Temple University Professor of Art History Terry Dolan sets Édouard Manet’s paintings in conversation with Richard Wagner’s music during her lecture, Facing the Music: Manet and Wagner. 

Manet was most familiar with Wagner’s short story “A Happy Evening” and his 1860 manifesto Lettre sur la musique. Both these work circulated in Paris and were discussed by numerous critics at the time Manet began his Music in the Tuileries. These writings distilled Wagner’s aesthetic principles from the Zurich essays and were written and published in French. Wagner articulated his arguments about the superiority of music over painting and literature in these essays. By situating his painting in the same setting that Wagner chose for his story—a Parisian park with people listening to an outdoor concert—Manet could confront Wagner’s ideas with his brush.