Debussy’s operatic aesthetic is defined as much in relation to the traditional genres of French opera as in relation to Wagner or naturalism. His style is built by both assimilation and opposition – the two processes can be simultaneous. The assimilation process, considered as a more or less visible and conscious form of appropriation, is the most commented on in the case of Pelléas et Mélisande: what Wagnerian processes does Debussy retain in his score? How does he integrate earlier styles into his writing? What elements of Russian music may have influenced him? And so on. The opposition process is less often analysed, for it is not confined to the rejection of a work, but hinges on this work by responding negatively to its musical concepts. With Debussy, negation becomes a powerful creative operation. One of the peculiarities of his personality is radicalism, amplified by the search for an ideal and uniqueness. To write is to gradually eliminate the easy solutions, the surplus, the conventions.

Wagner’s influence was enormous in the period up to the start of the First World War, and even then it did not disappear altogether. His musical impact on Debussy has been widely explored and discussed, but this chapter surveys the broader context for Wagner in France. His presence is felt in the development of psychoanalysis, the French novel, painting, and, of course, in music. Wagnerism paradoxically challenged France’s sense of identity and yet was used to reinforce the emergence of a distinctly French voice. It is often said that the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (1890) – difficult music for both listeners and performers – marked the high water of Wagnerian influence on Debussy’s style, but this chapter shows that it is more compelling to speak of creative manipulation than of imitation.

This chapter uses Pirandello’s collaboration with Italian modernist composer Gian Francesco Malipiero on the opera The Changeling as a way into discussing Pirandello’s relationship to and understanding of music more broadly. Several of the author’s short stories, including such works as “Old Music,” “Farewell, Leonora!” – both written in 1910 – and “Zuccarello the Distinguished Melodist,” dating to 1914, make note of shifts in Italian musical taste in that period and therefore suggest a certain attention to music on the author’s part. But Pirandello’s interest in musical vanguardism is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that he collaborated with Malipiero, a musician so experimental that he was dubbed the “Pirandello of the music scene.” The essay recounts their collaboration as a window onto the two men’s personalities, experimental performance at the time, and the complications for artists and intellectuals who collaborated with the Mussolini regime.

The leitmotif of both American and British Krautrock reception in the 1970s was the continuing popularity of German stereotypes and clichés, with the music press coverage in both countries differing only in nuances. It was not before the end of the decade that those ascriptions and stereotypes slowly started to fade away; by then, in a broad consensus among critics and pop journalists, the ‘future sounds’ of Krautrock were widely regarded as a transformative contribution to pop music and culture. The shift in the Anglo-American music press’s understanding of Krautrock in the 1970s suggests that Krautrock’s mission to create a new and transnational cultural identity, for themselves and for West Germany, can ultimately be considered successful; British as well as American observers clearly placed Krautrock outside the Anglo-American realm of pop music, viewing it as a distinct West German phenomenon detached from pop music’s Anglo-American roots. In addition, and as a result, Krautrock’s soundscapes and performative elements were perceived as the first fundamental contribution to pop music from outside the Anglo-American sphere.

In the two decades between the first staging of Gluck’s Orfeo in 1903 and the end of Asakusa Opera in the great fire of 1923, musical theatre in Japan saw a rapid process of adoption and transformation. But despite the well-known role of Italian choreographer Giovanni Vittorio Rosi in the training and performance of Western opera at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, the association between opera and Italy that was so prominent in other parts of the world never quite took hold. The chapter interrogates the limits of the appeal of italianitá in the history of transnational operatic encounters. These limits are in part rooted in the general difficulties of transplanting a composite cultural form to a foreign setting and its hybridisation with local cultural practices. The chapter discusses the nation-building goals of the Meiji government and the translation of librettos, the Wagnerian moment among Japanese artists and intellectuals and the general conditions of cultural exchange in Meiji Japan and their effects on perceptions of Italianness.

Mahler’s move to Vienna in 1875 brought him into contact with a thriving culture of young intellectuals, many of whom would go on to become social, political, and artistic leaders in the new century. The center of gravity of this group was the University of Vienna, where Mahler enrolled in 1877 (concurrently with his last year at the Conservatory). This chapter lays out the University’s distinctively modern blend of Enlightenment humanism and rational science, surveying important figures on the faculty (the philosopher Franz Brentano, the physicist Ernst Mach) and those among Mahler’s student cohort (Engelbert Pernerstorfer, Victor and Sigmund Adler, Max Gruber, Heinrich Braun, and, above all, Siegfried Lipiner). Organizations founded by these students also receive consideration, among them the Academic Wagner Society, the Pythagoreans, the Saga Society, and the Pernerstorfer Circle; in these venues Mahler encountered many of the ideas that would drive the main artistic decisions of his career.