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September 15, 2020
Alex Ross's Playlist for His Book "Wagnerism"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Alex Ross's Wagnerism thoughtfully examines the unparalleled influence the music of Richard Wagner has had on the arts.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Richard Wagner is all things to all people in this sweeping cultural history . . . Ross follows Wagner’s long reach everywhere: Nietzschean philosophy, high-modernist novels, The Lord of the Rings, cowboy stories, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and such Hollywood epics as Birth of a Nation, Apocalypse Now, and Captain America. Ross manages to tame the sprawl with incisive analysis and elegant prose that casts Wagner’s music as ‘an aesthetic war zone’ . . . The result is a fascinating study of the impact that emotionally intense music and drama can have on the human mind."
In his own words, here is Alex Ross's Book Notes music playlist for his book Wagnerism:
My new book Wagnerism is not actually about Wagner: it’s an account of the composer’s influence on literature, art, film, philosophy, politics, everything. No musical figure in history has had anything like his impact, for good or ill. I’ve tried to map the repercussions from Wagner’s lifetime to the present, touching on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, George Eliot, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Kandinsky, W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodor Herzl, Lenin, Hitler, Bugs Bunny, Buñuel, and Philip K. Dick. Wagner’s operas are always present, even if they are being heard in ways the composer could not possibly have intended. So my playlist will be Wagnerian, though not necessarily Wagner plain and simple.
Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin
In 1860, Baudelaire heard Wagner conduct this music, and it sent him into a trance that more or less inaugurated Wagnerism as a phenomenon. “I remember that from the very first bars I suffered one of those happy impressions that almost all imaginative men have known, through dreams, in sleep. I felt myself released from the bonds of gravity, and I rediscovered in memory that extraordinary thrill of pleasure which dwells in high places . . . Next I found myself imagining the delicious state of a man in the grip of a profound reverie, in an absolute solitude, a solitude with an immense horizon and a wide diffusion of light; an immensity with no other decor but itself . . . Soon I experienced the sensation of a brightness more vivid, an intensity of light growing so swiftly that not all the nuances provided by the dictionary would be sufficient to express this ever-renewing increase of incandescence and heat. Then I came to the full conception of the idea of a soul moving about in a luminous medium, of an ecstasy composed of knowledge and joy, hovering high above the natural world.”
Prelude to Rheingold
The beginning of Wagner’s Ring cycle depicts more than the eternal flowing of the river Rhine; it suggests the beginning of the universe, metaphorically represented as the emergence of towers of harmony from a fundamental tone. The music stays fixed on a single E-flat-major chord for 136 bars; then, with the sense of a dam bursting, it shifts to A-flat as the primeval songs of the Rhinemaidens begins. The hypnotic fixity of the music has made it a favorite of film directors who want to evoke the coursing of eternity. Perhaps the most memorable usage is in Terrence Malick’s The New World, where it accompanies scenes of Native American women at play in the waters—an uncanny analogue for Wagner’s story, which recounts the ruination of nature by the power-hungry schemes of gods, men, and dwarves.
“O heilige Schmach” from Die Walküre
The mythological apparatus of Wagner’s work—swords, sorcery, magic rings, love potions, swan boats, the Holy Grail—is a kind of Trojan horse in which much more modern concerns are concealed. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, the Ring is really an allegory of bourgeois capitalism, with Wotan, the chief of the gods, in the role of the grand aristocrat in decline. The psychological design of these mythic characters is as richly layered as in any great nineteenth-century novel. Perhaps the most remarkable scene in the Ring comes in Act II of Walküre, after Fricka, Wotan’s wife, makes her husband realize that his scheme for winning back the cursed Ring is founded on delusion and deceit. He collapses into an epic monologue of self-hatred and self-pity, in the course of which he recognizes his own powerlessness and mortality. Few vocal performances on record are as intense as Hans Hotter’s account of one passage of the monologue, at the Bayreuth Festival in 1955. He sings: “O righteous shame! / O shameful sorrow! ... Infinite rage! / Eternal grief! / I am the saddest of all living things!”
Prelude to Tristan und Isolde
Thomas Mann, “Tristan”: “The Sehnsucht motif, a lonely wandering voice in the night, softly uttered its tremulous question. Silence followed, a silence of waiting. And then the answer: the same hesitant, lonely strain, but higher in pitch, more radiant and tender. Silence again. And then, with that wonderful muted sforzando which is like an upsurging, uprearing impulse of joy and passion, the love motif began: it rose, it climbed ecstatically to a mingling sweetness, reached its climax and fell away, while the deep song of the cellos came into prominence and continued the melody in grave, sorrowful rapture.”
“Pilgrims’ Chorus,” played by Donald Lambert
By the turn of the last century, Wagner was an unavoidable presence in international culture, his work not only widely worshiped but also widely mocked and scorned. The business of satirizing Wagner was a bustling one from the start: even those who loved the work couldn’t help poking fun at its grandeur and pretension. In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, a number of jazz takeoffs on Wagner came on the market, wearing the musical equivalent of a sardonic grin. Perhaps the finest of them is the 1941 Tannhäuser fantasia by the stride pianist Donald Lambert. If it seems a little tame at first, hold on.
Good Friday Spell from Parsifal
All the darkness and discord around Wagner notwithstanding, I keep returning to his work because it is steeped in desperate human feeling. Indeed, the darkness and discord contribute to Wagner’s humanity, in the more neutral sense of that word. In recent years, I have gone back most often to Parsifal, his murkily mystical farewell. Part-Christian, part-Buddhist, part-esoteric-occultist, Parsifal is a drama of initiation, in which a callous, brutal boy discovers empathy. That he becomes the king of the Grail realm is almost incidental to that journey. In Act III, the sage old Gurnemanz meditates on the blooming of meadow on Good Friday—the intermingling of life and death, the inseparability of life and death. At the height of the scene, against a prismatic blaze of orchestral sound, Gurnemanz sings: “All creation gives thanks, all that blooms and soon fades away.” Marcel Proust loved that line, and paraphrases it to heart-stopping effect in In Search of Lost Time: “What exactly was its clear relationship to the first awakening of spring? Who could have said? It was still there, like an iridescent bubble that had not yet burst, like a rainbow that had faded for a moment only to begin shining again with a livelier brilliance, adding now all the tones of the prism to the mere two colors that had iridesced at the beginning and making them sing. And one remained in a silent ecstasy, as if a single gesture would have imperiled the delicious, frail presence which one wishes to go on admiring for as long as it lasted and which would in a moment disappear.”
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His second book, the essay collection Listen to This, received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.
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