Sincerity and the Limits of Symbolism

Whereas some religiously themed puppet or otherwise “popular” productions were overwhelmingly successful with Parisian critics and audiences, Maurice Bouchor and Ernest Chausson’s La Légende de Sainte-Cécile and, later, the Théâtre du Vaudeville’s unsuccessful production of Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand’s Les Drames sacrés (with music by Charles Gounod) were colossal failures both with the critics and with the public by virtue of their dependence on editorial intervention as a means through which to modernize ancient stories. In these cases, critics indicted the works as insincere—a fatal flaw when it came to the representation of sacred subjects on secular stages. Through analyses of these short works, this chapter examines how each work navigated the slippage between avant-garde aesthetics and Catholic tradition and reveals two opposite but closely related processes of critical success and failure: while successful works eschewed the intellectual aura of Symbolism in favor of traditional and “sincere” engagements with Catholic heritage, these failed productions embraced the complexities of modern music and drama—authorial decisions that, in the end, rendered them insincere for Parisian audiences and thus incapable of being perceived as truly religious.

City of Sound

This chapter chronicles a time when Dede worked as a cigar roller in the day time while he dedicated himself to his avocation at night. In this period between his return to New Orleans in late 1851 and his departure for Europe, he published a song, “Mon pauvre coeur” (“My poor heart”). It was a melodie, a form of art song most closely associated with Hector Berlioz and Charles Gounod and similar to the German lieder of Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. The printed song makes it among the oldest, if not the oldest, published music by an African American. We can conclude from the song that Dede was composing stately melodies for a white and black audience at a time when most music lovers were responding to more lively, foot-tapping kinds of songs.

William Sterndale Bennett: Imitator or Original?

Sterndale Bennett has often been characterized as an imitator of Mendelssohn. While it is true and unsurprising that there are similarities in the two composers’ musical language, actual imitation is difficult to substantiate. Bennett’s reputation as a composer has passed through several phases in the last 200 years. It was high in his lifetime in Germany as well as in Britain, when resemblance to Mendelssohn was counted as a positive asset, but later assailed by promoters of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, who needed a preceding dark age and tended to dismiss early Victorians as copiers of Mendelssohn. Recent writers have shown a more positive attitude to the Victorian period in general. Bennett’s individuality has in fact been fully recognized from the first by such widely differing commentators as Mendelssohn himself, Robert Schumann, Henry Heathcote Statham, Frederick Ouseley, Charles Gounod, Charles Stanford, Geoffrey Bush, Peter Horton and Larry Todd. His style was founded on the Austro-German classical tradition and the London Pianoforte School headed by Clementi and Cramer, through his teacher Cipriani Potter, as is confirmed by early sources. This article surveys some of Bennett’s most characteristic piano pieces, and ends by analysing notably original features of his harmonic style that owe nothing to Mendelssohn, such as the inverted pedal note, evaded resolution of dissonance, and harmonic anticipation.