18 Paris and the regions from the Revolution to the First World War
In a ubiquitous nineteenth-century image of France, Paris is the brain, head or heart of a living organism.1 It is France’s mindset, or its emotional core, or its lifeblood. The analogy is so ingrained that it has become easy, in dealing with post-Revolutionary France, to equate Paris with the nation in the sense either that everything else was a pale reflection of the capital or that nowhere else really mattered. This chapter argues for a more differentiated view of France, greater sensitivity to change over time and an acknowledgement that Paris was not always the model of choice. That said, no discussion of relationships between Paris and the regions – whether concerning education, government or the arts – can avoid confronting France’s degree of centralisation, which considerably exceeded that of established nations such as Britain, and which in terms of the artistic culture it fostered stood uneasy comparison during the long nineteenth century with emerging and young nation states such as Italy and Germany.
In some ways the regions did indeed mirror Paris. Progressively, they had either set up or been granted their own versions of Parisian musical institutions, practices and repertoires. From the Napoleonic period to 1864, national legislation had governed theatre (and therefore opera) in an attempt to ensure coverage countrywide; the first regional branches of the Paris Conservatoire, those in Lille and Toulouse, dated from 1826. As organised music-making became more and more prized, quartet societies, orchestral societies and choral societies spread, often (though not always) in emulation of Parisian models.
Nevertheless, by 1914 Paris had been living for over thirty years through unprecedentedly high levels of discontent about its power to set France’s agenda, even though debates about ‘decentralisation’ – meaning everything from regional regeneration, to regional emancipation, to devolution and even to federalism – had rumbled through the century from the 1830s. At the fin de siècle the crucial difference rested in arguments about relative power becoming overlaid with calls for cultural ‘regionalism’ – a celebration of ancient forms of diversity rooted in language, dialect, history and terroir, which brought accepted hegemonies into question. Musically, the 1890s were especially important in both respects: where the late 1880s had seen a second attempt at a ‘national’ opera house in the provinces (in Rouen),2 the following decade offered a unique kind of open-air opera festival in a Roman amphitheatre (Provence); a sudden rise in the number of regional premieres of French opera (especially in Lyons, Bordeaux, Rouen and Toulouse);3 the founding of a regional composers’ society (the Société des Compositeurs Normands in Rouen, 1892);4 and the self-conscious ‘sharing’ of a modern-day premiere between the Opéra-Comique and the birthplace of its troubadour composer, Adam de la Halle (Le jeu de Robin et de Marion, Arras, 1896). In the background, the collection of folksongs – encouraged by the French state since the Second Empire – took on a new urgency as ‘regional’ musics gained enhanced status as compositional raw material within the philosophy of the Schola Cantorum.
Musically, the French regions rarely get a good press. And unless we guard against it, the traditions of caricature and polemic can lead to two methodological dead ends. The first involves quality-testing local standards of performance against musical experience in the capital; the second mistakenly conflates décentralisation and régionalisme by requiring that regional composers display (usually folkloric) antagonism towards Parisian norms. While work on the historiography of regional music must perforce address these questions hermeneutically, in this chapter my aim is more directly historical: to point towards the changing musical relationships between French musical centres, Paris among them. This is not as easy as it might appear. Research on regional France is so young that it does not lend itself easily to attempts at synthesis. It remains dispersed, necessarily positivistic and, for the most part, characterised by minute attention to a single town, a single institution, a narrowly chronological period or a single musical society. It is also true that treating metropolitan centres alone, which constraints of space enforce here, sidelines both folk musics per se and the vibrant though often seasonal activity of France’s coastal resorts and spa towns.5 With such caveats in mind, but also as a way of telling the story of music in nineteenth-century France from a new perspective, it seems appropriate to begin not with the musicologically ‘normal’ subject of opera but with an examination of a category of music experienced by French citizens of all social strata, in both urban and rural contexts: the music of the Catholic church. Tellingly, it immediately presents us with challenges to centralist musical narratives.
Catholic church music
Church musicians experienced agonising levels of institutional rupture between the Revolution and Napoleon I’s concordat of 1801.6 Moreover, their music would be fought over by competing reformist camps and according to the ideals of different governments for the next century or more. Revolutionary fervour had resulted in the burning of choirbooks, the destruction of church organs and the disbanding of a national network of (admittedly small-scale) choirs and choir schools (maîtrises). Napoleon reinstated the Chapelle Royale as a chapelle impériale in 1806, but it remained in service only until 1830, the beginning of the July Monarchy; moreover, Notre-Dame had no more musical authority than any other cathedral. In short, French church music lacked an obvious Parisian centre to act as a model for either normal daily or festive regional practice.
