Alex Ross' Wagnerism

 "The philosopher is not free to dispense with Wagner."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner 

Wagnerism is the history of the reception of Richard Wagner and his music, and of the uses made of Wagner's music after his death. And, well, some of those uses weren't very nice. 

When the book was good, I thought it was very good, but it wasn't at all times. It's more encyclopedic than analytic, at times even gossipy. Did you know that Virginia Woolf went to a benefit costume ball as a Valkyrie in 1909? Me neither. Not sure that tells me much about Woolf, though it might say something about how ubiquitous Wagner was.

Years ago I read Ross' The Rest Is Noise, his history of twentieth century classical music, around when it came out in paperback. I really liked it, even though most of it went over my head. (And I'm pretty tall.) I don't know that much about serious music. A diminished seventh, you say--is that music, baseball, or planetary science? I wouldn't know one if it bit me on the ear. Still, sometimes I like a book that's too hard for me, it leaves me wanting to know more.

Because Wagnerism addresses Wagner's presence in literature and film--and politics--more than in music, this book worked differently for me. 

Ross' organization is a mix of chronological and by topic. The first figure Ross covers is Nietzsche, an early Wagner disciple, at least until he wasn't, and the most prominent. Ross gives himself 60 or so pages on Nietzsche, and is lucid and helpful. Nietzsche and Wagner is a topic on which books could be written--and have, with more than one of them by Nietzsche himself. Subsequent chapters are on French Wagnerians (Baudelaire was an early booster), British, American, Austrian, Russian, black (W.E.B. DuBois was a fan), gay, Jewish, feminist. Right-wing, but also left-wing. Well, everyone actually was listening to Wagner for a while.

When Ross gives himself space he's at his best. This includes his writing about Nietzsche and Baudelaire. There was interesting stuff on Joyce. Wagner is important to Thomas Mann, (less so to Heinrich) and Thomas Mann's attitude toward Wagner changes over the years. I was particularly interested in Ross' take on Mann's Joseph saga, which he reads as a direct challenge to Wagner's Ring Cycle: both tetralogies, both investigations of myth, but Mann dealt with Old Testament--that is, Jewish--subjects, which Wagner himself wouldn't touch. There was some good stuff there.

On the other hand Ross speculates that Wagner is behind Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Mann's Doctor Faustus. But how can that be when *everyone* knows that Leverkühn is Nietzsche + Schönberg? 😉  There needed to be either more or less to that argument.

Ross is at his tip-top best on Willa Cather. He devotes an entire chapter to her, largely on The Song of the Lark, and she shows up in some of those other categories listed above as well. Very well worth reading if you care about Cather.

Wagner in World War II is the emotional heart of the book. Ross is at some pains to remind us that lots of people who did not like Naziism, were never going to like it, still liked Wagner. 

Wagner's politics were complicated and probably not well-thought-out. He got himself in serious trouble supporting the anti-monarchical revolutions of 1848 and it took him years to get out of that trouble. He was pretty seriously pacifist. He meant his anti-Semitism though, publishing a vile article first anonymously, and later doubling down by re-publishing it under his own name. One of the main reasons Nietzsche, not exactly known for his compassion, broke with Wagner was his abhorrence of Wagner's anti-Semitism.

Hitler's Wagner--and Hitler really did love Wagner--was not all of Wagner. But how big a chunk of the total Wagner was Hitler's Wagner? The jury's still out on that, even I would say, in Ross' mind.

There was trivia and some of the trivia was fun. I did not know that Laughing Cow cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) is actually a pun on the Valkyries of Wagner; some Frenchman in World War I making fun of the German propensity for Wagnerian code names. (The Siegfried Line, anyone?) Thomas Mann and Willa Cather played records and drank champagne at the Knopf's in 1943. What's Opera, Doc? makes an appearance, as well as other cartoons of the era. Though, for that matter, I read Broom Hilda at GoComics this morning; and Now I'm Very Angry Broom Hilda did not get a mention...are the cartoonist Russell Myers' backdrops influenced by Wagnerian set design? Think of those remote, fantastical geological outposts. (Though, of course, they have more to do with the Coconino County backdrops of Herriman's Krazy Kat.) Some of Ross' arguments/speculations are about on that level...

