In the early 1920s a French businessman, Leon Bel, was looking for a name for his new brand of processed cheese. He remembered seeing a meat wagon on the World War One battlefields with the sardonic name ‘La Wachkyrie’. Like the Valkyries in Wagner, it brought solace to fallen soldiers in the field. Bel thought it would do very well, and gave his cheese the same name in a more orthodox spelling. La Vache Qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) is still very popular today.
Reading this completely unsuspected story of a trademark in Alex Ross’s book, I wondered with some astonishment at this world. A businessman looking for a striking name for a mass-market product hits on a joke about the title of a five-hour German music drama written 70 years earlier — and it succeeds. His market knows what he’s talking about.
Wagner gripped the communal mind for decades after his death in 1883, and he’s not done with us yet. Ross has written a book about Wagner’s consequences with a striking omission — what he did with music, and what he did to music. Wagner was, above all, a composer. The power of his musical invention is the reason why he is still in our lives. All other mythical dramatists, contrivers of theatrical spectacle, political theorists and grubby purveyors of national and racial theories from his time have disappeared, as Wagner, without his music, would certainly have disappeared.
Nevertheless, it is possible, as Ross has found, to write a very long book about his influence which has almost nothing to say about the music itself, and which doesn’t find it necessary to talk about the music that was shaped by him. Ross quotes an American mythographer saying that ‘Wagner’s two great successors are James Joyce and Thomas Mann,’ rather than, for instance, Debussy and Schoenberg. It is an eccentric approach, but entirely possible.
Many of the best creative minds of the time were immediately engaged by Wagner’s endeavor. Between the 1850 Weimar premiere of Lohengrin and the 1865 premiere of Tristan und Isolde Wagner had written four full-length operas and two acts of another. Concert performances had built up interest across Europe. By the time of the construction of the theater in Bayreuth solely for the performance of his work, and the first production there in 1876 of the full cycle of the Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner was probably the object of more feverish intellectual speculation than any artist in the world. One more music drama followed, Parsifal, expressly written for the unique Bayreuth design and acoustics, and confined to performances there until the 20th century.
The division between Wagner and Wagnerism was already apparent in the composer’s lifetime. In many of the best houses, even today, you can be ticked off for applauding after the first act of Parsifal, rather than filing out in sacramentally silent awe. The tradition goes back to the original performances; but it’s recorded that the audience member who was indignantly hissed for yelling Brave at the Flower Maidens turned out, when the lights were raised, to be Wagner himself. Once he was dead, and control passed to his terrifying widow Cosima, all bets were off.
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