À bas Wagner!: The French Press Campaign against Wagner during World War I

Abstract

In the career of Richard Wagner, artistic and ideological issues have always been closely interconnected, and, up to the present day, his work continues to be discussed on political rather than on purely musical grounds. In France, the most famous examples of the ideological controversies surrounding Wagner are, first of all, the Tannhäuser crisis of 1861, which led to the opera's withdrawal after only three performances, and, second, the nationalist revulsion against his work after the Franco-Prussian War, which resulted in a temporary ban of his operas in the 1870s and ‘80s. Wagnerism in France began to wane at the turn of the century. This was partly due to internal divisions among Wagner's followers and partly to Wagner's growing popularity among the general public which detracted from the avant-garde élan and “radical chic” that had surrounded him. The demise of Wagnerism as an avant-garde cultural movement did not, however, make the figure of Wagner any less controversial either ideologically or politically. Rather predictably, just as he had during the Franco-Prussian War, Wagner was once again at the center of a heated debate during World War I. As early as September 1914, that is, very shortly after general mobilization, Camille Saint-Saëns, the seventy-eight-year-old doyen of French music, published a series of articles in the nationalistic L’Écho de Paris in which he requested that Wagner be banned from French Opera houses. His articles caused outrage among the more liberally minded but also enlisted considerable support from the side of French conservative and nationalist forces. Though initially revolving around Wagner and his work, the polemic soon spread to a wider campaign directed against all Germanic influences in French art and culture, especially those of an avant-garde nature. It is in the context of this wider anti-German, antimodernist reaction that the Wagner campaign during World War I will be presented in this article. After a brief outline of the controversy, I shall move on to the different political and cultural agendas of Wagner's opponents, to representations of him by wartime caricaturists, to the reaction of Wagner's defenders, and finally to the role played by Wagner in the wider antimodernist reaction.

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