What Would Wagner Think if He Showed Up at Berout and Heard Some of the Playing?

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Wagner was always a dramatist as a composer and the words mattered a great deal to him. He felt that something was lost when they just became orchestral show pieces. Take for example, the the end of rhingold, the entry of the gods into valhalla. Its grandiose, splendid, kind of not quite uplifting, but it's just very energizing. It makes you feel grand and important listening to it....

To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. “When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music,” says the veteran music journalist and staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, explores the complicated legacy of Wagner, as well as how music shapes and is shaped by its cultural context.

Alex joined Tyler to discuss the book, what gets lost in the training of modern opera singers, the effect of recording technology on orchestras, why he doesn’t have “guilty pleasures,” how we should approach Wagner today, the irony behind most uses of “Ride of the Valkyries” in cinema, his favorite Orson Welles film, his predictions for concert attendance after COVID-19, why artistic life in Europe will likely recover faster than in America, Rothko’s influence on composer Morton Feldman, his contender for the greatest pop album ever made, how his Harvard dissertation on James Joyce prepared him for a career writing about music, and more.

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Recorded August 20th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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