French Connection: Paul du Quenoy takes issue with a new study of Manet and Wagner

Review of Therese Dolan, Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of Their Time (Ashgate, 2013).

November 2014, Volume 8, Number 3, 91–3.

Therese Dolan brings the eye of an art historian to Wagner studies in this attempt to assess the composer’s early influence in French cultural life through the prism of one work by one painter: Edouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries (1862). Executed just one year after the famous fiasco surrounding Wagner’s ill-fated introduction of Tannhäuser to French audiences at the Paris Opéra, the canvas includes depictions of a number of important cultural figures identified as supporters, or at least trenchant observers, of Wagner’s music (the French term ‘Wagnérien’ did not appear for several years thereafter: it is usually traced to the time of the first French performances of Rienzi in 1869). Manet’s proto-Wagnerians include the writers Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier and Jules-François-Félix Husson (called ‘Champfleury’), the composer Jacques Offenbach and the visual artists Henri Fantin-Latour and Gustave Courbet.