Introduction

Abstract

This book is a history of musical culture in nineteenth-century Paris as revealed by some of its most prominent music critics. As such it has three interrelated aspects: a study of music criticism per se, a reception history of composers whose music was regularly performed in nineteenth-century Paris, and a study of the philosophical ideas which permeated musical thought and which are implicit in critical judgements of the period. Its cultural milieu is primarily that of the literate (and, in addition, musically literate) élite – the readership addressed in the pages of the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris. It can, therefore, represent no more than a thin slice of history. Yet within this slice lie the foundations of many twentieth-century assumptions about Western art music, its conventions and the relative merits of its composers. The Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, founded by the publisher Maurice Schlesinger in 1834 as the Gazette musicale and bought, along with his publishing house, by Louis Brandus in 1846, was the most important and influential music journal in France until its closure at the end of December 1880. As a document of nearly half a century of musical thought it is unsurpassed; only Le Ménestrel, produced by the Heugel publishing house, equalled it in breadth. From the 1860s the two journals, both published weekly, vied with each other in quality and scope; after the Gazette's closure, Le Ménestrel took its place as France's most prestigious music journal.