00:01:39.580And we get into, especially in this episode, what happened with Wagner's legacy and how his often really politically capacious and contradictory work was interpreted and fought over after he died.
00:01:52.340when people were competing over his legacy.
00:03:57.520And this thing called Wagnerism really dates back to the early 1860s.
00:04:03.800I mean, there were stirrings of it even before,
00:04:06.060But in the early 1860s, Charles Baudelaire went to see a series of concerts that Wagner did in Paris and was completely enraptured and transported by the music and sort of fell under the spell and set about working on this essay,
00:04:25.620which in the end was published only after the huge scandal that took place around Wagner's
00:04:31.700Tannhäuser, the Paris Opera in 1861. Great kind of chaotic moments, many chaotic moments
00:04:38.520in Wagner history. And he came up with this essay, which, you know, on the one hand is
00:04:44.860the response of a fan almost abasing himself before this phenomenon, declaring that he should
00:04:52.240have been annihilated by the force of the personality of music. But at the same time,
00:04:59.300he's really taking possession of Wagner, translating Wagner into his own language,
00:05:05.660into his own concerns. So the Wagner that emerges in that essay, Richard Wagner and
00:05:10.800Tannhäuser in Paris, is not the Wagner of the biography and of Wagner's own interpretations
00:05:21.700of his works. It really is an appropriation. And so at this moment begins this pattern of
00:05:30.360artists, but also thinkers, philosophers, politicians, just sort of ordinary people
00:05:36.160responding to Wagner in such a personal way that the music and the meaning of the music is
00:05:42.820transformed and just translated into a completely new context. So you have this French Wagner,
00:05:48.980The symbolist Wagner, very much about dream worlds and the unconscious and sort of satanic resonances and outre sexuality and sort of all of this welling up.0.76
00:06:03.340And you had a sort of Victorian Wagner and an American kind of heroic Wagner and various German Wagnerisms and Italian Wagnerisms.
00:06:14.020And so it goes on and on. And at the heart of my book is just a string of artists who very often had a tense push and pull relationship with Wagner. And, you know, in the end, it's a classic study of the anxiety of influence or of Agon, as Nietzsche called it, the younger artist contesting with the older one and asserting himself against that influence as took place.
00:06:41.160It's obviously the case of Wagner and Nietzsche himself.
00:06:43.560And, you know, going straight up through to the beginning of the 21st century and continued struggles with and contestations with Wagner in Hollywood and still in literature and on and on.
00:06:58.480And so it's a huge kind of rambling narrative that takes you into many different worlds and ultimately just a huge conflict of ideas and perceptions about Wagner to the point where I think we really lose track at times of what Wagner is, you know, as he undergoes these transformations.
00:08:39.220Because in the end, people had to go to Bayreuth to see their Wagner for many, many years,
00:08:43.660or they did, but there was a kind of official Wagner, and then there were all these other
00:08:49.540Wagners sort of outside of it, right? Yeah, well, when I think of the official story,
00:08:55.300as you read it in the obituaries in 1883, it was about this man who underwent such struggles
00:09:05.500and defeats thrown out of Germany in 1849, having to flee Germany, this fiasco in Paris
00:09:12.760endless financial problems and then this magical apparition of of ludwig ii he's saved
00:09:19.560and the and the dream of of bayreuth uh comes about and then he he dies having written the
00:09:26.700ethereal final valediction of of parsifal and so that's that's kind of the official narrative
00:09:32.320it's a great man narrative it is a victorian i think it was like a victorian narrative of
00:09:39.880withstanding great trials and triumphing through sheer industry and force of character.
00:09:49.540You know, so this is kind of the international official Wagner.
00:09:53.060And that the German-ness of it was obviously of monumental importance in Germany,
00:09:57.940probably less so outside of Germany, except insofar as, you know,
00:10:04.680Wagner was able to make himself the symbol, the figurehead of a great nation. But I think above
00:10:11.980all in that period, it was Wagner's colossal industriousness, you know. And so then you had
00:10:17.540sort of voices on the side contesting that narrative, you know, and this idea of the French
00:10:22.920Wagner, sort of Wagner as an agent of the unconscious and of dream and of chaos. You had
00:10:30.940It's sort of people beginning to suggest a feminist interpretation of Wagner, you know, the anarchists, the far left interpretation, as well as the far right, which I think was more of an alternative, not so much a mainstream idea right there at the beginning.
00:10:48.060In the early 1880s, even though Wagner had been incubating this mode of thought in Bayreuth in the last years, this would sort of grow in importance as the 19th century went to its end.
00:11:01.580So I think of it as a battle, really, a battle began over what Wagner meant and who was going to own him.
00:11:09.140And obviously, a right-wing nationalist point of view won that battle.
00:11:13.460But it's worth honoring kind of the other sort of people who are battling for his name.
00:11:22.960Well, it strikes me, I'm just kind of, I have maybe an obvious meta commentary, which is that there's all this struggle over the authentic Wagner and the creation of his legacy.
00:11:32.020and you know I think Alex would probably suggest an ultimate failure to discern a true
00:11:38.680the core of the artist in his work which strikes me as you know a little bit ironic because Wagner
00:11:45.460himself was so preoccupied with the idea of authenticity and truth in his operas right so
00:11:51.460it seems almost maybe ironic is not the right word maybe I actually mean appropriate and like
00:11:55.600the Alanis Morissette that you know this this thing that he was so chasing in his work and so
00:12:00.140Devalorizing in his work was something that was, you know, also the object of so much legacy.
