Nearly 150 years after his death, Wagner remains an enigma — and a touchstone

Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker magazine, has written a wonderful if daunting new book. “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music” is a history of everything Wagnerian since composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was born. Ross’ reach is breathtaking, extending past music in its many forms to cultural, social and political history, as well as biography.

Everyone of even modest historical interest who has said a word about Wagner is in this book. Alex Ross is almost certainly the only writer in history to put Queen Victoria, Bugs Bunny and John Waters into the same manuscript.

Queen Victoria met Wagner and made notes about him in her diary. Bugs Bunny stars in the cartoon “Herr Meets Hare,” in which Bugs mocks Hermann Goring and Adolf Hitler while accompanied by bits from Wagner’s opera “Tannhauser.” John Waters’ film “Mondo Trasho” mixes the sound of snorting pigs with the “Ride of the Valkyries” over what Ross calls “a ghastly death scene for the drag performer Divine.” (”Ride of the Valkyries” has been used in hundreds of movies, even silent ones. D.W. Griffiths had an orchestra play it during “Birth of a Nation” in 1915.)

Elsewhere, Ross explores what avatars of high culture have to say about Wagner — George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann and Susan Sontag among them. Tyrants as well: Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and various Italian fascists.

As Wagner fans go, W.E.B Du Bois is a surprise. The black scholar, polemicist and activist loved Wagner’s music. He hoped a black American composer would tell the history of his people from Africa to Harlem through Wagnerian mythical operas.

Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung,” conclusion of the “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle, has provided English speakers with an elastic metaphor for the twilight of the gods — and the twilight of just about anything else meeting a bad end. Ross notes that Hitler’s demise in his bunker was called a gotterdammerung. I note that gotterdammerung has been invoked to describe the closing of automobile plants and the fourth-quarter meltdowns of football teams.

Wagner’s anti-semitism is a tricky subject. There is no question it ran deep and his loathing for rival composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) borders on the pathological -- and has poisoned Wagner’s reputation. However, Wagner was long dead before Hitler championed his music and Wagner’s aging wife, Cosima, invited the would-be Fuhrer into the Wagner home in Bayreuth.

Ross writes, “This is a book about a musician’s influence on non-musicians.” Many of those non-musicians used Wagner to advance their political agenda, transforming his characters and music into propaganda. So in World War I, the Germans had the Siegfried Line and various military operations received Wagnerian names.

The Germans continued employing Wagnerian nomenclature during World War II, but the Allies, under the influence of German emigres, also used Wagner. Arturo Toscanini played “Ride of the Valkyries” at a 1944 benefit concert for the Red Cross at Madison Square garden. On the printed program, American B-17s heading for Germany surrounded by fighter trails were compared to the Valkyries.

I have been listening to Wagner since I was a high school kid in Fairbanks in the early 1960s. My dad, Fabian, had a gigantic Magnavox stereo. My buddies would come over when my parents were not home, and we would crank up “Tannhauser” while playing poker. Even then, I asked myself, “How did he do it?” Richard Wagner’s creative genius is a mystery no matter how much you read about him and his music. As an old man missing those Wagnerian poker games, I am still asking: “How did he do it?”

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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