‘Lydéric, sauveur de Flandres’: décentralisation théâtrale and the local politics of the opera in Lille, 1881–1896

On 17 March 1897 the municipal council of Lille met for the fourth day in a row to agree the city’s budget for the coming year. When the discussion came to the theatre,¹ for which an annual subsidy of 110,000 Francs was envisaged, mayor Gustave Delory proposed, to general agreement, that the council should first turn its attention to another matter, namely the cahier des charges. The cahier, a kind of contract between the municipality and the city’s theatre director, stipulated various conditions to which the director, a private entrepreneur, should conform.² Like most provincial stages, Lille’s municipal theatre had always presented a mixed repertoire of a range of theatrical and operatic genres. As a mark of the theatre’s status and quality, the cahier had traditionally specified that the director should mount at least two opera performances (as opposed to opéra-comique, a genre that contained both spoken dialogue and arias) every week. Such works, it was stated, must be among those included in the repertoire of the state-subsidized opera houses in Paris.

This time the municipal Commission des Beaux-Arts proposed a number of revisions to the cahier. The two-weekly operas no longer needed to come from the repertoire of state-subsidized houses in Paris, but from that of ‘[theatres in] big cities, subsidized by the State or the Cities’.³ According to the Commission, the quality of a work need not be proven through previous performance in Paris, but rather by performance in any large city. Alongside this broadening of geographical perspective, a second new term in the cahier stated that at least half of all works of opera performed should be from the ‘modern’ repertoire, and that each season should see the premieres of at least two new modern operas never previously played in the city.

These changes, though consisting of just a few words here and there, marked a significant shift of emphasis in local opera politics and the principles that underpinned them. As the radical republican councillor Charles Debierre, Professor of Anatomy and a member of the Commission, explained, the various changes stood in logical relation to each other. The goal of performing more modern works, ‘which depart a little from the furrow traced by the old-style music’, was directly linked to broadening the pool of inspiration beyond the state-subsidized theatres in Paris. Invoking Ernest Reyer’s Sigurd, performed in Lyon before Paris, Debierre explained that the capital was no longer the only French city to produce new works.⁴

Yet, while Debierre and his fellow councillors cited other provincial cities as examples to be followed, they also insisted upon their capacity as Lillois to determine for themselves the proper way to manage the city’s cultural institutions. When the conservative opposition councillor Brackers-d’Hugo dissented from the Commission’s proposal that the assistant director of the orchestra should be selected by examination rather than directly appointed, he cited letters he had received from the composer Jules Massenet and the conductor of the Paris Opera Claude-Paul Taffanel, both of whom rejected the idea. Brackers-d’Hugo presented the views of these high authorities as self-evident proof that the Commission was wrong. Debierre, who was an important member of Lille’s Université Populaire, part of a national movement for working class adult education, objected with a forceful appeal to local common sense. ‘We have a brain like everyone else and we know how to discuss and pass judgement with knowledge of the facts. We do not need the authority of M. Massenet and M. Taffanel, because we are ourselves and we do not need to defer to authorities outside the city of Lille.’⁵

The Commission’s changes, which after some debate were passed by the council, represented the culmination of more than a decade and a half of municipal opera policy. Beginning with the 1881 election of a journalist named Géry Legrand as mayor of Lille, the first committed republican to hold that office under the Third Republic, the municipality conflated the revival of the opera with both a greater degree of local autonomy in its management and a more careful attention to innovations being developed elsewhere. Inspiration was to be drawn not simply from the capital city, but from other French cities and broader European movements in the art form, a striking departure from previous practice. This reforming agenda took shape in the context of a concerted effort on the part of the ruling elites of the Third Republic to construct ‘a discursive link between the Republic and the prestige of French culture’.⁶ As they engaged enthusiastically with this agenda, Legrand and the councillors around him also sought to assert the importance of the city, and its natural representatives the municipal council, in a modernizing France.

This agenda took shape in the light of significant re-composition of the city’s social structure. An early industrializer by French standards, Lille had been substantially transformed by the late nineteenth century, and a sizeable industrial bourgeoisie took its place alongside professional and mercantile elites. Meanwhile the bulk of the city’s population consisted of poor artisans and workers, whose social, cultural and educational needs became a focus of attention for middle-class reformers and workers alike. At the same time, a climate of political and cultural centralization under the Third Republic stood in tension with increasing interest all over France in the (real or imagined) distinctiveness of its various regions. Though the mixture of French and Flemish languages and dialects spoken in Lille meant that standard French remained the language of common usage, members of the municipal council were acutely aware of the city’s Flemish history and its implications for both popular and ‘high’ culture.⁷

Debates around the opera are a particularly good way to examine questions surrounding the politics of culture in the Third Republic because of the enormous changes, both institutional and aesthetic, that gripped the art form in the last third of the nineteenth century. Paris lost its pre-eminence as the European centre of the arts, at the same time that the radical ideas of German composer Richard Wagner became increasingly influential. Amidst these shifting cultural sands, provincial opera houses in France were subjected after 1864 to the stresses of deregulation, which undermined their financial viability and, in the eyes of some, their artistic value. Discussion of opera during this period was frequently inflected with participants’ fear of decline—artistic, national, or both.

