Fromental Halevy, La Magicienne--dossier de presse parisienne (1858) * Michele Carafa, Le Solitaire--dossier de presse parisienne (1822)

Abstract

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, the veteran scholar of nineteenth-century French music H. Robert Cohen lamented the volume, diversity, and scope of the French press that dealt with music, and the inability of scholarship—as he saw it—to profit from this corpus of musicography. He wrote: Specialists of nineteenth-century music and musical life in France possess a truly remarkable resource. Yet we have developed neither the bibliographical skills to deal with the press in a systematic manner, nor a systematic approach for exploring the press with a view toward identifying significant materials. . . . We must begin to delineate identifiable sections of the whole and attempt to deal with each on its own terms. . . . We must begin to construct a methodology aimed at allowing us to explore the press in a systematic manner. (H. Robert Cohen, ‘The Nineteenth-Century French Press and the Music Historian: Archival Sources and Bibliographical Resources’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1983–4), 137)