Livros - Wagner

 

When Michael Dirda first heard Wagner, he understood why Victorian mothers shielded their daughters from it. "This wasn’t just a 40-minute duet, it was aural sex"

If ever there was a moment for Richard Wagner, it is 2020

By Michael Dirda

Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music,”

In Wagner’s operas, sums up Ross, “we see the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled.” In “Wagnerism,” however, those impulse — aesthetic, sexual, philosophical and political — are deftly untangled, then enticingly presented for the general reader. The result is a superb example of cultural history and, given its themes, a work surprisingly relevant to this plague-ridden, watershed year.