Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., was the first to write about AIDS in the press and is a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He is the author of We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer and is completing On The Future of Wagnerism, the sequel to his memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite. He is a specialist in addiction medicine in New York City, where he lives with his life-partner, gay activist and writer Arnie Kantrowitz. Larry Mass on: Wagnerism In The Shadow of Black Lives Matter Larry Mass - Sep 11,2020 ALEX ROSS’S TESTIMONIAL TO THE LIFE, TIMES AND ART OF RICHARD Commentary by LAWRENCE D. MASS Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 766 pages, 2020

For every window on Wagner we think we’ve already peered through, Ross has found more lenses and prisms through which to re-view them. At his best, Ross gives dimension to individuals, artworks and events, and captures their intersections with one another and the wider world of the past. But for all its evocation of the life and times of Wagner and the “artwork of the future” — Wagner’s and that of his many disciples, there’s little that looks to a salutary future for Wagnerism. Alex Ross’s Wagnerism is erudite, expansive and elegiac. Extensively annotated, compellingly laid out and compulsively readable, it’s brimming with juxtapositions and gems of detail and insight. Its greatest success is in demonstrating with endless examples what we already know — how widespread and powerful Wagner’s appeal has been to so many individuals and factions of culture, politics, history, religion, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. As everyone also knows, Wagner’s art is dogged by questions of its entanglement with the character and prejudices of Wagner the man and his place in the advent of Hitler and Nazism. However otherwise gifted and influential as an artist, the documentation and affirmation of which are the principal motivation and achievement of Wagnerism, Wagner was also a colossus of grandiloquence and mean spiritedness. Legendarily bigoted, spiteful, vindictive and heinously antisemitic, he was redolent of Donald Trump in being mendacious, appropriating, and a divisive, sadistic, bullying, tyrannizing, scapegoating German and white supremacist. Whatever else he was, he was also, to quote Alex Ross — in turn quoting Auden, who also called Wagner “perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived” — “an absolute shit.”… Ross is adroit, for example, in sketching in a few sentences how Tannhauser’s journey could be so viscerally appealing to Theodore Herzl, the founder and visionary of Zionism, and as well to W.E.B. Du Bois in his pursuit of a heroic new African spirit. He’s comparably adept in parsing how, beyond questions of antisemitism, an exemplar of self-hatred like Otto Weininger could engage so much interest. The relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche seems more accessible here than when we kept trying to put the pieces together ourselves. Setting the stage by opening with the closing event, the composer’s death in Venice in 1883, Wagnerism commences with “Rheingold,” a look-back redolent of the Hollywood heyday movies Ross later explores as having been so inspirited by Wagner. A whirlwind tour of Wagner’s creative life ensues with the Ring cycle components as touchstones and in counterpoint with Wagner’s vacillating relationship with Nietzsche. Along the way of what’s only the first 64 pages, we are helped to gauge Wagner’s artistic maturation within the Ring itself and in the two great , Tristan and Meistersinger, that were composed amidst the mammoth 26 year project of the cycle. Onward to the events leading to the establishment of the Festival in 1876 and the groundwork for Parsifal and its early controversies. A later chapter, “Grail Temple,” begins with a survey of the “Esoteric, Decadent and Satanic Wagner” that encircles the Wagner of Parsifal that Nietzsche found so objectionable. Past pages on the philosophical murk of so much Parsifal literature, art and commentary, however, we still don’t have the summary perspective of key issues and controversies Ross can be so good at. That may be more because of Wagner’s cunning than Ross’s inadequacy. As put it in a backstage aside in Tony Palmer’s film of and about the , does anyone really understand Parsifal? … As Ross concludes in his adaptation of this material for his recent New Yorker piece, “Wagner in Hollywood”: “The urge to sacralize culture, to transform secular pursuits into secular religion and redemptive politics, did not die out with the degeneration of Wagnerian Romanticism into Nazi kitsch.”… Wagnerism, which Ross never tries to define — yes, it’s that vast, we intuitively concede — is something you can sense the first time you notice the enraptured, absolute quiet of a Wagner audience or the outsizedness of Wagner ovations, even for mediocre performances. Mainstream opera enthusiasm can become rowdy with cheers and boos, but the thunderous force of a Wagner ovation can seem of another species. In contrast to the standard repertoire works that showcase singers, Wagner himself is more discernibly the font of this most passionate enthusiasm of operatic experience. Past the peak of progression of my own Wagnerism, this roar of Wagnerian ovation began to resound with greater menace. It seemed less secure, less the Heimat it had seemed to me in the throes of Wagnerism oblivion and denial. As I became evermore lost in the perfumed gardens of Klingsor and Kundry, I began to realize with gathering discomfort that I no longer felt I knew what that roar of the crowd was really all about. Was it truly, solely and simply in response to Wagner’s musical and theatrical genuis? 1

