“I felt as if released from gravity, with rekindled memories of voluptuous pleasures that circulate in lofty places.”1 Thus wrote Charles Baudelaire on March 18, 1861, recalling the dream state triggered by the Lohengrin Overture performed at one of Wagner’s Parisian concerts the previous year. Although Baudelaire’s advocacy for Wagner’s music did nothing to resuscitate Tannhäuser from its inglorious demise at the Paris Opéra that very week, his essay remained a touchstone for French Wagnerians until the end of the century. And thus, it also initiated a remarkably resilient double-track in the ensuing French reception of Wagner. Official and institutional obstacles faced by his operas (not least fostered by nationalist sentiment following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870) and pragmatic attempts to overcome these coexisted with the growing, and almost cultlike, adulation of artists, writers, musicians, and their high-society patrons. Wagner’s works remained off-limits to Parisian stages for decades, while from the late 1870s onward concert societies led by progressive conductors such as Edouard Colonne and Charles Lamoureux picked up the slack with myriad performances of operatic excerpts. Even when an official endorsement finally occurred in the form of a production of Lohengrin at the Opéra in 1891, it was nearly derailed by popular protests fueled by strident rhetoric about the supposedly xenophobic tenor of Wagner’s art and ideology. But with the political will now in place to overcome that hurdle, Wagner became the most popular composer at the Opéra in the 1890s, an irrefutable index of pent-up demand.
Before this breakthrough, wagnéristes had other options: pèlerinages à Bayreuth or other foreign centers where the operas were produced. It was on one such pilgrimage to hear the 1884 Munich Ring that the twenty-three year old writer Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949) conceived of the Revue wagnérienne, with encouragement from the young English Germanophile—and later proponent of Aryan-German supremacy in the Bayreuth circle —Houston Stewart Chamberlain.2 Often seen sporting a waistcoat embroidered with Wagnerian musical motives, Dujardin conspicuously played the ultra-refined dandy and esthete. Somewhat paradoxically, he also had a good head for business and managed to secure funding from two wealthy industrialists, Alfred Bovet and Agénor Boissier, to launch the journal in 1885. Around the same time, Dujardin struck up a close friendship with Teodor de Wyzewa (1862-1917), whom he promptly brought on board to work on the Revue.3 Wyzewa, a Polish expatriate from early childhood, came to wagnérisme from university studies in philosophy and languages in the provinces, and, according to the later account of his daughter, became the intellectual backbone of the journal.4 Certainly his command of German, in contrast to Dujardin’s halting efforts, proved valuable. Frail and introspective, it is not difficult to imagine him as a kind of éminence grise behind his flamboyant friend. Not long after the demise of the Revue in 1888 they parted company. Wyzewa moved on to the mainstream press and scholarly writing, and Dujardin to a checkered literary career.
Despite claims for Wyzewa’s authority, any single intellectual perspective, or for that matter, purpose, is difficult to discern in the three-year run of the Revue wagnérienne. Part chronicle of domestic and international Wagner performances, it also functioned as a vehicle to translate Wagner’s writings, a venue for critical essays on his work, and a forum for creative writing and lithography inspired by Wagner. Thus the Revue provided varied fare for its readers. The main Wagnerian critics in the daily press—Louis de Fourcaud, Victor Wilder, and Alfred Ernst—lent their pens. In the lead editorial of the first issue, Fourcaud, wary of the nationalist tinderbox, claimed the main purpose of the journal was to explain Wagnerian aesthetics to French composers and listeners so that the lessons might be applied to a rejuvenation of the French operatic tradition. The next year Hans von Wolzogen treaded a more incendiary path: in an essay titled “L’art Aryan” he enjoined acceptance of Wagner’s Germanic art because it resonated with a shared Christian ethos and primeval tribal past. (Dujardin would remain committed to racial essentialism and a supporter of Chamberlain’s thought until the end of his life, thereby earning opprobrium from the Resistance and an old age spent in relative isolation.) Wyzewa contributed studies of Schopenhauer’s thought and, wearing his Russophile hat, the congruence between the spiritual worlds of Wagner and Tolstoy. Chamberlain provided summaries of articles that had appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter. The critics Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe offered a thumbnail account of Wagner’s place in the history of harmony.
