{"id":926,"date":"2018-02-03T22:06:07","date_gmt":"2018-02-04T03:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=926"},"modified":"2018-02-04T12:03:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-04T17:03:53","slug":"another-cheap-shot-at-wagner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/02\/another-cheap-shot-at-wagner.html","title":{"rendered":"Another Cheap Shot at Wagner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Was Richard Wagner a “monster”? No so far as I can tell. Here’s my book review of Simon Callow’s opportunistic “Being Wagner” in this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal”:<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1866, a Munich newspaper reported that Minna Wagner, the recently deceased wife of the composer Richard Wagner, had lived in \u201cdirest penury.\u201d She was reduced to accepting poor relief notwithstanding \u201cmomentary\u201d support \u201con the part of her [estranged] husband.\u201d Never mind that a letter signed by Minna herself had stated that the voluntary annual allowance she received from her husband had permanently freed her from financial cares. The newspaper claimed\u2014 falsely\u2014that the letter had been written for her in order to conceal the facts.<\/p>\n

This instance of fake news was not a novel occurrence in\u00a0Wagner\u2019s harried life. And 135 years after his death he is harried still by the mandatory cartoon that makes him a \u201cmonster.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are three basic sources for depicting Wagner the man. First there are his operas, which remain as vital to the Western cultural canon as ever. Second there is his personal behavior, copiously recorded in letters and other written accounts. Third there are his essays, notoriously including the egregiously anti-Semitic \u201cJudaism in Music\u201d of 1850. Though any portrait of Wagner that begins with the essays will necessarily be prejudiced against him, this is a typical route. There are even influential writers on Wagner who disdain considering the operas altogether.<\/p>\n

As it happens, the operas are saturated with complex self-portraiture, and a governing motif is\u00a0Mitleid<\/em>\u2014compassion. Like it or not, Wagner\u2019s characters specialize in empathetic comprehension. And any perusal of Wagner\u2019s more than 12,000 letters will confirm that this humane aptitude was not foreign to Wagner the man. His many heart-breaking letters to Minna document astute, guilt-ridden understanding of their failed marriage, an understanding that impelled him to generously support an unhappy and unpleasant woman even when his own financial resources were nearly barren.<\/p>\n

And Wagner was uncommonly rich in friendships. According to the monster cartoon, these friendships were all fundamentally exploitative. But consider the impresario\u00a0Angelo Neumann, who left a book-length account of his eventful personal and professional relationship with the composer. Why was Neumann so dedicated to Wagner? Because he recognized his genius. Because Wagner\u2019s prickly company was galvanizing. And because Wagner\u2019s torrent of human feeling was endearing. Neumann, by the way, was Jewish.<\/p>\n

The Wagner literature disposes of Neumann,\u00a0Hermann Levi\u00a0and other Jews in the Wagner orbit as studies in self-hatred. Such an approach is patronizing and obtuse. A fairer question is why Wagner wrote and spoke such intolerable nonsense about Jews. Reasons of a sort may be adduced. But the simple fact is that his evil anti-Semitism does not align with his actual behavior. That behavior is often elusive because Wagner was a consummate actor. He wore many faces. Was he a master imposter, or was he (as his letters suggest) helplessly inhabited by a repertoire of demonic personae?<\/p>\n

That the actor and author Simon Callow should be enticed by such a figure is only natural. His own distinguished career includes one-man shows aimed at illuminating\u00a0Jesus,\u00a0Shakespeare, Dickens,\u00a0Oscar Wilde\u2014and Wagner. He has now turned his Wagner performance into a reckless little book that stylishly recycles the standard monster caricature.<\/p>\n

In \u201cBeing Wagner,\u201d Mr. Callow writes early on that his main source was the composer\u2019s \u201cown words, in his copious published writings. . . . Above all, I found that my most sustained sense of the man came from a book I had somewhat dreaded reading\u2014his two-volume autobiography,\u00a0My Life<\/em>.\u201d Mr. Callow\u2019s surprise that the book \u201cturned out to be as vivacious and candid as the greatest artists\u2019 autobiographies\u201d says it all. Everything endearing about Wagner\u2014including the \u201csurprisingly punctilious\u201d pension he paid to Minna\u2014strikes Mr. Callow as uncharacteristic. He is himself a victim of the monster myth, which he inserts as a corrective whenever his Wagner portrait turns too pleasant.<\/p>\n

In particular, Mr. Callow is seduced by the ironic panache of Wagner\u2019s self-descriptions, the most memorable of which are nearly Dostoyevskian exercises in hilarious self-humiliation. Mr. Callow\u2019s compression of these stories\u2014their merciless expansiveness is itself comedic\u2014does not do them justice. A greater injustice is that the derisive tone Wagner applies to himself turns patronizing when applied to Wagner by another, lesser writer.<\/p>\n

That Mr. Callow\u2019s breezy portrait of Wagner is disrespectful will not be noticed by readers brainwashed by the monster cartoon. A small minority will think twice and recognize that Mr. Callow is glibly passing judgment on a supreme psychologist whose distressing and self-distressing gift was to peer more profoundly into the human psyche than any of his contemporaries\u2014a predicament that left him lonely, restless and insatiable.<\/p>\n