Further along in my own process of self-detoxification from Wagner, I realized I will never again be able to experience that roar as divorced from the darker energies wafting within and about Wagner and Wagnerism. The question that always lurked there had finally broken through: To what extent does the audience appreciate that it is being invited to legitimately participate, albeit tacitly under the mantle of high art, in levels of racism and antisemitism that are otherwise proscribed? In his section, “Democratic Vistas,” Ross looks at Mark Twain, a cockeyed Wagnerite who wrote of his 10 day trek to Bayreuth, and of his experience of Wagnerism: “Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in a community of the mad; Sometimes I feel like the one blind man where others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned; and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.” If you knew nothing else about this passage, you might be persuaded that it’s the description of a first visit to an opium den… Ross’s takes on racism and antisemitism can otherwise seem like generic white liberal takes on these matters. While such efforts to make things right and put them in perspective appear laudable in motivation and presentation, we have that sense of something missing. In the case of racism, what the usual cast of today’s white liberal spokespersons has to say may be insightful and caring, but as Black Lives Matter is helping us better appreciate, what has been missing are the multitudinous, previously ignored voices of everyday black experience and sensibility. Their stories — especially of the likes of George Floyd, Breona Taylor and many others who have been so notably victimized— are finally being told and heard as never before. Just as gay people of my generation grew tired of hearing ourselves described by heterosexuals and tired of seeing ourselves portrayed onstage and onscreen by heterosexuals, just as women have grown tired of hearing themselves spoken for by men, just as Hispanics and Asians have grown tired of seeing and hearing themselves characterized by Caucasians, and just as blacks have reached their limits in terms of having their lives accounted for by whites, I can’t be the only Jew to have grown weary of having my reactions to Wagner paraphrased and spoken for but otherwise ignored by others, notwithstanding their learning, ostensible compassion and good intentions. Beyond the notable achievements of Wagnerism, distinguished by intellectual dexterity, a literary gift for engaging readers and a careful willingness to articulate how serious and odious Wagner’s anti-Semitism can be, a question lingers, the very question that Ross cites as lingering at the conclusion of the Ring cycle. Where do we go from here? I don’t think anyone has the answer to that. But why not look for it, even in what might seem unlikely or suspect places? Not so exclusively in the art, memoirs and artifacts of the famous, infamous and offbeat that are the more predictable bedrock of scholarship as in Wagnerism, nor even at the historical and political developments that have so exhaustively inspired deconstructive postmodern stagings and cinematic appropriations of Wagner, but from the more mundane worlds of music and opera surrounding us. Just as Black Lives Matter challenges even the most liberal and tolerant among us to see a greater landscape of black life and experience, so the ongoing scholarly ferment in Wagner circles around anti-Semitism should be more open to a greater canvassing of Jewish experience with a more forefront participation by self-identified Jews in that discourse. For all the discussion of Jews, antisemitism, Wagner and Wagnerism by Ross and many others among the dramatis personae in Wagnerism, however, such testimony per se is rarely if ever solicited or demarcated as such. Nor is its absence noted. Testimony like that of my Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite remains all too foreign in these realms — rare, suspect, unwelcome and ignored. It makes me feel like Twain at Bayreuth or that civilian in the opium den. In any context, of course, if you’re a wheel but not willing to be squeaky, you’re not likely to get oiled. Not so unlike the slaves who voluntarily stayed with and fought for their Southern masters during the Civil War in Gone With The Wind, Jewish Wagnerites can seem generically and notably out of touch with our feelings about antisemitism and as well our ethnicity. As William M. Hoffman (Ghosts of Versailles) has put it, the post-Holocaust generation of Jews is numb. Those of us who are liberal and urbane almost uniformly, wishfully think of ourselves as culturally cosmopolitan and well assimilated in our Wagnerism, the very hiding places Wagner, with Nazism in hot pursuit, so ruthlessly, relentlessly, obsessively and sadistically routed and indicted in his artworks, essays and other writings. In Wagner’s time and yet again in our own, we Jews have been all too susceptible to internalizing this prejudice, to introjecting mainstream