Saint-Saens

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time.  Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history.  Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define.  Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought.  For if this age understood time, it was through a melody.
  This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time.  Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music.  They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself.  At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

Though best known as a pianist, organist, conductor and composer, Camille Saint-Saëns was a knowledgeable and prolific writer on a great range of subjects besides music. This was no mere amateur 'dabbling' but part of what he saw as the civic duty of an artist: to be an intellectual, on the one hand, well-informed about everything and, on the other, expressing his views correspondingly.

Gabriel Fauré fue uno de los compositores más destacados de su tiempo. Así lo describieron sus más allegados. Pero el hecho de componer aislado de la vanguardia y no dotando a su música de una intención revolucionaria, y con una técnica musical, que no era del gusto de todos, hizo que su figura pasara de largo en otras partes de Europa. Sin embargo, en París, llegó a ser uno de los compositores más importantes de finales del siglo XIX, dejando tras su muerte, grandes aportaciones a la música francesa. Una música francesa, que había renacido para imponerse frente a las otras dos corrientes imperantes: Italia y Alemania. Este trabajo pretende situar a Gabriel Fauré en el contexto histórico y así definir su importancia en la historia de la música occidental.
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Gabriel Fauré was one of the most well- known composers of his time. He was described this way by his friends. The fact of composing out the vanguard and not giving his music a revolutionary intention, made his figure passed over in other Europe countries. However, in Paris, he became one of the most important composers at the end of the 19th century, leaving after his death, great contributions to French music. A French music had been reborn to prevail, leading the other two important trends: Italy and Germany. This work pretends to place Gabriel Fauré in the history context and define his value in the Western Music History.

While many strategy games (both real-time- and turn-based-) use a fictionalized Earth history as a backdrop for their ludic elements, few seek to faithfully represent the progression of music history via the use of pre-existing music. Soren Johnson’s Civilization IV stands alone as it presents a thorough retelling of music history, with representative works from the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern Eras, including works by Josquin, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, and American minimalist composer, John Adams. The game’s lead designer and AI programmer, Soren Johnson, personally selected each track included in the underscoring playlists. Drawing heavily upon new interviews with the game designers, this paper explores Soren Johnson’s personal representation of music history, analyzing in particular his use of John Sheppard’s Media Vita, Saint-Säens’s Cello Concerto No.1,  Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and the works of John Adams. I also discuss the implications of Johnson’s personalized version of history and argue that we can identify him with auteur film directors. The paper also addresses the potential for Civilization IV to educate its players in genres they may have been unfamiliar with, helping them contextualize and appreciate previously unfamiliar musics.

Proust has shown little interest in the decorative arts of his time, but his work bears the mark of the "submarine style" distinctive of Art nouveau. The low bookshelves with glass panes in the Grand Hôtel room at Balbec ― the symbol of À la Recherche’s unity, according to Georges Poulet in Proustian Space ― prove to be authentic witnesses of “modern style”. But what does “modern style” actually mean? À la Recherche includes five occurrences of the expression that could lead to misunderstanding. Contrary to a preconceived idea, it is not the English name for Art nouveau. This French coined anglicism refers to the international revival of the decorative arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, a fascinating but disturbing blend of aesthetics and social ideas. Proust detected at once and discreetly highlighted the cosmopolitan and "rastaquouère" (so to speak "métèque") inspiration of an ephemeral artistic movement contemporary with the Dreyfus affair. Enriched with an abundant and entirely original iconography, full of new discoveries and identifications, Rastaquarium brings back to life an epoch of which the novelist caught the essence. For the first time the whole question of decorative arts in À la recherche is fully tackled in all its ramifications, in a fascinating instance of the network of connections at the heart of Proust’s system.

Proust n’a manifesté que bien peu d’intérêt pour les arts décoratifs de son temps, mais son œuvre ponctuée d’aquariums est marquée par le «style sous-marin» caractéristique de l’Art nouveau. Les «bibliothèques vitrées» de la chambre de Balbec ― dans lesquelles Georges Poulet voyait le symbole de l’unité de l’œuvre ― se révèlent d’authentiques témoins du «modern style». Mais qu’est-ce que le «modern style»? L’expression, qui revient cinq fois dans À la Recherche du temps perdu, n’avait jamais vraiment été élucidée. Contrairement à une idée reçue, ce n’est en rien le nom anglais de l’Art nouveau. Cet anglicisme bien français désigne un renouveau international des arts décoratifs qui, mêlant esthétique et idées sociales, fascine et inquiète… Proust a parfaitement perçu et discrètement mis en valeur l’inspiration cosmopolite et «rastaquouère» d’un courant artistique dont le bref épanouissement coïncide avec les années de l’affaire Dreyfus. Enrichi d’une vaste iconographie, entièrement originale, fourmillant de trouvailles et d’identifications nouvelles, Rastaquarium fait revivre une époque dont l’écrivain a su capter l’essentiel. Toujours abordée de façon fragmentaire, la question des arts décoratifs dans la Recherche n’avait jamais été traitée dans son ensemble, seule manière de saisir les réseaux de correspondances si chers à Proust.