That said, Paris was not entirely out of the liturgical-music picture. It sporadically provided a different kind of hub for sacred music. In particular, while individual maîtrises around the country struggled to re-establish themselves in the first half of the century, educational initiatives were an obvious target for centralising zeal. We normally associate the centralisation of French music education with the Paris Conservatoire (founded as a school for military music in 1792 and as a school for civic music more generally in 1793–5), but the Conservatoire’s roots were firmly republican, and beyond its organ class it never played an institutional role in the country’s church music. But the two most important, and state-funded, schools of church music of the nineteenth century were also Parisian, and were led by musicians whose love of church music dovetailed with a love of early music. The first was opened by Alexandre-Étienne Choron in 1817 as an école primaire de chant, became formalised as a specialist church music school in 1825 under the title Institution Royale de Musique Religieuse, and closed in 1834 amid the July Monarchy’s cooling-off of support for religious institutions. Choral music – Palestrina, Victoria and Handel especially – reigned supreme here. The second, set up as the École de Musique Religieuse in 1853, was longer-lived and affectionately referred to as the École Niedermeyer in honour of its first director Louis Niedermeyer. In the anti-clerical ferment of the 1880s it was forcibly rendered a general music school. Up to that point, each of these schools was intended as a state training ground for the nation’s maîtres de chapelle. Each contributed to attempts to remove the operatic from church music in favour of a classic repertoire based on a cappella polyphonic techniques; the École Niedermeyer’s curriculum added Bach for organists and plainchant studies for all. In 1894 the privately funded Schola Cantorum was established by a Bach specialist on the organ (Alexandre Guilmant) and a maître de chapelle renowned for his ‘Sistine Chapel’ services at Saint-Gervais in Holy Week (Charles Bordes), with the young composer Vincent d’Indy in tow. When it became a school, in 1896, two-thirds of the Niedermeyer pattern was repeated. Finally, once the Schola established a relationship with Dom André Mocquereau and the monks of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes for the teaching of plainchant, the triptych was complete.
It might seem that rural and small parish churches, with their serpents accompanying plainchant and their local compositional traditions, lie a long way from such concerns; yet the centralist drive is detectable in various ways. Hard-line supporters of plainchant convened a conference in Paris in 1860 and voted to regulate all regional French church music as a way of purging secular influence and enforcing plainchant reform nationally.7 In addition, the three main schools for sacred music were each predicated on the notion that Paris provided either a hub or, in more decentralist mode, a model ripe for regional emulation and adaptation. The École Niedermeyer’s centralism had the most impact during the period: between 1853 and 1907 it placed at least 295 church organists and forty-one maîtres de chapelle across the country.8
Cathedrals had always featured local composers writing music in situ, their libraries becoming more or less living museums of local musical tradition. Such tradition could be deeply organic, via dynasties such as the Wackenthaler family in Alsace, six of whom composed and improvised their way through church careers in Strasbourg, Sélestat and Haguenau from around 1800 to well beyond German annexation. Performance in church could lay such composers open to the charge that they were not good enough to risk criticism (no applause, no reviews); but liturgical and ceremonial works undoubtedly contributed to a sense of local repertoire and culture. Nevertheless, such localism diminished especially in the second half of the century, as an international repertoire of classic and modern music progressively established itself through periodicals and specialist publishers alike.
Chant was interestingly different. Paris had its own, but it was actually less important than versions in use from Digne, Dijon, Malines (Mechelen, Belgium), Reims and Cambrai, and Rennes; finally, in the 1890s and 1900s there came an influential raft of publications from the Benedictine congregation of Solesmes. Nomenclature did not map onto geographical usage here: while the nineteenth century saw protracted attempts at Rouen and Toulouse to hold on to local traditions, the Digne, Rennes and Reims–Cambrai chant books were used all over the country, and the same would indirectly become true of Solesmes itself.9
Within Catholic church music a different kind of centralisation developed by which non-Parisian influences became progressively more important during the century. Where the musical aesthetics of liturgical practice were concerned, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican more generally and the abbey of Solesmes gradually became the ‘centres’ to be reckoned with. For Romantics and for moderate Ultramontanes (French Catholics who put obedience to the authority of Rome before obedience to the French state),10 the Sistine Chapel Holy Week model, in which Allegri’s Miserere, Victoria and the Ingegneri Responsories (then attributed to Palestrina) held sway, represented both a radical and a reverent break from more or less operatic compositions, or operatic contrafacta, in liturgical choral practice. Cathedral choir schools specialising in Sistine Chapel repertoire (and new compositions emulating its style) increased to the point where, in the 1880s, the capacity to sing this repertoire with grace and ease became, alongside plainchant performance, a defining feature of a ‘model’ cathedral choir school deemed worthy of state funding even amid rampant government anti-clericalism. Interestingly, few such schools were in major metropolitan centres: Strasbourg was the largest of them; Rouen and Dijon were smallish towns; Langres, Moulins and Autun were even smaller. As for the congregation of Solesmes, the story of its increasingly dominant role in plainchant reform challenges all assumptions about Parisian or even urban power, revolving as it does around centralisation overseen by the Vatican.
