A surprisingly diverse array of styles and modes of commentary have been associated with the term “music criticism.” In common parlance, it is the discussion of recent musical goings-on (albums, concerts, etc.), often with the goal of reviewing or evaluating these events. Critics may also place music within a broader context: they may assess how a certain work fits within its maker’s previous oeuvre, how the work and its maker fit within the history of a genre or style, or how all of this fits within some cultural picture—a decade, a country, a people, and so on. Either (or both) the music and the broader picture may be the primary target of a critic’s inquiry: some critics may be more concerned with scrutinizing a musical work than with the work’s implications on broader cultural issues; other critics may be more interested in what a musical work says about those issues than in the features or merits of the work itself. In practice, critics of any stripe usually engage in both, whether or not they intend to.
This chapter examines music criticism of a fairly specific type, time, and place: the criticism of Western art music in nineteenth-century France. The chapter focuses specifically on “positivism,” a scientific and critical approach that arose in the earlier part of the century, with its influence (both positive and negative) on French writings about music. Despite the chapter’s relatively narrow purview, this particular episode in intellectual history usefully illustrates many of the things that “music criticism” could mean in the nineteenth century: commentary on works and composers; the advancing of an aesthetic or philosophical belief, with music serving as an example or a foil; and in some cases, simply a general cultural commentary from a writer who happened to be professionally involved in music. Music criticism could be an arena for all these things, either singly or in combination.
Thus the aim of this chapter is not a historical overview or summary of music criticism in the nineteenth century; there are countless books that address the major debates within music in far more detail than a single chapter could hope to achieve. The interest here, on the contrary, is to see how music criticism functioned alongside major debates outside of music—how music was called on as witness, so to speak, in broader debates within the history of ideas in the nineteenth century. This is what is meant by “intellectual culture.”
After a brief overview of the origins of positivism, this chapter surveys various responses to positivism’s implications among music critics in the second half of the nineteenth century. The chapter concludes with a more extended look at one music critic, Edmond Hippeau, who addressed positivism both directly and indirectly in his journalistic and critical writings, and particularly in his writings on Hector Berlioz. Our concern is not with Berlioz’s music specifically, nor even with his own (quite extensive) critical writings, but, rather, with Berlioz’s legacy as Hippeau understood it, and the logic behind his attempt, in his capacity as music critic, to protect that legacy from positivistic explanation. As will be shown, Hippeau was a stringent critic of positivism even while accepting many of its premises, and thus he serves as a particularly vivid illustration of what was at stake for music in the rise of positivism in the nineteenth century—and, more broadly, what was at stake for French culture in the enterprise of music criticism.
Positivism is commonly understood today as a philosophical or scientific doctrine. In Anglo-American scholarship, it is usually associated with the writings of A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Hempel, and other intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century who looked to the empiricism of the natural sciences as a model for philosophical theories of knowledge. Positivism in this sense is the belief that statements of fact are meaningful only if one can conceive of ways to verify empirically their truth value. This conception of fact and truth distinguishes assertions like “There are aliens hiding on Mars” from “There are undetectable aliens on Mars.” The first assertion can be empirically tested—perhaps not easily, but one can at least imagine ways to test it—and is therefore a meaningful statement. It may not be a true statement, necessarily, but it is a meaningful one. The second assertion, by contrast, cannot be empirically tested; its very premise is that aliens cannot be perceived. Therefore the statement is not meaningful. It’s not even false, because calling it false assumes there is something being asserted. Rather, according to the doctrine of positivism, it is literally devoid of meaning.
For these reasons, positivism was part of the broader twentieth-century movement against metaphysics, at least in the Western world. The most influential writings of the mentioned philosophers were published in the aftermaths of World Wars I and II, when skepticism about abstract, invisible forces like destiny or spirituality, as well as the intangible (and increasingly destructive) ideologies driving human behavior, were at an all-time high. As the horrors of the century kept piling up, Western intellectuals found the “pure” spaces of logic, mathematics, science, and the natural world to be effective sanctuaries from the flaws and frailties of human beings.
But positivism predates the World Wars. (That is why the twentieth-century positivist movement is sometimes called “neopositivism.”) It originated in France, almost single-handedly by the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). As is discussed further, Comte’s positivism was also designed to counteract the turbulence of human society (in Comte’s case, the vacillating between revolutions, empires, restorations, and republics of nineteenth-century France) with the objectivity of science. Consequently, unlike its twentieth-century counterpart, French positivism was not primarily a philosophical or scientific movement. From the beginning, the primary impetus of positivism was to use the sciences as a model for the “outside” world of human affairs. Its implications were thus felt in several fields—sociology and history, as well as the arts—and were discussed by intellectuals of all stripes.
