‘Wagner Was the Original Canceled Artist’
Alex Ross on the controversial composer and his own ‘ghost identity’
as an academic.
THE REVIEW
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By Len Gutkin
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/len-gutkin>
Chronicle of higher education review, NOVEMBER 12, 2020
A complaint commonly heard from academics about works of popular history
or criticism is that they bury their debts to the academic scholarship
without which they could not exist. No one will say this of the/New
Yorker/staff writer Alex Ross’s extraordinary/Wagnerism: Art and
Politics in the Shadow of Music,/which came out in September from
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Far from suppressing its dues,/Wagnerism/— a
comprehensive history of Wagner’s influence and reception from the 19th
century until now — is not coy about its scholarly foundation, which it
displays in exhaustive endnotes and, uncharacteristically for this kind
of general-audience writing, in in-line citations in the body of the text.
Alex Ross's Music History Syllabus
I asked Alex Ross to suggest some titles in musicology and music history
that everyone should read. Here's what he said.
*Richard Taruskin*,/The Danger of Music/
*Lydia Goehr*,/The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works/
*George E. Lewis*,/A Power Stronger Than Itself/
*Laurence Dreyfus*,/Wagner and the Erotic Impulse/
*Carolyn Abbate*,/Unsung Voices/
I spoke with Ross about his relationship with the academy, modernism and
romanticism, and what to do with truly noxious historical and cultural
figures.
*Many of your colleagues at/The//New Yorker/— Jill Lepore, Louis Menand
— are academics who have moved firmly in the direction of
general-audience writing. Reading/Wagnerism/, it seems to me that you’re
on the opposite path: a journalist moving toward scholarship.*
I was very much on the academic path after college, and then took this
swerve into journalism almost without meaning to. In the early 1990s, I
had applied two consecutive years to grad school, first Duke and then
Harvard, and had gotten in. I was on the point of going when
journalistic opportunities arose, and I decided to give it a try. Ever
since then, there’s been this ghost identity, my nonexistent scholarly
career. I often think about how that would have gone.
All the writing that I’ve done has involved an element of wanting to
sustain that ghost career, or find a position somewhere between
“journalism” and “scholarship.” I don’t feel that there’s a total
difference between these kinds of writing. They’re not different
species. There is so much that lies in between.
When I wrote my first piece for/The New Yorker/in 1993, I felt I was
able to occupy that middle ground. Because of the leeway I was given in
choosing topics and pursuing them at my own pace, the research phase was
very rich. If I hadn’t found that path at/The New Yorker/— at first I
was at/The//New York Times/— I would have given up. It would not have
been satisfying to me.
In more recent years, I’ve felt my role more and more to be to mediate
between these spheres — and especially to let general readers know
what’s going on in the scholarly world. I have written a whole series of
articles in which I’m summarizing, and to some extent adding my own
ideas to, the scholarship: on Beethoven; on music, war, and violence; on
Bach; on Salieri; on questions of racism in classical music.
I did quite a bit of research for my first book,/The Rest Is Noise./But
ultimately that was an extension of my critical writing./Wagnerism/was
more scholarly right from the outset. The topic itself is a rather
specialized one, and had never really been given the kind of treatment
that I undertook: to bring together all of these different questions
about how Wagner affected the arts and literature. So I felt from the
outset that this wasn’t a kind of breezy general-interest treatment of a
subject that had already been done in depth in the
scholarship./Wagnerism/needed to have a scholarly infrastructure, as
well as to have some interest to the general reader.
ALex Ross.jpeg
JOSH GOLDSTINE
Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker. credit: Josh Goldstine
*Did you feel pressure from Farrar Straus to popularize it?*
For my editor, the brilliant Eric Chinski, it was not a question of
popularizing — he knew what he was getting into. But when I subjected
him to a rough draft of the book, which was 350,000 words, he encouraged
me strongly to cut it back somewhat. To some extent I went along with
those suggestions. Looking back on it now, I wonder whether I should I
have gone further!
There is a huge quantity of fascinating scholarship on Wagnerism, and I
drew heavily on it.**As with some of those/New Yorker/articles, but on a
much bigger scale, this is just a guide to the scholarship.
One scholar who has worked in this area, the historian Celia Applegate,
has called Wagner the Schengen zone of scholarship — where people are
free to trade ideas and disciplinary techniques. Some are musicologists
who have branched out into literature or art or film; some are
specialists in each of those areas who have gravitated toward Wagner.
It’s this fascinating interdisciplinary area where everyone is meeting
up under a kind of umbrella of Wagner. You have to invent a language for
dealing with these kinds of interdisciplinary connections, because the
institutional framework really doesn’t exist.