00:12:06.960You know, he was so obsessed with the organic, the rooted, the authentic, a kind of realness that wasn't sort of naturalistic realness, but something that was sort of the spiritual realness.
00:12:19.960And he thought that he was capturing that and transmitting it in his operas.
00:12:26.280And he thought that he'd found the place in Bayreuth where this force could sort of radiate outward.
00:12:33.660But obviously, that was not happening.
00:12:37.180And, you know, I'm intrigued by the moment when he received that essay from Baudelaire.
00:12:45.820There's actually two letters. It's quite amusing.
00:12:48.280The two letters that he wrote to Baudelaire.
00:12:50.120The first was sort of essentially kind of, thank you so much for sending your essay.
00:12:55.220very interesting in any case here are my you know 10 or 12 huge problems that i'm dealing with
00:13:00.580the financial and so the kind of email that we've all written this is like thanks all very excited
00:13:06.580to read this or or you know i've started reading it very exciting you know then he writes a second
00:13:11.100letter which is suddenly kind of prostrate with with gratitude just just kind of just so so
00:13:18.820appreciative, desperately appreciative of this kind of engagement that Baudelaire had shown
00:13:25.440in his work. And what intrigues me is, you know, he couldn't possibly have agreed with everything
00:13:30.220that Baudelaire was saying. You know, I mean, this essay he talks about sort of, you know,
00:13:33.800the counter-religion, sort of the new religion of Satanism kind of erupting, these very sort of
00:13:39.340Baudelaire ideas and just a lot of proto-symbolist vocabulary that Wagner must have found quite
00:13:46.560incomprehensible. Nonetheless, he was very excited to see just the intensity of this response.
00:13:52.440And I think the sort of practical, you know, showman in him knew that to have such a response
00:14:01.480from a kind of alien, sort of just from a very different point of view, was sort of a guarantee
00:14:08.300of the power and endurance of his work. You know, for work to endure, it must be misunderstood.
00:14:15.400It must be misread, you know, according to the sort of, you know, original idea of the creator.
00:14:20.880It must sort of atomize into sort of all these different sort of perceptions.
00:14:26.440You know, other listeners, other spectators must take possession of it.
00:14:29.760So I have the sense that all along he was perhaps, you know, somewhat divided.
00:14:33.980You know, on the one hand, he was this colossally self-willed person, megalomaniac, narcissist, you know, who really did want to impose his ideas on the whole world.
00:14:45.400But at the same time, he was a guy putting on a show and was ready to accept the idea that people would have, you know, different understandings of his work and that his own sort of point of view was not going to be universal.
00:14:58.160So I think there was a kind of split in him and just a basic split in sort of his own contradictions.
00:15:03.500I mean, sort of ideologically, as you've already discussed, there were many, many contradictions.
00:15:09.060There was a great deal of inconsistency.
00:15:11.000There was a sort of dilettante-ish, just sort of faddish, you know, he would just read something and latch on to it and write a 10,000-word essay about it and then, you know, forget about it and move on to the next thing.
00:15:21.480So it's this bundle of contradictory ideas.
00:15:25.400And so all along, you know, you were never going to find, you know, the one true, clear, crisp kind of vaguer idea that was just never going to happen given who he was.
00:15:36.700I mean, it's kind of, I would say, that shines through in his relationship to Nietzsche, too.
00:15:40.360And he's like, I love how much you like me.
00:15:44.980No, I think, again, there, Wagner was so excited to find this young, brilliant mind responding to his work with such enthusiasm and at the same time being aware that Nietzsche had very different ideas from his own.
00:16:00.280And I think he was sort of willing to accept that up to a point.
00:16:05.720And Nietzsche kind of kept pushing to the degree that Wagner just broke away.
00:16:11.860Well, in some way, that is the interesting thing, right?
00:16:13.700Like in some way, the coming into being of the Bayreuth festival sort of ends up ossifying things a little bit.
00:16:21.560I mean, that's where Nietzsche sort of realizes, oh my goodness, I have nothing.
00:16:26.740You know, it's at Bayreuth that he's like, what did I just kind of enthusiastically endorse, right? And that's also where the contradictions become kind of harder to work away, it seems, right? There's an amazing line from Eduard Hanslik, I think, from the first Bayreuth festival, where he says something like, there's this big lie of describing this luxury entertainment for rich bankers, aristocratic ladies and journalists as a national festival or something like that, right?
00:16:55.900And he's basically saying like, like, I mean, and Hans like knew that, of course, an opera was always both of those things.
00:17:02.120It was high art and someone had to make money doing it.
00:17:05.580But like, he did seem to think like the contradiction here as manifest in this Festspielhaus is like, is actually a problem, right?
00:17:14.360Like it's supposed to be, people think they're witnessing the birth of a national mythology, but it's just kind of a social occasion.
00:17:21.020It's basically a horse race with more singing.
00:17:23.440No, and this is, I mean, it's just wonderful to read about Bayreuth in the early years and how it became this cosmopolitan watering hole for, you know, European aristocrats and wealthy Americans and Isabella Stewart Gardner and sort of all these sort of groups of people coming from all over.
00:17:44.480And Cosima presiding over all of this, this woman who, on the one hand, of course, was severely reactionary and pedantic and narrow-minded.
00:17:56.160But at the same time, I mean, she was the very image of a cosmopolitan.
00:18:00.080Half French, half Hungarian, spoke perfect English and was technically German, you know.
00:18:05.960So she sort of inculcated this atmosphere.
