Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone by Craig Schuftan

Author:Craig Schuftan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Wagnerian

OF ALL THE romantic composers, Wagner is the one most deserving of a place in the history of rock and roll. Others have had their moment in the sun — Beethoven was briefly in vogue in the late ’60s thanks to Wendy Carlos’s A Clockwork Orange soundtrack, Strauss had one of his tone poems pressed into service as Elvis’s walk-on music in the ’70s, and Rivers Cuomo, as we’ll see later, has always had a soft spot for Puccini. But Schumann? Mahler? Berlioz? None are likely to find a place in the index of even the most exhaustive rock history, let alone have an entire genre of rock music named after them.

The phrase ‘Wagnerian rock’ is generally credited to songwriter Jim Steinman. Steinman adapted Wagner’s Das Rheingold into a stage musical in 1974.1 Three years later, he had teamed up with ex-Rocky Horror Picture Show star Meat Loaf to record Bat Out Of Hell, a hysterically over-the-top ode to American romance that turned Meat Loaf into an unlikely star, and paved the way for future Steinman mini-operas like Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. But by the time Bat Out of Hell appeared, the term ‘Wagnerian’ already had some currency in the world of heavy metal. When The Stalk Forest Group changed their name to Blue Oyster Cult in 1971, rock critic Richard Meltzer suggested a way to lend their new name a bit of typographical panache. ‘I said, “How about an umlaut?”’ Meltzer later recalled, ‘Metal had a Wagnerian aspect anyway’.2 The heavy metal umlaut — or ‘rock dots’ as they came to be called — went on to have a life of their own, subsequently adopted by scores of bands from Motörhead to Mötley Crüe for their vague associations of tragedy, paganism, and above all, loudness.

By ‘Wagnerian’ Meltzer most likely meant ‘loud and intense’ — which is absolutely fair. ‘I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s,’ says Lady Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. ‘It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.’3 Wagner’s music was frequently dismissed as ‘noise’ by nineteenth-century critics. A cartoon published in 1869 showing the composer hammering a crotchet into a concertgoer’s ear with a mallet sums up a fairly widespread feeling about him at the time. But Wagner intentionally strove for intensity in his music, and just like the metal bands he unknowingly inspired, if the technology of the day wasn’t up to producing what he heard in his head, Wagner simply went ‘one louder’. He had a specially designed Festival Theatre built in Bayreuth to accommodate his musical vision — the first stone was laid in 1872, and it would be another four years before the theatre saw its first performance. Meanwhile, The New York Times reported excitedly on Bayreuth’s radical new design. Wagner had the orchestra sunk below the floor so that the music would rise up before the audience as if from nowhere. The paper informed

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