Wagnersim: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross

If the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t struck this year, my husband and I would have attended a Ring cycle in Chicago in April (Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung). Jim has seen it/them several times and was looking forward to sharing it/them with me. I have seen the Ring on video and heard the recordings but never seen the cycle or any of the individual operas live. Among other Wagner operas, in person, I’ve seen Tristan and Isolde in Los Angeles with David Hockney’s sets, one of the first opera performances I ever attended. I’ve seen Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger at the San Francisco opera. I sang and acted as a sailor in a chorus from The Flying Dutchman with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. (Have a look here. That’s me downstage left with the shaved head and sleeveless shirt.) We sang the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhauser on the same program, an entire concert of opera selections by different composers. That was fun.

I’m a fan. Tristan may be the most beautiful of Wagner’s music. I may prefer Meistersinger for its naturalism, its comedy, its humanity. Meistersinger is truly remarkable as a through-sung play, or music drama, to use Wagner’s term. I’m not sure Wagner is my favorite opera composer but how could one choose? I’m not a “Wagnerite” exactly, but I’m definitely a fan.

I was looking forward to Alex Ross’ new book much as I had been looking forward to seeing the Ring in Chicago. And then, after the Chicago Ring was canceled, looked forward to the book as an antidote to the disappointment. At least I could read Ross’ Wagner-sized exploration of Wagner and his influences, when it came out, I consoled myself.

Ross’s book is an amazing work of research. He has accomplished a truly impressive compilation of the myriad streams of art that have flowed from the inexhaustible fountainhead of Wagner. There is a “but” coming, but first I want to emphasize how completely ambitious and successful Ross is in his project of tracking the influences of Wagner on European art and culture from the time of Wagner’s pre-eminence in the late 19th-century, to the height of “Wagnerism” after his death in 1883 and up to World War I, and then continuing more ambivalently through the next century. The book opens with Wagner beginning his composition of the Ring amid revolutionary wars in Europe, in 1848, and ends 660 pages later with Terrence Malick’s movie To the Wonder from 2012 (followed by another 100 pages of footnotes and an Index).

Unfortunately, what comes in-between is a compendium of what feels like what must be every appearance of Wagner’s name, or reference to his work, or praise or refutation of his genius, by nearly every writer, thinker, or artist of the late 19th or 20th century. At times it reads like a Google search for “Wagner”: an endless list. Did Ross actually read all this stuff? The effect is more often tedious than insightful. Who are all these people? And what does it matter? Many of the references cited are trivial – a novel is mentioned because it includes a scene at an opera house during a performance of Lohengrin, or an artist is mentioned because she once painted a water-color depicting the Rhinemaidens. And many of the persons cited are also trivial. No disrespect to either Alex Ross or the dozen and dozens of persons he mentions, but often (in a criticism that sounds like one that might be leveled against Wagner himself) I longed for less scope and more focus.

The problem is that Wagner looms so large that no cultural-creator that came after him could avoid confronting him. But an artist acknowledging Wagner’s presence, as they set out to make their own way in his wake, is different from an artist relating to Wagner in a manner that informs the subsequent art. Anyone who has attended a Wagner performance knows the power of his work and how it stirs up thoughts and emotions. The problem is that everyone feels that way after a Wagner performance and a lot of us go home and write in our diary, or send a letter to a friend (or make a facebook post) about our experience at the matinee; that doesn’t mean that all our Wagner experiences are worth collecting in a book like this. Ross could have shortened his list in two ways. First by focusing on those folks whose life and work were truly, significantly, shaped by the legacy of Wagner, not merely the fact of Wagner. That’s still a long list, but not quite so long. And second, by focusing on those folks whose own work has gone on to be important in their own right, not merely because they created in Wagner’s shadow.

The book’s most successful and interesting chapter, for me, is Ross’s extended look at three writers whose Wagner debt is undoubted: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Ulyssess, includes numerous references to the Ring. The characters of Stephen Deadelus and Leopold Bloom map onto Seigfried and Wotan as well as Telemachus and Odysseus. The Wasteland borrows imagery and themes from Wagner, including some of Wagner’s uglier ideas. Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, is world-encompassing, like Wagner, and uses stream-of-consciousness technique in the writing, which Ross considers a parallel to Wagner’s compositional innovation of endless melody.

Thomas Mann comes up many times, both as the author of Wagner-shadowed novels and in essays and lectures about Wagner. I’ve read, Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, and I found Ross’s analysis of those books insightful. There’s also a good bit about In Search of Lost Time. Having just finished re-reading Proust a few months ago I can attest how frequently and significantly Wagner hovers over that work.

