¹ Three classic texts provide further detail about these and other events in French Wagnerism: Pistone, Danièle, ‘Wagner à Paris (1839–1900)’, Revue internationale de musique française, 1 (1980), 7–84Google Scholar; Kahane, Martine and Wild, Nicole, Wagner et la France (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar; Turbow, Gerald D., ‘Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France’, in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. Large, David C. and Weber, William (Ithaca, 1984), 134–66Google Scholar. A more recent, but equally valuable survey is Fauser, Annegret and Schwartz, Manuela, ‘Einleitung’, in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik, ed. Fauser, Annegret and Schwartz, Manuela (Leipzig, 1999), 9–31Google Scholar. Two indispensable overviews of the debates surrounding the relation of Debussy's Pelléas to Wagner are Pasler, Jann, ‘Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy's Opera’, 19th-Century Music, 10 (1987), 243–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Huebner, Steven, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (New York, 1999), 468–79Google Scholar.

² Baudelaire, Charles, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, suivi de textes sur Richard Wagner par Nerval, Gautier et Champfleury, with an introductory essay by Robert Kopp (Paris, 1994)Google Scholar. A widely available reprint of the journal is Revue wagnérienne, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1968).

³ The dates in parentheses are the dates the compositions were completed. All three operas received their full premiere performances at the Théâtre royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Belgium. The premieres of Gwendoline and Fervaal occurred soon after their completion, while Le Roi Arthus was first performed almost a decade later in 1903. Detailed considerations of these three operas, their librettists and their composers appear in Huebner, French Opera, 255–85 (on Gwendoline), 308–50 (on Fervaal) and 351–92 (on Le Roi Arthus).

⁴ Even though Ravel's comic opera, L'Heure espagnole (1907–9), is categorically different from the parodies mentioned in this paragraph, its overt, tongue-in-cheek use of leitmotifs nevertheless invites us to understand it as a parody of Wagnerian theory and practice. A rare but sophisticated examination of this issue is Huebner, Steven, ‘Laughter: In Ravel's Time’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18 (2006), 225–46, esp. 235–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Huebner has also interpreted the desublimation of love in this opera as a parody of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. See Huebner, , ‘L'Heure espagnole: la grivoiserie moderne de Ravel’, in Aspects de l'opéra français de Meyerbeer à Honegger, ed. Branger, Jean-Christophe and Giroud, Vincent (Lyons, 2009), 193–213Google Scholar.

⁵ The other contributors to this one-act ballet were Pierre-Octave Ferroud, Jacques Ibert, Roland-Manuel, Marcel Delannoy, Albert Roussel, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric and Florent Schmitt. According to the score for piano four-hands (Paris: Heugel, 1929; plate no. 29811), the Fanfare is meant to be played at the opening of the ballet and repeated notatim towards its middle, after Delannoy's Bourrée and before Roussel's Sarabande.

⁶ According to the programme included in the piano score, the ballerinas did not actually dance to the introductory Fanfare during its first public performance at the Académie Nationale de Musique (Paris Opéra) on 4 March 1929. Nevertheless, both the dance and the dancers are present by implication: the Fanfare incorporates the ballet by framing it, while also calling the fledgling ballerinas to order with its miniature reveille.

⁷ Lest we think that these parodies, as instances of ‘modernist cool’, have mastered the Wagnerian legacy once and for all, Lawrence Kramer reminds us that ‘the force of symbolic investiture has a way of reaffirming itself willy-nilly’. Kramer, , ‘Enchantment and Modernity: Wagner the Symptom’, in Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley, 2004), 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Caddy, Davinia, ‘Parisian Cake Walks’, 19th-Century Music, 30 (2007), 288–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ A detailed analytical study of Wagner's influence on the French composer is Holloway, Robin, Debussy and Wagner (London, 1979)Google Scholar, while a more focused, sketch-oriented study of this phenomenon is Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Tristan in the Composition of Pelléas’, 19th-Century Music, 5 (1981), 117–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Towards the end of her essay, Abbate adduces a section from a preliminary draft of Pelléas whose text setting seems to create an analogy between Golaud's murder of Pelléas and Wagner's threat to Debussy as a young French composer at the fin de siècle (140). In my reading of the Cake Walk, Debussy takes revenge on this earlier oppression by skewering not only his symbolic father but also his former self.

