A simulacrum of the ‘true modern cult’: the Bayreuth Festival and French novels of pilgrimage at the turn of the century

This essay defines the contours of a literary subgenre that has never been investigated either in French studies or musicology: that of the turn-of-the-century ‘Bayreuth novel of pilgrimage’. As a specifically French phenomenon, it has no parallel elsewhere in Europe. The genre relies on a dual outsider’s perspective: that of a French person in Germany and that of a literary writer in a musical environment. The focus is on four novels and short stories from Symbolism and Decadence, two literary movements that were deeply enmeshed in French Wagnerism. The works analysed are Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s ‘La légende moderne’ (1876), Élémir Bourges’s Le Crépuscule des dieux (1884), Joséphin Péladan’s La Victoire du mari (1889), and Teodor de Wyzewa’s Valbert (1893), all of which bear testimony to the imbrication of religion and nationalism in Bayreuth, which will lead to social stagnation rather than regeneration.