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 So appreciated was
Wagner in literary France, that a monthly journal devoted entirely to him, La
revue wagnérienne, was founded in Paris in February 1885. Its aim was
to promote Wagner not only as a composer but also as a poet and the creator
of a new form of art. The journal included translations of his essays and
libretti, studies of him, book reviews, poems, press clippings, occasional
lithographs by painters Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon and also a
bulletin of performances of Wagner’s works throughout Europe.
Issued
1885-1888, La revue wagnérienne was founded by Edouard Dujardin,
poet, novelist and disciple of Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé. Dujardin
shared editorial duties with co-founder Théodore de Wyzewa, French
musicologist born in Russia of Polish descent, and English aristocrat and
Germanophile, Houston Stewart Chamberlain who married Wagner’s daughter
Eva in 1908.
The
journal was closely associated with the Symbolists, for Dujardin was also
founder and editor of the Symbolist magazine, La revue indépendente.
Mallarmé and other symbolists contributed to both journals.
Of
Mallarmé’s essay Richard Wagner, rêveries d’un poète français
in La revue wagnérienne August 1885 it has been suggested that it
was “more the idea of Wagner that inspired his reverie rather than
any specific work”. For Mallarmé had had very little experience of Wagner’s
music until Dujardin took him to a Sunday concert.
A
special tribute to Wagner in the Revue January 1886 included sonnets
by Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Charles Morice, René Ghil and Stuart Merrill.
Of these Symbolist poets Mallarmé and Verlaine are the better known. But
Morice and Ghil were important theorists of the movement. Morice theorised
in La littérature de tout à l’heure (1889) “on the need for
vagueness in poetry, for great thoughts to be veiled rather than clearly
expressed”.
Ghil,
impressed by Wagner’s ideas of the integration of poetry and music,
propounded “a theory by application of which poetry was to become
indistinguishable from music“. In his essays La traité du verbe
and De la poésie scientifique he expounded “the doctrine of l’instrumentation
verbale”, namely that the musical quality of a poem could be
intensified and the theme orchestrated by the conscious use of certain
groups of vowels and consonants as if parts of an orchestra. Merrill’s
poems Les gammes and Les fastes were experiments in
versification and in orchestration of verse, very likely in response to Ghil’s
theory.
Other
contributors were novelist Joris Karl Huysmans, who wrote on the overture to
Tannhäuser, English poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne on
the death of Wagner, and Wyzewa on Wagnerian painting, supposedly inspired
by the ideals of Bayreuth, by such painters as Edgar Degas and Gustave
Moreau.
Wyzewa’s
essay in the Revue June 1886 was an example of the journal’s
eclectic approach to its subject matter. His Littérature wagnérienne
drew together such diverse novelists and poets as Huysman, Émile Zola, Paul
Bourget, Auguste, Comte de Villiers de L’Isle-Aidain, Verlaine and
Mallarmé. In 1895 a collection of Wyzewa’s Revue articles was
published under the title Nos Maîtres.
Another
erudite contributor to the Revue was Victor Wilder, Belgian music
critic and translator and passionate Wagnerian. He wrote on the ritual of
the Meistersinger for the Revue and acted as adviser on the first
Paris staging of Lohengrin. Wilder also translated all of Wagner’s
operas from Lohengrin on. Cosima Wagner preferred his translation to
those of Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter (an anagram of his surname Truinet),
one of the first Frenchmen to appreciate Wagner. He, too, translated Tannhäuser,
Rienzi, Lohengrin and Der Fliegender Holländer. Wilder’s
librettos were rejected by the fanatics of the Revue who wanted those
of French music writer, Alfred Ernst to be used. Ernst, another prominent
champion of Wagner, translated Die Meistersinger, Parsifal and
the Ring for French singing and wrote books on Wagner and
contemporary drama, Wagner’s poetical works and a study of Tannhäuser.
The
young founder and editor of the Revue, Dujardin, was a man of
distinction, too. Described as “a dandy given to wearing Lohengrin’s
swan as an insignia on his vests”, he was, however, a versatile writer. He
published verse, Poésies and Mari Magno, two volumes of Théâtre
(landmark plays in Symbolism), lectured and wrote on the history of
religious belief and wrote novels. Probably his most notable achievement was
his correlation of Wagner’s use of leitmotif and the introduction of monologue
intérieur into narrative prose. His novel, Les lauriers sont coupés
(1888) is an early example of its use, and was a direct influence on the
young James Joyce who later honoured Dujardin as the discoverer of the
stream of consciousness technique which he developed to its ultimate in his
own novel Ulysses (1922).
Whatever
La revue wagnérienne may have done for Wagner in its three years of
existence, it did much to encourage public perception of the Symbolist
movement. It also provided a stimulating environment and lively forum for
the exchange of literary, philosophical and musical ideas that Wagner
inspired.
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