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I've mentioned this a couple of times on here, but I have a fairly strict "no rating or reviewing classical music" policy on here. Which means that I actually don't catalogue a significant portion of the music I listen to! Especially recently--I grew up on classical music, but after many years as a rocker my wife got me back into it in a major way, and it's what we usually have on in the evening.
The reason behind the classical music embargo is, basically, that I don't feel qualified--I'm just not conversant enough in the technical or theoretical aspects of music to say anything intelligent about it. Specifically, I have absolutely no idea how to evaluate whether a given classical performance is good or bad. Like, one of the things I ended up reading at over the course of preparing this list was lengthy comment thread debating which sopranos have played the best Isolde, and I'm like, I dunno!
Anyways, slioganach rec'd me Tannhäuser; Siegfried-Idyll; Tristan und Isolde, but in order to keep following my own rules (more on that later) I compromised and wrote... whatever this is.
A bit of a nonstandard one. I really liked writing this one, even though it super doesn't make sense as a workaround of my "no rating classical music" policy because I don't really "rate" things the same way anymore.
OVERTURE: Lisztomania
When I was... I want to say maybe twelve years old my dad rented the movie Lisztomania and we watched it together. It wasn't my first Ken Russell movie--I'd already seen The Lair of the White Worm, my dad had a problem with choosing age-appropriate movies for me, although looking back on it I'm kind of thankful because it sort of vaccinated me against being an obnoxious film snob. Anyway, the central conceit of this movie is that Franz Liszt was The First Rock Star, and so they get Roger Daltrey to play him, and honestly it's a really fun movie if you don't take it too seriously, but here's the part about Wagner:
See, in real life Wagner and Liszt were buddies (Wagner even married Liszt's daughter), although Liszt apparently got pretty annoyed with Wagner asking him for money all the time. This movie kid of extrapolates from that, um... that Wagner is a literal vampire who sucks Liszt's musical talent out of his neck and then uses it for nefarious purposes, namely German nationalism, and what that means is constructing a Frankenstein monster and dressing it up as a Viking, only Liszt kills both Wagner and the monster with the power of music, only then what happens is that Cosima (Liszt's daughter who Wagner married, remember) brings them both back to life and fuses them together as they become Hitler, who eventually is defeated by Liszt and all the women he has fucked over the course of the movie, flying in a rainbow pipe-organ spaceship.
Normal movie!
And afterward I remember my dad saying to me that the problem with Wagner was that he made bad music that made people feel bad. Now, something you need to understand about my dad is that he is a dumb person who thinks he is smart, so every time he makes some kind of intellectual pronouncement you need to assume that he's wrong.
So I--who basically knew a smattering of Wagner's greatest hits before this--went into a shallow dive of his operatic canon with the assumption that he made good music that made people feel good.
Act I: Music
Scene 1: Running
For this... I guess project, I started with Tannhäuser, then Parsifal, then (as recommended by twitter) Tristan und Isolde. I intended to finish this off with a cheeky Ring Cycle, but then this list took so long to write that I snuck in Lohengrin too. Maybe not anyone's idea of a rational order, but it worked for me.
I listened to these at work, or walking my dog, or working in the dog run while my dog played around with his little dog friends, or while deep-cleaning the house since my parents-in-law were coming and I wanted it to look nice, or folding laundry, or biking up from midtown across the park, or shopping at Whole Foods. I streamed all of them off YouTube, and some of them had ads, so I had the unique experience of hearing Isolde's "Liebestod" interrupted by ads for White Claw. I can safely say that this is NOT how Wagner would have wanted it, but more on that later.
Anyway, the one context in which I never listened to these was while running. I'm a pretty obsessive runner, but my one real vice is that I always listen to music while I run, which any actual serious runner will tell you you're not supposed to do, because you're supposed to time your breaths unevenly so that you don't exhale on the same footfall every time, and music fucks that up. But I always listen to music. Why? Well, it's a cliché, but I honestly do take a lot of inspiration from Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running--and so, like Murakami, I run "to acquire a void".
That's also why I listen to music.
Scene 2: Schopenhauer
You know who Wagner really liked? Arthur Schopenhauer!