None of this implies that the French state did not itself try to impose order on regional cathedrals. In particular, from 1872 it put in place inspection systems and grants to improve sacred music nationally via the maîtrise system. Archival records suggest that many high-ranking clergy, including those from Beauvais, Besançon, Montauban, Nancy, Toul, Nevers, Nîmes, Poitiers and Reims, welcomed the move as a benign, even promising, indication of support. Most requested inspections (in the hope of grants). However, by contrast, the bishop of Bayeux responded to the 1870s government initiative with suspicion; on learning that Charles Vervoitte, the government inspector, was to visit his cathedral’s maîtrise, he wrote: ‘This inspection is something new. What is the government’s intention? What authority does your inspector enjoy, and what are his rights? … I cannot imagine that the government is considering taking control of plainchant, which is only one aspect of Christian worship.’11 Where maîtrises were concerned, he was right to suggest that he had detected the thin end of a wedge: by 1885 a chilly anti-clericalism had ensured that only six mâitrises retained government support; they were kept afloat as much as heritage sites for plainchant and polyphony as on account of their liturgical value.12 Further problems for maîtrises arose in 1901, when clerics were banned from teaching the general primary school curriculum within their Christian schools. In fact the French government was already moving closer to cutting off all engagement, political and financial, with the church: the separation of church and state took place in 1905.
Secular education
In terms of its size and scope, although not always in terms of the quality of its teaching, the Paris Conservatoire dominated secular music education throughout the entire nineteenth century. Thereafter, effective opposition from d’Indy and an increasingly secularised Schola Cantorum from 1900 gave Paris a system in which, despite the reforms of Gabriel Fauré at the Conservatoire from 1905, philosophies focused on training the musical professional (at the Conservatoire) and educating the complete musician (at the Schola Cantorum) operated simultaneously. Reasonably enough given its origins, the Conservatoire’s training of musicians at state expense had always been somewhat utilitarian: it existed primarily to provide the capital with opera singers and orchestral musicians, and operated from 1795 according to the implicit recognition that the piano, taught by and to both sexes, was central to music teaching and practice. Expectations of over-supply would mean that the regions benefited too. But could a single institution serve a nation the size of France? The debate was joined early.
The idea of setting up regional music schools on a Parisian model went as far back as 1798, when the Paris Conservatoire’s first director Bernard Sarrette responded to criticisms that his institution was of purely local import, took stock of the maîtrises lost to the Revolution, and formulated a project to replace them with secular schools in three tiers.13 Until the Napoleonic period, when the minister of the interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, tried to set up six regional conservatoires as part of a new law on public education, there was no central government appetite for such provision: Paris was indeed to serve the entire nation.14 The same held during the Restoration, as strikingly illustrated by Choron’s trips across France, during which he hunted out potential students who would be whisked away by government diktat from the humblest of rural homes to begin a new life as the next generation of Parisian musicians, sacred and secular. Here was centralisation in action, ironically counterpointed by Choron’s advocating a regional network of municipal and state schools and, as he put it, ‘trying to start a musical insurrection’ to that end wherever he went.15
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the regions had similar ideas. As early as 1793, the composer Adrien Boieldieu (1775–1834) had campaigned for a conservatoire in his home town of Rouen; music education in Lille was available via its concert society, called Le Grand Concert, from 1801, and its académie, some of whose singers Choron wished to train at his Paris school, opened in 1816;16 in 1805, Toulousains began suggesting that the council open a conservatoire, succeeding after a petition of 1820;17Marseilles opened a municipal music school in 1821; Strasbourg opened one in 1827, by which time the conservatoires at Lille and Toulouse had become nationalised as official branches (succursales) of the Paris operation.
Questions of regional difference surface immediately when one considers how and why such conservatoires – all of which started life independently of Paris and none of which had the range of classes found there – were formed. Unity of purpose with Paris lies only in a predominant utilitarianism: Strasbourg needed violinists of a quality to serve the municipal theatre, and initially targeted strings; Marseilles needed male opera singers, but was also committed to the group teaching of the working classes in the name of liberalism and moral improvement; Toulouse, another town within the famed Midi catchment area for male voices, started with singing only, and was wedded to Italianate traditions of repertoire and practice. It is hardly surprising, then, to find closer regulatory contact with Paris causing tensions such that the story of the six regional conservatoires nationalised by the mid-1840s (those of Lille and Toulouse in 1826; Metz and Marseilles, 1841; Dijon, 1845; and Nantes, 1846) features iterated games of cat and mouse. Paris tried to subordinate its branches through the imposition of Paris-centric directors, inspection, target-setting and curriculum reform, together with threats to withdraw funding, ‘national’ status or both; and regional individuals and councils attempted to maintain local traditions. Most importantly, however, nationalised regional conservatoires were always preparatory schools either unfunded by the state (Metz, Marseilles to 1852) or funded only marginally. Ironically, the prize of ‘national’ status or recognised ‘feeder school’ came at the highest cost to individual town councils.
