Renegotiating French Identity: Musical Culture and Creativity in France during Vichy and the German Occupation

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The new historiography of Vichy and recent theoretical insights: implications for study of the music created and performed
• Recent historiographic insights into the regime's conflicting visions and evolution
• Initial new directions in larger studies of Vichy culture
• New issues: dual surveillance, the complex bureaucratic matrix, and the cultural field
• Vichy's musical culture and the still looming questions: what did result, when, and where?
• Concomitant theoretical issues: how were musical works inscribed, framed, and read?
• Public and creative responses: the question of collective and individual French identity
• What constituted resistance in music, and what kinds of innovations did it foster?
• Reformulating older questions and posing new ones
• 1. The essential political and institutional background
• Beyond a monolithic view of Vichy and its doctrine of the Revolution Nationale
• Vichy and its relation to the Germans
• Vichy's brand of patriotism and nationalism
• Beneath the apparent traditionalism
• The evolution of the regime and the significant markers
• German and Vichy repression, and the development of the resistance
• Vichy's reconstruction of French identity
• Vichy's negotiations of French cultural identity
• Vichy and the question of the French national heritage, or cultural tradition
• The limits allowed by the Germans in the reconfiguration of French national identity
• Vichy's cultural institutions and the divergent, evolving mandates
• A consistent Vichy cultural agenda?
• Beyond conceptions of a Vichy patriotic double game
• A Vichy musical program? Its evolving aims and the musical field
• The role of Ministers of National Education and of the Secretaire Generale in music
• The role of the Germans and their interest in concerts and in the musical press
• German and French broadcasts of classical concerts
• The Germans and the Paris Conservatoire
• The Germans and intervention in French recordings
• Vichy's own constraints and shifting goals in music
• Vichy experts in music, and the case of Jacques Rouche
• Another Vichy expert-Alfred Cortot
• Vichy and its goals in recordings
• Vichy's corporate organization of the musical profession
• Vichy and state commissions in music
• The Case of the opera: Rouche's initial latitude but growing Vichy and German Pressures
• Vichy's interest in the Conservatoire and its regional branches
• Subversion within institutions and performance venues
• The development of the musical resistance and its response both to the Germans and to Vichy
• 2. Re-inscribing, framing, and subverting an operatic icon: Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande
• The double advantage of both Berlioz and Debussy
• Pelleas: its nature, style, and the initial French reception in 1940
• Desormiere's classic interpretation in a still relatively autonomous musical field
• The 1940 production and the opera's enunciation within the context
• Ambiguity, liminality, and the opera's impact at Vichy's start
• Pelleas at Vichy: refocusing the opera's national significance through performance
• The recording of Pelleas and its increasing dissonance with the new discursive framing
• Resistance responses to the Franco-German cultural discourse
• Pelleas and the battle over national memory: the 1942 commemoration and production in Paris
• The discursive framing and context of the 1942 production of Pelleas
• Vichy's political turn, mounting resistance, and the 1943 Debussy commemoration
• The Resistance appropriation of Debussy and of Pelleas
• Debussy as emblematic of authentic French classicism
• Debussy and Pelleas as cultural emblems of liberation
• From propaganda to national healing: Debussy in the reconstruction of cultural memory
• 3. From the legal to the illegal: Schaeffer's journey toward resistance and artistic exploration
• Vichy's attempt to remake French youth and Schaeffer's own personal agenda
• Radio-Jeunesse and Vichy's new sound culture
• Schaeffer's quest to make tradition dynamic in Jeune France
• Jeune France's organization and range of projects
• Jeune France and Mounier's revolutionary humanism
• Jeune France and the creative curation of tradition
• Musical innovation within Schaeffer's Jeune France
• Schaeffer's movement from the legal to the illegal
• Schaeffer's subjective re-assessment and reflection on the language of things
• Schaeffer's search for an invisible theater and new meanings, or realms of perception
• Schaeffer and the Studio d'Essai: from new perceptual fields to resistance
• 4. The soft or hard borders of French identity: Honegger's iconic role and subjectivity during Vichy
• Honegger omnipresent
• Honegger's modernism and the modernist strain condoned by both Vichy and the Germans
• Honegger's supporters and their ideological trajectories
• The evolution of the French fascist aesthetic and Honegger's complex relation to it
• Gaston Bergery and his support for Honegger
• From state collaboration to collaborationism: the fine line and Honegger's symbolism
• Music and the goal of the group collaboration
• Honegger and the musical synthesis promoted by later 1941
• The composer's dual cultures and his style in Antigone
• The original material inscription, enunciation, and reception of the opera
• The context for the selection of Antigone at the Paris Opera
• Antigone's physical and ideological re-inscription at the Opera in early 1943
• The multivalent potential of the opera's text and style
• The critical and public reception of Antigone at the Paris Opera in 1943
• The performative impact of Antigone in 1943 Paris
• Honegger's search for identity in Vichy and occupied France
• Honegger's contradictions as critic
• The Second Symphony and Honegger's subjective conundrum
• Monologic or Dialogic? The critical reception of the Second Symphony
• Honegger the resistant? His postwar sanctions
• 5. Poulenc's metamorphosis: his journey towards resistance and a stylistic counter-discourse
• From one nationalism to another
• Poulenc at Vichy's dawn
• Vichy traditionalism in Les Animaux modeles?
• From the search for personal authenticity to a new political awareness
• Resistance nationalism and its artistic goals
• Theories and models of French musical resistance
• Poulenc's search for his own resistance style
• Exploring the tactic of stylistic disruption: Poulenc's Sonata for Violin and Piano
• Poulenc's turn to the literary resistance's stylistic paradigms
• Metamorphosis and its meaning in Poulenc's Figure humaine
• The importance of trajectories and of symbolic meanings within their context
• 6. Messiaen in a Catholic Church divided: spiritual authority, subjective agency, and artistic breakthrough
• Messiaen's refusal and his nonconformist background
• Mobilization, capture, and creativity
• Internment, internal liberty, and Messiaen's Quatuor
• Levels of utterance in Messiaen's Quatuor
• Reactions to the Quatuor and to its textual framing
• Release and recruitment into Schaeffer's Band of Christian Democrats
• Messiaen's artistic explorations in Portique pour une fille de France
• The politics of Messiaen's appointment to the Paris Conservatoire
• Performance of and support for Messiaen's previous compositions
• Messiaen's new circles and private commissions
• Vichy's political direction, division within the church, and Messiaen's creative choices
• Sartre, Messiaen, Hello, and subjective choice
• New content and approaches to form in the Visions de l'Amen
• Responses to the challenge of Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen
• Messiaen's turn to resistance themes and models
• Man and God in the Trois petites liturgies de la presence divine
• The Resistance embrace of Messiaen and of his work
• Conclusion: Vichy's shifting cultural goals and tactics: the results, the responses, and how to perceive them
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index