Abstract:

This dissertation explores the critical reception of Richard Wagner, Erik Satie, and Claude Debussy, beginning with French music criticism in the last decades of the nineteenth century and extended to musicological scholarship of the present day. I focus especially on the concepts of "modernity" and "modernism," tracing patterns in the vocabulary that critics used to define these terms and in the strategies they employed to place Wagner, Satie, and Debussy within their purview.

My basic thesis is that the concept of "modern music," like the concept of "modern politics" or "modern culture," was a manifestation of the opposition between idealism and realism, and that the task of defining "modernity" in French musical culture consisted of situating music within this binary framework--whether to reinforce, reject, synthesize, or in some other way come to terms with the polarity that it represented. A subsidiary thesis is that musicological scholarship in the twentieth century continues to rely on these oppositions, and that the French music surveyed here has had a direct impact on the way music history, even beyond France, has been told.

Chapter 1 begins by examining the convergence of different issues: the aesthetics of German Romanticism, Baudelaire's valorization of cosmopolitanism and ephemerality, and the general reception of Wagner in France. By tracing the tension between idealism and realism through three decades of French Wagner criticism, I isolate the themes of modernity and modernism that will resurface in the following chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 show how the ideal-real duality informed the reception of Satie, whose career effectively traversed the logical extremes of both terms. Finally, Chapter 4 shows how Debussy's modernity, caught between competing paradigms, was assessed in the early twentieth century and in the present day, with the former relying on a Wagnerian rendering of the ideal-real duality and the latter relying on a Satiean understanding.