00:18:10.620You know, Colette wrote wonderful scenes set at Bayreuth. There are a number of other novelistic portrayals of it as well as journalistic portrayals. But of course, there is the massive contradiction at the heart of it. You know, this is exactly what Wagner supposedly was fleeing from, you know, opera as a grand culinary entertainment. And he ended up creating his own version of it.
00:18:37.780But, you know, again, the practical side of him would have said, well, whatever it takes to keep the thing going, you know, and lots of people, despite this somewhat kind of unsophisticated or superficial atmosphere, you know, did come to Bayreuth and did have very intense experiences and carried something very powerful away with them.
00:18:59.620So, yeah, there's an early history of my right is fascinating.
00:19:04.300Kozma is an absolutely fascinating personality in her own right.0.93
00:19:08.780And she was conservative, but at the same time, you know, she was a brilliant organizer.
00:19:13.080This festival, I think, would have faded away.
00:19:16.000The whole apparatus would have faded away unless she'd sort of really thrown herself into it and made it work.
00:19:52.540I mean, one thing she definitely did, and I think you alluded to that already with her sort of, you know,
00:19:57.180highly cosmopolitan background right Richard I think to some extent thought and I think we've
00:20:03.020talked about this Moira and I in our previous episodes like there is a you know there's a kind
00:20:07.720of anti-bourgeois affect to the entire undertaking in the sense that like you have to set aside a
00:20:13.040better part of a work week to actually consume these operas which not everyone can do but I
00:20:18.920think he thought of this as like oh this is not music for shopkeepers basically but she takes the
00:20:24.980perfectly reasonable steps like okay so you're describing someone who could take a lot of time
00:20:28.700out of their day that's an aristocrat you're describing an aristocrat and kind of turned
00:20:32.820into like baden baden with better music right it seems to me like she his his anti-bourgeois
00:20:38.380affects were still honed on 48 they were basically you know something better right he's almost a
00:20:43.060marxist in that way he says you know i want to be a critical critic in the morning i want to be
00:20:47.760fishing in the afternoon and listening to siegfried in the evening right like that's the image that
00:20:52.020were that were getting i think out of richard and cozy was like no no no no the only people who can
00:20:57.260make this work are rich as hell and we need to get them here right yeah absolutely yeah and i mean up
00:21:03.400to a fairly late stage wagner was still clinging to the idea that he was going to be giving away
00:21:08.440tickets for free i mean he had this idea that that sort of impoverished students would be able
00:21:14.400to come and sort of you know experience the ring and and all that was wildly impractical and so
00:21:20.880yeah she made it she made it work and and she built something that's that still exists and
00:21:27.420and it's as much in her image as Sognerson is yeah so because you know we ourselves have a let's say
00:21:34.320Wagnerian work ethics meaning we love shoes and we don't finish our work that quickly we we're
00:21:41.600currently on our listeners are caught up on the first two installments of The Ring Cycle and I
00:21:46.520thought so which means that you know we've never talked about really siegfried on this podcast at
00:21:51.600all and i think siegfried is a pretty good example of like the the kind of reverberations and
00:21:58.180refractions that you talk about in in your book sort of what his position is in the entire cycle
00:22:04.940and what his meaning is vis-a-vis wagner right i mean you mentioned that like for french or for
00:22:10.480francophone wagnerism you didn't need the ring at all in some way it was it was tanhäuser and
00:22:16.340And it was Tristan that really, I think, shaped their Wagner.
00:22:20.740But certainly sort of in the, I would say in the conservative or on the right, there are different versions of this.
00:22:26.580But on the right, the reception is very much tinged with or connected to the figure of Siegfried.
00:22:31.580And so I thought we could sort of walk through that a little bit and talk about what role Siegfried plays in, well, in the tetralogy and in its reception.
00:22:42.020Like what are the different Siegfrieds that we're getting?
00:22:44.660And, you know, and I should sort of warn our listeners, it's not about like how to interpret the figure, but even what the role of the figure in these four operas even is, right?
00:22:54.760Like there are some real serious tensions and, you know, there is a Siegfried we get in the opera Siegfried.
00:23:02.480And then there is a very different Siegfried that we get in Goethe Demmerung, which is a lot harder to square with what a lot of the 19th century read into this figure.
00:23:11.020So, but do you want to sort of get us started on that a little bit?
00:23:13.840like is the centrality of that figure at least for the ring itself kind of this kind of magic eye
00:23:20.960where basically you have to look into it and and you're going to get something slightly different
00:23:24.860back depending on who's doing the looking right yeah i mean i guess personally first of all i
00:23:31.340should confess that this is my my least favorite part of the cycle i if i'm sort of sitting through
00:23:38.580the entire ring. I always kind of roll my eyes a little bit when we get to Siegfried, especially
00:23:46.220the, you know, especially the first two acts. I mean, of course, the remarkable thing about this
00:23:53.020is that there's this enormously long interruption that took place during the composition of this
00:24:01.120opera. Because in 1857, he broke off composing after the second act and sat down and wrote
00:24:10.840Tristan. And then he wrote Meistersinger. And only then at the end of the 1860s did he go back
00:24:21.080and write the third act. He tinkered a little bit with aspects of it, you know, in the years in
00:24:26.260between but basically set the whole thing aside so it's it's it's he's a different composer
00:24:31.220audibly a different composer when act three begins and so that's when i personally get excited again
00:24:36.400because suddenly it's this music sort of coming out of the just the post uh tristan uh experience
00:24:42.100and then there's this incredible new energy that enters into it but you know this is at the same
00:24:46.820time of course the heart of the story the hero uh siegfried i mean as you've discussed i mean he
00:24:53.120It started with the idea he was just going to write an opera about the death of Siegfried.
00:24:57.000And then he decided he needed to sort of tell the story of the young Siegfried.
00:25:00.640And then eventually he went all the way back and created the stories of Rheingold and Valkura.
00:25:05.600But it's all about leading up to Siegfried.
00:25:09.920We have this kind of blonde teenage hero who's really an idiot in a lot of ways, but who has these uncanny abilities.0.98
00:25:20.220And he's in the process of discovering these abilities.0.95
00:25:23.380So, you know, this is, I mean, this is such an absolutely archetypal mythic story.
00:25:29.520The young, the novice discovering his powers.
00:25:33.140It's Superman, it's Spider-Man, it's all the men.
00:25:36.760And Wagner repeats the whole conceit in Parsifal.
00:25:41.940And there's a kind of excitement in that, you know.
00:25:45.240So, you know, to confess, I always sort of dread having to sit through these first two acts, and then I end up, you know, enjoying it to a degree, because it is such an irresistible story, you know, despite the semi-obvious anti-Semitism and the sort of general kind of cult of stupid masculinity, there is an appeal to the thing, and this is, there was a mass appeal with Siegfried.
00:26:12.920Alex, let me jump in and just also make clear to listeners that like, yeah, it's almost a very different kind of narrative, right? He's basically cribbing from fairy tales. It's a very compact, very contained, it doesn't have an epic feel. The epic is sort of at the outer edges of this forest where Siegfried is just being raised by the dwarf Mime, who our listeners will remember, and basically realizes that's not my dad and I need to, you know, reforge this broken sword that I happen to have.
00:26:42.680and I need to get out of here and slay a dragon.
00:28:16.060But it's basically like, yeah, it's this superhero discovering his powers kind of story.
00:28:20.540Now, this is a story with universal appeal.
00:28:23.360You know, so yes, you know, you can have the right-wingers embracing Siegfried as the archetype of Aryan masculinity and fearlessness.
00:28:36.040But then you also have George Bernard Shaw on the left taking the most delight in this part of the cycle, you know, absolutely head over heels in love with Siegfried, the character, sort of seeing him as a sort of a boy anarchist revolutionary rebel who doesn't care about the system and is willing to sort of bring it all down.
00:29:00.180And I think there were a lot of other people on the left who could sort of use the Siegfried character for their own purposes.
00:29:08.440Nietzsche also absolutely loved the Siegfried character and was rather disappointed with what happened after that.
00:29:16.320So, you know, just as the superhero movies today, you know, can be seen as allegories for whatever you want, you know, sort of oppressive forces on the right, on the left, you know, whatever kind of context you want.
00:29:30.620You know, this Siegfried story functions in the same way. But especially by the time you get to, you know, obviously World War I in Germany, you start seeing a very explicit weaponization of the Siegfried character, the Siegfried legend as part of the great German mission.
00:29:51.320And, of course, there were many, many instances before that of an explicitly nationalist, right-tending interpretation of this story, you know, in defiance of any competing interpretations.
00:30:05.500Exactly. So Siegfried, right, is easy to love because he brings all this, what he's got is instinct.
00:30:12.600He's got a healthy sense of disrespect.
00:30:16.780I mean, the culminating moment of the third opera is that he is confronted by his own grandfather, Wotan, and smashes the spear that holds all the laws.
00:30:28.760This is the moment that Shaw is thinking of in terms of him as a baby anarchist.
00:30:34.680He's like, this is just another old man.
00:30:36.220All the treatments, all of sort of the Metternich system, everything is being sort of smashed to pieces.0.98
00:30:42.040Exactly. At the same time, he also has this instinct, and this is something that I think, you know, not just the right drew out of him, but like someone like Fritz Lang in his Nibelung movie does that too. He's above all defined, and part of this is just that he's an adolescent, by what he hates, right?
00:30:58.260He has this kind of Schmittian friend enemy thing going where he's basically surrounded by people who are just horrible.
00:31:05.900And he has this like incredible gift for sniffing that out and then hurting them badly.
00:31:11.780And as you already alluded to, not few of these people will have slightly anti-Semitic hues of the people that Siegfried sort of victimizes in this way.
00:31:22.320so he does become this kind of like yeah arian superman who just kind of keeps
00:31:27.180sometimes giving a literal beating to people who are coded as yeah as as whom he senses are his0.89
00:31:35.220enemies almost without them having done all that much to him right i mean poor mima he keeps
00:31:41.780reminding him he's like you know i did raise you for the last like x years and he's like
00:31:45.700I brought a bear home that could maul you you know I mean like that's it's it's truly sadistic
00:31:52.320pure instinct pure absence of intellect pure physicality you know against Mima who's who's0.69
00:31:59.460physically weak but but you know very cunning and Siegfried sees that absolutely as the enemy0.75
00:32:05.200and this fits in perfectly with the sort of a certain right-range German kind of resentment
00:32:40.880turn right like the the Siegfried we meet in Goethe Demmerung is suddenly a very different
00:32:44.940guy which is like this is the interesting thing again like the the right-wing Siegfried fans
00:32:51.360must have had some difficulty with with the Goethe Demmerung Siegfried who is he's still dumb0.99
00:32:57.140but by now the stupid or I don't even know is is dumb even the right word he's he's inactive and0.97
00:33:05.300hesitant sort of in ways that that he isn't in the first opera but in ways that certainly make0.99
00:33:11.740the character a lot more complicated and make him a lot harder as kind of or less less make him a lot
00:33:18.880less apt as kind of a projection screen for sort of germanic fantasies right exactly yeah no his
00:33:25.460his instincts are now failing him his his supposed ability to sort of size people up at one glance
00:33:31.840You know, when he runs up against Hagen, it fails him completely.