Despite such diversity, the legacy of the Revue wagnérienne has come to be understood largely as a mouthpiece for the emergent Symbolist movement in literature and the arts.5 Near its midpoint, the brief run of the journal coincided with the 1886 Symbolist manifesto published in Le Figaro by the poet Jean Moréas, an effort to acquaint a wide public with avant-garde trends in literature that was met with some suspicion by the writers themselves, who were instinctually reluctant to be categorized. Symbolism has remained notoriously difficult to conceptualize, being variously taken as celebration of the art of suggestion; evacuation of the author’s voice in the free contrapuntal play of phonetics and analogical language; rejection of evocative description as an end in itself; retreat from urban society; cultivation of an interchangeability of the senses; and self-conscious production of difficult literature in which the act of decoding and interpretation is meant to provide spiritual fulfillment. Although Symbolist-influenced contributions were the minority in the Revue, writing by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine—obscure figures at the time, but now of course bright stars in the French literary firmament—has helped in retrospect to tip the balance of attention to the journal’s Symbolist content. So, too, have lithographs by artists Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon. Both Dujardin and Wyzewa were known to be sympathizers with, and to a certain extent practitioners of, avant-garde literary trends. And Wagner was almost unanimously cited as an influence by Symbolists, a connection that can be traced back to Baudelaire’s famous essay. It also appears that the outright Symbolist pieces, though in the minority, were the ones that attracted the most attention, largely for their impenetrability and moral license. The financial backers Boissier and Bovet raised their eyebrows, and were eventually seconded by the conductor Charles Lamoureux, who had allowed the Revue to be sold at his concerts and had initially been a strong supporter. When he condemned the decadent style of the journal in 1887, Dujardin protested that this was a gross exaggeration. But he went on to attack Lamoureux for repeatedly programming unchallenging excerpts in order to assuage middlebrow taste and shore up his box office.6 The two tracks in French Wagner reception emerged with particular clarity in Dujardin’s positioning of wagnérisme Parisien officiel against the literary refinement of a wagnérisme militant. But musicians and sponsors sided with Lamoureux. The journal’s days were numbered. And wagnérisme militant soon became outflanked by new challenges that issued from the avant-garde.
The three articles from the Revue wagnérienne translated here, by Huysmans, Wyzewa, and Dujardin give ample witness to its Symbolist side. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) began his literary career as an art critic and novelist much taken with Emile Zola’s naturalism. An aesthetic volte-face in the early 1880s crystallized in one of the great blockbusters of the fin de siècle and beacon of decadence for younger Symbolist writers, the novels rebours (Against the Grain, 1884). Protagonist Jean Floressas des Esseintes modulates fluidly between the salacious sounds of bordellos and the sacred songs of chant, all the while passing in review many of the most prominent French artists and writers of his time. His house brims with rich fabrics and thick carpets, a paradis artificiel hermetically sealed from the quotidian so as to enshrine his self-indulgent synesthesic experiences and fantasies of the macabre. As a stimulus to reflect on the idea of a paradis artificiel, Huysmans could not have improved upon the Venusberg, and his gloss on the Tannhäuser Overture included here reads like a page out of A rebours. Synesthesic images communicate the sensory overload, the huge cymbals of “blinding purples and sumptuous golds” followed by “adorably blue and airily pink sounds.” For Baudelaire in his famous essay, it had been “the ardor and whiteness” of the Lohengrin Prelude; for des Esseintes a bizarre mouth organ where the tastes of various fine liqueurs were activated by stops labeled flute, horn, and voix céleste. Somewhere in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk theory lay support for such analogical thinking, as claims for a unified artistic vision gave rise to ready erasures of sensory boundaries. The Huysmans Venus is a formidable creature, and a measure of the fin-de-siècle femme fatale is readily seen in a comparison with Baudelaire’s description of the same music. Baudelaire’s “the true, the terrible, the universal Venus” who incites “furious palpitations of the heart and all the senses” and “the entire dictionary of onomatopoeia attached to love”7 becomes for Huysmans the “image of the irresistible and magnificent She-Satan” and the huntress who crushes her victims “under the force of enervating flowers … Sodimita Libido.” Now, it is not entirely clear why Tannhäuser should quake before the lust of the sodomite in Wagner’s scene, but the passage does seem redolent of des Esseintes’ gender-bending infatuation with the acrobat Miss Urania, whom with repeated viewing he comes to think of as a man, all the while imagining himself feminized. In bed, however, Miss Urania proves decidedly lackluster, and after his seduction of her des Esseintes hastens to his one homosexual affair in the novel. Dujardin claimed that Huysmans understood little of music and jotted much of his text in the program during the concert at which he heard the Tannhäuser Overture.8 It had little to do with Wagner, he said, but was worth a smile anyway on account of its extravagance. Except that it was precisely this kind of contribution that assumed inordinate prominence in the eyes of the journal’s supporters—and detractors.