Quick and dirty: Schopenhauer's whole thing was that the world's true essence was what he called "will", and what I am going to call "desire" for reasons that will make sense later. This is bad because desire can never actually be satisfied, but there are three ways out.
One is the experience of aesthetic transcendence through art, which allows someone to experience the true nature of the world as composed of desire without feeling that desire and as such freeing us from its pain--and music, as the most abstract and least representational form of art, is the best at doing this ("All art aspires to the position of music"--callback!). One is to cultivate universal compassion for all other beings, and in so doing find both empathy for their desires and for one's own. And one (the only one that actually works) is to attempt to renounce one's own nature, as a human being, to desire, which is done through the asceticism and self-denial of the religious mystic.
The freedom from desire--that is what I would call "the void".
Scene 3: Brecht
You know who hated the idea of emotional transcendence through art, and probably also hated Schopenhauer and Wganer, although I don't know for sure? Bertolt Brecht!
Okay, so, backing up: Schopenhauer, as previously mentioned, believed in music as a method for transcending desire, but also believed that it was a limited, temporary method because its pure abstraction made it incompatible with any engagement with the root of desire. But then Wagner was like, what if we combine music with drama, using the general model of opera, and in so doing give a concrete meaning to the transcendent beauty of the music, thus pointing the way to a better world? (we will address what "better world" means later, maybe)
But then Brecht... (quick and dirty) Brecht was like, there are important messages to be conveyed in order to point the way to be better world, but the dramatic form nullifies them by fooling the audience into believing that said better world has already been achieved by the end of the play, so what you gotta do is use the transcendent beauty of music in a purposefully incongruous way to distance the audience from the drama and engage them intellectually.
Brecht was a materialist and Schopenhauer was an idealist. And if you know me you know that I am 100% Team Brecht here, even if sometimes I feel like the likes of Schopenhauer had their hearts in the right places. My outlook on the world is almost entirely, fervently materialist, to the point that I sometimes even Max Weber gives me the jibblies.
And that makes me endless obsession with music, and with the idea of "acquiring the void" through music... kind of weird!
Scene 4: Bayreuth
Okay, backing up: the underlying assumption here is that Wagner's music is good, and it makes people feel good. The question is, then: if we reject idealism, is feeling good enough?
Richard Wagner cares a lot about how you feel. In a way that almost seems antithetical to the concepts of romantic self-expression he's often associated with, I never much get the impression that he cares that much about telling you what he feels, but he really, really wants you, the listener, to feel a certain way at any given point during his operas. It's... honestly kind of sweet? And I legit do feel kind of bad to have only experience his music in the semi-distracted, technologically-mediated way that I have. If I had the time and the money (thanks for your donations everyone!) I'd get myself tickets to Bayreuth 2023 and this list would be a good bit different.
Scene 5: Experience
Which brings us to our first big question: what does it actually feel like to listen to Wagner?
Well, it feels like going to Europa-Park in Rust, Germany (to paraphrase Defunctland, a europe-themed theme park in already europe-themed europe) and throwing up on Wodan Timbur Coaster.
Me comparing music to throwing up on various amusement park rides is a running gag, a bit if you will, and let me say here that it does not mean I don't like the Wagner I have listened to. I actually really love it, like a lot! But the comparison does hold--saying that an album (or book, film, etc) is a "roller coaster ride" is a cliché, but here it's actually fitting. Because, like, what is a roller coaster but a series of design elements (drops, inversions, etc) that each individually produce a reaction in the rider, and then when arranged in sequence produce the visceral simulation of a narrative? That's what Wagner does with opera!
See, famously, Wagner threw out the standard operatic playbook to instead structure his operas around the leitmotif--a particular snatch of melody that represents both a narrative element and the emotion associated with the narrative element. These are then arranged in sequence such that what the audience feels about each element of the narrative--and about the narrative as a whole--is effectively completely under Wagner's control, and thus the conclusions that the audience draws from the narrative are also completely under Wagner's control.
It's honestly a pretty neat trick, although (being that I am incredibly suspicious of anything that feels like the imposition of a narrative upon an individual by culture) I don't really trust it--it makes me feel kind of icky, is what I'm saying, and it makes me feel even ickier to how good Wagner is at it, because, as previously mentioned, he makes good music that makes people feel good.