"Perhaps [George Bernard] Shaw hung back from direct engagement with Wagner because he wished to avoid placing himself in competition with the Meister." [439]

Is this that same Shaw who cheerfully bashed on Shakespeare?

"Cy Twombly listened intermittently to Wagner while working on his ten-painting cycle Fifty Days at Iliam..." [631]

I listen to Wagner intermittently, too, though in my case, the inters are pretty danged mittent. Are my posts therefore Wagnerian? Well, maybe they go on too long...

Ross ends with a brief history of his own listening to Wagner. He was not initially a fan, it seems, but then in his twenties got excited about Wagner. But wondered, should he?

Anyway, good when it was good, and very good when it was very good, as we say in the Department of Tautology. If anything in the subject interests you, it's quite readable and often astute. It didn't blow me away like his first book, though.

It's one of those pan-European books that might do for a lot of countries, but I'll stick to the basics and count it for Germany:

Mann's Doctor Faustus and its Story

"...this strategy was a bitter necessity in order to achieve a certain humorous leavening of the somber material..."

from Thomas Mann's The Story of a Novel 

Mann wrote The Story of a Novel shortly after completing his novel Doctor Faustus, in 1949. It was translated into English in 1961 by the Winstons. I thought I'd read them as a pair.

That bit about humor? I think Mann succeeded:  the novel is funny, except, of course, when it isn't. Tom at Wuthering Expectations reminded recently that Mann's Magic Mountain is funny, and this is, too. Magic Mountain is funnier than Doctor Faustus, but then World War I was a barrel of laughs compared to World War II. Still, there's some laughs in this one. The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, spends the first chapters comically complaining that he doesn't know how to write. In very elaborate prose. When our hero, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is worried about the symptoms of early-stage syphilis, his doctors are comically unavailable: suddenly dead, hauled off to jail, etc. (The devil may have done it.) The names of characters are simply silly. Someone whose German is better than mine should feel free to comment, but I make out the names of the conservative circle of intellectuals around Sextus Kridwiss as Mister Chaos, Mister WoodenShoes, Mister Birdy, and Mister PorridgeMess.

So you probably know this as that crazed, howling cheese of a novel about the musician who slips into syphilitic dementia, full of dry theory about twelve-tone music, a novel unintelligible to mere mortals, and yes, it is all those things. It's an allegory about the collapse of German culture into Hitler-led barbarity.

But, hey, it's funny, too, so that makes it all OK...right?

Anyway, a quick summary: Adrian Leverkühn is born on a German farm around 1890; his friend (and future biographer) Serenus Zeitblom is born in the nearby town, two years earlier. Everyone pretty quickly realizes young Adrian is a musical genius and takes the time to nurture his talent. Adrian first studies theology, but finally comes around to the study of composition. He writes some apprentice works, but then deliberately gives himself syphilis by sleeping with a prostitute known to be infected. This deepens his aloofness and separates him from normal family life; it also liberates his creativity.

Or something does. Adrian writes a confession that Zeitblom reproduces in which Adrian makes a deal with the devil for twenty-four years of musical productivity. Was it just a midnight dream, like Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor? Adrian is discreet and ironic, but he always treats subsequent wonderful events as if some power was assisting him. If there is a devil, one of the concessions the devil extracts is Adrian can have no normal human contacts; well, syphilis makes one type of contact awkward; and Adrian's shy and aloof, given to migraines, so all he can do is work anyway. He produces a number of masterpieces, though they're experimental and not universally loved.

The novel in the last third or so becomes, as Mann notes in The Story of a Novel, more novelistic: there is romance, murder, suicide, the death of Adrian's father. Finally in 1930, the twenty-four years are up, and Adrian submerges into syphilitic dementia. His last two compositions are based on the Apocalypse of John and the death of Faust. Götterdämmerung indeed.

Is this Faust saved? We don't know. Marlowe's Faust isn't, but Goethe's is. Mann suggests, but I haven't read, that the original Faust book is ambiguous, and certainly this is. The novel runs in two time tracks: the events of Adrian's life from 1890 to 1930 or so, with Adrian's death coming in 1940. But there is also the time that Zeitblom is supposedly writing it in: from 1943 to the fall of Berlin in 1945. The Russian advance from the East, the invasion of Sicily and then the fall of Italy, D-Day, the Ardennes offensive leading to the Battle of the Bulge. But Adrian's dead, and salvation for Adrian would mean his music would be performed and understood; that the German culture he is the stand-in for would once again have a place on the world stage. In 1945? Well, a German could only hope. Or then again, maybe hope against is more appropriate? Is German culture irredeemably compromised? Zeitblom articulates both possibilities.

