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The Composer As Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism Author(S): Jane F

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The Composer As Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism Author(S): Jane F The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism Author(s): Jane F. Fulcher Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 197-230 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/763888 Accessed: 03-09-2018 00:25 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Musicology This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:25:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Composer as Intellectual: Ideological Inscriptions in French Interwar Neoclassicism JANE F. FULCHER On December 16, 1915, the director of the recently reopened Paris Opera displayed his political acumen to a gov- ernment still skeptical of opera's relevance in wartime. Drawing on in- 197 novations in his own private theater, Jacques Rouch6 mounted a seem- ingly anodyne work, resembling classic "op6ra-ballet" and bearing the pallid title of Mademoiselle de Nantes.1 The production, in reality, was ingenious-a brilliant departure in wartime propaganda-not through blatant brainwashing but through means far more powerful for being so insidiously indirect. Central to the work's scenario is a concert, with musicians and audience dressed in period costume; the former are presenting a per- formance of French music before the grandchildren of Madame de Montespan. More specifically, the eighteenth-century progeny of this famous mistress of Louis XIV are listening to selections of Lully and Charpentier that illustrate the birth and growth of opera in France. Volume XVII - Number 2 - Spring 1999 The Journal of Musicology ? 1999 by the Regents of the University of California , Before taking over the Op6ra, Rouch6 had been director of his own Thditre des Arts, where he had introduced a series of "concerts illustrds," featuring musicians in pe- riod costumes acting out concerts from the historical past. On the success of such con- certs, see the praise by the Socialist L'Humanit, on January 16, 1913. On the re-opening of the Op6ra, despite the opposition of the theater's subscribers as well as the "Conseil des Ministres," see the anonymous article, "Les Thditres subventionds pendant la guerre," preserved at the BibliothNque de l'Op6ra, Fonds Rouchd, pi&ce 96. And on re- lated productions at the Op6ra, in addition to this one, see Charles Dupachez, Histoire de l'Opra de Paris: un siecle au Palais Gamier (Paris, 1984) - This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:25:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY The homology between performances here occurring was charged: the audience that was present in the Opera was being manipulated astutely toward identification with that represented on the stage. The concert depicted historically was instilling national memory as well as cultural identity, creating a sense of its unity and continuity as the patrimony of all future generations. So too was the performance at the Opera; the audience in the theater was witnessing its own past on the stage, and in identifying with the historical audience, imbibing the same lesson of French identity and tradition. Its heritage, it learned, was classic; in ad- dition, since the illustrious days of Louis XIV it had been bound instru- mentally to state power, had defined the community, and ensured its prestige. Rouch6, in this and similar productions, was inserting the Op6ra into a network of wartime propaganda through clever mediation, or the attempted control of the production of meaning. Like other institu- tions, the Opera was to serve as a realm of national memory and myth to instill a unified wartime identity in politically and culturally fractured France.2 The myth was that of French classicism: France was "Latin" and thus classic in culture, but according to a circumscribed notion of 198 the style that was rooted in the ideology of the monarchist Right. The goal of this study is thus, first, to examine this myth as it was propagated in music, and then to trace its impact in the twenties, when contesta- tion again was possible, and intellectuals confronted it. As it will seek to demonstrate, neoclassicism in wartime and the twenties was no "Zeit- geist," it was the 'national style,' synonymous with patriotism, which made it a matrix for political dissension.3 An integral part of national symbolism, deployed in political communication, "official classicism" provoked adversaries of the government to respond with contestatory articulations of "the classic." 2 On the larger issue of national memory in this period, see Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de memoire Vol. II La Nation (Paris, 1986). On the political and cultural divisions within France on the eve of the war, see Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music from the Dre)fus Affair to the First World War (New York, 1999), 216-19. In the months pre- ceding the war, the military authorities had squared off against the Socialists and Syndi- calists. On this and the subsequent "Union Sacrde," or the forced conciliation of political factions in the interest of national solidarity (declared by Poincard at the start of the war), see Maurice Agulhon, La Ripublique (188o-z932) Vol. I (Paris, 1990), 260-62. 3 This is not to say that there were not common stylistic tendencies in Europe as a response to the war, in particular a tendency toward simplicity and austerity. Their cul- tural construal and connotations, however, were substantially different, as seen in the di- verging rhetorics associated with French Classicism and German "Neue Sachlichkeit." On the latter, see Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA, 1994), 474-76. Also see Pascal Huynh, La Musique sous la R?publique de Weimar (Paris, 1999). This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:25:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FULCHER French composers, considered intellectuals, were necessarily im- plicated in this dialogue, for their public choice of classic values was rife with connotations within this system of political representation. Contemporaries indeed interpreted and commented on their political "message" by reading their conceptions of the classic, rightly or wrongly, within the framework of current concepts and meanings. Rather than considering one case in depth I have thus chosen to examine several composers who publicly responded to different "constructions" of the classic, some of which included prescriptions for music. Yet, as we shall see, it was they who ultimately made the creative leap from these con- ceptions, as articulated discursively, to the realm of style, or to musical models of the classic. The space covered in this leap is my interest, or that eloquent gap that Roger Chartier has described between the "registers" of discursive articulation and artistic "representation."4 But, again, it was not only 'translation' of current conceptions or models they sought: some, as we shall see, inflected or reacted to key values and concepts in specific constructions of the classic. Controlling the Classic Image 199 Throughout French cultural institutions in wartime the goal of propaganda was the same: to effect consensus concerning identity and arrive at a unified core of national beliefs.5 This was crucial in the wake of the "cultural war" that had followed the Dreyfus Affair, when the defeated French nationalist Right belligerently posed the question of "essential French values." It was then that the monarchist "Ligue de l'Action FranCaise" reasserted true French culture as "clas- sic," however not without strenuous opposition concerning its signifi- cance from the French Left. With the nationalists's triumph by wartime, and the concomitant credibility of the Action Franmaise, the task of French cultural institutions was to impose the league's interpretation of French "Latin" and classic culture. For the combat was to be "refer- enced" in myth in order to galvanize energies, and to create a common 4 See Roger Chartier's discussion of the work of Louis Marin in Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore, 1997), 90-91. On the condi- tions under which French composers came to be considered intellectuals at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and thereafter, see Jane F Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music, 15-20. 5 On the war as a battle to impose "cultural representations" and as (according to wartime propaganda) a "war of cultures," see Christophe Prochasson and Anne Ras- mussen, Au nom de la patrie. Les intellectuels et la premiPre guerre mondiale (z9zo-z9z9) (Paris, 1996), 280. On the collaboration of leaders in education, religion, and the arts in war- time propaganda efforts, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto, 1989), 223-36. This content downloaded from 129.74.250.206 on Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:25:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY emotional bond in a still politically divided nation. To achieve this, the myth had to have a foundation in national history, since in France, as in Great Britain, history became the very core of national identity.6 The prestige of nationalist writers like Barres and Maurras now reached its height, and their ideas concerning the "national genius" were widely accepted and deftly vulgarized.
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