Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 784 pages; $40. Fourth Estate; £30.as long a shadow over Richard Wagner as Wagner casts over art. So argues Alex Ross, the music critic of the, in his gigantic new book, “Wagnerism”. Fifty years after the German composer’s death in 1883, his operas became “the chief cultural ornament of the most destructive political regime in history”.
Through the Meister’s family and various unsavoury boosters, Mr Ross traces the links between the Third Reich and Bayreuth, Wagner’s eventual home and the spiritual abode of his music. But the book is more than either a prosecutor’s brief or a case for the defence. Instead Mr Ross offers a “passionate ambivalence” as he charts Wagner’s vexed legacy, which loomed over Modernism and fin de siècle Europe.
Hitler admired Wagner as a musician first and a thinker second. In the early 1920s he kept a stack of the composer’s records in his flat in Munich. Yet, says Mr Ross, his enthusiasm was more intoxicated than insightful. The Führer seemed to overlook Wagner’s preoccupation with love. The “Ring” critiques power; for all its Aryan overtones, “Parsifal” elevates compassion. Wagner’s heroes struggle with remorse—hardly a Nazi virtue.
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