¹⁰ As is well known, Ravel's friend Ricardo Viñes describes him weeping at a performance of the Tristan Prelude on 1 November 1896. In addition, the framing harmony in Ravel's mélodie on Roland de Marès's ‘La ballade de la reine morte d'aimer’ – a poem about unrequited love in a medieval era – is a half-diminished seventh chord in the same registral arrangement as the famous Tristan chord. While they may be interesting in their own right, they do not necessarily paint Ravel as a devoted Wagnerian.

¹¹ A detailed, authoritative account of this movement is Messing, Scott, Neoclassicism in Music from the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Rochester, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹² Orenstein, Arbie, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York, 1991), 122Google Scholar. Orenstein pairs Wagner with Beethoven in this comparison, but the relationship between Beethoven and Ravel is an entirely different matter – one which I do not broach here. A standard life-and-works account in German, Hirsbrunner, Theo's Maurice Ravel: Sein Leben, Sein Werk (Laaber, 1989)Google Scholar, also claims that French musical Wagnerism had ‘long been overcome’ [längst überwunden] by the time Ravel began to compose in the 1890s (108).

¹³ Stephen Zank does make a link between Ravel and Wagner, insofar as the latter helped to inspire French writers and composers to conceive of art synaesthetically; examples of such art in Ravel include Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, according to Zank. Nonetheless, he explicitly denies any direct influence of Wagner on Ravel, either aesthetically or musically. My contention here, however, is that such an influence can be established. See Zank, , Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel (Rochester, 2009), 223–67Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Ravel’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 60–5, at 60Google Scholar. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

¹⁵ I discuss this essay at greater length in my ‘Adorno's Ravel’, in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Composer, ed. Kaminsky, Peter (Rochester, 2011), 111–41Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘The Case of Wagner’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Ridley, Aaron, trans. Norman, Judith (German orig. 1888; Cambridge, 2005), 262Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Adorno, , ‘Ravel’, in Gesammelte Schriften vol. 18, Musikalische Schriften V, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf and Schultz, Klaus (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 274Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Classic examples of this literature, which is voluminous, include Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Le Drame wagnérien (1894), Alfred Ernst, L'Art de Richard Wagner (1893), Edmond Hippeau, Parsifal et l'Opéra wagnérien (1883), Adolphe Jullien, Richard Wagner, sa vie et ses œuvres (1886), Maurice Kufferath, Parsifal de Richard Wagner (1890), Albert Lavignac, La Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1897), Catulle Mendès, Richard Wagner (1886), Émile de Saint-Auban, Un Pèlerinage à Bayreuth (1892), Édouard Schuré, Le Drame musical (1886), Georges Servières, Richard Wagner jugé en France (1887), and Albert Soubies, L'Œuvre dramatique de Wagner (1886).

¹⁹ ‘Il voudrait rouvrir nos frontières à ce même Wagner que nous y reconduisions, voilà peu d'années, avec des cris de délivrance’. Louis Laloy, ‘Wagner et nos musiciens’, La Grande Revue, 54, 10 April 1909, 558.

²⁰ ‘L'imitation wagnérienne. L'imitation debussyste. Inconvénients de l'une et de l'autre’. Pierre Lalo, ‘La Musique’, Le Temps, 18 August 1908.

²¹ An article which places this review within a broader context of Debussy reception in France is Kelly, Barbara L., ‘Debussy and the Making of a musicien français: Pelléas, the Press, and World War I’, in French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939, ed. Kelly, Barbara L. (Rochester, 2008), 58–76Google Scholar.

