SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
The Schola Cantorum
3. The Schola Cantorum
The Lamoureux Concerts had served their purpose, and, in their turn, their heroic mission came to an end. They had forced Wagner on Paris; and Paris, as always, had overshot the mark, and could swear by no one but Wagner. French musicians were translating Gounod’s or Massenet’s ideas into Wagner’s style; Parisian critics repeated Wagner’s theories at random, whether they understood them or not–generally when they did not understand them. A reaction was inevitable directly Paris was well saturated with Wagner; and it came about in 1890, among a chosen few, some of whom had been, and were even still, under Wagner’s influence. It was at first only a mild reaction, and showed itself in a return to the classics of the past and to the great primitives in music.
There had been several attempts in this direction before, but none of them had succeeded in making any impression on the mass of the public. In 1843, Joseph Napoléon Ney, Prince of Moszkowa, founded in Paris a society for the performance of religious and classical vocal music. This society, which the Prince himself conducted in his own house, set itself to perform the vocal works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[221]
[Footnote 221: It published, in eleven volumes, the ancient works that it performed. Before this experiment there had been the Concerts historiques de Fétis, preceded by lectures, which were inaugurated in 1832, and failed; and these were followed by Amédée Méréaux’s Concerts historiques in 1842-1844.]
In 1853, Louis Niedermeyer founded in Paris an École de musique religieuse et classique, which strove «to form singers, organists, choir-masters, and composers of music, by the study of the classic works of the great masters of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.» This school, subsidised by the State, was a nursery for some real musicians. It reckoned among its pupils some noted composers, conductors, organists, and historians; among others, M. Gabriel Fauré, M. André Messager, M. Eugène Gigout, and M. Henry Expert. M. Saint-Saëns was a professor there, and became its president. Nearly five hundred organists, choir-masters, and professors of music of the Conservatoire and other French colleges were trained there. But this school, serious in intention, and a refuge for the classic spirit in the midst of the prevailing bad taste, did not trouble itself about influencing the public, and, in fact, almost ignored it.
Lamoureux attempted in 1873 to perform the great choral works of Bach and Händel; and in 1878 the celebrated French organist, M. Alexandre Guilmant, ventured to give concerts at the Trocadéro for the organ and orchestra, which were devoted to religious music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the deplorable acoustics of the concert-room had a prejudicial effect on the works that were performed there; and the public did not respond very warmly to M. Guilmant’s efforts, and seemed from the first only to find an historical interest in the masterpieces, and to miss their depth and life altogether.
Then a pupil of Franck’s, M. Henry Expert, who began his admirable works on Musical History in 1882, laid the foundation of the Société J.S. Bach, in order to spread the knowledge of ancient music written between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. And he succeeded in interesting in his undertaking, not only the principal French musicians, such as César Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Gounod, but also foreigners, such as Hans von Bülow, Tschaikowsky, Grieg, Sgambati, and Gevaert. Unhappily this society never got farther than arranging what it wanted to do, and only sketched out the plans that were realised later by Charles Bordes.
The general public were not really interested in the art of the old musicians until the Association des Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais was founded in 1892 by Charles Bordes, the choirmaster of the church of Saint-Gervais. The immediate success and the noisy renown of the Society were due to other things besides the talent of its conductor, who combined with a lively artistic intelligence both common-sense and energy and a remarkable gift for organisation–it was due partly to the help of favourable circumstances, partly to the surfeit of Wagnerism, of which I have just spoken, and partly to the birth of a new religious art, which had sprung up since the death of César Franck round the memory of that great musician.
this was: The Schola Cantorum
go to next chapter: César Franck’s genius
