Wagnerism
The LA Phil returns to the Bowl
Solo for Orchestra. The New Yorker, Sept. 28, 2020.
For Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the greatest public figures of our time, died today at the age of eighty-seven. Like many people, I am more or less speechless with sadness, but I wanted to offer up some music in her memory. In 2012, she wrote up a list of her favorite recordings, which I published on the New Yorker website. On it was Matthias Goerne's Schubert album An mein Herz, which she said she listened to at home while working. The recording of "Du bist die Ruh" embedded above appears on that disc. Ginsburg had a lifelong love of opera, and I got to witness her enthusiasm first hand at the Santa Fe Opera in 2013, while I was working on a profile of Joyce DiDonato. I know without having to ask that Joyce is one of dozens of opera singers befriended by Justice Ginsburg who are now devastated by her death — as is everyone who still believes in an American ideal. זיכרונה לברכה: may her memory be a blessing.
My mother contra Wagner
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.
Wagnerism publication day
Bea cautiously sniffs my latest creation.
Nightafternight playlist
— Ethel Smyth, The Prison; Sarah Brailey, Dashon Burton, James Blachly conducting the Experiential Orchestra (Chandos)
— Ives, Symphonies Nos. 1–4; Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Phil (DG, Aug. 28)
— Catherine Lamb, point/wave; Giacomo Fiore (Populist)
— Experiments in Living: Brahms, Schoenberg, Crawford, Cheung, Pluta, Charmaine Lee, George Lewis; Spektral Quartet (New Focus)
— Timothy McCormack, KARST; Klangforum Wien (Kairos)
— Rage Thormbones, RAGE THORMBONES (Carrier)
— Nathalie Joachim and Special Music School 10th Grade, Transformation (Kaufman Music Center)
— Du Yun, A Cockroach's Tarantella; JACK Quartet (Modern Sky)
— Bach-Ramsay, Goldberg Variations; Parker Ramsay, harp (King's College)
— Marc Yeats, The Anatomy of Melancholy and other piano pieces; Ian Pace (Prima Facie)
— Missy Mazzoli, Proving Up; John Moore, Michael Slattery, Talise Trevigne, Abigail Nims, Cree Carrico, Andrew Harris, Chris Rountree conducting the International Contemporary Ensemble (Pentatone)
— Beethoven, Complete Quartets; Quatuor Ebène (Erato)
Neue Unternehmungen
I am deeply honored that the venerable German firm of Rowohlt will publish two books of mine in late November. One is Die Welt nach Wagner, a translation of Wagnerism by Günter Kotzor and Gloria Buschor-Kotzor. The other is a translation of my second book, Listen to This, by Dieter Fuchs. My German is far from perfect, but it is good enough to be able to appreciate the extraordinary, quasi-übermenschlich efforts on the part of the translators, who faced some fairly intractable problems not only with my prose but with the mélange of sources on which I drew. Meine Dankbarkeit ist riesengroß und grenzenlos.
Poulenc's songs
Drunken Angels. The New Yorker, Aug. 17, 2020.
Audio: William Parker sings "Sanglots," from Banalités, with Dalton Baldwin at the piano, from EMI's Oeuvres complètes edition of Poulenc's works.
Second dispatch from the mystic abyss
Cyril Kuhn, "Wagner."
Where to start? With Wagnerism, the point of departure was clear from the outset: the man's death at the Palazzo Vendramin, in Venice, on February 13, 1883. There is nothing innovative in beginning a book with a major figure's demise, but the import of my three-thousand-word evocation of the worldwide wake for the composer is less retrospective than predictive: in the memorial ritual, the manifold and conflicting strains of Wagnerism, the phenomenon of Wagnerian influence, immediately become visible. Everyone agrees that he was significant, but no one remembers him, cherishes him, or condemns him in quite the same way. The so-called Meister dematerializes into competing projections of his work. The noise of his own funeral drowns him out.
From the narrative standpoint, it's useful to begin a large-scale book of this kind not with abstract claims but with an exemplary scene that enfolds certain themes and introduces certain characters. (I think of it as the Barbara Tuchman maneuver — the funeral of Edward VII at the outset of The Guns of August.) My first book, The Rest Is Noise, opens with the Austrian première of Salome in Graz in 1906 — an episode that allowed me to bring on stage Strauss, Mahler, Puccini, Schoenberg and his students, Adolf Hitler, and the protagonist of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Indeed, I chose that setting precisely because the great novelist had gone there before me. With Wagnerism, Mann is again directing behind the scenes. He was undoubtedly thinking of Wagner when he titled one of his most famous stories Death in Venice, even if the composer goes unnamed in that text. And so my Prelude — a nod to Wagner's favored way of beginning an opera — is called "Death in Venice."
