The vast quantity of French-language music journalism and reportage in the nineteenth century can tempt us into citing one or another review that reflects our own view of the topic or work. We sometimes state or imply that a review stands for the attitudes and opinions of most musicians and music lovers of the day.

The idiosyncratic career of Félicien David was reported with great interest and vivacity by dozens of critics. Selected reviews reveal patterns that apply not just to David's works, but to nineteenth-century music generally. These patterns include: 1) the greater reliability of reviews by critics who were musically trained (e.g., Berlioz, Reyer, Gounod and Saint-Saëns), despite the possibility of bias; 2) critics sometimes conferring with each other before they wrote their review, or echoing each other's written opinions; 3) a willingness on the part of some critics to carry out a near-vendetta against a composer or work, whether for personal reasons (e.g., conflict of interest) or because of a deep-seated intolerance for any aesthetic and musical approaches that were at variance with the critic's own; 4) the sense of a positive mission, in writings by critics who were themselves prominent creative artists (see point 1); and 5) the power of a review to help determine the success or failure of a work, composer, or performer.

A recently published letter by Berlioz (translated here for the first time) reveals how conscious this remarkable composer-critic was of his own biases and aesthetic commitments, and how willingly he allowed them to shape his reaction to a new work by a younger, lesser-known composer. The responses of Berlioz and others to two works of David, Le Désert and Herculanum, provide the primary material for discussion. These responses include an insightful and previously undiscussed review (of Herculanum) by Ernest Reyer.

Respected as one of four ‘feuilles de qualité’ in nineteenth-century France, the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published articles by some of the most talented writers/critics of its time. In ‘feuilletons’, large articles that ran across the bottom of the first and second pages, these authors gave perceptive critiques in high-quality prose and provided their readers with relief from the political news discussed on the page above. In January 1858 literary critic Hippolyte Rigault asserted that modern criticism communicated not just through forthright judgements but also through innuendo and nuance. A sophisticated readership could then be expected to take up the task of understanding the allusions and filling in the blanks. Like Rigault, Hector Berlioz (music critic of the Débats from 1835 to 1863) and Ernest Reyer (from 1866 to 1898) used both text and subtext to convey their assessments. This study, with the goal of examining how shades of approval and disapproval could be alluded to or directly revealed, traces how they wrote about their younger contemporary Georges Bizet in the years following Rigault's article.

French influence on American twentieth-century music has long been central to historical narratives, particularly in relation to Nadia Boulanger and her pupils from the 1920s onward. Yet the much earlier impact of Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), Boulanger's own teacher, has been largely ignored. While most American audiences around the turn of the century were largely unfamiliar with Fauré, Boston embraced his music enthusiastically. By the 1890s, a growing Francophile aesthetic reflected in the city's musical life encouraged performances of French repertoire, and a remarkable number of Fauré's compositions were introduced, some heard frequently enough to become well known to local audiences. Many of Boston's most influential critics, educators, performers and patrons admired Fauré and advocated for him as a representative modern French composer. That his music was so warmly welcomed in Boston at the end of the nineteenth century without any overt self-promotion by the composer has not been widely known until now. Although Fauré never visited the United States, his music found a home away from home in Boston, both while he was still living and well beyond.

Drawing on recent scholarship (Kelly, Pasler, Wheeldon, Fauser) examining the discursive construction of the reputations of well-known Belle-Époque musicians, this article investigates the case of Gabriel Fauré and the ways in which his posthumous legacy was shaped throughout the 1920s in France. Drawing on wide-ranging journalistic and biographical sources, the article argues that the figure of Fauré was increasingly constructed around the concept of the ‘classic’ in the years immediately following his death in 1924. I suggest that the types of ‘classicism’ associated with Fauré in this context were, however, multivalent and largely contingent on the cultural and aesthetic mandates of those ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ that sought to advocate in favour of his posthumous legacy. This article thus examines the notion of Fauré ‘the classic’ as it was discursively constructed in three specific instances: by the French Republic in its State funeral for the composer; by the young post-war generation of composers (especially Georges Auric of the group Les Six), and by the composer, former student, and biographer of Fauré, Charles Koechlin. These cases reveal that Fauré's classicism was articulated in contrasting ways, ranging from a heroic classicism associated with the celebration of national ‘great men’, an aesthetic classicism linked to French musical traditions, or, finally, a classicism derived from the aesthetics and culture of Ancient Greece.

This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

RIPM (Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale) is widely regarded as the most comprehensive resource offering electronic access to music periodicals from the early Romantic era to the twentieth century. Founded in 1980 by H. Robert Cohen, RIPM is the youngest of the so-called ‘4 R's of International Music Research’; its partner initiatives include RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), and RIdIM (Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale). Cohen's ambitious project was notably visionary in its use of technology: not only did it use computing from the start (beginning with DOS-based indexing systems), but it was also the first of the 4 R's to explore full text searching. RIPM seeks to address ‘two main problems that have prevented these [historic music] journals from being systematically collected and examined: (1) the limited number of libraries possessing the journals, and (2) the difficulty encountered when one attempts to locate specific information within an available source’. The project has thus focused on collection building, curation, indexing and accessibility. This international cooperative's accomplishments are impressive: as of July 2020, the database contains 527 music periodicals, 430 available in full text complete runs, totalling 996,000 annotated records and 1.47 million full-text pages of music periodicals.