Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism through the Music of Third-Republic Paris, by Jennifer Walker

Abstract

In Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces, Jennifer Walker probes the French state’s engagement with the Catholic Church in the area of music during one of the final episodes of the centuries-long historical process of secularization. She argues that the Republic demonstrated, in the types of religious music it supported and programmed in the last decade of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, the attitude of Ralliement favored by Pope Leo XIII. Ralliement, as Walker explains on pages 7–8, was a political strategy of fostering close cultural ties between French identity and Catholicism even while the official state administration became increasingly independent of the church and autonomous. For Walker’s purposes, “the Republic” means people with official positions in the government (especially such figures as the Minister of Religion René Waldeck-Rousseau, the director of the Conservatoire, and the director of the Opéra-Comique, among others) and individuals such as composers and critics with a demonstrated affinity for republican (as opposed to monarchist or ultramontane) ideas. Her argument extends to nearly every musical genre imaginable, provided texts are involved: Catholic liturgical music, salon music, light theater, official concerts at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and opera. She studies scores and their texts, the choices made by publishers and concert programmers, published reviews by critics, and the occasional document associated with librettists or composers.This book’s most important contribution is its opening of a frank discussion of the place of religion in a newly secular society. Many authors have discounted religious music in studies of periods marked by increasingly secular qualities; in French studies in particular, religious music has been considered nonartistic, opportunistic, and therefore insincere, or has been almost completely overlooked. In Walker’s hands, religious music is almost incapable of being insincere, and her focus is so intense that nonreligious works are all but entirely absent, even as a context and basis for comparison. She demonstrates not only that religious music was widely practiced in a decade known for its increasingly secular outlook, but also that the secular, republican government and its supporters had a demonstrable need for religious music. To be sure, Walker understands religion as a political tool; she identifies it as an “ideological state apparatus” (p. 6) as formulated by Louis Althusser. She therefore refrains from engaging with composers’ personal religious beliefs or with the phenomenon of personal faith or spirituality. In this book, religion and religious symbols are elements of the legible cultural discourse discussed by Jann Pasler in Composing the Citizen.1 Just as Pasler demonstrates that music was conceived of as a coherent language that audiences expected to be able to interpret and understand,2 so Walker implies that religious ceremonies, locations, stories—and, of course, religious music—were all conceived of as part of a system of communication that Parisians could and did speak fluently in order to enrich and understand their lives.Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces comprises six chapters devoted to the types of religious music and their cultural functions that were performed in five distinct spaces in Paris during the ten or so years of Ralliement policy. Four of these spaces are distinctly secular: bourgeois salons, the Petit Théâtre de la Marionnette, the Salle des Fêtes at the Trocadéro, and the Opéra-Comique; one, the Église Saint-Eustache, was used for secular concerts despite objections from church authorities. The composers who created the musical works form a much longer list: Gabriel Fauré, Augusta Holmès, Ernest Chausson, Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet, Casimir Baille, and Gabriel Pierné, among others. In each chapter, Walker presents either a single work or a collection of works in a concert series that occupied the contested space between sacred and secular. She methodically explains how each composition or concert series benefitted the ideological camps involved, most often representing a compromise between the republican goal of a secular society and the Catholic Church’s goal of upholding traditional values, respect for religious beliefs, and authority in the cultural sphere. The majority of Walker’s chapters argue that such compromises successfully appeased republicans and Catholics alike as evidenced by the opinions of critics on both sides. Thus, she successfully demonstrates that religious compositions were neither niche nor representative of reactionary interest but rather part of the mainstream musical culture. As an exception to prove the general rule, chapter 3 argues that one high-profile work that did not appropriate the republican approach to Catholicism failed miserably: Walker charts the disastrous course of Ernest Chausson’s score for La légende de Sainte-Cécile, which was both too traditional and too modern to win approval from either of the interested parties.Walker’s reconstruction of the cultural landscape is detailed, expansive, and deep. She has scoured dozens of periodicals in order to understand the range of responses that each work discussed in her study received from critics. She has considered archival sources previously overlooked by other scholars, particularly those held at the Archives historiques de l’Archevêché de Paris. Furthermore, and very impressively, she consistently shows the relationships between biblical, medieval, early nineteenth-century, and ultimately Third Republic versions of different characters, tropes, and issues. (The characters of Grisélidis and Saint Agnes are two examples explored in chapter 6.) Walker’s choice of case studies confirms her interest in the republican landscape of the city of Paris charted by Pasler and Annegret Fauser, the ideological distinctions between different factions of Catholic musicians and church leaders as outlined by Katherine Bergeron and Katharine Ellis, and the political dimensions of art music probed by Clair Rowden.3 Yet her choices of theaters to study, particularly the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette at the Galerie Vivienne, and of musical works, especially Stéphan Bordèse’s Contes mystiques and Gounod’s Les drames sacrés, show an original approach to this era and its cultural high points. The repertoire examined by Walker has not previously been studied in detail, a point that indicates the novelty of her approach and her argument. Throughout the book, she engages with nineteenth-century critics as though they were her contemporaries, demonstrating a familiarity with their aesthetic preferences and social and political alignments that could only have been gained through years of research and careful attention to cataloging. One might only wish for a dramatis personae of critics to whom she turns most frequently, to help the reader identify these players.In Walker’s book, “sacred” and “secular” operate as labels for the extreme ideological poles with which the more pragmatic descriptors “Catholic” and “republican” are