There is a new book out on Richard Wagner,
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
by Alex Ross.
I came to Wagner while studying with Vincent Scully about Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect, inventor of the steel framed skyscraper, always replete with ornamentation that has never been matched.
I realize that some here revile Wagner. This book refutes some of the reasons often given for this revulsion, so perhaps it is worth quoting:
quote
Ross has much that’s interesting to say about the responses to Wagner’s
controversial, wide-ranging, and widely circulated writings about art,
nationalism, anti-Semitism, and any number of other topics; he’s
attentive to Wagner’s early anarchist and leftist views; and, of course,
he devotes many pages to the embrace of Wagner’s music and ideas by
Hitler and the Third Reich.
The strongest pages in
Wagnerism—they come in the final third of
the book, mostly in the chapter “Siegfried’s Death”—deal with the
complex position of Wagner in Hitler’s imagination, Nazi Germany, and
the Allied countries before, during, and immediately after World War II.
Ross brings a feeling for historical paradox and ambiguity to this
prototypical case study in the relationship among art, society, and
politics. He explores the long-running scholarly debates about what he
refers to as “the Wagner-Hitler problem.” Addressing scholarly
discussions as to whether Hitler’s obsession with Wagner was dominated
by a rapturous engagement with the operas themselves or an enthusiasm
for Wagner’s writings on anti-Semitism and the German spirit, Ross
concludes that “Hitler’s relationship with Wagner remained one of
musical fandom rather than of ideological fanaticism.”
Whatever attracted him most strongly to Wagner, Hitler was determined to
make him central to the iconography and mythology of Nazism, though the
composer and his work were not wholeheartedly embraced by the citizens
of the Third Reich. Wagner “was too strange, too eccentric, to serve as a
reliable ideological bulwark” in Nazi Germany, Ross writes. “Nor was
his work popular enough, in the mass-market sense, to operate as a
unifying force.”
As for the claims that Wagner’s music was played in the concentration
camps, Ross examines them carefully and concludes that if it happened,
it was only rarely. “The vast majority of survivor testimonies,” he
writes, “indicate that the music of the camps was popular in nature:
marches, dance tunes, hits of the day, light classics.”
Ross argues that “Wagner’s popularity in America actually surged” in the
1940s. Arturo Toscanini and other conductors performed the operas
before enthusiastic audiences; apparently some concertgoers didn’t find
it difficult to separate the nineteenth-century artist from the country
that he had mythologized and that was now a sworn enemy. The
New York Times
critic Olin Downes wrote that Wagner’s operas were “the antithesis of
Hitler, and crushing condemnation of all that Hitlerism implies.”
end quote
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/10/08/the-cults-of-wagner/if you encounter a paywall, you can read it here
https://outline.com/z94bDB
