Evaluación anual 1 Alumnado

“The waltz stops. The dancers stand still. The bells of Paris all count the twelve strokes of midnight. From December 31, 1919, we move to January 1, 1920.”2 _{Thus begins Le 1}er _{janvier 1920, historian}

Arthur Conte’s fascinating glimpse into Parisian society, culture, and politics at the turn of the first new decade since the end of the war.3 _{It was not so much the specific events of January 1}st_{, 1920,}

that mattered to Conte, but the date gave him a convenient and symbolic starting point to survey the changes that would characterize the new decade. One of these changes is alluded to (almost inadvertently) on the very first page, when Conte imagined the last seconds of 1919 at the elegant restaurant Maxim’s: this is the end of the waltz, perhaps a trivial remark, unless it is, as I read it, an oblique metaphor that captures the transformation of the dance as a social activity in postwar Paris. In the first chapter, I quoted the lines that follow this passage to illustrate the attempts that

1 _{Maurice Magre, L’Œuvre amoureuse et sentimentale de Maurice Magre (Paris: Bibliothèque des curieux,}

1922), 87.

2 _{Arthur Conte, Le 1er janvier 1920 (Paris: Plon, 1976), 11. “La valse s’arrête. Les danseurs s’immobilisent.}

Toutes les cloches de Paris égrènent les douze coups de minuit. Du 31 décembre 1919, nous passons au premier janvier 1920.”

3 _{This book, published in 1976, is part of a series that also includes Le 1}er _{Janvier 1900, 1940, 1960 and 1980.}

were made to preserve a sense of continuity within Parisian social circles. Although it is tempting to say that the customers of Maxim’s would have seen no difference between December 1919 and January 1920, newspaper and magazine accounts give us a sense of hyper-awareness of some crucial ongoing social and cultural shifts they might well have felt in a suddenly acute manner at this symbolic juncture. Conte’s very first sentence—“The waltz stops.”—expresses more than a brief musical pause during a New Year’s Eve celebration. It alludes to the coming obsolescence of the waltz, a genre whose decline and demise was announced, apprehended, and averted repeatedly in the postwar years. What was once one of the most characteristic genres of popular music in France became a symbolic remnant of a better past, as well as a safeguard of French elegance and moral superiority, and consequently acquired an exceptional nostalgic valence. But nostalgia is paradoxical in its capacity to provide a sense of continuity in ruptures, to bridge temporalities and distances, and, especially in music, to act as a “resistance to the irreversible,” as Vladimir Jankélévitch put it.4 The waltz stopped, and yet, it did not. In his book tracing the history of the waltz, Luc Rudolph touches on this paradox when he identifies the year 1914 as “the end of the absolute domination of the waltz in the world of dance music, even if hundreds were created during the carnage, despite the ban on ballroom dancing. . . . The waltz was staying put.”5

It is not immediately obvious why the onset of the war should have marked the end of a musical genre so highly prized until then if that genre remained strongly represented in the following years, if it “stayed put.” Of course, the ban on dancing during the conflict had major

4 _{Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 56.}

5 _{Luc Rudolph, La valse dans tous ses états : Petite histoire de la valse et de ses compositeurs dans le monde}

(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 296. It is unsettling to see that one of the only studies of the history of the waltz writes so summarily about its decline. “Avant 1914, la valse régnait, « faisait fureur » : impossible d’imaginer une soirée chez « Maxim’s » sans que le chef Boldi en joue de nombreuses. Mais cette date marque la fin de la domination absolue de la valse sur le monde de la musique de danse, même si pendant le carnage des centaines furent créées, en dépit de l’interdiction des bals. . . . Nombre de titres étaient influencés par le conflit en cours, mais la valse restait là. Après la guerre, elle perdit progressivement sa prééminence, comme la danse perdait de son importance sociale.”

Rémi Hess, author of the other major study of the waltz in 1989, is even more succinct. Even though he discusses the interactions between jazz and the waltz, he does so only in the abstract, detached from a specific historical context. See Rémi Hess, La Valse : Révolution du couple en Europe (Paris: Métailié, 1989), 298–99.

consequences for Parisian dancing activities, but every dance, and not just the waltz, was affected. Why would the waltz in particular be at a disadvantage? Was there something unique in the relation between the waltz and the war? And how can we explain the persistence of this genre even while it was coming to be considered outdated in the press? In this chapter, I will answer these questions by drawing attention to the debates that framed the discussions of the value of the waltz in the early postwar years, touching on the ethics of dance, on the preservation of France’s national culture and musical tradition, and on the damage of the war. First, I will show the political, ethical, and musical challenges to the waltz as a popular dance, including how it became entangled in nostalgic experiences and discourses. I will then analyze a number of waltzes that produced “sounds of memory,” justifying the continuing predilection to compose new waltzes in domestic, theatrical, and concert settings after the Armistice, and which together expose the conflicting interpretations of the nostalgic affect of the genre in varying settings. I will demonstrate that the waltz acquired its nostalgic affect both through extramusical circumstances (based on postwar national and international relations) and intramusical features (chiefly through formal and metrical disruptions), which I study here as necessarily interconnected, concluding that the waltz was not just a nostalgic object, but also a channel through which the Parisian public could interpret their national history and their place in contemporary politics.