*Right*—*you’re coordinating musicology, German studies, Victorian
studies, literary theory, theater history, art history, gay history,
Jewish studies, the history of ideas. And opera. What was hardest to
catch up on?*
Writing about opera requires you to be interdisciplinary from the
outset. Music is only one component of what is going on. There is scenic
design, there is acting, there’s the text, theatrical direction,
costumes, lighting — it immediately requires you to step outside of your
comfort zone.
In coordinating the different fields of specialty, I’m weaving together
different moves. I like that kind of transition where you’re jumping
from a broad historical perspective to a very detailed engagement with
music and then moving into literary criticism.
It was a big challenge at times to essentially pretend to have mastery
of so many different fields. I was very comfortable with musical
description and literary criticism. Much more challenging was writing
about dance, the visual arts, theater history. Those are fields that I
barely ever talked about in print. The pace of the writing would come
screeching to a halt. Architecture as well: I spent an entire afternoon
simply trying to come up with two or three sentences about Louis
Sullivan that looked moderately well-informed. I had no practiced
language to fall back on. But that was where it became such a fantastic
education.
I never feared asking for help. One just amazing thing — this happened
over and over again — is when I’d be wondering how on earth to interpret
a certain passage, or how to cite a source that I couldn’t get hold of.
I would just write completely out of the blue emails to perfect
strangers, and often I would get this wonderful assistance. In great
measure, people are delighted to have someone from the outside taking an
interest in their subjects.
*Were there exemplary works of scholarship that you had in mind as
models? One that occurs to me is Carl E. Schorske’s/Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna/, which, like Wagnerism, is a multidisciplinary cultural history
that moves across media — art history, architecture, literature, and so on.*
That book was really important to me going back to when I was a
teenager. I found it in my school library when I was 16 or 17. The
lion’s share of/Wagnerism/is about the fin de siècle, seen through this
Wagnerian lens. I’m helplessly drawn to that period, and Schorske’s book
was the gateway into it.
In terms of other books, there weren’t one or two absolutely paramount
models. It was more that in each of these disciplines, particular works
would seem to have that broader scope — whether it was T.J. Clark or
Jacques Barzun. Barzun was a formidable figure now receding into the
past, who wrote a book that proceeded across very wide terrain:/Darwin,
Marx, Wagner/.
*Speaking of T.J. Clark, his/Farewell to an Idea/has a line that I love,
maybe my favorite line in modernist criticism: “Modernism is our
antiquity, the only one we have.” You’ve said/Wagnerism/comes out of
your interest in the fin de siècle. But your Wagner is also very much a
modernist Wagner. As the 21st century goes on, and the high points of
historical modernism disappear further into the past, into antiquity,
what does modernism mean for your work?*
Eric Chinski encouraged me to foreground ideas about modernism as a
unifying principle, which I tried to do. I’m not sure that I succeeded
in either defining modernism or in showing how it works in the field of
Wagnerism, because it is ultimately a very elusive idea. The more you
read the more you become confused. Everything becomes “modernist.”
Anything in the late 19th century which has traditionally/not/been named
modernist, or has seemed to be antithetical to modernism — you can be
sure that someone somewhere has written an article saying that no,
actually, Rachmaninoff was a modernist, Tennyson was a modernist.
I grew up with the narrative that modernism was this violent break. It
was adversarial, it was antagonistic. Of course, so much of the more
recent commentary on modernism has questioned the cleanness of that
break, shown how much modernism owed to the 19th century. Wagner makes
that point more strongly than anyone else. Schoenberg always looked
at/Tristan and Isolde/as a landmark. When you look at French Wagnerism,
you see how Wagner is encouraging ideas about stream of consciousness,
interior monologue, dream states, this space of rupture and violent
transcendence. Wagner has a less visible role in Anglo-American
modernism, but feeds the imaginations of Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf when
they’re young.
What’s so contradictory about Wagner is that there’s also the Romantic
side — his romanticism, his grandeur, is so flamboyant and extravagant.
*At a roundtable hosted by the Modernist Studies Association this week,
panelists addressed “the virtual disappearance of modernism as a hiring
field.” Romanticism likewise has more or less disappeared. As
categories, both are seen as too ideologically and conceptually
freighted — period designations like “20th century” or “18th/19th
century” are increasingly preferred. But when I read a book like yours,
I think that it is probably a mistake to get rid of these categories,
because they’re operative whatever we call them. We can’t get away from
them.*
If you’re just coming to terms with the cultural history of these eras,
romanticism and modernism alike, the common ground is this extreme
empowerment of the artist as legislator, as priest, as revolutionary, as
spiritual leader. That is what makes modernism so romantic, ultimately.
