Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword by Slavoj Zizek situates Adorno’s reflections within present debates over Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the moral status of his work, proving why this book remains one of the most important character studies of the twentieth century.

“An astonishing book, comparable only to the later Wagner tracts by Nietzsche . . . essential reading for anyone seriously involved with the composer, and now we can read it thanks to a superior translation by Rodney Livingstone.” — New York Review of Books

“A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature.”– Susan Sontag



Theodor W. Adorno was director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death in 1969. His works include Minima Moralia, Quasi una Fantasia, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics and (with Max Horkheimer) Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Publication
May 2009

Series
Radical Thinkers

176 pages

Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 344 5
US$12.95 / £6.99 / CAN$16