Paul Taffanel - Reviving Early Music

Reviving Early Music

Taffanel also revamped the required repertoire for his Conservatory students. Beginning in 1894, he replaced much of the 19th-century music his student Louis Fleury called "idle twittering" with works by Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers of the 18th century. Until then, French musicians (save for a handful of organists) had ignored the Bach revival that had swept England, Germany and Austria. Alfredo Casella, who had studied Bach in Italy before coming to Paris, noted that none of his classmates at the Conservatoire knew that composer's music.

Taffanel toured widely in Europe. This placed him ahead of his contemporaries in awareness of baroque repertoire. (His tours had included playing Mozart concertos at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, a singular honor for a French performer.) Thanks to this awareness, Taffanel's impact on the early music revival in France cannot be overestimated. Louis Fleury writes,

Bach's sonatas, those wonders, long buried in the dust of libraries, awakened to find a real interpreter . He was the first, at any rate in France, to find out the meaning of these works, which his colleagues thought dull and badly written for the instrument ... It is a fact, though hardly credible, that down to 1895 Bach sonatas were not taught in the flute class (under Altes) at the conservatoire.

His work sparked and helped fuel a growing interest in France in early music, with editions such as Saint-Saëns' of music by Jean-Philippe Rameau. In 1897, Taffanel also became head of the orchestra class at the Conservatoire.