Offenbach's operas were a significant force for cultural change, both in his own time and in the decades to follow. In this book, Laurence Senelick demonstrates the ways in which this musical phenomenon took hold globally, with Offenbach's work offering an alternative, irreverent, sexualized view of life which audiences found liberating, both personally and socially. In the theatre, the composer also inspired cutting-edge innovations in stagecraft and design, and in this book, he is recognized as a major cultural influence, with an extensive impact on the spheres of literature, art, film, and even politics. Senelick argues that Offenbach's importance spread far beyond France, and that his provocative and entertaining works, often seen as being more style than substance, influenced numerous key artists, writers, and thinkers, and made a major contribution to the development of modern society.

Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture

In an era of heightened patriotic fervor following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Parisians packed concert halls to hear performances of Handel's oratorios and Bach's organ works. At the same time, both royalists and republicans called for the re-evaluation of the once detested musique francaise of the ancien regime. Musicologist Katharine Ellis examines these unlikely aspects of cultural life in the new Republic as part of a broader study of the early music revival in nineteenth-century France. This revival gives us a vivid sense of how music's cultural meanings were contested, distilled into dominant visions, and then often revised. Peppering the century are famous fakes, pastiches and other creative negotiations between past and present. Descriptions of these phenomena by contemporary witnesses reveal how dissent could run along social, religious and political lines, and why certain genres became idealized while others were disparaged. After providing an overview of trends and contexts throughout the century, Ellis examines specific repertoires that evoked unusually spirited advocacy and debate. She explores the attempts to revive French Baroque stage music in the 1870s; arguments on the appropriateness of Palestrina's liturgical music; the reception of Bach and Handel, and their relation to French choral activity; and, finally, musical "Frenchness." Four case-study chapters focus on key debates and repertories stretching from Adam de la Halle to Rameau, via Josquin, Janequin, Palestrina, Bach and Handel. Interpreting the Musical Past discusses what is at stake in the construction of a musical heritage, and how ideology informs musical value judgements. In its focus on the nature of musical experience and the meaning of music in society, the book explores amateur and professional music-making; working-class, aristocratic and bourgeois cultural life; national pride; religious politics; and ritual, both liturgical and secular. Based on extensive primary research in Paris and the French regions, Interpreting the Musical Past is at once a history of culture, of reception, and of historiography. Covering five centuries of music (from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries) and a century of French history, it explains long-term changes of cultural meaning while celebrating the richness of local detail. This study of musical revivalism offers a penetrating analysis of what lies at the heart of the construction, championing, and development of a musical cultural memory.

Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth Century France

THE FAMOUS POLISH HARPSICHORDIST Wanda Landowska has recently been characterized as an "uncommon visionary" and an "epochal exception." (1) Such epithets recognize her as a singularly influential musician and, at the same time, mythologize her into a modern revolutionary who almost single-handedly initiated the worldwide harpsichord revival of the twentieth century by championing above all the "authentic" performance of Bach on the harpsichord. Over the past seventy years the legend of Wanda Landowska has become firmly enshrined in the histories and mythologies of the early music movement. This image stems from her successful and sustained international solo career--flourishing to her death in 1959--and from the worldwide impact of her midcareer recordings of the 1930s. (2) Wanda Landowska's story is one of struggle, controversy, and triumph in which personal sacrifice engenders musical greatness while the performer becomes anointed as the true voice of the composer. Her visual and artistic self-representation and the aura of aristocratic mystique and inspiration turned her concerts into ritualized celebrations during which she appeared as a high priestess of the cult of Bach. From her clothing to her hairstyle, every element of her public appearances was deliberate and choreographed. (3) Landowska "would not have dreamt of beginning a recital without first establishing the proper atmosphere: the lighting on stage had to be very dim before she would glide, wraith-like, onto the platform, hands clasped as if in prayer and eyes cast heavenward." (4) The roots of Landowska's self-representation as the "goddess of the harpsichord" and the myths associated with it reach back to the beginnings of her career in prewar Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. (5) The French capital provided the cultural context within which Landowska's career as performer, composer, and scholar was molded. As a young woman in her twenties she could draw on models of gendered performance tested by other female musicians in the French capital. Indeed, the strategies that she and her entourage developed in these early years created "Madame Landowska," as she was known, by instrumentalizing successful female career tactics in prewar Paris so as to forge her own unique artistic identity. Landowska's claim for artistic uniqueness, her increasing musical specialization as a harpsichordist, her (self-)representation as "musical daughter" of Bach, her emphasis on a special musical calling, the relentless rhetoric of exceptionality and artistic struggle not only characterize her (auto)biography since the 1940s but also reflect key elements of women's professional strategies in the Parisian musical world around 1900. (6) Her correspondence and other documents from these early years reveal that she was an active agent in the creation of her public persona while drawing on a support network that included her husband, Henri Lew, her impresario, Gabriel Astruc, and a host of wise if not always old men such as Charles Bordes and Leo Tolstoy. Paris, Women, and Harpsichord Music Women musicians in particular were attracted to fin de siecle Paris because it offered career opportunities that were scarce in other cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and London. (7) Paris had a cosmopolitan and financially well heeled audience, dozens of concert series, hundreds of salons and concert societies, many schools and conservatories--all spaces within which a young, ambitious musician could carve out a place for herself. What Walter Benjamin so famously called the capital of the nineteenth century represented not only a place full of career opportunities but also the cultural and musical center of a Europe that needed to be conquered for any major international career to flourish. (8) Paris presented thus an ideal milieu for the ambitious young pianist and fledgling composer Wanda Landowska, who moved to the French capital in 1900 at the age of twenty-one to fulfill her "mad desire to be famous. …

Creating Madame Landowska

Between history and commodity: the production of a musical patrimony through the record in the 1920–1930s

A detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccini's music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilson's study explores the ways in which Puccini's music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions that were debated throughout Puccini's career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccini's operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.