00:33:37.480And I think this is a kind of interesting sort of psychological observation about a sort of, you know, boyish mentality being made into maturity, into adulthood, and resulting in terrible decisions.
00:33:53.300You know, a familiar story. And I mean, I think it's so brilliant what he does in Goethe Demarung. It's a huge, unwieldy opera, somewhat overpacked with material.
00:34:11.460But I think what's happening in Go to Demeroying, I always have this feeling that, you know, he's now in the early 1870s composing, working with a text that he wrote in the early 1850s.
00:34:49.180And instead of composing and just instead of phoning it in and just going on autopilot for the remainder of the cycle,
00:34:57.440what happens, I feel, is that he begins to work with these materials in a perverse way.
00:35:04.080He begins to sort of twist them around, just his whole grand leitmotif system.
00:35:10.340He increasingly uses it with a bitter irony.
00:35:14.440You know what happens when Hagen takes possession of Wotan's spear motif and it turns into this sort of colossal dark evil kind of grand utterance.
00:35:25.540What happens to sort of all the love motifs.
00:35:29.720And in the same way, he's gotten bored of Siegfried.0.83
00:35:32.520He said this to Cosimo, she recorded in her diaries, that, you know, what I like about Siegfried is the sort of silly boy and the adult Siegfried is horrible.0.97
00:36:26.000For me, you know, it's the exact opposite.
00:36:29.120Wagner has done this meta-operatic thing of taking hold of these older forms and appropriating them to his uses, playing off of operatic history and using those resonances to deepen the story and complicate the story.
00:36:48.900And so I think that it's very unusual to find real irony in music.
00:36:52.600It's very hard to be ironic in music, you know, because we have such a visceral reaction to music and it just tends to be, you know, tragedy, happiness, you know, to have these in-between states or these contradictory states is difficult to capture.
00:37:38.080That's probably also why Shaw disliked it, because it's in some way a post-revolutionary novel, a post-revolutionary opera, right?
00:37:45.760It's kind of, the question it seems to ask is, what if you shatter the old world and then are too indolent, lazy, and or intellectually curious enough to replace it with anything whatsoever, right?
00:37:58.860And I'm guessing that the echoes to 48 are probably intentional.
00:38:04.580I'm guessing that, you know, there's just like there's an anti-revolutionary impulse to the opera.
00:38:10.140It's not in the sense that he's like, you know, counter-revolutionary or against it.
00:38:14.360He's just saying, I think it's not going to do anything, you guys.
00:38:18.180And there is, it is ultimately an incredibly resigned, from the first note, really kind of an incredibly resigned opera where exactly like Siegfried is all about this organicism.
00:38:30.220Like there is no holding this kid back, right?
00:38:32.480They all try, everyone's trying to lie to him
00:38:56.400This is, you're watching the train hurdle
00:38:59.060towards the bridge that has fallen down.
00:39:01.380There is nothing, you know, it's a question of how does it happen?
00:39:05.360It's not a question of, you know, oh, this suspenseful moment, will he, won't he, right?
00:39:10.420I mean, it involves, this is also something that Shaw complains about.
00:39:13.120It involves a magic potion, which is like, honestly, one of the horriest cliches in opera.
00:39:20.320But again, like, I think you're right that there's this irony there.
00:39:23.040He wants to take friction out of it almost, right?
00:39:27.040He wants to say it's not that there is a moment where it all could turn out okay.
00:39:31.600It does really feel like this is happening now, right?
00:39:35.400Like it's driving towards that conclusion and whatever could have been different would have had to have happened before, yeah, measure one, basically.
00:39:44.860No, it is absolutely the work of a disappointed, disillusioned revolutionary who is reverting to a somewhat aristocratic, somewhat monarchist worldview, but also with this world-weary sensibility and also this sort of continuous streak of anarchism or just sort of little loss of faith.
00:40:11.360And yeah, this is the mentality that sort of Wagner inhabited, you know, for the remainder of his life.
00:40:18.560And then he turns to this sort of mystical fusion of different religious strains in Parsifal.
00:40:25.360And so what politically is happening here is quite complicated.
00:40:30.520It's certainly no longer revolutionary, but it also doesn't really speak of the optimistic, nationalist, sort of Kaiserreich feeling of the 1870s, sort of somewhat disengaged from that.
00:40:49.480And in fact, after an initial burst of optimism at a moment where he thought that the Kaiser and Bismarck would underwrite his festival,
00:40:58.540once he realized that that wasn't going to happen, he increasingly lost faith in the new Germany and found it all very banal and disappointing.
00:41:09.980And, you know, started even seeming to become somewhat tired of Bayreuth and spending increasingly long periods in Italy.
00:41:17.580But at the same time, you know, he is engaging with this new strain of biological racism,
00:41:24.360anti-Semitism, reading Gobineau, the kinds of sort of Aryan theorizing that's getting
00:41:30.160published in the Bayreuth letter, very, very dangerous new strain of anti-Semitism.
