Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is among the most famous mainstays of the operatic repertoire, along with Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini, and he will remain so for as long as opera lasts. One hesitates to say that his works are as popular as those of the other three eminences. Performances of his supreme masterpieces Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Parsifal are comparatively uncommon, for they demand the largest and surest orchestras, the highest production values, and nothing less than the world’s finest singers, specifically of the rare heavy-lifting breed known as dramatic voices, or Wagnerian voices. In the United States, these works are almost never seen outside New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, with the exception of an occasional sighting in Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C. Three earlier operas of Wagner’s, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin are more amenable to the capacities of lesser opera houses, and one might find them capably served in Denver or Boston. But even these have a hard time reaching the provinces, where people like to see La Traviata and La Bohème again and again. I sang with the Palm Beach Opera Chorus in the Florida premiere of Tannhäuser in 2002; the work had its world premiere in Dresden in 1845.
What Wagner’s operas lack in popular appeal, however, they more than make up for in the obsessiveness of the admirers who love them best. That obsessiveness, especially on the part of artists and intellectuals, is the subject of an impressive new book by Alex Ross, the classical-music critic of The New Yorker, the author of a fine book on 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise, and perhaps the most interesting writer on music we currently have. He does not consider Wagner’s influence on other composers, which would require a book of its own.
Why Wagnerism? Why is there such a thing? Isms speak of movements — classicism, romanticism, naturalism, expressionism — not of individual artists. No other artistic colossus rates this expansive suffix as Wagner does; his only intellectual peers in this respect are the world-shattering Darwin and Marx. Literary historians sometimes call the Renaissance in England the “Age of Shakespeare,” and intellectual historians speak of a certain German cultural epoch as the “Goethezeit”; but those terms refer to phenomena of a particular time and place. Wagnerism recognizes no such limits. It attracts adherents of every race and nation, every political or religious creed, chauvinists and cosmopolites, celibates and voluptuaries, vegetarians and militarists. Among the greatest musicians neither Bach nor Beethoven nor Verdi has begotten such a following as Wagner has — such a proliferation of acolytes and adepts among poets, novelists, playwrights, painters, philosophers, and political men of both Left and Right (though not so many of the center). Now Ross has turned his attention to the fever that Wagner ignites in so many men and women of high talent.
There are some obvious reasons why Wagner collects worldwide followers — but also passionate antagonists — as flannel does lint while these figures of comparable genius do not. Shakespeare wrote poetry of such formidable density that it is hard even for most native English speakers today to understand. Nietzsche, who was Goethe’s most significant admirer, said that the life of this paragon of German culture was an event without consequences: Goethe fathered no descendants, for such all-sided mastery as his (he was a scientist and a statesman as well as the greatest writer of his time) had become impossible in the modern age of intellectual specialization. Wagner to his advantage worked in the universal language of music and composed the poems of his music dramas — he preferred not to think of his masterpieces as operas, disdaining all the showstopping twittering and Babylonian spectacle of that lesser art at its loudest — aware he was creating the founding myths of an alternative to the belief in might as right and in the endless progress of commercial civilization.
His noblest creations, in the Ring cycle, were Wotan and the Valkyrie Brünnhilde. Wotan is the greatest of the gods, stymied in his longing for perfect freedom by the iron restrictions of divine law and reduced to yearning for the End. He is a figure as extraordinary, as moving, and as brilliantly nuanced as Shakespeare’s philosopher-magician Prospero. Brünnhilde is his favorite daughter, who defies her father’s express order even as she attempts to carry out his most cherished wish; punished by the loss of her godhead, introduced to the exquisite glories of love and the desolation of betrayal, she brings on the destruction of the gods that initiates the new dispensation of human freedom.
Nietzsche, who was also Wagner’s most significant admirer, as well as his most notorious apostate, declared: “Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.” Wagner and Nietzsche were the warmest of friends for a time, so long as Nietzsche remained a perfervid worshipper. Never before or since has so great an artist had so magnetic a hold on a great philosopher, nor has so great a philosopher done so much for the reputation of the artist he revered.
