ABSTRACT
The French have long been good at historical interplay. We can say the same of French music across several centuries, together with much music that has become indelibly associated with France or, more usually, with its capital city. In a study of nineteenth-century interplay which admits less of the 'historical' of the current project's title, Christopher Reynolds addresses the double bind of (mostly German) Romantic composers wanting to preserve their status as original artists while creating intertextual webs of allusion in a spirit of homage and among friends. From the point of view of French music, that reference to the 'trivial' is important. One wonders whether this analogy would have occurred to Lacome if the Gothic had not first become a potent and fashionable symbol of French artistic pre-eminence within continental Europe.
