A Brief Wagner Corrective

Although it hardly meets the burden of its title, Alex Ross's newly posted article for The New Yorker's Culture Desk section, "The Case For Wagner In Israel", is a brief but incisive commentary that ought to be read by all whose understanding of Wagner is mired in the pop image of this complex artist as a composer of music characterized by "grandiosity, bombast, anything that makes a loud noise and goes on for a very long time," as Mr. Ross put it, and that he was Hitler’s favorite composer.

The artist who fired the imaginations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Cather, Kandinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Eisenstein, among hundreds of others, cannot be summed up in a few adjectives.

[...]

Wagner must take some of the blame for the reductionist image that prevails in the public mind. It was his spiteful anti-Semitism that has caused so many people to draw a straight line from the “Ring of the Nibelung” to Hitler.

Read the full text here.