18 - Critical Battlegrounds in the French Third Republic

Summary

The Third Republic was paradoxically both a ‘golden age’ – of the press, of cinema and of music – and a time of tragedy, humiliation and almost perpetual pessimism. Bookended by Bizet’s Carmen (1875) and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940–1), the musical world experienced a dizzying array of schools and movements, as musicians negotiated the transition from nineteenth-century romanticism to twentieth-century modernism, via the looming spectre of Wagnerism. These musical transformations took place against an extraordinarily turbulent political background: born out of, interrupted and ended by war with Germany, the Republic was also regularly rocked by internal crises, not least the Dreyfus Affair, which split the already deeply divided country further into two.