Chaos and Dancing Star: Wagner's Politics, Wagner's Legacy (review)

Before readers get more than a chapter or two into Roy Pateman's Chaos and Dancing Star: Wagner Politics, Wagner's Legacy, they may be tempted to dismiss the whole work out of hand, writing its author off as a hopeless crank and rejecting his magnum opus about magna opera as a confused jumble. Doing so would be a mistake, however, since Pateman's book contains plenty of information that is extremely valuable and includes significant observations that can clarify our understanding of Wagner's intellectual heritage. Nevertheless, the end product is a decidedly mixed bag. There is much to criticize about Pateman's book. The author's style, or lack thereof, is frustrating at best. Sentences are often left as fragments. Typographical or spelling errors abound. When punctuation is not inserted randomly or for reasons known only to the author, it may be left out entirely. All these signs of carelessness combine to give Chaos and Dancing Star a strictly amateurish appearance. Surely, one thinks, a competent editor would have spared Pateman's audience such sentences as the (undeniably true but utterly meaningless) observation that "it is possible that Wagner had read [Rabelais] even though he makes no reference to his famous book" (p. 62). Surely even a modicum of proofreading would have eliminated such painful constructions as "The Elysian Fields is the final resting place ..." (p. 70). Surely some vigilance from the publisher would have caught the embarrassing misspelling of Ludwig Feuerbach's name in the index or suppressed most of the author's irrelevant first-person observations. (Did you know that Roy Pateman's grandfather was born in London in 1877? Or that Pateman saw the 1989 production of Tannhäuser in Chicago? Or that Pateman has "been a philosophical anarchist-pacifist since the age of fifteen" [p. 246]? Or that the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin was played at his wedding to Carole in 1960? Has your understanding of Wagner and his legacy been hampered at all because you did not know these things?) As though these gratuitous reflections were not enough, Pateman offers his readers a two-page autobiographical entry, including himself among the list of notable Australians who have been influenced by Wagner's work. Even aside from this profile, the sheer quantity of first-person statements weighing down this book intrudes unwelcomely on the reader like the chatter of a stranger who feels obliged to fill you in on his life story at distressingly frequent intervals during a long flight.

And make no mistake about it: Chaos and Dancing Star is a long flight indeed. Its stated purpose is to examine those revolutionary artists, authors, and activists who either inspired Wagner or took their inspiration from him. Confined to this limited purpose, it should be noted, the book works surprisingly well. Nevertheless, even the most peripheral figures who may have had some relationship to Wagner's work tend to be profiled by the author. For this reason, Pateman continually finds himself rendering such insights as "I have not found any comments [that Lysander Spooner] may have made on Wagner" (p. 297), and readers continually find themselves wondering, as a result, why they had just slogged through yet another impenetrable paragraph.¹

At its best, however, Chaos and Dancing Star does provide a comprehensive survey of intellectual life before, during, and after Wagner's time, always addressing the question of how (or even whether) each figure may be important in a consideration of the composer's thought and outlook. If you have ever wondered whether someone had read Wagner's prose works, enjoyed his music, or contributed an idea to his intellectual perspective, then this is the book for you. One learns things. For instance, the author—who apparently has more time on his hands than the rest of us—notes that Wagner shared no fewer than 421 separate dreams with Cosima, according to her diaries (p. 154). Moreover, Pateman, whose academic work led him...