Stephen Fry talks to Alex Ross

well well well i think that means that we are now live and streaming and i want to welcome everybody to this chat that i'm having with alex ross who is um one of the best-known and most admired writers on music from america and across the world these being a staffer on the new yorker for the best part of a quarter of a century wrote the brilliant the rest is silence uh listening in the 20th century oh i'm hearing my own voice back now and i want to welcome are you hearing it too i am having a very with alex ross who is um i'm having a very distressing error here wow that's horrible i hope robin is listening who's our host of course boost am i doing this too am i being echoed into infinity oh i'm hearing my own voice ladies and gentlemen this is freakish um what's going on we've got a little notice having a here distressing error here i need to close youtube i'm being told have i got youtube open no i haven't gotten is that better yes that's better oh well thank goodness for that how extraordinary i do apologize everybody if that was my fault it just shows you i paint myself to some people at least as some kind of tech wizard and i'm as hopeless as hopeless can be anyway now welcome i was introducing alex ross uh new yorker music writer and his new book wagnerism uh i think the sub title i got it right is is um art and music sorry art politics in the shadow of music um now i have been a lover of wagner or at least a baffled and sometimes confused lover of wagner for most of my life and i have read a lot of books on the subject there are so many books written on him i'm told there are more on him than there are napoleon and even more of the non-shakespeare which seems hard to believe but anyway the point is there's a vast literature but i have to say in all honesty it's the reason i'm here this is the best book environment i have ever read it is magnificent it's not a biography it's not a musical study it's far more important really it's a study of the influence of wagner in all corners of cultural life it's a it's a tour de force it's a piece of writing and it's i promise you if you uh if you get it and read it you will be uh absolutely hooked because whatever one's view of wagner this is obviously something we're going to come to um it is impossible to ignore the shadow he cast over the 20th and 21st centuries no comparable figure exists perhaps in all of human culture certainly in the west that we know of who has been such an influence not always a positive one i mean he was an influence in as much as people worked and wrote against him and tried their very best to escape the influence which is another form stravinsky for example i suppose you could say was devoted to the idea of not being like wagner which is a kind of influence anyway um i'm i don't talk too much because alex will have so much interesting to say so i want to ask you first alex if i may what was it how long was this in gestation as a book is it something you've been preparing for decades uh well first of all thank you i'm totally bowled over by that by that uh praise and and uh it's wonderful to be um chatting with you since i've uh followed your work on wagner and in other media um uh for a long time but uh yeah this this was a long gestating project i mean the actual work of researching and writing it uh took about 10 years uh before that i suppose i was consciously or unconsciously gathering a string and i found myself while i was working on the rest is noise my first book wagner kept intruding uh he kept sort of um poking his head in and sort of casting a shadow in one way or another to the to the point that i was making these detours perhaps unnecessary detours uh sort of into uh the realm of of wagner as i worked in that book whether it was his uh enormous influence on music at the beginning of the 20th century or of course in the chapter on music in nazi germany uh he kept becoming more and more of a factor and so this this sort of distraction uh uh pointed i think sort of guided me toward my next uh big uh uh subject there was just something there which i was uh uh fascinated by and sort of couldn't turn away from but sort of long before that i was uh since i was um a teenager i suppose i've been uh fascinated perhaps in an unhealthy way by this period of the fantasy ecla you know the end of 19th early 20th centuries so almost everything that emanates from this period musically culturally historically uh uh has has just long uh obsessed me um and wagner is was so omnipresent uh in that period that uh writing this book was sort of both a way to deal with wagner in a perhaps slightly fresh or unusual way not a biographical study not one of these thousands of books some of which are behind me here um but it was also allowed me to immerse myself once again uh in this epic uh that's that has just long been uh uh so so close to me and then and so just following this wagner thread uh through the period she sort of gave me a sense of sort of a fresh perspective on some of the celebrated artists and and writers in this period so many of whom were affected to one degree or another by wagner and not just musicians of course but painters and poets and novelists uh as well and and i suppose there is i can't think of many composers in what we call the classical tradition uh about whom one could say everybody has a problem with them i mean there is a wagner problem the most obvious one uh i speak as a jew myself is the anti-semitism uh which is unmistakable and hard to avoid and of course the taint of of nazism of course he died 50 years before uh hitler became chancellor but nonetheless there is an association in most people's minds and in the citizens of israel and so on have long had a a natural