Appendix 9: Excerpts from Book

Chapter 1: Beginnings (March 1828), pp. 3-6

At promptly 2:00 on Sunday afternoon, 9 March 1828, the violinist-conductor François-Antoine Habeneck, just entering his 48th year, took the crowded stage of the Salle des Concerts at the Paris Conservatoire and gave the summary premier coup d’archet for Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, never before heard—or so it was believed—in France. Subsequently two students at the Conservatoire, the Maillard sisters, sang excerpts from operas by Rossini; Joseph Meifred, in a work of his own composition, introduced the public to the piston-valved horn he had helped design—and for which he and his colleague (and former teacher) Louis Dauprat were both writing method books; Eugène Sauzay, the incumbent 1r prix in violin from Pierre Baillot’s class at the Conservatoire, played a concerto by Pierre Rode. The concert concluded with three works composed by the director of the Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini: a chorus from Blanche de Provence, the overture to Les Abencerages, and the Kyrie and Gloria from the mass Cherubini had composed for the coronation in 1824 of Charles X, the reigning king. The concert lasted some three hours. 
     Among the listeners were those few of the Conservatoire’s faculty and students not already to be found onstage, delegates from the royal government led by Viscount Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld, swashbuckling Director of Fine Arts and promulgator of the decree instituting the concerts, and the artists, journalists, and ordinary music lovers who one way or another had learned of an event not to be missed. A principal eyewitness to that momentous afternoon was the Franco-Belgian savant François-Joseph Fétis, whose successful journal La Revue musicale was in its third year of publication. He rightly saw the concert as a turning point in the fortunes of Conservatoire, closed in the wake of Waterloo and since the reopening still uncertain of its mission and of how to go about claiming its proper measure of international prestige. Fétis called his essay “Rebirth of the Royal School of Music: Société des Concerts” and opened with a tribute to the artists who out of devotion to their art sacrificed self-interest to achieve collective glory—a transaction cited one way or another whenever writers tried to assess the institutional mystique. 

Honor to the [musicians of the old] Conservatoire who, remembering its former glory, have come at the first call to associate themselves with the new school, lend their support, and mold its noble career! Honor to the head of that school, who, motivated only by his zeal for the prosperity of an art he himself has sensibly enriched, gave his council, wrote the proposal, and designed the strategy to return the first musical establishment in France to its brilliant former renown! Honor to the young students who, understanding what was expected of them, showed themselves worthy of their forerunners—like the young draftees of the Empire, proud to fight beneath the gaze of the old veterans of the Revolution, and rivaling them in audacity and valor. They were fired by an ardor hitherto untasted, and they became, in one stroke, distinguished artists.
     The concert of 9 March 1828 will be remembered as a great day for the splendor of French music, the moment of its rebirth. The performance was stamped with superiority. The vain attacks on the Conservatoire by the newspapers will stop: the teachers and their students countered them with strength and dignity, and their immense success justifies the government’s support of the institution.
     What verve, what energy, what ensemble, what perfection of nuance they brought to the Beethoven symphony! They made it seem easy, with fine brush strokes, majestic pianos from a huge orchestra, thunderous fortes. It was all perfect, admirable, worthy at last of the best artists in the capital of France. 

Fétis admonished the young people never to forget their signal victory, striving always to match the level they achieved at the outset. 
     He praised Habeneck in general and in particular, noting the salutary improvements that resulted from his conducting with the violin and bow instead of the percussive strokes from the bâton de mesure Parisians were accustomed to hear resonating from the pit at the Opéra: “With his violin he gets heated up and joins in the collective atmosphere; with his baton he is glacial and seems bored. Besides, in a concert he can see the orchestra, whereas the stupid arrangement at the Opéra puts the players at his back.”
     Fétis was pleased and intrigued by the modernity of the repertoire, and thought that what he understood as a decision to focus on new music promised great things for the future of the fledgling association. “Who can believe,” he asks of the “Eroica,” “that this magnificent composition has never been heard in Paris? But how could it have been, without an entirely new organization?” The old concerts spirituels had been done on a single rehearsal, generally dominated by the singers. The symphonies had to have been works already known to the players, and even then the performances were generally mediocre.
     Of Nélia and Caroline Maillard, in excerpts from Sémiramide and Bianca et Falliero, Fétis observed that their student voices, though not without talent, failed to achieve the still-remembered effect of the original stage productions; he found the Rode concerto as offered by Sauzay—a last-minute substitute for Baillot—somewhat cold. (He thus identifies, at the very first concert, what appear from the accumulated press notices to have the been the two weakest links of the early years: the limitations of youthful voices and the occasional froideur of approach.) Everything else he found “delicious,” and noted that for the first time a chorus from the Conservatoire sang with perfection, an advance he attributed to the new class in ensemble singing.

The enthusiasm of the listeners equaled their astonishment, and became manifest in noisy and prolonged applause. One seldom leaves a concert satisfied, but here the feeling was better than satisfaction: it was mingled with national pride. Everybody was saying you couldn’t find a better performance anywhere in Europe. People who knew the old Conservatoire concerts congratulated themselves for having found the new ones; the others asked each other in astonishment where this sudden surge of virtuosity came from.