Debussy’s creative world was deeply enmeshed in the cultural field of the French capital. Steeped in a post-Enlightenment worldview centred on exploration, accumulation of knowledge, and scientific discovery, no aspect of human experience and its habitats was deemed out of bounds in this path to creative accretion. Like many of his contemporaries, Debussy became fascinated by a wealth of new ideas about the world and the human condition that exploded onto the scene during his lifetime. Mysticism and occultism expanded the horizon within which to understand the mind and its creative potential; archaeological discoveries from Greece and Rome brought alive a past that belied the bland classicism so revered only decades earlier; and a rich smorgasbord of historical research – one that encompassed music and its practice – provided new materials from the foreign worlds of medieval, if not mythical, pasts. Over the course of Debussy’s life, these currents were woven together into the conceptual framework that sustained his creative world and that he claimed continually to renew rather than reproduce.

On 25 April 1876, the Union Franco-Américaine held a well-publicised fundraiser in Paris at the newly opened Palais Garnier for a monument that would become the Statue of Liberty. This massive sculpture was a transatlantic civic project that had been in the works since the end of the American Civil War in 1865, intended to celebrate political freedom, and in particular the abolition of slavery, while also reaffirming Franco-American friendship, an alliance famously forged in the crucible of the American Revolutionary War. Taking place in a theatre decorated with American and French flags, with a backdrop painted by Jean-Baptiste Lavastre that showed the projected statue in New York Harbor, the gala event attracted a veritable who’s-who of Franco-American grandeur – from Lafayette's grandson, Oscar de Lafayette, to the United States Minister to France, Elihu B. Washburne. For its musical portion, the celebration featured a cantata written for the occasion by Charles Gounod, La Liberté éclairant le monde, as well as several other musical items, including the American anthem ‘Hail, Columbia’. Yet despite all of these efforts, the fundraiser turned out to be but a lukewarm accomplishment, both financially and artistically, simultaneously competing for attention with such major theatrical events as Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, which had its premiere three days earlier, on 22 April, and continued to draw the public and critics into the Théâtre-Italien.

Despite its modest impact, however, the 1876 fundraiser counts among the better-known musical events in the transatlantic story of the Statue of Liberty. The saga of this monument began in the early summer of 1865 around a dinner table at the home of the French legal scholar and abolitionist Edouard de Laboulaye (1811‒83). Among the guests were not only Lafayette's grandson Oscar and Alexis de Tocqueville's brother Hippolyte, but also a young sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834‒1904). Given that Napoléon III had backed the Confederacy, this group of liberal supporters of the North and admirers of Lincoln resolved then and there to find a way tangibly to show French loyalty to the reasserted ideals of the victorious American republic. It would take until 1871, however, for the project and Bartholdi's design to crystallise into the idea of a colossal female statue for New York Harbor, and a few more years to bring on board the somewhat reluctant Americans who considered the gift something of an imposition.

This collection of essays on words and notes in the long nineteenth century is book-ended by two that frame the volume by reflecting on how text and music – printed on the same silent page – both create and veil meanings through their association within the same sonic artefact. If Peter Dayan's inquiry into Erik Satie's 1913 Chapitres tournés en tous sens tells us about modernist fragmentations of signification in a composition that challenges the earlier, more direct associations between words and notes, Susan Youens's close reading of Franz Schubert's 1825 song ‘Der Einsame’ teases out how, a century earlier, a composer could shape his reading of specific words through his choice of notes, relying on musical signifiers to carry meanings that an informed and attentive listener (or scholar) might perceive. In the context of this volume, these two case studies of word-note associations serve as prisms fracturing the seemingly straightforward issue of how words and notes might relate to each other during the long nineteenth century into a rainbow of questions that address concerns as different as reception, listening, analysis and context. And together with the other contributions here, the two essays speak to their readers on two important levels: they teach us something new and intriguing about their specific topic – I now know more about Karl Lappe and his ‘briefly fashionable’ poetry than I ever thought I wanted to – but they also open up fresh methodological perspectives by addressing (as the editors have put it so eloquently) ‘an unusually wide range of meeting points between music, creative and other textual responses to it during the long nineteenth century, and modern scholarship.’

