Sounding Nostalgia in Post-World War I Paris by Tristan Paré-Morin
In the years that immediately followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Paris was at a turning point in its history: the aftermath of the Great War overlapped with the early stages of what is commonly perceived as a decade of rejuvenation. This transitional period was marked by tension between the preservation (and reconstruction) of a certain prewar heritage and the negation of that heritage through a series of social and cultural innovations.
In this dissertation, I examine the intricate role that nostalgia played across various conflicting experiences of sound and music in the cultural institutions and popular media of the city of Paris during that transition to peace, around 1919-1920. I show how artists understood nostalgia as an affective concept and how they employed it as a creative resource that served multiple personal, social, cultural, and national functions.
Rather than using the term “nostalgia” as a mere diagnosis of temporal longing, I revert to the capricious definitions of the early twentieth century in order to propose a notion of nostalgia as a set of interconnected forms of longing. Drawing from journalistic and archival sources, histories and theories of nostalgia, and musical and cultural studies of Paris, I interrogate the continuities and discontinuities among the political, economic, and social forces affecting musical nostalgia in the aftermath of a costly, global war. I show that nostalgia was a complex notion engaging a multiplicity of meanings and functions that were experienced and cultivated collectively in a variety of musical activities in the public sphere. Nostalgia not only expressed resistance to change, but also conveyed progress and offered answers to collective debates about postwar memorialization, French national identity, and cultural modernism.
The music that I discuss, ranging from concert favorites to unpublished songs, demonstrates that genres and venues usually studied separately were informed by similar struggles in defining their continuing relevance in a new era. This music also sheds light on the interconnectedness of apparently distinct markets for nostalgia and how they intersected with civic life, politics, urbanism and nationalism.
One year after the Armistice that ended the Great War was signed on November 11, 1918, two hundred performances had already been played at the Théâtre national de l’Opéra, France’s most prestigious stage. Cultural activities had resumed under the name of elegance. As operagoers could read in the opening pages of their program in January, it was thanks to the “prodigy of elegance” that “in the aftermath of the war, with the ongoing shock of the most tragic upheavals, Paris is able to indulge in the fine recreations of art.” The invitation received by a Mr Lavedan for the December 16, 1919, dress rehearsal of Goyescas, Enrique Granados’s one-act opera, illustrated this elegance with characters taken straight out of the aristocratic pastoralism of a pre-Revolutionary opéra comique. The evening’s program, which also featured the first revival in almost thirty years of Léo Delibes’s ballet Sylvia, promised to be a pleasant escape from postwar shock. But Raoul Laparra, the reviewer for Le Ménestrel, the foremost music journal in Paris, was not impressed by either work. He criticized the “excessive timidity” of Granados’s orchestration and the incomprehensible libretto, and he only found good will without apparent results in Sylvia. Nonetheless, he was moved by an interlude in Goyescas that provided the “nostalgia of Aragon,” a region in northern Spain famous for its jota, a folk dance used by Granados. As for the accompanying ballet, Laparra recognized it as “one of the most charming flowers of the French garden,” whose perfume gave him “nostalgia” for other forgotten works by Delibes that should be brought back to light.
Invitation to the dress rehearsal of "Goyescas," Académie nationale de musique et de danse, December 16, 1919.
Laparra principally derived satisfaction from the feeling of nostalgia triggered by both works. But he used that term with two significantly different implications. His longing to hear music from the past is familiar to us all today, although, unlike us, Laparra did not have the means to relieve his nostalgia with easily-accessible audio and video recordings of forgotten works. On the other hand, feeling nostalgia for a Spanish dance does not match current understandings of the term, since there is no temporal distance nor any sense of loss in the jota. It also does not correspond to the historical meaning of nostalgia, originally a medical term that literally means the “pain of the return home.” Laparra, a Frenchman, did not long to return home to Spain. Yet, he might have dreamt to travel there, as he likely did many times before. As a writer, he was recognized for his expertise on Spanish music, while as a composer, he contributed numerous Spanish pastiches, as in two of his operas, La Habanera (1908) and La Jota (1911). In that context, Laparra’s “nostalgia of Aragon” expressed a strong desire for the colors of this exotic elsewhere, an escape from the present not via an idealized time, but via a geographical fantasy of otherness that marked his entire creative and intellectual career. These two uses of the word nostalgia within a single review show the malleability of the term in the early twentieth century, when it could be both a temporal and geographic term, and when it could reflect a sense of real loss as well as the eager desire for something different.
However, Laparra’s nostalgia was not triggered solely by music from another time and another place, but also by the sociohistorical context in which the two works were presented. If the reviewer had read any newspapers that morning, he would have seen on the front page a summary of the German response to the compensations demanded by the Allied countries. In his review, Laparra briefly alluded twice to the war and its consequences, in the sentences that immediately precede each of his nostalgic suggestions. Hence, Sylvia was an outcome of the nation’s reawakening to its treasures after the “blow” (bourrasque), while one of the themes of the interlude from Goyescas, conducted by the son of the “departed” (disparu) composer had a “melancholic charm reminiscent of the expression on the face of Granados.” Nothing more was needed to call to mind the unspoken tragedy of the death of the Spanish composer: on his journey back to Europe in March 1916, after his American trip during which Goyescas received its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a torpedo struck his ship, the Sussex. Although the ship did not sink, the panicked composer and his wife tried to escape, throwing themselves in the water where they drowned together. The event was not mentioned in the review, but that was not necessary. In the years following the Armistice, the war, its consequences, and its trauma were omnipresent in the press. There was hardly a page without an allusion to the personal, material, and social damage caused by the war.
