Revolution and Opera

The French Revolution ended the court that had run French music for a century and created something new: a public. Concert halls, opera houses and a national conservatoire grew up to serve a nation of citizens rather than a king's guests, and the nineteenth century was a time of grand spectacle, comic opera, orchestral daring and some of the best-loved tunes in the repertoire. This chapter follows that story from a marching song to a gypsy cigarette-factory worker on the stage. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

La Marseillaise

The song now sung as the French national anthem was written in 1792 in Strasbourg by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, an army officer, as a marching song for the army of the Rhine (check the details). It got its name from volunteers from Marseille who sang it as they marched to Paris (check). It was declared the national anthem in the mid-1790s, was banned or sidelined at times under later regimes, and was restored as the anthem later in the nineteenth century (check the dates). Its story shows how a song can be adopted, dropped and revived as political fortunes change.

The Conservatoire and the New Public

In the mid-1790s the revolutionary government set up a national conservatoire in Paris to train musicians for the army, the festivals and the theatres (check the date). It became one of the most influential music schools in Europe and shaped what French musicians were taught for generations. The Revolution also staged large open-air festivals with music for thousands of singers, a new idea at the time.

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz (1803 to 1869) was a composer who wrote for the largest orchestra he could imagine, and who is best known for the Symphonie fantastique, first performed at the end of 1830 (check the date). It tells a story, loosely autobiographical, of an artist in love, and uses a recurring theme (an idée fixe) that returns in different forms as the story unfolds. Berlioz also wrote a Requiem and a large opera on the story of Troy, Les Troyens, which had to wait a long time for a full staging (check). He had a mixed reception at home during his life, and his reputation grew afterwards.

The Opera Houses

Offenbach

Jacques Offenbach was born in Cologne and settled in Paris, where he became the leading composer of operetta under the Second Empire (check the dates). His works, such as Orpheus in the Underworld, made fun of classical myth and, by implication, of contemporary society (check the date). The lively dance music from that work became widely known as the cancan, though the tune's later fame owes much to how it has been used in later years.

Bizet and Carmen

Georges Bizet's Carmen was first staged at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1875 and had a mixed reception; Bizet died a few months later (check the dates). A popular legend says he died believing the work a failure and never knew that it would become one of the most performed operas in the world (check this carefully, since the story is tidier than the evidence). The opera's story of a soldier, a cigarette-factory worker and a bullfighter was shocking to some audiences of the time, and its music has since become some of the best known in the repertoire.

César Franck

César Franck (1822 to 1890) was born in Liège, now in Belgium, and spent his working life in Paris as an organist at the church of Sainte-Clotilde (check the details). His Symphony in D minor, from his later years, is his best-known work, and he is often associated with a cyclic approach, in which themes recur across movements (check). He taught a circle of pupils who carried his ideas forward, and he marks the turn from the grand opera of the middle of the century to the more inward, symphonic music that followed.

Exercises

Next chapter: Impressionism: Debussy, Ravel & Satie, which covers the new French sound around 1900.