Wagner in Context (Cambridge University Press) was released this past spring.
Musicologist David Trippett, is the editor who brought this remarkable book to fruition.
It contains 42 essays by music scholars, writers, and other classical figures (including conductor Leon Botstein), all probing the life and legacy of composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Divided into six sections including geography, politics, people, performance, and reception, the book offers meaty dives on well-known topics (i.e. The Ring and its stagings through time), practicalities (money), realities (criticism), as well as pointed socio-cultural examinations (performing his work in Israel; Buddhism, video game music).
In this exclusive interview, he shares insights on how such an ambitious project comes together.
Cultural Currents: What was the inspiration behind Wagner in Context? Any particular event or encounter driving this ahead?
David Trippett: Usually, writers on music begin with artworks. In Wagner’s case, his opera and music dramas, where the sounding music and its history remains in focus. This work-centred approach is not what interested me for Wagner in Context. The purpose of the X in Context series is specifically to look beyond individual biography and works to the rich contexts that lie behind them: the macro-political scene, social mores, ideals of femininity, shifting philosophical ideas, attitudes towards bodily health, royalty practice in different countries vs cost of living. These include both local contexts of the nineteenth century (i.e. during Wagner’s lifetime) and those that come thereafter, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It begins by weaving Wagner’s whole approach to life and art into the woof of nineteenth-century Europe, and it zooms out, placing this in wider contexts with which his music resonates. As I say in the introduction, it’s like looking at a beautiful garden through a window pane. Your eye can focus on the greenery or on the frame and glass, but not both at once. This book invites readers to switch between both, focussing back and forth, thereby placing Wagner into a more dynamic history.
Cultural Currents: How did you determine which authors would make the most compelling contributions?
David Trippett: One of the enjoyable aspects of this project was the chance to rethink what it means to study Wagner in the 2020s. After charting the range of topics that were essential, and those more variable and less developed that were desirable, I set about approaching scholars whose work I admire. People enjoy writing about Wagner, such is the incredible breath and reach of his artistic interests, reading habits, and personal affiliation, not to mention the sheer quality of his music. I was very fortunate that almost everyone I approach to write a chapter agreed; we discussed one or two, while others developed a life of their own (what began as a commission for internet memes became ‘Wagner and the Schopenhauerean erotics of video game music’, and a commission initially directed at German literary history eventually became ‘Wagner and Spain’, which discusses the remarkable influence of Calderón and Cervantes). The project offered the chance for world experts, as well as some new voices, to focus on intellectual contexts in their own right, within starting with works and Wagner’s biography. For this reason, I think it was an appealing proposition, and I was very grateful to all the writers in the volume for agreeing to take up the challenge of condensing everything into such short (3000wd) chapters.
Cultural Currents: What major surprises did you discover during the editing process?
David Trippett: It is perhaps a cliché, but Wagner is ever new. I have studied his music and writings for decades, but the new viastas emerging – concerning warfare, physical health, Israel, personal finance, Spanish literature (etc.) – was genuinely surprising. It was less a case of Solomon’s edict of ‘nothing new under the sun’, more a case of each new age reinventing, refashioning, and – frankly – reproblematising the information we have, forcing us to rethink assumptions and break apart old narratives afresh. This remaking process, remaking Wagner studies for the twenty-first century, was undoubtedly one of the more rewarding aspects of this project.
Cultural Currents: Is there a common thread that runs through this collection?
David Trippett: Perhaps not a common thread, but a consistent attitude: to explore the context inhabited by Wagner, and to bring these to the fore. The book is divided into six sections: Place; People; Politics, Ideas, and Bodies; Life, language, and the Ancient World; Music and Performance; Reception. Each contains a set of short chapters, offering what amounts to a Michelin-starred taster menu of Wagner studies.
Cultural Currents: What new discoveries may readers expect?
David Trippett: Did you know that had royalties been paid in the German states as they were in Paris, Wagner’s annual income would have been c. €2,000,000? Readers can explore more in Sven Friedrich’s excellent analysis of ‘Wagner’s Finances’. The role of noise in language (as the Rheinmaidens’ utterance—’Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle’—emerges from noise into language) is borrowed from the hissing of a snake in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Serpentina, and was ultimately linked to the idea of Rauschen / rauschen (noise / to rustle) in Wotan’s ravens by the media theorist Friedrich Kittler? Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has a thought-provoking discussion of Kittler’s profound influence on Wagner reception. Wagner ‘took the waters’ often, notably at Albisbrun, in order to improve his constitution, circulation, and strength. This included ice baths, cold towel wraps, carefully controlled diet and exercise schedule. Holly Watkins has explored the deeper contexts for this in an exciting chapter about physical health. And readers may not have known previously that one of the chief architects of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, adored listening to Wagner, and attended the opera almost daily in Vienna. His diary records a confession that ‘it is only those days that I do not hear Tannhäuser that I begin to doubt the possibility of Israel.’ This inverts the association more commonly attended upon Wagner and Israel, and Viktor Nefkens offers an important discussion about the differences between influence, association, and appropriate of Wagner’s music. These are tiny examples from within the book’s 42 chapters, and, of course, I would recommend readers explore the full set at leisure.
Cultural Currents: This is an election year in America. What does conductor, Leon Botstein, have to say about Wagner’s fascination with this country?
David Trippett: Leon has contributed an characteristically erudite and original discussion. It concerns both the role America played in Wagner’s imagination (including imagery – Siegfried as frontiersman) and the early performance history of Wagner in America (including a production of Parsifal in Yiddish in New York during 1903). One of the most valuable lines of argument that readers might wish to explore more is the idea that Wagner’s realisation of drama and imagination in sound formed an important template for early cinema in America, particularly in demonstrating the emotional power this combination of drama / narrative, Wagnerian music, and entrancing spectacle. I dare say, the lessons of this genre are not lost on politics today, even if their origins are rarely traced back so far.
Cultural Currents: San Francisco Opera is staging Tristan and Isolde this fall season. How might your book enrich this experience for our audience?
David Trippett: I would encourage readers to begin by exploring three chapters: that on Schopenhauer; that on Wagner’s orchestration; and that on Wagner’s ideal femininity. All bear on the narrative, philosophy and expressivity of Tristan. Beyond these, I encourage readers to grasp onto any chapters that capture the imagination. Listening to Wagner is ultimately a very personal experience, and reading, too, has an inwardly directed goal – of greater understanding, of expanding our horizon, of expanding our world. We need this form of enlightenment constantly, and I hope the production of Tristan, with the wonderful artists of the San Francisco Opera, can help to bring it about for all readers and listeners, Wagnerians and non-Wagnerians alike.