¹ I thank Nineteenth-Century Music Review's General Editor, Bennett Zon, for editing this review essay. I also thank my Editorial Board colleagues Sanna Pederson and Heather Platt for their advice and encouragement.

² Nancy Toff surveys literature from the Baroque to the recent past in The Flute Book: A Complete Guide for Students and Performers, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 183–274.

³ The Symbolist aesthetic, which emphasized suggestion and nuance, arose in Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Auguste Poulet-Malassis, 1857, 1861, 1868). Symbols distinguish those poems, but so do imagery, intertextuality, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and sensory references, plus what poets called ‘music’. Les fleurs du mal influenced Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and their verse, along with that of Baudelaire, initiated Symbolism's first phase. For more, see Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899; rev. ed. 1919); Henri Peyre, Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), translated as What is Symbolism?, trans. Emmett Parker (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980); Wallace Fowlie, Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).

⁴ Paul Verlaine's Art Poétique (1874), a poem that first appeared in the journal Paris-Moderne: revue littéraire et artistique on 10 November 1882 and was reprinted in his collection Jadis et naguère (Paris: Léon Vanier, 1884), articulated the Symbolist concept of ‘music’, which recognized aspects of our aural art in the literary form. See Wright, Alfred J. Jr., ‘Verlaine's “Art Poétique” Re-examined’, in Publications of the Modern Language Association 74/3 (1959): 268–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stéphane Mallarmé explored the poetic notion of ‘music’ systematically; see Chapter 3, ‘Mallarmé and the Spectacle of Musical Poetry’, in Joseph Acquisto, French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (London: Routledge, 2006): 47–80.

⁵ Insights on the influence of Symbolist poetry and its recitation appear in Helen Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music (London: Routledge, 2009), and Katherine Bergeron, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Époque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also David Evans, ‘Tough Crowd: The Perils of Reading Poetry Aloud, or How Poetic Value Is Negotiated in Performance’, in Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna Paliyenko and Catherine Witt (London: IMLR Publications, 2015): 207–28.

⁶ For flutist Marcel Moyse (1889–1984), ‘the French flute style was related to French pronunciation’, according to his biographer, who substantiated her assertion with a quotation from the artist: ‘The position of the mouth and the tongue required to speak French is a natural one to produce the flute tone’; see Ann McCutchan, Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994): 47. A student of Moyse, Raymond Meylan, concurs; see his book, The Flute, trans. Alfred Clayton (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1988): 119. Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922–2000) was said to have ‘explained that playing the flute was the same as singing’, emphasizing ‘the emotional and musical use of breath to create atmosphere and drama’; see Sheryl Cohen, Bel Canto Flute: The Rampal School (Cedar Falls: Winzer Press, 2003): 8, 11.

⁷ Active engagement and imagination stimulation distinguished Symbolist poetry, and French musicians took notice. Two mélodies from 1870, Henri Duparc's ‘L'invitation au voyage’, which sets a poem from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal, and Gabriel Fauré's ‘Lydia’, which applies the Symbolist aesthetic's principles to his setting of Parnassian verse by Leconte de Lisle, offer evidence of the aesthetic's early influence on French vocal music.

⁸ Ernst Gombrich's popular book, The Story of Art, first published in 1950, is in its 16th edition (New York: Phaidon Press, 2007).

⁹ Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961): 199 and 202.

¹⁰ Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012): 189. Kandel shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for his research relating to memory. See also Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, introduction by Wolfgang Kemp, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999): 11, 16, 103.

¹¹ The websites www.wyastone.co.uk/in-the-age-of-ravel.html (accessed 12 June 2022) and www.wyastone.co.uk/in-the-age-of-debussy.html (accessed 12 June 2022) provide track lists and timings for In the Age of Ravel and In the Age of Debussy.

¹² A.L. (Amédée-Landély) Hettich (1856–1937), Répertoire moderne de vocalises-études, 12 vols (Paris: Éditions Alphonse Leduc, 1907–1930).

