With Wagnerism, Alex Ross complicates the image of fascism’s favorite composer
Aux Features Book Review
“Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit…” For a certain generation of pop culture junkies, the first image that springs to mind when Richard Wagner comes up is Elmer Fudd, clad in shiny armor and horned helm, mangling “The Ride Of The Valkyries” as he operatically hunts (and lusts!) after his rabbit quarry. Perhaps instead one pictures a flock of U.S. military helicopters soaring over the Vietnamese coastline in Apocalypse Now, raining down bombs and bullets as the 19th-century composer’s most famous song drowns out both whirling blades and screaming bodies. Or maybe one’s mind leaps to Nazi Germany, where Wagner’s work was “the Muzak of genocide” as author Alex Ross calls it in his latest book, Wagnerism: Art And Politics In The Shadow Of Music, a dense and illuminating examination of Wagner’s influence on culture and history.
Wagner was the monoculture event artist of his age: a composer whose ambitious operas (which included Lohengrin, Parsifal, Tristan Und Isolde, and the four-part Ring cycle) introduced techniques and concepts that influenced culture across Europe and North America. In his 2007 book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century, Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, touched briefly on Wagner’s influence on the world of music—detailing a lineage of avant-garde modern classical music that starts with Wagner acolytes Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. With Wagnerism, Ross traces the controversial composer’s influence across what the author calls the “artists of silence”: novelists, poets, and painters.
What makes Wagnerism such a challenging and rewarding read is how Ross comes to terms with that influence. Admitting his initial negative impressions of Wagner as “the Nosferatu shadow falling on that epoch,” Ross paints a picture of Wagner that complicates his image as fascism’s favorite composer. When Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself,” he may as well have been talking about Wagner’s many philosophical about-faces.
Wagner associated with anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and passionately made speeches about “perpetual revolution,” advocated for the dissolution of the aristocracy, and incorporated spiritual influences from Kabbalism, Islam, and Hinduism into his operatic stories about Grail quests and Nordic gods. Wagner was also an anti-Semite and a racist who praised the Civil War as “the only war whose aim was humane” for ending slavery and cheered the king of Zululand for defeating the British in the early parts of the Anglo-Zulu War. The man whose work would inspire the Third Reich once wrote “the desire to conquer other lands is ‘un-German’” and lived an androgynous, at-times campy lifestyle that would have doomed him as a decadent, depraved artist by that regime. Because of what Ross calls “the emphatic vagueness of his convictions,” entire groups who would have good reason to dismiss Wagner could still claim him as one of their own.
Ross explores these contradictory facets of Wagner’s life and work by looking at how he’s perceived by his admirers. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism who laid the foundations for establishing the state of Israel, drew so much inspiration and energy from Wagner’s work that he said “only on the evenings when there was no opera did I have doubts about the correctness of my ideas.” In one of his short stories, W.E.B. Du Bois imagined an African American man looking back fondly on a performance of Lohengrin as his last happy memory as he is about to be hanged by a lynch mob. Feminists and gay artists saw themselves in Wagner’s Valkyries and in the homoerotic undercurrents that run through his operas.
The anarchist Emma Goldman zeroed in on the cross-cultural appeal of Wagner’s music, writing that his work is “the releasing force of the pent-up, stifled and hidden emotions of their souls.” In an age when so many different groups had to live under various forms of oppression, the transcendent power of Wagner’s music gave them an outlet to feel and express emotions they were often forced, for the sake of survival, to repress.
Over the course of more than 700 pages, Ross covers a tremendous amount of ground—touching on the Russian Revolution, the birth of cinema, both World Wars, and a who’s-who of artistic and philosophical heavyweights, including James Joyce, Willa Cather, Luis Buñuel, Yukio Mishima, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Wagnerism is mercifully light on the music theory terminology that made The Rest Is Noise an occasionally frustrating read for those of us who couldn’t identify a tritone by ear if you put a gun to our heads. And while Ross does offer a lot of biographical information and anecdotes about Wagner, he’s careful not to psychoanalyze him or make excuses for his subject’s major failings.
Wagnerism doesn’t advocate for separating the art from the artist. With an artist whose legacy is as confusing and complicated as Wagner’s, that kind of surgery is impossible. Which Wagner do you remove? Ross makes this point throughout the book: There is no definitive Wagner—he is a prism through which so many different artists and thinkers refracted their own light. “The essence of reality lies in its endless multiplicity,” Wagner wrote. “Only what changes is real.”
Where once was a man, there is now only a shadow. What shape that shadow takes, Wagnerism suggests, says just as much about the beholder as it does about the body that once cast it.
Author photo: Josh Goldstine
37 Comments
Alex Ross
Wagner has been one of my favorite composers for a long time. That being said he was terrible person by not just our standards, but the standards of decency for a few decades now. However his worldview wasn’t that unique for the time he was in.
I love his music (well, parts of it… long stretches of Die Walkure really drag), but he was a pretty crappy human being even by the standards of his era. Even Ludwig II, who probably had a gay crush on Wagner, tired of his antics and intrigues after awhile.
He’s like the H.P. Lovecraft of operatic music.
