This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing from my Heart radio. That is, of course, the Prelude to Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sergio Zawa. My guest today. Alex Ross is the author of Wagnerism, Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, about the life and work of German composer Richard Wagner. Alex Ross has been the music critic at The New Yorker since nine and at The New York Times before that. While his beat is classical music, he writes on a wide ranging number of subjects, from opera to avant garde, Kurt Cobain to Bob Dylan, all alongside essays on history, art, film and literature. He's a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, cited by the Foundation for his ability to offer quote new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future unquote, with his deep knowledge of music history. I wanted to know how Alex Ross saw popular music fitting into the pantheon of culture against past illustrious genres. Well, I think there is kind of a natural life cycle with genres as they unfold over time that eventually their their past can begin to overshadow their present. You know, if you if you look at the history of jazz, you know, and the emergence of this jazz classicism in recent decades, where you know, kids go to music schools and and and study jazz and sort of learn how to play Ellington the same way generations of conservatory students have have learned Beethoven and Brahms, and so there's that kind of classical mentality, which yeah, I think can sort of overcome any art form. And it's tricky, you know, because I think that the fires of invention are alive in every genre all the time, and they remain alive in quote unquote classical music as well. And so the kind of seduction of the past, for me as a critic and also just as a listener, is something to be you know, it's inescapable, and I love all the music of the past, but for me it's also something to be resisted, you know, because you you sort of have to pay attention to what's going on now, and you know there is in every genre sort of always also that completely new kind of feelings. So it's kind of I mean, a lot of has to do with well, what's getting marketed, you know, what's getting marketed as kind of new music now in pop music, and I think a lot of that is just kind of market driven and not necessarily paying attention to where the real originality is. And so you know, if something is just being sort of shoved down your throats so kind of relentlessly, people will, Yeah, people will tend to kind of go back to the past because they have a sort of freedom. This is kind of wonderful freedom for like, I don't know if someone who's like fourteen years old now like choosing to become obsessed by by the Beatles, you know, And I think there's a joy in that, you know, in just in kind of taking ownership of the pa asked. And I think you can also like open you up to sort of new ideas in the present, Like once sort of engage with something that just seems from a totally different world, almost irrelevant to your own when it comes alive and just feel so urgent, then I think that just sort of changes your perspective on the present and opens you up to new possibilities. So so there's there's a real power also in and just disappearing into the past and kind of re emerging on the other side, and in real safety and security too, you know. I mean, I I found like I would look at popular music today and I neither listen to nor collect anything today. Nothing. I mean that the artists whose contemporary recording as I buy more regularly is Winton Marsalis. I mean I listened to classical music. Pretty much of my listening is classical music, or five percent, five percent of it might be jazz. The other ten percent is Beetles Stone Zeppelin, who from my pots smoking south Shore Long Island youth, you know, I mean that which these were are? I mean, whose neck exten all that kind of stuff. But another thing I thought about reading that Dylan article you wrote a while back, and I think about artists of their day, and certainly Dylan is by and large of his day and thoughtful. And I'm wondering if back then you wanted people to help you negotiate that new frontier we were in of learning the truth about the American government and our political process, and people did that, and they devoured a lot of thought provoking and political content in music and in films and stuff forth, and now we're in a place where people have a fatigue from that and they're like, I don't want to talk about that. I want love songs. It's almost like your audience is saying, I need my art art my artistic menu, my artistic reality to be easy and simple. Do you feel that way that's how the audience used it. I don't know. I mean, I think you're right in that you're just in the marketplace. You know, the sixties and seventies were just a really remarkably open moment in terms of themercial musical marketplace. A lot of voices came in who were not being kind of just unexpected voices, unexpected faces, being sort of allowed that that space to to speak to a really broad public. You know, if you just look at how Dylan, how his career developed at at Colombia, he put out a couple of records and they went nowhere, and and they just sort of waited around and sort of kind of they just let him go on making records even though he was getting very little attraction. And then suddenly he became Bob Dylan. Suddenly these this extraordinary phenomenon began. But there was a patience there to sort of sign up an unusual artist and and sort of let them develop. And I think that that kind of patience is much less common, you know, the idea that you would sign up an artist, give them some money and and sort of see what they come up with, you know, I mean now, and an artist gets signed today, like you know, they're they're already They've often already become super famous you know, on YouTube, on on TikTok. You know, they already have the audience, and so just kind of carving out the creative space. It's it's more uncommon. But yeah, the seventies, it was just remarkable how many albums were made where artists were just really exploring just in terms of themes, not just political themes, but also just spend the sounds, you know, the kind of sounds that that got explored. And yeah, I think maybe going back to the eighties, eighties and nineties, everything became you know, a bit more kind of straight and narrow in terms of what was going on. And then it is a celebrity, the power of celebrity and just how we mean the biggest problem I think in any arena is we just pay so much attention to just such a small number of artists, and so many other voices get crowded out. And it's just this winner takes all economy at the works in culture the way it works in in mainstream kind of worlds, and frankly it works in classical music too. You know, we have we have a few just celebrity artists in classical music who cog up too much attention and in factly the repertory you know, I mean, I think we we tend to play you know, a certain number of pieces over and over again. Yes, there are fantastic pieces, but there's so much more, you know, to be explored in the past and in the presence. People don't want to take a chance. Yeah, yeah, just people only buying tickets when they see just really familiar names, you know, on the on the program. So it's something to be pushed back against in class musical world, you know, as well as the kind of mainstream arena. It's just been kind of my proccupation, like from the start of the critic is just kind of all right, so you know, you know this like trying something new, try to break composer or sort of try kind of Alexander Zemlinsky, you know, instead of Maller. You know, they're just there are other options out there, and it's just this, It's what I get really excited about, you know, because I grew up and and I just first I devoured you know, Mozart, by Demon and Broms and divor Jack, you know, and then I started discovering more and more and just the ongoing excitement as always finding new music as well as of course kind of interesting new ways to perform the familiar music. But that's just kind of what I try to communicate on my writing is just try something new. Well. The thing about Dylan is that I'm always reminded of that line that people had about Olivier in my business. They said, if Olivier came around today, he'd be on a soap opera. They said they weren't quite sure that that really rich flavor of hisn't that rich quality that that that heightened sense of of the polished actor would have a place, Or you'd be the villain in Game of Thrones or something like that. When I look at Dylan, I think of him being of his time, and if he came around now, you know, where would he because there's a period of Dylan and not a lot of albums, but a couple of them that I just crave as music. You know, blood on the track because I