In The Story of the Novel, Mann tells us that when he read the final chapters to Adorno, (who was serving as his adviser on musical theory) Adorno told him that the ending was too optimistic, and Mann decided that was right, and rewrote it to be darker. Certainly Mann did not think Germany redeemed enough to return to live there, though there were calls for him to do so, even to become president of a newly freed Germany, something like Vaclav Havel.

I was thinking about rereading it after I read Broch's The Death of Virgil earlier this year. (Still thinking about The Death of Virgil!) Both novels were written in the US in the closing years of World War II. Mann was living in Los Angeles; Broch in D.C., but according to The Story of a Novel, they met a couple of times during those years. Mann was also deeply involved in war work and traveled to D.C. a few times. When I read The Death of Virgil I thought it was surprising how little political a novel it was, given the time it was written and the nature of the (Austrian exile) author. Doctor Faustus is a very political novel. Though I've now read them relatively closely together, two big Modernist stories about major artists, I'm not sure I have much else to say about that comparison in retrospect...

But I'd already been thinking about rereading Faustus after I read Rolland's Jean-Christophe a bit over a year ago. Here I think the connection is quite clear: both characters are musicians; both represent German musical culture of their era, its relation to the rest of Europe; both protagonists die young. Both authors are closeted homosexuals. (At least likely so. The evidence on Rolland is thin.) Mann was engaged with Rolland, even dreaming about him according to his diary. Rolland, writing just before World War I, is more hopeful. That reflects the times, but as well the temperaments, of the two authors.

One notable difference is that the music theory in Mann is quite difficult and authentic-feeling; Adrian's compositions feel like they really do exist. Rolland is quite general about the works that Jean-Christophe Krafft has written. Most of Adrian's compositions are vocal music and set a text; Jean-Christophe's are purely instrumental. (I think Mann's choice is wiser from a writing point of  view.) This makes for very different novels: the Rolland is a much easier read, with considerably more emphasis on the personal relationships; Mann is more difficult, and much of the first half of the novel feels frankly didactic. (Though the fact that Mann can write about Brentano, Keats, Shakespeare, or the Bible help ground it.) All that makes Mann's more believable. I wondered if Mann was thinking specifically about Rolland in The Story of the Novel when he wrote this:

"There is nothing sillier, in a novel about an artist, than merely to assert the existence of art, to talk about genius, about works, to hail these and rave about their effects upon the souls of the audiences. No, concrete reality, exactitude, were needed--this was utterly clear to me."

But short of including a score or a CD, the reader can only estimate musical works from the description of their effects on others. Doctor Zhivago includes Zhivago's poems and we can judge of them, though less so in my case, since I have no Russian. But a novel about a musician? Music is inherently harder. Is Mann's the right approach? I think a lot of people don't read Mann because of his difficulty, because of all that music theory, but then I think hardly anybody reads Rolland at all. (Which is a shame.)

Also reading The Story of a Novel was interesting from the perspective of a working writer. Of course, in 1943 (when he starts the novel) Mann is famous and celebrated as a novelist in ways that seem almost impossible anymore today. From the outside one might assume he has an almost Goethean level of self-assurance. Turns out it wasn't entirely so. So here's some quotes, mostly about the writing process, I copied out of the book:

How much Faustus contains of the atmosphere of my life! A radical confession, at bottom. From the very beginning that has been the shattering thing about the book.

Has any man who ever bore the incubus of creation on his back, always concerned, obsessed, preoccupied with the the work of days and years--has any such man ever been an enjoyable companion? Dubito. 

Protracted psychological low, intensified by horror at the misguidedness of the novel I began with so zestful a sense of experiment.

Why, yes. Certainly! On with it! We'll cut a page and a half; we'll cut three pages. That will make it more readable, somewhat more readable. 

The fact remains, never before has any work so agitated and moved me! 

But also these, more general:

Switzerland is where the most gloriously un-German things are said in German.

