The Long View | Woke-ism and Wagnerism

This time last year when my sister texted to ask what I wanted for Christmas I responded with a screen shot of Alex Ross’s Wagnerism. There followed a flurry of messages from her husband concerning ‘that book you want for Christmas’. I hadn’t considered the costs of posting all 1000 grams of Wagnerism from London to Copenhagen - good job it was the season of goodwill.

For the first five months of 2021, Wagnerism sat just to the right of my desk, directly in vision. I had my own book to finish and starting Ross’s would be my reward for doing so, the physical presence of the unread tome doing a decent job of helping me focus on meeting my deadline. I was desperate to open it. In life’s deepest valleys, I have passingly entertained the blinkered notion that there are really only two composers who cut it: Bach and Wagner, and so I relished the prospect of diving into 660 pages on the latter from the most readable critic around.

Wagnerism wasn’t what I expected. Naively, I hadn’t quite clocked that the book isn’t really about Wagner, and it’s an altogether denser, less lyrical read than The Rest is Noise. Although the book lingers rather too long perhaps on certain moral quandaries at the expense of others, it did not disappoint.

I won’t précis the many alterations Wagnerism has made to my perception of the composer in this column. What I will say is that, from what I understood of it, the book opens up far more than it nails down – which was surely the point. It can send you along countless extraneous pathways; in the post-Wagnerism comedown, I hastily devoured Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and spent a bizarre evening in the company of William Dieterle’s B-movie Magic Fire (worth YouTubing, if only for Korngold’s cameo as Hans Richter – stick-on beard included). The complete list of movies, novels, plays, productions and places with which Wagnerism has prompted me to familiarise myself runs to pages.

Some way into Wagnerism, I began to mentally audit the stockpile of borrowed intellectual ammunition I could deploy next time I went for a beer with Niels, an actively anti-fascist German friend of mine who uses the composer’s proto-Nazism to affectionately mock my profession. I had a little factually exaggerated speech all prepared: ‘Niels mein freund, Wagner has been commandeered by vegans, environmentalists, feminists, leftists, homosexuals and persecuted Jews as much as he has by fascists.’ Unfortunately, by the time I came to voice it we were both inebriated and I have no recollection of how it went.

However true that little speech is (it’s half-true at best), in a sense, it denies history and grossly offends the victims of Nazism – which is why I reserved it for a private conversation (if anyone is offended reading it here, I apologize sincerely). The truth is, I don’t really care what my friend thinks of Wagner the man. But it would please me if he, being a culturally aware but non-opera-going German, could develop some sense of the humanitarian qualities of the composer’s works. However, that development must be on Niels’s own terms. If Wagner appears ‘to tell the truth about the world’ – to borrow a phrase from the beautiful, personal benediction Ross bestows upon the composer’s music in his Postlude – that truth must exist to some degree in the consciousness of the beholder.

One lesson of Wagnerism is that few cases are closed, few crimes absolved, by totting-up the profit and loss account of Wagner’s enlightened beliefs and behaviours against his bigoted ones. Wagner narratives collude and collide with each other inconsistently, both those that have played-out with increasing volume and volatility in the centuries since his death and those that surrounded the composer or emanated from him during his life.

The triumph of Wagnerism is that so many contrasting narratives are given their due, while Ross manages to somehow couch the real-terms power of the composer’s music between the lines He suggests that the sonic and philosophical beauty of Wagner’s music exists in the way it is received and acted upon in the conscience of good people of whatever race (something the composer himself perhaps wasn’t fully conscious of until late in life). The biggest revelation Wagner handed Ross, the author writes, was that of his own humanity.

That is a powerful idea to consider in 2021, when narratives must apparently be set in direct opposition to one another, when there can only be one version of events that sees pure good defeat pure evil, and when the empathetic or visionary power of a work of art can be instantly invalidated by the very human failures of its creator or their period of history.

Wagnerism provides a timely reminder of this, while also underlining the truth that real knowledge often leads to inconclusiveness, confusion and contradiction. In that sense, the book has implications that go far beyond opera while providing an essential counterweight to our binary, polarising culture that suggests we don’t have to respond to a work of art if we’ve already passed judgement on its creator. It’s easy – right, even – to detest Richard Wagner. But millions of us, from all over the world, find such deep love in his music because we know it’s more about us than it is about him.