Table of Contents

Note sur l’iconographie – Remerciements – Abréviations

Rastaquarium

Qu’est-ce que l’Art « nouveau » ?

Le « modern style » n’est pas un style

Naissance d’une expression

Le mobilier des Proust

Le monde de Liberty

Contre Ruskin

1905 : « Sur la lecture »

La Femme inconnue de Lille et le Printemps par « Brown »

Le moment Maple

Bing !

Le « modern style » dans la Recherche

Les bibliothèques vitrées de Balbec

De la référence anglaise à la référence bavaroise : le Salon d’Automne de 1910

Style « sous-marin »

Le Royaume de Neptune ou la civilisation de l’aquarium

Le « modern style », agent de l’étranger

L’esthétique dreyfusarde

Siegfried n’est pas Samuel

Le règne de l’impur

Le style franco-sémitique

Une nouvelle croisade

Dreyfusards avant Dreyfus

Style rastaquouère

Bibliographie - Index nominum - Table des illustrations

In this paper I propose a path of research that is entirely tangential to the long artistic and professional career of Camille Saint-Saëns, useful, however, to provide a further element of knowledge to that long phase of discovery and revaluation of ancient music that interested not only the choices of our composer, but also that part of the French musical life oriented to defend and strengthen the values of tradition in the name of the revanchist spirit that influenced the transalpine culture at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
The story began at the beginning of the twentieth century and involved Samson’s author as honorary president of the Société des instruments anciens: a small ensemble founded in Paris in 1901 by Henri Casadesus who had the peculiarity of performing with old instruments on a repertoire of unpublished pieces from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made by composers (often little known) belonging to the most important European musical traditions. The declared intention of the Société was to “reconstituer fidèlement l’ensemble des sonorités qu’employaient les compositeurs de l’époque" through a repertoire of completely unknown pieces, ‘discovered’ in unspecified French and foreign libraries.  The members of the ensemble belonged almost all to the same family as the founder, but there was no lack of external participation such as that of the young Alfredo Casella, hired as harpsichordist in the first decade of the twentieth century. The vague indications in the brochures on the unknown pieces proposed by Société and the absence of feedback in the musicological literature have raised more than a few doubts about the true origin of this repertoire.
The reason for Saint-Saëns’ authoritativeness as a famous composer for such a faded musical story remains unknown.

One largely accepted conviction about the Modern Greek Musical History is that the Art Music actually never took roots in Greece, as the so called Classical Music did not interest but the higher class of the society. Researching at the Athens Conservatoire Archives inevitably leads us to plenty of evidence that prove this conviction to be false. The foundation of Athens Conservatoire, in 1871, aimed to the musical cultivation of the middle and lower classes of the society, as one can deduce from the institution’s registries of the time: next to high-school pupils and university students one finds pupils originated from the middle and lower class (merchants, engineers, tailors, bookbinders, printers, land-surveyors, cabinet-makers, clock-makers, blacksmiths), who, thanks to the free of charge classes that the Conservatoire offered, could learn to play music. The musical activity of the Conservatoire gradually improved in quality and the Athens Conservatoire very soon became a musical centre of Greece. When Camille Saint-Saëns visited Greece in 1920, said that the Conservatoire’s orchestra could stand anywhere. Some years later, the musical activity of the orchestra, under Dimitri Mitropoulos’ direction (former student of the Conservatoire), proved to be pioneering, presenting modernist music quite early. The example of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, which made its Greek premiere on January 1926 (that is only a few years after the Swiss (1918) and French (1924) premieres) is quite significant, since its warm reception by the Athenian audience, can prove that Art Music actually took roots in Greece.

