Episode 28: Richard Wagner: Act III

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Laurie Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are continuing our great epic Wagner series.

And we have a really special guest.

Yes, we're very excited to be joined by Alex Ross, who has written a 700-page book on the Wagner legacy.

So, Billy, the perfect person to talk.

It is a doorstop.

It is a massive book.

I can lift weights with the thing.

And, like,

I'm impressed that you can do it with one arm because I would need both.

Alex is as formidable as his book is.

He has been the music critic at the New Yorker since 1996.

He is the author of The Rest is Noise, Listening to the 20th Century, his big Wagner opus, Wagnerism, Art and the Politics in the Shadow of Music.

And he has received both the MacArthur Fellowship and the guggenheim fellowship as well as an arts and letters award from the american academy of arts and letters and he is also we should say a real mensch who is so generous with his expertise and his time and i think there's nobody i would rather go on this weird journey into the wacky wonderful world of rehard wagner with alex ross

Again, you're doing it for the third time.

I mean, just a big shout out, big tip of my hat to you following us into these, like, the weird wilds yet again okay but it is so much weirder adrian than i as a civilian had ever anticipated oh yeah wagner is such a rich text and we get into especially in this episode what happened with wagner's legacy and how his often really politically capacious and contradictory work was interpreted and fought over after he died when people were competing over his legacy yeah so i hope people enjoy and as long as people tell us they like these we keep making them There is no limit to the amount of Wagner we can do, right?

So like you guys, we got a lot of good feedback on this.

And I think you guys have created a monster.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A giant dragon.

All right.

Here we go for our conversation with Alex Ross.

Enjoy.

All right.

So maybe to start, we should say that.

Your book, Wagnerism, is subtitled Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.

And that's why we're so excited to have you on here today, because in some way, that's, I think, also how we've been going through the ring cycle on this podcast.

That is to say, this is a politics podcast more than it is a music podcast.

But with Wagner, the politics are there, but they're always sort of in the shadow of Wagner's music and the oeuvre.

And to just kind of divorce it from that is doing him a disservice, I think.

And it's not to say that then, as now, our listeners can't go out and enjoy a performance of Die Walkürre and not think too hard about what it all means.

But it does mean that you have to ignore a little bit more than, let's say, when you see a Bizet opera.

And Wagner wanted you to kind of think about this stuff.

He wanted you to pick up on the political dimensions, on these big philosophical dimensions.

And so I'm really just very, very excited to have you on and to get to talk to you about the aftermath of all this, the legacy of this, the very, very ambivalent legacy of this man.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, the challenge that I undertook with this book was

not to write about Wagner per se, because there have been 10,000 or however many books about Wagner, but about the aftermath, about the reverberation of Wagner

through history up to the present day, especially focusing on how other artists, how artists outside of music responded to him.

So that's the heart of the book.

And this thing called Wagnerism really dates back to the early 1860s.

I mean, there were stirrings of it even before, but in the early 1860s, Charles Baudelaire went to see a series of concerts that Wagner did in Paris and was completely enraptured and

transported by the music and sort of fell under the spell and set about working on this essay, which in the end was published only after the huge scandal that took place around Wagner's Tannuuser, the Paris opera in 1861, one of the great kind of chaotic moments, many chaotic moments in Wagner history.

And he came out with this essay,

which, you know, on the one hand is the response of a fan almost abasing himself before this phenomenon and declaring that he's sort of been annihilated by the force of the personality of music.

But at the same time, he's really taking possession of Wagner, translating Wagner into his own language, into his own concerns.

So the Wagner that emerges in that essay, Regard Wagner and Tannhuizer in Paris,

is

not the Wagner of the biography and of

Wagner's own interpretations of his works.

It really is an appropriation.

And so at this moment begins this pattern of artists, but also thinkers, philosophers, politicians, just sort of ordinary people responding to Wagner in such a personal way that

the music and the meaning of the music is transformed and just translated into a completely new context.

So you have this French Wagner, this symbolist Wagner, very much about dream worlds and the unconscious and

sort of satanic resonances and outreach sexuality and

sort of all of this welling up.

And you had a sort of Victorian Wagner and an American

kind of heroic Wagner and various German Wagnerisms and Italian Wagnerisms.

And so it goes on and on.

And at the heart of my book is just a string of artists who very often had a tense push-and-pull relationship with Wagner.

And in the end, it's a classic study of the anxiety of influence or of agon as as nietzsche called it the younger artist contesting with the older one and and asserting himself against that that influence as took place obviously in the case of wagner and nietzsche himself and you know going straight up through to the to the you know beginning of the 21st century and and continued struggles with and content contestations with with wagner in in in hollywood still in in literature and and on and on so it's a

it's it's a huge kind of rambling narrative that takes you into many different worlds and ultimately just a huge conflict of

ideas and perceptions about Wagner to the point where I think we really lose track at times of what Wagner is

as he undergoes these transformations.

But this is what's fascinating.

Yeah, so there's a place I wanted to sort of get to as well.

There is a, you start the book with Wagner's funeral and his death and funeral in 1883 and the fact that like basically, and there's two things that emerge, right?

There are people, there's a kind of official kind of mourning process memorialization that takes place.

And then there are all these people speaking out that will be part of your narrative who are like, are they talking about the same guy, right?

They're very much pointing out that like people are misunderstanding this man.

And so.

I mean, I think that that speaks to the kind of fractured nature of his influence, as you say.

But it also does suggest that there is one that was sort of the sanctioned and the and the official kind of Wagner story, right?

I mean, channeled through Bayreuth, channeled through his widow and his clan, et cetera, et cetera.

And that everyone else sort of felt they had to, at least, I mean, unlike Woodlair in the 1860s, when there was no Bayreuth to kind of control the estate and everything, but everyone was kind of like, they were the partisans in the hills, and there was the kind of the main, you know, force of Wagnerism sort of embodied by this fairly conservative, extremely conservative set of institutions.

How do you chart that relationship?

Because in the end, people had to go to Bayreuth to see their Wagner for many, many years, or they did, but there was a kind of official Wagner, and then there were all these other Wagners sort of outside of it, right?

