Helen and Paris: Classicism and Frenchness in Saint-Saëns’s Hélène

Abstract Camille Saint-Saëns’s one-act opera Hélène (1904), one of several works he composed on ancient Greek topics, depicts the night Helen of Troy departs Sparta with the Trojan prince Paris, igniting a war in the process. Hélène had been a long-gestating project, spurred by a simmering disdain for Jacques Offenbach’s enduringly popular satirical operetta La Belle Hélène (1864), which Saint-Saëns’s believed triggered no less than the collapse of French musical taste. Indeed, the opera was widely perceived in the Parisian press as a reclamation of the cultural legacy of ancient Greece—a treatment that rescued Hellenic absolute beauty from the German clutches of first Offenbach and then Wagner. Drawing extensively on reception studies, cultural history, and hermeneutical analysis, this article situates Hélène in complex, interweaving fin de siècle French musical debates over cultural heritage, nationalism, Wagnerism, and the aesthetics of absolute beauty.