Guys, the world is a museum of marxist failure. You are apparently trying to get exhibits of your own.

Not at all, exctly what I was looking for. Thank you.

I don’t think he actually advocates book-burning; rather he suggests ‘burning’ as a mental exercise. But – yeah, I think Marxist analysis of art certainly does lead to categorizing some of it as “Entartete Kunst”, degenerative, undesirable art; just like almost any ideological analysis. Poor Salvador…

Some seriousness in music is permissible. In the second half of the XIXc, seriousness became toxic, especially in Germany. Mozart and Haydn had the light touch when needed.

Perhaps Czech nationalism would have become evil too, given the chance, but since the death of Zizka the Czechs have not flourished militarily, unfortunately.

A side topic: given their accomplishments in almost every other field, why is British music so crappy?

You forgot to add “alas”.

It’s armies that scare me, not people being proud of their culture’s dance, cuisine, theatre, or whatever. The late Wagner, by the way, didn’t like armies much.

In reply to Bob, I don’t think there’s any sense in which his music could be called antisemitic. He considered that his music was different from that of everybody else except Beethoven and Bach. He thought that Mendelsohn and Meyerbeer wrote meretricious music, but he didn’t compose the way he did in order to be different from them. However, because he was an antisemite, he used antisemitism as a rhetorical device when he attacked their music.

An analogy might be a film-maker, say, who tries to make original films. He thinks that American movies are formulaic. I don’t think that means his films are anti-American.

Wagner’s antisemitism was contemptible, but it is not the only fact in the whole of his life and being.

Look, uh, here’s a long rave I wrote, in a thinking-aloud way, about Judaism in Music, which can quite reasonably be skipped.

The essay Jewishness in Music is nasty, and there are some especially skin-crawling paragraphs within it which are often rightly quoted against Wagner. Complaints about those paragraphs being “taken out of context” are irrelevant, because no one with a healthy mind could have written those paragraphs in the first place.

He wrote things like:
“When we listen to a Jew talking we are unconsciously upset by the complete lack of purely human expression in his speech. The cold indifference of its peculiar jargon [WA Ellis translated this as “blabber”] can never rise to the excitement of real passion.” etc.

But Wagner’s argument was not a simple one. The context made it clear that he was writing about “the Jews” in a specific time and place, that is, in mid-19th century Germany.

He said that cultured Jews have semi-assimilated into German culture, but not completely. By retaining a separate Jewish culture, they did not enter into the deepest hopes and fears, etc, of the mainstream. (I don’t need to make the point that this is paranoid and bigoted nonsense. I am trying to distinguish the line of argument, which is nasty in a subtle way, from the rhetoric in which some of it is couched, which is nasty in an obvious skin-crawlingly creepy way.)

Wagner then wrote:
“It is in this situation that we have seen the emergence of Jewish thinkers. The thinker is the poet who looks to the past; the true poet is the propet who foretells. Only the deepest and most heartfelt sympathy with a great, similarly-minded community, to which the poet gives unconscious voice, can produce such a prophet. Completely cut off from this community by the nature of his situation, equally completely torn from all connection with his own race, the more distinguished Jew can only consider his acquired culture as a luxury which he does not know how to put to practical use.”

Therefore, Wagner argued, when Jews of culture wrote in a German idiom, it tended to sound like pastiche and imitation, and to lack depth.

That was the essence of his attack on Mendelsohn, a composer he often respected and stole ideas from, and Meyerbeer, who he owed a debt of gratitude.

There’s a bit more to Wagner’s argument, which I suddenly think – now speculating wildly – may have been read by Theodor Herzl. That is, Wagner also said that there must have been genuinely great Jewish music “in its pure form” [meaning before the diaspora], but that synagogue music as it existed by the 19th century was only a distorted memory of that.

Wagner’s actual words, of synagogue music, were “cackling, gurgling”, etc. In trying to extract the central line of argument, I’m not wanting to gloss over the fact that the words in which it was expressed were often extremely nasty.

He then noted that there had been attempts to reform synagogue music, but argued that this was being done from above, and not drawn from a living tradition with cultural roots.

It occurs to me that this could have struck a chord with Herzl. Herzl was very Wagnerian. For example the second Zionist Conference opened with the Tannhäuser overture, and one of the conference symbols (in placemats, etc) was an illustration of Siegfried slaying Fafner: the point being that Siegfried represented the young, Jewish future who was going to slay the dragon of old Europe, and strike out into a new and fresh world.

Herzl was listening to Wagner a lot, especially Tannhäuser, while he wrote Der Judenstaat. The lines in “Jewishness in Music” about the impossibility of revitalising Jewish music from above, but also saying that great music can only grow organically from a community: it would be easy to think that idea was consistent with Zionism, or could be part of a case for Zionism.

(Sorry; I’m just thinking aloud about this, and I hadn’t expected to go down this tangent. It’s a half-baked idea, if that. It’s also complicated, politically. I don’t think that if Herzl noted that aspect of Wagner’s argument, that it would take a Jewish community to create great Jewish art, then that would make Wagner, you know, cool about the antisemitism thing. It would just be … complicated.)

Wagner ended with a call to cultured Jewish people, who were supposedly in this plight, to lose their Judaism entirely: and, it is clear, to lose everything else that was particularly Jewish in order to fully assimilate into the bigger community. The last sentence ends by saying Jews should achieve redemption [from the supposed curse of being cut off from the well-springs of german culture] through “Untergang”, and there have been arguments over what “Untergang” means. It can mean like the sun going down, it can mean “destruction” or “decline”. In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the word turns up occasionally and seems to mean a sort of creative self-transformation.

