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| La Revue wagnérienne | |
|---|---|
| Title | La Revue wagnérienne |
| Caption | Cover of La Revue wagnérienne (specimen) |
| Editor | Édouard Dujardin |
| Discipline | Music criticism |
| Language | French |
| Publisher | Librairie de l'Art indépendant |
| Country | France |
| History | 1885–1890 |
| Frequency | Monthly |
La Revue wagnérienne was a Parisian monthly review devoted to the reception of Richard Wagner and Wagnerian aesthetics in late 19th-century France. Founded in 1885, the review situated Wagnerian drama within debates involving Richard Strauss, Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Claude Debussy, and French and international critics such as Émile Zola, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. The journal became a nexus for cross-disciplinary exchanges among composers, poets, painters, and musicians including Pierre Loti, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt, and visual artists associated with Gustave Moreau and Édouard Manet.
La Revue wagnérienne emerged in the milieu shaped by the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the cultural politics of the Third French Republic, and the Parisian salons that promoted international artistic currents such as Symbolism, Decadence (fin-de-siècle), and Aestheticism. The review intersected with debates catalyzed by performances at institutions including the Opéra de Paris, the Théâtre de la Monnaie, and concerts linked to impresarios like Georges Hartmann and Édouard Colonne. Its publication coincided with critical controversies involving premieres of works by Wagnerian composers and reactions from figures such as Hector Berlioz, Jules Massenet, and critics around journals like Le Figaro and La Nouvelle Revue.
The review was founded by a coterie that included Édouard Dujardin and supporters from circles around Joris-Karl Huysmans, Ernest Reyer, and Catulle Mendès. Editorial leadership involved alliances with advocates of Wagner such as Camille Bellaigue, Adolphe Jullien, and contributors from literary magazines like La Vogue and Le Livre. The editorial board interacted with managers and conductors including Hans von Bülow, Anton Seidl, and theater directors at venues such as Bayreuth Festival and provincial houses linked to the careers of singers like Jean de Reszke and Emma Calvé.
Contributors formed an international roster featuring critics and writers: Jules Bois, Gustave Kahn, Paul Adam, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Théodore de Wyzewa. Musicians and theoreticians who wrote or were discussed included Camille Saint-Saëns, François Coppée, Auguste Rodin (in relation to stage design), and Hippolyte Taine (on aesthetics). Visual artists and illustrators associated through Salon exhibitions and theatrical designs included Odilon Redon, Fernand Khnopff, Henri Fantin-Latour, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Édouard Manet, reflecting crossovers between pictorial Symbolists and musical Wagnerism. International voices such as Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Franz Liszt, Hans Pfitzner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Julius Korngold, and Emanuel Chabrier appeared in commentary or reviews.
The review published essays on music dramas like Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal alongside polemics about staging, libretto, and orchestration. Themes included analyses drawing on thinkers and writers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Edgar Allan Poe (translated reception), connecting Wagnerian leitmotif theory to dramatic theory advocated by Richard Strauss and critical methods deployed by Émile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé. Discussions addressed relationships between Wagnerian aesthetics and contemporary theater developments at institutions like Comédie-Française and innovations linked to scenographers influenced by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Adolphe Appia.
Contemporaneous reception involved responses from newspapers and journals including Le Figaro, Le Temps, La Revue Blanche, and La Presse, provoking debates with cultural authorities such as Jules Claretie and music directors at the Opéra-Comique. The review influenced performance practices and critical vocabularies used by conductors like Charles Lamoureux and impresarios involved with touring companies featuring singers such as Jean Lassalle and Sophie Cruvelli. Its ideas circulated in intellectual networks connecting the review to institutions like Université de Paris, salons patronized by Marie Bashkirtseff and Juliette Adam, and to literary movements that informed later critics and composers including Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky.
Published monthly from 1885 to 1890, the review was printed by small presses in Paris and issued under imprints associated with independent booksellers and journals like Librairie de la Revue and publishers active in the fin-de-siècle market such as Alphonse Lemerre and Édouard Pelletan. Physical distribution intersected with bookshops on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and subscriptions circulated among subscribers in London, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Brussels, and Saint Petersburg. Typography, illustrations, and frontispieces drew on collaborations with printers and engravers known to work with Gustave Moreau, Théodore Duret, and Maurice Denis.
The review contributed to the institutionalization of Wagner studies in European musicology and to reception histories written later by scholars at archives linked to Bibliothèque nationale de France and conservatoires such as Conservatoire de Paris. Its influence extended to theatrical practices at the Bayreuth Festival and to nineteenth-century studies associated with historians like Ernest Lavisse and musicologists including Hector Berlioz biographers and François-Joseph Fétis-inspired scholarship. Successive generations—critics such as Louis Laloy, composers like Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, and directors at the Opéra National de Paris—contested, adapted, or repurposed the review's positions in debates that shaped modernist trajectories involving Symbolist aesthetics, the Decadent movement, and comparative studies involving German Romanticism and French modernism.
Category:French music magazines Category:19th-century publications