For many years, the flowering of the symphony in France after 1870 received little scholarly investigation, and most writings that did appear contented themselves with blithely pronouncing French symphonies inferior to their Germanic counterparts. Save for an unpublished and almost inaccessible dissertation by Jean-Paul Holstein,Footnote ¹ no serious or panoramic account of the French symphony existed before the mid-1990s, though one could find worthwhile examinations of individual composers, especially Camille Saint-Saëns. Since then, however, studies have appeared in various sizes and depths, most notably by Ralph Locke, Fabian Kolb, and the present reviewer.Footnote ² To this list we can now add Andrew Deruchie’s monograph: although it is not, as advertised, the first full-length study of the fin de siècle French symphony – Kolb’s 780-page monograph appeared a year earlier – it certainly is the first English-language work to study the most significant symphonies in France between 1886 and 1903 to this depth. He focuses exclusively on seven iconic works from those years based on their exposure and influence; although this necessitates unfortunate omissions – the most grievous being the Third Symphony of Albéric Magnard (1896) – he fully justifies the choice to concentrate on a smaller number of works rather than produce a survey.

Like all fin de siècle symphonists, French composers faced the double imperative to develop an original and innovative voice while respecting the traditions inherited from Beethoven. In the seven symphonies he studies, Deruchie devotes particular attention to two issues: how each work engages the darkness-to-light narrative indelibly associated with Beethoven’s symphonies by 1886, and the manner in which the composition employs cyclic organization.Footnote ³ According to Deruchie, each symphony forges an individual path, and collectively the diverse solutions reveal that the fin de siècle French symphony possesses a ‘richness of invention, sophistication, and striking variety’ unmatched elsewhere in that period – including, arguably, Germany and Austria (p. 3).

Deruchie begins with Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony (1886), which he describes as a brilliant merger of tradition (darkness to light), innovation (Lisztian form) and French character (eclecticism). Borrowing Liszt’s ‘two-dimensional’ structure found in Die Ideale and other compositions – in which he compresses the multi-movement sonata cycle within the functions of a large sonata-allegro form – Saint-Saëns derives almost all of his material from the opening motives.Footnote ⁴ According to Deruchie, the Lisztian paradigm explains many of the formal anomalies in this symphony. The composer aggressively championed eclecticism as a distinctive French trait; the second movement, for example, includes echoes of Baroque counterpoint, Tristan, and even perhaps Franck’s Piano Quintet (ironically, since Saint-Saëns hated this work dedicated to him). The inclusion of both organ and piano bespeaks timbral eclecticism. In the finale, Saint-Saëns synthesizes these diverse materials to drive the work to its triumphant conclusion (p. 45). At the same time, he achieves sublimity through ‘charm’, which Deruchie defines as refined understatement (pp. 50–1); for example, the apotheosis theme first appears quietly, in vividly colourful scoring. The Third Symphony thus represents a manifesto promoting a nationalist style in the face of French Wagnerism.

Deruchie turns next to César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor (1887–88), loved by the public and loathed by critics. He argues that many of the alleged ‘faults’ in construction, melody, and harmony make sense when we examine the work as a metaphysical darkness-to-light tale told by leitmotif-like cyclic themes. Through close harmonic analysis, Deruchie shows the symphony enacting a redemption plot in which F-sharp gradually gains mastery over F-natural to achieve a triumphant conclusion (p. 73). But it does so, according to Deruchie, without Beethovenian battle scars: the mood of the opening music suggests ‘suffering, not struggle’, while the moment of victory arrives with ‘quiet, serene lucidity’ rather than blaring triumph; the final coda is ‘isolated in D-Major warmth … delicately bathed in the ethereal sound of harp arpeggios’ (pp. 87–9). In such subdued achievement and assertion of conquest, Deruchie finds the ‘mysticism’ that both supporters and opponents ascribed to Franck.