However, being a ‘feeder school’ for Paris was not the only regional option. In a phenomenon that stretched well into the twentieth century, several towns, among them Lyons (1840) and Bordeaux (1843), developed private music schools out of more general music and social clubs variously entitled cercles or sociétés philharmoniques. Bordeaux extended this idea to popular forms of musical practice in 1880, when the Harmonie de Bordeaux, founded in 1860, opened a music school.18 The most extreme case evident thus far is that of Rouen, where failure to persuade the town council to support a conservatoire (excepting a short-lived singing school, 1844–9) extended over more than a century from Boieldieu’s initial call in 1793. The deadlock was broken only in 1904 when the Musique Municipale (developed from local pre-1870 military bands) set up an associated institution, and this was closely followed by a similar venture, for brass players only, under the aegis of the Harmonie de Rouen-Saint-Sever in 1911.19 Back in Paris, the determination to widen access to secular music education had already taken a striking turn with the founding in 1902 of the Conservatoire Mimi Pinson – a music school for working-class girls.
Both François Lesure and Emmanuel Hondré have reflected on the extent to which the educational ventures of the long nineteenth century represent decentralising or centralising tendencies. As Lesure notes, once the 1790s attempt at a national network failed, French central governments of whatever stripe lacked the will and authority to enforce anything more than piecemeal adherence to Parisian régimes; and not once did Paris create a regional branch as part of a national plan.20 Arguably, this latter situation changed in the 1880s, when a new raft of succursales was created (Avignon, Nancy, Rennes, Le Havre: all 1884) amid increased professionalisation of the regional schools and new demands that they adhere to the Paris curriculum.21 But the swift annulment of national status in Avignon (1889) and Le Havre (1891) suggests continuing levels of instability. Conversely, the most decentralising effect of the far-flung conservatoires, like Marseilles, was to create secondary centres; despite struggles to retain some semblance of regional identity, subordination to and dependence on Paris remained a constant.22
The Paris Schola Cantorum model was intentionally different. In essence it combined the cercle and conservatoire models in a liberal approach to educating the ‘whole’ musician; and crucially, where unity in the guise of uniformity was a classically republican and centralist goal at the Paris Conservatoire, the Schola became famous for celebrating a pre-Revolutionary France of contrasting regions whose cultural individuality was ripe for nurturing – especially the Latinism of the south.23 By 1902, Avignon and Marseilles had ‘Scholae’; Lyons established one in 1902–3; Bordeaux and Nantes were to follow soon after; and what turned out to be the flagship school, at Montpellier, was opened in 1905. The Schola’s influence here and elsewhere is complex: new regional branches, such as those in Avignon and Marseilles, Lyons and Montpellier, were diverse (mostly choirs, not schools), adopting selectively from the Paris Schola’s praxis, where alongside regionalism we also find centralising and decentralising behaviours. It contributed, for example, to a growing official respect for French stage music of the Baroque and Rococo eras, but decentralised it by mounting regional performances. Otherwise its educational centralism took non-Parisian forms: instrumental composition in post-Beethovenian styles, and the study and performance of Vatican-approved sacred repertoires (Gregorian chant and Palestrinian polyphony). In addition, across France, Schola and Conservatoire philosophies were not total opposites; in the pre- and post-war periods, the personal networks of Guy Ropartz at Nancy and Strasbourg, conservatoire and Antoine Mariotte at Orleans, enabled these two institutions to reconcile otherwise antagonistic principles.24
Music for the stage
It was probably in relation to stage music that the loudest pro- and anti-decentralisation voices were heard. It was also in relation to stage music that France’s greatest and most rehearsed musical crises arose. Under deregulation (the liberté des théâtres, 1791–1806), state licensing (1806–64) and deregulation again (1864 onwards), the conundrum of how to organise French theatre, and with it French opera, endured. In addition, after 1864 the rise of cheap genres, with operetta at their head, seemed unstoppable, and the vitality of café-concert traditions – occasionally in local dialects and with their own regional hierarchies – was ever-increasing.
Paris never had enough national stages to absorb all the high-genre works written by debutant and young composers. Moreover, several aspects of the bureaucratic system militated against flexibility and opportunity. Neither the Opéra (presenting grand or recitative opera in French, and ballet) nor the Opéra-Comique (staging number or dialogue opera in French until the early 1870s) nor the Théâtre-Italien (presenting opera in Italian) could easily take on a work written with one of the other theatres in mind; the Théâtre-Lyrique of 1851–70, designed as a solution to the problem, provided only temporary and partial respite.25 The regions could help only in theory. For most of the period, composers intent on an international career knew that a regional premiere would gain them little national attention; Paris managers of the national theatres, which were still licensed even after 1864, were contractually obliged to provide a certain number of brand new works. They cross-subsidised them with classics; taking on the second-hand was usually wasted effort in contractual and potentially financial terms. A regional premiere, then, could bury a work for ever, and constant battles against insolvency among regional theatre managers suggested that production standards would not be high.26 Increased commitment to decentralisation in the 1890s – raising the profile of selected regional stages in order to mitigate any sense of a ‘wasted’ premiere – continued in the following decade but also tended to leap-frog the regions in worrying ways.27 Jules Massenet’s output was especially telling: although some of his works played in the regions before they reached the capital, those premiered outside Paris were premiered abroad: in London, Brussels, Vienna and (in the case of six of his nine premieres between 1902 and 1914) Monte Carlo. The story of the attempt to turn the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen into a regional théâtre-lyrique (i.e. a ‘debutant’s stage’) perhaps suggests why. Specialising in young unknowns with no ballast from their more established French rivals risked marginalising a regional théâtre-lyrique from the outset. It is no wonder that its first ‘national’ success, in 1890, was a work by an established composer that happened to have languished unperformed in France since its Weimar premiere in 1877: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1890).
