Started: April 2, 2020
Finished: May 14, 2020
Why I Read This Book
Confession time: I have no ear for classical music at all. (It's one of my many failings. I've tried to develop an appreciation for it in the past, and just couldn't do it.)
But, as a history nerd, I still sometimes take an interest in the biographies of famous composers. Particularly if the lives of those composers intersect with the historical and political events of their time.
Wagner is an excellent example of a classical composer whose biography is fascinating reading, even to those of us who aren't musically inclined.
Wagner's politics were a fascinating contradiction.
On the one hand, Wagner collaborated with the socialists and the anarchists. Wagner was one of the leading figures in the Dresden uprising in 1849 in which he collaborated with none other than Mikhail Bakunin (the father of modern anarchism).
But on the other hand, Wagner also posthumously became Hitler's favorite composer because of Wagner's ideas of German nationalism, and his rabid antisemitism. And so nowadays, it's impossible to talk about Wagner's legacy without mentioning the Nazis.
So who was the real Wagner? Was he a progressive revolutionary, or a reactionary anti-semite? Seems like it would make a fascinating biographical study either way, no?
But politics aside, as a fan of fantasy and mythology, I was also interested in Wagner's epic mythological 15 hour Ring Cycle. I wanted to know more about, but I also wanted someone to summarize it for me. Because there was no way I was going to sit through 15 hours of opera.
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| From Wagner's Die Walkure. This looks pretty epic. But could I get the Cliff Notes version, please? |
In the end, I ended up reading Wagner: A Documentary Study just because that was the only book I could find. (I was still living in Japan at the time, so I got it from Oita Prefectural Library).
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| 2009 Review HERE |
It was a collection of authentic documents related to the life of Richard Wagner. Which was about as boring as it sounds. To quote myself from my 2009 review:
I did learn interesting bits and pieces about Wagner's life from this book, but it was a poor substitute for a biography. It was just a series of fragments, and the reader had to guess at the gaps.Okay, so it wasn't an enjoyable reading experience. But it did largely satiate my curiosity. I stopped looking for another Wagner biography after reading that one.
Moreover, most of Wagner's letters have to do with the techniques of music, which were unappreciated and uninteresting to an unmusical person like me.
I didn't find this book at all enjoyable actually. It was one of those books where I couldn't even get through a single page without my mind wandering off at some point.
I stuck through the entire book simply out of determination.
And then, a few months ago, I stumbled upon this book in the bookstores here in Saigon. A nice breezy biography of Wagner written for a popular audience. This is exactly what I had been looking for 12 years ago. (It was published in 2017, so it's no wonder that I couldn't find it back in 2008.)
I initially left it on the shelves. Sure, it would have been nice if I had found this book 12 years ago. But now I had already read about Wagner. My curiosity had been satiated.
But then, when working through my scripted review series, I filmed a video re-capping my old review of Wagner: A Documentary Study, and on camera I found myself re-telling the story of how 12 years ago I had wanted to find a readable biography of Wagner, couldn't find it anywhere, but then just recently saw it in the bookstore and didn't buy it. And I found it hard to justify in words why I hadn't bought it. And then I found myself on camera saying that I would buy this book if I ever saw it again in the bookstores.
Wagner: A Documentary Study edited by Herbert Barth, Dietrich Mack, Egon Voss
...well, after having committed myself on camera, I decided I should really buy this book after all. So the next time I was in the same bookstore, I checked to see if this was still on the shelf. It was, so I grabbed it, bought it, read it, and here I am with the review.
The Review
So, yes, this is the Wagner biography I'd been looking for all along. It's light, easy to read, written in a breezy style, and written by someone more concerned with the interesting biographical details than the technicalities of music composition.
I had wanted something that was for a popular audience and not scholarly, and this was it exactly.
Of course, the trade-off with these kind of books is that there are lots of gaps, omissions, and over-simplifications. (And I'll get around to complaining about some of those in a minute.) But it was fun and easy to read, so that's the big take-away.
The author, Simon Callow, is actually a professional actor. I'd never heard of him before, but when I looked him up on Wikipedia, he has indeed been in a number of famous movies that I've seen (2). I was worried that this would mean that he couldn't write, but in fact his prose is perfectly readable.
Simon Callow in the forward gives the background to his obsession with Wagner, and why he was motivated to write this biography. He also makes the disclaimer: "I am not a musician, either as performer or musicologist. I am a well-informed music lover, but it would be entirely inappropriate for me to attempt musical analysis" (p.xvi).
