Shaena Weitz

The genre of potpourri as we know it — if we have heard of the genre at all —  is essentially a medley of tunes taken from a single opera, described by the current Grove as “hackwork for the amateur or impoverished musician.” But when the potpourri first appeared in France around the turn of the nineteenth century, it was understood in thoroughly different terms. In its original form, the potpourri was a vehicle for witty musical commentary through the borrowing and juxtaposition of passages from diverse musical genres. This type of potpourri was made illegal by Napoleonic copyright law: using excerpts from multiple works at a time was banned. The potpourri was more than a string of copied phrases, however. The relationships between the chosen passages and their adjacent and nearby neighbors were layered and nuanced, drawing on a web of instrumental and staged works for a complex musical game. While each potpourri and its badinage were individual, most of them made some remark on one central topic — musical resemblance — thereby creating a body of commentary on originality in music.

        Musical similarity was so central to the potpourri that one critic, reminiscing about the genre after it had been banned, explained that the potpourri had been “especially useful for denouncing plagiarists” because one could group together pieces that were harmonically or melodically analogous. But the strength of the charge was more variable than the critic remembered. Potpourris highlighted musical resemblance to differing ends and showed a wide range of feelings about authorial rights and originality in music: from shameful in one extreme to playful in the other. These unpredictable conclusions about creation reflect a tension between a culture of musical imitation and the burgeoning cult of genius at a moment when concepts about originality and the legal rights afforded to it were unsettled. By examining the piano potpourris of Louis Jadin (1768–1853), Hyacinthe Jadin (1776–1800), Daniel Steibelt (1765–1823), and Sébastien Demar (1763–1832), this paper examines concepts of musical authenticity, borrowing, and plagiarism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. The way that these potpourris deconstruct, reconstruct, and play with preexisting music shows how French musicians found originality by toying with resemblance in a genre that was, ironically, banned for the plagiarism that it sought to highlight.

In the mid-1830s, the writers of the first French music journal devoted to the piano, Le Pianiste, were confronted with a piano performance trend that they struggled to understand. When playing a written piece, some pianists were no longer improvising, or embellishing, or changing their performances from one time to the next. Instead, some were playing a given score exactly as written and playing a piece the same way repeatedly. The way that these new pianists performed was so different from what Le Pianiste’s authors were accustomed to, that they alleged that the new pianists were not piano players at all, but merely piano “pressers.” Further, their extreme fidelity to the score was causing them to overlook the music and lose their “natural heat.” Le Pianiste dubbed these players the “monochromatic school.”

Drawing on Le Pianiste’s description of monochromatic playing and its opposite, what we might call “polychromatic” playing, this paper discusses how the improvisatory — ornamenting, altering rhythms, or substituting pitches on the spot — was a central practice in performing the entirety of the written score in early nineteenth-century France. Further, it connects these performance practices to shifting notions about the role of the performer and the meaning of a musical work. Le Pianiste’s damning opinion of those who performed only what was written provides an unfamiliar viewpoint about the virtue of altering pieces in performance, and places this practice later than previously known. Further, it sheds new light on a musical ethos familiar to early nineteenth-century Paris, a place that nourished so many pianists, such as Chopin and Liszt. While my focus is on a microhistorical moment, this paper provides new information which helps define a point of transition in three large-scale trends over the century: the development of the Urtext — a fixed ideal “work”, the rise of performer as interpreter, and the decline of improvisation.

When the Gazette musicale opened in January 1834, the journal accepted as fact that Gioachino Rossini was a genius. Within three years, the coverage dramatically changed: Rossini went from “living god” to “plagiarist” with “irritating” music. Within a few years his status as genius was restored, then revoked again. Rossini’s French publisher Eugène Troupenas alleged that the owner of the Gazette, music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, used his journal as a means to pressure musicians into publishing contracts. Refuse his overtures, and suffer derision in the journal. And sure enough, the Gazette’s flip-flopping tracks perfectly with Schlesinger’s minor contracts for Rossini pieces: an old cavatina here, a new romance there. When Schlesinger had something to promote, Rossini was lauded, and when Schlesinger needed more, he commissioned journalists for hit pieces to get his way.

Even though Rossini had not written a new opera in years, his music — and his image — still had value, not only to the publishers who sold his scores, but also to theatres, singers, composers, and the public. And Schlesinger’s schemes represent an effort to extort control over that value that deserves more attention. Schlesinger and his proxies did not simply disparage Rossini: they inflamed anxieties about fame, invented rivalries intended to taint Rossini’s reputation, and suggested that writing opera was easy, among other tactics. Applying research on both media (Soules 2015) and celebrity (Marcus 2019) to examine Schlesinger’s techniques sheds new light on how media manipulation influenced Rossini reception. Rather than viewing negative press as merely a way to mark changes in taste, this research approaches negative press as a powerful media tool.
This paper examines anti-Rossini coverage in the Gazette to better understand the role of negative press and anti-celebrityism in operatic reception. Becoming more attuned to nineteenth-century media techniques can help us identify commonplace press strategies that transformed public taste for personal benefit. Overall, this paper explores the rhetoric and tactics that separated genius from celebrity, turned celebrity into a liability, and influenced the frames of operatic reception — for both Rossini and others — for centuries to come.

When the one-act opéra-comique _Nina, ou la folle par amour_ with music by Nicolas Dalayrac (1753–1809) premiered in May 1786 at Salle Favart, it became an overnight sensation. In Benoît-Joseph Marsollier’s (1750–1817) libretto, the titular character is driven to madness by the absence of her beloved. Though Nina has been told he is dead, she waits longingly for his return. The idea of a woman rendered insane by separation from the curative balm of her love’s presence enchanted audiences. Nina’s slightly disheveled appearance inspired new hairstyles, and medical texts considered her fictional plight. Scholars such as Michel Delon have explored how concepts of devotion, sanity, and hope found in _Nina_ lived on in the realm of ideas, but little attention has been paid to how _Nina’s_ music lived on — reused, recycled, and reclaimed in various ways.
This paper investigates _Nina’s_ musical afterlife in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. Two melodies in particular, “Quand le bien-aimé reviendra” and a shepherd song, became what we might now call eighteenth-century memes. Musicians used these tunes in staged works such as vaudevilles for parody, in instrumental genres such as potpourris to comment on musical originality, in religious services to denote piety, and in political protest songs to honor Napoleon after his exile. These excerpts were not used simply to remind an audience of their love for _Nina_, but were reappropriated for humorous, sincere, or subversive reasons.
Through the example of _Nina_, this paper’s goals are twofold: first, to further conversation about the life of operatic music beyond its representation on stage; and second, to think more broadly about reception not only as what people say about music, but also what they do with it. The imaginative ways that musicians gave old melodies new meanings show that the practice of musical reuse that flourished after the Revolution was not reductive, but rather vibrantly creative. Further, acknowledging the reuse of preexisting melodies as a creative practice—and an object of study—provides a new avenue to better understand the unjustly neglected musical culture of post-Revolutionary France.