Such dilemmas represented one of the last pre-war phases of a century-old inequality between Paris and the regions, where neither a dedicated Napoleonic system (with towns hierarchically arranged in arrondissements served by a mixture of resident and touring companies) nor an ostensibly level playing field (the 1864 free market, with optional municipal subsidy) yielded stability. Setting aside the more obvious victims of Napoleonic centralisation, such as the German theatre in Strasbourg (forcibly closed in 1808), the core problem was grand opera, about which we hear the first anguished regional voices within four years of the premiere of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.28 The central problem was not, as caricature suggests, suspicion of the new, but realism about what provincial theatres could afford. Moreover, as the salaries of star singers escalated, rendering the actors in provincial companies second-class citizens, grand opera rapidly became viewed as something of a pariah – a situation that the ‘one genre per theatre’ structure of theatrical management in Paris prevented. When bankruptcies occurred it was invariably the opera company that took down the rest of the operation. Regional debate on how (or whether) to fund grand opera via the public purse was accordingly impassioned: including it in a manager’s contract could threaten everyone’s theatrical diet and the entire company’s livelihood.
If, for the vast majority of the period, regional theatres in France depended on Paris for their core repertoires, change is apparent from the 1880s onwards. The rise of Brussels and Monte Carlo as ‘French’ operatic centres, and continuing hostility to putting Wagner on a national stage in Paris, opened up new possibilities. Paris had seen an infamous Tannhäuser at the Opéra in 1861 and a creditable thirty-eight-show run of Rienzi at the Théâtre-Lyrique in 1869; but the composer’s post-1870 diatribes meant that mounting his works on a state-funded stage was anathema in a capital where opera was still symbolic of national pride. In the wake of the riot-inducing Lohengrin at the (private) Eden-Théâtre in 1887, decentralist races to stage Wagner in French meant that Der fliegende Holländer (Lyons, 1893), Die Walküre (Nantes, 1893), Die Meistersinger (Lyons, 1896), Tristan (Aix-les-Bains, 1897) and Siegfried (Rouen, 1900) all preceded Paris. The first complete French Ring took place in Lyons in 1904.
Specifically regionalist initiative, however, was best illustrated by the phenomenon of the open-air opera arena. Here the Midi produced a new type of spectacle rooted in its regional environment such that attempts to stage it elsewhere required both recomposition and compromise. To experience the real thing, it was the Parisians who were obliged to travel – as indeed they did. In 1890s Provence, the coalescence of an established and language-based regionalism centring on the work of the writer Frédéric Mistral with his Félibrige (a celebration of Latinité that distinguished the south from the Parisian ‘north’) and the historic vestiges of Roman life all contributed to the building of a distinctive tradition that took quasi-operatic spectacle to new heights and required performing forces of a type and number (typically a double symphony orchestra or military band) that recalled the great fêtes of post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. It also cemented regional difference by sharing arena space with the bullfighting fraternity. In Paris, the circus rings that Jules Pasdeloup and Charles Lamoureux customarily used as concert venues could seat up to 7,000; the neo-Roman arena at Béziers could hold 10,000 more. Saint-Saëns in particular seemed to appreciate the unique environment of these arenas: after he had been commissioned to write incidental music for the spectacular Déjanire (1898), open-air presentation inspired two more of his works. Adapted for Paris where necessary, Les barbares (1901), Parysatis (1902) and Déjanire created a crucial inheritance for the more ardently regionalist Déodat de Séverac, whose Héliogabale, written for Béziers in 1910, was set to a text by the Félibrige poet Émile Sicard and scored in part for the Catalan cobla ensemble with its distinctive type of oboe.29
Professionals and amateurs
A distinctive feature of the Provençal arena spectacular was its mix of amateurs and professionals – a mix that, where concert life was concerned, characterised music-making much more widely across France. Both Paris and the regions had amateur societies (who often performed for charity and whose mission tended to involve musical regeneration) and, from the 1840s especially, networks of orphéons and fanfares (which performed competitively and whose mission was rooted in thoughts of social, rather than musical, regeneration; see Chapter 13 above). Differences between Parisian and regional practice were, in this context, primarily differences of degree, affecting levels of interpenetration between the two spheres. From the time of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (1828–1967) and extending to the humblest theatre band, Paris orchestras were highly professionalised; by contrast, until a few ventures such as those in Lyons and Angers took off during the Third Republic, regional orchestras, including theatrical ones, were not. And while Paris audiences were used to mixed-repertoire professional programmes and the combination of a professional orchestra and an amateur choir, they would surely have rebelled at the generic mix that awaited audiences in Lille in 1849, when chamber music (a Haydn quartet and a Beethoven cello sonata) and male-voice choruses (sung by the Orphéon Lillois) shared a single concert programme.30 Certainly, nothing of the sort occurred in Paris chamber circles, even during Lamoureux’s so-called Séances Populaires de Musique de Chambre, founded in 1863.
