What this covers
Alex Ross makes the case for Richard Wagner's place in the canon by arguing that his artistic genius and moral darkness—his anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism—are inseparable rather than detachable flaws. This inseparability, Ross contends, makes Wagner not uniquely evil but exemplary of the human mixture of creative and destructive energies. The conversation ranges across performance history, the sociology of concert attendance, and the hidden moral problems in composers like Ludwig van Beethoven and Mozart, dismantling the notion of a pure humanist tradition against which Wagner stands alone as a corrupted figure.
Ross disputes the Lost Golden Age Fallacy about vanished great singers by noting that musicians have lamented their predecessors for decades, and he examines why Wagner's operas are fragile—dependent on multiple elements fusing perfectly, unlike a solo piano work—making them vulnerable when audiences lose the habit of attendance. He traces how the Americanization of orchestral sound eroded regional distinction across European orchestras, and argues that contemporary voice training sacrifices expression and language for technical perfection, creating a Technique-Expression Tradeoff that leaves modern singers technically superior but expressively diminished. He also explores the occult dimension of conducting—how legendary figures like Wilhelm Furtwängler transform orchestras through presence alone—and discusses how institutional commitment to challenging work, as Esa-Pekka Salonen demonstrated in Los Angeles, can reshape audience appetite for difficult music rather than merely pander to existing taste.
Ross argues that Wagner's greatness and his darkness (anti-Semitism, nationalism) are inseparable rather than separable, and that this makes him exemplary of the human mixture of creative and destructive energies rather than a uniquely evil figure to be quarantined from the canon.
- Wagner had the qualities to become a universal figure like Shakespeare but his anti-Semitism shadows the achievement
- Other revered composers (Mozart, Beethoven) also carry moral problems, so the pure-vs-evil framing is mistaken
- Wagner poses no clear and present danger today, so demonizing him is misplaced
Modern opera singers prioritize technical perfection over expressive drama and linguistic clarity.
- Contemporary opera voice training places too much emphasis on sheer technical quality and not enough on expression, the use of language, and the communication of drama, so although technical standards are higher than ever, the total expressive conviction found in 1950s-60s singers is harder to find.
“in terms of the training of opera voices today, there might be a little too much emphasis on sheer technique and less on expression and the use of language and the communication of drama through the voice”
- If Wagner heard a modern performance he would likely be impressed by the technical standard but displeased by the finished, ringing power that swamps the words, because he was a dramatist as much as a composer and would prefer to hear the meaning of the words even at the expense of a perfectly sustained note.
“I don't care if the C-sharp is perfectly sustained in the soprano if I'm losing the meaning of the words. Because he was always a dramatist as well as a composer, and the words mattered a great deal to him”
- The 1955 Bayreuth Ring conducted by Joseph Keilberth is Ross's favorite precisely because Keilberth had no grand interpretative scheme; he disappears into the music so it comes alive spontaneously, revealing the constant shifting of moods and psychological instability, combined with an incredible cast including Astrid Varnay's Brünnhilde and Hans Hotter's Wotan.
“maybe precisely because he didn't seem to have some great interpretative scheme to bring to bear. He just disappears into the music, and the music itself comes alive”
Wagner operas are particularly vulnerable because they require coordinating multiple interdependent elements that can easily fragment or fail.
- Wagner opera is more vulnerable to a loss of meaningfulness than Beethoven piano sonatas because opera requires fusing many interdependent elements—the right singers, conductor, and stage director—whereas a solo pianist can produce a great recording without depending on all those cogs and wheels.
“this opera is so much more complicated in terms of putting all these ingredients together and making an effective fusion... A pianist on his or her own can make a great Beethoven recording without needing all of these cogs and wheels”
- The Second World War created a caesura in which Wagner singers went into exile or remained in Nazi Germany, and after the war they reunited as Bayreuth resumed under the Wagner grandsons with a new philosophy, producing an explosion of recordings as if from pent-up energy.
“because the Second World War created this caesura, and a bunch of singers went into exile... after the war, they all came back together, and Bayreuth resumed with what seemed to be a brilliant new philosophy... suddenly, there was this explosion as if it was pent-up energy”
- Wagner was ambivalent about excerpting his works: extracting pieces like the 'Ride of the Valkyries' was brilliant marketing that spread his fame, but pulling out a passage such as the entry of the gods into Valhalla strips it of dramatic irony—what sounds grandiose and uplifting is actually an empty, hollow spectacle masking a catastrophe—so Wagner is richest experienced whole as theater.
“when you pull out the excerpt, you lose those levels of irony, those levels of dramatic richness... I do feel that Wagner is always at his richest when you take the entire conception in the theater”
- Georg Solti's classic studio Ring hammers too hard with an unnecessarily brutal edge, and not coincidentally it is Solti's aggressively hard-hitting 'Ride of the Valkyries' that Coppola used in Apocalypse Now—an ironic choice since the film scene of male soldiers exalting in destruction inverts Die Walküre's actual celebration of unusually powerful women, who became feminist icons at the turn of the century.
