Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music Hardcover – Illustrated, September 15, 2020

Wagnerism seems to have been reduced to an eccentric cult, a hobby and obsession for that few. Once, I seriously prepared to experience the entire Ring, both by listening to it first and researching Wagner’s philosophy – he personally knew Nietzsche and read Schopenhauer – and his historical context. It was fantastically interesting. Of course, appreciating his work is one thing, but there is also the baggage: his antisemitism, his posthumous appeal to Nazis, his Teutonic chauvinism. I have long wanted an in-depth treatment of him and the “Wagnerism” that has influenced western culture so deeply. Ross’ book filled that gap brilliantly. It offers a dazzling tour of western history from the appreciation of a rarified intelligentsia in the 19C mold to its expression in popular culture, such as Star Wars and Tolkien.To put it mildly, Wagner began his career in tumultuous times. As a radical-democrat participant in the revolution of 1848, he was exiled from Germany for more than a decade. If despotism emerged triumphant in 1849, the authority of dynasts was on the defensive, eventually ending more than 1,500 years of “divine legitimacy”, further eroding the authority of the fragmented Christian denominations. Then, there was science and rationalism, also chipping away the authority of the church in a secularizing age. In addition, industrialization and capitalism were on the ascendent, also undermining the traditional certainties that came with serfdom and farming as cities began to grow explosively; this opened startling new paths to both freedom and chaos. Furthermore, new technologies were enhancing communications and transportation, in effect shrinking the world at an unprecedented rate, while the killing efficiency of new weapons brought fear to entire populations. In a nutshell, the old narratives were decadent and apparently spent, creating room for new ones. Like Wagner’s.Though his philosophy and politics shifted unceasingly rightward from 1848, Wagner sought to create a new mythology, one that would employ art in order to provide meaning, new narratives, and a call to action. In this way, he believed the old myths represented a way to parochialism – Wagner wished to transcend the past rather than restore it. His genius, he knew, would provide a new “universal fable”. He would generate a spiritual intensity in the practice of his art, against materialism and Enlightenment rationalism and towards the release of “primal energies” and an honest acknowledgement of the dark side of humanity, culminating in the exercise against all odds of human will. According to Ross, he set out to save core of religion in secularizing age, channeling mythic symbols as artistic, figurative value that religion once held as literally true. The Ring can be viewed as an anti-capitalist allegory, born in revolutionary agitation 1848.In his philosophy, he occupied the nexus of romanticism – rejecting the piecemeal clarities of “science” in favor of mystery and holism – and modernism, with a goal to disrupt bourgeois complacency while emphasizing his subjective individual vision. It was art beyond romanticism’s “opulent textures”, crude utopic visions and grandiose view of the past, in favor of “hard lines, harsh colors”. In theatrical terms, Wagner was renouncing the “false realism” of neo-classicism in order to transport men to an “ideal realm of unity” to transcend a decadent system. His art would recreate life by way of symbol and narrative.His means to do so was the Gesamtkunstwerk. It sought to unite the music, visuals arts, philosophy, and politics in a comprehensively aestheticized environment as well as in a holistic presentation. As Ross informs us, Wagner thought this possible because the 19C intelligentsia focused far more intensively on fashionable, essential art than we currently do. Everyone in the know seemed obsessed with his artistic works, occupying their minds and even informing their life choices. Art was supposed to emerge from the opera house and morph into a social model for the future. As Ross puts with his usual elegance: the “Wagnerian synthesis” represented “Romantic art-religion…bound to Hegel’s dialectic of progress, creating an aesthetic juggernaut”.Wagner’s myths appealed to imperialists with their presumptions of cultural superiority. It captured the Victorian imagination, a new “secular cathedral space” to contemplate the tensions between an idyllic past and the industrial present. Of course, each country saw Wagner through its own prism. His new mythology could be interpreted as modernist, Arthurian, a return to wilderness, the self-made act of will, etc. In particular, nationalism required invention of mythic past. W.E.B. du Bois saw Afro-Wagnerism as nascent black internationalism, a way to unite a diaspora. Women, fighting patriarchy, found their place within Wagner’s universe to think and feel more freely. There was also a large gay subculture that worshipped him.Beyond his international appeal, Germany remained the focus of Wagner’s efforts. As embodied in his work, conservatives dreamed of something beyond the liberal, bourgeois state, manifesting the “will of the people” (das Volk) in autocratic, militaristic leadership from the top. In retrospect, this was a step toward fascism, with the vaguely defined “glorious, world-conquering spirit” as its calling. According to Ross, Hitler later transmogrified Wagnerism to his purpose; Wagner, Ross emphatically repeats, did not cause it. In my view, Wagner did lend fascism momentum.Wagner’s antisemitism, as Ross acknowledges, cannot be denied and should not be ignored. He entertained fantasies of vengeance and redemption in a confused and ugly hatred of Jews. They were blame for all modern woes, a mighty conspiracy theory that operated in opposition to “the other”. Nonetheless, even Theodore Herzl was an admirer of the self-discovery theme of Wagnerian heroes, in their crusades against entrenched beliefs and forces, their unleashing of primordial emotion, their creation of community art (read: Zionist, nationalist), and their fusion of art and religion.After WWI, Ross argues that Wagner came to embody how “modernism’s horizon has darkened”, viz the propensity to violence, propaganda as mythmaking, the will to total domination, the feeling that nothing is stable in our ever-changing modern life. Thus Wagnerism “summons Schopenhauer’s Will”: unconscious, pathological, subhuman forces. Karl Jung saw him as a “master of comparative mythology”, while Joseph Campbell called him an “initiator of modern myth creation”. His work is as fecund as it ever was, if less in intellectual fashion.A great deal of the book is devoted to an examination of Wagnerism’s impact on Modernist art. In the most hifalutin terms, Wagnerian modernists opposed prevailing norms, introducing transgressive themes, “threatening zones of bourgeois comfort” (I love Ross’ use of language), smashing the conventions of imagined utopias, releasing primitive unconscious energies. Gesamtkunstwerk fed directly into stream of consciousness, e.g. Virginia Wolff rejected the pretty portrayals of the “fabric of things” of contemporary novels in order to “capture the inner life of her characters” in all their subjectivity. Even as Dada and futurism opposed Wagnerian culture, Ross asserts, they “worked from a Wagnerian script”.In more popular and populist veins, Wagnerian imagery continues to dominate film, political propaganda, and innumerable other art forms. There would have been no Tolkien without Wagner, Ross asserts, indeed perhaps no fantasy genre literature. While this strikes me as stretching the concept a bit too far, Ross provides a number of striking examples, from Hitler’s posters of himself in Teutonic armor to the grand hallway in the Star Wars award ceremony, Volume 4, and the helicopter Valkyries in Apocalypse Now.This book is a wonderful tour of the last 170 years of culture from the vantage point of the output of a towering artistic genius. Because it is a somewhat difficult text and not an introduction, I think it might be better for those steeped in these issues or for Wagner aficionados. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Recommended with the greatest enthusiasm. Ross is a supremely talented and learned writer.

