Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of their Time by Therese Dolan (review)

Édouard Manet’s 1862 painting La Musique aux Tuileries is at the centre of this clearly and engagingly written interdisciplinary examination of a crucial moment in aesthetic modernism. While no musicians are shown performing, the painting features portraits of key figures in the arts during the period. These writers, artists, and musicians structure Therese Dolan’s account: each chapter focuses on one of them in his relation to Wagner and Manet. Dolan places the works of Baudelaire, Gautier, Champfleury, Fantin-Latour, and Offenbach in dialogue with the emerging musical and pictorial modernism that crystallized around Manet’s and Wagner’s works and the vigorous debates these provoked. Dolan’s study—more expository than argument-driven—moves seamlessly between a close reading of La Musique aux Tuileries and broader aesthetic (and political) questions. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, amply quoted (although one wonders why quotations in the body of the chapters appear in translation only, whereas those in the notes are always in French), and exhibiting a solid command of the vast secondary literature, Dolan paints a vivid picture of what was at stake in discussions of Wagner’s and Manet’s merits, including the debate over realism and the question of the intelligibility of the work of art. The book is generously illustrated, with portraits of the writers and artists featured, reproductions of many of the works discussed, and caricatures and cartoons from the press. Dolan demonstrates how ‘the writers on Wagner portrayed in Manet’s picture described the acoustic experience in visual terms and vice versa’ (p. 212), and indicates the Wagnerian aesthetics informing the work, which is Manet’s ‘painted response to the writings on art, music and literature produced by the critics gathered on the left side […], a visual rejoinder to a constellation of ideas circulating about modernism’ (p. 61). These critics ‘shared elective affinities with Wagner and his music’; Dolan interprets Wagner as ‘a deus ex musica who intervenes in this painting as implied by the music in the title’ (p. 226). She makes a convincing case for her interpretation, despite frequent tentative formulations about Manet’s own intentions: ‘Manet may have contemplated these key concepts [of Baudelaire about Gautier] during his preparation of Music in the Tuileries, responding stylistically to the qualities in Gautier’s writings that he wanted to transpose into painting. By including Gautier next to Baudelaire in a painting with a musical title, Manet may have wanted to invoke their mutual love of inter-arts analogies involved with color and sound’ (p. 76). If, as Dolan in effect suggests, we should see the painting as a crystallization of a complex web of aesthetic and political transformations at the time of its creation, then ultimately it matters little whether Manet may have had in mind the same musical and literary references to which Dolan appeals. Readers will come away from this study with a far richer appreciation not only of Manet’s painting but also of the vast canvas of the arts scene, with its friendships, rivalries, and public debates, in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.