Authority as performance: the love of Bach in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Bach was not a ‘modern composer author of the BWV and of the Cantatas Complete Works’ before musicology, the record industry and the modern amateurs. This paper traces the long transformation of what became ‘music’ and how it produced our taste for Bach as a musician, giving him the strange ability of being both the object and the standard of our love for music. Through a study of the use of Bach in a country other than Germany, and from 1800, when Bach's work begins to be published in France, to 1885, the year of his birth Bicentennial, we follow Bach's grandeur as it originates in the zeal of a small circle of his ‘early adopters’, from Chopin to Alkan, from Gounod to Saint-Saëns, from Liszt to Franck. We show how, all along the nineteenth century in France, Bach is becoming music: not only a reference, an ancient Master, the statue of the Commendatore in the shadow of whom we write the music of the present time, but a contemporary composer. We show also how the reverse is true: music is ‘becoming Bach’, it is reorganized around his figure (and Beethoven's), resting on their production. Bach does not integrate an already made musical universe: he produces it, partially, through the invention of a new taste for music.