Wyzewa begins his report on the Salon of 1885 in “Wagnerian Painting” with a plea for the union of the arts as tied to a fundamental life force. In a more extended Schopenhauer-tinged disquisition on the salon of the following year in the Revue, he posited the primacy of inchoate sensations that blended in “a confused whirl of colors, sounds, and thoughts” to produce “the life of the soul.”9 Concomitantly, he attacked descriptive academic painting, just as in an earlier issue he had taken to task the program music of Camille Saint-Saëns for being merely descriptive.10 That Wagner also wrote copious amounts of descriptive music could not be denied, but entwined as it was with the requirements of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it existed on a higher plane. What emerges with particular clarity in Wyzewa’s writing is his folding of synesthesia into an impulse toward greater abstraction at the behest of greater emotional truth. The painter Gustave Moreau (also much praised in A rebours) is a “symphonist of refined emotions.” James Whistler paints a “symphony of refined emotions,” with Wyzewa perhaps recalling here the British-American painter’s extensive use of musical terms in his previous titles (for example, the Symphony in White portrait series). In short, musical metaphors serve the cause of painting that does not care about “real forms” and combines “contours and nuances in pure fantasy.” It was a mere five years later that Maurice Denis would publish his famous rallying cry for avant-garde artists: “Remember that a painting—before existing as a battlefield horse, a nude woman, or any sort of anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors and assembled into a certain order.”11 Denis did not mean to do away with representation altogether, and certainly neither did Fantin-Latour, whose lithographs of Wagnerian subjects Wyzewa singles out for their emotional resonance. Indeed, the work on which he lavishes the most attention, Fantin-Latour’s oil painting Autour du piano (which Wyzewa calls Homage to the Musician; see Figure 2) is less noteworthy for its technical audacity (pace Wyzewa) than as an icon of French Wagnerism because of its size and depiction of the wide professional reach of enthusiasm for his music. The composer Chabrier sits at the piano surrounded by the likes of Vincent d’Indy, translator Camille Benoît, critics Adolphe Jullien and Amédée Pigeon, civil servant Edmond Maître, and patron and judge Antoine Lascoux. For all the brouhaha around the symbolist sympathies of the Revue, none of these figures was strongly associated with that movement.
Nevertheless, Wyzewa also draws an explicit connection between greater freedom in painting and more liberal approaches to poetry that were one of the hallmarks of Symbolism, “neglecting the conventional meanings of words” to evoke the “intense life of emotion.”
Free verse and prose poetry sometimes (though not necessarily) formed a corollary to the liberation of diction. Syntactical discontinuity might challenge coherent narrative. In the dying days of the Revue wagnérienne, Edouard Dujardin marshaled discontinuity for particularly striking effect by inventing a monologue intérieur for his novel Les lauriers sont coupés (1888), a major influence on James Joyce’s later stream-of-consciousness technique. Whereas the syntax of his short sentences in the novel is perfectly direct and unambiguous, “impulses of the soul” (as Wyzewa might put it) produce a chain of disparate thoughts and impressions.12 Dujardin later compared this to perceived musical discontinuities in Wagnerian leitmotivic technique caused by their semantic role in response to different images in the text.13 His “Amfortas: Paraphrase Moderne,” included here, seems to occupy an interstice between prose poem and monologue intérieur, or perhaps a kind of bridge to the latter that extends right out of a specific Wagnerian passage, Amfortas’s great monologue in the first act of Parsifal. The syntax is much more convoluted than in Les lauriers sont coupés, but common ground between them lies in the breathless succession of images and jagged course of the narrative shaped by a strong identification with the hysteria of Wagner’s character. Perhaps the most Wagnerian aspect of Dujardin’s piece is its play on memory. A German-language preface unfolds a succession of verbal fragments from the episode, evanescent sparks from a past experience in the theater. The French text gets spun around these as the speaker imagines himself transplanted into the scene, and indeed comes to assume Amfortas’s subject position. “The flash of a diabolical kiss” hearkens back to Huysmans’ satanic Venus, one of the many verbal details in Dujardin’s paraphrase that stems not from Wagner’s verbal text but from the music. The cumulative impact of this “impulse of the soul” is of overbearing psychological torment, almost expressionism avant l’heure—to hint at yet another of the many artistic directions spawned by Wagner’s art.