Sigmund Freud, another modern mythmaker of complicated influence, wrote to a medical colleague about a performance of Die Meistersinger that “real ideas are set to music, as in no other opera.” More than any other opera composer, Wagner wrote music for an audience that loves ideas, or at least loves the sound that ideas make. Profound minds and simpler minds smitten with their own profundity have found much to engage them in Wagner’s art, which lends itself to being thought about, talked about, written about. His works are so rich that they can be readily assimilated by pretty much any ideology or nationalism or fad: Thus Ross in his whirlwind study examines “socialist Wagner, feminist Wagner, gay Wagner, black Wagner, Theosophical Wagner, satanic Wagner, Dadaist Wagner, sci-fi Wagner, Wagnerismus, Wagnerismo, Wagnérisme.”
The sine qua non of Wagnerism is vehement sincerity. The mark of a true Wagnerite is that you are sufficiently fascinated by him to make him uniquely your own. Ross observes that you can hold contradictory opinions about Wagner, agreeing both with Stéphane Mallarmé that he is a god and with W. H. Auden that he is “an absolute sh**.” He contains multitudes, like Walt Whitman, who noted, “So many of my friends say Wagner is Leaves of Grass done into music that I begin to suspect there must be something in it.” Every admirer, who can be a detractor at the same time, forms his own exclusive cult — a single devotee with his personal deity, a very modern sort of religiosity, the aesthete’s version of bowling alone.
For Wagner’s enthusiasts there is no superlative exorbitant enough to encompass his grandeur. The great French poet Paul Valéry considered Wagner to combine the best of Shakespeare and Beethoven. With wild and woolly magniloquence Nietzsche called him “a volcanic eruption of the total undivided artistic capacity of nature itself.” H. L. Mencken pronounced his operas “the most stupendous works of art ever contrived by man.” Thomas Mann chimed in with praise for “probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art.” W. E. B. Du Bois hailed him as the indispensable genius: “The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life.” Know him or you have failed to live. For vital thinkers and enraptured souls such as these Wagner was not merely the supreme artist. He was a destiny.
Ironically and fatefully, the incomparably grand Wagner suffered agonies in the first 25 years of his career for his inability to write a blockbuster grand opera of the conventional sort, like those that were turned out regularly by Giacomo Meyerbeer and which won this envied rival lavish renown and princely wealth. Envy turned into loathing, not only for Meyerbeer but for the entire Jewish people whom he came to represent in Wagner’s poisoned mind. Wagner’s 1850 essay “Jewishness in Music” ripped into Jews as cultural parasites, unwelcome foreigners in every nation, their “hissing” and “grunting” barely identifiable as human speech and their music the summation of all their unpardonable faults. Here is sufficient evidence to endorse Auden’s blunt opinion of Wagner the man. This screed has rightly blackened Wagner’s reputation among decent people, including those who love his artistry.
But then it also enhanced his standing among those who shared such monstrous sentiments. The young Adolf Hitler could not get enough of Wagner’s art or of his hatreds, and the full-grown Führer undertook, with the assistance of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and documentary-film director Leni Riefenstahl, to make Wagner’s music the soundtrack of Nazi world domination. Ross ably describes “Wagner’s position as a Nazi cultural deity” and the difficulties it presents for those disinclined to embrace fascism but excited about the Master’s music. And he relishes such insults to Hitler’s fanboy piety as the preference that more ordinary Nazis showed for American jazz.
Wagnerism is an admirable work of scholarship — one is tempted to say, an amazing feat of erudition — that also displays the winning features of journalism at its most skillful. Comprehensive in its reach, the book is clearly intended to be both the definitive treatment of this vast subject and a conversation starter for Wagnerian devotees. There are flaws, of course, as in any work of encyclopedic ambition — namely, the bagginess of an omnium-gatherum, with too many cursory plot summaries of too many deservedly obscure novels that do pertain to Ross’s theme but that depart even the painstaking reader’s mind swiftly and for good. Wagnerism is not really an introduction to Wagner but rather the history of a blazing cultural phenomenon, appealing especially to those who are already Wagnerites and who enjoy knowing about others who share their passion. It will not soon be outdone on that count.
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