Wagnerism

Amid growing reverence for Wagner, Seidl became a cult figure, as Joseph Horowitz recounts in Wagner Nights: An American History. In 1891, Seidl replaced Thomas at the Philharmonic Society, maintaining a Wagner focus. He also led summertime programs at Brighton Beach, where Wagner was by far the most frequently performed composer. In 1890, in Brooklyn Heights, Seidl presided over a singular event known as the “Parsifal Entertainment”—an abridged concert rendition with religious accoutrements, falling on Palm Sunday. The Clevelands attended, libretto in hand. Laura Holloway-Langford, the spiritually inclined head of an organization called the Seidl Society, hoped to launch a summer Wagner festival, a kind of Brooklyn Bayreuth. There were proposals for building exact replicas of the Festspielhaus in the United States—one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, another on the Hudson River. These went unrealized, despite rumors of support from Cosima.

In 1903, Heinrich Conried, the Met’s new general manager, mounted a full production of Parsifal, in defiance of Bayreuth’s claim of exclusivity. Cosima tried to stop the staging with a lawsuit—Wagner et al. v. Conried et al.—but the U.S. Circuit Court ruled against her. Because the United States was not a signatory to the Berne Convention, Parsifal fell outside of German copyright. A secondary controversy involved protests from religious quarters, on the grounds that Parsifal made inappropriate use of Christian symbolism. Reverend C. H. Parkhurst, of New York, called it “stupid sacrilege.” Several American clergymen came to the opera’s defense: Washington Gladden, a leader of the liberal-minded Social Gospel movement, crowned Wagner one of the “witnesses of the light,” alongside Dante and Michelangelo. Amid the furor, the first run of eleven performances was a major success, generating $186,000 in receipts.

Opening night was Christmas Eve 1903. The Times lavished coverage on the fashions of the Golden Horseshoe, as the elite boxes at the Met were known: “Mrs. Vanderbilt was in black velvet and wore a black silk beaver hat. Mrs. Baylies was in black lace pailleted in gold. Her small black hat had a long white plume, and a black and white lace wrap. Mrs. Barney was in her box, and with her was her daughter, Miss Katharine, in pale blue satin. None of the party wore hats.” Up in the galleries, the crowd was more diverse: “A colored man wearing a jewel in his necktie which if real was worth nearly $30,000, discussed motifs and movements with a man and his wife from beyond the Bronx who were in evening attire.” As in London, the crowd assimilated the Bayreuth ban on intermittent applause: “Even when the wild heroine Kundry, in the person of Mme. Ternina, clad in skins and with dishevelled hair, came galloping madly through the air the silence was as of the grave.”

The man then occupying the White House took notice. “Mother came back yesterday, having thoroughly enjoyed Parsifal,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit. The president might be classified as a casual Wagnerian: mentions of the composer dot his correspondence, though he had no time for in-depth exploration. When his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge went to the Wagner shrine, Roosevelt wrote, “I envy you Bayreuth. In a perfectly dumb way I have always admired Wagner’s operas and I should like greatly to see them in their own place.” In 1904, the president spent nearly an hour inspecting a series of Parsifal Tone Pictures by a favorite artist, the expatriate Symbolist painter Pinckney Marcius-Simons, who lived in Bayreuth. In 1906, Alice Roosevelt, the president’s oldest child, wed Nicholas Longworth III, and Wagner again resounded at the White House—Tannhäuser, not Lohengrin—while the president led his daughter down the aisle.

AMERICAN SIEGFRIEDS

sidney lanier

One night in 1888, the artist Albert Pinkham Ryder attended a performance of Götterdämmerung at the Met. On returning home, he set about painting what he had seen. “I worked for forty-eight hours without sleep or food,” Ryder recalled. The resulting picture, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, is a vision of spirit-shrouded nature, with a gnarled, windswept tree dominating the composition and yellowish moonlight bathing the scene. Siegfried is riding by on a horse; his steed has one leg in the air, as if frightened. The Rhinemaidens wave from the water, their bodies twisted like the branches of the tree. Sometime before 1887, Ryder produced an even wilder, more abstract impression of The Flying Dutchman, with paint thickly layered in impasto style. These paintings later made an impression on Jackson Pollock, who, in the words of the art historian Robert Rosenblum, took them as an image of the “overwhelming energies and velocities of nature.”

