Given Wagner's position as the ultimate symbol of German cultural superiority, and Parisian audiences’ long-established love for Wagner's music, one might expect that German occupiers would turn the Paris Opéra into a shrine to the German composer, saturated with nationalistic symbolism. Yet although the Opéra did become the occupying authorities’ primary site for promoting the idea of Wagner as a symbol of Franco-German collaboration, paradoxically, the programming of Wagner works decreased significantly in both number and diversity during the Occupation. Unlike the concert associations, where the programming of Wagner's music remained mostly unaffected, the Paris Opéra underwent an important programming shift as far as Wagner works were concerned.

The Opéra was one of France's most prestigious cultural institutions, highly coveted by Hitler, and the site of a remarkable co-option of the cultural sphere into a political one during France's “dark years.” The censored Parisian press negotiated demands to both promote German art as superior and to account for French attitudes toward Wagner and French culture. The discourse of Collaboration through Wagner sits at the center of this chapter—a discourse made palatable to Parisian audiences by employing the discourses examined in the earlier parts of this book: the universalist discourse that rejected Nazi appropriation in 1933, the rapprochement discourse of cultural diplomacy, and the attraction of the fascist aesthetic and the Hitler–Wagner connection displayed at the Bayreuth Festival. Ultimately, the idea of enacting Collaboration by staging Wagner works suited both German demands and French attitudes, presenting a fragile solution to France's perpetual “cas Wagner.” Consideration of surviving fragments of clandestine press material verifies the unsurprising rejection of the Collaboration discourse, while also confirming the absence of anti-Wagner sentiment even at the height of Franco-German hostilities.

The End of Rapprochement via Wagner?

1939 began as a normal year at the Paris Opéra in terms of programming Wagner. Between January and August, the Opéra was running simultaneous productions of Lohengrin, La Walkyrie, and Le Vaisseau fantôme; until just a week before the declaration of war, Wagner works were being performed up to six times a month. Nevertheless, Jacques Rouché, the director of the Réunion des théâtres lyriques nationaux (RTLN), had been affected by the increasing political tensions of 1939.