The article (excerpt?) in the New Yorker last month was frankly pretty bad. It reads like a lazy wiki list of every time Hollywood used Wagner, and drops a few turds like the following takes, which I challenge you to read without envisioning a freshman delivering them between massive bong rips:It is probably no coincidence that the superhero emerged in the nineteen-thirties, at a time when totalitarian regimes were overrunning Europe and Russia. The objectification of the young male body in Communist and Fascist propaganda probably influenced the trend: liberal-democratic societies, derided as weak, required warriors of power. The chiselled and buxom torsos of comic-book characters seem to be descended from the fin-de-siècle sketches of Wagner heroes and heroines by such illustrators as Arthur Rackham and Franz Stassen. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has observed that the motif of concealed identity, a staple of comics and superhero movies, recalls Lohengrin, the knight with no name. Like Lohengrin’s ill-fated bride, Elsa, girlfriends of Superman and Batman jeopardize the relationship when they ask too many questions.Modern fantasy began with the release of George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” in 1977, which paid homage to the “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rogers” serials of the thirties. The project drew Wagner comparisons almost from the outset. Susan Sontag had coined the term “pop-Wagnerian” to describe Nazi-era German films; Pauline Kael applied it to the second “Star Wars” installment, “The Empire Strikes Back.” As in the serials, the sci-fi future of “Star Wars” is given neo-medieval, chivalric features. Lightsabres stand in for swords; Darth Vader is a Black Knight with a hidden identity. The critic Mike Ashman has noted various similarities to the “Ring.” When the hero Luke Skywalker seizes his father’s lightsabre, he is like Siegfried mending Siegmund’s sword. And when Yoda, the wizened Jedi master, trains Luke in a swampy forest the scenario recalls the dwarf Mime’s relationship with Siegfried, except that Yoda is on the side of good.A more unsettling echo comes at the end, when Luke, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, having led the Rebellion to victory, are honored at a temple ceremony. Fanfares give way to a vigorous march version of John Williams’s “Force” theme, which recalls Wagner’s Siegfried motif. Lucas chooses a curious visual design for this scene. The camera watches from behind as the trio proceeds down a long stone walkway, with troops arranged in rigid rows, toward a dais behind which imposing pillars rise. The shot has two clear cinematic predecessors: the hero Siegfried’s entrance into Gunther’s court in Fritz Lang’s silent epic “Die Nibelungen,” and Hitler’s march through the Nuremberg parade grounds in “Triumph of the Will.” Although Lucas has denied that Riefenstahl influenced the scene, the likeness seems too close to be accidental. To be sure, his heroes break out in goofy grins, undercutting the solemnity of the tableau. But this aw-shucks appropriation of Fascist style makes the allusion no less strange or disturbing. As in “Apocalypse Now,” but without critical distance, American-accented heroes absorb the iconography of an evil empire.Actually, the end of Star Wars was pro-fascism.My eyes, they roll.
Hot Take: The Book
I find a lot of it eyerolling, but I was under the impression that Lucas had explicitly cited Triumph of the Will as inspiration for the medal scene.
It’s a bit confusing but an earlier draft had a scene of a big Imperial ceremony and THAT was what was influenced by Riefenstahl.But also I’m just gonna point out that, y’know, the creators of Superman and Captain America and many others were Jewish.
Although isn’t a bit weird that that the Jewish creators of Superman called him that? That was the traditional English translation of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” so beloved by the Fascists (although it is worth remembering that Nietzsche, much like Wagner, would not have fared well had he actually lived in Hitler’s Germany). Ironically, the popularity of the comic book character means that modern translations of Nietzsche generally translate the term as “Overman” instead.
Chewbaca, which contributed to the success of the Rebels as much as the humans is specifically snubbed by not getting a medal by the racist Leia (whom you might remember referred to him earlier as a mere “walking carpet”), so yeah? The whole idea of a “republic” being led by a princess is very anti-democratic too.
What if Chewbacca *declined* the medal? Maybe medals like that are not part of Woookie tradition, and he received something more appropriate for his culture that we just didn’t see? Perhaps he felt that his efforts did not need a bit of metal on a ribbon for validation?
And maybe carpets are an item of high esteem in Wookie culture, and being called a “walking carpet” by Leia was a great honor!
That excerpt was a huge disappointment–I ended up skimming it. Disappointment because I usually love Alex Ross’ writing–even when it’s some aspect of music that I previously had no interest in.
I mean, the Star Wars/Triumph of the Will thing has been known for decades at this point. He makes a decent point even if its a bit of a cold take
Yes. Ross is a good writer, adept at balancing thought-provoking and accessible, and he’s one of the best (only) writers we currently have who advocates for the value and aesthetic relevance of Western Art Music in a way that doesn’t descend into bloviating, conservative traditionalism. In other words, he’s as close as we (i.e. people to whom this tradition deeply matters) have to a viable public intellectual. But when it comes to talking about the art of popular culture without descending into reduction, condescension, or stale-ass arguments that we should have stopped finding interesting decades ago, he kind of sucks.
Jew see we’re having a special on Wagner this week?
