Salons, Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song, 1830-1870. .(Book Review)

Salons, Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song, 1830-1870. By David Tunley. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2002. [xii, 283 p. ISBN 0-754-60491-8. $79.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Few aspects of French cultural life have been as misunderstood or maligned as the salons. Today, the expression "salon music" carries connotations of superficiality and sentimentality, while that of "salon composer" serves as a slight, if not an outright insult. Yet these epithets are more than demeaning--they perpetuate the myth that salons were just elitist entertainments where innocuous trifles accompanied pleasant conversation.

Fortunately, this inequity is being redressed. Cecile Tardif ("Faure and the Salons," in Regarding Faure, ed. Tom Gordon [Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999], 1-14) and Jeanice Brooks ("Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac," in Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 [1993]: 415-68), among others, have demonstrated that the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Parisian gatherings fostered some of the era's most distinguished music and artists. Of course, not all of the pieces played or sung at the salons had such high aspirations. But failure to distinguish between high art and divertissement is to be both unfair and ignorant of the facts.

While we now have a better grasp of its relatively recent past, salon culture of the mid-nineteenth century remains rather nebulous. Although further removed, this social scene still matters much, as it set the stage for the later artistic efflorescence and fostered much creativity of its own, particularly in the form of the romance. Indeed, not since Frits Noske's French Song from Berlioz to Duparc, 2d ed. (trans. Rita Benton [New York: Dover, 1970]) has the vocal music of that period attracted much serious scholarship.

Thus, David Tunley's Salons, Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song, 1830-1870 offers welcome illumination of a hazily known age. Complementing the author's facsimile anthology of the epoch's vocal literature (Romantic French Song with Translations and commentaries, 6 vols. [New York: Garland, 1994-95]), this book offers essential historical, social, and aesthetic context for understanding that elegant and musically enthusiastic period.

Nine chapters, each a self-contained essay, constitute its substance. Chapter 1, "Musical Paris," portrays the French capitol in the 1830s, when music was, in the quoted words of Jules Janin, "the great pleasure of this city" (p. 1). In addition to opera and theater, Parisians enjoyed several professional orchestral and choral concert series, countless public chamber and solo recitals, numerous performances by amateur music societies, plus burgeoning music education and publishing sectors. As Tunley suggests, this preoccupation with music could not help but spill over into the salon tradition, which had begun to revive during the Restoration. While diaries, letters, and memoirs provide essential information, the author draws heavily on newspaper articles, a surprising number of which report on ostensibly "private" events.

"The Salons and Their Music" begins with a survey of four Parisian quartiers in which musical salons were concentrated, each of which drew different cliques. Glimpses of specific salons appear next, as do vignettes of their organizers, the most notable of whom were women. The third chapter, "Singers in the Salons," ...