J. K. HUYSMANS
The Overture to Tannhäuser
Revue wagnérienne (April 1885)
Translated by Brendan King
From a landscape such as nature wouldn’t know how to create, from a landscape in which the sun pales to the most exquisite and utmost dilution of golden yellow, from a sublime landscape in which, under a sickly luminous sky, the crystallized whiteness of mountaintops opalesce above bluish valleys; from a landscape inaccessible to painters because it is composed solely of visual chimeras, of the silent shimmering and humid throbbing of the air, a chant ascends, a chant singularly majestic, an august canticle springing from the souls of tired pilgrims advancing in a group.14
And this chant, with none of that female effusiveness, none of those wheedling prayers trying to obtain through the perilous phonyness of modern worship that encounter with God reserved for the few, swells with that certitude of pardon and a conviction of redemption that was borne in upon the humble souls of the Middle Ages. Reverential and proud, manly and honest, it tells of the appalling fatigue of the sinner who has descended to the depths of his conscience, the unfailing disgust of the spiritual seer confronting the iniquities and accumulated errors in these strongholds, and it also affirms, after a profession of faith in the redemption, the superhuman happiness of a new life, the inexpressible gladness of a reborn heart enlightened, as at Mount Thabor, by the rays of a mystic Superessence.
Then this chant grows weaker and little by little fades away; the pilgrims fan out, the sky darkens, the luminous light of day grows dim and shortly afterward the orchestra floods this authentic and unreal scene with crepuscular gleams. It is a dissipation of colors, a fine spray of nuances, a crystalline haze of sounds that expire with the last echo of the canticle fading in the distance; and night falls on this immaterial nature, now withdrawn into itself in uneasy anticipation, created by the genius of man.
Then a cloud, irradiated with the colors of a rare flora, the expiring purples, the death-agony pinks and the moribund whites of the anemone, disperses, scattering fleecy vapors, whose ascending shades grow darker, exhaling unknown perfumes in which are mixed the biblical scent of myrrh and the voluptuously complex perfumes of modern essences.
Suddenly, in the middle of this musical scene, in this fluid and fantastical scene, the orchestra bursts out, portraying the advancing Tannhäuser in a few decisive traits, sketching him from head to foot with the outline of a heraldic melody: and the darkness is shot through with gleams; spirals of clouds take on the arched forms of haunches and palpitate with the pneumatic swelling of breasts; the blue avalanches of the heavens throng with naked forms; screams of desire, cries of lust, impulses of yearning for a carnal Beyond leap from the orchestra, and above the undulating espalier of fainting, swooning nymphs, Venus rises, but no longer the antique Venus, the old Aphrodite, whose impeccable contours inspired lechery in gods and men during the lustful festivals of paganism, but a more profound, more terrifying Venus, a Christian Venus, if the sin against nature of coupling these two words were possible!
Indeed, this is not the unfading Beauty appointed only to earthly joys, to artistic and sensual excitations as the salacious sculptures of Greece understood it; this is the incarnation of the spirit of Evil, an effigy of omnipotent Lust, an image of the irresistible and magnificent She-Satan who is unceasingly on the lookout for Christian souls, at whom she aims her delightful and malevolent weapons.
Such has Wagner created her, this Venus, an emblem of the physical nature of the individual, an allegory of Evil struggling against Good, a symbol of our internal hell opposed to our inner heaven, leading us back in a bound through the centuries, to the impenetrable grandeur of the symbolic poem by Prudentius, that living Tannhäuser who, after years dedicated to debauchery, tore himself from the arms of the victorious She-Devil to seek refuge in the penitential adoration of the Virgin.
In fact it seems that the Venus of the musician is the descendant of the poet’s Luxuria, of that pure huntress who, steeped in perfumes, crushed her victims under the force of enervating flowers; it seems that the Wagnerian Venus attracts and captivates men like the most deadly of Prudentius’ deities, her whose name the poet writes with a trembling hand: Sodomita Libido.
