The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Composer Richard Wagner and the Birth of the Movies

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

The German composer Richard Wagner had an enormous influence not only on modern music but on artists of all stripes, and on political culture as well. His use of folkloric material to create modern epics won him the admiration of thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, and made him popular in Hollywood since the birth of film. Alex Ross, whose new book is called “Wagnerism,” tells David Remnick that Du Bois “might have seen ‘Black Panther’ as a kind of Wagnerian project.” And yet Wagner’s music was used to heroically represent the Ku Klux Klan in “The Birth of a Nation.” In fact, the composer’s strident anti-Semitism fed into the rise of Nazism in Germany. The many aspects of Wagner’s influence were often contradictory. “So much baggage arrives with him,” Ross says, but “we aren’t necessarily imprisoned by what the man himself thought.” The composer himself “starts to disappear” as his influence diffuses through society. “He becomes a mirror for what other people are thinking and feeling. And we have that right, we have that power with art. If there’s something about it we reject, we can—without forgetting or overlooking that darker aspect—remake it in our own image.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. With just a few exceptions, I don't think there's anything in classical music that's more familiar in Ricard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries from his opera, The Valkyrie. That theme has appeared in movies as various as Birth of a Nation, an apocalypse now, and even a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And you may not have even realized that this was from Wagner, too. The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross has written some amazing books about modern music, starting with The Rest is Noise, and his new book is called Wagnerism.

It's about the long shadow that the composer cast not just in music, but over much of the culture of the 20th century. Alex's book opens just as Wagner dies, and he quotes from the obituaries which were effusive, to say the least. 1883. Deceased yesterday in our city was the musical genius of Germany. Ricardo Wagner is dead. How many memories crowd upon our mind? The bold struggles that he sustained, the sublime victories that he achieved,

the art that he created, the bitter enemies he had, the fanatical partisans that idolized him as a god, the crowned kings who knelt down before him. No more. A corpse. But from him rises a voice that will not die, and perhaps will become in time more powerful, more hearken to, more beloved.

He was a man of the theater, loved the stage, loved the flamboyance and the aliveness of the stage. And everything emanated from that. The music, the text, the planning, directing the stage. It all comes back to putting on a show. Well, your book is not a biography, strictly speaking of Wagner. It's called Wagnerism. And the idea is that more than anyone in what we might call classical music, more than Bach, more than Beethoven or Mozart, Wagner has been a colossal influence on all of culture. How can you even begin to sketch the range of his influence? He had a huge influence on music, not necessarily more so than Monteverdi or Bach or Beethoven. And the question of his influence on, music was something that I just completely put aside in this book, because that's a book or many books in itself. But in terms of how he affected artists and writers, architects, dancers, choreographers, theater theorists, intellectuals, philosophers, it was enormous. And by the turn

of the last century, this fabulous, decadent period of the Fand de Siacla, if you were a young artist or really kind of any cultured young person at that time, you have to be a young person. You had to have some relationship with Wagner. You could worship him, you could reject him, you could do whatever else you wanted with him, but you had to have a stance. 1884. There was, in some hearers, real antipathy to the composer, in others, animosity to him as a German, and these prejudices struggled fiercely against the dominating power of the music and the rapturous enthusiasm of the majority. If you grew up in the 60s, you sort of had to have some relationship with the Beatles or Bob Dylan. It was just absolutely universal.

So Wagner was a horrendous anti-Semite. Why hasn't he been, I hate to use the phrase, canceled for those beliefs? Well, people have been trying to cancel Wagner since the 1850s with that success. He was incredibly controversial from the start, and his anti-Semitism became a point of contention very early on. It's very complicated. It's actually somewhat difficult to pin him down on this question, which it seems like one of the very simple, straightforward things about him. He was anti-Semitic. He had profound problems with Jewish people, and he said so at nauseating length. But in terms of his influence on those who came after him, on the nationalists and the anti-Semites, and eventually Hitler, there are some gaps. So Wagner certainly played a role in popularizing.

Semitism, but in terms of how he affected the rest of the development of German politics, that's a much tougher question, and there's still a lot of debate over that. So when we think of Wagner as the theme music of the fascism to come, how mistaken is that? It is, it is partly mistaken. You know, the thing with Wagner is that there's a temptation to paint the devil's horns on him and sort of make him out to be the bogey man. And there are definitely problems with that. And, you know, there are definitely problems with that view, I think to some extent it lets everyone else off the hook. There were many other forces that went into the roots of Nazi ideology. But you can imagine that some people would find these distinctions, maybe a distinctions

without a difference. When you would see audiences all over the world, particularly in New York and in Israel and other places, objecting to the performance of Wagner's music on this basis, How do you react? I'm not going to argue with anyone who finds Wagner reprehensible and doesn't want to listen to him. It's not the purpose of this book to kind of seduce people into listening to Wagner. But I do think we can get carried away with this demonization of Wagner and sort of giving him an outsized role. You know, there are other sides of Wagner that pointed in a very different political direction. I think this is what is so often forgotten.