viewpoints and judgments. Where conflict is recognized it tends to be denied, universalized, relegated and rationalized. Not much more than in Wagner’s time, and most paradigmatically in the case of Wagner himself, have the keepers of the flame of Western culture had much interest in or tolerance for “whiney” Jews, any more than for “uppity” blacks, or for “shrill” white or “angry” black women. While it’s now evermore widely accepted that Die Meistersinger and it’s caricature villain Beckmesser, along with other of Wagner’s characters and situations, are infused with Wagner’s antisemitism, few Wagnerites will admit that these stereotypes have or ever did have much currency in the mainstreams of Wagner appreciation. The most skillful of Wagner’s defenders, like Ross, now acknowledge the composer’s antisemitism warts and all, but still emphasize the ambiguities and absence of antisemitic specificity in the works themselves. Pause for a moment to recall Ross’s quoting of Wagner on the importance of not spelling everything out. Those of us [Jews] who are liberal and urbane almost uniformly, wishfully think of ourselves as culturally cosmopolitan and well assimilated in our Wagnerism, the very hiding places Wagner, with Nazism in hot 2

pursuit, so ruthlessly, relentlessly, obsessively and sadistically routed and indicted in his artworks, essays and other writings… The problem with Wagner apologism, a term that can be used accusatorily and that isn’t explored in Wagnerism, is not that it seeks to exonerate Wagner but that it can betray its own ostensible openness to interpretations of Wagner. When Ross later dismisses Nazi readings of Wagner for their superficiality, romantification and gutting of Wagner’s complexity, it can seem tacit that he’s also apologizing for Wagnerism’s most shameful and tragic depths and mistakes. I’m reminded how I myself, with secret shame for my Jewishness when I was growing up in Macon, Georgia in the l950's, might say things like, Yes, I’m Jewish, BUT I’m not religious. Yes, there are troubling issues in Wagner BUT…Yes, some Nazis apparently played Wagner in the camps, BUT, Ross notes, few camp survivors attest to much presence of Wagner’s music during their internment. Beyond this endless balancing act, and when all is said and done, that Nazis read what they did into Wagner seems no more or less legitimate than the ways in which many other Wagnerite factions have interpreted and appropriated the composer. The Wagnerism of Hitler and Nazism, in other words, was no less legitimate or more unreasonable a reading of what’s actually or intuitively there in Wagner than any other avenue of interpretation… Jews are and always have been a conspicuous coterie of Wagnerism and Ross does marvel at the varieties of Jewish experience in these realms. — .e.g, Mahler, Schnitzler, Adorno, Hanslick, the refugee emigres to Hollywood and many others, and as well in various milieus such as in Israel, and in France, where the term Wagnerism (Wagnerisme) appears to have originated. There’s the legendary Tomaschevsky Brooklyn Yiddish Theater Parsifal that was the lineage of conductor . There’s Karl Tausig, the Polish-Jewish pianist who became Wagner’s disciple and friend. There’s Wagner’s romance with part-Jewish Judith Gautier. There’s gay and Jewish Weininger, whose life, work and suicide Ross explores with fresh detail and perspective. There’s Levi, who Ross sees as more independent than codependent. There’s “Wagner’s Jew” Josef Rubenstein, and Angelo Neumann. There’s likewise commentary on Schnitzler’s book The Road [or Path] To The Open, about Jews and anti-Semitism in fin-de-siecle Vienna, this time referencing the pioneering work of Germanist Marc Weiner, who has notably engaged with Ross’s mentor Vaget in debates about Wagner’s antisemitism at Harvard and in the German Quarterly. In the richness of its explorations of Wagner’s antisemitism and that which was ambient in Wagner’s time and milieu, Weiner’s and the Anti-Semitic Imagination is a benchmark and bellweather of Wagner studies. (See my commentary on Weiner, “Pandemic Wagnerology,” on medium.com). Notwithstanding Weiner’s own Wagnerism, however, his membership in the Wagnerism Club is still in dispute. Beyond referential acknowledgment, his work is not sentient in Wagnerism or otherwise among Wagnerites. Returning to the challenge of making the case for a greater probing of the conflictedness of Jewish Wagnerites, let me recount my own moment of direct experience with Ross. What follows is excerpted from “Pandemic Wagnerology”: “Nor, for that matter and not surprisingly, has [Ross] mentioned my work. I know he has seen my Confessions because I personally handed him a copy following a talk he did on “The Wagner Vortex” in 2013. When I gave him the book he recoiled, saying he’d already seen it, thank you. But it’s inscribed to you, I persisted. As I have with other Wagnerites not known to be Jewish, I inscribed it as follows: ‘For Alex Ross, Honorary Jewish Wagnerite.’” I include this anecdote repeated from my “Pandemic Wagnerology” not to be self-serving or disingenuous but as cautionary. While it may seem a reasonable response from an ardent Wagnerite like Ross to someone who considers himself an apostate in a process of detoxification from Wagner and Wagnerism like me, the status quo of non-Jewish Wagnerites remaining the custodians of Jewish sensibility and opinion about Wagner, even