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12 Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France

visual arts but had little or no use for music-Victor Hugo
definitely disliked it and Thdophile Gautier, as you
remember, 'preferred silence ' I The first of the profoundly
musical poets was Baudelaire and he was already on the path
which led to the later Symbolists whose avowed object was
to 'win back from music its own property.' But before this
Wagnerian dream of the fusion of the arts could be realised,
music itself had to achieve a deeper and more independent
form of existence in France. Berlioz's bitter complaints of
the existing state of things was by no means mere romantic
exaggeration or inspired solely by personal pique. At the
turn of the century the Second Empire suddenly emerged
from the all-too-customary welter of French political
intrigue. The twenty years of its brilliant but precarious
existence were to prove to be the seed-time of a rich and
varied musical growth which burst into sudden flower after
the' disasters and horrors of the Prussian war and the
Commune.
Writing many years afterwards, Camille Saint-Saens des-
cribed for a later generation the difficulties which French
musicians had to contend with in those early days.
" Young musicians of to-day would find it difficult to form any idea
of the state of music in France when Gounod appeared " (that is to
say, during the late i85o's.) " The beau monde was intoxicated with
admiration of Italian music and the ripples of the great waves which
had borne the fleet consisting of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini and the
marvellous interpreters of tfeir music to their victorious invasion of
Europe could still be felt. On the horizon, but still veiled in morning
mist, the star of Verdi was appearing. For the mass of the bourgeois
public music did not exist outside of opera and French opera comique
which included works written for France by illustrious foreigners." (I
take it that Saint-Saens is referring to Meyerbeer) ' Melody' was the
god worshipped by all; or rather, under the name of melody, the ' tune'
which catches the ear at the first hearing and is easy to memorise."
The melody of the slow movement of Beethoven's fourth symphony
was not considered melody and Beethoven was seriously defined as
'algebra in music.' "... Only a handful of musicians and musical
amateurs, who really loved and cultivated music for its own sake, adored
in secret Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven with occasional works of Bach
and Handel. Except at the Conservatoire concerts and in a few chamber
music societies frequented by a small number of initiates it was quite
hopeless to try and have a symphony, a trio or a quartet performed."
This was the Paris in which Gounod and Saint-Sahns
himself, Bizet, Franck, Fauri, Delibes and Massenet grew
up. Whatever we may feel about their music now Saint-
Saens did set an entirely new standard of stylistic purity
and correctness of writing in France, and Gounod brought
an entirely new freshness and spontaneity of emotion and
melodic impulse to French opera: Bizet's Carmen was not

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