Page 147 - HandbookMarch1

22 Nineteenth Century Musical Renaissance in France

Gesamtkunstwerk was achieved-literature and painting
entered music in an entirely new way. The reasoned
dialogue, the 'conversational' music which the nineteenth
century had inherited from the eighteenth and preserved
precariously in spite of Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner, was
shattered; and with it passed the whole conception of
music as primarily a form of emotional rhetoric.

Franck himself only died in I89o and the spirit of his
circle-its moral elevation and artistic idealism-was per-
petuated by d'Indy and Bordes when they and Guilmant
founded the Schola Cantorum in 1894. Bordes was primarily
a church musician, a Parisian organist like Franck who had
founded in 1892 a choral society, the Chanteurs de St.
Gervais, which performed with d'Indy's help works by
Vittoria, Palestrina, Josquin des Pros and a complete and
correct musical liturgy for Holy Week. It is touching and
artistically right that Gounod, an old man of nearly 75,
wrote to congratulate Bordes on this first Semaine Sainte,
which realised his own dreams of fifty years before. The
foundation of the Schola was an act of faith. Its original
capital amounted to 37 francs 50o centimes, but it was not
long before d'Indy was able to move into larger premises
than those of the Rue Stanislas and the original object-the
study of plainsong and the revival of sixteenth century poly-
phonic music-was enlarged and the Schola became a rival
of the Conservatoire. Monthly concerts acquainted the
public with Bach, Rameau, Gluck, Monteverdi, seventeenth
and eighteenth century French music and modern French
works, generally of the Franck school. A publishing
business was affiliated to the main educational foundation
and brought out collections of folk-songs, anthologies of
mediaeval and renaissance music (largely French); seven-
teenth and eighteenth century French operas; and,
eventually, modern music as well. The discipline was
rigorous and strongly rooted in tradition. D'Indy was an
extremely dogmatic and strongly prejudiced director; but
an inspiring and vigorous personality with an intense and
idealistic faith in music. In contrast to the complete divorce
between art and morality or religion envisaged by Debussy
and the Symbolists d'Indy delighted in delivering himself
of highly controversial remarks, such as:
'The principle of all art is of a purely religious order'; or ' In
artistic creation seven faculties are concerned--the Imagination, the
Heart, the Spirit, the Intelligence, the Memory, the Will and the
Conscience.'

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