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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. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner’s many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W.E.B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

Wagner's Ring is one of the most complex dramatic creations of modern times and its stage presentation requires impossible resources. It also demands an educated audience, without which there is not much justification for a performance. The tetralogy is full of difficult narratives and dialogues that make a prior, in depth reading of the libretto a must. It is not just a matter of figuring out the plot, as in other operas, but of exploring the many levels of meaning through which the Ring unfolds. In addition, the cycle incorporates esoteric themes that have seldom been discussed in connection with Wagner. This background is unknown territory to most people and it is unrealistic to expect sudden enlightenment from the Ring's libretto alone. Every classical journey deals with the promise of a homecoming and it is therefore not surprising that Wotan, the main protagonist in the Ring, eventually reemerges in the Land of the Grail, where he is converted into Titurel by Wagner's poetic imagination. Ernest Newman, Wagner's quintessential biographer, had already noted this odd development, but did not pause long enough to consider the startling implications. One should not look at Wagner in disconnected, narrow ways. The dismal level of today's intellectual discourse on Tragedy makes it impossible to do justice to the composer's apocalyptic vision. In that context, it is important to address the increasingly popular contention that Wagner was Hitler's spiritual father and that the Ring is a dangerous anti-Semitic fantasy. The Holocaust is indeed tragic, but its reduction to a moral failure on the part of Germanic culture understates the metahistorical significance of what actually happened.C.J. Jung once tried to tackle these issues directly in his study of the Wotan archetype (1936), but his analysis has since been buried under the weight of more detailed but less perceptive commentaries. A vigorous reassessment is long overdue.

Like many great artists throughout the millennia, Richard Wagner wrote his operas as allegories which can be represented in ways that range from the mundane to the esoteric. When Wagner's cryptic esoteric messages are deciphered they tell a story about the evolution of human freedom and consciousness that would be told two generations later in a different format, by the physicist/philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The allegories of The Ring bear a message meant for today.

Emslie's study of Wagner's creativity examines the centrality of love - and its obverse, hate - to the composer's world view.