As he grappled with these challenges and opportunities, Géry Legrand, who was mayor between 1881 and 1896, developed a policy of ‘décentralisation théâtrale’ (theatrical decentralization). Attempting to somewhat free the local theatre from the conventional obligation to follow Parisian practice, Legrand sought to increase the number of new works performed in Lille and encourage local composers to premiere their work in the city. For Legrand, the desire to decentralize the opera did not spring from indifference to national or Republican cultural politics or the wider goals of the Third Republic, but rather from his perception that these would be best realized if put into practice with appropriate attention to local specificities. At the same time, décentralisation théâtrale reflected Legrand’s conviction that cultural refinement, and the moral and political progress it could bring to the citizenry, would not be achieved by emulation of Paris alone, but by connecting Lille to broader European cultural movements.

In this article I use the local press and sources from the municipal and departmental archives to explore the ideas underpinning this policy, its development and effects, contextualizing these in a discussion of Legrand’s cultural politics more generally. I argue that an exploration of these politics demonstrates the cultural vitality of French provincial cities such as Lille, as evidenced here by their capacity for avant-garde musical experimentation. More generally, I argue that local opera studies can provide a valuable contribution to the larger history of the politics of culture in the Third Republic, representing a meeting point of ideas about Republican citizenship, the proper role and capacities of the local state and the relationship between artistic modernism and symbols of local identity and history. As such, they enlarge our understanding of the period, as well as providing a longer historical context to twentieth-century cultural decentralization.

The article consists of three sections. In the first, I outline the relationship between institutional political power, civic identity and the opera in nineteenth-century France. In the second, I explain the principal characteristics of Géry Legrand’s opera policy, situating it in the context of his cultural politics more generally. Finally, I explore how these policies took effect in relation to one particular movement within the opera, Wagnerism, which sprung up in response to the work and ideas of Richard Wagner. I focus on a single case study in some detail, showing how Lydéric, an opera by a local composer performed in 1895, enriches existing interpretations of Wagnerism in France, and so contributes to wider histories of fin-de-siècle culture by emphasizing that they cannot be told solely from a metropolitan perspective.

II

Opera, politics and the state were closely entwined in nineteenth-century France, particularly in the mid-century when the Parisian stage reached its peak of importance. Generous state payments to four theatres, which were overseen by a committee of political appointees, ensured that the French opera industry was highly centralized. ‘No signal could have been stronger: [the opera] was as important to Napoléon III’s government as the railways, the military and probably the Church.’⁸ Indeed, the Paris opera houses were characterized in an important study of the late 1980s as ‘a subtly used tool of the state’, a medium for the conveyance of political meanings and ideas about national identity through an ‘ineffable political transaction’ from state to audience.⁹

This picture has been complicated by more recent scholarship. Music was indeed of critical political importance in the Third Republic, as an extensive historiography has outlined.¹⁰ However the exercise of power in the opera was mediated through a range of formal and informal structures, rather than being hierarchical and unidirectional. All participants in the art, whether politician, librettist, composer, performer or critic, shaped it in their own way with the means available to them. Even members of the audience were not passive observers, but could make powerful interventions into the development of the art; famously so, in the case of the Paris Jockey Club’s disruption of the first performance in Paris of Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser in 1861.¹¹ Power in the opera should be conceived ‘less as a set of hierarchical pressures and more as a network of regulations, practices and negotiations’.¹² The historiography of the politics of opera in France has examined this Parisian context at length, while work on provincial municipal theatres is comparatively underdeveloped.¹³

Similar relationships of power existed in municipal theatres. Each was run as a private company by a director appointed by the mayor. The director took on the financial risk of running a season, but mayors and municipal councillors exercised considerable influence through the cahier and financial measures such as the fixing of ticket prices or provision of a subsidy to the director. Subsidies were different in each city but might be paid in kind, perhaps including the free use of the theatre building, music library, instruments, sets, props and costumes, or a waiver of the poor taxes due on ticket sales.¹⁴ Even with such benefits it was difficult for provincial directors to run a full programme of opera and make a profit on ticket sales alone; many cities chose to pay additional subsidies in cash.

Payment of a subsidy increased municipal influence over the theatre; indeed, the policy was explicitly framed as such on its first introduction in Lille in 1862.¹⁵ The need for greater control sprang, councillors argued, from developments in the arts, which were tending towards formal unity between its different branches. This greater complexity, in turn, required an institutional support structure for its management, rather than the undisciplined free market. Increasing municipal influence over the opera was therefore a necessary step in its modernization.