00:41:34.640So he's engaging with that at the same time that he's sort of starting vaguely anti-militarist
00:41:42.080militarist views and sort of anarchist views and neo-socialist views. So, it's a huge mess
00:41:47.700of contradicted political ideas. And, you know, I think the important thing to say for me is that,
00:41:55.020you know, this is exactly the kind of mentality that, you know, several decades later,0.89
00:41:59.700the Nazis were able to manipulate so expertly. I mean, when you look at Richard Strauss,0.79
00:42:06.200You know, he was a man of somewhat similar disposition, you know, an ironist, a kind of, you know, sort of anarchist, just sort of purely devoted to the cause of art, sort of dabbled in different philosophies.0.54
00:42:19.680And, you know, that is someone whom the Nazis are able to take hold of, even though he doesn't buy into the philosophy.0.66
00:42:29.020He becomes sort of open to appropriation.0.56
00:42:30.940So this is, you know, as politically vague as all of this is, it is at the same time sort of exactly the kind of mentality that would sort of prove very vulnerable to exploitation by the Nazis.
00:42:45.000This might be a good opportunity for us to consider some of those left-wing readings of Wagner's operas.
00:42:53.640Because, you know, Adrian and I have talked about Wagner as a character who's, you know, revolutionary 1848 hopefulness really curdled into, you know, particularly anti-Semitism, but like all these different kinds of antagonistic racist nationalisms.
00:43:10.500And that was a very, you know, I think it's very easy for us from the perspective of the 21st century to look back and say, of course, that's how it happened in the 19th.
00:43:18.400But it was a historically contingent phenomenon.
00:43:21.500on. And, you know, it's easy to imagine alternative futures and the notion that Wagner could have gone
00:43:28.420another way. And I wonder if maybe there's some of that, you know, hopeful speculation in these
00:43:34.000left-wing readings of his work. Yeah, well, of course, I mean, there was an anti-Semitism on
00:43:38.680the left. And that is really where, you know, Wagner's own anti-Semitism really takes root.
00:43:43.760I mean, it really flares up around 1848 at the time he was sort of, or just after 1848 when he
00:43:48.740He was at the time, he was farthest to the left, strictly speaking.
00:43:54.120And you find on the left, you find anti-Semitism in league with nationalism, in league with the hope for the fall of the aristocracy and the birth of a democratic republic.
00:44:07.940Those things weren't blatantly contradictory.
00:44:11.240I'm sort of looking at things from our sort of contemporary point of view.
00:44:15.000It doesn't quite map onto our sort of contemporary sense of what's right and what's left.
00:44:21.740So the left-wing reading of Wagner, it didn't necessarily have to discount or ignore the anti-Semitism at all.
00:44:31.440Until probably by the post-Dreyfus, you know, early 20th century, that was sort of no longer so tenable.
00:44:38.280But earlier on, it wasn't a massive contradiction.
00:44:42.040And so throughout the 19th century, Wagner was very strongly identified with the left, especially outside of Germany.
00:44:49.120You know, in America, the first popularizers of Wagner in this country were members of the Germania Music Society, the Germania Orchestra, who were sort of a lot of, you know, quite left-wing people who had fled Germany around 1848.
00:45:08.500And so their philosophy was, you know, we're playing great German music in the service of liberal ideas and sort of the democratic spirit. And so sort of Wagner came along with that. And sort of Wagner remains controversial for those left-wing views.
00:45:27.320There wasn't even so much awareness, I think, of what he had become, you know, sort of the most popular, the most widely distributed Wagner writings were Artwork of the Future and Art and Revolution, sort of the most stridently left-wing ones.
00:45:42.420You know, people were not reading the bizarre meanderings that he was publishing in the Bayreuth letter, you know, or even the Jewishness and music essay was not so widely distributed.
00:45:52.860And so this really fixed the image of Wagner for several generations. And so there was no contradiction and there was nothing kind of stopping, you know, Victor Adler in Austria and sort of various other left-wing leaders. Jean Jaurès in France was something of a Wagner fan of sort of seeing Wagner as integral to their cause and sort of medium for their message.
00:46:18.440Just following up on that, I think there's also an interesting kind of question of how opera and how music travel at the time in general. The Wagner clan is unusual in setting up this one institution, Bayreuth, that's supposed to govern it all. And they only succeed within some measure.
00:46:38.760But that meant that in some way, the ring that we've been walking people through and Parsifal are, I would say, the least performed right outside of Bayreuth.
00:46:49.240I feel like if you went to the opera and saw a Wagner opera in 1890 and you were not in southeastern Germany, like most likely you'd see one of the earlier ones, wouldn't you?
00:47:00.580And I do think that, like, that also must have been part of the equation, that most people encountered artworks that preceded that turn in Wagner.
00:47:26.100I mean, certainly in New York, it was performed at the minute.
00:47:31.000There were traveling, there was Anglo-Neumann sort of traveling ring production, which went all over.
00:47:38.740And, you know, increasingly all the leading opera houses, you know, much later did Paris official friend society kind of finally lost its horror of Wagner.
00:47:51.660And before that, you had to go to Brussels to see the ring at 11A.
00:47:57.840But, you know, Covent Garden, Hans Richter was conducting the ring at Covent Garden.
00:48:02.920So it was, you know, you had to be in a sort of larger urban area.
00:48:07.820But yes, the ring was widely seen, widely known.