Wagner's impact on Western culture can hardly be overestimated. When Howard Shore describes his use of leitmotifs in the Oscar-winning score for the blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001–03), for example, he reveals himself as but one recent musician in a long line of creative artists affected by Wagner the composer. Wagner's theories about musical theater can be felt even in contemporary discussions of Broadway musicals, such as Oklahoma! (1943) and Rent (1996). As for modern opera, Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise (1983), Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto (1984), and Karlheinz Stockhausen's cycle Licht (1977–2004) are among the more recent responses to the challenges posed by Wagner almost 150 years ago. In fact, artists from all disciplines over the last century and a half have likewise relied on aesthetic concepts shaped prominently by Wagnerian ideas about the nature of art, whether Symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé avant-garde painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kiefer; the sculptors Hans Arp and Auguste Rodin; or the architects of the Bauhaus. Media technology itself, when related to art, has drawn its aesthetic justification from Wagner's thoughts. And his political and social views influenced the Zionist Theodor Herzl as well as the anti-Semitic fascist Adolph Hitler, with repercussions still powerfully felt in concert life today – in Israel, above all, but worldwide as well.

The 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris offered exciting and often surprising aural pleasures. Military bands serenaded passersby from the bandstands; musical couleur locale was provided in the Romanian or Moroccan taverns; and never-before-heard sounds from foreign cultures accompanied spectacles of African village life, Vietnamese theater, or Javanese dance. But strangest of all was the telephone display at the pavilion of the Société générale des téléphones, where live performances on Parisian stages could be heard through acoustic tubes connected to electronic telephone lines that transmitted the sounds. Together with the exhibition of the Edison phonograph in the Galerie des Machines, the telephone exhibition counted among the best-known successes at the Exposition. The listening stations proved to be places of magic and discovery but also of uncomfortable awe, however mitigated by the secure parameters of an industrial fair. To listen to sounds that had no immediate source was to glimpse a future that might well bring with it those strange and wonderful inventions popularized in novels by Jules Verne. The prospect was both enticing and frightening.

Neither the telephone nor the phonograph was entirely new in 1889. Edison's earlier, albeit disappointing, prototype had been shown in the 1878 Exposition universelle, and telephonic transmissions from the opera house were already the attraction of the 1881 Exposition internationale de l’électricité in Paris. However, what makes their presence in the 1889 Exposition universelle so central is the fact that here, for the first time, electroacoustic technology became an integral part of an exhibition project conceived as a gigantic taxonomy of human and industrial achievement. Electricity had become one of the main themes of the Exposition, featured not only in the various inventions of the Galerie des Machines, but also, and more visibly, in such installations as the nightly illuminated fountains and the electric lights around the Exposition, especially a spectacular electric light-sculpture by Sautter-Lemonnier and the 20,000 light bulbs that illuminated Edison's exhibit (both also in the Galerie des Machines). While in 1878 electrical technology was in its “embryonic state,” now it was a fully fledged industrial force in the competitive game of highly developed nations.

How to exhibit the music of France and abroad at the 1889 Exposition Universelle was a question that occupied the organizers of the fair very early on in its preparation, and it led to a variety of solutions, both in the official program and through private enterprise. From the outset, musicians had lobbied that a share larger than in any of the previous fairs should be reserved for music in 1889. With rising numbers of concerts in Paris, with new private music schools to cater to the greater need for teachers and performers, and with the increased manufacture of musical instruments, music was a growing field in 1880s France, both culturally and economically, echoing urban and industrial development. The government responded, in 1887, with the creation of a music commission for the Exposition, the Commission des Auditions Musicales, led by the director of the Conservatoire, Ambroise Thomas. Beside Ambroise Thomas as president, the Commission consisted of Léo Delibes as vice president and the pianist André Wurmser as secretary. Its sixteen members comprised, among others, Théodore Dubois, César Franck, Benjamin Godard, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, Ernest Reyer, and Camille Saint-Saëns. The Commission was to ensure that music was “represented in the double aspect of composition and performance.” In addition, in the general categories of the fair's exhibits, “Class 13” was dedicated to musical instruments, sandwiched between Classes 12 (photography) and 14 (medicine and surgery), and grouped into the section “Education and Teaching—Materials and Processes of the Liberal Arts.” Within the official structure of the Exposition Universelle, music was thus represented both aurally and visually, as an art and as a craft, and as belonging to the past and to the future.

