Abstract

The impact of the composer Richard Wagner, a pivotal figure in the arts during the nineteenth century, could be felt in literature and philosophy as well and music and theater. It is difficult to assess the influence of such an epic personage who was as much a child of his age as he was father of the next one, but one common thread which is discernable in the writings of Wagner's greatest interpreters is their appreciation of Wagner's world view, and the growing influence of music and mass culture, is characteristic of the spirit of "modernity." This dissertation is a study in the contrast of four personalities, Charles Baudelaire, J. K. Huysmans, Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno, each of whose critique of Wagner contends with a different issue of modernity and which, together, demonstrates the debt owed by modernism's foremost thinkers to the influence of the composer. In contrasting these figures, as well, can be seen the emerging importance of mass culture and how Wagner's influence remained so prominent from the nineteenth into the twentieth century