Not the Last Word: Heath Lees enjoys a colourful but far from complete history of ‘wagnérisme’

Review of Paul du Quenoy, Wagner and the French Muse: Music, Society, and Nation in Modern France (Academica Press, 2011). 

March 2012, Volume 6, Number 1, 93–6.

Why is the tale of Wagner and the French so satisfying? According to the author of this book, it’s because of its happy ending today. In his Introduction, as he surveys nearly two centuries of Wagner and wagnérisme in France, Du Quenoy pronounces himself ‘ecstatic’ if readers conclude ‘that culture could in at least one case transcend the nasty political divisions of our unhappy world’ (p. 7). He means of course the eruption of three wars engulfing both France and Germany, not to mention all the spleen and propaganda churned out by the increasingly mediatised hate-machinery of the years linking 1870, 1914 and 1939. Yes, one can rejoice in the indestructibility of Wagner’s art, which officially died in France during the war years, yet rose again each time, renewed in vigour, and ever wider in embrace.