Pynchon & Wagner

Thu Sep 17 23:42:03 UTC 2020

Not in terms of social psychology but in those of art & politics, cinema 
& its soundtrack might be more interesting than rock/pop music when it 
comes to Wagner's legacy in late modern culture:

+ ... “The Birth of a Nation” set the pace for a century of Wagnerian 
aggression on film. More than a thousand movies and TV shows feature the 
composer on their soundtracks, yoking him to all manner of rampaging 
hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming evildoers 
... Action sequences are only one facet of Wagner’s celluloid presence. 
A colorful—and often shady—array of Wagner enthusiasts have appeared 
onscreen, from the woebegone lovers of Robert Siodmak’s noir “Christmas 
Holiday” to the diabolical android of Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant 
<https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/alien-covenant-bursts-with-pomposity>.” 
The composer himself is portrayed in more than a dozen movies, including 
Tony Palmer’s extravagant, eight-hour 1983 bio-pic, starring Richard 
Burton. But the Wagnerization of film goes deeper than that. Cinema’s 
integration of image, word, and music promised a fulfillment of the idea 
of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” which Wagner propagated 
at one stage of his career. His informal system of assigning leitmotifs 
to characters and themes became a defining trait of film scores. And 
Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s gallery of mythic 
archetypes: his gods, heroes, sorcerers, and questers. / This 
contradictory swirl of associations mirrors the composer’s fractured 
legacy: on the one hand, as a theatrical visionary who created works of 
Shakespearean breadth and depth; on the other, as a vicious anti-Semite 
who became a cultural totem for Hitler. Like operagoers across the 
generations, filmmakers have had trouble deciding whether Wagner is an 
inexhaustible store of wonder or a bottomless well of hate. But that 
uncertainty also mirrors the film industry’s own ambiguous role as an 
incubator of heroic fantasies, which can serve a wide range of political 
ends. When Hollywood talks about Wagner, it is often—consciously or 
not—talking about itself. / When the lights went down at the Bayreuth 
Festspielhaus in 1876, for the première of the “Ring of the Nibelung” 
cycle, a kind of cinema came into being. The Viennese critic Eduard 
Hanslick, no friend of Wagner’s, felt that he was looking at a 
“bright-colored picture in a dark frame,” as in a diorama display. The 
composer had intended as much, saying that the stage picture should have 
the “unapproachability of a dream vision.” The orchestra was hidden in a 
sunken pit known as the “mystic abyss”; its sound wafted through the 
room as if it were transmitted by a speaker system. The inaugural 
performances took place in a near-blackout. From the Festspielhaus, 
according to the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, “the darkness of all 
our cinemas derives” ... Wagner’s influence is nowhere more enduring 
than in the realm of myth and legend. He manipulated Teutonic and 
Arthurian myths with consummate dexterity, understanding how they could 
resonate allegorically for modern audiences. “The incomparable thing 
about myth is that it is always true, and its content, through utmost 
compression, is inexhaustible,” he wrote. Wagner’s master array of 
borrowed, modified, and reinvented archetypes—the wanderer on a ghost 
ship, the savior with no name, the cursed ring, the sword in the tree, 
the sword reforged, the novice with unsuspected powers—lurks behind the 
blockbuster fantasy and superhero narratives that hold sway in 
contemporary Hollywood ... The chief lesson to be drawn from the case of 
Wagner is that the worship of art and artists is always a dangerous 
pursuit. In classical music, the slow, fitful learning of that lesson 
has had a salutary effect: contemporary European productions of Wagner’s 
operas routinely confront the darker side of his legacy. Perhaps it is 
time to contemplate the less fashionable question of how Hollywood films 
and other forms of popular culture can be complicit in the exercise of 
American hegemony— ... +

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/how-wagner-shaped-hollywood
https://www.goethe.de/ins/es/de/kul/mag/20758663.html

+ ... Auf Wagners Einfluss auf moderne Kultur kann im Gegensatz dazu gar 
nicht genug aufmerksam gemacht werden. Dieser ist direkter erkennbar als 
beispielsweise der eines Mozarts oder Beethovens... Die Filmmusik, die 
eine breite Hörerschaft auch der jüngeren Generation anspricht, greift 
viele Methoden des Deutschen auf: Die majestätischen Bläser und die 
dynamischen Streicher in den Soundtracks bekannter Komponisten wie John 
Williams (vor allem/Star Wars/), Hans Zimmer (/Fluch der 
Karibik/,/Gladiator/) oder Howard Shore (/Der Herr der Ringe/) lassen 
sich auf die Stücke Wagners zurückführen und sind von diesem hörbar 
inspiriert. Auch seine Art der Verwendung von Leitmotiven gehört zu den 
handwerklichen Grundlagen der Filmmusik ... +

I like the way Lars von Trier works with the prelude from "Tristan und 
Isolde" in his movie "Melancholia".