problem with him but there's also another problem which is really with the power of his music many people find almost obscene clara schumann and many others who are contemporary wrote about this that that it has an effect on one that is almost cheating it seems to short-circuit the the the proper logical way that arch should work even the most emotional romantic art uh ought to earn its way into your soul and into your heart whereas this has a visceral and a complete power over many listeners that can be laughed at as but many varnarians were scoffed in their time and considered pretentious and absurd because of their weeping and their wailing and their gasps of ecstasy um or or it can um it can seem literally dangerous that you abandon some part of yourself in a way that is akin to drugs or something else that people might disapprove of and this was one of the very first objections to wagner wasn't it yeah it was both the it was a objection early on but it was also the very root of this phenomenon that came to be called vagranism this experience of being overwhelmed by wagner and inflamed by wagner and somehow that he he he propels you uh in some unexpected new direction um but you're quite right i mean the you know when people talked about the threat or or some sort of you know sinister aspect of wagner early on it wasn't so much uh the anti-semitism which uh very early on was was uh uh not widely known the the judaism music as they haven't been published anonymously uh in 1850 but it was this it was the sense that this this music somehow um uh gets under our skin uh to a dangerous degree it uh triggers uh dangerous energies there was a lot of focus on on wagner's eroticism uh uh on the idea that that somehow he was um dangerous for for women or young men as well i suppose um uh also this association with you know german power um and sort of the the threat of sort of the burgeoning uh german nation but exactly the same effect was what baudelaire for example um celebrated in his 1861 essay ricardo and townhart and paris which which is really the the uh sort of ground zero of wagnerism uh as as i see it uh before uh nietzsche um baudelaire uh reported being uh uh overwhelmed by by wagner invaded uh by wagner uh penetrated by wagner he said um but but at the same time uh he he felt this to be a joyous experience you know it wasn't problematic at all for him he he wanted uh to be uh uh by art in this way and then what's what's very interesting about what happens with baudelaire and a number of these other french uh uh wagnerians uh in the later 19th century and into the 20th um it's not that they fall under wagner's spell and do his bidding um it's much more that that the you know at the end of this process of this very intense engagement they emerge with their own wagner they really take him over and appropriate him uh reinvent him into something uh quite unrecognizable uh from from the sort of the reception of october that existed before so you have this you know wagner of the dream state uh of the stream of consciousness of uh of the sort of welling up of these of these uh uh uh intense erotic uh energies of baudelaire talked about a sensation of satanism in there which is not to be found in in wagner's own uh commentaries on his you know intentions sort of vaporous poison yeah yeah so you have this emergence of this you know uh sort of strains of of satanism and occultism and and uh um esotericism uh being being attached to wagner in in quite surprising ways so this is this is sort of how the phenomenon unfolds but for other people it was it was unnerving you know to have music that had such sensational visceral um uh impact it just kind of it didn't behave at all the way the way it works of of previous eras had had behaved there there was something um um uh uh overwhelming you know about the fact of it i i wonder if like me you you when you think of in on an average day and you think of a bombastic boar who who of whom you're tired and and then the moment a bar of pacifier or tristan comes on and you start to listen every you remember why it is that he has such power over you that that that he ought not to just because he want he was such a a a prolix and bombastic writer and so full of himself and so kind of mostly mean to people he had a rather impish gleeful sense of humor which was often cruel um the way he treated the young nietzsche for example makes you forgive nietzsche for all his later recantation of bargainerism and um and there is a you know real sense that uh he's the perfect way of approaching the eternal question of the gap between the fruits of the tree and the ugliness of the tree you know he was a very ugly tree from which most extraordinary fruits fell and is it all right to ignore him the man and say that his art is actually something quite aside from him yeah i've never really sort of attempted to make that sort of total separation of the art and artist with with wagner i mean i feel there's sort of no way of of ignoring it and the whole point i think of this artwork is is not to take you into some pure uh ethereal upper sphere um the the the work has has always been i mean at least for me um intensely psychological uh intensely political um not always clear what the political ramifications are but it just feels as though wagner attaches himself the work attaches itself to whatever is going on around us right now and every stage of history and in different countries wagner has had this this adhesive effect and then when you look at how wagner is used in hollywood and how he seems to somehow uh chime with and and blend in with this this extraordinary variety of images so it's just it's never been sort of something apart for me and my own history coming to terms with wagner was