Wagnerism

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. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. 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. In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.

’An absolutely masterly work’ Stephen Fry Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller 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.

Sutton presents a study of the influence of Richard Wagner on the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). She explores the role of Wagnerism within British culture of the 1890's, in particular the relations between Wagnerism and the decadent movement.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colorful account of such operatic favorites as Manon and Werther by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgré lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus.

This Companion provides an overview and in-depth analysis of Wagner's Ring using traditional critical analysis alongside more recent approaches.

As never before or since, Richard Wagner's name dominated American music-making at the close of the nineteenth century. Europe, too, was obsessed with Wagner, but—as Joseph Horowitz shows in this first history of Wagnerism in the United States—the American obsession was unique. The central figure in Wagner Nights is conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), a priestly and enigmatic personage in New York musical life. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, filling the three-thousand-seat music pavilion to capacity. The fact that most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism and constituted a vital aspect of the fin-de-siècle ferment that anticipated the New American Woman. Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Horowitz's lively history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never documented before. An entertaining and startling read, a treasury of operatic lore, Wagner Nights offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

The 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris is famous as a turning point in the history of French music, and modern music generally. This book explores the ways in which music was used, exhibited, listened to, and written about during the Exposition universelle. It also reveals the sociopolitical uses of music in France during the 19th century.

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four "scenes" compose this book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno). It is difficult today to realize how profoundly Wagner affected the cultural and ideological sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Wagnerism rapidly spread throughout Europe, partly because of Wagner's propagandizing talent and the zeal of his adherents. But the main reason for his ascendance was the sudden appearance of what the century had desperately tried to produce since the beginnings of Romanticism - a work of art on the scale of great Greek and Christian art. Finally, here it was, the secret of what Hegel called the "religion of art" rediscovered. The first two scenes of the book, contemporary with the European triumph of Wagnerism, inscribe themselves in a historical sequence that is punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, in which the universal unbridling of nations and classes is prefigured. The second two register certain effects of Wagnerism that are not just ideological but make themselves felt in a new political configuration that solidifies a confusion between the "national" and the "social." Art and politics are both at play here, but as neither a politics of art nor, even less, an art of politics. Instead, what is at stake, more gravely, is the aestheticization, the figuration, of the political. The four scenes frame and clarify the "true scene" that sanctioned Nietzsche's rupture with Wagner, the major philosophical event that Heidegger, in1938, said it was imperative to understand as a turning point in Western history.

From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.

Wagner was more than a composer--he was a cultural phenomenon. The author seeks to explain this phenomenon. One claim is that Wagner's music dramas served to provide encouragement and inspiration to Victorians struggling with the problems of a changing and challenging era. Intellectual developments (including the theories of Charles Darwin and the impact of historical scholarship on Biblical studies) had struck a severe blow against religious orthodoxy. Thus, the English strove to retain their inherited or instinctive beliefs and at the same time to accept the conclusions of natural and social science. Frustrated by the academic arguments, many persons turned to less intellectual substitutes, including Wagnerism. Almost all of Wagner's plots involve some form of redemption and hunger for the infinite. The author also claims that Wagnerism drew on the Victorian need for social justice, and points out that just as many Wagnerians sought emancipation from confining materialist philosophies or simply delighted in sexual liberation.

Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried. Parsifal. Tristan und Isolde. Both revered and reviled, Richard Wagner conceived some of the nineteenth century’s most influential operas—and created some of the most indelible characters ever to grace the stage. But over the course of his polarizing career, Wagner also composed volumes of essays and pamphlets, some on topics seemingly quite distant from the opera house. His influential concept of Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art”—famously and controversially offered a way to unify the different media of an opera into a coherent whole. Less well known, however, are Wagner’s strange theories on sexuality—like his ideas about erotic acoustics and the metaphysics of sexual difference. Drawing on the discourses of psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, and other emerging fields of study that informed Wagner’s thinking, Adrian Daub traces the dual influence of Gesamtkunstwerk and eroticism from their classic expressions in Tristan und Isolde into the work of the generation of composers that followed, including Zemlinsky, d’Albert, Schreker, and Strauss. For decades after Wagner’s death, Daub writes, these composers continued to grapple with his ideas and with his overwhelming legacy, trying in vain to write their way out from Tristan’s shadow.

100 key writings from spanning across thirty years of the acclaimed New Yorker art critic’s career. Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light collects 100 key writings by Peter Schjeldahl spinning thirty years, his last twenty as the art critic of the New Yorker. In this unfailingly lucid guide to an art world in constant, dramatic flux, Schjeldahl addresses new artists and Old Masters with the same pitch of acuity, empathy, and wit. No other writer enhances the reader’s experience of art in precise, jargon-free prose as he does, with reviews that are as much essay as criticism. Implicit in Schjeldahl’s role as a frontline critic is a focus on artists, issues, and events of urgent relevance to the culture at large. Holt, Cold, Heavy, Light tells us why we still care about Rembrandt and Mantegna, Matisse and Picasso; takes the measure of contemporaries Basquiat and Holzer, Polke and Kiefer, Sherman and Koons; introduces us to newcomers Kerry James Marshall and Laura Owens; and salutes rediscoveries of Florine Stettheimer, Hélio Oiticica, and Peter Hujar. The book provides essential knowledge to anyone curious about the character, quality, and consequence of art today. The pieces in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light were compiled and arranged by the critic Jarrett Earnest, with an ear attuned to Schjeldahl’s range of voices. “The effect of reading him in depth, over time,” Earnest says in his introduction, “is like that of great literature. You come away not only with new insights and ideas, but with a feeling of having been granted an extra life.” “This is a rapturous read for art lovers and all who appreciate dynamic critical essays,” —Booklist “Bruce is no longer The Boss; Peter Schjeldahl is! Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light is the apex of artistic criticism and commentary,” —Steve Martin “The great New Yorker art critic writes like an angel about everyone from Vermeer to Picasso, Donatello to Andy Warhol, in beautiful, enjoyable, accessible essays across 30 years,” —Philadelphia Inquirer

This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music - from fugue to Romantic opera - on Woolf's prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music's role in Woolf's aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her 'musicalized' work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawr

Joseph Kerman is one of the most eminent, wide ranging, and readable of today's writers on music. Admirers of his many books - on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music - will find much to interest them in this collection of essays, taken from general journals, such as the Hudson Review and the New York Review of Books, as well as more specialized publications.

In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.