GOUNOD Charles.

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Lot n° 294
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GOUNOD Charles.
2 autograph MANUSCRIPTS on Richard WAGNER, [1887?-1891]; 27 pages small in-4 (with erasures, corrections and additions, and some musical quotations) and 5 pages and a quarter in-4. Interesting texts on Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner (a subtitle has been neatly crossed out), undated text published in the Revue de Paris (May 1, 1905), which suggests the date of 1887 [reprint attached]. Gounod intends to judge the "considerable artistic personality" that is Wagner, without worrying about the man, or his opinions or his insults to France. It is not as a melodist that Wagner imposes himself: "One wants Richard Wagner to be the apostle of the "continuous melody!" It is rather the "continuous symphony" that should be said; for his work exists above all by this; [...] far be it from me to deny that Wagner produced melodies, and charming ones, and even very beautiful ones"; as for the famous "Leit motive", it is not "a Wagnerian dogma", and Gounod already finds traces of it in Meyerbeer or Halévy. "Richard Wagner is, above all, a decorator musician. He possesses, to the highest degree, the ability to adapt sounds to the scenic impression. For him, the art of music is not the goal, but the means to the theatre. This is so true that, in front of his works, the listener becomes absorbed, as it were, in the spectator, so much so that the sound of the musician becomes, as it were, the ambient atmosphere of the dramatist; to such an extent that the prodigality, not to say the debauchery, of the incessant modulations with which he walks his drama and which are so tiring from the point of view of pure music, almost disappears in the system of diffuse harmony which constitutes his musical environment. And what is very important to note here is the connection between the musical language of R. Wagner and the essentially symbolic and legendary character of the subjects he loves. It must be said that R. Wagner is the most German of German musicians. The term "music of the future" does not seem appropriate to this retrospective. "The expression of symbolic thought and dramatic movement through the blending of declamation and instrumental accent is R. Wagner's goal, the key to his work and the secret of his power in the theatre. The virtue of his music lies less in the music itself than in its relationship with the poetics and the drama." Gounod recognizes in Wagner "a great master" by his dramatic conception, to which everything contributes and which is "a law of musical optics"; by "the unheard-of luxury of combinations of sonority that his instrumentation presents and which is his own. His orchestral palette is of a prodigious extent" (and Gounod shows in detail how Wagner revolutionised the orchestra after the great masters)... Etc. [1 March 1891]. Answer to an article in the Figaro " Gounod against Wagner ". Gounod refutes the opinion of the public that he is against Wagner. He recalls that he was "the first" to receive Wagner at his home "exiled and sobbing"; that he encouraged him to give his concerts at the Salle Ventadour; that in 1860 he attended and acclaimed the three performances of Tannhäuser at the Opéra; that he was insulted when he proclaimed "the high value of the artist and his work", that he was one of the first to admire his works. His position is clear: "Neither Wagnerophobia, nor Wagneromania". Gounod ends with a defence of French art, which must avoid Wagnerian imitation, and keep its own character: "France is essentially the country of clearness, concision, measure, taste, i.e. the opposite of excess, swelling, disproportion, prolixity" ....
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