In my review of Ophilia, which I always always come back to, I talk about "cognitive pop", pop music that takes the same kind of snatches of melody that form a Wagnerian leitmotif, and use them to evoke the audience's sense of memory. Well, Wagner didn't write pop music, and as previously established he is concerned with emotion rather than memory (or at least not individual memory--more on that later), but it's the same structural trick.
And you know who really liked Wagner? The symbolists! Baudelaire, Verlaine, those guys. They specifically were into the idea that you can turn on and off emotions like a faucet using particularly powerful artistic symbols (hence the name). And what they were interested in, the reason why they wanted to do this, was desire--the desire to feel.
(this is the part where i say that Eli and the 13th Confession honestly feels wagnerian to me, a statement that will make no one happy)
Wagner did what he did for desire too, but for him it was a bit more complex--or perhaps just complicated--than that.
Act II: Fandom
Scene 1: Ludwig
Remember when I said that Wagner wasn't interested in memory? Well, he wasn't interested in personal, subjective memory (just as, oddly, he didn't seem interested in personal, subjective emotion), but he was very interested in collective memory, aka culture, and culture's terrifying stepson nationhood.
Backin' up a bit... imagine you're 15 years old, and you go to the opera, and it absolutely blows your mind, like, you are feelin' emotions you did not know it was possible to feel and you are feeling them with your heart and your soul and your body and you have never encountered anything so perfect or so powerful as what you have just seen.
Now imagine that you are literally a King. Capital letters. That's what happened when King Ludwig II of Bavaria went to see Lohengrin and Tannhauser.
King Ludwig II of Bavaria was, as far as I can tell, not all that great a king--although apparently he wasn't actually insane, that was something his political enemies concocted to get him out of power. He also wasn't much of an artist, although I've heard people say some nice things about his contributions to architecture and interior design. He was, more than anything, the world's greatest fanboy, and perhaps person he was the biggest fanboy of was Wagner. Wagner inspired that in people--it's the reason I keep doing that "you know who really liked Wagner?" bit. And the arrangement certainly worked out well for Wagner--if you're a guy who has made yourself penniless by make Difficult art and also by being generally kind of an asshole, it's very nice to have a literal king decide he's going to bankroll all your dumb projects.
But what did Ludwig get out of it? And what does anyone get out of being a fan? I mean, actually, this one's easy: it gives your life meaning. Again, Ludwig II was a terrible king. And he didn't much care! Ludwig II organized his life around the state of emotional transcendence that Wagner, and art more generally, gave him.
But, like. He was still very much a king. And when you're a king you don't actually have much of a choice as to what gives your life meaning! So when people called Ludwig mad they were actually kind of right, in that he made choices with his life that were objectively the wrong ones.
You know who Ludwig II liked almost as much as he liked Wagner? Louis XIV! Yeah, he used to basically LARP as Louis XIV, he would make people call him "the moon king" (as opposed to the Sun King) and he tried to build a mini-Versailles before he ran out of money. Now, Louis XIV... that's the "l'état, c'est moi" guy. And again, what really jumps out at you about Ludwig II is how utterly disinterested in being l'état he actually was. He was for the most part completely uninvolved with politics--and he was also fairly disinterested in the idea of the monarch as the symbolic manifestation of the (in this case Bavarian) nation.
Because, like, what the fuck is a nation?
Scene 2: Homesparkle
In 2016 my wife and I moved to Zurich. For context, I'm as American as apple pie and clandestine regime change, and she's Swiss, but from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Neither of us spoke any German.
Now, when you move anywhere in Switzerland the first thing you have to do is register yourself at the town hall of whatever municipality you're living in. When my wife and I went to do this, we were informed that we each needed to present our "Heimatschein", a document which neither of us had. Now, they didn't really have a problem with me not having one, I wasn't expected to, but they got so freaked out, or as freaked out as a Swiss person ever gets, about my wife not having a Heimatschein.
Which led us, naturally, to check in with Google as to what a Heimatschein actually is. And the translation we were given was "Homesparkle". Homesparkle! All of this bureaucratic handwringing about our lack of a Homesparkle!
