... a crowded and mesmerizing history.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ magnificent new book.

... a work of enormous intellectual range and subtle artistic judgment that pokes and probes the nerve endings of Western cultural and social norms as they are mirrored in more than a century of reaction to Wagner’s works. 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.

He fleshes out his story with consummate authority and élan, even if he occasionally falls into the trap of elites-speaking-only-to-elites. But perhaps that elitism is purposeful, given Wagner's audiences. Ross is an unabashed Europhile.

... takes up Wagner’s protean impact with unprecedented scope.

... sweepingly original.

Like his muse’s operas, the work is filigreed, prone to bombast, at times bloated, and, at over 700 pages, formidable. But 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. Though Wagner’s myriad hatreds are certainly deeply plumbed, judgment is not Ross’s aim in the book.

Just like Wagner’s operas, this book sprawls. There are hundreds of characters, but many keep telling a similar story. Some of them come back again and again just when you think you’ve got rid of them. This, however, is part of Ross’s thesis: Wagner is so dominant an aesthetic presence that you can spend your whole life wrestling with him.

Wagner’s reach, as Ross comprehensively demonstrates, is vast, greater by far than that of any other musician in history, greater perhaps than any artist in any medium, his influence profound and continuing and by no means confined to music itself. I find myself already slipping into hyperbole, always a danger with Wagner. This is something Mr. Ross never does. 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.

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. Ross makes the case that the work and influence of German composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) is key to understanding the art and politics of the last 150 years, and he does so with the sweep and scope of a Wagner overture.

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—some famous and significant, others just curious. The book is packed with descriptions of paintings, plot summaries, and biographical anecdotes, from Baudelaire and Whitman all the way to Philip K. Dick and Apocalypse Now. At times this plenitude threatens to make Wagnerism read like an encyclopedia. But Ross also offers insightful discussions of Wagner’s most significant legacies—for theater direction and narrative technique, for feminism and queer culture, and for revolutionary politics..

... dense and illuminating.

... encyclopedic.

... magnificent.

Ross has written a book about Wagner’s consequences with a striking omission — what he did with music, and what he did to music.

... his most ambitious book.

The story diverges and digresses and soon gets out of Ross’s control. Like Wagner with his repeated orchestral motifs, he tends to go round in circles: I don’t mind Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence in music, but a historical narrative needs to move ahead. In this encyclopaedic book, the plethora of interpreters makes Wagner mean anything at all, which ultimately makes him mean nothing in particular.

Drawing on hundreds of bibliographical sources and copiously end-noted, Ross’s Wagnerism is exhaustive, a clear labor of love but one structurally weakened by the diffusiveness of its subject matter. Ross claims too much and admits as much. The consequence is a blurred narrative in parts and a sense that points are being stretched.

The first time I sat through Wagner’s complete Ring cycle, early in the 1990s, the neighboring seats held a planeload of Germans who had come over for the Met’s version because it was more to their taste than the modernizing Regietheater dominant in various German cities.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’ newest opus of nearly 700 pages, Wagnerism , posits that we live our lives almost unaware of the currents that have shaped the cultural content we consume, the world through which we move. An account of composer Richard Wagner’s influence on the past 160 or so years, Wagnerism is neither a biography of Wagner nor an analysis of his music, but a grappling with Wagnerism itself and how it has shaped the world beyond music. Following Alex Ross’ two volumes of music criticism and history–The Rest is Noise and Listen to This — Wagnerism becomes a biography of a culture’s history of influence, spreading outwards from Wagner himself and across the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. Much like the structure of Wagner’s music–seemingly endless, not just temporally but musically, in its addictive linking of melodies and motifs so that the end and beginning of whole sequences become indistinguishable–Wagnerian figurations appear and reappear in the chronology of time. Extending into a much larger and consistently more urgent cultural question, Wagnerism asks: how do we separate art from artist? Myth from culture? Culture from Myth? Must we? Can we? Can we not, and still live with the dissonance?.

... wide-ranging, erudite.

... sweeping.