In 1923, Émile Vuillermoz published his book Musiques d'aujourd'hui, prefaced by his teacher Gabriel Fauré, with Éditions Crès et Cie. The printing of the book was completed on 15 February 1923 (as indicated on its last page) and it was distributed during the following weeks; it attracted attention from the musical and intellectual milieu from the time of its publication, as inferred by Georges Auric's review for Les Nouvelles littéraires dated 10 March 1923. Its content would have been broadly familiar to Auric and his contemporaries, since it was essentially a compilation of critical texts that had already been published in Le Temps and other newspapers between 1920 and 1922 (see Table 12.1).

The aim of this chapter is to contextualise and analyse Vuillermoz's exegetical undertaking in Musiques d'aujourd'hui. The history of early twentiethcentury French music has been taught in such a way that Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are generally seen as occupying the higher echelons of musical achievement. Notwithstanding their musical qualities, the reasons for this situation are also based on a lengthy process of canon formation. This practice, as with every artistic canon, presupposes a constant effort by critics to assert artistic value and ensure an institutional presence that reflects a form of cultural capital (to adopt Bourdieu's concept).

In light of this, the role that some canonisers were driven to play in the process of ascribing value deserves close scrutiny. Vuillermoz is a significant example from the musical field of the first half of the twentieth century, writing on music until shortly before his death in 1960, with his last works on Debussy and Fauré. Critical studies of how France's musical canon was discursively elaborated during the interwar period have been undertaken in recent years by several colleagues whose work is included in this book. I propose to adopt a more focused view of this process here in relation to the publication of Musiques d'aujourd'hui. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Theodor W. Adorno's categories of musical attitudes: the expert, the good listener and the consumer as a way of exploring the critic, reader/music-listener relationships, which Vuillermoz was keen to address in Musiques d'aujourd'hui.

After a rollercoaster ride through so much wonderful music, punctuated by personal tragedy and illness and then abbreviated by death, let us define what themes and conclusions may be drawn. Unease persists with some accounts of composers’ deaths. Although uncertainty will continue regarding the exact cause of Mozart's death, that he was not poisoned is beyond all reasonable doubt, and his final illness, from either kidney or heart failure, took two and a half weeks. There have been cases, more than a hundred years ago, where analysis of contemporaneous accounts allows confident clinical conclusions, as with Beethoven or Brahms. Clearly Schubert did not die of syphilis, although he almost certainly died with it.

A recurrent theme has been the dogmatic claims made by doctors and musicologists alike. Elgar's ‘last five words’ may reflect more about Ernest Newman than about Elgar. Before we leave Newman, surely his overwhelming character assassination of Beethoven is appalling, defacing the memory of a titanic figure. This tendency to advance the potentially salacious, especially VD or alcohol, can render an awful disservice to the reputations of great people who deserve better, something which had concerned Beethoven himself. Newman's judgement is continued in subsequent quotation by others – and to what end? Opinions from pompous medical pin-stripes should be discarded, along with an apparent urge to publish increasingly abstruse medical opinion. Merging of the scholarly with the ludicrous was seen with various published diagnoses in the cases of Mozart and Beethoven, for both of whom over a hundred diagnoses have previously been advanced. Hopefully, future research will be presented in a manner reasoned upon a balance of probabilities. Moreover, it is a mantra of good clinical practice to never make two or more diagnoses where one would do.

We should dispose of Mozart's Tourette's syndrome and Gershwin's ‘overwrought hysteria’. A recent Proms concert programme asserted that Schumann died of syphilis, with a suggestion that his hand problem had been self-inflicted; both are questionable. The biographer's responsibility is to do justice to all the evidence.

Music criticism extended beyond written commentary in newspapers and journals in interwar France. This chapter examines the activities of critics as concert organisers. It focuses on two concert series after the Great War: the concerts of La Revue musicale, which were set up in Paris by the influential journal director, critic and musicologist, Henry Prunières (1886–1942); and the Petits concerts, which were established in Lyon in 1919 by the critic and musicologist Léon Vallas (1879–1956) and associated with his journal La Nouvelle Revue musicale. I show how criticism could be performed in the concert hall, alongside other forms of unwritten and written communication, such as pre-concert talks and lectures, as well as reviews, leader comments and features. To what degree did these sonic and oral forms support Prunières's and Vallas's central occupations as critics, musicologists and biographers? Recent studies of interwar criticism have revealed the considerable ideological differences between Prunières and Vallas, particularly over their efforts to remember Debussy. This chapter explores the extent to which these concert series and the repertoire they featured reflected the aesthetic and ideological orientations of their organisers. Both critics were committed to promoting a common canon of French music, which drew on music from the generations of Rameau and Couperin, on the one hand, and Debussy and Ravel, on the other.