Nationally, the orphéon and fanfare movements had modest beginnings as outgrowths of post-Revolutionary musiques militaires or German Liedertafeln, with their choral branch taking wing from 1819 in Paris, when the potential of massed singing became clear as a result of the primary-school activities of Guillaume-Louis Bocquillon-Wilhem.31 The movement’s expansion continued to involve children but quickly shifted its emphasis to the moral improvement of working men (not women). Male-voice choirs covered the country, with the exception of small pockets including Corsica and the Lozère, by 1870.32 With a largely dedicated three- and four-voice repertoire for choirs, and operatic arrangements aplenty for bands, gargantuan competitive festivals characterised the movement from the 1850s. National and international meetings in Paris (1859) and London (1860) brought new levels of attention. Nevertheless, all attempts at creating a national federation of orphéons, with a head office in Paris, failed: the movement grew rapidly, informally (although always under police surveillance) and in line with commercial imperatives in ways belied by the bureaucratic orderliness of competition reports in the specialist press. One date, however, became an orphéon fixture nationwide: with St Cecilia as its adopted patron saint, each 22 November saw celebratory Masses, processions and concerts in towns and villages across France, often involving a wide spectrum of the local community.
Mixed amateur choral music, which was established more quickly in Protestant circles than in Catholic ones, currently offers a less distinct picture. Choral festivals emerged on the west coast (the Association Musicale de l’Ouest, 1835, centring on Niort, La Rochelle and Poitiers) under the inspiration of Désiré Martin-Beaulieu; Lille hosted a ‘Festival du Nord’ with large-scale choral repertoire in 1829, 1838 and 1851; Strasbourg, true to its Germanic-leaning traditions, mounted Haydn’s Creation in the same year as Paris (1801), and during the second half of the century (before annexation) became a centre for choral music extending from Bach to Berlioz, who conducted his L’enfance du Christ there in 1863.
Concerts
Where the state took a lively regulatory interest in both opera (until the 1864 legislation) and the orphéon, concerts were, for much of the period, the business of private individuals and groups. Beyond the national Poor Tax levy on ticket sales, whether organised as independent events by touring virtuosos or conductors, as subscription series by local chamber groups or cercles, or as part of larger concerns, even Parisian concerts attracted little state interest and, still less, state subsidy, until well into the Third Republic. Their histories are thus often difficult to unearth, which leads to the familiar risk that early historical narratives are over-determined by the shape of those records that most readily reach the public domain, either in official archives or in print. Although newspaper reviews reveal much about repertoire and taste, our institutional knowledge of the main Paris concert societies of the turn of the nineteenth century – the Haydn-centric Concert des Amateurs de la Rue de Cléry (1799–1805), for instance – is still very much a work in progress;33 and the task of following early concert virtuosos around regional France is largely dependent on the collection of ephemera that are only now becoming valued.34 Such elusive informality means that questions of centralisation and decentralisation have less regulatory purchase in concert life than in many other types of French music-making; and the patterns that are becoming increasingly perceptible as research progresses are often attributable to other causes: perceptions of aesthetic value and what we would now call cultural capital, bourgeois projects to educate and civilise, and more general ideologies of regeneration.35
In Paris, professional traditions in concert activity ranged widely. Benefit concerts organised as one-offs by freelance individuals and their professional colleagues gave priority to operatic extracts and virtuoso showpieces, in a tradition closely bound up with the availability of piano-makers’ concert halls such as those of Érard and Pleyel, and with a focus on novelty. In contrast, seasonal mini-series such as the Holy Week Concerts Spirituels (revived 1805‒31) favoured the presentation of established favourites, both sacred and secular, with a focus on German and Italian music that reached back to Pergolesi’s evergreen Stabat mater and forward to Mozart, Beethoven and the Italian Ferdinando Paer (1771–1839). More homogeneous performance traditions of the sonata-based repertoire that became known as la musique sérieuse started a little later, spearheaded by the Quatuor Baillot (1814‒40), led by Pierre Baillot. They created loyal followers who prized reverent silence in the concert hall, and, once outside it, proselytised loudly for an emerging canon of ‘greats’.36 The founding of the celebrated Société des Concerts du Conservatoire is best seen as an orchestral response to such developments.