was um uh sort of a slow process uh uh initial phase of of really having a quite adverse uh reaction to him i just remember when i was a kid uh i i was very accustomed to mozart and beethoven and and brahms and the first time i listened to wagner it just sounded like this this soup this this kind of gas cloud of ideas kind of floating around and blending into each other and i find it a unappetizing experience and then by the time i was in university i was very very much steeped in in european uh history and and culture of the late 19th early 20th centuries and i was extremely aware of wagner's anti-semitism and his nefarious political ramifications and so i was viewing vodka very much through you know just purely as a problem a kind of problem of intellectual history and it wasn't until somewhat later uh that i found a more personal relationship with the music and so just you know from the start um it's it's just it's just all been packed together it's just been sort of you know wagner his life uh the the the context in which is what his work came into being and then sort of all the subsequent history it's just and this actually makes it just more interesting in fact it's it's sometimes very alarming it's deeply unsettling uh to confront all the different ways in which wagner uh has been used uh but for me this is this is what my own relationship with with music and and with art is like i always want to know the context you know just when i was a kid i would just always be reading biographies and listening to sort of records or some kind of pompous narrator was telling the composer's life story you know over the music and i just you know i i just i just always wanted to know how the music is is related to the society uh around it and this has been kind of and in his own writings he he correctly noted that by using mythology there was you were never going to go into a dated world that it was always going to be fresh and always going to be accessible because it was outside his own time and therefore can be appropriated to any time which is one of the the great tricks isn't it yeah this is what he did at the end of the 1840s as this turn from history to myth which can be oversimplified when you look at sort of the uh you know mythic and legendary uh ideas were sort of uh very important to vargas from the outset but but he did make this very deliberate decision with the as he said to work on the ring cycle to step far back from history uh and to address these these universal uh mythic themes as a way of of ensuring in fact that this work would would always be relevant would always sort of uh speak to uh uh listeners of different worlds and and different times and he got that exactly right i mean this is really really the reason uh if there is one reason why this phenomenon of wagnerism took off i think it is his virtuosity um in in deploying these mythic uh archetypes and leaving together mythic ideas from different traditions because you know the ring is not just norse gods uh uh there are there are many different stories uh interwoven and of course once you get to parsifal you know uh um uh master goulash of yuri religious all kinds of other things let the um let the viewers uh know i've got here the the the list of the chapters because it it it describes so many of the different cultural areas that you go down the little um the sort of magisteria the kingdoms the realms that you um the chapter one is rheingold wagner nietzsche in the ring but that's a huge subject on its own of course then you have a chapter called tristan called baudelaire and the symbolists you already mentioned baudelaire's famous essay and swan knight victorian britain and gilded age america because that's a whole other side which again is fully influenced by by the grail temple esoteric decadent and satanic wagner holy german art the kaiser icon fantasy vienna nibelheim jewish and black wagner wienersberg feminist and gay wagner brunhilder's rock villa cather and the singer novel magic fire modernism 1900 to 1914 no tongue first world war in hitler's youth ring of power revolution in russia flying dutchman ulysses the wasteland the waves uh secretes death nazi germany and thomas mann writer of the valkyries film from birth and nation to apocalypse now and then finally the wound wagnerism after 1945. so people can get an idea there of just uh how how what a wonderful series of inventions they're in for in reading this um for example uh what you you may uh just let's start out of order ulysses the wasteland and the waves those are obviously three gigantic in the english language at least landmarks in in literary modernism james joyce and t.s eliot and virginia woolf um and you the obvious connection i suppose might be with virginia woolf and james joyce something to do with the internal monologue of the you know the stream of consciousness as it's called uh um and with tsl it famously begins with wagnerian i i wonder what it was that you thought appealed to these young and extraordinary gifted writers what they saw in bug especially remembering and this is an odd point but i think it's an important one they didn't really have the chance that we have to listen and listen and listen and listen they wouldn't have had the whole ring available to them they wouldn't have had the whole of tristan available might have had a few 75s uh i suppose as as we call 78 i mean as we call them those old scratchy records but they must have obviously reacted very strongly and i wonder what it was that that made wagner of all so important to these literary figures yeah well this chapter was was very important to me and i felt it was sort of almost the culmination of the story that i was telling because in a lot of ways i am talking about wagner