The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity

This book argues that French musical meanings and values in the years from 1898 to 1914 are best explained not in terms of contemporary artistic movements, but rather in terms of the political culture, which was undergoing subtle but profound transformation as nationalist leagues enlarged the arena of political action. Applying recent insights from French history, sociology, political anthropology, and literary theory, the book reveals how nationalists used critics, educational institutions, concert series and lectures to disseminate their values through a discourse on French music; and it demonstrates how the Republic and Left responded to this challenge through their own discourses on French musical values. Against this background Fulcher traces the impact of this politicized musical culture on composers such as d'Indy, Charpentier, Magnard, Debussy, and Satie.

French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chronology Some descriptions of Satie 1. Satie's career as a composer: some interpretations 2. Why and where Satie composed 3. Parody, pastiche, quotation and the question of influence 4. Satie and Debussy 5. Satie's compositional aesthetic 6. Satie, counterpoint and the Schola Cantorum 7. Orchestration versus instrumentation 8. Questions of form, logic and the mirror image 9. Compositional systems and other sources of inspiration 10. Composition and the other arts 11. Satie on other composers 12. Satie and the wider world Appendix: chronological catalogue of Satie's compositions Notes Select bibliography Index of Satie's works General index.

Satie the composer

Debussy and the Theatre means, in effect, 'Debussy and Pellias et Milisande', the only stage work Debussy chose and completed himself without a definite production in view. The opera both established Debussy's mature style and reputation in the forefront of contemporary composers and changed the course of operatic history. But Pelleas was also largely responsible for Debussy's compulsive inachievement' in the theatre. Before it he delayed completing other works so that Albert Carre's production at the Opera-Comique would be his theatre debut; and then its traumatic dress-rehearsal in April 19o2 left him reluctant to undergo another similar experience. This, coupled with his search for lyrical librettos or scenarios that could inspire the rhythm and colour that he regarded as vital ingredients in theatre music, resulted in a career littered with abandoned projects. The story of this most fascinating of love hate relationships with the stage is told, as far as possible, in the composer's own words or from contemporary documents."

Debussy and the theatre

SINCE ITS first reproduction in print in 1949, the single manuscript page containing the piece by Erik Satie entitled Vexations (Ex. 1) has attained something approaching celebrity status.' In many ways, this remains Satie's most revolutionary work, still causing controversy over a century after it was composed in 1893. With its 840 repetitions, it is Satie's longest composition and also the supreme example of his quest in the 1890s to make much out of a little (in this case, what is in effect a single three-part diminished chord). It is also the first known experiment in organized total chromaticism and continual, unrelieved dissonance, with no obvious sense of direction or tonal centre. Indeed, if its 'theme' contained the missing AN, it might be viewed as the first experiment in serialism. It is certainly minimalist; it is the first piece to explore the effects of boredom, even of hallucination, both on the performer and on the audience, as well as being the first piece to incorporate a period of silent meditation in its performance indications. It is no wonder, then, that Vexations was the piece that most interested John Cage in his post-war rediscovery of Satie. He mounted the first complete performance of it in the Pocket Theatre, New York, on 9 September 1963; it lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes, though the link between the timing and the 840 repetitions was not fortuitous. As Ornella Volta has discovered, Cage in fact carefully divided the performance up into 56 twenty-minute slots, each containing fifteen playings of one minute and twenty seconds.2 It would appear that Satie deliberately made Vexations hard to grasp (or memorize) for the performer (presumably a pianist or a harmonium player, although no instrument is specified, just as no dynamics are marked). Satie's apparently abstruse enharmonic notation spells chords 13 and 33 in Ex. 1 differently, even though they are the same, and the identical right-hand parts of chords 1, 10 and 12 (or 18, 27 and 29) are

Understanding satie‘s ’vexations‘

Part 1 Koechlin's life. Part 2 Koechlin's reputation: Koechlin's reputation as a composer, then and now Koechlin's reputation and achievements as a pedagogue. Part 3 Early works to 1910: vocal music to 1899 piano and chamber music to 1910 symphonic music to 1910 vocal music from 1899 to 1910. Part 4 1911-1924 The "perilous domain of chamber music": chamber music piano music songs (to 1928) orchestral music and ballets. Part 5 1924-33 The interrelationships of didactic works, contrapuntal exercises and original compositions - didactic works and orchestral music chamber and piano music. Part 6 1933-8 Music for the early sound film and for the people: music for the early sound film music for the people other chamber music (1935-7) other orchestral and choral music. Part 7 1938-50 Orchestral music and the "art monodique": orchestral music and ballets chamber music and monodies keyboard and vocal music. Part 8 Koechlin the composer. Part 9 Koechlin's musical techniques: rhythm melody harmony counterpoint orchestration form. Appendix a: translation of the "Etude sur Charles Koechlin pour lui-meme". Appendix b: catalogue of Koechlin's compositions by opus number works without opus number (including the orchestartion of works by other composers). Appendix c: bibliography: prose works by Koechlin articles by Koechlin books, theses and articles on Koechlin.

Robert Orledge

Papers

French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War

Satie the composer

Debussy and the theatre

Understanding satie‘s ’vexations‘

Charles Koechlin, 1867-1950: His Life and Works