TALES OF LOHR: WRESTLING WITH WAGNER
How do you solve a problem like Richard?; plus, "Factory Roll Call" takes on Jack Smith (no, the OTHER Jack Smith...)
Last night, I attended the second of the Pittsburgh Opera’s scheduled quartet of performances of Richard Wagner’s 1843 opera The Flying Dutchman, my first time seeing this fantastical-nautical tragic romance live on stage. This was a robust, powerful production, with possibly the best aggregation of vocalists I’ve yet experienced on the Pittsburgh Opera stage. Bass-baritone Kyle Albertson’s Dutchman was an imposing and sympathetic figure of melancholic might, beautifully matched by the forceful grace of soprano Marjorie Owens’ take on Senta. Tenor Bryan Register deftly mixes virility and pathos as Senta’s yearning suitor Erik, and bass Peter Volpe, as Senta’s shipping-mogul father Daland, has fun with this avuncular operator’s maneuvering ways. The choral passages, spearheaded by tenor Daniel O’Hearn’s Steersman and contralto Leah Heater’s Mary, are rich and lively, with the curtain-raising Act III celebration a particularly rousing interlude. The Opera’s orchestra, under the vigorous baton of Antony Walker, deliver’s Wagner’s bold, assertive themes with gusto and emotion, and Steven C. Kemp’s stripped-down stage set, working in concert with evocative projections designed by Ian Wallace, makes the production feel unexpectedly expansive without sacrificing a sense of intimacy or compromising the Dutchman’s tragic isolation.
And yet, for all these virtues, it was hard to wholly shake the underlying strangeness of sitting in the dark, at this particular moment in our collective cultural history, face to face with the music of Richard Wagner.
As I write this, the global community, and America specifically, is experiencing a marked upswing in public expression of anti-Semitic sentiment, instances of violence against Jewish individuals and institutions, and incessant dog-whistling from certain political circles on a scale not witnessed in several decades. Much of this, no doubt, is response to the current conflagration in the Middle East, misguided lashing out by people incapable of distinguishing the troubling actions and statements of the Israeli government from the will and desire of all Jewish people worldwide. But it is impossible to ignore the creeping persistence in the last decade of attacks in the right-wing media against Hungarian-born Jewish businessman and political donor George Soros, frequently tarred as a “globalist'“ puppet-master; the reluctance of Republican politicians to definitively forsake openly fascist, anti-Semitic elements within their base (witnessed by Ron DeSantis refusing to call out Floridian protesters flying Nazi flags, or former president Donald Trump’s reluctance to criticize the 2017 Charlottesville protesters who chanted “Jews will not replace us” during their march); and the rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes and acts of violence, peaking in 2018 with the mass killing at the Tree of Life synagogue right here in Pittsburgh, the deadliest anti-Semitic terror attack in United States history. (At the risk of even feinting in the direction of making this about myself, it is important for me to mention here that the Tree of Life attacks are something about which I struggle to maintain any objective viewpoint, as one of the victims was the father of a high-school friend of mine.) A mere three days before I attended the opera, on Veteran’s Day, no less, Trump gave a speech in which his language took on its most nakedly Nazi-leaning shadings yet, echoing the dehumanizing rhetoric of Adolf Hitler as he referred to his perceived enemies as “vermin” and vowing to root them out before they destroy “his” America.
Hitler was a lover of classical music, and his favorite composer was Richard Wagner. He supported lavish mountings of the maestro’s music dramas, particularly his sprawling four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, which he praised as masterful paeans to German nationalism and the superiority of the Aryan race, twin engines upon which the Führer powered a reign of terror, hatred, and misery the likes of which far too many people in 2023 America seem primed to re-ignite. Wagner, of course, did not consciously craft his operas as signal texts for Nazism’s rise. He died six years before Hitler was even born, and no artist can fully control how their work is used, or misused, once they have passed on. But it is undeniable that Wagner himself, decades before the Third Reich, shared its anti-Semitic sentiments. He expressed these prejudices publicly via essays such as Jewishness in Music (originally published pseudonymously in 1850, then again in 1869 under Wagner’s own name), in which he characterizes the Jewish influence in classical music as a “curse,” and advocates for the religion’s “self-annulment” as a means of human salvation. Wagner expressed similar sentiments in private correspondence, such as in an 1851 letter to fellow composer Franz Lizst, in which he described his distaste for Jews being “as necessary to me as gall is to the blood.”
The great cultural reckoning with questions of separating the artist from the art is a fairly recent development, but the challenges presented by Wagner’s undeniable bigotries have been present within the classical community virtually since the collapse of the Third Reich. Wagner’s operas are still presented on a regular basis around the world, so an unspoken consensus seems to have been reached that these works, for all the failings of their creator, are too aesthetically important and worthwhile to be relegated to the archives of history. But then, of course, one has to confront the other question: If you’re not going to disregard Wagner altogether, how then do you deal with the implications of who he was within your presentation?
In one respect, the Pittsburgh Opera is at advantage in their choice of repertoire, as The Flying Dutchman is ideologically divorced from the nationalistic iconography and Aryan-supremacy undercurrents that provide principal elements of the Nibelungen cycle. The opera doesn’t even take place in Germany, being set in a fishing village on the Norwegian coast and boasting a protagonist of Dutch nationality. (It’s The Flying DUTCHMAN, after all, not The Flying DEUTSCHER MANN.) This gives the Pittsburgh Opera license to simply deal with the material on its own terms, and though it is hard to deny that a few of Wallace’s projections, most notably a looming close-up of The Dutchman’s haunting stare, owe a bit of their impact to their similarity to Orwellian propaganda imagery, it is very easy, when immersed in the drama and swept away by the music, to set aside the composer’s baggage and enjoy The Flying Dutchman for what it is. (Helfrich’s director’s notes in the program do allude to Wagner’s controversies, but do not go into intricate detail in a way that would be almost necessary if one were presenting one of the Nibelungen operas instead.)
This past summer’s presentation of Wagner’s piece by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by Christopher Alden, took a radically different approach, not only leaning into the German origins of its creator, but specifically wedding it to imagery associated with Weimer-era Germany and the Holocaust itself. The photograph above, taken from the opera’s first act, looks as much like a Wagnerian stage moment as it does a color-tinted still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, an expressionist tableau evoking all the ideas that were clashing and catching fire within Hitler’s imagination as he dreamed the Reich into existence. Further visual evocations of the era are supplied by Senta’s prize portrait of The Dutchman, which vividly calls to mind not just Otto Dix’s excoriating images of the Great War, a conflict so instrumental in precipitating Germany’s slide into fascism, but also the coruscating woodcut-reminiscent artwork prevalent in both contemporary and current representations of the Holocaust. What’s more, Alden has essentially conceived the Dutchman as a survivor / refugee of the Shoah, dressing him in a striped garb highly redolent of concentration camp prisoner’s wear and reconfiguring his cursed seaborne odyssey as an iteration of the God-condemned mythical figure of The Wandering Jew. These creative choices, foregrounding the sort of cultural slanders and genocidal atrocities the underlying beliefs of men like Wagner gave birth to, have come in for no small degree of skepticism from critics, some of whom have accused the controversial Alden, here as in past works, of shaping his program in a way that runs counter to the intentions of the original creators.
But whether one adopts the take-it-as-it-is tack of the Pittsburgh Opera, or Alden’s rub-your-face-in-the-issues slant, there is no denying that, as long as the operas of Wagner continue to be performed, these sorts of calculations will need to be made, these decisions arrived at, and the resultant criticisms and controversies borne. It is no different from what rightly awaits any poet who cites Ezra Pound as a primary influence, or any film director who cribs imagery or editorial technique directly from D.W. Griffith. One cannot deny that great art can indeed issue forth from sources that likewise produce psychic poison. The question is, how easily can one savor the nectar without succumbing to the toxin’s destruction?
For my part, I walked out of the theater last night humming Wagner’s stirring overture to myself. But let me tell you. Humming is not so easy when you’re holding your nose.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
JACK SMITH (1932 - 1989)
Andy Warhol could often be quite circumspect about the artists and filmmakers whose work influenced his own. Though he was a prolific viewer of avant-garde and experimental cinema, and a regular attendee at the screening series presented by fellow filmmaker and colleague Jonas Mekas, Warhol was just as likely to discuss with the press his viewing of Hollywood dross like The Carpetbaggers as he was to wax enthusiastic about the latest dispatch from Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, or the like. (Once, upon being asked by an interviewer to cite the single greatest influence on his own filmmaking, Warhol reached all the way back to the earliest possible point, giving up the name of Thomas Edison.) But there was one contemporary filmmaker about whom Warhol was seldom coy in expressing his admiration and acknowledging his influence: Photographer, director, and performance artist Jack Smith, one of the American pioneers of the popularization of camp aesthetics and presentation.
Born in Ohio and raised in Texas, Smith made his first film, Buzzards Over Baghdad, in 1952. He moved to New York City the following year, and slowly began to build a career that drew heavily on the influence of the glossiest, gauziest elements of early Hollywood to filter those aesthetics through a wholly fresh sensibility. Smith would frequently work in the photographic medium, crafting images highly evocative of classic Tinseltown publicity photos. The principal work in this vein was The Beautiful Book, a 1962 limited edition of Smith photos published by poet / filmmaker Piero Heliczer. Smith also continued to make films whenever he was able to acquire the necessary film stock and equipment; his early works include Overstimulated and Scotch Tape (the latter title perhaps a reference to the handyman’s substance it often seemingly took to hold his low-budget productions together).