Yeah, well, when I think of

the official story, as you read it in the obituaries in 1883, it was about

this man who underwent such struggles and defeats, thrown out of Germany in 1849, having to flee Germany, this fiasco in Paris,

endless financial problems, and then this magical apparition of Ludwig II.

He's saved, and the dream of Bayreuth comes about.

And then he dies having written the ethereal final valediction of Parsifal.

And so that's kind of the official narrative.

It's a great man narrative.

It is a Victorian, I think of it as like a Victorian narrative of

withstanding great trials and triumphing through sheer industry and force of character.

You know, so this is kind of the international official Wagner.

And the German-ness of it was obviously of monumental importance in Germany, probably less so outside of Germany, except insofar as Wagner was able to make himself the symbol, the figurehead of a great nation.

But I think above all in that period, it was Wagner's colossal industriousness.

And so then you had sort of voices on the side contesting that narrative, and this idea of the French Wagner, sort of Wagner as an agent of the unconscious

and of dream and of chaos.

You had sort of people beginning to suggest a feminist interpretation of Wagner, you know, the anarchist, the far-left interpretation, as well as the far-right,

which I think was more of an alternative, not so much a mainstream idea right there at the beginning in the early 1880s.

Even though Wagner had been incubating this mode of thought in Bayreuth in the last years, this would sort of grow in importance as the 19th century went to its end.

So I think of it as a battle, really, a battle between

over what Wagner meant and who was going to own him.

And obviously, a right-wing nationalist point of view won that battle.

But it's worth honoring kind of the other

sort of people who are battling for his name.

Yeah.

Maura, did you want to jump in?

Well, it strikes me, I'm just kind of, I have maybe an obvious meta-commentary, which is that there's all this struggle over the authentic Wagner and the creation of his legacy.

And,

you know, I think Alex would probably suggest an ultimate failure to discern a true

core of the artist and his work, which strikes me as, you know, a little bit ironic because Wagner himself was so preoccupied with the idea of authenticity and truth in his operas, right?

So it seems almost, and maybe ironic is not the right word.

Maybe I actually mean appropriate in like the 11th, more said that, you know, this, this thing that he was so chasing in his work and so powerizing in his work was something that was, you know, also the object of so much of his legacy.

Yeah.

You know, it's a wonderful point.

You know, he was so obsessed with the organic, the rooted, the authentic, a kind of realness that wasn't sort of naturalistic realness, but something sort of the spiritual realness.

And he thought that he was capturing that and transmitting it in his operas.

And he thought that he'd found the place in Bayreuth where this this force could sort of radiate outward.

But obviously that was not happening.

And you know, when

I'm intrigued by the moment when he received that essay from Baudelaire.

There's actually two letters.

It's quite amusing.

The two letters that he wrote to Baudelaire.

The first was sort of essentially kind of, thank you so much for sending your essay.

Very interesting.

In any case, here are my 10 or 12 huge problems that I'm dealing with, the financial

and sort of the kind of email that we've all written that's like, thanks, all very excited to read this, or, or, you know, I've started reading it, very exciting.

You know, then he then he writes a second letter, which is suddenly kind of prostrate with gratitude, just kind of just so

appreciative, desperately appreciative of this kind of engagement that Baudelaire had shown in his work.

And what intrigues me is, you know, he couldn't possibly have agreed with everything that Baudelaire was saying.

You know, I mean, this essay he talks about sort of, you know, the counter-religion and sort of the new religion of Satanism kind of erupting, these very sort of Baudelaire ideas and just a lot of proto-symbolist vocabulary that Wagner must have found quite incomprehensible.

Nonetheless, he was very excited to see just the intensity of this response.

And I think the sort of practical

showman in him knew that to have such a response from a kind of alien,

sort of just from a very different point of view, was sort of a guarantee of the power and endurance of his work.

You know, for a work to endure, it must be misunderstood.

It must be misread, you know, according to the sort of original idea of the creator.

It must sort of atomize into sort of all these different sort of perceptions.

You know, other listeners, other spectators must take possession of it.

So I I have the sense that all along he was perhaps

somewhat divided.

You know, on the one hand, he was this colossally self-willed person, megalomaniac narcissist, you know, who really did want to impose his ideas on the whole world.

But at the same time, he was a guy putting on a show and was ready to accept the idea that

people would have

different understandings of his work and that his own sort of point of view was not going to be universal.

So I think there was a kind kind of split in him, and just the basic split in sort of his own contradictions.

I mean, sort of ideologically, as you've already discussed,

there were many, many contradictions.

There was a great deal of inconsistency.

There was a sort of dilettante, just sort of faddish, you know, he would just read something and latch onto it and write a 10,000-word essay about it, and then

forget about it and move on to the next thing.

So, it's this bundle of contradictory ideas.

And so, all along, you know, you were never going to find, you know, the one true, clear, crisp kind of the Wagner idea.

That was just never going to happen given who he was.

It's kind of, I would say, that shines through in his relationship to Nietzsche, too.

He's like, I love how much you like me.

And it's just kind of true.

No, I think again there, Wagner was so excited to find this young, brilliant mind responding to his work with such enthusiasm and at the same time being aware that Nietzsche had very different ideas from his own.

And I think he was sort of willing to accept that up to a point.

And Nietzsche kind of kept pushing to the degree that Wagner just broke away.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, in some way, that is the interesting thing, right?

Like in some way, the coming into being of the Bayreuth festival sort of ends up ossifying things a little bit.

I mean, that's where Nietzsche sort of realizes, oh my goodness, I have nothing.

I was wrong about this work.

It's at Bayreuth that he's like, what did I just kind of enthusiastically endorse?

And that's also where the contradictions become kind of

harder to work away, it seems.

There's an amazing line from Eduard Hanslick, I think, from the first Bayreuth festival, where he says something like, there's this big lie of describing this luxury entertainment for rich bankers, aristocratic ladies and journalists as a national festival or something like that, right?

And he's basically saying, like,

like, I mean, and Hanslik knew that, of of course, an opera was always both of those things.

It was high art, and someone had to make money doing it.

But, like, he did seem to think like the contradiction here as manifest in this Festbielhaus is like, is actually a problem, right?

Like, it's supposed to be, people think they're witnessing the birth of a national mythology.

but it's just kind of a social occasion.

