In the prelude to Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, Alex Ross provides a summary of the many shifts in the meaning of the term “Wagnerian.” It emerged in the 1840s with “an ironic ring” to indicate the intense fandom inspired by the composer Richard Wagner, then only in his 30s. After Wagner died in 1883, it became “an artistic quality, an aesthetic tendency, a cultural symptom.” From there, it became shorthand for any work that was “grandiose, bombastic, overbearing, or, simply, very long.” Things that have been called “Wagnerian” include “Fight Club, the sound of ice breaking, the All-Ireland Gaelic football championship of 1956, … the roar of a Lamborghini V10.”
Not to be left out is Ross’s own exhaustive and exhausting book, which is less a biography of Wagner than a history of his influence on the careers of others. Wagnerism spans continents, crosses artistic mediums and ideological lines, and extends well into the 21st century. At nearly 800 pages, it is heavy enough to give someone a concussion. Like his subject, Ross, a music critic for the New Yorker, hardly goes in for half-measures.
Recent posterity has not been kind to Wagner. His name has become a common adjective, but his actual achievements have been obscured by the shadow of his reputation. More than his music, we remember his virulent anti-Semitism and Adolf Hitler’s insistence on linking Nazism to his prestige. Ross writes that “Wagner’s life assumes a tragic shape. An artist who had within his reach the kind of universality attained by Aeschylus and Shakespeare was effectively reduced to a cultural atrocity — the Muzak of genocide.” Even without that burden, Wagner’s actual corpus has been reduced to a few snippets, such as the “Ride of the Valkyries,” often used for comic effect in cartoons and films. Wagner is boogeyman or background music and nothing else.
Wagnerism is not a simple recovery mission. Indeed, Ross relies on the lesser arts of criticism, research and citation, to dredge up all the ways Wagner helped encourage the ugliest tendencies of 19th-century Europe. He associated with the racial theorists Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain and filled his writings, lectures, and magazine, the Bayreuther Blatter, with polemics against the Jewish people. But Ross also shows that Wagner was, like most artists, intellectually erratic and hard to categorize. At age 36, he participated in the 1849 uprising in Dresden alongside the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In the following decade, he became a disciple of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and corresponded with the poet Charles Baudelaire, who described his encounter with Wagner’s work as a “ravishment.” He enjoyed the friendship and financial support of Bavaria’s Ludwig II. After the unification of Germany, his music “signified the military might of the new German nation,” though the Prussian monarchs were wary of him.
Wagner’s compositions tended to provoke immoderate responses from some of modern history’s most significant figures. Theodor Herzl credited Tannhauser as his inspiration for writing The Jewish State. W.E.B. Du Bois “took Wagnerian myth as a model for a heroic new African-American spirit.” Emma Goldman suggested that “the elemental untrammeled spirit of Wagner’s music affects the women as the releasing force of the pent-up, stifled, and hidden emotions of their souls.” Heinrich Mann hated Wagner, while his brother Thomas spent decades defending him. “Wagner’s effect on neighboring arts was enormous,” Ross writes. But his impact on “the artists of silence — novelists, poets, and painters,” was “unprecedented, and it has not been equaled since, even in the popular arena.”
If the grandeur of influence is Ross’s primary theme, the pitfalls of fandom may be a secondary one. Wagner’s most notorious admirers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Hitler, play simultaneously significant and reduced roles in his survey. Nietzsche’s copious writings on Wagner, whether for or against him, were always “propaganda,” triumphal and obsessive one moment, sardonic and disillusioned the next. Ross concludes that Nietzsche “exposes the neurosis that his own excessive fandom has generated” and then largely drops the philosopher for the remainder of his narrative.
Hitler, in Ross’s words, “was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups much less leading them.” Hitler claimed to have had his life altered by Wagner when he saw Rienzi in 1905. A friend recalled Hitler telling him that after seeing the opera, he was “conjured up in magnificent, inspiring pictures his own future and that of his people.” Hitler’s obsession with Wagner was not unique among the early Nazis, but at the same time, his connection with the composer was complex, more a matter of “musical fandom” than of “ideological fanaticism.” Hitler was prone to vague rhapsodies that no Deafheaven fan could quibble with. “When I hear Wagner,” he said, “it seems to me like the rhythms of the primeval world.”
As expansive as Wagnerism is, Ross has managed to insulate himself from succumbing to the rhapsodies and dramas he describes. Ross proves that operatic criticism can be written in a medium volume. He remains loyal to the New Yorker voice of informed enthusiasm, processing often specialized and little-known cultural history that rarely stoops to obscurity. Free of the magazine’s concision, Ross trusts his readers with enough information to fill several intensive university seminars, though the results sometimes tax the attention span or send one deep into an internet wormhole.
Ross also takes a complex approach to the concept of genius. Wagnerism was not written to re-litigate Wagner’s undeniable greatness but to demonstrate its sensitivity to appropriation and mutation. “Wagner creates ambiguity and certitude in equal measure,” Ross writes. “Whatever is flitting through the subject’s mind is amplified and reinforced by a deep engagement with the music.” He shows how Wagner’s fingerprints can be detected on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or The Matrix and how the composer has inspired a diverse array of artists and thinkers despite his undeniable defects. But Ross also shows how Wagner’s uncompromising and mythical art could encourage people to translate its intensity into the world for their own purposes. Even as Ross tries to dispel some of the conceptions built up around Hitler and Wagner, we are still left with a Hitler who in 1920 called for “a dictator who is a genius,” which we are still living down a century later.
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
