French-language Operas - French Wagnerism and Debussy

French Wagnerism and Debussy

The conservative music critics who had rejected Berlioz detected a new threat in the form of Richard Wagner, the German composer whose revolutionary music dramas were causing controversy throughout Europe. When Wagner presented a revised version of his opera Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861, it provoked so much hostility that the run was cancelled after only three performances. Deteriorating relations between France and Germany only made matters worse and after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, there were political and nationalistic reasons to reject Wagner's influence too. Traditionalist critics used the word "Wagnerian" as a term of abuse for anything that was modern in music. Yet composers such as Gounod and Bizet had already begun to introduce Wagnerian harmonic innovations into their scores, and many forward-thinking artists such as the poet Baudelaire praised Wagner's "music of the future". Some French composers began to adopt the Wagnerian aesthetic wholesale. These included Emmanuel Chabrier (Gwendoline, 1886) and Ernest Chausson (Le roi Arthus, 1903). Few of these works have survived; they were too derivative, their composers were too overwhelmed by the example of their hero to preserve much individuality of their own.

Claude Debussy had a much more ambivalent — and ultimately more fruitful- attitude to Wagnerian influence. Initially overwhelmed by his experience of Wagner's operas, especially Parsifal, Debussy later tried to break free of the spell of the "Old Wizard of Bayreuth". Debussy's unique opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) shows the influence of the German composer in the central role given to the orchestra and the complete abolition of the traditional difference between aria and recitative. Indeed, Debussy had complained that there was "too much singing" in conventional opera and replaced it with fluid, vocal declamation moulded to the rhythms of the French language. The love story of Pelléas et Mélisande avoided the grand passions of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in favour of an elusive Symbolist drama in which the characters only express their feelings indirectly. The mysterious atmosphere of the opera is enhanced by orchestration of remarkable subtlety and suggestive power.