But even though the idea of her recalls the allegorical entities of the Middle Ages, she brings an additional spice of modernity, insinuating an intellectual current of refinement into this molten mass of savage delights; and to the naïve canvas of ancient times she adds a kind of provocative excitement, assuring more certainly through this overstimulation of a nervous acuity the ultimate defeat of the hero, who is suddenly initiated into the lascivious cerebral complexities of the worn-out epoch in which we live today.
And the soul of Tannhäuser buckles, his body succumbs. Deluged by ineffable promises and passionate murmurs, he falls, delirious, into the arms of the perverting clouds that embrace him; his melodic personality is obliterated by the triumphal hymn of Evil. Then the tempest of roaring flesh, the lightning flashes and electric blasts that are rumbling in the orchestra subside; the incomparable clash of those huge cymbals, which seems to be a transposition of blinding purples and sumptuous golds, fades away; and a gentle, deliciously tenuous susurration, an almost divine rustling of adorably blue and airily pink sounds, trembles in the nocturnal ether, which is already beginning to brighten. Then dawn breaks, the hesitant sky begins to whiten, as if painted with the white sounds of the harp, and is tinged with tentative colours which little by little become more definite and resplendent amid a magnificent alleluia, amid the crashing splendor of kettledrums and brass. The sun rises, flaring out fanlike, splitting the thickening line of the horizon, climbs as if from the bottom of a lake whose watery surface seethes with her reflected rays. In the distance, the intercessionary canticle hovers, the faithful canticle of the pilgrims, cleansing the last wounds of a spirit exhausted by this diabolical struggle; and, in an apotheosis of light, in a gloriole of Redemption, Matter and Spirit soar upward, Evil and Good are reconciled, Lust and Purity are bound together by the two musical motives that are snaking round each other, blending the rapid, exhausting kisses of the violins, the dazzling and mournful caresses of taut, nervous strings with the calm, majestic chorus that unfurls itself, with that mediatory melody, that canticle of the now kneeling soul celebrating its final immersion, its unshakable constancy in the bosom of God.
And, trembling and enraptured, you come out of the vulgar hall where the miracle of this essential music has been performed, carrying with you the indelible memory of this overture to Tannhäuser, this prodigious and initial summary of the overwhelming grandeur of its three acts.
TEODOR DE WYZEWA
Wagnerian Painting: The Salon of 1885
Revue wagnérienne (June 1885)
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Richard Wagner’s work, beyond its incomparable worth as a philosophical Revelation, still has, for us, the force—clear and precious—of an aesthetic doctrine.15 It signifies the natural, necessary alliance of the three forms of Art—plastic, literary, musical—in the communion of a single, unique aim: to create life, to incite our souls to create life.
Thus Wagnerists should not shut themselves up in the narrow confines of pure music; they should study all works, in all the arts; and for this study, again, the Master provides them with a sure criterion, giving Wagnerian Painting, as well as Poetry and Music, this aim: the creation of life.
But what, in the vast field of life, is the special share that Painting should manifest? Should it give us only simple sensations of material bodies, through an exact representation of their forms? Or should it rather give us finer, more intimate emotions, and so to speak, portray the soul, as well as bodies? It can and must, certainly, do both these things. Just as the writer can, by the single method of the stable words of a language, immediately communicate to us the succession of his thoughts—and that in Prose or even in Poetry—almost neglecting the conventional meaning of words, using just the ordering of rhythms and sounds, and evoke in us, more exactly, the intense life of emotion; so, too, can painters, solely by the method of plastic procedures, translate, immediately, their vision of the objective world—or else, too, neglecting, almost, the usual meaning of figures, and by using only the ordering of lines and colors, evoke in us real and precise emotions that no poetry, no music, could express. There are two kinds of painting: one, immediate, the so-called realist painting, giving the exact image of things, as seen by the special vision of the painter; the other, mediate, like a Poetry of painting, not caring about real forms, but combining contours and nuances in pure fantasy, producing for our souls not the direct vision of things, but—a consequence of secular associations between images and feelings—a world of living, blissful emotion; there are two kinds of painting both equally legitimate and sacred, the different forms of a superior Realism, both of which the Wagnerist finds along the way outlined in Art by the revered Master.
