Anything But Wagner: A Response

We experienced Wagnerians have, over the years, become largely inured to the badmouthing of Wagner and his music-dramas, and tend to merely shrug our shoulders, turn our back, shake our head, and walk on as such badmouthing issues typically from the mouths of TOFs (True Opera Fan; a bit like a teenage movie fan, only worse — much worse), from the mouths of those whose knowledge and understanding of Wagner and his music-dramas are of the superficial or pop sort, or from the mouths of outright morons. So it gave us something of a start to read such badmouthing coming from one whose blog posts suggest he's none of the above, but is, rather, a fairly knowledgeable operagoer and a man of some considerable intelligence.

We speak here of a rather lengthy essay (lengthy, that is, for a blog post, but perhaps not for its original online publication site on which it's no longer extant; ergo, the blog reprint) written by physician, university professor, opera-lover, and blogger Neil A. Kurtzman, MD of Music and Medicine titled, "Anything But Wagner".

There is, of course, no gainsaying another's expression of his likes and dislikes of anything whatsoever. But when an expression of one's dislike takes the form of this apparently half-in-earnest response by Dr. Kurtzman to a lament by his Wagner-loving first cousin, the daughter of his father's brother, that she could find no one in the family to go with her to a Wagner opera that reads: “I hope you get the Wagner gene from your mother or that it’s a mutant.... I’d hate to think that it might be lurking in my DNA waiting to pounce on an unborn descendent” (see below for our comment on Dr. Kurtzman's "proposal" of a literal "Wagner gene"), we may be forgiven for suspecting there's something fueling Dr. Kurtzman's intense dislike of Wagner's music-dramas other than aesthetic antipathy.

And sure enough, even a cursory reading of Dr. Kurtzman's essay makes that something plain and clear: ignorance — ignorance of Wagner the man and artist, and, much more pertinently, ignorance of his music-dramas; an ignorance grounded solidly in the superficial, the stereotypical, and the questionable.

Here, for telling instance, is Dr. Kurtzman's opening salvo:

No one can seriously dispute Wagner’s exalted place in the history of Western art or his genius. Here Verdi has the definitive word. When asked by a young composer how to deal with hostile critics, Verdi advised ignoring them. “Look to the box office,” he said. “The theater is meant to be full.” Verdi’s dictum holds true for all art. The box office, of course, has to be looked at in the long term. In the short haul it is often irrational, like the stock market, but eventually it sorts everything out. The box office has spoken about Wagner. There is a large audience that eagerly wants to hear his music and which values him as much, or even more, than any other composer of operas. But this large audience seems to include only about half of the serious lovers of opera.

That first sentence, which is disconnected from, and has no relevance to, what immediately follows, can be safely disregarded as it's there primarily as a sop, and to make Dr. Kurtzman appear an evenhanded critic. He then, with a nod of approval, quotes Verdi on his (Verdi's) obsession with the box office as if to say that's something artists ought to be obsessive about as a metric in the judging of the aesthetic worth of their creations. Vox populi, vox Dei, after all.

Could anything be more perverse as an arbiter of the aesthetic worth of a work of art?

Hardly.

But, then, Dr. Kurtzman needs to embrace that populist notion in order to make an argument against Wagner's music-dramas ("The box office has spoken about Wagner") as there's a vastly larger opera audience for Verdi's soapy melodramas than there is for Wagner's complex dramas. I would suggest to Dr. Kurtzman that by proffering such evidence he's shot his own argument in the foot, so to speak. After all, there will always be a vastly larger audience for, say, the novels of Stephen King than there will be for those of, say, Thomas Pynchon.

(And just incidentally, Dr. Kurtzman's conjecture that the audience for Wagner's works "include only about half of the serious lovers of opera," is, we would conjecture, wrong by about half. The audience for Wagner's operas (i.e., those works written prior to Das Rheingold) may "include only about half of the serious lovers of opera," but the audience for Wagner's great music-dramas (i.e., those works from Das Rheingold forward) includes, possibly, only about 15%-20% of those "serious lovers of opera," the audience for Tristan und Isolde possibly excepted as that music-drama is perhaps the most singular work in the entire operatic canon; a work that just about all but the musically retarded find compelling.)

