On the Future of Wagnerism: Art, Intoxication, Addiction, Codependence and Recovery

On The Future of Wagnerism: Art, Intoxication, Addiction, Codependence and Recovery is the sequel to Lawrence Mass’s memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America. Together, they form a narrative of consciousness and experience in the author’s life as a gay Jewish man, as a physician, and as a writer. Via the trajectory of his own struggles with and specialist work in addiction, Mass explores interfaces of culture, social tolerance, health and spirituality. How do such seemingly disparate phenomena as Wagnerism and AIDS, and such different figures as Richard Wagner and Larry Kramer, come to reflect on one another and the ways we live now? As we attempt to navigate an uncertain course in our voyage forward, On the Future of Wagnerism inspires us to glimpse broadening horizons.

From the Introduction by Adam J. Sacks:

Art, Medical Humanism and Civil Society

The voice of Dr. Lawrence Mass unites the worlds of music, gay history and activism with addiction medicine. He has found a novel and effective means to communicate his expertise and concerns in these areas via the figure of Richard Wagner. The current volume is a successor text to his acclaimed memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America (currently available on Amazon Kindle).

A sequel to Confessions, On the Future of Wagnerism is a wide-ranging anthology of memoir, personal journalism and essays that elucidate common denominators of recurrent maladies of our world: antisemitism and homophobia, addiction and codependence, health care inadequacy and malfeasance. Mass accomplishes this while maintaining an accessible style filled with valuable accounts of the culture and politics of late 20th Century Europe and America. His role as a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and gay rights activist who wrote the first press reports on AIDS render him a figure of historical significance.

His engagement with Wagner, however, brings his reflections to a mode of thought and criticism rarely seen in any widely available fashion since the Weimar Republic: that of the doctor of medicine who diagnoses and engages with cultural life. From Albert Schweitzer to Max Nordau, the medical humanist once carried authority throughout civic life. Mass renders this seemingly esoteric objective with clarity and friendliness.

But why the German composer Richard Wagner as a central focus? Richard Wagner and the cult following that emerged in his wake—“Wagnerism”— is unique in the annals of modern culture. Wagner was an artistic and technical genius who used his formidable talents in support of a deeply antimodern, antagonistic and exclusionary worldview. Wagner, who still stands astride concert and opera houses all over the world, challenges the presumptions of any link between genius and goodness, as well as the role of representative arts in a healthy democratic civic sphere.

As Mass attests via his own experience of being acculturated to Wagnerism, the cult of Wagner not only lives on, it provides a lens through which to reconsider many of the greatest challenges of Mass’s own life experience, and of the various minorities and subcultures—gay, Jewish, recovery—that experience reflects.

Written against the backdrop of our Post-9/11 era of backlash against globalization and the international turn to authoritarianism, Mass offers an arsenal of cultural perspectives and psychological tools to understand how individuals become seduced by malevolent magicians of politics and art. For it is too often images—whether visual, literary or musical signatures—that at first fascinate, then intoxicate and play their key roles in the indoctrination of paranoia and intolerance.