This broader purview can be sampled in a curious treatise entitled Matérialisme et spiritualisme: Étude de philosophie positive, published in 1865, by Alphonse Leblais. Despite the author’s background in mathematics, Matérialisme et spiritualisme was a work of philosophical and cultural commentary centered on the two general schools of thought identified in the book’s title. Leblais defined the first term, materialism, as a method of inquiry that begins with nature and the physical world, and places humankind within this framework. By contrast, spiritualism begins with an idealized, divinely inspired vision of human society and places the physical world within this framework. Leblais writes:
Since antiquity, we have employed two quite distinct methods in order to study nature. One, from which modern science was born, begins by studying the World or the surrounding environment before addressing that of Man. … The other method, much more ambitious and from which theological philosophy was born, begins on the contrary with the study of Man and by assimilating all phenomena of the exterior world to those of living nature. (Leblais 1865, 15–16)1
Leblais traces this bifurcation to Plato and Aristotle, and writes that it has had many incarnations throughout history, laying the foundation for a host of ideological tensions that continued into Leblais’s present, including “reason and imagination, science and poetry, the objective and the subjective, analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, empiricism and mysticism, observation and dogma, fatalism and optimism, [sensualism and idealism], naturalism and transcendentalism, or in the end materialism and spiritualism” (14–15).2
One outgrowth of the materialist camp, Leblais writes, is positivism, which he defined broadly as any method of explanation or mode of thought favoring the physical and observable over the invisible and inscrutable. For Leblais, positivism was the most comprehensive of the materialist ideologies and the primary focus of his treatise. Especially when wielded by historians, positivism was a method of explaining historical phenomena by citing only human actions, without any reference to abstract, metaphysical forces like “destiny,” “fate,” or “Hegelian world-spirit,” or even more modest forces like “genius” or “inspiration.”
And that is what made positivism controversial among historians and critics of the arts, which over the course of the nineteenth century increasingly came to be seen as one of the last holdouts from the encroachments of materialism. Where positivists conceived of art in empirical, analytical, and scientific terms, critics countered by touting art’s abstract, inscrutable, and spiritual nature; belief in the latter among music and art critics grew in exact proportion to the rise of the former among general historians. As the critic Louis de Fourcaud complained in a book about French painting:
Rationalism, which has penetrated everything and has rendered all observable material of equal importance before the human mind, has suppressed traditional aesthetics. There was a time when … [o]ne recognized the existence of a character of beauty residing in the works themselves, resulting from their intrinsic meaning and their purpose. Today … all critical judgment now relies on the standard of positivist observations. (de Fourcaud 1896, 6–7)
Louis de Fourcaud objected not only to the notion that the beauty and meaning of an artwork could be located in its empirically verifiable features but also to the notion that the beauty and meaning of art were in need of verification at all. The “traditional” mode of aesthetic appreciation, for Fourcaud, was to feel the impact of an artwork intuitively—to let it speak for itself.
Unsurprisingly, music critics were among the most vehement skeptics of positivism. As the art form that most obviously transcended the physical and observable, music was viewed as the most fundamentally incompatible with the materialistic preoccupations of the positivists. And as the art form that was thought to communicate most directly, bypassing mere rational thought, music was the least in need of positivist explanation and logical analysis. As the aesthetician and statesman Alfred de Falloux wrote,
Music is truly the spiritualist language par excellence, the language which arouses and epitomizes our most elevated instincts, and whose proper function is to help refined habits prevail over vulgar ones. Where the domain of the indefinite begins, so too does the reign, charm, and magic of this language of sounds we call music.
(de Falloux 1868, 514)
Here, de Falloux was effectively invoking the Baroque “Doctrine of the Affections,” echoing Johann Mattheson’s thought in the previous century from Der Volkommene Capellmeister (1739) that “the musician must … represent virtue and evil with his music and … arouse in the listener love for the former and hatred for the latter [for] it is the true purpose of music to be, above all else, a moral lesson” (quoted in Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 185). There is nothing explicitly religious about Mattheson’s statement, of course, and it would be easy to imagine de Falloux similarly making his claim without any recourse to spiritual language. That he did so nonetheless shows how much the divine, the most immaterial force one can call upon, became a symbol of the anti-materialist and anti-positivist movement.
Conversely, critics often used the word positivist as a pejorative term, reserved for music that was too easily reducible to its purely sonic effects and that failed to convey a sense of deeper, abstract meaning. In an 1873 book on French opera, for example, Gustave Chouquet employed positivist language to criticize the music of Giacomo Meyerbeer, writing that the composer’s idiosyncrasies of harmony and orchestration appealed primarily to listeners’ nerves and senses rather than to their hearts and minds. “Positivism is the enemy of ideal beauty,” Chouquet wrote, “and Meyerbeer is the premier realist musician of our time” (Chouquet 1873, 272–273). Chouquet goes on to describe the overtures to L’étoile du nord and Le pardon de Ploërmel in particular as the work of a “materialist philosopher” more than a composer (271–272). Positivism, realism, materialism: what those concepts have in common is their emphasis on the tangible and the explicable—the very opposite of what Chouquet and nearly every other nineteenth-century critic believed music to be. Positivism was thus part of a constellation of concepts pertaining to this general philosophical tension between what is observable, and therefore within the reach of human understanding, and what is invisible and therefore mysterious. “We do not deny the energy or the effect [of Meyerbeer’s music],” Chouquet concluded; “nonetheless we will not stop insisting that [these effects] seem antithetical to great art, in which the ideal element will always prevail over the physical element” (270).
For French intellectuals, the tension between the tangible and the intangible was not merely an aesthetic matter but a cultural and political one as well. As the title of Leblais’s treatise—Matérialisme et spiritualisme—suggests, this tension impinged on religious matters, as religion was among the last bastions of idealism in the increasingly materialistic nineteenth century. The tension between science and spirituality, in turn, was itself a common metaphor for the political upheavals of post-Revolutionary France: just as new scientific discoveries required revision or wholesale rejection of previously held beliefs, so too did the First, Second, and Third French Republics entail a continual rethinking of the “rights of man” and a body of laws that changed in accordance with the ebb and flow of human affairs. And in the same way that religion was founded on eternal truths subject to no one’s whim but God’s, the First and Second Restorations were characterized not only by the resurgence of Catholicism as a political force but also by the identification of the throne with divine providence, as epitomized by the slogan trône et autel (“throne and altar”) that became the Bourbon rallying cry. That the aesthetic, religious, and political implications of positivism were inextricably bound to each other is demonstrated by the art critic and cultural commentator Jacques de Biez, who in an 1896 biography of the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet wrote that the divide between positivism and idealism “represents the antagonism between earth and heaven, between proof and hope, between the Struggle for life and the Duty to life” (de Biez 1896, xii–xiii). All those dualities derived from the culture wars of nineteenth-century France: secularism versus religion, logic versus faith, progress versus tradition, citizens versus subjects, and so on.