It's basically a horse race with more singing.

No, yeah.

No, and this is, I mean, this is,

it's just wonderful to read about Bayreuth in the early years and how it became this cosmopolitan watering hole for

European aristocrats and wealthy Americans and Isabella Stewart Gardner and sort of all these sort of groups of people coming from all over and Cozma presiding over all of this, this woman who, on the one hand, of course, was severely reactionary and pedantic and narrow-minded.

But at the same time, I mean, she was the very image of a cosmopolitan,

half French, half-Hungarian, spoke perfect English, and was technically German.

You know, so

she

sort of inculcated this atmosphere.

You know, Colette wrote wonderful scenes set in Bayreuth.

There are a number of other novelistic portrayals of it, as well as sort of journalistic portrayals.

But of course, there is the massive contradiction at the heart of it.

You know, this is exactly what Wagner supposedly was fleeing from, you know,

opera as a grand culinary entertainment.

And he ended up creating his own version of it.

But, you know, again, the practical side of him would have said, well, whatever it takes to keep the thing going, you know, and lots of people, despite the somewhat kind of unsophisticated or superficial atmosphere, you know, did come to Bayreuth and did have very intense experiences

and carried something very powerful away with them.

So yeah, there's an early history of Myruid is fascinating.

Cozma is an absolutely fascinating personality

in her own right.

And she was conservative.

At the same time,

she was a brilliant organizer.

This festival, I think, would have would have faded away.

The whole apparatus would have faded away unless she's sort of really thrown herself into it and made it work.

And she was an opera director and I think was sometimes more inventive than we give her credit for in terms of how she staged the operas, especially in

the early years, as well as the casting and the administration.

So she was a very formidable figure.

And the legend of Bayreuth,

the sort of the afterlife of Bayreuth is much more her creation than her husband's, you know, the two times that her husband ran the festival.

It was an abject failure.

Okay, I realized that.

I mean, one thing she definitely did, and I think you alluded to that already with her sort of, you know, highly cosmopolitan background, right?

Zichad, I think to some extent thought, and I think we've talked about this, Moira and I, in our previous episodes, like there is a, you know, there's a kind of anti-bourgeois affect to the entire undertaking in the sense that like you have to set aside a better part of a work week to actually consume these operas, which not everyone can do.

But I think he thought of this as like, oh, this is not music for shopkeepers, basically.

But she takes the perfectly reasonable steps like, okay, so you're describing someone who can take a lot of time out of their day.

That's an aristocrat.

You're describing an aristocrat and kind of turned into like Baden-Baden with better music, right?

It seems to me.

Like, she, his, his anti-bourgeois affects were still honed on 48.

They were basically, you know, something better, right?

He's almost a Marxist in that way.

He says, you know, I want to be a critical critic in the morning.

I want to be fishing in the afternoon and listening to Siegfried in the evening, right?

Like, that's the image that

we're getting, I think, out of Richard.

And Kozi was like, no, no, no, no, no.

The only people who can make this work are rich as hell, and we need to to get them here right yeah absolutely yeah and i mean up till a fairly late stage wagner was still clinging to the idea that he was going to be giving away tickets for free at my work i mean he had this idea that that sort of impoverished students would be able to come and sort of you know experience the ring and and all that was wildly impractical and so yeah she made it she made it work and and she

built something that's that still exists and and it's as much in her image as Wagner's in his, yeah.

So, because you know, we ourselves have a, let's say, Wagnerian work ethics, meaning we love shoes and we don't finish our work that quickly, we we're currently on, our listeners are caught up on the first two installments of the ring cycle.

And I thought, so, which means that, you know, we've not talked about really Siegfried on this podcast at all.

And I think Siegfried is a pretty good example of like

the kind of reverberations and refractions that you talk about in your book, sort of what his position is in the entire cycle and what his meaning is vis-à-vis Wagner, right?

I mean, you mentioned that like for French or for Francophone Wagnerism, you didn't need the ring at all.

In some way,

it was Tannhuus and it was Tristan that really, I think, shaped their Wagner.

But certainly sort of in the, I would say in the conservative and on the right, there are different versions of this, but on the right, the reception is very much tinged with or or connected to the figure of Siegfried.

And so I thought we could sort of walk through that a little bit and talk about what role Siegfried plays in, well, in the trilogy and in its reception.

Like what are the different Siegfrieds that we're getting?

And, you know, and I should sort of warn our listeners, it's not about like how to interpret the figure, but even

what the role of the figure in these four operas even is, right?

Like there are some real serious tensions.

And, you know, there there is a Siegfried we get in the opera Siegfried, and then there is a very different Siegfried that we get in Gotta Demarung, which is a lot harder to square with what a lot of the 19th century read into this figure.

So, but do you want to sort of get us started on that a little bit?

Like, is the centrality of that figure, at least for the ring itself, kind of

this kind of magic eye where basically you have to look into it and

you're going to get something slightly different back depending on who's doing the looking?

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess personally, first of all, I should confess that this is my least favorite part of the cycle.

If I'm sort of sitting through the entire ring, I always kind of roll my eyes a little bit when we get to

Siegfried,

especially the,

you know, especially the first two acts.

I mean, of course, the remarkable thing about this

is that there's this enormously long interruption that took place during during the composition of this opera because in 1857

he broke off composing after the second act and sat down and wrote Tristan and then he wrote Meistersinger and only then at the end

of the 1860s did he go back and write the third act.

He tinkered a little bit with aspects of it in the years in between, but basically set the whole thing aside.

So

he's a different composer, audibly a different composer when act three begins.

And so that's when I personally get excited again, because suddenly it's this music sort of coming out of the, this, the post-Tristan experience, and there's this incredible new energy that enters into it.

But, you know, this is at the same time, of course, the heart of the story.

The hero Siegfried, I mean, as you've discussed, I mean, he started with the idea he was just going to write an opera about the death of Siegfried.

And then he decided he needed to sort of tell the story of the young Siegfried, and then eventually went all the way back and created the stories of Rheingold and Valkura.

But it's all about leading up to Siegfried.

And so who do we have?

We have this kind of blonde teenage hero who's really an idiot.

in a lot of ways, but who has these uncanny abilities.