1963 represented the arguable peak of Smith’s cinematic output. In addition to appearing in Ron Rice’s films Chumlum and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man and Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra (three years earlier, he had acted in Jacobs’ Little Stabs at Happiness), Smith made his own most famous film, Flaming Creatures. Shot for $300 with expired film stock salvaged from a camera shop’s waste bin, Smith’s film was an outrageously woozy, camp-saturated miasma of drag, faux-exotic jewelry and music, heavily cut with blaring pop tunes, crude sexual imagery, blatantly homoerotic narration, and a sexual assault interrupted by a simulated earthquake. Among Flaming Creatures’ cast and crew were future Silver Factory caretaker Billy Linich (aka Billy Name), frequent Warhol film performer Mario Montez (here billed as “Dolores Flores”), and Velvet Underground co-founding member John Cale, who worked on assembling the soundtrack score. Flaming Creatures became a standard-bearer for the new, permissive daring of the cinematic avant-garde and a persistent target of censors and conservatives seeking to leach the countercultural influence from the world of art and ideas. Smith’s film was denied screening at prominent international film festivals (the ousting from one such festival, in Belgium, led to several other major filmmakers, including Brakhage and Anger, pulling their films from the schedule in protest); Mekas was arrested on several occasions for attempting to screen the work in New York theaters; and, despite impassioned defenses from Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and social commentator Susan Sontag, Flaming Creatures was eventually deemed obscene by the New York Supreme Court, which barred it from further public exhibition. (This decision would eventually be overturned several years later on appeal.)
Andy Warhol is alleged to have seen Flaming Creatures upwards of two dozen times. He persistently praised Smith as a major cinematic talent, and would ultimately incorporate Smith’s camp sensibility and numerous members of his creative entourage into his own work. Warhol likewise adopted what he described as Smith’s willingness to simply keep “shooting until the actors got bored,” and even appropriated the designation of his onscreen talent as “superstars” from an interview Smith gave to poet and future Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga in 1962. Smith was a believer in the raw, impulsive screen potential of untrained talent, and Warhol seized on this conception of onscreen performers and ran with it all the way to the pop-cultural end zone.
Perhaps inevitably, Smith and Warhol became occasional collaborators. Warhol appears onscreen in Smith’s never-completed Flaming Creatures follow-up Normal Love (dancing in drag atop a gigantic pink cake fabricated by Claes Oldenburg), and shot a behind-the-scenes reel of production footage that was impounded by NYPD officers during one of the Flaming Creatures screening raids and never returned. Smith, for his part, appeared in a few Warhol productions in front of the camera, including 1966’s Hedy and a somber, subdued 1964 Screen Test. Smith and Warhol’s most substantial collaboration was Batman Dracula, for which Warhol shot numerous reels of Smith exulting in his extravagance in both titular roles. Warhol never completed or released this film, a fact which rankled Smith to no end, as he felt the film contained “some really lyrically beautiful scenes,” not to mention his own personal favorite role he’d ever played. Smith needles Warhol for this in 1965’s Camp, in which the filmmaker teases the offscreen Warhol to release a Batman comic book locked in a glass-fronted china cupboard.
Sadly, as he would with many of his former creative colleagues, Smith ultimately turned against Warhol, bashing the Pop artist as a thief for taking both Montez (who he regarded as the best actor in his ensemble) and screenwriter Ronald Tavel away to use for his own purposes. He branded Warhol a “vampire” and a panderer, and claimed in his own private notes that he was forced to “purify the projectors” after screening Warhol films. Smith would have a similar falling-out with Mekas over the latter’s defenses of Flaming Creatures; Smith saw Mekas’ championing of the work as opportunistic exploitation, and later accused the impresario of appropriating Flaming Creatures earnings to support other filmmakers at his own expense.
But for all his financial, legal, and interpersonal struggles, Smith never stopped creating. He continued to appear in the films of major avant-gardists, including Gregory Markopoulos’ The Iliac Passion (also co-starring Warhol as Poseidon) and Up Your Legs Forever, created by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His later career was dedicated primarily to theatrical work, largely as a performer. He appeared in plays directed by Robert Wilson and Charles Ludlam, and crafted a host of his own original works that he presented in small theaters and event spaces throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s in New York. Among the most notable of these works was 1976’s Secret of Rented Island, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, and 1982’s I Was a Male Yvonne de Carlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground. He also continued his photography practice, frequently mounting programs of the images as soundtracked slide shows. In 1987, two years before his death from AIDS-related causes at the age of 56, Smith was made an honorary doctor of letters by Whittier College in California, and his legacy as a camp pioneer and avant-garde pace-setter has only continued to grow since his death.
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