From the Aug 3 – Aug 9, 2000 issue

Visual Art

Wagner's Godhead

A Very Personal History of Opera

by Trisha Ready

RICHARD WAGNER IS GOD. That's what my uncle told me when I was 16, and he sketched a pyramid scribbled with the names of who he considered to be the all-time greatest composers. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss occupied the lower rungs of the list--Germans, like seraphim and cherubim, rising up toward the true Mack Daddy of classical music.

"Anything else," he waved his hand, "jazz, or that screeching rock shit. That's for cretins."

We were sitting in my uncle's Wagner-shrine of a San Francisco living room at the time, listening to an aria from Siegfried. I had to ask the name of the opera twice. My uncle rolled his eyes. He looked more and more like an Italian version of Vincent Price the older he got. His living room was ornate--saturated with golds and blood reds, marble-top furniture, Persian carpets, and Louis the XV chairs. My uncle had designed the room himself. He had a fetish, and a real talent for gold leafing.

We sat engulfed by the longing of the music. He was teaching me how to listen to Wagner. All around us were giant 12- by 15-foot canvases, scenes from Wagner's operas my uncle had painted. He was Wagner's own alchemist, fashioning paintings as devotional as a Renaissance artist's offerings to an Old Testament Father. Only Renaissance painters had a cultural context my uncle lacked.

My uncle was all juxtaposition of extremes: hip and edgy when it came to his taste in film, books, and politics. And he was sexually ravenous, went back and forth between high art and the shadowy back rooms and glory holes of the Jaguar Bookstore in the Castro. My family considered him a perverted nut for the same reasons that I adored him. "It's just music, for Christ's sake," my father would mutter. "And who the hell understands or cares what they're screaming about?" They warned me to keep my distance.

But I fell in love with my uncle's love for passion, which always swept me up in its frenzy. He was wild, vital. Swore often. Talked about sex, and civil rights. He had an antique carved cupid headboard that I craved. His canvases were passionate experiments, trying to express what the music felt like inside him. He broke up space into tiny fractals, playing with texture and color. Mythical bodies of the tortured lovers Tristan and Isolde, for example, were distilled down until they were almost symbols.

I had heard stories of Wagner's anti-Semitism, which my uncle always adamantly refuted. To me, Wagner's presence permeated the music, and I felt oppressed by its weight. I fidgeted. The music made me restless; I couldn't contain it. I craved water, a television, or a simple chord that would please, please resolve itself.

My uncle would yell at me: "Let it in, open up to it!" He hoped the music would penetrate my skin, my bloodstream, match its pulse to mine.

He was a classical religious zealot, reborn into Wagner from the edge of death. It was the late 1930s; he was 18 or 19, and living in a tuberculosis sanitarium in L.A. He was drowning in the fluids of his lungs, fighting a high fever. A broadcast of Tanhauser came on the radio. His room filled up with those drenching, pulsing chords of Wagner's. The fever broke. He said the music breathed for him, lifted him up from the dark, into an ecstatic state he kept trying to re-create the rest of his life. He wanted me to have that same transubstantial moment while I sat in the center of his stylized Wagner shrine.

He would dance around the room, chanting in German--pretending to lash himself to a mast, forge a ring on an anvil, or light flames around Brunehilde laid out on an altar to sleep. That man could tell fabulous stories. I don't remember the details of the myths; I was too mesmerized watching my uncle's trance-like states. And sometimes I would lean back in my chair to examine Wagner's sculpted bust--another worshipful creation of my uncle's--glaring down at me from atop a bookshelf. I knew he wasn't someone I could worship.

My uncle banned me from his house, and his heart, for a month once when I said I wanted to go dancing, out to a nightclub, in the middle of one of our musical evenings. I was in my mid-20s by then--and I was drunk. Although I had come to love opera and classical music, I still didn't fathom what was so great about Richard Wagner. I liked the Italians and the French.

That drunken evening my uncle played for me the overture from Tristan and Isolde and I nodded off, which was a mistake. That's the same piece of music I would ask you to listen to now if you were sitting with me in my uncle's ornate living room with its Wagner library, and paintings, and framed letters from Wagner's family in Germany inviting my uncle to show his artwork there in 1959.

It's also the same piece of music that my uncle played the last time we had a real conversation. Before his mind started to dissolve. I mean that the music was the conversation, because he'd already lost a lot of his ability to speak by then. Alzheimer's disease was making shadows on the lobes of his brain.

We stood on opposite sides of the room, listening: me leaning on the back of a chair, him sitting in his wheelchair. I am telling you this because it took me nearly 20 years to understand what he heard at the core of Wagner's music. I tend toward the manic. I avoid sitting in the murky waters of emotional depth. Maybe you'll get it faster than I did.

And I'm telling you this because I want you to go experience Wagner opera, Die Walküre or Das Rheingold, at the Seattle Opera House where my uncle showed his paintings in 1983 or '85. He stayed the whole summer on Capitol Hill, which he said was as boring as that Gay Pride Parade that hobbled down the street, and he was glad to go home again, an unabashed snob.

I'm back in the room with my uncle now. The last time we listened to opera together. The music was rising and falling. I want to say throbbing, but it was more tidal, pulling at the water of my cells. It felt like my uncle and I were drowning in a pond, in green light, gold light, the tendrils of plants moving around us. The eucalyptus tree from the neighbor's yard was rustling. My uncle was telling me a story about aching for something--someone beyond the brittle betrayal of a body that disappears. He was talking with his eyes, with one hand gripping the metal arm of his chair, mourning the impending loss of himself. He was completely quiet. The music spoke in slow waves, resonant as grief.

We breathed it. Until the scratches got louder than the waves, and the needle lifted from the evening's disk. And then I just stood there, watching how slowly my uncle's hand opened its tight grip on the chair. In another year I would take my uncle to a nursing home and then return to his empty house, open all the windows and doors, and play that same piece. Emptied, exhausted of every emotion. I got drunk on Wagner--no God to me, but merely music.