Resonances from beyond the grave: music and the occult in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

Music has featured prominently in the occult from as far back as histories of the subject may be traced. Yet however great the occult’s importance in French esoterism from Mersenne to Messiaen, accounts of its more recent manifestations in the nineteenth-century séance have inexplicably ignored its music. Newly recovered documents allow music’s key role in the séance in the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond to be placed at the center of its history.

The séance—the practice of table turning—arrived in Paris in early 1853. Within weeks, Parisian salons were swamped with spirits relaying words, images, and music from beyond the grave. Music’s engagement with spiritism took many forms: the documentation of spirits at performances in the opera house, the transmission of composers’ posthumous views on terrestrial and celestial music, and the dictation of unknown works by Mozart. One salon, made up by the Fourierist members of the editorial board of the recently suppressed journal La démocratie pacifique, was remarkable for its success in recalling celestial music from the spirit world; the music broadcast to the salon was recorded by the critic and composer Allyre Bureau, and subsequently published. The music thus transcribed was reported to various musical authorities—including the composer Félicien David and the pianist Émile Prudent—as well as to such well-connected salonnières as Delphine de Girardin. The occult musics and the discourses that surrounded them were transmitted to posterity in such different media as the fantastic novel and the oil painting.

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