WAGNERISM

A wide-ranging, erudite examination of how Richard Wagner’s influence has extended far beyond the opera house.

Award-winning New Yorker music critic Ross places Wagner (1813-1883) at the center of a capacious, fascinating history of Western culture. Focused on Wagner’s reception by novelists, poets, artists—and Hitler—the author argues compellingly that the “staggeringly energetic” Wagner loomed as “the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900”—and endures still. As Nietzsche proclaimed about the man with whom he had a tense, complicated relationship, “Wagner sums up modernity.” Drawing on a prodigious number of sources, Ross examines Wagner’s influence on the famous—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cezanne, Gauguin, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence, among many other modernists—and infamous: Otto Weininger, whose anti-Semitic writings rival Wagner’s in virulence; and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British botanist and “German racial ideologue” who served as “the bridge between Bayreuth and Nazi Germany.” Ross probes Wagner’s attraction to Jews (Zionist Theodor Herzl, for example), Blacks (including W.E.B. Du Bois), feminists, and homosexuals despite Wagner’s professed bigotry and racism. Across Europe and in the U.S., Wagner became a cult figure: “a torchbearer of the modern” for the French; “a messenger of Arthuriana” in Britain. For Americans, “Wagner harmonized with a national love of wilderness sagas, frontier lore, Native American tales, stories of desperadoes searching for gold.” Lohengrin is a staple of weddings, and from The Birth of a Nation onward, Wagner’s music has been the soundtrack of more than 1,000 films, which have used his work “to unleash all manner of rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming evildoers.” The author asks: “In the face of a sacred monster like Wagner, what power do spectators have? Are we necessarily subject to the domination of his works, complicit in their ideology? Or, in embracing them, can we take possession of them and remake them in our own image? One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.

A deeply informed history as vigorous as Wagner’s music.