A new pastel by Monsieur Degas, the prodigious ruler of plastic life; a painting by Monsieur G. Moreau, the symphonist of refined emotions, or some terrifying drawing by Monsieur Redon, or that exhibition of Old Masters opened recently at the Louvre, are all Wagnerian deeds; but not, alas, that yearly Market of Paintings, which is a Painting Salon the way wigmakers’ or bootmakers’ shops are Coiffure or Shoe Salons. This is because Wagnerism is, above all, the exclusion of Beckmesserisms, of academic exercises, of works of art made without the least divine hunger for speculative Creation. Thus we have sought in vain this year, among the miles of painted canvas, a few serious works capable of serving as examples for an exposition of Wagnerian theory. We were barely able, aside from the admirable Wagnerian master Fantin-Latour, to contemplate two such things—splendid, it is true: a symphony in somber colors (the catalog says: a Portrait), by Whistler; and a wonderful scene from daily life, young girls playing in a courtyard, by Bartholomé. Then, nothing aside from the recurring wretchedness of compromises, academicisms, dishonest visions.
Fantin-Latour consoled us for this wretchedness: he, first of all, is a conscious Wagnerist and knows, admires, celebrates the Master. But above all, his is the utter glory that he alone today resolutely understands the twofold task possible for the painter: he has, in his great paintings, each of which shows a new victory, reproduced, more precisely than anyone else and more completely, the objective, real, total life of forms: and he has, in lovely drawings, written the poem of plastic emotion, communicating to our souls emotions that are strangely sweet and warm, through a combination of lines and colors.
In this Exhibition, again, he has given us two remarkable models of these two arts. First of all, there is a lithograph: The Rhine Maidens, I think. From Wagner he has taken as subject the excited mockery of the river nymphs as Siegfried journeys off, toward his Death. But what does it matter here—the subject, the exactitude of location, the resemblance of this painting to the Bayreuth staging? Monsieur Fantin-Latour wanted to give us, in plastic language, the emotion of the scene, and he has given it to us. These pale maidens with their contours curving softly in light, and this darkened horizon, where the hero advances, sounding his horn: it all conveys a gaiety in which something like fear lurks; Monsieur Fantin has rendered the profound meaning of the scene, and of this entire drama, the GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, where the young Siegfried, along with the joy of his strength, conveys to us something too much like the anguish of the cruel deed so close.
And, near this adorable fantasy, what a superb work of real, powerful life: the Homage to the Musician! In a room where air grows feeble, around a piano, piously stand six men. Real and alive is the room, real, alive, these men, without one line of their faces having been changed; and yet, such is the psychological vision of the Master, that all these men, variously, with different expressions, bear witness to the private emotion given to all of them by the extraordinary music they hear. By design, to achieve an exact rendering, M. Fantin has turned these faces toward him; understanding, again, how stupid this so-called realism is, which forces the painter to show men in their habitual poses, and forces them to perceive, thus, inexactly, their features, deformed by the necessity of feigning a false task, inevitably.
Figure 1. Henri Fantin-Latour, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens (Salon of 1885), lithograph, 46.5 × 37.5 cm (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada).
A theoretician and an artist, and profoundly sincere, of an incomparable artistic honesty: such is the painter these two works have surprisingly revealed to us. It is not that they are perfect already; at least, they make painters see the only way that is suitable to them, the Wagnerian way of frankness, of fidelity to theories, of a continuous effort to feel life, and to express it. They are thus for everyone, a teaching, and for the rare initiates into Art, a joy; and, if he had known them, Richard Wagner, our divine Master, would have found them an homage worthy of his great soul.
Figure 2. Henri Fantin-Latour, Around the Piano (or Homage to the Musician, Salon of 1885), oil on canvas, 63 × 87 cm (Paris, Musée du Jeu de Paume).
EDOUARD DUJARDIN
Amfortas
A Modern Paraphrase
Revue wagnérienne (December 1885)
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
PROGRAM
The Temple of the Holy Grail; choir of knights: “der Labung darf er nahn … “; choir of young men: “den sündigen Welten … “; choir of children: “die Glaube lebt… “ —Entrance of Amfortas; —Amfortas recumbent. Titurel; —Amfortas: “Wehe! Wehe mir!…” —Titurel.
Amfortas: “Nein! …”—“wehvolles Erbe …” —“nach ihm …” —“die Stunde naht…” —“des eignen sündigen Blutes Gewell…” —“der dort dem Erlöser …” —“und aus der nun mir …” —“aus der Sehnen’s Quelle, das ach! keine Büssung je mir stellt!…” —“Erbarmen! … dass heilig ich sterbe.”
