Book cover of Wagnerism

Book description

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics―an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Wagnerism as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I knew Wagner was a big deal, but I had no idea how big a deal. What a superstar he was in his day, the range of his influence, how innovative he was. The research for this book was prodigious and somehow it never drags. I don't remember a bad sentence in this whole very long book. There's a reason Alex Ross is music critic for The New Yorker.

All the myths about Wagner, half remembered, half picked up from pop culture and black and white images of Hitler or women with horned helmets - overturned! Amazing work of historical archeology which uncovers Wagner at the very bedrocks of our modern culture.

If you love Wagnerism...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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