Les Jours de Gloire: The French Violin School and the Paris Conservatoire, 1795-1842

Abstract

The French Violin School is a body of compositional, performing, and teaching practice which emerged within the context of the Paris Conservatoire, founded in 1795. Its first exponents were all founding professors of that institution: Pierre Baillot, Pierre Rode, and Rodolphe Kreutzer. Their model was the Italian, Giovanni Battista Viotti, who had moved to Paris from Turin in 1782. This violinistic style was promulgated through the pedagogical activity of the Conservatoire in several forms: direct teaching; the official violin method published by the Conservatoire printery and its subsequent translations; and a large corpus of composition for violin, including the famous books of etudes by Rode and Kreutzer, as well as by successors such as Jacques Fereol Mazas and Charles Dancla.

Although there has been much written on the French Violin School's compositional and violinistic style, few scholars have considered the degree to which its pedagogical practice was bound up with the culture of the institution surrounding it. In turn, scholars of the Conservatoire have not considered the key contribution of the violin school in a detailed and critical way. The existing scholarship on the Conservatoire as an institution has largely glossed over the history of its foundation, in part because much of the relevant French scholarship was written under the sway of the revisionist school of Revolutionary historiography and thus contains an anti-Revolutionary bias. The result is a portrayal of the Conservatoire as a glorious national institution with somewhat regrettable Revolutionary origins, one which only slowly finds its feet. A close examination of its history, however, reveals that the Conservatoire owes its existence both to Revolutionary events and Revolutionary values, and that those values shaped the internal culture of the institution for some years after its inception.

The thesis explores the development of both the French violin school and its institutional home and relocates them within the wider cultural framework of the Revolution. By combining a close examination of pedagogical detail with wide-lens cultural analysis, it offers a comprehensive picture of the internal culture of the institution, exposes its strengths and weaknesses, and suggests that they go a long way toward explaining both early success and early relative decline. Setting these two stories alongside one another reveals the complex and hitherto unrecognised interrelationships that shaped them during the turmoil of the Revolutionary period. What emerges is that it was the early years in which the Conservatoire in general, and the violin school in particular, showed leadership within the music world and French society. These were 'les jours de gloire'.

Please note: The requisite French accents are missing in this abstract, due to the limitations of the ANU Student Administrative System. Show more