Wagnerism Quotes

“In the story of Wagner and Wagnerism, we see both the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled. It is the triumph of art over reality and the triumph of reality over art; it is a tragedy of flaws set so deep that after two centuries they still infuriate us as if the man were in the room. To blame Wagner for the horrors committed in his wake is an inadequate response to historical complexity: it lets the rest of civilization off the hook. At the same time, to exonerate him is to ignore his insidious ramifications. It is no longer possible to idealize Wagner: the ugliness of his racism means that posterity's picture of him will always be cracked down the middle. In the end, the lack of a tidy moral resolution should make us more honest about the role that art plays in the world. In Wagner's vicinity, the fantasy of artistic autonomy falls to pieces and the cult of genius comes undone. Amid the wreckage, the artist is liberated from the mystification of "great art”. He becomes something more unstable, fragile, and mutable. Incomplete in himself, he requires the most active and critical kind of listening.

So it goes with all art that endures: it is never a matter of beauty proving eternal. When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“The composer came to represent the cultural-political unconscious of modernity—an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longings for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence. Wagner was arguably the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900 and then went to its doom.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“Yet Götterdämmerung is no apocalypse: it envisions a transfer of power, from gods to people. It is also the redress of a wrong, restoring the Ring from the illusory heights to the truthful depths. Wotan, very unlike Hitler, has repented of his megalomania: "I longed in my heart for power ... I acted unfairly… I did not return the ring to the Rhine... The curse that I fed will not flee from me now." The conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, whose father, Hans, was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, once told me: "When I really think about Wagner, I don't discover anything that had to lead to Hitler. And what happens here"—we were looking at the score of Walkure, at Wotan's cries of shame—"is not something that any fascist could have written. Because it is not simplifying. It is a 'giving up' thing. Wagner abused power but hated the state." "Götterdämmerung" is the wrong word for the scenes that unfolded in Berlin during the war's last days: the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, the suicides of Josef and Magda Goebbels, the murder of the Goebbels children, the killing of Hitler's dogs.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“Works of post-Wagnerian modernism, Ulysses included, superimpose myth and modernity in a way that promises a comprehensive revelation of the world, both its variegated surfaces and its primordial roots. In The Waste Land, such correspondences tend to break down. Archetypes float up from the depths of the past, but they ultimately find little lasting resonance in contemporary lives. Instead, they provide a reassuring clutter of allusions for the stranded intellect: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In that sense, Eliot's poem is, more than Ulysses, an irrevocably anti-Romantic, anti-Wagnerian work.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“Nietzsche hoped that Bayreuth would be the fulfillment of his Greco-German dreams—a modern festival along Hellenic lines, fusing Apollonian and Dionysian elements, presented before an audience of elite aesthetes. Wagner, for his part, clung to his fantasy of a great popular festival, open to people of all backgrounds. Supporters were building up an international network of Wagner Societies, whose members made advance contributions in exchange for tickets. Through their patronage, Wagner hoped to keep admission free. By 1873, fund-raising was lagging, especially among German notables. Two of the biggest donors were, reputedly, Abdülaziz, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Isma’il Pasha, the khedive of Egypt.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“In the thirties, Knopf arranged for the two authors to meet, perhaps sensing that these outwardly conservative, inwardly radical writers had much in common.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“1881, the novelist and critic Paul Bourget defined decadent style as “one in which the unity of the book breaks down and gives way to the independence of the page, in which the page breaks down and gives way to the independence of the sentence, and in which the sentence breaks down and gives way to the independence of the word.” For some, this atomization of discourse was a misfortune; for others, it advanced the cause of art. Although Bourget does not mention Wagner, Nietzsche makes the connection, using the Frenchman’s analysis to lament that life no longer resides in the whole, that discourse is devolving into an individualist free-for-all. Tristan, with its disconnected, groping phrases, is a case in point—even if Nietzsche cannot stop listening to it.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“For Nietzsche, Wagner epitomizes a decadent culture that must be overcome. For Baudelaire, decadence is a site of resistance, a source of secret power. Decadence long had a purely negative connotation: it was the overripe expression of an exhausted civilization. The conservative critic Paul Scudo found in Wagner’s music “the qualities and the defects of an epoch of decadence.” Baudelaire took possession of the word in his 1857 essay on Edgar Allan Poe, saying that any literature labeled “decadent” was almost certain to be superior to the alternative. In”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music