Am 17.09.20 um 18:26 schrieb Gary Webb:
> Every time Wagner comes up lately I’m reminded of Allen Bloom’s 
> comparison of the frenzy induced in the youth due to Rock/Pop music( 
> ...this was in the 80s) to the frenzy Wagner’s music induced in 
> Germany almost a century later...
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/06/07/is-rock-music-rotting-our-kids-minds/a9f3e90a-f31f-41b3-921e-0041e40fa9f2/
>
> I don’t agree with Bloom, and I wonder what he would think of the 
> things currently occupying our obsessive youth... probably that the 
> souls he was intent on saving from the dread Walkman, have long since 
> been lost, and mysteriously converted to 1s & 0s...
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Sep 17, 2020, at 12:07 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> of course, Wagner's family had much to do with the reactionary 
>> beliefs even
>> before Adolf came around--Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner
>> (both British-born), eg. Syberberg's long interview/documentary about
>> Winifred gives some insight into the family dynamics following Wagner's
>> death and legacy.
>>
>> rich
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 6:26 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen 
>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Alex Ross:
>>>
>>> + ... In recent decades, scholars have reconstructed a school of
>>> Wagnerian leftism, which gained purchase in Europe and America at the
>>> end of the 19th century. Socialists, communists, social democrats, and
>>> anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner’s work. After the Bolshevik
>>> revolution, Wagner had a brief vogue as a figurehead of proletarian
>>> culture. / The starting point for the Wagner left was the composer’s own
>>> revolutionary activity in 1848 and 1849, which forced him into exile for
>>> many years. His writingsArt and Revolution
>>> <http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/11/97.pdf>andThe Art
>>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>-Work of the Future
>>> <http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf>were classic, if
>>> eccentric, articulations of the idea that art could play a leading role
>>> in the struggle for social equality. His own work became a kind of dream
>>> theatre for the imagination of a future state. Of course, other
>>> ideologies exploited the composer in the same way. It would be a mistake
>>> to say that Shaw and his fellow leftists found the “true” Wagner. But it
>>> would also be a mistake to say they misunderstood him... Wagner’s tale
>>> of the corrupting power of the golden Ring matches Marx’s musings on the
>>> “perverting power” of money. When, in Das Kapital, Marx speaks of the
>>> hoarding of commodities, he notes that the hoarder “sacrifices the lusts
>>> of the flesh to his gold fetish” and adopts “the gospel of
>>> renunciation”. The word Marx uses here, “/Entsagung/”, is the same that
>>> Wagner applies to the dwarf Alberich’s renunciation of love – the
>>> gesture that wins him access to the Rhinegold. For Marx and Wagner
>>> alike, love and power are irreconcilable ... Peter Kropotkin was an
>>> admirer ...Patrice Chéreau
>>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>’s epochal Bayreuth
>>> production of the Ring
>>> <http://www.wagneroperas.com/index1976ring.html>(1976-80), took
>>> inspiration from The Perfect Wagnerite, realising Shaw’s vision of “tall
>>> hats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas”. /
>>> In 1943, the great theatre criticEric Bentley
>>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/theater/eric-bentley-dead.html>– who
>>> recently died at the age of 103 – asked a charged question: “Is Hitler
>>> always right about Wagner?” The question hangs in the air as the
>>> controversy rolls ever on ...+
>>>
>>>
>>> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/17/why-did-lefties-love-wagner-alex-ross-wagnerism-revolution-hitler
>>>
>>> In "Versuch über Wagner", Adorno writes:
>>>
>>> "In der Liebe sterben: das heißt auch, der Grenze gewahr werden, die der
>>> Eigentumsordnung am Menschen selbst gesetzt ist: erfahren, daß der
>>> Anspruch der Lust, wäre er jemals zu Ende gedacht, eben jene autonome,
>>> sich zugehörende und ihr eigenes Leben zum Ding erniedrigende Person
>>> sprengen würde, die verblendet glaubt, im Besitz ihrer selbst Lust zu
>>> finden, und der dieser Besitz Lust gerade entzieht. Wohl verweigert
>>> Siegfried geizig den Rheintöchtern den Ring; aber indem er den Kreis der
>>> Verblendung schließt, findet er die Geste, die Erdscholle hinter sich zu
>>> werfen als das individuelle Leben, das der nicht mehr halten muß, dem es
>>> einmal hielt, was es versprach. Daher ist Wagners Werk nicht nur der
>>> willige Prophet und beflissene Büttel von Imperialismus und
>>> spätbürgerlichem Terror: es verfügt zugleich über die Kraft der Neurose,
>>> dem eigenen Verfall ins Auge zu sehen und ihn zu transzendieren im
>>> Bilde, das dem saugenden Blick standhält."
>>>
>>>
>>> Am 28.08.20 um 12:41 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>>>>
>>>> Did you know (cf. Christian Hänggi: Pynchon's Sound of Music, Zürich
>>>> 2020: Diaphanes, p. 215) that Richard Wagner is the most frequently
>>>> referenced composer & musician in Pynchon's books?
>>>>
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVprS--bLks
>>>>
>>>> Jessye Norman - Liebestod (Tristan und Isolde)
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>> .
>>>
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l