was already a composer of extraordinary originality and was reluctant to spend time abroad, as prescribed by the Prix,64 but the experience of Italy nevertheless inspired much of his later music, notably the symphony Harold en Italie (1834).65 In 1828 he gave his first orchestral concert in Paris: self-promotion was the only means of getting his music before the public.
Under the influence of Beethoven, Berlioz brought before the public the first great Romantic symphony, Symphonie fantastique (1830). Berlioz distributed a programme to the first audience, thereby making explicit what had only been hinted at in earlier works. The five movements are summed up under the heading ‘Episode in the Life of an Artist’. They chart (1) intimations of passion and frenzied passion, among many other listed moods, (2) a ball, (3) a scene in the country, (4) a march to the scaffold and (5) a dream of a witches’ sabbath. In each an idée fixe represents the beloved in various forms (the beloved existed for Berlioz in the shape of the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, whom he first encountered on stage in 1827 and married in 1833). In the first movement it is also the first and by far the most substantial subject in an unusual adaptation of sonata form, which privileges melodic intensification and climax over balanced recapitulation, even though it retains the harmonic scheme I–V–I as the primary arc of the movement. The symphony has been misrepresented by authors who consider it a mishmash of pre-existing material, even if the slow introduction to the first movement and idée fixe, for example, did have their origins in other works.66Edward T. Cone and others have argued strongly for its unity as a symphonic work.67
The symphony’s first performance at the Conservatoire with an orchestra of over a hundred on 5 December 1830 excited great interest and general approval (Fétis’s marked disapproval notwithstanding). It was attended by Liszt, among other luminaries, who heard at first hand the cyclic principle that would underpin much of his own work. He experienced too a symphony that liberated the orchestra, establishing a Romantic style that would find rich progeny in his music and that of Wagner, the Russian nationalists and many others. 1830 was the year of Romanticism, when the movement achieved a crescendo of expression in France after many setbacks.68
Berlioz wrote three more symphonies and a strange sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (1831), which mixes existing works and declamation; it reflects on the ‘events’ and circumstances of the symphony. Harold en Italie has no programme beyond movement titles, but it too uses an idée fixe to suggest a brooding hero in various picturesque situations. It makes extensive use of a solo viola to represent its Byronic hero, though not in the virtuosic way of a conventional concerto. Roméo et Juliette (1839) is a symphonie dramatique in seven movements for soloists, chorus and orchestra; as Julian Rushton remarks, it bears little resemblance to any symphony then known. Berlioz’s intention was to ‘present the essence of the play in a work for the concert hall’, using all the means of the Romantic orchestra at his disposal.69 The resulting work probed the limits of expressive and programme music. It had a liberating effect on Wagner and others, and inspired other hybrid symphonic works.70 Berlioz’s last symphony, entitled Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, was commissioned by the government to celebrate the tenth anniversary (1840) of the July Revolution. It is scored for large wind band and percussion with optional chorus and strings. Created for a great outdoor occasion, it is in the tradition of the Revolutionary works of Gossec and Méhul. Berlioz’s music bears witness to the many changes made to instruments in the early nineteenth century, not least in Paris, a major centre of their manufacture.
Before the breakthrough works of the 1880s (by Franck and Saint-Saëns) audiences gravitated towards the ‘pure’ works of the German tradition, the symphonie dramatique (after Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette) and the ode-symphonie, definitively represented by Le désert (1844) by Félicien David (1810–76), a ‘multi-movement work for orchestra, soloists and chorus [which] combined elements of the symphony, symphonic poem and oratorio’.71 Its ten movements are grouped in three parts. Each movement opens with a recitation, and there are solos for tenor, male choruses and instrumental sections. It concludes with a chorus to Allah. There are many orientalisms, which reflect a popular tendency in French music that lasted well into the twentieth century. The C upper pedal note that opens the first movement and is maintained for many bars is effective in evoking the vast empty space of a desert.
