Durham E-Theses La musique des lumières: The Enlightenment Origins of French Revolutionary Music, 1789-1799 HUFF, JONATHAN,EDWARD How to cite: HUFF, JONATHAN,EDWARD (2015) La musique des lumières: The Enlightenment Origins of French Revolutionary Music, 1789-1799 , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11021/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 1 2 For my parents, Martin and Julie Huff 3 4 ABSTRACT It is commonly believed that the music of the French Revolution (1789-1799) represented an unusual rupture in compositional praxis. Suddenly patriotic hymns, chansons , operas and instrumental works overthrew the supremacy of music merely for entertainment as the staple of musical life in France. It is the contention of this thesis that this ‘rupture’ had in fact been a long time developing, and that the germ of this process was sown in the philosophie of the previous decades. In essence, I assert that to understand the Revolutionaries’ ambitions for music which treated music as a pedagogical tool, it is imperative to evaluate their basis in Enlightenment musical aesthetics. In order to justify this assertion, I will examine the evidence from three angles in respective chapters. The first chapter will consider the nature of Enlightenment musical aesthetics, its foundations in Classical conceptions of music, and its path to the Revolution. The second chapter will consider the ways in which this perspective was adopted and transformed by the Revolutionary authorities, who sought a system of music (and the arts) which could inculcate Republican principles. In the last chapter, I will complete the present study by examining the nature of the Revolution’s political music itself, evaluating two case studies and taking into account modern scholarship’s interpretation of the repertoire. 5 6 LA MUSIQUE DES LUMIÈRES : The Enlightenment Origins of French Revolutionary Music, 1789-1799 by Jonathan Huff A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Research (MAR) Department of Music The University of Durham 2015 (53,827 words, excluding translations) 7 8 CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 5 La Musique des lumières: ........................................................................................................................................................... 7 Contents ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 List of Illustrations ................................................................................................................................................................. 11 Statement of Copyright ......................................................................................................................................................... 13 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................................................ 15 Introduction .............................................................................................................................................................................. 17 Chapter I: La musique des lumières ................................................................................................................................ 21 Chapter II: Revolutionary Conceptions of Music ........................................................................................................ 52 Chapter III: The Music of the Revolution ...................................................................................................................... 89 Epilogue: Les éléphants galantes .................................................................................................................................... 134 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................................................... 137 9 10 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Cover: The Carmagnole (Dance Around the Guillotine) by Käthe Kollwitz (1901) 2. Page 61: La Mort de Marat, Jacques-Louis David (1793) 3. Page 62 : Les Derniers Moments de Michel Lepeletier , Jacques-Louis David (1793) 4. Page 127 : Robespierre exécutant le bourreau , Hector Fleischmann (1908) 11 12 STATEMENT OF COPYRIGHT The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Information derived from it should be acknowledged. 13 14 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to a great many people who have helped and supported me in one way or another since this project began in June 2013. I would like to thank my supervisors, Patrick Zuk and Thomas Stammers, whose invaluable assistance and sincerely-appreciated care made this study possible. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of St John’s College, who awarded me the Postgraduate Scholarship Prize which funded my research in Yale’s Beinecke Library, and of the Department of Music at Durham University, who generously funded a research visit to Paris in March 2014. I would like to thank the staff of the Parisian archives for their assistance- these included the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, whose rich resources formed the basis for a great proportion of my research. I am grateful too to the staff at the Beinecke Library for their assistance in negotiating their archives, and to the staff of the British Library and of the Bill Bryson Library for all their help. For directing me towards useful sources and offering helpful advice, I would like to thank David Charlton, Mark Darlow, Mark Everist, Michael Fend, Sarah Hibberd, Jonathan Penny, Joseph Schultz, and Clare Siviter. I owe personal thanks to the staff of St John’s College, and in particular to Mark Ogden and Sue Trees who encouraged me greatly over the duration of this project. Most importantly, I would like to thank my family and close friends for their care, and for enduring me during the many hours I spent locked away with my books. In particular, I am deeply indebted to Vincent Battista and to Andrew Corkhill, whose fraternal support has meant so much. 15 16 INTRODUCTION The music of the French Revolution is commonly perceived to represent an unusual rupture in compositional praxis, and a turn towards didactic pedagogy: suddenly patriotic hymns, chansons , operas and instrumental pieces apparently overthrew the supremacy of works intended merely for entertainment. In other words, music suddenly became—as Winton Dean has described it—a vehicle for the Revolutionaries’ ‘rabid’ ideology. 1 It is the contention of this thesis that this ‘rupture’ had to the contrary been a long time developing, and that the germ of change was sown in the philosophie of the previous decades. In essence, I assert that to understand the Revolutionaries’ ambitions for music, which treated music as a pedagogical tool, it is imperative to evaluate their basis in Enlightenment musical aesthetics. It was, after all, in the writings of the philosophes that the classical perception of the didactic purpose and power of music were re-ignited. Whilst modern aesthetic commentaries concerned with the mid-eighteenth century are preoccupied with the fierce rivalry between Rousseau and Rameau and the wider contest known to us as the Querrelle des Bouffons , such a preoccupation has obscured a shared consensus which perceived music as a means to educate and improve society. This perspective was nurtured in the final decades of the old regime, and reached the Revolutionaries intact. We would do better therefore to treat the Revolutionaries’ didactic musical project not as ‘rupture’, but as the culmination of a developing change in conceptions of music. This perspective fits well with how modern scholarship perceives the relationship between the Enlightenment and 1789, for it is commonly held that the philosophes were in some way responsible for the Revolution. This belief, explored recently by cultural historians such as Roger Chartier 2 and Jonathan Israel 3 builds on Daniel Mornet’s seminal work, Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1933) . Mornet in turn revived the perspectives of Alexis de Tocqueville 4 and Hippolyte Taine 5 that the radicalism of eighteenth-century philosophies was an important catalyst in the