The Commission des Auditions Musicales comprised four subcommittees: “musical composition” (which dealt with all art music); orphéons and choral societies; brass and other bands; military music. It organized a variety of performances and competitions to showcase French music and its performance, and to engage in friendly rivalry with other nations. In particular, the five official orchestra concerts at the Trocadéro were meant to display “the immense superiority” of France's composers. Indeed, these concerts “were going to correspond to a real exhibition of this art.”

On 9 June yet another sonic attraction of the Exposition Universelle opened its doors to the public: the telephone display at the pavilion of the Société Générale des Téléphones, where live performances on Parisian stages could be heard through acoustic tubes connected to electronic telephone lines that transmitted the sounds. Together with the exhibition of the Edison phonograph in the Galerie des Machines, the telephone exhibition was among the best-known successes at the Exposition. The listening stations proved to be places of magic and discovery, but also of uncomfortable awe, however tamed within the secure parameters of an industrial fair. To go and listen to sounds that had no immediate source was to catch a glimpse of a future which might well bring with it some if not all of those strange and wonderful inventions so popularized in novels by Jules Verne. The prospect was at the same time enticing and frightening.

Neither the telephone nor the phonograph was entirely new in 1889. Edison's earlier, though disappointing, prototype had been shown in the 1878 Exposition Universelle, and telephonic transmissions from the opera house were already an attraction of the 1881 Exposition Internationale de l’Électricité in Paris. However, what makes their presence in the 1889 Exposition Universelle so central is the fact that here, for the first time, electroacoustic technology became an integral part of an exhibition project conceived as a gigantic taxonomy of human and industrial achievement. Electricity had become one of the main themes of the Exposition, featured not only in the various inventions of the Galerie des Machines, but also, and more visibly, in such installations as the nightly illuminated fountains and the electric lights around the Exposition, especially a spectacular electric light-sculpture by Sautter-Lemonnier and the 20,000 light bulbs that illuminated Edison's exhibit (both also in the Galerie des Machines). While in 1878 electricity was in its “embryonic state,” now it was a full-fledged industrial force in the competitive game of highly developed nations.

The 1889 Exposition Universelle had turned into a celebration of the virtues of Republican France and its meritocracy, embodied in the mythologized figures of the frontier-breaking scientist and the daring explorer.

Programs of Concerts at the Exposition Universelle

Although the various concerts, opera performances, and centennial festivities of and around the 1889 Exposition Universelle contributed to the unparalleled presence of music at a World's Fair, it was the music of cultures perceived as “Other”—whether European folk music or more exotic species from the Near and Far East—that most excited visitors and commentators alike. Romanians, Hungarians, Arabs, and Gypsies enriched the sonic landscape of the many restaurants and cafés scattered along the Champ de Mars, while sounds never heard before by (most) European ears, such as those of the Javanese gamelan and the Vietnamese Theater, brought new thrills to the listening experience of the Exposition by providing a new soundtrack for the by now all-too-familiar exoticisms of prints, novels, theater, and popular entertainment. These sounds, in particular those that pervaded the colonial exhibition of the Esplanade des Invalides, generated sonic encounters of the “Other” that redrew the boundaries of musical experience both of musicians like Claude Debussy and of the wider Exposition audience. Listeners whose musical experience of the East thus far was one created by the imaginary world of European exoticism now came face to face with “the real thing,” usually for the first time. The two sonic worlds proved irreconcilable. This gap between the imagined and the real became one of the main threads of the sonic perception and reception of non-Western music during the 1889 Exposition Universelle. The music of other cultures was often too unfamiliar to be enjoyed comfortably as mere sonic background to the sampling of local foods in cafés. Visitors also encountered the jarring reality of sounds that accompanied the spectacle of the exotic, and began listening actively to these “new” and exotic musics that had come from afar to the Exposition Universelle on the banks of the Seine. The reactions were not always positive.

Musical Exoticism and the Listening Imagination

It is difficult to gauge the listening imagination and sonic experience of European listeners in the late 1880s from the vantage point of the early twentieth-first century. But although we can neither recreate the sonic horizon of expectation for an imagined 1889 listener, nor listen ourselves to music with 1889 ears (an issue discussed further in chapter 6), we can nevertheless rely on circumstantial evidence that may allow us to evaluate to some degree these European encounters with the musical “Other.”

Works Performed

Opéra:

Delibes, Léo. Coppélia, ou La Fille aux yeux d’émail (1870), 2 acts, libr. by Charles Nuitter.

