San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A massive new cultural history traces the composer Wagner’s influence.
Like Jesus and Karl Marx, Richard Wagner left behind a legacy so rich and malleable that it could be carried forward in countless directions. In addition to the voluminous operas themselves — dozens upon dozens of hours’ worth of inventive music and densely allusive librettos — Wagner left his imprint in numerous other areas as well.
He churned out essays on music, politics, religion and philosophy. He introduced new ideas into the worlds of theater, painting and architecture. He did his bit at the barricades during the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. He invented the brass instrument now known as the Wagner tuba.
And if Wagner was a prismatic figure during his lifetime — capable of reflecting back to an observer whatever seemed most valuable to them — that quality only became more pronounced after his death in 1883. Again like Jesus and Marx, our relationship to Wagner is mediated through the generations of his subsequent interpreters, all the multifold Wagnerites and Wagnerians and Wagnerists who claimed his inheritance for themselves.
The entire history of Wagner after Wagner is now the subject of a massive and suavely brilliant new book by Alex Ross, the longtime music critic for the New Yorker. “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music,” a magnum opus more than a decade in the making, sets out to do nothing less than chart the entire scope of Wagner’s influence in Western history and culture, including everything from French Symbolist poetry to “Star Wars.”
That capsule description conveys the work’s jawdropping blend of ambition and erudition, but downplays its easy accessibility. This is a book that an educated reader can dip into just about anywhere with pleasure and profit; putting it down again is a harder assignment. To walk with Ross through the myriad byways of Wagnerism is to feel the presence of a wise and attentive tour guide. He knows where all the best attractions are — a littleknown German novel here, a piquant historical anecdote there — and gets you to them with smooth efficiency.
The key part of the title, “Wagnerism,” lies in its last three letters. This is not a book about Wagner, as Ross insists (a claim that is slightly disingenuous but fundamentally correct). It’s about the shadow he cast in his wake, and the way others have interpreted — and inevitably misinterpreted — his work.
Ross’ categories begin in geography, but soon rotate along other axes. A chapter on Jewish and Black Wagner gives way to one on feminist and gay Wagner.
Literary modernism looms large; James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf get an entire chapter to themselves, as does Willa Cather, whose 1915 novel “The Song of the Lark” is steeped in the world of opera.
A panoramic late chapter traces Wagner’s musical and dramatic presence through the entire history of cinema, from “The Birth of a Nation” through “Apocalypse Now” with stops at “The Big Sleep” and Bugs Bunny. At times it seems that any historical figure for whom Wagner was important — from the painter Anselm Kiefer to the scifi novelist Philip K. Dick — comes under Ross’ genial, probing scrutiny.
Naturally, that includes Adolf Hitler, one of the 20th century’s most devoted Wagnerites. The relationship between Wagner and the Third Reich has always been a charged and murky subject, and one of Ross’ many achievements is to treat it with the clarity it deserves without letting it blot out the image of all the other Wagnerisms.
Today, nearly a century and a half after his death, Wagner remains a figure to be grappled with. Once you have heard and absorbed his music, it has a way of staying with you, in all its dark, erotic, shimmering splendor. Not everyone is happy about that power (like any kind of power, it’s a scary thing), and that ambivalence was as prevalent during his lifetime as it is today.
Ambiguities and contradictions run through everything he created and everything he touched. Ross quotes a wonderful line from Nietzsche (that no one should talk about Wagner without using the word “perhaps”), which gets to a central unease at the heart of the Wagnerian project.
“Wagnerism” doesn’t dispel that unease — how could it? — but it explores with grace and insight why Wagner and his work have been so important to so many people, and why they continue to be so into the 21st century.