Seto on Blaszkiewicz (2023)

In this lively book, Jacek Blaszkiewicz explores the intersections between music and urban politics in Second Empire Paris. Fanfare for a City argues that the influence cut both ways: the transformation of the city under Napoléon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène “Baron” Haussmann, had a tremendous impact on musical life, and conversely, musical practices and discourses shaped urban planning decisions and the aesthetics of urbanization. The book complements Aimée Boutin’s 2015 City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris, but Blaszkiewicz brings a musicologist’s ear to the subject. He makes his case by looking beyond the concert hall and opera house to socioeconomically diverse spaces, from cafés and salons to street corners and exhibition halls. While the book draws theoretical approaches from sound studies and urban sociology, Blaszkiewicz describes his project as “urban historical musicology,” a framework that emphasizes how music “is imbricated in urban policymaking, placemaking, and mythmaking” (15).

Fanfare for a City unfolds with a wonderful musicality. The introduction opens with a colorful account of the inauguration of the boulevard du Prince-Eugène (named after the uncle of Napoléon III) to literal and figurative fanfare in 1862. In the epilogue, Blaszkiewicz recapitulates the topic: the thoroughfare was quietly renamed the boulevard Voltaire eight years later, amidst the tumult of the Franco-Prussian War. The intervening five chapters offer development and thematic transformation, as Blaszkiewicz moves from the “bird’s eye” perspective of Haussmann and other government planners to the street-level experience of musicians and merchants. Throughout the text, key figures recur like leitmotifs: Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre. 

The first chapter examines how Haussmann’s approach to redeveloping Paris was informed by his lifelong engagement with music. His taste for classic repertoire, displayed in the weekly soirées he hosted in his private apartments at the Hôtel de Ville, was “a musical demonstration of the continued importance of history to the empire” (23). Blaszkiewicz then considers Haussmann’s aesthetics alongside those of two contemporaneous musicians who embraced monumentality, technology, and spectacle to articulate a vision of modernity: Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner. The comparison with the latter composer is especially instructive. Both “demolished” existing structures in order to create—Haussmann fashioned himself as an artiste-démolisseur—and Haussmann approached urbanism, like Wagner approached music drama, as “a sole-authored enterprise” (40).

In chapter two, Blaszkiewicz uses the 1855 and 1867 Expositions universelles as case studies for how imperial planners sought to curate multisensory experience. He focuses on the lavish awards ceremonies that concluded each event: the visuals were stunning, but various musical “misfires” suggest there was an “incongruent relationship between visual and sonic fanfare in Second Empire Paris” (43). Blaszkiewicz’s account of the 1855 closing ceremony is tragicomically entertaining. Berlioz had composed a new cantata for 1,200 musicians for the occasion, but the performance was cut short. A third of the way into the piece, Napoléon took a dramatic cadence and rest as the cue to begin his speech. (Here, as with several other instances in the book, the musical excerpt could be better aligned with the prose description, but this is a minor quibble.) Blaszkiewicz reads the episode as indicative of a “delicate balance between monumentality and contingency” gone awry (59). Perhaps. But there is a simpler explanation: stuff can go wrong in performance, especially when bureaucrats get involved.

The final three chapters highlight the socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological fissures in Haussmann’s Paris—between bourgeois and working class, center and periphery, and nostalgia for le vieux Paris versus a utopian vision of the city’s modern, cosmopolitan future. Esther da Costa Meyer’s important 2022 study Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 is a recurring point of reference. Chapter three explores the café-concert, an institution that has been relatively understudied by musicologists despite its ubiquity in the Second Empire. Blaszkiewicz argues that the café-concert’s “spontaneity and democratized openness ran counter to Haussmann’s efforts to compartmentalize, taxonomize, and sanitize the city plan” (79). Bureaucratic pressures and deregulation ultimately led to the demise of many venues, as impresarios had to compete with theaters to survive. Blaszkiewicz makes a provocative comparison to the present day: “Much like deregulation policy in the modern neoliberal era, the late Second Empire’s deregulatory schemes were in fact an assault on the autonomy of localized social spaces” (109).

Chapters four and five explore, respectively, the contributions of street musicians and street vendors to the Parisian soundscape. On the one hand, street musicians and vendors were celebrated as urban heroes and avatars of the disappearing old city; on the other, they were regarded as nuisances who were subjected to increasingly strict regulation. (Blaszkiewicz’s careful archival work includes a dive into the Archives de la Préfecture de Police.). At the heart of the final chapter is an analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s Les Voix de Paris (1857), a hybrid volume that pairs a historical and proto-ethnomusicological study of street cries with a large-scale composition for orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists entitled Les Cris de Paris. (The piece has never been performed or recorded in its entirety, but a short arrangement by the Ensemble Clément Janequin on their 2009 album L’écrit du cri will give the curious reader a sense of the work’s flavor.) Despite the music’s humor—the story concerns a sleep-deprived city dweller vexed by noisy hawkers on the street below—Kastner treats his source material nostalgically, championing street cries as an important locus of cultural memory. Blaszkiewicz contends that Les Cris de Paris can thus be heard as a commentary on “the moral imperative of listening to disenfranchised voices” (174).

Fanfare for a City is an impressive, deeply researched achievement that offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between soundscape and cityscape in the Second Empire. For musicologists and readers interested in nineteenth-century French culture, the book provides new insights about musical practices and genres that have been little explored. But there is also a broader subtext that runs throughout the book, about how (mostly working-class) Parisians were impacted by gentrification, deregulation, and policing. Fanfare for a City is not only an illuminating read for its insights on urban and music history, but also a timely meditation on the interconnections between art, public policy, and urban communities.