This collection of essays by scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French music has been assembled in homage to the influential and inspirational French musicologist François Lesure who died in 2001. Lesure's immense erudition was legendary and spanned music from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Two French composers who were particular foci in his scholarship were Berlioz and Debussy and this collection is based on scholarship around these two composers and the sources, contexts and legacies relating to their work.
This collection of essays by scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French music has been assembled in homage to the influential and inspirational French musicologist Fran‘s Lesure who died in 2001. Lesure's immense erudition was legendary and spanned music from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Two French composers who were particular foci in his scholarship were Berlioz and Debussy and this collection is based on scholarship around these two composers and the sources, contexts and legacies relating to their work.
This book appraises the contribution of Paul Dukas (1865–1935) to a wide variety of French musical practices. As a composer, critic, artistic collaborator and teacher, Dukas was central to the fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Paris musical scene (and more broadly to the French scene). Significantly, his compositional style mediated tradition through the modern language of his present, while his critical writings pioneered a new mode of musical discourse in the French press. Of further interest are Dukas’s professional relationships with iconic figures such as Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy, and his role in fostering the next generation of French composers. In addition to mentoring famous names such as Olivier Messiaen and Tony Aubin, he staunchly supported his female students, notably Elsa Barraine, Claude Arrieu and Yvonne Desportes. This unique essay collection offers a panoramic perspective on a comparatively neglected French musician. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician traces two aspects of his work: Part I treats Dukas as a composer, thinker and artistic collaborator; Part II constructs his intellectual legacy as seen in his creative and pedagogic endeavours. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in fin de siècle and early twentieth-century French music, women in French music, music criticism and composition education in the Paris Conservatoire.
Today, Claude Debussy's position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure, and scholarship has long taken for granted the enduring musical and aesthetic contributions of his compositions. Yet this was not always the case. Unknown to many concert-goers and music scholars is the fact that for years after his death, Debussy's musical aesthetic was perceived as outmoded, decadent, and even harmful for French music. In Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation, Marianne Wheeldon examines the vicissitudes of the composer's posthumous reception in the 1920s and 30s, and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his music. Rather than viewing Debussy's artistic greatness as the cause of his enduring legacy, she considers it instead as an effect, tracing the manifold processes that shaped how his music was received and how its aesthetic worth was consolidated. Speaking to readers both within and beyond the domain of French music and culture, Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. By analyzing the cultural forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, Wheeldon contributes to a greater understanding of the inter-war period--the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 30s Paris--and offers a musicological perspective on the subject of reputation building, to date underrepresented in recent writings on reputation and commemoration in the humanities. Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation is an important new study, groundbreaking in its methodology and in its approach to musical influence and cultural consecration.
Some of Debussy's most beloved pieces, as well as lesser-known ones from his early years, set in a rich cultural context by leading experts from the English- and French-speaking worlds. The music of Claude Debussy has always been widely beloved by listeners and performers alike, more perhaps than that of any of the other pioneers of musical modernism. However rich in itself, his creative output also participated, and continues to participate, in a network of cultural connections, the scope and meaning of which can only be gleaned through multiple interpretive frameworks. Debussy's Resonance offers twenty new studies by some of themost active and respected English- and French-language scholars of French music. The book treats a large swath of the composer's music, from previously unexplored mélodies of his early years to late pieces such as the ballet Jeux and the Douze Études, and takes into consideration the numerous contexts that helped shape the works and the different ways that musicologists and critics have explained them. CONTRIBUTORS: Katherine Bergeron, Matthew Brown, David J. Code, Mark DeVoto, Michel Duchesneau, David Grayson, Denis Herlin, Jocelyn Ho, Roy Howat, Steven Huebner, Julian Johnson, Barbara L. Kelly, Richard Langham Smith, Mark McFarland, François de Médicis, Robert Orledge, Boyd Pomeroy. Caroline Rae, Marie Rolf, August Sheehy FRANÇOIS DE MÉDICIS is Professor of Music at the Université de Montréal. STEVEN HUEBNER is Professor of Music at McGill University.