²² ‘Et tous les imitateurs font fausse route, mais ces imitateurs-là se perdent plus sûrement que les autres, à cause de la singularité de leur modèle. Imiter un Wagner, immense, et qui concentrait en lui la musique tout entière, cela se concevait encore; et pourtant qu'a produit l'imitation de Wagner? Mais, imiter un Debussy, étroit et rare, c'est pure aberration. L'art de ces jeunes gens se réduit à l'exploitation de quelques menus procédés; et cela devient de plus en plus petit, petit, petit. On souhaite presque de restaurer en France l'influence wagnérienne’. Lalo, ‘La Musique’.

²³ The full contrafactual proposition, followed by its factual refutation, would read something like this: ‘If it were possible and desirable to do so, we would almost wish to restore Wagnerian influence in France, but it is not, and so we do not wish this.’ Laloy also errs somewhat in failing to recognise that Lalo's description of Wagner as a ‘colossus’ is actually a tongue-in-cheek reference back to his German correspondent's adulatory description of Wagner's operas as ‘colossal art’ and ‘the work of a giant’.

²⁴ A major account of actors and debates during this era is Fulcher, Jane F., French Cultural Politics & Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Ravel's response appears in Louis Laloy, ‘Wagner et les musiciens d'aujourd'hui’, La Grande Revue, 10 May 1909, 161.

²⁶ Ravel's general point is well taken, but it may not be factual, since I have not been able to locate any article in which Scudo makes this specific claim. In his major article on Wagner – a review of the premiere performance in Paris of the German's music at three orchestral concerts (25 January, 1 February and 8 February 1860) – he does not explicitly pit Wagner against Rossini. See Scudo, Paul, ‘Revue musicale. La musique de M. Richard Wagner’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 26 (1860), 227–38Google Scholar.

²⁷ It is probably not coincidental that Ravel is echoing Baudelaire, who also exclaims at the beginning of his essay on Wagner and Tannhäuser that, having so much to say, he could not possibly say it all. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's interpretation of Baudelaire's claim – which clearly partakes of the aesthetic discourse of sublimity – might also help us understand the philosophical resonance of Ravel's response: ‘The message is clear: music infinitely overwhelms the possibilities of writing’. Lacoue-Labarthe, , Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner), trans. McCarren, Felicia (Stanford, 1994), 4Google Scholar.

²⁸ Péladan's interest in Wagner is explored in Cazeaux, Isabelle, ‘“One does not defend the sun”: Some Notes on Péladan and Wagner’, in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Strainchamps, Edmond and Maniates, Maria Rika, in collaboration with Hatch, Christopher (New York, 1984), 93–101Google Scholar, as well as in Michel Cadot, ‘Un ardent wagnérien: Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918)’, in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme, 475–84.

²⁹ Péladan, Joséphin, Le Théâtre complet de Wagner (les XI opéras scène par scène), avec notes biographiques et critiques (Paris, 1894), xGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Ibid., xxi.

³¹ Mendès, Catulle, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1886)Google Scholar.

³² Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, 240.

³³ Ibid., 259.

³⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, And Other Writings, 273. A recent account of European musical modernism whose notion of decadence depends strongly on Nietzsche, Wagner and their relationship is Downes, Stephen, Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.

³⁵ Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, 241.

³⁶ Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’, 281.

³⁷ For further discussion of decadent dialectics in Ravel, see Puri, Michael J., Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (Oxford, 2011), 7Google Scholar. Three sources of recent scholarship which helped to generate this concept are Constable, Liz, Denisoff, Dennis and Potolsky, Matthew, ‘Introduction’, in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Constable, Liz, Denisoff, Dennis and Potolsky, Matthew (Philadelphia, 1999), 1–34Google Scholar; Kuspit, Donald B., The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and Bernheimer, Charles, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Ansell-Pearson, Keith, trans. Diethe, Carol (Cambridge, 1997), 42Google Scholar.