¹³ Ravel's Vocalise-étude was originally set in F minor/major. However, the performers appear to have used a transposed arrangement titled ‘PIÈCE’ and labeled ‘Transcription pour Flûte ou Hautbois ou Violon avec accompagnement de Piano par Th. DONEY’ and first published by Leduc in 1921. Pitched in G minor/major, it produces an intimate impression via its limited range, which still approximates a mezzo-soprano voice. Louis Fleury produced yet another flute arrangement in G minor/major, published in 1926 by Éditions Alphonse Leduc under the title ‘Pièce en forme de Habanera’, that occasionally exploits the instrument's brilliant high register through upward octave transposition of selected phrases.

¹⁴ Bars 1–38 of Ravel's Vocalise-étude represent a precursive prolongation – an extended prefixial passage dependent upon the structural tonic harmony of G major first heard in bar 39. For more, see my chapter ‘Tonal Implication and the Gestural Dialectic in Schubert's A Minor Quartet’, in Schubert the Progressive: History, Performance Practice, Analysis, ed. Brian Newbould (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 56–62, and my essay ‘Precursive Prolongation in the Préludes of Chopin’, in the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 3 (2007–2008): 25–61.

¹⁵ For more on rising registral ceilings, see my chapters ‘Contextual Processes in Schubert's Late Choral Music’, in Rethinking Schubert, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 297–9, ‘The Dramatic Monologue of the Mass in A Flat’, in Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert, ed. Joe Davies and James William Sobaskie (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019): 76–7, and ‘Identification in Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise’, in The Cambridge Companion to Winterreise, ed. Marjorie Hirsch and Lisa Feurzig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 161–2.

¹⁶ Roger Nichols authored The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris: 1917–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Ravel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), and Poulenc: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Nichols also translated Jean-Michel Nectoux's Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

¹⁷ The American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) incorporated the terms ‘Arrangement’, ‘Harmony’ and ‘Symphony’ within portrait titles, and included the terms ‘Nocturne’, ‘Note’, and ‘Variations’ within landscape titles. For instance, the painting many know as ‘Whistler's Mother’ actually is called ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother’ (1871). Titles influence attitude and interpretation.

¹⁸ Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937) studied organ with César Franck at the Conservatoire, won the Prix de Rome in 1882, conducted the première of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird in 1910, and composed numerous operas, ballets and mélodies, as well as choral and chamber works. See Georges Masson, Gabriel Pierné, musician lorrain (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993), and Wood, Marc, ‘Pierné in Perspective: Of Church and Circus’, The Musical Times 143/1878 (2002): 47–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for more about the composer.

¹⁹ Durand et Cie published a flute edition of Pierné's sonata in 1909.

²⁰ Written when the composer was 23, though not published until 1975, the Mouvement de sonate was preceded by Ravel's Menuet antique (1895) and followed by the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), Jeux d'eau (1901), Quatuor pour instruments à cordes (1905), and the Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera (1907). I am unaware of any other flute recordings of this work, though there are many featuring violin.

²¹ Ralph Vaughan Williams, who studied with Maurice Ravel, related that the composer's motto was ‘Complexe mais pas compliqué’; see Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964): 79. I thank Ryan Ross for sharing this quotation's source.

²² Fauré's compositions bear N numbers established by Jean-Michel Nectoux in Gabriel Fauré: Catalogue des œuvres (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2018). The entry for the Berceuse, Op. 16 – N 50 – appears on pp. 71–3 of this resource. Nectoux reports that Hamelle released a flute edition of the work in 1904; see p. 72.

²³ In addition to Fauré's Berceuse, flutists play arrangements of his Pavane (N 100), the Berceuse from Dolly (N 113.1), and the Sicilienne from his incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande (N 142), plus mélodies like Après un rêve (N 34) and Clair de lune (N 94), as well as the Morceau de lecture à vue pour flûte et piano (N 199).