Ryder’s Siegfried marks a merger of American and Wagnerian mythologies. It departs from the libretto in setting the scene at night and placing Siegfried on a horse; the background looks more like a Western mountain lake than the Rhine. It’s almost the reverse of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: here a lone Wagnerian hero goes riding in the American outback. Similar transpositions appear in Wagner-inspired paintings by Louis Eilshemius and Arthur Bowen Davies, whose dreamlike tableaux represented an American strain of Symbolism. In general, though, Nibelung and Arthurian motifs crop up less often in Gilded Age art than they do among the Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, the Siegfried-like figures who populate the vistas of the American spirit—the frontiersman, the cowboy, the homesteader, the outlaw—are homegrown heroes, denizens of the great wide open.

The “imagined communities” of nineteenth-century nationalism required the invention or elaboration of a deep mythic past. The case of the United States was especially complex because its ruling population had come from Europe. What stories were purely American? Indisputably, the deep past of the North American continent belonged to its native peoples. Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was one hugely successful attempt at constructing an American epic, even if its metrical pattern imitated the Finnish Kalevala. Anton Seidl, at his death, was planning an operatic trilogy on the Hiawatha story, in the hope of creating an “American Nibelungenlied.” In the same period, Antonín Dvořák was predicting that African-American spirituals would supply raw material for future compositions. The idea of a national mythology based on the legacies of conquered, murdered, and enslaved peoples was not one for which Wagner provided a precedent.

The American Siegfried strides through the work of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier, who achieved national renown in the late nineteenth century before fading into the literary background. At his best, Lanier created a dense verbal music that has drawn comparisons with the august Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1842, Lanier fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Disregarding his father’s desire that he pursue a career in law, he dedicated himself to poetry and music. In 1873, he took a position as principal flute of the Peabody Orchestra, the resident orchestra of the Peabody Institute, in Baltimore. He also composed several charming pieces for his instrument. In poetry, his chief models were Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. He was fixated on the idea of freeing the English language from classical influences and reestablishing its Saxon roots. In a treatise titled The Science of English Verse, he declared that the metrical scheme of an Old English work such as The Battle of Maldon was “well-nigh universal in our race.”

In 1870, on a visit to New York, Lanier heard a Theodore Thomas performance of the Tannhäuser overture. An “unbroken march of beautiful-bodied Triumphs,” the poet called it. He obtained a copy of the Ring libretto, and, in 1874, began work on a translation. A few effective renderings of passages from Rheingold appear in the endpapers of Lanier’s German-English dictionary—“Of the Rhine-stream’s Gold / Heard I rumors; / Treasure-Runes it / Hides in its crimson gleam”—but the project trailed off. In the end, Lanier came to think that instrumental music was superior to the dramatic kind, that the Gesamtkunstwerk was a retrogression to primitive ritual. Wagner was probably on his mind when he praised the “immeasurable profounds of music” over the “quite measurable shallows of this old Scandinavian godhood.”

In 1875, Lanier found fame with “The Symphony”—an anticapitalist poem in which instruments of the orchestra speak out loud and condemn industrial society. That success led to a commission for the American centennial festivities: Lanier collaborated with the New England composer Dudley Buck on a choral cantata titled Centennial Meditation of Columbia. Lanier’s text takes the form of a monologue by the New World goddess Columbia. The language is knotty and dense, as in the poet’s attempted translation of Rheingold: “… old voices rise and call / Yonder where the to-and-fro / Weltering of my Long-Ago / Moves about the moveless base / Far below my resting-place.” The final line is a pseudo-Wagnerian mouthful: “Wave the world’s best lover’s welcome to the world.” The cantata had its premiere on the same program that disgorged Wagner’s American Centennial March. The music went over well, but the poem caused bafflement and merriment. When Lanier shot back at his critics, Buck said that the ruckus brought to mind “the early Wagner pamphlets in defense of his own ideas.”