seen to be largely though not wholly aligned. Walker acknowledges that the lived experiences of individuals and of social groups in the late nineteenth century were characterized by competing interests that more often than not prevented those individuals and groups from fully embracing either pole. An example is her use of the term “conformistes saisonniers” (p. 13) to describe bourgeois citizens who retained traditional affiliations with their inherited Catholic faith by means of certain sacraments (especially baptism, marriage, and burial) and attendance at Mass on important holidays such as Christmas and Easter, but who otherwise lived the secular, modern life promoted by the republican government. However, once she indicates the gray areas between belief and nonbelief, or practice and nonpractice, or acknowledgment and erasure of Catholic teachings and symbols, Walker tends to fix individuals’ and groups’ positions on the ideological spectrum. She refers to critics, for example, as “notoriously conservative” (p. 105), “notoriously anticlerical” (p. 127), and “notoriously Ultramontane” (p. 153) as a way of sorting these individuals into their unchanging categories. Similarly, she presents institutions as marked by unchanging ideological orientations: the Conservatoire is unerringly aligned with republicanism, while the Schola Cantorum is intractably ultramontane. Although these alignments are uncontroversial and somewhat self-evident, they do not fully capture the slippery nature of political allegiance. For example, the Conservatoire regularly chose biblical stories as the basis of cantata texts for the Prix de Rome and required laureates to compose psalm settings as part of their “envois” during their fellowship. For its part, the Schola Cantorum included nonreligious works in its history and composition curriculum, and its choral group, the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, likewise performed secular repertoire. Walker’s characterization of the bourgeois salons in chapter 1 as “for the most part, entirely secular in nature, not only by virtue of the religious indifference of many of their high-society attendees, but also by way of the cultural products that were intended for production and consumption in salon environments” (p. 58) might be seen as reductive, not least in light of examples suggesting a more nuanced state of affairs, such as the salonnière comtesse Greffulhe’s close friendships with Catholic priests, or the religious compositions of Edmond de Polignac, husband to Winnaretta Singer, the princesse de Polignac, which were performed on the organ in his family’s salon. These examples may be particularly prominent exceptions to the general rule, but I bring them up to suggest that both sacred and secular, as tendencies, can be more or less pronounced in the activities or expressions of both individuals and groups, rather than being distant poles in relation to which those individuals and groups find their fixed place in perpetuity.The book’s case studies indicate that strategies for the promotion of Ralliement, as well as the benefits received, varied from one project to another, as did what was seen to constitute success. The closest Walker comes to demonstrating a truly shared attitude of Ralliement is when she points to the many ways in which republican goals and Catholic priorities overlapped (for example, in the plays Tobie and Noël that are the subject of chapter 2). However, just as often as the two institutions were aligned on points ideological or aesthetic, they diverged. This can be seen in Walker’s examples of works that were well received by either republican or Catholic authorities but not both. (An example is the Contes mystiques discussed in chapter 1, which seems to have met with support primarily from critics rather than church officials; although the first half of that chapter is devoted to examining the voices of church leaders who promoted music, what they were promoting was specific methods of accompanying plainchant, rather than the aesthetics of religious-themed salon music.) In many instances, works that received a mixed reception numbered both Catholics and republicans among their fervent supporters and vocal detractors. (The Concerts d’Harcourt held at the Église Saint-Eustache and discussed in chapter 4 were opposed by church leaders, but heartily approved of by critics of both anticlerical republican and traditionalist Catholic leanings.) What Walker has really shown in this book is that when it comes to relations between church and state in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, “it’s complicated.”While Walker’s research on the literary influences on the works she studies is peerless, consideration of other arts as a context for musical works would benefit her argument about Ralliement ideology and aesthetics. She admittedly includes architecture and decorative arts in her discussion of Catholic pavilions at the 1900 Exposition, but given the importance of biblical subjects in the literature and paintings of the time, an intermedial approach would further deepen her argument about the political significance of religious music during the Third Republic. Walker mentions Henri Lerolle in chapter 3, and it is significant that many of his most successful paintings depict contemporary religious practice (such as his famous The Organ Rehearsal) or the life of Christ (such as Arrival of the Shepherds and The Last Supper). Countless religious paintings were produced in the period Walker studies, some doctrinal, some republican, some exoticist, some Symbolist, some misogynist, and art historians have studied the significance of this trend.4 Although a complete inquiry into the relationship between painting and music would require another full-length book, the presence of biblical topics in the other arts is an essential counterweight to the Republic’s strategy of fostering appropriate religious music or the use of religion in music.Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces makes two much-needed interventions in the field of musicology. First, it enriches the narrative of the political dimension of fin-de-siècle French music by elucidating the specific ways in which the republican government and its allies promoted religious music as part of a transitional strategy of secularizing civic life. Second, it demonstrates how musicology can continue to engage with the religious means and ends of music in a post-Enlightenment period, not just in France but in the United States, Italy, Germany, England, Spain, the rest of western Europe, and elsewhere. For these reasons, the book will be essential reading for scholars working on fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century French music as well as music of the same period composed or performed elsewhere in western Europe. Additionally, the book will serve as a point of reference for those working on other post-Romantic periods; Walker indicates in her epilogue that even contemporary musical practice navigates a contested space between religious symbols as tradition and religious symbols as totems of personal and collective identity in the present. This book invites us to consider how music can function as both an agent of and threat to any hegemonic institution, political, religious, or otherwise.