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

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 ...

No one has ever been able to explain exactly why Richard Wagner had such a shuddering impact ... Old French poem of that title, which was written jointly by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...