And he's in the process of discovering these abilities.

So, you know, this is, I mean, this is such an absolutely archetypal mythic story.

The young, the novice discovering his powers.

It's Superman, it's Spider-Man, it's all the men.

And Wagner repeats the whole conceit in Parsifal.

And there's a kind of excitement in that.

To confess, I always sort of dread having to sit through these first two acts.

And then I end up

enjoying it to a degree because it is such an irresistible story, despite

the

semi-obvious anti-Semitism and the sort of general kind of cult of

stupid masculinity,

there is an appeal to the thing.

And this is, there was a mass appeal with Siegfried.

So in terms of the same thing, Alex, let me jump in and just also maybe make clear to listeners that, like, yeah, it's almost a very different kind of narrative, right?

He's basically cribbing from fairy tales.

It's a very compact, very contained, it doesn't have an epic feel.

The epic is sort of at the at the outer edges of this forest where, you know, Siegfried is just being raised by the dwarf Mime, who our listeners will remember, and basically realizes that's not my dad.

And I need to

reforge this broken sword that I happen to have.

And I need to get out of here and slay a dragon.

So the whole thing really feels...

It almost switches genre on you a little bit.

And I think that's what you're

queuing into.

You're just like, you've been primed for eight and a half hours at this point for one kind of thing.

And then you get something a very strange kind of idol almost in the middle there.

Yeah, yeah.

And the psychological kind of dimensions of it are really constricted from what we saw in Valkyrie, which is this sort of monumental tale of sort of the god collapsing and losing his power and sort of undergoing this

crisis and sort of downward spiral.

And then the heartbreaking farewell of Wolthan and Bunnhilde, which is just one of the most grand emotional moments in 19th century music.

And as, you know, just so much going on in Vakira, as well as kind of heroes and swords, if you get that bit.

So, you know, suddenly in Siegfried, kind of all that has kind of

gone out the window, and you just sort of have this boy's adventure story, although it gets more interesting as it goes along.

Suddenly, you have this very peculiar situation at the end where first Siegfried finds what he thinks is a very beautiful

man in armor, and then he realizes it's a woman and it's his aunt.

But you know, they fall in love anyway.

So that suddenly we're back in kind of Parisian variety.

Yeah, they're like, Disney get the meeting with the dwarf was weird, but uh, we're back in Incestville and we can uh we can we can work with that.

Yeah, it's basically like, yeah, it's this superhero discovering his powers, uh, kind of a story.

Now, now, this is a story with universal appeal, you know.

So, so, yes, you know, you can have the right-wingers embracing uh Siegfried as the archetype of Aryan masculinity and fearlessness.

But then you also have George Bernard Shaw on the left taking the most delight in this part of the cycle.

You know, absolutely head over heels in love with

Siegfried, the character, sort of seeing him as a sort of a boy anarchist revolutionary rebel who doesn't care about the system and is willing to sort of bring it all down.

And I think there are a lot of other people on the left who could sort of, you know, sort of use the Siegfried character for their own purposes.

You know, Nietzsche also absolutely loved the Siegfried character and was sort of rather disappointed with what happened after that.

So you know, just as the superhero movies today, you know, can be seen as allegories for whatever you want, you know,

sort of oppressive forces on the right, on the left, you know,

whatever kind of context you want, you know, this Siegfried story functions in the same way.

But especially by the time you get to, you know, well, obviously World War I

in Germany, you start seeing a very explicit weaponization of the Siegfried character, the Siegfried legend as part of the great German mission.

And of course, there were many, many instances before that, of an explicitly nationalist, right-tending interpretation of this story, you know, in defiance of any competing interpretations.

Exactly.

So Siegfried, right, like is easy to love because he brings all this,

what he's got is instinct.

He's got a lot of, right, he's got a good, he's got a healthy sense of disrespect.

I mean, the culminating moment of the third opera is that he is confronted by his own grandfather, Votan, and smashes the spear that that, you know, that holds all the laws, right?

As this is the moment that Shaw is thinking of

in terms of him as a baby anarchist.

He's like, this is just another old man.

All of sort of the Metternich system, everything is being sort of smashed to pieces.

Exactly.

At the same time, he also has this instinct, and this is something that I think not just the right drew out of him, but like someone like Fritz Lang in his Niebelung movie does that too.

He's above all defined, and part of this is just that he's an adolescent, by what he hates, right?

He has this kind of Schmittian friend, enemy thing going, where he's basically surrounded by people who are just horrible.

And he has this like incredible gift for sniffing that out and then hurting them badly.

And as you already alluded to, not few of these people will

have slightly anti-Semitic hues of the people that Siegfried sort of victimizes in this way.

So he does become this kind of like, yeah, Aryan Superman who just kind of keeps sometimes giving a literal beating to people who are coded as, yeah,

whom he senses are his enemies almost without them having done all that much to him, right?

I mean, poor Mima keeps reminding him, he's like, you know, I did raise you for the last like X years.

And he's like, I brought a bear home that could maul you, you know?

I mean, like, that's, it's, it's.

truly sadistic.

His pure instinct, pure absence of intellect, pure physicality, you know, against Mima, who's who is physically weak, but

very cunning.

And Siegfried sees that absolutely as the enemy.

And this fits in perfectly with the sort of a certain right-ring German kind of resentment against civilization, civilization, kind of French refinement or English manners.

Against this, we put the brute instinct of

spirit, Geist,

and this will be triumphant.

And so all of this vocabulary kind of just proliferates everywhere.

And even Thomas Mann succumbs to it during World War I.

Yeah.

Yeah, but then we kind of get this turn, right?

Like the Siegfried we meet in Goethe Demelung is suddenly a very different guy, which is like, this is the interesting thing.

Again, like the

right-wing Siegfried fans must have had some difficulty with the Goethe Demolon Siegfried, who's, he's still dumb, but by now the stupid, or I don't even, is is dumb even the right word?

He's inactive and hesitant, sort of in ways that he isn't in the first opera, but in ways that certainly make the character a lot more complicated and make him a lot harder as kind of or less less, make him a lot less apt as kind of a projection screen for sort of Germanic fantasies, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, no, his instincts are now failing him, his his supposed ability to sort of size size people up at one glance, you know, when he runs up against Hagen,

it fails him completely.

