Presentation of the festival

Distant or nearby, traversed in reality or simply fantasised: in the nineteenth century, foreign lands allowed French music to question its identity.

With the Industrial Revolution, what was far away was brought closer at the speed of a steam engine: the dreamed-of Orient of fairy tales and explorers lay within the reach of well-off Europeans. For the less wealthy, the drawings in illustrated newspapers opened windows onto other lands. The musical output of nineteenth-century France echoed this fascination: the plots of its operas were generally set beyond the nation’s borders, and dances imported from abroad nourished a large part of the instrumental repertory. In parallel to the bellicose, colonialist geopolitics of the age, artists also journeyed to foreign climes in order to seek new paths. Travel took on the sense of a quest for origins, bringing with it the hope of regenerating an exhausted West.