alex ross gives a walking tour of wagner's new york _ the new yorker

7/30/2019 Alex Ross Gives a Walking Tour of Wagner's New York _ the New Yorker

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/alex-ross-gives-a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york-the-new-yorker 1/13

22.05.13 Alex Ross Gives a Walking Tour of Wagner's New York : The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york.html?printable=true&currentPage=all 1/13

« The Handsome Family

Main

Remembering St. Vincent’s »

May 16, 2013

A Walk ing Tour of Wagner’s New York

Posted by Alex Ross

Print

More

Share

Close

Reddit

Linked In

Email

http://www.newyorker.com/contact/emailFriend?referringPage=

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york.html?printable=true&currentPage=all

http://www.newyorker.com/


http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york.html&title=A%20Walking%20Tour%20of%20Wagner%92s%20New%20York&summary=Your%20page%20content%20description&source=

http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york.html&title=A%20Walking%20Tour%20of%20Wagner%92s%20New%20York


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/alex_ross/search?contributorName=Alex%20Ross

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/remembering-st-vincents.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/handsome-family-wilderness-new-album.html





The first in a short series of posts commemorating Wagner’s two-hundredth birthday, which falls on May 22nd. Above is the title page of Wagner’s “Grosser

Festmarsch,” also known as the “American Centennial March,” commissioned for the celebrations of 1876.

In his last years, Richard Wagner often spoke of immigrating to America. The composer had enthusiastically greeted the founding of the German Empire in 1871, but in

the following decade, as Bismarck and the Kaiser failed to provide funds for his nascent festival at Bayreuth, his chauvinism waned, and he entertained the idea of

escaping to the New World. Cosima Wagner, his second wife, wrote in her diary in 1880: “Again and again he keeps coming back to America, says it is the only place on

the whole map which he can gaze upon with any pleasure: ‘What the Greeks were among the peoples of this earth, this continent is among its countries.’” In consultation

with Newell Jenkins, an American dentist w ho had become a family friend, Wagner drew up a plan whereby American supporters would raise a million dollars to resettle

the composer and his family in a “favorable climate”; in return, America would receive proceeds from “Parsifal,” his opera-in-progress, and all other future work. “Thus

would America have bought me from Europe for all time,” Wagner wrote. The pleasant climate he had in mind was, surprisingly, Minnesota.

What might have happened if, against all odds, Wagner had realized his American scheme? The outcome is almost impossible to imagine, although some historical novelist

should give it a try. Somehow, one pictures Wagner winding up in California. In the event, of course, he stayed put. “Parsifal” had its première at Bayreuth, in 1882, and

the composer died the following year, his name and work destined to be woven into the fate of the German nation.

During his tempestuous life, Wagner lived in many cities across the Continent, leaving an indelible imprint on all of them. In Leipzig, Dresden, Paris, Zurich, Lucerne,

Vienna, Munich, and Venice, among other places, you can go on Wagner walking tours, seeing the houses where he lived, the halls where he conducted, and the meeting-

places where he held forth. In recent weeks, as a kind of thought-experiment, I have been following ghost tracks of Wagner in New York, a c ity that he never saw and

probably would have hated. A case of authorial obsession is to blame for this peculiar undertaking: I am w orking on a book called “Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of





Music,” an account of Wagner’s cultural impact. To be candid, the itinerary is often pretty dull, but it picks up interest toward the end, as traces emerge of hidden links

between the Rockefellers and the Holy Grail.

Because of the heavy influence of German immigrants on nineteenth-century America, the stateside cult of Wagner s tarted early. In 1854, w hile in Swiss exile, Wagner

wrote delightedly to Liszt that he had heard tell of “Wagner nights” taking place in Boston; he was referring to a Grand Wagner Night presented by the Germania Musical

Society, in December of 1853. The musicians of Germania, pictured above, had come to America in 1848, many of them left-wing idealists who, like Wagner himself,

had taken part in revolutionary activity. For ty-eighters, as the revolutionaries were know n, made up a s ignificant portion of the German-American population; chief among

them was Carl Schurz, who supported Lincoln, was elected a senator from Missouri, and served as Rutherford B. Hayes’s Secretary of the Interior. Interestingly,Wagner read about Schurz’s American career and approved of it, calling Schurz a “proper German.” Schurz, for his part, displayed a healthy ambivalence toward

Wagner. Stopping in Zurich after his own flight from German lands, he steered clear of the composer, finding him an “excessively presumptuous, haughty, dogmatic,

repellent person.” Many years later, though, Schurz fell under the spell of “Parsifal” at Bayreuth. “I now beheld something like what I had imagined Heaven to be when I

was a child,” he wrote in his memoirs.

http://books.google.com/books?id=lCkuAQAAIAAJ

http://books.google.com/books?id=8oks8-lgwlgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA106#v=onepage&q&f=false





The putative tour begins on the south end of Manhattan, at 12 Old Slip, where the 77 Water Street office tower now stands. Here, in the eighteen-thirties, a young

German merchant named Otto Wesendonck joined William Loeschigk in launching a textile-import firm, specializing in the finer silks. The company, later based on Broad

Street, prospered, with Wesendonck returning home to serve as its European representative. In 1848, he married the poet Agnes Luckemeyer, who was persuaded to

change her name to Mathilde, which happened also to be the name both of Wesendonck’s deceased first wife and of his beloved sister. (Chris Walton’s book “Richard

Wagner’s Zurich: The Muse of Place” tells more of this curious marriage.) In the eighteen-fifties, the Wesendoncks settled in Zurich and built a grand villa on a hill

outside the city. Wagner entered the household and, as was his wont, created disarray. Otto was exceedingly generous in his support for Wagner; Wagner, in turn,

became exceedingly infatuated with Mathilde, although their relations probably remained chaste. He set to music five of her poems—the “Wesendonck Lieder”—and then

incorporated some of that music into “Tristan und Isolde,” which became a kind of medieval mirror image of the affair in progress. Thus was Wagner’s supreme

creation, the most revolutionary musical work of the nineteenth century, made possible in part by the firm of Loeschigk & Wesendonck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SdC5q_ALNM

http://www.rietberg.ch/en-gb/information/museum/historical-background.aspx

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/richard-wagners-zurich-chris-walton/1008402510

http://books.google.com/books?id=SCMsAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA13&dq=%22loeschigk,+wesendonck%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=e7tuUdC2MOHC4AP60oHICQ&ved=0CFAQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=%22loeschigk%2C%20wesendonck&f=false





Incidentally, Otto Wesendonck had a brother, Hugo, who played a prominent role in the revolution of 1848 and then fled to America with Otto’s support. While Otto was

conservative in his politics, Hugo remained a liberal, becoming active in the anti-slavery movement and in the Union cause. At the same time, he prospered in business; in

1860, he founded the Germania Life Insurance Company, which, by the time of his death, four decades later, occupied a commanding position in the trade. In 1917, with

America’s entrance into the First World War, the company took the precaution of changing its name to Guardian Life Insurance, and so it remains. In a curious

coincidence, Guardian’s current headquarters are located directly across from Old Slip, a few dozen feet away from where Otto Wesendonck began to build his fortune. I

wandered into the lobby, hoping to strike up a conversation about Wagner and the Wesendoncks, but, when asked what business I had being there, I could think of no

plausible reply, and retreated.

http://www.guardianlife.com/





The tour now heads north along the Bowery. In Chinatown, we pass the site of the first American performance of a Wagner opera: “Tannhäuser” was given at the

Stadttheater, at 37-39 Bowery, in 1859. The conductor was Carl Bergmann, who led the Germania Musical Society for much of its existence. The theatre was obliterated

long ago; Confucius Plaza now stands on the spot. On the north side of Union Square is another monument to the power of the Wesendoncks: the 1911 headquarters of

Germania Life Insurance. The twenty-story Renaissance Revival structure was noted in its day for its rooftop neon sign. It is now a W Hotel, but a plaque honors the

building’s origin.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mutually-beneficial-robert-wright/1101387041?ean=9780814793978&isbn=9780814793978

http://twi-ny.com/confucius.jpg





One could go looking for traces of Gilded Age Wagner in the area of the old Metropolitan Opera House on West Thirty-ninth Street, but it would be wiser to skip Times

Square and take the subway uptown. Disembarking at 110th Street, we walk over to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, one of whose architects, Ralph Adams Cram,

was a fairly mad Wagnerian. “I do not suppose it is possible for anyone who is not a follower of Wagner to understand how he is taken by those who love him,” Cram

once wrote from Bayreuth. “They find here … something they have wanted all their lives.” On West 107th Street, we stop at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, a shrine to

the once-notorious painter and mystical guru; Roerich, too, had Wagnerian tendencies, although these were soon overwhelmed by Theosophical emanations. We then go

up Broadway toward Riverside Church, whose Bayreuthian resonances require a fair amount of explanation.

http://www.roerich.org/

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchdetail.cfm?trg=1&strucID=693967&imageID=806101&total=31&num=0&word=metropolitan%20opera%20house&s=1&notword=&d=&c=&f=&k=1&lWord=&lField=&sScope=&sLevel=&sLabel=&sort=&imgs=20&pos=1&e=w





Riverside’s tower contains a magnificent seventy-four-bell, five-octave carillon, which was donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in honor of his mother, Laura Spelman

Rockefeller. The work of the stor ied Gillett & Johnston foundry, in Croydon, England, it originally resided at the old Park Avenue Baptist Church in 1925, and was

reinstalled at Riverside on the occasion of the opening of the church, in 1930. Its bourdon bell, a very low C, is, at twenty tons, the heaviest tuned bell in the world. For

decades, the carillon marked the passing quarter-hours with a sequence based on the bell motif in Wagner’s “Parsifal”—the figure that sounds repeatedly as the knights of

the Holy Grail approach their shrine at Montsalvat. This is from Christian Thielemann’s recording of the opera, with René Pape as the elder knight Gurnemanz:

The Riverside bells took those four recurring notes through a series of permutations, with the intervals falling in the first half-hour and rising in the second half-hour, in

imitation of the minute hand of a clock. The pattern is notated in Percival Price’s 1983 book “Bells and Man”:

1:25

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=133937

http://www.theriversidechurchny.org/events/?carillon





Today, the same four notes ring out, but, oddly, the order has been scrambled: you hear the Wagner element only at the end, before the hour strikes. Also, the “E” is

currently having trouble.

