With my parents and David Remnick at the Rest Is Noise book party, 2007.
Tonight I will be speaking with my friend and colleague Anne Midgette at a virtual event hosted by Politics and Prose, the great DC-area bookstore. It will be a bittersweet occasion, since my previous appearances at Politics and Prose were rather joyous events, with my family and several of my high-school teachers in attendance. My mom died in February, and I can't help thinking about her today. I confess that she was always a little hesitant about my plan to write a book about Wagner and Wagnerism, though she enthusiastically followed the project, as she did everything I undertook. When she was volunteering for the Smithsonian's Steinway Diary project, she would send me snippets of Wagneriana from late-19th-century America, and tracked down a Theodore Thomas reference that had eluded me. But Wagner was not a composer she listened to willingly, or at all. There were no Wagner records in the home growing up. I don't remember any specific objection being voiced against him, simply a general feeling that he was suspect. I think this is still fairly common with many people who have been schooled in the "strict" classical tradition, the Bach-to-Brahms lineage. Christoph von Dohnányi once told me that his mother had the same attitude. When he conducted Wagner, she would say, "I only come because you do it!" I recall my mom approvingly reading my 1998 New Yorker article about Wagner, which was more antagonistic than my current take. Nonetheless, she would have been thrilled to have the finished book in her hands. Her reverence for books was absolute, and the fact that her son had become a writer of books gave her, I think, no end of pleasure.