crave desire, I crave I mean, there's cuts on that thing that I just can listen to again and again and again, and I have the highest amount of appreciation for those. And then there's a lot of it which is to me, it's just Dylan sounding like Dylan. When I discovered Dylan, and it was late, you know, because I had this strange development in terms of my taste where it was all classical, correct, all classical, and just all kind of eighteenth nineteenth century classical. I mean, I was just barely in the twentieth century. I listened to a little bit of mod or a little bit of sibilious. You know. That was as crazy as I got as a teenager. And then, you know, past the age of eighteen, I really started moving into the twentieth century in classical music, discovering modernism and then finally starting to listen to first jazz and then rock. But it still it took me a few years until I got around to Dylan, you know, because I just sort of dismissed him as this something from a different generation, of no interest. And then I was in Berlin in summer, never forget this, staying at a friend's apartment, and he had a few albums c d s, and I was just sort of looking for stuff to listen to um while I was working, and put on Highway sixty when we visited, and almost immediately became obsessed by it. You know it once, listen to it again. I listened to it, like, you know, ten more times that day, and after a couple of days, I started to memorize the lyrics, and you know it become obsessed. But when I started sort of looking at Dylan's career, it is the kind of career that you find in classgow music. He's always himself, but he goes through phases, he sort of matures, He takes unusual turns, He kind of scandalizes his audience at a certain point. You know, this kind of sort of plugging in, the kind of going electric moments disturbs his audience, the same way you know, Scherenberg and Stevinsky disturbed their audiences, you know, or late Beethoven for that matter. And the sort of these sort of ups and downs in terms of reputation. But at the same time, he's he's always kind of developing, he's always sort of growing as an artist, and and that is unusual. I think in the pop music arena, it's so hard to sustain. You know. It's not that people lack talent, I think just the marketplace. It's it's just so difficult to sort of keep your place in the marketplace and the sort of business in the industry while also sort of continuing to develop because people want you to keep doing the same thing over and over again, you know. And and the power of Dylan was to refuse to do the same thing over and over again, to go in new directions and to keep his place, and that just doesn't happen very often. I think there's just an incredible willpower they're not to give in and to sort of continue going in his own direction. But yeah, I just think we're lucky to be living at the time that this man is alive. You know, he's completely extraordinary talent um and just kind of will Like thousands, for thousands of years, people will still be talking about Bob Dylan. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, If you like conversations with insightful journalists, check out my interview with Alex Ross's colleague New Yorker editor David Remnick. The magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress the hell out of the reader. Unremittingly, it's like a band having a set list. If you do everything, it's all sixteenth notes from mentioning. So you got a divito? Or will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, invoice, and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility. Hear more of my conversation with David Remnick in our archives that Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, I talked to Alex Ross about one of the most important composers in the world, Ricard Wagner, and the dark specter of his anti Semitic views. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Alex Ross has been a music critic for three decades. I wanted to know how his line of work has evolved as our access to media has changed, the world has definitely changed, you know. I mean when I started out in the early nineties first writing for the New York Times is their most junior, very junior critic. There were just so many more of us, you know. I remember the world premiere of John Corleano's The Ghosts of Versailles the Meto, I mean I think they were they were seventy or eighty music critics from around the world, you know, attending that that performance. You know, I just had so many colleagues from different papers that I would see, you know at concerts, a latent Kerner from the Village Voice and Kyle Gann from the Village Voice, and people from the Post and the Daily News, and you know that someone was still writing a Terry teach Out was still writing back class music for a Time magazine. You know. So there were just a lot of us, you know, and now very often when to go to concerts, like I'm the only critic there, or it's just kind of one other, one other colleague, and that diminishes the power of criticism, I think, because I think the sort of critics have power and usefulness as a pack, you know, because no one wants like a single voice laying down the law in terms of what's good and what's not. But what you want is the conversation, the debate. You know, you want Pauli and k L and Andrew Sarah's yelling at each other, you know, and for the reader, you kind of triangulate your idea of what's actually going on from reading different critics and and you know, I usually agree with this person on such and such a thing, And so if as the field kind of empties out, we're losing our sort of ability to to really have an impact. But still, you know, we're still here, and and there's still a bunch of us here, and I think really critics still have a very big role to play. For me, it's never been about delivering a judgments. You know, it was a good or bad thumbs up, thumbs down, That's not what it's about. You know, my opinion kind of needs to be somewhere in the review, but it's not paramount. The first thing to do is just sort of convey the texture of of what happened, something that happened. You're a journalist, an event has taken place in musical form and you're reporting on it, but to give it context, to show well how did this concert compare to sort of a bunch of other sort of beet symphony performances of the past, you know, this new composer, where did they come from? How do they depart from sort of the given styles of the day, And that I think is really useful to the reader, just giving the sense of context and just starting a conversation. You know, let's just let's think about this music and talk about it. And in classical music, I think there's so many people who are experienced. They go to concerts all the time, they're very knowledgeable, but they don't they're kind of reluctant to say anything, you know, they're not sure sort of how to articulate, you know, what they've experienced. And so for me, I just always feel as I'm just kind of throwing a phrase out there to begin the conversation and to filter you know, I think there's just we're just being assaulted by so much information and so many just kind of possibilities, and so I'm just here sort of filtering out as best I can and seizing on a few things and saying, you know, try this. And I think that's that's a very important role. You know, you can get that in other ways, you can read the Amazon reviews and and sort of have you know, there are other people out there filtering. But I think kind of I've been doing this long enough that, you know, like to have experience. I have a kind of track record, and people kind of know what to expect a little bit when when they read our reviews, whether whether they agree with me or not, they kind of know where I'm coming from. And I think that's that is something that you can trust. So I hope we'll still be able to keep doing this, you know, for for a while longer. But you know, I feel very lucky to be where I am at the New Yorker and editors who really give me freedom to explore different areas. Many years ago, I was doing a film and I went off on location and just devoured Scott Berg's biography of Lindburg. I read the book in like three nights. Obviously, there were some things about Lindbergh that he discovered that he was very disturbed by his his isolationism and his uh anti Semitism or what have you. And ironically, the same thing relates to your book about Wagner. Was for people who don't know was Wagner known to be white supremacist anti Semitic. Was that common knowledge in his day or beyond? Or do people just suspect that for certain because of the company he kept. Oh no, it was very vocal. It was. It was in prints from eighteen fifty on. He wrote an essay in eighteen fifty Jewish Nous in Music. It was actually first published anonymously, but it became known that he was the author, and then almost twenty