In short, debates about positivism among French music critics were never just about music. The broader tension between materialism and idealism, and the positivist movement that emerged out of this tension, was a far-reaching and versatile one, a framework for organizing observations that could be employed in countless fields and disciplines. That is why music critics not only kept abreast of philosophy and aesthetics but also actively participated in it—in their journalistic writings and in more specialized books and treatises. As the “scientific spirit” inflected other fields of inquiry throughout the nineteenth century, music criticism served as a sort of last defense of traditional idealism. Music was the standard by which critics evaluated new developments, like positivism, in intellectual culture.
The cultural and political ramifications of positivism were evident from the very start of the movement, in the activities of Auguste Comte, a philosopher active during the religious upheavals of the Restoration and the waxing and waning of Catholicism as a force for social organization in the first decades of the nineteenth century. His student years at the École Polytechnique—an institution one contemporaneous observer accused of “preserving revolutionary ideals and of passing them on to students who have carried on an all-too-faithful tradition of republicanism and impiety” (Spitzer 1987, 44)—coincided with Louis XVIII’s decrees requiring clerical governance at nearly every level of administration of the University of Paris, undoing the state control of the institution that had been enacted in the wake of the French Revolution. Even as a student, Comte was already disdainful of principles decreed arbitrarily, either by a higher power or by common consent of the people. After being expelled from the École Polytechnique for political agitation, Comte came to view his philosophical mission as establishing order in an era of political turmoil and social upheaval. In philosophy as well as politics, Comte’s belief in a natural order governed by discoverable laws led him naturally to a belief in a meritocratic social order led by an intellectual elite. Comte thus turned to the rigor of science, which he described as “the only philosophy by which the revolution can be brought to a close,” as a moral as well as intellectual guide (Comte 1851, 274). This is the doctrine that came to be known as positivism, which Comte claimed was the only school of thought not founded on arbitrary decree:
No previous philosophy was able to conceive of order except as fixed: this renders it completely inapplicable to modern politics. The positivist spirit, which alone rejects the absolute without introducing the arbitrary, thus offers the only notion of order appropriate to our progressive civilization. It provides a sturdy foundation while giving it an objective quality according to the universal dogma of invariable natural laws, which in this sense prohibits all subjective digressions.
As Mary Pickering writes, Comte did not advocate for pure empiricism; he recognized the need for “absolute” guiding principles (Pickering 2009, 3). But Comte distinguished himself from the “metaphysical” tradition (Comte’s term) of science by “recognizing the impossibility [of discovering] the origin and destination of the universe and understanding the secret causes of phenomena.” Comte wished to concentrate instead on “real laws”—that is, observable phenomena—that would aid in the “necessary subordination of ideality to reality, which the empire of the absolute has until now been preventing” (Comte 1907, 319). Turning away from “absolute truth,” Comte sought to focus the human sciences, both natural and social, on “relative truth,” the kind that derives from relating observable phenomena to each other. As he wrote in his Système de politique positive, “Substituting the relative for the absolute everywhere, returning all to the human realm, [positivism] will limit the study of truth to that which will cultivate the good and the beautiful” (Comte 1851, 301). In other words, the only legitimate conception of truth was one that was available to the senses and confirmed through positivistic verification.
What was true of the laws of society and of nature was also true for the laws of art. Comte claimed positivism was not only amenable to but also necessary for art, which since the Middle Ages “has searched vainly for general guidance and a worthy end” (Comte 1851, 274).4 This guidance, for Comte, was to come from the truths of positivism. To be sure, Comte was aware that the rationalism and objectivity of science seemed incompatible with the creative impulses of artists; he wrote that “nothing is more contrary to the fine arts than narrow-mindedness, an overly analytical approach, and the abuse of reason” (Comte 1907, 291). But since art seeks to portray the world in a state of perfection, as Comte argued, art requires the kind of knowledge of the world that only positivism makes available. “Our faculties of representation and expression, he wrote, “are necessarily subordinate to our cognitive and rational functions [nos fonctions de conception et de combinaison]. This law is fixed and immutable, and has never been subject to real change” (293).