So much the better, in my opinion. I didn't want to get bogged down in a lot of musical analysis.
At only 200 pages (plus indexes) this is hardly the definitive biography of Wagner. And it's obvious even to the casual read like myself that a lot is being cut out. [At the end of the book, there's a chronology of the major events of Wagner's life (p.201-205) and it was noticeable that some of these events weren't even in the main text--like the death of Wagner's beloved sister Rosalie in 1837.] And yet, the text does a good job of exploring what were the major influences that made Wagner tick.
A lot of what drove Wagner was not entirely rational. Wagner was driven by ego, emotions, romanticism--and also Simon Callow implies that some hallucinations and an over-active imagination also shaped the way Wagner told his autobiography.
But at the same time, there are intellectual developments, and Simon Callow does a good job of tracing these in a way that's very readable.
Wagner was always sympathetic towards the revolutionaries. (As a young man, he participated in the student riots in Germany that accompanied The Revolutions of 1830 (W)). Initially Wagner had to temper his radicalism in order to obtain royal patronage, but Simon Callow does a good job of tracing how exactly Wagner ended up at the center of the Dresden Uprising (W). During The Revolutions of 1848 Wagner was driven towards more radicalism by his associations with his associate conductor socialist August Rockel (W) and Bakunin. It also appeared that he got swept up in the emotions and revolutionary excitement of the 1848 days.
Wagner's participation in the Revolution cost him his job and his royal patronage, and he appears to have regretted his involvement. But he did continue his liberal education by reading Hegel (who he didn't understand) and Feuerbach (W) (who made a great impact on Wagner).
On pages 92-97, there's even some attempt to reconcile Wagner's liberal views with his reactionary anti-Semitism. As author Simon Callow explains, Wagner had a view of humanity as being happiest in the state of nature, but being currently unhappy because of the oppressiveness of modern civilization. All of this sounds very 1960s flower-child-esque, but such a philosophy inevitably has a hidden dark side--it requires the existence of certain people who are keeping humanity from this happy state of nature. And Wagner latched on to the Jews.
But despite this brief attempt to try to explain the antisemitism, Simon Callow usually treats it as completely irrational, and frequently describes Wagner's relentless anti-Semitism almost as if it were an illness.
...Wagner's anti-Semitism ... was more than a bizarre peccadillo, beyond a prejudice: it was an obsession, a monomania, a full-blown neurosis. No conversation with Wagner ever occurred without a detour on the subject of Judaism (p.185)There's also a fascinating epilogue in which the history of Wagner's legacy is briefly discussed. It turns out that it was not inevitable Wagner would become a Nazi symbol--the immediate heir to Wagner's legacy was his liberal son Siegfried who attempted to distance his father's opera house from anti-Semitism. But, as a twist of history would have it, Siegfried died in 1930, and Siegfried's wife became heir to the Wagner legacy and the opera house. And Siegfried's wife was a huge Hitler fan. And Hitler was a huge Wagner fan, so an alliance was made.
So all of that was fascinating, and for the most part I got exactly what I wanted out of this book. I felt like I understood Wagner's conflicted politics a lot more after finishing this book.
The only thing I didn't get, that I would have liked, was more analysis of Wagner's Operas, particularly his epic Ring Cycle.
Simon Callow does give plot synopses of many of Wagner's early operas and these are interesting for showing Wagner's fascination with the epic and with the macabre. But then by the time we get to the part of Wagner's biography where he is writing the Ring Cycle, we don't get much insight into the plot of the work. Simon Callow mentions its something about dwarfs, dragons, gods and heroes, but he talks about it only in the vaguest of terms, and I didn't really feel like I had much of an idea of what the opera was actually about.
It's not that Simon Callow doesn't write about the Ring Cycle--he writes plenty about Wagner's struggle to get it produced--but the reader is given very little information about what happens in the Opera. Instead, he alludes to themes rather than explaining them.
When discussing The Rheingold (the first opera in the Ring Cycle), Callow writes:
...it embodied with amazing dexterity, within its unbroken two-and-half hour span, Wagner's tragic critique of modern capitalism, grounded in his understanding of Feuerbach, and channelled through figures derived from the ancient myths of the German people. (p.104)Well, that all sounds fascinating. But what was Wagner's critique of modern capitalism? How did he embody it in The Rheingold? What myths did he use?