Increased municipal power in the opera was also expressed through reforms to the system of débuts, the practice by which new performers were admitted to the company, and the status of abonnés (season ticket holders). The débuts, when at the beginning of a season new members of the company were subject to the vocal (and sometimes projectile) approval or disapproval of the audience, were a long standing tradition in provincial theatres and the ‘bane’ of theatre directors.¹⁶ In 1865 the practice was reformed in Lille, the new cahier stipulating that audiences could only manifest their opinion at the curtain call, not during a performance, and that the mayor would have the final decision on admission to the company.¹⁷ A revision three years later held that abonnés would meet in the theatre foyer during the interval of a debutant’s third performance and hold a formal vote in the presence of a police commissioner; any ‘improper’ noise during performances was forbidden.¹⁸ Though this compromise gave a special place to season ticket holders over other audience members, their privilege was strictly regulated and subject to the supervision of state authority in the person of the police officer.¹⁹ This system was in use at theatres in Ghent and Antwerp, a fact which its advocates cited as proof of its effectiveness and reason to introduce it in Lille.²⁰ Indeed, the struggle for control of the theatre between municipal governments and entrenched, privileged sections of the audience was a trans-European phenomenon in the second half of the nineteenth century.²¹

The cumulative effect of such policy changes was that the municipal theatre came increasingly to be regarded as part of the ordinary functioning of the municipality. The need to annually agree the subsidy as a part of the municipal budget hastened a process by which the opera was folded into wider debates in municipal councils and the local press about the proper priorities and responsibilities of the municipality. Councillors hostile to a theatre subsidy frequently opposed it rhetorically to other forms of local spending such as sanitation, while those who were favourable framed their arguments in similar terms.²² By 1903, when explaining a new system to provide health insurance to members of the orchestra, the socialist mayor Gustave Delory called the orchestra a ‘quasi-municipal service’ and compared the musicians to workers on the municipal tramways.²³

As well as occupying an increasingly important status in local institutional politics, the opera in a city such as Lille was a central part of urban bourgeois life and a vital mark of civic status, as it was in cities across Europe.²⁴ To be a member of an opera audience in the middle of the nineteenth century was to be visible to one’s fellow audience members, even if the increasing tendency to dim the lights during the performance made this less true than it had been in the previous century.²⁵ Taking one’s seat, strolling around outside before and after a performance or during an interval, leading applause or presenting gifts to a performer all offered elite members of the audience the opportunity to consciously cultivate an image of distinction and assert their status.

Even by the 1890s, when the experience of the performance itself was silent and anonymous, the occasion of attending the opera still represented a moment of public display. One sketch in a local paper describing an opening night in 1892 named thirty-nine individuals, as well as remarking upon the attendance of ‘numerous members of the Nouveau Cercle’, ‘members of the [municipal] theatre commission’, journalists from the Belgian press ‘and a crowd of dilettantes whom it would take too long to list’.²⁶ What is more, the identification of the audience as a collective entity did not depend only upon its tangible visibility. It depended too upon an act of imagination that constructed the audience discursively through the local press and shared rituals of behaviour. The audience, in other words, was another form of imagined community, defined in the nineteenth century by its urban character.²⁷

Performing the social rituals associated with attending the opera also gave the local audience the opportunity to connect themselves with a larger imagined community: the audience for opera across France or Europe. This audience was substantial, while the composers, writers, impresarios and singers that entertained them were highly mobile across Europe and even parts of the Americas.²⁸ The greatest stages, most of all Paris, attracted ambitious composers from across Europe.²⁹ While the audiences themselves were not yet as mobile as they would come to be at the end of the century, when thousands of middle-class Europeans visited Wagner’s Bayreuth each year, the art form itself already operated across a terrain that was not confined to any national space. In the later part of the century, municipal councillors in Lille made frequent reference to the opera industry’s international character in their discussions on the subject.³⁰

Lille was never an internationally important centre of opera in the same sense as Paris. Nevertheless, even the fairly average talents that made up its permanent company were part of a European employment market by the 1860s. Jules-Henry Vachot, the director of the opera in the 1865–1866 season, had formerly been director of the Ghent and Antwerp theatres. After leaving Lille he returned to Belgium to manage La Monnaie in Brussels, at the time considered one of the finest opera theatres in Europe. He later returned to Paris where he died in 1884.³¹ Eugène Bertrand, director in 1867–1868, a year the local theatre historian Léon Lefebvre called ‘one of the finest the Lillois had seen for 20 years’, had spent five years managing theatres in the United States of America, as well as spending time in Brussels.³² Biographies of the hundreds of performers and directors in Lefebvre’s history of the Lille theatre demonstrate that such mobility was the norm in the city, while listings of openings and recent appointments in the Parisian theatrical and musical press demonstrate that medium-sized and large cities across France, the Low Countries, Italy and the German lands were also connected to this labour market.³³

By extending and entrenching their role in opera politics, as in cultural politics more generally, municipal governments sought to increase the importance of the local state. This increased importance would spring in part from the municipality’s capacity to manage social relations in the city; music was a valuable tool of public policy in the Third Republic, as will be discussed below.³⁴ As Daniel Sherman has explored with reference to art museums, cultural institutions provided provincial elites with a means of ‘cultural legitimation’ that justified their continued status as mediators between the city and the nation.³⁵ In addition to these local and national resonances, the politics of the opera also provided municipalities with a means of relating the city to a wider European cultural polity. Cultural representation ‘sp[oke] a local language as well as a national and transnational language’.³⁶

III

Géry Legrand (1837–1902) was elected as a municipal councillor in 1876, and in 1881 as mayor of Lille, a position which he held until 1896.³⁷ He was the younger son of an old local bourgeois family with a traditional attachment to the legal profession. His father Pierre (1804–1859) was a lawyer, a moderate democratic parliamentarian during the Second Republic, and a writer of several works on jurisprudence, politics and local life, including a humorous portrait of the milieu from which he sprung.³⁸ Géry’s older brother Pierre (1834–1895), a lawyer at the Lille bar, was later a senator, and Minister of Commerce in several governments during the 1880s, under which responsibility he organized the Universal Exhibition of 1889.³⁹

