Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics -- an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.,For better or worse, Richard 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 as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Charles Baudelaire, Wassily Kandinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Bunuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, fascists, communists, 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 anti-Semitism. His name is now