IN Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61), the narrator tells us in the first paragraph that Philip Pirrip's baby lips ran together the sounds of his given and last names into Pip: ‘So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’ The onomatopoeia of the name aptly characterizes his sense of self as a small, piping presence in a large, often hostile world. As a young adult, however, Pip receives a name decidedly more advanced in acoustic associations as well as sounding more grown up. ‘We are so harmonious, and you have been a blacksmith – would you mind it?’ asks Herbert Pocket of his new friend. ‘Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There's a charming piece of music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.’ Pip agrees: ‘I should like it very much’ (202).

To the first readers of Great Expectations, the Hanoverian composer would have been strikingly present due to the centennial commemoration of his death the year before the novel's publication, which included the first of the Great Handel Festivals. The composer's popularity was, of course, well established throughout England before 1859; his music was widely performed and his name was synonymous with nobility and Christian virtue. With the establishment of a festival of his music at the Crystal Palace, a great showpiece of British progress, Handel became decisively associated with that Victorian watchword ‘progress’. Moreover, the thousands of men and women who gathered triennially to sing together the great oratorios at the London festival were drawn from around the country, but generally originated in the industrial north and the Midlands.

Should a commercially unviable art form be subsidized with public money? Or should it be for market forces to decide its future? In an environment where private patronage of the arts was rare, that was the central, destabilizing dilemma provoked by moves toward deregulated theatre – spoken and lyric alike – across mid-nineteenth-century France. Composers and playwrights, and their professional associations, had long clamoured for just such a ‘ liberte des theatres’, in which anyone wealthy and in good standing could set up a theatre, and theatre managers could put on whatever repertory they chose. After an unsuccessful attempt amid the revolutionary fervour of 1848/9 it was, ironically, during a conservative imperial regime that they finally achieved their goal: on 6 January 1864 Napoleon III promulgated a decree deregulating the theatre industry nationwide1 – from 1 July of that same year the nature of French theatrical entrepreneurship would change fundamentally. This essay explores the hotly debated question of what form of deregulation was most appropriate to the regions, where operatic provision before 1864 was widespread but beleaguered, and where the challenges of funding grand opera, though in some ways similar to those of Paris, rested on a radically different infrastructural basis. In so doing it provides a context for the sea change of 1864 and helps to explain why the one-size legislation of the ‘liberte’, although conceived after consultation with regional préfets, essentially failed the operatic constituency it was intended, among others, to help.

French Opera Systems

To understand the ramifications of the 1864 legislation we must scroll back briefly to the aftermath of the Revolution. The first ‘liberte des theatres’, of 1791, had brought belated but not unproblematic freedom from ancien régime systems of royal privilege. In 1806 and 1807 Napoleon I repealed it. To maintain State control over the performing arts, to ensure the purity of French theatrical genres, and to keep a close eye on public order, he drastically reduced the number of theatres allowed in each urban area of France, and rendered every French theatre manager a State licensee with a cahier des charges [contract] that specified his artistic duties and his financial conditions of operation.

Chapter preview

The relationships between music and the people who produce, perform, and use it are central to the sociology of music. This chapter introduces some of the central ideas of the sociology of music and helps you place it in the context of other approaches. Music is not just the sounds it makes. We like and value some musics and not others, as much because of our social and educational backgrounds, and because of the associations that accompany music, as because of musical style itself. We also include music as part of a wider collection of lifestyle choices. For that reason, the sociological study of music tends to explore the human networks around music, rather than the characteristics of musical style. Nevertheless, it covers contemporary and historical culture from several perspectives, and embraces all types of music. It gives priority to people-centered research methods where possible, to explore music's social meanings; social networks and cultural capital; the shape of the music market; exclusivism and subcultural mentalities; and more general questions about the relationship between music and identity.

Key issues

• Sociologies of music: what are the main questions?

• The problem of “high art.”

• Are geniuses constructed, not born?

• “Art worlds” and the music business.

• “Cultural capital,” social status, and identity.

