In the early 1920s a French businessman, Leon Bel, was looking for a name for his new brand of processed cheese. He remembered seeing a meat wagon on the first world war battlefields with the sardonic name ‘La Wachkyrie’. Like the Valkyries in Wagner, it brought solace to fallen soldiers in the field. Bel thought it would do very well, and gave his cheese the same name in a more orthodox spelling. La Vache Qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) is still very popular today.
Reading this completely unsuspected story of a trademark in Alex Ross’s book, I wondered with some astonishment at this world. A businessman looking for a striking name for a mass-market product hits on a joke about the title of a five-hour German music drama written 70 years earlier — and it succeeds. His market knows what he’s talking about.
Wagner gripped the communal mind for decades after his death in 1883, and he’s not done with us yet.
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