Conference Agenda

Few composers have been lampooned as much as Richard Wagner, both during his lifetime and after his death. Known for his arrogant personality and his uncompromising artistic vision, Wagner made many enemies in his attempts to impose his revolutionary framework for opera all over Europe. But, for all the criticism coming his way, he also inspired a high number of spoofs, parodies and comic imitations that paid homage to his outsized influence. This phenomenon, which mostly baffled him, began with the stage parodies of Tannhäuser in the 1850s, and reached its apex by the mid-twentieth century, with the new media of animation and cinema. American films like Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) spread an exaggeratedly Teutonic imagery—helmets, horns and bear hides—to an increasingly larger audience, who would revel in the more incongruous aspects of the Wagnerian grand epic. But, in the aftermath of World War II, making fun of Wagner also carried its own special power. It was as a form of exorcism that could address the lingering trauma of Wagner’s and, by extension, of German high art’s association with Nazism.

If we are to accept Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody as ‘a form of imitation but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text’ (1985: 6), the dual nature of parody—criticism as well as acknowledgment of a work’s success—is evident in the examples this panel has chosen to examine. Our exploration of Wagnerian parodies goes across the lines of media, time periods, and national borders. It begins in France in the 1880s, with two complementary papers on instrumental and literary parodies of Wagner, and ends in the second half of the twentieth century, with Anna Russell’s comedic analysis of the Ring cycle. Throughout, we will seek to tease out common strategies in deflating the more problematic characteristics of Wagnerian works, from monumentalism to nationalism. We will also pay special attention to the fact that parody may in fact not be so much the language of the detractor as that of the admirer.

A little man with disheveled gray hair and a deranged look on his face is hammering a quarter-note-shaped spike through an innocent eardrum. The blood spilling over seems to bring him much satisfaction. This 1869 caricature by André Gill has become one of the most famous visual representations of Richard Wagner, arguably even more so than the more realistic depictions available to us. With the enduring success of this parodic image comes the question: why was Wagner such a prized target for caricaturists? And also, why does many a modern listener still associate the Ride of the Valkyries with its cartoon parody “Kill the wabbit”? From Johann Nestroy to Tristanderl und Süssholde, many of Wagner’s works have been lampooned with the view of capitalizing on their success (Borchmeyer 1983, Rowden 2017). In France, while there were stage parodies that followed a similar model around the time of the 1861 premiere of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra, composers like Emmanuel Chabrier, who genuinely admired Wagner, also wrote instrumental works that simultaneously mocked and paid homage to the composer (Huebner 1999, Taruskin 2009).

It is this particular mixture of reverence and irreverence that I propose to examine here. As of yet, there is no proper study of French parodies of Wagner in literature, a neglect this paper proposes to remedy. Having selected examples from the Symbolist writers Édouard Dujardin, Jules Laforgue and Teodor de Wyzewa, I show that literary parodies of Wagner are filled with the same ambiguity as their musical counterparts: at once deeply devoted to the cause of Wagnerism and critical of Wagner’s lofty ambitions. Ultimately, I argue that these parodies were instrumental in forging the doctrine of French Wagnerism, a movement that exalted Wagner just as much as it was willing to reinterpret his aesthetics creatively.

French caricatures of Wagner’s works and his artistic ambitions are mostly to be found in literature and in the theater. When it comes to instrumental music, this phenomenon is more marginal. Debussy famously mocked the lyricism of Tristan und Isolde in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” from Children’s Corner (1908), but he did so in such an understated manner that the pianist who premiered the work, Harold Bauer, did not recognize the quotation of the longing motif to which the composer was referring. The parody is more obvious, however, in two quadrilles for piano four hands: one by Chabrier, entitled Souvenirs de Munich and published posthumously in 1911, and the other by Fauré and Messager, entitled Souvenirs de Bayreuth and published in 1930, also after the death of the two composers. The paratext provides us with humorous instructions that the music alone cannot give: “fantaisie en forme de quadrille” (“fantasy in the form of a quadrille”), mocking Tristan und Isolde and the Ring cycle. While these pieces in the rare genre of Wagnerian instrumental parody have been studied by Taruskin (2005) and Picard (2010), several key aspects remain unexplored, especially concerning both their production and their reception in Wagnerian circles from the 1880s. This paper proposes first to deepen the understanding of the parodic motivations of these two pieces by defining what is imitated from Wagner and how the quotations are transformed. Second, these two Souvenirs seem to have carried different meanings for each of the composers involved: in both cases, if there is parodic intention, it is not certain that one can speak of caricature, especially when considering the piece as a whole. It is notable that, in some passages, the mocking nature of the parody is toned down. Finally, several historical questions emerge. First, the publication of these scores was not a given, as they were salon pieces circulating in manuscript form for many decades. Second, these two Souvenirs are not only parodies but they also illustrate several strands of French Wagnerism in the 1880s, their meaning having changed considerably with their publication several decades later.

English-born comedian, singer, pianist and composer Anna Russell (1911-2006), who described her career as ‘finding the comical in serious music’ (1985: 1), is best known for her send-up of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, a routine she performed on five continents from the early 1950s until her ‘farewell’ tour in the mid-1980s. In her unique style, Russell deftly summarised opera’s biggest canonical work, guiding her audience through the mythological intricacies of Wagner’s plot complete with musical excerpts and commentary. The subtitle of her autobiography confirmed her reputation as ‘the Queen of Musical Parody’, and her Wagner routine has even been discussed in scholarly literature as part of a longer history of Wagner parodies and satires (see Baker 2013, Goehr 2016, Daub 2020). But is it in fact a parody? If so, in what sense? Who, or what, is the object of Russell’s ridicule?

To answer these questions, my paper seeks to go beyond mere analysis of Russell’s script (memorably quotable as it is) to consider her routine as a kind of theatrical performance, the production and reception of which may be pieced together via autobiography, press criticism, fandom and audio(-visual) recordings. Among other things, I want to explore the question of ‘camp’ in Russell’s theatrical persona and the role of camp within the discrimination of social hierarchies of taste (serious/comic, elite/popular etc.), while at the same time bringing into dialogue various, often contradictory strands of her reception. Russell’s routine, I suggest, may be regarded less as a parody in any straightforward sense than as an informed piece of music appreciation for a general audience.