(Review of Marc A

from Salmagundi

(Review of Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, Nebraska, 1995.)

Wagner was an ideological, political antisemite, and a leader of German opinion about the destructive effect that Jews have on German culture, on what he saw as the native, inherent, indwelling body of values deeply rooted in the German soul. The overall demonstration of his antisemitism hardly has to be made again, and Weiner doesn't bother to, since the contours are so well known. He simply deals with the details that pertain to his argument that Wagner's ideology is not confined to his political-aesthetic tracts, but pervades the operas, both text and music. A history and analysis of the general issue of Wagner's antisemitism can be found in the third volume of Leon Poliakov's History of Antisemitism (1975), and in T. W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner (1952), to mention two well known sources, and more recently, in Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (1992).

Wagner's antisemitism is woven into his idealistic utopian nationalism, whereby Jews, with their racial degeneracy and financial power, threaten to destroy the purity of German Volk-based culture and the Nordic race. He sees them as Mediterranean and Oriental, people even worse than the French and the Italians, whose native decadence they compounded. Their financial power, like that of Meyerbeer--stockbroker and composer--corrupted the opera and concert stages by buying self-serving influence for bad art. Their foreignness, with their distorted bodies, foul smells and high voices, repelled the healthy instincts of the German people. Their calculating and materialistic character made them incapable of producing true art, only mimicry of models they were incapable of understanding deeply. The sources of these opinions in Wagner's own work are not hidden: his own letters and those of his wife Cosima, and his essays "Was ist 'deutsch'?, Das Judentum in der Musik and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, will provide the basic texts. Beyond these, however, are the barrage of popular antisemitic stereotypes about the Jewish body (Weiner's particular concern) that are displayed in the text and music of his operas as well as in his essays.

One can not argue in defense of Wagner's antisemitism that everybody in Germany at the time was antisemitic to one degree or another. First, it is not true, since antisemitism was an issue politicized by extreme nationalists in opposition to the Enlightenment values of a more tolerant, cosmopolitan group with substantial influence, among whom was Wagner's friend Nietzsche. Lessing' Nathan the Wise is a well known part of this tradition and one can think as well of the high esteem in which the Mendelssohns were held by a significant part of the intellectual world. To argue that the terms on which the Mendelssohns were accepted were not entirely appealing to the Jews--namely, that they are as good as Christians, exotic houseplants, noble ancestors, practically Christians, etc.--is not unreasonable, but it is also necessary to point out that the sacred Germanic Volk culture was also domesticated on its entrance into the official culture. That is the way cultural power expresses itself: others should aspire to be as good as we are. The generous side of this welcomes others to the sacred band and the destructive side guards its purity against the corruption of outsiders. The latter was Wagner's position, and because of his musical stature his many fervent writings against the malign influence of Jews gave this kind of nationalism a shameful intellectual respectability. He was the most formidable propagandist for this position among his contemporaries.

This role is very different from that of Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice. Shylock is derived from antisemitic stereotypes and love and mercy triumph over his cursed Jewish legalism, yet he is such a poignant figure while the comedy devours him in its triumphant celebration that he has often been treated as a tragic figure since the Romantic movement revalued Outsiders and Monsters. While this is impossible to support as Shakespeare's intention, it indicates a dramatic possibility that we could not imagine for Malvolio in Twelfth Night or Beckmesser in Meistersinger, for example. Shakespeare's antisemitism is orthodox, in an England that had been without Jews for over three centuries. It is an abstract bigotry remarkably disconnected from actual people. He is not warning us against the threat of a very real presence in the land. The antisemitism that he used was a cultural residue (in Pareto's sense) and not an ideological battle cry. Unlike Wagner, he is not advocating it, but simply assuming it. It is a survival in Elizabethan England of the traditional and official Catholic view of the Jew as the rejecter of Christ and his mercy. The portrait takes its color from theology and folklore and not dread, political ideology, social contempt or personal hatred.

Wagner's kind of antisemitism draws much of its ideology from the glorification of the Volk, an idea that swept over Europe in the wake of Romanticism. This idea had many manifestations on the left and right, some universalizing and some yoked to an essentialism and nationalism that was, and still remains, narrow and murderous. Wagner's variety was the latter: the German Volk have a special knowledge and way of knowing based on his fanciful etymological connection between deutsch and deuten (to explain, clarify), quoted by Weiner (p.62-63) from Wagner's essay, "Was ist deutsch?":

'deutsch' is...that with which we are familiar, what we are used to, what we have inherited from our fathers, what has sprouted from the earth....It denotes therefore those people [Völker] who remained in their place of origin, continuing to speak their primeval mother tongue [Urmuttersprache], while those [previously German] lines [Stämme] ruling in the former Romanic countries gave up their mother tongue. The concept 'deutsch' is therefore attached to language and the primeval homeland.

The nations that surrendered their native languages to bastardized forms of the Roman conqueror's language have lost their integrity like those wanderers and perpetual strangers the Jews. This is pure identity/essentialist politics. Outsiders can only dilute, corrupt, weaken the essence and identity of a true Volk. They are incapable of really knowing what the Volk know, and Wagner says that they only parrot or mime the authentic, like Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer [Das Judentum in der Musik]. Their distortions, Wagner felt, might be mistaken for true work and could destroy the integrity of the culture.