This density and regularity of concert activity was impossible in regional France of the same period. Nevertheless, new research on late eighteenth-century Bordeaux reveals tantalising comparisons with Parisian tastes and practices.37 In addition, traditional narratives of Parisian dominance, such as François-Antoine Habeneck’s single-handed introduction of the French to Beethoven symphonies between 1807 and 1814 (with the Société des Concerts from 1828), are at the very least nuanced by information from northern France, which witnessed the national premieres of Beethoven’s Second Symphony in Douai in 1812 and the ‘Pastoral’ in 1823; in the south, Marseilles had heard all the symphonies in concert by 1829.38
In the latter part of the period, one especially prominent strand of decentralisation deserves attention: the rise of the ‘democratising’ orchestral concert. The numerous ‘promenade’-type concerts of orchestral and dance music put on by figures such as Philippe Musard had been geared towards entertainment; other potentially educational performances in informal settings, such as those by bands in parks, or even those brought by musicians from the Far East or north Africa to the later Expositions Universelles, were also sources of diversion, distraction and, in the case of the latter, curiosity.39 By contrast, the democratising orchestral concert was a ‘worthy’, almost didactic, event. The trailblazer was Pasdeloup, who created the ‘Concerts Populaires’ tradition in 1861. More famous conductors such as Charles Lamoureux or Édouard Colonne followed in the 1870s, eventually crushing Pasdeloup’s venture on account of their higher performance standards, but apart from the introduction of a chorus to do large-scale choral repertoire they left the basic recipe untouched: play the orchestral classics, with a few solo items for light relief, in a hall large enough to bring a substantial number of tickets within reach of a new, lower-class, audience.40 Across the city, circus rings were pressed into service; a later and striking example of a non-standard venue aimed at attracting new concert audiences was the 1893 Palais d’Hiver built within the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation (the Paris Zoo).41 Since re-educating public taste potentially opened doors to local funding, this was a winning formula. Toulouse founded its series in the same year as Pasdeloup’s series; in 1866 Bordeaux followed (with a Sunday-afternoon offshoot of the concerts of the Société Philharmonique de Sainte-Cécile), and in 1868 Rennes; in the 1870s, Marseilles (1870), Lyons (1873) and Rouen (1875) joined the trend; and in the following decade the Nantes Société Philharmonique renamed itself the Société des Concerts Populaires and, with 6,000 francs of new subsidy, inaugurated a series focused on large-scale works with chorus.42 In general, Parisian filiation was at once resented and required. The orchestras of Charles Lamoureux and Édouard Colonne received a hostile reception in Lille in 1884 and 1906 respectively from knots of loyal subscribers, on grounds of unfair competition with the local orchestra;43 conversely, the briefest glance at the vice-présidents d’honneur of another concerts populaires organisation, the Association Artistique d’Angers (founded in 1877), reveals dependence on those same Parisian conductors, plus Guilmant, Pasdeloup and Saint-Saëns, not to mention a host of Parisian honorary founding members, and Charles Gounod as président d’honneur.44
Considerable research is necessary before the tentative arguments put forward here can be synthesised into anything resembling a confident analysis of inter-urban musical relationships in France during the long nineteenth century. Yet already the picture is more complex than that of a hegemonic Paris towering over a France as obscure as it is profonde. The reasons for such complexity are already beginning to emerge, with border territories, folkloric traditions, French anti-clericalism, the centralising power of the Catholic church and pre-Napoleonic inheritances among them. And while Parisian musicians and government agents were always likely to attempt centralisation (or decentralisation controlled from the centre), it is by pushing on the pressure points of their failures that we shall come to a fuller understanding of French musical self-determination. In so doing we shall perhaps rediscover for French music of the post-Revolutionary period something of what today’s Parisians scent as the annual July exodus beckons: the richness of experience, lying beyond Haussmann’s unified facades, which makes France diverse and Frenchness plural.
Notes
1 See, for example, in Revue et gazette musicale, 42–3 (1875), 338; , Critique et littérature musicales (Paris: Hachette, 1856), 270–1. Variants include the idea of Paris as the boiler of a central heating system: see , Discours sur la décentralisation artistique (Marseilles: Barlatier-Feissat, 1850); or, more loosely, as a light source: , La France musicale, 23 (1 May 1859), 178.
2 See , ‘Decentralisation and regeneration at the Théâtre des Arts, Rouen, 1889–1891’, Revue de musicologie, 94 (2008), 139–80. The first attempt was in Lyons, 1865–1872.
3 (ed.), Rapport sur la musique française contemporaine (Rome: Armani & Stein, 1913), 51.
4 Such societies, however, were not 1890s inventions. Douai, for instance, had a Société d’Émulation to foster regional composition from 1832. See , ‘Douai’, in (ed.), Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 399.
5 On the latter, see especially , ‘La villégiature lyrique ou la musique dans les casinos au XIXe siècle’, in , and (eds), D’un opéra l’autre: hommage à Jean Mongrédien (Paris: Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1996), 389–98.
6 For a compelling example, see , Musique et société à Rennes aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Geneva: Minkoff, 1988), 115–21.
7 As its proponents acknowledged, the infrastructure to implement such a system was inadequate. See Ikuno Sako, ‘The importance of Louis Niedermeyer in the reform of nineteenth-century church music in France’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2007), 136–9.
8 See Sako on Niedermeyer graduates: ‘The importance of Louis Niedermeyer’, 158, 210–49.
9 For Rouen, see and , ‘Vervoitte, Charles’, in (ed.), Dictionnaire, 1274; for Besançon, see , Dictionnaire musical des villes de province (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 91.
10 In opposition to Gallicans, whose high levels of independence from Rome had been enshrined in France since Louis XIV’s time. For a succinct account, see , ‘Organ music in the Mass of the Parisian rite to 1850 with emphasis on the contributions of Boëly’, in and (eds), French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor (University of Rochester Press, 1995), 19–20.