Next we have Dr. Kurtzman's penetrating assessment of Die Meistersinger, a music-drama Dr. Kurtzman avers is "full of nastiness[!]"; one wherein "Sach's final monologue [is] a racist harangue[!!]," a harangue that Dr. Kurtzman declares always "reminds [him] of another Nuremberg Rally."

Charming — and, of course, quite absurd. There's not so much as a hint of racism in Sach's "final monologue" (or, more properly, apostrophe) addressed to the assembled Mastersingers, master artists all, which apostrophe reads:

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us:
if the German people and kingdom should one
day decay under a false, foreign rule,
soon no prince would understand his people;
and foreign mists with foreign vanities
they would plant in our German land,
what is German and true none would know, if it
did not live in the honor of the German Masters.*
Therefore I say to you:
honor your German Masters,
then you will conjure up good spirits!
And if you favor their endeavors,
even if the Holy Roman Empire
should dissolve in mist,
for us there would remain
holy German Art!

* (I.e., Masters as in Mastersinger, not Masters as in ruler.)

Well, that "racist harangue" is clearly no racist harangue whatsoever, in or out of context, but a passionate declaration of German nationalism expressed in the florid language of 19th century German Romanticism. And just by the bye, and as a point of interest, after writing that "harangue," Wagner struck it from the text as he felt it interfered with the dramatic flow and pacing of the music-drama's close. He was right about that, of course, as he always was in such matters, but was later persuaded by the harangues of his wife, Cosima, to reinstate the apostrophe as she felt its nationalistic sentiments were exactly what all good Germans — and especially one good German in particular: Wagner's benefactor and protector, King Ludwig II of Bavaria — needed to hear. At the time, she was as right about that as Wagner was right about the need to strike the apostrophe from the text on dramatic grounds.

But back to Dr. Kurtzman's charming essay.

Dr. Kurtzman goes on to lodge another objection against Wagner's music-dramas, this time against Wagner's libretti which Wagner, of course, wrote himself (and which libretti Wagner insisted on referring to as "poems", which, technically speaking, we suppose they are). Writes Dr. Kurtzman:

[The libretti of Wagner's music-dramas] were written by a writer who was as bad at writing as Wagner was good at composing. God, that eternal jokester, sent us Giuseppe Verdi the same year he produced Richard Wagner. The former determined to bend audiences to his will, the latter equally determined to please them. Thus, no Piave or Boito for Wagner. They might have imparted some good sense regarding stagecraft or timing to the self-obsessed German. A Wagner opera is a succession of highlights interspersed with long boring spells which could have been avoided if Wagner’s librettist had owned and used a scissors.

Of all the ignorant statements in this largely uninformed essay, the above statements betray in no equivocal or ambiguous way, and more than any other, the breathtaking depth of Dr. Kurtzman's ignorance in the matter of Wagner's music-dramas.

The libretti for the music-dramas were crafted, and crafted perfectly, by Wagner to function as they were intended to function in the gestalt of the whole. And Wagner wrote them himself for the clear and ineluctable reason that he was the only one who could have written them. Not the finest poet in all of Germany, not Goethe himself had he been alive to do so, could have written them. And that's because of the way Wagner wrote his music-dramas — the way they had to be written in order to become what we know them as today, which is to say, artworks that rank among the greatest works of art in all of human history. And that's not the mere judgment of a devout Wagnerian, but the judgment of history itself.

But, one might argue, the mature operas of Mozart and the two great choral works of J .S. Bach — the Matthäus-Passion and the B Minor Mass — all inhabit that same lofty domain, and they were written using librettists, so why not Wagner's music-dramas? And the answer is, the native method of composition of both Mozart and Bach allowed of — required, actually — an outside librettist, whereas Wagner's positively prohibited it.

Wagner didn't write his music-dramas by first writing a libretto and then setting it to music, or vice versa. His creative mind simply didn't work that way. Wagner began with the libretto (after completing one or more prose sketches), but as he was writing the words, and before he'd written so much as a single measure of music, he "heard" the shape and sense of that music as he was writing, and that's principally what's responsible for the extraordinary, even unique, organic unity of a Wagner music-drama's music and text. One cannot strip the text from the music in Wagner's music-dramas and expect that text to read like first-rate literature. It doesn't, and to his dismay, Wagner himself found that out rather early in the game. As I wrote in an S&F post titled, "The Awful Text Of Wagner's Ring":

Wagner himself ... initially viewed his texts for the Ring (which he called "poems") as great epic-dramatic poems in their own right. He subsequently, and quite early on after his completion of the full text of the Ring, was disabused of that idea after he'd finished the full score of the music for the first of the Ring music-dramas, Das Rheingold, the first music written for the Ring. Wrote Wagner in a lengthy, detailed letter to one of his closest confidants, conductor and composer August Röckel:

The completion of [the full score of] the Rheingold (a task as difficult as it was important) has restored my sense of self-assurance.... I have once again realized how much of the work's meaning (given the nature of my poetic intent) is only made clear by the music! I can now no longer bear to look at the poem without music.