as as the background to as a sort of conduit for modernism and sort of the emergence of the modern world and modern culture in many different forms uh and so this is where you know the transition really is complete um and it is actually a moment in which you know wagner's cultural power is fading uh you know in the 1920s um and into the early 30s sort of the period in which these these um uh three uh great works appeared uh the wasteland ulysses uh and the waves and i had to tackle on finland's wake as well that's not enough you have to throw in villages awake as well um and um and so yeah sort of you know it's it's the 20s it's the jazz age and the sort of this this grand lumbering uh figure of the romantic year sort of no longer has the conjuring power that he that he once had and also sort of the the first world war has cast a great shadow over formally revered uh german cultures or germany being increasingly identified with uh aggression and and so they're sort of a falling off of sort of everything uh uh german especially in the in the um english-speaking world uh and yet these these writers belong to the generation that you know in their youth before the first world war wagner was just absolutely unavoidable and you just couldn't really be an intellectual sort of cultured young person without having some kind of relationship with vagra some kind of stance it could be one of just total rejection uh or it could be some some very sort of complicated relationship but but just as with sort of being a young person in the 60s you know he just sort of had to have a take on bob dylan and and the beatles and so so vodka was just so ubiquitous and and so the pattern is generally that there's an early period of infatuation sort of you know fashionable immersion in wagner um and this happens especially with uh joyce and elliot uh a little less so with with wolf who was always somewhat ambivalent um and then there's a sort of a pulling away uh and sort of as this sort of the maturation process uh sets in uh wagner is sort of put at arm's length along with sort of everything else you know from the victorian era the edwardian era from sort of the whole romantic age um sort of one must have put this uh behind one and yet these wagnerian resonances and echoes linger very strongly uh whether in the wasteland which sort of depicts the whole mindset really of a kind of decadent esteet uh you know in the years before the first world war or in ulysses where joyce is is really sort of caricaturing himself a sort of younger version of himself is stephen daedalus as this young man who sort of waves his walking stick around uh the walking stick itself being an affectation pretending that it's neutral uh siegfried's uh um and so he is he is mocking himself and and thereby sort of casting off uh wagner's influence and yet the whole idea of this of this blending of the modern and the mythic uh in ulysses i think undoubtedly owes something to wagner and and joyce red fagna's writings very carefully as well as sort of listening to the operators he was himself of course a very musical deeply musical uh person and and so uh it is kind of a reversal uh a rejection of wagner at the same time uh it is a a work just kind of uh infiltrated everywhere by wagner uh references and fitting its wake uh even more so uh virginia woolf was was sort of constantly vacillating and i think she had a a more a more distant relationship with wagner but still a significant one i think a significant one and um and she went to byroid the only one of this group who who went to byroid and and was deeply deeply moved by parsifal and so i think you can you can see sort of a fainter but but still palpable uh shadow of parseval in in the waves especially yes and it is one of the um contradictions inherent in wagner is is that in his own time he was a radical and a modernist a political rattle radical and friend of anarchists in his early life and uh and certainly a german nationalist but that was quite a radical position too because it was anti-monarchist and it was it was after building a united germany um and yet of course he was a victorian and he died well inside what we call the victorian er at least the 19th century and and so seems unmodern to 20th century eyes and yet is still a modernist or a modernist influence that's to say he doesn't get covered in the thick brown varnish that i don't know tennyson and carlisle and matthew arnold and you know sort of really victorian figures with big whiskers uh are dismissed by the bloomsbury eights and by other modernists and and by the jazz age and and and wagner carries on he carries on being an influence and it it's um it's it's a peculiar thing how someone like stravinsky for example whom you can see connected to the jazz age that's very fragmented and spiky the music very sharp and broken up and got that very sort of modernist feel seemed so completely opposite to wagner and yet they they they you know they were still there was still an option of going the wagnerian way right up through schoenberg who was uh wagnerian in his early years enormously wasn't he yeah you know one thing i decided not to do in this spark to sort of keep the whole thing uh a little bit under control was really not to address foger's influence on on subsequent music which is of course a huge topic in itself and then the book you know would have been you know uh and also it's it's because he had such a strong effect outside of music that that this this phenomenon is so remarkable really because you know inside music he was of course very influential uh was he more influential than monteverdi or or bach or beethoven or stravinsky himself i don't know you know he was one of us of a series of figures that seem to sort of shift uh