Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite ... is outpaced only by figures like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare in the number of books written about him in the Library of Congress, and, as W.H. Auden put ...

You cannot escape Richard ... book, “Wagnerism,” presents this particular “ism” as an overwhelming force containing, like atomic energy, constructive and destructive powers. Underscoring ...

Alex Ross’s capacious and enthralling new study, “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music,” is perfectly timed. Richard Wagner’s music, particularly that for his epic, doom ...

For some, Richard Wagner is infamous as the favorite composer of Hitler, who seems to have admired Wagner as an early exponent of his own racist ideology and worldview. Impressed by this assumption ...

Were it not for him we would have neither Mahler nor Debussy, nor for that matter Gershwin or Richard Rodgers. But Wagner’s music itself is not Ross’s topic here. Instead, this is “a book ...

HITLER CASTS as long a shadow over Richard Wagner as Wagner casts over art. So argues Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, in his gigantic new book, “Wagnerism”. Fifty years after ...

As an undergraduate composition student in the 1990s, I barely encountered Richard Wagner ... to emphasize that this is a book about Wagnerism, not Wagner, which is a little like talking about ...