The French reception of Wagner is often based on the two pillars of the 1861 Tannhäuser production and that of Lohengrin in 1891. Sufficient is now known about the composer's earliest attempt to engage with Parisian music drama around 1840 to be able to understand his work on Das Liebesverbot, Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer , his editorial and journalistic work for Schlesinger, and his emerging relationship with key figures in Parisian musical life, Meyerbeer most notably. A clearer picture is also beginning to emerge of Wagner's position in French cultural life and letters in the 1850s. Wagner's position in Paris during the 1860s, culminating in the production of Rienzi at the Théâtre- Lyrique in 1869, is however complex, multifaceted, and little understood. Although there were no staged versions of his operas between 1861 and 1869, the very existence of a successful Parisian premiere for an opera by Wagner in 1869—given that there would be almost nothing for two decades after 1870—is remarkable in itself. The 1860s furthermore saw the emergence of a coherent voice of Wagnérisme , the presence of French Wagnéristes at the composer's premieres all over Europe and a developing discourse in French around them. This may be set against a continuing tradition of performing extracts of Wagner's operas throughout the 1860s, largely through the energies of Jules Pasdeloup, who—as director of the Théâtre-Lyrique—was responsible for the 1869 Rienzi as well. These competing threads in the skein of Wagner-reception in the 1860s are tangled in a narrative of increasingly tense Franco-German cultural and political relationships in which Wagner, his works, and his writings, played a key role. The performance of Rienzi in 1869 was embedded in responses to the Prussian-Austrian War of 1866, the republication of Das Judenthum in der Musik in 1869, and the beginnings of the Franco-Prussian War.

The emergence of grand opééra around 1830 resulted in large-scale works in five acts setting libretti largely based on historical subjects that dominated much European stage music until the First World War. But these shifts in generic paradigm came at a price. The repertoire of the Paris Opééra was based as much on ballet-pantomime as on opera, and until 1830 both genres would share the stage in a single evening. Although the aesthetic impulses behind grand opééra made programming new opera and ballet henceforth impossible, the state required the Opééra to maintain the balance between opera and ballet in order to reserve the institution's ““pompe et luxe,”” a situation that called forth a number of responses from its management during the period that all Parisian opera houses were controlled by license (1806/7 to 1864). In the short term, the Opééra continued using older smaller-scale works to accompany ballet as part of the same evening's entertainment, but despite the canonic pressures this exerted it was a practice that could not be sustained indefinitely. A second alternative was to shorten up-to-date grand opééra , to bring them down to dimensions at which they could be performed with ballets; the best-known example of this procedure is the reduction of Rossini's Guillaume Tell from four acts (1829) to three (1831). A third possibility was the process of morcellement : the extraction of individual acts or pairs of acts from grand opééra and their performance alongside ballet. A longer-term strategy, and one so far entirely ignored in modern scholarship, was the development of a new type of stage music specifically to accompany ballet: petit opééra . Emerging from two closely related works at the same time as the birth of grand opééra , Rossini's Le Comte Ory (1828) and Auber's Le Philtre (1831), petit opééra was the direct result of institutional pressure from the state for the Opééra to mount productions of both opera and ballet, the preference of the institution and its audiences for evenings with both opera and ballet, and the indirect aesthetic pressure engendered by the appearance of grand opééra . The tradition of composing petit opééra continued up to the end of the licensing period in 1864 and encompassed, among such foreign imports as Weber, Verdi, and Donizetti, works by Haléévy, Adam, Thomas, Auber, and Rossini; two of the best-known casualties of the complexities surrounding the genre were Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and Wagner's scenario for Le Hollandais volant . Petit opééra was characterized by libretti in two acts with a limited number of musical compositions, a clear distinction between composed number and following recitative (a decisive break with grand opééra ), a limited number of characters and a comic register; it developed a set of conventions that remained consistent from its origins ca. 1830 to its latest presentations in Alary's La Voix humaine (1861) and Masséé's La Mule de Pedro (1863).

Pauline Viardot-Garcia——known as Meyerbeer's first Fidèès in Le Prophèète , and in the title role of Gluck's Orphéée in the version assembled by Berlioz——was known for her performances of roles in Don Giovanni from the mid 1840s until she retired from the stage in 1863. At least as significant as her dramatic involvement in the opera was her purchase of the autograph of Don Giovanni in London in 1855. From the mid-1850s, the autograph of Don Giovanni held a particular place within the Viardot circle. It was associated with a number of ritualistic discourses comparable with very few such documents before or since. Pauline Viardot preserved the document in an artefact that was as close in construction to a reliquary that its nature would allow, and treated it as a shrine. Its position was described with great pride by Viardot in her correspondence, and visitors to her homes in Paris and Baden-Baden behaved exactly as if they were in the presence of a relic: Rossini genuflected and Tchaikovsky claimed to have been in the presence of divinity. The autograph, coupled to its surrounding ritualistic discourses, was elevated to the status of a national monument when it was displayed at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and at the anniversary exhibition of Don Giovanni 's premiere in 1887. When it was donated to the library of the Conservatoire in 1892 (announced as early as 1889) its sacred and national characteristics were elided. By this time, the autograph of Don Giovanni had contributed substantially to the ongoing nineteenth-century project of enshrining Mozart.