Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist 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. In Wagnerism, Ross explores the phenomenon known as Wagnerism which saturated European and American culture around 1900, being a model of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. Ross ranges across artistic disciplines to paint an image of how Wagner's many-sided legacy wrestled with beauty, violence, and ideologies, including its impact on artists such as Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, and more.