Wagner and the French Muse: Music, Society, and Nation in Modern France

Abstract

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 to the extent that they named a major journal La Revue Wagnerians. Wagner's musical themes, dramatic structures, and philosophical tropes have recurred in the works of almost every major French composer before World War I. 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 , through 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.