Géry also studied law in Paris but pursued a career as a writer and editor in the periodical press. He was founder–editor of various publications including the Journal Populaire de Lille, ‘the first truly popular’ periodical in Lille, which counted Émile Zola among its contributors.⁴⁰ This was forced to close in 1866 over its political writing, and one of its writers was briefly imprisoned. The same year, Gustave Masure, a municipal councillor and the son of a bank director, founded Le Progrès du Nord, initially published in Brussels before it was licenced in France. Géry soon joined his friend, taking over the editing of the paper on the several occasions that Masure was imprisoned in the late 1860s, when he was defended in court by Léon Gambetta and Pierre Legrand (the son).

Both Pierre and Géry were opportunist republicans, moderate by the standards of the coalition of radical republicans (such as Charles Debierre) and socialists (such as Gustave Delory) who would come to displace Legrand’s faction in the municipal council, but to the left of mainstream opinion in the senate for most of their careers.⁴¹ Géry came to power in the context of a struggle to more firmly implant republican politics in the city and the department. Lille had voted consistently to the left of the Nord department as a whole in the more conservative early years of the Third Republic, during which time the distribution of the Progrès du Nord was limited to subscribers, sale on the street being banned.⁴² In the 1880s, both national and local politics consolidated to the left, with Géry Legrand becoming mayor four years after the election of his brother and Gustave Masure to the senate.

Legrand came to power with education and culture as a core part of his republican politics. A promise to build a new Palais des Beaux Arts, to house the city’s collection of paintings and sculpture (then exhibited in the mairie), was a central part of his campaign. The completion of this edifice in the Place de la République in 1892 and the establishment of Lille as a nationally important centre of secular tertiary education were his two most visible lasting legacies. He also organized public festivals to mark the centenaries of the birth of Victor Hugo, the revolution of 1789 and the successful defence of the city against Austrian siege in 1792.⁴³

In pursuit of his cultural agenda Legrand frequently expressed frustration at the institutional limits of municipal agency, remarking in a discussion about the possibility of direct municipal management of the theatre that even the smallest expense required a mandate from Paris.⁴⁴ ‘Centralization to excess kills our efforts,’ he complained during a discussion on founding a school of arts and crafts in the city, ‘they want to see everything and do everything from Paris[...]The smallest credit, the most modest agreement can only be permitted by the high intervention of the President of the Republic.’⁴⁵ In the face of what he perceived as state obstruction, Legrand was inclined to frame the development of successful cultural policy as requiring ‘decentralization.’⁴⁶

Opera seemed especially suited to a policy of decentralization at the time Legrand came to power. Paris was not quite the source of authority it had once been. During its mid-century peak, the capital had been the centre not only of the French art, but also of world opera: the most important stage on which a composer would aim to have his work performed.⁴⁷ Provincial theatres rarely staged works which had not first been seen in Paris.⁴⁸ Partly as a result of the death of its great star Giacomo Meyerbeer in 1864, Paris began to lose its status as the globally pre-eminent site for the performance of new works; the Opéra Garnier was seen by some as ‘provincial’ after 1870, at least in comparison to its earlier cosmopolitan character.⁴⁹ The repertoire ossified and several seasons at the Opéra Garnier during the 1870s saw no new works being performed at all. Critics worried whether, without opportunities to have their work performed, young French composers would suffer and the art decline compared with Germany and Italy.⁵⁰ Paris’ scene began to revive from the 1880s with the success of composers such as Emmanuel Chabrier but, partly as a result of competition from Richard Wagner’s theatre in Bayreuth, never recovered the dominant status it had in the mid-nineteenth century.

Problems in Paris created new tensions and anxieties on the part of provincial mayors and theatre directors. If the capital no longer represented the gold standard, it was difficult to know on what the provincial opera should be modelled. These challenges were exacerbated, at least initially, by the deregulation of French theatres in 1864. Municipal theatres no longer possessed a monopoly on dramatic entertainment and therefore could not rely on the takings for performances of more popular forms of theatre to cross-subsidize operas that were expensive to stage. ‘A state of near chaos’ endured in the years immediately following the change, while the manager of the Bordeaux theatre drily remarked that the ‘liberté des théâtres’ was really the ‘liberté des café-concerts’.⁵¹

While the initial shock of deregulation was mitigated by the widespread municipal provision of cash subsidies, many contemporary observers articulated a sense that the provincial opera was in crisis, a claim that is accepted in much of the historiography.⁵² Four years after the dictionary listed ‘décadent’ as a neologism in 1877, the councillor with special responsibility for the arts labelled the Lille theatre ‘en décadence’.⁵³ Decentralization seemed to offer one way of overcoming these challenges; it was a ‘hotly-debated issue’ throughout the final third of the century, presented by many as a remedy for Paris’ failure to stage enough new works and promote younger composers.⁵⁴ Géry Legrand was a ‘partisan’ supporter of this policy.⁵⁵

