Prospects

In an article titled “De la symphonie moderne et de son avenir” (On the modern symphony and its future), which appeared in La Revue et gazette musicale in June 1870, the progressive critic Ives Kéramzer forecasted a bright future for the symphony in France: the nation's young composers would take up the genre handed down from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, and radically revitalize it. “The classical manner has said its final word,” he declared, “a new formula must be sought.” This was a bold prediction for the time. Quite apart from the specifics of Kéramzer's vision, his title alone likely seemed audacious to many readers, who would have seen little around them to indicate that any sort of symphony had much of a future in France. Most would have known nothing of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century symphonies by François-Joseph Gossec, Simon Leduc, Étienne Méhul, Luigi Cherubini, and Ferdinand Hérold, and few would have remembered those of Georges Onslow. Berlioz had yet to become popular, and the excellent symphonies Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and Bizet had composed in the 1850s either remained entirely unknown or had been largely forgotten. Parisians could hear orchestral music at the subscription-only Société des concerts du Conservatoire and at Jules Pasdeloup's more accessible Concerts populaires, though these organizations focused overwhelmingly on Germanic classics, and when they did program recent French music, audiences for the most part cared little for it.