Reading with Provincial Eyes: The French Musical Press beyond the Capital Katharine Ellis (University of Cambridge) [email protected] The centralised nature of France in the nineteenth century and beyond encourages the assumption that its towns are simply pale and small-scale versions of the capital. On close inspection this assumption proves to be illusory in various ways: firstly, there comes a point when Paris is simply not scalable; secondly, we find decentralist or regionalist resistance to Parisian norms; thirdly, local conditions spark local initiatives that have little to do with models available elsewhere, whether in the capital or not. As published in the daily papers or in specialist periodicals, music criticism is no exception to this phenomenon. When the hundreds of critics who worked in the capital are reduced to a few influential names, the ramifications for critique and debate are radically different. Local rivalries are lived out in greater relief, meaning that losers pay a higher price; by extension, the relationship between writers, local musicians and readers is more intimate, and more obviously so. Among specialist publications, the relative absence of publisher journals and competing titles makes for a less rampantly commercial arena; instead, questions of local solidarity and aspiration loom large. Relations with Paris itself need careful handling. Matters of local pride reach peak intensity not locally but in the breathless dialogue of regional correspondents and their editors in Paris, where «Nouvelles» columns often present French provincial music-making through rose-tinted glasses. Finally, discourses that might in Paris seem self-evidently important for the whole of France become transformed or even displaced on account of the regional, or municipal, coverage of each publication1. 1. For an example, see my analysis of the national versus the local reception of the 1876 Rameau festival in Dijon. ELLIS 2008. Journal of Music Criticism, Volume 5 (2021), pp. 1-19 © Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini. All rights reserved. Katharine Ellis In this article I shall take a small sample of critics, newspapers and specialist periodicals to illustrate the nature of provincial difference in French music criticism, and to encourage closer study of provincial music-critical activity, both in comparative perspective (by genre of publication, or in terms of geography), and as a window onto a holistic view of individual local musical cultures comprising composers, performers and listeners, and embracing everything from folk festivals and military bands to chamber music, amateur and professional concerts, opera, and appearances by touring virtuosi. This article opens up some of those perspectives via a discussion of the workings of music criticism during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in two types of context: the mid-size town in a single region (Rennes, Angers and Nantes), and in a regional powerhouse (Lyon)2. The first three centres allow for discussion of interconnections and regional solidarity or competition, enhanced by the centrality of the figure of Étienne Destranges and the availability of some of his incoming correspondence at the Bibliothèque Municipale in Nantes; the last, in addition to being France’s second city, recommends itself because the rare survival of a back-office archive within the Vallas Collection at the Bibliothèque Municipale in Lyon illuminates key aspects of music-critical ambition and practice. THE MUSICAL PRESS AND THE MID-SIZE URBAN COMMUNITY A cluster of journals in the north-west of France at the end of the nineteenth century offers an idea of what regional co-operation could achieve in the attempt to provide local music lovers (and musicians) with a journalistic support-structure of the kind that Parisians could take for granted. The three papers on which I shall concentrate are Angers-revue (which became Angers-artiste and then Angers-musical (1880-1936), Nantes-Lyrique (1876-1894), run by the formidable local critic Étienne Destranges (1863-1915), and the much shorter- lived Le Sonneur de Bretagne (1892-1895) run by two members of the Collin dynasty of Breton church musicians. Oriented respectively towards concert life, to opera, and to local and regional musical news, between them they also illustrate several aspects of provincial difference that should in turn inform our manner of reading their content. 2. Census figures from 1881 illustrate the disparities: Rennes c.61,000; Angers c.68,000; Nantes, c.124,000; Lyon c.380,000. 