Richard Wagner is a key figure in the history of Western classical music. He is also among the most controversial ones, particularly in view his antisemitism, eagerly seized upon by the Nazi machine. But, as Alex Ross shows in this magisterial and epic study, many were the cultural movements (even wildly conflicting ones) who looked to Wagner with admiration. Ross examines the influence of Wagner and Wagnerism, not only in music but also in a wider cultural and historical context. In the process he also provides insights into the composer's works.

This has been the most readable, informative and knowledgeable book not only on Wagner but about so many of the people around him .. influenced by him or whose lives touched his. A tour de force! Excellent, superb .. I couldn't put it down ...

A fascinating erudite look at a cultural phenomenon. I especially enjoyed Ross’s look at Willa Cather and her love of Wagner.

The title says it all--this isn't your standard historical (hagiographic) bio of Wagner. There are plenty of those. This is about the response to him over time, which has been more or less political, depending on where you're standing. It's a massive book, and the ARC I read could have been better indexed, but I hope that will come inthe final edition. It's a great resource for folks working on music and politics.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review.

Wagnerism is a major achievement and a key contribution both to cultural criticism and musicology. The book adroitly connects Wagner and his legacy with a broad spectrum of art forms and artists from the 19th century through the present. As always, Alex Ross's research is impeccable, and the organization of the book's chapters is quite logical and intuitive, no easy task for such a rich and complex topic. The book also speaks to our current cultural moment in terms of addressing the influence of an artist known for his political toxicity (both in his own writings and in the way his work was used after his death). While fans of Wagner might be automatically drawn to this study, it is equally relevant for readers like myself with more skeptical views of his music and legacy. It is no wonder that the book took ten years to research and write, as the author's enthusiasm for the primary sources considered here is clear from the text. Despite its great length, the book is extremely readable and engaging. Anyone who might have missed Ross's earlier book The Rest is Noise should check that out as well.

No surprise, as Alex Ross is the author, but this is a brilliant and perceptive analysis of Wagner and his development in the context of the historical period and the aesthetic influences that surrounded him. Inventive and perceptive, this is a book that Wagnerites will (mostly!) love, and a valuable contribution to international music history. Bravo!

This is one of those books that is like a liberal arts education in a single volume. Wagner turns out to have mattered in so many varying ways, to so many people around the world--albeit often in ways that are discrediting to Wagner--that the book ends up mapping a huge portion of cultural history. And Alex Ross always writes so neatly and eloquently. Really stunning.

From our Book Musik Podcast:

Tosh and Kimley discuss <em>Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music</em> by Alex Ross. A famous quip goes “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Whether you find Wagner’s music to be sublime or bombastic, this is an essential read. It is not a biography or an examination of his music but, more interestingly, it’s a very deep dive into the enormous cultural and political influence Richard Wagner has had on his contemporaries and everyone since, from writers to painters, dancers, philosophers, politicians, and filmmakers. The diversity of those who’ve come under the spell of Wagnerism is beyond compare. And this is despite Wagner’s well-known antisemitism and association with Hitler and the Nazi regime. Cancel culture hasn’t quite figured out what to do with Wagner but Ross leaves no stone unturned in this enormous and hugely satisfying read.

I received a digital copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a really fascinating, often in-depth look at what Wagner's music has meant throughout its history. Parts of the book read as a biography of Richard Wagner, but it's far more a biography of, to put a little flippantly, the Wagnerian "fandom" both during the composer's life and long after his death.

The book does a very good job of presenting the breadth of Wagner's impact in various places, times, and in different intellectual and political circles--positive and negative. It doesn't shy away from Wagner's more unpleasant views, or from the ways his work has been used for ill--but it also presents a complicated, sometimes apparently contradictory Richard Wagner who cannot so easily be dismissed as any one thing and whose work has influenced countless others.

I did not know very much about Wagnerian opera going into this book. I knew the general themes and basic outline of parts of the Ring cycle, Tannhäuser, etc.; like anyone, I can recognize the Ride of the Valkyries and, though I didn't know what it came from, the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin. I've had a recording of Tannhäuser on my iPod for years but I'm not sure I've ever listened to it in full. I've come out of reading this book with a much greater appreciation for the wide-ranging impact of Wagner's work--I had never realized just how much of an impact he had on so many other artists, or how many different things his work has meant to different groups of people.

