Original image by There Stands the Glass.
An amusing reference to Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung is made in the 2021 zombie saga Army of the Dead. I watched the irredeemably trashy flick because I’m an uncultured rube. Or at least I was prior to the pandemic. As sporadically documented at this site, I dedicated much of the quarantine to an immersion in opera. My nascent fascination with Wagner led me to Alex Ross’ deliriously dense Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Ross documents and analyzes Richard Wagner’s immense influence on music, cinema, visual art, literature, philosophy, politics and other aspects of contemporary society.
I treated Wagnerism as a textbook. Although I have a firm grasp of history and read Thomas Mann’s doorstop The Magic Mountain for the first time last year, I was woefully ignorant of many of the intellectual and academic concepts Ross examines through the lens of Wagner. My cultural illiteracy forced me to pause every few pages to get up to speed. The methodical process lasted four months. I’m not entirely to blame. Ross occasionally writes unfortunate sentences like this: “He proposes an ontology based on the rational operation of mathematics, at the same time, he stresses the infinity of being, defining it in terms of multiplicity.”
Just as taking in Die Zauberflötein last year allowed me to see layers of significant subtext that had previously been invisible to me, Wagnerism heightened my capacity to experience life more meaningfully. The Wagner joke in Army of the Dead would have sailed over my head a few years ago. I’m still a pitiful excuse for a scholar. Yet given enough time, this country bumpkin might manage to transform his life into an admirable Gesamtkunstwerk.