Nostalgia and the Mal de Paris: Composing the City–Country Duality

Abstract Starting in the 1830s, French musicians began to fully engage with the concept of nostalgia as an affective category and as a musical trait. The deliberate artistic process of naming music and musical works as ‘nostalgia’ contributed to the demedicalization of the term while transforming its original meaning as homesickness into a spectrum of spatiotemporal emotions. Musical renditions of nostalgia also displaced expressions and discussions of this emotion away from the countryside, where it had originally been rooted, towards the city. Musicians thus directly participated in the transformation of nostalgia into a commodity, a fashionable product that could be purchased in music stores, experienced firsthand in entertainment venues, and tailored to the needs and desires of an urban population. This article traces the shift in the evocation of nostalgia in music and the musical press during the nineteenth century in Paris, where it became most prevalent in dozens of vocal romances and instrumental pieces. The compositions that I analyse, rather than forming a unified depiction of the city, offer a range of sonorous and thematic ideas that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the place nostalgia played in the imagination of an urban population increasingly conscious of its artistic value and impact. I thus uncover three main stages in this shift, which show how successive generations of musicians, influenced by different attitudes to urbanity, conceived nostalgia. I investigate why composers drawn to nostalgia were attracted to certain types of musical and formal models, what these choices reveal about their understanding of nostalgia and its purpose, and, more importantly, what this musical nostalgia sounded like. This article provides the first overview of works that deliberately use nostalgia as an explicit topic across genres and generations in nineteenth-century Paris.