French Art Song: History of a New Music, 1870–1914 by Emily Kilpatrick (review)

Reviewed by: French Art Song: History of a New Music, 1870–1914 by Emily Kilpatrick Keith E. Clifton French Art Song: History of a New Music, 1870–1914. By Emily Kilpatrick. (Eastman Studies in Music, 186. ) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2022. xxi, 445 p. ISBN 9781648250545 (hardcover), 110; ISBN 9781800108103 (ebook), 29. 95. Music examples, facsimiles, tables, bibliography, index. In his Nouveau dictionnaire de musique illustré (1855), Charles Soulier described the French mélodie as "a sort of romance" characterized by "sweet and piquant inflections" (Frits Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc: The Origin and Development of the Mélodie, 2nd ed. , trans. Rita Benton New York: Dover, 1970, 23). Hardly a ringing endorsement, Soulier's assessment reflects the disregard with which French song has often been treated, especially when compared to stage, chamber, and symphonic music. Emerging from the nineteenth-century chanson tradition and bolstered by the popularity of Franz Schubert's lieder, the mélodie found new life in the works of Hector Berlioz, whose Neuf mélodies irlandaises (1830; a. k. a. Irlande) gave the genre its title, while Nuits d'été (1840–41) emerged as its first milestone work. Most previous studies have focused on the "how" of French song, referencing poets, musical forms, approaches to text setting, and other broad observations (see, for example, Barbara Meister, Nineteenth-Century French Song: Fauré, Chausson, Duparc, and Debussy Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, and Graham Johnson, A French Song Companion New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). The "why"—relationships bet ween composer and interpreters, the role of the salon and conservatory in song dissemination, the vexing question of transposition—has been ignored or received short shrift. In her new book, Emily Kilpatrick examines the mélodie from a variety of perspectives, situating the genre as a site for musical experimentation worthy of consideration at the center, rather than the margins, of French musical life. Focused on the period from the Franco-Prussian War through the start of World War I, Kilpatrick makes her intentions clear in the book's title, boldly proclaiming the song as "new music. " With twelve chapters divided into three larger parts centered on poets, singers, and the public, she begins with the radical poetry of Charles Baudelaire. Echoing Katherine Bergeron's assessment of Baudelaire as the place where French composers "found their Goethe" (Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, 7), Kilpatrick reminds us that in a brief time span, Emmanuel Chabrier, Henri Duparc, and Gabriel Fauré all set Baudelaire's poetry. Set against the backdrop of Baud-erlaire's defense of Richard Wagner, song composers responded to the rise of wagnérisme in different ways. Most surprising was Chabrier, whose setting of the poet's "L'invitation au voyage" supplanted his signature wit with a harmonic language modeled on Tristan und Isolde. Devoting a chapter to 1870, End Page 675 the année terrible that encompassed the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris, Kilpatrick notes that while Fauré and Jules Massenet were serving in the French armed forces, other composers were expressing support for the French cause through music. In her reading, Duparc's "L'invitation au voyage"— among the best known of all French songs—supersedes a mere travelogue to become "a powerful encapsulation of nostalgia and loss" (p. 45). Turning to the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian conflict, Kilpatrick points out the importance of the Société national de musique in disseminating mélodies, even when critical reactions were absent and the genre relegated to amateur st atus. Duparc's "Extase, " also modeled on Tristan, served as inspiration for Faure's "Hymne, " the first of three Baudelaire settings that moved beyond his early mélodies to texts of Victor Hugo. Regarding the question of transposition, she writes that Duparc and Fauré both supported the practice and "were frustrated at times by publishers' reading (or perhaps misreading) of the intended market for their songs; crucially, both sought to ensure that published transpositions were pianistically logical as well as vocally tasteful" (p. 78). Kilpatrick's long-awaited critical edition of Fauré's songs for Edition Peters, coedited with scholar. . .