The sounds of the French language, the history of French education, the cultural politics of the Third Republic, and the performance of French verse come surprisingly together in Katherine Bergeron's Voice Lessons, a study of the modern vocal art known as la melodie francaise. In the years after 1890, French composers began writing songs of extreme subtlety and nuance - songs so concerned about expressing too much that they expressed very little, to the point of having almost no melody at all. What was this new music trying to say? Listening to melodies composed by Gabriel Faure, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others, Bergeron seeks to understand not only the meaning of this elusive repertory, but also how it came to develop in such a way. Faure's exquisite song cycle from 1910, La Chanson d'Eve, forms a fertile starting point for the study, as it narrates the story of the first woman's discovery of language and her voice in song. An apologia for the new musical language of French composers, the cycle also points to larger trends-in particular, to the new forms of teaching that emerged with the liberal idealism of the Third Republic. The book explores France's free and modern education system, and the positivist science called la phonetique experimental that grew alongside it, showing how each enabled a new vision of the French language and its accent. Voice Lessons chronicles an idealistic musical moment in French history, when poets, composers, actors, singers, and scientists learned to see and to speak their language in new ways, and imagined that speaking as a new form of melody. Through close readings of songs, poems, sound recordings, and other historical records, the book explores the development of a rare musical art, why this musical art emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared.