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.  

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

The book analyzes Wagner's influence on Willa Cather, who is often characterized as a regional writer. Ross argues that she was one of the most important literary Wagnerites: "Among major authors only Thomas Mann knew his Wagner better." The influence is clearest in her 1915 novel, The Song of the Lark, whose heroine Thea Kronborg is based on the soprano Olive Fremstad.

Hardback