Wagner

On Power:

What is power?

Recently, The London Times wrote on orchestral music, and the difficulties that touched it in the 20th century. Our Eric would say that it never got over World War I; it certainly never got over World War II.

When it came to the great contest of the 1914–18 war, German propagandists like Thomas Mann characterized it as a conflict between the Kultur of Germans and the Zivilisation of their French-led opponents; between, in musical terms, the deep, metaphysical character of the German tradition, and the superficial joie de vivre of the French.

The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, “engineers of human souls”. Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music – he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves – did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested “irony” of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. “To talk about musical irony”, he writes, “we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do.” His concluding advice is that one should “stay alert to multiple levels of meaning”, making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, “rich experience[s]”. The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.

In any aspirant totalitarian regime, cultural producers like musicians have to be overseen, goaded, persecuted and petted. Hitler’s Germany was different only in that a musical vision of politics was uniquely central to the nightmare that was played out in the Reich between 1933 and 1945. It wasn’t that music was too important not to be politicized, more that politics was music in another form; “Politics aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa”, as Ross puts it. The threatening rhetoric of Hitler’s coded language about the Jews from the Kroll Opera speech of 1939 on the eve of war, and the speeches from the period of the exterminations themselves, are drenched in Wagner, and Ross acutely picks out the references to Parsifal in the Führer’s tirades.... For Ross, the Nazi infatuation with music is the crux of his story.

So fell angels.

For listen to this, once:





Theodore Roosevelt, who has been quoted here often lately, once said of America's frontiersmen that they were "a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very hearts' core."

That phrase, "powerful for good and evil," is the thing that underlies what is at work here. Our ancestors had a power that we have almost lost, a strength that has almost gone out of the world.

Here, in this last century, is where heroes and demons fought. This was the weapon that fell broken from their hands. It lies before us. We have turned from it in fear: but there it rests, for the one strong and brave enough to forge it new.

Do you let a wry mouth turn you aside from that? Wagner did not hide from such things: neither from demons nor broken swords. Cynicism, an affliction with irony, they are shelters for the fearful. Here is the real thing: joy and fury, love and fire, with no looking away. That is the thing we have almost lost.

It is not too late.

If you take it, strike for the good.

UPDATE: To my very great pleasure, I learn that we have a musician among us who has just performed this piece. He offers an insightful comment that I would like to encourage you to read.

Thank you sir, both for the comment, and for your work.