is Wagner's influence on the left, on social Democrats in Germany and Austria and other countries, on communists. He was a figure of some importance in early Bolshevik Russia as a kind of hero of the proletarian theater. He influenced and excited feminists and early gay rights activists. W. E. B. Du Bois was an enormous fan of Wagner, and there were so. several other African Americans of the late 19th century, early 20th century, who loved Wagner. Forgive me, but why in particular did he appeal to Du Bois and various African-American artists and political figures? Du Bois saw this exploitation of a mythic past for modern ends as a model, actually, for African-American artists. He thought, well, our artists can do the same thing

and reaching back to myth and making these old stories come alive. 1936. It is as though some one of us chose out of the wealth of African folklore, a body of poetic material, and with music, scene, and action, retold for mankind the suffering and triumphs and defeats of a people. You might have seen Black Panther, the film, as a kind of Wagnerian enterprise, because that is exactly what that film is doing. And it's a sign that that happens over and over again with these people of very different backgrounds.

Something happens when they listen to Wagner and they get these what I call glimpses of future greatness, of sort of future possibility. That's Alex Ross. His new book is Wagnerism and will continue in a moment. You write about something called the Wagner spell, which is essentially the way his music captivated listeners of his day. What was so enchanting about Wagner? What was the transcendent quality there,

and when is it captured in modern times? Wagner's way with the orchestra was astounding, and he had a way of creating a kind of orchestral soundscape where the fact that you were listening to music, the fact that you were watching instrumentalists, produced sound seemed to kind of disappear, and the sound was kind of emanating out of the walls. And one of my favorite moments is at the beginning of Parcifal, where there's this shimmer of sound and arpeggios and the strings and murmuring winds, and then this solo line, which is

a trumpet and oboes. This sounds so uncannily familiar, and not just from listening to a song. it on a recording, but it's as if you've been in more than one film and heard this music quoted in some way or another, haven't you? Oh, absolutely. You've heard the prelude of Parsifal in Terence Malik's films and Werner Herzog, sort of going back to the early days of silent film. People were reaching toward Wagner because of that spell and also because of the use of light motifs, these sort of identifying tags

for different characters in different situations. It was a great crutch in early film history if horses are galloping across the screen have the movie house pianists play The Ride of the Valkyries, you know? And so Wagner was part

of the vocabulary of Hollywood from the very beginning and was working... With Ride of the Valkyries, you hear it in this terrifying scene in birth of a nation, why do you suppose the filmmakers scored that with Wagner? Right. It was terribly ominous that you have the Rite of the Vauqueries playing with the triumphant ride of the Ku Klux Klan at the climax of this horrendously racist movie, which was so enormously popular in its day and was really one of the founding documents of Hollywood cinema.

So why Wagner in that scene? My feeling is probably that this was just already part of the common practice to have the Rite of the Valkyries playing with horse scenes. and the Ku Klux Klan were there on their horses. So there may not have been a kind of grand design behind it. But what jumped out to me is that in the late 19th century, people love this music. It was hugely popular, but it tended not to be associated with this kind of military scene.

The right of the Vakraries is about these powerful women sailing through the air on their horses. and it was actually sometimes associated specifically with a kind of feminist message. Some feminist writers found the spectacle of Wagner's Valkyries inspiring. And then Hollywood comes along and makes the writer of the Valkyrie's male action music. And that's an interesting shift, and I think it has a lot more to do with Hollywood than with Vagner. Alex, you've now finished a long process, years and years of immersion in Vagrises. and all the culture that comes out of Wagner.

And part of what comes with Wagner is the sheer volume of it, the length of it, the what we call Zitzflesh, the number of hours sitting down listening to a single opera or performance. Will you happily go back to the opera house and listen to another four, five, six hour long opera, or are you Wagnered out?

I'm not, actually. People have asked me that, and I haven't gotten sick of him. the whole process of the book was an incredibly rich experience for me. I mean, of course, I spent some time, much time, listening to the music itself, but much more it was about immersing myself in this vast body of literature and art that was in some way or another affected by Wagner. It was just an incredibly rich experience.

And I think with a figure like Wagner, who so much baggage arrives with him, we aren't necessarily imprisoned by what the man himself thought. We aren't forced to experience Wagner the way he might have wanted us to or the way people experienced him in the past. You know, we are free to make him our own and this applies to every kind of art, I think,

and we can just place it in a completely new context and find a new understanding for it. And that ultimately is what this book is about. Wagner, in a curious way, start to disappear as this book goes on. He sort of transforms into other people. He becomes a mirror for what other people are thinking and feeling. And we have that right. I think we have that power with art.

If there's something about it, we reject. We can, without forgetting, without overlooking, that darker aspect, we can remake it in our own image and put it to new use. My friend and colleague Alex Ross, thank you. The book is Vagher we quiet. I'm hunting rabbits. The book is Wagnerism. I can't recommend it highly enough.

It's extraordinary. Kill the rabbit. Kill the rabbit. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour this week. Kill the Wabbit. And I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios

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