Several episodes from the history of Russian, Spanish and Byzantine thought are singled out, which were connected with the ongoing struggle between the principles of secularism (like in the culture-centered philosophy of early Ortega y Gasset) and of theocentric humanism (Unamuno, Rev. Fr. Georges Florovsky). We stress the predominant importance of the fourteenth-century Byzantine Christocentric philosophy for the contemporary intellectual quest, as David Dishypatos gives us a key to the philosophical explanation of deification, whereas Theodore Metochites (ca. 1305) points to the possibility of attaining a 'secular conciliarity (sobornost)' of philosophers, using Socrates as an example. These philosophers have at least one important thing in common, as they are hostile towards any deconstructionism and 'Nitzschean paradigms' (A. Kovelman) in the history of culture.

In Les Gaietés du Conservatoire (1899), Albert Lavignac delighted his readers with anecdotes about Rossini and highlighted the deceased maestro’s amiable address to him as «ma grande clarinette». What was untold but no less personal and in fact illuminating is his benefit from the samedi soirs, where he once witnessed a performance of Rossini’s L’Amour à Pékin (1867). Hitherto unknown to Rossini studies is Lavignac’s compositional reception of what the late Rossini in an epistolary postscript referred to as «nouvelle gamme chinoise». Taking an unusual whole-tone configuration, Rossini’s scale was embedded in Lavignac’s solfège textbook (1877) and scrupulously disguised under as many as six different clefs. Their shared use of a harmonic sequence and, above all, Lavignac’s exercise title (Gamme chinoise) render the case of pastiche unmistakable. However, the Rossinian influence turned out to forge their subtly intertwined and unfavourable fate. No less than three scattered textual passages from the early twentieth century criticised Rossini and Lavignac directly or otherwise for the erroneous correspondence between the whole-tone scale and the Chinese scale (supposedly pentatonic instead of hexatonic in structure). The present study sheds light on the emergence of ‘gamme chinoise’ as a Rossinian notion and poses the thought-provoking question as to why the scale composed exclusively of whole tones could have reasonably been understood as a Chinese scale at the time. Reconstruction of the Parisian reception history regarding traditional Chinese music theory reveals distorted interpretations of the Chinese lülü 律呂 (not at all a practical six-note scale) as ‘gamme chinoise’ from Jean-Philippe Rameau (1760) to Georg Capellen (1910). Although there is no indication that Rossini possessed the scholarly interest or patience to figure out anything about Chinese music, the marked consonance of his scalic idiosyncrasy with that particular French misunderstanding of musical heritage from China serves to reorient our attention to the oft-evaded issue of chinoiserie. I suggest that, central to Rossini’s aesthetic of chinoiserie in the musical scale is a tendency of defamiliarisation typical not only of Rossini’s notorious sense of humour, but also European representations of such far-eastern locale as Pékin. As such, the whole-tone scale in fin-de-siècle Paris was tied to exoticism at least in part through the Rossinian notion entailing neither European diatonicism nor – rather deliberately – Chinese pentatonicism. Rossini, to borrow Wagner’s words from Eine Erinnerung an Rossini (1868), was «handed to the posterity» as explorer of a different Chinese-linked scale and important predecessor of French modernist composers.

An essay on Saint-Saëns's grand opera, "Samson et Dalila," which investigates how the infantile construction of the opera's eponymous hero can be justified, or at least better understood, in the context of the death of the composer's two sons and which, using Barthes's concept of "holophrase," traces the challenges to adult male subjectivity that Samson presents.

On 8 December 1938, items from the archives of Jules Massenet, consisting of photographs and some important correspondence received by the composer or his wife, were sold by auction in
Paris. Those letters that were considered to be the most valuable were sold separately, while the others were gathered into fifteen auction lots of 150 items each. While some of these are now held at
the Bibliothèque nationale de France or at the Beinecke Library, most were dispersed, or deposited in places where they remain unknown. An example is a packet, just rediscovered at the Bibliothèque historique of the city of Paris, that was acquired, and then bequeathed, by Lucy Arbell, the composer’s last muse. This packet provides new information on the composer’s life, works and relationships, thanks in particular to unpublished letters from Bizet, Puccini, or Verlaine. It also testifies to
the composer’s particular concern over his correspondence, which he sometimes carefully annotated or cited in the memoirs (Mes souvenirs) that he wrote at the end of his life; several letters in the pack show evidence of this. The packet also contains material relating to personalities— documents or autographs that Massenet seems to have particularly and preciously collected together. Thus, while this new collection confirms Massenet’s important place in the social and
cultural fabric of the Third Republic, it also bears witness to an author who wished to leave his mark as part of a cultural tradition, and to leave behind information that would be useful in constructing the image that he wished to hand down to posterity.