Félicien David: not a satellite but a star

Jules Combarieu, in volume 3 of his Histoire de la musique (published posthumously in 1919), described Félicien David as the ‘satellite’ of a ‘heavenly body ofthe first magnitude’, namely Hector Berlioz. The demotion of David to a marginal role in music history was part of a larger process – in the early twentieth century – by which hundreds of capable and even inspired composers of the nineteenth century were categorized as either great or else forgettable. Music critics and historians, such as Combarieu, were important agents in this black-and-white sorting process. So were performers and concert organizers: David’s works had already begun to disappear from the repertoire in the 1890s, some of them even earlier.