Ross is our greatest living music critic writing in English and in this book, he shows his broad understanding of the cultural background as well as the music. Wagner, love him or hate him (I do both), is one of the most influential and important figures in western culture since the mid 19th century. Ross's deep reading of his music and of its many influences, is classic. Most writers on Wagner are strong on either the music or the culture, but Ross is an expert on both. Be prepared: once you've read Wagnerism, your reading list will expand. His analyses of Cather, visual art, and especially Thomas Mann, among other things, will keep me busy reading for years. I can't recommend this more highly. Thanks Alex for sharing.

This study of Wagner's cultural and political impact is fascinating, going right to the heart of the "Wagner Problem" that is a key focus. That is, how are we to deal with loving the music and detesting the man? Ross's study makes it unequivocally clear that Wagner was a ferocious anti-Semite and that he glorified German nationalism, at least in the latter part of his career. This had consequences, though there is a lot more debate about those than about the nature of Wagner's views, as Ross illustrates. The book also shows what a towering figure Wagner was in his time and afterwards, not just in Germany and not just in music, but across Europe and across the arts. The book is not an easy read (I was tempted to headline it "Exhaustive and Exhausting") but it is worth the effort. I learned a lot that I didn't know, and saw connections that I not known of. What I missed was more about the music. I love Ross's music criticism and his "The Rest is Noise", and wish there had been more in this book about Wagner's music. Maybe someday.

Alex Ross is music critic for the New Yorker. His previous books, which I have read with pleasure, are about music. I assumed this book, with Wagner in its title, would also be about music – specifically, about the music of Richard Wagner and its influence on composers who flourished after him. For example, there is a considerable literature on Wagner’s influence on Puccini and Debussy. In this book, Puccini is just mentioned a couple of times and Debussy is allotted one paragraph noting the relationship between his Pelleas and Tristan. Chapter after chapter, however, is devoted to Wagner and anti-Semitism, Wagner and Jews (Gustav Mahler conducted his operas, Theodore Herzl attended every performance of them he could), and of course Wagner and Hitler. There is in fact much more about Hitler in this book than there is about any of the composers who came after Wagner. In fact, there is very little about music in this book, it is mostly a political tract – a political tract written by a music critic.There are two reasons I would not have bought this book had I known what its subject really was: (1) I am fully aware that Wagner was an anti-Semite and don’t need any further evidence in that regard, and (2) I separate the man and his personal views, from his music. I greatly enjoy his Wesendonck Lieder and his Siegfried Idyll. I have sung in a chorus performing Die Meistersinger and love the third act. (I am aware of the charges that Beckmesser is an anti-Jewish stereotype, but I have never seen it played that way, and I have attended performances in the US, England, and Germany.) For the rest, I am not enamored of his operas. But it has nothing to do with his anti-Semitism, I would not like them any better were he the latest in a long line of rabbis. I also listen with pleasure to Chopin and play some of his easier pieces, though I know he was a really vulgar anti-Semite from the time he was a teenager; and I have sung Bach with great pleasure, though there is more anti-Semitism in his St John’s Passion than, I am sure, in all of Wagner’s operas combined. In fact, I don’t even know the attitude towards Jews of most composers as it isn’t the sort of thing I like to research. Of course there are limits. I wouldn’t hang a painting by Hitler on my wall. But in general I judge a composer by his music, a painter by his paintings, and so forth.As for the physical presentation of this book, there are many photographs, but many of them are washed out or overexposed. For example, on p. 573 there is a photo with the caption “Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress.” Well, I suppose it could be. But it could be of anyone else, for all that is visible are images, totally blacked out, of horses and riders; no features on any of them are perceivable.

One of the best examinations of Wagner and his influence I have read. It mainly della with Wagner's influence on literature and the visual arts, discussing in detail the works of Thomas Mann, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather.....the list is endless. He also discusses Wagner's influence on cinema. He investigates in great detail the disastrous association of Wagner with Hitler, and how his grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, tried to repair the reputation of Bayreuth when the Festival re-opened in 1951. I especially liked tge discussion of Regietheater productions, starting with Patrice Chereau's Centenary RING in 1976. Highly recommened.

I've only just started this book and am only about 100 pages in to it but so far so good! I would have to say that it's a pretty erudite tome and takes a lot of getting used to but having seen and or listened to a lot of Wagner in my time I'm finding it very interesting. Mid to late 19th Centuary European geopolitical history.is not for the feint hearted and is the background to Wagner's life. So far it is highly recommended.

This is a dense, comprehensive yet ultimately readable survey which restores Wagner and rescues him from the Nazis. Listening to Parsifal whilst reading, it convinces you that sometimes you really do need to separate the creator from the work of art, and appreciate the art for what it is.

An extraordinary and often microscopic level of detail, leading the reader through an enlightening journey of Wagner's influences on culture past and present. The connections that were drawn throughout the book will often surprise you. A tome of epic importance.

Very well reviewed already but promises to be good!