The decisive battle – On French Lohengrins

Michał Piotr Mrozowicki

Abstract

There are two crucial moments in Richard Wagner’s reception in France. The first one is very well known by opera lovers all over the world: the scandalous, hostile reactions of some spectators (especially members of the Jockey Club) during the three Parisian performances of Tannhäuser in March 1861, reactions which ruined Wagner’s hopes of a career in Paris and in France. The second one, perhaps less well known, is actually much more important: the first performance of Lohengrin at the Palais Garnier, on 16 September 1891, which opened the great Wagnerian era at the Opéra de Paris. Wagner’s posthumous belle époque, which lasted until the First World War, was marked by innumerable famous productions of his operas and music dramas not only in Paris but also in many French provincial theatres.

One should remember, however, that Lohengrin’s definitive triumph in Paris, in 1891, was preceded by a long, fierce battle between Wagner’s supporters and his intransigent enemies.

This paper cites several texts written about Lohengrin after its world premiere in Weimar, in 1850, especially Gérard de Nerval’s article published in La Presse and Franz Liszt’s enthusiastic articles in Le Journal des débats (Paris) and Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig). The latter, reproduced in Liszt’s book Lohengrin et Tannhaüser de Richard Wagner(printed in 1851, also in Leipzig, but in French, intended primarily for French readers), prompted the Belgian François-Joseph Fétis, to respond with seven critical articles on Wagner, which appeared in La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris in 1852. Those texts by the Hungarian composer Liszt and the Belgian musical critic Fétis, published in French, gave rise to the endless confrontations between French Wagnerophiles and Wagnerophobes.

In spite of that animated discussion, Lohengrin was not staged in any theatre in France during the 1850s, even in extracts or in a concert version. French opera lovers had to make do with press articles giving concise accounts of its German and Austrian productions.

Lohengrin’s French premiere was announced several times in the late sixties at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial. However, neither Léon Carvalho nor his successor Jules Pasdeloup managed to produce this opera. Lohengrin’s appearance on French stages was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and particularly by Wagner’s Gallophobe works of this period, such as Eine Kapitulation. The first French performance of this opera – and the only one in Wagner’s lifetime – took place in 1881 in Nice (in an Italian version by Salvatore Marchesi), under the baton of Auguste Vianesi.

After some aborted attempts to perform Lohengrin in the capital at the Théâtre-Italien, the Opéra-Comique and the Palais Garnier in 1884, 1885 and 1886, Parisians could finally admire this opera at the Eden-Theater, on 3 May 1887, thanks to the perseverance of Charles Lamoureux. That famous conductor planned to give ten performances of Lohengrin over the course of the season, yet violent anti-German and anti-Wagnerian demonstrations, encouraged by the Prime Minister René Goblet, forced him to cancel all but the first, which from the purely artistic point of view was a great success.

Four years later, on 16 September 1891, Lamoureux again conducted Lohengrin in Paris, this time at the Palais Garnier. Critics compared the artistic standard of the two Parisian Lohengrins. They praised almost all the singers of this new performance, especially Ernest Van Dyck, reprising the title role, and Rose Caron, who replaced Fidès Devriès as Elsa. In 1891, as four years earlier, demonstrations were held around the opera house against Lohengrin and its performances, but this time the government reacted quite differently. The Prime Minister, Charles de Freycinet, unlike René Goblet four years before, used the security forces to protect the artists. A few days later, the demonstrators stood down, as the German composer’s unusual masterpiece finally conquered the Parisian audience. That was the decisive battle, the turning point in Wagner’s reception in France. Since 1891, his operas and music dramas have enjoyed a remarkable career on French stages, with Lohengrin always one of the most admired. The author mentions several other performances of this opera and its famous Parisian interpreters, such as Jan Reszke (Jean de Reszké) and his brother Edouard, Salomea Krushelnytska, Lauritz Melchior, Lotte Lehmann, Germaine Lubin, Sandor Konya, Régine Crespin, Rita Görr, Wolfgang Windgassen, Elisabeth Grümmer, Siegfried Jerusalem, Jonas Kaufmann, René Pape, and two other Polish singers, Rafał Siwek and Tomasz Konieczny.