For Comte, this delicate balance between our rational and aesthetic faculties was in part a reaction to the Romantic culture of his era. Contrary to the fantastical, escapist ethos of Romanticism, Comte felt that the role of positivism was to keep art rooted in the real world, to aid in the betterment of reality rather than to enchant us with fanciful visions of a transcendent one. “From Homer to Corneille,” he wrote, “all eminent artistic geniuses had always conceived of art as enriching human life, and in turn improving it, but never with the need to direct it” (Comte 1907, 293). This tradition, Comte suggested, had been lost in the “mental and moral anarchy” of post-Revolutionary France (293). Comte thus established two extremes between which art must maintain equilibrium. Indulging in creative expression risks reducing art to “purely sensual enchantment,” while subordinating the aesthetic to rational principles threatens to reduce art to “technical exercises”; either extreme ignores the “moral” aspect of art that is its true purpose (297).5 “Art always consists of an ideal representation of that which exists,” Comte concluded, “aiming to cultivate our intuition of perfection. Its domain is thus as vast as that of science” (282–283).6
While Comte thus laid the groundwork for positivism as an aesthetic doctrine as much as a scientific one, the artistic implications of positivism received relatively little attention in his writings. He authored individual books on astronomy and physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology, as well as sociology, history, and general philosophy, all from the perspective of positivism, but he did not write any major books devoted solely to positivist aesthetics. Positivism was brought to bear on art more thoroughly by the philosopher widely viewed as Comte’s most prominent successor: Hippolyte Taine (1829–1893). An alumnus of the Sorbonne, Taine began his philosophical career focusing primarily on matters of sociology and history, but around mid-century he widened the scope of his interests to include literature and the arts. In a series of treatises written in the 1850s and 1860s, Taine expanded the implications of Comtean positivism to encompass not only what the social function of art ought to be but also how the history of art unfolds, how artists come to be, and how art is to be understood as a reflection of its time and place.
Broadly speaking, Taine viewed artworks as the sum of their creator’s social and historical circumstances. He famously singled out three factors in particular as the proper starting points for a true understanding of art: the artist’s national and ethnic background (what Taine referred to as “race”), his or her cultural and social background (“milieu”), and his or her place in history (“moment”). In his Philosophie de l’art, he writes that since any artwork is the product of an artist, the former necessarily bears the mark of the latter; and since any artist is fundamentally a member of some broader group of artists—a group defined by style, genre, school, generation, and so on—it similarly follows that any one artist necessarily bears the mark of the group; and, finally, since any group of artists is fundamentally a member of a specific historical and cultural moment, it follows that the group necessarily bears the mark of its historical moment (Taine 1872, 13). Taine writes:
This group of artists is itself a part of a broader entity that is the world that surrounds them, and whose tastes are the same as theirs. For the state of mind and of mores is the same for the public as it is for artists; they are not isolated men. It is their voice alone that we hear today, centuries later; but beneath this ringing voice that calls to us, we discern a murmur and, like a vast and muffled din, the great, infinite, and varied voice of the people who sang in unison around them. These artists achieved their greatness only through this harmony. (Taine 1872, 9)7
By treating artists and the public equally as representatives of their historical time and place, Taine was effectively “demystifying” artists, treating them not as mysterious, Romanticized demigods but as human beings, subject to the same social circumstances as anyone else. For the purpose of understanding history, historians should thus not treat artists as fundamentally different from lowly laymen. As he put it in Philosophie de l’art: “We thus propose this rule: that in order to understand a work of art, an artist, or a group of artists, one must recreate exactly the general state of mind and morals of the time to which they belong” (13).8
This, in turn, implied that art could be understood exclusively in human terms, without recourse to universal or absolute standards of beauty. And freedom from such grand, unifying abstractions ultimately meant that one could discover concrete, quantifiable factors explaining an artwork’s creation and providing a standard by which its value could be measured. “The modern method I attempt to follow,” Taine writes, “and which we first see in all of the moral sciences, consists of nothing more than considering human works, and in particular works of art, as facts and products whose characteristics one must discern and whose origins one must seek” (Taine 1872, 20).9 As was the case with Comte, Taine’s determination to treat art as an objective, empirically observable phenomenon (he once claimed that “beauty is a fixed relation between variables, what mathematicians call a function”) ran counter to the Romanticized conception of art, and especially of music, of his own time (Wolfenstein 1944, 339n28).
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that music critics would be among the most vehement denouncers of positivism. By the end of the nineteenth century, music was seen as one of the last art forms, and possibly among the last of any field of human endeavor, that could not be reduced to the merely material and observable. Music’s incorporeal nature, coupled with the mysterious directness of its appeal, made it the perfect counter to the increasingly physical conception of the world. Bolstered by the prestige bestowed on it by Romantic philosophers (Schopenhauer: “music is also wholly independent of the appearing world, simply ignoring it, so that it could in a sense still exist even if there was no world at all”) French critics worked to preserve the inscrutable nature of music, and to protect it from the encroachment of positivism (Schopenhauer 1859, 285).
This defense against positivism took several forms, but broadly speaking there were two areas of music where positivism was seen as a threat. The first concerned the analysis of music: how music’s “meaning” is ascertained, in what features of a composition this meaning is to be found, and whether music’s import could be analyzed or verbalized at all. The second area concerned the history of music, and whether the “greatness” of composers could be viewed as the result of specifiable historical circumstances rather than innate, ultimately unanalyzable talent.
