Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third Republic Paris by Jennifer Walker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third Republic Paris by Jennifer Walker Joseph F. Byrnes Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third Republic Paris. By Jennifer Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. x, 355. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-757805-6.) Paris was the setting for compositions and performances of religious (and here read Catholic) music in secular venues. Jennifer Walker offers as her first example a performance of the mystery play Sainte-Genviève de Paris in the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir on January 6, 1893. For Walker, the history of such performances is, in effect, a history of Church-State interchange, yea even reconciliation. She narrates the rich and varied musical history of a secularized Catholicism, which presumably gives the lie to the old standard notion of "two Frances"—a Church and State in mutual opposition. Musical notation is integral to the analysis of religious music throughout the book, which is a volume in a remarkable series of studies labelled "AMS Studies in Music," a joint effort of the American Musicological Society and the Oxford University Press. Footnotes include a wide and detailed range of references, with the French texts translated by the author expanded to include preceding and following sentences. Too extensive to be read in full—they almost created an overweight metanarrative—these notes can serve for subsequent use by researchers. In "The Catholic Church in Republican Musical Aesthetics," Walker introduces both the Catholic in-house churchmen and musicologists who tried to define "sacred" music and the secular critics who, surprisingly, even more severely limited the texts, melodies, and harmonies that deserved the label of "sacred music." At the center of such discussions figured the works of Dubois, Fauré, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Widor. The centerpiece of the next chapter, "Pious Puppets and the Limits of Symbolism," is the puppetry of the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette, wherein the musical narratives were almost exclusively Catholic, to wit, Tobie (Tobias) and Noël, ou le Mystère de la nativité. Reporters and critics provided detailed presentations of story and musical line. In "Sincerity and the Limits of Symbolism," the author juxtaposes the Petit-Théâtre's offering of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile to [End Page 415] the Théâtre de Vaudeville's Les Drames sacrés to show again how critics, believers, and non-believers alike demanded text fidelity and musical seriousness. In chapters four and five, Walker trains a much more wide-angle lens on the series of concerts at the Church of Sainte-Eustache, "The Republic's Sacred Cathedral," and at the Trocadéro, "The Republic's Secular Cathedral." The Sainte-Eustache oratorio performances were religious in musical content but were problematically tied to the government's control of the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Handel's Messiah, Berlioz's Requiem, Gounod's Mors et Vita, Wagner's La Cène des Apôtres, Massenet`s La Terre promise, and Bach's Saint Matthew Passion constituted the series, the use of Sainte-Eustache as a "theater" disturbing Cardinal François Richard and pleasing secular critics. Walker calls the ensemble a "Repertoire for the Republic." She details here the subtleties of the story lines, the mechanics of the musical lines, their place within each composer's total oeuvre, and the usually favorable critical response, concluding, "Much to the Church's chagrin, the church of Saint-Eustache thus became a key site in dismantling the polarizing dichotomy between Church and State" (p. 191). At the Trocadéro and the Champ de Mars, the 1900 Exposition Universelle featured displays of Catholic art, literature, and music. Cardinal Richard was absent from the opening liturgical celebration, but in his place Father Stéphen Coubé preached reconciliation with the Republic, pointing out that work, science, and art could be sanctified and given moral force by the Church. For all this to take place in 1900, ideologies had shifted in the preceding ten years, according to Walker, although, in fact, featured composers and works in 1889 (the Fair commemorating the 1789 Revolution) and 1900 overlapped considerably in their story, musical lines, and critics' responses. Brand...