The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire played German works and usually ignored French composers, but with the revival of the abstract symphony in the 1850s, new organisations sprang up to play works by, for example, Gounod, Saint-Saëns and Henry Litolff (1818–91), notably Jules Pasdeloup’s Société des Jeunes Artistes (1853–61).72 As Chapter 7 suggests, ‘absolute’ symphonies of the period tended to be rather ‘academic’; at least, they looked back to the Viennese classics, including Beethoven, rather than to Berlioz.
The symphonie concertante
The symphonie concertante continued to flourish until around 1830, its galant origins somehow not counted dissonant with the stirring events of the time (see Chapter 5). Giuseppe Maria Cambini (1746–1825) was a prolific composer of Italian origin who settled in Paris in the 1770s and thrived there after the Revolution. His Symphonie concertante in D for two violins and orchestra, ‘La patriote’ (1794), unlike many others, is fully suited to the period of Robespierre, even in its scoring for oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trombone and strings. Its first movement, Allegro maestoso, uses La Marseillaise for its first subject and forte transitional material. Rushing string semiquavers accompany its familiar strains. Formally the movement follows Mozart’s concerto form, with a new second subject for the soloists’ establishment of the dominant. The finale starts with a Haydnesque 6/8 of a fairly light-hearted character, based on the popular French song ‘Cadet Rousselle’, but at bar 239 Revolutionary zeal returns in an assertive, rhetorical closing Allegro (see Example 6.1).73
Example 6.1 Giuseppe Maria Cambini, Symphonie concertante in D, ‘La patriote’, finale, bars 239–43
In contrast, the Symphonie concertante in F, Op. 38 (c. 1795), by Jean-Baptiste Sébastien Breval (1753–1823) is of a much lighter character, which recalls Ralph P. Locke’s characterisation of these works: ‘audiences saw in the alternately chattering and cantabile interplay between the soloists … something similar to the conversation between characters in a play or opera’.74 Mozart’s first-movement concerto form is followed here as well.75
The concerto
The symphonie concertante may have retained a surprising popularity with the French public until long after Napoleon’s demise, but the solo concerto was the genre suited to Romantic sensibilities. It was responsive to the burgeoning array of formidable players at the Conservatoire and virtuosos visiting the salons and the increasing number of concert rooms. The concerto of this period is not well studied, but two clarinet concertos (c. 1800–5) by Xavier Lefèvre (1763–1829) show the way it was going. Each has three movements – fast, slow, fast – and the modest orchestra of two oboes, two horns and strings (the orchestra of the Baroque!) is gaining some independence.76Viotti’s violin concertos, some written for Paris and several later ones composed for London in the 1790s after his position in Paris became untenable, show an unusual bias to the minor mode. They exhibit a fine grasp of Classical expressive rhetoric, with many passages hinting of the dramatic style of Beethoven. The Concerto No. 22 in A minor was composed in London (c. 1793–7); it was admired by Brahms, who praised its ‘remarkable freedom of invention’. The orchestra’s role has been amplified, as has its size. Although the first movement has a long opening tutti, which remains in the tonic, after the soloist’s first entry the key suddenly changes to A major, which presages a second subject in the unusual key of the dominant major (E). This and abundant other shifts of mood and harmony give the work an innovative character. It is nevertheless a characteristic work of the prolific and highly influential French violin school.