People who feel held back and not given their due, and who at the same time present a distinguished appearance, often seek redress in racist self-assertion.

Life is pain, and we only live as long as we suffer. [Ouch! Tell me it ain't so, Tom!]

There is no doubt in my mind to whom we are indebted for this victory. It is Roosevelt.

Mann was an enthusiastic American citizen at the time and a great partisan of FDR. Still the House Un-American Activities Committee hounded him out of the country a couple of years later.

Anyway, a great--and affecting--and sometimes funny--novel, even if the music theory pretty much still goes over my head. It's impact falls at the conflux of the intellectual-political-emotional, with emotional perhaps being the least, but certainly not null, term.

Humpty's eyes may look a little dazed.

Anyway, this post (and the process of writing this post) has gone on **way** too long. I was also reading the books with the idea of #GermanLitMonth, and in fact finished them a while ago. But I've been a particularly slow blogger of late.

Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe [Interim]

Romain Rolland won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, and according to the Nobel Prize biography Jean-Christophe is his masterpiece. Nowadays he seems rather forgotten.

Jean-Christophe Krafft is born to a musical family in a small principality on the German side of the Rhine a little after German unification. It's the story of how he became a composer. A Kunstlerroman.

The work came out in French over the years 1904-1912 in ten short volumes; the entire work was translated into English by 1913 by Gilbert Cannan and not, as far as I can tell, since.

This is an interim post because those ten novels add up to 1600 pages in my one volume edition. I've finished the first three novels, about 400 pages, and I thought I'd note what I have so far.

The story begins with our hero in his cradle and goes on from there. It's a very linear novel. Jean-Christophe's grandfather Jean Michel Krafft is the Kapellmeister (head musician for the court) in this unnamed principality; his father Melchior is a talented but dissipated violinist who marries Louisa, a gentle woman but beneath him socially. Their eldest child is Jean-Christophe, though there are two brothers to come. When our hero is in his early teens, his grandfather dies of old age, and his father dies of alcohol, leaving the family nothing but debts. Jean-Christophe becomes the breadwinner, playing in the principality's orchestra and giving music lessons.

The novel is, as I say, very linear; it describes one of Jean-Christophe's relationships after another; it moves forward in time without jumps forward or back; the currently most significant relationship is given its space and then doesn't return. There's his mother, his grandfather, his father. His uncle on his mother's side provides him a sense of spirituality and of music as it relates to the average person. There's Otto, his first real friend: his family's poverty, his need to work, and his own hauteur/shyness combine to make friendship difficult for Jean-Christophe, and his friendship with Otto is intense until it's over. Then his first two girlfriends: with the first nothing happens and then she dies; the carnality of the second relationship is disapproved by all, eventually including Jean-Christophe himself. The first three books take him to the end of his adolescence.

My thoughts so far. 1.) Rolland really is obscure these days. For a Nobel Prize winner, his Wikipedia biography is pretty short. I took a look at the French version and it wasn't much longer. The French have so many Nobel Prize laureates in literature they may feel they can just ignore a couple of them. The Toronto Public Library basically has no circulating Rolland, though a number of his books are available for stack usage at the main reference library.

2.) His relationship with Otto is much more intense and much more individualized than is his relationship with either of the two girls. Though they get somewhat fuller portraits, they can still be boiled down to the ethereal and the earthly, at least in Jean-Christophe's life. His friendship with Otto is more complex and it's destroyed when Jean-Chistophe hears a rumor (started by his younger brother) that the relationship between the two of them is homosexual. It isn't, but the thought that others might think so is enough to make Jean-Christophe so unpleasantly conscious of their friendship it ends soon after. This made me wonder if Rolland himself were homosexual. The Interwebs were inconclusive, but kind of said yes. The evidence may be thin because Rolland felt he had to keep it that way, I don't know.

This made me wonder about 3.) what did Thomas Mann think about Romain Rolland? If indeed Rolland was a somewhat closeted homosexual, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, who wrote a long novel about a young man becoming a composer, it seems to me Mann could hardly escape having an opinion. Comparing Doctor Faustus with this novel would be fruitful I suspect, but that's another post. But conveniently I happen to have Mann's selected diaries in English here at home. (Have I mentioned I may have a problem with book purchases?) It even has an index so I didn't have to reread it. On two occasions Mann mentions dismissively articles comparing Rolland's Jean-Christophe with his own Buddenbrooks. But then in an entry on June 17, 1933, he writes:

Last night I dreamed Rolland had died, and that I was delivering a very earnest eulogy beside his coffin, furious about German crimes.

