Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Alex Ross

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Richard Wagner was unfortunate in that his most infamous fan was Adolf Hitler, who was also enamored of the composer’s second most notorious admirer, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nazism wasn’t Wagner’s fault, but he can’t be entirely excused for what he helped inspire. While the primeval myths evoked by his music could be yoked to politics even he might have found disagreeable, his prose writings include an unmistakably poisonous dose of anti-Semitism.

But as New Yorker music critic Alex Ross covers in his magisterial new book, Wagner’s influence reached well beyond German nationalists and anti-Semites. The French avant-garde was besotted, with Baudelaire finding “repeated shocks of familiarity” between his poetry and Wagner’s opera. Baudelaire wasn’t alone in the artistic vanguard—in France and elsewhere—who found “analogies of sensation” in the oceanic sound of Wagner’s music, whose leitmotifs and endless melodies, not to mention all that furious kettle drumming, suggest that he was also a precursor of heavy metal. And his sense of spectacle through work that encompassed many art forms was later realized in Hollywood cinema.

During his lifetime (1813-1883), Wagner drew criticism but mostly from fuddy duddys who held that musical evolution ended circa 1800. His work was beloved by composers as varied as Verdi and Mahler, by sectarians as diverse as anarchists and Theosophists. However, Wagnerism is primarily “about a musician’s influence on non-musicians—resonances and reverberations of one art form into others.” He may have been misunderstood by many admirers, but misreadings can become acts of imagination. As Ross lucidly puts it, “The behemoth whispers a different secret in each listeners ear.” Wagner’s glittering hoard of archetypes—the cursed Ring, the Hero with no Name, the Acolyte with Unsuspected Powers—became a legacy more durable than the literary, visual and musical work he inspired in other artists of his era.