Ross answers this question in the interview with Stephen Fry, who in effect asks how we’re to handle all the disturbing, morally problematic aspects of Wagner (most of which, to repeat, originate outside the works themselves). Ross replies that we should “put it all onstage,” which is to say that he sides with the auteurial revisionists, to the point of not only tolerating but endorsing the notion of what I call the adversarial production, which uses the music and the nominal characters and actions of the creators’ work to critique it, to contradict it, often violently. In my book, I call that “both parasitic and parricidal.” It is the reigning philosophy of operatic production today, and one that the Postcritical attitude allows to go unexamined.

˜ ˜ ˜

I’m up to page 517 of Wagnerism, just starting the section headed “Bayreuth 1924” in the chapter subheaded “Nazi Germany and Thomas Mann.” So I still have 143 pages to go, and will certainly plow ahead, since we’re careening into the “ism” events of my own lifetime, and of all the writers dealt with in the post-WW1 chapters, Eliot (we’re done with him now, I guess) and Mann are the ones I’m most familiar with. I’ll conclude with a few notes on things that struck me as I read. These remarks are in part critical observation, but don’t let that dissuade you: what I said about the book at the start still stands.

Bookends: I love the opening and the closing (I peeked ahead). Ross’s Prelude, titled “Death in Venice,” recounts Wagner’s death of a heart seizure at the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal while working on an essay to be called “On the Womanly in the Human,” and then the waves of shock that rolled around the Western world—the emotional outpourings, the mournful gatherings, the memorial events, the effusive obituaries, the perorations and funereal salutations from notables in every artistic, intellectual, social, and political field of endeavor, and the journey of the special funeral train to the burial ceremonies at Wahnfried. I started to tear up myself at the thought of all this not for a head of state, princess, military figure, or popcult celebrity, but for an artist, a figure of the High Culture who was dominant in the collective consciousness as none now could be. These pages perfectly set up what is to follow.

In his brief Postlude, Ross writes out the same early personal history he relates in the Cowen interview, including allusions to a couple of troubled periods that induce sympathy, and sensitively captures the still-charged, ambivalent state of mind and spirit with which he takes leave of his great subject.

A reviewer’s predicament: Even if I had finished my reading of Wagnerism in good time and with adequate mindspace for contemplation, any attempt at adequate assessment would founder under the great waves of references. Sometimes they come in strings, and roam far and wide beyond our accustomed Shaw/Nietzsche/Mann, et al. stomping ground. “As Joe Bflx says, and Mary Mfl adds” . . .  Who are they all, what guarantee of authority or simple reliability do they represent, and by the way, what do you think, Alex? To competently review the book, as ill-informed a person as myself would have to research at least fifty of these names just to verify that we’re not getting the old flim-flam and that the author is not dragging them in just to remain uncommitted.