Journal d’un critique musical lyonnais

Lyon’s musical life between 1907 and 1930, a veritable effervescence, is magnified through the eyes of the journalist Léon Vallas (1879-1956), the sharpest and least complacent of the fifteen or twenty (!) music critics in Lyon’s newspapers… He is also the only one to have a national – that is to say, Parisian – and international audience, and some of his books on Debussy, translated into English, are still being reprinted across the Atlantic in 2018! He is still the only critic of the 20th century to have Lyon talked about outside his own city. Very much involved in the struggles of his time, he shared the dreams of his generation, imbued with the same typically French obsessions, with its partisan rejections and a certain distrust of superficiality, even going so far as to be unfair, notably towards Mahler or Puccini. He attached great importance to this function of enlightening the judgement of his readers, and was often very convincing. His diary, written down in a familiar, relaxed and sometimes extemporaneous tone (because it was not intended for publication), which makes it so tasty, also reveals his other activities, such as those of lecturer, teacher, author, but also concert organiser. He was keen to bring his Revue musicale de Lyon to life, illustrating it with concerts that were off the beaten track: he played the music of his contemporaries, often for the first time in Lyon, from Debussy to Richard Strauss, from Ravel to Schoenberg, from Stravinsky to Poulenc, as well as exhumations of works from what was not yet called “early music”, from Couperin to Rameau, from Janequin and Goudimel to Du Caurroy and Marais). Let us not forget either his “spoken criticism of recordings”, an idea that would be well exploited later by others…
Extracts from Vallas’ diary for 1940 have been added.