years later he reap published that essay under his own name eighteen sixty nine, and he was becoming just one of the most famous composers in the world. And he threw his reputation behind this repellent document and did not deviate from that, you know, from until the end of his life. What was he suggesting? He had the idea that you know that, of course anti Semitism had had existed, you know, for centuries, for for millennia. Wagner and they sort of had this religious basis. But Wagner was moving towards a more racial kind of idea. You know, it's sort of beyond the idea that that Jews could convert and and therefore solve whatever problem was deemed to exist with them. And Wagner was sort of moving towards this idea that well, there's a problem here that can't be solved because just you know, Jews are are inherently different from other people. And his thesis and that essay was that you could tell if Jewish people writing music, you could tell there was something off, there's something inauthentic, something we kind of seeped through. They can never master this language. Now, when you when you write a book, let's use the Wagner as an example. I would imagine that the process begins with just a mountain of reading. You're just doing nothing but reading in the beginning, and I was wondering whether are things that were disqualifying or the books you were going to write, or the biographies you were gonna write. And you started to get into it when you go maybe not, I don't want to write about this guy's life and this woman's life. Did you ever have that happen? Yeah, I mean Wagner does not. Yet Vagner does test your your There are moments you know when sort of sort of towards the end of the process, I really I got to the stage I was talking about Nazi Germany, and it is. It is horrifying, you know, to watch a film like The Eternal Jew, this absolutely disgusting propaganda film that the Goubbles made demonizing the Jews, and Wagner is quoted right right there at the beginning of the film as an authority, you know. And this was literally a film that was designed to make people comfortable with the idea of murdering Jews on mass was designed to sort of reduce Jews to a level of just sort of vermin, you know, literally, people, is this this entity that needed to be exterminated. So that was the function of the film, And there was Wagner being cited as an authority at the beginning of the film, as a as a great German cultural figure who would apparently approve of this undertaking, you know, horrifying, And you know you stop and think, well, you know, have I just gone sort of completely taken wrong turn here? But then you know, there are so many other aspects of of Wagner that that contradict that Nazi image. Like I said, they're very appealing aspects to his personality. You know, he was a clownish kind of human being who just ran around talking all the time, jumping around was was just sort of overflowing with with ideas and energies. Wagner was not this kind of cold, dogmatic figure. And I think when you look at the fact that Tator Herzel, the great Zionist loved Wagner's music, Artist Schnitzler W. E. B. Du Bois, the great Black civil rights Titanic intellectual figure, absolutely loved actions music and and so these figures found something in him. They not only enjoyed it, they found it inspiring to their their personal projects. And so there's that energy and Wagner which can really be turned in in any direction, and it can be turned toward evil, it can also be turned towards good. It can be just completely reinvented and and transplanted to two different kind of uh world entirely. Um, that's what art is, you know. I mean, just art goes out into the world and just kind of is subject to whatever people make of it. However people want to use it, whatever the creator intended. Uh, something completely different can be made out of it in ways that are sometimes really disturbing. But that's I think the fascination of the mystery of just how art works in the world. Music critic Alex Ross. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Hear Is the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Alex Ross talks to us about the amazing artists that have come back from failure and how they did it. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio. Writer Alex Ross ponders the big questions, including one of the deepest, the nature of art and how much of oneself must the artist put in their work? Yeah, and the joy of art, I think putting on masks and sort of playing different roles, and yeah, I think we do. And of course this has always been going on and art, you know, artists have always made art about themselves and restive, use their own experiences, and then the audience kind of, you know, reads into that that work and and it's sort of you know, finds the traces of the self that that the artist put there, you know. But then you also have I just feel like going back to the beginning of time, you know, whenever what we recognize as art first arose, it was not kind of you know, Jeff cave guy acting out, you know, whatever happened to him the previous day. It was him putting on a mask and and you know, becoming fooling everyone to thinking that that you know, the devil was in the cave with them, and that was the thrill of it. And so yeah, I think there is probably too much of this kind of autobiographical reading of art these days. And you know, for me, I just love getting lost in a work of art and getting lost in this in this other world. And it's somehow particularly thrilling when you know, I know that the artist has has sort of disappeared as well. It's not that I'm disappearing into the artist's world, is that he or she has created this new kind of sphere which is something that has never existed before, and and now we're being you know, invited into it. I mean just you know, look at the world of Schubert's music. You know, we don't know very much about Schubert. He just does not seem to have been a particularly remarkable person in a lot of ways. There's no one really remembered very much about Shubert. You know, he seems to have been this rather mousy guy. He was not brooding and mysterious and and it's kind of violent in his temperaments, you know, but he created these these worlds to become infinite, just kind of you know, the B flat major, the final Piano sonata where we're on this out on this huge landscape shadow we beautiful but also shadowy and goes on and on and and so that's what I love. I think in art is being transported and following the artist on some strange journey or like you know, Morton Feldman, Morton fun was this this hilarious guy who grew up in Queens talked to all the time just kind of just never shut up, dominated every every conversation was funny, you know, but also just kind of a lot you know. So it was just one of these guys. It's just a lot any about this music that is almost silent and moves very slowly and and just sort of hovers on the on the edge of silence. But it's just yeah, it's sort of he knew Rothko and his his music. He was writing what period inties, Yeah, sort of really the fifties and sixties, sort of the peak of his career. Fifties sixties seventies. He knew Rothko and and his music has I think there's a lot in common. Um, there's that with Rothko's paintings. There's one called roth Chapel, which is ordinarily beautiful piece. Yeah, he writed for the opening of the Rothko Chapel and then he performed by who was quartet or piano or orchestra. It is a sort of small group of instruments and chorus, wordless chorus. And yeah, it's this liminal music. It's sort of music that's just hovering on in a in a fog. But I find incredible beautiful. But what's what's fascinating about filament as a phenomenon is the music sounds nothing like it's it's It seems to have been created by a completely different person from who he presented himself, you know, in daily life. And that, Yeah, that kind of division fascinates me. That once he sat down at his desk, he created a world which had nothing to do with his his daily world. Well, my friend put this into context. He said that you become an artist when your career is over. Now, for some people, there's the embryonic artistic period. And remember that most actors and actresses and and performers or whatever and whatever field don't make it. They don't become commercially successful. Only five percent or something of the people in my union make a living as actors, and the rest it's a part time endeavor. And he said to me that you might have the beginnings and the and the scratchings of an artistic career, and then if you make it, then you go off into your career and the artistry stops. And I was devastated when I read that article. And you say, you know, the most googled aspect of wells career of the poemssan commercials, which we, of course we hear in this office in the studio. I was regaling them with stories about how