all of musical language uh probably wasn't film composing it's worth saying his particular yeah yeah but it but you know it's it's it's the cultural influence that the part but nonetheless yes i mean the the relationship you know in a way you know stravinsky's loud brusque uh rejection of wagner sort of false somewhat in the same categories there are some of these literary uh modernist uh figures and and you know nonetheless uh stravinsky knew his wagner um and he went to my right with diagolev and and najinsky uh diagolef was was completely infatuated by by uh wagner uh his whole uh life um uh right up to the end um and uh ninjinski was was found involved very interesting so you know stevenson i think felt compelled to just sort of you know cut ties uh completely you know and yet it's very interesting that right before one week before the premiere of the right of spring was the 100th anniversary of wagner's birth and so that the paris periodicals were were full of talk of this anniversary and recounting the famous town wizard scandal of 1861 and it's perhaps not a coincidence that that diagolev uh chose to more or less stage uh this the great you know writer's spring scandal at exactly um this moment and with with uh french writers and publications saying that stravinsky was the new wagner in the sense that that he he was sort of this this scandalous uh avant-gardist uh who was sort of once again uh revolutionizing music and and so you know despite uh uh all of the kind of you know outer signals there there still is you know even with the figure as seemingly distant as these these ties much more obviously in the case of schoenberg who who really adored wagner and and and revered him and and was deeply influenced by his orchestration uh in his early period and and always found him a useful uh uh point of reference and saw his own sort of uh move into aginality as the completion of a process that began with with yeah yeah um and so moving on now this might seem like special pleading but i think it's so interesting that i hope people don't think it is we're both as it happens gay men i think and uh your chapter on on the the gay world of violence why it is that wagner appeals to gay people why it was almost a code for in the days when when being gay was a completely illegal uh thing um why it was a code people who knew that oh you like wagner do you sort of wh used to say that he is he so does he it's probably easier to see why the um the lesbian community might find so much fun in the you know valkyries and things without being too good stereotyped you know what i mean it's a very kind of yeah um but i i wonder why there is this side and is that indeed a window into the transgressive nature of wagner generally or the the sense of you know why outsiders go to him of both left and right and of different sexualities is that all part of the wagner mystery yeah i think so i mean this was um sort of this this idea that wagner was a a figure of sexual transgression and somehow um uh sort of uh friendly to her or an ally of those who were following sexually unconventional paths it's it's a very important uh strain of this whole phenomenon and one that i think was was overlooked for quite a long time uh until there's a very important book that came out a few years ago by lawrence dreyfuss about sort of wagner and the erotic impulse uh which sort of brought a lot of this back up to the surface but susan sontag and others have talked about it but yeah when you look at the late 19th century this was this was a constant topic and wagner really became uh a symbol uh for the nascent uh gay rights uh movement he was he was seen at the very least as an ally some people thought that he was gay himself or sort of homoerotically inclined and there were these there was a questionnaire from the turn of the century sort of designed to help young people figure out you know you know were they were they gay were they earning um and one of the questions was are you peculiarly fond of vogner um and and this made perfect sense because you know wagner there was a side to wagner that was that was friendly to to all of this you know i mean he he their passages his writings which which have this homoerotic tinge uh he he did have this this finish almost um for uh soft uh silky garments which could be seen as almost as a form of of cross-dressing and all this was exposed in the public arena um in the uh 1870s in a way that was quite shocking to him personally um and really just a remarkable instance of a figure of such you know towering significance um uh being being attacked for his sort of sexual uh peccadillos um and you know just from his private utterances we know that he had no problem with with having gay men uh around him and uh there's a remarkable moment in the diaries where kuzma wagner is talking about their friend paul von neukovsky who uh designed the sets of parsons fall and he was showing up with his uh italian lover pepino and and kosuma said something like this is ridiculous this is this is absurd there's something kind of dismissive and and wagner said this is something for which i have understanding but no inclination um which is you know a quite progressive comment i'm immense they both teased nietzsche with the possibility that he might be well yes yeah and an an over-masturbator as well yeah yeah but the point was i think there was a sort of atmosphere around the vlog nurse that was that was welcoming uh to uh gay men and and uh lesbians a little later and so by the turn of the century my right was seen as a kind of um uh uh watering hole for for uh uh gay people a place where you could feel a little more comfortable and be a little more open in other words the fact that the the son siegfried was uh gay