Despite valiant service in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War and the humiliation of victorious Germans marching down the Champs Élysées in February 1871, d'Indy failed to share his compatriots' Germanophobia. He remained in thrall to German literature—Schiller, in particular—and German music. Weber and Schumann fired his ambitions early, trumped only by the dawning revelation of Wagner, introduced to him in the form of piano duet arrangements of the operas by his comrade-in-arms, Henri Duparc, and revealed by the first performance of the Ring operas together at Bayreuth in 1876. Born in 1848, Duparc was three years older than d'Indy and guided him like an elder brother, not only to Wagner, but to a meeting with his own teacher, César Franck, who became a father figure to d'Indy. In 1876 d'Indy and Duparc were elected joint secretaries of the Société Nationale de Musique—founded by Saint-Saëns and Bussine within days of the German occupation of Paris to "give hearings to the works of living French composers exclusively"—and d'Indy began to push for performances of foreign, specifically Russian and German, works, prompting the accusation that he was fostering "a second German invasion." But German Romanticism held an unbreakable grip upon French composers—everyone from Castillon to Magnard had taken Schumann to heart—and the rage for Wagner in the 1880s was a second wave of Germanophilia. In 1875 Duparc composed the symphonic poem Lénore, after the ballad by August Bürger, depicting the heroine's wild ride with Death, performed at a Pasdeloup concert October 28, 1877. Prone to emulation verging on rivalry—as in his "answer" to Saint-Saëns' Septet for piano, trumpet, and strings (1881) with his own Suite dans le style ancien for two flutes, strings, and trumpet (1886)—it was inevitable that d'Indy would try his hand at something similar. Already a prolific composer who had discarded several orchestral works, including an overture to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1876), d'Indy turned to Swabian poet Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), whose 1811 lyric, "Harald" (set as a ballad by Johann Loewe in 1835) provided a furious ride into an eerily moonlit forest lorded over by elves, whose dance puts the hero into a centuries-long sleep. Composed over 1877-1878, d'Indy's "symphonic legend"—precociously sumptuous yet luminous and transparently scored—is both potently evocative and predictably frenzied by turns, though its audible antecedents are less Wagner or Duparc than Weber and Saint-Saëns' Phaéton (1873). Pasdeloup conducted the premiere on March 24, 1878.

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