I saw Bob Dylan while studying English as an undergraduate student at the State University of New York--College at Oneonta. Reception was mixed, the greatest appreciation having come from the older generation (mostly professors at the university) who appreciated first-hand his legacy and the impact he likely served on their individual composition. The students, however, were disgruntled by the lack of pure entertainment offered by the superannuated Dylan and his band, the craggy voice that pushed through the microphone, and the stolid performative maneuvers meandering behind a guitar or piano. This lack of enthusiasm on the crowd's part (of whom I was a dissenting opinion) betrayed their allegiance first to entertainment for its own sake, for ours is the generation of immediate satisfaction, of instant gratification. Patience for art has faded away. It is my belief, however, that this process is an inevitably natural process by which art methodically destroys and creates itself in ever-transforming guises to suit a particular moment in space-time. Bob Dylan being relegated to the past does not condense his memory, only recognizes the natural process by which art (especially music) fades into the new. This process has nearly banished Richard Wagner's operas, which have become a niche mode of artistic appreciation. Wagner's struggle to maintain relevant (like Dylan's) was not his battle to fight, but was splayed (unlike Dylan, obviously) throughout the novels of British Modernism around the time of the first World War.
First published in 1915, the narrative of Maugham's Of Human Bondage displaces itself into the previous century in its discussion of Wagner well before the outbreak of violence of Maugham's contemporary history. In a discussion of Henrik Ibsen's plays, one “Professor Erlin classed him with Richard Wagner, but of him he spoke not with anger but with good-humoured laughter…He had seen Lohengrin and that passed muster…But Siegfried! When he mentioned it Professor Erlin leaned his head on his hand and bellowed with laughter. Not a melody in it from beginning to end! He could imagine Richard Wagner sitting in his box and laughing till his sides ached” (100). Erlin contends Wagner would never have taken himself as seriously as do audiences of his operas. He continues: “‘I tell you young people that before the nineteenth century is out Wagner will be as dead as mutton. Wagner! I would give all his works for one opera by Donizetti” (100), an Italian composer whose works were composed a few years before Wagner emerged to prominence. Of Human Bondage necessarily escapes too lengthy a discussion on the composer, partly because of the complicated British-German relations in the early months of the war. But Maugham showed a great appreciation for Wagner's music, even is it was largely banished from British society, a fact that caused Ford Madox Ford to hide Wagner in his novel, The Good Soldier (also published in 1915), under the guise of Lohengrin--the Arthurian tale/Wagnerian opera. Wagner never appears explicitly in the text, but one can't ignore the four references to Lohengrin, the most telling describes, "Edward was always right in his determinations. He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was the Chevalier Bayard" (260). Then, in D.H. Lawrence's was likewise fascinated by Wagner, and his earlier novels borrowed from Wagnerianesque pessimism. And John Galsworthy discusses Wagner in A Man of Property, crying against, "one of those new-fangled German pantomimes by that fellow Wagner...that fellow Wagner had ruined everything; no melody left, nor any voices to sing it" (32-33). A similar sentiment was described in E.M. Forster's Howards End, where Margaret says, "the real villain is Wagner. he has done more than any man in the nineteenth century towards the muddling of arts" (47). The fascination with Wagner resides in the significance of his German culture, as the pessimism of modernism and the twentieth century begins to develop into a more fully realized discourse. What cannot be mistaken is that these authors, for the most part, never relinquished in their satisfaction of experiences Wagner, only that they were forced to aestheticize the relationship which British society had for his music and Germany holistically.
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