French Vocal Literature by Resick Georgine

Author:Resick, Georgine [Resick, Georgine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2017-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Cultural and Musical Life: Battle on a New Front

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) referred to Beethoven as his musical model, though he (along with Schumann) was considered a part of the boldly progressive New German School that gathered around Liszt. Wagner identified with the idealistic and utopian initiatives already in the air in the 1830s, wishing to transfer the values of “pure” concert music to the operatic stage.12 His efforts to find a foothold in Paris in the late 1830s came to naught (even with Meyerbeer’s introduction), though they were the occasion of his composing a handful of credible French mélodies (Mignonne, L’Attente, Tout n’est qu’images fugitives) to present to Pauline Viardot (who politely rejected them). It was not until the first Paris performance of the prelude to Tristan und Isolde in 1860 that musicians began to take note of Wagner’s music.

Failing to attract musical attention in Paris in the 1830s, Wagner was regarded as something of a madman in the late 1840s.13 His provocative writings of 1849–1851 sparked heated debate in the proliferating Parisian press.14 Wagner’s insistence in Art and Revolution (1849) that sociopolitical revolution was necessary for artistic and spiritual regeneration,15 combined with his association with the 1848–1849 uprising in Dresden, considerably alarmed conservatives; however, they endeared him to the intellectual avant-garde and the bohemians, dispirited by the failure of the Second Republic. In Opera and Drama (1850–1851), Wagner revealed his plan for a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), of which opera—a fusion of musical, dramatic, and scenic art—would be the natural medium. (To many, Wagner’s theory seemed little more than a rehash of Gluck’s Preface to Alceste of 1769.)16 His insistence that poetry must dominate operatic music17 excited the attention of numerous writers and artists who were already attracted to Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences (see chapter 6).18 Wagner’s autodidactic reading—jumbled influences of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Paul Lagarde’s “Germanic Christianity,” and Arthur de Gobineau’s racial theories (1853–1855)—resulted in his distasteful polemic Judaism in Music (1869) and a rejection of industrial society and materialism.19 Wagner frequently muddied the waters with extremely contradictory statements, which explains how he was able to expediently “adjust his politics” and appeal to a wide spectrum of readers who used his works for their own purposes.20

Amid the shifting sands of Wagner’s support during the long decades before his success in France, those who wished to break with tradition or were at odds with the status quo were his primary adherents. Baudelaire’s famous laudatory letter to Wagner following an 1860 concert of his operatic excerpts influenced three groups of writers to embrace Wagner: the Parnassian poets, who dubbed themselves the “first wagnéristes” and fanned literary flames in the periodical Parnasse contemporain; Manet and the realists, along with artists and art critics of the 1860s who later coalesced as the impressionists; and the nascent symbolist movement, inspired by Baudelaire and Verlaine, led by Mallarmé, and fostered by the young avant-garde poets who founded the Revue wagnérienne in 1885.21 By the 1880s, admiration for Wagner was a mark of intellectual progressiveness.22

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