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The chaotic posthumous cult that came to be known as Wagnerism was by no means a purely or even primarily musical event. It traversed the entire sphere of the arts.
-Alex Ross

Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit!
-Elmer Fudd

One of Alex Ross' previous books, The Rest is Noise, was a broad tour through the world of modern classical music. Chapters were devoted to movements or individual composers and their works, and how they inspired generations of future artists -- but Wagner gets his own book. He has "Wagnerism", where other composers might not have their own "isms".

Wagner passes away less than 200 pages in, and nearly all the text is devoted to the "shadow of music", or how Wagner's own techniques in composition, staging, mythology, and depiction of emotion influenced a bewildering array of other artists, writers, and thinkers. His use of the leitmotif may be the ancestor of the use of music in film - where Leni Reifenstahl used Wagner in the Triumph of the Will, Charlie Chaplin used him to mock Hitler. Ross is sure to include other musicians, but also - in this music critics' phrase - the "artists of silence" - poets, writers, and painters.

Wagner's appeal was broad, and Ross's telling of this is almost overwhelming. It would be easy to say that the book in this way almost resembles a performance of Wagner, with a bombardment of facts. His popularity was astonishing. At his height, tens of thousands of concerts of his works were played in a decade. Imagine anybody who's music was played live that much. The performances at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus drew devotees from all over the continent and the United States. They are of all classes and backgrounds - from middle-class ladies to such figures as W.E.B. DuBois or Theodor Herzl.

Much of the book is devoted to Wagner's enduring and broad influence across generations of artists. Baudelaire, the French poet, saw in him a gift for the otherworldly, an understanding of dreams. Artists from the French Symbolists to high modernists, from Willa Cather to James Joyce, saw something in him. Not everybody who heard him was a fan, of course. W.H. Auden thought he was not respectable as a person and Mark Twain felt out of place at Bayreuth, like a "heretic in heaven". Yet Ross also, in his wide scope of searching for Wagner's devotees and listeners, finds some on the radical left, of a few brief visits by Mikhail Bakunin, and of his association with gay camp and lesbians who took on the iconography of Brünnhilde. Unavoidably, there is also the intersection between Wagner's art and his politics. As we leave the 19th and move on to the 20th century, Wagnerism takes on sinister connotations.

Wagner's own disgusting anti-Semitism looms over his life and art, and Ross to his credit does not avoid or deny it. Wagner's distinct aesthetics and eccentric lifestyle would have made him a pariah or an unreliable element in Nazi Germany, but his gleeful use by the Third Reich and the extreme right is his "Nosferatu shadow", and the retread of his own prejudices and of his appropriation by some of the worst evil in human history.

That said, Ross goes on to say that "Wagner served the Nazi state only when he was shorn of his ambiguities," and it was partly due to this own rewriting of his story and his own family's complicity that the Third Reich had gone so far in its identification with him as it did. Attempts to mandate Wagner into the life of Nazi Germany were unsuccessful. Soldiers of the Wehrmacht who were given tickets to the opera did as you'd expect soldiers to act. They sold the tickets for beer money or fell asleep in the seats. It would be too easy to say: First Wagner, then Hitler. Ross is right to assert you'd be better off looking at all the history of the West to find where Hitler came from.

Wagner has "near-infinite malleability", and interpretations of his work defy easy categorization or description. His legacy is beyond the "chaotic posthumous cult" of what "Wagnerism" was in the late 19th century, and ranges from the heights of idealism to the worst of concealed hatred. Ross takes us on a grand lecture tour of them all, and shows the composer and the artist, through his vast, conflicted, ongoing legacy.