Pierre Rode (1774–1830) was considered the most distinguished exponent of the school after Viotti. He was a fine violinist and composer, who developed his style in the Revolutionary 1790s with composers like Cherubini and Méhul around him, though it is congruent with Haydn and Mozart. In 1795 he was appointed professor of violin at the new Conservatoire, and in 1800 he was named solo violinist to Napoleon. His music balances brilliant display and affective lyricism. The tunefulness, often of a melancholy nature (and therefore well suited to emerging French Romanticism), evinces more repetition of ideas than one might find in Mozart, for example, which is typical of ‘bridge’ composers who adopted many of the manners of the Classical style but allowed melody and accompaniment greater prominence. Rode’s Violin Concerto in B♭ (1800) is representative. The several restatements of the attractive main theme of the second-subject group in the exposition offer the soloist a chance to improvise variations on the material and imbue it with greater expressiveness. Rode’s solo-violin output includes the once-famous 24 caprices en forme d’études (c. 1815), which recall Paganini’s 24 caprices (c. 1805).77
Chamber music
Until 1814, when Baillot started his series, there were few public chamber concerts, but there was a vast appetite for music in the home. Groupings of flutes, guitars, clarinets, strings and other instruments in duos, trios, quartets, quintets and less often sextets and septets in mixed or homogeneous ensembles performed a massive published repertoire that is little known today. According to Mongrédien, original compositions and arrangements existed in equal numbers.78 Certainly, private clients were keen to have arrangements of their favourite operas, and the ubiquitous Haydn symphonies were typically transcribed as quintets.
From around 1770 string quartets as we understand them were known mainly as quatuors concertants. Janet Levy attempts to define what was meant by this term, concluding that it had much to do with texture and part-writing, ‘the interaction or interplay of parts … one instrument to a part’, and so on.79 A key figure in the development of the genre was not French: Boccherini supplied works that were supposed to be short and accessible, as the publisher and composer Ignace-Joseph Pleyel (1757–1831) demanded they should be. In each published collection of six quartets, however, Boccherini cunningly slipped in two quartets that suited his own, more ambitious tastes, for the sake of his reputation.80 Pleyel himself wrote quartets that met his requirement for easy tunefulness and constant variety, without taxing the listener or player. In spite of this, the first movement of the String Quartet in C major, Ben 365 (1803), is substantial; it lasts over thirteen minutes and contains several different themes in the second-subject area, the first of which is subject to various contrapuntal treatments. The minor-mode slow movement brings with it greater seriousness and an elevated melodic manner in the central section, which evokes an operatic aria. The finale recalls the last movement of Haydn’s Op. 33 No. 3, also in C, though the stratospherically high writing for cello at one point brings to mind Mozart’s ‘Prussian’ Quartets. There is no minuet or scherzo.
Later composers of quatuors concertants include George Onslow (1784–1853), Antoine Reicha (1770–1836) and Cherubini. For the most part these composers stayed close to Haydn and Mozart, though Beethoven’s influence, especially of the Op. 18 quartets, is evident in, for example, Cherubini’s adoption of the scherzo in place of the minuet. In addition to thirty-six string quartets, Onslow wrote thirty-four string quintets, which draw together many of the different traditions of French chamber music. Amid a great variety of chamber works, Reicha’s wind quintets stand out for their acute responsiveness to instrumental sonorities and influence on the genre.
As virtuosity grew in importance, so did a type of quartet that placed the emphasis on the first violin, reducing the other instruments to accompaniment; it was known as the quatuor brillant. Quartets based on well-known tunes were called Quatuor d’airs connus or Quatuor d’airs variés. Composers tended to be instrumentalists like J. B. Gambaro, who arranged works by Rossini for various quartet groupings.81
For much of the period covered by this chapter, the dominant solo instrument was the piano. Nevertheless, the interest in the instrument, the skilled instrument manufacturers and the extensive activity of publishers were not matched by remarkable compositional activity by French composers. That had to wait a generation or two, for the French were well entertained by an influx of mainly foreign virtuosos, particularly Chopin, Liszt and Thalberg. If, on the other hand, one accepts Chopin as an honorary French composer, for it was in Paris that he settled in 1831 and was feted as a teacher, performer (chiefly in the salons, which suited his light technique better than the concert hall) and composer, France had one of the outstanding composer-pianists of the day. His connection for many years with George Sand brought him into intimate communion with a major force of French Romanticism. He favoured short lyrical forms and dances (mazurkas, waltzes and polonaises), though his mature piano sonatas, No. 2 in B♭ minor (1837) and No. 3 in B minor (1844), remarkably combine a free Romantic lyricism with extended post-Classical forms. Other works fall in between, such as his ballades and scherzos. Several sets of variations and two sets of études (1832, 1837) are among his most obvious concessions to the abiding love of virtuoso display in Paris at the time. Chopin’s emulation of operatic vocal styles in his piano writing, his advanced harmony and constantly innovative formal solutions had a deep influence on French music. That his Romanticism was famously infused with an admiration for pre-Romantic music made him irresistible to French taste.
