Memory, History, and Operatic Meaning in Wartime and Postwar France
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Music
First Advisor
Kreuzer, Gundula
Abstract
Opera held a central position in French culture during the German occupation (1940–1944) and in the decades of the postwar. In this dissertation I explore how French operas were understood to have meaning during and after the war, stretching to the early 1960s, and focusing in particular on the place of the past—as memories, and as histories—in these meaning-making processes. I term the operas that I study an “arrière-garde,” in contrast to the avant-garde, signaling not so much their stylistic choices as their orientation towards an unstable, destructive past that threatened to overwhelm the present. The first chapter surveys the elliptical occupation-era writings of the music critic Pierre Lalo (1866–1943), arguing that he employed operas and their histories as a set of memories and myths, and that his writings demonstrate how to interpret postwar operas with historical stories as politically engaged in the present. Drawing on the insights of the first chapter, and examining production materials, critical reception, and the ideas of postwar French theorists, I turn to a set of close interpretations of operas in the following chapters. The second chapter examines Darius Milhaud’s Bolivar (1950), written in exile during the war and premiered afterwards in Paris as a signal of French artistic recovery. Milhaud clearly intended the opera as a celebratory invocation of the liberation of France, but audiences understood its many allusions to illustrious moments in French history as commenting on the contemporaneous colonial war in Indochina, and the opera was caught up in a critical querelle. The third chapter argues that Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) helped its postwar audiences process the psychological effects of the occupation. Drawing on theories of trauma, I discuss how the opera engages with clinical therapeutics, and with practices of testifying and witnessing. I position the character of Mère Marie in particular as a survivant, or survivor. The fourth chapter analyzes Henri Tomasi’s one-act Le Silence de la mer (1960), a piece derived from a clandestine, occupation-era novel that considers the places of music and of silence in resistance. Before the opera’s radio premiere the French government banned the piece for its connections to opposition to the colonial war in Algeria, but later broadcast it widely, apparently to promote Franco-German rapprochement. This dissertation thus engages with a broad collection of postwar contexts, explores a little-studied corpus of mid-century French compositions, and offers a novel perspective of postwar French music as insistently political within a troubled historical moment.
Recommended Citation
Stewart, Zachary Lee Nazar, "Memory, History, and Operatic Meaning in Wartime and Postwar France" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1319.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1319