The first concern—that of what and how music means—had of course been the subject of aesthetic debate for centuries. Up until the nineteenth century, that debate was (very broadly speaking) waged, on the one hand, between performers, composers, and listeners with actual firsthand experience with music-making, and who never needed any convincing of music’s expressive or communicative ability, and, on the other hand, philosophers, casually listening critics, and other onlookers intrigued or baffled by music’s intangible nature. As Lydia Goehr has written, the nineteenth century is often seen as a turning point in this debate, as it was for the most part then that philosophers became more sympathetic to the musician’s view and were more receptive to the possibility that the abstraction of music (especially instrumental music) needn’t be considered a weakness, and perhaps was even its strength (Goehr 2007). But it would be more accurate to describe the nineteenth century as a stalemate rather than a turning point, because the growing conviction among aestheticians that music could express the infinite was exactly matched in science by the growing knowledge of the physical properties of sound. It is in the nineteenth century that both the “idealist” view of music as having limitless expressive content and the “materialist” view of music as a purely physical and acoustic phenomenon reached their respective heights. The two sides were mutually reinforcing, each spurring on the other. As Jules Combarieu put it in an 1894 article on music and poetry, critics of his era were caught within an ideological battle between “scientific materialism and metaphysics,” which he claimed represented “the two most opposing tendencies of the human mind”:
One side views the language of sound as a kind of superior language acting not only our sensibility and imagination but also revealing to the mind a glimpse of inaccessible truth; the other side is inclined toward the basest animal instincts and approaches music with brutal empiricism and psychology. (Combarieu 1894, 2)
That is, faith in empiricism led some critics to focus on the autonomic rather than the cognitive responses to musical stimuli. “In order to experience the pleasure [of music],” the philosopher Charles Beauquier wrote, “artistic education is not necessary; the nervous system suffices” (Beauquier 1865, 21). Beauquier did not deny that music has the ability to appeal to the mind, but it does so only as a by-product of sensory stimulation. The expressive content that the mind perceives in music (what he called “sentiments”) ultimately depends on “physical sensation,” and that “their substance, their essence—and it is this that distinguishes sentiments from pure ideas—is nothing but organic activity modified in different ways by hearing, imagination, and memory” (75).10 Additionally, the purely physiological aspect of the aesthetic experience was seen as a symptom of modern decadence, something from which music needed to be protected. As the critic Henri Blanchard wrote:
the art of music has served as a conduit to man for glorifying the Eternal, for celebrating the splendor of religion; and if, day by day, sensualism causes it to degenerate into assorted songs, fantasias, and arrangements, it takes but a spark to revive it, to restore its patriotism, and to see it produce such beautiful national hymns as la Marseillaise and the Chant du départ, which have brought back to our times the greatness that used to be attributed to music in antiquity. (Blanchard 1839, 54)11
This comes from a review in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris of Carl Maria von Weber’s Leyer und Schwert, a setting of patriotic German poems by Theodor Körner, inspired by the poet’s service as a soldier in the German War of Liberation. Blanchard was keenly aware that Weber’s music, which closely mimics the poetry’s vivid natural and militaristic imagery, was vulnerable to criticisms that visually descriptive music appealed more to the rational mind than to the emotions. Blanchard moved quickly to preempt those who (he imagined) would equate Weber with a “Flemish painter”:
No, my positivist sirs; without descending into the nonsense of descriptive music, Weber discovered how to produce by means of a simple piano accompaniment all the effects you have just described, at least for those with refined ears, impeccable intelligence, and people blessed with the sixth sense that is the musical soul.
As observed earlier, “positivist” was Blanchard’s default pejorative for those who were deaf to music’s abstract, idealized content.
Another threat to that idealized content was the increasing concern among nineteenth-century critics that the impact of music was too easily attributable to technical, “formal” features of composition. Recall that this is what Chouquet criticized in Meyerbeer: the composer’s idiosyncratic orchestration and tone color, while novel and often riveting, were too transparently the result of calculation and craft. For French critics, the increasing sophistication of compositional means, as well as of analytical methods on the part of critics, were lauded only as long as they did not overshadow the genuinely expressive—which is to say intuitive—content that was still thought to be music’s fundamental goal. As François-Joseph Fétis, the very founder of French music criticism, wrote of Wagner’s “leitmotif system” in 1852:
this method, which might have been conceived out of necessity given the subject, loses all its merit if it becomes a formula. Monotony would be inevitable in a score built on this system, and emotion would be weakened all the more since the effect is predetermined. Let us not forget that art cannot be born of intelligence alone: art requires the aid of sensibility in order to put imagination into practice; it is imagination, not conception, that makes beautiful works of art. (Fétis 1852, 495)
That a prolific music theorist like Fétis, author of several treatises on harmony and tonality, would nonetheless caution against the excesses of compositional “systems” demonstrates how much even the most advanced French criticism in the nineteenth century remained indebted and loyal to traditional notions of music’s idealist nature.
All these concerns about the encroachment of positivism can be sampled in the writings of Edmond Hippeau, founder of the journal La renaissance musicale. Underlying Hippeau’s writings was the same determination as surveyed earlier to protect the sanctity of the musical experience. As one of the most active participants in the French Wagner craze of the late nineteenth century, for example, Hippeau parroted Fétis’s fear that Wagner’s rationalizing of compositional beliefs into a body of principles and doctrines (or what the French perceived as such, at any rate) was a threat to artistic authenticity:
The most serious reproach one could make of Wagner is not that he sought new means to achieve dramatic truth in opera. … What one must criticize in him is precisely his systematic mind: he believed he could turn his particular point of view, his unique conception, into an absolute doctrine. (Hippeau 1883b, 67)
Rejecting the notion of aesthetic systems, Hippeau sought to locate the value of Wagner’s music elsewhere, in that which could not be measured, precisely articulated, or even satisfactorily explained: the spiritual. (It is not surprising that Hippeau’s comment comes from a book on Parsifal, the opera to which like-minded critics turned when it became necessary to assert the primacy of the spiritual over the human in Wagner’s music.) Hippeau also wrote several books on Berlioz, whom Hippeau considered along with Wagner to be the standard-bearer of contemporary music. These books include Berlioz intime d’après des documents nouveaux (1883) and Berlioz et son temps (1890), in which the defense of Berlioz’s legacy against the positivist threat is a recurring theme.