00:50:16.220Wagner both as like acknowledged as kind of like integral to racialist and racist thought in the
00:50:21.960United States and as like this revolutionary who makes a really good case for just shooting a bunch
00:50:30.900of confederates uh and uh it's it's really I love the fact that like that the kind of tension that
00:50:37.620you were pointing to like still works in a Hollywood movie in the 21st century is really
00:50:43.480I actually don't think I ended up talking about Tarantino in the book, but I definitely noticed that irony when the movie came out and mentioned it a little bit and sort of other stuff I wrote for The New Yorker.
00:50:56.980I think it was Christoph Waltz who may have sort of dragged Tarantino's attention to Wagner, dragged him to one of the operas.
00:51:04.700But yeah, that actually points to something very specific, very interesting in Wagner reception history, which is the Black response to Wagner, where W.E.B. Du Bois was a huge Wagner fan and wrote an extraordinary story called Of the Coming of John, which appears in The Souls of Black Folk, about a young Black man who goes to a performance of Lohengrin.
00:51:32.980and then is asked to leave because he is sitting next to a white woman who has become
00:51:40.380uncomfortable with his presence and other more kind of aspects of this that I won't go into.
00:51:46.240But the basic fact is like this contradiction of this sort of young black man being swept away
00:51:50.060by this extraordinary music and then confirming the reality of racism in contemporary America.
00:51:56.360And for what Du Bois is really saying, you know, here's this sort of ideal world0.60
00:52:02.840which we can glimpse in Wagner, a kind of utopia against the ugly reality of being Black in America.0.99
00:52:12.260You know, now this seems strange, you know, to our contemporary sensibility because we think of Wagner as racist.0.97
00:52:19.820And how could W.E. Du Bois, you know, embrace such a composer?
00:52:24.600Well, the thing is, is that Wagner is anti-Semitic. In terms of his views about black people, he had very little to say. This was not a preoccupation of his. He said almost nothing publicly.
00:52:39.960Actually, if you go through Cosma's diaries, you find some derogatory remarks and you find some complimentary or sympathetic remarks about Black people, especially in the United States post-Civil War.
00:52:55.040In any case, there's nothing in the sort of public apparatus of Wagner's work and views that would at this time lead Du Bois to think this is a man who sort of expresses hatred toward me and toward my race.
00:53:13.880He was very aware of the anti-Semitism and discussed about the anti-Semitism, but it wasn't a specific kind of autistical for him to appreciate Wagner.
00:53:21.880And not only that, he sees Wagner's use of Germanic Teutonic myth as a model for Black artists to use their own myths and modernize those myths and build something from them in contemporary art.
00:53:43.140And so he explicitly says, you know, this is a model we should emulate.
00:53:48.000And now things get even more strange when he ends up visiting the Bayreuth Festival in 1936.
00:54:25.980Du Bois was a complicated character, you know.
00:54:27.820And his worship, his reverence for European models and sort of European art, you know, creates contradictions that he didn't necessarily sort of articulate or perceive from our point of view.
00:54:45.900I mean, sometimes I think, well, who am I to really question, you know, W.E.D. Du Bois.
00:54:50.240You know, and there are other black intellectuals and black artists who also respond to Wagner, but Du Bois is the main one.
00:54:59.160And that adds, you know, another layer, if you want to find it, to that tarantula.
00:55:05.140I mean, right down to the fact that, right, like black singers really lay hold of the Wagnerian corpus pretty early and do really, which, of course, still remains highly politicized.
00:55:19.480I mean, that's the other thing. It becomes, you know, seeing, you know, Black women singing Wagner's somehow differently politicized. But then, you know, as Kira Thurman, I think, points out in her work, there is a, there's then also after 45, a real sort of move in Bayreuth to basically rely on African-American singers above all to kind of, yeah, to just kind of yada, yada, everything that happened before, right?
00:55:46.820So they started leaning into it a little bit.
00:55:49.760But there's a long history before that, too.
00:55:52.740Bringing Grace Bumbrey, she writes wonderfully about Grace Bumbrey and the complications of her being cast as Venus, as monuments of ur-sensuality, you know, in Tannhäuser, but also being cast as this is the new Bayreuth, the progressive Bayreuth, and all of that nasty stuff is in the past.
00:56:13.620But there is some history to that in Bayreuth.
00:56:15.140And one of the stories that I featured in my book, which I stumbled upon quite unexpectedly, was that of Lorana Aldridge, who was a contralto, the daughter of Ira Aldridge, towering Black actor of the early, mid-19th century, great Shakespearean, internationally famous.
00:56:35.780Wagner seems to have seen him perform in Zurich.
00:56:39.780And his daughter, the daughter of Ira Aldridge,
00:56:43.500a Swedish woman, was a singer of quite extraordinary talent,
00:56:48.060it seems, a gorgeous, controllative voice.
00:56:51.660And she ended up auditioning for Rosemann Wagner
00:56:54.640and being hired to sing the part of one of the Valkyries
00:57:14.320She had a history of still health and she had to withdraw.
00:57:19.440I found a letter from Cosima Wagner to Lerona Aldridge responding to requests that she later made to come back and sing.
00:57:28.220And Kozma was saying, our personnel is already set for the season, but it's a quite polite and sort of more than perfunctory letter that she writes.
00:57:40.400And so that's a remarkable story in itself.0.52
00:57:44.380If a Wagner went on to marry Houston Stuart Chamberlain, one of the most disgusting figures in modern intellectual history, the prophet of Hitler.0.60
00:57:57.180You know, for me, it's part of the eccentricity of Bayreuth in this period that it's, you know, could on the one hand harbor all of these extreme views and at the same time seem to have no problem with a woman of mixed race coming to sing one of the Valkyries.
00:58:17.000It's just, this is the kind of thing that went on at Bayreuth.
