https://thebaffler.com/salvos/wagnermania-shields
INTRO: (Nathan Shields): When the revolution came to Dresden in 1849, Richard Wagner greeted it with unhinged ecstasy. “Whatever stands, must fall,” the thirty-five-year-old court conductor wrote that April in the radical periodical Volksblätter. “I will break the power of the mighty, of law, of property . . . I will destroy all rulership of one over other.” As Dresden’s radicals rose up in May, Wagner swung into action, acting as a lookout and helping secure weapons. Accompanying him in these duties was the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, later cited by George Bernard Shaw as the model for Siegfried, anarchic Übermensch of the Ring cycle.
In the wake of the uprising’s suppression, Wagner evaded a probable death sentence by fleeing to Switzerland, where he lived in exile for a decade—composing, polemicizing, and sponging off wealthy acquaintances. There he embarked on the sixteen-hour operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, at once timeless mythic cosmology and biting commentary on unfolding political events. The Ring cycle narrates the history of the world from the primal fall, through the age of the gods, to the apocalyptic conflagration that will one day consume them. But its primal fall is a transparent allegory for the birth of capitalism; its gods are the European aristocracy; and its apocalypse is the revolution Wagner gleefully imagines sweeping them away.
Twenty-five years later, Wagner cut a very different figure. By 1874, when he completed the Ring, the former exile was back home in Germany, a celebrity nicknamed “the Meister” for his oracular authority. That year he moved into a villa in the provincial town of Bayreuth, where King Ludwig II of Bavaria funded a festival dedicated entirely to his work. Wagner envisioned the new theater there—with its egalitarian seating arrangement, concealed orchestra pit, and immersive dim lighting—as a democratic temple of art, open to anyone willing to make the pilgrimage. King Ludwig and Kaiser Wilhelm I were in attendance when Bayreuth opened in 1876, with a premiere of the completed Ring. By the time Wagner died in 1883, it had become a luxury destination for the upper classes he’d once fantasized about sending to the tumbrils.
The contradictions that marked Wagner’s life only deepened after his death. For French artists from Baudelaire onward, he was the apostle of a seemingly apolitical aestheticism, of l’art pour l’art; to Germans, a nationalist figurehead. At the turn of the century, he was idolized by both the decadent Italian novelist (and future proto-fascist politician) Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Three decades later, his music introduced the Nuremberg Rallies.
It is this last Wagner that we know best, or think we do. He has gone down in popular history as a raging anti-Semite (true) and Hitler’s favorite composer (not entirely true); his music is thought to have provided the soundtrack for the death camps (in fact, it was mostly light waltzes and operetta). Wagner’s role in the iconography of German imperialism was real enough. When Hindenburg claimed Germany was stabbed in the back by the treaty of Versailles, he was invoking Siegfried’s assassination by the villainous half-breed Hagen. And when Hitler died, Siegfried’s funeral march was played to commemorate him. But Wagner was less popular in Nazi Germany than this might suggest, and his appeal was more complex. For one thing, Hitler’s Wagnermania was not shared by rank-and-file Nazis, who scalped the opera tickets he gave them. Besides, Siegfried’s funeral march had first been played to mark Lenin’s death. In 1933, at the dawn of the Third Reich, Thomas Mann could still find in Wagner the spirit of a very different Germany than Hitler’s. Wagner’s real meaning, Mann insisted, was “entirely revolutionary.” He would “assuredly be branded a Kultur-Bolshevist today.”
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? This is the question that Alex Ross sets out to answer in his new book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Formally, Wagnerism is a reception history... (MORE)
INTRO: (Nathan Shields): When the revolution came to Dresden in 1849, Richard Wagner greeted it with unhinged ecstasy. “Whatever stands, must fall,” the thirty-five-year-old court conductor wrote that April in the radical periodical Volksblätter. “I will break the power of the mighty, of law, of property . . . I will destroy all rulership of one over other.” As Dresden’s radicals rose up in May, Wagner swung into action, acting as a lookout and helping secure weapons. Accompanying him in these duties was the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, later cited by George Bernard Shaw as the model for Siegfried, anarchic Übermensch of the Ring cycle.
In the wake of the uprising’s suppression, Wagner evaded a probable death sentence by fleeing to Switzerland, where he lived in exile for a decade—composing, polemicizing, and sponging off wealthy acquaintances. There he embarked on the sixteen-hour operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, at once timeless mythic cosmology and biting commentary on unfolding political events. The Ring cycle narrates the history of the world from the primal fall, through the age of the gods, to the apocalyptic conflagration that will one day consume them. But its primal fall is a transparent allegory for the birth of capitalism; its gods are the European aristocracy; and its apocalypse is the revolution Wagner gleefully imagines sweeping them away.
Twenty-five years later, Wagner cut a very different figure. By 1874, when he completed the Ring, the former exile was back home in Germany, a celebrity nicknamed “the Meister” for his oracular authority. That year he moved into a villa in the provincial town of Bayreuth, where King Ludwig II of Bavaria funded a festival dedicated entirely to his work. Wagner envisioned the new theater there—with its egalitarian seating arrangement, concealed orchestra pit, and immersive dim lighting—as a democratic temple of art, open to anyone willing to make the pilgrimage. King Ludwig and Kaiser Wilhelm I were in attendance when Bayreuth opened in 1876, with a premiere of the completed Ring. By the time Wagner died in 1883, it had become a luxury destination for the upper classes he’d once fantasized about sending to the tumbrils.
The contradictions that marked Wagner’s life only deepened after his death. For French artists from Baudelaire onward, he was the apostle of a seemingly apolitical aestheticism, of l’art pour l’art; to Germans, a nationalist figurehead. At the turn of the century, he was idolized by both the decadent Italian novelist (and future proto-fascist politician) Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Three decades later, his music introduced the Nuremberg Rallies.
It is this last Wagner that we know best, or think we do. He has gone down in popular history as a raging anti-Semite (true) and Hitler’s favorite composer (not entirely true); his music is thought to have provided the soundtrack for the death camps (in fact, it was mostly light waltzes and operetta). Wagner’s role in the iconography of German imperialism was real enough. When Hindenburg claimed Germany was stabbed in the back by the treaty of Versailles, he was invoking Siegfried’s assassination by the villainous half-breed Hagen. And when Hitler died, Siegfried’s funeral march was played to commemorate him. But Wagner was less popular in Nazi Germany than this might suggest, and his appeal was more complex. For one thing, Hitler’s Wagnermania was not shared by rank-and-file Nazis, who scalped the opera tickets he gave them. Besides, Siegfried’s funeral march had first been played to mark Lenin’s death. In 1933, at the dawn of the Third Reich, Thomas Mann could still find in Wagner the spirit of a very different Germany than Hitler’s. Wagner’s real meaning, Mann insisted, was “entirely revolutionary.” He would “assuredly be branded a Kultur-Bolshevist today.”
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? This is the question that Alex Ross sets out to answer in his new book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Formally, Wagnerism is a reception history... (MORE)