Paris - History, Aesthetics of Music, 19th Century French History - General & Miscellaneous, French Music

Salons, Singers, and Songs

Name: Salons, Singers, and Songs
Author: David Tunley
ISBN: 9780754604914

by David Tunley

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Overview

"Afternoon and evening entertainments in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy and upper middle classes were a staple of cultural life in nineteenth-century Paris. Music was often a feature of these occasions and private salons provided important opportunities for musicians, especially singers, to develop their careers. Such recitals included excerpts from favourite operas, but also the more traditional forms of French song, the romance and its successor the melodie." Drawing on extensive research into the musical press of the period, David Tunley paints a vivid portrait of the nineteenth-century Parisian salons and the performers who sang in them. Against this colourful backdrop, he discusses the development of French romantic song, with its hallmarks of simplicity and clarity of diction. Combined with Italian influences and the impression made by Schubert's songs, the French romance developed into a form with greater complexity - the melodie. Salons, Singers and Songs describes this transformation and the seeds it sowed for music by later composers such as Faure, Duparc and Debussy.

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So ebullient was 19th-century Parisian society's writing about music, says Tunley (music, U. of Western Australia-Nedlands) that critics even reviewed performances at fashionable private salons in considerable depth and detail. Through contemporary published reviews, he traces the evolution of the music there as well as in public recitals and concerts, into the characteristic style of romantic French song and its further development into the final stage of French m<'e>lodie. The quotations are translated and often paraphrased, but the French originals of most are provided in footnotes. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)