'Les Vingt and the Belgian avant-garde': A discussion of the music staged under the auspices of Les Vin its aesthetic relationship to music, art and literature in Belgium and France, with reference to La Societe Nationale de Musique, Paris (Vincent d'Indy, Eugene Ysaye, Octave Maus).

摘要

Between 1884 and 1893 a group of avant-garde artists calling themselves “Les Vingt” (or Les XX) hosted an annual exhibition in Brussels that became the focal point of a European avant-garde movement. As post-impressionists, their diverse interest in the modern genres of visual art were part of a wider cultural expression of fin-de-siècle aesthetics that had strong roots in Belgian social unrest. In a manner that had little precedent, they presented one of the first true collaborations of art, music and literary thought. Every January the foremost writers, poets, composers and musicians traveled from Paris for a lecture series and a concert program of new music staged in the galleries of the art exhibition. This manifesto of the avant-garde, publicized in the journal L'Art Moderne, became an international phenomenon. It also represented one of the clearest models of a unified fin-de-siecle philosophy.; At the center of the music series lay collaboration between three figures: Octave Maus, Eugene Ysaÿe and the composer Vincent d'Indy. D'Indy was the secretary to Paris' premier new music venue La Société Nationale de Musique, and the chief figure in a generation of composers including Fauré, Chausson, and Debussy. His brand of post-Wagnerian modernism was at the forefront of debate in the Parisian new music scene and found its chief exponents in the students of César Franck: “le jeune école française”. Les XX offered d'Indy and his fellow Franckists an International forum and success at Les XX brought currency to a style that sparked political and aesthetic controversy in Paris. Belgian audiences and critics welcomed the new music of Parisian composers caught in the post-Wagnerian dilemma. The freedom d'Indy found at Les XX allowed him to refine an artistic agenda that La Société Nationale de Musique only partly allowed.