²⁴ Transient tonicization is a common feature in Fauré's music. For more, see my chapter ‘Allusion in the Music of Gabriel Fauré’, in Regarding Fauré, ed. and trans. Tom Gordon (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999): 181–8. Robert Orledge called this technique ‘tonal sidestepping’; see Robert Orledge, Gabriel Fauré, rev. ed. (London: Eulenberg, 1983): 250.

²⁵ Allusion distinguishes Fauré's music; see my chapter, ‘Allusion as premise: two mélodies of Fauré’, in Making Sense of Music: Studies in Musical Semiotics, ed. Constantino Maeder and Mark Reybrouck (Louvain-le-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2017): 15–26.

²⁶ Nadia Boulanger discussed Fauré's ‘long lines’ during a lecture at the Rice Institute (now Rice University, Houston, Texas) in February of 1925; see Don G. Campbell, Master Teacher: Nadia Boulanger (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press, 1984): 108.

²⁷ See Edward Blakeman, Taffanel: Genius of the Flute (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For more on Paul Taffanel (1844–1908), who conducted the Paris Opéra as well as the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, and founded the Société de musique de chambre pour instruments à vent, see Toff, The Flute Book, 246–7, and Ardal Powell, The Flute (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003): 208 and 216–24.

²⁸ Paul Taffanel's students included Marcel Moyse (1889–1984), whose pedagogy and mentoring dominated the flute world during much of the twentieth century, Gaston Blanquart (1877–1962), long-time flutist with the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne, Louis Fleury (1878–1926), dedicatee of Claude Debussy's Syrinx, Philippe Gaubert (1879–1941), flute professor at the Conservatoire and conductor at the Paris Opéra and Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, and Georges Barrère (1876–1947), first flutist at the première of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, dedicatee of Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5, and long-time member of New York City orchestras. See Claude Dorgeuille, The French Flute School, 1860–1950, trans. and ed. Edward Blakeman (London: Tony Bingham, 1983), and Chapter 11, ‘The French Flute School’, in Powell, The Flute, 208–24, for excellent discussions of these artists.

²⁹ Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune incorporates elements of variation, rondo and ternary forms, enabling multiple, co-existent structural interpretations – what may be called structural multiplicity.

³⁰ The values, principles and means of Impressionism – a visual arts movement that arose in the 1860s, thrived in the 1870s and evolved in the 1880s – differed from then-contemporary Symbolist poetry, though the movement's leading artists, like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, certainly employed suggestion and elicited contribution. See Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), and Jann Pasler's entry, ‘Impressionism’, in Grove Music Online.

³¹ The quote, ‘Anyone who calls my music “impressionist” is an imbecile’, attributed to Claude Debussy, appears to be a contrivance of contemporary culture that was derived from a letter that the composer sent to his publisher Jacques Durand in March of 1908 about his Images pour orchestre (1905–1912). In that envoi, Debussy actually wrote: ‘J'essaie de faire “autre chose” et de créer – en quelque sorte des réalités – ce que les imbéciles appellent “impressionnisme,” terme aussi mal employé que possible, surtout par les critiques d'art qui n'hésitent pas à en affubler Turner, le plus beau créateur de mystère qui soit en art!’ (‘I am trying to do “something different” and to create – somehow realities – that which imbeciles call “impressionism,” a term as poorly used as possible, above all by the critics of art who do not hesitate to cast it on Turner, the finest creator of mystery that is in art!’); Lettres de Claude Debussy à son éditeur, ed. Jacques Durand (Paris: Durand et Cie, 1927): 58. Debussy's letter also appears in Claude Debussy's Correspondance: 1872–1918, ed. and ann., François Lesure, Denis Herlin and Georges Liébert (Paris: Gallimard, 2005): 1080–81. Debussy's orchestral essay Printemps (1887), written at the Villa Medici during his Prix de Rome residency, had been criticized for its ‘vague impressionism’ decades earlier, so the composer's impatience with being misconstrued is understandable; see Debussy on Music, collected and introduced by François Lesure, trans. and ed. by Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977): 50.