himself so there was sort of an entourage around him and this sort of advanced from the public eye uh uh sufficiently that that it was written about you know there was a uh an essay by the uh extraordinary playwright and and polemicist oscar panitsa uh called byroid and homosexuality uh and so it was sort of you know brought out and brought out into the into the uh open and uh and it was part of this this remarkable phase in germany at the end of the 19th century where modern gay rights was coming into being among this hirschfeld and the magazine and wagner was it was a topic uh um in these uh circles um and the sort of a topic of interest um and and so this this idea emerged that uh that yes wagner was was almost a code word he was part of the the the canon of of gay taste fascinating because you think there it is immediate aftermath you know following wagner's death this sense that he was a kind of crown prince of bohemia with his crushed velvet beret and and as you say silk clothes and a style a high doctrine of art such as no one had ever had even higher probably than oscar wilde's and a real sense of of a complete belief as art and aesthetics as a kind of religion as a way forward as a way of of mediating the world and the way of understanding the world and as a vocation that is supreme above all others that this somehow came also the stuart chamberlain and the the the the fascists started to to take it over there was a peculiar period then when wagnerism moved away from being a high art and beauty and license and freedom and uh and and became instead something that was rigidly uh uh connected with pan-germanism and other such things and yeah yeah and all this was happening together i mean the decadence wagner and the bohemian factor in this kind of uh uh free atmosphere at biroid and byram was also a very cosmopolitan place and sort of the other irony of course is the wagner family became progressively less german as the years went by because yokozuma herself was completely non-german she was a french hungarian woman and that was commented upon people thought people said after wagner's death why is this french hungarian woman sort of running our great german national festival um and then the son siegfried marries winifred wagner a british orphan and houston stewart chamberlain marries into the family marries the daughter uh ava uh and so it's you know once you get to this from 1930s the the grandsons are you know one one quarter german um and yet you know this this this urge to to uh to nationalize uh byroids especially sort of right before the first world war i think uh chamberlain was married into the family uh cozma uh uh an extraordinary woman i always think is a bit underserved uh by the by that extant uh literature she had many many dark and difficult qualities but she was also just just you know she created this festival you know she made it an institution she was also a theatrical director so very conservative in her taste but but she was a woman of unusual power um in the artistic arena at that time but she steps away um and and so the the whole operation is nationalized by the time it reopens in 1924 it is more or less nazified or sort of well on the way to being notified and this this is this strikes me so much this complexity of you know on the one hand you have this ever broadening uh cultural uh sort of proliferating set of sort of of competing images of wagner and wagnerism in his influence but sometimes this this ideological narrowing is taking place and the right wing uh is is is ever more assertive and ever more persuasive in terms of how it's appropriating wagner as against this tradition of left-wing wagnerism which was really flourishing in the late 19th century yeah and so many german and austrian uh social democrats and uh communist socialists uh anarchists you know every every uh jean-jacques in in france um wagner was a hero of the left and right into the 1920s and sort of early bolshevik period uh in russia fagna wasn't named to conjure with but the but the right wing in in germany uh wins the argument in the end really and and they and they they still you know win the argument today i mean this the the fact of of of the left factor and leftist wagnerism uh just comes a surprise to to many people because you know we've been so uh conditioned to think of wagner first and foremost as the proto-nazi uh composer as hitler's favorite composer and so on with this exactly so that siegfried becomes a blondarian and mima becomes a jew and it's it's very hard to kick those out of your mind isn't it as images but it's worth remembering too isn't it that hitler most people feel that hitler barely knew wagner's work didn't really understand that his favorite piece was the reenzy overture which is a kind of blast of marshall uh you know kind of wonderfully overdone and brilliant of course and yeah he made people he made his soldiers i mean his you know his nearest in command every nuremberg they had to sit through the meister singer and got terribly bored and would leave in the interval and make him cross but i mean vodka did know hitler didn't know wagner well i mean there's no disputing that uh he he had a kind of he had a a memory that sort of allowed him to he was very good at sort of memorizing things uh quickly and and and he would impress uh sort of tried and true vagnerians with his uh detailed uh knowledge of the librettos and then the score and you know there were there was a sort of a a show-offy kind of uh uh uh element to this he he would sort of use this this memory of his to to sort of basically um present himself as far more efficient you know whether it's their military plans or whatever it was um um but it was you know i mean it was a deep lifelong love of his you