• Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret

    Author(s):
    Jack Blaszkiewicz (see profile)
    Date:
    2021
    Group(s):
    American Musicological Society
    Subject(s):
    Musicology, Nineteenth century, Music, France, History
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    cabaret, haussmann, second empire, thirdspace, Psychogeography, 19th century, French music, Music history
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/1fx4-pf50
    Abstract:
    Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2021.45.2.147
    Publisher:
    University of California Press
    Pub. Date:
    November 2021
    Journal:
    19th-Century Music
    Volume:
    45
    Issue:
    2
    Page Range:
    147 - 166
    ISSN:
    0148-2076
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    2 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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