Claiming Wagner For France

"This book examines the shifting attitudes toward Wagner reflected in the Parisian press during the period of the Third Reich. Paradoxically, during one of the darkest periods of French history, as the German threat grew more tangible and then manifested in the Nazi occupation of France, Parisians chose to see in Wagner a universality that transcended his Germanness. As Franco-German diplomatic relations gradually worsened in the 1930s, Wagner became an increasingly integral part of French musical culture. Parisians were unwilling to surrender Wagner to German exclusivist claims. In previous decades the French had used Wagner to symbolize a diverse array of political arguments and positions, from right-wing nationalism to left-wing humanism and egalitarianism, In the 1930s, however, the Parisian press depicted him as a universalist. Although Wagner had stood in for German nationalism and chauvinism in recent periods of Franco-German conflict, in the 1930s Parisians refused this notion and attempted to reclaim his role in their own national history and imagination. Even once war was declared in 1939 and a ban on the performance of Wagner's music was implemented, commentators insisted that it was simply a temporary measure designed to avoid public disturbance. Simultaneously, they maintained that 'music has no borders,' and that 'it is childish to mix art and politics.' The Wagner discourses that emerged from the 1930s Parisian press paved the way for the dominant Wagner discourse in the German-controlled Occupation press: Collaboration through Wagner. By a great irony of history, the concept of Wagner the universalist that had been used to resist the Nazis in the 1930s was transformed into the infamous collaborationist rhetoric promoted by the Vichy government between 1940 and 1944"--

This book explores the historical-cultural interactions between French concert music and American jazz across 1900-65, from both perspectives.

How did Wagner's experiences in Paris influence his works and social character? And how does his sometime desire for recognition by the French cultural establishment square with his German national identity and with the related idea of a universally valid art? Friedrich Nietzsche more than once claimed that Wagner's only true home was in Paris. This book is the first major study to trace Wagner's relationship with Paris from his first sojourn there (1839-1842) to the Paris Tannhäuser (1861). How did Wagner's experiences in Paris influence his works and social character? How does his sometime desire for recognition by the French cultural establishment square with his German national identity and with the related idea of a universally valid art? This book presents Wagner's perennial ambition of an international operatic success in the "capital city of the nineteenth century" and the paradoxical consequences of that ambition upon its failure. Through an examination of previously neglected source materials, the book engages with ideas in the so-called "Wagner debate" as an ongoing philosophical project that tries to come to terms with the composer's Germanness. The book is in three main parts arranged broadly in chronological sequence. The first considers Wagner's earliest years in Paris, focusing on his own French-language drafts of Das Liebesverbot and Der fliegende Holländer. The second part explores his stance towards Paris "at a distance" following his return to Saxony and subsequent political exile. Arriving at Wagner's most often discussed "Paris period" (1859-61), the third part interrogates the concert performances under the composer's direction at the Théâtre-Italien and revisionist aspects of their reception. JEREMY COLEMAN is Lecturer in Music in the School of Performing Arts, Universityof Malta.

This research monograph studies and reinterprets the works and ideas of Richard Wagner that have had such a profound influence on the artistic and intellectual life of France. His Romanticism influenced the French symbolists so greatly that they named their major journal La Revue Wagnerians. His musical themes, dramatic structures and philosophical tropes recurred in the works of almost every major French composer before World war One. Massenet was so devoted that he earned the sobriquet "Madamoiselle Wagner". Proust employed Wagnerian concepts and allusions in his modernist fiction and publicly defended Wagner's artistic achievements against the general assault on German kultur during the 1914-1918 war. Wagner remained important during the interwar years as well as the occupation 1940-1944 and after the Liberation. Du Quenoy interprets the phenomenon of France's infatuation with Wagner and discusses why Wagner's influence has been misunderstood and understudied. The author points to the effects of competition, war and political recrimination on the French psyche. In the face of such bitter struggle who would expect a German cultural icon to have played such an important and consistent role in French life? The author points to the strength and uniqueness of Wagner's creativity and his spiritual universalism as the answer. The author also discusses Wagnerism and Wagnerites in France's literary, musical and political culture.

A ground-breaking study of the musical and literary priorities, professional practices and creative interactions that shaped one of the most adventurous artforms of the Belle Époque.

Examines the influence of Wagner on European literature and culture, from Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche to the surrealist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the decadent illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.

A companion volume to Drake's Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (2002), French Intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation traces the political positions adopted by French writers and artists from the end of the 19th century to the Liberation. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it offers a clear and accessible analysis of the intellectuals' engagement with nationalism, pacifism, communism, anti-communism, surrealism, fascism and anti-fascism, which is located within the evolving national and international context of the period.

This significant volume moves music-historical research in the direction of deconstructing the national grand narratives in music history, of challenging the national paradigm in methodology, and thinking anew about cultural traffic, cultural transfer and cosmopolitanism in the musical past. The chapters of this book confront, or subject to some kind of critique, assumptions about the importance of the national in the musical past. The emphasis, therefore, is not so much on how national culture has been constructed, or how national cultural institutions have influenced musical production, but, rather, on the way the national has been challenged by musical practices or audience reception.