THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 71
would lead us back to our point of de-
parture. The soundtrack was now Sieg-
fried’s Funeral Music, the memorial to
the failed hero of the “Ring.” The first
part of this descending leg took place in
deep shadow, as the road briefly swerved
north before heading back south. The
muffled drumbeats of Siegfried’s funeral
procession matched the loss of light and
the onset of a nighttime chill. As Hock-
ney intended, the orange disk of the sun
reappeared over a gray-blue ocean just as
the orchestra moved into the major and
intoned Siegfried’s leitmotifs at high vol-
ume—a magnificent, valedictory mood.
None of the filmmakers who live in the
vicinity could have more perfectly cho-
reographed this golden-hour blend of
sight and sound.
Eventually, as in every Hollywood
phantasmagoria, illusion surrendered to
reality. The Funeral Music wound to its
close as the road straightened out and
houses became crowded together. Mal-
ibu’s beach culture reasserted itself:
weathered Siegfrieds toted surfboards
back to their cars. Wagner’s grandeur
took on an ironic, melancholic tinge,
promising a state of transcendence that
contemporary existence was bound to
foreclose. Still, when the sun plunged
into the ocean on cue, it was like no other
sunset I had seen—the final frame of a
live film with an invisible director.
H
ockney, with his utopian explosions
of primal color, might seem a cu-
rious fit for Wagner, the master of shadow
and foreboding. Nonetheless, the com-
poser has long been one of Hockney’s
musical favorites. The painter has at-
tended the Bayreuth Festival three times,
and in 1987 he designed a production of
“Tristan und Isolde” for the Los Ange-
les Opera. Around the same time, he
bought a beach house at the bottom of
Las Flores Canyon, and in the early nine-
ties he began plotting mountain routes
that could be timed with Wagner selec-
tions. These expeditions informed his
ideas about the play of light on land-
scape, both on canvas and in the theatre.
When he experienced hearing loss, he
had his Mercedes outfitted with a po-
tent stereo system. Friends and fellow-
artists were invited along for the ride.
There are actually three Wagner drives:
the Malibu Canyon route; a more ex-
tended traversal of the Santa Monica
Mountains, which involves going up
Kanan Dume Road; and an excursion in
the San Gabriel Mountains, well to the
east, which is closer to Hockney’s prin-
cipal Los Angeles home, in the Holly-
wood Hills. Until recently, the capacity
to perform “Wagner Drive” rested exclu-
sively with Hockney, but in 2016 the art
historian Arthur Kolat completed a mas-
ter’s thesis on the subject, in the course
of which he interviewed Hockney and
codified directions and musical cues for
the drives. Kolat passed them on to me,
and this past summer I started trying
them out. These adventures had the virtue
of adhering to even the strictest pandemic-
era restrictions: I could attend perfor-
mances without leaving my car.
In what sense is “Wagner Drive” an
art work? Kolat’s thesis takes up that
question, suggesting that the drives may
have begun as a lark and then taken on
larger creative significance. Certainly,
they cast light on the rest of Hockney’s
œuvre. Around 1990, he produced a dozen
or so sizable paintings—“Pacific Coast
Highway and Santa Monica” is the big-
gest, measuring six and a half feet by ten
feet—that replicate vistas from the Mal-
ibu drives. Their brash colors seem unreal,
and yet the slash of red-orange at the
top of a bluish slope in “Thrusting Rocks”
is faithful to the heightened sensory im-
pact of the Wagner experience. Similar
hues appeared in Hockney’s lustrous
opera stagings, which include “Tristan,”
“The Rake’s Progress,” “The Magic
Flute,” and a Stravinsky triple bill.
In musical terms, the drives dwell on
the cinematic side of Wagner, empha-
sizing spectacular surfaces over psycho-
logical depths. When you hear the bom-
bastic Entrance of the Gods during the
ascent into the mountains, you forget
the dark subtext of the “Rheingold”
finale—the Rhinemaidens decrying the
hollowness of the spectacle, Loge laugh-
ingly predicting doom. The otherworldly
beauties of “Parsifal” become divorced
from the sickly decadence of life at the
Grail Temple. The experience borders
on kitsch, but in a bracing way. Insert-
ing the “Ring” and “Parsifal” into an
echt-American road ritual banishes the
portentousness of Wagner discourse and
restores a sense of make-believe. The
bouncy Bernstein prelude puts you in
the right mind-set. (The San Gabriel
drive leads off with Sousa marches.)
Sometimes I felt a real sense of won-
der. When I tried out the Kanan Dume
drive, which lasts for about ninety min-
utes, road construction prevented a turn
onto Mulholland Drive, which in this
area is woodsier and more rustic than on
its famous ridgetop stretches to the east.
So I made a detour, staying on Kanan
Dume Road awhile longer. At the mo-
ment the Entrance of the Gods ended,
I entered a tunnel, and the “Parsifal” pre-
lude kicked in just as I emerged. The
change accorded with another geologi-
cal shift, into a landscape marked by the
Conejo volcanic formation: orange-brown
tones gave way to paler, starker colors.
Wagner set his opera in the “northern
mountains of Gothic Spain,” but this aus-
tere terrain would have served just as well.
“
T
he drive into the Santa Monica
Mountains is a bit like Monsal-
vat, isn’t it?” Hockney said to me, during
a video call the other day. The artist, who
is eighty-three, has spent the pandemic
year in Normandy, France, where he
recently bought a seventeenth-century
house—a “Seven Dwarves house,” he
calls it. He was dressed in his usual pas-
tel tones, with circular yellow-framed
glasses perched on his nose.
When I asked about the origin of
“Wagner Drive,” Hockney said, “Well,
the first thing I did was, when I was driv-
ing once to Las Vegas—past Las Vegas,
to Zion Park—I listened to Handel’s
‘Messiah,’ and I realized that all religions
come from the desert, from someone
contemplating the cosmos in the des-
ert.” That advisory aside, he emphasized
the playfulness of his Wagner conceit: “I
took some kids on it once, and they said,
‘Oh, this is like a movie,’ and I realized,
Well, they would never have listened to
the ‘Parsifal’ prelude just sitting at home.”
The notion that “Wagner Drive” could
take on a life of its own, even without
the artist’s supervision, pleased him. “Yes,
it could be adapted by anybody,” he told
me. I posed the question that Kolat had
contemplated before me: In what sense
are the drives art works or performances?
Hockney answered, “When I did them,
I could take only two people in the car.
But I did realize it was a kind of perfor-
mance piece or performance art. It was
now. It was only now—when it was over,
it was gone. Performance is now, isn’t it?
It has to be now.”
