The Composer Richard Wagner and the Birth of the Movies

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Books, Society & Culture, Remnick, Storytelling, Wnyc, News, David, Yorker, Arts, Politics, New

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

The German composer Richard Wagner had an enormous influence not only on modern music but on artists of all stripes, and on political culture as well. His use of folkloric material to create modern epics won him the admiration of thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, and made him popular in Hollywood since the birth of film. Alex Ross, whose new book is called “Wagnerism,” tells David Remnick that Du Bois “might have seen ‘Black Panther’ as a kind of Wagnerian project.” And yet Wagner’s music was used to heroically represent the Ku Klux Klan in “The Birth of a Nation.” In fact, the composer’s strident anti-Semitism fed into the rise of Nazism in Germany. The many aspects of Wagner’s influence were often contradictory. “So much baggage arrives with him,” Ross says, but “we aren’t necessarily imprisoned by what the man himself thought.” The composer himself “starts to disappear” as his influence diffuses through society. “He becomes a mirror for what other people are thinking and feeling. And we have that right, we have that power with art. If there’s something about it we reject, we can—without forgetting or overlooking that darker aspect—remake it in our own image.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:05.0	With just a few exceptions, I don't think there's anything in classical music that's more familiar in Ricard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries from his opera, The Valkyry.
0:34.4	That theme has appeared in movies as various as Birth of a Nation, an apocalypse now, and even a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
0:45.0	And you may not have even realized that this was from Wagner, too.
1:09.9	Yeah. The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross has written some amazing books about modern music, starting with The Rest is Noise, and his new book is called Wagnerism.
1:16.1	It's about the long shadow that the composer cast not just in music, but over much of the culture of the 20th century.
1:18.1	Alex's book opens just as Wagner dies, and he quotes from the obituaries which were
1:23.2	effusive, to say the least.
1:26.6	1883.
1:28.4	Deceased yesterday in our city was the musical genius of Germany.
1:32.6	Ricardo Wagner is dead.
1:35.7	How many memories crowd upon our mind?
1:38.5	The bold struggles that he sustained,
1:41.1	the sublime victories that he achieved,
1:43.9	the art that he created, the bitter enemies
1:47.1	he had, the fanatical partisans that idolized him as a god, the crowned kings who knelt down
1:55.0	before him, no more, a corpse. But from him rises a voice that will not die, and perhaps will become,
2:05.1	in time, more powerful, more hearken to, more beloved.
2:15.4	He was a man of the theater, loved the stage, loved the flamboyance and the aliveness of the stage.
2:25.2	And everything emanated from that.
2:26.9	The music, the text, the planning, directing the stage.
2:31.3	It all comes back to putting on a show.
	...

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