Wagner’s antisemitism

Well, i don’t know what to think about Wagner, of course it seems that he was antisemitic, but was it not the case of a lot of people in Europe during the XIX century ?

Most of the time we forgot, that Richard Wagner was not here during the Nazi period. So the appropriation by the Nazi of his music doesn’t neceseraly mean that he would have been a Nazi…

And someone reflecting on the lesson of the Nazi era should know where that division leads.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it…so sayeth Santayana.

The sentence I italicized from the previous commentor hit me like a punch in the stomach. The current divisions in our own nation are so stark. And the nationalism being fed by the Republican party is so reminiscent….

Wagner is not unique, though, as an (arguably) great composer whose music has dodgy political implications.

Large parts of the Russian Orthodox choral corpus, for example, are set to particularly obnoxious power-worshipping texts– e.g. Bortnyansky’s chorale “The Tsar Shall Rejoice in Thy Strength, O Lord”– as you might expect from the state religion of a quasi-Oriental despotism. And it seems pretty clear that they helped promote a culture of deference to absolutist authority in Russia that contributed indirectly to the 20th C. horrors there.

Nevertheless it is extremely beautiful and affecting stuff and well worth listening to.

Actually, Wagner, being a consumate showman with an eye for the interest attaching to scandal, might look upon this production of the Meistersinger as, at least, an interesting experiment. Sure, it violates the canon of the Gesammtkunstwerk by throwing in an alienation effect worthy of Brecht – but it recuperates that effect by making it part of the performance.

Clark’s article is otherwise pretty silly, especially the part about how societies dedicated to Wagner — presumably things like the Ring Cycle organizers in Seattle — are, unlike societies dedicated to Mozart, composed of mentally sick people. Perverts, all of them.

Hmph.

XIXc and before, huh. Let me quote Orwell here (1945):

…It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Anti-Semitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be anti-Semitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely anti-Semites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point for any investigation of anti-Semitism should not be “Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?” but “Why does anti-Semitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?” If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them. anti-Semitism should be investigated—and I will not say by anti-Semites, but at any rate by people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has disappeared a real enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best to start not by debunking anti-Semitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that can be found, in one’s own mind or anybody else’s. In that way one might get some clues that would lead to its psychological roots. But that anti-Semitism will be definitively cured, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.
http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/orwell/466/

See – the larger disease of nationalism…

Perhaps it’s best to do what so great (but naive) a musician as Bruckner did- enjoy the music (if it’s to your taste) but ignore the words! I don’t buy for a moment the idea (which I am well aware has been ingeniously argued by a few musicologists) that there is something “antisemitic” about the actual structure and procedures of the music- music alone just isn’t capable of signifying anything that definite. And the musicians who learned most from Wagner qua pure musician were themselves Jewish- Mahler and Schoenberg.

Wagner by the way was a real bastard in many ways, not just his nationalist / antisemitic views. A gifted sociopath.

FYI: The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was forced by public opinion to avoid playing Wagner for many years. When the music purist tried to sneak Wagner in, the outcry was huge.

Comment on: “Anti-Semitism was pretty widespread in the XIXc and before.” My addition: and in the XXc, XXIc, …

Europe is an Equal Opportunity Offender: Gypsies, Muslims, etc. are in some anti-X capacity to this day.

A gifted sociopath.

Ah, this reminds me of Orwell’s Notes on Salvador Dali:

…One ought to be able to hold in one’s head
simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
http://www.george-orwell.org/Benefit_of_Clergy:_Some_Notes_on_Salvador_Dali/0.html

Hmm. This doesn’t necessarily work in regard to a composer, does it?

That Mark Twain quote was really said by Rossini.

I remember, from a liner note on an old record, a story about Wagner telling Nietzsche, “Take off your glasses! You must hear nothing but the music.” This was back when they were friends.

The operas from the first half of Wagner’s career are pretty easy for me to take, from The Flying Dutchman up to the Ring Cycle. The final acts of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal I find unbearably tedious (and the same goes for many of Mahler’s and Brückner’s symphonies).

After Nietzsche broke with Wagner and accused him of anti-semitism, he championed Bizet. That man had impeccable taste.

I think reminders to “ignore the politics, just focus on the music” are at least a little disingenuous. Isn’t it much more interesting to look for ways to see the music and the politics are related? But there was none of that in Clark’s article. Everyone knows Wagner was racist, but how exactly is sustained harmonic tension anti-semitic? Explain, please.

This is not to say I would condemn Wagner, any more than I would condemn M.I.A. (even if I thought she was condoning terrorism instead of simply questioning our assumptions about its nature.) Neither artist would be as interesting without the politics; treat it as art, not politics–it doesn’t have to be a prescription for anything. But treat it as art that transforms the way we think about politics.

Oh, sorry, Rossini said it about Wagner, not Twain about Rossini. Makes sense now.

“but how exactly is sustained harmonic tension anti-semitic?”

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.

In reply to Thomas, I don’t think talking about holy german art is particularly jingoistic, and I can’t think of any reason why anyone should take offence, on-stage or off. The English sound off about “the language of Shakespeare and Milton”, say, and as far as I’m concerned they’re entitled to. The Germans can sound off about their music. The Italians can get all misty-eyed about their painting and their music. I’ve been ear-bashed about a Vietnamese poem that’s about 19 times longer than _Paradise Lost_, and frankly I’d like to hear more about it.

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

Someone who can’t find frivolity or cynicism in Mozart isn’t looking. (What is the translation and meaning of “Cosi Fan Tutti”?). Please explain to me his similiarity to their younger contemporary, Holderlin. As I said, they were Austrians.

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?

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.

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…

In response to Bob Mcmanus’s post about intellectual arguments that come out of the German anti-Enlightenment, I would recommend reading Culture by Adam Kuper. He basically writes an intellectual history of how different conceptions of culture are drawn from the German counter-Enlightenment (as well as the Enlightenment), and makes a similar point that the counter-enlightenment spawned very different strains of thought.

Skippy, I think you’re on the wrong thread. Your generic comment could semi-plausibly be stuck in lots of other places, I suppose. Take your pill like a good boy now.

I must disagree with those saying in effect this is old news. I personally couldn’t avoid having at least one avid Wagnerian among my aquantainces who refuses to even entertain the notion that the man did not like Jews.
Likewise, the annual congregation in Bayreuth draws a decent bunch of people on the right to far right, closeted anti-Semites who are part of the wider problem of the partial inability to purge former Nazis from post-war German society. While coverage of these devouted has in recent years turned more towards their nuttier aspects, there is still an equal amount of coverage which presents these people as some kind of “elite”.
And this in turn is a good example, almost like a miniature model, of both the worship of a leader figure and the inability of a society to renounce the leader and his more important followers (in that e.g. people simply loving the music still have to endure a festival shaped by the nutcases).