“Did you hear that? He didn’t say ‘You’ he said ‘Jew!’”“Oh, Alvy.”
Glad someone caught the reference and didn’t think this was some kind of anti-Semitic joke.
Glad to assist, as much as I am loathe to reference Woody Allen these days…
Right? Not sure what’s worse, to be thought an anti-Semite or a Woody Allen supporter…
Anti-semites lose their jobs, Allen supporters get to keep them.
I read recently that Wagner was actually declining in popularity throughout the Nazi as well as Weimar eras:https://www.theage.com.au/world/wagner-popularity-went-through-the-ring-cycle-in-nazi-era-20070704-ge59sg.html
In Germany at the time names like Siegmund and Siegfried were considered to be ‘Jewish’ names.
The book does touch on this- Ross points out that, at one point, Hitler ordered performance venues to literally give away tickets to Wagner performances and they STILL couldn’t fill the houses. Wagner’s star fell enough during the Nazi era that people wouldn’t go to his operas for free.
True. The ad copy that Wagner “inspired” the Third Reich has become almost dogmatic, just like the claim that we “can’t possibly” separate an artist from their art (why, exactly?). But it leaves much to be desired. Hitler (the most artistically pretentious of the high-ranking Nazis) hero-worshipped Wagner and loved his music. Meanwhile, Goebbels liked a good light operetta and was even willing to go in for some pop and cabaret, provided its performers were racially acceptable and its humor toed the political line. Goering was too busy being highly unstable for us to really have much success pinning down his musical tastes. And everyone else in the Reich, and in Germany more broadly, was listening to… whatever they were listening to. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking of Hitler (or his tastes) as metonymically representative of the Reich, in part because that’s exactly what he believed, and in part because we have a responsibility to do justice to the much more complex actuality of how totalitarian regimes come into existence and function.Also, some music composed for propaganda (or propaganda-adjacent) films made under the Nazis (like Wundt’s scores for Triumph or Olympia) certainly dabbles in Wagnerism. But 1) Wagner’s influence on a certain type of big, epic-romantic scoring practice was increasingly prevalent by the mid-thirties, including the Hollywood film scores of Jewish refugees such as Korngold, and 2) even these films don’t use a Wagnerian idiom exclusively, and many, many others don’t use it at all.So, where’s the “inspiration,” exactly? What’s its nature? How, exactly, did this vague and metaphorical “inspiration” translate to the very tangible damage that the Reich inflicted on humanity? The depressing, and far more realistic truth is that if different groups of people can each have “their own Wagner,” then the same thing is certainly true about Nazism itself.
I was hoping for a treatise on Mage and Grendel by the brains behind Kingdom Come. Disappointed.
Real talk: as much as I genuinely enjoyed this book, I would have loved even more to read a book on Matt Wagner’s work.
I love opera and love almost everything about music of 18th and 19th century, but Wagner is shit. The company I worked for once did some innovative visual content to be played during the overture of The Flying Dutchman. We all attended dress rehearsal to see the finished piece, and watch some of the opera, and walked out after about ten minutes, because it was all we could take listening to Wagner’s teutonic twits warble on.
But without it, would we have the Sea Captain’s restaurant in The Simpsons (which is named “The Frying Dutchman”)?
You settle in for the next 4 hour installment of the Ring Cycle at 6pm. Two hours of turgid, overwrought orchestral stodge later, you look at.your watch. 6.20.
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” — Mark Twain.
Didn’t Oscar Wilde make some comment to the effect that Wagner was a real popular ticket because the orchestra was so loud nobody cared if you spent the entire performance visiting with your buddies?
Wagner creates some incredible music in the Ring cycle, but one wishes he would have consulted Verdi on the importance of dramatic pacing.
I actually had tickets to see the whole Ring Cycle performed in April. Alas it was a casualty of COVID.Even then a good deal of my plan was to drink during it.
Wagner imagined entire symphonies. I’d love to visit his birthplace in Germany, think i’m going to apply for a passport and go after covid-19 ends.
Wasnt ‘Ride of the Valkeries’ written as intermission music anyway?
I’m one of those “beholders” you mention. And in general, I’m very capable of separating the art from the artist. I accept and respect the legitimacy of the fact that this is not the case for other beholders, particularly for people whose history or identity gives them painful reasons to not be able to make that disconnect. But I’m still one of those beholders, right? And so, following this logic, if I can separate the art from the artist, then the art is separate from the artist. At least, for me. This is one of the legitimate “Wagners.” And yet the dogmatic, a priori notion that anyone might be able to legitimately do this and have that view respected has become, with increasing predictability, regarded as a kind of sociopathy, or idiocy, that we can dismiss out of hand before the conversation even gets started. “Obviously, we can’t separate the art from the artist, but…”Many, many artists speak of the moment of artistic creation as being one in which something else co-habits and partially determines their process and product, whether they anthropomorphize it as their muse, or the ancestors, or just accept it as a reality inherent to the process. This actually seems like an entirely defensible basis, if not for the total autonomy, than for at least some degree of separation—it’s just respect for the reality of art, which is both autonomous and intentionally and culturally inflected. All I see in criticism these days is cultural determinism masquerading as due diligence.