And I think this is a kind of interesting sort of psychological observation about

a sort of

boyish mentality being maintained into maturity, into adulthood, and resulting in terrible decisions.

You know, which is a very familiar story.

And I mean,

I think it's so brilliant, what he does in

Goethe Demerung.

It's a huge, unwieldy opera,

somewhat overpacked with material.

But

I think what's happening in Go de Demerong, I always have this feeling that, you know, he's now in the early 1870s composing, working with a text that he wrote in the early 1850s.

So he is a much older man.

He's been sort of trapped in this world for a long time.

His preoccupations have really moved elsewhere.

He's beginning to look toward Parsifal and the sort of the religious preoccupations of his final period.

He's lost interest to some extent in this whole apparatus.

He's impatient with it.

And instead of...

composing and just instead of phoning it in and just going on autopilot for the remainder of the cycle, what happens, I feel, is that he begins to work with these materials in a perverse way.

He begins to sort of twist them around.

Just the whole grand light motif system, he increasingly uses it with a bitter irony.

You know, what happens when Hagen takes possession of Votan's spear motif and it turns into this sort of colossal dark evil kind of grand utterance.

What happens to sort of all

the love motifs?

And in the same way, he's, you know, he's gotten bored of Siegfried.

He says this, he said this to Cosima.

She recorded in her diaries that, you know, what I like about Siegfried is

the sort of silly boy, and the adult Siegfried is horrible.

Wow.

And that comes across in the opera, I think.

There's something horrible about Siegfried, just the failure of his heroism.

And of course, the fact that Rudhilde must finally step in and complete what he has been unable to do.

And, you there are levels of irony in this.

This is something Shaw complained that Wagner reverted in Goethe Demerung to an older operatic model.

And he said,

horror upon horrors, Nietzsche says something similar.

He's just written a

big grand opera with conspiracy trios and

duets and a wedding scene.

And it's all so awful.

He's just lost his way.

For me,

it's the exact opposite.

Wagner has sort of done this meta-operatic thing of taking hold of these sort of older forms and sort of appropriating them to his uses, sort of playing off of operatic history and using those resonances to deepen

the story and complicate the story.

And so I think that...

It's very unusual to find real irony in music.

It's very hard to be ironic in music, you know, because we have such a visceral reaction to music and it just tends to be, you know, tragedy, happiness, you know, sort of to have sort of these in-between states or sort of these contradictory states is difficult to capture.

But Wagner does it.

I mean, Vikeder Remung above all, he's writing sort of, you know, just the most nightmarish wedding in operatic history.

These thrilling scenes, Hagen calling the vassals, which is actually just also at the same time, the sort of this icon of

evil and menace,

just these layers of meaning behind sort of a whole series of scenes.

And I think it's just fantastic.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

That's probably also why Sean disliked it, because it's in some way a post-revolutionary novel, a post-revolutionary opera, right?

It's kind of

the question seems to ask is, what if you shatter the old world and then are too indolent, lazy, and or intellectually incurious enough to replace it with anything whatsoever, right?

And

I'm guessing that the echoes to 48 are probably intentional.

I'm guessing that, you know, there's just like there's an anti-revolutionary impulse to the opera.

It's not in the sense that he's like, you know, counter-revolutionary or against it.

He's just saying,

I think it's not going to do anything, you guys.

And there is, there's a, it is ultimately an incredibly resigned, from the first note, really a kind of a incredibly resigned opera where exactly like Siegfried is all about this organicism.

Like there is no holding this kid back, right?

Like they all try.

Everyone's trying to lie to him and he's like, I see through you and now you will be slain.

Right.

And that the opposite is true.

This gets entirely inverted, turned on its head really in Gautasemeron, where really you have a,

where it's very clear that almost like a Votan thing where whatever mistakes were made, you haven't even seen them on the stage.

They are, they are already baked in.

This is this, you're watching the train hurtle towards the bridge that has fallen down.

There is nothing, you know, it's a question of how does it happen?

It's not a question of, you know, oh, this suspenseful moment, will he, won't he, right?

I mean, it involves, this is also something that Shaw complains about.

It involves a magic potion, which is like, honestly, one of these, the horriest cliches

in opera.

But again, like, I think you're right that there's this irony there.

He wants to take friction out of it almost, right?

He wants to say, it's not that there is a moment where it all could turn out okay.

It does really feel like this is happening now, right?

Like it's driving towards that conclusion, and whatever could have been different would have had to have happened before, yeah, measure one, basically.

Yeah, no, it is absolutely

the work of a disappointed, disillusioned revolutionary who is reverting to a somewhat aristocratic, somewhat monarchist worldview, but also with this

world-weary sensibility and

also this sort of continuous streak of anarchism or just sort of little loss of faith.

And yeah, this is

the mentality that sort of Wagner inhabited for the remainder of his life.

And then he turns to this sort of mystical fusion of different religious strains in Parceval.

And so what politically is happening here is

quite complicated.

It's certainly no longer revolutionary, but it also doesn't really speak of the

optimistic, nationalist, sort of Kaiser-Reich

feeling of the 1870s, sort of somewhat disengaged from that.

And in fact, after an initial burst of optimism at a moment where he thought that the Kaiser and Bismarck would underwrite his festival, once he realized that that wasn't going to happen, he increasingly lost faith in the new Germany and found it all very banal and disappointing and

started even seeming to become somewhat tired of Bayreuth and spending increasingly long periods in Italy.

But at the same time,

he is engaging with this new strain of biological racism, anti-Semitism, reading Gobineau, the kinds of sort of Aryan theorizing that's getting published in the Bay Road of Letter, very, very dangerous new strain of anti-Semitism.

So

he's engaging with that at the same time that he's sort of spouting vaguely anti-Millerist, militarist views and sort of anarchist views and neo-socialist views.

So it's a huge mess of contradicted political ideas.

And I think the important thing to say for me is that

this is exactly the kind of mentality that several decades later, the Nazis were able to manipulate so expertly.

