Wagnerism

Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

Alex Ross

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780007518517
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

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 Buñuel, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prelude: Death in Venice
• 1. Rheingold: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the Ring
• 2. Tristan Chord: Baudelaire and the Symbolists
• 3. Swan Knight: Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America
• 4. Grail Temple: Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner
• 5. Holy German Art: The Kaiserreich and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
• 6. Nibelheim: Jewish and Black Wagner
• 7. Venusberg: Feminist and Gay Wagner
• 8. Brünnhilde’s Rock: Willa Cather and the Singer-Novel
• 9. Magic Fire: Modernism, 1900 to 1914
• 10. Nothung: The First World War and Hitler’s Youth
• 11. Ring of Power: Revolution and Russia
• 12. Flying Dutchman: Ulysses, The Waste Land, The Waves
• 13. Siegfried’s Death: Nazi Germany and Thomas Mann
• 14. Ride of the Valkyries: Film from The Birth of a Nation to Apocalypse Now
• 15. The Wound: Wagnerism After 1945
• Postlude
• Chronology of Events in Wagner’s Life
• Picture Section
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• About the Author
• Also by Alex Ross
• About the Publisher