I would my friends were in on the gag on the set of the movie, who knew this material? We would parody it on the set. So we'll be shooting a movie and they'd say action, and I wouldn't say anything. And then the person who was hipped what was going to go Austin, Austin, and I doesn't he do something? Doesn't need to do? So I would murmur in my drunken wars and Wells and doesn't need to do something and everyone will be howling with laughter. Who was in on the joke? But I mean, here's Wells, and what you wonder is not this a career to all careers have a shelf life, although for most artists that seems to be that way. Artists who are very skilled, they sell a lot of records. It's particularly music, because music occupies its own place. But it was well someone who he really was frustrated by being misunderstood the sands of the business and what audiences wanted. We're shifting, all of which may be true simultaneously, or was it really the case that he just was out of ideas? I think, you know, I mean, I have a very special kind of relationship with Wells's work. I've just been fascinated by him for for so long, And I'm just one of these people who, you know, can focus on some sort of fragment of some unfinished project of of Wells and get really excited about it, and of other people just won't see anything there, you know. So I'm just I'm just a fanatic when it comes to Wells. But what I find so interesting about his career and I think it's actually a weird similarity to Wagner in this respect is he was extremely successful very young and then and then there was a series of colossal failures just by the by the end of his twenties. You know, he seemed to be washed up certainly by the time he was getting into his thirties. And then he I feel as though he in that condition of failure and he didn't enjoy it. It was just endlessly frustrating for him. To the end of his career. He made something of that failure. It actually liberated him, I think. And when he started making movies like you know, Charms of Midnight and Touch of Evil, just very threadbare productions, you know, very little money, and he just he was able to conjure, you know, something out of almost nothing. I think if he had sort of continued his if he continued having a kind of great success, you know from the start, I feel like that that might have never happened for him. And the comparison with Wagner is that, you know, Wagner had this massive collapse of his career eighteen forty nine eighteen fifty after he achieved great success at having this position as contrecting the opera in Dresden, one of the leading you know, young younger German opera composers as well as conductors. And then he joined the uprising in Dresden in eighteen forty nine, was exiled from Germany, didn't come back to Germany for more than ten years, was just thrown back on almost no resources, living in Zurich and in that instant and this is just this kind of stunning thing to look back on, he decides to come up with with this massive four part operatic cycle, the biggest opera project ever undertaken, and really kind of one of the biggest works of art in any medium, and with absolutely no prospect of performance. It just the world just it just it just seemed inconceivable this thing would or come to light. And he kept writing it, you know, amid failure, amid near poverty, and and pursued it and somehow got to the point where, you know, twenty six years later it was finished and he had built his own opera house in which to perform it. There was one tremendous stroke of fortune that allowed this to happen, which was King Ludwig the Second becoming King of Bavaria, who who had a fanatical relationship with Wagner's music and was willing to spend huge amounts of money to bring into being. But even before that happened, you know, Wagner had written most of this, a good part of this cycle, and somehow the total collapse of his career liberated him to do something completely new. But it takes a special kind of talent, I think, to pursue your vision, you know, amid failure and amid collapse, but also in any of these arts, to endure, you know, the white water and the tough times, and to come out as an artistic type. But to be Wells, who was an incredibly insightful guy. I'm under I'm from the school that's of the belief that it all died for him after Anderson's Like, he realized he was never going to have the control he wanted and the money he wanted to make the movie to have those two things. The only person that I can tell in film history who got the money that he needed and had the economic security he needed to fortify his creative dreams is Spielberg. Spielberg's the person was given exactly what he wanted and needed to make the movie exactly the way he wanted and made the movie exactly the way he wanted, you know, it was his production. So the Rest is Noise, which I loved and thought it was a great book. Now, when you write a book like this, I'm assuming that when you write a biography of someone, there is a certain framework of the life of that person and the things that you're able to gather together about that life. But with this other book, you can go in any direction you want to. Basically you can. It's much more free ranging. Was the book something that you understood what it was from the get go or did it change while you and didn't meander while you were writing the book. Yeah, well thanks so much, first of all, and yeah it was. It was quite a journey at that book because I started it with a less ambitious idea. I thought I was going to write a series of essays essentially about different twenties century composers and and sort of showing different aspects of the world of twenties century music, you know, through them. Actually, my original idea was I was going to end the book with Bob Dylan. That obviously wouldn't have worked at all, it was a whole different topic, but that it was going to be that kind of thing. It was gonna be a series of portraits. And then as I started sort of going into it, I started becoming much more interested in and that's just kind of the texture of history itself and what was going on, you know, in sort of America in the thirties, FDR and the New Deal and the depression, when you know, Aaron Copeland was coming to the Four and and how people's careers intersected with with the politics, with with sort of the bigger you know, social history. You know, obviously a Shustakovitch and the civil is an incredibly dramatic and complex story, you know, because house in Nazi Germany. Yeah, a very painful, but just you know, fascinating in terms of how these artists negotiated this treacherous political train. And so the book turned into something more like history decade by decade. It's still there, still are kind of principal figures who come to the Four in different parts of and that adjustment took years and years of figuring out how the narrative was going to unfold and figuring out, you know, very painful decisions about who to include and who to leave out. But you know, and then I just wrote too much, you know, in the initial draft of the book was twice as long, and so that I had to cut it. But that was very helpful in terms of refining the material yet more and really figuring out what was the most important kind of moment in each decade that was going to sort of advance the story. And so it was. It was very difficult, but I think it was very um. I was just very lucky, I feel like, at the beginning of a new century to to be tackling this material and to discover the people actually wanted to read this story, you know, because at first it seemed like this was not going to be sort of widely kind of popular book, and it wasn't. It wasn't a runaway best seller or anything, but it did surprisingly well, and I feel as though people were ready to look back on this century. And it's not just about music. It's about the century itself. It's about the political upheavals and how artists who happen to be composers people. I want people to understand that is Wagner is um not Wagner, Yeah, and just real live this century in a different way. So Wagnerism is your most current book you're working on another one, now do you? Can you say what it is or now? I am starting to think about a new book. And actually I have not talked about this in public yet, but the book I want to write next is about the emigrads in Los Angeles, the German speaking emigrades and film in music, in literature. This incredible Herman convocated shuldn't of Lubitch and Fritz Long and Billy Wilder and Thomas Mann and Schernberg and Corn Gold and so that's the focus of the next book. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and best of luck. Okay, thank you author and critic Alex Ross. I'll leave you with one of Ross's favorite pieces. This is Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing. Is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the thing from my Heart radio. That is, of course, the Prelude to Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sergio Zawa. My guest today. Alex Ross is the author of Wagnerism, Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, about the life and work of German composer Richard Wagner. Alex Ross has been the music critic at The New Yorker since nine and at The New York Times before that. While his beat is classical music, he writes on a wide ranging number of subjects, from opera to avant garde, Kurt Cobain to Bob Dylan, all alongside essays on history, art, film and literature. He's a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, cited by the Foundation for his ability to offer quote new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future unquote, with his deep knowledge of music history. I wanted to know how Alex Ross saw popular music fitting into the pantheon of culture against past illustrious genres. Well, I think there is kind of a natural life cycle with genres as they unfold over time that eventually their their past can begin to overshadow their present. You know, if you if you look at the history of jazz, you know, and the emergence of this jazz classicism in recent decades, where you know, kids go to music schools and and and study jazz and sort of learn how to play Ellington the same way generations of conservatory students have have learned Beethoven and Brahms, and so there's that kind of classical mentality, which yeah, I think can sort of overcome any art form. And it's tricky, you know, because I think that the fires of invention are alive in every genre all the time, and they remain alive in quote unquote classical music as well. And so the kind of seduction of the past, for me as a critic and also just as a listener, is something to be you know, it's inescapable, and I love all the music of the past, but for me it's also something to be resisted, you know, because you you sort of have to pay attention to what's going on now, and you know there is in every genre sort of always also that completely new kind of feelings. So it's kind of I mean, a lot of has to do with well, what's getting marketed, you know, what's getting marketed as kind of new music now in pop music, and I think a lot of that is just kind of market driven and not necessarily paying attention to where the real originality is. And so you know, if something is just being sort of shoved down your throats so kind of relentlessly, people will, Yeah, people will tend to kind of go back to the past because they have a sort of freedom. This is kind of wonderful freedom for like, I don't know if someone who's like fourteen years old now like choosing to become obsessed by by the Beatles, you know, And I think there's a joy in that, you know, in just in kind of taking ownership of the pa asked. And I think you can also like open you up to sort of new ideas in the present, Like once sort of engage with something that just seems from a totally different world, almost irrelevant to your own when it comes alive and just feel so urgent, then I think that just sort of changes your perspective on the present and opens you up to new possibilities. So so there's there's a real power also in and just disappearing into the past and kind of re emerging on the other side, and in real safety and security too, you know. I mean, I I found like I would look at popular music today and I neither listen to nor collect anything today. Nothing. I mean that the artists whose contemporary recording as I buy more regularly is Winton Marsalis. I mean I listened to classical music. Pretty much of my listening is classical music, or five percent, five percent of it might be jazz. The other ten percent is Beetles Stone Zeppelin, who from my pots smoking south Shore Long Island youth, you know, I mean that which these were are? I mean, whose neck exten all that kind of stuff. But another thing I thought about reading that Dylan article you wrote a while back, and I think about artists of their day, and certainly Dylan is by and large of his day and thoughtful. And I'm wondering if back then you wanted people to help you negotiate that new frontier we were in of learning the truth about the American government and our political process, and people did that, and they devoured a lot of thought provoking and political content in music and in films and stuff forth, and now we're in a place where people have a fatigue from that and they're like, I don't want to talk about that. I want love songs. It's almost like your audience is saying, I need my art art my artistic menu, my artistic reality to be easy and simple. Do you feel that way that's how the audience used it. I don't know. I mean, I think you're right in that you're just in the marketplace. You know, the sixties and seventies were just a really remarkably open moment in terms of themercial musical marketplace. A lot of voices came in who were not being kind of just unexpected voices, unexpected faces, being sort of allowed that that space to to speak to a really broad public. You know, if you just look at how Dylan, how his career developed at at Colombia, he put out a couple of records and they went nowhere, and and they just sort of waited around and sort of kind of they just let him go on making records even though he was getting very little attraction. And then suddenly he became Bob Dylan. Suddenly these this extraordinary phenomenon began. But there was a patience there to sort of sign up an unusual artist and and sort of let them develop. And I think that that kind of patience is much less common, you know, the idea that you would sign up an artist, give them some money and and sort of see what they come up with, you know, I mean now, and an artist gets signed today, like you know, they're they're already They've often already become super famous you know, on YouTube, on on TikTok. You know, they already have the audience, and so just kind of carving out the creative space. It's it's more uncommon. But yeah, the seventies, it was just remarkable how many albums were made where artists were just really exploring just in terms of themes, not just political themes, but also just spend the sounds, you know, the kind of sounds that that got explored. And yeah, I think maybe going back to the eighties, eighties and nineties, everything became you know, a bit more kind of straight and narrow in terms of what was going on. And then it is a celebrity, the power of celebrity and just how we mean the biggest problem I think in any arena is we just pay so much attention to just such a small number of artists, and so many other voices get crowded out. And it's just this winner takes all economy at the works in culture the way it works in in mainstream kind of worlds, and frankly it works in classical music too. You know, we have we have a few just celebrity artists in classical music who cog up too much attention and in factly the repertory you know, I mean, I think we we tend to play you know, a certain number of pieces over and over again. Yes, there are fantastic pieces, but there's so much more, you know, to be explored in the past and in the presence. People don't want to take a chance. Yeah, yeah, just people only buying tickets when they see just really familiar names, you know, on the on the program. So it's something to be pushed back against in class musical world, you know, as well as the kind of mainstream arena. It's just been kind of my proccupation, like from the start of the critic is just kind of all right, so you know, you know this like trying something new, try to break composer or sort of try kind of Alexander Zemlinsky, you know, instead of Maller. You know, they're just there are other options out there, and it's just this, It's what I get really excited about, you know, because I grew up and and I just first I devoured you know, Mozart, by Demon and Broms and divor Jack, you know, and then I started discovering more and more and just the ongoing excitement as always finding new music as well as of course kind of interesting new ways to perform the familiar music. But that's just kind of what I try to communicate on my writing is just try something new. Well. The thing about Dylan is that I'm always reminded of that line that people had about Olivier in my business. They said, if Olivier came around today, he'd be on a soap opera. They said they weren't quite sure that that really rich flavor of hisn't that rich quality that that that heightened sense of of the polished actor would have a place, Or you'd be the villain in Game of Thrones or something like that. When I look at Dylan, I think of him being of his time, and if he came around now, you know, where would he because there's a period of Dylan and not a lot of albums, but a couple of them that I just crave as music. You know, blood on the track because I crave desire, I crave I mean, there's cuts on that thing that I just can