Édouard Lalo’s Symphony in G Minor (1886), on the other hand, rejects the Beethovenian topos. Like Brahms’s Fourth and later Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Lalo’s composition begins and ends in ‘darkness’ and in fact never really breaks free of it (even the inner movements end somberly). Deruchie speculates that the mood might reflect Lalo’s disquiet about threats to the Third Republic and its liberal ideals at that moment (pp. 117–18). Despite the work’s tangled composition history, with sections recycled from both a discarded symphony and an opera, Deruchie demonstrates through careful tonal and thematic analysis that the work forms a skilfully integrated whole. What impresses Deruchie most is ‘its remarkable concision’ and deliberate eschewal of ‘monumentality’: Lalo’s symphony unfolds in compressed and condensed proportions and ‘derives the mass that contemporary listeners expected through density instead of through an imposing temporal span’ (pp. 105, 112). In other words, the composer engaged with the Beethoven of the Fourth Symphony instead of the Fifth, while conjuring a fraught atmosphere foreign to both works.

Deruchie seizes on Vincent d’Indy’s observation that Ernest Chausson covered his Symphony in B-flat Major (1890) with a ‘veil of sadness’ to describe the work as another subversion of the Beethoven narrative – darkness progressing not to triumph or tragedy but to doubt (pp. 150–1). Constant shifts in mode, vague cyclic connections and an attenuated apotheosis that ends with a whimper rather than a bang all ‘suggest disengagement and withdrawal from struggle, rather than conquest or victory, at least as these are normally expressed in the nineteenth-century symphony’ (p. 132). Deruchie connects the ambivalent mood to Chausson’s sympathies for the symbolist poets: sharing their pessimism about modern life, the composer and adopted their strategy of retreating into a refined world of art (p. 151). However plausible this explanation, Deruchie at the same time makes little of another very evident source of distress – Chausson’s well known struggles with composition in general and his particular frustrations in writing this symphony (he agonized for over a month on a single measure in the finale). Did his creative difficulties and symbolist Angst perhaps feed off each other?

According to Deruchie, d’Indy composed his Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (1886) in part to challenge the image of Beethoven championed by republican writers who hailed his ‘heroic’ style as the musical embodiment of liberal humanism; d’Indy, by contrast, promoted Beethoven as a defender of Catholic faith and tradition, especially in his late works. The ‘Mountain Symphony’ operates not through the propulsive and teleological thrust of the ‘heroic’ style but through variation, a late Beethoven trademark. By preserving the essence of the theme rather than transforming it, d’Indy’s cyclic process affirms timeless truths instead of celebrating self-willed evolution (p. 163). If Berlioz’s Harold en Italie represents an ‘anti-Eroica symphony’ (according to Mark Evan Bonds), the ‘Mountain Symphony’ arguably can be described as an ‘anti-Pastoral’ in its un-‘bucolic’ virtuosity, advanced harmonic language, and deep cyclic saturation. ‘Despite the superlatives he lavished on Beethoven’s symphonies … his own symphony conspicuously rejects some of their most salient features …’. (p. 157). Deruchie also argues that the vogue for enracinement (rootedness) espoused by Maurice Barrès ‘forms the ideological basis of the Symphonie’ (p. 169), so that the work both ‘corrects’ Beethoven and embraces regionalism.

Fifteen years later, a different agenda motivated d’Indy’s Second Symphony (1902–03). For many commentators, a new symphony by the prominent and controversial director of the Schola Cantorum promised a didactic purpose – demonstrating how a symphony should be written. On the surface, the Second Symphony is more traditional than the works of Franck and Chausson as well as his own ‘Mountain Symphony’: a sonata cycle of four movements (not three), each of which ends firmly in its tonic, with the finale culminating in an emphatic peroration. D’Indy’s pupil René de Castéra suggested that the symphony symbolised the defeat of ‘modernism’ by ‘tradition’.Footnote ⁵ Refuting this reading, Deruchie argues that d’Indy actually advocates a partnership of innovation and tradition: whole-tone passages appear in contexts resolving in dominant–tonic progressions while conversely conventional forms like the fugue and chorale are spiced with chromaticism and augmented triads (p. 189). The symphony shows harmonic and motivic influences of Chausson’s symphony and Guillaume Lekeu’s Piano Trio, but d’Indy ‘rectifies’ both by providing the grand thematic synthesis and uplifting conclusion they lack (p. 212). D’Indy wrote the Second Symphony at a time of pointed aesthetic and socio-political controversies in which ‘wars’ raged between the Schola Cantorum and Paris Conservatoire as well as between opposing ‘chapels’ of debussystes and d’indystes – guerre and chapelles are period terms – and the passions from the Dreyfus Affair still simmered (in a letter of 1902, d’Indy denounced the neglect of the symphony genre as ‘artistic Dreyfusardism’). Deruchie touches too lightly upon this context and criticizes writers who discuss polemical qualities in the work. Yet he observes that d’Indy, a highly skilled orchestrator, deliberately included awkwardly scored moments to ‘strike a reactionary pose against what he saw as the excessive appeal to corporeal pleasure of debussysme … by cultivating a predominantly severe orchestral sound’ (p. 217). However different the details, then, Deruchie concedes an ‘oppositional’ character in the Second Symphony.

