Music in France.(French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870-1939)(Book review)

French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870-1939. By Barbara L. Kelly. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008. [xix, 260 p. ISBN-13: 9781580462723. $90.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index.

The Franco-Prussian War was both catastrophic and cathartic for the French. A humiliating occupation of its capital, the loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region, and the realization that its political infrastructure was in chaos with the ascent of the Commune were among the ramifications. Almost immediately, however, a deeply nationalist mindset began to permeate French society leading to a period of nearly unprecedented social and cultural growth. Despite political divisions and social unrest, French culture ascended to heights that placed it in center stage on the world's forum. The birth of the Third Republic, and its nearly seven-decade run, provided an impetus for the rediscovery of France's national identity.

Drawn from a 2001 conference entitled "Nationalism and Identity in Third Republic France," Barbara Kelly has assembled a collection of essays that examine nationalism and its impact on French culture and music. The twelve offerings are packaged in three sections covering national identity formation, political alignment and artistic canon and style, and regionalism. Although the running theme is nationalism, the collection overall is interdisciplinary.

The first section, "Heroism, Art, and New Media: France and Identity Formation," is comprised of four essays examining how French society shaped its social and political identity by identifying heroic icons, refuting Wagner and the German aesthetic, and embracing transformational technologies at the 1889 Exposition Universelle.

Edward Berenson's essay examines Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a nineteenth-century explorer of Italian lineage who peacefully claimed territories in Central Africa for France. Brazza's fame peaked in the 1880s as his conquests of lands along North Africa's Congo River came to the public's attention through the media, serving as a welcome contrast to France's territorial losses of the previous decade. Berenson posits that it was the growing power of the media, the government's desire to create heroic figures to promote and unify France, and Brazza's compelling story as a foreign-born explorer who adopted France as his country that led to his emergence as a national hero.

Annegret Fauser's essay on technology at the 1889 Exposition Universelle reveals the socially transformative effects that the telephone and phonograph had on the listening public. Recounting descriptions from the popular press of live performances at the Opera transmitted via the telephone to listeners at the Exposition grounds, Fauser examines how these new technologies provided the means for the French to access music from distant cultures as well as repertoire from the past. At the heart of the essay is Thomas Edison, who unveiled his phonograph at the Exposition thereby allowing the public to interact with the machines by listening to music and recording their voices.

Barbara Kelly traces the reception of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande and his emergence as the prototypical French composer. "Debussy and the Making of a musicien francais: Pelleas, the Press, and World War I" documents how an otherwise isolated symbolist composer, became France's musical figurehead by the end of World War I. Through an examination of the press coverage of Pelleas, the writings of Debussy's advocates and detractors, and Debussy's own accounts of his opera as a refutation of Wagnerism, Kelly reveals that an ongoing debate over the work's musical, historical, and nationalist value eventually resulted in consensus about Debussy's place as France's musical chef d'ecole.