Ideology

“The style is the man. The man is his work. Vincent d'Indy is, fully and completely, a man of his style and his work.” Thus summarized a critic identified only as “Fodège” the inextricable entwinement of aesthetics and ideology that characterized d'Indy's thought. While it is a truism that a composer's values and experiences will color his or her work, d'Indy wore such connections on his sleeve in a way few others did. Art, he stated at the beginning of his Cours de composition musicale (the pedagogical program of the Schola Cantorum, the Parisian music school he helped to found in 1894) and echoed frequently through its four volumes and elsewhere, existed to teach and better humankind: “Let us thus define art: a way of life for the soul, that is, a means of nourishing humanity's soul and fostering its progress by providing it with sustenance for both the present and the future. For the human soul is by no means only that of the individual, but also the collective soul of all generations, destined to profit from the teachings of works.” Music, d'Indy believed, could realize this most ambitious undertaking by instilling in the “collective soul” of humanity the cornerstone values of his eminently conservative ideology.

D'Indy's politics and values have been discussed at length elsewhere, so they need only be briefly outlined here. Born into an aristocratic family with a long tradition of military service (which he continued in the war of 1870), the composer opposed the Republic and remained a lifelong legitimist.