Music of the Future, Music of the Past:TannhäuserandAlcesteat the Paris Opéra

Abstract

The 1861 productions of Wagner's Tannhäuser and Gluck's Alceste at the Paris Opéra led to a major turning point in reception of both composers in France. After Tannhäuser's spectacular failure in March of that year, the management of the Opéra decided to mount Alceste, a move that critics took as an invitation to compare the two. It was in the preface to Alceste, after all, that Gluck had directly expressed his famous operatic reforms, which Wagner's later aesthetic principles were often perceived to echo or, less charitably, to plagiarize. Critics in the 1850s had begun to make connections between the two composers, but reception of these two 1861 productions cemented a link that would last well into the twentieth century.

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