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Conversations with tyler is produced by the mercatus center at george mason university, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Alex ross: There are a great many wonderful wagner voices to day but there's always a little bit of dearth in one category or another. We never seem to be at the moment where now there are sit surfeit of outstanding voices for every roll. i think this comes up throughout opera, not just in wagner. The high technical quality of voices to day, but it's not so easy to in this total expressive conviction,. whether in wagner or orverdi or or mozart....

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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