Music journalism
No reader of Balzac’s Illusions perdues will forget his depiction of the ruthless world of nineteenth-century Parisian journalism. However, amid the aggressive competition, corruption and greed, much artful music criticism appeared both in general newspapers like the Journal des débats and in the specialist music periodicals that began to proliferate in the 1830s. Music reviewers of the early 1800s resembled their eighteenth-century counterparts; they were literary figures. In spite of their literary backgrounds and biases, some authors were perfectly competent; yet their outspoken, imperious judgements were unsupported by much musical substance.82 Nevertheless, their writings helped to shape public taste as well as the development of the nineteenth-century French musical canon, exerting influence on musically trained critics active later in the century.83 They served as a link between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as foreshadowing a number of the debates that would mark the latter years of the 1800s. Julien-Louis Geoffroy, who wrote for the Journal des débats, was among the most prominent of this group of authors. He was indebted to Rousseau, and shared his view that ‘melody was the seat of beauty in music’. His deep-rooted antipathy to what he identified as German musical values, as well as distaste for certain Italianate musical extremes, led him to emphasise a French national operatic style that privileged an aesthetic balance, based on ‘uniting the best elements from diverse sources’.84
Musicians who subsequently entered the ranks of music journalism managed to subtly transform the discourse of the profession and cover a broader repertoire in their reviews.85 One of Geoffroy’s successors as music critic at the Journal des débats, François-Henri-Joseph Blaze, known as Castil-Blaze, was a musician. Recent research has revealed his significance and influence as a keen observer of French musical culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.86 Part of the first generation of Conservatoire students, Castil-Blaze had a thorough musical education, and he employed that training to develop a technically knowledgeable and adept music criticism.87 This was evident in his interest in a wide range of musical genres and his enlarging of the scope of reviews beyond opera to include concerts, educational publications and published scores. Other critics worthy of mention include the poet Théophile Gautier, Joseph d’Ortigue, Jules Janin and Maurice Bourges.
Throughout the 1820s most music criticism was in periodicals of general interest, but in 1827 Fétis began publishing the Revue musicale, a weekly specialist journal devoted to music.88 The Revue set a standard pattern by including historical articles, biographies and essays on instrument construction, as well as performance reviews and announcements of upcoming concerts and publications.89 The fact that Fétis wrote almost all the articles gave the journal a consistent critical vision that aimed, for the most part, at educating the public. The Revue ushered in a new era of music criticism, and for the nine years of its independent existence it served as a model for the periodicals that followed in its wake. When Fétis left Paris to become director of the Brussels Conservatoire, he left the journal in the care of his son Édouard. A few months later Édouard withdrew and arranged a merger with a rival, the Gazette musicale de Paris, which had been in operation for only eleven months.90 The resulting Revue et gazette musicale de Paris continued until 31 December 1880.
The Gazette was the house journal of Maurice Schlesinger, a Paris-based member of a prominent Berlin music publishing family. The Gazette’s ‘dominant character was … German Romanticism’. From the outset it attacked Fétis and seemed disposed to wage war on the ‘meaningless virtuosity of fashionable piano music’.91 The proliferation of music journals in the 1830s also meant that the editors had to vie for the attention of the public. Schlesinger therefore designed his journal to avoid overt educational goals. Instead, the Gazette prominently featured Hoffmannesque contesmusicaux, which were entertaining diversions and connected the journal to a Romantic aesthetic that would ultimately permeate many of its articles.92 The first ‘portrayed Beethoven as a social outcast, alienated and misunderstood’.93 Others were by such celebrated authors as Sand, Janin, Dumas, Balzac, Berlioz and Wagner, whose ‘Une visite à Beethoven’ (1840) features the popular subject of alienated genius.
