Ultra-modern French music constitutes a movement whose significance it may be still too early to estimate judicially, whose causes are relatively obscure and unprophetic, but whose attainments are exceedingly concrete from the historical viewpoint aside from the æsthetic controversies involved. Emerging from a generation hampered by over-regard for convention, vacillating and tentative in technical method in almost all respects save the theatre, and too often artificial there, a renascence of French music has been assured comparable in lucidity of style and markedly racial qualities to the golden days of a Couperin or a Rameau, while fearing no contemporary rival in emotional discrimination and delicate psychological analysis, and not infrequently attaining a masterly and fundamental vigor. The French composers of to-day have virtually freed dramatic procedures from Italian traditions, and even gradually distanced the Wagnerian incubus. They have re-asserted a nationalistic spirit in music, with or without dependence on folk-song material, with a potent individuality of idiom which has not been so persistent since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, French critical activity, scholarship, research, educational institutions, standards of performance have risen to a pitch of excellence formerly denied to all save the Germans.
While the roots of this attainment go back half a century and more, the flower of achievement is still so recent as to pique inquiry. It must be acknowledged that on the surface no causes are discoverable which are proportionate to the results attained, but closer examination discloses an unmistakable drift. During almost three-quarters of the nineteenth century, despite the epoch-making work of Berlioz, the efforts of French composers were centred in one or another of the forms of opera. Auber, Boieldieu, Meyerbeer and others were succeeded by Gounod, Thomas and Délibes, leading insensibly to Massenet and Bizet. Gounod's Faust (1859) and Roméo et Juliette (1867), Thomas' Mignon (1866), Délibes' ballet Coppélia (1870), Massenet's early work Don César de Bazan (1872), and Bizet's Carmen (1875), unjustly pilloried as 'Wagnerian,' were typical of the characteristic tendencies of the period.
Yet it was precisely at a time when Parisians were seemingly engrossed in the theatre, that signs of radical departure were apparent, and these may be fittingly considered the forerunners of the later standpoint. Up to nearly the middle of the nineteenth century the Concerts du Conservatoire, themselves the successors to somewhat anomalous organizations, were the only regular orchestral concerts in Paris. In 1849 Antoine Seghers reorganized the Société de Sainte Cécile, at which works by Gounod, Gouvy, and Saint-Saëns were occasionally in evidence. In 1851 Jules Pasdeloup founded the Société des Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire, merged ten years later into the Concerts Populaires, which afforded a definite opportunity, if somewhat grudgingly accorded, to young French composers. In 1855 Jules Armingaud formed a string quartet, later augmented by wind instruments, for the popularization of chamber music. He persisted against the obstacles of popular indifference, and ultimately became even fashionable. About this time also came an awakening in the study of plain-chant and the religious music of the sixteenth and preceding centuries. In 1853 Niedermeyer founded the École de Musique Religieuse, a significant institution which eventually broadened its educative scope into a fairly wide survey of musical literature. Other instrumental organizations of later date, and one particularly significant attempt at educational enfranchisement, will receive mention at the proper place. The foregoing instances serve to point out the seeming paradox of the rise of instrumental music at an apparently unpropitious time.
Without minimizing the genuine impetus given to instrumental music by the establishment of the foregoing organizations, the trend of ultra-modern French tendencies would have been dubious were it not for the preparatory foundation laid by Camille Saint-Saëns, Edouard Lalo and César Franck. Since the work of these men has already been estimated in previous chapters, it will suffice to indicate the precise nature of the influence exerted by each.
Saint-Saëns, possessing marvellous assimilative ingenuity as well as intellectual virtuosity, brought the contrapuntal manner of Bach, the forms of Beethoven, and the romanticism of Mendelssohn and Schumann into skilled combination with his own somewhat illusive and paradoxical individuality. To this he added a wayward fancy for exotic material, not treated however in its native spirit, but often in a scholastic manner that nevertheless often had a charm of its own. From the preparatory standpoint his conspicuous virtue lay in the incredible fertility with which he produced a long series of chamber music works, concertos and symphonies possessing such salient qualities of invention and workmanship as to force their acknowledgment from the Parisian public. If his music at its worst is little better than sterile virtuosity in which individual conviction seems in abeyance, such works as the fifth piano concerto, third violin concerto and third symphony (to name a few only) bear a well-nigh classic stamp in balance between expression and formal mastery. Saint-Saëns, then, popularized the sonata form, in its various manifestations, by means of a judicious mixture of conventional form and Gallic piquancy, so that a hitherto indifferent public was forced to applaud spontaneously at last. If to a later generation Saint-Saëns seems over-conventional and at times sententious rather than eloquent, we must remember that in its day his music was thought subversive of true progress, and unduly Teutonic in its artistic predilections. To-day we ask why he was not more unhesitatingly subjective. But possibly that would be expecting too much of a pioneer. Any estimate of Saint-Saëns would be incomplete without mention of his effective championing of the symphonic poem at a period when it was still under suspicion. His four specimens of this type show impeccable workmanship, piquant grace, true Gallic economy in the disposition of his material. They undoubtedly paved the way for works of later composers manifesting alike greater profundity of thought and higher qualities of the imagination.