(Parsifal, I, 3)16
The church is lofty and filled with light; groups of people praying wander here and there; people kneeling form indistinct rows of bowed heads; the confused murmuring of litanies fades into grave silences. And, near the huge, massive pillars, there are men, male voices, souls praising, waiting for the divine Coming: “Let us come toward God! …” the voices of young men chime in, moved by life, and who are not so much adoring, alas! as lamenting to the son of the Woman: “For this sinful world Christ has given his body …” and, from time to time, voices come down from invisible summits, childlike and angelic, virginal: “Faith lives, the Spirit soars…” so pious songs of glorification and lamentation are intermingled with heavenly virginities. And among the songs are grave silences, solemn appeals to the Most Holy in the silences of human voices … silences and songs intermingle, pious murmurings, under the high arches of the luminously expansive church.
He, the Wounded, is motionless on his couch, prostrate, while there flows around him a crowd of faithful; he remains still, and his body leans back, his hands hang at his sides, his head is thrown back, and his face, face-to-face with the heaven of the dome, his eyes staring into the upper air; and his lips, half-opened by his feeble breath, preserve the rigid torpor of exhaustion…
In the vast naves swarms the human crowd … Soar up, sounds of prayers, wings of devout confessions! … the voices that thunder and the silences that powerfully resound, the voices and silences in the soul that hears them are murmurs. —Let us come to God! … sinful world! … Faith lives, the Spirit soars! … Hymns that go on and on, scattering in the soul of one gripped by the deathly anguish of the coming crucifixion; in his soul he hears them murmuring; and the words of these silences, as well as of these songs, drone all around his soul. Sing, voices! He remains trapped in perception of you; time is blurred, space is misted over in a chaos of vegetation; and he dreams of he knows not what pieties, what sufferings; he dreams obscurely of pious practices and penances; a mental sleep is in the rigidity of flesh; the soul is drowsy; it hears like one who sleeps; and there is, in that soul, a very distant echo of the circumfusing canticles mixed with silences, canticles intermingled, pious, lamenting, and virginal.
—Fulfill the Office, awaken, live, act—he must! The time has come to officiate, and to live: banish sleep! and speak the imperious and melancholic word that commands action. With a sudden start, the Wounded trembles; his senses return to him; he half lifts himself, and, on his couch, he sounds disturbed, with vague thoughts, vague gestures: “Ah! Ah me! …” the memory comes back, alas! the memory of sufferings, and of anguishes, and of lamentations, and of misdeeds, as well as of punishments, and of cries of Desire: “O Christ, your lamentation already resounds in me … No! let me sleep away my oblivion, my lethargic doze of pain: Do not awaken the Wounded! Oh! let me die! …” He must awaken, live: and the Holy One calls him, again, gravely, to his deed: “The Deed! Carry out the Deed! …” so he lives; he lives, and he rises, in a rage of tormenting thought.
Infernal Lust, laughter of the carnal Curse, fury of female Concupiscence: suddenly there shines a lustful eye, a swooning glimpse of throat, the flash of a diabolical kiss —while he shouts: “No!” and this evocation of laughing and concupiscent lust is the eternal motif that rises up from ancient Herodias, from Gundryggia, and from the Unnamed, Pre-Devil, the Rose of Hell, O original Downfall, Kundry!