when they appear to be in happy partnership with us, should be more open to input. As with the Wagner Societies, once it’s judged that one’s Wagnerism credentials are inauthentic or otherwise lacking, the predictable result is ostracism. Wagnerism discourse as we’ve known it should have no more right to being an exclusionary club than orchestras should continue to have an easy pass on excluding women or other arts institutions to relegate people of color. While Jews rank among its members, the Wagner Society of New York, the site of Ross’s Wagnerism launch and where Vaget recently did an engaging presentation on the Jewish context of Der Fliegende Hollander, has kept its distance from the likes of Gottfried Wagner, Marc Weiner and me. When Leonard Bernstein welcomed the Black Panthers into his living room, the scoffing of skeptics was unanimous. A repeat of such a moment is something you’re not likely to find anytime soon in the living rooms of WSNY. Nor, alas, can we look to Ross and his book for a more probing inquiry into the origins, history and place of Wagner Societies in Wagner appreciation and promotion. There’s a psychology and strategy at work in Wagnerism and as well in Weiner’s work and even my own. By being honest about the seriousness of Wagner’s antisemitism and at the same time probing its complexity and diversity and the greatness of the art showcasing it, the intention and hope is conveyed, albeit tacitly, that the monster is thereby defanged. Now that we know this devil, we’re safer and on more sure footing than when he was the devil we didn’t know or admit to knowing as such. It would be as if in our telling the truth about them, the confederate statues that have dominated central locations in Southern and other American cities can be left in their current places with qualifying plaques and the resulting expectation that their toxicity will be thereby defused. Likewise with Nazi sculptor Arno Breker’s bust of Wagner, which glowers like a security guard in greeting visitors to Bayreuth. It seems implicit that if we add plaques, extra program notes and mount occasional 3

exhibits, we can continue to indulge with impunity the cultism that venerated a romanticized Southern world made possible by slavery, and the antisemitic art that so incomparably influenced and continues to dominate musical culture and that enabled the greatest recorded atrocity of genocide in the history of civilization.

Bust of Richard Wagner by Arno Breker, leading sculptor of the Nazis. Breker’s Wagner bust, installed in 1955, continues to welcome visitors to Bayreuth in one of the Festival’s most prominent sites. Other Breker Wagner busts in Bayreuth’s Festival Park and environs include those of fiercely antisemitic Cosima Wagner and Hitler confidante and collaborator . Breker is also known for his busts of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Speer. Though Ross does refer to the “soulless statues in the style of Arno Breker,” of statues of Wagner in America he notes that the best known of these, in Baltimore and Cleveland, “still stand, despite occasional calls for them to be removed.” When it comes to the tests of time, at least for the foreseeable future, Wagnerism too will likely stand its ground. Ross’s principal motivation seems to be to do whatever is necessary, including getting even more serious about the most difficult truth, not only to chronicle but to honor and preserve Wagnerism, the biggest obstacle to which in our time continues to be the ongoing fallout from Hitler and Nazism. The alternative — a quantum depedestalization of Wagner with its possible outcome of a relegation of Wagner in the repertory— remains unthinkable to Ross and fellow Wagnerites. In this Parsifalian quest to make things right and with impressive sleight of hand, Ross manages to shift the onus for the association between Wagnerism and Nazism onto Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a leading racist and antisemitic theorist who married into the . While it’s plausible that Wagner himself might have had real problems with Hitler and Nazism, and Ross is always measured and qualified even in supposition, it does seem wishful thinking and less than fully persuasive to thus exculpate Wagner. Chamberlain did not write Parsifal. Ross is determined that Wagner himself, however appropriately scolded or judged, will not be held primarily and certainly not enduringly or surpassingly responsible for Hitler and Nazism, however impressive ever-gathering circumstantial evidence might seem. And even if Wagner should be thus indicted, that can’t be expected to supersede something as all-encompassing and all-important as Wagner appreciation. It can’t be expected to unseat something as mighty, as vastly inspiring, as life-giving and enhancing, as sustained and sustaining as the opiate of Wagnerism. It’s like indicting the Church, “the opiate of the masses,” for the Inquisition and genocides of millions of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Whatever the criticism, however serious, however true, the Church will prevail, however dogged and shadowed by politics and history. And likewise Wagnerism, in the future trajectory of which Alex Ross’s testimonial will be a cornerstone. Like the Wanderer standing against Siegfried, Wagnerites have what seems infallible authority. While the Confederate statues in confrontation with Black Lives Matter include