listen to again and again and again, and I have the highest amount of appreciation for those. And then there's a lot of it which is to me, it's just Dylan sounding like Dylan. When I discovered Dylan, and it was late, you know, because I had this strange development in terms of my taste where it was all classical, correct, all classical, and just all kind of eighteenth nineteenth century classical. I mean, I was just barely in the twentieth century. I listened to a little bit of mod or a little bit of sibilious. You know. That was as crazy as I got as a teenager. And then, you know, past the age of eighteen, I really started moving into the twentieth century in classical music, discovering modernism and then finally starting to listen to first jazz and then rock. But it still it took me a few years until I got around to Dylan, you know, because I just sort of dismissed him as this something from a different generation, of no interest. And then I was in Berlin in summer, never forget this, staying at a friend's apartment, and he had a few albums c d s, and I was just sort of looking for stuff to listen to um while I was working, and put on Highway sixty when we visited, and almost immediately became obsessed by it. You know it once, listen to it again. I listened to it, like, you know, ten more times that day, and after a couple of days, I started to memorize the lyrics, and you know it become obsessed. But when I started sort of looking at Dylan's career, it is the kind of career that you find in classgow music. He's always himself, but he goes through phases, he sort of matures, He takes unusual turns, He kind of scandalizes his audience at a certain point. You know, this kind of sort of plugging in, the kind of going electric moments disturbs his audience, the same way you know, Scherenberg and Stevinsky disturbed their audiences, you know, or late Beethoven for that matter. And the sort of these sort of ups and downs in terms of reputation. But at the same time, he's he's always kind of developing, he's always sort of growing as an artist, and and that is unusual. I think in the pop music arena, it's so hard to sustain. You know. It's not that people lack talent, I think just the marketplace. It's it's just so difficult to sort of keep your place in the marketplace and the sort of business in the industry while also sort of continuing to develop because people want you to keep doing the same thing over and over again, you know. And and the power of Dylan was to refuse to do the same thing over and over again, to go in new directions and to keep his place, and that just doesn't happen very often. I think there's just an incredible willpower they're not to give in and to sort of continue going in his own direction. But yeah, I just think we're lucky to be living at the time that this man is alive. You know, he's completely extraordinary talent um and just kind of will Like thousands, for thousands of years, people will still be talking about Bob Dylan. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, If you like conversations with insightful journalists, check out my interview with Alex Ross's colleague New Yorker editor David Remnick. The magazine is not the magazine if it doesn't have a sense of humor. You're not in business to depress the hell out of the reader. Unremittingly, it's like a band having a set list. If you do everything, it's all sixteenth notes from mentioning. So you got a divito? Or will you sound like the Ramones? Although I've heard of worse things. So you want some variation in tone, invoice, and that's your responsibility, you feel, I feel all of it's my responsibility. Hear more of my conversation with David Remnick in our archives that Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, I talked to Alex Ross about one of the most important composers in the world, Ricard Wagner, and the dark specter of his anti Semitic views. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Alex Ross has been a music critic for three decades. I wanted to know how his line of work has evolved as our access to media has changed, the world has definitely changed, you know. I mean when I started out in the early nineties first writing for the New York Times is their most junior, very junior critic. There were just so many more of us, you know. I remember the world premiere of John Corleano's The Ghosts of Versailles the Meto, I mean I think they were they were seventy or eighty music critics from around the world, you know, attending that that performance. You know, I just had so many colleagues from different papers that I would see, you know at concerts, a latent Kerner from the Village Voice and Kyle Gann from the Village Voice, and people from the Post and the Daily News, and you know that someone was still writing a Terry teach Out was still writing back class music for a Time magazine. You know. So there were just a lot of us, you know, and now very often when to go to concerts, like I'm the only critic there, or it's just kind of one other, one other colleague, and that diminishes the power of criticism, I think, because I think the sort of critics have power and usefulness as a pack, you know, because no one wants like a single voice laying down the law in terms of what's good and what's not. But what you want is the conversation, the debate. You know, you want Pauli and k L and Andrew Sarah's yelling at each other, you know, and for the reader, you kind of triangulate your idea of what's actually going on from reading different critics and and you know, I usually agree with this person on such and such a thing, And so if as the field kind of empties out, we're losing our sort of ability to to really have an impact. But still, you know, we're still here, and and there's still a bunch of us here, and I think really critics still have a very big role to play. For me, it's never been about delivering a judgments. You know, it was a good or bad thumbs up, thumbs down, That's not what it's about. You know, my opinion kind of needs to be somewhere in the review, but it's not paramount. The first thing to do is just sort of convey the texture of of what happened, something that happened. You're a journalist, an event has taken place in musical form and you're reporting on it, but to give it context, to show well how did this concert compare to sort of a bunch of other sort of beet symphony performances of the past, you know, this new composer, where did they come from? How do they depart from sort of the given styles of the day, And that I think is really useful to the reader, just giving the sense of context and just starting a conversation. You know, let's just let's think about this music and talk about it. And in classical music, I think there's so many people who are experienced. They go to concerts all the time, they're very knowledgeable, but they don't they're kind of reluctant to say anything, you know, they're not sure sort of how to articulate, you know, what they've experienced. And so for me, I just always feel as I'm just kind of throwing a phrase out there to begin the conversation and to filter you know, I think there's just we're just being assaulted by so much information and so many just kind of possibilities, and so I'm just here sort of filtering out as best I can and seizing on a few things and saying, you know, try this. And I think that's that's a very important role. You know, you can get that in other ways, you can read the Amazon reviews and and sort of have you know, there are other people out there filtering. But I think kind of I've been doing this long enough that, you know, like to have experience. I have a kind of track record, and people kind of know what to expect a little bit when when they read our reviews, whether whether they agree with me or not, they kind of know where I'm coming from. And I think that's that is something that you can trust. So I hope we'll still be able to keep doing this, you know, for for a while longer. But you know, I feel very lucky to be where I am at the New Yorker and editors who really give me freedom to explore different areas. Many years ago, I was doing a film and I went off on location and just devoured Scott Berg's biography of Lindburg. I read the book in like three nights. Obviously, there were some things about Lindbergh that he discovered that he was very disturbed by his his isolationism and his uh anti Semitism or what have you. And ironically, the same thing relates to your book about Wagner. Was for people who don't know was Wagner known to be white supremacist anti Semitic. Was that common knowledge in his day or beyond? Or do people just suspect that for certain because of the company he kept. Oh no, it was very vocal. It was. It was in prints from eighteen fifty on. He wrote an essay in eighteen fifty Jewish Nous in Music. It was actually first published anonymously, but it became known that he was the