All these figures seamlessly took over the romantic religion of art.
They changed its language, its orientation, its content, but still Joyce
is forging the sword, Dedalus is forging the sword. It might be framed
in a sardonic way, but there’s no question that Joyce himself was
unleashing this mighty weapon that would change the world.
Unfashionable as some of those concepts have become — properly
unfashionable in terms of the masculinist underpinning of so much of it,
the questions of racism, misogyny, and so on — we need to contend with
it. And so much about it is/not/noxious, not poisonous. These works
retain their magnificence; they are highly mutable, adaptable to
different spectators. A big part of/Wagnerism/was to foreground the
degree to which spectators who did not share Wagner’s background were
not only able to consume the work but to make the work their own. So I
talk about W.E.B. Du Bois and Theodor Herzl and Magnus Hirschfeld. Willa
Cather, feminists, gays and lesbians, people on the far left. The intent
of the creator and the context of the created work do not dictate the
reception or the subsequent creative application of the work.
That’s a mundane thing to say, but in the case of Wagner, too often our
reading of Wagner himself has blotted out the rest of the picture. And
there’s an aspect of the reception which has blotted out the rest of the
picture, too — the Nazi reception. It’s incredibly urgent that we focus
on that, but it’s about finding a balance. But I’ve wandered away from
your question.
*You’ve wandered right into my next question, which is about
noxiousness. Wagner is even more problematic than many other
now-problematic figures, maybe barring Ezra Pound, because of his
overtly anti-Semitic statements on Jews and art. Obviously, you don’t
think that this is grounds for canceling him — if you did you wouldn’t
have written this book. But Wagner/has/been canceled, at least in
Israel, where, as you discuss, to this day he remains barely
performable, despite the efforts of superstar Jewish musicians like
Daniel Barenboim.*
*There is a perception that college students are newly sensitive to the
objectionable aspects of the art and culture being transmitted in, for
instance, the Columbia University core curriculum — where in 2015 there
wereprotests over Ovid
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/14/columbia-students-claim-greek-mythology-needs-a-trigger-warning/>,
for his depiction of rape. I wonder if you think that the case of Wagner
has anything to say to this debate about the potentially damaging
consequences of works of art. Do you see yourself as engaged in this
culture-war question at all, or would you prefer to remain aloof from
that sort of thing?*
I’ve steered clear of it, because I feel like there are no simple
answers to these questions when it comes to Wagner. He was the original
canceled artist. People have been asking whether he’s too horrible to be
performed since the 1850s — not just because of the anti-Semitism, but
because of his anti-French attitudes, or simply because of the music itself.
The Wagner Literature Syllabus
Wagnerian literature — novels, plays, and poems with Wagner as a central
theme — occupied fin de siècle and modernist writers to a surprising
extent. All of these are discussed in/Wagnerism/:
*Willa Cather,*/The Song of the Lark/
*Gabriele d’Annunzio*,/The Flame/
*Thomas Mann*,/Buddenbrooks/
*Virginia Woolf,*/The Voyage Out/
*Marcel Batilliat*,/Chair mystique/(only in French)
Yet Wagner has persisted. One of the questions of this book is, why?
What I would say is that by this stage, in the early 21st century, after
more than a 150 years of debate around Wagner’s viability as a cultural
offering, we’ve achieved a fair degree of sophistication about how to
deal with Wagner. In the post-Nazi era, changes in how Wagner was staged
explicitly foregrounded those questions. In a strange way, this has
enriched Wagner himself as a cultural quantity. Some people just
blatantly apologize for Wagner and try to cover up all these issues; at
the other extreme, there are people who violently dismiss his work. In
the middle there are many people who are engaged with Wagner but who do
have this ambivalence, this uncertainty.
Thomas Mann made Wagner interesting to me, because he presented this
figure who was seductive and also questionable, magnificent and also
odious. That attracted my attention! Of course there are people who
refuse to listen to him. I respect that. I’m not going to debate anyone,
or try to win them over. But it is very much worth keeping in mind that
there are Jewish Wagnerians, feminist Wagnerians, leftist Wagnerians,
gay Wagnerians. To declare Wagner an irredeemably awful and
unperformable figure, to demonize him completely, is at the same time to
erase — to use the fashionable word — all of those experiences.
/This interview has been edited for length and clarity./
/We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Pleaseemail
the editors <mailto:[email protected]>orsubmit a letter
<mailto:[email protected]>for publication./
OPINION <https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/tag/opinion>
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/len-gutkin>
Len Gutkin
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/len-gutkin>
Len Gutkin is an associate editor at/The Chronicle Review./His first
book,/Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present,/was
published in February 2020 by the University of Virginia Press.
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