“As an American ashamed of my country’s recent conduct on the international stage, I reflected that much devastation has been visited on the world since May 1945, and that very little of it has emanated from Germany. The endlessly relitigated case of Wagner makes wonder about the less fashionable question of how popular culture has participated in the politics and economics of American hegemony”
Alex Ross, page 658, “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music”
Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” is a protest song. It’s an attack on war and imperialism from the point of view of one its’ victims: an ordinary joe shipped off to kill the oppressed and then thrown aside when he gets back home.
“Born in the USA” (the original recording) is also a fist pumping, chest beating, celebration that you can bawl your head off to in a huge room. It’s the “Star Spangled Banner” on steroids. What’s that exciting noise just before the fade? Gunfire? A rocket attack? A building collapsing?
So when Alex Ross asserts that Wagner’s Ring Cycle is an attack on lust for power and gold, I’ll take his word for it. But The Ring also gives its audience the opportunity to celebrate and vicariously experience that violence, lust and destruction. At a safe distance.
But Bruce Springsteen is a liberal, and a democrat with a small and a capital D. Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite, and an advocate of nationalism and revolution.
I don’t think we should judge the art of the past by the moral standards of the present. But Wagner’s racism and politics were well known, and condemned when he was alive.
Bruce is the boss. Your colleague, your co-worker, possibly even your friend.
Wagner is the Master. You can only be a slave to a master. Although there’s always a transgressive thrill in pretending to be a slave.
“Wagnerism” Alex Ross’s mammoth survey of Wagner’s influence on Western art and culture is, as you would expect from the author of the brilliant “The Rest is Noise”, rich with detail and accessible. It’s also disturbing and terrifying.
Like any decent human being would be, Ross is appalled by the many of the things he uncovers. But his ambiguous regard for Wagner’s music occasionally seems to blind him to some of the ironies in his own prose.
For example this quote on page 515:
“Many leading historians of the Third Reich are disinclined to take him (Hitler) at his word, and doubt that Wagner played a significant role in the dictator’s political development.”
Is followed on page 530 by this:
‘At the end of September 1923, Hitler arrived at Beyruth to speak at a “German Day” gathering. There… …he affirmed that the National Socialist Movement was “anchored in the works of Richard Wagner”‘
Clearly, Adolf Hitler is not a reliable expert on the Third Reich.
Similarly when at the very end of the book, Ross reports Donald Trump’s negative reaction to a performance of the Ring, it seems like he’s trying to get Wagner’s music off the hook. The point is not whether Trump likes Wagner, but whether Trump is like Wagner.
Let’s see what they have in common.
Good at building a personal brand – check.
Good at merchandising that brand – check
Trangressive – trashes norms of behaviour, breaks the rules, focuses on taboo subjects – check
Repeats the same things over and over (like a leitmotiv?) until his audience is transported – check
Human beings are very good at imagining their own destruction. How many Hollywood movies have you seen where you can enjoy the White House going up in flames? But humans also seem very bad at doing anything practical about avoiding that destruction.
This book provokes the thought that the destructive impulses captured in Wagner’s music are not just common in all humans, but are, at this point, out of control in both culture and politics.
Perhaps Wagner’s music marks the point where Western culture started to get too big, too large, too total, too global, too much. But in a period where the planet might go down in a flaming Gotterdammerung and an exTV presenter nearly brought down the US Government by encouraging an armed mob to riot, some of whom looked like extras from a bad opera, maybe we need to think harder about the consequences of our creative impulses and choices.
Before reading this book my attitude to Wagner’s music was one of hostile ignorance. Now I’m less ignorant. And a lot more hostile.
Nick Reynolds At Work 