- Series: California Studies in 20th-Century Music (Book 16)
- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press (May 25, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0520275306
- ISBN-13: 978-0520275300
For the three forces competing for political authority in France during
World War II, music became the site of a cultural battle that reflected
the war itself. German occupying authorities promoted German music at
the expense of French, while the Vichy administration pursued projects
of national renewal through culture. Meanwhile, Resistance networks
gradually formed to combat German propaganda while eyeing Vichy’s
efforts with suspicion. In The Musical Legacy of Wartime France,
Leslie A. Sprout explores how each of these forces influenced the
composition, performance, and reception of five well-known works: the
secret Resistance songs of Francis Poulenc and those of Arthur Honegger;
Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner of war camp; Maurice DuruflĂ©’s Requiem, one of sixty-five pieces commissioned by Vichy between 1940 and 1944; and Igor Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes,
which was met at its 1945 Paris premiere with protests that prefigured
the aesthetic debates of the early Cold War. Sprout examines not only
how these pieces were created and disseminated during and just after the
war, but also how and why we still associate these pieces with the
stories we tell—in textbooks, program notes, liner notes, historical
monographs, and biographies—about music, France, and World War II.
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