An Absolute Shit
The lives and afterlives of Richard Wagner.
By Mina Tavakoli
Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite. This wasn’t just ugly, of-the-times
bigotry or part of a sad and private hang-up, but a
blood-and-body-consuming dimension of his being. As per the usual
pageantry that comes with hate, his loathing took on enduring and
complicated expressions, was pathetically pseudoscientific, a product of
some combination of transference, projection, and fear, and is, in
hindsight—but also was, during his lifetime—a character trait that left
his name and work rank with the spice of rot.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
WAGNERISM: ART AND POLITICS IN THE SHADOW OF MUSIC
By Alex Ross
For the uninitiated, let me be clear: Wagner was a lot of things. He was
a fop—a dandy who died in a room tailored in plum satins and whose last
words were allegedly “My watch!” His fundamental rewiring of the ideas
of harmony and tonality—the musical mathematics for how some notes are
meant to go together—has made him the artist so many credit with
ushering in modernism in music. He is contestably the most influential
composer that ever lived, was unequivocally a genius, is outpaced only
by figures like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare in the number of books
written about him in the Library of Congress, and, as W.H. Auden put it,
was “an absolute shit.”
Alex Ross—a New Yorker music writer for the past two decades—has spent
the better part of his life bedeviled by both the beautiful and the
reprehensible qualities of the 19th-century composer. The outcome of his
years-long infatuation is Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of
Music. Like his muse’s operas, the work is filigreed, prone to bombast,
at times bloated, and, at over 700 pages, formidable. But the remarkable
trick about Ross’s undertaking is in how it steers clear of the usual
critical constructions that befall bad artists who make good art. Though
Wagner’s myriad hatreds are certainly deeply plumbed, judgment is not
Ross’s aim in the book.
Just as in his first, equally brick-sized work—the Pulitzer Prize
finalist The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century—Ross here
makes the case that classical music from the mid-19th to the early 20th
centuries foregrounds much of how we think and talk about music and its
relationship to the people who enjoy it. But Wagner is a figure that
especially imprints on and becomes imprinted with history, revealing, in
silhouette, what an epoch and its thinkers share. Ross’s new book charts
the ideological pandemonium Wagner unleashed in his audiences, and the
result is more an intellectual cartography than an assessment of
Wagner’s influence through time. But by following Wagner’s reception
rather than laying claim to a decisive reading of his work—instead
hunting it, inspecting it, tracking how it moves—Ross has given us a
book that does something impressive. Ross, in a rare feat of
contemporary criticism, divests himself of his autonomy as a critic,
hands it to others, and shows how writing about art is always an
intervention between the subject and its beholders.
Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1813. His mother was the
daughter of bakers and his stepfather a playwright who would stoke in
his stepson a fascination with theater that Wagner would later call an
“almost demonic fire.” With a preternatural capacity to pump out
complicated, Beethoven-inspired compositions and with an unshakable
sense of grandiosity, Wagner began his musical career as something of a
bête noire, virtually destined to court adoration and nemesis.
From his precocious boyhood, Wagner would go on to wedge his ideas for
the art of opera into the minds and hearts of not just his own milieu
but generations of listeners and viewers thereafter. He would do so with
an iconoclasm otherwise afforded only to inventors of things like Mickey
Mouse or the iPhone. So much of how we think about, consume, and stage
modern music is indebted to Wagner’s vast acreage of intellectual
property—from the way we seat people steeply in theaters to some core
principles and practices of conducting; from the sheer concept of
atonality to the act of dimming the lights before a show.
Wagner’s music is embedded not only in the global consciousness but in
the recesses of the global unconscious, too. The hymn known in weddings
immemorial as “Here Comes the Bride” might be the most universally
identifiable—taken from a passage in his Romantic opera Lohengrin—but
the thundery “Ride of the Valkyries” (from the second opera in the
four-part, 15-hour-long Ring cycle) is inescapable, be it in Elmer Fudd
cartoons or Apocalypse Now. There are also the tension-soaked opening
notes of Tristan und Isolde, followed by the “Tristan chord”—likely the
most analyzed chord in Western music—a sequence that, with its strangely
unresolved, half-diminished double dissonance, still sounds remarkably
horny, like an orgasm edged, then held to fermata.