The first singer to portray Tristan was\u00a0Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a prodigious artist whom Wagner regarded as a rare friend. He died suddenly, age 29, days after the premiere. Wagner confided to his diary: \u201cI drove you to the abyss! I was used to standing there: my head does not swim. But I cannot see anyone else standing on the brink: that fills me with frantic sympathy.\u201d Anyone who thinks those words are hyperbolic does not know the existential void into which Tristan plunges.<\/p>\n

Central to Wagner\u2019s identity was his unwavering recognition of the magnitude of his genius and the conditions for its proper cultivation. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. If he were to pursue conducting, or some other gainful employment, he could not compose. As a result, he was frequently impoverished and ill, vilified and derided. His enemies were real, powerful and numerous. Mr. Callow here discovers \u201ca beady instinct for protecting his gift, his genius, and what fed it.\u201d He argues that when Wagner \u201csued for favours, he had two modes: one, grovelling, the other haughty.\u201d Wagner was himself the keenest analyst of his extreme instability. \u201cWhat makes you see or wish to see a wise man in me? How can I be a wise man, I who am myself only when in a state of raving frenzy?\u201d Mr. Callow cites this frank testimony to an intimate correspondent only to discover evidence of \u201cthe unrelenting soap opera\u201d of Wagner\u2019s \u201cemotional life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in a book eschewing musical analysis, Mr. Callow is betrayed by his ignorance of music. Did Wagner retouch\u00a0Beethoven\u2019s orchestration because \u201cBeethoven had, in Wagner\u2019s view, got it wrong\u201d? No, like many conductors afterward, he felt the need to accommodate changes in instruments since Beethoven\u2019s day. Did he create \u201cthe notion of the conductor as puppet master\u201d? No, as he explained in his pamphlet \u201cOn Conducting,\u201d Wagner realized that a new kind of music\u2014marshaling larger forces and pervasively flexing tempo and dynamics\u2014required a new kind of proactive conductor. Did the tenor\u00a0Albert Niemann\u00a0trim the role of Tannh\u00e4user because he figured \u201cthe sooner the inevitable catastrophe was over, the better\u201d? No,\u00a0Niemann\u00a0(a supreme singing actor) felt that he could not sustain the opera\u2019s last act without abridging the second-act finale.<\/p>\n

As for \u201cTannh\u00e4user\u201d itself, did it arise from \u201cthe compost heap\u201d of Wagner\u2019s imagination? Is \u201cDie Meistersinger\u201d \u201ceverything Wagner said an opera shouldn\u2019t be\u201d? Does the \u201cRing of the Nibelung\u201d amount to \u201cself-celebrating Teutonic tub-thumping\u201d? Come on. Summarizing the affect of it all, Mr. Callow says that Wagner\u2019s audiences are impelled toward mass submission, not the state of active critical engagement provoked by\u00a0Bertolt Brecht. Is he actually not aware that the \u201cRing\u201d and \u201cTristan\u201d have excited more intense critical commentary than the fading Brechtian corpus ever will?<\/p>\n

The closest Mr. Callow comes to plausibly evoking Wagner the man is when he quotes those who admired him. Here, for instance, is the dramatist\u00a0\u00c9douard Schur\u00e9: \u201cTo look at him was to see turn by turn in the same visage the front face of Faust and the profile of Mephistopheles . . . one stood dazzled before that exuberant and protean nature, ardent, personal, excessive in everything, yet marvellously equilibrated by the predominance of a devouring intellect.\u201d And here, balancing the books, is Mr. Callow\u2019s follow-up: \u201cWagner had, it seemed, no inhibitions whatever, his qualities and defects on open display, to the delight of some and the deep repugnance of others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predictably, Mr. Callow more extensively considers \u201cJudaism in Music\u201d than any of the operas. He blithely clinches the Wagner-equals-the-Third Reich equation: \u201cHitler-like,\u201d Wagner spewed poison\u2014\u201cthe notion of the Jews as a rotten part of the body politic which needed to be excised\u201d\u2014that was \u201centhusiastically taken up by the Nazis.\u201d In fact, whether a straight line runs from Wagner\u2019s brand of odious anti-Semitism to Hitler\u2019s murderous\u00a0Judenpolitik<\/em>\u00a0is a necessary question long debated by historians, with no consensus in sight.<\/p>\n

It is wholly understandable that the shadow of the Holocaust has for more than half a century blackened our view of Wagner the man. Someday a revisionist wave will surface. But not yet.<\/p>\n

Mr. Horowitz\u2019s books include \u201cWagner Nights: An American History.\u201d His book-in-progress is \u201cUnderstanding Wagner.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was Richard Wagner a “monster”? No so far as I can tell. Here’s my book review of Simon Callow’s opportunistic “Being Wagner” in this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal”: In 1866, a Munich newspaper reported that Minna Wagner, the recently deceased wife of the composer Richard Wagner, had lived in \u201cdirest penury.\u201d She was reduced to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-eW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":929,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions\/929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}