The journals provided forums for a wide variety of composers, professional critics and on occasion more scholarly figures like Fétis to voice their opinions about not only performance but music generally. Some, like Berlioz, chafed under the demands of journal editors,94 but the extraordinary mix of knowledgeable authors engaging music seriously was truly outstanding. The articles vividly detailed that musical world and the figures who dominated it. Moreover, they chronicled the changes in musical composition of this period, tracking a shift in compositional aesthetics as well as providing, through their criticism, a framework for understanding the new musical values that resulted.95
Notes
Michael McClellan was set to revise and extend the coverage of this chapter when illness overtook him in 2012. I (Simon Trezise) have refashioned much of it, but the sections closest to his draft are ‘The restoration of religious music’ and ‘Music journalism’. The section devoted to instrumental music is entirely mine.
1 Thermidor was the eleventh month, otherwise July, in the Revolutionary calendar; it was on 27 July 1794 that the National Convention attacked Robespierre and other Revolutionary hardliners.
2 , Napoleon and his Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship (New York: Norton, 2001); , France under Napoleon, trans. (Princeton University Press, 1981).
3 , ‘Paris: centre of intellectual ferment’, in (ed.), The Early Romantic Era: Between Revolutions: 1789 and 1848 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 32–3.
4 , Histoire du Concert Spirituel, 1725–1790 (Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 1975).
5 , The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, ed. , trans. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1.
6 , The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), 219.
7 , ‘The background of the Romantic movement in French music’, Musical Quarterly, 6 (1920), 259.
8 Reference LockeIbid., 264. See also , ‘The French Romantic movement’, in (ed.), The French Romantics, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. I, 1–32.
9 For a balanced account that relates Revolutionary anti-clerical action to long-standing anti-religious sentiment see , ‘De-Christianization’, in and (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 20–32.
10 For a discussion of the vandalism of the Revolution, see , Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 185–223.
11 et al., ‘Gossec, François-Joseph’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
12 148 revolutionary works, in vocal score only, are found in (ed.), Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899), including Gossec’s Te Deum of 1790 (pp. 1–12). For a discussion of Gossec, his collaborator Chénier in many later projects, and the Te Deum, see , ‘Marie-Joseph Chénier and François-Joseph Gossec: two artists in the service of Revolutionary propaganda’, in (ed.), Music and the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 221–35.
13 Locke, ‘Paris: centre of intellectual ferment’, 37; , Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 60–2.
14 Jam, ‘Marie-Joseph Chénier and François-Joseph Gossec’, 227–8.
15 The three songs mentioned here were only the most common of a huge body of popular political songs that appeared in the 1790s. See , Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
16 Jam, ‘Marie-Joseph Chénier and François-Joseph Gossec’; , La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 441–74; , Écrire la Révolution, 1789–1799 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 149–59. The question of whether or not a Revolutionary religion (or religions) was developed in the 1790s has been much debated. For a summary see Mona Ozouf, ‘Revolutionary religion’, in Furet and Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 560–70.
17 For a selection of their music, see Pierre (ed.), Musique des fêtes et cérémonies.
18 , French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1789–1830, trans. (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1996), 15.
19 , Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 226–8.
20 Almost none of Le Sueur’s pre-Revolutionary sacred music survives. See , Catalogue thématique de l’oeuvre complète du compositeur Jean-François Le Sueur, 1760–1837 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1980), 15–16.
21 Mongrédien, French Music, 123–5, 169.
22 , ‘Cherubini, Luigi’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (accessed 22 May 2014).
