'Cantor of the enduring human heart' Wagner in the Parisian press, 1933

Abstract

In the last three decades a significant body of musicological research has been devoted to various aspects of Wagner’s reception in France in the second half of the nineteenth century and up to World War I.1 Many of these studies focus on crisis points in the relationship between the French and the figure of Wagner as a German composer (Maynard 2007; Schmid 2008; Fauser 2009). These crisis points typically revolved around concepts of nation and nationalism, and were closely tied to the fluctuations and crises of the Franco-German politico-diplomatic relationship. When French critics wrote and thought about Wagner before the interwar period, it was frequently a means to express fears and desi..