In the preface to Berlioz intime, Hippeau writes that the book was intended not as a biography but as an objective exegesis of facts and details about Berlioz’s life, culled from all manner of data: over the course of the book Hippeau cites not only Berlioz’s own writings and correspondences but also almanacs, census reports, and geological and geographical studies of the regions in which Berlioz lived. “I would not like to be accused of immodesty,” Hippeau writes, “and I hesitate to acknowledge the approach which seems to me to best describe the spirit with which I undertook this project: I wanted to write a purely scientific work” (Hippeau 1883a, 3–4). The reason for this hesitation, he goes on to explain, is that this “experimental methodology” inevitably steered Hippeau onto the terrain of positivism. A considerable portion of the book’s preface is thus devoted not to Berlioz but to Taine. (An excerpt of this discussion had also been published in three installments the year before, in La renaissance musicale, under the title “The Positivist Aesthetic” [Hippeau 1882]). Hippeau acknowledges some sympathy with Taine, agreeing, for instance, that “beneath a person’s exterior hides an interior person, and [that] the former is nothing but a manifestation of the second”; a sufficiently trained historian should therefore be “capable of rediscovering beneath each ornament of a structure, each feature of a painting, or each sentence of a text, a particular sentiment from which the ornament, the feature, and the sentence originate” (Hippeau 1883a, 5–6).
But Hippeau was no positivist. The previous point, he writes, is where he and Taine part ways. Unlike Hippeau, Taine sought beneath the exterior, visible features of artworks and artists “a general state of mind, certain general patterns of thought and feeling” (Hippeau 1883a, 6). According to the positivist doctrine, these general states are in turn the result of historical and social circumstances—the race, time, and milieu, as noted here. Hippeau, on the other hand, “[did] not want to know if there are general laws directing the human mind, races, societies, all of humanity” (18). The problem with positivism was not simply whether such knowledge was even possible (though Hippeau does express skepticism on this) but, rather, that these general laws, if they did indeed exist, would simply serve to make Berlioz prototypical. Hippeau, by contrast, was more interested in understanding how Berlioz was atypical. He wanted to discover not how Berlioz was a product of his times but, conversely, how Berlioz stood out from those who were born into the same conditions and circumstances. While conceding that one must not “neglect to consider [Berlioz’s psychology] in its close relation to the mores and public life of his era and to compare this era to those that preceded and followed it,” Hippeau cautioned that one must also not “neglect the purely psychological part of the subject and fail to search out the origins, the raison d’être, of musical dispositions that drove Berlioz to his artistic career, where, despite obstacles, he achieved the highest rank” (19).
Hippeau’s book is thus as much about the limitations of positivism in understanding music history as it is a study of Berlioz. The very title of the work, with its paradoxical claim to offer an “intimate” look at Berlioz via documents and other external data, encapsulates the shoals that Hippeau was attempting to navigate: the tension between composers and their historical contexts. Along with its follow-up study, Berlioz et son temps (whose title, one might note, also addresses the same binary dilemma), Hippeau’s book is a fascinating document of the author’s conflicted relationship to positivism, and it reveals what was at stake for music in the positivist movement toward the end of the nineteenth century.
It is worth highlighting the many points of overlap between Hippeau and Taine. After all, Hippeau did not underestimate the importance of gaging the “moral temperature” (Taine’s phrase) of a historical era, and in fact, Hippeau consistently praises Taine’s ability to capture an era’s prevailing ethos. Certainly Hippeau does not hesitate to borrow Taine’s characterizations of French culture in the nineteenth century when discussing Berlioz’s origins. The first chapter of Hippeau’s book takes as its point of departure the sense of cultural and moral malady that Taine attributed to France following the July Revolution and which both Taine and Hippeau claimed pervaded the entire French generation of the 1830s. Hippeau even writes that the young Berlioz fits fairly well Taine’s description of the era’s most prominent artists, at least in literature—Alexandre Dumas père, Victor Hugo, and so on (Hippeau 1883a, 54–55). But Hippeau notes that the literary character of the era, which does appear to be encapsulated by this small group of writers, does not correlate well with the tremendous variety of musical styles of the same era:
[I]n the music of this century, there are so many diverse genres that it would be difficult to determine which ones corresponded exactly to the aspirations of the modern René [from Chateaubriand’s René] or Werther [from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther]. Is it the zeal of Rossini, the elegant coquetry of Auber, the severity and power of Meyerbeer and Halévy, the gaiety and vivacity of Boïeldieu, the somber majesty of Beethoven, the fantasy and poetry of Wagner and Schumann, the impetuous audacity of Berlioz and Wagner? (Hippeau 1883a, 55)13
In other words, positivism may be a useful way to grasp the prevailing trends of an era’s art, but it is ill-suited to eras where no single trend dominates. Put another way, if we accept Taine’s premise that artists of the 1830s were all symptomatic of Romantic decadence, then they are all in a sense “historically equivalent” to each other; and this only serves to obscure the considerable differences between them. A second problem with a positivist rendering of the era is that Taine cannot explain why some figures become artists while others belonging to the same era, subject to the same circumstances, do not. In both cases, positivism erases individuality. “The study of epochs,” Hippeau writes, “far from highlighting the persona of the artist, thinker, writer, or poet, necessarily causes him to disappear” (Hippeau 1883a, 9).
