Stephen Gould, Tenor: Special Contributors Reception and Interview, November 16, 2019

Stephen Gould, one of the great heldentenors of our era and an annual Bayreuth Festival performer, was guest of honor at a November16, 2019 reception. He discussed the new Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser, and also noted the value of supporting young artists in the early stages of their careers. The Society presented him with an engraved silver tray as a memento of the occasion. 

Gould graciously made time to meet with our special contributors while performing Tristan, Act II with the National Symphony Orchestra. Hosted by Frank and Claudia Deutschmann, he was interviewed by F. Peter Phillips, Society Secretary. The Society annually plans an appreciation for the generous contributions of many members, enabling our awards, grants, recitals, and other assistance to promising dramatic singers: a very challenging career path.

Tristan (Stephen Gould) and Isolde (Christine Goerke) with  National  Symphony Orchestra.  
(photo taken  at  NY  performance.) Photo : Scott Suchmam/NSO.

New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, x + 769 p. List price: $40.00; WSNY Price: $29.99 (click here to order)

This is a remarkable book. Alex Ross has written what is arguably the most wide-ranging, intellectually comprehensive, entertaining, and thoroughly useful volumes ever produced on Wagner. Let us dispense at once, then, with its main problem: the title. This is not a history of “Wagnerism,” if that word means, as it does perhaps to most of us, a distinct body (or bodies) of thought that propagates the ideas of Wagner, drawn both from his writings and his music dramas. What it is is a panoramic survey, with multiple critical analyses, of the impact, for good or ill, that Wagner has had on European and North American culture over the last 150 years. The subtitle is also questionable. “Shadow” suggests that Wagner’s music has served in part as a penumbra that restrains or even limits artistic freedom or political action, whereas Ross offers ample evidence that Wagner has served as an empowering agency for artists from all walks of life. Indeed, in the balance, he has been more a vital impulse than an affliction on modern culture.

Alex Ross in conversation at virtual launch event, Sept. 14, 2020. Photo: Neil Friedman (screen shot). WSNY co-presented the Sept. 14 virtual launch event for Alex Ross’ Wagnerism: Art and  Politics in the Shadow of Music. On November 19, WSNY will present Alex Ross in Conversation with with Professor Heath Lees. Click here to register!

There are multiple dangers when dealing with the reception of a universal artist such as Wagner. He can mean all things to all people, and, because he can, writers can all too easily lose themselves in admiration of the boundless scope of the work so that any possibility of a palpable grasp of the subject dissolves. Ross, however, brilliantly avoids this problem. Narrative is one of his great strengths; he is a born story-teller who narrates his tales succinctly and compellingly. Chapters are centered around topics, but arranged in roughly chronological order, with considerable temporal overlap. The advantage of this approach is that discussion of major figures in the reception history of Wagner is often spread over several chapters. For example, Thomas Mann’s lifelong critique of Wagner surfaces throughout the book, covering not only the early ‘Wagnerian’ short stories, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and the ‘Sorrows and Grandeur’ lecture, but even Doctor Faustus. It would be difficult to imagine a more unWagnerian character than Adrian Leverkühn, the fictional composer in this work. He embodies a total rejection of Wagnerian romanticism, which Mann, by the 1940s, had come to sense as a demonic aspect of German society. And yet, by the end of the novel, Leverkühn’s modernism has not been offered as a solution to Germany’s problems; on the contrary, Ross even hints that the fate of Leverkühn indicates that Mann might have been moving back to an acceptance of Wagner as a humanistic force in society. It is this sort of extended argument that gives contour to Wagner’s reputation as well as a complexity and continuity to the whole volume. It also allows readers to draw their own conclusions as to the limitations and individuality, as well as universality, of Wagner’s work. Throughout, we see his impact on the modern world through both individual responses to his work and through public events. This leads to neither a hagio­graphy nor a denunciation of Wagner. Rather, it is a balanced and precise history.