Wagner’s influence is so prolific that he’s been immortalized with his
own adjective, “Wagnerian,” which, not unlike “Lynchian” or
“Kafkaesque,” is a term that swallows a host of meanings almost to the
point of unmeaning. The ideas carried in other chronically abused terms,
such as “leitmotif” (a recurring bit of music associated with a
character or object) and Gesamtkunstwerk (a “total work of art”), also
belong to Wagner, and are now associated with works ranging from The
Lord of the Rings to the buildings of Le Corbusier. Loudly, publicly,
and with the frequency of an obsessive, he also published a number of
brainless essays that calcified what he called his “instinctive
repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence.”
The Wagner universe of art and thought was, and is, rich with things
that are mammoth-sized, ideas so spacious and open to interpretation
that they work like Rorschach blots for both his fans and his foes. In
the right room, the mere mention of anything Wagner will yield a chorus
of both love and hate, and for good reason: He inspires awe and ire in
precisely the same, out-of-control proportions as the brilliance and bad
politics associated with his name. By the same token, however, his work
casts a strangely revealing spell that lays bare the critical framework
of anyone who has an opinion of him.
Despite the insistence of its title, Ross’s latest book is not only an
overview of Wagner’s influence on musicians and nonmusicians alike,
though it is certainly and explicitly that; more usefully, it is also a
Trojan Horse that delivers a larger exercise in figuring out the limits
of criticism. While the book repeatedly asks, “What does it mean to
admire Richard Wagner?,” it implicitly poses a more onerous set of
questions: What does it mean to stake a claim to any artist? What are we
supposed to do with their damning qualities? What do we do when we
equivocate about them—and what gets lost in the process?
Wagner’s life and work constitute an excellent and fertile jungle to
wander through in service of the everlasting riddle of whether an
artist’s personal prejudices are a significant factor or an extraneous
one in the art they create. Negotiating the balance of politics and
aesthetics in art criticism is by no means a new endeavor, but Wagner’s
corpus poses considerable challenges, especially in a contemporary mode,
wherein critics often feel like arbiters of ethical consumption. Tacit
declarations of a subject’s moral value (or lack thereof) are a hallmark
of buzzy reviews—even a recent interview with Ross, certainly calibrated
both for search engine optimization and to flatter contemporary tastes,
bears the title “Wagner Was the Original Canceled Artist.”
But that headline belies the size of the tangle both with Wagner and
within Ross’s Wagnerism. Though the expectations associated with the
adjudication of an artist’s goodness might be top of mind for modern
readers who’ve gotten even a whiff of Wagner’s ridiculous hostilities,
Ross measuredly warns against the promise of a finite answer for what to
do with a problem like Wagner. “I am conscious of my limits,” he writes
in the introduction, though he’s speaking not only of the boundaries of
his “expertise and language” but, more broadly, of his aesthetic, moral,
and critical project of presenting Wagner as a case study in
understanding what happens—and what matters—to individuals when
confronted with good art from artists with festering ethical sores.
With so much landscape to cover, as fairly as possible, in Wagner’s
work—and its dissonant, clanging reverberations—Ross must take on a
number of jobs. Foremost, he has to be a well-equipped guide, leading us
through the brambly fields of Wagner’s output and pointing out the
responses his work and persona have engendered: how he’s endured endless
relitigations of his character, how historical appropriations and
reappropriations of him have tilted public perception, and the curiously
generative hypocrisies in his fandom. But Ross also must be an
anthropologist, patrolling with authority a panorama littered with past
critics; he then must divide this vast geography into discrete and
digestible sections that confront the ways Wagner moved from man to
metaphor.
But even as he dons these uniforms, what he is not doing a whole lot of,
exactly, is passing judgment on the subject or his art. “You need not
love Wagner or his music to register the staggering dimensions of the
phenomenon,” Ross writes, though the phenomenon in question is not so
much that of Wagner’s aftershocks as it is the care with which Ross
needs to handle the Wagnerverse. He may fastidiously exhaust the point
that Wagner has seduced and more or less wrung dry the emotional and
rational faculties of all the minds who have been touched by his work.
But it’s Ross’s roaming catalog of the wilderness of the world’s deep
and motley approaches to Wagner (be they schools of Jewish Wagnerites or
Black Wagnerites) that makes the book such a distinctly Gordian knot of
the logical and emotional pathways we pave by loving an artist’s art.
What Wagnerism shows, very clearly, is that while music and its creators
constrain how you receive them—at least to some initial degree—they will
never take away one’s freedom to respond.
“In a way,” Ross writes, “this book is a story of failed analogies.”
From metaphor to allegory, his main action throughout is erecting
parallel constructions between Wagner the man and Wagner the myth, in
order to chart the passage from Wagner to Wagnerism.
