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Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France.

Article Excerpt
Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France. By Katharine Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xii, 298 p. ISBN 0-19-517682-0. $60.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Anyone setting out to explore France and the French, whether from a historical perspective or in the present, will sooner or later come up against what we might term the three "P's" of Philosophy, Politics, and Paris. Each of these, either alone or in potent, inherently unstable combination, exerts its influence on a fourth "P," which is "Patriotism." It is thus not at all surprising to find all four "P's" playing their part in Katharine Ellis's fascinating exploration of early music in nineteenth-century France. This is a book that succeeds on many levels. Readers requiring a straightforward, digestible narrative to introduce them to the main events of this story--sometimes divertissement, more often melodrama--and to the idealists, ideologues, and people in between who form its dramatis personae, will be grateful for the first three chapters, which respectively cover 1800-46, 1846-78, and 1878-1900. If 1846 seems to have been chosen fairly arbitrarily (though it does have the benefit of dividing the three chapters into manageable chunks of around forty pages each, which probably suited the publisher), 1878 is more artfully selected, for at least two reasons. First of all, it makes musical sense: readers with any knowledge of France's cultural life will immediately recognize 1878 as the year of an Exposition universelle, and Ellis skillfully uses this as a jumping off point for her third chapter, which opens with an account of Alexandre Guilmant's six organ recitals at that event. With these recitals, Guilmant...

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