Symphonie en fa, op. 20; Pavane, op. 50; Caligula, op. 52 by Gabriel Fauré

Debates concerning the appropriate nature of sacred music in France persisted throughout the nineteenth century. While many figures within the Catholic Church took the more traditional stance in their proclamation of plainchant as the genre of sacred music par excellence, other priests and church musicians insisted that more modern styles of composition were not only appropriate but necessary for French Catholics. This debate was not limited to the confines of the Church: Republican composers, for their part, also contributed their views on the matter, which largely stated that the realms of sacred and secular were not mutually exclusive. This chapter outlines the debate on both sides in order to reveal how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music into their secular constructions of French music. It also reveals the discursive slippages between Catholic denigrations of “modern” religious music and “secular” compositional styles: more often than not, modern religious music was strikingly close to the Catholic ideal, even when it was written by a decidedly secular composer for non-liturgical use. A study of Contes mystiques, a collection of twelve mélodies written by such composers as Gabriel Fauré, Théodore Dubois, Henri Maréchal, and Pauline Viardot, reveals how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music and how this modern music was strikingly similar to the Catholic ideal, even when written by “secular” composers for non-liturgical use.

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Gabriel Fauré and Théodore Reinach

Performing Antiquity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190612092.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 21-46

Author(s):

Samuel N. Dorf

Keyword(s):

Second Century ◽

Personal Life ◽

The South ◽

Ancient Greek ◽

Gabriel Faure ◽

French School ◽

Ancient Music ◽

Instrumental Accompaniment ◽

School Of Athens

This chapter focuses on archaeologist and music scholar Théodore Reinach’s collaboration with composer Gabriel Fauré. In 1894 Reinach asked the composer to create an instrumental accompaniment to a recently discovered second-century BCE hymn dedicated to Apollo in Delphi. Reinach, along with other scholars from the French school of Athens, deciphered the Greek notation from the marble tablets, and Fauré wrote a modern accompaniment to the original melody. For Reinach, the need to re-enact antiquity transcended scholarly interest in his personal life. Reinach not only reconstructed ancient Greek music, but also built a replica ancient Greek villa in the south of France (with a modern piano hidden behind an ancient cabinet) in order to live out his ancient Greek fantasies. This chapter uses the metaphor of the modern piano hidden behind the ancient veneer of the cabinet to explore the ways modern aesthetics lurk underneath the scientific reconstructions of ancient music carried out by Reinach in the 1890s and 1910s.

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