Each literary, musical, and philosophical figure he calls on to give
testimony provides a new translation—or mistranslation—by which to read
the man’s legacy. It’s clearly not lost on Ross that this marathon act
of kneading every tension in and out of Wagner’s knotty corpus is, in
itself, Wagnerian. In 2016, Nicolas Dames wrote that in the best
criticism, “we should hear a critic’s performance of the work in
question, much like a musician’s performance of a score.” This is to
say, effective criticism should be as inventive as it is ekphrastic: As
it wraps itself around one artistic object, it makes a second one in the
process. Furthermore, it’s obligatory: “The behemoth,” Ross points out,
“whispers a different secret in each listener’s ear.”
Take the case of Nietzsche. A contemporary of Wagner’s, the philosopher
had a revealing relationship with the composer, moving from faraway
interest to adoration, idolatry, mania, and, finally, enmity. While both
were orbiting around Switzerland in 1869, they began an intimate, near
father-son relationship. Fizzy with the buzz around Wagner’s latest
opera, Das Rheingold, Nietzsche looked upon the composer with the
reverence of a new cult inductee and treated him as a world-historical
artist. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s 1872 essay, he explained
the need for a chaotic, “Dionysian” style of art, to oppose the staid,
rational, “Socratic” bilge then dominating Germany. Wagner was that
figure, he believed—a man who breathed the “sublime and the
ultra-sublime,” a man whose existence accomplished the Sisyphean,
superhuman task of “sum[ming] up modernity.”
But Wagner’s grandiosity grew, and it began to gnaw at the disciple. Two
major forces caused Nietzsche grief, the first of which was the
development of Wagner’s own opera house and festival in the German
hamlet of Bayreuth. Though it was conceived—and later successfully
executed—as a mecca for opera, in its early days it was a remarkably
garish meeting point of commodity and chauvinism, something more like a
Wagner-themed amusement park filled with what Nietzsche saw as a maw of
“bored, unmusical” guests and “idle European riff-raff.” (Bayreuth would
even prefigure some of the gaudier features of modern branding: Shops
outside the opera house were stuffed with beer mugs and “sundry
toiletries” stamped with Wagner’s face.) “I no longer recognized
anything,” Nietzsche practically moaned. “I scarcely recognized Wagner.”
Nietzsche’s second issue with Wagner—a more fundamental, very
Nietzschean one—was what he saw as a series of ethical hypocrisies in
Wagner’s weak Christian ethos—in particular, his anti-Semitism. Though
Wagner had, in 1850, already published a nauseating pamphlet titled
“Jewishness in Music” under a pseudonym (K. Freigedank, or
“Freethought”)—an essay in which he describes the Jewish people as a
“swarming colony of worms that takes up residence in the body of art”—he
republished the work with his full name and a more damning addendum in
1869 and would continue to churn out essays with rabid indictments of
Jewishness as a scourge of art until his death in 1883.
For Nietzsche, these texts proved to be too much. In his 1888 essays The
Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, he portrays Wagner as a
decaying, duplicitous, anti-Semitic Christian, a stupefier of unthinking
audiences with old German classics, and a man who has resolutely “made
music sick.” He admits, painfully, that he had misapplied his faith in
Wagner’s seemingly world-historical capacities all along. “Wagner’s art
is diseased,” he writes. “Everything he touches he contaminates.”
Nietzsche “revenged [himself] on Wagner for [his] deceived expectations”
by spending his last year of lucidity publishing screeds against him.”
The intensity of Nietzsche’s feeling—that violent ambivalence, that
long-wrought, well-anthologized defense of his turn away from the
composer, and, crucially, that sense of personal disloyalty to the
vision of the man he’d constructed and relied on as a savior—is a
refrain throughout Wagnerism. Among fans of Wagner’s music both during
his life and after, this sense of personalized perfidy is a mainstay.
Auden (who, again, called Wagner a shit) also considered him “perhaps
the greatest genius that ever lived.” Thomas Mann seesawed between
resentment and veneration; the French poet Catulle Mendès took a similar
stance, as Ross notes, “admiring and despising his old idol in equal
measure.” The American composer Leonard Bernstein’s wits’-end
admission—“I hate Wagner, but I hate him on my knees”—may as well serve
as the epitaph for a legion of writers and fans who saw revering his
work as a sort of conscious hypocrisy.
