Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music [Paperback]

Alex Ross, renownedNew Yorkermusic critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalistThe Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politicsan aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.

For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations asThe Ring of the Nibelung,Tristan und Isolde, andParsifalwere models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul C?zanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Bu?uel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.

InWagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagners many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles forThe New Yorkerhave come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, fromO Pioneers!toApocalypse Now.

In many ways,Wagnerismtells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor ló”