figures of renown and daring, there is no equivalent among them, not remotely, of the sovereign genius of Richard Wagner, of what Thomas Mann called “the greatest talent in the entire history of art.” Surely, such a superman must prove exempt from the rules of engagement for mortals. Like no other work on Wagner or musical culture, Wagnerism makes the case for Wagnerism’s legacy of influence on art and as well on stirrings and movements of minority and sectarian consciouness. Inevitably, as Wagner himself can seem to have foretold, his artwork of the future would wander from its path of being revolutionary and invincible to loosing its footing along the shadowy byways of the future that became history. As the Buddhism that kept beckoning to Wagner doubtless helped him foresee, nothing of this world is forever. Epilogue. A close friend — a gay, liberal fellow Georgian whose grandfather fought in the Confederacy — and I were discussing the fate of Confederate statues. What should be done? How can we mitigate the toxicity of these taxpayer funded (to the tune nationally of $40 million) relics of slavery and emblems of racism without getting into the unsavory business of interfering with artistic freedom? His suggestion was that rather than remove them, we should consider placing statues of American Civil Rights leaders in meaningful juxtaposition to them. Opposite that of Robert E. Lee, for example, consider placing a statue of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, John Lewis or Barak Obama. Meanwhile, there’s a new statue, the first in 60 years for Central Park in New York City. The Women’s Rights Pioneer Monument, as its called, honors Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They are the first women to be so honored, to break the “bronze ceiling” of what was heretofore a club for men only in Central Park, as most everywhere else.

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In Germany today there are no legal public statues of Nazi figureheads. The issue of related figures, like Wagner, appears to have thus far skirted major protest. In my exchanges with Marc Weiner about the Breker busts, it’s clear that neither of us has the heart or stomach to be involved in anti-art initiatives, notwithstanding the deep empathy we share for Black Lives Matter and other activism around minority concerns, including those of Holocaust survivors. Meanwhile, I recall a postcard from Germany during WW2 that showed Hitler in apposition to Einstein. Putting aside tough questions of the public subsidization of such vestiges of Nazism as the Breker works, in a hypothetical future reconfiguring of public art for Bayreuth, which historical figures might occupy appositional places for Wagner? In his penultimate chapter, “Siegfried’s Death,”about the Nazi period and the war years, Ross notes that in recent seasons Breker’s Wagner bust at Bayreuth has been “hemmed in” by an exhibit called “Silenced Voices” — a series of panels of Jewish musicians who served at Bayreuth in the pre-Nazi period and perished during the war, a number of them at death camps like Theresienstadt. Were any sent to Flossenberg in the environs of Bayreuth, where was appointed titular head by Hitler and where 30,000 inmates were murdered? Possibilities for other figures that give dimension and context to Wagner do come to mind: Giacomo Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Hermann Levi, Friedelind Wagner, , Lauritz Melchior, Friederich Schorr, Lotte Lehmann, Bruno Walter, to name a few. And Gottfried Wagner? Farfetched is it might seem to pose such a comparison, are Gottfried, the most outspoken Wagner family on the issue of his family’s complicity in Nazism, and his aunt Friedelind Wagner, the only outspokenly anti-Nazi Wagner family member who risked her life and legacy to leave Germany during the war, less worthy of being rendered in bronze in the environs of Bayreuth than Winifred Wagner? Though Winifred is known to have helped some Jewish artists escape persecution, Ross notes that her record of loyalty to Hitler and the Festival was unwavering. Have we been tacitly granting surpassing credit to never- repentant Nazi collaborator Winifred Wagner for maintaining and guiding the festival through the period of her intimate friendship with and enthusiastic support for Hitler and Nazism, and beyond from the sidelines via the leadership of the Festival she designated for her sons, likewise never publicly repentant Nazi collaborators Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner? In his chapter, “Venusberg,” on Wagner erotics, Ross observes that “moral crusades in art seldom succeed in felling their targets, and Wagner is no exception.” Just as the BLM-led felling of Confederate statues cannot rewrite the legacy of racism and slavery, appositioning Breker’s busts and statues with others cannot reconfigure the legacy of antisemitism and the Holocaust. However daunting the prospects and challenges of change, the process of reconfiguration, if not yet the particulars, would begin to fall into place as we transition from what’s already the ancien regime of Wagnerism. In the shadow of Black Lives Matter and other movements of minority and sectarian consciousness and activism — including those seeking greater accountability for, and some of them inspired by, Wagnerism — the future will chart its own course.

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