Edouard Lalo stands in sharp contrast to Saint-Saëns. He was of an impressionable, dramatic temperament, drawn spontaneously toward the exotic and the coloristic. His Spanish origin betrays itself in the vivacity of his rhythms, and the picturesque quality of his melodies. If indeed the crowning success of a career full of reverses was the opera Le Roi d'Ys (sketched 1875-6, revised 1886-7) produced in 1888 when the composer was sixty-five, his services to instrumental music are none the less palpable. If Saint-Saëns turns to the exotic as a refreshment from a species of intellectual ennui, with Lalo it is the result of a fundamental instinct. Lalo's ultimately characteristic vein is to be found in concertos, of lax if not incoherent form, employing Spanish, Russian and Norwegian themes, a Norwegian Rhapsody for orchestra, and scintillant suites of nationalistic dances from a ballet Namouna. He became a deliberate advocate of 'local color' treated with a veracious and not a conventional atmosphere, in which the brilliant orchestral style was more than a casual medium. His salient qualities were romantic conviction and emotional ardor, in which he provided a sincere and positive example whose influence is tangible in later composers. Herein lies his historical import.
It may seem unnecessary to refer again to the unselfish, laborious yet exalted personality of César Franck, or needless to rehearse the humble and patient obscurity of his life for almost thirty years, the gradual assembling of his devoted pupils, the unfolding of his superb later works, and their posthumous general recognition, but it is only through such reiteration that the causes of his position become manifest. For it is precisely through such vicissitudes that convictions are forged and that the composers' idiom becomes forcefully eloquent. Franck was not content with superficial assimilation of technical procedures, nor with a facile eclecticism, hence it is the moral character of the artist which has affected his disciples to a degree even overshadowing his technical instruction. Like Saint-Saëns, Franck went directly to Bach for the essence of canonic and fugal style, to Beethoven for the cardinal principles of the variation and sonata forms. But unlike Saint-Saëns he did not detach external characteristics and apply them half-heartedly; he grasped the basic qualities of the music he studied, yet expressed himself freely and elastically in his own speech. He taught and practised not the letter but the spirit of style.
As regards historic import, Franck's harmonic idiom (while remotely related to that of Liszt), perfectly commensurate with his seraphic ideality, has become infiltrated more or less into the individuality of all his pupils. Less imitated but of great intrinsic significance is Franck's virtual reincarnation of the canon, chorale prelude, fugue and variation forms in terms of modern mystical expressiveness. His crowning historical feat was the fusion of hints from Beethoven (fifth and ninth symphonies), Berlioz's somewhat artificial but suggestive manipulation of themes, Liszt's plausible transformation of musical ideas for a programmistic purpose, into an independent solution of thematic unity employing a 'generative' theme to supply all or nearly all the thematic material. It may be suggested that Saint-Saëns had anticipated Franck in this respect (third symphony in C minor), but the latter had already worked out the idea in his quintet (1878-79) and there are germs of a similar treatment in his first trio (1841).[44] If Franck's pupils have adopted this idea of thematic variety based upon unity, in differing degrees of fidelity, this device remains a favorite procedure with the Franckist school, and Vincent d'Indy has employed its resources with conspicuous success.
But the secret of Franck's enduring influence does not consist solely in the genuine creative aspect of his technical mastery despite its ineffaceable example. It lies equally in the pervading morality of his æsthetic principles, and in the intrinsic message of his musical thought. In place of vivacious, piquant but often artificial and conventionalized emotion of a recognizably Gallic type, he brought to music a serenely mystical Flemish (or, to be more exact, Walloon) temperament, a nature naïvely pure and lofty, a character of placid aspiration and consummate trust. His faith moved technical and expressive mountains. Through the steadfastly permeating quality of his artistic convictions he counteracted the superficial and meretricious elements in French music, and substituted the calm but radiant ideals of a gospel of beauty which he not only preached but lived in his own works. Understood only by the few almost to the hour of his death, he preceded his epoch so far in fearless self-expression that it seems almost inaccurate to characterize him as a preparatory figure. He is not only the greatest of these, a forerunner in many respects of a later period, but also a prophet to whom one wing of French composers look for their inspiration and solace.
The foregoing names are not alone in their contributory effect upon modern French composers. Among many, a few names may be selected as worthy of mention. Georges Bizet, essentially of the theatre, in his overtures Roma (1861), Patrie (1875), the suite Jeux d'Enfants (1872), a charming series of miniatures, as well as the classic suites from the incidental music to Daudet's L'Arlésienne, disclose a remarkable and specific gift for instrumental music, whose continuance was only limited by his untimely death.