So imagine the look on my face when years later I am listening to Tristan und Isolde and near the beginning of Act I Isolde starts talking about her Heimatschein. Her Homesparkle!
Scene 3: History
Wagner had the Homesparkle in his heart, and the homewonder in his love.
Because, like, remember when I said that one of the things you can use to give your existence meaning (or, and here's a callback, to give form to your endless desire) is fandom? Well, I'd submit that all forms of nationalism are basically that, but for an imagined community of people.
And so, like, Wagner, German nationalist, sure. But, like, Germany isn't really real now, it definitely wasn't when Wagner was coming up (remember, for Ludwig II to be king of Bavaria Bavaria had to be an independent country), and it really really definitely wasn't at the times in which his operas are supposed to be set.
Last Christmas, as well as giving you my heart, I also read this book called The Wolf Age by Tore Skeie, who is apparently a pop-history celebrity in his native Norway but who basically unheard of outside of it. This was his first book to be translated to English, and it was marketed really heavily as "Game of Thrones IRL", and yeah, it's kind of that, but it's also... well when I was reading it I thought what I was getting was basically an origin story for Norway, how the variously feuding Viking clans managed to unite under a single ruler and form a modern-ish nation... but then I read the afterward and Mr. Skeie referred to his book as an "anti-nationalist history" and I realized, oh, wait, he was actually debunking the origin story for Norway! Which Mr. Skeie assumed I knew, but I didn't, hence the confusion. The main thrust here, actually, is that the fact that the country "Norway" and the category of person "Norwegian" exist are basically accidents of political expediency, and there is absolutely nothing other than some guy named Olaf's desire to consolidate power for his heirs 1000 years ago that makes it mean anything.
And, like. If anything close to the age of heroes that Wagner wrote about in Tristan and Parsifal and the Ring Cycle actually ever existed, it's what Tore Skeie was writing about.
Scene 4: Nation
How did Wagner, someone who was so interested in the transcendent, someone who lived in an age of heroes and gods, in which something banal and, I'm gonna say it, cucked, as believing in an arbitrary assortment of people that arose from temporary political expedience... how did Wagner become a German nationalist?
Well, I feel like Wagner wasn't a German nationalist so much as he was just a nationalist, full stop. He was someone who believed in the concept of "Nations", just, like, in the capacity that Nations are good. That's a distinct type of guy--there are a few rationalist-adjacent political weirdos on tumblr that fit that description. And I feel like Wagner thought Nations were good because he thought that believing in something was a distinct moral virtue. And believing in a nation isn't nearly as virtuous as believing in art, but it's something, I guess.
Scene 5: Sorry
Okay, we gotta address the Führer in the room. Because, like, you know who really liked Wagner.
Yes, I will say it right now, Wagner was 100% an anti-Semite. I get the feeling that his problem with Jews was the idea, honestly very common in Europe all throughout history, that because they existed outside of the framework of Christianity they didn't have a nation and could never be categorized and therefore never be trusted.
Hating Jews is bad, and nationalism, including Wagner's style of nationalism, is also bad. And yet, as previously established, Wagner wrote good music that makes people feel good. What do we do with this?
Act III: Desire
Scene 1: Emotion
Let's go back to the basic structure which I tried and maybe did not succeed in articulating above--Wagner's operas:
- Use music to control the emotion the audience feels; and
- Use that emotion to guide them through his narratives; in order to
- Control the message they derive from his narratives.
But, point three. Wagner would be the first guy to tell you that stories have to be about something. So what are these about?
Scene 2: Rules
I'm on summer break from law school. So I was honestly kind of dismayed to discover that what most for Wagner's operas are about is contract law. Or, to be less glib, his operas are about rules, and how rules relate to morality, and how morality relates to--wait for it--desire.
This is especially true of the Ring Cycle--Wotan derives his power from the fact that his spear is covered with unbreakable contracts, and the whole plot of the various operas revolves around various deals characters make--Wotan getting the giants to build Valhalla in exchange for marrying Freia, then swapping that for the Rheingold--it goes on like that for thirteen more hours. This kind of reciprocal, transactional morality--in which basically anyone can make any deal with anyone and the only truly bad thing you can do is double-cross someone--is very pagan, it really is the kind of social structure you find in epic poetry and it's the way I would imagine a lot of the civilizations of antiquity were organized.