Conversely, if we grant that not all these musical styles typified the ethos of the 1830s equally, then this calls into question the validity of the general “moral temperature” with which positivists characterize the era. Hippeau writes: “He [Taine] assumes there is only one type of art in any given era. He begins with a definition and forces everything to fit within it” (Hippeau 1883a, 11). Indeed, as Hippeau points out, the dominant genre in France in the 1830s and ’40s was grand opera, a genre whose opulence and grandiosity seem antithetical to the growing tide of populist unrest that came to a head in 1848. Taine’s positivist methodology, Hippeau suggests, cannot explain “the profound contradiction between the violent aspirations of the men of this generation and their musical education, that is to say the taste of the public” (59). Hippeau goes on to note that, at a time when so many listeners were inclined toward Rossini, Berlioz was attracted to Beethoven, and that it was Beethoven’s musical language, not Rossini’s, that gave musical voice to the malaise and eventual upheaval of the July Monarchy. In fact, Hippeau writes that Berlioz’s music was powerless to express his era’s “moral temperature” because, prior to the Beethovenian influence in France, music in general was not yet capable of fully speaking the language of “passion and emotion” (55–56).
Ultimately, Hippeau finds that the problem of positivism is more than simply failing to capture the nuances of history. More fundamentally, it is a self-refuting doctrine. Taine purports to explain the origins of artworks without recourse to abstract concepts like “genius” or “divine inspiration”; this he accomplishes by placing the emphasis on the observable phenomena of human activity. But since Taine considers the individual to be little more than a conduit of values or morals learned from his or her historical moment, he has simply replaced the abstract inspiration of artists with the abstract inspiration of artists’ eras (Hippeau 1882, 115). This, Hippeau suggests, devolves into circular reasoning: the actions of an individual are to be explained by race, milieu, and moment; but the nature of an era’s race, milieu, and moment can only be determined by observing the actions of individuals (125). Causes are thus indistinguishable from effects; the “moral temperature” of a historical moment can only be asserted, not explained. Far from practicing empirical observation of concrete phenomena, then, positivism relies on abstractions and generalizations. It amounts, in Hippeau’s words, to “pure metaphysics” (Hippeau 1883a, 7).
For these reasons, Hippeau makes clear in the preface to Berlioz intime his intention “to study particular facts, without any preconceived theory” (17). Relying on notions of an era’s prevailing ethos might be a practical necessity for a historian, but one should not conflate the era with the ethos:
In wanting to define the moral state of the generations who entered the scene at the start of the First Empire, or, before that, the Revolution, we may find ourselves relying on classifications, abstractions, and generalizations, and lose sight of Berlioz by failing to consider anything outside a milieu or moral climate. The other extreme would be to impose on him our ideas, our beliefs, our sentiments, our habits. We will keep ourselves from going too far in either direction; we will place ourselves in Berlioz’s time; we will pretend for a moment that we were born in his time; but we will not claim to have said everything when we reconstruct his era. We must observe; but Berlioz will be our point of departure as well as the destination.
Hippeau thus claims to focus his study not on the historical circumstances of Berlioz but on “the individual”—Berlioz himself (18). Taine may have purported to direct his study of artists inward in order to discover the “psychology” behind artworks, but this paradoxically led him to observations about historical eras, peoples, and cultures. By contrast, Hippeau wanted this inward study to remain inward, to arrive at “an exact understanding of a person, of his character and temperament, of his passions and his genius” (19–20). This is the true meaning of Hippeau’s title: Berlioz intime. Such an approach achieves in practice what the positivists claimed in theory. Since it is the individual, not the milieu, that gives works of art their distinctiveness, and that it is individuals rather than “moral temperatures” that should be the object of the historian’s study, a truly analytical approach to the history of art should be founded on observation—specifically observation of the infinite variety of individuals in a given time and place.
The reluctance to adumbrate general laws or abstract forces guiding Berlioz’s development leads Hippeau to resist the notion of compositional principles or doctrines, just as Fétis had done. Hippeau insists at several points that Berlioz never had a “system,” which is to say he never relied on purely technical craft in place of inspiration: “it seems that reason, or the systematic spirit, plays no part [in Berlioz’s music] … the doctrine of expression did not present itself to his mind like a law codified article by article, but it imposed itself on his thinking like a truth requiring no proof nor any formula” (Hippeau 1890, 146–148). In defiance of the “progressive” spirit with which science and materialism were associated, Hippeau writes: “Progress consists in no longer seeking to measure art against an a priori conception, an ideal type, an abstract definition of truth, beauty, and goodness” (Hippeau 1883a, 8). Even as he endeavored to keep Berlioz’s music beyond the reach of empirical observation, then, Hippeau was equally determined not to rely on Platonic notions of idealism. Hippeau opted for the elusive middle ground between the two, where the greatness of Berlioz’s music was palpable but essentially mysterious.
Hippeau thus writes in a brief but illuminating passage that there are really two Berliozes for the historian to consider: Berlioz “the man” and Berlioz “the artist,” who “appear one and the same to us, for we intuit the aspirations of the latter when we study the character and great passions of the former” (Hippeau 1883a, 60–61).15 What this seems to suggest is that “the man” is the Berlioz whose actions historians can observe and who they can therefore understand, while “the artist” is the Berlioz driven by intangible things like “inspiration” and “genius” and whom historians can only ever know indirectly or incompletely. Hippeau writes that this notion of two Berliozes is to be taken both literally and metaphorically. On the one hand, Hippeau does really believe that only Berlioz “the man” is available to objective historical analysis of the kind positivists purport to offer. On the other hand, Berlioz “the man” and Berlioz “the artist” are effectively extensions of the same tensions Leblais educed as manifestations of materialism and spiritualism, as noted at the start of this chapter: “reason and imagination, science and poetry, the objective and the subjective,” and so on. Like Leblais’s binarisms, Hippeau’s two Berliozes symbolize the two axes of French culture.
