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The foreign artists and composers who lived in Paris between the two World Wars have been labelled »École de Paris« by some contemporaries. Behind this label lay a desire to emphasize the stylistic difference between cosmopolitan works and »French« art. At the time, critics systematically adopted a »nation-centered« reading of art and music, resulting in two types of reaction: on the one hand, a defense against the »threat« of the extinction of the French tradition; on the other, a desire to assimilate the nationals of the »young nations« born of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in order to prevent their germanization). Put to the test of musical analysis, this discourse reveals all the weaknesses of ideological generalizations: which musical features are actually »cosmopolitan«? And which »French« music did they threaten?

Prof. Dr. Federico Lazzaro (University of Fribourg) specializes in the cultural history of music in France during the Third Republic (1870–1940). Among his publications, the monograph Écoles de Paris en musique, 1920–1950: Identités, nationalisme, cosmopolitisme (Paris, Vrin, 2018) and the edited collections Artistic Migration and Identity in Paris, 1870–1940 (with Steven Huebner, New York, Peter Lang, 2020) and Musique, disque et radio en pays francophones, 1880–1950 (with Michel Duchesneau, Paris, Vrin, 2022).