Shortly after his election as mayor, Legrand appointed a small group of councillors, led by the adjunct for beaux arts César Baggio, to examine the local opera and propose ways to improve its artistic quality and vitality, inviting them to completely revise the cahier.⁵⁶ Baggio, a lawyer from another long-established bourgeois family and a close ally of Legrand, framed his proposals around the notion that as ‘a great intellectual centre’, Lille needed a theatre worthy of that status.⁵⁷ Rejecting entirely the proposal of some councillors that the existing subsidy should be abandoned and the theatre run on a commercial basis, Baggio reaffirmed the principle tentatively asserted by some of his predecessors that the opera should provide aesthetic and moral education. For Baggio, increased municipal subsidy and careful management through the cahier were the means of achieving this. Over the course of Legrand’s administration, the municipal subsidy increased from 60,000 to 80,000 francs in 1889, and to 96,000 by 1896.⁵⁸

Legrand and Baggio, like other political leaders in the Third Republic, saw music partly in terms of its ‘public utility’.⁵⁹ Music, for many republican politicians, was ‘a form of sensibility, a kind of knowledge, and a practice’ which would shape democratic habits and values and form bonds in society.⁶⁰ Arguing in this vein, Baggio explained to the other councillors that the theatre ‘is not only a pleasure; it is also an education; it is a school of aesthetics; it is a school of morals [which should] develop good taste rather than pervert it; raise the artistic level and not lower it’.⁶¹ This, Baggio explained, was the spirit in which he and the other members of the commission had revised the cahier. The theatre, remarked councillor Ernest Cannissié—a linen spinner—could ‘purify’ the spirits of the citizenry, a function at least as important as cleansing the poor neighbourhoods of the city.⁶²

The problem with the local theatre, Baggio argued, was that the repertoire did not live up to this serious vision. Prioritizing profit, directors had opted for works that were cheaper to stage and provided easy amusement. Opérettes, short light-hearted works such as Les Mousquetaires au couvent or La Fille de tambour major, had been preferred to longer, more serious works such as Verdi’s Aïda. In response, the new cahier specified that at least three complete operas—as opposed to single acts or arias—should be performed each week, and that at least three works that had not previously been performed in Lille should be shown per season. Though these were to be works which had previously been performed at the state-subsidized theatres in Paris, rather than entirely new works, the desire to revive and reform the repertoire was clear. As a point of comparison, the cahier, then in effect at the Opéra Garnier, specified just two new works per season.⁶³ In addition, the 1881 cahier introduced a provision that the municipality could demand that the director stage up to two further works (one lyrical, one dramatic) by Lillois artists in a given season.

At the same time as they turned to the city’s own resources in order to revive the municipal theatre, Legrand and the councillors around him were acutely aware of developments elsewhere. Their discussions about the administration of the opera were always conducted in a comparative frame of reference. Councillors looked to the example of other cities, both inside and outside of France, for example noting the size of the subsidy paid in one city, or the method of recruiting musicians in another. In part comparisons were conceived in terms of competition: as Lille needed to maintain its status among the top tier of cities and opera was closely linked to city prestige, it naturally followed that the Lille opera should match that of other cities.⁶⁴

These comparisons frequently evoked the sense that certain other cities were logical reference points for Lille because of their social or cultural similarity. This applied especially to cities in Belgium and the Netherlands, which were referred to with great frequency.⁶⁵ The routine and unremarkable nature of such references suggests a deeply held recognition that the opera was a political–cultural institution that existed in similar forms across a European network of cities. In this context, comparisons between Lille, Rotterdam, Ghent, Brussels or even Geneva were as valid as references to Rouen, Paris, Marseilles or Lyon. Evidence from the work of other historians suggests that such a transnational perspective on the opera was shared in other European provincial cities.⁶⁶

IV

In the 1880s and 1890s the Lille opera, like theatres across Europe, operated in the shadow of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The German composer was the dominant personality in European opera for the last forty years of the nineteenth century, continuing to influence the art after his death. Some in France regarded him with hostility as a symbol of German military power—particularly after his text for Ein Kapitulation, a planned satirical comedy on the French defeat, had become known in Paris—while for his admirers he became ‘a yardstick against which the works of every composer across the political spectrum would be measured for decades’.⁶⁷

Wagner sought to bring about a revolution in the aesthetics, compositional techniques and subject matter of European opera. In essays such as La Musique de l’avenir (which he published initially in French in 1860 to introduce his work to the French public) he explained his desire to bring about an ‘intimate blend of music and poetry’ in his operatic works.⁶⁸ Rather than seeing an opera as a discrete series of individual pieces of music, Wagner thought an opera should represent a logically coherent whole, beginning with the prelude that would present in embryo all the themes of the work to come. ‘My preludes must consist of the elements [of the opera], and not be dramatic like the Leonora overtures, or the drama becomes superfluous’, he wrote in 1878, while composing the prelude to his opera Parsifal.⁶⁹ Wagner’s ideas were widely known in France, most importantly through the criticism of Charles Baudelaire.⁷⁰

The ideal music, which he identified with the German symphonic tradition, the pinnacle of which was Beethoven, was a ‘melodic aggregate’, unlike the ‘Italian Opera, where the melody stands entirely isolated and the intervals between the separate melodies are occupied by a manner of music we can only term absolutely unmelodic, since it scarcely quits the character of downright noise’.⁷¹ The principle technique with which Wagner achieved this effect was the leitmotif, a musical theme or phrase associated with each character or idea within the story. Baudelaire described the technique as a ‘mnemonic system’ in which ‘each character, so to speak, wears the badge of a melody which represents his moral character, and the role which he is called to play in the story’.⁷² By the employment of the leitmotif, Wagner hoped to achieve his goal of fusing music and poetry. He favoured mythical subjects, such as the Arthurian legend, upon which he based his final work, Parsifal, and believed that these reflected the German national character.