I mean, when you look at Richard Strauss, you know, he was a man of somewhat similar disposition, you know, an ironist, a kind of, you know, a sort of anarchist,

just sort of purely devoted to the cause of art, sort of dabbled in different philosophies.

And, you know, that is someone whom the Nazis are able to take hold of, you know, even though he doesn't bind to the philosophy.

He becomes prey.

He becomes sort of open open to appropriation.

So this is, you know, as politically vague as all of this is, it is at the same time sort of exactly the kind of mentality that would sort of prove very vulnerable to exploitation by the Nazis.

Yeah.

This might be a good opportunity for us to consider some of those left-wing readings of Wagner's operas.

Because, you know, you, Adrian and I have talked about Wagner as a character whose revolutionary 1848 hopefulness really curdled into

particularly anti-Semitism, but like all these different kinds of

antagonistic racist nationalisms.

And that's was a very, you know, I think it's very easy for us from the perspective of the 21st century to look back and say, of course, that's how it happened in the 19th, but it was a historically contingent phenomenon.

And, you know, it's easy to imagine alternative futures and the notion that Wagner could have gone another way.

And I wonder if maybe there's some of that, you know, hopeful speculation in these left-wing readings of his work.

Yeah, well, of course, I mean, there wasn't anti-Semitism on the left.

And that is really where Wagner's own anti-Semitism really takes root.

I mean, it really flares up around 1848, at the time he was sort of, well, just after 1848, when he was at the time of his sort of, he was farthest to the left, strictly speaking.

And you find on the left, you find anti-Semitism in league with nationalism, in league with the hope for the fall of the aristocracy and the birth of a democratic republic.

You know, those things weren't blatantly contradictory.

I'm sort of looking at things from our sort of contemporary point of view.

It doesn't quite map onto our sort of contemporary sense of what's right and what's left.

So the left-wing reading of Wagner didn't necessarily have to discount or ignore

the anti-Semitism at all.

Until probably

by the post-Dreyfuss, you know, early 20th century, that was sort of no longer so tenable.

But earlier on, it wasn't a massive contradiction.

And sort of throughout the 19th century, Wagner was very strongly identified with the left, especially outside of Germany.

You know, in America, the first popularizers of Wagner in this country were members of the Germania Music Society, the Germania Orchestra, who were sort of a lot of quite left-wing people who had fled Germany around 1848.

And so their philosophy was,

we're playing great German music in the service of

liberal ideas and sort of the democratic spirit.

And so sort of Wagner came along with that.

And sort of Wagner, Wagner remains controversial for those left-wing views.

There wasn't even so much awareness, I think, of what he had become.

You know, sort of the most popular, the most widely distributed Wagner writings were Artwork of the Future and Art and Revolution, sort of the most stridently left-wing ones.

You know, people were not reading the bizarre meanderings that he was publishing in the Bayreuth Bledder, you know, or even the Jewishness and Music essay was not so widely distributed.

And so this really fixed the image of Wagner for several generations.

And so there was no contradiction contradiction and

there was nothing kind of stopping Victor Adler in Austria and sort of various other left-wing leaders.

Jean-Jaures in France was something of a Wagner fan of sort of seeing Wagner as integral to their cause and the sort of

medium for their message.

Just following up on that, I think there's also an interesting kind of question of like who

Right, how opera and how music traveled at the time in general, right?

Like, you know, the Wagner Kran is unusual in setting up this one institution, Bayreuth, that's supposed to govern it all.

And they only succeed within some measure.

But that meant that in some way, the ring that we've been walking people through and Parsifal are, I would say, the least performed, right, outside of Bayreuth.

Is that accurate?

I feel like if you went to the opera and saw a Wagner opera...

in 1890 and you were not in southeastern Germany, like most likely you'd see one of the earlier ones, ones, wouldn't you?

And I do think that like that that also must have been part of the equation, that most people encountered artworks that preceded that turn in Wagner.

Yeah, well, Lone Great and Tanois were always the most popular ones.

Those were the Wagner operas that Mark Twain loved.

It was much more traditional operas compared to what came later.

And yet the ring was well known.

I mean, certainly in New York.

It was performed at the minute.

There were traveling, there was Anglo-Neumann sort of traveling ring production, which went all over.

And, you know, increasingly, all the leading opera houses, you know,

much later did

Paris Official Friend Society kind of finally lost its horror of Wagner.

And, you know, before that, you had to go to Brussels to see the ring at Le Monnet.

But, you know, Covent Garden,

Hans Richter was conducting the ring at Covent Garden.

So it was,

you know, you had to be in a sort of larger urban area.

But yes,

the ring was widely seen, widely known.

The story was widely propagated.

One of my favorite things when I was working on the book was coming across a whole series of books that were published in, especially in America and England, right around the turn of the century, which I characterize as young adult Wagner literature.

And so you have sort of stories of the ring, stories of the Wagner operas for young people, with a great deal of boulderization.

You know, the plot of Valkyrie, the sort of

incest aspect was not touched upon.

A couple versions in which Siegfried and Brunhilde, you know, are happily married at the end of the ring instead of, you know, going up in a forepyre and various other emendations.

But yeah, these stories,

the stories themselves were widely known.

And yes, I think by the end of the 19th century, the early fame of Loangren Tano Rosa was now counterbalanced by growing fame of the green.

And then in 1914, suddenly Parsifal can be performed everywhere.

And there's this sudden wave of Parsifall productions all over the world.

So there's a Parsifal fad.

I forget whether you talk about this in

the book, but there is this very funny kind of 21st century reflection on this, right?

Where Where in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, the Christopher Wallace character tells Django the story of the ring of the Nibelung, but it's the story of the opera very clearly.

There are a couple of things that are not in the Nibelung

that Wagner made up, and they're in there.

And they do this, I think, right before a scene or right around the scene that is said to Verdi's Requiem to the DS Erie, which is meant to evoke the right of the Klansmen in D.W.

Griffith's

birth of a nation.

And it's very clear that, like, they're not using Wagner there pointedly in order to, because Griffiths scored that scene originally to the Right of the Valkyries.

And so there's this kind of, this is interesting kind of Wagner both as like acknowledged as kind of like integral to racialist and racist thought in the United States and as like

this

revolutionary who makes a really good case for just shooting a bunch of Confederates.

