Ahead of his highly anticipated class on the surprising cultural afterlife of the German composer, New Yorker music critic and author of the acclaimed new book Wagnerism talked to us about why Wagner is worth our attention, his own complicated feelings about Wagner’s music, and the music he’s missed most during the pandemic.
In Wagnerism, you contend that Richard Wagner is the most widely influential composer in history. This might sound like a bold claim to some music lovers, but – at the risk of putting it too mildly – you've done the work to back it up. Why is Wagner more influential than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven?
In musical terms, I don’t think that Wagner was any more influential than various other composers, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. But when you consider his effect on the world outside music – literature, painting, architecture, dance, film, philosophy, and, above all, politics – there has never been anything quite like it in history. Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, George Eliot, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Kandinsky, Eisenstein, Philip K. Dick, Anselm Kiefer – all registered his impact. Note that I say, “For better or worse, he was the most widely influentialdd…” In the political realm this influence took a distinctly destructive form, with Wagner’s effect on Hitler and the culture of Nazi Germany.
In your course on Wagner for 92Y, you will be discussing that surprising afterlife in politics, literature, painting, and film. Your writing and thinking often take this distinctively wide-angle view – using music as a springboard into an examination of history and culture that leaves us far from where we began as casual listeners. In your hands, it often seems that music becomes a way to understand just about everything. Can you tell us a bit about this approach from your perspective as both a cultural critic and someone who simply loves listening to – and thinking about – music?
From the very beginning of my writing career, I have been interested in how music intersects with other forms of culture and with the society around it. I grew up immersed in classical music, but I was always passionately devoted to literature, history, the visual arts, and various other pursuits, and I never felt that music existed in some sealed-off separate realm. I have never understood that urge to treat music as some sort of ethereal emanation, floating above history. Nothing created by our species is going to escape the driving impulses of our species, including the darkest ones. I was interested in writing this book not because I love Wagner’s music more than any other – I’ve had a very ambivalent relationship with it over the years – but because he provides the ultimate case study in that inevitable entanglement of music and society.
Let’s address the elephant in the room that you consider so thoughtfully in your writing: many people are averse to Wagner because of his notorious, outspoken anti-Semitism during his life, and his music’s disturbing associations with Nazi Germany. Why do you think people who feel this way should consider listening to and thinking about his music right now?
I don’t believe that anyone should listen to Wagner, particularly if they are disinclined to. My book is a history of an event, this phenomenon of Wagnerism; it’s not any kind of brief on behalf of Wagner. I very much wanted to avoid apologizing for Wagner, but also don’t want to demonize him. His antisemitism was ferociously ugly, and it anticipated even more virulent strains. But his politics were not fascist or totalitarian. He tended often toward anarchism, and at the end of his life he denounced the militarized German state. Furthermore, the kinds of passionate engagements I describe in this book, including those of the great African American thinker W.E.B. Du Bois and the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, shows us that art can affect spectators in unexpected ways, even in ways that contradict its apparent spirit. We’ll be talking about the rich, complex tradition of Jewish Wagnerism, and how some Jewish listeners felt that the best way to take revenge on Wagner was not to reject him but to embrace him on their own terms. There are Jewish Wagnerians today who believe that the equation of Wagner and Nazism is a dark kind of victory for Hitler: he should not be allowed to own Wagner for all eternity.
Who are two living composers who you think push the boundaries of the art form in exciting ways? Who are two artists outside of music – writers, filmmakers, visual artists, etc. – who are doing the same?
Two composers whose work excites me deeply are the composer/singer Kate Soper, who writes works that muse philosophically on the very nature of what music is, and Tyshawn Sorey, who draws on classical music traditions as well as on avant-garde improvisation, while communicating in his own absolutely individual voice. Outside of music, I cherish the work of Garth Greenwell, who has found a radically lyrical voice for writing about self and sexuality, and Mona Hatoum, whose installations capture so piercingly the damaged, fraught landscape of the political and ecological world we have made for ourselves.
If you could pick any piece of music to hear live right now – by anyone, anywhere – what would it be? Why?
I wish I could hear Brahms’s infinitely consoling German Requiem. Choral music is the most dangerous way to make music in the Covid era, and so massed choruses are a long way off, at least in a conventional indoor space. But Brahms wrote some of the greatest mourning music in the repertory, and he conceived humanity as a true collective sense – German was his language, yet his sense of empathy was universal. Unlike Wagner’s, alas.