Hardly a single major artistic figure from the fin-de siècle to the mid-20th century seems to have been able to avoid Wagner, either as a benign influence, a hostile antagonist, or both. It is perhaps ‘both’ that defines his unique power and becomes the dominant theme in the volume. The world has consistently felt exceptional ambivalence toward Wagner, arising from conflict between intense admiration for the seductive power of his music dramas and frequently acute discomfort at how overwhelming their impact can be. Many of Wagner’s more trenchant critics note the way in which his music leads one toward philosophies and ecstatic or utopian visions that are profoundly suspect, as the political and military conflicts of the early 20th century suggest. In this regard, it is appropriate that the opening chapter of the volume should be devoted to Nietzsche’s tormented and unresolved conflict with Wagner and his work, as it anticipates the wracking ambivalence that artists and writers, political theorists and revolutionary activists, individuals and collectives, have experienced with Wagner. Their struggles may have had triumphant outcomes, often in the realm of creative art — artists as various as Baudelaire, Shaw, Yeats, Willa Cather, Joyce, Woolf, Eisenstein, and Terence Malick, not to mention modern stage directors, have found Wagner to be primarily a liberating, if sometimes dangerous, influence — but when the struggles are collective and incorporate Wagner more as propagandist than artist, disaster can result. Ross focuses especially on the dilemma of racial minorities, especially Black and Jewish, many of whom have found liberation and self-fulfillment in the music dramas, but are cruelly disappointed by social responses, based on Wagner, that exclude, even erase them. The discussion of Wagnerite W.E.B. Dubois’ experience of racial intolerance, told in his story ‘On the Coming of John,’ is notably powerful in its anticipation of the destruction of minority culture, partly in Wagner’s name, that was to follow later in the century.

The dark side of Wagner, his appeal to nationalist and, above all, Nazi propagandists, is prominent in Ross’s book. Hitler’s sojourns in Bayreuth are described with discomforting detail, and yet Ross does not omit to notice that the bulk of the Nazi party had very little interest in Wagner and were not above resisting Hitler’s demands that they attend the Festspielhaus. When one balances this against abundant evidence offered elsewhere in the book that Wagner appealed to a wide range of political biases, especially left-wing revolutionaries, who, from George Bernard Shaw via Vsevolod Meyerhold to Frank Castorf, have stoked the flames of revolutionary impulse embedded in the works, one recognizes how truly universal Wagner’s appeal has been. Ross’ achievement has been not to beat the drum for a particular way of interpreting Wagner, but to show how many drums have been beaten.

Wagner has survived, Ross demonstrates, not only due to the power of his work, but by its constant ability to adapt to a changing world. It was threatened by the anti-heroic leanings of modernism, but survived as the modernists, in stripping the works of their Victorian trappings, found in them an elemental understanding of humanity as asocial, even mystical beings that had so far eluded readings of Wagner. It was threatened too by the cultural reaction to the two World Wars, and in our own time by our growing awareness of the Holocaust and Wagner’s problematic association with it. However, this cannot hide either Wagner’s intensely intelligent political understanding or the overwhelming sense of humanity that lies within his work. Often he can serve as a bulwark against forces that threaten our society. Indeed, it is notable that as the narrative moves into our own pitiless times, Parsifal frequently appears in discussion, not only from an antisemitic point of view, but as a work of extraordinary compassion.

Perhaps the most exhilarating parts of the book are those where the positive, life-giving attributes of Wagner’s influence come to the fore. Ross provides a succinct account of his influence on French symbolism and contributes an especially valuable summary of the Revue wagnérienne, which is followed a chapter or two later by a section outlining the maturing influence of Wagner’s ideas on Yeats and the Celtic twilight. The keystone chapter to the entire book is on Willa Cather, whose life was divided between the wild landscapes of the American West and the city; she never felt the countryside as a culturally deprived wasteland, as her experience of Wagner’s works had instilled the landscapes of her Nebraska home with an enormous beauty and consequent sense of meaning. There are some unexpected but very welcome sallies into distinctly unWagnerian territory, with telling passages on Theodore Fontane’s stories of the disastrous impact of Wagnerian ideals on lovers, and Frank Wedekind, who found the operas both ‘irritating and engrossing’, violently attacked the influence of Wagner on contemporary culture. Even Brecht, an anti-Wagnerian if there ever was one, is measured against Wagner in a comparison that could do with further development.
Ignore the inaccurate title. This is a noteworthy book, with breathtaking range and scope, by an author who is as good a literary critic as he is a musicologist. Ross does not lard his prose with jargon or, for that matter, with Wagnerian grandeur. He writes, first and foremost, because he loves to tell stories and there can be no grander reason for writing than that. Above all else, this book is a true pleasure to read.

Simon Williams
Simon Williams is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theater and Dance, University of California at Santa Barbara.He lectures and publishes widely on theater and opera. He was the Society's Bayreuth lecturer from 1998 to 2000.

© Wagner Notes, October 2020, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.

Der fliegende Holländer. A. Kampe, M. Fujimura, E. Nikitin, S. Skorokhodov, F.-J. Selig, D. Portillo; Metropolitan Opera; V. Gergiev, cond., F. Girard, dir. Performance (premiere) of March 2, 2020.