And it's, it's really,

I love the fact that like that, the kind of tension that you were pointing to like still works in a Hollywood movie in the 21st century.

It's really quite remarkable.

Yeah.

I actually don't think I ended up talking about Tarantino in the book, but I definitely noticed that that irony when the when the movie came out and mentioned it a little bit and sort of other stuff I wrote for the New Yorker.

I think it was Christoph Waltz who may have sort of drawn

Tino's attention to Wagner.

I dragged him to one of the operas.

But yeah, that actually points to something very specific, very interesting in Wagner reception history, which is the black response to Wagner,

where W.

E.

B.

Du Bois

was a huge Wagner fan.

and wrote an extraordinary story called Of the Coming of John, which appears in the souls of black folk about a young black man who goes to a performance of Lohengren

and then is asked to leave because he is sitting next to a white woman who has become uncomfortable with his presence.

And other more kind of aspects of this that I won't go into, but the basic fact is like this contradiction of the sort of young black man being swept away by this extraordinary music and then confronting the reality of racism in contemporary America.

And for what Du Bois is really saying,

you know, here's this sort of ideal world, which we can glimpse in Wagner, a kind of utopia against the ugly reality of

being black in America.

You know, now that this seems strange, you know, to contemporary sensibility, because we think of Wagner as racist.

And how could W.E.

Du Bois, you know, embrace such a composer?

Well, the thing is, is that Wagner is anti-Semitic.

In terms of his views about Black people, he had very little to say.

This was not a preoccupation of his.

He said almost nothing publicly.

Actually, if you go through Cosmo's diaries, you find some derogatory remarks and you find some complimentary or sympathetic remarks about

Black people, especially in the United States or post-Civil War.

In any case, there's nothing in the sort of public apparatus of sort of Wagner's work and views that would at this time lead Du Bois to think

this is a man who sort of expresses hatred toward me and toward my race.

He was very aware of the anti-Semitism and disgusted by the anti-Semitism,

but it wasn't a specific kind of obstacle for him to appreciate Wagner.

And not only that, he sees Wagner's use of Germanic Teutonic myth as a model for black artists to use their own myths and modernize those myths and build something from them in contemporary art.

And so he explicitly says, you know, this is a model we should emulate.

And now things get even more strange when he ends up visiting the Bayreuth Festival in 1936.

Oh my God.

There's a couple of fascinating essays about this experience.

Again, he's he's very aware of anti-Semitism.

He says,

this is

sort of

one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my life, and I have seen much.

And at the same time, he continues to adore Wagner and continues to feel transported by what he experiences at the festival.

So it was obviously a long-time dream come true for him.

He ignores the Olympics.

It's very odd.

Du Bois was a complicated character,

and

his worship, his reverence for European models, sort of European art, you know, creates contradictions that he didn't necessarily sort of articulate or perceive from our point of view.

I mean, sometimes I think, well, who am I to really question, you know, W.E.D.

Du Bois?

You know, and there are other black intellectuals and black artists who also respond to Wagner, but Du Bois is the main one.

And that adds, you another layer, if you want to find it, to that.

I mean, right down to the fact that

black singers really lay hold of the Wagnerian corpus

pretty early and do really, which, of course, still remains

highly politicized.

I mean, that's the other thing.

It becomes, you know, seeing

a black woman singing Wagner is somehow differently politicized.

But then, you know, as Kira Thurman, I think, points out in her work, there is a

there's then also after 45, a real sort of move in Bayreuth to basically rely on African-American singers above all to kind of

yeah, to just kind of yada, yada, everything that happened before, right?

So that Days of Attenborough is to start leaning into it a little bit.

But

there's a long history before that, too.

Bringing Grace Bunbury, she writes wonderfully about Grace Bunbury and the complications of her being cast as Venus, as an embodiment of

rural sensuality, you know, in Tannhauser, also being cast as this is the new Bayreuth, the progressive Bayreuth, and all of that nasty stuff is in the past.

So, yeah, complicated moment, but there was some history to that in Bayreuth.

And one of the stories that I featured in my book, which I stumbled upon quite unexpectedly, was that of Laurana Aldridge, who was a contralto, the daughter of Ira Aldridge, towering black actor of the early mid-19th century, great Shakespearean, internationally famous.

Wagner seems to have seen him perform in Zurich.

And his daughter, daughter of Ira Aldrich and a Swedish woman, was a singer of quite extraordinary talent, it seems, a gorgeous contralto voice.

And she ended up auditioning for Gosma Wagner and being hired to sing the part of one of the Valkyries in the ring of 1896.

Not only that, she became quite close to the family.

She seems to have really especially befriended Ava Wagner, one of the daughters.

She seems to have lived at Vonfried, the Wagner house in Bayreuth, for some period.

And then she became ill.

She had a history of ill health, and she had to withdraw.

I found a letter from Cosmo Wagner to Laurona Aldrich responding to requests that she later made to come back and

sing.

And

Cosmo was saying, our personnel is already set for the season, but it's a quite polite and

sort of more than perfunctory letter that she writes.

So that's a remarkable story in itself.

If a Wagner went on to marry Houston Stuart Chamberlain,

one of the most disgusting figures in modern intellectual history, the prophet of Hitler.

And so what do we do with that?

You know,

to me, it's part of the eccentricity of Bayreuth in this period, that it

could, on the one hand, harbor all of these extreme views and at the same time seem to have no problem with a woman of mixed race coming to sing one of the Vauqueries.

It's just

this is the kind of thing that went on at Bayreuth.

I mean, you could have very left-wing people, you could have sort of feminists mixing there.

It was an atmosphere very welcoming to gay people,

gays and lesbians really thronged in in the the audience and so it was it was a complicated place and the complicated cosmo kind of was the sort of

created this peculiar mix

yeah i was thinking about you know it's obviously a situation or a experience that we can't relate to being you know a bunch of lefties or queer people hanging out on a let's say platform furnished by someone who's famously just an awful human being and probably actively plotting the downfall of democracy.

You know, we have, we have Twitter and

they have BioBlight, but this is something I think that we need to drive home for folks listening, that like, it's not just that the Wagner Klan had some right-wing views, as you point out, like

they were,

think tanks putting it too strongly, but like through the Bayerota Bletta, through their publication, like they, like...

