La Revue musicale was a weekly musical review founded in 1827 by the Belgian musicologist, teacher and composer François-Joseph Fétis, then working as professor of counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatoire de Paris. It bore that name until 1835,[1] when Maurice Schlesinger, a music editor from Berlin who had moved to Paris in 1821, revived it under the title of the Revue et gazette musicale then the Gazette musicale.
Schlesinger had already created a publishing house to make music accessible to all and, in 1834, he had founded a society for the publication of classical and modern music at a reasonable price, most notably works by Mozart, Haydn, Weber, Beethoven, Hummel and Berlioz. He also published Robert le diable and Les Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer, as well as La Juive by Fromental Halévy.[2]
He widened the subject matter of the Gazette musicale from music itself to also include literature about music – in 1837 he commissioned from Honoré de Balzac for the Gazette the novella Gambara (dealing with the new style of grand opera).[3]
The review was later renamed La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, and was published until 1880.