Chapter Ten - Rameau in Late Nineteenth-Century Dijon: Memorial, Festival, Fiasco

Summary

Sunday: two series of music festivals have been inaugurated, one in Dijon, in honor of Rameau; the other in Bayreuth, in honor of M. Richard Wagner.

In Dijon it is an illustrious French musician, one of the fathers of our modern national school, whom artists, accompanied by an enthusiastic crowd, have gone to celebrate.

Bayreuth—pride personified, overblown, coldly cruel arrogance pushed to monstrous levels—inaugurates for itself the temple it has erected for itself: Richard Wagner pontificates in Richard Wagner's honor …

Well, to me the pleasant and tranquil picture of the festivities in Dijon is far more alluring than the enharmonic orgies at Bayreuth.

Assiduous readers of the Paris journal L’Art musical might have noticed this unusually passionate news item in the edition of August 17, 1876. In it, the Wagnerian composer and critic Victorin Joncières came under attack for an implied lack of patriotism. His sin was to have waxed lyrical over Wagner's Das Rheingold in his column for La Liberté, while, in the same article, decrying Rameau's music as “outdated [and] deadly boring.”

Joncières was in a tiny minority among Parisian journalists, who otherwise reported enthusiastically on the Dijon festival of August 11–15—irrespective of whether they wrote for the specialist or daily press. For the former, both Johann Reuchsel (Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris) and Arthur Pougin (Le Ménestrel) wrote open letters the day after the “fêtes Rameau” officially ended. Four days of concerts, theatrical events, processions, circus acts, shooting competitions, military tattoos, fireworks, and choral competitions—and the inauguration of a statue of Rameau in the old Place du Théâtre (now the Place Sainte-Chapelle)—had drawn an extraordinary 30,000 visitors to the town. Written as though amid the crowds, Reuchsel's letter to readers of the Revue et Gazette musicale buzzed with excitement: “The town is filled with joyous fanfares, the singing of orphéon choruses, and the cries of light-heartedness … the town bustles with laughing and singing. Dijon is like a fairyland.”