Music in Zola's Fiction, Especially Wagner's Music

Abstract

Zola's relation to music has been discussed by various critics and biographers, all of whom readily admit that he was not in any way a technically competent musician. Beyond this obvious fact, they split into two sharply opposed camps, one of which states that, in spite of a transfer of his theatrical ambitions to the lyric theater late in his life, he actually knew little and cared less about the art of music, while the other insists that he did have a genuine interest in music and an innate though untrained sensitivity to it. Both camps are largely biographical in their approach, and in spite of their differences in emphasis and interpretation, they agree on the obvious facts—that as a schoolboy at Aixen-Provence, Zola played a clarinet in the band (in order to make himself eligible for certain special privileges enjoyed by its members), but gave it up after he went to Paris; that when collaborating with the composer Alfred Bruneau on an operatic version of L'AUaque du moulin, in 1893, he bought a piano (or a harmonium); that at about the same time he began to attend concerts, which he had previously ignored; that he questioned his friends Henry Ceard and Bruneau about the mysteries of music and got a good deal of information from them; that his sense of pitch was poor; that his interest, whether great or small, was largely confined to vocal music; and that he was influenced in some way by the ideas and works of Wagner, though opinions as to the date and extent of this influence vary widely.