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In the introduction to his study of Wagnerism, Alex Ross borrows a striking parable. He compares this movement and perhaps even its founder Wagner himself to a black hole. Its unimaginable attraction affects everything in its surroundings, pulls in and devours the objects that happen to be in its vicinity, and curves the travel lines for those who are too far away or themselves have too strong a mass to avoid the power of Wagnerism itself. What makes this parable more ingenious than Ross himself seems to understand is that it is next to impossible to study a black hole as a "thing in itself." The darkness and gravity are so strong that the gaze cannot capture the object itself. Instead, we are left to study its effect on the environment. It is this approach that makes Ross' book on Wagnerism succeed in avoiding the classic trap of the discord between form and content in this magnificent study. By building up his book in fragmented studies of other phenomena that are stuck in its gravitational field, we can slowly but surely form our own picture of the subject in question.

The first chapter of the book is what gives us the most insight into the movement's father Wagner himself and deals with his relationship with Nietzsche and how Wagner influenced him. This is also where we come closest to Wagner's own time and thinking, even though his personal life, writings and music are treated throughout the book. It is full of the different ways in which Wagner revolutionized not only the music but the cultures and other practices around him. From his way of using Nietzsche as a personal publicist (something that, according to Ross, has not occurred in a similar way before) to his way of carefully controlling his own brand and image. The rest of the book deals with various objects that were drawn into the cultural maelstrom that his music and thinking unleashed on values. From the way in which writers such as Baudelaire, Joyce, Wolff and Prust's literature were influenced by it to the black opposition to racism in the United States, from Nazism's complicated relationship with Wagner to how the movement was involved in shaping left - wing anti-capitalism in both Germany and Russia. From movies like apocalypse now to science fiction writers like Arthur C Clarke. Ross brings the reader on an odyssey in cultural history which does not shy away any subjects and really shows how the Wagnerian revolution is still with us today.

According to Ross, what then created this attraction in Wagner? Even if it is not said outright, or at least not developed as much as I would have liked, it is clear to the author that Wagner was a reaction to the cold and bare aristocratic rationalism of the Enlightenment. A burning hatred of capitalism and the pharaonic inequality and industrialization of the lower classes was a hearth in Wagner's world. So was the hatred of the way industrialism shattered both nature and human life. Packed cities full of desperate people reduced to cogs in an industrial machine whose sole purpose was to make a profit for an elite. At the same time, this pathos was paired with a contempt for the demystification of values ​​where the clinical light of enlightenment peeled away all romance and all values ​​beyond the cold profit. The answer was for Wagner the romantic, as for so many others a return to a mystified host, but not to Christianity but to the classic national myths, of course this fairly common mixture of romance and anti-capitalism is closely associated with Wagner's ardent anti-Semitism. Something that Ross fortunately did not shy away from in the least.

Wagner and Wagnerism response to the enlightened slaughterhouse where everything is dissected into smaller and smaller pieces was to try to create an art that housed more than just the music. An art that could encompass the entire human being. Both the intellect, the mysticism, politics and different art orientations in one.

What, then, created the traction of this art and its creator? Ross gives no simple answer. Which is admirable if anything. Instead, he focuses on how this leap of artistic and intellectual tendencies came to spread and change everything around him, right up to the present day. From politics to art. Low and high. The closest explanation we can glimpse form between the lines is that there were aspects of Wagner that everyone could use. From Baldwin, du Bois and Kropotkin to Hitler and later everyone else. The main problem with Ross' book is that it unfortunately does not focus enough on the material upheavals that enabled both Wagner's art and, perhaps more importantly, its spread throughout the world. But with that said, there are small grains of this here and that in the book, and that one wants more of it, of this indispensable book for those who want to understand culture, politics and intellectual development during both the 1800s and 1900s, is a higher grades than I give most other books.