Despite Paul Dukas’s reverence for Beethoven, he took exception to what he considered Beethoven’s predilection for jolts and ruptures in the symphonies that seemed to call attention more to the composer than to the music; as the nineteenth century progressed, such moments of idiosyncrasy degenerated into ‘antimusique’ (p. 235). Dukas called upon composers to reject excess and maintain equilibrium. According to Guy Ropartz, Dukas’s Symphony in C (1895) achieved ‘an abnegation of the self [by which it] rises to a humanism that is properly classical’ (quoted on p. 228). Deruchie describes the work as a ‘rectification’ of the Eroica, attaining transcendence without ‘the “antimusical” elements of discontinuity, rupture, and imbalance in which Dukas heard a surfeit of subjectivity, and to which he traced the decadent condition of contemporary music’ (p. 244). Dukas’s symphony lacks overt thematic recall, but Deruchie points to deep-level cyclic connections between the three movements (the principal material of the slow movement and finale derive from the secondary and closing themes of the first-movement exposition). There are some hermeneutic stretches – the comparison of Dukas’s symphony to Émile Durkheim’s sociology (pp. 237–8) seems somewhat tenuous as described – but, as with most of the chapters, Deruchie’s insights amply compensate for the more dubious speculations.

Throughout the book, Deruchie engages thoughtfully with recent scholarship both in French and Germanic music; often the works cited relate directly to the narrative, but some are more tangential (e.g., McClary and Adorno in the Chausson chapter, pp. 148–50), likely reflecting the book’s origins as the author’s doctoral dissertation.Footnote ⁶ Each analysis finds fault with most previous studies of the symphony in question, and while Deruchie specifies where in his view these readings have gone wrong, the tone occasionally implies that no one has understood these works properly before now. (Full disclosure: as one of the writers critiqued, let me say that I find many of his interpretations persuasive, including some that challenge my own, but I would strongly contend that my comments about Lalo’s and d’Indy’s symphonies described and cited on pp. 92, 186–7, and 195–7 are more nuanced in their original contexts than as Deruchie presents them.) His analyses are very thorough, theoretical and copiously illustrated with examples and tables; while usually not overly technical, they can overwhelm with detail. The principal weakness of the book is the absence of a conclusion: it ends abruptly with the final sentences of the Dukas chapter (regarding its cyclic connections). The reader needs a final summation of what he or she has learned in this journey about the composers’ multivalent approaches to Beethoven’s legacy, to the cyclic process, and to the symphony in fin de siècle France.

The writing is generally engaging, despite frequent lapses into the convoluted (‘quiddity’, ‘supererogatory’), the colloquial (‘add a wrinkle’) and the verbified (‘instantiate’). There are a few stray typos – Lawrence Davies (recte Laurence; p. 65), Camille Cheviallard (recte Chevillard, pp. 92, 228, 286), Eugene Weber (recte Eugen; pp. 149, 283) – and a factual error (Théodore Dubois, not Ambroise Thomas, directed the Conservatoire in 1904; p. 85). Something went amiss in the typesetting for Figure 1.1 (unclear key symbols and a wrong rehearsal letter for the first-movement development; p. 25), and the staves on p. 131 arbitrarily lack lines.

Despite these assorted caveats, The French Symphony at the Fin de Siècle is immensely valuable: rich in insights, meticulously presented, Deruchie’s book shows each composition to engage individually and distinctively with the challenges posed by the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition. In the end, he shows each work to be as cunningly crafted and tightly unified as the Germanic works to whose standards they have always been held and usually found wanting. Deruchie’s book will go a long way towards moving the French symphony out of the shadows of its unjustly second-rate reputation.