Wagnerian Music

views updated

Wagnerian Music

Taken solely as a musician, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) must be placed in the most elite rank of Western composers, alongside Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Nonetheless, his politics, philosophy, and theory of history are inseparable from nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. Identifying the exact nature and extent of Wagner’s hostility to Jewish people, and the effects of this hostility on his art, is complicated by the fact that bigotry is always irrational. Moreover, anti-Semitism has cultural, religious, and pseudoracial manifestations. It is undeniable that each of these forms of anti-Semitism is reprehensibly present in Wagner’s writings, but there is no consensus as to whether they are detectable in any of his operas.

In Wagner’s theory of the musical stage was that all components of an opera must express an aesthetic system and a political and cultural philosophy. He believed that by writing his own texts, designing his own scenarios, and dictating elaborate stage directions, he could impose eternal control over the meanings that he considered essential to his works of art. Yet despite all his efforts, Wagner’s works, no less than those of less deliberate composers, have been subjected to the subsequent interpretations of producers, audiences, and critics. It requires no particular inventiveness to discover anti-Semitism in Wagner’s public and private utterances, but it is a more difficult matter to pinpoint precise expressions of anti-Semitism in the music or texts of his operas.

Wagner shamelessly expressed anti-Semitism in his infamous essay, Das Judentum in der Musik (1850). The common translation of this work, “Judaism in Music,” seems to imply a religious element, but Wagner’s purposes were more sweeping than that, and a more accurate translation might be “Jewishness in Music.” Wagner was hostile towards all aspects of Jewish heritage, which he viewed as an alien and destructive force in German culture, and indeed in all European civilization. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was not so much religious as racial and ethnic. Although he was contemptuous of bourgeois Christianity, he nonetheless accepted the traditional Christian view of the Jewish people as hoarders of money that was “slimy with the blood of countless generations.” He confessed to an “involuntary repellance” for the “nature and personality of the Jews,” who, he insisted, were responsible for a corruption of the public taste in the arts.

But if it was Wagner’s intention to communicate anti-Semitism by strictly musical devices he seems to have failed in the meritless task. For while it is certain that the texts of his operas communicated idiosyncratic philosophical messages, the most careful searchers have failed to detect specific anti-Semitic references in his lyrics. Scholars debate whether certain of his characters were intended to personify any of the pejorative Jewish racial or cultural stereotypes that were all too prevalent in nineteenth century Europe, but they have offered little specific direct evidence of any such characterization. Finally, while Wagner, especially in Die Meistersinger, clearly contributed to a theory of what the Nazis later called entartete musik (degenerate music), it is unclear whether he attempted to incorporate his theoretical anti-Semitism into any of his musical compositions. His works do not contain travesties or pejorative depictions of Jewish liturgical music, which he disparages in Das Judentum. Although Wagner expressed patronizing or hostile attitudes towards Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, his attacks never took the form of a cheap musical parody.

Wagner desired that his music should express not only emotions, but complicated philosophical principles as well, and particularly the revolutionary ideals, radical moral values, and spiritual strivings that he associated with the German race. Like the classical Aristotlean critics and his contemporary composers of “tone poems,” Wagner believed that music imitated emotional states, and he believed that he could communicate precise spiritual messages by assigning them to specific musical phrases, which he called “leitmotifs.”

Musical notes, like words, can be used as symbols and arbitrarily assigned to specific referents, and a musical phrase, like a word phrase, can symbolize anything one chooses to attribute to it. A Hakenkreutz (swastika), for example, may have entirely different meanings to a Navaho, a Hindu, or a Jew. Likewise, pictures on canvas or actions on stage may have equivocal references. Wagner sought to exert maximum control over how the symbolic elements of his art would be perceived by reinforcing the occurrences on stage with words and music, imagining that he could prevent any distortion of his meanings. It is from his predictable failure to triumph over ambiguity that the greatest strength and beauty of Wagner’s art, as well as its evil misuses, have arisen. Wagner’s romanticized historiography included three mythical Germanic worlds. The first of these, comprising his four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, had its sources in ancient pagan myths, including the Norse Volsunga Saga and the medieval German epic Das Nibelungenlied, from which he freely adapted his texts. The mythical sources of the operas Tannhäuser, Parsifal, and Lohengrin were in the Grail myths of late medieval Christianity. A third source, reflected most prominently in the setting of Die Meistersinger, was Wagner’s idealized view of the organic German town, the Burgertum of the late Middle Ages and early renaissance. Each of these worlds clearly offers a setting to display grandiose conceptions of Germanic identity, and each of them is readily employable to racist, ethnocentric or anti-Semitic ends.

The mythology of the Ring Cycle presents a world in opposition to both Old and New Testament traditions. It is an attempted revitalization of pagan Germanic myth and an attempt to discover in it the uncompromised barbarian vigor and primitive virtues praised by the Roman historian Tacitus in his depiction of Germanic tribes. These virtues, which Wagner expressed through the eponymous hero of his opera Siegfried, included fearlessness in battle, the sanctity of oaths, and an absolute loyalty to the king.