Wagner’s impact in France was dramatic. Composers felt they should ‘respond to Wagner’s legacy from within’ absorbing his ideas about aesthetics and musical–dramatic structure to develop a distinctly French style that responded to Wagner without simply imitating him.⁷³ This challenge was bound up in the wider anxieties of the ‘fin-de-siècle’ sense of national decline, and a drift in genres towards drame–lyrique works, which were based on literary subjects and took personal and psychological drama as their subject matter rather than the political–historical themes of grand opera.⁷⁴ Wagner himself, in an 1879 interview with the French critic Louis de Fourcaud that was reprinted several times in the 1880s, had suggested that French composers should adopt his methods, but in a way which was appropriate to their national context.⁷⁵ Fourcaud, along with writers at the Revue Wagnérienne, was a key transmitter of Wagner’s ideas to a French audience, particularly to those interested in symbolism in the arts.⁷⁶

Wagner’s work rapidly found favour in France in the 1890s. In 1891, Lohengrin was performed in Rouen, the first performance of the work in France. Thirty years before, the first run of Tannhäuser in Paris had been abruptly cut short by audience and critical hostility, and none of Wagner’s operas had been performed in France since. The production in Rouen was a great success, running twenty-seven times in the spring of 1891 and spurring a flurry of representations of the work—and other Wagner operas—across France.⁷⁷ For the rest of the decade, he was the most frequently performed composer at the Paris opera.⁷⁸

The adoption of Wagner’s ideas and techniques by French composers was a more gradual process.⁷⁹ Composers such as Emmanuel Chabrier began adopting aspects of his style in the late 1880s. Chabrier’s Gwendoline was performed at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1886, the year before the Revue Wagnérienne ironically referred to it as ‘the first theatre of Paris’, owing to the fact that it was much more inclined to perform works that conservative Parisian directors avoided.⁸⁰La Monnaie was also the stage on which Vincent d’Indy’s Fervaal received its first performance in 1897. The dramatic themes and plot line of Fervaal were similar to those of Parsifal, while d’Indy also emulated Wagner in the symphonic construction of the music.⁸¹ The critic Pierre Lalo, son of the composer Édouard Lalo, viewed this opera as a landmark in the absorption of Wagner’s style into France, a view shared by some historians.⁸² Wagner’s absorption culminated with Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, performed in Paris in 1902.⁸³ Like Wagner, Debussy employed leitmotifs to associate particular musical themes with particular dramatic ideas, as well as developing a strong current of extended symbolism throughout the work.⁸⁴

Lille responded enthusiastically to the Wagnerian turn of the 1890s; the city staged several of Wagner’s works during the decade. The spring season of 1892 saw a successful run of Lohengrin. In the days leading up to the opening night, the press devoted several issues to discussing the work, its history and the ideas and style of Wagner, including discussion of La Musique de l’avenir.⁸⁵ Celebrating the positive audience reception, the liberal Écho du Nord remarked that it was to Lille’s credit that ‘the kitchen boys of Lille are not anti-Wagnerian like those of Paris’, and described with pleasure the attentiveness of the audience and their practice of applauding discretely, which proved that they took the work as seriously as its quality demanded.⁸⁶ The following year the ‘success of the season’ was the Vaisseau Fantome (The Flying Dutchman), which had never before been performed in France. An 1897 production of Tannhäuser was similarly ‘a real success’.⁸⁷

The turn towards Wagner was conceived in the light of decentralization and was partly inspired by the example of Rouen, which had staged a number of important works before Paris. The Lille Artiste (a journal founded by Legrand) remarked that Rouen’s Théatre des Arts was ‘in the avant-garde’ and that Lille should be encouraged by its ‘attempts at decentralization, [which] have produced such excellent results. Was it not Rouen that produced Samson et Delila and Lohengrin?’⁸⁸ Thus, performing Wagner fulfilled more than one function: it presented the city as forward-thinking, it engaged with the avant-garde of a European artistic movement and it asserted Lille’s independence from Paris.

Legrand also promoted decentralization by supporting the work of local composers, a mayoral power specified in the cahier. The most successful work by a local composer performed in Lille during this period was Lydéric, a three-act opera by Émile Ratez, performed in the spring seasons of 1895 and 1896. Like the much more famous works of d’Indy and Debussy, both of which it predated, Lydéric was unmistakeably influenced by Wagner. That it emerged from a context of municipal opera politics underlines the fact that décentralisation théâtrale was not a policy of insularity, but rather of conscious engagement with cultural developments across France and beyond.

