Volume 32, Number 1 · January 31, 1985
Klingsor's Apprentices
By James Joll
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics
edited by David C. Large, edited by William Weber, edited by Anne Dzamba Sessa
Cornell University Press, 361 pp., $14.95 (paper)
'People who start to think about Wagner too much go crazy,' the composer's great-granddaughter recently remarked to an interviewer. And indeed it is hard to think of any artist who has had so widespread and disturbing an influence. His music has inspired terror as much as affection. Puccini talked of 'this terrible music [that] destroys us and ends in nothing.' The Russian poet Alexander Blok called Wagner 'a summoner and invoker of ancient chaos.' This interesting volume of six essays with an introduction and conclusion traces some of the ramifications of Wagnerism both as an organized movement and as an artistic and intellectual influence in several countries. During Richard Wagner's lifetime and for a generation after his death. Wagnerism was a movement with implications that went far beyond the wall of the opera houses of the world, and the debate about the meaning of his symbolism and the interpretation of his works has never ceased.
Review, 2678 words
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