In this dissertation, I look at the expression and mediatization of various forms of nostalgia in Paris at a time when the memory of the war and its trauma enveloped most of private and public life. I examine the personal, collective, national, and cultural functions that nostalgia served in that context. Considering the direct impact of the memory of the war on postwar musical cultures, my aim is to decipher the circulation of a plurality of collective nostalgias and to consider the intricate roles they played across various conflicting experiences of sound and music, and across various artistic and social contexts. While this is not a dissertation about the consequences of World War I, rather about the musical cultures that followed it, the war lies in the background of many of my analyses, either directly or indirectly. The war provides the context as I investigate the artistic motivations of musicians and their audiences, how they shaped their relations with the public and the press, how institutions promoted their work, the role that Paris played as a city in the broader diffusion of individual and collective conceptions of nostalgias, and finally, what we can say about the formation of a common nostalgic reimagining of the past through the city’s media and arts.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1: The Sounds of Nostalgia
The histories and theories of nostalgia, their application to music, and their relevance in the specific context of this dissertation are the focus of the first chapter, “The Sounds of Nostalgia,” which sets the stage for my discussion of nostalgia in the specific case studies discussed in the following chapters. In this chapter, I review the historical conceptions of nostalgia from its origins until the early twentieth century in order to establish a theoretical apparatus that reflects the variety of affects and objects regarded as nostalgic by French artists and writers of the time. Dismissing neither ancient nor current meanings of the term, I insert them into a wider map of nostalgias that features four major paradigms that are better adapted to the complexities of temporal and geographic longings expressed in my sources and exemplified throughout this dissertation. I then discuss nostalgia as a musical expression. As a reaction to the lack of consistency in previous musicological uses of the term, I propose that musical difference is fundamental to a critique of musical nostalgia. Finally, I examine the centrality of Paris in nostalgic narratives, showing conflicting reactions to historical change in the postwar years.
Chapter 2: Media, Myths and Memorials
The following three chapters each center on a different sphere of musical activity in postwar Paris. In chapter 2, “Media, Myths and Memorials,” I focus on the national myths that shaped musical memorials of the war. Drawing from George Mosse’s concept of the “myth of the war experience” and its legitimizing of the sacredness and national interest of wartime sufferings, I examine public and mediatized musical responses that memorialized the war, the French victory, and its heroes, and how they adopted or rejected the national myths through their use of nostalgia. I conclude with a detailed analysis of the Tombeau de Claude Debussy, a collective homage published in 1920 that comprised ten compositions by as many French and foreign composers (among which were Dukas, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky, and Bartók). I compare it to a war memorial that challenged the established myths of the war through its heterogeneity, which strayed away from the conventional expressions of nostalgia that war memorials were expected to strive for.
Chapter 3: Waltzes of Nostalgia
In chapter 3, “Waltzes of Nostalgia,” I examine the changing attitudes toward the waltz, a genre whose rapid transformation into a symbol and product of musical nostalgia was influenced by such circumstances of the war as the restrictions on theatrical and social activities, and the rapprochement between French and American cultures. I show how listeners, dancers, and composers assigned to the genre their own regrets and desires about the fate of the nation, and how they used it to convey moral and political messages. The chapter explores the reengagement with the nation’s cultural history and the ensuing tensions in discourses surrounding the moral and aesthetic value of waltzes in various sites, from the new cosmopolitan dance halls called dancings to the theatrical stages and finishing in the concert halls with a discussion of the reception of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse as representative of the ambiguity between the genre’s decay and its rehabilitation in postwar Paris. Central to this chapter is the notion of “sounds of memory,” which I adapt from Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as a way to focus on the waltz’s material, symbolic, and functional content, and its interplay of memory and living tradition.
The fourth chapter, “Nostalgic Revolutions, Modernist Renovations,” engages more directly with musicological debates on the nature of neoclassicism as either modernist or nostalgic. Following Theodore Ziolkowski, I discuss classicism as a broader movement inspired by national values of simplicity and order, but not necessarily based on classical themes or forms involving the use of imitation or pastiche. Focusing primarily on the musical and critical work of the young composers known as Les Six, with a special emphasis on the everyday and the popular, I argue that modernism and nostalgia are constantly interwoven, but in ways that defy the common paradigms of nostalgia. Drawing from the Lusophone notion of saudade, I propose the notion of “sideways nostalgia” to describe playful forms of longing that conventional forms of nostalgia do not adequately account for. The second half of the chapter looks at the reception of modernist compositions in the concert scene of the period, where prewar music formed the vast majority of the repertoire and where Les Six were largely ignored, and concludes that nostalgia was a guiding force behind both the more conservative and more progressive attitudes.