Hitler’s admiration has severely damaged Wagner’s reputation

In the early 1920s a French businessman, Leon Bel, was looking for a name for his new brand of processed cheese. He remembered seeing a meat wagon on the first world war battlefields with the sardonic name ‘La Wachkyrie’. Like the Valkyries in Wagner, it brought solace to fallen soldiers in the field. Bel thought it would do very well, and gave his cheese the same name in a more orthodox spelling. La Vache Qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) is still very popular today.

Reading this completely unsuspected story of a trademark in Alex Ross’s book, I wondered with some astonishment at this world. A businessman looking for a striking name for a mass-market product hits on a joke about the title of a five-hour German music drama written 70 years earlier — and it succeeds. His market knows what he’s talking about.

Wagner gripped the communal mind for decades after his death in 1883, and he’s not done with us yet. Ross has written a book about Wagner’s consequences with a striking omission — what he did with music, and what he did to music. Wagner was, above all, a composer. The power of his musical invention is the reason why he is still in our lives. All other mythical dramatists, contrivers of theatrical spectacle, political theorists and grubby purveyors of national and racial theories from his time have disappeared, as Wagner, without his music, would certainly have disappeared.

Nevertheless, it is possible, as Ross has found, to write a very long book about his influence which has almost nothing to say about the music itself, and which doesn’t find it necessary to talk about the music that was shaped by him. Ross quotes an American mythographer saying that ‘Wagner’s two great successors are James Joyce and Thomas Mann,’ rather than, for instance, Debussy and Schoenberg.