ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on three intersecting but discrete ways of understanding Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Frenchness: as part of a historical lineage, as an adopted stylistic transformation, and as a form of transnational musical hybridity. Amid the cacophony of critical voices in the fin-de-siecle Parisian musical press, one point of relative harmony among Paul Dukas and his colleagues was the notion that ‘Frenchness’, a set of inherent qualities that separated French music from the traditions of other cultures, was highly desirable. The importance of Frenchness to Dukas’s legacy is multifaceted. To begin, Dukas was sensitive to how critics and audiences perceived the interaction between his Jewish heritage and his French identity. Dukas and his colleagues invoked this ‘vocabulary of Frenchness’ in discussing a wide range of works, confirming the value of French music in a conveniently circular way: it has Frenchness because it is French, and it is French because it has Frenchness.
