One of the things that drew my attention in these videos is Ross’s recounting of his sources of interest in Wagner. He tells us that around the age of twelve he attempted to approach the composer by way of recordings of Lohengrin he’d withdrawn from the library, but felt disoriented by the melodic and harmonic fungibility and the lack of closed structures in the music, and so restrained any further curiosity for a number of years. But then, in his college studies, he kept coming across Wagner and his ideas (including, of course, his anti-Semitism) as a significant cultural, social, historical, and political problem, a force that could not be ignored if one wished to understand contemporary Western civilization and its discontents. So he returned to the music, now better equipped to receive it, and began attending performances of the operas. In other words, he backed into Wagner at a relatively advanced age, coming to him by way of intellectual problematics, which are posited more by the great jumble of ideas in Wagner’s prose writings (and the great jumble of responses to them) than by the content of his music dramas.

That’s an odd, triangulated approach, though one that is probably becoming more common in our academized cultural world. I’ve known people initially drawn to Wagner through the sonorous depths and richness of the orchestral writing, through the beauties and heroics of the singing, or the lure of the mythical tales being told, or a combination of these. Among them, adolescence is the usual time to be seized by the mystique that Wagner surely does invoke as does no other operawright. I can recall my own moment of epiphany. At the boarding school I attended, the library housed a basement space called the Browsing Room where, in a comfortable setting of club chairs, books, and records, inclined students could spend free time reading and, with proper turn-taking etiquette, listening to music. I’d already seen two or three Wagner performances, heard broadcasts, learned the plots of the operas, etc., and felt drawn to them when, on an afternoon in the Browsing Room during my freshman or sophomore year, my turn with the console phonograph featured the Flagstad/Melchior recording of the Tristan Love Night. And in that seventeen or eighteen minutes I suddenly understood, viscerally and without yet being able to articulate it, the Three-In-One of Greatvoiced singing, chromaticism, and eroticism that is at the heart of the mystique.^(I) The organic progression, it seems to me, is from the unique sensory and emotional experience of the music and drama to the composer, his life, his ideas, and the ensuing problematics. Immersion first, perspective later; the reverse feels already distanced.

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In 2012, Ross delivered a talk to a convocation organized by Steven Rubin, the President of Henry Holt & Co. Rubin is a former writer on music himself, and interested in trying to lift the level of the discourse now. With almost no paying jobs on offer, that’s looking like ten miles of bad road ahead, but the effort is commendable. Ross’s talk was entitled “The Prospects of Music Writing in a Post-Critical Age.” I gather that by “Post-Critical” Ross was referring mostly to the decimation of journalistic criticism over the past three decades or so. As he points out (and I am sure he is correct), he is “absolutely” the only paid, full-time music critic for a national magazine left standing in the United States. But when I first saw the talk’s title, it fit perfectly with what I had already concluded about Ross’s work, which is that it is in fact an example of Postcriticism as a genre, or at least leaning in that direction much of the time. Postcriticism might seem to be a logical outgrowth of the Postmodernist mindset in general, and certainly does share certain attitudes with it, such as a wish to dispense with narrative or with hierarchical structure. It’s a logical outgrowth of the general movement in the arts over the past century-plus, from the Premodern concentration on an artwork’s manifest content to the Modern valorization of structure and materials to the Postmodern’s preoccupation with ideas and concept. But the disciplines we normally associate with Postmodernism (semiotics, deconstructionism) are nothing if not critical, whereas Postcriticism seeks to dismiss the critical stance altogether as an opportunistic showcasing of knowledge and opinion, kneejerk skepticism, or obsessive faultfinding—its popcult equivalent would be the plaintive cries to do away with “negative energy” and embrace the cuddly “positive” sort. And it’s not that criticism, however defined, should not itself be subject to critical inspection. Take my own everyday working definition: “the application of prior knowledge to a problem.”^(II) I’m fond of its succinct accuracy and practicality. Yet it does presume that there is a problem, and that the critic has correctly perceived it. That is obviously vulnerable to the “To a Hammer, Everything’s a Nail,” or “Strawmen Everywhere” Fallacy—the possibility that the critic sees reality only as a world of problems awaiting the light of his or her prior knowledge, and that if none presents itself, will make one up just to keep on complaining. And that is a danger, a snare for the critical mentality, that has no doubt snagged us all from time to time.