The composer Ratez was born in Besançon and studied in Paris, but became ‘a Lillois ... by adoption’, spending forty years as director of the Lille Conservatoire.⁸⁹ He was a republican, active on—or at least, not hostile to—the organized left. He allowed the overture to a later opera, Le Dragon Vert, to be performed at a May Day concert organized by the radical–socialist coalition municipality in 1901, and a few days later at a meeting of the Université Populaire hosted by the radical councillor Charles Debierre.⁹⁰ He was also involved in providing evening music classes for workers after the First World War.⁹¹ These politics were shared with the director of the theatre orchestra Oscar Petit, one of the writers of the libretto of Lydéric, Eugène Lagrillière-Beauclerc (who wrote regularly for the newspaper co-founded by Legrand, Le Progrès du Nord) and of course Legrand himself.⁹² Indeed, the published libretto was inscribed with a dedication to the mayor in recognition of his support for the production, which included making special arrangements for the director and company to dedicate time to rehearsals.⁹³

Ratez was also, like d’Indy, Debussy and others, among the generation of French composers who incorporated Wagnerian themes into their music. In 1893, the prominent Wagnerian critic Louis de Fourcaud named Ratez among a list of seven young composers who in recent years had played ‘an important part in the movement of the modern [musical] art’.⁹⁴

The meeting of left-wing politics and Wagnerism present in the person of Ratez was not particularly unusual in the 1890s. Socialist readings of Wagner’s work were not uncommon; in 1887, for instance, the brothers Pierre and Charles Bonnier published their analysis of Parsifal in the Revue Wagnérienne. The brothers argued that Wagner’s belief in the possibility of creating a new man through the revolutionary transformation of art had always meant that his aesthetic concerns were tied up with political ones.⁹⁵ For the Bonniers, his work represented a kind of naturalist socialism. As a rising young composer interested in Wagner it is highly likely that Ratez was familiar with this analysis, as well as some of the brothers’ other writings on opera and auditory science available in the municipal library.⁹⁶ Though he was a professor in Oxford by 1890, Charles Bonnier in particular was closely associated with the socialist left in the north of France through his connection with Jules Guesde, elected deputy for Roubaix in 1892.⁹⁷ The Guesdist strand of socialism was an important part of the political milieu in the Nord in the 1890s, and Lille itself would elect a socialist, Gustave Delory, to succeed Legrand as mayor in 1896. While Lydéric does not seem to have been received as an overtly left-wing artwork (and its patron, Legrand, was by no means a socialist), its themes of justice and liberation from tyranny might have been conceived by Ratez as a response to the work of Bonnier.

Like Wagner’s Parsifal, Ratez’s opera told a mythical story of a young man raised in a forest who discovers that he has a moral obligation to defeat a tyrant and prove himself a worthy leader of a new, purer age. Unlike Parsifal, which drew on a broad mythic tradition which Wagner regarded as ‘Germanic’, Ratez’s story had deep local roots. Lydéric was based upon the legend of Lydéric and Phinaert, a medieval epic poem, elements of which appeared in various Latin, French and Flemish versions between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.⁹⁸ Lydéric is the son of Salvaert, a Burgundian prince who is killed by a giant called Phinaert when passing through Flanders on his way to England. Salvaert’s wife, Emergaert, escapes and gives birth to Lydéric, before she is captured by Phinaert and held prisoner. The baby is left in the forest, where he is raised by a hermit who feeds him goat’s milk. ⁹⁹

As a young man, Lydéric discovers the truth of his origins. In the opera, this revelation comes after the hermit prays to God to give Lydéric the strength to remove a large stone from the entrance of his father’s tomb, revealing a scroll on which his testimony is written; an incident which mirrors the grail scene in Parsifal. Salvaert’s testimony predicts a future in which the people will revolt and support Lydéric in his task of vengeance; Lydéric vows to ‘cast off the chains’ which have fallen upon Flanders.¹⁰⁰ He then challenges Phinaert to a duel on the Pont de Fin in Lille, a dramatic scene in which he kills Phinaert and is hailed by the chorus as a liberator and ‘saviour of Flanders’.¹⁰¹ King Dagobert gives Lydéric the title of ‘forester’ and grants him the right to rule over Flanders, which he does with great justice.

Ratez was telling a story that was widely known in the city. Lydéric was the ‘popular hero’ of the people of Lille; he had been celebrated during the annual carnival every year since the sixteenth century.¹⁰² ‘The Flemish, and in particular the Lillois, [were strongly attached]’ to Lydéric and Phinaert.¹⁰³ As well as his annual appearance in effigy at carnival, Lydéric was celebrated in local literature, both in the dialect poetry of Alexandre Desrousseaux and in conventional verse by local intellectuals.¹⁰⁴ A local, popular connection was also implied by Ratez’s use of musical themes, which reviewers recognized as coming from the tradition of popular song, though Ratez was not alone among composers in using this device.¹⁰⁵

With its mythic subject matter and sylvan setting, Lydéric’s debt to Wagner was obvious to reviewers. Besides the thematic similarities with Parsifal, a writer from the Paris paper Le Temps remarked that the opening scene in the wood reminded him of the first performance of Tannhäuser in Paris.¹⁰⁶ The music, too, struck reviewers as inspired by Wagner; both those who were critical and the majority who praised the work.¹⁰⁷

Ratez had ‘the skill and the science of a serious musician’ according to one local periodical, employing leitmotifs to develop the themes of the opera in a manner which was ‘totally modern’.¹⁰⁸ Ratez had ‘abandoned entirely the form of opera with a series of duets and trios, with no link attaching one to the other; [he] achieves the intimate union of the poem and the music… by the continuous employment of characteristic motifs’.¹⁰⁹Lydéric, in short, was ‘a very modern opera’ according to the Progrès du Nord, employing leitmotifs in order to develop ‘a symphonic ensemble’.¹¹⁰ The style is ‘Wagnerian!’, the Progrès exclaimed with mock horror.

