Vincent d'Indy

From the Romantic era onwards music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time.  Through its play of themes and recurrence of events music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history.  Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define.  Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought.  For if this age understood time, it was through a melody.
  This book examines the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of human time.  Whether in the purported timelessness of Beethoven’s late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert’s music, in the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time, as a reflection of a particular culture’s sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history, each of the book’s chapters explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music.  They chart the development across the course of the nineteenth century of music’s capacity to convey the manifold nuances of time, revealing how music would finally become seen as the ideal instantiation of time and human existence itself.  At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, it provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

Proust has shown little interest in the decorative arts of his time, but his work bears the mark of the "submarine style" distinctive of Art nouveau. The low bookshelves with glass panes in the Grand Hôtel room at Balbec ― the symbol of À la Recherche’s unity, according to Georges Poulet in Proustian Space ― prove to be authentic witnesses of “modern style”. But what does “modern style” actually mean? À la Recherche includes five occurrences of the expression that could lead to misunderstanding. Contrary to a preconceived idea, it is not the English name for Art nouveau. This French coined anglicism refers to the international revival of the decorative arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, a fascinating but disturbing blend of aesthetics and social ideas. Proust detected at once and discreetly highlighted the cosmopolitan and "rastaquouère" (so to speak "métèque") inspiration of an ephemeral artistic movement contemporary with the Dreyfus affair. Enriched with an abundant and entirely original iconography, full of new discoveries and identifications, Rastaquarium brings back to life an epoch of which the novelist caught the essence. For the first time the whole question of decorative arts in À la recherche is fully tackled in all its ramifications, in a fascinating instance of the network of connections at the heart of Proust’s system.

Proust n’a manifesté que bien peu d’intérêt pour les arts décoratifs de son temps, mais son œuvre ponctuée d’aquariums est marquée par le «style sous-marin» caractéristique de l’Art nouveau. Les «bibliothèques vitrées» de la chambre de Balbec ― dans lesquelles Georges Poulet voyait le symbole de l’unité de l’œuvre ― se révèlent d’authentiques témoins du «modern style». Mais qu’est-ce que le «modern style»? L’expression, qui revient cinq fois dans À la Recherche du temps perdu, n’avait jamais vraiment été élucidée. Contrairement à une idée reçue, ce n’est en rien le nom anglais de l’Art nouveau. Cet anglicisme bien français désigne un renouveau international des arts décoratifs qui, mêlant esthétique et idées sociales, fascine et inquiète… Proust a parfaitement perçu et discrètement mis en valeur l’inspiration cosmopolite et «rastaquouère» d’un courant artistique dont le bref épanouissement coïncide avec les années de l’affaire Dreyfus. Enrichi d’une vaste iconographie, entièrement originale, fourmillant de trouvailles et d’identifications nouvelles, Rastaquarium fait revivre une époque dont l’écrivain a su capter l’essentiel. Toujours abordée de façon fragmentaire, la question des arts décoratifs dans la Recherche n’avait jamais été traitée dans son ensemble, seule manière de saisir les réseaux de correspondances si chers à Proust.


Table of Contents

Note sur l’iconographie – Remerciements – Abréviations

Rastaquarium

Qu’est-ce que l’Art « nouveau » ?

Le « modern style » n’est pas un style

Naissance d’une expression

Le mobilier des Proust

Le monde de Liberty

Contre Ruskin

1905 : « Sur la lecture »

La Femme inconnue de Lille et le Printemps par « Brown »

Le moment Maple

Bing !

Le « modern style » dans la Recherche

Les bibliothèques vitrées de Balbec

De la référence anglaise à la référence bavaroise : le Salon d’Automne de 1910

Style « sous-marin »

Le Royaume de Neptune ou la civilisation de l’aquarium

Le « modern style », agent de l’étranger

L’esthétique dreyfusarde

Siegfried n’est pas Samuel

Le règne de l’impur

Le style franco-sémitique

Une nouvelle croisade

Dreyfusards avant Dreyfus

Style rastaquouère

Bibliographie - Index nominum - Table des illustrations

The earliest extant E-flat contra alto clarinets was made by Alessandro Maldura in 1881 for the Milan Exhibition of Industry. It is preserved today in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Its design is identical to Maldura's 1866 patent for a bass clarinet and ensemble music appears in Alessandro Vessela's "Studi d'instrumentazione per banda", Milan, 1897.
A more successful and widely marketed B-flat contra bass clarinet was designed by Gustave Besson's daughter, Marthe Josephine Besson, who trained as a maker under her father in Paris, and from 1878 was responsible for all the firm's patents. Marthe headed the firm after the death of her mother and married Adolphe Fontaine in 1880. Afterward, the company in Paris was named Fontaine-Besson and their London factory was F. Besson & Co. In 1888, Marthe became sole proprietress, supervising manufacturing and patenting a number of brass instrument designs. In 1889, a prototype contra bass clarinet was developed and illustrated in an 1894 advertisement. It was called a pedal clarinet in order to distinguish it from other bass clarinets. Marthe Besson summited a 15-year French patent for a re-designed pedal clarinet which was approved in 1890. Other patents for the pedal clarinet were approved in England (1891), Spain (1891), Belgium (1891), and Germany (1892). The pedal clarinet was also brought to the United States at the Chicago International Exposition and demonstrated by Louis-Albert Bretonneau, bass clarinetist of the Paris Opera Comique. Thus Besson promoted her pedal clarinet in six countries and in doing so, encouraged composers to write for it and music schools to purchase it. Today only six examples of the pedal clarinet have been located, but there others yet to be found. By the 1920s, Besson contra bass was superseded by Buffet-Crampon's Boehm-system contra bass clarinets.

