On “Wagnerism” by Alex Ross

In this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” I review Alex Ross’s important new book “Wagnerism.” I write in part:

Great works of art are so powerfully imagined that their intent and expression mold to changing human circumstances. But the operas of Richard Wagner are arguably unique in this regard: No other creative genius in the Western canon so unerringly holds up a mirror to time and place. . . . Thomas Mann’s claim that Wagner “was probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art” cannot be dismissed as hyperbole.

Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music” takes up Wagner’s protean impact with unprecedented scope. In other writers’ accounts, Wagnerism ends with World War I in Europe and America and, slightly later, in Soviet Russia . . .  But in Mr. Ross’s wide-ranging chronicle, Wagner’s influence outside the world of music keeps on going . . . No previous writer has so copiously chronicled the sheer ubiquity of Wagner in important novels, poems and paintings. The result is an indispensable work of cultural history, offering both a comprehensive resource and a bravura narrative.

While the existing Wagner literature is vast and defies generalization, the best-known studies range from passionate advocacy to equally impassioned denunciation. Mr. Ross, who came late to Wagner, is a centrist—a circumspect, at times even diffident, Wagnerite. He writes: “The behemoth whispers a different secret in each listener’s ear.” Mr. Ross . . . is able to become many listeners. Relatedly, there are limits to his degree of engagement—and Wagner is about commitment, however dangerous or misguided. These limits frame and modulate Mr. Ross’s extraordinary book. . . . 

The author upon whom Mr. Ross lavishes the most attention is Willa Cather, whose Wagnerism—in her life as in her fiction—was an explicit leitmotif. . . . Cather’s achievement, [he] summarizes, “was to transpose Wagnerism into an earthier, more generous key. She offered grandeur without grandiosity, heroism without egoism, myth without mythology. Brünnhilde stays on her mountain crag, hailing the sun: no man breaks the ring of fire.” 

But is that all? In the early 20th century, most American Wagnerites were women, for whom Wagner was an antidote to lives marginalized in a man’s world of work and money. And so it was with Cather, whose most insightful Wagner commentary diagnoses Kundry, in “Parsifal.” One of Wagner’s most original creations, Kundry oscillates between extremes of submission and domination. Cather’s Kundry, at the Met, was Olive Fremstad, a Wagner soprano, Callas-like in veracity and intensity, with whom Cather became friends. Of Fremstad’s Kundry, Cather writes that it “is a summary of the history of womankind. [Wagner] sees in her an instrument of temptation, of salvation, and of service; but always an instrument, a thing driven and employed. . . . She cannot possibly be at peace with herself. . . . A driven creature, [she is] made for purposes eternally contradictory.”

Mr. Ross cites this commentary without comment. But read Cather, and read about Fremstad (who twice married abortively, identified with Ibsen’s women and chopped wood in Scandinavian forests), and it all fits together. Wagner, for Willa Cather, was more than an inspirational artistic model: He was a therapist, a medium for self-understanding and empowerment. 

This dimension of the Wagner experience is equally inescapable in considering the vexed topic of Wagner and the Jews. . . .

The peculiar intensity of affinity Wagner could arouse in Jews was perhaps most notably evinced by Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere of “Parsifal” at Bayreuth. To his father, a rabbi, Levi wrote: “The most beautiful thing that I have experienced in my life is that it was granted to me to come close to such a man, and I thank God daily for this.” 

Or take the case of Gustav Mahler, who, as Mr. Ross observes, once argued that the devious dwarf Mime, in “Siegfried,” was “intended by Wagner as a persiflage of a Jew.” Mahler then added: “I know of only one Mime, and that is me.” There is, however, more to this aside. Mahler also said: “No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits . . . the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested; but for God’s sake it must not be exaggerated and overdone. . . . You wouldn’t believe what there is in that part, nor what I could make of it.” For Mahler, Wagner exquisitely understood the Jew in Mime.

Mr. Ross ventures in a useful direction in considering the “special appeal” of “Lohengrin” for Jewish listeners: “The opera romanticizes the figure of the itinerant outsider who stands apart from the ‘normal’ community, much as many Jews perceived themselves within German society.” 

As a lifelong Jewish Wagnerite, I would go the distance: Wagner is the supreme poet of homelessness, the master musical portraitist of marginality. He is Siegmund, an orphan of ambiguous parentage, who exclaims: “I am always unpopular. . . . Misery is all I know.” He is Wotan and Tristan, who drop out. He is Hans Sachs, a lonely philosopher of pessimism. He is the cerebral Loge, whose irony is quick and irredeemable. As for Wagner himself, he suspected his actual father to have been Jewish. He fled the law as a political exile. He was always in debt. His enemies were numerous and powerful. His health was poor. 

That he was himself a paradigmatic outsider explains many of the most impassioned, most therapeutic manifestations of Wagnerism, beginning with his appeal to gays and women, to whom he seemed, as to so many Jews, “one of us.” And so he is also Parsifal, who may be read as androgynous; or Senta, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, driven to flout convention because of oppressive circumstances—because of a brutish husband or clueless father. . . .