Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: thing from my Heart radio. That is, of course, the
Speaker 1: Prelude to Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic,
Speaker 1: conducted by Sergio Zawa. My guest today. Alex Ross is
Speaker 1: the author of Wagnerism, Art and Politics in the Shadow
Speaker 1: of Music, about the life and work of German composer
Speaker 1: Richard Wagner. Alex Ross has been the music critic at
Speaker 1: The New Yorker since nine and at The New York
Speaker 1: Times before that. While his beat is classical music, he
Speaker 1: writes on a wide ranging number of subjects, from opera
Speaker 1: to avant garde, Kurt Cobain to Bob Dylan, all alongside
Speaker 1: essays on history, art, film and literature. He's a MacArthur
Speaker 1: Genius Grant recipient, cited by the Foundation for his ability
Speaker 1: to offer quote new ways of thinking about the music
Speaker 1: of the past and its place in our future unquote,
Speaker 1: with his deep knowledge of music history. I wanted to
Speaker 1: know how Alex Ross saw popular music fitting into the
Speaker 1: pantheon of culture against past illustrious genres. Well, I think
Speaker 1: there is kind of a natural life cycle with genres
Speaker 1: as they unfold over time that eventually their their past
Speaker 1: can begin to overshadow their present. You know, if you
Speaker 1: if you look at the history of jazz, you know,
Speaker 1: and the emergence of this jazz classicism in recent decades,
Speaker 1: where you know, kids go to music schools and and
Speaker 1: and study jazz and sort of learn how to play
Speaker 1: Ellington the same way generations of conservatory students have have
Speaker 1: learned Beethoven and Brahms, and so there's that kind of
Speaker 1: classical mentality, which yeah, I think can sort of overcome
Speaker 1: any art form. And it's tricky, you know, because I
Speaker 1: think that the fires of invention are alive in every
Speaker 1: genre all the time, and they remain alive in quote
Speaker 1: unquote classical music as well. And so the kind of
Speaker 1: seduction of the past, for me as a critic and
Speaker 1: also just as a listener, is something to be you know,
Speaker 1: it's inescapable, and I love all the music of the past,
Speaker 1: but for me it's also something to be resisted, you know,
Speaker 1: because you you sort of have to pay attention to
Speaker 1: what's going on now, and you know there is in
Speaker 1: every genre sort of always also that completely new kind
Speaker 1: of feelings. So it's kind of I mean, a lot
Speaker 1: of has to do with well, what's getting marketed, you know,
Speaker 1: what's getting marketed as kind of new music now in
Speaker 1: pop music, and I think a lot of that is
Speaker 1: just kind of market driven and not necessarily paying attention
Speaker 1: to where the real originality is. And so you know,
Speaker 1: if something is just being sort of shoved down your
Speaker 1: throats so kind of relentlessly, people will, Yeah, people will
Speaker 1: tend to kind of go back to the past because
Speaker 1: they have a sort of freedom. This is kind of
Speaker 1: wonderful freedom for like, I don't know if someone who's
Speaker 1: like fourteen years old now like choosing to become obsessed
Speaker 1: by by the Beatles, you know, And I think there's
Speaker 1: a joy in that, you know, in just in kind
Speaker 1: of taking ownership of the pa asked. And I think
Speaker 1: you can also like open you up to sort of
Speaker 1: new ideas in the present, Like once sort of engage
Speaker 1: with something that just seems from a totally different world,
Speaker 1: almost irrelevant to your own when it comes alive and
Speaker 1: just feel so urgent, then I think that just sort
Speaker 1: of changes your perspective on the present and opens you
Speaker 1: up to new possibilities. So so there's there's a real
Speaker 1: power also in and just disappearing into the past and
Speaker 1: kind of re emerging on the other side, and in
Speaker 1: real safety and security too, you know. I mean, I
Speaker 1: I found like I would look at popular music today
Speaker 1: and I neither listen to nor collect anything today. Nothing.
Speaker 1: I mean that the artists whose contemporary recording as I
Speaker 1: buy more regularly is Winton Marsalis. I mean I listened
Speaker 1: to classical music. Pretty much of my listening is classical music,
Speaker 1: or five percent, five percent of it might be jazz.
