Alex Ross is the most wide-ranging of culture critics. In his more than two decades at The New Yorker, his subjects have ranged from the world of the classical-music conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to the career and travails of Nirvana’s driving genius, the late Kurt Cobain. Ross has published three books, including “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.” His latest is “Wagnerism,” a brilliant, magisterial work of cultural history that makes the case (in the most elegant and fascinating terms) that no artist left a deeper influence on his era and the era that followed than the composer Richard Wagner. (Ross also wrote about the topic in the magazine.)
This week, we’re bringing you a selection of Ross’s New Yorker pieces, and his immense versatility is immediately evident. In “Song of the Earth,” Ross writes about the composer John Luther Adams, whose recent work has been inspired by the Arctic landscape. In “Love on the March,” he reflects on the progress of gay rights over the past several decades. In “Secret Passage,” he explores the complexities of Wagner’s masterpiece “Ring” cycle. In “The Wanderer,” he profiles Bob Dylan in late career and on the road. “Othello’s Daughter” is an acute examination of the Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge. In “How American Racism Influenced Hitler,” he chronicles how early-twentieth-century racial politics in the U.S. helped shape Nazi ideology. Finally, in “The Shadow,” Ross recounts the highs and lows of the career of Orson Welles. We hope you’ll enjoy these glimpses of Alex Ross at work and at his very best.
A composer takes inspiration from the Arctic.
Reflections on the gay community’s political progress—and its future.
Decoding ten bars in Wagner’s “Ring.”
Decades of Dylanology have missed the point—the music is the message.
The rich legacy of Ira Aldridge, the pioneering black Shakespearean.
Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.
A hundred years of Orson Welles.