The waltz, more than any other dance (and perhaps any musical genre) acquired an exceptional status after the Armistice: writers and critics for many different types of publications and readerships frequently spoke of the waltz in the past tense. The prolific critic of concert music Émile Vuillermoz commented in 1922 that “today, the languid ecstasy of the waltz is as far from us as the ceremonial rites of the minuet or pavane. And it is the tango that currently collects the curses of the misoneists, until the time when the shimmy will take its place.”6 Vuillermoz’s

6 _{Émile Vuillermoz, “Les Grands Concerts,” Excelsior, January 16, 1922, 4. “Aujourd’hui, la languide extase}

de la valse est aussi loin de nous que les rites cérémonieux du menuet ou de la pavane. Et c’est le tango qui recueille actuellement les malédictions des misonéistes jusqu’à l’heure où le shimmy viendra prendre sa place.”

hyperbolic statement and his use of the rare word misonéiste to refer to the haters of anything new situates the waltz as a distinctly outdated dance, yet one that still remains alive, at least as part of a dispute between old and new dances. What is at stake here is the idea that dances are competing against each other, vying for primacy on the dance floors. It is implied that the misoneists promote a return of the waltz as part of their aversion to the tango, one of the most popular dances after the war. This kind of swift, matter-of-fact dismissal of the waltz as obsolete is common in the press of the time, usually without additional justification, as if it were a given, needing no elaboration.

Another reviewer of concert music, G. Allix, offered a more explicit critique of the changed social context of the dance in what could otherwise have been a straightforward concert review. Commenting on a performance of Hector Berlioz’s symphonic arrangement of Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation à la valse, Allix indicated that a certain knowledge of the social norms of dancing had disappeared since the heyday of the waltz—a change that could even be noticed during an orchestral concert when dancing was absent. He asked, with more than a hint of regret: “Have the modern generations forgotten this page of Weber, that any girl once used to play as best as she could before she could think of getting married? The audience immediately applauded the finished waltz without suspecting the coda. Or is it no longer the custom to escort the dancers back to their place?”7 _{Allix might have been right in suspecting that Weber’s Invitation à la danse, over a}

hundred years old, was no longer a favorite of the young generation, despite being part of the repertoire of the Ballets russes before the war. But he might also simply have overlooked the differences in listening expectations between music written to accompany social dancing and music for theatrical staging, the Invitation being an example of the latter. The blurred boundaries between these two might explain the audience’s premature applause. Nonetheless, Allix’s suggestion of a generation gap in understanding the social functions of the waltz, and the implication that

7 _{G. Allix, “Concerts Pasdeloup,” Le Monde musical 31, no. 21–22 (November 1920): 331. “Mais est-ce que}

les générations modernes ne connaissent plus cette page de Weber, que toute jeune fille autrefois devait jouer tant bien que mal avant de pouvoir songer à se marier ? Le public applaudit aussitôt la valse finie, sans paraître soupçonner la coda. Ou bien n’est-ce plus la mode de reconduire les danseuses à leur place ?”

something was lost, something that failed in transmission to the next generation, helps to understand the multiple facets that informed the decline of the waltz.8

Similar statements can be found in the dance press, which spread rapidly in 1920 with various degrees of commercial success. The magazine Paris-Danse told its readers in April 1920 that “we speak only for memory of the mazurkas, . . . of the polkas cadencées, of the waltzes in triple time, of the American quadrilles.”9 Yet, in its following issue, it backed down and reassured its readers that “all our dancers are still strong supporters of the waltz,” a dance it described as “our old dance.”10

During the postwar years, it was not unusual to see the end of the waltz being simultaneously announced and averted, since claims concerning its disappearance were also a way to reminisce about it and to promote reengagement. As I will show in this chapter, the threat to the waltz was also perceived as a threat to the nation, which explains the characterization of the waltz in Paris-Danse as our dance, and the rhetorical emphasis with which it reports the dance’s endurance just after having declared it a “memory.”

Evidently, magazines like Le Monde musical (which published Allix’s review) and Paris- Dance appealed to different kinds of readers and different levels of engagement with the dance. In the former example, it is the waltz as a musical genre that is deemed outdated; in the latter, it is the waltz as a social activity. Together, these comments reveal that it was both the status of the waltz

and of waltzing that had recently changed. To better understand each of these changes, we must

8 _{Not much information about G. Allix can be gathered from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which}

lists simply his dates as 18..-19.. Allix annotated letters by Berlioz for a 1903 publication, which would make him at the very least forty years old in 1920, likely older. For comparison, Émile Vuillermoz was 42 years old in 1920.

9 _{H. J., “Chez les Professeurs : Les Danseurs et la Danse,” Paris-Danse 1, no. 8 (April 2, 1920): 6. “On ne}

parle plus que pour mémoire des mazurkas, pas de quatre, pas des patineurs, des polkas cadencées, des valses à trois temps, des quadrilles américains et des entraînants lanciers. Le tango et autres danses modernes ont pris leur place, et les fantaises [sic] sur cette danse ne sont guère près de s’épuise, à moins que les danses

d’antan ne reprennent leur revanche.”

10 _{Jean de Marcigny, “Sport et Art : La Danse est un art plastique,” Paris-Danse 1, no. 9 (April 9, 1920): 1.}

“Est-ce à dire que pour ces danses nouvelles, nous négligions en France, nos vieilles danses ? En aucune façon et tous nos danseurs, toutes nos danseuses sont encore de fervents adeptes de la valse.”

first have a closer look at the ethical and political discourses that accompanied dancing activities after the war.