This is a pioneering attempt to re-articulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four ‘scenes’ compose this book, all of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno). The two first scenes of the book, contemporary with the European triumph of Wagnerism, inscribe themselves in a historical sequence that is punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. The second two register certain effects of Wagnerism that make themselves felt in a new political configuration that solidifies a confusion between the ‘national’ and the ‘social’. Art and politics are both at play here, but as neither a politics of art nor, even less, an art of politics. Instead, what is at stake, more gravely, is the aestheticization, the figuration, of the political.