One way of working out Wagner’s meaning is not to look at the last sentence in isolation, but as part of the whole paragraph. Wagner said that Jacob Börne came out of his “isolation”. He did this not just by changing himself, but also by changing the people around him, ie, non-Jewish Germans, teaching them things about humanity. What Börne did, Wagner wrote, was hard but can be done. “Without a backward glance, take part in this work of redemption though self-denial, for then we will be one and indivisible.”

Is assimilation a racist idea? Of course it is. Is it a creepy essay? Hell, yes. But that, for what it’s worth, is what I think the essay is saying. The rhetoric in which it is couched is nastier than its argument, and you need to keep both registers in mind in judging it. That is, not forgetting the nastiness of some of the rhetoric.

I’m probably talking to myself by now, but I found this clarified some of my own thoughts on this, so it could be useful to someone, or it could merely be annoying. Since it’s only pixels, here goes.

Laon

I have tried listening to Erik’s orchestral music and found it very unSatiesfying. Perhaps deliberately so. Where is the emotional range? Where is the contrast? Where is the melody? When there is a popular Satie revival beyond ‘Gymnopedies’, you may force-feed me felt berets with impunity.

There are lots of ways of undermining the Jingoism of ‘Holy German Art’ without destroying the musical continuity of Meistersinger. You could have the crowd reacting to Sachs in some way other than admiration. You could have a group of Jews in the crowd who walk out. You could have a fight breaking out over who was the most ‘German’.

One intriguing theory (not sure how much evidence there is for it) is that Wagner planned a much shorter ending to the work without all the tub-thumping, but was encouraged to write the current finale by Cosima. The traditional ending to a comic opera would indeed be the union of the happy couple, rather than a tendentious sermon.

Did Orwell really write in favour of book-burning? That puts him on the wrong side of almost any debate. As do the following sentences: ‘If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would’; ‘Clearly, such people are undesirable (…)’ – precisely the rhetoric employed by 19th-century anti-Semites.

Perhaps John Emerson would like to point out how Mozart’s string quintet in G minor – a wholly sincere and serious work – is poisonous or degrading. Indeed I would be surprised if he can point to anything cynical at all in Bach, Mozart, Haydn or Schubert. (Particularly Schubert, who was a wholehearted fan of Romanticism.) Then what is the matter with a lack of cynicism?

Well, one question is whether Wagner thought it was. I went googling for the “Jew in Music” but only found some repulsive excerpts. I did read that Wagner was in part reacting to Mendelson(?) and Meyerbeer, tho many say it was less a matter of theory than spite. I would like to understand why Wagner made his musical choices:when an artist chooses to break with tradition, my presumption is that it is partly a political choice, even if the polity is only his musical peers. Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Steve Reich were I suspect doing something more than looking for a new idea that sounded neat.

Sachs said that if the Holy Roman Empire were to dissolve and Germans were ruled by a foreign country, that would be bad, obviously, because there would be no understanding between the people and their rulers, and the rulers would try to import their own culture onto the existing one. However, Sachs continued, things would still be okay so long as people hold on to their own culture.

Subtext: politics doesn’t matter much, while culture matters a lot. Sachs’ address was a piece of historical irony, I think it’s called, on Wagner’s part. Sachs is given lines that make sense with historical hindsight: Meistersinger was set about sixty years before the Thirty Years War, in which the countries in the lands now called Germany were about to be overtaken by war, and the new rulers were not be terribly interested in preserving the culture of ordinary German people. Sachs was, anachronistically, referring to that.

Sachs said that ordinary people have to preserve their culture, and they do that by honouring their artists, the German masters: ie, the Mastersingers, though “masters” applies to other artists as ell. If “Meister” makes you unhappy because it’s a German word, think “maestri”, which is the connotation in this context: the artists.

Here’s a plain English text of what Sachs actually sings. I’ve made slight grammatical changes to make it (I hope) flow in English. I don’t think I’ve changed the sense. Sachs is trying to persuade a young artist, Walter, to join a conservative group of artists, the Mastersingers, that the young man despises.

Hans says to Walther:
“How can this art be unworthy if it includes such prizes?
“Our Masters [the Mastersingers; an artist guild] have cared for this art in their own way, and cherished it truly as best they knew, and that has kept it real.
“It’s not aristocraic like it used to be, when it was blessed by Courts and Kings, but in the stress of hard times it has been kept genuinely German. And it flourished best in the hardest times. That tells you how much it has been honoured. What more can you ask of the Master[singer]s?
“But watch out! Evil times are coming. If the German people and their realm should fall under false and foreign rule, the princes will not understand the people. They will import foreign delusions and toys in our German land. No one will know any more what is truly German, unless they honoured German Master[singer]s.
“So I say to you that you should honour the German masters, and that will raise good spirits!
And if you appreciate their works, then even if the Holy Roman Empire dissolved in mist we would still have our Holy German Art!”

WEB Dubois, by the way, took Wagner’s idea quite seriously, as part of the inspiration for what became the black consciousness movement. He said that black Americans should hold onto and value their own “Mastersongs”, in order to develop, build and honour their own culture and identity. He identified the great blues tradition as the black American “mastersongs”, correctly (I think) citing that tradition as the greatest american music. Two chapters of The Souls of Black Folk are explicitly Wagnerian in their ideology. I think Dubois’ reading of those lines is a natural and unstrained reading of what Wagner’s lines actually said: it is the common current reading that is fanciful, strained and, well, silly.

As for interrupting the music, my feeling is that the director Konwitschy (sp?) is a prat and a wanker, and I’d have wanted my money back.

Cheers!

Laon