La critique musicale au temps des Encyclopédistes 1750-1774

The growing interest in French music and opera in the eighteenth century calls for a systematic study of the institutions, practices, and theories of music criticism in the periodical press of the time. Because La critique musicale au temps des Encyclopédistes attempts to fill this important need, it deserves an attentive reading. Coronat-Faure's study was originally a French dissertation and it retains many of the characteristics of this exercise. Her narrow sample of primary sources include concert and opera reviews in two official, government-sanctioned weeklies (the Mercure de France and Avant-Coureur) and two semi-clandestine publications (the Mémoires secrets, and Correspondance littéraire). She also treats a small selection of aesthetic criticism that focuses mostly on canonical texts by Rousseau and Diderot. Her announced chronological parameters of 1750-74 are both arbitrary and somewhat misleading, since her discussion of the periodical press starts only in 1762. On the other hand, her discussion of aesthetic criticism covers a slightly longer period than 1750-74, because she includes the writings of Lacépède and Chabanon of the late 1770s.

Coronat-Faure assumes no prior knowledge of the field on the part of her readers, and takes great pains to introduce every author or musician she mentions with biographical background. Although this approach is useful to those entirely new to the field of eighteenth-century musical and intellectual life, it results in undue repetitions. Moreover , those interested more specifically in Coronat-Faure's original analysis might find it frustrating that her contribution occupies a relatively small portion of the book. Furthermore, much of the general introductory material is poorly footnoted, making it difficult for the researcher to find the sources of much of the information.

The book is organized in three parts, each divided roughly in three chapters. Part I "Les sources, les rédacteurs", is descriptive, presenting the selected publications and providing biographical sketches of the journalists and philosophes who authored these publications. Part II, "Etude de la critique" starts by analyzing the requirements for writing music criticism. Using A. Machabey's Traité de la critique musicale (1947) as her theoretical basis, Coronat-Faure proceeds to analyze whether eighteenth-century criticism can be called music criticism in the modern sense of the term. Although she deplores that so little of eighteenth-century criticism was concerned with identifying lasting masterpieces, she concedes that it was properly criticism since it provided information both about the performance and the works themselves, made an attempt at providing objective judgments (albeit often by simply relating how the public reacted to the performance), and was written by knowledgeable authors. The following chapters of Part II discuss the various ways authors could obtain the knowledge required for writing music criticism, and the problems of style and objectivity inherent to writing music criticism. Because Coronat-Faure quotes amply from contemporary periodicals in this part, it stands out as the most original and lively portion of the book. Part III bears the all-encompassing title of "Aspects de la critique musicale du dix-huitième siècle," and it covers a vast array of information one can gather from reading contemporary eighteenth-century music criticism-from theories of aesthetic criticism and the relative importance of various kinds of music in the middle of the eighteenth century (opera, instrumental music, and religious music), to the increasing attention given to the quality of the performance.

The book's appendices include a useful table that lists performances from January 1762 to April 1774 at the three venues she surveys (the Opéra, the Comédie-Italienne, and the Concert Spirituel), as well as the journals in which reviews appeared. It is less clear why she appends several contemporary texts illustrating the workings of the Opéra, since she does not discuss them in the text of her book. The bibliography is limited to mostly French works and makes no mention of the extensive and recent Anglo-American scholarship on music and the press in eighteenth-century France, including works that would have been immediately relevant to Coronat-Faure's study, among them: Cynthia Verba, Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue 1750-1764, (1993); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1995); Georgia Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music 1600-1750 (1981); and Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort, eds., The Mémoires secrets and the Culture of Publicity (1998).

The principal failings of the book are twofold: first, the information the author provides is sometimes incomplete making it difficult to understand the actual situations she analyzes; and second, her interpretations reveal more about her own value judgments than those of the early-modern audience of concerts and operas. To illustrate my first point, I will look at Coronat-Faure's discussion of the critical reception of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) by the Parisian press. Based on her observation that in all the journals she reviewed, the critics' discussions of Gluck's operas were uncharacteristically detailed and passionate, Coronat-Faure concludes that they spontaneously recognized Gluck's opera as a masterpiece. She fails to mention, however, that Gluck's critical reception was to a great extent carefully orchestrated by Gluck and his librettist Du Roullet, who well in advance of the opera's performance prepared the public and the critics for their innovations by publishing letters in the Mercure de France detailing Gluck's aesthetic principles and professional expectations.

Perhaps even more troubling are the author's value judgments with no account of her underlying assumptions. For example, she characterizes André Grétry, arguably one of the most successful opera composers of his time, as a minor composer because he wrote only in one genre, opéra-comique (265). Similarly, when discussing Rousseau's authority as a music theorist, as well as the contemporary success of his opera Le Devin du village, she wonders how these were possible, considering that Rousseau was "dépourvu du moindre talent de musicien!"(76) About the star actress and singer at the Opéra, Sophie Arnould, she laments moralistically: "[elle] aurait pû être une grande actrice, mais elle a laissé sa vie amoureuse et les nombreuses esclandres qui l'ont emaillée, la détruire." (270) These kinds of judgments detract from the scholarly tone of this study, and far from rendering it more lively and personal, might alienate some readers.

Despite these drawbacks, La critique musicale au temps des Encyclopédistes makes for lively reading. The extensive quotations from the contemporary press will undoubtedly be a useful resource for further research in this field. Finally, the author should be commended for bringing to our attention an important and understudied aspect of Enlightenment journalism that will interest any scholar of eighteenth-century culture.