Gounod, Charles. Faust (1859), 5 acts, libr. by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré.

Gounod, Charles. Roméo et Juliette (1867), 5 acts, libr. by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré.

Halévy, Fromental. La Juive (1835), 5 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe.

Massenet, Jules. Le Cid (1885), 4 acts, libr. by Adolphe d’Ennery, Edouard Blau, and Louis Gallet.

Meyerbeer, Giacomo. Les Huguenots (1836), 5 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps.

Meyerbeer, Giacomo. Le Prophète (1849), 5 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe.

Meyerbeer, Giacomo. L’Africaine (1865), 5 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe, François Joseph Fétis, et al.

Paladilhe, Émile. Patrie! (1886), 5 acts, libr. by Victorien Sardou and Louis Gallet.

Rossini, Gioacchino. Guillaume Tell (1829), 5 acts, libr. by Étienne de Jouy and Hippolyte-Louis-Florent Bis.

Saint-Saëns, Camille. Henry VIII (1883), 4 acts, libr. by Léonce Détroyat and Armand Silvestre.

Thomas, Ambroise. Hamlet (1868), 5 acts, libr. by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré.

Thomas, Ambroise. La Tempête (1889), 3 acts, libr. by Jules Barbier.

Verdi, Giuseppe. Rigoletto (1851), 3 acts, libr. by Francesco Maria Piave.

Verdi, Giuseppe. Aida (1871), 4 acts, libr. by Antonio Ghislanzoni, after a scenario by Auguste Mariette.

Opéra-Comique:

Adam, Adolphe. Le Chalet (1834), 1 act, libr. by Eugène Scribe and Mélesville [Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier].

Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit. Fra Diavolo (1830), 3 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe.

Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit. Le Domino noir (1837), 3 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe.

Bemberg, Hermann. Le Baiser de Suzon (1888), 1 act, libr. by Pierre Barbier.

Bizet, Georges. Carmen (1875), 4 acts, libr. by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.

Boieldieu, François-Adrien. La Dame blanche (1825), 3 acts, libr. by Eugène Scribe.

Dalayrac, Nicholas-Marie. Raoul, Sire de Créqui (1789), 3 acts, libr. by Bernard Boutet de Monvel.

Dalayrac, Nicholas-Marie. La Soirée orageuse (1790), 1 act, libr. by Jean Baptiste Radet.

Deffès, Louis. Le Café du roi (1861), 1 act, libr. by Henri Meilhac.

Donizetti, Gaetano. La Fille du régiment (1840), 2 acts, libr. by Jules Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Alfred Bayard.

Gounod, Charles. Philémon et Baucis (1860), 2 acts, libr. by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré.

Grétry, André Ernest Modeste. Richard, Coeur de Lion (1784), 3 acts, libr. by Michel Jean Sedaine.

The Exposition Universelle, which took place in the six months between 6 May and 6 November 1889 in Paris, was one of the major political, economic, and cultural events of the late nineteenth century in France. It attracted more than thirty million people to its wonders, and 61,722 exhibitors, as the government of France invited the world to come to Paris to show samples of its industrial products, natural resources, and cultural achievements. The Exposition was located at the Champ de Mars, on the banks of the Seine, right in the center of the French capital. A spectacle to end all spectacles, the 1889 Exposition Universelle was an event of superlatives: the highest iron tower (figure I.1), the latest technology, the most exotic people, a maximum number of historic reconstructions, and the most diverse music ever heard. Surrounding the Eiffel Tower, an impressive array of buildings showcased the industries and crafts from countries as diverse as Bolivia and China; exhibitions in the Palais des Beaux-Arts presented paintings and sculptures from France and abroad; the Galerie des Machines was a temple to industrial progress, “a masterpiece of modern mechanics” containing “all the wonders of human activity.” Artists from all over the world came to Paris to perform at this event, whether inside the Exposition Universelle like the dancers and musicians from Java, or in other Parisian locations but loosely connected to the World's Fair, like Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which was hired to add to the international attractions in and around the Exposition Universelle.

But the fair was also designed to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution of 1789. As a result, many a European monarch frowned upon the occasion. But while nations such as Britain, Italy, and Germany withheld official support, their governments encouraged private enterprise to represent their nations appropriately. For republics such as the United States, Argentina, and Brazil, however, the fair offered an perfect window to celebrate the republican ideal. But 1889 was also a crucial year for other reasons.