Wagner as Man & Artist

Ernest Newman brings his formidable critical intelligence to the most divisive figure in Western music history. This isn't hagiography or hit piece; it's a rigorous, psychologically acute reckoning with a man whose genius was inseparable from his profound contradictions. Newman traces Wagner's trajectory from impoverished revolutionary to Bayreuth's iron-fisted patriarch, drawing extensively on the composer's own voluminous writings and letters to let him speak while maintaining critical distance. The result reveals both the staggering ambition behind works that transformed opera forever and the troubling personal history that shadowed that achievement. What emerges is neither the monster nor the martyr, but a human being of extraordinary complexity whose art somehow contained it all. For anyone seeking to understand how a single artist could reshape an entire art form while remaining deeply, stubbornly, fascinatingly flawed.