ABSTRACT
The people in France who were immediately receptive to Richard Wagner were not musicians but literary figures – a few older but still radical writers such as Baudelaire, and a number of young Turks like Villiers, Mendes and Mallarme. Wagner's supporters, litterateurs rather than musiciens, had to make special efforts to keep abreast of the musical issues in the conflicts that were being acted out over Tannhauser. Wagner began by considering the fundamental links between poetry and music. The poet's first experience of Wagner's music is vividly recounted in his famous letter to Wagner where he acknowledged that he had become a convert. In fact, Wagner's music was more modulatory in its effect than that of any previous composer in the Western musical tradition. In an 1879 article On the Application of Music to the Drama, Wagner exposed the wrong-headedness of such labelling schemes and distanced himself from the word 'leitmotif' that von Hans von Wolzogen had invented.
