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Name: Wagnerism
Rating: 4.5 (64 reviews)
Author: Alex Ross

Alex Ross

Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

4.5 (64 ratings)

20 mins

Brief summary

Wagnerism by Alex Ross explores the multifaceted impact of German composer Richard Wagner on art, literature, politics, and culture, with a critical and insightful approach.

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Wagnerism
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What’s in it for me? Discover how the composer Richard Wagner influenced cultural life long after his death.

No composer in history has exerted such a broad influence over culture and the arts as Richard Wagner. His revolutionary work scandalized and upended the artistic establishment. But Wagner also played a huge role in politics. The Nazi movement chose him as their figurehead; Hitler, in particular, was a devotee.

Wagner’s own views were complex and ambiguous. At times he was an anarchist, at times a nationalist – but always an anti-Semite. These blinks will trace Wagner’s influence on art and politics through the decades. And they’ll ask a question: When we’re listening to his music, who are we really hearing – Wagner or ourselves?

In these blinks, you’ll discover

the link between Wagner and modernist literature;
how Wagner influenced the Spaghetti Western genre; and
why there were Jewish, Black, and gay Wagner fans.

Richard Wagner’s visionary music dramas have remained astonishingly influential.

In February 1883, Richard Wagner died in Venice at the age of 69, and the world went into a frenzy.

Lengthy obituaries around the world chronicled his musical achievements – Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, the Ring cycle. Radical revolutionaries in the US praised him as an anarchist. A poet as far away as New Zealand wrote a commemorative sonnet.

Over in Europe, the young composer Gustav Mahler wept as he ran through the streets. And in early March, some Viennese students organized a tribute to Wagner that quickly descended into an anti-Semitic riot. It got so serious that the police had to break it up.

These were only the first signs of the extraordinary effect that Wagner would have on art, culture, and politics in the century ahead.

The key message here is: Richard Wagner’s visionary music dramas have remained astonishingly influential.

Wagner was controversial all his life. In 1849, he was involved in revolutionary protests in Dresden and had to flee the country. A year later, he published the infamous essay “Judaism in Music.” Wagner used a pseudonym, but his essay caused a scandal that sent shock waves far beyond the musical world.

But he was first and foremost a composer. Wagner referred to his work as “music dramas.” The best-known is Der Ring des Nibelungen, or the Ring cycle – a series of four evening-length works that tell a mythological story on an unprecedentedly epic scale. It’s a story of lust for power and wealth, of love, and of the downfall of gods themselves.

Another work, the yearning love story Tristan und Isolde, shocked audiences with its harmonic daring. And Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, drew on the ancient legend of the Holy Grail to create a curious, transcendental work rooted in Christian tradition.

Wagner’s musical influence was huge, like that of Bach or Beethoven. But only Wagner had such a colossal effect on other art forms like literature, the visual arts, and even cinema. And then, of course, there was his influence on politics – especially on Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. But, as we’ll discover in the blinks to come, this protofascist interpretation of Wagner is just one of many possible takes on his work.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, once a close friend of Wagner’s, later disavowed the composer – and yet he remained obsessed with him. “Wagner sums up modernity,” he wrote. “It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.”

Wagner’s international influence on literature was vast, varied, and lasting.

In 1860, Wagner received a letter. “I owe to you the greatest musical pleasure I have ever experienced,” it read – continuing with a declaration of having been “penetrated and invaded, a truly sensual enjoyment.”

The letter’s author was the controversial poet Charles Baudelaire, who'd recently attended one of Wagner's concerts in Paris. Baudelaire was just one Wagnériste among many in France. So many of the country’s other leading artists found themselves captivated by Wagner. Among them were Emile Zola, Paul Cézanne, Stéphane Mallarmé – all struck by the composer’s bracing modernity and scandalous decadence, as epitomized by the erotic, mesmerizing Tristan und Isolde.

Wagner’s enormous artistic influence in Austria and Germany was entangled with nationalism.