³⁹ This episode is reported in Jourdan-Morhange, Hélène, Ravel et nous: l'homme, l'ami, le musician (Geneva, 1945), 56Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ A thorough comparison of these two societies, as well as a complete listing of their programmes, can be found in Duchesneau, Michel, L'Avant-garde musicale à Paris de 1871 à 1939 (Sprimont, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ In his essay on Wagner, Baudelaire rationalises this choice in a way that would also have suited Ravel as a cerebral artist: ‘All the great poets naturally and fatally become critics. I feel sorry for poets guided only by instinct; I find them incomplete’ [Tous les grands poètes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je plains les poètes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois incomplets]. Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 29.

⁴² Cited in Maurice Ravel, ‘À propos des Images de Claude Debussy’, Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, February 1913, 135, translated and republished as ‘Regarding Claude Debussy's Images’ in Ravel, Maurice, A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, ed. and trans. Orenstein, Arbie (Mineola, 2003), 366–8, at 366Google Scholar.

⁴³ Ravel mistakenly dates the article to September 1908, but it was actually published in August.

⁴⁴ Ravel, ‘Regarding Claude Debussy's Images’, 368.

⁴⁵ Ravel, ‘Concerts Lamoureux’, Revue musicale de la S.I.M., March 1912, 50–2, translated and republished as ‘The Lamoureux Orchestra Concerts’ in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 344–7, at 345.

⁴⁶ Three aspects of this sentence suggest Ravel's familiarity with Baudelaire's 1861 essay on Tannhäuser. First, he invokes Tannhäuser as the quintessential Wagner opera. Next, he seems to acknowledge Baudelaire's testimony by referring to the audience's astonishment at the Parisian début of its music. Finally, his metaphorical language echoes Baudelaire's: ‘Everything that these words imply – will, desire, concentration, nervous intensity, explosion – are apparent and palpable in his works.… I love this surfeit of health, these excesses of will that are inscribed in his works like bitumen burning on the ground of a volcano’ [Tout ce qu'impliquent les mots: volonté, désir, concentration, intensité nerveuse, explosion, se sent et se fait deviner dans ses œuvres.… J'aime ces excès de santé, ces débordements de volonté que s'inscrivent dans les œuvres comme le bitume enflammé dans le sol d'un volcan]. Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 55. Baudelaire's take on Wagner, in turn, is based to some degree on Théophile Gautier's review of the performance of Tannhäuser at Wiesbaden, which appeared in the 29 September 1857 issue of Le Moniteur. Gautier not only associates Wagner's medievalism with German Romanticism, but also calls him a ‘paroxyste’ (97) – an artist who seeks to maximise the intensity of his expression. Gautier, ‘Sur Tannhäuser’, Le Moniteur, 29 September 1857, reprinted in ibid., 95–106.

⁴⁷ Ravel, ‘The Lamoureux Orchestra Concerts’, 345. Translation slightly emended.

⁴⁸ Maurice Ravel, ‘Fervaal, action musicale en trois actes et un prologue; poème et musique de Vincent d'Indy’, Comœdia illustré, V, 20 January 1913, 361–4, translated and republished as Ravel, ‘Fervaal’, in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 358–61, at 358. A more nuanced reading than Ravel's, in which Fervaal emerges not as an imitation of Parsifal but rather as the original result of d'Indy's ‘Wagnerian struggle against Wagner’, is Suschitzky, Anya, ‘Fervaal, Parsifal, and French National Identity’, 19th-Century Music, 25 (2001–2), 237–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Ravel, ‘Fervaal’, 359–60.

⁵⁰ Maurice Ravel, ‘Parsifal, drame sacré de Richard Wagner, version française d'Alfred Ernst. Représenté pour la première fois le 1^er Janvier 1914, au théâtre national de l'Opéra’, Comœdia illustré, 6, 20 January 1914, 400–3, translated and republished as Ravel, ‘Parsifal’, in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 376–9, at 376.

⁵¹ Arbie Orenstein helpfully reproduces the entire notice in Ravel, Maurice, Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Orenstein, Arbie (Paris, 1989), 527–8Google Scholar.

⁵² Letter 136 in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 169–71.

⁵³ Ibid., 171.

⁵⁴ Examples include the League's ‘Honorary President’ Camille Saint-Saëns, whose series of articles condemning Wagner in Fall 1914 issues of L'Écho de Paris were collected and republished as Germanophilie (Paris, 1916), and its Secretary Jean Poueigh (aka Octave Séré). A recent overview of French attitudes towards Wagner during the war is Marion Schmid, ‘À bas Wagner! The French Press Campaign against Wagner during World War I’, in French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 77–91.

⁵⁵ Maurice Ravel, ‘À l'Opéra-Comique: Francesca da Rimini et La Vie brève’, Comœdia illustré, VI, 20 January 1914, 390–1, translated and republished as ‘At the Opéra-Comique: Francesca da Rimini and La Vida breve’, in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 372–5, at 372.

⁵⁶ Quoted in André Révész, ‘The Great Musician Maurice Ravel Talks About his Art’, ABC de Madrid, 1 May 1924, 19, translated and republished in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 431–5, at 432.

⁵⁷ Maurice Ravel, ‘La Sorcière à l'Opéra-Comique, Théâtre des Arts: 3^e Acte d'Idoménée, La Source lointaine’, Comœdia illustré, V, 5 January 1913, 320–3, translated and republished as ‘The Witch at the Opéra-Comique’ in Ravel, A Ravel Reader, 353–7, at 354.

⁵⁸ Ravel, ‘Parsifal’, 376–7.

⁵⁹ The effect of the Berne Convention on performances of Parsifal is laid out in Beckett, Lucy, Richard Wagner: Parsifal (Cambridge, 1981), 92–6Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Beckett is emphatic on this point: ‘The stage history of Parsifal is unique: the presentation of no other dramatic work has been so intimately connected with a single theatre’. Ibid., 87.

⁶¹ A compilation of reviews of the 1914 Paris premiere appears in Bernard, Gabriel, Le Wagner de Parsifal (Paris, 1914), 299–313Google Scholar.

⁶² ‘Il faut tant de conditions climatériques et atmosphériques, tant d'heureux acquiescements d'une nature complice pour que le fluide mystérieux de l'au-delà se propage jusqu'à nos nerfs, pour que l'air que nous respirons devienne soudain bon conducteur de l'électricité naturelle!’ Ibid., 308.

⁶³ Ravel, ‘Parsifal’, 377.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 376–8.

⁶⁵ Nichols, Roger, Ravel (New Haven, 2011), 162Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 163.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 163.

⁶⁸ This understanding of the effect of artistic influence accords with the one Ravel expressed in his 1928 lecture to the Rice Institute, whereby the potential benefit of such influence depends not only on its ‘quality’ but also ‘even more upon the strength of the personality’ that receives it – that is, the strength to withstand this influence without being engulfed by it. Maurice Ravel, ‘Contemporary Music’, in A Ravel Reader, 40–9, at 44.

⁶⁹ Scott Messing has come to the same conclusion, although he does advance J.S. Bach's Passacaglia in C minor for organ as a somewhat plausible candidate. See Messing, Neoclassicism in Music, 50. By calling the Passacaille another ‘Hommage à Rameau’, Vladimir Jankélévitch points towards Debussy and his two medievalist sarabandes from Pour le piano and Images. See Jankélévitch, , Ravel (Paris, 1956), 44Google Scholar. In this essay I largely bypass the Debussyian middleman to focus on a direct relation between Ravel and Wagner, who was the main musical inspiration for medievalism in Debussy, Satie and other fin-de-siècle composers.

⁷⁰ The brackets in Example 4 symbolise the elision of the expected tonics.

⁷¹ Ulrike Kienzle reminds us that Wagner's Amfortas is ‘a perverted Christ figure’, since ‘he has failed in his task of becoming a redeemer of the world’. See Kienzle, , ‘Parsifal and Religion: A Christian Music Drama?’, trans. Cicora, Mary A., in A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal, ed. Kinderman, William and Syer, Katherine R. (Rochester, 2005), 94Google Scholar. The terms Heilandsklage and Wehelaute, which have become standard for referring to these associative themes, originate in von Wolzogen, Hans, Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik des Parsifal, nebst einem Vorworte über den Sagenstoff des Wagner'schen Dramas (Leipzig, 1882)Google Scholar.

⁷² Merely the arch-like Gestalt of the Passacaille would have brought Wagner to mind for many listeners. Jules Champfleury and Hector Berlioz, who played an important role in the early reception of Wagner in France, both noted his preference for this formal shape in their responses to the 1860 premiere of his music in Paris. Berlioz, for example, described the Lohengrin Prelude in a manner evocative of the Passacaille: ‘It's actually a slow, immense crescendo which, after having attained the highest degree of sonorous force, returns to its point of departure, following the reverse path, and ends in an almost imperceptible, harmonious murmur’ (C'est en réalité un immense crescendo lent, qui, après avoir atteint le dernier degré de la force sonore, suivant la progression inverse, retourne au point d'où il était parti et finit dans un murmure harmonieux presque imperceptible; Berlioz, Hector, ‘Concerts de Richard Wagner, la musique de l'avenir’, in A Travers chants, études musicales, adorations, boutades et critiques (Paris, 1862), 291–303, at 296Google Scholar.) See also Champfleury, Jules, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1860)Google Scholar. Maurice Kufferath borrows Berlioz's resourceful technique of illustrating the musical Gestalt of the Lohengrin Prelude in the text with a pair of angle brackets (<>), but he goes further to apply it to the opening Prelude of Parsifal. He argues not only for an overall climax at the Heilandsklage, but also for its autonomy as a piece of programme music, insofar as its motivic sequence effectively summarises the plot of the entire opera. See Kufferath, , Parsifal de Richard Wagner. Légende-drama-partition (Paris, 1890), 224Google Scholar.

⁷³ Baudelaire's description of Wagner's music as ‘prudently concatenated’ can also be productively applied to the Passacaille, whose phrases dovetail neatly into each other, despite the difference in content from one to the next. Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 47; emphasis his.

⁷⁴ Holloway, Robin, ‘Experiencing Music and Imagery in Parsifal’, in Parsifal: Richard Wagner, ed. John, Nicholas, English National Opera Guide no. 34 (London, 1986), 23–41Google Scholar. After identifying the Wehelaute as ‘the extraordinary sound that summons up Parsifal to anyone who has ever heard it’ (32), he then chronicles the vicissitudes of this ‘central sonorous image’ across the opera, concluding that it is ‘a sort of virus, that contaminates everything it touches, sates itself, and works its way out’ (39). Gary Tomlinson, in turn, incorporates Holloway's argument about the Wehelaute into an even broader argument about commodity exchange in late capitalism in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 136–9.

⁷⁵ A literary analogue to Ravel's pilgrimage-in-music is Téodor de Wyzewa's novel Valbert ou Les Récits d'un jeune homme (Paris, 1893), in which a young Frenchman and an older Russian nobleman encounter each other at the Bayreuth festival and re-enact, in more modern terms, the relationship between Parsifal and Amfortas. A performance of the third Act of Parsifal is the occasion for the novel's anagnorisis, whereby the on-stage demonstration of ‘wisdom through compassion’ (durch Mitleid wissend) allows the young man finally to comprehend the suffering of the unloved Valbert. Édouard Dujardin's ‘Amfortas, paraphrase moderne’ is also a bit of creative writing closely related to the Passacaille, due to its spotlight on Amfortas's suffering. See Dujardin, ‘Amfortas, paraphrase moderne’, Revue wagnérienne, I (1885–6), 310–13.

⁷⁶ One could also push this analogy further and argue that Ravel is identifying with Wagner in the way that Parsifal identifies with Amfortas. And, if we take seriously my proposal in Ravel the Decadent that Ravel was a queer composer, this identification could also have a homoerotic basis; as Mitchell Morris has shown, such discourse has historically thrived on Wagner, due in large part to the centrality of male suffering in Wagnerian subjectivity. See Morris, , ‘Tristan's Wounds: On Homosexual Wagnerians at the fin de siècle’, in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Fuller, Sophie and Whitesell, Lloyd (Urbana, 2002), 271–91Google Scholar. Discussion of the specific association between Parsifal and homosexuality at the end of the long nineteenth century can be found in Kennaway, James, ‘Degenerate Religion and Masculinity in Parsifal Reception’, Current Musicology, 88 (2009), 35–62Google Scholar, as well as in an issue of The Opera Quarterly devoted to Parsifal, which features historical texts about homosexuality by Oskar Panizza and Hanns Fuchs (The Opera Quarterly, 22 (2007), 321–44).

⁷⁷ I am not the only one, of course, to conflate Bayreuth with Monsalvat. In a short but evocative account of his pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the novelist Édouard Rod described how his journey through the surrounding landscape, with its ancient forests, not only conjured up the Middle Ages, but also prepared his soul for the ‘religious chords which accompany the March of the Knights of the Grail’ (accords religieux qui accompagnent la marche des chevaliers du Graal). Rod, ‘Souvenirs wagnériens’, Revue wagnérienne, I (1885–6), 204.

⁷⁸ Baudelaire, among others, situates Wagner's characteristic medievalism squarely within a Romantic aesthetic. See Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser, 25.

⁷⁹ Nietzsche makes the same argument in The Case of Wagner – albeit with more critical intent – when he uses Parsifal as the main symptom through which to diagnose Wagner as the decadent artist par excellence, as reflected in his statement that ‘Wagner had the virtue of decadents, pity [das Mitleiden]’ (Nietzsche, Case of Wagner, 246). More generally, Wagner appears in the Passacaille as Baudelaire's ‘man of passion’, a typology which Lacoue-Labarthe explicates as follows: ‘Wagner is [for Baudelaire] essentially a pathos, a subject as pathos’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 28).

⁸⁰ A detailed examination of Colette's attitude towards Wagner, especially as expressed in her novels, is Ursula Link-Heer, ‘Willy und Colette in Bayreuth’, in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme, 485–510. Link-Heer does not, however, make the connection I am making between L'Enfant and Parsifal. Peter Kaminsky does refer in passing to a moment from Parsifal in discussing the Child's maturation process in L'Enfant – both Amfortas and the Tree complain about their wounds – but does not further investigate this coincidence. Peter Kaminsky, ‘The Child on the Couch; or, Towards a (Psycho)Analysis of Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges’, in Unmasking Ravel, 318.

⁸¹ Jankélévitch, Ravel, 157.

⁸² Marcel Marnat senses an affinity between Daphnis and Wagner (both Parsifal and the Ring) on the basis of their representations of nature, but does not pursue this hunch. See Marnat, Ravel (Paris, 1986), 338.

