Dubroca's Traité and French Style Soutenu in the Nineteenth Century, Part 1
2009; Routledge; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2769-4046
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoKURT ADLER RELATES AN ANECDOTE about the venerable French conductor, Pierre Monteux, who, upon returning to the Metropolitan Opera after an absence of about forty years, nonplussed the performers by thoroughly reworking their liaison instincts in performance according to the practice familiar to him from his youth.1 No doubt he required the reinstatement of liaisons that in recent decades had fallen from common spoken practice. The laudable desire on the part of singers to sound natural by being faithful to the spoken tongue that prevailed in their day met head-on with an older formal tradition that demanded a carefully contrived artifice in declamation that had its roots in the poetry and prosody of French going back to the Renaissance and beyond. There is a fundamental performance practice issue involved in this story: to what extent should a musical performance of text adhere to the diction precepts prevailing at the date of composition, as opposed to the date of performance? Linguists are quite familiar with the distinction between the diachronic (spanning a historical continuum) and synchronic (at a single point in time) approaches to the study of language. Diachronic studies seek to describe a language over a period of time, often centuries. A synchronic analysis is a thin-section slice, or cross-section of the language at a specific moment in its history. Musicians who specialize in music written prior to the Baroque era are versed in diachronic considerations of diction, and such study has become a matter of course in that arena. Lyric diction handbooks tend to present a single recommended approach to singing in a language, independent of diachronic considerations. Vocal music written since 1600 usually is unthinkingly homogenized into a single broad synchronic brush-stroke when it comes to pronunciation-which is to say, modern. A single example of this for the English language would be Handel's oratorios, in which historical concerns over pronunciation are often overlooked. The situation is analogous to a modern Shakespearean company, which must concern itself with pronunciation issues of Elizabethan/Jacobean English, within the context of the more pragmatic necessity of clear stage elocution.2 In a very broad sense, all musicians who perform music not written in their own time and place are historians, whether they appreciate it or not. The re-creation of a composition that has been in existence for twenty, one hundred, or four hundred years involves historical textual as well as stylistic considerations that do not apply in the same way as with newly composed music. One may of course choose to ignore potential historical linguistic discrepancy from modern practice, but it is surely best if that is a conscious decision, not an unconsidered one. DUBROCA'S TRAITE Louis Dubroca was a French priest, historian, journalist, linguist, theater writer, and biographer of Napoleon and Toussaint-Louverture. His 1802 (revised 1824) L'art de lire a haute voix provided advice for actors on the effective manner of French stage declamation. Its sequel, the 1824 Traite de la prononciation des consonnes et des voyelles finales des mots francais is a thorough treatment of final consonants and liaison in the spoken French of the early nineteenth century, and provides as close a mirror of stage practice at that time as one is likely to encounter. It is firmly entrenched in the prescriptive linguistic tradition of the time, and the text throughout is peppered with remarks about the abominations that the French language is forced to tolerate in the mouths of the indiscriminate. Although not written specifically with music in mind, the precepts espoused serve as a guide to the principles of stage diction employed in grand opera during the Napoleonic Empire and the Bourbon Restoration. The stage diction principles employed in the grand operas of Auber, Berlioz, Cherubini, Halevy, Mehul, Meyerbeer, and Rossini from the 1820s to 1850s would have correlated well with Dubroca's prescriptions, and formed the basis for operatic stage practice in the later nineteenth century operas of Bizet, Chabrier, Delibes, Gounod, Massenet, and Thomas-and thus of Monteux's own background. …
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