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Books by Leslie Sprout

For the three forces competing for political authority in France during World War II, music becam... more For the three forces competing for political authority in France during World War II, music became the site of a cultural battle that reflected the war itself. German occupying authorities promoted German music at the expense of French, while the Vichy administration pursued projects of national renewal through culture. Meanwhile, Resistance networks gradually formed to combat German propaganda while eyeing Vichy’s efforts with suspicion. In The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, Leslie A. Sprout explores how each of these forces influenced the composition, performance, and reception of five well-known works: the secret Resistance songs of Francis Poulenc and those of Arthur Honegger; Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in a German prisoner of war camp; Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, one of sixty-five pieces commissioned by Vichy between 1940 and 1944; and Igor Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes, which was met at its 1945 Paris premiere with protests that prefigured the aesthetic debates of the early Cold War. Sprout examines not only how these pieces were created and disseminated during and just after the war, but also how and why we still associate these pieces with the stories we tell—in textbooks, program notes, liner notes, historical monographs, and biographies—about music, France, and World War II.

Papers by Leslie Sprout

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2019

Arthur Honegger composed his first sound film scores in 1933–34. For Les misérables, Raymond Bern... more Arthur Honegger composed his first sound film scores in 1933–34. For
Les misérables, Raymond Bernard, who was under contract at Pathé-
Natan to direct big-budget theatrical films that would compete with
Paramount’s French-language productions, expected Honegger to
provide intermittent orchestral underscoring for already filmed
sequences that privileged dialogue over music. For Rapt, the musically
trained Dimitri Kirsanoff used independent financing to collaborate
from the start with Honegger and Arthur Hoérée on what the director
called “a hybrid form . . . in which music, image, and dialogue work
together.” The innovative electroacoustic and sound editing techniques
in the soundtrack for Rapt have, I argue, overshadowed the strikingly
reciprocal relationship between the soundtrack’s more conventional
instrumental underscoring and the images on screen. Honegger
theorized in 1931 that, in sound film, music’s “autonomy” would free it from the burden of mimesis. Instead, the images on screen would teach
listeners about music’s abstract “reality.” In practice, however, in Rapt,
mimetic music and musicalized sound effects bridge the gap between
aesthetic goals of hybridity and practical demands for intelligible
dialogue. My analysis of the abduction, washhouse, storm, and dream
sequences in Rapt demonstrates that a successful hybrid of sound and
image ultimately has the potential not just to use images to pin down
music’s elusive “reality,” but also to use music’s mimetic possibilities to
influence our reading of ambiguous imagery. It also shows that music
does not need to be in itself groundbreaking in order to contribute to
groundbreaking innovations in sound film.

Notes, 2004

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Notes, 2004

The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, 2013

Journal of Musicology, 2009

In spring 1945, a small group of students, among them Serge Nigg and Pierre Boulez, protested dur... more In spring 1945, a small group of students, among them Serge Nigg and Pierre Boulez, protested during the ﬁrst performances in liberated Paris of the neoclassical works Stravinsky had composed in America. Whereas Boulez’s biographers have interpreted the student protests as a sign of René Leibowitz’s successful promotion of serialism in France, scholars of the Cold War have seen the 1945 concerts as a precursor to Stravinsky’s participation in the 1952 L’Œuvre du XXe siècle, a festival in Paris indirectly funded by the CIA. These interpretations subsume the immediate postwar period in France within a synchronic view of the early Cold War era. But the 1945 protests against Stravinsky were not about the decisive embrace of a single musical style; rather, they were about the desire of young French composers to play an active role in shaping the postwar future of music in France. In 1945, Nigg—and not Boulez—represented the aesthetic opinions of a generation of French composers who had grown up during the German occupation of Paris and the political aspirations of those who, like Nigg, ﬂocked to the French Communist Party at war’s end. Nigg’s participation in the 1945 Stravinsky debates gives us occasion to examine his earliest musical compositions and the political opinions he would express with increasing ideological fervor in the 1950s. Although in verbal pronouncements he supported socialist realism, Nigg’s rare and complex use of a French folk tune in his 1954Piano Concerto betrays his ambivalence about the Soviet demand for communist com posers to reject “falsely cosmopolitan tendencies” in favor of their national cultural heritage. Having rejected in 1945 both Stravinsky’s neoclassicism and French nationalism (the latter tainted by associations with Vichy during the occupation), Nigg had to choose in the early Cold War between his aesthetic and political loyalties.

Musical Quarterly, 2004

The first performance of [the Quartet for the End of Time] at the Stalag in January 1941 has, tog... more The first performance of [the Quartet for the End of Time] at the Stalag in January 1941 has, together with the première of The Rite of Spring, become one of the great stories of twentieth-century music.

Book Reviews by Leslie Sprout

Context, 2024

draws on two overlapping areas of musicological research. The first is French reception of Wagner... more draws on two overlapping areas of musicological research. The first is French reception of Wagner from the composer's early Paris sojourn (1839 to 1842) to the present day. Passionate debates in the French press over Wagner and wagnérisme-his adulation by various French musicians, writers, and artists-intensified during times of military conflict between France and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Orzech's book builds on the substantial existing scholarship on Wagner reception in France up to the First World War and adds to the growing scholarly work (mostly, but not exclusively, in French) in the second area: musical life in Paris during the Second World War.

Revue de musicologie, 2023

du volume. Sans tomber dans les effets de mode, le projet piloté par Timothé Picard embrasse quan... more du volume. Sans tomber dans les effets de mode, le projet piloté par Timothé Picard embrasse quantité de problèmes d'une actualité brûlante : quelle place pour la critique dans les nouveaux médias ? quelle critique pour les musiques actuelles ? peut-on encore parler d'un genre littéraire quand les modes d'écriture se diversifient indéfiniment ?, etc. Il y a donc fort à parier que l'ouvrage sera aussi riche d'enseignements pour les chercheurs que pour celles et ceux qui font aujourd'hui profession de critiques musicaux.

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2019

Notes, 2004

The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, 2013

Journal of Musicology, 2009

Musical Quarterly, 2004

Context, 2024

Revue de musicologie, 2023