Wagner in Paris, or Paris in Wagner: Heath Lees is intrigued by a refreshing new approach to Wagner’s relationship with Paris

Review of Jeremy Coleman, Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity (The Boydell Press, 2019).

March 2020, Volume 14, Number 1, 89–93.

This is a book that could readily be judged by its cover, though less readily by its title. The cover (note to the author: not a frontispiece) is a striking reproduction of a caricature by Wagner’s friend in Paris, Ernst B. Kietz. Frequently found in the Wagner literature, it is usually skated over as one of those ‘Richard Wagner King of Noise’ cartoons that proliferated during the middle decades of the 19th century. In this book, Jeremy Coleman devotes a whole page to it, deftly teasing out its comment, information and illumination, plus of course, its layered humour. It perfectly captures Wagner’s Paris contradictions – his grandiose schemes displayed as nursery tantrums and his artistic role compacted into one of ‘god and beggar’ (Coleman’s words, p. 41, with help from Adorno). 

The title is something else. In the past, Richard Wagner in Paris would have been just a plain statement of the book’s historical subject. However, years of reception-study in music scholarship have changed all that. Now the short and simple title accrues infinitely more resonance through the proximity of three words hovering beneath it as a subtitle: Translation, Identity, Modernity.