Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the cris de Paris were still mainly regarded as annoying noise. Since then, however, a process was underway to regulate and reduce itinerant street trading. During this process, which takes place over several decades, the street cries are being listened to and described with increasing interest.
According to Joseph Mainzer, the cries were an elementary form of folk music; Jean-Georges Kastner saw in them music in the process of coming into being. Kastner’s artistic ambition was to give musical form to ‘the voices of Paris’. Not his own composition, but Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise can be seen as the realsation of that ambition.
00:00 Intro
00:53 City noise
02:46 Marginalisation and nostalgia
04:35 From annoyance to aesthetics
08:49 Mainzer (1841): street calls as music
12:09 Kastner (1857): Les voix de Paris
19:04 Offenbach (1858): Purchase your pleasure, ladies!
24:10 Charpentier (1900): Louise
Marchande de plaisir (wafer seller) and her cry (with a mocking child in the background). Bertall, La comédie de notre temps (1875)
Music excerpts:
00:37, 04:26, 11:44 Jean Péheu, Les cris parisiens: scène d’imitations 191? https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k127305d
07:17 Duncan MacLeod, The Cries of Columbia Road 2017
15:03, 16:28 Jean-Georges Kastner, Les voix de Paris. Ensemble Clément Janequin, D. Visse. L’écrit du cri. Harmonia mundi 2009
18:36, 22:08 Jacques Offenbach, Mesdames de la Halle. M. Mesplé, J-Ph. Lafont a.o., Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Manuel Rosenthal. EMI 1983
23:54 Giacomo Puccini, La bohème. R.C.A. Victor Chorus, R.C.A. Victor Orchestra, Th. Beecham. EMI 1956
24:42, 27:36 Gustave Charpentier, Louise. I. Cotrubas, P. Domingo, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, New Philharmonia Orchestra, G. Prêtre. EMI 1976
References: see episode 26.
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