https://slippedisc.com/2020/10/the-hole-in-the-heart-of-wagnerism/
https://thecritic.co.uk/wagner-restless-provocateur/
Wagner brings out the worst in power-seekers. The German word for megalomania is Grossenwahn, or grand delusion. That’s what Wagner does, a reckless reordering of normality. He named his own house Wahnfried, which means peace after madness. He’s a menace.
Ross has an intriguing chapter on Wagner’s gay side. His patron, the homosexual and half-mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, was besotted in every way and Wagner only encouraged his arousal if their letters are anything to go by, forever trying to be all things to all men and women.
“Throughout his life,” writes Ross, “Wagner pursued an ideal of androgyny, a spiritual merger of the sexes.” Although a dominant male to his wives, he sought sexlessness in Parsifal, “androgyny elevated to the level of religion”, in which “the Saviour redeems the world by overcoming the duality of gender.”
His sexual ambiguity spoke powerfully to Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Thomas Mann, whose novella Death in Venice is both an evocation and a validation of Wagnerian themes, “pederasty made acceptable for the cultural middle classes”, as the Berlin critic Alfred Kerr acridly put it.
My impression is that minorities, be they sexual or religious, are drawn to Wagner by a perception of permissiveness and transgression. His operas breach Biblical taboos of adultery and incest. He wants to destroy the world that prejudices those who differ from the norm. He speaks for those who have no voice, hurling their missiles in the face of a worshipful establishment, making the elites at grand opera houses humbly submissive to his art.
While Alex Ross enumerates his conquests among the creative classes, I am not sure he has fully grasped his appeal to our subversive unconscious. He is not alone in this reluctance. Freud, who knew the Wagner operas, was strangely muted in his analysis.
At the risk of undermining his own thesis, Ross quotes Nietzsche in advocating that no statement should ever be made about Wagner without the word “perhaps”. I am well past 600 pages before I see the flaw in his case. Ross states that Wagner is — perhaps — the most influential figure in the history of music. He isn’t. Remove Bach and there is no history. Take out Beethoven and everything grinds to a halt. Eliminate Verdi and there is no Italian opera. Without Stravinsky, no twentieth century.
Remove Wagner, however, and the rest of music continues regardless. Wagner is a one-off, an ego, a restless provocateur. To Wagnerites, he’s the fusion of all arts. To Wagner-sceptics like me, he’s a genetic anomaly, a genius without anxiety.
Norman Lebrecht's piece that is sort of about Alex Ross' book Wagnerism and more about Lebrecht's dislike of Wagner is ... fairly typical for a piece about Wagner.
Lebrecht's deliberately tendentious assertion that if you remove Wagner the rest of music continues regardless delimits Wagner's influence to music when Wagner's ambitions were more all-encompassing. The total work of art has so thoroughly influenced post-Wagnerian ideas about the arts and the arts that it's worth summarizing just a handful of English-language books on the legacy of the total work of art. Ever been to Disneyland? Welcome to the total work of art? Ever watched movies? Cinema as a descendant of the music-drama is not that hard to make a case for and the Marvel cinematic universe can be thought of as a residually Wagnerian project with some two dozen movies spanning the birth and death of the Earth in superheroic monomythic style.
Star Trek, for instance, is a half-century franchise that distills nearly everything about what the total work of art as instigated by Wagner was expected to achieve? What's that, you may ask? A summation of all the arts toward the aim of telling a story and presenting a vision of a perfected or perfectable humanity, the existence of which is catalyzed by the total work of art is pretty much Star Trek to both t's.
The Ring of Truth by Roger Scruton (on Wagner’s ideas about art and humanity)
The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace by Matthew Wilson Smith
Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno by David Roberts
Dialectic of Romanticism by Peter Murphy and David Roberts
particularly The Total Work of Art in European Modernism by David Roberts
I mentioned these books in another context, because if Norman Lebrecht really wanted to argue for the cumulatively negative effect of Wagnerian bombast he should have made some kind of case that the total work of art influences franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars or made Michael Bay's Transformers franchise possible. Yes, yes, we can look to the late Roger Scruton's argument that Wagner told us the story about our stories but if we want to widen the lens a bit and ask why, say, Philip Ewell and other American musicologists have discussed the "white racial frame" of musicology and how Germanophile it has been Wagner has to come up.