Even more tantalizing is the description of the ideological conflict that The Ring of Nibelung caused the Nazi party. You see, Hitler loved the opera, but his commanders? Not so much.
...the more intellectually acute of the [Nazi] high command pointed out that The Ring of Nibelung was a proto-Marxist text, and that Parisfal was dangerously close to a religious experience, which was equally repugnant to the Nazi ethos. (p.197)So there's something really interesting being hinted at here, but wouldn't it be nice to know why the Nazi high command thought that The Ring of Nibelung was a proto-Marxist text? But we get none of that in Simon Callow's book.
Oh well, I guess that's what I get for deliberately choosing the easy-reading version. I suppose there's always Wikipedia if I need a plot summary of The Ring cycle.
Other Notes
* Mike Duncan, in his podcast on the feud between Marx and Bakunin (which I linked to last July) mentions the anti-Semitism that was present in Bakunin's accusations against Marx, but also cautioned against drawing too much from this, because in the 19th century every ideology was tainted by anti-Semitism. After hearing this, I was wondering whether or not Wagner's anti-Semitism should also be considered in the context of is time. But Simon Callow makes it very clear that Wagner's anti-Semitism was extreme even for its day, and was recognized as such. Even in his day, there was a big backlash to Wagner's infamous article "Judaism in Music". (And actually, while we're on the subject, Francis Wheen thinks Bakunin's anti-Semitism was also extreme even for its day.)
*... and speaking of Bakunin:
On page 78, Simon Callow describes Bakunin in these words:
"It was the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, the most notorious terrorist in the world, the Osama bin Laden of his day..."
This strikes me as extremely unfair. Granted, no one would ever describe Bakunin as a pacifist. He believed in violent insurrection. But I think there's a distinction to be made between an insurrectionist and a terrorist. Bakunin was all for fighting on the barricade, but he never would never have thrown a bomb into a crowded coffee house, nor did he endorse such behavior. (Although granted, after Bakunin's death several of his later followers would turn to terrorism. But that's different.)
I think I get what Simon Callow is going for. He's trying to convey to his readers (many of whom may be ignorant of 19th Century history) that Bakunin was really really notorious in his day, and he's trying to do it in as few words as possible, because Bakunin only gets a handful of sentences in the whole book. (Although Bakunin's association with Wagner was infamous, it was also very short-lived). Nonetheless, I thought the comparison to Osama bin Laden was tasteless.
* I had no idea before reading this book, but it turns out Wagner and his wife were intimately connected with Friedrich Nietzsche as well. So that's yet another giant figure of the modern world that Wagner was connected to.
Connections with Other Books I've Read
* Rupert Chistiansen has a blurb on the backcover: "He [Simon Callow] sees the man plainly and he sees him whole, without excessive veneration or excoriation".
For my review of Rupert Christiansen's book, Paris Babylon, see HERE.
* From page 144:
First he [Wagner] moved into a magnificent new house in town; not only did he furnish it to the very height of luxury, it was minutes away from the house once lived in by Lola Montez, the hated mistress of Ludwig's deposed grandfather, Ludwig I. The locals drew their conclusions: Wagner was quickly named Lola II or Lolotte.So who was Lola Montez? She gets talked about in Revolutions of 1848 by Priscilla Robertson, and she also has a major role in the fictional book Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser as well as the movie of the same name.
Footnotes (docs, pub)
(1) It's interesting that in his bibliography, Simon Callow lists loads of biographies of Richard Wagner. I wonder why I couldn't track these down 12 years ago? I think the mistake I made was I assumed that everything was available on Amazon.com. If I couldn't find it by searching on Amazon.com, it didn't exist--or so I reasoned to myself. But I think I've come to realize over the years there is a lot of books that actually aren't on Amazon.com--particularly stuff published by university presses, I think. I probably would have much better luck if I had searched through inter-library loan or something. (Although at the time, I was living in Japan, so that wasn't really an option.)
(2) Specifically of Simon Callow's filmography I've definitely seen: Amadeus, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Jefferson in Paris, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Shakespeare in Love, and The Phantom of the Opera. All of them were before I started my movie review project, so no reviews on this blog for any of them. A few others on his filmography list are might-have-seens (the memory gets a bit hazy).
Video Review (Playlist HERE)
Video review HERE and embedded below:
Link of the Day
The great Noam Chomsky and the super Stephen Krashen on April 6, 2020.
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