In Fantin-Latour's often reproduced 1885 portrait Autour du piano, we see Chabrier at the keyboard surrounded by a contingent of prominent Wagnerians—Camille Benoit (composer and translator of Wagner), Antoine Lascoux (dedicatee of Chabrier's Souvenirs de Munich), and Vincent d'Indy, among others now forgotten. The score from which Chabrier plays, however, is—tellingly—Carmen. With Chausson's Le Roi Arthus, Chabrier's Gwendoline is often cited as a prime document of Wagnerian epigonism by critics who seem to know it only by its reputation and never to have heard its music. It is the impossible libretto by Catulle Mendès that is full of Wagnerian bric-a-brac, though paced (as Wagner's best effects often are) with Meyerbeerian calculation. Mendès, a brilliant mediocrity, derivative Parnassian poet, Wagnerian propagandist, librettist of Messager's Isoline and Debussy's Rodrigue et Chimène, and literary man of all work, also amplified in his novels such dark undercurrents of the first Romantic wave as sadism, satanism, and the entire gamut of sexual perversions as a décadent heavy industry. To even the most innocent of his productions an aura of salaciousness clings. Nominally set on an eighth century English coast, chez Mendès we've never left nineteenth century Paris. When Gwendoline, Senta-like, recounts her vision of being carried off by a Danish pirate, Mendès the glib boulevardier has the women respond, "Danois ou non, corsaire ou non, un amoureux/Est toujours charmant..." set by the composer to one of his most deliciously beguiling phrases. It is a tiny thing but indicative of the mix. Harald's encounter with Gwendoline has, likewise, been prefigured by the vision of a Valkyrie "dans la nue," projected in one of Chabrier's most fetching melodies. The libretto's thrusting élan carries us toward the rites of the wedding bed, sung rather than enacted in a panting love duet of rare incandescence, though Chabrier delays it with a sensuously ravishing épithalame that is among his most tender and moving moments. The point to notice is that Mendès' risible hackwork called forth a torrent of Chabrier's richest invention and characterization, going far toward suspending our disbelief. The stormy Overture has become a popular concert number, though it is often written about as if it were a spinoff of Wagner's for Der fliegende Holländer, though Chabrier's possesses an ineffable lift, sweep, and melodic flair beside which Wagner's seems contrived. Gwendoline's premiere was given on April 10, 1886, at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, and greeted with such enthusiasm that the composer was recalled repeatedly to take bows.

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