³² The literature on Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is vast and scattered. One might start with Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976): 236–59, and Brown, Matthew, ‘Tonality and Form in Debussy's Prélude à “L'Après-midi d'un faune”’, Music Theory Spectrum 15/2 (1993): 127–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Arrangements of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune include those for two pianos (1895) by Debussy, for piano four hands (1910) by Ravel, and for piano solo (1912) by Leonard Borwick, all of which were published in Paris by Fromont. In the Age of Debussy's album notes indicate that Gustave Samazeuilh's transcription for flute and piano (Paris: Editions Jobert, 1925) was used in this recording (p. 2). Samazeuilh (1877–1967) prepared arrangements of music by many contemporaries, including D'Indy, Dukas and Fauré, for various publishers.

³⁴ Paul Dukas (1865–1935), a classmate of Claude Debussy's at the Conservatoire, may be best known for his orchestral scherzo L'apprenti sorcier (1897), which was featured in the Disney film Fantasia, and for his opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1899–1907). For more, see Laura Watson, Paul Dukas: Composer and Critic (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2019).

³⁵ Paul Dukas, ‘La plainte, au loin, du Faune …’. (Paris: La revue musicale, 1920): 1–5. Other composers represented in this tombeau of ten scores include Béla Bartók, Manuel de Falla, Eugène Goossens, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel, Eric Satie, Florent Schmitt and Igor Stravinsky. Roger Nichols’ liner notes specify that Gustave Samazeuilh's transcription (Paris: Durand et Cie, 1927) was used in this recording.

³⁶ See the arrangement edited by Karl Lenski (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1984).

³⁷ For more on this work's predecessors, see David Grayson, ‘Bilitis and Tanagra: Afternoons with Nude Women’, in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane E. Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 117–40, and Gibbons, William, ‘Debussy as Storyteller: Narrative Expansion in the Trois Chansons de Bilitis’, Current Musicology 85 (2008): 7–28Google Scholar.

³⁸ For more on the poet, see H.P. Clive, Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925): A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), and Jean-Paul Goujon, Pierre Louÿs: une vie secrète, 1870–1925 (Paris: Seghers/J.J. Pauvert, 1988).

³⁹ Rie Schmidt's 1983 performance of Fauré's sonata in Carnegie Hall won critical acclaim. See John Rockwell's review of her recital, dated 13 February, in the New York Times, Section 1, p. 56 (available online at www.nytimes.com/1983/02/13/arts/music-debuts-in-review-227396.html, accessed 12 June 2022).

⁴⁰ Made on 2 and 3 October 1985 at the Chapel, College of New Rochelle, this recording of Gabriel Fauré's Première Sonate pour violon et piano was widely circulated on the compact disc, Ruth Laredo and Paula Robison, French Masterpieces for Flute and Piano (MusicMasters Classics, 01612-67069-2; 1992). In a personal communication for which I am grateful, Paula Robison shared that she began performing Fauré's Op. 13 in 1981, explaining: ‘For about ten years I had the delight of playing in a duo with Ruth Laredo. We were looking for substantial repertoire and she had played the Fauré Sonata many times with violin. The Franck Sonata was already in our repertoire and we played it often. But we felt that it was a bit of a struggle because of the second movement, and the need for double stops. We made it work, we loved playing it, but we wanted something more natural. Ruth said, “Let's try the Fauré sonata.” The Fauré was perfect. It has a great elegance as well as passion, and the tessitura worked well. The vocal style of the work is well suited to the flute. So we set about making our own arrangement. We disagreed sometimes, because Ruth always had the violin in her ear, but we always came to a good compromise based on experience in performance. In the end Ruth was really hearing it as a flute and piano sonata. What a masterpiece!! I'm so grateful to have it part of my life!’

