Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Volume 21)

Studies on the History of Society and Culture

by James H. Johnson

Beginning with the simple question, "Why did audiences grow silent?" Listening in Paris gives a spectator's-eye view of opera and concert life from the Old Regime to the Romantic era, describing the transformation in musical experience from social event to profound aesthetic encounter. James H. Johnson recreates the experience of audiences during these rich decades with brio and wit. Woven into the narrative is an analysis of the political, musical, and aesthetic factors that produced more engaged listening. Johnson shows the gradual pacification of audiences from loud and unruly listeners to the attentive public we know today.

Drawing from a wide range of sources―novels, memoirs, police files, personal correspondence, newspaper reviews, architectural plans, and the like―Johnson brings the performances to the hubbub of eighteenth-century opera, the exuberance of Revolutionary audiences, Napoleon's musical authoritarianism, the bourgeoisie's polite consideration. He singles out the music of Gluck, Haydn, Rossini, and Beethoven as especially important in forging new ways of hearing. This book's theoretical edge will appeal to cultural and intellectual historians in many fields and periods.

Genres: Music, History, France, Nonfiction

363 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 1994

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listening in Paris is a cultural “history of perception” examining the era 1750-1850 during which time French spectators transformed from a chatty, distracted audience to a quiet and engaged listening public. His analytical framework, which Johnson attributes to idealist philosophy, places the listener at the center of the historical narrative and takes the stance that musical meaning does not reside in the score (or authorial intention) but in the specific moment of reception—a discursively shaped and historically contingent moment. He clarifies this statement by asserting that musical meaning is not completely up for debate, its structure limits the locus of interpretations that can be made and goes on to argue that the act of listening “is a dialectic between aesthetic expectations and musical innovations” (3). In this study, Johnson examines the development of musical styles, perceived musical meanings, general cultural norms and expectations, new forms of theatre architecture and socio-political circumstances to describe and explain this transformation in engagement. Johnson is primarily a historian and the majority of his source base comes from texts (reviews, memoirs, correspondence, etc.) with musical analysis scattered throughout to “locate salient musical features that reinforced, challenged or changed existing aesthetic assumptions” (5). While generally trying to present a gradual and uneven change in listening conventions during this time period, the attention Johnson pays throughout to specific composers and works (as well the overall organization into 5 distinct parts) gives the impression of ruptures in this process—an aspect of his work that he both embraces and attempts to mitigate (as on page 83: “Musical perception does not change monolithically”).

Overall, Johnson makes a convincing argument with the material available to him. While he does acknowledge the limitations of his source base, one does wonder how representative the texts he calls upon are for describing the entire listening public. However, it would almost seem unfair to expect Johnson to accurately recreate the experience of all listeners during this time (regardless of class, etc.) because the documentation simply is not there. Despite some potential methodological issues and literalism in his readings, I feel that he has argued his point well considering material constraints. A question that arose for me was how this trajectory might differ in another European nation—would the periodization be similar? Would the points of apparent rupture align? What if we took this history of listening deeper into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Perhaps Johnson’s work is most successful in its ability to generate these questions and more.

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good read. I really liked like how the author tried to explain how the behaviors of audiences changed in Parisian opera houses.

[Etha Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and above all entertainingly written account of Parisian opera & concert life in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is very much not my field, but Johnson makes the history both interesting and a fluid read. I highly recommend