“it's the Solti recording of 'Ride of the Valkyries' that you hear in Apocalypse Now because that's just the most aggressively hard-hitting one... The scene in Die Walküre is all about women. It's all about these unusually powerful women”
Performance tradition, context, and interpretive restraint matter more than comprehensive theoretical schemes or claims of lost golden ages.
- The concept of guilty pleasures should be rejected because it buys into the idea that there is an exalted level of genius and an embarrassing realm down below, a hierarchy Ross dismisses even while admitting he likes certain Oasis songs.
“I don't have guilty pleasures. I feel that it buys into this idea that there's some exalted level of genius and then this embarrassing realm down below”
- Conductors appear to live and keep working longer than almost any other profession—Toscanini active into his 80s, Klemperer conducting despite physical decrepitude, Blomstedt vital in his 90s—and although unverified medically, the intensity of memorizing scores and the particular mode of upper-body exercise seem to encourage longevity and keep conductors sharp.
“conductors live longer and keep working longer than most professions... there seems to be something in terms of the intensity of this mental activity of memorizing scores, of this particular mode of upper-body exercise — it does seem to encourage longevity”
- Liszt had every right to do what he wanted with Wagner in his transcriptions because the two had a complex relationship of mutual borrowing—when Liszt arranged Parsifal he was to some degree arranging his own ideas that Wagner had appropriated, taking them back.
“Wagner took from him and Liszt also took from Wagner. They had a very complex relationship. There was a great deal of mutual borrowing... when he arranges Parsifal, he is, to some degree, arranging a couple of his own ideas as Wagner appropriated them”
- Ross holds that Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks is the greatest pop album ever made, but specifically the original New York sessions without the big band, not the later Minnesota remix.
“the original version, not the Minnesota remix. The original New York sessions without the big band — that's the greatest pop album ever made, in my opinion”
- Rules forbidding noise or applause between movements should not be dogmatic—some pieces, like the end of the Emperor Concerto's first movement, are built to provoke applause—yet there is good reason audiences are quiet because the dynamic extremes (the whispery opening of Beethoven's Ninth or the subliminal E-flat opening of the Ring) require silence, so the standard should be case-by-case across a thousand-year tradition of music with different social functions.
“there's very good reason why audiences generally are quieter at classical performances because of the dynamic extremes. If people are making noise at the beginning of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you're not going to hear this whispery, this ethereal tremolo”
- The complaint that all the great Wagner singers are in the past is a very familiar and recurring syndrome; people said the same thing in the 1950s and 60s, lamenting earlier singers, so claims of a lost golden age should be treated skeptically.
“people are always saying that all the great Wagner singers are in the past. People said that in the '50s and '60s... So this bemoaning of a lost golden age is a very familiar syndrome”
- Beyond explicit instructions, conducting has a slightly mystical dimension in which a legendary conductor's mere presence transforms the orchestra's playing—as in the anecdote of Furtwängler standing silently at the back of a hall and the playing becoming electrified—because the musicians' respect, attentiveness, and sense that this might be the last time make them give something more.
“that's the weird, the slightly occult power that the conductors can have. Just their mere presence transforms the playing”
Wagner's actual cultural danger today is overstated relative to other cultural forms that are equally or more morally compromised.
- Wagner had the combination of qualities to become a universal cultural figure on the scale of Aeschylus, Dante, or Shakespeare, but his anti-Semitism and extreme nationalism shadow his achievement, and rather than diminishing the work this inseparability of greatness and darkness makes him an exemplary human phenomenon, since the mixing of creative and destructive energies is who we are as a species.
“everything sublime and magnificent and moving in Wagner is inseparable from this corruption, this darkness, this evil. And I think that makes him a very human, unfortunately, exemplary human phenomenon, where the greatness and the darkness are all mixed together”
- Wagner is not a clear and present danger in today's culture—he is not lurking behind contemporary racism, inequality, or political threats—whereas American popular culture, which we treat as innately pure and innocent, is actually deeply mixed up with American history and present-day politics; so demonizing Wagner while idealizing other composers goes too far.
“I don't feel there's a clear and present danger with Wagner in today's culture... What is at work in ways that I don't think we're fully conscious of... is all of this American popular culture that we think of as innately good and pure and innocent”
- Mozart's The Magic Flute is unambiguously racist through the atrocious stereotype of Monostatos in a way that no Wagner opera is, because Jews and Black people are never explicitly present in Wagner's operas—stereotypes are only theorized—so the framing of Mozart and Beethoven as pure humanist figures versus Wagner as uniquely evil is a mistake.
“The Magic Flute by Mozart is unambiguously racist in a way that no work by Wagner is because Jews are not present explicitly in any of Wagner's operas... There is this atrocious stereotype of Monostatos in The Magic Flute”
Orchestral sound has become homogenized through American influence, erasing regional character once found in European traditions.