know what i tried to point out about about hitler is that he fell in love with the music i think well before he had any particular political ideas you know he was a teenager uh in lintz and he saw lohan grin and he saw rian's d and he was swept away and this was a completely unremarkable experience for sort of someone of that generation again this was the generation where you you just you know millions of people uh were you know had those moments of of sort of teenage infatuation um and it's it's only later you know as hitler's politics are radicalized at the end of the first world war that this this fusion begins to happen between um wagner's art um and the emergent you know political mission of of uh hitler and and the nazi party and it was it was never a perfect fusion you know i mean yes wagner was was very widely used as a propaganda symbol in nazi germany um but there were problems uh there were aspects of of wagner that had to be concealed uh and covered up in order to have him work um in this fashion and you know wagner's own politics where we're highly confused and at times he could sound like a complete anarchist and sort of reject the very idea of the organized state and he said you know nations the german nation shouldn't have a standing army which is you know an idea that sort of the italians italian state can totalitarians take and readily embrace um and so and so you you know as any political appropriation whether on the left or the right sort of had to sort of do some airbrushing you know of of vloggers uh politics yes you wanted to give a sort of potted uh description of what the ring means one the most obvious thing you would say is that love and power cannot coexist uh yeah which is why you know our work yeah yeah you just have to wonder why you know if you know if hitler was so infatuated with wagner um you know how did this sort of fundamental critique yeah did he ever sort of have any grasp of this you know yes that's what i meant exactly yes the strain of pacifism uh in in parsifal and the cult of of compassion was something sort of diametrically opposed to to sort of the the nazi uh ideology especially once once the war uh began and and germans were explicitly warned um not to uh indulge feelings of pity and the same word midlight was was used that sort of is the kind of you know uh eda feeks of of parts of all and so and so yeah this this this composer is is so complex and so contradictory that sort of any any political manipulation of him must involve a simplification but this is not to say that that wagner was somehow the innocent victim you know of such manipulations because there are very clear uh lines of connection from his own ideology to nazi ideology anti-semitism above all but also the the stride and nationalism uh and and chauvinism and so it was this was not an unfortunate accident you know that happened and the remarkable formulation that i always turn to comes from thomas mann who for me sort of the ultimate wagnerian uh because he was deeply passionate about the music and at the same time deeply ambivalent and acutely aware of of of the the problems attendant uh on wagner in in german uh culture and history but what he said was that uh uh wagner lent himself to his own exploitation to his own misuse and it's a beautiful formulation because in one hand it acknowledges that there is a misuse a distortion a simplification going on in the so-called nazi wagner but it is a process to which wagner lends himself it is a process in which he uh has participated um made himself a hostage to a fortune that was yeah terrible yeah it's a tragic flaw and for anyone who loves vagueness music it's just endlessly dismaying that someone who has such a a vast vision of of of humanity and and sort of the sort of human psychology and and sort of the whole kind of history of human culture he was he was a lavishly well-read man uh sort of you know uh who drew on so many different uh influences and inspirations but when it came to the anti-semitism when it came to the german chauvinism uh he was so absolutely uh uh hemmed in you know by his by his bigotry by by sort of the limits of his vision and you just wish could there have just been some moment you know what she had sort of stepped back and and sort of you know uh asked whether whether sort of this was the right path to take but he didn't he was it was an utter obsession with him right to the end i'd love to end with the thought of the 21st century um which we see crumbling civilization crumbling around us at least it can feel like that uh not just the pandemic but all kinds of other things seem to have given a lot of us the idea that that we have come to a time of quite alarming uh quite alarming contingency and fragility in what in things that we used to regard as solid in terms of you know uh outlook and indeed a rise in nativist nationalism uh which is um you know we can see in the earlier 20th century i wondered what you felt wagner's legacy uh can teach the 21st century and might what do you fear about it might he be appropriated again or um is he no longer relevant to to to politicians in the way that he could have been in the 20th century yeah this is this is obviously something i've i've thought a lot about and and uh so toward the end of the book i i make this theme almost central sort of you know what can we learn from this case to wagner in in our own uh dangerous political moment you know in terms of wagner's abiding presence in the right wing and among neo-nazis and white supremacists it is it is still there you know he is still present as a point of reference it is he is not a significant factor from from you know what what i was able to see uh scouring some some sort of rather ugly corners of the of the