These are hard times for Francophiles, even those who draw a bright line between the splendor of French art and the squalor of French politics. Just as many Americans now find themselves reflecting sourly on the collective ingratitude of a nation whose very survival in World War II was made possible by American fighting men and American generosity, so it has been irresistible to recall the shabby behavior of certain French artists and intellectuals after their country surrendered to the Nazis in 1940. One thinks, for instance, of Colette, who blithely published her work in anti-Semitic magazines during the German occupation, or of the great pianist Alfred Cortot, who went so far as to serve as Vichy’s high commissioner of fine arts and to perform in Nazi Germany.
Judith Thurman, Colette’s latest biographer, blames her subject’s wartime behavior on “moral lethargy.” It might better be called moral idiocy—the same idiocy with which the whole of modern French history is variously tainted. From the French Revolution to I’affaire Dreyfus to the present moment, this idiocy runs like a blood-red thread, not always predominant but perpetually visible. Among French artists like Colette, Cortot, and their fellow collaborationists, the most troubling thing is that they were not second-tier figures but creative and performing geniuses, whose work remains to this day representative of the quintessence of French art.
But is French art itself as morally equivocal as so many French artists have been? It is tempting—perhaps dangerously so—to jump to that conclusion, especially if one is already predisposed to find the French artistic temperament fundamentally unserious. Americans in particular have long been more at ease with the unabashed high-mindedness of Austro-German culture, perhaps because the puritan strain, with its reflexive distrust of pleasure for its own sake, is so deeply embedded in our own national character. Nothing discomfits “serious” Americans quite so much as the champagne fizz of high-art-with-alight-touch, a defining quality of French art through the ages; fearful of hangovers, such Americans are more likely to opt for what Byron called “sermons and soda-water.”
American idealism similarly inclines many of us to bristle at the petit-bourgeois smugness and opportunism too often evident in French attitudes toward art and its makers. Writing in the introduction to the catalogue of Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, currently on exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curator Gary Tinterow reminds us that in the wake of the abdication of Napoleon as emperor of France in 1814, Great Britain and its allies demanded of the Louvre that it return to their original owners hundreds of works of art stolen by Napoleon’s armies in the preceding decade. Dominique-Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre, replied: “Let them take them, then. But they have no eyes to see them with. France will always prove by her superiority in the arts that the masterpieces were better here than elsewhere.”
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As it happens, New Yorkers and Washingtonians have had many choice opportunities of late to reflect on the paradoxical nature of French “superiority” in the arts. Aside from Manet/Velázquez at the Metropolitan, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is presenting Matisse Picasso, a show juxtaposing the painting and sculpture of the reigning masters of the School of Paris. Meanwhile, Washington’s Phillips Collection and National Gallery mounted retrospectives of the works of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, two major post-impressionist painters whose domestic subject matter and intimacy of approach have unfortunately blinded many American critics to their true significance.
In addition, the Metropolitan Opera recently revived John Dexter’s superlative 1977 production of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, an opera about the guillotining by the Jacobins of an order of cloistered nuns in which events of the highest moral gravity are portrayed in music whose unaffected charm strikes many listeners as startlingly incongruous. And Lincoln Center is currently presenting a season-long retrospective of the music of Hector Berlioz; scheduled events range from a new Metropolitan Opera production of Les Troyens, Berlioz’s epic theatrical version of Virgil’s Aeneid, to an eagerly awaited revival of the puppeteer Basil Twist’s abstract “staging” of the Symphonie fantastique.1
Of all these artists, it is Berlioz who poses the greatest problems to those who find French art light-minded. Although, at first glance, it may be difficult to see how such a phrase can reasonably be applied to the music of a composer whose most ambitious works were inspired by the writings of Virgil, Shakespeare, and Goethe, one need only compare My Life, the autobiography of Richard Wagner, with Berlioz’s Memoirs to grasp the difference between the seriousness of a world-saver and the seriousness of a melancholic wit who viewed both the world and himself with the same wry detachment. It is no coincidence that Wagner has always been more popular than Berlioz: he never made the fatal mistake of encouraging us to laugh at ourselves.2
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Even more problematic, however, is Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-94), whose operetta L’Etoile (1877) was produced to scintillating effect last October by the New York City Opera. Chabrier’s music has never been well known outside of France. His songs are rarely included on recital programs, and in a quarter-century of regular concert-going I have yet to hear a live performance of Dix pièces pittoresques (1880), his most important work for solo piano. In this country, he is known almost exclusively for España (1883), a riotous orchestral rhapsody on Spanish themes that still figures prominently on pops-concert programs, and as a result he continues to be dismissed by most critics as a charming but minor purveyor of “light music.”
In fact, Chabrier was far more than an entertainer, as the English composer-conductor-critic Constant Lambert, himself a lifelong Francophile who labored diligently to introduce his music to British audiences, never tired of explaining:
He was the first important composer since Mozart to show that seriousness is not the same as solemnity, that profundity is not dependent upon length, that wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and that frivolity and beauty are not necessarily enemies.
To those who find this description paradoxical to the point of unintelligibility, the music of Chabrier will seem trivial, even irritating—just as it has puzzled sober-sided listeners that a man who adored the operas of Wagner could also have produced Souvenirs de Munich (1886), a slapstick “quadrille” for piano duet based on “favorite themes” from Tristan und Isolde. Yet Chabrier himself saw no contradiction, perhaps because his temperament was as varied as his music, in which tender lyricism and rumbustious peasant vigor are interwoven without regard to conventional notions of stylistic consistency.
