SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
complex and unstable
PARIS AND MUSIC
The nature of Paris is so complex and unstable that one feels it is presumptuous to try to define it. It is a city so highly-strung, so ingrained with fickleness, and so changeable in its tastes, that a book that truly describes it at the moment it is written is no longer accurate by the time it is published. And then, there is not only one Paris; there are two or three Parises–fashionable Paris, middle-class Paris, intellectual Paris, vulgar Paris–all living side by side, but intermingling very little. If you do not know the little towns within the great Town, you cannot know the strong and often inconsistent life of this great organism as a whole.
If one wishes to get an idea of the musical life of Paris, one must take into account the variety of its centres and the perpetual flow of its thought–a thought which never stops, but is always over-shooting the goal for which it seemed bound. This incessant change of opinion is scornfully called «fashion» by the foreigner. And there is, without doubt, in the artistic aristocracy of Paris, as in all great towns, a herd of idle people on the watch for new fashions–in art, as well as in dress–who wish to single out certain of them for no serious reason at all. But, in spite of their pretensions, they have only an infinitesimal share in the changes of artistic taste. The origin of these changes is in the Parisian brain itself–a brain that is quick and feverish, always working, greedy of knowledge, easily tired, grasping to-day the splendours of a work, seeing to-morrow its defects, building up reputations as rapidly as it pulls them down, and yet, in spite of all its apparent caprices, always logical and sincere. It has its momentary infatuations and dislikes, but no lasting prejudices; and, by its curiosity, its absolute liberty, and its very French habit of criticising everything, it is a marvellous barometer, sensitive to all the hidden currents of thought in the soul of the West, and often indicating, months in advance, the variations and disturbances of the artistic and political world.
And this barometer is registering what is happening just now in the world of music, where a movement has been making itself felt in France for several years, whose effect other nations–perhaps more musical nations–will not feel till later. For the nations that have the strongest artistic traditions are not necessarily those that are likely to develop a new art. To do that one must have a virgin soil and spirits untrammelled by a heritage from the past. In 1870 no one had a lighter heritage to bear than French musicians; for the past had been forgotten, and such a thing as real musical education did not exist.
this was: Complex And Unstable
go to next chapter: musical weakness
