Page 136 - HandbookMarch1

9 DECEMBER, 1947.

FRANK HOWES, ESQ., M.A.,
PRESIDENT,
IN THE CHAIR.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSICAL
RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE (x87o-1895).
BY MARTIN COOPER, EsQ.

BEFORE I start on the main body of what I have to say, a
few words of explanation are perhaps necessary.
First of all, with regard to the limits which I have set
myself. You will have seen the dates--I87o-i895-and
possibly wondered at their apparent arbitrariness. But all
I could hope to do here is to trace the main outlines of the
first stage of France's musical revival. Debussy is onlyjust
on my map; Ravel, Roussel and even the later Faurd quite
off it. But by 1895 all the main contributory elements
which formed these later styles had made their appearance.
Satie and Chabrier-the models acclaimed by a later
generation-were active before Franck was dead: the
Schola Cantorum was founded in the same year as Debussy's
Aprds midi d'un faune appeared-in 1894. These twenty-
five years are not the most glorious: much of the music
was still tentative and the sense of national style was by no
means complete. But because they were years of growth
they are particularly worthy of sympathetic study.
And then a word about the illustratibns. Please do not
expect masterpieces, for I have deliberately chosen passages
not so much for their intrinsic worth as for their historical
interest: and chosen them, too, from among the rather less
well known works.
And now, I think, I have warned you sufficiently and
can plunge in medias res.
* * *
The first half of the nineteenth century produced only
one great musician in France, Hector Berlioz: and he was
so entirely individual a character-such a unique blend of
poet, musician, journalist and Romantic extravagant that
his influence on French music was always small, and largely
posthumous. The big figures of the French Romantic
movement in literature were passionately interested in the

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