"At the age of twenty-six Richard Wagner gave up his as yet undistinguished musical career in Germany and traveled to Paris, then the musical center of Europe, in order to make his fortune with a grand opera, Rienzi. It was a mad undertaking. The operatic Paris of the early 1840's was a rat race in which an impecunious, unknown German stood no chance. Wagner barely managed to survive by means of journalism and musical hackwork. But he did composer his first masterpiece, The Flying Dutchman. And from the mercenary, sensation-loving French capital, Wagner looked back to his homeland, the country of Mozart and Beethoven, as the inspiration of the ideals of artistic depth and purity which were to dominate his later life. The writings presented in this book present Wagner in a new and unexpected light. They strikingly convey what he thought, felt, and suffered as a young man, before bitterness and frustration took their toll. In later years Wagner's pen was employed mainly to project himself upon a recalcitrant world as the creator of a new and greater art. Here, his style is unpretentious, his mind still open, his voice still gay. These early writings convey the fascination of Wagner's personality--an impassioned idealist, a penetrating thinker, a shrewd observer, warmhearted, courageous, and brimming over with high spirits, poetry, and humor. They also vividly re-create the life of Paris in the pleasure-loving age that followed Napoleon and gave a dramatic insight into the revolutionary ideas which Wagner was triumphantly to vindicate in his later music. This selection of the best pieces which Wagner wrote for French and German periodicals, newly translated and edited by two of the leading Wagner specialists in England today, rescues some superb writing from undeserved neglect. And it provides a self-revealing and witty portrait of a great composer before he became famous." --Jacket.

How did Wagner's experiences in Paris influence his works and social character? And how does his sometime desire for recognition by the French cultural establishment square with his German national identity and with the related idea of a universally valid art? Friedrich Nietzsche more than once claimed that Wagner's only true home was in Paris. This book is the first major study to trace Wagner's relationship with Paris from his first sojourn there (1839-1842) to the Paris Tannhäuser (1861). How did Wagner's experiences in Paris influence his works and social character? How does his sometime desire for recognition by the French cultural establishment square with his German national identity and with the related idea of a universally valid art? This book presents Wagner's perennial ambition of an international operatic success in the "capital city of the nineteenth century" and the paradoxical consequences of that ambition upon its failure. Through an examination of previously neglected source materials, the book engages with ideas in the so-called "Wagner debate" as an ongoing philosophical project that tries to come to terms with the composer's Germanness. The book is in three main parts arranged broadly in chronological sequence. The first considers Wagner's earliest years in Paris, focusing on his own French-language drafts of Das Liebesverbot and Der fliegende Holländer. The second part explores his stance towards Paris "at a distance" following his return to Saxony and subsequent political exile. Arriving at Wagner's most often discussed "Paris period" (1859-61), the third part interrogates the concert performances under the composer's direction at the Théâtre-Italien and revisionist aspects of their reception. JEREMY COLEMAN is Lecturer in Music in the School of Performing Arts, Universityof Malta.

Richard Wagner, seine Frau Minna und "Der fliegende Holländer" in Paris