Jean Nattiez as Music Critic in Amiens, 1946-1963: the Challenges of Post-War Musical Reconstruction

Abstract

For the theatre-goers of Amiens, the night of 5-6 May 1940 sparked something akin to collective mourning. After a matinée performance of Carmen, the municipal theatre—one of the earliest eighteenth-century examples still standing in France—burnt down. Only the façade remained, soon held up by emergency buttressing. Fires are a common enough feature of theatre life, and France is full of examples of municipal determination to rebuild after such losses; but the timing in Amiens intensified the grief because of what it presaged. Nazi bombing raids began ten days later, causing huge civilian casualties, and the Occupiers’ tanks rolled in soon afterwards. The Liberation brought yet more bombing, now from the Allies. The events of 5 May, then, fused in local memory with a short period of devastating bombing followed by four years of wartime pain, immediately creating a potent symbol delineating pre- from post-war life . Some measure of that symbol’s significance can be gauged from what happened to the façade a decade later, when instead of being demolished it was painstakingly rolled back by five metres, over three days, in alignment with a redeveloped main street . It is now the façade of a bank, but that is another story.