It was a few years until Mann started Doctor Faustus, so make of that what you will. Rolland was a famous pacifist and pan-Europeanist.

Also without leaving the house I could look up James Gibbons Huneker.  Huneker was once (early 1900s) a well-known American critic with a strong interest in both music and avant-garde European literature of the time. (What can I say? There was a phase. A bunch of his books were in some used bookstore I frequented.) I figured he had to have an opinion on Rolland. And he did, but it was only a passing sideswipe. Rolland's prose was 'mucilaginous.' Ouch. A little unfair, but judging only from translation, which I'm sure Huneker was not, it may not be entirely so...

Anywho. That's a start, but that's all for now.

Mathias Enard's Compass

Someday I'll compose an opera called Schopenhauer's Dog--it will be about love and compassion, Vedic India, Buddhism, and vegetarianism. The dog in question will be a music-loving Labrador its master takes to the opera, a Wagnerian dog...The dog will be a witness to the ruin of culture and the return of barbarism; in the last act, Schopenhauer's ghost will rise from the flames to save the dog (but only the dog) from destruction.

I don't know, I found that funny. Was I supposed to? I think so. And I say that without knowing anything particular about Schopenhauer, Vedic India, Wagner, or the opera. I know no more about Buddhism than the average decently literate Westerner--we spent a couple of weeks on it in my high school World Religions class. I'm not even especially familiar with Labradors. This is a cat household.

Énard's novel won the Prix Goncourt for 2015--the major French literary book prize. It's a love story of sorts, or maybe better an obsession story: Franz Ritter is in love with Sarah; for at least quite a while, we see her thinking of him as no more than a friend. They are both academics, with expertise in obscure areas: he studies the introduction of Western musical forms (such as opera) into the "Orient." Her area of scholarship is more strictly literary. They talk about intellectual things. Edward Said's Orientalism is a major touchstone.

The frame of the novel (there are frequent flashbacks) takes place in one long sleepless night of Ritter's, when he's in his home town of Vienna. The above quote occurs in a section headlined 2:30 AM, and Ritter, as he fails to fall asleep, becomes more and more absurd until he reaches peak absurdity at that hour; as the dawn approaches, he returns to something like sense.

It's a complex novel, full of things I don't necessarily know very much about. I couldn't say much without doing some serious reading around it. I haven't read Énard's two earlier novels, both of which are also available in English, though now I might. And I got this from the library and it's due soon. Really I'm only going to be able to be shallow in anything I say.

And maybe that's OK.

What all that made me wonder about is, to what extent do we as readers need to understand intellectual referents in order to enjoy a novel about intellectual characters? I've read Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus twice--Mann is another touchstone for Énard's book--without knowing very much about music theory either time; in fact, I'm quite sure that the first time I read Doctor Faustus, I knew absolutely nothing about music theory; my youthful listening to the Clash and Graham Parker did nothing for my understanding of the late Beethoven piano sonatas and twelve-tone music. In fact, until I read Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise a few years ago, I suspect that all of my knowledge of music theory came from incompletely understood passages in Doctor Faustus.

A friend of mine hasn't read Doctor Faustus, even though she liked Mann's The Magic Mountain (equally full of intellectuals talking about intellectual things) because while she knows something about Western philosophy, (the intellectual domain of The Magic Mountain) she doesn't know anything about the music theory featured in Doctor Faustus. This always struck me as strange, because I was quite sure when I read The Magic Mountain for the first time, I knew next to nothing about the history of Western philosophy, and I liked it just fine. Both of those books of Mann's left me with a list of things I wanted to read, and that's one of the things that novels can do for a reader.

We can also simply enjoy the possibility of romance, which Énard offers as well: it's a story of eggheads in love.

Anyway it, too, left me with a bunch of things I'd like to read: Nizami's Layla and Majnun or that Schopenhauer in the first sentence. At least two of them are already on the shelves, bought in earlier fits of intellectual ambition that petered out before fulfillment: al-Shidyaq's Leg over Leg and Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.