A year after the centennial, Lanier penned a poem in honor of the composer who filled and troubled his vision. “To Richard Wagner,” initially subtitled “A Dream of the Age,” recapitulates the antimodern rhetoric of “The Symphony” through an array of Wagnerian motifs. The opening lines paint an American Nibelheim, with the night sky wiped out by the pollution of Trade: “I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime. / All glory twinkled through some sweat of fight.” In a chaotic contemporary landscape, nature is molded anew, creeds collide, art struggles to invent fresh forms. But then a transforming sound is heard, a blast of “old Romance,” which rises over the “murk-mad factories” of the present:

Bright ladies and brave knights of Fatherland;

Sad mariners, no harbor e’er may hold,

A Swan soft floating tow’rds a tragic strand;

Dim ghosts of earth, air, water, fire, steel, gold,

Wind, care, love, lust; a lewd and lurking band

Of Powers—dark Conspiracy, Cunning cold,

Gray Sorcery; magic cloaks and rings and rods;

Valkyries, heroes, Rhinemaids, giants, gods!

Lanier deserved some sort of prize for summarizing the majority of Wagner’s work in a handful of lines. (Anna Alice Chapin quotes them in Wonder Tales from Wagner.) In the subsequent stanzas, which were cut from the final version of the poem, Lanier pursues an intricate conceit in which Wagner’s myths are woven into contemporary lives—the “modern Last / Explains the antique First.” We read of smiths and clerks whose “dull hearts” make manifest the yearning hymns of knights and ladies; of “pale girls by spinning spools in factories” who sing of “Elsa’s woes and Brünhild’s passionate pleas.” Then comes the peroration, which contains a presumably accidental echo of Richard Pohl’s 1854 comment about art moving westward:

O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art!

No trifler thou: Siegfried and Wotan be

Names for big ballads of the modern heart.

Thine ears hear deeper than thine eyes can see.

Voice of the monstrous mill, the shouting mart,

Not less of airy cloud and wave and tree,

Thou, thou, if even to thyself unknown,

Hast power to say the Time in terms of tone!

Lanier seems on the verge of a politicized reading of the Ring story, such as Shaw would present in The Perfect Wagnerite. At the very least, he is grasping what the Pre-Raphaelites resisted: Wagner wishes to transcend the idyll of the past, not to restore it.

O Wagner, westward bring thy heavenly art!” Owen Wister, another would-be composer who turned to literature, seemed to take the instruction literally, whether or not he ever read Lanier’s poem. His 1902 novel The Virginian, which established the principal tropes of cowboy literature, was the work of a young man who glorified Wagner and saw the West in explicitly Wagnerian terms. That Wister’s writing is shot through with white-supremacist rhetoric brings up the all-too-familiar convergence of Wagnerism and racism, although the likes of Wister had no need to look as far as Bayreuth for inspiration. Scientific theories of racial difference became prevalent in the United States in the years before the Civil War, in the writings of Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, and others.

Wister came from an artistic lineage. His grandmother was the Shakespearean actor Fanny Kemble; his mother was the essayist Sarah Wister, who memorably described a Wagner tribute in Paris in 1883. Henry James was a family friend. Young Owen studied music at Harvard with the composer John Knowles Paine, who disapproved of his student’s “indecorous and scandalous explosions of Wagnerian harmony.” Wister’s obsession had an irreverent strain; parodies of Rienzi and other Wagner works figured in the comic operas he helped to concoct at the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, Harvard’s long-running revue. Theodore Roosevelt was Wister’s classmate. Later, Roosevelt would receive the dedication of The Virginian.