Having said that, the idea that Wagner could be "removed" from music history and we'd still have music history, unlike removing "Bach" or "Beethoven" is dubious. Which Bach are we supposed to remove for there to suddenly be no music history? I admire the music as J. S. Bach but he was about a dozen generations descended from a line of vocational musicians. Telemann was more popular and widely known in Bach's lifetime. Handel was the bigger deal in the English-speaking lands. It wasn't that composers didn't know and admire J. S. Bach, it's that the Bach who had a palpable influence on Haydn, for instance, was C. P. E. Bach.
Lebrecht's polemical taxonomy of who you can "remove" doesn't mention teachers. Remove Nicola Porpora and you don't have Haydn after which you don't have Mozart as a matter of course because Haydn encouraged Leopold to encourage his son's musical gifts and practice. Haydn was the trend-setter in his era for plenty of good reasons. Remove the theorist and teacher Anton Reicha and you lose the musician who instructed Lizst and Berlioz and if you lose those two composers you've precluded Wagner practically by default. Merely because Wagner began extending the music-dramatic potential latent in the idee fix and thematic transformation across large-scale forms that were previously explored by the French Berlioz and the Hungarian Lizst doesn't mean someone else besides Wagner couldn't have carried those ideas to a vaguely Wagnerian end.
To be clear, I'm pretty much in the anti-Wagnerian camp but I don't ignore Wagner's hemisphere-changing influence. I also don't see any reason to make a bad faith claim that Wagner can be "removed" and the history of music, let alone all the other arts in the post-Wagnerian West, go on as before.
Wagner was an inspiration to Scott Joplin, for instance and Alex Ross has a section on African American intellectuals and artists inspired by Wagner's legacy. We have to account for the Wagner problem in the U.S. at least, if for no clearer reason than what Douglas Shadle called the way that the "Beethoven problem" became the "Wagner problem". Think of it this way, if there was no Wagner there was still opera but the total work of art as a bid to "change the world through art" persists. Specialists on the legacy of the total work of art, noted above, have proposed that while the idea has been thrown aside with prejudice in western Europe the idea is literally bigger than ever with Disneyland and Hollywood and video games as completely immersive experiences of interactive world-building adventures. In other words, the Wagnerian concept of the total work of art migrated to the United States after the end of World War 2 and so whether we support, oppose, or ruefully concede it's here to stay and try to decide which variants of it are more or less hazardous or personally amusing the Wagnerian total work of art is something we have to contend with.
For those who have read my writing for a while you may know I've written about how a key failure of the Christian pastor, writer and apologist Francis Schaeffer was attempting to account for the arc of modern Europe and the modern West without once referencing or dealing with Richard Wagner's legacy. Schaeffer wrote about John Cage and did so in a way that showed he paradoxically agreed with Maoist criticism of John Cage's ideas, but Wagner never came up in Schaeffer's work. That evangelicals have a vexed relationship to pop culture and technology while relying on arguments against the culture industry they may not even realize were formulated by Marxists is something I've touched on in the past, but something else I've merely alluded to in passing is what David Roberts explained at three books' length on how European thinkers and creatives floated the idea that the arts could take over for Christianity as an explicitly civic religious social bond. Leonard Meyer wrote extensively about that, too, but I'm trying to keep this relatively brief.
For those religious adherents to one or another of the Abrahamic religions in the West to get some idea of how and why we have endlessly rebooted franchises that paradoxically envision a never-arrived at love-death utopian realization of humanity in the midst of self-sacrifice you ... kind of have to pay some attention to Wagner. Lebrecht knows this after decades in the arts and entertainment coverage industry, which is why his piece seems so obviously in trolling bad faith. Without something like Wagner's Tannhauser Scott Joplin might not have heard and might have been less passionate in trying to write operas like A Guest of Honor or Treemonisha. I mean, to play with Lebrecht's polemic, had there been no Wagner Scott Joplin might have still wanted to write operas but without a Wagnerian legacy he might have cast about for someone else to write the libretto to Treemonisha.
To say that without Verdi there would be no Italian opera seems pretty stupid when you could say that about, oh, the Florentine Camerata instead and have it actually be true. Lebrecht isn't trying very hard and that shows but it's this particular kind of not trying very hard and leaning on a history-wouldn't-happen-but-for-this-one-person as a foundation for saying "except we don't need this guy" is the kind of thinkpiece we've never "needed". Robert Craft could seriously entertain the idea, for a moment, that if you removed Mozart nothing of Western music history was really lost since Haydn and Clementi could still get us Beethoven and the rest of music history. But Craft immediately said that obviously nobody should, or has to, think of the arts this way and that the beauty of Mozart's work was its own best defense whether or not he "needed" to exist for the rest of "music history" to happen. If we're going to insist on games of status and relevance then Robert Craft is always going to be a bigger deal, more relevant, and more insightful than Norman Lebrecht by the measure of Lebrechtian provocation.