⁴¹ Robert Stallman's flute edition of Fauré's Sonata in A major, Op. 13, was published by the International Music Company (catalogue # 3254) in 1992.

⁴² See the compact discs featuring flutists James Galway (The French Recital, RCA Victor Red Seal, 09026-68351-2; 1996), Michel Bellevance (Pan, Meridian, CDE84509; 2004), Emmanuel Pahud (Fauré & Franck: Flute Sonatas, Skarbo, DSK4074; 2007), Kara Kirkendoll Welch (Ballade: Works for Flute and Piano by Dutilleux, Fauré, Griffes and Martin, MSR Classics, MS 1286; 2009), Robert Langevin (Sonates Romantiques, Avie, AV2213; 2010), Sharon Bezaly, (Flute Sonatas – Bezaly Ashkenazy, BIS, BIS2259, 2017), Lisa Friend (Lisa Friend Plays Fauré and Debussy, Chandos, CHAN 20084; 2019) and Atsugo Koga (Music from France for Flute and Piano, Genuin, GEN22559; 2022).

⁴³ In a personal communication for which I am grateful, Leone Buyse related that Denis Verroust, discographer of Jean-Pierre Rampal, indicated to her that to his knowledge, Rampal never transcribed or played Fauré's A major sonata. However, she also mentioned that Alain Marion shared his own transcription of the work with her in the early 1990s. This suggests that by that time, Fauré's composition had attracted flutists on both sides of the Atlantic.

⁴⁴ Fauré's first violin sonata was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1877. For more, see Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, 80–84, and Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: Catalogue des œuvres, 62–5. Upon publication, Camille Saint-Saëns championed it in his article, ‘Une sonate’, Le journal de musique 45 (1877): 3. In the second edition of his invaluable research guide, Edward R. Phillips reports that Saint-Saëns’ article was reprinted in the composer's book, Au courant de la vie (Paris: Dorbon–Áine, 1914) on pp. 41–2; see Phillips, Gabriel Fauré: A Research and Information Guide (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011): 290.

⁴⁵ See James William Sobaskie, ‘Allusion in The Music of Gabriel Fauré’, in Regarding Fauré, ed. and trans. Tom Gordon (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999): 179–80.

⁴⁶ The barcarolle was a favourite genre of the composer; see James William Sobaskie, ‘Rêveries within fantasies: the Barcarolles of Gabriel Fauré’, in L'analyse musicale aujourd'hui, ed. Mondher Ayari, Jean-Michel Bardez and Xavier Hascher (Le Vallier: Éditions Delatour France, 2015): 333–56.

⁴⁷ See Robert S. Hatten, A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

⁴⁸ Jean-Michel Nectoux relates that Fauré participated in performances of his first violin sonata in charity concerts during the Great War, when the composer would have been around 70; see Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, 404.

⁴⁹ See Ransom Wilson and Christopher O'Riley, Flute Music of Les Six: Milhaud, Tailleferre, Auric, Poulenc, Honegger, Durey (Etcetera, KTC 1073, 1990). Poulenc's sonata was commissioned by the Library of Congress, dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and premièred by Jean-Pierre Rampal with the composer at the piano.

⁵⁰ See Nectoux, Gabriel Fauré: A Musical Life, 433, where Francis Poulenc's review of a 1928 recording of Fauré's Sonata in A by Jacques Thibaud and Alfred Cortot is quoted in translation: ‘Whether it's due to the perfection of the interpretation, the fact is that I have totally revised my opinion of this work. On reflection, I cannot think of a better violin sonata written in the last fifty years’. Poulenc's review appeared in Nouvelle Revue musicale 1 (November 1928): 14. Perhaps three decades later, Poulenc's Sonate pour flûte et piano embodied the admiration expressed in that review.