Before tackling today’s topic, I’d like to call attention to an important piece in Arts Journal by Joseph Horowitz, on the subject of the fate of arts funding under our current pandemic and political circumstances. It’s the best analysis, with historical background, that I’ve seen on this live-or-die subject. 

Today’s post is inspired by Wagnerism/Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, by Alex Ross. I say “inspired by” to make clear from the start that this will not be a review of the book in any coherent and balanced sense. There are already plenty of those, and more in the offing, I’m sure. Besides, I haven’t finished reading it yet. I am at the moment on p. 391—just done with Wagnerism in Virginia Woolf, starting with same in Marcel Proust—with only 269 pp. to go in main text. Twelve days till deadline; I should be through it by then. And please understand: if you are interested in the book’s subject (that is, the impact of Wagner’s operas, prose writings, and other life achievements on subsequent cultural developments in every species, though principally literature, except for opera and music themselves), by all means read it. It is an impressive achievement of research and synthesis that views familiar ground from a new p.o.v. and ploughs some long-fallow acres, too, and as always with its author is highly literate and fluidly composed. Any reader will learn from it, and anyone who’s written much above the Twitter level will understand and respect the labor and devotion involved in its creation. I shall return to aspects of it below, after consideration of related matters I happen to find urgent.

I was truly surprised when I first heard a few years ago that Ross was working on “a Wagner book.” From my regular readings of his New Yorker columns, I had formed an impression that he wasn’t really on a Wagner wavelength, and that opera in general was not among his foremost interests. Probably I shouldn’t have been so taken unaware, for among other uses his new book serves nicely as a prequel to his The Rest is Noise (2007).^(I) That book takes as its starting point the 20th Century fin de siècle, over which Wagner “lowered” as a “lurking presence” (words Ross uses in online interviews on Wagnerism) and exerted an “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom’s now almost epithetic phrase, cited by Ross), out from under which it squiggled and squirmed to escape. But since it is the ongoing squiggling and squirming that Ross has, with every sign of approbation, given most of his extremely selective attention to as a journalistic writer, his approach to a major Wagner project was, in prospect, bemusing.

As with most prominent authors these days, Ross has been the subject of several video interviews in connection with his new book. I’ve seen two of them so far. I have learned to grant a substantial discount on what even the most experienced interviewees find themselves saying in response to questions—so much depends on the knowledge and biases of the interviewer, and a subject can find him- or herself wandering along strange paths. One of Ross’s interlocutors, for instance, is Tyler Cowen. Cowen is an economist of good standing and libertarian leanings, whose name rang a bell with me because in my book I had devoted an endnote to disputing what I take for slippery reasoning in one of his articles with respect to “Baumol’s Disease,” an important theory in the economics of the performing arts, and its application to the High-Culture, nonprofit sector. ^(II) As an interviewer on the subject of Wagner, Cowen poses what I charitably assume to be faux-naïf questions, the kind meant to represent what an earnest but culturally uninformed person might ask. (To paraphrase: “I have a beautiful recording of Rheingold highlights conducted by Kempe—why should I listen to the whole thing?” Or, “Who in today’s pop and rock scene carries on something from Wagner?”, etc.). By the end, I’ve decided that some of this naïveté is pas faux. The other interviewer is Stephen Fry, an accomplished actor and man of parts, who handles the cultural materials with far greater deftness. After the necessary preliminaries, he directs Ross immediately to his late chapter on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf.