It was only a matter of time: Richard Wagner, the most volcanically controversial figure in the history of music, has inserted himself into the 2012 Presidential election. The ad above was released by the Emergency Committee for Israel, a political advocacy group overseen by William Kristol and Gary Bauer, among others. The soundtrack is a lightly mangled version of Siegfried’s Funeral Music, from “Götterdämmerung,” the final opera of the “Ring” cycle. The choice serves various purposes. First, it creates a palpable chill, endowing President Obama with a demonic aura. Second, viewers who are aware of Wagner’s anti-Semitism may instinctively associate the shouting crowd at the Democratic National Convention with anti-Jewish mobs. Finally, the ad seems designed to trigger memories of the Wagnerian iconography of Hitler’s Germany. Siegfried’s Funeral Music was the chief anthem of Nazi mourning, and was heard alongside the slow movement of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony after Hitler’s death. On some subliminal level, the ad might actually be equating Obama with Hitler. How well it works as political propaganda is not for me to judge, but it did succeed in making me feel ill.
At the New Yorker Festival, on October 7th, I will give a lecture entitled “The Wagner Vortex.” Wagner’s two-hundredth anniversary arrives next May, and we will be reminded again, if any reminder is needed, of the aesthetic and political battles that have never ceased to rage around this composer. Why does Wagner’s music have such a mesmerizing effect on listeners of many different backgrounds? What are the mechanics of this vortex that pulls us in, even in a political attack ad? And why have the operas provoked such a teeming variety of interpretations, from one end of the ideological spectrum to another? After all, before Siegfried’s Funeral Music was played for the death of Hitler it was played for the death of Lenin.
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