The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 JANE F. FULCHER OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS the composer as intellectual This page intentionally left blank the composer as intellectual Music and Ideology in France 1914–1940 jane F. fulcher 1 2005 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fulcher, Jane F. The composer as intellectual: music and ideology in France 1914–1940 / Jane F. Fulcher. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13 978-0-19-517473-1 ISBN 0-19-517473-9 1. Music—France—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Composers—France. 3. Music—Social aspects—France. 4. Music—Political aspects—France. I. Title. ML270.5.F83 2005 780′.944′09041—dc22 2004049521 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my mother, Carol Fulcher This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to a number of colleagues, in several disciplines, who have been of indispensable help by so generously offering me intellectual ex- change, their own materials, bibliographic suggestions, and moral as well as pro- fessional support. I am particularly indebted to the historians Carl E. Schorske, Arno J. Mayer, Christophe Charle, Jacques Revel, Roger Chartier, and Michael Steinberg. I also wish to thank Leon Botstein for providing me with the opportu- nity to present and develop my ideas concerning Claude Debussy by inviting me to advise the Bard Music Festival the year that it was devoted to Debussy. I am grateful to historians Christophe Prochasson, Steve Schloesser, Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, Joel Blatt, and Maurice Agulhon for the materials and advice they gave me. Colleagues in my own field of musicology have been equally generous and supportive, and I especially wish to thank Philip Gossett, Richard Leppert, Pamela Potter, Marian Green, and Brian Hart. I am also grateful for the informa- tion, sources and support provided by Leslie Sprout, Nigel Simeone, Bridget Con- rad, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Martin Marks, Myriam Chimènes, Glenn Watkins, Bar- bara Kelly, Andrea Musk, Ronald Wiecki, David Grayson, and the late François Lesure. My students at Indiana University also helped to stimulate my ideas and to provide me with valuable information through their own research projects, and so I wish to thank them, and particularly Gary Laycock and Jennifer Smull. vii viii acknowledgments My friends and colleagues in Paris were a continual source of both inspira- tion and practical help in all domains of my research; I am thus extremely grate- ful to Elizabeth Bartlet, Leslie Wright, Annegret Fauser, Sabina Ratner, Marie Rolf, Esteban Buch, and Earl and Donna Evleth. Equally supportive were my col- leagues, in several departments, at Indiana University, especially Gilbert Chaitin and Rosemary Lloyd in the Department of French, Thomas Mathiesen and the late A. Peter Brown in Musicology, and Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Gretchen Hor- lacher, Robert Hatten, and Mary Wennerstrom in Music Theory. In addition, I am indebted to those colleagues who provided me with the stimulating opportunity to present and discuss my ideas at Princeton and Yale Universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Trinity College, and the University of Cincinnati, as well as at the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. I thus wish to thank Scott Burnham, Leon Plantinga, Gail Hilson Woldu, Edward Nowacki, and, once again, Roger Chartier, Jacques Revel, and Christophe Charle. Also of considerable and generous aid in various aspects of my research and the development of my ideas were art historian Mark Antliff, and several sociolo- gists whose planning of and participation in a conference on opera and society was particularly stimulating for me: Victoria Johnson, Thomas Ertman, and Craig Calhoun. I remain extremely grateful to another sociologist, the late Pierre Bour- dieu, who never flagged in his support or help, who offered me the opportunity to present my material to his seminar, and who published material relating to this study in his journal. I also wish to thank those colleagues who were of essential assistance in the development of this manuscript in all its stages, and whose professional advice I have greatly valued. This book would not have been possible without the expert computer assistance of Melissa Beaver, who patiently and enthusiastically helped me through several stages of its growth and revision. Nancy Toff, of Oxford Uni- versity Press, was always generous with her help and advice, practical and intel- lectual, in both her fields of expertise, publication and the music history of this period. I am also most grateful to my editor, Kim Robinson, for her valuable as- sistance in all phases of the preparation and publication of this book, as well as to the three scholars whom she so insightfully selected to read it. I remain indebted, as well, to my previous editor, Maribeth Payne, for her en- thusiasm, advice, and guidance in my previous book and in the transition to the publication of this one. Several institutions also made this study possible through their financial and practical assistance over the period of its genesis and development, from 1986 to the present. I am thus grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for their fellowships for individual research, and to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was the Ed- ward T. Cone Member in Music Studies for 2003–4. I also wish to thank the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for its research fellowship, acknowledgments ix and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for its support and the op- portunity to present my ideas. I am equally grateful for the assistance I received from the Office of Research and the University Graduate School and the Program in West European Studies at Indiana University. Finally, I wish to thank my family for their continual belief and generous help in every aspect of my career, particularly my mother, to whom this book is dedicated, my sister, Carol Ann Fulcher, and brother-in-law, Frederick Pepper. This page intentionally left blank contents Introduction The Artist as Intellectual?, 3 The Composer, Public Issues, and Symbols, 4 The Political and Symbolic Background, 10 The State, National Symbols, and the Dialogue, 11 Two Histories and Their Intersection, 17 1: Wartime Nationalism, Classicism, and Their Limits Part 1: State Hegemony and Musical Culture: Institutions and Propaganda French Identity and the Classic Myth, 19 The Myth and Music in Wartime, 22 Imagining the French Community through Opera, 23 Defining the “Classic Masters” in Concerts, 26 “Defending” French Music and Its “Purity,” 31 Professional Interests versus Cultural Politics, 33 The Orthodox Discourse and Its Boundaries, 34 Wartime Ideology and Musicology, 40 French Editors, the Canon, and the Classics, 42 Resistance to the War and Its Culture, 45 xii contents Part 2: Intellectual and Creative Responses How to Defend “la Musique Française,” 46 Nationalist Orthodoxy: D’Indy versus Saint-Saëns, 48 Charpentier’s Double-Voiced Schemes, 50 Debussy’s Dialogue with Orthodoxy, 52 Ravel’s Inflections of Tradition: The Tombeau,65 Satie’s Subversions: Language and the Dialogic in Parade,70 The Birth of the “Next Generation,” 84 2: The National or Universal in the Twenties Part 1: Conservative Hegemony and Political-Cultural Conflict Memory and the Nationalists’ Agenda, 86 Commemoration, Spiritualism, and the Classic in Music, 86 Political and Symbolic Confrontations, 89 Consecration, Concerts, and the Orientation of Taste, 91 The Opera of Conservative Ideas, 96 Reclassifications in Scholarship and Criticism, 108 New Goals in French Musical Education, 113 The Complex Case of Nadia Boulanger, 116 Forging the French Image Abroad, 117 Cultural Responses of the Far Right and Left, 118 Politics through Culture, 118 The Action Française and “Intelligence,” 119 The “Schola d’Action Française,” 122 The Left: Universalism and the “Classic,” 123 Syndicalism, Music, and the Fêtes du Peuple, 126 Part 2: French Composers as Intellectuals and the Issues The Older Generation and Its Choices, 133 D’Indy: Innovation versus Dogma, 134 Ravel: Reasserting the Universal and the Modern, 136 Satie and Leftist Individualism: Socrate, 146 The Adversative Modernism of Youth, 152 Wiéner’s Challenge through Repertoire, 152 The Generation of 1914 in Music, 154 The Counterculture and Its Supporters, 156 Cocteau: Protecting Modernism with