In addition to its savage heroes, the world of Der Ring is populated by gods, giants, and dwarfs. Some people have seen in Wagner’s dwarfs the embodiment of a vicious stereotype of the Jewish people as hoarders and manipulators of wealth. In Das Judentum in der Musik, Wagner wrote negatively about Jewish bankers, then proceeded to describe Jewish musicians with the same scurrilous imagery that he assigns to the subterranean dwarfs of Das Rheingold. He described the work of Jewish composers, for example, as a “worm-befretted carcass.” Two years earlier, in an 1848 prospectus for Der Ring des Nibelungen, he had similarly characterized the gold-hoarding dwarfs as being “like worms in the dead body” of German art.

Wagner’s chosen people, the Wälsungs, are a race with no perceptible virtue other than the warrior trait of physical courage, loyalty to their chief, and a somewhat ambiguous reverence for women (clouded by an extreme possessiveness and a tendency to regard women as trophies). Wagner’s superman, Siegfried, is not a noble savage, but a virile barbarian who, like his father, is beyond Christian notions of good and evil. He shares these traits, presumably, with the Übermensch of Friedrich Willhelm Nietzsche, and one can see in him the precursor of the Hitler youth—tall, blonde, handsome, rash, unreflective, and controlled by forces he is incapable of contemplating.

Wagner’s racial attitudes are often confused with those of Nietzsche, who, like Wagner, heralded the coming of a new “superman,” unconstrained by the supposedly tenderhearted values of bourgeois Christianity. But where Nietzsche’s philosophy placed supreme value on the individual will, Wagner celebrated the collective German Volksgeist, or “national character.” Nietzsche expressed an admiration for certain cultural values that he associated with Jewish people, and he was equally hostile to the Jewish and the Christian religious heritage. Wagner’s racial nationalism viewed the Jews as an inferior, unredeemable race who could play no role in the German nationalism he celebrated. But Nietzsche opposed racial anti-Semitism and the herd mentality of vulgar German nationalism. Thus, Wagner found himself in the contradictory position of trying to reconcile barbarian lawlessness with nationalistic communalism. The supermen of the Ring cycle—Siegmund and his son Siegfried—are antisocial outlaws as well as symbols of ethnic purity, tribal loyalty, and racial spirit.

Wagner’s use of Grail mythology is more notable for its sexism than for its anti-Semitism. It centers on chaste knights whose holiness is often proven by their renunciation of sensual females, as in the examples of Parsifal and Tannhäuser. The opera Lohengrin combines familiar elements of classical, Germanic, and Hebraic mythology. A young woman is commanded by her husband and champion that she must never ask his name. When natural curiosity finally overcomes her, he reveals that he is Lohengrin, son of Parsifal, and a keeper of the Grail.

He then leaves her, returning to his sacred vigil at Mounserat, and she dies of grief. There is nothing anti-Semitic about this, unless one accepts the proposition that there is no place for Jews within the mythology of medieval Christianity, other than that of the Wandering Jew. But the only person in any of Wagner’s operas with the name “Wanderer” is Wotan, the king of the gods and the progenitor of the Germanic master race, the Wälsung.

Die Meistersinger is the only Wagner opera that is not dominated by supernatural forces. Set in the sixteenth century, it involves a songfest and two competitions, one for a musical prize, the other for the hand of a beautiful young woman. There are two heroes, one of them the historical Hans Sachs, a shoemaker and poet. The other is Walther, a young knight who, somewhat incongruously, is not associated with any sort of practical hand trade, but who demonstrates his craftsmanship by composing a masterful song. Reminiscent of Marxism in its conception, the opera envisions a world before the rise of industrial capitalism and a time before workers were alienated from their labor. The villain of the opera is the unattractive character of Beckmesser, in whom some critics have seen a caricature of the Jewish bourgeoisie. There is no internal evidence for this interpretation, although in his blind attempts to adhere to rules that he does not understand, he resembles the fabrications of Das Judenthum. Some critics have seen in Beckmesser’s unimaginative interpretation of the guild’s formal rules, and in the horrid cacophonies he produces, an intentionally grotesque travesty on Jewish religious music.

The hostility of many audiences, Jewish and non-Jewish, to Wagner stems largely from the fact that he was much admired by Hitler. Indeed, his operas came to symbolize German racial and artistic supremacy to the Nazis. Since the destruction of the Third Reich, Wagner’s music has been associated in the popular mind with both fascism and Western imperialism. During the 1970s, for example, the most familiar of his musical themes, The Ride of the Walküres, accompanied the depiction of a helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.

Wagner did not publicly disclose his anti-Semitism in the first anonymously published edition of Das Judentum, which was released in 1850, but in the 1869 edition he restated his views shamelessly. It would seem, therefore, that if he had intended to portray the Dwarf Nibelungs as symbols of a supposedly Jewish capitalism, or Beckmesser as a symbol of decadent Jewish art, he could have done so openly and without any qualms. Yet when one compares Wagner’s abstract anti-Semitic blathering to his formulations of German myth in the prospectus for Der Ring, and then compare those to the texts of his operas, it is easy enough to find continuities. It is thus perfectly understandable that, given Wagner’s unsavory anti-Semitic attitudes and the deployment of them by the Nazi generation, there is a continuing hostility to any performance of his works in Israel. Despite the fact that some Jewish musicians and conductors insist that there are no specific expressions of anti-Semitism in his music, there are many persons, both Jewish and non-Jewish, whose appreciation of his music will always be diminished by the composer’s avowed anti-Semitism.

SEE ALSO Anti-Semitism.