Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de Musique Romantique Française

From the Classical colonnades of the Petit Trianon to the architecture of the church of La Madeleine and the Palais Garnier, the Romantic period was permeated by the influence of Antiquity. In music, it runs in a continuous thread from the tragédies lyriques of Gluck to the epic works of Fauré and Saint-Saëns written for the Roman theatres of Béziers and Orange in the early years of the twentieth century.

From Spontini’s Olympie to Berlioz’s Les Troyens, from Kreutzer’s Astianax to David’s Herculanum or Magnard’s Bérénice, French music drew on antique sources, such as mythology and ancient legend. This taste for the monumental, later reflected the great epic films of the twentieth century, nevertheless left a great deal of room for individual expression, with large-scale collective scenes, on the one hand, and more personal moments of reverie or solitary lament, on the other. In painting, overgrown ancient ruins became a common subject, and the idea of the vanity of human existence and of Man’s insignificance led in the extreme to the challenging of religious beliefs.

Only the superhuman hero could hope to overcome Man’s implacable fate. While the avant-gardes contemptuously rejected aesthetic traditions in which Antiquity prevailed as the inevitable subject of inspiration, those who had a less rigorous view of modernity seized the opportunity to make original experiments with sound: Ravel, for example, in his Menuet antique, or Debussy, in his Épigraphes antiques.

TOPICS OF THE FESTIVAL
The hero figure
The greatness of Rome
Neoclassicism, from the Enlightenment to Romanticism Myth and Legend
Antiquity and Modernity