Some of the most rebarbative stuff ever written, like when was either written in that house or published through it?

Or it's really, I mean, like, it's really quite striking.

It's not just a bunch of opinions.

It's that they kind of institutionalize it.

They were kind of a stalking horse for the extreme right.

And yeah, you mentioned Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who is someone that we'll definitely have to do an episode on at one point if I can ever stomach reading that book again.

But it's just, I mean, the worst.

Yeah, I mean, once Chamberlain arrives, it's all over.

And Cozuma is also retreating from the festival at that point.

And so her cosmopolitanism is receding.

Siegfried Wagner, the Sun, is taking charge.

He's gay, which is okay.

That's nice, but he's also very receptive to

the right wing and becomes an enthusiast of Hitler.

And yeah, the degree of

sort of the imprimature that the Wagner family gave to Hitler by embracing him in 1923, 1924, I think was

very important

for the broadening of Hitler's appeal, making him salonfeig,

as one says in German, sort of acceptable in the salons, sort of acceptable in kind of

upper society.

And so the Wagner's really assisted in that and in so many ways, sort of, you know, paved the way for Hitler.

And so then you sort of go back to, well, how much, so, okay, the Wagner family is deeply enmeshed with Hitler.

How much Wagner is actually

being used in all this?

How much responsibility does Wagner himself bear?

What does he contribute in this metamorphosis of Bayreuth into

this combination of sort of think tank, as you said, and kind of temple of Nazism?

And that's the most complicated question of all.

And the one that I just have never found a satisfactory answer to.

You know, there's so many aspects of Wagner's worldview, which are almost antithetical to Nazism.

He just didn't really believe in a sort of organized state.

He didn't believe that nations should have standing armies.

At the same time, there was sort of this vision of the political hero who could somehow

cure everything.

There is the anti-Semitism, of course.

There is the sort of quasi-vague socialism.

So there's many pieces that do point toward Nazism and there are many pieces that point away from it.

I think the particular kind of point that I made talking about Wagner and Nazism in my book, which I wasn't the first to make, was that the Nazis were quite selective in terms of how they used Wagner.

They didn't go too deeply into Wagner's own writings and own political views.

Chamberlain actually says something very interesting when he published The Foundations of the 19th Century, his horrifying book, sort of the manifesto of Aryan supremacy.

He was accused of plagiarizing from Wagner.

Cosmo and other members of the Wagner family were quite upset.

And he just sort of reused all of

Daddy's ideas.

And he said, no, no, no, no, no.

You know, Wagner,

I worship Wagner, one of the titanic figures of all cultural history, but as a political thinker,

no good, too inconsistent, always changing his mind about things, flitting from one fad to another.

You know,

he was a dilettante when it came to politics.

I think Chamberlain was actually, I hate to say it, somewhat right about that, at this one particular point.

There was something very dilettanteish, inconsistent, kind of ramshackle about Wagner's politics.

And the Nazis were

wary of quoting from it too much.

There's also the question of Wagner's writing style.

Is it a comprehensible writing style?

If you were quoting from it, you know,

could anyone sort of tell what he was saying uh so hitler himself did not ever quote directly or by name from wagner's anti-semitic writings uh

he had more reliable sources for for anti-semitic bile um than than wagner wagner was more effective as this god-fatherly figure of vague German power,

this embodiment of German supremacy.

This was how Wagner was ultimately useful in Nazi Germany.

And there were also Nazis who found him suspicious, untrustworthy.

This, the sort of the gay atmosphere at Bayreuth was noticed.

There were too many Jews in Bayreuth.

People would say there were questions, is there Jewish ancestry

in the Wagner family?

This was a rumor that Nietzsche actually started and the kept going around to the point where Winifred Wagner asked Himmler to try to put a stop to this talk,

which I find to be one of the most

darkly funny moments in the whole saga.

So, yeah, the sense that there's something slightly decadent and unhealthy about Bayreuth, not a good place for sort of young, pure German youth.

At the same time, you have Hitler sending the wounded soldiers to Bayreuth during the war to be healed by the power of Wagner's music.

It's a gigantic, ugly mess.

But yeah, as sort of an ideological tool,

the Nazis were rather careful in terms of how they handled Wagner.

But very

canny as well.

Yeah.

It's just a lot of contradictions.

I think that might be a good place to wrap up

with a big pile of the mess.

Sounds like Wagner in a nutshell.

Yeah, I mean, Wagner politics is such a...

Yeah, it's just in terms of like, where does Wagner, where do you put Wagner on our contemporary spectrum of right and left?

Where do you put him on the 19th century spectrum of

right and left?

And then the question of, well, even if we could figure out what Wagner himself actually

thought and where he belongs,

does that matter so much?

I mean, even if you become convinced that Wagner was a man of the left, the fact remains,

he was appropriated by the right and remains sort of a figure of the right.

Look at the Wagner group in Russia,

the

now deceased Wagner group.

And so the reception is as powerful as

the original phenomenon and can overwhelm the original.

And ultimately, so we make of Wagner what we will.

And it's just so impressive that after all this time, Wagner remains so controversial and so problematic.

He just has not receded into

the sort of the

sort of faded ranks of the sort of great figures of history.

There's something still so dangerous about Wagner.

That is so interesting in itself.

Still, something still very unsettled.

Yeah, and the most unsettling thing about it is probably how much he would have loved that.

And that we're completely playing his game.

And the more you hate Wagner and the more you rant against Wagner, that's just more publicity for the Wagner brand.

Well, on that note, thank you so much for talking us through the reception or these parts of it.

And thank you for the amazing book.

I really recommend that listeners whose appetite has been whetted by what was just said, check it out.

It's very readable.

It is not short.

So do

bring some time.

But the individual chapters are manageable.

I think one can come back to it.

And it's just, it's a, you know.

A short book on Wagner always seems to me a contradiction.

So I applaud you

for not giving us a Rheingold, but giving us the full Goethe Demerung.

And

thank you so much for joining us, Alex.

It was great to talk to you about this.

Thank you, Alex.

Bye.

Take care.

Thank you.

The Men with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lau.