Narrator: How could the same music inspire both Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and Adolf Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust? How could one composer’s work become a touchstone for French Symbolists, British feminists, Russian revolutionaries, and the American Western, while also serving as the unofficial soundtrack to the Third Reich? This is the central, bewildering paradox of Richard Wagner, an artist whose influence radiated, and continues to radiate, with both creative and destructive energy. In his monumental book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, author Alex Ross embarks on a sweeping investigation to unravel this complex legacy, revealing how Wagner’s art became a vast, often distorted, mirror reflecting the aspirations, contradictions, and deepest horrors of the modern world.

Narrator: Richard Wagner’s art was forged in the fires of revolution. His monumental four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, was not merely a fantasy epic but a profound critique of power, capitalism, and social decay, deeply rooted in the political turmoil of his time. This is best understood through his direct actions. In May 1849, Wagner was not just a composer but an active revolutionary. During the Dresden uprising, he was seen generating propaganda, procuring arms, and even shouting, "War and always war," alongside the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. When the uprising was crushed, Wagner fled into exile, a fugitive from the very systems of power he sought to dismantle.

During this exile, his vision for the Ring transformed. Initially fueled by revolutionary zeal, his discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy in 1854 introduced a deep strain of pessimism. The focus shifted from political liberation to a more metaphysical exploration of the insatiable, destructive "Will" that governs existence. This is felt in the anguish of the god Wotan, who cries, "I am the saddest of all living things!" as he confronts his own powerlessness. Wagner’s ambition was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a "total work of art" that synthesized music, myth, politics, and philosophy to address the fundamental questions of human nature.

Narrator: The intellectual drama between Wagner and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most significant in modern cultural history. Initially, Nietzsche was Wagner’s most brilliant and fervent admirer, seeing the composer as a cultural savior who could revitalize a decadent Europe. He became a frequent visitor to Wagner’s home, almost a surrogate son, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was a philosophical tribute to Wagner's genius.

However, this adoration curdled into profound disillusionment. The turning point came at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Nietzsche arrived expecting a sacred artistic ritual but instead found a commercialized spectacle. He saw tacky merchandise, with Wagner's face on beer mugs, and an audience of "idle European riff-raff" more interested in social sport than art. He fled the festival in disgust, feeling that "The Wagnerian had become the master of Wagner!" This experience solidified his break from the composer. For Nietzsche, Wagner came to represent the very sickness of modernity he sought to overcome. Yet, even in his fiercest critiques, Nietzsche could never fully escape Wagner's shadow, famously admitting, "Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian." Their relationship was a true agon—a contest of love and hate that was essential for Nietzsche's own philosophical self-formation.

Narrator: While Wagner faced resistance, his music became a powerful catalyst for the artistic avant-garde, particularly in France. The infamous "Tristan chord," with its unresolved, ambiguous harmony, captured a sense of "insatiable longing" that resonated deeply with Symbolist artists and writers. No one embodied this connection more than the poet Charles Baudelaire. After attending a Wagner concert in Paris, Baudelaire experienced a "conversion," describing a "truly sensual enjoyment" that felt like "rising in the air or tossing on the sea."

In his influential 1861 essay, Baudelaire defended Wagner against conservative critics, reframing him as the "truest representative of modernity." He celebrated the "decadent" qualities of the music, seeing its unbridled passion not as a moral failing but as a "satanic religion" of desire. This interpretation opened the floodgates. Wagner's concept of "endless melody" inspired poets to experiment with free verse and the interior monologue. Painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin sought to translate his emotional intensity into color and form, with Van Gogh aspiring to create "an art of consolation for broken hearts" just as Wagner's music had done. Wagnérisme, as the movement became known, provided a framework for artists to challenge convention and explore the inner worlds of dreams, desire, and the subconscious.

Narrator: When Wagnerism crossed the Atlantic, it was adapted and transformed to fit the cultural landscape of Gilded Age America. On one hand, his music was domesticated. The "Bridal Chorus" from Lohengrin, which in the opera precedes a tragic separation, was stripped of its context and became the ubiquitous soundtrack for happy weddings. Children’s books sanitized his complex myths, with one author, Florence Akin, rewriting the fiery, self-immolating finale of the Ring so that Siegfried and Brünnhilde both survive and "hurry, worry, falsehood, greed, and envy vanished from the earth."

On the other hand, Wagner's heroic archetypes were appropriated to create a new American mythology. Author Owen Wister, a fervent Wagnerite, saw the rugged American West through a Wagnerian lens. In his 1902 novel, The Virginian, he created the archetypal cowboy hero—a lone, noble figure who was explicitly compared to a medieval knight. This "American Siegfried" was a fusion of European mythic grandeur and American frontier individualism. However, this appropriation was often intertwined with the problematic racial ideologies of the era, with Wister using his narrative to promote a vision of "Aryan birthright" and white supremacy, demonstrating how Wagner's myths could be used to reinforce national narratives, for better and for worse.

Narrator: The most toxic and enduring part of Wagner's legacy is his virulent antisemitism and the Nazi regime's subsequent appropriation of his work. Wagner's 1850 essay, "Jewishness in Music," was a landmark in racialized hatred, arguing that Jews were incapable of true artistic creation. This ideology became deeply intertwined with the Bayreuth Festival, especially after his death. By the 1920s, the festival had become a hotbed of German nationalism, and Hitler, a lifelong Wagner obsessive, found a welcoming home there.

Hitler strategically leveraged Wagner's legacy to legitimize the Nazi movement. He saw himself as a Wagnerian hero—a Siegfried or a Parsifal—destined to save Germany. He cultivated a close relationship with the Wagner family, particularly Winifred Wagner, and made Bayreuth a centerpiece of Nazi cultural propaganda. The grand, march-like chorus "Wach auf!" from Die Meistersinger was played at the massive Nuremberg rallies, its call to honor "holy German art" twisted into a slogan for racial purity. Nazi propaganda films like The Eternal Jew explicitly quoted Wagner's antisemitic writings to justify genocide. While the extent to which Wagner's music was played in the death camps is debated, his ideology was undeniably a cornerstone of the culture that perpetrated the Holocaust.

Narrator: After 1945, the world had to grapple with Wagner's "damaged oeuvre." At Bayreuth, his grandsons Wieland and Wolfgang initiated the "New Bayreuth" style, stripping the operas of their Teutonic trappings and presenting them in abstract, minimalist stagings to de-Nazify them. This launched a new era of Regietheater, or director's theater, where productions often offer radical reinterpretations—from Marxist critiques of capitalism to environmentalist "eco-parables."

Simultaneously, the trauma of his legacy remains raw. The unofficial ban on performing Wagner's music in Israel, born from the pain of Holocaust survivors, stands as a powerful testament to this wound. A 1981 attempt by conductor Zubin Mehta to play Tristan was met with shouts of "Concentration camp music!" and a survivor baring his scarred stomach, challenging Mehta to "Play Wagner over my body." This unresolvable conflict—the simultaneous existence of profound artistic beauty and abhorrent ideology—is the essence of Wagnerism.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Wagnerism is that art is never pure. It does not exist in a vacuum, but is instead a powerful, malleable force that is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the society that creates and consumes it. Wagner's work, more than any other, demonstrates this truth. His legacy is not a settled verdict but an "eternal agon"—an ongoing struggle that forces us to confront the most difficult questions about culture, politics, and human nature.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge: what is our responsibility when faced with a work of undeniable genius created by a deeply flawed and hateful man? To simply cancel Wagner is to ignore his immense influence on the very fabric of our culture. To embrace him uncritically is to sanitize a toxic legacy. The true task, as Alex Ross suggests, is to engage with the whole, to look into Wagner's art as a "magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species" and confront the reflection of both what we love and what we hate in ourselves.