'An absolutely masterly work' Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned
author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, 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,
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 writers, artists, and thinkers,
including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan,
Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Bunuel, 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 anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with
artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what
it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen,
charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy.
The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture
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, from
O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a
tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in
universal reach is implicated in 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 condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual
passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the
world.
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