Music and the French Revolution

by Edited by Malcolm Boyd

• ISBN13: 9780521081870
• ISBN10: 0521081874
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Rouget de Lisle's famous anthem, La marseillaise, admirably reflects the confidence and enthusiasm of the early years of the French Revolution. But the effects on music of the Revolution and the events that followed it in France were more far-reaching than that. Hymns, chansons and even articles of the Constitution set to music in the form of vaudevilles all played their part in disseminating Revolutionary ideas and principles; music education was reorganized to compensate for the loss of courtly institutions and the weakened maitrises of cathedrals and churches. Opera, in particular, was profoundly affected, in both its organization and its subject matter, by the events of 1789 and the succeeding decade. The essays in this book, written by specialists in the period, deal with all these aspects of music in Revolutionary France, highlighting the composers and writers who played a major role in the changes that took place there. They also identify some of the traditions and genres that survived the Revolution, and look at the effects on music of Napoleon's invasion of Italy.

Table of Contents

Editorial preface

Introduction: exploring the Revolution

Elements of Continuity 'Royal Agamemnon'

The two versions of Gluck's Iphigenie en

Opera buffa into opera comique, 1771-1790

Periodical editions of music at the time of the French Revolution

The French string quartet, 1770-1800

A Versailles musician of the revolutionary period

Revolutionary Opera

The new repertory at the Opera during the Reign of Terror

Revolutionary rhetoric and operatic consequences

Lenore, ou L'amour conjugal: a celebrated offspring of the Revolution

On redefinitions of rescue opera

Music and the New Politics

The Conservatoire de Musique and national music education in France, 1795-1800

French Revolutionary perspectives on Chabanon's De la musique of 1785

Two artists in the service of Revolutionary propaganda

The constitutions set to music during the Revolution

Napoleon and After

The French occupation of Lucca and its effects on music

Beethoven and the Revolution

The view of the French musical press Beate

Index

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