TY - JOUR
AU - Ellis, Katharine
AB - It has long been William Weber’s contention that France, and especially Paris, offers earlier indications of canon-formation than many scholars of European musical life care to acknowledge. With this book he presents eight case-study chapters focusing on the relative longevity in opera and concert programming of composers whose Parisian careers, taken together, span the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. His approach takes in both individuals (Haydn and Wagner have a chapter each) and institutions (programming in Parisian opera houses, and at the Comédie-Française), with discussions of the latter enhanced and rounded out by Beverly Wilcox’s chapter on repertory and programming across the 65-year life of the Concerts spirituels. Weber’s international comparisons focus primarily on London, whose precocious musical historicism he analysed in detail in his The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England. Organized broadly chronologically by subject matter, but with its feet firmly in the eighteenth century, the book offers wide-angle snapshots on the canonic fates of sacred concert music, the mainstream genres of grand opera and Opéra-Comique, plays (many of them with dedicated music), and secular concert music. The presence of an Afterword rather than a full-scale conclusion speaks to the book’s structure as a collection of related but largely self-sufficient studies; across the chapters, variations of scale and scope—musical, chronological, geographical—most likely derive from the book’s mixture of new and previously published work. While the voices of journalists and other commentators pepper the text, the title’s focus on the press is addressed primarily via Chapter three on eighteenth-century traditions in music criticism (following on from Wilcox’s discussions in Chapter two), Chapter four on Haydn’s 1780s reception, and the latter portions of Chapters five and six on opera and theatre. Less clearly signalled but just as important are the data sets that turn out to be the foundation stones for the book’s argument, and which continue Weber’s career-long work on repertorial patterns: day-by-day programming data from theatres, and comprehensive data from the Concerts spirituels (Wilcox). These are complemented by a necessarily more selective approach when bringing together Wagner-related data from commercial and benefit concerts lying outwith established concert series or other institutional structures (Chapter eight). The diachronic and often comparative repertorial patterns that emerge from the tables in Chapters two and five to seven provide striking raw material that is ripe for research even beyond that which is accomplished here. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Canonic Repertories and the French Musical Press: Lully to Wagner
JF - French History
DO - 10.1093/fh/crac029
DA - 2022-05-16
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/canonic-repertories-and-the-french-musical-press-lully-to-wagner-utcnIntvtT
SP - 263
EP - 264
VL - 36
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -