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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Relatively early in the composition of Les Troyens Berlioz declared his intention to include a "pas d'almées with the music and dancing exactly like the Bayadères' ballet which I saw here sixteen or seventeen years ago." Despite Berlioz's claim that he had "gone into it" and "there is no anachronism," historical evidence would suggest that the presence of Indian dancing girls in Dido's Carthage is actually highly inauthentic and anachronistic. Indeed, Berlioz's immediate inspiration for the ballet in question was not ancient history but, rather, a group of Indian dancers and musicians who had visited Paris in 1838. An investigation of the context of the bayadères' performances and the reception of the dancers and their music reveals that issues of authenticity and anachronism were a constant preoccupation for their French audiences, most of whom had previously encountered bayadères only through the exoticizing lens of Western representations. Berlioz's own references to the bayadères are examined in relation to contemporary reviews and the text of a highly self-reflexive play that was performed as a prologue and that shaped audiences' responses to the bayadères' performances at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. Although Berlioz is generally thought to have abandoned his intention to embody the 1838 bayadères in Les Troyens, I argue that he actually retained aspects of his original Indian inspiration in the act IV ballet; moreover, an awareness of the impact of the bayadères' performances on Berlioz and his contemporaries greatly informs our appreciation of the contribution of the act IV ballet to the wider imperial subtext of Les Troyens. If, rather than simply dismissing anachronism, we are willing to embrace it as a concept fundamental to Berlioz's opera, the act IV ballet—often cut in recent productions—can be newly appreciated as occupying a significant role in the historical dialectic of Les Troyens as a whole.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article analyzes the writings of Berlioz on Wagner and, to a lesser extent, of Wagner on Berlioz, emphasizing the covert innuendoes of their verbal sparring during the period surrounding the Tannhäuser debacle at the Paris Opéra (1860) and Berlioz's tribulations with Les Troyens (ca. 1853–63). Because Berlioz's style and subtlety have worked against him in this famous rivalry, the priority goes to him, and especially to his magnum opus as critic, the volume A travers chants (1862). A selection from thirty years of music criticism both serious and light ("flying leaves"), A travers chants reveals itself as an unconventional counterpart to Wagner's treatises; as a tactical response to Wagner, both in the reprinted review of his 1860 concerts and in the structure, themes, and allusions of the text as a whole; as an object lesson in reading Berlioz, whose engaging clarity and humor can be more deceptive, in their ironic undertones, than the thickets of Wagner's famously tangled prose. This article interrogates some of that prose, revealing Wagner's deep ambivalence toward a predecessor of intimidating prestige to whom his music is frequently indebted—as Berlioz occasionally finds coded ways of reminding him. It shows Berlioz, for his part, continually sympathetic to the younger man's practical difficulties and high artistic ideals. And it shows him eventually coming to acknowledge the power and legitimacy of his music, despite strong aversion to Wagner's harmonic idiom and to the two cardinal points of his aesthetic: an "impious" insistence on the primacy of the word; belief in a musical progress culminating in his own Gesamtkunstwerk. In a late letter wrongly omitted from the Correspondance générale (its authenticity and correct date are here established), Berlioz movingly implies the injustice of his earlier prejudice toward a practice sanctioned by his own unshakeable creed of artistic freedom.</jats:p>

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (1909–10), as well as providing the model for some famous adaptations in other media, represents an important late stage in the development of a venerable French novelistic tradition: the soirée à l'Opéra. Notwithstanding his obvious lack of musical expertise (or perhaps because of it), Leroux's keen exploration of operatic reception deserves its place alongside more eminent contributors to that tradition such as Balzac, Dumas, and Flaubert. The richness of his portrayal of the institution's mythology and place in contemporary popular consciousness derives partly from his direct use of a large number of sources, which goes far beyond the conventions of the Gothic novel. These range from real and fictional operas to reportage concerning the famous fatal accident at the Opéra in 1896 and the rivalry between Christine Nilsson and Marie Miolan-Carvalho. The most significant of them, though, is the set of gramophone records buried underneath the Opéra in 1907, which was Leroux's inspiration and which emerges as the metaphorical key to interpreting the novel—if not the tradition as a whole.</jats:p>