- Orchestral interpretation has become homogenized because the great 20th-century American orchestras smoothed out regional differences—where a French wind section once sounded distinct from a German one—and this 'Americanization of orchestral sound' then spread back to European orchestras, eroding their distinctive regional character.
“It's been called the Americanization of orchestral sound because the great American orchestras of the 20th century tended to smooth out those regional differences... that attitude has spread backward, back to Europe”
- The intense professionalization, specialization, and self-consciousness of orchestral playing—reinforced by recording technology making orchestras eager to avoid mistakes—has raised technical standards to their highest ever level but at the cost of the looser, more expressive, slightly chaotic ensemble that conductors like Furtwängler prized, a tradeoff that deserves to be questioned.
“the advent of recording itself made orchestras much more self-conscious about their sound, more eager to avoid mistakes, getting away from that looser, slightly more chaotic understanding of orchestral ensemble that Furtwängler, for example, prized”
Critics and audiences can be persuaded to value challenging contemporary and modernist work through sustained institutional commitment.
- German-speaking audiences are the most whisper-quiet and concentrated because the music is steeped in their traditions, but that same deep familiarity with Brahms makes them resistant to 20th-century and contemporary music, whereas audiences like those at the Ojai Festival have been trained over decades to get more excited the more complex and difficult the music is.
“those same Austrian and German audiences may be quite resistant to 20th-century music and contemporary music because they love and know Brahms so well. That doesn't prepare them so well for something different and new”
- Although the stereotype is that classical audiences only want the tried and true, sustained institutional commitment to challenging repertoire can change audiences' minds, as happened with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen and to some extent in Berlin under Simon Rattle.
“when an institution, a festival really shows commitment to this repertoire, they can change the audience's mind. And that's also what happened with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen”
- Music critics must have command of neighboring cultural areas because music is not separate from the rest of culture—writing about opera means writing about literature, staging, and theater ideas—and breadth also serves the critic's role as an advocate and face of the art form, since readers who enjoy a critic's pieces on Dylan or Radiohead or nature may give a piece on Mozart a chance they otherwise wouldn't.
“music critics need to have command of neighboring cultural areas because music is just not separate from the rest of culture... When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music”
- Morton Feldman took the unearthly atonal vocabulary of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—harmonies that were prickly and alarming in their original context—and, by keeping everything quiet and spaced out, transformed them into distant, eerie objects of radical beauty that can be contemplated from a distance like Rothko's misty abstract paintings, an aesthetic of radical quietude especially appealing in moments of frenzy and chaos.
“these harmonies that can be prickly and alarming and unnerving in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern... in Feldman, they become distant, and they acquire this eerie beauty... It's as if you can step way back from them and contemplate them as art objects”
- Reading Joyce's Ulysses at age 18, before fully knowing the classic 20th-century modernist works, gave Ross a taste for a sprawling, comprehensive, all-devouring modernism of all-engulfing chaos rather than strict, spare modernism, which prepared him for unexpected and irrational juxtapositions of styles in music such as the symphonies of Charles Ives.
“Ulysses gave me a taste for a kind of sprawling, comprehensive, all-devouring... It's the modernism of all-engulfing chaos. And in music, that happens to be a mode that I'm quite fond of, whether it's the symphonies of Charles Ives”
Classical music institutions face unique pandemic recovery obstacles because live performance requires indoor crowding audiences cannot yet psychologically accept.
- Classical music and the performing arts will be the very last cultural forms to recover from the pandemic because they depend on crowding people into indoor spaces, and even after a vaccine resolves the medical question, a psychological block and fear of crowding will remain, threatening the bigger institutions while smaller, more resourceful chamber and recital outfits recover faster.
“classical music — it's going to be the very last to come back... It's an art form that subsists on crowding people into an indoor space... even if there is a vaccine, there'll still be a psychological block against people coming back”
- Once people get out of the habit of going to concerts it can be very difficult to persuade them to come back, as happened to the Metropolitan Opera after 9/11 when some patrons who stopped attending never returned because they developed new cultural habits.
“once people get out of the habit of going to concerts, it can be very difficult to persuade them to come back. This is what happened to the Metropolitan Opera after 9/11... some of them just never came back. They just developed new cultural habits”
- The pandemic could have a healthy effect if it makes classical music more local in focus, cutting back the wasteful jet-setting culture in which conductors guest-conduct in ten places per season for hefty fees, so that music directors instead concentrate their careers in one place and build ties to the surrounding community.
“that could be a very healthy thing if conductors just spent more of their time with their orchestra that they are the music director of instead of feeling the need to guest conduct in 10 other places... Why not really concentrate your career in one place, work on building ties to the community”
- A significant component of the American orchestral and opera audience attends out of social obligation rather than deep engagement—subscription holders going because 'the Joneses down the street are going'—yet such patrons are necessary to sustain orchestras as civic institutions supported across generations; Ross estimates at least 50 to 60 percent of a second-tier city opera crowd is genuinely enjoying it.
“there are certainly quite a few people who go out of a sense of obligation... 'The Joneses down the street are going, so we might as well go.'”