Introduction

Imagine that the music business has gone topsy-turvy. You walk towards a CD shop and the first music you hear is a piece of Western classical music blasting out over its entire ground floor.

Assiduous readers of the Paris journal L’Art musical might have noticed this unusually passionate news item in the edition of August 17, 1876. In it, the Wagnerian composer and critic Victorin Joncières came under attack for an implied lack of patriotism. His sin was to have waxed lyrical over Wagner's Das Rheingold in his column for La Liberté, while, in the same article, decrying Rameau's music as “outdated [and] deadly boring.”

Joncières was in a tiny minority among Parisian journalists, who otherwise reported enthusiastically on the Dijon festival of August 11–15—irrespective of whether they wrote for the specialist or daily press. For the former, both Johann Reuchsel (Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris) and Arthur Pougin (Le Ménestrel) wrote open letters the day after the “fêtes Rameau” officially ended. Four days of concerts, theatrical events, processions, circus acts, shooting competitions, military tattoos, fireworks, and choral competitions—and the inauguration of a statue of Rameau in the old Place du Théâtre (now the Place Sainte-Chapelle)—had drawn an extraordinary 30,000 visitors to the town. Written as though amid the crowds, Reuchsel's letter to readers of the Revue et Gazette musicale buzzed with excitement: “The town is filled with joyous fanfares, the singing of orphéon choruses, and the cries of light-heartedness … the town bustles with laughing and singing. Dijon is like a fairyland.”

It is one of the ironies of French history that the revolution which brought with it the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, and a ‘middle-of-the-road’ official attitude to both culture and government policy should also have marked the beginning of the headiest decade of French Romanticism: the 1830s. Extremism and compromise coexisted in the form of several philosophies – artistic, religious and social – competing for attention. Added to which, the nature of Romanticism itself as a self-conscious movement defined as much by internal contradiction as anything else meant that living in Paris during the 1830s offered unparalleled intellectual and artistic stimulation. For a young man of Liszt's intellectual curiosity such bounties were not to be scorned. The city was effectively his university.

Salon culture was buoyant, populated by the major figures of French Romanticism: Delacroix, Sand, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, Berlioz, Chopin, Heine and Balzac. To this constellation of friends and acquaintances, Liszt could add his connections with Maurice Schlesinger's Revue et Gazette musicale (a mouthpiece for German Romantic ideas in France), his enthusiasm for the Saint-Simonians and for the Liberal Catholic philosophies of the Abbé Robert Félicité Lamennais and the writer and social philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Voracious reading extended from the Bible and the writings of St Augustine and Thomas à Kempis to Goethe, Byron, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Chateaubriand and the work of historians such as Michelet and Quinet.

In the sphere of art music, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation and wider dissemination of many of the structures and institutions which had been set up in Europe during the preceding decades, and which were now developing worldwide and gaining in status. Models for operatic, orchestral, educational, publishing and journalistic institutions provided by the major European centres – particularly Paris, Vienna and London – became established in the New World to the extent that cities such as Boston and New York emerged as their potential rivals on the increasingly intercontinental stage of middle-class musical life. Such consolidation took various forms: nationalist drive and the breakdown of court culture lay behind the emergence of municipal musical culture in much of what now constitutes the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary; in North America, the ‘European’ musical traditions of cities such as New York and Boston were initiated by immigrant German musicians and embraced by a wider middle class hungry for cultural status. The pace of consolidation also varied: in France and Britain, for instance, it was leisurely in comparison with the breathless rush from urbanisation to the establishment of Europeanised cultural institutions in a new city such as Los Angeles, in which the developments of a century in Europe took place in just a few decades, starting in the 1880s. Nevertheless, the relatively late appearance of now-familiar pillars of musical life in some European cities should not be forgotten: through the entire period under consideration Paris lacked a purpose-built orchestral concert hall and Vienna a permanent civic symphony orchestra. In these areas respectively each city lagged well behind Chicago and Boston, for example.