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20o Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France
Octave Fouque had written Variations on a theme from the
Bdarnais in 1883 Saint-Saens an Auvergne Rhapsody in
1884; and behind these early musical experiments by
practising musicians lay the activity of theorists. Gaston
Paris lectured on folk-song in Paris in the spring of 1885
but at the Conservatoire Louis Bourgault Ducoudray had
been introducing folk-song into his lectures on musical
history since I878 and his speech at the Universal Exhibition
the same year had struck an entirely new note in French
musical aesthetics :
'No element of musical expression,' he said, 'to be found in any
tune, however ancient or remote in origin, should be banished from
our musical idiom.'
After a mission to Greece in 1876 he set an example him-
self, publishing in the same year his '30 Popular Greek
Melodies' followed nine years later by his collection of
Breton folk-songs. Almost contemporary were Lalo's
exotic works-the Symphonie espagnole and the Rhapsodie
norvdgienne in 1875 and the Concerto russe in 1881. Not
that these works of Lalo's had the musical qualities of his
exotic ballet Namouna (I882) or his opera Le Roi d'Ys
(x888) ; but the interest was the same, if in a more popular
and diluted form. And parallel to the interest in folk-song
was the renewed enthusiasm for Gregorian plain-chant.
Here, as so often, we find Liszt among the earliest
instigators, discussing with d'Indy as early as 1873 the place
of liturgical melodies in the music of the future apropos
of his oratorio Christus. In I88i came Dom Pothier's
Melodies grdgoriennes d'aprds la tradition, the first of the
Solesmes publications.
But the combination of folk-song and liturgical melody
was already an accomplished fact in one country, Russia,
and when Saint-Sains returned from Petersburg in i874
with a score of Boris Godunov he little realised that he was
bringing what was to be a kind of Palladium to the modernists
with whom he himself was already losing sympathy.
Bourgault-Ducoudray had that score, so had d'Indy and so
eventually had Debussy-and who shall say what they
learned from it ? Debussy's own visit to Russia in 1879
acquainted him with little else beside the music of Tchai-
kovsky, a few songs by Borodine (much more important) and
the gipsy music which he heard again in Paris during i88o
at the Concert Besseliivre. In 1889 came the Universal
Exhibition and the concerts of Russian music-Glinka,
Dargomyzhsky, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Borodine, Rimsky

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