It is sin —For he has sinned against the Grace of the Lord; the chosen one of the pure has become the only sinner among the pure: O punishment from the offended rich in Grace…
… Holy of Holies, oh memory of the Holy! Solemnly he rose in the soul, the Holy One today outraged! O memory of the salvation of benediction! memory of the Divine! Aspiration that from the very bottom of the soul steams toward exalted penances, penances to the lamenting Lord so wretchedly insulted!…
Song of the Most Holy, sing! Shine, light of the Pure! Open wide, veil of Mystery! Words, speak, all, in welcoming the Lord who comes! Open up, sad sky, so the rite of the eternal Sacrifice may be renewed! —here is the body of bread, here is the blood of drink; the mystic vase will shine, here is the food; God’s blood, here is the wine; take, take, take; sinners, here is the wine and the bread; approach, most melancholy; for the wine will flow in your blood, the bread will become your flesh, and the sacred blood will flow from your heart…
The sacred blood flows, O Wounded, from his heart; the blood of the Suffering One flows in his veins; and it is his own blood, which boils up, and flows, terrifyingly! —once there was a perverse charm, a spell-like attraction, a pagan enchantment; once, a terribly beautiful lust; now this memory haunts him; now he believes the promise of the Master, he moans under Concupiscence, hurls infinite lamentations, always vibrating, from the Crucified who throbs in his flesh. For the sinful world Christ suffered, because he felt yearning pity for our Yearning… O pity of the Lord, see your agonizing son, throbbing, crucified: he was the Holy, and the Pure, and the Good; he sang your name, he who is crying today: pleasant he was to you, this outcast; he was your guard, your servant, your strength, your splendor, your joy, he who almost blasphemes, and who is lost, driven mad by sensual memories, and who whirls in the madness of his flesh, and curses himself, knowing your speech no longer … your divine speech under the effort of desires turns strange, it is altered, it is corrupted, now it becomes frighteningly other, and it turns into magical sounds: the prayer to God becomes a suggestion of hell: harsh, the charm brings back the Evil One; and it is she … O thought always quick with guilty delights, unforgettable, unforgettable thought! The Wounded sees again the damnable visions, and in his jaded eyes lewd things pass by: Sinning eyes! Sinning senses! Sinning sensations! He feels the great gardens full of smoking fragrances and hot colors; the softness of warmth was soft, when before his body she rose up, the animal female, mad with her body … she had that laughter and that voice, yes, that gaze that so restlessly caressed him, those lips, yes, so trembling on him, that hair cascading over him, yes, those flattering curls, and around his neck those arms, so tender those cheeks, so new that mouth that, in the communion of all sufferings, kissed away the salvation of his soul… monstrous kiss! A woman was there, shameless flowering of sensualities, a woman that he, the chaste one, had.
Pity, Lord! On illusory delight, pity! Lord! On joys, and on absolutely desirable joys, pity! Pity, for in this kiss I have known all that my flesh irrevocably thirsts for! —and I implore the grace of the Merciful One, —his unique grace on my misery, yes, redemption, peace, oblivion, death.
O suffering of Desire, of double Desire, the Mystical and the Carnal, suffering of the mysterious aspirations of the Angel and the Beast, o suffering of Concupiscence and Religion, carnal and mystical man, Amfortas, thus you lament, and we, with you, we live the great endless Desire of multiple lives.
1. Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris” (1861), in Oeuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris, 1976), 2:784. For a translation of Baudelaire’s essay, see Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964; repr. New York, 1986), 111-46.
2. Dujardin gives an account in “La revue wagnérienne,” La revue musicale 4/11 (1923): 141-60.
3. For an account of their meeting, see Paul Delsemme, Teodor de Wyzewa et le cosmopolitisme littéraire en France à l’époque du symbolisme (Bruxelles, 1967), 20-21.
4. See Isabelle de Wyzewa, La revue wagnérienne: Essai sur l’interprétation esthétique de Wagner en France (Paris, 1934).
5. For further context, see Pamela A. Genova, Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence (Aldershot, 2002), 266-90.
6. Dujardin vented his side in “Question wagnérienne et question personnelle,” Revue wagnérienne 3/5 (15 June 1887): 129-34.
7. Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner,” 2:794.
8. Dujardin, “La revue wagnérienne,” 151-52.
9. Teodor de Wyzewa, “Notes sur la peinture wagnérienne et le salon de 1886,” Revue wagnérienne 2/4 (8 May 1886): 100-13.
10. Teodor de Wyzewa, “La musique descriptive,” Revue wagnérienne 1/3 (8 April 1885): 74-77.
11. Quoted in Jean-Paul Bouillon, Maurice Denis (Geneva, 1993), 20.
12. Edouard Dujardin, Le monologue intérieur, trans. Anthony Suter (London, 1991), 111.
13. Ibid., 110-11.
14. Huysmans’ article appeared in the Revue wagnérienne 1/3 (8 April 1885): 59-62. The translation given here is taken from Parisian Sketches (Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, U.K., 2004), 155-59.
15. Wyzewa’s article appeared in the Revue wagnérienne 1/5 (8 June 1885): 154-56.
16. Dujardin’s article appeared in the Revue wagnérienne 1/11 (8 December 1885): 310-13.