Since Wagner’s own era, countless relationships to the composer and his work have continued to define and redefine his legacy. Alex Ross brings many of these relationships together in his latest book. Largely setting aside the musical lineage of Wagner, Ross instead focuses on other epochs of art and politics in order to make sense of the composer’s influence, which was and remains unprecedented in terms of scope and complexity. In Wagner’s lifetime, he won the hearts and minds of Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Baudelaire, George Eliot, and Queen Victoria. In the nearly 140 years since his death, those circles of influence have expanded across time and space, leaving Wagner’s fingerprints on everything from spaghetti westerns to the Bolshevik Revolution.

Much of Wagner's legacy, however, has been wrapped up in his influence on Hitler. Valid though the equation may be, its dogmatic nature ignores the far more tangled relationships that exist across genres between art, audience, and artists. Instead of uniformly absolving or canceling Wagner, Ross instead asks across 800 pages if we can hold the two impulses at the same time.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Ross's 2007 book THE REST IS NOISE forever changed the way I think about and listen to music. What a glorious, exalted, human experience it was to read his earlier book, and to have a companion website there to hear in real time of all of the music I was learning about. Apart from the music itself, and apart from Ross's always-fascinating, never-condescending approach to explaining the significance of a given composition, another thing that really made this earlier book soar and sing for me was Ross's historical scene setting--his extraordinary ability to make these composers come alive as human beings who were living through a moment in history, and influencing that history. Ross's scenes are as vivid as Barbara Tuchman's and they call to mind Tuchman's humanity and her uncanny ability to revivify the past.

Ross's previous book also included a tantalizing, brief examination of Wagner's music and influence, that left me wanting to know more. And now Ross has devoted himself fully to Wagner, and Wagnerism in this next book. The book begins with a vivid scene of Wagner's death, and follows on with even more vivid detail about the way the world reacted to the news of Wagner's death. It's stunningly written. The moments come alive on the page. And then comes a bald statement of Ross's thesis about Wagner and his influence. I suggest you just accept it. Dive in, rather than trying to this-or-that his thesis, or debate it on the page as you read. Just go with it. Put aside any conclusions you may have made about Wagner and his art, prior to reading this book, and let the book lead you. I was exhilarated by the journey. I felt warmly taken care of, but never condescended to. Ross gave me so much to think about.

I'm assuming that Ross will put up a companion listening web site as the publication date draws nearer, with links to all of the music he refers to in the text, but I was able to find all of it fairly easily online and to listen as I read. It really enhances the reading experience and it's one of the best intermedia experiences I could recommend.

I could not have been more grateful, when I got to the end of this book, for the way Ross introduced me to new thoughts about Wagner, about music, about history. Thanks to FSG for making this book available to me in electronic ARC.

I received a review copy of this from the publisher through NetGalley back at the end of April. Two weeks ago my e-reader couldn't validate the license, and when I redownloaded it, most of my notes for some reason went ...{poof}. I only had the last chapter to go, too.

This is a huge work. Rather fitting...if you anyone who is familiar with Wagner's music, I think of several words that comes to mind, one certainly is long! Mr. Ross covers so much history, political impacts, cultural impacts... he packages his analyses around the operas and has more than a few technical expositions of his works. For example

More words have been spilled about the first three bars of Tristan - a rising minor sixth in the cellos, a two-step descent, a pungent chord of cellos and winds - than about any short passage in music, with the possible exception of the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth/

Ross is a New Yorker music critic and knows his stuff - a lot of which I don't get, despite spending the last year and a half listening to Great Courses on concert music (Classical was only one period), theory, composition, forms, and more. When Ross said, "Just as Wagner's music consists of a succession of motifs that suggest psychological states..." well, I have to take his word for that. And you'll also get the art that was inspired by Wagner's work and philosophy. And the political histories.

This is an unfair review as there is too much here to even begin to summarize. I don't doubt that there are some who will devour this book and chew on Mr. Ross's observations. I read a lot, across a wide spectrum of topics and I'm not daunted by depth; this book was daunting.

A really long book of not only his life but the influences he had on others and those on him during his life and after. Divided up among the operas he created we get a look at him and what people have thought of him.