2 Reading with Provincial Eyes: The French Musical Press beyond the Capital Angers-revue began on 30 September 1880 as the transformation of Angers’s only arts journal, L’Abeille, into a music journal attached to the local orchestra, the Association Artistique d’Angers, which had been established in 1877. As Yannick Simon makes clear in his history of the orchestra, this relationship of support for the Association Artistique was explicit from the outset, couched in an opening editorial as a promise of support for a valued local cause that brought honour to the town; indeed, Simon refers to it as the Association’s «bulletin»3. Hence its lead articles routinely reviewed the orchestra’s concerts, while its closing articles offered previews of forthcoming programmes, making the journal an interesting mix of the concert review and the educational programme note. In between were news and reviews colums of more general interest. Two local luminaries were at the journal’s head: Jules Bordier (1846-1896), also President of the Association and effectively head of programming until the orchestra’s dissolution in 1893, and Louis de Romain (1844-1912), Vice-President of the Association and chief editor of the journal itself. Despite changes of title, and even when its title page replaced mention of the Association with the grander Revue artistique de l’Ouest — the journal remained true to its roots. From the point of view of its insertion into the social fabric of music- making, Angers-revue and its successors had no analogue in Paris. The orchestra itself channelled the spirit of Édouard Colonne’s Association Artistique du Châtelet, but Colonne did not run an associated journal: neither was there ever a journal allied to the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (founded 1828), or Jules Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires (founded 1861), or the Concerts Lamoureux (founded 1881). There is no real analogue for Angers-artiste and its successors until 1895 and the Tribune de Saint-Gervais, which was a mouthpiece for Charles Bordes and his Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, and for the concerts of the Schola Cantorum more generally. Some but not all of this is explained by questions of institution and personnel; some is explained by questions of scale. Most of Paris’s orchestral societies were run by their founding conductors — who were also in large part their funders. The most famous trio of Jules Pasdeloup, Charles Lamoureux and Édouard Colonne are in this group. Working within the mainstream of concert life, all could depend on a wide variety of coverage in the capital’s daily and periodical press. They doubtless worked hard to garner positive coverage; but they did not need to manufacture it themselves. As to the Paris Conservatoire 3. SIMON 2006, p. 95. 3 Katharine Ellis orchestra: by the 1880s both its repertory and its reputation had ossified and it garnered less press attention than more recent arrivals performing more exciting fare; but its finances were secure because of its being nested within the Conservatoire, and its concerts were in any case famously over-subscribed. In direct contrast to the founder-conductor orchestras, the Conservatoire orchestra could afford to plough its own furrow irrespective of the press. The Angers orchestra was in a different situation: it needed a mouthpiece. The Association required increased subscriptions and ticket sales to pay its players because season by season it ran a near-permanent deficit, performing in a hall that could accommodate 1700, a full 600 seats larger than the Paris Conservatoire. It had to be entrepreneurial. Bordier and De Romain understood this: they ran the journal itself at a deficit as a way of supporting the orchestra, and with a print run (2000 copies) that by the late 1880s outstripped the capacity of the hall in which the orchestra performed4. In relation to content, I would argue that they also understood that the journal had to be upbeat: any claim to critical ‘objectivity’ would have defeated the object, as well as being disingenuous. This was more than self-aggrandisement or self-delusion; it was to do with sustaining the fabric of music-making in Angers. The Angers orchestra was also the municipally-run theatre orchestra, and between them these two musical institutions dominated municipal-funded musical life in the town. If one went under, so would the other, leaving potentially hundreds of musicians and theatre workers without employment. There is no analogue for this level of consequential financial fragility in the capital because the subsidy system for national theatres, and the generally larger scale of employment opportunity, meant that complementary employments did not overlap systematically and symbiotically. A journal such as Angers-artiste and its later incarnations had to meet its own ‘local’ needs, and these bring their own surprises. Brussels looms large, and often larger than Paris. This is not just because of Louis de Romain’s Wagnerism — which meant he took in interest in what was happening at La Monnaie. And neither was it a crude gesture against French centralisation. It was a gesture of respect to orchestra members and their families, and further cements the function of the journal as a «bulletin». One of the founding principles of the Association in 1877 had been to replace local (and inferior) theatre musicians with professionals — and the most available high-quality professionals were to be sourced from Belgium.