Composer, pianist, and critic Claude Debussy's musical aesthetic represents the single most powerful influence on international musical developments during the long fin de siècle period. The development of Debussy's musical language and style was affected by the international political pressures of his time, beginning with the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the rise of the new Republic in France, and was also related to the contemporary philosophical conceptualization of what constituted art. The Debussy idiom exemplifies the ways in which various disciplines - musical, literary, artistic, philosophical, and psychological - can be incorporated into a single, highly-integrated artistic conception. Rethinking Debussy draws together separate areas of Debussy research into a lucid perspective that reveals the full significance of the composer's music and thought in relation to the broader cultural, intellectual, and artistic issues of the twentieth century. Ranging from new biographical information to detailed interpretations of Debussy's music, the volume offers significant multidisciplinary insight into Debussy's music and musical life, as well as the composer's influence on the artistic developments that followed. Chapters include: "Russian Imprints in Debussy's Piano Music"; "Music as Encoder of the Unconscious in Pelléas et Mélisande"; "An Artist High and Low, or Debussy and Money"; "Debussy's Ideal Pelléas and the Limits of Authorial Intent"; "Debussy in Daleville: Toward Early Modernist Hearing in the United States"; and more. Rethinking Debussy will appeal to students and scholars of French music, opera, and modernism, and literary and French studies scholars, particularly concerned with Symbolism and theatre. General readers will be drawn to the book as well, particularly to chapters focusing on Debussy's finances, dramatic works, and reception.
Nearly one hundred years after the death of its composer, the music of Claude Debussy has lost none of its breadth of appeal. With the rare ability to entice listeners on many levels, at its heart lies an engaging simplicity-one which defies traditional analysis and lends mystery to what ultimately is an extremely refined and highly personal approach to composition. Equally fascinating is Debussy's often contradictory personality--at times elusive, but always centered on his devotion to music and his ambition to create a name for himself unlike any other. Author Eric Frederick Jensen provides new insight to the man and the music in this authoritative biography. Although born into poverty, and a failure as a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire, Debussy became the most famous French composer of his day, known for his culture and refinement. His revolutionary music baffled critics but was embraced by audiences. Debussy's scandalous personal life stirred up as much controversy as his music, and his notoriety proved more harmful to his career than the unusual nature of his compositions. Jensen also explores Debussy's relationship to the arts and his career as a music critic. Debussy drew on all of the arts in his development as a composer, including poetry and painting, and his fascination with the arts has often led to his being classified as an Impressionist or Symbolist, two claims which Jensen debunks. One of the finest music critics of his time, Debussy's reviews reveal a great deal not only about his musical taste, but also about what he felt the role and function of music should be. Debussy brings together the most recent biographical research, including a revised catalogue of Debussy's compositions and the first complete edition of his correspondence. With separate, chronological sections on his life and music, Debussy is accessible to the general reader who wishes to focus on his life and personality, while providing detailed discussion of the music to musicians and students.
Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.
Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. In the midst of a sea change in conceptions of the human person, the critics who wrote about Debussy's music in the Parisian press-continually returning to this music's nebulous relationship to sensation and sensibilité-attempted to articulate a music aesthetic appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. While scholarship on French music in this period has often emphasized its affinities with other art forms, such as Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry, Debussy's Critics demonstrates that a preoccupation with the specifically sonic materiality of Debussy's music, informed by late nineteenth-century scientific discourses on affect, perception, and cognition, was central to this music's historical intervention. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, this book reveals the disorienting and bewildering experience of listening to Debussy's music, which compelled its early audiences to reimagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.
In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates exactly how opera functions as dramatic form. Grounded in close analyses of performances of thirty scenes and five whole operas by first-rate singers and celebrated directors, Performing Opera provides readers with an appreciation of the unique challenges and skills required by performers and directors. It will assist them in their own performance and equip them with detailed knowledge of works most commonly featured in the repertoire. In the first part of the book the analysis progresses from scenes in which the singers are silent, via arias and monologues, duets and confrontations, up to ensembles. Wider issues are subsequently addressed: encounters with offstage events, encounters with the numinous, characterization, and the sense of inevitability in tragic opera.
