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

Abstract

In his remarkable 1851 polemic, Opera and Drama, Richard Wagner characterized Paris as ever-hungry, impatient for the new, and as a city where an ambitious young artist might thrive; indeed, as the ‘great devourer of all artistic tendencies’. But such an image also suggests that the city might just as easily chew up and spit out a young composer. It is not surprising that Wagner, at this point living in Zurich, had such contradictory feelings about the French capital. Opera and Drama was written in the aftermath of what Jeremy Coleman, in his fine, detailed study of the composer’s fraught relationship with the city, characterizes as his ‘second assault’ on Paris. Having fled the aftermath of the Dresden Uprising of May 1849, in which he had been implicated, Wagner was now a political exile. Like Odysseus searching for Ithaca or perhaps condemned, like the tragic hero of his own 1843 opera, The Flying Dutchman, to journey the earth for eternity until the spirit of music finally redeems and releases him, Wagner needed a new home, and so it was that he heard the Sirens of Paris calling. While lodging with the composer Franz Liszt in Weimar, the pair plotted the city’s conquest, and, as Coleman describes, drew up plans for ‘nothing less than the future of art in the wake of political failure’.