⁸³ Momentarily setting aside the referent of the Good Friday Music, we can make at least two further associations between Wagner and the Daybreak. First, the Daybreak clearly belongs to the genre of Wagnerian ‘transformation music’ (Verwandlungsmusik), since it paints the gradual scenic change from night to day and from the Pirates' Camp of Part II to the meadow of Part III. Second, the ornamental figuration in the strings, winds and harps that persists throughout the Daybreak (but is not shown in Ex. 8) can be understood as a state-of-the-art version of the ‘Forest Murmurs’ (Waldweben) from Siegfried. Henri Gauthier-Villars noted as much in his review of the 8 June 1912 premiere of Daphnis at the Théâtre du Chatelet: ‘What melodic effusion and expressive fragment take us by surprise with their facility and their “Gemüt”, which are by definition so little Ravelian! By the same token, certain effects seem too easy to anticipate, such as the interlude of the final tableau, this swarming and charming description of daybreak in which groups of nine triplet quavers [in the piano-vocal reduction, not the orchestral score] burble above a broad melody. It evokes Siegfried's forest so indiscreetly that we actually feel queasy when we do not hear the expected entrance of the Forest Bird’ [‘Telle effusion mélodique, tel fragment expressif surprennent par leur facilité et leur “gemuth” [sic] si peu raveliste par definition! Certains effets semblent également trop peu imprévus, tel l'interlude du dernier tableau, cette grouillante et charmante description du lever du jour où gazouillent des groupes de neuf triples croches au-dessus d'une large mélodie, et qui évoque si indiscrètement la forêt de Siegfried qu'on éprouve un véritable malaise à ne pas entendre entrer le thème attendu de l'Oiseau.’] Gauthier-Villars, , Review of Daphnis et Chloé, in Collection des plus beaux numéros de ‘Comœdia illustré’ et des programmes consacrés aux Ballets et Galas Russes, depuis le début à Paris, 1909–1921, ed. de Brunoff, Maurice and de Brunoff, Jacques (Paris, c.1922), n.p.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ The Good Friday Music takes place in two keys: B major and D major, respectively. I chose to excerpt the latter because, in comparison to the former, it is more similar to the passage from Daphnis in four respects: tonally (both are in D major), harmonically (their punctuating dissonances are identical), formally (both are reprises), and rhythmically (they progress quickly to their dissonant harmonies, unlike the passage in B major).

⁸⁵ The dotted rhythm in the timpani that follows in the wake of the dissonant harmony on E♯ is presumably a reference to the ‘Figure of Pain’ (Schmerzensfigur) at the centre of the Communion theme. The percussive motif appeared at the end of the Act III Prelude (apparently to quash the Prophecy Motif and its promise of salvation), while the Figur sounded most recently at Parsifal's previous outburst (‘O Wehe! Des höchsten Schmerzentags!’) during the Good Friday Music.

⁸⁶ The half-diminished seventh chord is, after all, the harmony that sets their Love Theme – in homage to Tristan, perhaps – and the one based on E♯ appears in the middle (bb. 17–18) of the ballet's Introduction.

⁸⁷ By imputing a musical dimension to Gurnemanz's narrative about Good Friday as a ‘day of pain’ (Schmerzentag), I part ways with Alain Patrick Olivier, who finds no representation of pain in the music during this episode in Parsifal. See Olivier, , ‘Commentaire musical et littéraire’, in Parsifal, Wagner, L'avant-scène opéra, 213 (Paris, 2003), 82Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ See Puri, Michael J., ‘Dandy, Interrupted: Sublimation, Repression, and Self-Portraiture in Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 60 (2007), 317–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which is reproduced as Chapter 3 in Puri, Ravel the Decadent.

⁸⁹ This dialectics is closely related to the dialectics of ‘shame and grace’ that Ellis Hanson attributes to Wagner and the interpretation of his music by figures of the French Decadence. See Hanson, , Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, 1997), 27–43Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ A psychoanalytical stance impels us to draw certain conclusions from imputing the dandy's interruption to the Trio. If we treat both the interruption and the dandified material it interrupts as autobiographical gestures, and if we interpret Amfortas as a figure which attracts homosexual identification, then the Wehelaute reference in the Passacaille becomes a confessional gesture on Ravel's part that, as a return of the repressed, gives voice not only to his sexual desire, but also to the pain he suffers upon repressing it.

⁹¹ For further discussion of the relation between the collaborative ideal of the Ballets Russes and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, see Garafola, Lynn, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (New York, 1989), 45Google Scholar.

⁹² Pierre Lalo, in particular, harped on these points. Although it postdates the composition of Daphnis, his review of the 19 May 1911 premiere of L'Heure espagnole is highly apropos here; in it he describes the opera as the Ring cycle ‘viewed through a microscope’. For a useful survey of attitudes towards Ravel in the press of his time, see Goubault, Christian, La Critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva, 1984), 400–8Google Scholar.

⁹³ Ravel, ‘Contemporary Music’, 44.