Das Mittelalter im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Kompositionsgeschichte in Frankreich. By Stefan Morent. (Beihefte zum Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, bd. 72.) Stuttgart; Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013. [200 p. ISBN 9783515102940. 42 [euro].] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Stefan Morent sets out in this book to examine how the Middle Ages were understood, interpreted, and explored artistically in nineteenth-century musical culture, with special emphasis on repertoire rather than on discourses concerning musical aesthetics and literature. As a German scholar, Morent takes something of an outsider's position in relation to types of metahistorical topics that throughout the twentieth century have otherwise been addressed mainly in and Belgian scholarship. The book (which was also Morent's Habilitationsschrift at the University of Tubingen) is centered around three case studies, providing one chapter each on compositional contexts and processes in the music of Gabriel Faure, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie. These chapters draw on a number of works wherein Morent (and others) have identified allusions to medieval repertoires and compositional techniques, alongside more abstract reverberations of music from the Middle Ages. One may be surprised to find that composers such as Maurice Emmanuel and Charles Koechlin are not represented among the case studies, given the preponderance of such medievalisms in their works. It is possible that Morent has decided to deliberately focus on composers who have, in later historiographical contexts, been regarded as major, rather than others for whom historical perspectives were at the core of their creative interests. Louis Niedermeyer figures in all chapters, as one would expect, whereas Joseph d'Ortigue and Francois Auguste Gevaert do not appear at all--surely their importance in Paris must have been considerable. Even so, Morent's choice of case studies gives the book a specific angle, as it links certain elements of perceived Frenchness exactly to the medievalist elements. This ought to be of considerable interest to scholarship on the three composers studied. In the first case study, Morent argues in a number of analyses that Faure's works--mainly the Requiem op. 48, which is his main case here--present an integrated scope of harmony, where modal and tonal/functional aspects have formed a synthesis. Modality thus augments the exhausted possibilities of functional harmony and moves in a completely different direction than chromatic surface-layer elaborations of strong tonal progressions, common in much coeval German and Austrian music, and which occasionally may appear similar to the modal features in Faure. In order to make a comparative evaluation, Morent inserts an excursus wherein Faure's writing is contrasted with (among other things) a bipolar relationship of tonal and modal features in medievalist works by Franz Liszt. This is an interesting observation which could undoubtedly, backed up with further argument and analysis, be extended to a broader hermeneutical stratagem for a particular French style of nineteenth-century musical medievalism. One must, however, ask whether Liszt's education in a pedagogical-cum-aesthetic paradigm that predates, by at least thirty-five years, Faure's boarding at the Ecole Niedermeyer in the 1850s, is not as important as (or in fact more important than) the fact that this paradigm was Viennese. In a chapter on Debussy's Pelleas el Melisande, Morent draws attention to the importance both of Charles Bordes's Schola Cantorum and to the scholarly and musical environment of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. This chapter might have benefitted from a wider scope of analysis and not being so stricdy focused on Pelleas el Melisande; Morent seems to admit that the historicisms here are vague, often exemplified in declamatory elements from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music and music theory, rather than from medieval repertoire. …