Lecture "Proust et la musique" by Cécile Leblanc

As part of the cultural programme of the Mairie du 8e arrondissement of Paris, Cécile Leblanc will give a lecture on "Proust et la Musique" on Tuesday 10 March 2020 at 6pm at the Hôtel Cail, 56 boulevard Malesherbes, Paris 8e.

A graduate (agrégée) in classical literature, Cécile Leblanc is a senior lecturer at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle-Paris 3 and holds the Habilitation to direct research. She specialises in the relationship between music and literature at the end of the 19th century. She is the author of "Wagnérisme et création en France 1883-1886" (Champion, 2005) and co-edited "Le wagnérisme dans tous ses états 1913-2013" (Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2016). She contributed to the Encyclopédie Wagner (Actes Sud, 2010).

Music plays a major role in the writing of all Marcel Proust's texts, whether fiction or criticism, and in particular of the Recherche, which unfolds through the prism of musical current events, from the triumphant Wagnerism of the 1890s to the works of Strauss and Debussy. His curiosity and musical knowledge are immense. From the salons where music was funded without being truly loved, and where he deplored the listening conditions, to conversations with the composers and performers he frequented, foremost among them Reynaldo Hahn, he acquired a genuine gift for musical criticism. A regular concertgoer and an avid reader of the press, he showed tireless attention to contemporary music and fed his work on the great scores composed at the beginning of the 20th century: Pelléas et Mélisande, Salomé, Le Sacre du printemps. These would allow him, after much hesitation, to synthesise, in the mysterious figure of a French musician with an "advanced" and controversial aesthetic – controversial even in the eyes of the narrator himself – a quarter-century of musical debate.