Adolf Hitler, tellingly, had a far less fraught relationship to the
composer. For him, Wagner was an angel of Germanic ideals. Naturally,
the existence of “Jewishness in Music” didn’t harm his legacy in the
Führer’s eyes, and it’s very likely, according to Ross, that several
particularly nasty passages in Mein Kampf were copied closely from
Wagner’s essay. In Hitler Speaks, the German reactionary Hermann
Rauschning even quotes Hitler as seeing something of a spiritual master
in him: “I recognize in Wagner my only predecessor…. I regard him as a
supreme prophetic figure.” The depth of this ardor rendered the memory
of Wagner, Ross tells us, “warped…around Hitler’s presence” in the 20th
century: The Wagner estate’s support of the Third Reich, the “flurry of
Wagneriana” in the Nazi regime, and the consecration of the Bayreuth
Festival as a site of annual Nazi visitation after Hitler’s rise to
power in 1933 sealed the connection securely. The critic Siegfried
Scheffler, in a review of the first Nazi-packed event, referred to the
pair as the “two Führers.”
“One danger inherent in the incessant linking of Wagner to Hitler,” Ross
notes, “is that it hands the Führer a belated cultural victory—exclusive
possession of the composer he loved.” For Ross, such a victory is far
more ambiguous: Though Wagner had unquestionably been an anti-Semite, he
had also been something of a left-wing anarchist and a self-proclaimed
man of the people.
Wagner was exiled from Germany and its musical world for 12 years after
playing a not-unmeaningful role in the 1849 May Uprising in Dresden by
ordering hand grenades, serving on the barricades, and loudly rallying
rioters from the town hall balcony. “The backshadowing narrative was too
simplistic,” Ross writes; he quotes the German academic Hans Rudolf
Vaget, who alleges that the young Hitler’s exaltation of Wagner is one
of “patent normality within the cultural context from which he sprang.”
Socialists, communists, social democrats, radicals, dilettantes, and
anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner, and yet his co-option by
Hitler effectively reduced him “to a cultural atrocity—the Muzak of
genocide.”
Declarations like “too simplistic” are a hallmark of Ross’s approach to
unsnarling the life and afterlives of Wagner’s work, and this critical
tool eventually becomes anticipatory. Each passage is so rhythmic in its
argument, so swinging in its pendulum, that it begins to move
metronomically. First, it lays out the land—a portion of Wagner’s life,
a fan, a foe, a movement, a reaction to him—then, without fail, it
swings in the other direction. Often, we enter baroque hyperbole, a
favorite means by which Ross re-creates just how inchoate,
contradictory, and dense Wagner’s system of art and belief was.
Baudelaire’s ardor for the music was like that of “an addict, an opium
dreamer,” and Twain’s response to the prelude to Parsifal, Ross reports,
was “rhapsodic, almost delirious.” Ross himself speaks of the operas as
having “near-infinite malleability” that often created “interpretive
pandemonium.”
But any man contains multitudes, and in its own way, the volume of
commentary that describes Wagner’s spell as ineffable can feel like a
critical sidestep. It often seems as if the only way to approach the
darker spots that stain Wagner’s being is to blur them into murk.
Ross is aware of this analytical shortcut. Wagner’s “misogyny, like his
racism, can dissipate in the face of an unexplained force that erases
distinctions and brings about transcendent unity,” he writes. This is to
say, delusion or self-deception will necessarily be part of any equation
that involves celebrating an artist. And when it comes to Wagner in
particular, there is a certain sense of fantasy in believing a single idea.
To paraphrase Mann, it’s more valuable to be intoxicated not by
intoxication but by insight. Ross devotes crucial moments of his book to
the curious cases of those fans who disdained Wagner’s cruel politics
but adored his music. Wagner was embraced not only by Hitler but also by
Afro-Wagnerites, feminist Wagnerites, and even the not-entirely-rare
examples of Jewish Wagnerites. In these fans, we can witness the logical
leaps some took to not exactly defend their adoration of him, but to be
able to separate their adoration from conventional identitarian
narratives and ground it in their own terms. Each subject takes things
personally, but this only sometimes means politically.
To take one peculiar example: Theodor Herzl considered himself a proud
Wagner acolyte. As the father of modern political Zionism, he found
himself “enraptured by the music of the great anti-Semite,” as his
biographer Amos Elon noted, and sought deep inspiration in the ebb and
flow of Wagner’s music as he wrote what would become The Jewish State.
In his 1898 autobiography, he recalled, “My only rest in the evening was
listening to Wagner’s music, particularly to Tannhäuser, an opera that I
went to hear as often as it was given. Only on the evenings when no
opera was performed did I doubt the rightness of my ideas.”