Nor should we be expected to be able to do so as, like all first-rate libretti, the superbly constructed text of the Ring is merely the armature about which the music-drama is constructed as we've on numerous previous occasions here on S&F taken the trouble to point out; an armature designed to provide the concrete narrative and factual detail which music alone is incapable of expressing, and which armature never competes poetically or dramatically with the music which is the principal carrier and transmitter of the music-drama's poetic and dramatic core.

So much for Dr. Kurtzman's, "[The libretti of Wagner's music-dramas] were written by a writer who was as bad at writing as Wagner was good at composing," and for his risible and clichéd, "A Wagner opera is a succession of highlights interspersed with long boring spells which could have been avoided if Wagner’s librettist had owned and used a scissors." As anyone who's taken the time and trouble to become intimately familiar with Wagner's music-dramas knows — something Dr. Kurtzman has clearly not done (but we'd bet he has done with any number of Italian confections) — a Wagner music-drama is just as long as it needs to be to express its dramatic ideas, and not a measure longer. Wagner was one of the most economical composers who ever lived.

There's more uninformed nonsense in Dr. Kurtzman's essay that ought to be addressed such as his superficially and questionably informed assessment of Wagner the man, and of Wagner's loathsome anti-Semitism and late-in-life racism, but our patience is close to being exhausted, and this blog post has already exceeded the allowable word-count limit we've set for our blog posts. But we do want to address one final matter. And that is Dr. Kurtzman's "proposal" of the existence of a literal "Wagner gene" (not to be confused with our trademark metaphorical "Wagner Gene" which is a different animal altogether). Writes Dr. Kurtzman:

I propose that there is a gene for Wagnerism and that it is an autosomal dominant gene. Autosomal means it is not on an X or Y chromosome and thus is just as likely to affect either sex. Dominant means that only one copy of the gene is needed for it to express itself. This lets me off the hook concerning my unborn descendents. I can’t have the gene as it would have manifested itself by now. It also means argument is futile. If you lack the gene Wagner will seem like a lot of noise. If you have it you’ll seek leitmotifs like a moth to a flame. Your enthusiasm for diminished sevenths will verge on obsession.

Here’s where genetic counseling is crucial, both for those who are Wagner positive as well as negative. If you are negative and acquire a positive spouse your children have a 50% chance turning out Wagnerian. And if that isn’t bad enough your spouse will either drag you to Parsifal at the drop of a grace note or worse disappear for weeks on end in search of the perfect Ring Cycle. Things are not so rosy for someone Wagner positive either. Most people don’t realize that two copies of the Wagner gene are lethal. Thus, one Wagnerian should never marry another – 25% of their progeny would be doomed. Consult Gregor Mendel and his sweet peas if this is passing you by. Father Owen Lee, the noted lecturer and writer on opera and a devoted Wagnerian, has taken the safest path – celibacy.

Well, we're certain Dr. Kurtzman can't be entirely serious about this — at least we trust he's not — but we freely confess we think he has a point. There's no half-way or partial love or hatred of Wagner's unique art. It's always an all or nothing response, and that suggests to us that a native genetic component is in some way involved. But, then, we're among those who, as a matter of faith rather than of knowledge, suspect there is a native genetic component involved in every conceivable human act and mode of response, and so our confessing that we think Dr. Kurtzman has a point with his Wagner gene proposal is not as gracious a confession as it might appear on first reading.

That said, we're now done here. We'd rather we had been able to say that our work is finished here, but we're afraid it's not. Not to worry, however. We'll get around to finishing our work here piecemeal over the following months. Of that you may be reasonably if not absolutely sure. We're in fact rather grateful to Dr. Kurtzman for providing us such a rich store of blog-post fodder.