70 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
MUSICALEV E N TS
ROAD TRIP
David Hockney’s “Wagner Drive.”
BYALEX ROSS
O
n a crisp afternoon in December, a
friend and I sat in an idling car at
the corner of Las Flores Canyon Road
and the Pacific Coast Highway, in Mal-
ibu, preparing to witness a performance
of “Wagner Drive,” a large-scale audio-
visual work by the artist David Hock-
ney. We were the sole audience for the
piece, and also its executants. My friend
drove; I operated the stereo. When the
clock read 4:09 p.m.—forty minutes be-
fore sunset—I hit Play on the sequence
of recordings that Hockney has specified
for the event. The Wagner did not begin
right away: first came “America,” from
“West Side Story.” As we headed north
on the P.C.H., the lyrics complemented
a panorama of motels, pizza places, surf
shops, and car-rental outfits: “Automo-
bile in America,/Chromium steel in
America,/Wire-spoke wheel in Amer-
ica,/Very big deal in America!”
With a rightward turn onto Malibu
Canyon Road, the beginning of a twist-
ing climb into the Santa Monica Moun-
tains, landscape and music changed in
tandem. “America” gave way to an or-
chestral arrangement of the Entrance of
the Gods into Valhalla, from “Das Rhein-
gold.” (The Wagner items on Hockney’s
playlist come from albums that Adrian
Boult made with the London Philhar-
monic and the London Symphony in
the early nineteen-seventies.) The raw
might of the sound—rugged brass figures
jutting through hazy string arpeggios—
reinforced the geological drama of our
ascent: the Santa Monica Mountains rise
straight from the sea, their tilted sedi-
mentary layers and volcanic formations
evidence of tectonic mayhem at the bor-
der between the North American and
the Pacific plates.
After four and a half miles, we turned
right on Piuma Road, which climbs sev-
enteen hundred feet, to the top of a ridge.
At almost the same moment, the mysti-
cal prelude to “Parsifal,” Wagner’s final
opera, began to unfurl. The weightless
sonorities and blended timbres of the
composer’s late style suited the veering,
dissolving perspectives of the drive: sun-
drenched south-facing mountains, purple-
tinted inland ranges, road-hugging rock
faces, occasional vistas of a now distant
ocean. A hilltop mid-century-modern
home, struck by the slanting winter sun,
became a sleek update of Monsalvat, Wag-
ner’s Grail Temple. The brass choir of
the Dresden Amen harmonized with the
mountain-and-ocean panorama of the
Malibu Canyon Overlook, although the
blare of brass from our car distracted a
couple who were trying to have a roman-
tic moment.
Nine minutes before sunset, we turned
left onto Las Flores Canyon Road, which
© DAVID HOCKNEY
“Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica” (1990), from a series of paintings replicating vistas from the Malibu drives.
