Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

Few artists have exerted a cultural influence as vast, enduring, and controversial as Richard Wagner. His operas inspired generations of writers, painters, philosophers, filmmakers, and political thinkers, while his ideas became entangled with some of the darkest ideologies of the modern age.
In this sweeping cultural history, Alex Ross traces Wagner's impact from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring his profound influence on figures as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Adolf Hitler. Moving across literature, music, visual art, theater, cinema, and politics, Ross examines how each generation has reinterpreted Wagner's legacy in its own image.
Erudite, balanced, and richly detailed, Wagnerism is both an intellectual history of modern culture and a nuanced account of how one artist's work continues to shape debates about aesthetics, identity, nationalism, and power.