The local press hailed Lydéric as a great success. The theatre was ‘packed’ and the foyer ‘buzzed like a bee hive’ according to the Progrès’ reporter, who believed the audience response demonstrated that the public could be enthused by new, serious works.¹¹¹ A few days after the first performance, the Progrès reported excitedly that it had been reviewed favourably in eleven papers in Paris and Brussels, and that the publishing house had received a request for the words and music from a theatre in Vienna that was considering staging it.¹¹²

While we might be wary of taking reports in the Progrès at face value, given its close association with both Legrand and the librettist Lagrillière-Beauclerc, its account is corroborated by other reports. The Parisian Lanterne recounted the great enthusiasm of the audience on opening night, on whose insistence the opening overture was played twice.¹¹³ Ratez was called on to the stage for applause at the end of the overture, second act and final curtain.¹¹⁴Lydéric was the most successful work on the Lille stage for a number of years, according to the Écho du Nord, which also noted that it represented a successful example of decentralization.¹¹⁵La Semaine Musicale de Lille remarked that even those readers who did not appreciate modern music should recognize the artistic importance of the work, which was remarkable for a work from a local composer.¹¹⁶ Ratez, the reporter of the Nouvelliste-Dépêche concluded, had a great future ahead of him.¹¹⁷

In fact, Ratez enjoyed only modest success in subsequent years. He won a prize of 500 francs for his chamber music in 1897, and continued to compose new works of opera which were performed in Lille and his native Besançon. But on his death in 1931 he was remembered primarily for his work at the Lille Conservatoire, his efforts to bring music to the local population and for the ‘Lillois opera’ Lydéric.¹¹⁸ Yet this future was not known to the audience at the premier in January 1895, who gave Lydéric a reception that compared favourably to that of works by nationally celebrated composers staged in Lille that season. Lydéric was performed six times, the same number as L’Attaque du Moulin, an opera by Alfred Bruneau from a short story by Émile Zola, and two more than Phryné, a new work by Camille Saint-Saëns that had debuted in Paris the year before.¹¹⁹ Given how seriously its contemporary audience took Lydéric and the project of décentralisation théâtrale, historians should approach them in a similar fashion.

V

The story of Géry Legrand and décentralisation théâtrale touches upon important questions relating to the politics of culture in the Third Republic. The development of new cultural forms at the fin-de-siècle cannot be understood only with reference to Paris, or to well-known figures of the avant-garde such as d’Indy or Debussy. This is not to suggest that a composer such as Ratez is some sort of unjustly forgotten genius, but rather that it is significant that somebody like him—a minor musician, director of a provincial music school—participated fully in the response of French musicians to developments in European opera, illustrated here with reference to Richard Wagner. It is significant also that his response involved the incorporation of local tropes into his self-consciously avant-garde opera.

Politicians such as Géry Legrand invested considerable political resources in supporting the work of local composers such as Ratez, with the support in turn of municipal councillors, the local intelligentsia and many members of the opera audience. Their reasons for supporting such a programme indicate why this subject is of interest beyond the field of opera history. Modernism represented a challenge to the coherence of the social and cultural order of the provincial city in part because the changes with which it was associated were often portrayed as coming from outside of the city.¹²⁰ In response, municipal elites attempted to develop and manage their own distinct forms of modern culture that would help them to navigate this challenge. Opera, because of its association with bourgeois social and cultural leadership, as well as its role in civic identity, was an important part of this effort.

So it was with Lydéric, a local story with deep popular roots, but also a work of avant-garde style and sensibilities. Lydéric stood for a cultural policy, décentralisation théâtrale, that would assert the importance of local identity and local independence, at the same time as demonstrating that the city was forward-thinking and modern. Studies of how this policy operated in cities across France at the end of the nineteenth century would enhance our understanding of the interplay between modernity and the histories of local places, as well as giving us new insight into the efforts of the urban bourgeoisie to maintain their cultural leadership in changing circumstances.

His thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers, whose probing and perceptive questions and comments greatly improved this article during the drafting process. He would like to give special thanks to the editors of French History for their patience and encouragement as he completed this, his first peer-reviewed journal article. Thanks also go to the members of the Modern French History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, for their intellectual companionship, as well as to Dr Jack Saunders for his comments on this article and his friendship. More thanks are due to Professor Axel Körner, who supervised the doctoral thesis from which this article developed. Special thanks of another kind go to all the crowd at Le Poste, the author’s Lillois family away from home, whose friendship made all those research trips so much more fun.

Footnotes