But then, remember, Siegfried breaks Wotan's spear. It's called Götterdämmerung for a reason. So, then, what's next?
Well, we get kind of an interlude with Tristan und Isolde, where the main conflict is Tristan's desire for Isolde versus his loyalty to Marke. What you have here is a feudal sort of morality, kind of an outgrowth from the previous, in which what matters is not the individual contract but the bonds and relationships between people. It doesn't much matter what Tristan and Marke say or do to one another, not really, as long as falls within the prescribed dictates of their realtionship.
But, then, this falls apart too--Tristan and Isolde desire each other, yes, but they also desire to escape (into the land of night) this kind morality that restricts each of them to one narrow role. The conflict, then, is how to escape this while still preserving their moral purity (more on that later), and the solution Isolde eventually comes up with is dying.
Scene 3: Christianity
What we're plotting here is kind of a historical progression of European cultural ideas of morality, and if we're doing that (are we really seriously doing that? is that what i have gotten myself into?) its final form is in Parsifal.
I gotta be real with all of you, I really really liked a lot of... pretty much all of, honestly, the Wagner I listened to, but the only part that really Got me, made me verklempt in that certain way only music can, was Act III of Parsifal. And for a long time I wasn't sure why, but then it hit me, oh, Act III of Parsifal sounds like a mass and it's hitting my ex-Catholic-school-kid lizard brain.
So this final stage of morality is Christian morality. But to Wagner, what that seems to mean, more than anything else, is a kind of universal morality. We see, in this historical progression, a gradual widening of the scope of that which needs to be loved, protected, cherished, respected--from the individual contract to the person to, finally, the whole world. Like Christ did.
(callbacks: very compatible with schopenhauer, not compatible at all with nationalism)
Scene 4: Purity
Okay, two problems: first of all, in a world of desire, how do you achieve this all-encompassing love? Because this kind of love is the love for things as they are and as such is almost the negative of desire.
Wagner's answer appears to have been innocence. Parsifal, remember, his whole thing is that he's the ultimate innocent--at the beginning of the opera he doesn't even know what a sword is. And this kind of innocence, the lack of knowledge of the reality of desire, is what allows you to live purely and universally. Siegfried is kind of an innocent too, except honestly he's just more a dumbass than anything else.
But then, problem number two: this kind of pure innocence doesn't exist in people, outside of newborn babies and certain operatic heroes. So how do you achieve it?
It seems like Wagner tried out Schopenhauer's way--mystic self-abnegation--and found it wanting. Maybe the most fascinating of Wagner's characters is Klingsor, the villain of Parsifal--his whole thing is that he tried to be grail knight, but he couldn't overcome his personal desire, so he resorted to self-flagellation, and when that didn't work either he said fuck it and became an evil wizard. This struggle--you experience desire, so you can't be good enough, but one thing you know that's "good" and is also really easy is suffering, so you make yourself suffer--this is something that basically everyone who's ever been subjected to Christian morality has known to some degree or another. Conventional Christian morality, actually, is all about arbitrary, draconian ideas of ritual purity in order to simulate this. A couple of people are busy destroying the world because they think that the population as a whole isn't doing this enough. It's a bad time.
'Cause, see, they get it backwards. The idea of creating innocence through rules of purity in order to free oneself from desire to achieve a state of universal love keeps you from ever doing that, because you can never win, you can never follow the rules well enough because the rules say not to have desire and the only way to not have desire is to follow the rules.
Scene 5: Death (Maybe)
Wagner was a man who lived with desire, maybe more so than most--I'm not going to get too biographical, you gotta trust me on this.
He didn't want to live like this. He couldn't live with his desire, because desire would never be fulfilled. His whole life would be like that first chord, you know the one.
He tried music, which worked for a little bit. But really, when it came right down to it, he knew there was only one way out, and that was dying.
Except, no. Because there's actually nothing wrong with desire.
So few people get this! Maybe because desire is painful and generally painful things are bad. But it's true. You have to be aware of your own desire, but you don't have to destroy it. That first chord is actually really beautiful.
"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."