W.E.B. Du Bois shared an equally glowing conviction. Transfixed after
his first visit to Bayreuth, he saw in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung a
vision of particularly African American heroism. “It is as though
someone of us chose out of the wealth of African folklore a body of
poetic material and, with music, scene, and action, re-told for mankind
the suffering and triumphs and defeats of a people,” he wrote in his
travel column for the Pittsburgh Courier. In The Souls of Black Folk, he
seems to get at a greater point: “Something in this world man must
trust. Not everything—but Something.”
Riven with apparent contradiction, Du Bois’s admiration does not absolve
Wagner of his idiocy, nor does Herzl’s appreciation abate the fact that
Wagner would have categorically loathed him and his cause. Neither is it
easy to resolve the fact that Emma Goldman found in Wagner’s work a
pressure valve for women’s “pent-up, stifled and hidden emotions,” or
that, as Ross writes, Wagner became part of the “syllabus of gay taste,”
with queer writers like Hanns Fuchs referring to him confidently as a
“spiritual homosexual.” Sundry other surprising Wagnerites populate the
history of left-wing thought, such as the Black intellectuals, like
Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, who found beauty in Wagner’s Teutonic
idealism.
These Wagnerites’ relationships to the composer are what make Wagnerism
and the idea of approaching art with a true subjectivity so fertile.
Nietzsche seems to get to the core of Wagner’s sharpest effect in a
journal entry written during his most passionate period of obsession
with the composer. “All of the psychologically decisive passages,” he
wrote, “speak only of me.”
Across these nearly 700 pages, Ross has done the work of explaining that
there is no science in the logic of love, but it is worth an attempt to
make one. Claiming messiness does not suddenly resolve a critical
argument. By the same token, reason, and conviction in that reason,
cannot undo hate. Even with such a monstrous artist and such a monstrous
body of work, Ross insists that no love for an artist demands complicity
with their evils. Artists are notoriously uncompromising, but what we’re
slated (or doomed) to do is try to compromise convincingly with what’s
at hand.
In an interview titled “The Value of Frustration,” the British
psychoanalyst Adam Phillips makes the salient case that the language of
pleasure and the language of fulfillment are inextricable. “I think that
the equation of happiness with forms of satisfaction is the problem,” he
notes. “I think it is that we’re bewitched by the idea of gratification
and we’re bewitched by the idea that gratification is what we want and
is the thing that will make us happy.”
Satisfaction, or the idea of expressing complicated ideas
economically—the swift and flattened thesis, tales of good versus
evil—does not find a home in Wagnerism. We’re reminded again and again
of his genius and his sins, but in a pattern that constantly reasserts
itself in Ross’s narrative, we follow how each version of Wagner that
each fan, critic, or reader holds close or views from afar is shaped by
the person’s ability to see him, articulate him, separate him out into
pieces, and underscore what matters most.
Tugging along these lines of inquiry is not always satisfying, but it
is, very literally, a model of the varying limits of empathy. “What we
hate in it,” writes Ross, “we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we
love in ourselves also.”
And this is where we are left at the end of Ross’s book. Wagner will
remain ground zero for the method of taking an artist and measuring the
person’s worth in terms of value systems that are historical, selective,
and utterly emotional. Seeing oneself as a devoted Wagnerite or an
anti-Wagnerite cannot be considered mutually exclusive conditions. It
shows the way that individual politics work—how they are self-selective,
shifting, and sometimes paradoxical. Wagner, like politics, is a
perceptual proposition—a thought experiment that asks us not only what
we value but also how we meaningfully justify those values as true.
Moral imperfections are tantalizing, whether they’re within Wagner or
any contemporary artist. And a public’s fascination with the slippages
that contradict the impossible idea of “greatness” is productive—it
allows us to realize that the principles of art and ideology are not so
much inseparable as they are the same force. Flashes of the most
Wagnerian figure in this country today came involuntarily to mind as I
read Ross’s book, and no mention of his name is necessary to underscore
Ross’s success in outlining the enduring relevance of a towering,
self-satisfied, endlessly fascinating figure whose myth often eclipses
his reality and whose seductive factors seem baffling to many. It is
certainly easy and attention-getting to begin a critical appraisal with
an argument for why one’s subject is reprehensible and deserves our
revulsion. But Ross also insists that it’s important to consider at
length why so many others have been attracted to the same figure or his
work. As Wagner himself intimately understood, harmony and resolution
are two entirely different forces.
Mina Tavakoliwrites about music and pop culture for The Washington Post,
Pitchfork, NPR, and elsewhere.
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