Abstract

In September 1859, near the end of his long political exile from Germany, Richard Wagner returned to Paris. His fortunes had altered considerably since his frustrated sojourn there twenty years earlier. The so-called Zurich essays had made his name as an operatic-cum-political firebrand throughout Europe, while a series of extended articles by the eminent critic François-Joseph Fétis in 1852 had given him a formidable – if hotly disputed – local reputation as a ‘musicien de l’avenir’. Yet there had still been only a handful of high-profile performances of his music in the French capital and, famously, no stagings of his operas. The Parisian image of the composer as a self-proclaimed musical messiah was thus formed at some remove from first-hand experience. In early 1860, however, Wagner organised and conducted three concerts of excerpts from his operas at the Théâtre Italien. These events were a financial disaster but proved excellent publicity, eventually resulting in the notorious Paris Tannhäuser (1861) and, before that, provoking sustained (and often impassioned) press debate. In this paper I want to examine this first encounter between Parisian critics and what they had been primed to hear as a forecast of the musical future. Placing Wagner’s concerts in dialogue with another instance of musical futurology – a satirical ‘Symphonie de l’avenir’ by Offenbach, performed at his Bouffes-Parisiens only days after Wagner’s third concert – I explore the complex status of ‘la musique de l’avenir’ in Paris in 1860: above all, the fact that it seemed to cast doubt on the very operatic future it was believed to foretell.