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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Pierre Baillot (1771-1842) Institutions, Values and Identity Vandoros, Markella Sofia Alexandra Maria Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 Pierre Baillot (1771-1842): Institutions, Values and Identity Markella Sofia Alexandra Maria Vandoros PhD in Music King’s College London Abstract On 12 December 1814, an unusual concert took place in Paris, one exclusively featuring chamber works. The audience gathered to listen to string quartets and quintets led by acclaimed violinist Pierre Baillot. The Séances de quatuors et de quintettes de Baillot were thus born and continued to operate until 1840. Parisian musical life was dominated by opera, a genre that the majority of modern historians working on nineteenth-century Paris tend to focus on. However, we discover that, owing to Baillot’s efforts, the public chamber music concert seemed to have a future. The central aim of my thesis is to give chamber music the place that it deserves in music history and to demonstrate that a deeper knowledge of concert culture can enhance our perception of conservatism and canon formation during the first half of the nineteenth century. I discuss the circumstances under which Baillot set up his séances and his ability to educate his audience through his programmes. The result was a genealogy of instrumental music, which represented the early stages of historization. We also look at Baillot’s status as a violinist, prompted by Paganini’s concerts in Paris, through a juxtaposition of the two performers, but also through Baillot’s own compositions. Further, Baillot’s treatises Méthode de violon du Conservatoire (1803) and L’Art du violon (1834) allow us to gain a deeper understanding of his aesthetic values, including the much-discussed beau idéal. The séances were made possible by the strong support network that Baillot had surrounded himself by, consisting of his contemporaries, as well as artists of the next generation. We acknowledge critic François-Joseph Fétis, whose writings in La revue musicale helped advance Baillot’s project, and composer George Onslow – the only French composer to have his works performed chez Baillot – whose nickname ‘le Beethoven français’ stimulates a discussion on French musical identity, or indeed frenchness. In the new generation of musicians, Eugène Sauzay and François Habeneck were both Baillot’s students at the Conservatoire; the former’s mémoires offer invaluable information on concert culture at the time, while the latter’s founding of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire in 1828, which featured Beethoven’s symphonies as the concert centrepiece for several decades running, illustrates how Baillot’s work shaped the future of Parisian instrumental music. 2 Contents List of illustrations │ 4 Acknowledgements │ 5 Introduction │ 6 1. Séances de quatuors et de quintettes de Baillot (1814-1840) │ 12 1.1 Winning over the right audience: Baillot’s subscribers 1.2 Collaborations and inspiration: Russia and Vienna 1.3 Baillot’s legacy: virtually unknown? 2. ‘Une espèce de magie attachée à son nom’: Baillot’s programmes and his celebrities │ 41 2.1 Towards a musical museum 2.2 ‘Un bon vieux maître, plein de charme’: Luigi Boccherini 2.3 Beethoven 2.4 ‘Papa’ Haydn and his son Mozart 3. Pierre Baillot: a virtuoso in disguise? │ 78 3.1 Baillot’s treatises and the beau idéal 3.2 Paganini and the Revue musicale 3.3 An unlikely connection: Giovanni Battista Viotti 3.4 Baillot: Soloist, teacher, writer, concert organiser...and composer 4. ‘Le Beethoven français’: George Onslow and French chamber music aesthetics │ 115 4.1 Le quintette de la balle, left-ear deafness, and Beethoven 4.2 Frenchness 5. Inspiring the next generation: Société des concerts du Conservatoire │ 149 5.1 Habeneck, the Eroica, and an emerging pattern 5.2 Mendelssohn: a new hero entices the French 5.3 Developing a canon: conservatism or progress? Afterword │ 181 Bibliography │ 184 3 Illustrations Jean-Baptiste Singry, Pierre Baillot (1815), Bibliothèque nationale de France | 16 Pierre Baillot, L’Art du violon. Nouvelle méthode (Paris, 1834), front cover, Bibliothèque nationale de France | 48 Antoine-Achille Bourgeois de la Richardière, Luigi Boccherini (1814), Bibliothèque nationale de France | 57 Eugène Delacroix, Théâtre Italien: Rossini soutenant à lui seul tout l'Opéra italien (1828), Bibliothèque nationale de France | 77 Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), Paganini (1831), Phillips Collection, Washington DC | 97 Henri Grévedon, Georges Onslow (1830), Bibliothèque nationale de France | 124 P. C. Van Geel, François-Antoine Habeneck (1835), Bibliothèque nationale de France | 159 4 Acknowledgements I am immensely grateful to my supervisors, Professor Matthew Head and Professor Roger Parker, for their invaluable guidance and continuous support throughout my doctoral studies. Their inspiring ideas, exceptional attention to detail and persistent encouragement were instrumental to the shaping of my thesis. I also acknowledge the Music Department at King’s College London for providing a tremendously stimulating academic environment. Thanks are also due to the IKY State Scholarships Foundation of Athens, Greece, for the financial support. I would like to acknowledge the staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the British Library, the Maughan Library and the University of London Senate House Library for their assistance on several occasions, and I am grateful to Dr Michael Fend, Flora Willson, Diane Tisdall, Fabio Morabito and Alessandro Sanguineti for their valuable comments on parts of my thesis. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my parents and siblings for their everlasting support, and especially to my sister Angela for proofreading several parts of my dissertation. To my husband Jérôme who, apart from inspecting my translations from original French texts in the thesis, stood by me throughout this journey, with enthusiasm and understanding, I am forever thankful. 5 Introduction When I first embarked on this project, my intention was to study the aesthetics of the so-called French Violin School, represented by three violinists and professors at the Paris Conservatoire, Pierre Baillot (1771-1842), Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831) and Pierre Rode (1774-1830), while concentrating on the musical values and the matters of performance that differentiated their school from other European ones. However, it was the pessimistic and hugely dismissive views of composers Hector Berlioz and Camille Saint-Saëns with regard to the Parisian chamber music scene in the first half of the nineteenth century that instantly captured my attention and ultimately shifted the central aim of my research to giving chamber music at the time the place that it deserves in music history. As a result, I focussed my attention on Pierre Baillot and his chamber music society in particular, the Séances de quatuors et de quintettes de Baillot, which was founded in Paris in December 1814 and which was the first of its kind in that it exclusively presented string quartets and quintets in its programmes. Taken by the overwhelming outpouring of opera in the first half of the nineteenth century, historians tend to overlook chamber music entirely, and so access to information on chamber music in the French capital initially appeared very limited, to some extent confirming Berlioz and Saint-Saëns’s views. As time went by, however, a few different sources began to provide answers to my numerous questions, the most pressing of which was whether there was enough interest, time, space and resources for chamber music in a city that was so engrossed in opera and ballet. Were Berlioz and Saint-Saëns right? Obviously Pierre Baillot’s project has to be placed in its volatile cultural context. In the turbulent two decades after the Revolution of 1789, France had witnessed the violent end of a monarchy that had lasted for centuries and the 6 execution of King Louis XVI by guillotine, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose influence over much of western Europe was followed by his two subsequent falls, and the entry of foreign troops into Paris for the first time in four hundred years. The same year that Baillot started his quartet and quintet series, France saw the first abdication of Napoleon in April and the immediate Restoration of the Bourbons with Louis XVIII as king. The political circumstances brought with them such turmoil that musical life could not have been left unharmed: the Conservatoire was temporarily closed down, also bringing the student concerts known as Exercices to a halt. Music societies and public concerts at the beginning of the Restoration were particularly disorganised and even private music salons were hit by confusion, as the nobles contemplated the Bourbons’ return.