Wagnerism: Art and politics in the shadow of music, as Ross’s title suggests, is an examination of the profound effect that Wagner had on world culture rather than a study of the man and his music. However, there is plenty of discussion of the operas and changing approaches to their staging, particularly at Bayreuth. The book is certainly ‘Wagnerian’ in scope and ambition. Nietzsche, agonising about his turbulent relationship with the composer, admitted: ‘Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.’ Three main legacies of Wagner to the future emerge: the Gesamtkunstwerk; the stream of consciousness; and the juxtaposition of myth and modernity.

Ross asserts that Wagner ‘cast his strongest spell on the artists of silence – novelists, poets, and painters who envied the collective storms of feeling that he could unleash in sound’. Prominent authors are woven throughout his narrative. Wagnerian motifs inflect Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), while Wagner saturates Thomas Mann’s brief masterpiece Death in Venice (1912). Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915) is emblematic of a slew of novels about singers with Wagner’s operas as the performative focus: ‘In the annals of literary Wagnerism, Willa Cather occupies a category of her own. Among major authors, only Thomas Mann knew his Wagner better, and he lacked Cather’s acumen on the subject of singers.’

Richard Wagner in Munich in 1871 (Franz Hanfstaengl/Wikimedia Commons)

The list of early twentieth-century authors influenced by Wagner is long: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and others. Proust ‘came of age in a period when aspiring aesthetes were Wagnerites almost by default’. Much of this discussion is entertaining and illuminating, displaying Ross’s deep immersion in this literary world. However, he does tend to go off on tangents, minutely detailing arcane twists of novelistic plots that have a rather attenuated relevance to his broader Wagnerian theme.

Two landmark modernist literary works of 1922 – T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s monumental Ulysses – are mined in some depth for their Wagnerian resonances. Woolf, too, is prominent: ‘The Waves stands as Woolf’s chief attempt to match the “overwhelming unity,” the “utmost calm and intensity,” the “smooth stream at white heat” that she discerned in Parsifal in 1909.’

Ross is good at explaining much of the swirling polemic surrounding Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism, including the heated and continuing debate as to whether his odious views fatally ‘infect’ the operas. Ross concludes – perhaps frustratingly for some but ultimately fairly – that this question still remains open. Contrary to popular perception, Wagner was not the property of the right: ‘socialists, communists, social democrats, and anarchists all found sustenance in Wagner’s work [which] became a dream theater for the imagination of a future state’. They included George Bernard Shaw who saw ‘no conflict between Wagner’s Romantic mythology and Marx’s historical materialism’.

Today, for many audiences the primary contact with Wagner is through film music. Prominent in contemporary film music techniques is the use of a system of leitmotifs that provide a kind of ‘sonic carpet ... endless melody by the yard’. Perhaps the most celebrated direct use of Wagner in film is ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), which is subjected to a clear-eyed, scathing analysis by Ross. The scene was intended as a ‘grand indictment of American hubris’, but soon became ‘a military fetish object ... influencing real-life behavior’, undergoing an ‘astonishing cultural transformation as an anthem of American supremacy’, one where the ‘German will to power gives way to God-bless-America imperialism’. Ross further observes: ‘Modern Hollywood often casts supervillains and serial killers as classical-music fans; the equation of Wagner and Hitler encouraged this durable shorthand.’

In recent times, the Star Wars franchise has ballooned out to nine films – the whole enterprise was described as Wagnerian from the outset. John Williams’s scores have, as Ross notes, developed over sixty distinct leitmotifs. Casting his eye over the filmic fantasy genre, Ross argues that it ‘shows that the urge to sacralize culture, to transform aesthetic pursuits into secular religion and redemptive politics, did not die out with the degeneration of Wagnerian Romanticism into Nazi kitsch’.

Ross’s postlude, seven hundred densely packed pages later, is a moving description of his own early troubled life and Wagner’s increasingly important part in it: ‘Many people have gone away from Wagner feeling uplifted, empowered, aggrandized. For me, he has more often brought revelations of my stupidity, my self-pity, my absurdity – in other words, my humanity.’ This might well be the experience of many. His final reflection is sobering, thought-provoking, and poetic:

When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.

This is a sometimes frustrating, at times even maddening, but always exhilarating and profoundly impressive, stylishly written book. Occasionally, the excavations of little-known aspects of Wagnerism appear gratuitous, but Wagnerism is a work of prodigious scholarship and deep understanding of the subject, garnered from a staggering variety of sources over a period of twelve years: well worth the time investment.