Despite the Covid-19 crisis, which caused the cancellation of the last two months of the Met’s 2019-2020 season, the company did manage to pull off three of eight scheduled performances of its latest new production. Der fliegende Holländer, the composer’s first mature work, has not had a fresh look at the Met since August Everding’s spectral industrial-age production appeared in 1989. That effort aged poorly over its three decades. In a barometer of decline, the snow storm that blasted through its finale withered over successive revivals from the original blinding blizzard to the light flurry we saw at its last outing in 2017. Strong casts, however, generally made it worthwhile. [The new production streamed on July 5, following WSNY’s June 29 and July 1 Seminar/Webinar, which included an interview with two cast members: Daland (Franz-Josef Selig) and the Steersman (David Portillo).]

Director François Girard made a (bloody) splash with a Parsifal that opened to general approval here in 2013. I never saw much in it. The Act II bloodbath looked gimmicky, and the rest said little of interest about the work. Girard’s Dutchman, his second Met production, did not fare much better. The overture is one of Wagner’s most evocative and can stand well on its own as a kind of short dramatic tone poem. Here it was cluttered with a showy and inconsequential lightshow projecting shapes that come to resemble a ship breaking up in the waves. As Mariusz Trelinski did with his own misstep in the prelude of Tristan und Isolde in his new production of that opera in 2016, the busy nautical projections were a pointless distraction. Girard made his worse by adding a superfluous dancer whose weird undulations were bereft of any connection to the unfolding plot that follows. John Macfarlane’s uninspired sets were bland and basic. The cursed Dutchman does not even get a ship and is left to wander around awkwardly on foot. Daland’s ship, which has some visual merits, is heaved on and off stage as necessary, but its presence merely announces the other ship’s absence.

The spinning chorus that gives rise to Senta’s ballad, the opera’s focal point, heaves on vertically suspended ropes that recall an adolescent’s gym class. This could have poked fun at Senta’s raging passions, but the effect did not seem intended to be humorous. Her portrait of the Dutchman appears only as a huge eye that looked like it was repurposed from a failed Ring Cycle. There was no hint of legend, mystery, or attraction – just an empty gesture toward obsession that made one think of later Wagnerian characters and wonder what they were doing here. Dutchman’s finale has been tricky for the last generation or two of directors. The music movingly proclaims the doomed couple’s redemption through love, but our alienated creative caste is too uncomfortable with both of those concepts to give them any credence. Girard has the traumatized townspeople look out over a crimson sunset in a moment that screams, “So what?”

This new production was intended to mark the magnificent Welsh bass-baritone Sir Bryn Terfel’s return to the Met after an eight-year absence. A broken ankle, however, removed him from all stage performance even before Covid-19 shut down the performing arts worldwide. He was capably replaced by the Russian baritone Evgeny Nikitin, whom I first encountered in the role under conductor Valery Gergiev’s baton at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater some twenty years ago. Nikitin gave alluringly brasher performances in those days, when he was still under thirty. Later, in 2012, he suffered a career setback with Dutchman when he was summarily fired from a new Bayreuth Festival production after an old video surfaced of him sporting what looked like a swastika tattoo. Being “cancelled” avant la lettre may have tempered his engagement with Wagner, but his solid baritone, which has given the Met memorable Klingsors, Kurwenals, and Gunthers, has not really grown into the part. The lower range, which conveys the grave depths of the doomed mariner’s devilish predicament, proved elusive.

Soprano Anja Kampe, shown above*, made a big, bright, and long overdue house debut as Senta. Having mastered heavier Wagner parts elsewhere – her Berlin Isolde last year was enthralling – she brought a powerful effort that in many ways saved this drab production. Like Nikitin, she sounded tired by the end of the evening, but Met audiences should look forward to hearing more from her. Nikitin’s countryman Sergei Skorokhodov proved an ardent Erik, delivering a manlier effort than we usually see in this cloying tenor part. And mezzo Mihoko Fujimura, a Wagnerian stalwart who has enjoyed a long and well-deserved European career, made a fine Met debut as Senta’s watchful governess Mary.

Gergiev was back on the Met podium after an absence of five years. Rumors have long swirled that the Met orchestra chafes under his reportedly authoritarian manner, and he has appeared regularly enough at Carnegie Hall to suggest that he has not just been too busy or too disenchanted with DeBlasio’s New York to have stayed away from the Met. He ran a tight performance, with a finely balanced touch that lingered over the sensitive moments while delivering a tenacious drive in the stormier scenes.

* Photo: Senta (Anja Kampe) surrounded by the spinning chorus. Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

Paul du Quenoy
Paul du Quenoy is a private investor. He holds a PhD in History from Georgetown University.
© Wagner Notes, July 2020, a publication of the Wagner Society of New York. All rights reserved.