Hippeau makes clear that these two Berliozes were not in conflict with each other, residing as they did in the same person. Thus positivism cannot even make the more modest claim to analyze simply one side of a dual personality. The synthesis of realism and idealism, Hippeau claims, was fundamentally a driving force of Berlioz’s music; neither one is an adequate characterization of Berlioz without the other. “One could even say,” Hippeau concludes, “that the one and the other are merged: Berlioz’s life affirms, with the same authenticity as his works, this spirit, which, far from pulling him in two different directions, perpetually mixed the ideal with reality” (Hippeau 1883a, 60–61).16
Readers familiar with the history of musicology in the English-speaking world may know that positivism has been a target of music critics more recently than the late nineteenth century. In his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, Joseph Kerman offered a landmark critique of Anglo-American musical scholarship in the twentieth century and its preoccupation with “objective” projects like manuscript authentication, Urtext editions, the compiling of composers’ complete oeuvres, and the like. This fixation with raw data, facts, and other empirical research, self-consciously modeled after the “neopositivist” school discussed at the start of this chapter (especially the writings of Hempel) stopped short of what Kerman famously called “critical” engagement with music—“interest in music as an object of delight” (Kerman 1985, 32). He contrasted this with nineteenth-century musicologists who openly acknowledged and embraced the aesthetic, nationalist, religious, or otherwise ideological agendas informing their work. (The works cited throughout this chapter are characteristic examples.) Kerman suggests that twentieth-century musicologists are no less aesthetically and ideologically attached to the objects of their study than their predecessors were, but they have become coy about this “subjective” aspect of their research, assuming instead a positivist stance (or posture) of objectivity, “invoked especially by those who without understanding science very well would like to attach the term ‘scientific’ to thought about music” (31).
While the positivism Kerman was attacking was not quite the positivism of the nineteenth century (that was one of his primary complaints), a brief comparison of the two will help illustrate what made nineteenth-century positivism and its musical backlash unique. The positivism Kerman was targeting was a “defensive” positivism, a retrenchment among musicologists in reaction to the messy subjectivity of Romanticism. In nineteenth-century France, the situation was exactly the reverse: positivism was perceived as a threat to the idealism of traditional musical aesthetics. Whereas Kerman advocated for a kind of critical engagement in which facts and data contributed to aesthetic insight, French critics of the nineteenth century took issue with positivism precisely because they believed aesthetic insight ought to come from something higher or more ideal than “mere” fact. The essential conflict of positivism as French critics perceived it was not between fact and aesthetics but, rather, between fact and truth, reality and ideality, humanity and spirituality.
One should not be misled by the binary manner in which the critics surveyed here framed the issue of positivism. Though Leblais, for one, presented the various incarnations of materialism and spiritualism as a series of oppositions, his conception of French intellectual culture was not as black and white as all that. For example, Leblais writes that Satan and God, in Christianity, do not simply refer to divine entities; they also serve as symbols for “Matter and Mind” (Satan being matter, God being mind), or even for “World and Man” (Satan being the analogy to worldliness, and man, insofar as he can rise above mere worldliness, being the analogy to God) (Leblais 1865, 21). Consequently, “Satan” and “God” are not just abstract concepts; they are also embodied in real, concrete things. By that token, religion necessarily has a materialist component.
Conversely, the laws of science, even though they govern the behavior of physical bodies, are nothing if not abstract ideals, since the very fact that they are “laws” means they are universally true and in that sense independent of any particular, real instance. Consequently, science is not exclusively materialist. Positivism, by extension, was not straightforwardly the opposite of idealism, any more than spiritualism was straightforwardly the opposite of realism. Both terms existed on a spectrum of meaning. Indeed, not even Taine was as materialist as his detractors suggested. As Martha Wolfenstein writes, the “central problem” of Taine’s aesthetics was “whether we can reconcile a universal standard of value with the historical variations of art and taste,” and that Taine offered different answers to this question at different points in his career (Wolfenstein 1944, 332). In his later writings, Taine did eventually come to believe, or at least admit the possibility, that a fixed standard of beauty could be extracted from artworks across diverse eras. This “reconciliation” with idealism culminated in one of his most influential works, De l’idéal dans l’art (1874).
As more and more French intellectuals contemplated the nuances of materialism and spiritualism, and more attention was paid to their many points of overlap, French literature on this topic came to rely on increasingly confusing terminology to explain the phenomenon. At one point, Leblais writes that throughout history there have been not only spiritualist metaphysics but also materialist metaphysics (Leblais 1865, 20). In an overview of French philosophy written in 1896, Jules Lachelier had to resort to such seemingly paradoxical phrases as “materialistic idealism” and “spiritualistic realism,” as these were the only ways to describe the myriad permutations that resulted when materialism and spiritualism interacted (Lachelier 1896, 101–102).
The materialism–spiritualism duality, in other words, was a nuanced spectrum within which intellectuals placed French culture, as well as within which music critics placed music. Even those who purported to reject the bifurcation of materialism and spiritualism could not help but feel the tug from one pole or the other. The very attempt to find a middle ground along that spectrum indicates that the spectrum was the primary conceptual framework by which French intellectuals made sense of the world around them; and as we’ve seen here, musical aesthetics and music criticism played an important role in their attempt to do so.
Translations from French are mine except where indicated. For longer quotations, as well as for quotations where a certain degree of creativity was required to render the passage into English, I have included the original French in the endnotes. On occasion, for single words or short phrases, I’ve included the original in the body of the text, in brackets.