What made great 19th century French music?

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Learn about 19th century French music's extraordinary mix of traditional, progressive and innovative. From the weird and wonderful orchestrations of Hector Berlioz, to the composers responsible for French music's greatest movement - Impressionism.

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Transcript
French music in the 19th century, particularly towards the end, is an extraordinary mix of the traditional, progressive and innovative – each vying for attention. Yes, Saint-Saëns was producing some of the most glorious orchestral and chamber works in a solid Romantic style, but on the other hand, Hector Berlioz was confounding his audiences with weird and wonderful orchestrations and the emergence of a new wave of Impressionist composers at the end of the century were rebelling against the dominance of German composer Wagner, and pretty much everything else, too. So it was a melting pot of contrasting styles and exciting new visions. And at the root of it? The French revolution which stirred a nation into expressing itself as never before.

And it was Berlioz that put 19th-century French music on the map – the post-Revolutionary period under Napolean still favoured Italian operatic composers and a heavy, leaden nationalistic music style, and Berlioz was hell bent on shifting things along, carrying France into a new musical age to match its monumental political changes. The inventor of the orchestral tone poem, in which music tells a story, Berlioz gave a humanity and a vividness to his music – no one else at the time came close to him in widening the scope of musical expression, his Symphonie Fantastique, written in 1830, beating Wagner by some years in its use of leitmotifs or a short musical phrases to describe characters of situations. It was autobiographical, fantastical, strange and eery – an opera without words. Nothing had been heard like it before.

But French music, it soon became apparent, was moving too fast – Berlioz was one of a kind, and it would be up to the likes Saint-Saens, César Franck, Bizet, Gounod and Chabrier to keep French music from becoming just another bourgeois pastime. Together, they would satisfy the French people’s tastes for traditional Romantic fare, but their geniuses would move French music subtly but inexorably towards its greatest movement – Impressionism.

Perhaps the greatest catalyst for Impressionism was Gabriel Fauré, who worked from the final decades of the 19th century up until the 1920s, bringing with him a new expressionism to music – simplicity, elegance, a harmonic originality, his songs and chamber music breathtakingly beautiful, understated, subtle yet highly coloured and perfumed. But it was Claude Debussy who produced France’s first great musical revolution since Berlioz – with his interest in oriental art and literature, Debussy gave music a whole new sensation through an entirely new musical vocabulary – from the sultriness of the Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune to the tempestuousness of his depiction of the sea in La Mer. And his ground-breaking opera Pelléas et Mélisande with its modal harmonies and dream-like plot shut the door on Wagner’s influence for good.

From then on, through Maurice Ravel and into the 20th century with Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Henri Dutilleux, French music would forever carve its own unique path.