A civil servant with a private income who did not become a full-time professional composer until the age of thirty-nine, Chabrier was by all accounts a bon vivant and boon companion, and almost as knowledgeable about the visual arts as he was about music. (He was painted by Degas and Manet, and amassed an extraordinary art collection whose centerpiece was Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère.) At the same time, however, there was nothing amateurish about his compositions, and his high-spirited letters leave no possible doubt of his complete commitment to his art:
For my part, my first concern is to do what pleases me while trying above all to express my personality; and my second is not to be a bore. . . . Never has an artist adored and sought to honor music more than I have; and no one has suffered more in doing so—and so shall I suffer to all eternity.
No single work conveys more of Chabrier’s idiosyncratic quality than “Idylle,” a short piano piece first published as part of Dix pièces pittoresques and later orchestrated as the first movement of Suite pastorale (1888). Against a softly ticking two-part accompaniment, we hear a shapely tune whose harmonic underpinnings are unexpectedly oblique (the tonic chord is not heard until the very end of the first phrase). Especially in the subtly colored orchestral version, the mood is poised between al-fresco cheerfulness and a pensive melancholy that flickers across the soundscape like clouds on a breezy summer day.
Francis Poulenc, who as a young composer had taken for granted that Chabrier was “a minor musician,” recalled for the rest of his life the first time he heard “Idylle”:
Today I still tremble with emotion thinking of the miracle that happened then; a new harmonic world opened up before me, and my own music has never forgotten that first kiss of love.
Nor was Poulenc alone in his intense attraction to so seemingly “minor” a masterpiece. George Balanchine, who set three ballets to Chabrier’s music, used “Idylle” as the accompaniment to the darkly romantic pas de deux of Cotillon (1932), in which a man and woman dancing together at a ball suddenly find themselves stalked by the black-gloved Hand of Fate. That Balanchine, the most profoundly musical choreographer of the 20th century, should have responded in such a way to “Idylle” speaks eloquently of the complex personality of its unusual composer.3
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The art critic Clement Greenberg once remarked that the modernist art of the School of Paris “rested on a sufficient acceptance of the world as it must be, and it delighted in the world’s very disenchantment, seeing it as evidence of man’s triumph over it.”
Much the same might be said of the music of Chabrier, and of a great deal of French art in general. It is worldly, even earthy, rather than spiritual; it is not idealistic but hedonistic. Instead of dwelling on the intractable sorrows of life, many of the greatest French artists have sought to ameliorate them by giving pleasure—as if to say that human existence is so indissoluble a mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it can often be more acutely portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy. For anyone who thinks differently, French art will always seem shallow and frivolous. To others, however, a world deprived of the music of Berlioz and Chabrier or the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard—or, for that matter, the novels of Colette and the recordings of Alfred Cortot—would be unimaginably sadder, not to mention duller.
Yet man cannot live by French art alone. For one thing, many of its makers have been too preoccupied with “the world as it must be” to imagine the world as it might be. For another, the balance between beauty and frivolity is famously delicate, and French artists as a group long ago lost the ability to strike it. Greenberg himself dryly remarked that painting in postwar France had deteriorated (one is tempted to say, degenerated) into mere “cuisine,” and the same is true of the other arts as practiced there today. It has been a very long time since a Frenchman wrote a symphony or a novel, or choreographed a ballet, that the rest of the world has found compelling or memorable.
It may be that French art of the kind I have been discussing has run its course, never again to be revived. And without their profoundly civilized and humane artistic achievements to commend them to our attention, what do the French now have to offer us? The answer may be found on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, though in truth the precipitous moral decline of the French is in another sense the oldest of news. Daniel Defoe first reported it three centuries ago in a brutally concise couplet that is no less telling today: “A dancing nation, fickle and untrue:/Have oft undone themselves, and others too.”
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1 Edouard Vuillard is on display at the National Gallery through April 20, Matisse Picasso at MoMA through May 19, and Manet/ Velázquez at the Met through June 8. Symphonie fantastique opens April 24 at Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio and runs through May 4.
2 For more about Berlioz, see my essay “An Unloved Romantic” (COMMENTARY, October 1997).
3 Chabrier’s output was modest, and three albums suffice to cover virtually all of his best work. His complete keyboard music (including Dix pièces pittoresques and Souvenirs de Munich) has been recorded by the pianists Pierre Barbizet and Jean Hubeau (Erato 4509-95309-2, two CD’s). His complete songs are available on Musique adorable!, performed by the soprano Felicity Lott, the tenor William Burden, the baritone Stephen Varcoe, and the pianist Graham Johnson (Hyperion CDA67133/4, two CD’s). Most of his works for orchestra, including España and Suite pastorale, were exquisitely recorded by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony (Mercury 434 303-2MM). Also available is a 1941 radio broadcast of L’Etoile featuring the mezzo-soprano Ninon Vallin and the tenor Hugues Cuenod (Cascavelle VEL 2013). These CD’s can be purchased online by viewing this article during the month of April on COMMENTARY’s website, www.commentarymagazine.com.
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