Page 139 - HandbookMarch1

14 Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France

revolutionary name in France) and the three first piano
concertos followed during the 1i86o's. As professor of the
piano at the Ecole Niedermeyer he initiated a promising
pupil, Gabiel Faure by name, into the mysteries-mysterious
indeed at that time in France--of Bach's keyboard music;
and later, as organist of the Madeleine, gave the same
young man one of his earliest appointments. At the same
time another Parisian organist, though far more obscure and
humble than the brilliant Madeleine virtuoso, was com-
posing for his own delectation those poems which, under
the name of 'Six Pieces for Organ,' were considered by
Liszt-that Diaghilev of the Nineteenth Century for the
smelling out of genius-as worthy to rank beside the
masterpieces of Bach. That was in I862; the organist
was C6sar Franck. You see, the picture is gradually filling
in-Gounod, Saint-Saens and Franck: but something was
still needed to link these separate efforts, to produce in
France something comparable with the many-sided musical
production which characterised Germany at the same time.
That something came-and came, in a bitter sense for
Frenchmen, from Germany-in I870. In the late summer
and autumn of that year the Second Empire collapsed as
though it had little more real existence than one of the
fantastic imaginings of that Offenbach who had been its
licensed portrayer and its most genially savage critic.
The death of Auber on May Izth, 1871, was as dramatic-
ally well-timed as anything in a Scribe libretto. It was the
end of an epoch and already, less than three months before
and with the Prussian troops hardly out of Paris, a
new era had been initiated. The Socid't Nationale de
Musique was founded on February 25th, 1871 and took for
its motto the simplest and most unequivocal of devices Ars
Gallica-French music.
There were about 150 members-including Saint-Sa-ns
(the moving spirit), with Raymond Bussine, Bizet, Massenet,
Lalo, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Alexis de Castillon, Faure,
Duparc and Dubois. Only Gounod had fled, to England
where he developed a disastrous new side of his talent, and
was thus absent at the decisive moment when conscious
form was given to something for which he had been half-
consciously striving for twenty years. But the mood of the
country was favourable. Disaster had for a moment laid
bare the fundamental unity of all Frenchmen in love for
la patrie. Opera, needing vast sums of money, was for the
moment at least in abeyance and by the time it reappeared
the movement was launched. The first concert was given

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