Speaker 1: The other ten percent is Beetles Stone Zeppelin, who from
Speaker 1: my pots smoking south Shore Long Island youth, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that which these were are? I mean, whose
Speaker 1: neck exten all that kind of stuff. But another thing
Speaker 1: I thought about reading that Dylan article you wrote a
Speaker 1: while back, and I think about artists of their day,
Speaker 1: and certainly Dylan is by and large of his day
Speaker 1: and thoughtful. And I'm wondering if back then you wanted
Speaker 1: people to help you negotiate that new frontier we were
Speaker 1: in of learning the truth about the American government and
Speaker 1: our political process, and people did that, and they devoured
Speaker 1: a lot of thought provoking and political content in music
Speaker 1: and in films and stuff forth, and now we're in
Speaker 1: a place where people have a fatigue from that and
Speaker 1: they're like, I don't want to talk about that. I
Speaker 1: want love songs. It's almost like your audience is saying,
Speaker 1: I need my art art my artistic menu, my artistic
Speaker 1: reality to be easy and simple. Do you feel that
Speaker 1: way that's how the audience used it. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you're right in that you're just
Speaker 1: in the marketplace. You know, the sixties and seventies were
Speaker 1: just a really remarkably open moment in terms of themercial
Speaker 1: musical marketplace. A lot of voices came in who were
Speaker 1: not being kind of just unexpected voices, unexpected faces, being
Speaker 1: sort of allowed that that space to to speak to
Speaker 1: a really broad public. You know, if you just look
Speaker 1: at how Dylan, how his career developed at at Colombia,
Speaker 1: he put out a couple of records and they went nowhere,
Speaker 1: and and they just sort of waited around and sort
Speaker 1: of kind of they just let him go on making
Speaker 1: records even though he was getting very little attraction. And
Speaker 1: then suddenly he became Bob Dylan. Suddenly these this extraordinary
Speaker 1: phenomenon began. But there was a patience there to sort
Speaker 1: of sign up an unusual artist and and sort of
Speaker 1: let them develop. And I think that that kind of
Speaker 1: patience is much less common, you know, the idea that
Speaker 1: you would sign up an artist, give them some money
Speaker 1: and and sort of see what they come up with,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean now, and an artist gets signed today,
Speaker 1: like you know, they're they're already They've often already become
Speaker 1: super famous you know, on YouTube, on on TikTok. You know,
Speaker 1: they already have the audience, and so just kind of
Speaker 1: carving out the creative space. It's it's more uncommon. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the seventies, it was just remarkable how many albums were
Speaker 1: made where artists were just really exploring just in terms
Speaker 1: of themes, not just political themes, but also just spend
Speaker 1: the sounds, you know, the kind of sounds that that
Speaker 1: got explored. And yeah, I think maybe going back to
Speaker 1: the eighties, eighties and nineties, everything became you know, a
Speaker 1: bit more kind of straight and narrow in terms of
Speaker 1: what was going on. And then it is a celebrity,
Speaker 1: the power of celebrity and just how we mean the
Speaker 1: biggest problem I think in any arena is we just
Speaker 1: pay so much attention to just such a small number
Speaker 1: of artists, and so many other voices get crowded out.
Speaker 1: And it's just this winner takes all economy at the
Speaker 1: works in culture the way it works in in mainstream
Speaker 1: kind of worlds, and frankly it works in classical music too.
Speaker 1: You know, we have we have a few just celebrity
Speaker 1: artists in classical music who cog up too much attention
Speaker 1: and in factly the repertory you know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think we we tend to play you know, a certain
Speaker 1: number of pieces over and over again. Yes, there are
Speaker 1: fantastic pieces, but there's so much more, you know, to
Speaker 1: be explored in the past and in the presence. People
Speaker 1: don't want to take a chance. Yeah, yeah, just people
Speaker 1: only buying tickets when they see just really familiar names,
Speaker 1: you know, on the on the program. So it's something
Speaker 1: to be pushed back against in class musical world, you know,
Speaker 1: as well as the kind of mainstream arena. It's just
Speaker 1: been kind of my proccupation, like from the start of
Speaker 1: the critic is just kind of all right, so you know,
Speaker 1: you know this like trying something new, try to break
Speaker 1: composer or sort of try kind of Alexander Zemlinsky, you know,
Speaker 1: instead of Maller. You know, they're just there are other
Speaker 1: options out there, and it's just this, It's what I
Speaker 1: get really excited about, you know, because I grew up
Speaker 1: and and I just first I devoured you know, Mozart,
Speaker 1: by Demon and Broms and divor Jack, you know, and
Speaker 1: then I started discovering more and more and just the
Speaker 1: ongoing excitement as always finding new music as well as
Speaker 1: of course kind of interesting new ways to perform the
Speaker 1: familiar music. But that's just kind of what I try
Speaker 1: to communicate on my writing is just try something new. Well.
Speaker 1: The thing about Dylan is that I'm always reminded of
Speaker 1: that line that people had about Olivier in my business.
Speaker 1: They said, if Olivier came around today, he'd be on
Speaker 1: a soap opera. They said they weren't quite sure that
Speaker 1: that really rich flavor of hisn't that rich quality that
Speaker 1: that that heightened sense of of the polished actor would
Speaker 1: have a place, Or you'd be the villain in Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones or something like that. When I look at Dylan,
Speaker 1: I think of him being of his time, and if
Speaker 1: he came around now, you know, where would he because
Speaker 1: there's a period of Dylan and not a lot of albums,
Speaker 1: but a couple of them that I just crave as music.
Speaker 1: You know, blood on the track because I crave desire,
Speaker 1: I crave I mean, there's cuts on that thing that
Speaker 1: I just can listen to again and again and again,
Speaker 1: and I have the highest amount of appreciation for those.
Speaker 1: And then there's a lot of it which is to me,
Speaker 1: it's just Dylan sounding like Dylan. When I discovered Dylan,
Speaker 1: and it was late, you know, because I had this
Speaker 1: strange development in terms of my taste where it was
Speaker 1: all classical, correct, all classical, and just all kind of
Speaker 1: eighteenth nineteenth century classical. I mean, I was just barely
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. I listened to a little bit
Speaker 1: of mod or a little bit of sibilious. You know.
Speaker 1: That was as crazy as I got as a teenager.
Speaker 1: And then, you know, past the age of eighteen, I
Speaker 1: really started moving into the twentieth century in classical music,
Speaker 1: discovering modernism and then finally starting to listen to first
Speaker 1: jazz and then rock. But it still it took me
Speaker 1: a few years until I got around to Dylan, you know,
Speaker 1: because I just sort of dismissed him as this something
Speaker 1: from a different generation, of no interest. And then I
Speaker 1: was in Berlin in summer, never forget this, staying at
Speaker 1: a friend's apartment, and he had a few albums c
Speaker 1: d s, and I was just sort of looking for
Speaker 1: stuff to listen to um while I was working, and
Speaker 1: put on Highway sixty when we visited, and almost immediately
Speaker 1: became obsessed by it. You know it once, listen to
Speaker 1: it again. I listened to it, like, you know, ten
Speaker 1: more times that day, and after a couple of days,
Speaker 1: I started to memorize the lyrics, and you know it
Speaker 1: become obsessed. But when I started sort of looking at
Speaker 1: Dylan's career, it is the kind of career that you
Speaker 1: find in classgow music. He's always himself, but he goes
Speaker 1: through phases, he sort of matures, He takes unusual turns,
Speaker 1: He kind of scandalizes his audience at a certain point.
Speaker 1: You know, this kind of sort of plugging in, the
Speaker 1: kind of going electric moments disturbs his audience, the same
Speaker 1: way you know, Scherenberg and Stevinsky disturbed their audiences, you know,
Speaker 1: or late Beethoven for that matter. And the sort of
Speaker 1: these sort of ups and downs in terms of reputation.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, he's he's always kind of developing,
Speaker 1: he's always sort of growing as an artist, and and
Speaker 1: that is unusual. I think in the pop music arena,
Speaker 1: it's so hard to sustain. You know. It's not that
Speaker 1: people lack talent, I think just the marketplace. It's it's
Speaker 1: just so difficult to sort of keep your place in
Speaker 1: the marketplace and the sort of business in the industry
Speaker 1: while also sort of continuing to develop because people want
Speaker 1: you to keep doing the same thing over and over again,
Speaker 1: you know. And and the power of Dylan was to
Speaker 1: refuse to do the same thing over and over again,
Speaker 1: to go in new directions and to keep his place,
Speaker 1: and that just doesn't happen very often. I think there's
Speaker 1: just an incredible willpower they're not to give in and
Speaker 1: to sort of continue going in his own direction. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I just think we're lucky to be living at the
Speaker 1: time that this man is alive. You know, he's completely
Speaker 1: extraordinary talent um and just kind of will Like thousands,
Speaker 1: for thousands of years, people will still be talking about
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, If you
Speaker 1: like conversations with insightful journalists, check out my interview with
Speaker 1: Alex Ross's colleague New Yorker editor David Remnick. The magazine
Speaker 1: is not the magazine if it doesn't have a sense
Speaker 1: of humor. You're not in business to depress the hell
Speaker 1: out of the reader. Unremittingly, it's like a band having
Speaker 1: a set list. If you do everything, it's all sixteenth
Speaker 1: notes from mentioning. So you got a divito? Or will
Speaker 1: you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of worse things.
Speaker 1: So you want some variation in tone, invoice, and that's
Speaker 1: your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility.
Speaker 1: Hear more of my conversation with David Remnick in our
Speaker 1: archives that Here's the Thing dot org. After the break,
Speaker 1: I talked to Alex Ross about one of the most
Speaker 1: important composers in the world, Ricard Wagner, and the dark
Speaker 1: specter of his anti Semitic views. I'm Alec Baldwin and
Speaker 1: you were listening to Here's the Thing. Alex Ross has
Speaker 1: been a music critic for three decades. I wanted to
Speaker 1: know how his line of work has evolved as our
Speaker 1: access to media has changed, the world has definitely changed,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean when I started out in the
Speaker 1: early nineties first writing for the New York Times is
Speaker 1: their most junior, very junior critic. There were just so
Speaker 1: many more of us, you know. I remember the world
Speaker 1: premiere of John Corleano's The Ghosts of Versailles the Meto,
Speaker 1: I mean I think they were they were seventy or
Speaker 1: eighty music critics from around the world, you know, attending
Speaker 1: that that performance. You know, I just had so many
Speaker 1: colleagues from different papers that I would see, you know
Speaker 1: at concerts, a latent Kerner from the Village Voice and
Speaker 1: Kyle Gann from the Village Voice, and people from the
Speaker 1: Post and the Daily News, and you know that someone
Speaker 1: was still writing a Terry teach Out was still writing
Speaker 1: back class music for a Time magazine. You know. So
Speaker 1: there were just a lot of us, you know, and
Speaker 1: now very often when to go to concerts, like I'm
Speaker 1: the only critic there, or it's just kind of one other,
Speaker 1: one other colleague, and that diminishes the power of criticism,
Speaker 1: I think, because I think the sort of critics have
Speaker 1: power and usefulness as a pack, you know, because no
Speaker 1: one wants like a single voice laying down the law
Speaker 1: in terms of what's good and what's not. But what
Speaker 1: you want is the conversation, the debate. You know, you
Speaker 1: want Pauli and k L and Andrew Sarah's yelling at
Speaker 1: each other, you know, and for the reader, you kind
Speaker 1: of triangulate your idea of what's actually going on from
Speaker 1: reading different critics and and you know, I usually agree
Speaker 1: with this person on such and such a thing, And
Speaker 1: so if as the field kind of empties out, we're
Speaker 1: losing our sort of ability to to really have an impact.
Speaker 1: But still, you know, we're still here, and and there's
Speaker 1: still a bunch of us here, and I think really
Speaker 1: critics still have a very big role to play. For me,
Speaker 1: it's never been about delivering a judgments. You know, it
Speaker 1: was a good or bad thumbs up, thumbs down, That's
Speaker 1: not what it's about. You know, my opinion kind of
Speaker 1: needs to be somewhere in the review, but it's not paramount.
Speaker 1: The first thing to do is just sort of convey
Speaker 1: the texture of of what happened, something that happened. You're
Speaker 1: a journalist, an event has taken place in musical form
Speaker 1: and you're reporting on it, but to give it context,
Speaker 1: to show well how did this concert compare to sort
Speaker 1: of a bunch of other sort of beet symphony performances
Speaker 1: of the past, you know, this new composer, where did
Speaker 1: they come from? How do they depart from sort of
Speaker 1: the given styles of the day, And that I think
Speaker 1: is really useful to the reader, just giving the sense
Speaker 1: of context and just starting a conversation. You know, let's
Speaker 1: just let's think about this music and talk about it.
Speaker 1: And in classical music, I think there's so many people
Speaker 1: who are experienced. They go to concerts all the time,
Speaker 1: they're very knowledgeable, but they don't they're kind of reluctant
Speaker 1: to say anything, you know, they're not sure sort of
Speaker 1: how to articulate, you know, what they've experienced. And so
Speaker 1: for me, I just always feel as I'm just kind
Speaker 1: of throwing a phrase out there to begin the conversation
Speaker 1: and to filter you know, I think there's just we're
Speaker 1: just being assaulted by so much information and so many
Speaker 1: just kind of possibilities, and so I'm just here sort
Speaker 1: of filtering out as best I can and seizing on
Speaker 1: a few things and saying, you know, try this. And
Speaker 1: I think that's that's a very important role. You know,
Speaker 1: you can get that in other ways, you can read
Speaker 1: the Amazon reviews and and sort of have you know,
Speaker 1: there are other people out there filtering. But I think
Speaker 1: kind of I've been doing this long enough that, you know,
Speaker 1: like to have experience. I have a kind of track record,
Speaker 1: and people kind of know what to expect a little
Speaker 1: bit when when they read our reviews, whether whether they
Speaker 1: agree with me or not, they kind of know where
Speaker 1: I'm coming from. And I think that's that is something
Speaker 1: that you can trust. So I hope we'll still be
Speaker 1: able to keep doing this, you know, for for a
Speaker 1: while longer. But you know, I feel very lucky to
Speaker 1: be where I am at the New Yorker and editors
Speaker 1: who really give me freedom to explore different areas. Many
Speaker 1: years ago, I was doing a film and I went
Speaker 1: off on location and just devoured Scott Berg's biography of Lindburg.
Speaker 1: I read the book in like three nights. Obviously, there
Speaker 1: were some things about Lindbergh that he discovered that he
Speaker 1: was very disturbed by his his isolationism and his uh
Speaker 1: anti Semitism or what have you. And ironically, the same
Speaker 1: thing relates to your book about Wagner. Was for people
Speaker 1: who don't know was Wagner known to be white supremacist
Speaker 1: anti Semitic. Was that common knowledge in his day or beyond?
Speaker 1: Or do people just suspect that for certain because of
Speaker 1: the company he kept. Oh no, it was very vocal.
Speaker 1: It was. It was in prints from eighteen fifty on.
Speaker 1: He wrote an essay in eighteen fifty Jewish Nous in Music.
Speaker 1: It was actually first published anonymously, but it became known
Speaker 1: that he was the author, and then almost twenty years
Speaker 1: later he reap published that essay under his own name
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty nine, and he was becoming just one of
Speaker 1: the most famous composers in the world. And he threw
Speaker 1: his reputation behind this repellent document and did not deviate
Speaker 1: from that, you know, from until the end of his life.
Speaker 1: What was he suggesting? He had the idea that you
Speaker 1: know that, of course anti Semitism had had existed, you know,
Speaker 1: for centuries, for for millennia. Wagner and they sort of
Speaker 1: had this religious basis. But Wagner was moving towards a
Speaker 1: more racial kind of idea. You know, it's sort of
Speaker 1: beyond the idea that that Jews could convert and and
Speaker 1: therefore solve whatever problem was deemed to exist with them.
Speaker 1: And Wagner was sort of moving towards this idea that well,
Speaker 1: there's a problem here that can't be solved because just
Speaker 1: you know, Jews are are inherently different from other people.
Speaker 1: And his thesis and that essay was that you could
Speaker 1: tell if Jewish people writing music, you could tell there
Speaker 1: was something off, there's something inauthentic, something we kind of
Speaker 1: seeped through. They can never master this language. Now, when
Speaker 1: you when you write a book, let's use the Wagner
Speaker 1: as an example. I would imagine that the process begins
Speaker 1: with just a mountain of reading. You're just doing nothing
Speaker 1: but reading in the beginning, and I was wondering whether
Speaker 1: are things that were disqualifying or the books you were
Speaker 1: going to write, or the biographies you were gonna write.
Speaker 1: And you started to get into it when you go
Speaker 1: maybe not, I don't want to write about this guy's
Speaker 1: life and this woman's life. Did you ever have that happen? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean Wagner does not. Yet Vagner does test your
Speaker 1: your There are moments you know when sort of sort
Speaker 1: of towards the end of the process, I really I
Speaker 1: got to the stage I was talking about Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: and it is. It is horrifying, you know, to watch
Speaker 1: a film like The Eternal Jew, this absolutely disgusting propaganda
Speaker 1: film that the Goubbles made demonizing the Jews, and Wagner
Speaker 1: is quoted right right there at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: film as an authority, you know. And this was literally
Speaker 1: a film that was designed to make people comfortable with
Speaker 1: the idea of murdering Jews on mass was designed to
Speaker 1: sort of reduce Jews to a level of just sort
Speaker 1: of vermin, you know, literally, people, is this this entity
Speaker 1: that needed to be exterminated. So that was the function
Speaker 1: of the film, And there was Wagner being cited as
Speaker 1: an authority at the beginning of the film, as a
Speaker 1: as a great German cultural figure who would apparently approve
Speaker 1: of this undertaking, you know, horrifying, And you know you
Speaker 1: stop and think, well, you know, have I just gone
Speaker 1: sort of completely taken wrong turn here? But then you know,
Speaker 1: there are so many other aspects of of Wagner that
Speaker 1: that contradict that Nazi image. Like I said, they're very
Speaker 1: appealing aspects to his personality. You know, he was a
Speaker 1: clownish kind of human being who just ran around talking
Speaker 1: all the time, jumping around was was just sort of
Speaker 1: overflowing with with ideas and energies. Wagner was not this
Speaker 1: kind of cold, dogmatic figure. And I think when you
Speaker 1: look at the fact that Tator Herzel, the great Zionist
Speaker 1: loved Wagner's music, Artist Schnitzler W. E. B. Du Bois,
Speaker 1: the great Black civil rights Titanic intellectual figure, absolutely loved
Speaker 1: actions music and and so these figures found something in him.
Speaker 1: They not only enjoyed it, they found it inspiring to
Speaker 1: their their personal projects. And so there's that energy and
Speaker 1: Wagner which can really be turned in in any direction,
Speaker 1: and it can be turned toward evil, it can also
Speaker 1: be turned towards good. It can be just completely reinvented
Speaker 1: and and transplanted to two different kind of uh world entirely. Um,
Speaker 1: that's what art is, you know. I mean, just art
Speaker 1: goes out into the world and just kind of is
Speaker 1: subject to whatever people make of it. However people want
Speaker 1: to use it, whatever the creator intended. Uh, something completely
Speaker 1: different can be made out of it in ways that
Speaker 1: are sometimes really disturbing. But that's I think the fascination
Speaker 1: of the mystery of just how art works in the world.
Speaker 1: Music critic Alex Ross. If you're enjoying this conversation, be
Speaker 1: sure to subscribe to Hear Is the Thing on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. When we come back, Alex Ross talks to
Speaker 1: us about the amazing artists that have come back from
Speaker 1: failure and how they did it. I'm Alec Baldwin and
Speaker 1: this is Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio. Writer
Speaker 1: Alex Ross ponders the big questions, including one of the deepest,
Speaker 1: the nature of art and how much of oneself must
Speaker 1: the artist put in their work? Yeah, and the joy
Speaker 1: of art, I think putting on masks and sort of
Speaker 1: playing different roles, and yeah, I think we do. And
Speaker 1: of course this has always been going on and art,
Speaker 1: you know, artists have always made art about themselves and restive,
Speaker 1: use their own experiences, and then the audience kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, reads into that that work and and it's
Speaker 1: sort of you know, finds the traces of the self
Speaker 1: that that the artist put there, you know. But then
Speaker 1: you also have I just feel like going back to
Speaker 1: the beginning of time, you know, whenever what we recognize
Speaker 1: as art first arose, it was not kind of you know,
Speaker 1: Jeff cave guy acting out, you know, whatever happened to
Speaker 1: him the previous day. It was him putting on a
Speaker 1: mask and and you know, becoming fooling everyone to thinking
Speaker 1: that that you know, the devil was in the cave
Speaker 1: with them, and that was the thrill of it. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, I think there is probably too much of
Speaker 1: this kind of autobiographical reading of art these days. And
Speaker 1: you know, for me, I just love getting lost in
Speaker 1: a work of art and getting lost in this in
Speaker 1: this other world. And it's somehow particularly thrilling when you know,
Speaker 1: I know that the artist has has sort of disappeared
Speaker 1: as well. It's not that I'm disappearing into the artist's world,
Speaker 1: is that he or she has created this new kind
Speaker 1: of sphere which is something that has never existed before,
Speaker 1: and and now we're being you know, invited into it.
Speaker 1: I mean just you know, look at the world of
Speaker 1: Schubert's music. You know, we don't know very much about Schubert.
Speaker 1: He just does not seem to have been a particularly
Speaker 1: remarkable person in a lot of ways. There's no one
Speaker 1: really remembered very much about Shubert. You know, he seems
Speaker 1: to have been this rather mousy guy. He was not
Speaker 1: brooding and mysterious and and it's kind of violent in
Speaker 1: his temperaments, you know, but he created these these worlds
Speaker 1: to become infinite, just kind of you know, the B
Speaker 1: flat major, the final Piano sonata where we're on this
Speaker 1: out on this huge landscape shadow we beautiful but also
Speaker 1: shadowy and goes on and on and and so that's
Speaker 1: what I love. I think in art is being transported
Speaker 1: and following the artist on some strange journey or like
Speaker 1: you know, Morton Feldman, Morton fun was this this hilarious
Speaker 1: guy who grew up in Queens talked to all the
Speaker 1: time just kind of just never shut up, dominated every
Speaker 1: every conversation was funny, you know, but also just kind
Speaker 1: of a lot you know. So it was just one
Speaker 1: of these guys. It's just a lot any about this
Speaker 1: music that is almost silent and moves very slowly and
Speaker 1: and just sort of hovers on the on the edge
Speaker 1: of silence. But it's just yeah, it's sort of he
Speaker 1: knew Rothko and his his music. He was writing what
Speaker 1: period inties, Yeah, sort of really the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 1: sort of the peak of his career. Fifties sixties seventies.
Speaker 1: He knew Rothko and and his music has I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot in common. Um, there's that with Rothko's paintings.
Speaker 1: There's one called roth Chapel, which is ordinarily beautiful piece. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he writed for the opening of the Rothko Chapel and
Speaker 1: then he performed by who was quartet or piano or orchestra.
Speaker 1: It is a sort of small group of instruments and chorus,
Speaker 1: wordless chorus. And yeah, it's this liminal music. It's sort
Speaker 1: of music that's just hovering on in a in a fog.
Speaker 1: But I find incredible beautiful. But what's what's fascinating about
Speaker 1: filament as a phenomenon is the music sounds nothing like
Speaker 1: it's it's It seems to have been created by a
Speaker 1: completely different person from who he presented himself, you know,
Speaker 1: in daily life. And that, Yeah, that kind of division
Speaker 1: fascinates me. That once he sat down at his desk,
Speaker 1: he created a world which had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: his his daily world. Well, my friend put this into context.
Speaker 1: He said that you become an artist when your career
Speaker 1: is over. Now, for some people, there's the embryonic artistic period.
Speaker 1: And remember that most actors and actresses and and performers
Speaker 1: or whatever and whatever field don't make it. They don't
Speaker 1: become commercially successful. Only five percent or something of the
Speaker 1: people in my union make a living as actors, and
Speaker 1: the rest it's a part time endeavor. And he said
Speaker 1: to me that you might have the beginnings and the
Speaker 1: and the scratchings of an artistic career, and then if
Speaker 1: you make it, then you go off into your career
Speaker 1: and the artistry stops. And I was devastated when I
Speaker 1: read that article. And you say, you know, the most
Speaker 1: googled aspect of wells career of the poemssan commercials, which we,
Speaker 1: of course we hear in this office in the studio.
Speaker 1: I was regaling them with stories about how I would
Speaker 1: my friends were in on the gag on the set
Speaker 1: of the movie, who knew this material? We would parody
Speaker 1: it on the set. So we'll be shooting a movie
Speaker 1: and they'd say action, and I wouldn't say anything. And
Speaker 1: then the person who was hipped what was going to
Speaker 1: go Austin, Austin, and I doesn't he do something? Doesn't
Speaker 1: need to do? So I would murmur in my drunken
Speaker 1: wars and Wells and doesn't need to do something and
Speaker 1: everyone will be howling with laughter. Who was in on
Speaker 1: the joke? But I mean, here's Wells, and what you
Speaker 1: wonder is not this a career to all careers have
Speaker 1: a shelf life, although for most artists that seems to
Speaker 1: be that way. Artists who are very skilled, they sell
Speaker 1: a lot of records. It's particularly music, because music occupies
Speaker 1: its own place. But it was well someone who he
Speaker 1: really was frustrated by being misunderstood the sands of the
Speaker 1: business and what audiences wanted. We're shifting, all of which
Speaker 1: may be true simultaneously, or was it really the case
Speaker 1: that he just was out of ideas? I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I have a very special kind of relationship
Speaker 1: with Wells's work. I've just been fascinated by him for
Speaker 1: for so long, And I'm just one of these people who,
Speaker 1: you know, can focus on some sort of fragment of
Speaker 1: some unfinished project of of Wells and get really excited
Speaker 1: about it, and of other people just won't see anything there,
Speaker 1: you know. So I'm just I'm just a fanatic when
Speaker 1: it comes to Wells. But what I find so interesting
Speaker 1: about his career and I think it's actually a weird
Speaker 1: similarity to Wagner in this respect is he was extremely
Speaker 1: successful very young and then and then there was a
Speaker 1: series of colossal failures just by the by the end
Speaker 1: of his twenties. You know, he seemed to be washed
Speaker 1: up certainly by the time he was getting into his thirties.
Speaker 1: And then he I feel as though he in that
Speaker 1: condition of failure and he didn't enjoy it. It was
Speaker 1: just endlessly frustrating for him. To the end of his career.
Speaker 1: He made something of that failure. It actually liberated him,
Speaker 1: I think. And when he started making movies like you know,
Speaker 1: Charms of Midnight and Touch of Evil, just very threadbare productions,
Speaker 1: you know, very little money, and he just he was
Speaker 1: able to conjure, you know, something out of almost nothing.
Speaker 1: I think if he had sort of continued his if
Speaker 1: he continued having a kind of great success, you know
Speaker 1: from the start, I feel like that that might have
Speaker 1: never happened for him. And the comparison with Wagner is that,
Speaker 1: you know, Wagner had this massive collapse of his career
Speaker 1: eighteen forty nine eighteen fifty after he achieved great success
Speaker 1: at having this position as contrecting the opera in Dresden,
Speaker 1: one of the leading you know, young younger German opera
Speaker 1: composers as well as conductors. And then he joined the
Speaker 1: uprising in Dresden in eighteen forty nine, was exiled from Germany,
Speaker 1: didn't come back to Germany for more than ten years,
Speaker 1: was just thrown back on almost no resources, living in
Speaker 1: Zurich and in that instant and this is just this
Speaker 1: kind of stunning thing to look back on, he decides
Speaker 1: to come up with with this massive four part operatic cycle,
Speaker 1: the biggest opera project ever undertaken, and really kind of
Speaker 1: one of the biggest works of art in any medium,
Speaker 1: and with absolutely no prospect of performance. It just the
Speaker 1: world just it just it just seemed inconceivable this thing
Speaker 1: would or come to light. And he kept writing it,
Speaker 1: you know, amid failure, amid near poverty, and and pursued
Speaker 1: it and somehow got to the point where, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty six years later it was finished and he had
Speaker 1: built his own opera house in which to perform it.
Speaker 1: There was one tremendous stroke of fortune that allowed this
Speaker 1: to happen, which was King Ludwig the Second becoming King
Speaker 1: of Bavaria, who who had a fanatical relationship with Wagner's
Speaker 1: music and was willing to spend huge amounts of money
Speaker 1: to bring into being. But even before that happened, you know,
Speaker 1: Wagner had written most of this, a good part of
Speaker 1: this cycle, and somehow the total collapse of his career
Speaker 1: liberated him to do something completely new. But it takes
Speaker 1: a special kind of talent, I think, to pursue your vision,
Speaker 1: you know, amid failure and amid collapse, but also in
Speaker 1: any of these arts, to endure, you know, the white
Speaker 1: water and the tough times, and to come out as
Speaker 1: an artistic type. But to be Wells, who was an
Speaker 1: incredibly insightful guy. I'm under I'm from the school that's
Speaker 1: of the belief that it all died for him after
Speaker 1: Anderson's Like, he realized he was never going to have
Speaker 1: the control he wanted and the money he wanted to
Speaker 1: make the movie to have those two things. The only
Speaker 1: person that I can tell in film history who got
Speaker 1: the money that he needed and had the economic security
Speaker 1: he needed to fortify his creative dreams is Spielberg. Spielberg's
Speaker 1: the person was given exactly what he wanted and needed
Speaker 1: to make the movie exactly the way he wanted and
Speaker 1: made the movie exactly the way he wanted, you know,
Speaker 1: it was his production. So the Rest is Noise, which
Speaker 1: I loved and thought it was a great book. Now,
Speaker 1: when you write a book like this, I'm assuming that
Speaker 1: when you write a biography of someone, there is a
Speaker 1: certain framework of the life of that person and the
Speaker 1: things that you're able to gather together about that life.
Speaker 1: But with this other book, you can go in any
Speaker 1: direction you want to. Basically you can. It's much more
Speaker 1: free ranging. Was the book something that you understood what
Speaker 1: it was from the get go or did it change
Speaker 1: while you and didn't meander while you were writing the book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well thanks so much, first of all, and yeah it was.
Speaker 1: It was quite a journey at that book because I
Speaker 1: started it with a less ambitious idea. I thought I
Speaker 1: was going to write a series of essays essentially about
Speaker 1: different twenties century composers and and sort of showing different
Speaker 1: aspects of the world of twenties century music, you know,
Speaker 1: through them. Actually, my original idea was I was going
Speaker 1: to end the book with Bob Dylan. That obviously wouldn't
Speaker 1: have worked at all, it was a whole different topic,
Speaker 1: but that it was going to be that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It was gonna be a series of portraits. And then
Speaker 1: as I started sort of going into it, I started
Speaker 1: becoming much more interested in and that's just kind of
Speaker 1: the texture of history itself and what was going on,
Speaker 1: you know, in sort of America in the thirties, FDR
Speaker 1: and the New Deal and the depression, when you know,
Speaker 1: Aaron Copeland was coming to the Four and and how
Speaker 1: people's careers intersected with with the politics, with with sort
Speaker 1: of the bigger you know, social history. You know, obviously
Speaker 1: a Shustakovitch and the civil is an incredibly dramatic and
Speaker 1: complex story, you know, because house in Nazi Germany. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a very painful, but just you know, fascinating in terms
Speaker 1: of how these artists negotiated this treacherous political train. And
Speaker 1: so the book turned into something more like history decade
Speaker 1: by decade. It's still there, still are kind of principal
Speaker 1: figures who come to the Four in different parts of
Speaker 1: and that adjustment took years and years of figuring out
Speaker 1: how the narrative was going to unfold and figuring out,
Speaker 1: you know, very painful decisions about who to include and
Speaker 1: who to leave out. But you know, and then I
Speaker 1: just wrote too much, you know, in the initial draft
Speaker 1: of the book was twice as long, and so that
Speaker 1: I had to cut it. But that was very helpful
Speaker 1: in terms of refining the material yet more and really
Speaker 1: figuring out what was the most important kind of moment
Speaker 1: in each decade that was going to sort of advance
Speaker 1: the story. And so it was. It was very difficult,
Speaker 1: but I think it was very um. I was just
Speaker 1: very lucky, I feel like, at the beginning of a
Speaker 1: new century to to be tackling this material and to
Speaker 1: discover the people actually wanted to read this story, you know,
Speaker 1: because at first it seemed like this was not going
Speaker 1: to be sort of widely kind of popular book, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It wasn't a runaway best seller or anything,
Speaker 1: but it did surprisingly well, and I feel as though
Speaker 1: people were ready to look back on this century. And
Speaker 1: it's not just about music. It's about the century itself.
Speaker 1: It's about the political upheavals and how artists who happen
Speaker 1: to be composers people. I want people to understand that
Speaker 1: is Wagner is um not Wagner, Yeah, and just real
Speaker 1: live this century in a different way. So Wagnerism is
Speaker 1: your most current book you're working on another one, now
Speaker 1: do you? Can you say what it is or now?
Speaker 1: I am starting to think about a new book. And
Speaker 1: actually I have not talked about this in public yet,
Speaker 1: but the book I want to write next is about
Speaker 1: the emigrads in Los Angeles, the German speaking emigrades and
Speaker 1: film in music, in literature. This incredible Herman convocated shuldn't
Speaker 1: of Lubitch and Fritz Long and Billy Wilder and Thomas
Speaker 1: Mann and Schernberg and Corn Gold and so that's the
Speaker 1: focus of the next book. Well, listen, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for taking the time to do this and best
Speaker 1: of luck. Okay, thank you author and critic Alex Ross.
Speaker 1: I'll leave you with one of Ross's favorite pieces. This
Speaker 1: is Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing.
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