Wagner arrived in Paris in mid-September 1859 with a plan of preparing the ground for a Paris Opéra production of the newly composed Tristan und Isolde. No longer the impecunious visionary he had been two decades before, barely surviving on credit and hackwork, and completing Rienzi in a Parisian debtor's prison, Wagner was revered in Germany as the composer of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, operas felt to exceed art by revealing the Teutonic soul—a renown which won him friends, or avid interest, at least, in the French capital. As usual, however, the decisive factor was not art but political connection. Wagner's music was adopted as a cause by Princess Pauline Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador and a leading figure—though she was obstreperously vulgar and understood nothing about music—at the court of Napoléon III and his empress, Eugénie. While the machinations leading to the mounting of Tannhäuser at the Opéra were under way, Wagner gave three concerts of his music in January and February 1860. Though financial disasters, they introduced the public to the revolutionary sound of Tristan through presentation of the Prelude to Act I, provoking controversy and winning over such literary figures as Baudelaire, Gautier, and Mendès. Meanwhile, boulevardiers assessed Wagner's sudden prominence as a German "invasion" and demonized his music as an icon of foreign influence. Cheap shots were the order of the day, and Offenbach, whose life was guided by a keen ear for popular appeal, dismissed Wagner with the frank mot, "To be learned and boring isn't art; it's better to be pungent and tuneful," while seizing the opportunity to guy him with Le Carnaval des Revues, opening at his Bouffes-Parisiens 10 February 1860. A vaudeville-like skit, Le Carnaval des Revues features Wagner, confronting the shades of Weber, Grétry, Gluck, and Mozart with "Ah! Ah! Here I am, here I am, I am the composer of the future and I shall crush you all, you, the past, you, the routine! I am a whole revolution! No more notes, no more harmony, no more tuning, no more scales, flats, sharps, naturals, no more ‘forte,' no more ‘piano'!" This introduces a very brief Symphony of the Future compounded of polytonal clashes and note clusters, followed by a Wedding March whose pomposity is underlined by drum strokes and zany topical allusions unrecognizable today, though the can-can music with which it concludes—to which the composer of the future succumbs and apologizes to the conductor—is unmistakable.

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