How did the Montsalvat motif find its way to Riverside, and what has become of it? One would probably need to be Dan Brown to get to the bottom of the matter, but on

the first point, a side-trip to the Rockefeller Archive Center, in Sleepy Hollow, New York, proved instructive. The archive holds hundreds of pieces of correspondence

relating to the Riverside carillon and to a similar array that Rockefeller donated to the University of Chicago, his father’s proudest creation. The philanthropist devoted an

extraordinary amount of time, energy, and money to his bells, employing as his musical adviser Frederick C. Mayer, the organist and choirmaster of the United States

Military Academy at West Point. Mayer, it turns out, created the Wagnerian sequence especially for Rockefeller’s carillons, calling it the “Parsifal Quarters.”

An imperious gentleman who could bang out a four-page single-spaced letter at the slightest provocation, Mayer explained in one missive why he felt that Wagner was

essential. He wished to break away from the familiar Westminster or “Big Ben” pattern, w hich he dismissed as “trivial and sentimental,” the product of “the most

unmusical people in Europe.” The “Parsifal” figure, on the other hand, evoked the mythical Temple of the Grail, “traditionally located in a wild section of the Pyrenees in

northern Spain.” It is, Mayer c laimed, “the only music written by a really great composer for bells.” Rockefeller, in a 1931 letter, pronounc ed himself “delighted” by the

“Parsifal Quarters.” While Rockefeller was not, as far as I can tell, a fanatical Wagnerian, he esteemed his bell expert and was inclined to grant his wishes. When, in 1934,

subordinates reported that Mayer had been paid forty-five-hundred dollars plus expenses for campanological expeditions across Europe, Rockefeller decided to send him

twenty-seven-hundred dollars more.

Officials at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago discarded Mayer’s “Parsifal” pattern in 1961, explaining that the four dedicated bells had

suffered too much wear and tear; the composer Easley Blackwood created a new sequence. As for the situation at Riverside, my inquiries have so far gone unanswered.

The chimes remain mystically evocative, even if their Wagnerian essence is obscured. On a recent visit to Riverside, I had trouble hearing them from the ground level, so

I went up to a little meeting room at the top of the tower. I found myself looking down on Grant’s Tomb as the bourdon boomed:

1:52

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50B11F9355912738DDDAA0A94D9415B818AF1D3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiKOhOzQyZg

http://rockefeller.uchicago.edu/architecture/carillon.shtml

http://www.rockarch.org/





Keywords

music

Print

More

Share

Close

Reddit

Linked In

Email

Culture Desk

All posts

RSS

10 hours ago

Remembering St. Vincent’s

22 hours ago

A Walking Tour of Wagner’s New York

1 day ago

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/remembering-st-vincents.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/rss.xml

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/


http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/a-walking-tour-of-wagners-new-york.html&title=A%20Walking%20Tour%20of%20Wagner%92s%20New%20York&summary=Your%20page%20content%20description&source=

http://www.reddit.com/submit


http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?keyword=music





The Handsome Family

@Culture Desk

Follow

Our Newsletters

You might like

Most shared

To get more of The New Yorker 's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe Now

“Frances Ha” and th e

Pursuit of Happiness

BY RICHARD BRODY

What Charles Ramsey

and Amanda Berry

Knew

BY AMY DAVIDSON

The Crack in the

N.R.A.’s Facade

BY ALEX

KOPPELMAN

Feeling Sorry for

Tsarnaev

BY PAUL BLOOM

The Sense of an

Ending: An Arizona

nursing home offers

new ways to care for peop le with dementia.

BY REBECCA MEAD

What the Benghazi E-

mails Reveal About

Washington

BY ALEXKOPPELMAN

LOLcattery

BY THE NEW

YORKER

Natash a, Pierre, and

the Great Cell-PhoneSmash ing of 2013

BY MICHAEL

SCHULMAN

Star Trek’s Best

Enemy Gets ReheatedBY IAN CROUCH

Cover Story:

“Defiance”BY MINA KANEKO

AND FRANCOISE

MOULY

Remembering St.

Vincent’sBY ANDREW

BOYNTON

Paint Bombs

BY KELEFA SANNEH

Back to Earth

BY SASHA FRERE-JONES

Couples

BY DAVID DENBY

https://w1.buysub.com/loc/NYR/ATGFailsafe

https://secure.newyorker.com/services/newsletters/demographics

http://www.facebook.com/newyorker

http://twitter.com/CultureDesk

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/05/handsome-family-wilderness-new-album.html

alex ross gives a walking tour of wagner's new york _ the new yorker

Documents