Wagnerism Art and politics in the shadow of music

The 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner (1813--1883) is all things to all people in this sweeping cultural history. New Yorker music writer Ross (The Rest is Noise) surveys the ongoing influence of Wagner, whose operas wrapped tales of gods, heroes, knights, Valkyries, rapturous loves, and apocalyptic infernos in enthralling music that mixed bombast with sensuousness, spirituality, and psychological complexity. Ross explores how Wagner's protean music and ideology mesmerized "Wagnerians" of many stripes; infamously, his anti-Semitic polemics made him Hitler's favorite composer, but he has also been claimed as an anarcho-socialist revolutionary and as an inspiration by Jews, feminists, gays, and blacks (for W.E.B. Du Bois, Wagner signified ethereal beauty beyond a racist reality). Ross follows Wagner's long reach everywhere: Nietzchean philosophy, high-modernist novels, The Lord of the Rings, cowboy stories, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and such Hollywood epics as Birth of a Nation, Apocalypse Now, and Captain America. Ross manages to tame the sprawl with incisive analysis and elegant prose that casts Wagner's music as "an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longing for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence." The result is a fascinating study of the impact that emotionally intense music and drama can have on the human mind. (Sept.)

It's always cause for rejoicing when New Yorker music critic Ross (Listen to This) publishes a book, and this latest is on a scale worthy of the composer of the Ring of the Nibelung. Ross makes the case that the work and influence of German composer Richard Wagner (1813--83) is key to understanding the art and politics of the last 150 years, and he does so with the sweep and scope of a Wagner overture, with separate chapters traversing "the entire sphere of the arts--poetry, the novel, painting, the theater, dance, architecture, film." And, of course, politics. The archetypes and mythologies of Wagner merit and receive full analysis, and their influence on the obvious (Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-Semitism, Nazi Germany) share space with the less so (Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, Game of Thrones). It's a tribute to the thoughtful and accessible Ross that his conclusions seem both valid and inevitable. VERDICT With this multifaceted jewel of a book, Ross has produced a monumental study of Wagner's legacy. Eighteen out of 18 anvils.--Bill Baars, formerly with Lake Oswego P.L., OR

A wide-ranging, erudite examination of how Richard Wagner's influence has extended far beyond the opera house. Award-winning New Yorker music critic Ross places Wagner (1813-1883) at the center of a capacious, fascinating history of Western culture. Focused on Wagner's reception by novelists, poets, artists--and Hitler--the author argues compellingly that the "staggeringly energetic" Wagner loomed as "the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900"--and endures still. As Nietzsche proclaimed about the man with whom he had a tense, complicated relationship, "Wagner sums up modernity." Drawing on a prodigious number of sources, Ross examines Wagner's influence on the famous--Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cezanne, Gauguin, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence, among many other modernists--and infamous: Otto Weininger, whose anti-Semitic writings rival Wagner's in virulence; and Wagner's son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British botanist and "German racial ideologue" who served as "the bridge between Bayreuth and Nazi Germany." Ross probes Wagner's attraction to Jews (Zionist Theodor Herzl, for example), Blacks (including W.E.B. Du Bois), feminists, and homosexuals despite Wagner's professed bigotry and racism. Across Europe and in the U.S., Wagner became a cult figure: "a torchbearer of the modern" for the French; "a messenger of Arthuriana" in Britain. For Americans, "Wagner harmonized with a national love of wilderness sagas, frontier lore, Native American tales, stories of desperadoes searching for gold." Lohengrin is a staple of weddings, and from The Birth of a Nation onward, Wagner's music has been the soundtrack of more than 1,000 films, which have used his work "to unleash all manner of rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming evildoers." The author asks: "In the face of a sacred monster like Wagner, what power do spectators have? Are we necessarily subject to the domination of his works, complicit in their ideology? Or, in embracing them, can we take possession of them and remake them in our own image? A deeply informed history as vigorous as Wagner's music. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.