00:58:20.840I mean, you could have very left-wing people, you could have sort of feminists mixing there.
00:58:24.860It was an atmosphere very welcoming to gay people, gays and lesbians, really thronged in the audience.
00:58:32.260And so it was a complicated place and the complicated cosmos kind of was the sort of created this peculiar mix.
00:58:39.520yeah i was thinking about you know it's obviously a situation or a experience that we can't relate0.53
00:58:45.620to being you know a bunch of lefties or queer people hanging out on a let's say platform0.93
00:58:51.680furnished by someone who's famously just an awful human being and probably actively plotting the0.95
00:58:56.380downfall of democracy uh you know we have we have twitter and uh and they had that they had
00:59:01.700but there this is something i think that we need to drive home for for folks listening that like
00:59:06.180it's not just that the Wagner clan had some right-wing views as you point out like
00:59:10.600they were think tanks putting it too strongly but like through the Bayreuther Blätter through
00:59:16.940their publication like they like some of the most rebarbative stuff ever written like when was it0.95
00:59:24.180written in that house or or published through it or it's it's really I mean like it's really quite0.98
00:59:29.740striking it's it's not just a bunch of opinions it's that that they kind of institutionalized
00:59:35.140They were kind of a stalking horse for the extreme right.
00:59:39.320And yeah, you mentioned Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who is someone that we'll definitely have to do an episode on at one point if I can ever stomach reading that book again.
01:00:04.220That's nice, but he's also very receptive to the right wing and becomes an enthusiast of Hitler.0.76
01:00:11.340And yeah, the degree of sort of the imprimatur that the Wagner family gave to Hitler by embracing him in 1923, 1924, I think was very important for the broadening of Hitler's appeal.0.74
01:00:34.620making him salonfähig, as one says in German,0.75
01:00:41.520sort of acceptable in kind of, you know, upper society.
01:00:45.120And so the Wagners really assisted in that
01:00:48.400and in so many ways sort of, you know,0.93
01:00:50.680paved the way for Hitler, you know.0.86
01:00:53.500And so then you sort of go back to, well,
01:00:55.340so okay, the Wagner family is deeply enmeshed with Hitler.
01:01:00.720Or how much Wagner is actually being used in all this?
01:01:07.080Or how much responsibility does Wagner himself bear?
01:01:11.520What does he contribute in this metamorphosis of Bayreuth into this combination of sort of think tank, as you said, and kind of temple of Nazism?
01:01:22.440And that's the most complicated question of all.
01:01:25.320And the one that I just have never found a satisfactory answer to.0.56
01:01:29.740You know, there's so many aspects of Wagner's worldview which are almost antithetical to Nazism. He just didn't really believe in a sort of organized state. He didn't believe that nations should have standing armies, you know.
01:01:45.300So at the same time, there was sort of this vision of the political hero who could somehow, you know, cure everything.
01:01:52.480You know, there is the anti-Semitism, of course.
01:01:56.040There is this sort of quasi-vague socialism, you know.
01:01:59.760So there's many pieces that do point toward Nazism and there are many pieces that point away from it.
01:02:06.120I think the particular point that I made talking about Wagner and Nazism in my book, which I wasn't the first to make,
01:02:13.920was that the Nazis were quite selective
01:02:47.400You know, Wagner, I worship Wagner, one of the titanic figures of all cultural history, but as a political thinker, no good.
01:02:56.800Too inconsistent, always changing his mind about things, flitting from one fad to another.
01:03:02.880You know, he was a dilettante when it came to politics.
01:03:05.660I think Chamberlain was actually, I hate to say it, somewhat right about that.
01:03:08.760At this one particular point, there was something very dilettante-ish, inconsistent, kind of ramshackle about Wagner's politics, and the Nazis were wary of quoting from it too much.
01:03:21.760There's also the question of Wagner's rating style.
01:03:23.920If you were quoting from it, you know, could anyone sort of tell what he was saying?
01:03:31.020So Hitler himself did not ever quote directly or by name from Wagner's anti-Semitic writings.
01:03:40.560He had more reliable sources for anti-Semitic bile than Wagner.0.53
01:03:47.840Wagner was more effective as this godfatherly figure of vague German power, this embodiment of German supremacy.0.78
01:04:01.000This was how Wagner was ultimately useful in Nazi Germany.
01:04:05.220And there were also Nazis who found him suspicious, untrustworthy.0.99
01:04:09.440This sort of the gay atmosphere at Bayreuth was noticed.1.00
01:05:18.180Yeah, I mean, Wagner politics is such a, yeah, it's just in terms of like, where does Wagner, where do you put Wagner on our, you know, contemporary spectrum of right and left?
01:05:29.380Where do you put him on the 19th century spectrum of right and left?
01:05:33.140And then the question of, well, even if we could figure out what Wagner himself actually thought and where he belongs, does that matter so much?
01:05:47.880You know, I mean, even if you become convinced that Wagner was a man of the left, there in fact remains, you know, he was appropriated by the right and remains sort of a figure of the right.
01:05:56.700Look at the Wagner group, the now deceased Wagner group.
01:06:03.300And so the reception is as powerful as the original phenomenon and can overwhelm the original.
01:06:12.920And ultimately, so we make of Wagner what we will.
01:06:18.720And it's just so impressive that after all this time, Wagner remains so controversial and so popular.
01:06:22.800He just has not receded into the sort of faded ranks of the sort of great figures of history.
01:06:32.000There's something still so dangerous about Wagner.