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John Darnielle — Wed, 14 May 2025 13:48:22 GMT

I'm reading Alex Ross's Wagnerism, which is very good; I feel like I'm not a good judge of nonfiction because I read so little of it. When I read nonfiction I'm a tourist, I don't actually know how they do things around here. Still, I own a lot of nonfiction, the shelves bulge with it; I'm unable to resist a book that seems interesting. "Clear the general backlog of nonfiction" is on my 2025 intentions list, and this is the third nonfiction book I'm reading this year (unless you count poetry, which you might, in which case the number's even higher), so I guess I'm doing all right. It slows me down, usually. I'm trying to push through that.

This morning, anyway, on the hilariously painful journey from supine to upright I'm doing daily right now (Achilles tendinopathy + the comeback tour of my plantar fasciitis, hottest double bill of 2025), I started up the "pieces of operas" playlist I've been listening to and got a triple dose of Verdi, Rossini, and some early opera I didn't recognize – all very non-Wagner stuff, which suits me fine: I'm reading Wagnerism not out of any love of Wagner, who frankly can kiss my ass for all the obvious reasons, but because Ross is worth reading on anything, and because I do want to know more about Wagner.

Wagnerism affirms what I'd gathered from talking to people over the years, i.e., that bunches of people have thought & still think he's the sum of achievement not just in opera but in art, which is part of his deal – "gesamkunstwerk," right, I first had this explained to me in college by Jack Abecassis, a great champion of opera: the "total work of art," encompassing fiction, music, history, whatever else you've got, Wagner is supposed to be the guy who really brings the hot fire on this point, when you get a Wagner piece you get it all, etc. The book documents how pervasive his impact was & is, at all levels of culture. So I've been listening to Tristan and Parsifal and Tannhäuser, all stuff I've avoided because again, fuck this guy, Mahler's music is considerably better and has the bonus of not being work by a virulent racist, but I'm at a point in my life now where I want, at least, to know, to hear what the deal is and be versed enough in it to say something about it.

And I'm still getting there, but here's the thing: this morning I just hit play on some Rossini instead. You know, Rossini. Not generally considered as sophisticated as Verdi, who I also listened to this morning. But a superior melodist by, I think, any realistic measurement, and while not as dramatic in the aggregate as R.W., still possessed of great dramatic flair; and I sort of melted into the music, as you do listening to opera sometimes, and I thought, really, gesamkunstwerk is really a question more of reading strategies than something a composer does – the "total work of art" is baked into the notion of opera as a form, and Wagner certainly digs into the concept and makes it his milieu – by conceiving the Ring Cycle, certainly an unprecedented act of ambition, and by imagining Bayreuth (although about Bayreuth I must add that when a composer builds a place for people to hear and celebrate his own work, and then that composer becomes the subject of a de-facto cult that finds his work more complex than that of any other, that's when I start looking for a good lab where I can get the Kool-Aid subjected to rigorous analysis); by being broadly engaged with the culture of the present day and connecting it to myth. That Wagnerian innovation is real, I can't dispute.

What I can and do dispute, listening to Rossini, listening to Offenbach, listening to Bellini and Donizetti and Cherubini, is that one couldn't have brought the same hemeneutic to another composer, and that one couldn't still do this. Wagner's engagement with his own reputation: that's as much an innovation as his music. The myth-building, the P.R., the interpolation of self into his work. The insistence of the centrality of the composer. He can't be entirely blamed for this – people want to worship idols, Liszt had his mania, too, and Paganini, musicians have been in the icon-minting business forever. But that his work is uniquely deserving of this critical approach, this I do dispute, strongly; his work points to a way of reading, but does not invent the dynamics present within that critical approach. Lock a dozen Wagnerites in a compound with only the music of Rossini and, given enough time, they'll construct a gesamkunstdeutung* in which Rossini's work carries the weight of human myth, of cultural progress, of spiritual density. They will publish volumes, and many of these volumes will be quite good, and will inspire more work on the theme. I'm convinced of this, and I think there are implications in it for how we treat popular culture today, and for how we regard any pop "phenomenon."

*this neologism makes no claims to work grammatically, I don't speak German

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