If we didn't have J. S. Bach we'd still have music history, though it would be a different kind of music history we can't easily imagine because of the significance Bach's music took on from the nineteenth century to ours in music education in the West. That we might find it hard to imagine what "music history" would be without J. S. Bach says as much about our inability to call to mind Vivaldi, Buxtehude, Hassler, Schutz, Monteverdi and countless other composers who were active through what is known as the Baroque era as it does about Bach's posthumous influence.
And now we've got Lebrecht sniffing this year that someone wants to "cancel" Heinrich Schenker (whose theories I never found useful at any point in my life) but if Lebrecht is willing to claim that we can "remove" Wagner and music history will go unchanged then surely this absurd gambit can be applied even more to a mere music theorist such as Schenker than it could to Richard Wagner who, while I can't abide Wagner's music, influenced composers whose work I do like, whether Shostakovich or Debussy (in reaction) or ... there aren't a lot of us Hindemith fans out there ... and even indirectly on Scott Joplin.
I mean, if we want to play what if games, what if Vsevolod Zaderatsky's works weren't suppressed by Soviet authorities and he wasn't sent to the Gulag? Would he have written his 24 Preludes and Fugues if he wasn't in the Gulag? Virtually no one knows who Zaderatsky is and would be hard-pressed to explain why or even if he "matters". But he composed his contrapuntal cycle between 1937 and 1938 while in the Gulag. If you want to hear some of the cycle there's places online you can go.
Since we don't live in a world where Zaderatsky's preludes and fugues were recognized as probably being the first such cycle composed in the last century (because stuff has to get published before scholars know it exists) it's moot to imagine an alternative history around that because it simply wasn't "history" as a written chronicle of events to any of us here in the United States until this century.
But to float something scholars could, you know, debate, that first Zaderatsky fugue in C major makes it seem as though a musical language like jazz had been around in select regions of the Baltics as far back as 1919.
If we wanted to find an example of why some musicologists and music theorists have tired of the "great man" way of defining history Lebrecht has given us a pretty straightforward if possibly inadvertent example. Now I don't think we can really escape stories about heroes, that's how people are. I don't think we will ever stop having canons in the arts and education by its very nature canonizes. Those caveats ever in mind, I've been pretty plainspoken about my lack of enthusiasm for the gods of Romantic era art religion. There's nothing particularly "wrong" with the "perfection" of Beethoven and Mozart if I'm just considering the music, even if I think Beethoven was prone to bloated bloviation and Mozart seemed too glib, preferring Haydn to both.
The problem I do have, however, is the idea that because pedagogues two centuries ago came around to the idea that Beethoven and Mozart wrote better than average music that often involved the piano that I, as a guitarist, can "only" assess musical qualities in light of that pianist/symphonic literature. I have all the Haydn symphonies and dig them, but there's often a moment where I think I prefer Hummel to Beethoven and there are Clementi piano sonatas I come back to where I just don't find Mozart all that enthralling. To put this another way, the perfection of two centuries ago doesn't give me any inspiration for how to address the musical challenges of the early twenty-first century that actually interest me.
I am, to use the jargon Leonard Meyer coined in Music, the Arts and Ideas, a formalist--what that means, per Meyer, is that I am willing to latch on to music that I find interesting because it helps me solve formal problems I'm interested in solving. So for me Beethoven and Mozart are, eh, okay, but Haydn and Clementi writing monothematic sonata forms? That helps me think about possibilities for a synthesis of blues, jazz, ragtime, country and other American popular styles with a range of sonata form scripts.
In other words, guys like Lebrecht (and they are, as a few contemporary writers have noted, so very often old white guys) make it their business selling and re-selling a version and a vision of music history. Lebrecht can write a piece at The Critic trolling Wagnerians but as David Roberts argued in his books on aesthetic theory after Adorno, the West has been in Wagner's shadow and even the East--you can think of Stravinsky's dystopian ballets as a kind of anti-Wagnerian summation of the arts as an act of negation rather than "uplift" but for that case you'd have to read David Roberts. We've been living in Wagner's world whether we wanted to be born into it or not. I'm working through Alex Ross' book and I doubt he's going to convince me to become a Wagnerian but even an anti-Wagnerian has to take seriously that a Lebrechtian proposal that if we "remove" Wagner "history" doesn't change is the kind of bad faith assertion that can, well, show up via link on a website called Slipped Disc.
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