author, and then almost twenty years later he reap published that essay under his own name eighteen sixty nine, and he was becoming just one of the most famous composers in the world. And he threw his reputation behind this repellent document and did not deviate from that, you know, from until the end of his life. What was he suggesting? He had the idea that you know that, of course anti Semitism had had existed, you know, for centuries, for for millennia. Wagner and they sort of had this religious basis. But Wagner was moving towards a more racial kind of idea. You know, it's sort of beyond the idea that that Jews could convert and and therefore solve whatever problem was deemed to exist with them. And Wagner was sort of moving towards this idea that well, there's a problem here that can't be solved because just you know, Jews are are inherently different from other people. And his thesis and that essay was that you could tell if Jewish people writing music, you could tell there was something off, there's something inauthentic, something we kind of seeped through. They can never master this language. Now, when you when you write a book, let's use the Wagner as an example. I would imagine that the process begins with just a mountain of reading. You're just doing nothing but reading in the beginning, and I was wondering whether are things that were disqualifying or the books you were going to write, or the biographies you were gonna write. And you started to get into it when you go maybe not, I don't want to write about this guy's life and this woman's life. Did you ever have that happen? Yeah, I mean Wagner does not. Yet Vagner does test your your There are moments you know when sort of sort of towards the end of the process, I really I got to the stage I was talking about Nazi Germany, and it is. It is horrifying, you know, to watch a film like The Eternal Jew, this absolutely disgusting propaganda film that the Goubbles made demonizing the Jews, and Wagner is quoted right right there at the beginning of the film as an authority, you know. And this was literally a film that was designed to make people comfortable with the idea of murdering Jews on mass was designed to sort of reduce Jews to a level of just sort of vermin, you know, literally, people, is this this entity that needed to be exterminated. So that was the function of the film, And there was Wagner being cited as an authority at the beginning of the film, as a as a great German cultural figure who would apparently approve of this undertaking, you know, horrifying, And you know you stop and think, well, you know, have I just gone sort of completely taken wrong turn here? But then you know, there are so many other aspects of of Wagner that that contradict that Nazi image. Like I said, they're very appealing aspects to his personality. You know, he was a clownish kind of human being who just ran around talking all the time, jumping around was was just sort of overflowing with with ideas and energies. Wagner was not this kind of cold, dogmatic figure. And I think when you look at the fact that Tator Herzel, the great Zionist loved Wagner's music, Artist Schnitzler W. E. B. Du Bois, the great Black civil rights Titanic intellectual figure, absolutely loved actions music and and so these figures found something in him. They not only enjoyed it, they found it inspiring to their their personal projects. And so there's that energy and Wagner which can really be turned in in any direction, and it can be turned toward evil, it can also be turned towards good. It can be just completely reinvented and and transplanted to two different kind of uh world entirely. Um, that's what art is, you know. I mean, just art goes out into the world and just kind of is subject to whatever people make of it. However people want to use it, whatever the creator intended. Uh, something completely different can be made out of it in ways that are sometimes really disturbing. But that's I think the fascination of the mystery of just how art works in the world. Music critic Alex Ross. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Hear Is the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Alex Ross talks to us about the amazing artists that have come back from failure and how they did it. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from my Heart Radio. Writer Alex Ross ponders the big questions, including one of the deepest, the nature of art and how much of oneself must the artist put in their work? Yeah, and the joy of art, I think putting on masks and sort of playing different roles, and yeah, I think we do. And of course this has always been going on and art, you know, artists have always made art about themselves and restive, use their own experiences, and then the audience kind of, you know, reads into that that work and and it's sort of you know, finds the traces of the self that that the artist put there, you know. But then you also have I just feel like going back to the beginning of time, you know, whenever what we recognize as art first arose, it was not kind of you know, Jeff cave guy acting out, you know, whatever happened to him the previous day. It was him putting on a mask and and you know, becoming fooling everyone to thinking that that you know, the devil was in the cave with them, and that was the thrill of it. And so yeah, I think there is probably too much of this kind of autobiographical reading of art these days. And you know, for me, I just love getting lost in a work of art and getting lost in this in this other world. And it's somehow particularly thrilling when you know, I know that the artist has has sort of disappeared as well. It's not that I'm disappearing into the artist's world, is that he or she has created this new kind of sphere which is something that has never existed before, and and now we're being you know, invited into it. I mean just you know, look at the world of Schubert's music. You know, we don't know very much about Schubert. He just does not seem to have been a particularly remarkable person in a lot of ways. There's no one really remembered very much about Shubert. You know, he seems to have been this rather mousy guy. He was not brooding and mysterious and and it's kind of violent in his temperaments, you know, but he created these these worlds to become infinite, just kind of you know, the B flat major, the final Piano sonata where we're on this out on this huge landscape shadow we beautiful but also shadowy and goes on and on and and so that's what I love. I think in art is being transported and following the artist on some strange journey or like you know, Morton Feldman, Morton fun was this this hilarious guy who grew up in Queens talked to all the time just kind of just never shut up, dominated every every conversation was funny, you know, but also just kind of a lot you know. So it was just one of these guys. It's just a lot any about this music that is almost silent and moves very slowly and and just sort of hovers on the on the edge of silence. But it's just yeah, it's sort of he knew Rothko and his his music. He was writing what period inties, Yeah, sort of really the fifties and sixties, sort of the peak of his career. Fifties sixties seventies. He knew Rothko and and his music has I think there's a lot in common. Um, there's that with Rothko's paintings. There's one called roth Chapel, which is ordinarily beautiful piece. Yeah, he writed for the opening of the Rothko Chapel and then he performed by who was quartet or piano or orchestra. It is a sort of small group of instruments and chorus, wordless chorus. And yeah, it's this liminal music. It's sort of music that's just hovering on in a in a fog. But I find incredible beautiful. But what's what's fascinating about filament as a phenomenon is the music sounds nothing like it's it's It seems to have been created by a completely different person from who he presented himself, you know, in daily life. And that, Yeah, that kind of division fascinates me. That once he sat down at his desk, he created a world which had nothing to do with his his daily world. Well, my friend put this into context. He said that you become an artist when your career is over. Now, for some people, there's the embryonic artistic period. And remember that most actors and actresses and and performers or whatever and whatever field don't make it. They don't become commercially successful. Only five percent or something of the people in my union make a living as actors, and the rest it's a part time endeavor. And he said to me that you might have the beginnings and the and the scratchings of an artistic career, and then if you make it, then you go off into your career and the artistry stops. And I was devastated when I read that article. And you say, you know, the most googled aspect of wells career of the poemssan commercials, which we, of course we hear in this office in the studio. I