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a comedy, but right at the end it takes a famously dark turn. Hans Sachs, a beloved cobbler and singer, suddenly cautions the audience to “Beware!” The German people are under threat, he claims, and they must be alerted to the dangers of foreign influence.

In German-speaking lands in the late nineteenth century, artists and audiences heard a great many things in Wagner’s works. His influence on other art forms was huge and varied, just like it was abroad. But, as the end of Die Meistersinger shows, there was also a nationalistic element to Wagner that became increasingly hard to ignore.

Despite Wagner’s bigoted views, he had fans among Jewish, Black, and gay communities.

It’s well known that Wagner was profoundly anti-Semitic. The aforementioned essay “Judaism in Music” vilifies Jewish composers like Meyerbeer and concludes that Jewish people should be redeemed through what Wagner ambiguously calls Untergang, a term that literally means a “going down” or “going under” but more commonly stands for “downfall.”

Did Wagner mean conversion and assimilation? Or something far more troubling? That is still open to interpretation.

As war and revolution raged, both the right and the left appropriated Wagner.

So, what did Wagner truly believe? His incendiary texts are full of contradictions, and his music raises questions too.

In “Religion and Art,” an essay he wrote in 1880, he voiced concern over the destructive potential of modern technologies like bombs and torpedoes. So was he a pacifist? Maybe – but then why does so much of his music sound strident and pugnacious?

The Nazis’ appropriation of Wagner rested on just one possible interpretation of the composer’s ambiguous worldview.

On February 13, 1933 – exactly 50 years after Wagner’s death – the writer Thomas Mann stood at a podium in Amsterdam. He was about to deliver a speech that would question Wagner’s influence on the politics of the day. Its title? “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.”

Boldly, Mann argued that Wagner’s views had little place in contemporary politics. He described the composer as a utopian socialist with anarchist leanings. The Nazis, Mann implied, were misreading Wagner; they were taking his name in vain.

Wagner has continued to inspire art and culture – and resist easy interpretation.

One of modern cinema’s most iconic moments is underpinned by five minutes of Wagner. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a group of American helicopters launches an enormous, shocking, deadly attack on a peaceful Vietnamese village. The soundtrack is “Ride of the Valkyries” from the Ring cycle.

The sequence was meant to illustrate the horror and hubris of war. It’s certainly unforgettable – but some viewers misunderstood its critical tone. And that has led to the music being used in actual warfare. It rang across the deserts during the First Gulf War in 1991, and then again in Iraq, in 2004. Nowadays, you could even call the “Ride of the Valkyries” a symbol of American supremacy.

Richard Wagner’s passionate and compelling music dramas reflect humanity, for better or worse.

The Bayreuth Festival Theater itself, which Wagner set up in 1876, has had to change with the times. In 1976, the young French director Patrice Chéreau presented a new production of the Ring. It scandalized audiences at first, but it soon became a landmark.

Chéreau teases out the historical associations embedded within Wagner’s work. The early stages evoke the nineteenth century. Instead of gods, there are Victorian aristocrats confused by the dwarves’ industrial factories. As the cycle progresses, time creeps forward. In the final scene, as Valhalla is burning, a wordless chorus of people who seem to be from the future gaze straight out into the audience.

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What is Wagnerism about?

Wagnerism (2020) chronicles how the works of Richard Wagner have influenced thinkers in the years since his death. Exploring the multitude of ways in which people have interpreted his music, it looks beyond his artistic legacy to his political influence – most of all on the Nazi party.

Best quote from Wagnerism

When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species.

—Alex Ross

Who should read Wagnerism?

Classical music fans who want to broaden their knowledge
Historians interested in the role of music and culture
Politics enthusiasts who want to explore the history of ideas

About the Author

Alex Ross is a staff writer at the New Yorker. His highly popular and award-winning first book, The Rest is Noise, is an account of classical music in the twentieth century. He also wrote Listen to This, a collection of essays.

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