internet you know i mean these these nativist movements now and and neo-nazism and neo-fascism and all the rest you know they draw so much on popular culture you know um and and sort of this is the weapon that they wield um and if you look at uh uh donald trump you know this he's a figure who comes from american popular culture in so many ways with the the you know the reality tv and the beauty pageants and professional wrestling and all this stuff and he plays you know rock songs he plays the rolling stones uh at his rallies not wagner um he can't stand wagner you know that from tina brown's diaries uh in fact um and and you know the rolling stones may not want him to be playing their song but this this this these are the some of the weapons that that he deploys and i think that's the case for a number of other um uh authoritarians around the world now and and i think this is kind of the more oblique lesson that we can learn i think it's not so much that that we sort of look at wagner as sort of an active present danger i think that's almost a kind of easy way out to say that oh all of this sort of somehow goes back to wagner and he's sort of the root of all evil and that's that's uh that's a complete cop-out you know i mean there's so many other sort of cultural uh uh kind of connections that we need to look at but i think we can sort of you know for speaking as american i think well we can look at how our popular culture and how sort of american art and culture has played a role um in white supremacy in this nativism in this whole kind of project of american global hegemony you know and popular culture has been has been a weapon intentionally or not um and and so this is this is the kind of lesson i think we can learn from from studying wagner and also i think the the whole sort of you know the how wagner is performed and staged these days is very often a good lesson in how we can you know instead of just putting him completely to the side um uh and saying we're just not gonna have anything to do anymore with this with this ugly artist instead confront it uh directly put it on stage talk about it write about it analyze it uh and and learn something from it and you know i know that the the contemporary waves staging wagner drives a lot of people up the wall and they would prefer just to see the valkyries and the swords and the magic ring and so on but i think this you know in the case of wagner above all uh this kind of uh confrontational and and and and reinventive and kind of revisionary uh style is is important and that shows us you know how to how to deal with with uh a figure like this you know and and i think this whole it's just been incredibly rich um uh uh uh sort of history now uh of their post-war sort of post-nazi uh wrestling with these with these questions with some sort of just remarkable artistic statements as as a result so i think you know this should go on uh we can't get rid of wagner i personally don't want to get rid of wagner as you don't and and and even so part of musical history you know the production instantly don't they when a new opera house does a ring an opera house does a new ring it's it sells out instantly yeah yeah no it's it's it's you know people make their living you know singing wagner and playing wagner and so and so it's and and you know we just can't i mean the last thing i would say is you know as important it is always to be conscious of this of this connection with with nazism and hitler um there's a point at which it becomes too uh overpowering um and when it gets to the point where this is now sort of the one thing that a lot of people know about wagner that is that is a loss because there is so much more um to this artist and there are so many people who are jewish who are very aware of these issues and nonetheless have have come to uh an understanding and appreciation of the of the composer and i think it it uh it's just it's we need to to approach this with the spirit of of we're not going to have all the answers you know there's not going to be a simple answer uh at the at the end of the story it's not going to be guilty or or not guilty you know it asks us to be patient with complexity and contradiction and and nuance which is never a popular request to make people people prefer to have the the uh the the clear precise answer but this is this is where we're left with absolutely the controversy goes on the meanings proliferates and and we sort of write the next chapter of the story absolutely that's brilliant alex alex i should call you alex mein ross shouldn't i in the bagnerian way having having to share your name with the steed um it's been a real pleasure talking to you and i i urge people to go and uh find the book wagnerism it's it's a magnificent read apart from anything else it teaches one so much about cultural history of the last 150 years it's absolutely uh unput downable so i want to thank alex very much for this and thank the rps instantly in 1855 uh wagner came and conducted at the philharmonic societies it then was i think it was before it was royal um so there's a good connection with that um in victoria so thank you to all all of you for coming and do consider supporting or becoming a member of the uh of the philharmonics of the royal philharmonic society um it's doing terrific work uh for musicians and for the spreading of musical ideas around around the country and the world so um uh alex thank you very much enjoy the rest of your slightly longer day in new york and uh good evening to everyone here in in the uk bye-bye so much thank you so much a pleasure

Channel: RoyalPhilSoc

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Id: KJinipl0w0E

Length: 54min 32sec (3272 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020