In 1882, Wister traveled to Europe to further his studies, and visited Bayreuth. Although he failed to meet Wagner—perhaps fortunately, since Evert Wendell, the Harvard chum with whom he was traveling, reported that the Meister was “looking rather cross”—Wister had a happy encounter at Wahnfried with Liszt, for whom his grandmother had written him a letter of introduction. When Wister played his piece Merlin and Vivien, Liszt called him “un talent prononcé.” As in the case of Lanier, Wister’s artistic longings ran up against family pressure, as his father pushed him toward a career in banking. In 1885, his health broke down, and he took a restorative trip out west, spending much of the summer at a ranch in Wyoming. (Roosevelt was already a believer in the rugged life.) The West had a galvanizing effect on Wister, and Wagnerian metaphors helped him translate his feelings into words:

The remains of the moon is giving just enough light to show the waving line of the prairie. Every now and then sheet lightning plays from some new quarter like a surprise. The train steamed away into the night + here we are. We passed this evening the most ominous and forbidding chasm of rocks I ever saw in any country. Deep down below a camp fire was burning. It all looked like Die Walküre.

In the same period, Wister asked his mother to send him his four-hand piano score of Meistersinger and also the music for “Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire,” which, he said, should be lying around the drawing room. Some years later, describing Yellowstone National Park, Wister said that the landscape reminded him of those moments in Wagner “when the whole orchestra seems to break into silver fragments of magic—sounds of harps and the violins all away up somewhere sustaining some theme you have heard before, but which now returns twice as magnificent.”

In 1891, just after the American frontier had been declared closed, Wister made a first attempt at writing a Western novel—an unfinished story of two Easterners on a hunting trip, titled The Romance of Chalkeye. One of the two sounds much like the author on his first trip west: “This extraordinary crystal silence! … It’s like the opening bars of Lohengrin.” His earthier companion dismisses Wagner as “a lot of damned noise.” The last line suggests that the experience of the West is leading Wister to become ashamed of his inner Harvard aesthete. Instead, he identifies with the rough male specimens he encounters on his journeys. Most of all, he is enamored of the cowboys—cow-punchers, in the lingo of the day. In his 1895 essay “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” which appeared with illustrations by the celebrated Western artist Frederic Remington, Wister compares cowboys to the knights of old: “In personal daring and in skill as to the horse, the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon of different environments.” Native Americans, he writes elsewhere, are unfortunate members of an “inferior race” who fall before the conquering whites.

The narrator of The Virginian is, like the author, a fellow from the East. When the title character is introduced, Wister invents the iconography of the Western loner in a single stroke: “Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips.” This figure exerts an almost erotic appeal, as the narrator admits—“a something potent to be felt, I should think, by man or woman.” We are in an American Eden, all history stripped away. As at the beginning of the Ring, we relive “creation’s first morning.”

The Virginian’s name is never disclosed. By withholding it and substituting monikers like “trustworthy man,” Wister gives his hero a legendary aura. Wagner’s nameless knight from a far-off land springs to mind. Like Lohengrin, The Virginian concerns a relationship between a reticent man and an inquisitive woman, but in this case the alliance has a happy ending: the Virginian gives up his free-roaming ways to marry Molly, a schoolteacher from Vermont. Because he remains unnamed to the end, Molly has avoided Elsa’s mistake of asking too many questions about her betrothed. The soul of the Anglo-Saxon male remains pure. The convention of the nameless Western hero would later find its apotheosis in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of spaghetti Westerns, in which Clint Eastwood plays the Man with No Name.

Amid the skillful tale-spinning, a more menacing agenda emerges. Wister not only cherishes the West as a land of unlimited possibility but upholds the Virginian as a superior exemplar of a superior race. Wister’s narrator lapses into strident editorials: “It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the eternal inequality of man … We decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, ‘Let the best man win, whoever he is.’” Embedded in this founding text of the Western genre is an unusually ugly articulation of the racist social-Darwinist philosophy that underlay so much of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Although there is no evidence that Wagner incited such rants, the music supplied a mental soundtrack for Wister as he spun his cowboy fantasies.

