He Dreamed of Vultures
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Although there exists no detailed empirical evidence, it is often said that more words have been written about Richard Wagner than about any other human that ever walked the earth, with the notable exception of Jesus Christ. Wagner himself started the hagiographic trend with his “Mein Leben” (1865) and not a year has gone by since without the appearance of at least a half-dozen tomes on the subject. The question for Joachim Kohler, then, is why would we care to read his latest?
The answer lies in the specificity of his “Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans” (Yale University Press, 704 pages, $40), first published in German in 2001 and now translated by Stewart Spencer. But this study is a psychoanalytic one, which attempts to both humanize and universalize the great man at the same time. The result is an extremely readable book, entertaining and provocative, thoughtful and perceptive. Often, however, Mr. Kohler abandons them to interpret the dreams of the composer and to investigate various traumatic childhood incidents.
For Wagnerians this worthy effort calls into question the role of the internecine battles for control of Bayreuth still extant today. Mr. Kohler is correct in stating that most biographies have been conscious or unconscious versions of the Wagner family party line, a necessary corollary of its control of virtually all research materials. He is also correct in proclaiming his own independence from the publicity machine. But much of his own material seems to be manufactured from his own psychosocial view of music history; significantly, his two other books were about the relationships between Wagner and Nietzsche and the Wagnerian influence on the worldview of Adolf Hitler. For long periods of reading time, one almost forgets that Wagner was ever a composer.
In fact, music is rather conspicuously missing from this book. Those who fear the inclusion of musical examples as much as Mime dreads the dragon’s cave can approach this work without trepidation. Furthermore, projecting his own perspective onto his subject – I feel that I can indulge in some armchair psychiatry here, considering the tenor of this book – Mr. Kohler mistakenly states about Wagner that: “In itself, music meant nothing to him. When he wrote it, it left no impression. “Readers will understand that he is attempting to isolate the music as but one element of the gestalt, but he overdoes it. Richard Wagner has been accused of many things, but perhaps the most outrageous is this charge that he had no interest in music!
Nevertheless I found Mr. Kohler’s book quite fascinating, as he treats Wagner as a sort of Robertson Davies character, a man of the theater who inhabits a Jungian landscape. The discussions of his lack of certainty regarding who his father might have been and the passionate adoration of his sister Rosalie are mesmerizing. The author’s attribution of various scenes and stage devices from the operas to these phenomena are always intriguing though apocryphal. He explores in great detail the prohibition by Lohengrin of the question of his own identity and the complex relationships between Tannhaeuser and both Elisabeth and Venus. As long as we all keep a healthy skepticism, these discussions can be quite useful.
Mr. Kohler does an excellent job of debunking the myths about the meaning of “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” eloquently demonstrating that it is not a formal argument for socialism, environmentalism, utopianism, Aryanism, or any other -ism for that matter. But in addition to marginalizing the music again, he speaks only cursorily about the form of the drama and the Herculean composition of the poem itself, painstakingly realized in a style roughly equivalent to the English version of terza rima. It is as if all of Wagner’s amazing innovations – from the most sublime passages to the invention of a new type of wind machine – were just insignificant minutia. All that really counts are his dreams about vultures (his stepfather – and possible actual father – was named Geyer, which, as Geier, means vulture in German).
Mr. Spencer’s translation is breezy and colloquial. He cannot resist the occasional joke – as, for example, when he uses the alternate spelling in the phrase “deflouring the baker’s daughter.” I would not recommend this work for someone unfamiliar with the Wagner oeuvre, but for fans eager to expand their horizons on the subject or aficionados looking for a little vacation from those dusty Eddic texts, it is a fun experience. One can have the best of both worlds: a sense of the scientific without any of that pesky scholarship.
Sigmund Freud used to say that “Don Giovanni” was his favorite opera. Whenever I see Siegmund the Walsung pull the magic sword out of the tree while his sister and lover audibly swoons, however, I can’t help thinking that “Die Walkure” had to hold a special place in his heart as well.
Mr. Kirshnit writes frequently about classical music for The New York Sun.