Wagner matters to Ulysses. And Joyce matters to 20th century literature, as do Woolf and Eliot and Mann and Proust. So they have a necessary place in a book like this. Elsewhere, though, Ross gets lost in the weeds. Ross gives an entire chapter to Willa Cather. No argument there. Cather may be a second-tier writer but she’s important and the Wagner influence is obvious on her life and her work. I enjoyed learning about that. But in the midst of the Cather chapter, just by example, Ross also includes a paragraph (pp. 342-343) with glancing references to:

• “the heroine of George Moore’s Evelyn Innes…”;
• “Leonora Bruna, the Spanish Wagner soprano in Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s 1900 novel Entre naranjos…” ;
• “Wedekind’s Kammersanger is a cynical egoist…”;
• “Henry Ceard’s 1906 novel Terrains a vendre au bord de la mer…”

Then the next three paragraphs are devoted to, respectively:

• “Gertrude Atherton’s Tower of Ivory, published in 1910…”;
• “James Huneker, the flamboyant New York critic” who apparently wrote a short story titled, “The Last of the Valkyries” and a novel titled, Painted Veils about a soprano named Easter Brandes;
• followed by a paragraph citing the Wagner influence in “Marcia Davenport’s 1936 novel, Of Lena Geyer“

I’m probably displaying my own ignorance to say I haven’t heard of or read any of those writers and maybe it’s my loss that I don’t plan to.

An alternate way to organize the book would be to isolate Wagner’s important innovations and follow those through the artists that came after. Ross mentions several: the leitmotif, the through-composed score replacing stand-alone arias, the focus on mythical and religious themes, the gesamtkunstwerk synthesis of all the arts, one might also mention simply the giant scale of Wagner’s art and see where that trend led. Wagner’s legacy of anti-semitism could be another chapter, although that certainly wasn’t Wagner’s invention. But Ross doesn’t do that. Instead he organizes his book basically chronologically, while also pulling out separate chapters to discuss Wagner’s influence on women, on gays, on African Americans, and on German politics.

Maybe my problem, rather than Ross’s, is that I want the book to be more about Wagner, which is not Ross’s intent. This isn’t a biography of Wagner; it’s a book after Wagner. Although there are scenes of Wagner’s adult life after he became influential, there’s no telling of his birth, or his childhood. We don’t know where he studied music or what inspired his musical ideas. Wagner lives at times in Leipzig, Dresden, Zurich, Lucerne, Paris, Palermo, Venice, Bayreauth, but when he lives where or why he moves, isn’t made clear and is beside the point. There is a brief timeline of his life at the back, if you’re interested.

Most surprisingly, Wagner’s influence on music is not described. There’s no chapter on Mahler, or Schoenberg, or Strauss, or Stockhausen. There’s no chapter on opera in the shadow of Wagner, except for some discussion of how his own operas have been re-staged by newer directors.

We must, of course, wrestle with Wagner’s anti-semitism, and Ross does. Wagner’s essay from 1850, Jewishness in Music, is mentioned repeatedly, though not extensively quoted so it’s a little hard to know exactly what Wagner says. Apparently Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn were his main targets, which sounds like professional jealousy from a composer at the beginning of his career. It’s not a fair reading to draw a straight-line from Wagner to Nazi-ism; Wagner’s art and politics were much more ambiguous than the simplification of Fascism. Wagner can be criticized for hoping for the Jews a redemption through transformation, which is a common hope for all of humanity in many of his operas, but he didn’t advocate annihilation. Ross points out that for Wagner, Jewish identity was associated with Jewish beliefs, which could be taken off and discarded. The sense of Jewish identity as an inalienable, biological trait came later.

Wagner’s reputation suffered by association long after his death because Hitler so loved the music, and because Hitler campaigned to position Wagner as a German folk hero by programming Wagner music at his rallys and giving away free tickets to school children and soldiers for Wagner opera performances. But, Wagner is difficult music, and the opera’s are long. The German people preferred dance music and jazz. Interestingly, Wagner declined in popularity in Germany during the 1930s while his popularity rose in America.

One take-away from Ross’s book is to understand just how wide-spread and far-reaching Wagner’s shadow falls. Everyone has something to say for or against him. And very often the responses are contradictory and yet equally true. Wagner contradicts himself. He spins myths, which are powerful because they are endlessly interpretable. The Ring means something to you, but the person in the seat next to you may be thinking something entirely different, or may only be wondering how long to the next intermission.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to see the Ring. I will one day. I’m thankful for Ross’s book, in the meantime. Maybe it’s time to re-read Ulysses or The Waves. Or maybe I should tackle Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (it’s on my bookshelf). Or maybe Willa Cather.