23 A recent exception to the general lack of scholarly interest in Cherubini’s sacred work is Ho-Yee Connie Lau, ‘In memory of a king: Luigi Cherubini’s C minor Requiem in context’ (PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2009).
24 Mongrédien, French Music, 159.
25 , Berlioz, vol. II: Servitude and Greatness, 1832–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 135–6.
26 Reference CairnsIbid., 9–11.
27 , Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2005), 179. For important background on Solesmes, see , ‘Avant Solesmes: les essais de rénovation du chant grégorien en France au XIXe siècle’, in and (eds), ‘La la la … Maistre Henri’: mélanges de musicologie offerts à Henri Vanhulst (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 407–14.
28 , ‘Vocal training at the Paris Conservatoire and the choir schools of Alexandre-Étienne Choron: debates, rivalries, and consequences’, in and (eds), Musical Education in Europe (1770–1914): Compositional, Institutional, and Political Challenges, 2 vols (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005), vol. I, 125–44.
29 , ‘Music of the Renaissance as viewed by the Romantics’, in (ed.), The Science and Art of Renaissance Music (Princeton University Press, 1998), 368–9; Mongrédien, French Music, 200–3.
30 Mongrédien, French Music, 197.
31 James C. Kidd, ‘Louis Niedermeyer’s system for Gregorian chant accompaniment as a compositional source for Gabriel Fauré’ (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1973); Catrena M. Flint, ‘The Schola Cantorum, early music and French political culture, from 1894 to 1914’ (PhD thesis, McGill University, 2007).
32 and , ‘The concert and the virtuoso’, in (ed.), Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 242.
34 Reference Leppert, Zank and ParakilasIbid., 242–3.
35 Quoted in Mongrédien, French Music, 212.
36 Ibid., 210.
37 Ibid., 225–33.
38 , ‘Le Concert des Amateurs de la rue de Cléry en l’an VIII (1799–1800), ou la résurgence d’un établissement “dont la France s’honorait avant la Révolution”’, in and (eds), Les sociétés de musique en Europe 1700–1920: structures, pratiques musicales, sociabilités (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007), 81–99; , Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 198–200.
39 Mongrédien, French Music, 213–14.
40 A vast amount of information relating to the Conservatoire concerts, compiled by D. Kern Holomon, is available at http://hector.ucdavis.edu/sdc/ (accessed 22 May 2014).
41 The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, ed. and trans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 80.
42 Johnson, Listening in Paris, 257–9, 263–4.
43 , ‘Les abonnés à la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire en 1837’, in (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987), 41–54.
44 , Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 71–2; , The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
45 Locke, ‘Paris: centre of intellectual ferment’, 70–1. The demand for chamber music in France before these concert series got under way is amply attested by Philippe Oboussier, ‘The French string quartet 1770–1800’, in Boyd (ed.), Music and the French Revolution, 74–92.
46 Joël-Marie Fauquet, ‘La musique de chambre à Paris dans les années 1830’, in Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, 299–326.
47 Statistics are taken from , Les sociétés de musique de chambre à Paris de la Restauration à 1870 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1986), 335–44.
48 Locke, ‘Paris: centre of intellectual ferment’, 71.
49 One of the few attempts to make sense of the situation in the provinces in general is Mongrédien, French Music, 251–9.
50 , Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129.
52 Reference MetznerIbid., 131–4.
53 Johnson, Listening in Paris, 264; Fauquet, ‘La musique de chambre’, 299–326.
54 Which of his two concertos was played has been the subject of debate, as has the manner of the accompaniment. Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger came to the conclusions presented here in ‘Les premiers concerts de Chopin à Paris (1832–1838): essai de mise au point’, in Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, 257–65.
