How did Wagner’s art become a proving ground where the Western world has wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence?
For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Artist like Woolf, Mann, Duncan and Buñuel saw him as a kindred spirit. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers did as well. Then with the rise of Nazi Germany, the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism.
Join Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s music critic, in this interdisciplinary survey of geniuses, madmen, charlatans and prophets who have battled over Wagner’s many-sided legacy.
The format of each session will be a talk by Ross followed by student questions via Zoom’s chat feature.
Oct 14: Introduction to Wagner’s life and work Oct 21: Wagner in France: Baudelaire, Symbolism, modern painting Oct 28: Wagner and modernist literature: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Mann Nov 4: Jewish and African-American Wagnerism: Herzl, Schnitzler, Du Bois Nov 11: Wagner and Nazi Germany Nov 18: Wagner in Hollywood and Wagner today
Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music can be purchased from bookshop.org.
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Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music, is “astoundingly erudite, scrupulous, generous, profound, objective and engaged, and enormously entertaining,” writes Tony Kushner. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts ...
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music, is “astoundingly erudite, scrupulous, generous, profound, objective and engaged, and enormously entertaining,” writes Tony Kushner. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.
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