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<jats:p>The French reception of Wagner is often based on the two pillars of the 1861 Tannhäuser production and that of Lohengrin in 1891. Sufficient is now known about the composer's earliest attempt to engage with Parisian music drama around 1840 to be able to understand his work on Das Liebesverbot, Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer, his editorial and journalistic work for Schlesinger, and his emerging relationship with key figures in Parisian musical life, Meyerbeer most notably. A clearer picture is also beginning to emerge of Wagner's position in French cultural life and letters in the 1850s.</jats:p> <jats:p>Wagner's position in Paris during the 1860s, culminating in the production of Rienzi at the Théâtre- Lyrique in 1869, is however complex, multifaceted, and little understood. Although there were no staged versions of his operas between 1861 and 1869, the very existence of a successful Parisian premiere for an opera by Wagner in 1869—given that there would be almost nothing for two decades after 1870—is remarkable in itself. The 1860s furthermore saw the emergence of a coherent voice of Wagnérisme, the presence of French Wagnéristes at the composer's premieres all over Europe and a developing discourse in French around them. This may be set against a continuing tradition of performing extracts of Wagner's operas throughout the 1860s, largely through the energies of Jules Pasdeloup, who—as director of the Théâtre-Lyrique—was responsible for the 1869 Rienzi as well.</jats:p> <jats:p>These competing threads in the skein of Wagner-reception in the 1860s are tangled in a narrative of increasingly tense Franco-German cultural and political relationships in which Wagner, his works, and his writings, played a key role. The performance of Rienzi in 1869 was embedded in responses to the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866, the republication of Das Judenthum in der Musik in 1869, and the beginnings of the Franco-Prussian War.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article examines the development of Wagnerism in late-nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how it became an integral part of Catalan nationalism. The reception of Wagner's music and ideas in Spain was determined by the country's uneven economic development and the weakness of its musical and political institutions—the same weaknesses that were responsible for the rise of Catalan nationalism. Lack of a symphonic culture in Spain meant that audiences were not prepared to comprehend Wagner's complexity, but that same complexity made Wagner's ideas acceptable to Spanish reformers who saw in the composer an exemplar of the European ideas needed to fix Spanish problems. Thus, when Wagner's operas were first staged in Spain, the Teatro Real de Madrid stressed Wagner's continuity with operas of the past; however, critics and audiences engaged with the works as difficult forms of modern music. The rejection of Wagner in the Spanish capital cleared the way for his ideas to be adopted in Catalonia. A similar dynamic occurred as Spanish composers tried to meld Wagner into their attempts to build a nationalist school of opera composition. The failure of Tomás Bréton's Los amantes de Teruel and Garín cleared the way for Felip Pedrell's more successful theoretical fusion of Wagnerism and nationalism. While Pedrell's opera Els Pirineus was a failure, his explanation of how Wagner's ideals and nationalism could be fused in the treatise Por nuestra música cemented the link between Catalan culture and Wagnerism.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Ernest Chausson made two major aesthetic decisions in the mid-1880s: he resolved to “dewagnerize” himself and declared that he would no longer write program music. These developments were coeval with Chausson's revisions of Viviane (composed 1882–83, revised 1887 and 1893), a symphonic poem that shares musical material and subject matter with the composer's magnum opus, Le Roi Arthus (1886–95). Drawing on unpublished sketches and manuscripts of Viviane, I trace how Chausson's evolving aesthetics manifested themselves in his revisions of the work. While he suppressed evidence of Wagnerian mimicry, the process of “dewagnerization” was equivocal; Viviane ultimately became more beholden to certain Wagnerian dramaturgical ideals. At the same time, Chausson brought Viviane more closely in line with sonata procedures, inviting the listener to appreciate the work on its purely sonic merits at a time when the composer was becoming less sympathetic to the idea of “descriptive music.” I conclude by discussing the connections between Viviane and Le Roi Arthus and exploring how Chausson's reuse of material from the symphonic poem sheds light on issues of influence and signification in the opera.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Pierre Boulez, in his characteristic oracular fashion, once declared the ballet Jeux to be “a sort of Afternoon of a Faune in sports clothes.” In this article, I contend that his pithy observation—characterizing the difference between Faune and Jeux in sartorial terms—has diverted historians ever since from asking the right questions about the later work. I examine belle epoque tennis culture to argue that the ballet's disjunct expressive registers—a diaphanous, cerebral score coexisting with sportive, avant-garde choreography—have their roots in belle époque social anxieties about what it meant to be appropriately masculine, but they also foreshadow the problematic place of danced works in current musicological scholarship.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The term unheimlich (uncanny) comes into usage in German music criticism in the nineteenth century and is often used to describe instrumental music, particularly sections of works featuring the ombra topic. While the idea that instrumental music can be uncanny regardless of text or program is not novel, this work differs from most existing scholarship on the musical uncanny in that it presents a possible precursor to the twentieth-century psychoanalytic uncanny. Instead, it examines Schelling's definition of the uncanny in the larger context of his ideas in order to form a basis for theorizing a version of this aesthetic category that is active in the nineteenth-century critical discourse about music.</jats:p> <jats:p>In the early nineteenth century, music becomes uncanny because it discloses what should remain hidden from finite revelation. Critics understand passages of instrumental ombra music as uncanny moments when music calls attention to itself as the sensuous manifestation of the Absolute. They remark on these passages’ effacing of boundaries and sense of becoming, residues of eighteenth-century uses of the topic in operatic supernatural scenes and as part of a chaos-to-order narrative in symphonic music. The article concludes with the reception of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the finale of Schubert's Octet, D. 803, using critics’ comments as a basis for extrapolating, through new analyses, as to the features that might make the particular works remarkable as examples of music's uncanny power made manifest.</jats:p>