Alex Ross has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His second book, the essay collection Listen to This, received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.
The New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2020 - Chicago Tribune,
The 10 Best Books of 2020 - NPR, Best Books of 2020 - Rolling
Stone, Best Music Books of 2020 - Financial Times, Best Books of
2020 - Air Mail, Top 10 Books of 2020 - Pitchfork, 15 Favorite
Music Books of 2020 "A work of enormous intellectual range and
subtle artistic judgment... The book has its own 'Wagnerian' heft
and ambitiousness of intent, being nothing less than a history of
ideas that spans an arc from Nietzsche and George Eliot to Philip
K. Dick, 'Apocalypse Now' and neo-Nazi skinheads . . . Ross has dug
deep into some of the most fertile (and occasionally most bizarre)
terrain of Western culture, examining and bringing to light the
struggles for individuation and self-discovery of a host of
reactive minds." --John Adams, The New York Times Book Review
"[Wagnerism] takes up Wagner's protean impact with unprecedented
scope . . . The result is an indispensable work of cultural
history, offering both a comprehensive resource and a bravura
narrative . . . Extraordinary . . . As Mr. Ross richly details,
Wagner's appeal to women and gays is a hallmark of his
achievement." --Joseph Horowitz, The Wall Street Journal "Capacious
and enthralling . . . In Wagner's operas, sums up Ross, 'we see the
highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled.' In
Wagnerism, however, those impulses--aesthetic, sexual,
philosophical and political--are deftly untangled, then enticingly
presented for the general reader. The result is a superb example of
cultural history and, given its themes, a work surprisingly
relevant to this plague-ridden, watershed year." --Michael Dirda,
The Washington Post "Readers who let Ross lead them anew through
the 20th century in 2007's The Rest Is Noise will find familiar
comforts in his sure guidance and musical prose. But they'll find
dazzling new dimensions in his scholarship, as adept with large
swaths of history as attentive to small crannies of expertise."
--Michael Andor Brodeur, The Washington Post (Best Classical Music
of 2020) "Magnificent . . . Every culture has its own issues with
Wagner, and Ross' even hand is especially impressive when taking on
the Big One. His explication of Hitler's rise and the legacy of
Wagner's anti-Semitism is a moving lamentation . . . In the end,
the inconsistencies are what made Wagner matter, and what make Ross
today's perfect Wagnerite." --Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times "Suavely
brilliant . . . [This] magnum opus more than a decade in the making
sets out to do nothing less than chart the entire scope of Wagner's
influence in Western history and culture, including everything from
French Symbolist poetry to 'Star Wars.' That capsule description
conveys the work's jaw-dropping blend of ambition and erudition,
but downplays its easy accessibility." --Joshua Kosman, San
Francisco Chronicle "Here is cultural history that ties together
politics, philosophy, sex, war and race . . . Ross is particularly
good at picking apart contradiction--and the legacy of
anti-Semitism--infamously embodied by Wagnerian ideas. But this is
not a biography of a man. It's a tracing of an aesthetic, one
overwrought and foundational, and Ross chips away geologic layers
to identify the rot. You'll see your world differently."
--Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune "The remarkable trick about
Ross's undertaking is in how it steers clear of the usual critical
constructions that befall bad artists who make good art . . . Ross
has given us a book that does something impressive. Ross, in a rare
feat of contemporary criticism, divests himself of his autonomy as
a critic, hands it to others, and shows how writing about art is
always an intervention between the subject and its beholders."
--Mina Tavakoli, The Nation "One of the many beauties of this
incomparably rich book is that it refuses to engage in any
simplistic analysis of its subject, who emerges in his full
bewildering complexity. It is one of the most valuable books about
Wagner I know of, compelling one to engage not merely with the
composer and his legacy but with music itself, how it works on us,
what it is . . . The miracle of Ross's book is that it is so fresh
and so personal; his intellectual stamina, though prodigious, is
never flaunted." --Simon Callow, Air Mail "How far art and artist
can be separated is an age-old question . . . By presenting an
honest assessment of the problem, Wagnerism supplies, if not
answers, then at least the right questions." --The Economist
"Ross's impressive research has uncovered hundreds upon hundreds of
Wagnerian references, allusions, and influences in the art and
literature of the last 150 years . . . [Ross] offers insightful
discussions of Wagner's most significant legacies--for theater
direction and narrative technique, for feminism and queer culture,
and for revolutionary politics." --Adam Kirsch, The New Republic
"Sumptuous . . . [Ross] fleshes out his story with consummate
authority and élan . . . Ross' ambition and broad command of
cultural history are peerless . . . [Wagnerism] is one of this
year's intellectual triumphs." --Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis
Star-Tribune "Ross is making the difficult argument for complexity,
and against great-man hero worship generally . . . For all its
authorial caution and scholarly deference, Ross has produced what
feels like a deeply personal work . . . Wagnerism is pleasurably
readable, even funny . . . Ross' book and his extraordinary
scholarship amply suggest that any anxiety over the survival of
Wagnerism as a sensibility and theory of art, independent of its
creator, is misplaced as well." --Franz Nicolay, Slate "[A] superb
chronicle of obsession, intoxication, hyperbolic exultation,
appropriation, exploitation, repudiation, transmutation, and
perpetual reinvention--an aerial view of a culture's nervous system
as it responds to an unexpected stimulus. In the end, Wagnerism is,
however obliquely, very much a book about Wagner and his music, all
the richer for being filtered through such a range of listeners and
spectators . . . This history of listening becomes a history of
consciousness." --Geoffrey O'Brien, Bookforum "Sweepingly original
. . . An endlessly fascinating tour of the lives and works touched
by, in his words, 'the chaotic posthumous cult' spawned by a
composer with a gift for making impassioned friends and equally
impassioned enemies . . . Ross narrates this epic tour while
hovering above the fray with a kind of lyrical skepticism that
eventually starts to feel like its own quietly principled way of
knowing the past: an ethic of reading history against its
accumulated layers, granting irony its own power of illumination,
and holding open a space for complex, contradictory truths."
--Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe "Ross offers a powerful sense of
the metamorphoses in Wagnerism across overlapping generations . . .
[and] a splendid presentation of American Wagnerism . . . Ross's
focus on Wagnerism is at its sharpest when he addresses the
long-term ideological implications of what Wagner himself saw as
the socially transformative power of opera. The book also offers
fascinating insight when Ross considers the more private
significance of Wagnerism as a force for shaping personal
identities." --Larry Wolff, The Times Literary Supplement "Alex
Ross's massive new book is worthy of its subject. . . [He] makes a
convincing--and astonishing--case for Wagner's presence in the
modern literary canon . . . Ross states: 'Writing this book has
been the great education of my life.' It has much to offer other
lives as well." --Steven G. Kellman, The American Scholar
"Illuminating . . . Ross traces the controversial composer's
influence across what the author calls the 'artists of silence'
novelists, poets, and painters. What makes Wagnerism such a
challenging and rewarding read is how Ross comes to terms with that
influence . . . Where once was a man, there is now only a shadow.
What shape that shadow takes, Wagnerism suggests, says just as much
about the beholder as it does about the body that once cast it."
--Ashley Naftule, The AV Club "Ross makes a persuasive case that
the nineteenth-century German composer wasn't just the most
influential artist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but
maybe the most influential artist ever in any form . . .
[Wagnerism] confronts the moment's dilemma of how to think about
bad men making great art that inspires both more great art and
unfathomable evil." --Steve Erickson, LA Magazine "Entertaining and
illuminating . . . [Wagnerism is an] exhilarating and profoundly
impressive, stylishly written book . . . [and] a work of prodigious
scholarship and deep understanding of the subject." --Michael
Halliwell, Australian Book Review "Ross has written a sweeping and
erudite book. In his hands, Wagner becomes a master key that
unlocks innumerable facets of modern culture. Ross moves with grace
and sophistication across many national contexts and artistic
movements . . . And he never lets his enormous learning get in the
way of the fun." --Charlie Tyson, The Hedgehog Review "Reading
Wagnerism took me two weeks, and once through with it, I felt as if
I'd spent a fortnight in Bayreuth among affable and highly informed
friends. It's a magnificent, eminently readable and often
entertaining fund of knowledge and I recommend it unreservedly."
--Rob Cowan, Gramophone "What I love best about Wagnerism is Ross's
effort to show the teeming floods of fans and their different
fandoms, their efforts to grapple with these matters--and their
failures--and their adaptations of other failures, and other
successes--and above all, the creation, dissolution, and
re-creation of communities around the art. That, ultimately, is why
he gives us this flood of stories, lives, artworks, anecdotes,
conflicts, and creations: to show us not Wagner's triumphs and
failures, but those of our living, ongoing world of culture and
belief." --Alison Kinney, VAN "Packed with striking vignettes . . .