was regaling them with stories about how I would my friends were in on the gag on the set of the movie, who knew this material? We would parody it on the set. So we'll be shooting a movie and they'd say action, and I wouldn't say anything. And then the person who was hipped what was going to go Austin, Austin, and I doesn't he do something? Doesn't need to do? So I would murmur in my drunken wars and Wells and doesn't need to do something and everyone will be howling with laughter. Who was in on the joke? But I mean, here's Wells, and what you wonder is not this a career to all careers have a shelf life, although for most artists that seems to be that way. Artists who are very skilled, they sell a lot of records. It's particularly music, because music occupies its own place. But it was well someone who he really was frustrated by being misunderstood the sands of the business and what audiences wanted. We're shifting, all of which may be true simultaneously, or was it really the case that he just was out of ideas? I think, you know, I mean, I have a very special kind of relationship with Wells's work. I've just been fascinated by him for for so long, And I'm just one of these people who, you know, can focus on some sort of fragment of some unfinished project of of Wells and get really excited about it, and of other people just won't see anything there, you know. So I'm just I'm just a fanatic when it comes to Wells. But what I find so interesting about his career and I think it's actually a weird similarity to Wagner in this respect is he was extremely successful very young and then and then there was a series of colossal failures just by the by the end of his twenties. You know, he seemed to be washed up certainly by the time he was getting into his thirties. And then he I feel as though he in that condition of failure and he didn't enjoy it. It was just endlessly frustrating for him. To the end of his career. He made something of that failure. It actually liberated him, I think. And when he started making movies like you know, Charms of Midnight and Touch of Evil, just very threadbare productions, you know, very little money, and he just he was able to conjure, you know, something out of almost nothing. I think if he had sort of continued his if he continued having a kind of great success, you know from the start, I feel like that that might have never happened for him. And the comparison with Wagner is that, you know, Wagner had this massive collapse of his career eighteen forty nine eighteen fifty after he achieved great success at having this position as contrecting the opera in Dresden, one of the leading you know, young younger German opera composers as well as conductors. And then he joined the uprising in Dresden in eighteen forty nine, was exiled from Germany, didn't come back to Germany for more than ten years, was just thrown back on almost no resources, living in Zurich and in that instant and this is just this kind of stunning thing to look back on, he decides to come up with with this massive four part operatic cycle, the biggest opera project ever undertaken, and really kind of one of the biggest works of art in any medium, and with absolutely no prospect of performance. It just the world just it just it just seemed inconceivable this thing would or come to light. And he kept writing it, you know, amid failure, amid near poverty, and and pursued it and somehow got to the point where, you know, twenty six years later it was finished and he had built his own opera house in which to perform it. There was one tremendous stroke of fortune that allowed this to happen, which was King Ludwig the Second becoming King of Bavaria, who who had a fanatical relationship with Wagner's music and was willing to spend huge amounts of money to bring into being. But even before that happened, you know, Wagner had written most of this, a good part of this cycle, and somehow the total collapse of his career liberated him to do something completely new. But it takes a special kind of talent, I think, to pursue your vision, you know, amid failure and amid collapse, but also in any of these arts, to endure, you know, the white water and the tough times, and to come out as an artistic type. But to be Wells, who was an incredibly insightful guy. I'm under I'm from the school that's of the belief that it all died for him after Anderson's Like, he realized he was never going to have the control he wanted and the money he wanted to make the movie to have those two things. The only person that I can tell in film history who got the money that he needed and had the economic security he needed to fortify his creative dreams is Spielberg. Spielberg's the person was given exactly what he wanted and needed to make the movie exactly the way he wanted and made the movie exactly the way he wanted, you know, it was his production. So the Rest is Noise, which I loved and thought it was a great book. Now, when you write a book like this, I'm assuming that when you write a biography of someone, there is a certain framework of the life of that person and the things that you're able to gather together about that life. But with this other book, you can go in any direction you want to. Basically you can. It's much more free ranging. Was the book something that you understood what it was from the get go or did it change while you and didn't meander while you were writing the book. Yeah, well thanks so much, first of all, and yeah it was. It was quite a journey at that book because I started it with a less ambitious idea. I thought I was going to write a series of essays essentially about different twenties century composers and and sort of showing different aspects of the world of twenties century music, you know, through them. Actually, my original idea was I was going to end the book with Bob Dylan. That obviously wouldn't have worked at all, it was a whole different topic, but that it was going to be that kind of thing. It was gonna be a series of portraits. And then as I started sort of going into it, I started becoming much more interested in and that's just kind of the texture of history itself and what was going on, you know, in sort of America in the thirties, FDR and the New Deal and the depression, when you know, Aaron Copeland was coming to the Four and and how people's careers intersected with with the politics, with with sort of the bigger you know, social history. You know, obviously a Shustakovitch and the civil is an incredibly dramatic and complex story, you know, because house in Nazi Germany. Yeah, a very painful, but just you know, fascinating in terms of how these artists negotiated this treacherous political train. And so the book turned into something more like history decade by decade. It's still there, still are kind of principal figures who come to the Four in different parts of and that adjustment took years and years of figuring out how the narrative was going to unfold and figuring out, you know, very painful decisions about who to include and who to leave out. But you know, and then I just wrote too much, you know, in the initial draft of the book was twice as long, and so that I had to cut it. But that was very helpful in terms of refining the material yet more and really figuring out what was the most important kind of moment in each decade that was going to sort of advance the story. And so it was. It was very difficult, but I think it was very um. I was just very lucky, I feel like, at the beginning of a new century to to be tackling this material and to discover the people actually wanted to read this story, you know, because at first it seemed like this was not going to be sort of widely kind of popular book, and it wasn't. It wasn't a runaway best seller or anything, but it did surprisingly well, and I feel as though people were ready to look back on this century. And it's not just about music. It's about the century itself. It's about the political upheavals and how artists who happen to be composers people. I want people to understand that is Wagner is um not Wagner, Yeah, and just real live this century in a different way. So Wagnerism is your most current book you're working on another one, now do you? Can you say what it is or now? I am starting to think about a new book. And actually I have not talked about this in public yet, but the book I want to write next is about the emigrads in Los Angeles, the German speaking emigrades and film in music, in literature. This incredible Herman convocated shuldn't of Lubitch and Fritz Long and Billy Wilder and Thomas Mann and Schernberg and Corn Gold and so that's the focus of the next book. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and best of luck. Okay, thank you author and critic Alex Ross. I'll leave you with one of Ross's favorite pieces. This is Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing. Is brought to you by iHeart Radio.