ABSTRACT
When Arthur Honegger's Antigone was staged in Paris, sixteen years after its Brussels premiere, having first been rejected by the Paris Opera as too "advanced" for the public, its impact shattered all expectations. Unexpected as Antigone's French triumph may have been, its occurrence in 1943, several months after the entry of German forces into previously unoccupied parts of France, is even more surprising. Just as perplexing, given this historical conjuncture, is that reviews in the collaborationist journals, Je suis partout and Comoedia, as well as in the Vichy-sanctioned L'Information musicale, had nothing but praise for both the opera's music and its text. In the broadest sense, the facts about Antigone lead beyond the long-entrenched debate about modernism's affinity for either fascism or rebellion. They compel a re-examination of the very concept of modernism and of the ways in which some of its subsets and strains could serve and undermine certain kinds of power.
