Michał Piotr Mrozowicki

Catulle Mendès was a nineteenth century French poet, novelist, librettist, literary and music critic, very famous at his times but unjustly depreciated by the next generations. The paper reminds the sphere of his activity that should never be forgotten: Mendès appears first of all as one of the main figures of the early French Wagnerism. Born in Bordeaux on the 22nd May 1841 (twenty eight years to the day after the German Master!), he got to know Richard Wagner in Paris in 1860 where the composer was giving his three famous concerts at the Italian Theatre (Théâtre-Italien) and obtained, thanks to Princess Pauline Metternich, the chance to perform his opera Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera. Twentyyear- old Mendès invited Richard Wagner to cooperate with the periodical that he had just founded, La Revue fantaisiste. However Wagner hasn’t published any text in La Revue fantaisiste. Disgusted by his Tannhäuser’s failure in Paris, he left the French capital soon. Catulle Mendès missed the good occasion to create the first French « revue wagnérienne ». Firstly, his journal’s reaction to the scandal at the Paris Opera was very terse. Secondly, Auguste de Gasperini’s study of Wagner’s operas, announced by Mendès, was going to be published not in La Revue fantaisiste, but in Le Ménestrel, the most antiwagnerian French journal of these times. Thirdly, the number of texts on music in general and on Wagner in particular published by the journal founded by Catulle Mendès was extremely small and didn’t reflect in any way his musical or Wagnerian fascinations. A few years later, in summer 1869, Catulle Mendès with his wife Judith Mendès, née Gautier, and their friend Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam paid a visit to Richard Wagner in Tribschen. It was a crucial moment for the development of their wagnerism. In September 1869 they observed in Munich the conflict between the composer and his patron, the king Ludwig II of Bavaria who wanted the first part of Wagner’s Tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, The Rhine Gold, to be performed then in Munich, despite the opposition of the author who preferred to keep all the parts of his monumental cycle for the new opera house that he was intending to construct as soon as possible somewhere in Bavaria. In 1879 Catulle Mendès wrote un roman à clef, a novel with a key, entitled Le Roi vierge – The Virgin king portraying the king Ludwig II of Bavaria and his complex relationship with Richard Wagner. This novel’s distribution in Bavaria was formally prohibited by the King who hadn’t appreciated its literary quality and his own portrait « painted » by the French writer. Responding to the King’s resolution, Catulle Mendès in 1886, a few months before Ludwig’s mysterious death, published another text à clef on Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner. The short text entitled L’Épître au roi de Thuringe (The Epistle to the king of Thuringia) reflects their conflict of 1869 and enhances the role of a group of French Wagner’s admirers supporting the German composer in his struggle against his patron’s despotism. These two texts, Le Roi vierge and L’Épître au roi de Thuringe, are thoroughly analyzed by the author of the paper as literary expressions of Catulle Mendès’s Wagnerism.

The subject of the article is the French reception of Tannhäuser after the failure of the three première performances in March 1861. From 1862 to 1894 the Parisian audience had to content itself with shorter or longer selections of this opera executed during Sunday concerts of Jules Pasdeloup’s, Edouard Colonne’s and Charles Lamoureux orchestras. In 1891 some French and foreign journalists, encouraged by the first Tannhäuser’s representations in Bayreuth, the Temple of Wagnerian art, began the discussions on the value of this work, some of them trying to prove that it’s a  m u s i c a l   d r a m a  as good as his later achievements, some other, on the contrary, pretending that Tannhäuser is an opera, marvelous, outstanding, extraordinary, but only an  o p e r a.

Tannhäuser’s reemergence at Paris Opera’s stage was preceded by the work’s productions in some French provincial theatres: in Lyons (première on April 4th, 1892), in Toulouse (première on April 13th, 1892), in Nice (première on March 14th, 1894) and in Nantes (première on March 27th, 1894). The author of the article discusses various aspects of these performances accentuating the fact that this time the main objects of controversies weren’t the composer and his Tannhäuser, but the soloists observed attentively by the musical critics and the spectators, as one can guess reading the reviews quoted in the article.

In November and December 1894, a few months before the work’s reappearance on the Parisian stage, its very important selection (including especially the entire first and third acts) was presented by the count Eugène d’Harcourt, – by the way member of the elitist Jockey’s Club – during his “eclectic concerts” at the rue Rochechouart’s Salle de Concerts. The author of the article recalls juridical and artistic controversies provoked by these executions of Wagner’s opera. Tannhäuser’s fourth performance at Paris Opera’s stage was preceded, in the spring of 1895, by many publications, books and articles devoted to Wagner’s masterpiece. The most important, Étude sur « Tannhäuser » de Richard Wagner. Analyse et guide thématique, was written by Alfred Ernst and Élie Poirée who tried to show the value of Tannhäuser, considered already as a musical drama and an important stage of the composer’s evolution.

The fifth part of the cycle is devoted to the presentation of the main Parisian musical critics’ opinions on the Tannhäuser’s performance at Palais Garnier on May 13th, 1895, conducted by Paul Taffanel and directed by Alexander Lapissida. If these journalists – such as Jacques Weber of Le Temps, Catulle Mendès of La Revue de Paris, Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert of Journal des débats, Paul Dukas of La Revue hebdomadaire, Ferdinand Le Borne of Le Monde artiste, Henry Gauthier-Villars of L’Écho de Paris, Alfred Bruneau of Gil Blas, and some others that are recalled in the article, were not unanimous on various aspects of this production, all of them considered Ernest Van Dyck, interpreting the title role, as the principle triumphator of the evening.

The article is devoted to the presentation of various aspects of the Tannhäuser’s fourth performance on the Parisian stage on May 13th, 1895, conducted by Paul Taffanel and directed by Alexander Lapissida. The author, following the reviews that appeared in many Parisian journals after this performance, describes the most characteristic elements of the scenery made by Dauphin Amable Petit, known as Amable (the first tableau of the first act), Marcel Jambon (the second tableau of the first act and the third act) and Eugène Carpezat (the second act). All the reviewers underlined the enthusiastic reactions of the audience that were not only provoked by the brilliant interpretation of the Wagner’s opera by the artists in 1895 but first off all by its intention to efface the compromising recollections of the Parisian Tannhäuser’s premiere in 1861.

The greatest star of the Parisian Tannhäuser’s performances in 1895 was Ernest Van Dyck in the title role. According to the Parisian press this production of Wagner’s work owed its success mainly to this Belgian tenor. However after his departure from Paris, and after some other changes of the cast that took place rather rapidly (still in the summer 1895), the performances’ artistic level hasn’t decreased in a significant way, and the work, played continuously until December 15th, 1913, was always highly appreciated by the French audience. Were the enthusiastic reactions of the Parisian public at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries to Wagner’s Tannhäuser and his other operas and musical dramas sincere and spontaneous? What was the part of the snobbery in Wagner’s reception in France during La Belle Époque? That was the question asked by some French journalists (Heugel, Maret, Doumic, Coppée and others). The author of the article recalls Georges Rodenbach’s Solomonic answer to this question presented in his text Tannhäuser et le snobisme.