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Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity by Jeremy Coleman

2021; Music Library Association; Volume: 78; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2021.0062

1534-150X

Woodrow Steinken,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Reviewed by: Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity by Jeremy Coleman Woodrow Steinken Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity. By Jeremy Coleman. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2019. [xvii, 201 p. ISBN 9781783274420 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9781787445895 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index. In Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity, Jeremy Coleman reconsiders a misunderstood gap in Wagner’s biography—the composer’s multiple attempts to find success in Paris—and contributes thoughtful observations on many of Wagner’s creative works, from his little-known attempts to contribute to debates about music and translation to the oft-misconstrued Tannhäuser debacle of 1861. Coleman’s book expands beyond the well-known history of Wagner in Paris, particularly the influence of Meyerbeer on the young composer, to include episodes of his biography that will prove useful and even surprising to other Wagner scholars. Coleman achieves this partly by asking tough questions of reception history, which appears especially fraught in relation to Wagner’s time abroad and his relationship to modernity and, by extension, ideology. Wagner’s position in the European art-music canon would seem to leave little room for a reconsideration of the composer’s role in musical modernism, yet Coleman delivers a persuasive argument for the singular importance of Paris to Wagner’s experience in the international music marketplace and his attempts thereafter to create a sufficiently unique German musical culture. The result is a refreshing perspective on Wagner’s motivations and business decisions that successfully revises the portrait of the composer as single-minded in his music, prose, and polemics. Central to Coleman’s method is the lens of translation, a lens that looks beyond linguistic conversion to “wider cultural and theoretical interpretations of it” (p. 13). During Wagner’s many years spent outside of Germany, the translations of his works (and those by other Germans, such as Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz) proved increasingly important to the composer and his international ambitions. Coleman makes the case that Wagner, not content with merely translating the versification of his librettos, also sought to translate his music for shifting audiences. One of the strengths of Coleman’s research is its presentation and analysis of Wagner’s articles written and subsequently translated for the French public, including manuscripts from his first Paris trip (1839–42) that have received little or no attention elsewhere. Further, by connecting Wagner’s two Paris periods (the latter being 1859–61) with the period in between, spent largely in Dresden and Zurich, Coleman offers a holistic perspective on Wagner’s art amid the tumultuous circumstances of his life as a young Kapellmeister and then as a musician [End Page 64] in exile. What often read like separate episodic fragments of the composer’s biography begin to make sense in the stories that Coleman tells. Coleman divides the book into three sections. In part 1, he highlights Wagner’s ambition to find success in Paris and garner positive reception in the international music community and press. This was most evident in Wagner’s plans for French-language productions of Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, the translations of which are relatively undiscussed in Wagner scholarship. Coleman also draws convincing connections between Wagner’s early works and his time in Paris by exploring the Parisian origins of Der fliegende Holländer, which the author argues received its Gothic sound-worlds and phantasmagoria from the composer’s experiences of Paris carnival season and its demonic, diabolic spectacle. At roughly the same time, Hector Berlioz’s translation and revision of Weber’s Der Freischütz into French afforded Wagner a chance to express the identity of German music in the Paris press. By analyzing Wagner’s articles on the French Freischütz and the series of translations those articles underwent, Coleman argues that the production of Freischütz appeared ambiguously between French and German opera. Subsequently, the author paints a complex picture of the relationship between the two national styles—not distinguishable in the black-and-white sense that Wagner would later perpetuate in his push for a uniquely German style of opera. Coleman launches part 2 with an exploration of Wagner’s identity with...