As a shocked world receives the news of Wagner's decease, we see such diverse figures as Verdi, Mahler, Nietzsche, and Swinburne reacting to it. Sarah Butler Wister's vivid description of a memorial concert in Paris conveys the contentious atmosphere that surrounded the composer even as an attempted deification process was under way. Particularly important is the ominous scene that attended a students' memorial at the Sophiensaal in Vienna — one at which antisemitic rhetoric surfaced, as the Neue Freie Presse noted. That event allows me to introduce the figure of Theodor Herzl, who resigned from the Albia fraternity in protest of the anti-Jewish outbursts. That Herzl loved the music nonetheless confronts us with Wagnerism in its most complex form — the partly alienated fascination of those whom the composer would have regarded as an inferior racial other. W. E. B. Du Bois, a Wagner fanatic, appears in the introduction in the same guise.
From the Dunedin Evening Star.
The composition of the prelude required a synthesis of a hundred or more far-flung sources. Much of the research was done without having to leave my desk: mass digitization of newspapers and magazines has exposed the daily fabric of the past to a remarkable degree. In the course of one roaming search I found a Wagner sonnet from Dunedin, New Zealand — a sign of just how far the sorcerer's spell reached. Having noticed that late-nineteenth-century pilgrims made a habit of collecting souvenirs from Wagner's grave in Bayreuth, I found examples in the Isabella Stewart Gardner archive in Boston, the online holdings of the Österreichischer Nationalbibliothek, Éric Lacourcelle's biography of Emanuel Chabrier, and Upton Sinclair's novel King Midas. (In the last, a Wagner pebble disgusts a Brahmsian customs officer.) When it came to Wagner himself in Venice, I relied on the meticulous researches of John W. Barker, who has written not one but two entire books about the composer's relationship with the city, building on Henry Perl's Richard Wagner in Venezia.
Isabella Stewart Gardner's Wagner ivy.
Crucially, I was able to visit the Palazzo Vendramin itself in 2011, during an idyllic month when I was based the American Academy in Rome. Alessandra Althoff Pugliese of the Associazione Richard Wagner di Venezia gave me a tour of the Wagner quarters, During the same period, I blew a certain amount of money on a sea-facing balcony room at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria, in Sorrento, where Wagner stayed at the time of his final meeting with Nietzsche. This sort of Wagner tourism may not have been strictly necessary to the writing process, but it gave me a certain confidence. Furthermore, various characters in my story had themselves gone on such journeys. Both William Butler Yeats and Andrei Bely went to the trouble of visiting the Grand Hotel et de Palmes, in Palermo, where the score of Parsifal was finished. When Alain Locke took the young Langston Hughes on a tour of Venice, he included stops at the Palazzo Giustiniani, where Wagner worked on Tristan, and the Palazzo Vendramin.
The author's most Wagnerian moment, in Sorrento.
As I traveled for The New Yorker over the past decade, I was constantly on the Wagnerian prowl. Visiting museums in various cities, I gravitated toward the Symbolist galleries, where something Wagnerish almost invariably lurked. I toured German Wagner cities — Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, and, of course, Bayreuth — and stopped at the sacred-kitsch sites of Ludwig II in Bavaria, including the Starnbergersee, where his body was found. (It is no accident that the Starnbergersee shows up in The Waste Land, a poem wet with Wagnerian allusion.) I went to the Goetheanum in Dornach, which Rudolf Steiner described as a second Bayreuth. And I made several visits to the Wagner sites in Lucerne and Zurich. If Wagnerism has a spiritual home, it is in Zurich, where James Joyce and Thomas Mann, two skeptical Wagnerians, lie buried a few miles from each other. Zurich also happens to be the native town of my friend and German tutor Cyril Kuhn, who was of inestimable help in the final stages of the book. His linotype of Wagner appears at the top of the post.
Bruckner's Wagner ivy
Three leaves of ivy that Bruckner collected from Wagner's grave in 1884. From the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