[Ross's] own Wagnerism remains personal rather than political. In a
movingly reticent autobiographical postlude, he describes key
moments when he saw his life through Wagner's operas." --David
Mikics, Tablet "Wagnerism chronicles a century and a half of
grappling, tracing the outsize effect of Wagner's operas and
writings on art, philosophy and politics . . . The case of Richard
Wagner can never quite be resolved, but Wagnerism offers a deep
exploration of the complex questions he raises." --Fred Cohn, Opera
News "Ross does a good and very full job in tracing the obsession
of different times and places, and the intellectual flavour each
wave took . . . Ross's book is excellent, and extraordinarily
thorough . . . A very thorough account of apparent delusion in
search of a fugitive meaning." --Philip Hensher, The Spectator
(Australia) "It's always cause for rejoicing when New Yorker music
critic Ross publishes a book, and this latest is on a scale worthy
of the composer of the Ring of the Nibelung . . . It's a tribute to
the thoughtful and accessible Ross that his conclusions seem both
valid and inevitable. With this multifaceted jewel of a book, Ross
has produced a monumental study of Wagner's legacy. Eighteen out of
18 anvils." --Bill Baars, Library Journal (starred review)
"Capacious, fascinating . . . A deeply informed history as vigorous
as Wagner's music." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Ross follows
Wagner's long reach everywhere: Nietzschean philosophy,
high-modernist novels, The Lord of the Rings, cowboy stories, Bugs
Bunny cartoons, and such Hollywood epics as Birth of a Nation,
Apocalypse Now, and Captain America. Ross manages to tame the
sprawl with incisive analysis and elegant prose that casts Wagner's
music as 'an aesthetic war zone' . . . A fascinating study of the
impact that emotionally intense music and drama can have on the
human mind." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "An absolutely
masterly work . . . A miraculous synthesis. Ross's writing is an
art that conceals art, propelling the reader on and on." --Stephen
Fry, actor and author of Mythos and Heroes "Wagnerism is as
magnificently realized as it is monumentally ambitious, a cultural
history of the modern world that Richard Wagner and his protean art
helped mightily to create, and equally a brilliantly synthetic
mapping-out of the infinitely multiplying, antagonistic and
cross-pollinating readings and misreadings, transformations and
transmogrifications that the world has wrought in its unceasing,
ongoing grapplings with Wagner. Alex Ross has assembled a vast
convocation of the artists, proponents and prophets of realism and
hallucination, psychology and mythification, avant-gardism and
populism, democracy and fascism, cosmopolitanism and racism, and
collectively they offer us an epic account of the progress of
modernity through mazes of aesthetics, ideology and consciousness.
It's a journey for which Ross is the ideal guide: lucid,
astoundingly erudite, scrupulous, generous, profound, objective and
engaged, and enormously entertaining." --Tony Kushner, playwright
"In this epic, extraordinary book, Alex Ross contends with the
'infernal logic' of Wagner's legacy, through the centuries and
across poetry, literature, art, philosophy, architecture, politics,
war, film. Wagnerism is a hugely exhilarating read, and a virtuoso
feat of scholarship and supple writing: Ross is such a
companionable guide, connecting ideas so casually and unspooling
stories so fluidly that you can almost lose sight of the ferocious
erudition that undergirds every page. I can't think of a better or
more profound work about the long, complicated shadow of cultural
influence." --Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing "For
those who love Wagner, this book is obviously heaven. But Wagnerism
goes far beyond the man himself, using its subject to springboard
into a breathlessly entertaining and dizzyingly diverse survey of
art, politics and culture over the past century and a half.
Ultimately, it's a book about how humans are inspired by art, and
like all of Alex Ross's writing, it bottles that strange lightning
and inspires us in turn." --Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi
and Knives Out "Until now, what I didn't know about Wagner and his
influence on culture could have filled a book. Fortunately, Alex
Ross's brilliant evocation of the composer's world more than
elucidates Wagner's various mysteries--it gives voice to why and
how he came to be such a significant political and aesthetic
influence on the world stage. Masterfully written and researched,
Wagnerism is itself a masterpiece--a breathtaking achievement."
--Hilton Als, author of White Girls "Wagnerism is monumental not
only in scale but in accomplishment. Wagner casts a vast shadow
over modern culture and it takes an incandescent critical
intelligence to illuminate this legacy in its full complexity,
distorted by neither hagiography nor demonology . . .
Afro-Wagnerians jostle with Nazis, Gilded Age feminists share the
stage with Zionists, gay Wagnerians consort with modernist
litterateurs. The result is a singular achievement of scholarship,
sensibility, and storytelling." --Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of
The Lies That Bind
"In this prodigious interdisciplinary opus, encompassing the visual
arts, literature, and philosophy, Ross deftly teases out the
tremendous and often polarizing impact Wagner's music and theories
had on modern culture and history, parsing those luminaries who
celebrated the composer and those who reviled him. In doing so--in
this prismatic examination conducted through a Wagnerian lens--Ross
underscores a paradox at the heart of modernism itself: the tension
between the retrograde and the avant-garde and, thus, the political
right and left, themes of even greater relevance in our present
times." --Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early
20th-Century Art, Guggenheim Museum "A masterpiece--massive and
magnificent. A book I've been waiting fifty years to read. It turns
lights on in regions where I have bumbled in murk." --Peter
Schjeldahl, author of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings
1988-2018 "Attention: a masterpiece! Wagnerism is extraordinary for
the richness of references and testimonies drawn from literature,
philosophy, the visual arts, musicology, the cinema. It is probably
the most informed work on Wagner and his aesthetic and cultural
significance that I have ever read." --Jean-Jacques Nattiez, author
of Wagner Androgyne
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