11 Paris, Archives Nationales, F19 3948, folder ‘Bayeux’.
12 See , Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2005), 199.
13 , ‘Une polémique post-révolutionnaire: le rétablissement des maîtrises’, in , and (eds), Échos de France et d’Italie: liber amicorum Yves Gérard (Paris: Buchet Chastel, 1997), 85.
14 On Chaptal, see , Les sociétés musicales en Haute-Normandie, 1792–1914: contribution à une histoire sociale de la musique (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2001), 540. On earlier Parisian inertia, see , ‘La musique dans le Midi vue de Paris’, in (ed.), La musique dans le Midi de la France: XIXe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996), 7.
15 , ‘Un chorège moderne’, part 3, Revue musicale, 8 (1 December 1908), 617. Vauthier cites a Choron letter of 1 August 1819, recipient unidentified.
16 Guy Gosselin, ‘Lille’, in Fauquet (ed.), Dictionnnaire, 695. See , ‘Un chorège moderne’, part 2, Revue musicale, 8 (1 May 1908), 438–9.
17 , ‘Toulouse’, in (ed.), Dictionnaire, 1225.
18 J. Aizic, ‘Bordeaux’, in Fauquet (ed.), Dictionnnaire, 163.
19 Rauline, Les sociétés musicales en Haute-Normandie, 545.
20 Lesure, Dictionnaire, 36.
21 This was the main condition for enhanced subsidy in 1885. See and (eds), Conservatoire de Nantes: 150e anniversaire (Nantes: CNR, 1996), 62.
22 Emmanuel Hondré, ‘L’école de musique de Marseille ou les enjeux d’une nationalisation (1821–1841)’, in Lesure (ed.), La musique dans le Midi de la France, 105.
23 Andrea Musk, ‘Aspects of regionalism in French music during the Third Republic: the Schola Cantorum, d’Indy, Séverac and Canteloube’ (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1999), 18.
24 Ibid., 49–50.
25 See , ‘Systems failure in operatic Paris: the acid test of the Théâtre-Lyrique’, in and (eds), Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914 (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 49–71.
26 See Rowden, ‘Decentralisation and regeneration’ for a succinct account of this long-standing problem.
27 (ed.), Rapport sur la musique française contemporaine (Rome: Armani & Stein, 1913), 54–5.
28 In La France départementale (1835), excerpted and critiqued by in Revue musicale, 9 (28 June 1835), 201–4.
29 Discussed in detail in Musk, ‘Aspects of regionalism’, 150–1. See also , Déodat de Séverac: Musical Identity in fin de siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
30 , ‘Jalons pour une étude de la musique de chambre à Lille au XIXe siècle’, in , and (eds), Musique, esthétique et société au XIXe siècle (Collines de Wavre: Mardaga, 2007), 65.
31 , ‘Vox populi’, in (ed.), La musique en France à l’époque romantique, 1830–1870 (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 232.
32 Reference Gerbod and BailbéIbid., 233.
33 For an insight into the revival of this series during a single year, see , ‘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.
34 See , and (eds.), ‘Avant-propos’, in Le musée de Bordeaux et la musique, 1783–1793 (Mont Saint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2005), 8.
35 Current research includes the collaborative project on concert history from its beginnings to 1914, ‘Répertoire des programmes de concert en France’. A searchable database is located at Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, www.cmbv.com (accessed 22 May 2014).
36 See , The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Olivier Morand, ‘Les derniers feux des concerts spirituels parisiens, 1816‒1831’ (PhD thesis, École des Chartes, 2002).
37 See Weber, The Great Transformation, 50‒1.
38 See Guy Gosselin, ‘Douai’, in Fauquet (ed.), Dictionnaire, 399; on , ‘R …’ in Revue musicale, 5/6 (March 1829), 126; and , ‘Le répertoire choral à la Schola et autour de la Schola (1903–1953)’, in (ed.), Le mouvement scholiste de Paris à Lyons: un exemple de décentralisation musicale avec Georges Martin Witkowski (Lyons: Symétrie, 2004), 97.
39 The most extended discussion, of one particular fair, is , Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (University of Rochester Press, 2005).
40 See , Jules Pasdeloup et les origines du concert populaire (Lyons: Symétrie, 2011), and Jann Pasler’s discussions of Pasdeloup in ‘Democracy, ethics, and commerce: the concerts populaires movement in late 19th-century France’, in Bödeker and Veit (eds), Les sociétés de musique en Europe 1700‒1920, 455‒65.
41 See , ‘Material culture and postmodern positivism: rethinking the “popular” in late nineteenth-century French music’, in Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008), 440.
42 These dates, which derive from preliminary newspaper and archive research, should be regarded as provisional and an invitation to future work, not least because they differ slightly from those provided by Pasler in ‘Democracy, ethics, and commerce’, 459.
43 Lesure, Dictionnaire, 42–3.
44 , L’association artistique d’Angers (1877–1893): histoire d’une société de concerts populaires, suivie du répertoire des programmes des concerts (Paris: Société Française de Musicologie, 2006), 190–1.
