I get into obsessions. After weeks of reading Browning’s poetry, I’ll switch to Sondheim and there will be weeks of listening, humming, scouring Youtube for bootleg videos. Then, I’ll switch to historical research and that will obsess me a while, then something else will come down the pike.
I don’t know where these little obsessions come from, but they crop up every now and then. They thrive, then run out of steam somewhere down the line, and my mind races off to the next obsession. The recent obsession? I found myself researching a bevy of material on Richard Wagner. I had “The Ride of the Valkyries” stuck in my head for four days at one point. I have recently recovered.
I am not a classical music buff, to be sure. Now, there are pieces I adore—Bach’s Double Violin Concerto always takes me somewhere outside time—but I am not shuffling between Brahms, Vivaldi, and Mozart on the car stereo on the way to work. As I grow older, though, I am more and more receptive to the layers of depth and beauty in classical music.
A few years ago, I watched Stephen Fry’s documentary Wagner & Me and, in those 90 minutes, Fry very nearly turned me a Wagnerian, almost gave me full-blown Wagneritis. In the film, Fry attends rehearsals for the famous Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner’s works are showcased in a theater he designed himself. Fry’s passion, shown onscreen through various moments of pinching himself to see if he’s still subsumed in Wagnerama, was contagious and I found myself an overnight fan, though more casually than Stephen.
To this day, I am deeply moved by the breathtaking climax of Tristan and Isolde and thrilled at the story of a man who spent nearly a quarter century writing a 15-hour opera that he knew would be a success and realized the dream of many an artist: he built a palace just to showcase his gift to the world.
The Ring of the Nibelung is, in many ways, both the crowning achievement of opera and something else entirely: a new form—Wagner called it epic music drama—or it could be simply called opera on steroids. There is hardly a musician or musicologist worth their salt that wouldn’t bow to what Wagner achieved. The world was given a true masterpiece—the word is overused now—and that’s what makes Wagner’s antisemitism all the more unsettling, as if such a thing wouldn’t be already.
While Wagner’s work is not tarnished, the man has become, culturally at least, irredeemable. He joins a long, long list of figures from history in that regard. And yet, when one keeps combing through history looking for corpses to reawaken and kill again, you find you can’t just stop at one person. If all history could be “corrected” to reflect our current moralisms (no matter how correct), wouldn’t we be shouting Hallelujah? But, that ain’t how the world works.
Even in writing this essay, the fact that I have not inserted in large, bold faced font the words “I denounce antisemitism in all its forms...” above opens me up for possible scorn. Incidentally, I do denounce antisemitism. That’s what makes liking Wagner hard, as Stephen Fry, whose relatives perished in the Holocaust, so achingly demonstrated in his film. The difference with Wagner and contemporary pariahs is that Wagner’s political views troubled fewer of his countrymen than you might think. Antisemitism in German literature hearkens back to the vitriol of Martin Luther and perhaps before. The 19th century German bon vivant was most likely, if only fashionably, antisemitic (again, that does not make any of this right). Therefore, Wagner was not a pariah in his own time and, therefore, the qualities of his music have still been appreciated despite his invective and he has never been ejected from the canon.
With Wagner, it seems one can separate the artist from the art and yet our contemporary cultural critics ask us more and more to ditch even the attempt at compartmentalizing. How can a sensitive, intelligent writer like me support the work of a man so consumed with antisemitism that he published his thoughts, under his own name, in a pamphlet called Jewishness in Music?
Well, it comes down to complexity. I understand the inherent complexity and dichotomies within the human being. We are all capable of great evil and unconscionable good (let’s try the good) and we are often able to do both on the same day. How can one live with such dissonance?
Soberly. Like a grown-up adult. Like someone who sets their eyes toward the future rather than trying to rewrite the past. Like someone who judges not lest we be judged but leaves the judging to a higher power. I would encourage others in this direction, but you might think I was cryogenically frozen in the past and have returned to disseminate ideas which are now, what is the word they use, “problematic?”
One simply doesn’t want to see an entire generation wasting their time and energy scouring the classics to bellow with compunction, “Oh, my! How could the human race ever have been so naïve!” Such useless exclamations must not be listened to, but must needs be written on a 6x8 index card, which should then be folded, as Dick Cavett said, five ways and inserted where the moon don’t shine.
So, we are left with uncomfortable disconnects, much like living life.
Someone put all this about Wagner better than me, though. In my research, I came across a wonderful BBC documentary on Wagner’s life and work. Near the end of the special, the late philosopher George Steiner commented on the disconnect in Wagner. I thought his comments especially enlightening, though if he had said these things in 2023, I wonder if they would try to awaken Prof. Steiner only to bury him again.
“Now, you can go at that [disconnect] in a number of ways. My own conviction is that people like ourselves—perfectly ordinary people—cannot grasp what is going on in the mind of a titanically complex creator ([someone] who can create Parsifal) and then say absolute barbaric inhumanities. So, I prefer to say that the man who has given us what he has musically lies certainly outside my range of understanding. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t make me bitterly, bitterly disturbed—ill-at-ease—but that, to put it very vulgarly (if I may)—that’s my problem, not his. How can you have among the highest achievements of beauty or speculative elegance and audacity of the human mind and conscience and guts and viscera on the one hand, and the awfulness on the other? Wagner’s music, as they say in a law court, is Exhibit A.”
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