Wagner, Faust, and Paris: A Reassessment
This paper proposes that Richard Wagner’s composition of Eine Faust-Ouvertüre in 1839–40 was a reaction to a French literary vogue for Goethe, and not, as the composer professed, a product of his withdrawal from Parisian musical circles into aesthetic Deutschtum. Indeed, given Wagner’s abandonment in 1832 of his Sieben Kompositionen zu Goethes Faust and immersion in anti-Goethean jungdeutscher discourse, his renewed attention to Goethe in 1839 would seem otherwise improbable.
Wagner left two explanations of the overture’s origins. According to “A Communication to My Friends” it represented his rebellion against French philistinism, while in Mein Leben he credited it to his resuscitation by a Paris performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The first account paints Wagner as Dante in a Gallic hell; the second, Beethoven as Beatrice. It has been demonstrated by other scholars, however, that neither cultural Heimweh nor Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had the pivotal roles Wagner later claimed. Meanwhile, a satisfactory motivation for the Overture’s composition has not been put forward.
Wagner’s return to Faust in 1839 was closely contemporary with a new wave of French Goethe criticism. In that year, just as he arrived in Paris, Louis-Léonard de Loménie, Henri Blaze de Bury, and George Sand published critical essays on, and translations of Goethe. Sand’s complaint in her “Essai sur la drame fantastique” of December 1839 that Faust was “I dare say, still little known in France” can have pointed Wagner toward an emerging cultural market. The literary-critical context in which Wagner composed the Overture indicates that it can have been a product both of cultural opportunism and rapprochement. Such an explanation is consistent with Wagner’s then still vibrant aspirations for German and French solidarity, aspirations he would articulate in his 1840 essay “On German Music.”
This paper proposes that Richard Wagner’s composition of Eine Faust-Ouvertüre in 1839–40 was a reaction to a French literary vogue for Goethe, and not, as the composer professed, a product of his withdrawal from Parisian musical circles into aesthetic Deutschtum. Indeed, given Wagner’s abandonment in 1832 of his Sieben Kompositionen zu Goethes Faust and immersion in anti-Goethean jungdeutscher discourse, his renewed attention to Goethe in 1839 would seem otherwise improbable.
Wagner left two explanations of the overture’s origins. According to “A Communication to My Friends” it represented his rebellion against French philistinism, while in Mein Leben he credited it to his resuscitation by a Paris performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The first account paints Wagner as Dante in a Gallic hell; the second, Beethoven as Beatrice. It has been demonstrated by other scholars, however, that neither cultural Heimweh nor Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had the pivotal roles Wagner later claimed. Meanwhile, a satisfactory motivation for the Overture’s composition has not been put forward.
Wagner’s return to Faust in 1839 was closely contemporary with a new wave of French Goethe criticism. In that year, just as he arrived in Paris, Louis-Léonard de Loménie, Henri Blaze de Bury, and George Sand published critical essays on, and translations of Goethe. Sand’s complaint in her “Essai sur la drame fantastique” of December 1839 that Faust was “I dare say, still little known in France” can have pointed Wagner toward an emerging cultural market. The literary-critical context in which Wagner composed the Overture indicates that it can have been a product both of cultural opportunism and rapprochement. Such an explanation is consistent with Wagner’s then still vibrant aspirations for German and French solidarity, aspirations he would articulate in his 1840 essay “On German Music.”