Prunières was also determined to promote international contemporary music, which had been almost inaccessible during the Great War. While the two critics may have broadly agreed about the significance of upholding French music of the past, what contemporary and foreign music did they bring to life in their concerts? Finally, the chapter considers the extent to which these concerts provided yet another platform for these influential critics to persuade and educate their regional, national and international audiences.

Origins and Motivations for the Concert Series

Writing anonymously in Le Progrès (Lyon), Vallas announced the launch of the Petits concerts in 1919, indulging in some self-publicity.

VAUGHAN Williams's writings on music cover a period of over sixty years, from his 1897 article in The Musician, ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’, to the posthumously published ‘Introduction’ to Classic English Folk Songs in 1959. They include articles published in periodicals, encyclopaedia entries, programme notes, introductions to monographs and editions, and three collections of essays: National Music (based on lectures that Vaughan Williams had given at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in 1932), Some Thoughts on Beethoven's Choral Symphony with Writings on Other Musical Subjects, and The Making of Music (based on lectures given at Cornell University in 1954). This substantial body of work reflects the wide range of the composer's musical interests: the art music of the past and present (including his own works), the folk song movement and the social function of music in Britain. As the leading British composer of his generation and a scholar in the field of hymnody and folk music, Vaughan Williams was both an artist and a public intellectual, and his opinions on music undoubtedly carried much weight.

Among the many influences on Vaughan Williams, four stand out in relation to his writings. First, his teachers, particularly Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Maurice Ravel, who, as Byron Adams has shown, refined Vaughan Williams's technique as a composer and did much to shape his views on compositional pedagogy. A second influence was the Folk-Song Society, of which Vaughan Williams was an active member from 1902. His many essays on folk song reflect not only his first-hand experience as a collector, but also his engagement with the views of other leading members of the society, especially Cecil Sharp. A third influence stems from the composer's student days at the Royal College of Music, where he was an active member of a debating society that met on Saturday afternoons. The society considered matters of both musical and wider cultural interest; among the papers Vaughan Williams contributed was ‘The Rise and Fall of the Romantic School’, which was probably the origin of ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’. The legacy of this was Vaughan Williams's willingness to discuss his music with close friends and contemporaries, above all Gustav Holst.

STEPHEN Walsh's assessment epitomizes the generally received view of Constant Lambert (1905–51). The book he was reviewing when he made this remark, Stephen Lloyd's Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (2014), sets out in great detail Lambert's key musical activities as composer, conductor and writer (at times, as Walsh points out, risking overload) in an attempt to encourage interest beyond the work in the title. But it seems likely that, without a parallel champion in the realm of performance, Rio Grande (1927) will indeed continue to be the work for which Lambert is best known, even though its brand of jazz-tinted exoticism can have little of its original effect on today's audiences, who are much more familiar with the idiom. Walsh asserts the case for ‘a handful of works belong[ing] in the repertoire’, including Eight Poems of Li-Po (1926–9) in the ensemble version, Music for Orchestra (1927), and the Concerto for Piano and Nine Players (1930–1). To this might be added Lambert's setting of words from Thomas Nashe's Pleasant Comedy in Summer's Last Will and Testament (1932–5), despite its failing to transcend the sum of its most striking moments: the latter stages of the purely orchestral sixth movement, Rondo burlesca (King Pest), and the climax and aftermath of the final Saraband. But for all his technical skill and inventiveness, Lambert's compositional voice lacks sufficient distinctiveness of personality to secure more than an occasional airing. His two other principal activities, conducting and journalism, are ephemeral in the literal sense, though some of the performances he recorded – catalogued by Lloyd over eighteen pages of appendix – are still commercially available and of historical interest. They include the first recording (1929) of Walton's Facade (1922–9, rev. 1942, 1951, 1977), with Edith Sitwell reciting (the Waltons and the Sitwells were his neighbours in Chelsea); the first recording of Warlock's The Curlew (1920–2) in 1931, a performance that is rather unsteady in rhythm and intonation at times, and marred by traffic noises during the opening bars; a 1946 recording of Delius's Piano Concerto (in the original 1897 version) with Benno Moiseiwitsch; and selections of ballet music with the Sadler's Wells and Philharmonia orchestras.

