This review concerns two recently published books dedicated to overlooked French composers, both of whom achieved renown in areas other than music during their lifetimes. The first man, Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834–1901) was born into an aristocratic family, albeit a disgraced oneFootnote 1. Unable to gain admission to the Paris Conservatoire, and with very few professional opportunities deemed ‘acceptable for a young aristocratic man’ he pursued a career as a ‘gentleman composer’ (Kahan, p. 18). The second subject, Jean Cras (1879–1932), was a scientist, an inventor, a distinguished Rear-Admiral in the French navy and a moral philosopher, in addition to being an esteemed composer. Cras, ‘during his lifetime, [enjoyed] the same stature and celebrity as Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel’ but ‘[s]ince his death, [both he] and his music have been almost completely overlooked’ (Bempéchat, front flap). By contrast, Kahan does not consider Polignac to be an ‘unjustly neglected composer’, mainly because his octatonic music, which is the focus of her study, ‘is, regrettably, not much more than a historical curiosity’ (Kahan, p. 3). She does suggest that his tonal music (which she, necessarily treats much more briefly than the octatonic music) ‘might justify the appellation’ (Kahan, p. 3).

The temperaments of the two men were also quite different. The aristocratic Polignac was plagued with an identity crisis. He was ‘a sickly and “delicate” son in a family of strong, brilliant older brothers’ and suffered ‘the additional turmoil of his sexual uncertainty’. His failure to meet the standard for admission to composition classes was due to both his limited talent and his poor showing in his courses (particularly his study of harmony with Napoléon-Henri Reber (1807–1880)). This latter may have been due in part to his ‘tendencies toward indolence’. (Kahan p. 18). Cras, on the other hand, was a man of determination and resolution: ‘resolutely French, resolutely republican … resolutely Catholic and resolutely contemptuous of aristocracy,’ although Bempéchat attributes a sort of dichotomy to him:

Although I will review the two volumes separately here, they share one aesthetic: the tension between musical novelty and compositional sincerity. Polignac's search for new scales, culminating in his experiments with octatonicism, may be contrasted with Cras's search for compositional authenticity and sincerity – his concern for the soul of the composer – which leads Bempéchat to conclude that ‘his aesthetic reasoning had become entrapped by romantic subjectivity’ (Bempéchat, p. 162). One of Polignac's obituaries, by Eugène d'Harcourt in Le Figaro (9 August, 1901), read ‘[a]lways in search of novelty, he invented a scale, a succession of whole tones [sic], for which one could reproach him for a certain hardness [of sound], but which gave to his works an astonishing originality. …[H]e was interested in all new ideas and strove to be an artist, in whatever form that took’ (Kahan, p. 108; emendations are Kahan's). By contrast, Cras's correspondence (from a letter of 19 January 1917) reveals his opinion of novelty for its own sake to be artifice and decadence, even in the hands of a composer as revered as Debussy:

Cras writes further of his concern for the artist's soul in passages such this one in a letter of 30 March 1904: ‘the goal of music (above all and perhaps exclusively) is to reveal the soul of the composer. … [A] piece of music attracts you as does a human being, because its merits equal those of its author's; one likes it as one would have liked its creator’ (Bempéchat p. 162; emendations are mine). He, like Henrich Schenker (1868–1935) who was active in Austria during the same period, seems to draw a distinction between talent and genius based on his perception of artistic integrity and sincerity.Footnote 2 He writes of Debussy, whose music he frequently performed in his home ‘to relax,’ ‘[a]s long as, when playing Debussy's best compositions, I would not, for example, [be able to] say, “what a beautiful soul this man must have”; as long as I do not feel my soul uplifted toward God, Debussy will remain for me a marvellous alchemist of rare perfumes, but not an artist’ (Bempéchat, p. 163).

On Cras's own use of exotic musical elements, including Breton folk idioms, Bempéchat writes that ‘[such elements] are invariably in proper context, in proper proportion and always at the service of the philosophical or autobiographical message he projects’ (p. 168). According to Bempéchat, Cras was very well aware of the difference between superficial imitation of a modal or folk idiom and the thorough assimilation of its style and affect. In a letter of 18 January 1903, Cras writes,

While Cras's exposure to exotic musical elements was a result of his travels and seeking out of musical experts (Bempéchat, p. 175), Polignac's seems largely to be academic in nature. Kahan mentions frequently that it is impossible to know whether Polignac attended particular musical performances (and notes her understandable frustration at the lack of such documentation), but she observes that discussions of ‘scales and their history; exoticism; rejuvenation of modern music; Russian music; and Gypsy music’ were common topics in Parisian musical periodicals (Kahan, p. 44). About the 1878 World's Fair, which featured Russian music as a ‘body of “exotic” repertoire that captured public attention’ she writes, ‘the lack of evidence of what Polignac heard and when he heard it is particularly frustrating, for it is in mid-nineteenth-century Russian music that the octatonic collection was first widely exploited as both a melodic and structural element.’ (p. 40) Admitting the lack of hard evidence connecting Polignac's writing to Rimsky-Korsakov, Kahan documents the many opportunities that Polignac would have had for engagement with Russian music and the study of scores to Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko and Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov that the Paris Conservatoire acquired in 1874 (p. 41).

Polignac's interest in the exotic is exemplified by one of his first pieces employing a ‘new scale’, his Fantasie-Tanz of 1884, a ‘wistful, mazurka-like piece for piano in ternary form’ (Kahan, p. 44). In his preface, Polignac describes the scale basis ‘in which the sixth degree is raised by a half step; but it parts company from [the ‘Greek Dorian mode’ upon which it is based] by virtue of its more modern tonality, which easily takes on an aspect that is bizarre, disconnected, quasi-macabre’ (Kahan p. 44; emendations are mine). In the context of the present discussion of novelty and sincerity, Polignac's motto, ‘Rien n'est vrai que le faux, le faux seul est aimable’ (‘only the false is true; the false alone is kindly’) is interesting. ‘It bears pointing out’, Kahan writes, ‘that the French word faux (false) can also be translated as “out of tune.”‘ (Kahan, p. 44) Or it may be a sort of paradox, such as composers often wrote over contrapuntal riddles and canons. Alternately, it may be a statement of his intentions for modern music: that the false (i.e., man-made, contrived) systems of musical organization are the only way forward now that the true (i.e., natural) system of musical organization according to the hierarchical tonal system is being called into question as backward-looking at best; antiquated at worst.