WAGNERIAN SKYSCRAPERS

Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium in Chicago

The American city, too, became Wagnerian. In 1920, the critic Paul Rosenfeld suggested that the nation’s urban life might have been molded in the composer’s image:

The very masonry a river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody … American life seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.

In London, Wagner saw “Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work.” He would have thought the same of New York and Chicago, with their crowded streets and jutting skylines. Yet his music spoke loudly to several presiding architects of the American metropolis—particularly to the Chicago School of John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, and Louis Sullivan. The city of the future, as these architects imagined it, would be a place not of soulless functionality but of ever-changing form and color. In Sullivan’s view, ancient values, “rhythmical, deep, and eternal,” would interpenetrate the modern. Structures such as the Wainwright Building, in St. Louis, and the Bayard Building, in New York, should have the noble mass of Gothic cathedrals, or give the impression of trees in a dense forest. The steel-frame building was “a thing rising from the earth as a unitary utterance, Dionysian in beauty.”

Root led the Chicago architects in embracing Wagner. A sometime church organist, he thrilled friends with his lively rendition of “The Ride of the Valkyries.” What roused him was not the might of the sound but its internal variety. In an 1883 essay, he called for a future “symphony of color” comparable to the nuances of musical language, in pursuit of the “complete unification of the arts for which Wagner labored.” Burnham, too, had musical leanings, and designed a home for Theodore Thomas’s Chicago Symphony. When Burnham died, in 1912, the Chicago orchestra responded to the news by playing Siegfried’s Funeral Music, as New York had done for Seidl. The Monadnock Building, Root and Burnham’s magnum opus, was originally to have been built of many-colored bricks, embodying the visual symphony; in the end, it became a uniform, unadorned purple-brown, heralding twentieth-century modernism. The construction methods underpinning early skyscrapers proved more influential than the semi-Wagnerian aesthetic that the pioneers wished to wrap around their steel skeletons.

Sullivan took nourishment from German philosophy, Transcendentalism, and the Pre-Raphaelites. In his youth, he saw Thomas conduct the Act III prelude of Lohengrin, and heard many more Wagner excerpts on arriving in Chicago. To quote his third-person memoir, Autobiography of an Idea: “He saw arise a Mighty Personality—a great Free Spirit, a Poet, a Master Craftsman, striding in power through a vast domain that was his own, that imagination and will had bodied forth out of himself. Suffice it—as useless to say—Louis became an ardent Wagnerite … his courage was ten-folded in this raw city by the Great Lake in the West.” In the late eighties and early nineties, strains of Wagner filled Sullivan’s studio, as the young Frank Lloyd Wright, one of Sullivan’s apprentices, attested: “He would often try to sing the leitmotifs for me and describe the scenes to which they belonged, as he sat at my drawing board.” Wright addressed Sullivan with the Bayreuthian epithet “Lieber Meister.”

In 1884 and 1885, the Met brought its Wagner to Chicago, setting off the usual hysteria. It was decided that Chicago should have its own major opera house. Sullivan and his partner, the German-Jewish émigré Dankmar Adler, received the commission to design it. The result was the Auditorium, the first major building in which Sullivan had a hand. The driving force behind the project was the progressive-leaning real-estate mogul Ferdinand Peck, who imagined a public space where people of all classes could congregate and imbibe the unifying tonic of great art. (Peck had been horrified by the Haymarket riot of 1886 and other signs of labor unrest.) As Joseph Siry has argued, Peck envisioned the Auditorium as a riposte to the Met, with its horseshoe of elite boxes. After a tour of European theaters, Peck and Adler settled on a more egalitarian fan-shaped seating plan, after the Festspielhaus model. Sullivan handled the ornamentation of the interior, using arching forms, gold-relief patterns, delicate mosaic work, and incandescent lighting to generate an atmosphere of enveloping warmth. Wagner is one of four figures portrayed in medallions to either side of the proscenium; the others are Haydn, Demosthenes, and Shakespeare.