In late 1907 the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt stood at Vienna's railway station, woefully declaring, ‘It's over’ as the train taking Gustav Mahler on his journey ultimately to the USA pulled away. Mahler had just suffered the triple hammer blow of his anti-Semitic ousting from the Vienna Opera, the death of his beloved little daughter, ‘Putzi’, and the news of his potentially fatal heart condition. But it was not over. For his remaining nearly three and a half years, before the train brought him back to die in Vienna, further great music was to come, and in some ways it would be different music. From this vignette, the strong influence of both mental and physical health upon the process of composition is seen. It may be asked how Mahler died and of what disease. We can wonder how he managed at all, as other personal and professional problems overshadowed his remaining life. More questions arise from Mahler's story, as they do from medical accounts of many other great composers. These will be posed, and hopefully answered, within this book. There is, after all, a keen general interest in the influence of ill health upon famous men. The outcome from the meeting of the Big Three at Yalta, so crucial for the world today, might have been very different if Roosevelt had not been close to death. By the same token, this book will consider how prevailing sickness affected both the quality and quantity of composition; was it because of, or in spite of, that illness? The nature of the music and how different Western music would be now if a particular composer had lived longer will be considered. For the person interested in classical composers and their sometimes dreadful deaths, and in the relationship between declining health and creative output, here is an overview.

At the outset it was vital to learn what had already been written on this topic. Not all musical authors have sought medical advice, just as doctors have sometimes neglected musical expertise.

On 15 August 1914, Parisians settling down to peruse the latest copy of the weekly music periodical, Le Ménestrel, were greeted with the following notice:

The seemingly dismal situation reported by the publication's director was not limited to Le Ménestrel alone. With the declaration of war in early 1914, publishing houses faced a number of practical and economic problems to overcome in order to continue operations. A large proportion of the publishing industry's workforce was of mobilisation age, resulting in a lack of manpower. The situation was exacerbated by shortages of primary materials: paper was in short supply throughout the war, with government forced to restrict the number of grams available to publishers, and regulations limiting both paper and fuel consumption for businesses were issued by the Préfecture on an ever-changing basis.

Daily newspapers were frequently curtailed in length, or appeared in smaller format, with the result that column space more usually reserved for concert and operatic reviews was frequently sacrificed for news of the fighting fronts. The situation was worse for dedicated music periodicals, with many forced to cease publication during the conflict. Whilst Le Ménestrel hoped to continue publication in a reduced format of four, rather than eight, pages throughout the war, it was eventually forced to abandon its plans, publishing its last wartime issue on 5 September 1914 and remaining silent until after the Armistice. Other important music periodicals such as Le Monde musical and Le Guide musical were to suffer the same fate, although some did manage to publish occasional wartime issues. However, Parisians were not entirely deprived of musical news. Le Courrier musical, directed by the critic Charles Tenroc, was able to continue for much of the war, with the exception of an initial hiatus from mid 1914 to 1916.

The French newspaper L'Action française was the official press organ of the political league of the same name, a right-wing, ultranationalist, anti-Semitic movement founded in 1899, which gained notoriety and exercised considerable intellectual influence in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. The movement's principal ideologue was Charles Maurras, a prolific writer and prominent political figure who maintained his position as editor-in-chief of L'Action française up until the political party's imposed dissolution at the end of the German Occupation of France in 1944. During the 1920s the political influence of Action française waned considerably. Condemned by the Pope in 1926, its political ambitions were severely curtailed as a result of diminished support from its traditional political base of Catholic sympathisers. Its fortunes changed dramatically, however, in the wake of the anti-democratic and violent demonstrations that took place in Paris on 6 February 1934. Primarily instigated by right-wing leagues including the Camelots du Roi, the paramilitary wing of Action française, these riots were the bloodiest civic confrontation to have occurred on French streets since the Commune. Viewed by some historians as a failed coup d’état, the February riots represented an attack on France's democratic and republican institutions and pointed to the swelling influence of militant far-right movements, including Action française, during this period. It ultimately caused the resignation of Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, the downfall of the acting leftist coalition government, and a growing radicalisation on both sides of the political spectrum.

Although a partisan political publication, by the late 1920s L'Action française began to resemble a general-interest daily newspaper with pages devoted to national and international affairs, the economy, sport and culture. This ostensible editorial mainstreaming did not however entail a concomitant whitewashing of its political agenda; indeed, Maurras and his journalists regularly called for the assassination of their political foes from the front pages of the paper, and the venture's financial fortunes were consistently troubled as a result of the legal challenges mounted against it for various cases of defamation. In 1929 a weekly instalment entitled ‘Les Spectacles’ was inaugurated and featured reviews of film, theatre and music that served to complement the publication's traditional critical focus on literature. Similarly to the newspaper's political journalists, contributors to ‘Les Spectacles’ were partisan in their political orientation.