This article compares three French operas from the fin de siècle with regard to their appropriation of Gregorian chant, examining their different ideological and dramaturgical implications. In Alfred Bruneau's Le rêve (1891), the use of plainchant, more or less in literal quotation and an accurate context, has often been interpreted as naturalistic. By treating sacred music as a world of its own, Bruneau refers to the French idea of Gregorian chant as 'other' music. In Vincent d'Indy's L'étranger (1903), a quotation of Ubi caritas does not serve as an occasional illustration, but becomes essential as part of the leitmotif structure, thus functioning as the focal point of a religious message. Jules Massenet's Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (1902) provides a third way of using music associated with history and Catholicism. In this collage of styles, plainchant is not quoted literally, but rather alluded to, offering in this ambiguity a mildly anti-clerical satire.

"Quel doit être le but d’un conservatoire de musique en France au début du XXe siècle ? Dans le cadre d’une école spécialisée, l’enseignement de la musique doit-il être un loisir éducatif ou une formation sérieuse à un art rigoureux ? Ces questions ont des réponses différentes, voire divergentes, selon l’administration qui dirige l’école (une Ville ou l’État). Cet article se base sur l’évolution du conservatoire municipal de Saint-Etienne de 1900 à 1910, période au cours de laquelle il parvient à reconquérir un statut national perdu en 1891. Il tend à montrer quels sont les mécanismes, locaux et nationaux, qui permettent à l’administration du conservatoire de se soustraire à l’autorité de la Ville. Les bénéfices de la formation de ces écoles ne servent plus, alors, le développement culturel local ou l’éducation populaire de la classe ouvrière, mais l’art musical, dont le point de fuite se trouve à Paris.


What should be the purpose of a music conservatoire at the beginning of the XXth Century? Within a specialised school, should the teaching of music be an educative hobby or a serious formation to an exigent art? These questions have different answers, even antagonist ones, depending on which administration runs the school (a City or the State). This article is based on the evolution of the city conservatoire of Saint-Etienne from 1900 to 1910, an era during which it conquers back a national status that it had previously lost in 1891. It tends to reveal which mechanisms, both local and national, allow the conservatoire’s administration to avoid the City’s authority. The benefits of the formation of these schools do not, then, help the local cultural development or the popular education of the working class, but the art of music, whose focus is Paris.
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Le présent ouvrage traite de l’apparent paradoxe selon lequel le nationalisme puisse se cristalliser dans la musique instrumentale qui semble se soustraire par excellence au discours de l’idéologie. Mais la musique constitue un enjeu politique déterminant à l’époque où se constituent et s’affrontent les nations comme entités culturelles. La musique à programme est un cas exemplaire de cette rivalité dans la construction de deux écoles nationales, l’une allemande, l’autre française : la Neudeutsche Schule et la Société nationale de musique.
Entre 1830 et 1914, les innovations dans le domaine de la musique à programme suivent un cheminement entre Paris et Weimar. Les œuvres musicales deviennent progressivement des objets identitaires alors qu’elles sont le produit d’un transfert culturel ; la musique à programme se développe par un système d’échanges permanents entre la France et l’Allemagne.
Celle-ci est analysée historiquement à partir de ses institutions, de ses genres et de ses œuvres, dont celles de Berlioz, Liszt, Chausson, d’Indy et Debussy.

Purpose of the work. To reveal the significance of myths and legends as the basis of general artistic principles in comprehending the reality of V. d'Indy. Explore "myth-thinking" in creativity, as a method of perceiving a man of his destiny and his place in history through the prism of the centuries-old cultural experience. Methodology. The research is based on a comprehensive approach (in the consideration of the musical, poetic and literary-critical activities of V. d'Indy). Structural, analytical-comparative (in representation`s forms of the myth`s interpretation and the musical interpretations) methods are used. The method of deductive-inductive is used to specify the phenomena and processes considered in the work. The scientific novelty consists in studying the semantics of mythological plots, their ontological and axiological characteristics. Conclusion. The constitution of the content of the symphonic works of V. d'Indy, appealing to the mythopoetic images, propagates the spiritual values of humanity that, at the same time, appear to be important moral and ethical concepts of the artist's outlook, namely: faith, hope and love.