Critical Allusion and Critical Assessment: Berlioz's and Reyer's Reviews of Bizet in the Journal des débats

Abstract

Respected as one of four ‘feuilles de qualité’ in nineteenth-century France, the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published articles by some of the most talented writers/critics of its time. In ‘feuilletons’, large articles that ran across the bottom of the first and second pages, these authors gave perceptive critiques in high-quality prose and provided their readers with relief from the political news discussed on the page above. In January 1858 literary critic Hippolyte Rigault asserted that modern criticism communicated not just through forthright judgements but also through innuendo and nuance. A sophisticated readership could then be expected to take up the task of understanding the allusions and filling in the blanks. Like Rigault, Hector Berlioz (music critic of the Débats from 1835 to 1863) and Ernest Reyer (from 1866 to 1898) used both text and subtext to convey their assessments. This study, with the goal of examining how shades of approval and disapproval could be alluded to or directly revealed, traces how they wrote about their younger contemporary Georges Bizet in the years following Rigault's article.

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