Song and Self by Ian Bostridge

Author:Ian Bostridge [Bostridge, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MUS000000 MUSIC / General, MUS028000 MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Opera, LCO010000 LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

We acknowledge the right and even the duty of superior races to attract those who have not arrived at the same degree of culture and to call them to the progress realised thanks to the efforts of sciences and industry. . . . We have too much love for our country to disavow the expansion of its thought, of the French civilisation.35

Ministers of the SFIO were convinced that France had a duty to remain in Morocco, to protect its inhabitants, and to prevent what they characterized as an ominous descent into barbarism and Islamic fanaticism. Despite Blum’s support for Gide’s assault on the excesses of the colonial concessions in the Congo, the position of both men was that these were indeed excesses and that a distinction had to be maintained between criticizing colonial abuse and criticizing what they saw as the noble mission of colonialism (and the postwar mandate system) itself.

Ironically enough, it was Ravel’s friend, Prime Minister Paul Painlevé, who escalated the war in Morocco in April 1925. In May the first of hundreds of antiwar demonstrations organized by the French Communist Party drew fifteen thousand protestors to the Parisian streets. It is not difficult to see why Ravel’s four-minute-long song, with Parny’s extraordinary anticolonial message and a musical language of supremely laconic dissonant violence, was an agitprop bomb dropped into that feverish May atmosphere. Ravel cannot have been unaware of the effect his song would have, but his subsequent comments about the cycle, and the ultimate sandwiching of the violence of the second song between two songs that depicted the more traditionally exoticist “attitudes de Plaisir et . . . abandon de la volupté,”36 suggest a retreat back into his aestheticizing shell. The Chansons madécasses were certainly a new venture for Ravel aesthetically, and the violence of the second song is a brilliant musical foil for the languor of the first and third. But the shocking political context should not be allowed simply to evaporate.

According to the historian Jane Fulcher, Ravel’s ideological practice was a matter of “subversion [that] was always subtle, taking place on the level of symbols and gestures which, as he well knew, could be even more powerful than conventional discursive confrontation.”37 If the second song of the Chansons madécasses is not a political manifesto, and is layered with as many ideological complexities as Parny’s poems, its “subversion” is surely more than “subtle,” being rather an exercise in imaginative identification with the “other” that problematizes or questions—as art surely can and should—the orthodoxies of the political and social order. Nevertheless, as a work of ventriloquism, like Parny’s poems, it remains problematic.38 Who should speak for the oppressed, then and now, for those who have been silenced? And to what extent was Ravel’s song an expression of radical chic?

As part of French culture’s engagement with the colonial “other,” Parny and Ravel’s vision of Madagascar and acts of ventriloquism may be troubling, but it’s undeniable that “Méfiez vous des blancs,” as song or prose poem, was a radical anticolonial intervention and was received as such by some audience members at its premiere.

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