“La obertura de Tannhaüser” de J. K. Huysmans. Traducción y comentario

Abstract

This work offers first a translation into Spanish and then a commentary on “La obertura de Tannhäuser”, a prose poem by Joris Karl Huysmans published in the Revue wagnérienne [1885] directed by Édouard Dujardin. Firstly, the text is a discovery, because it is a reflection on Wagner's music and work by a writer who is known for his pictorial criticism and who has little knowledge of the world of music. Secondly, although he ignores this art form because his forte is painting, the novel À rebours [1884], reveals a certain approximation, not only to Wagner's work, but also to the theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art]. Finally, the text is relevant from the technical point of view in that the critic's writing transfers Wagnerian representation and music to the pictorial and literary languages, thus denoting the “correspondence” between the different arts and Wagner and Moreau’s brotherhood. The discovery and translation of “L'Ouverture de Tannhæuser” will allow us to verify the importance of Wagnerian theory in the crisis of the naturalistic novel that Huysmans triggers with the writing of À vau-l'eau [1882] and À rebours and how this theory will be part of a new mode of literary writing that struggles between the production of a “total work of art” and the work of detail in which this totality is blurred.