55 , Salons, Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
56 Reference TunleyIbid., 20–1.
57 Reference TunleyIbid., 102–18.
58 Mongrédien, French Music.
59 Figures are based on the work of Barry S. Brook, quoted in Mongrédien, French Music, 265.
60 Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763–1817): Three Symphonies, ed. , The Symphony 1720–1840: A Comprehensive Collection of Full Scores in Sixty Volumes, ed. , ser. D, vol. VIII (New York: Garland, 1982), xii–xiii.
61 Quoted in Reference Charlton and Brookibid., xv.
62 Reference Charlton and BrookIbid., xix.
63 Reference Charlton and BrookIbid., xiii.
64 For a discussion of the Prix de Rome, see Chapter 7 below.
65 A complete list of prize winners, ‘Le “cas Berlioz”’ and more may be found in and , Le concours du prix de Rome de musique, 1803–1968 (Lyons: Symétrie, 2011), 841–8, 409–87.
66 For a detailed account of its genesis and premiere see , Berlioz, vol. I: The Making of an Artist, 1803–1832 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 352–75, 424–30. It is not clear whether the march already existed in its current form or not, as Cairns debates in ‘Reflections on the Symphonie fantastique of 1830’, in Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, 82–6.
67 Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony: An Authoritative Score, Historical Background, Analysis, Views and Comments (New York: Norton, 1971).
68 For an account of the emergence of French Romanticism, see , Diehards and Innovators: The French Romantic Struggle: 1800–1830 (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).
69 , Berlioz, Roméo et Juliette (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1.
70 See , The Dramatic Symphony: Issues and Explorations from Berlioz to Liszt (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2012).
71 ‘The French symphony after Berlioz: from the Second Empire to the First World War’, in and (eds), The Symphonic Repertoire, vol. IIIB: The European Symphony from ca. 1800 to ca. 1930: Great Britain, Russia, and France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 529–30.
72 Reference Brown and HartIbid., 530.
73 Example 6.1 is from The Symphonie Concertante, The Symphony 1720–1840: A Comprehensive Collection of Full Scores in Sixty Volumes, ed. , ser. D, vol. V (New York: Garland, 1983), 183–242.
74 Locke, ‘Paris: centre of intellectual ferment’, 63.
75 The full score may be found in , La symphonie française dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Institut de Musicologie de l’Université de Paris, 1962), vol. III, 171–231.
76 Mongrédien, French Music, 287.
77 A score of a violin and piano transcription is available at IMSLP: http://imslp.org/wiki/24_Caprices_for_Violin_(Rode,_Pierre) (accessed 22 May 2014); the work has been recorded.
78 Mongrédien, French Music, 290.
79 Janet Levy, ‘The quatuor concertant in Paris in the latter half of the eighteenth century’ (PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1971), 59.
80 Mongrédien, French Music, 293.
81 Ibid., 297.
82 Katherine Kolb Reeve, ‘Rhetoric and reason in French music criticism of the 1830s’, in Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, 538.
83 , ‘A dilettante at the opera: issues in the criticism of Julien-Louis Geoffroy, 1800–1814’, in and (eds), Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 (Oxford University Press, 2001), 46–68.
84 Reference Ellis, Parker and SmartIbid., 51–4, 60–2.
85 , Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–80 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8.
86 Mark Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze: the poetics and reception of French opera’, in Parker and Smart (eds), Reading Critics Reading, 86–90.
87 Ellis, Music Criticism, 27–32; Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze’, 103.
88 Ellis, Music Criticism, 33–45.
89 Peter Bloom, ‘A review of Fétis’s Revue musicale’, in Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, 55–79.
90 Ibid., 70–1.
91 Ellis, Music Criticism, 48.
92 Ibid., 48–50. Fétis had already published translations of some Hoffmann stories and essays in the Revue musicale, but not as a regular feature of that journal. Reeve, ‘Rhetoric and reason’, 539 n. 4.
93 Ellis, Music Criticism, 48–9.
94 Cairns, Berlioz, vol. II, 45–6.
95 Johnson, Listening in Paris, 270–80.