Unfortunately this is an idea that has stuck around, beyond Wagner's overheated tribalistic German nationalism. It can be heard quite clearly in T.S. Eliot's University of Virginia Lectures, published as After Strange Gods in 1934 (and because of Eliot's second thoughts never republished), where he warns against too many free thinking Jews as a threat to the integrity of Southern agrarian culture. The more benign side of this Romantic view of autochthonous wisdom is seen in Howards End, where Forster's vision is generous, elegiac and inclusive and is not attached to a battle between pure-hearted insiders and corrupt outsiders. Mercifully, he lacks the drive for certainties and for a tightly defined identity that would free him from the kind of inner conflict that should be welcome and natural. Instead we have a profound affirmation of human diversity in which the Romanticism survives as a kind of mawkishness in the portrait of Mrs. Wilcox's wisdom, and the attention that she pays to the voices of her ancestors. For despite her lack of high birth, "the instinctive wisdom the past alone can bestow had descended upon her--that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy." Or peasantry, proletarian, Republican, Confucian, Confederate, Fundamentalist, or any other equally clumsy name.

Given Wagner's role as the proponent of the appalling racist ideas that had such a vicious future in our century, we must then ask what role they had in his art. This is not a simple question, and my use of the term "art" rather than "music" indicates part of the difficulty that admirers of Wagner have with any question of his racist ideology. How can music, free of verbal content, be racist? When I told the composer Ezra Sims I was thinking about these things, he wrote me, "There is no politics in music. Or any high art I suspect. Texts may play with it, but finally the very requirements of singleness, balance, and reconciliation of elements see to it that the more a person expects--or allows--his social ideas (however well or ill intended) to generate and validate his art, the more they actually invalidate it." The purity of this, its serene classicism with regard to texts and its assumption that music is free of politics, is the kind of artistic credo that should free us from deconstructionists forever. (An aside: Weiner's book is free of jargon and is generally clearly written.) However, Sims doesn't account for Wagner's belief that he was composing unified works of art where music, text, idea and theatrical spectacle were inseparable, and he would probably dismiss all of that as Wagner's misunderstanding of his own art. That may well be true, and very much in the spirit of the new movement called WoW, Wagner ohne Worte (without words), that redeems him from his ideas and the poetry of his libretti.

Weiner's argument challenges this view of musical purity on grounds that are reasonable and rigorous. He argues that:

Wagner's anti-Semitism is not some minor, passing aberration limited to his personal antipathies, but a fundamental component in the ideological program of his social theories and his tracts on the aesthetic makeup of a future and different socially redemptive work of art. Moreover, that ideological and racist program is not solely discernible in Wagner's prose texts, not merely to be dismissed as an interesting, albeit largely abstract component of his multivolume theoretical writing, but constitutes the very raison d'être of his works for the stage." (65)

It is this uncompromising view that Weiner undertakes to demonstrate in his book, and the argument pursued in exhaustive detail is that various villainous figures in the operas are based on antisemitic stereotypes about the Jewish body, how Jews look, smell, walk and sound, and try to corrupt German culture. And it is not only clues in the texts, but when the music itself portrays Jewish stereotypical characteristics, it limps, chatters, screeches, is consigned to a higher, more decadent vocal range than the manly Heldentenor, and so forth. It is on this level of tone painting that the music itself participates in Wagner's antisemitism, according to Weiner.

His book is filled with examples of the coded signs offered to his contemporary "interpretive community" of the antisemitic stereotypes applied to villains who are not nominally Jewish. These characteristics are still recognizable in current patterns of bigotry, having to do with lack of spirituality, materialism, greed, clannishness, and of particular interest to Weiner, deformations of the body: smell, limping, filth, posture, sexual depravity. There are, of course, no Jews for Wagner to work with in his sources: the Eddas, the Niebelungenlied, or among the Meistersingers, that provided Wagner with opera subjects. Weiner's treatment of Beckmesser in Meistersinger is an example of his typical strategy, and its strengths and difficulties.

On the one hand, Beckmesser is a universal comic type, the pedant who fails to understand and who is doomed to fail in love and art. But on the other hand, Weiner points out persuasively, that the details of the portrait of Beckmesser is defined by antisemitic stereotypes drawn from Wagner's diatribes against the Jews. (This was not lost on Wagner's contemporaries, and there were Jewish protests of the performances in Mannheim and Vienna, very much like the Black protests of Birth of a Nation earlier in this century.) Central to the opera is Beckmesser's courtship of the beautiful Eva who is repelled by him, and his idiotic imitation of Walther von Stolzing's true German love song. This pattern of misunderstanding happens to be identical to Wagner's complaint about Mendelssohn in Das Judentum in der Musik: that it mimes the sounds without true grasp, because the Jew simply parrots a language and art. Weiner argues further that the codes are "written on the body" and the physical presence of Beckmesser, his clumsy walk, bad smell, high voice, are all those of the degenerate Jew.

A note on the imitation of the Prize Song. Here is Weiner's passage:

Beckmesser will never be able to penetrate into the 'depths' of the 'life-giving inner organism' of Walther's prize song and will instead reflect back to the audience--the communal Volk--only a distortion...of Walther's artistry. In his parrotlike mimicry, and through his foreign eyes, the organism of German art will metaphorically die. The first stanza of Walther's text had run thus:

Morgenlich leuchtend in rosigem Schein,

voll Blüt' und Duft

geschwellt die Luft,

voll aller Wonnen

nie ersonnen,

ein Garten lud mich ein

Gast ihm zu sein. (MN, 110)

[Beaming with morning's rosy splendor, and filled with blooms and scents, with all the joys as yet unknown, a garden beckoned to me to be its guest within.]

From this pantheistic panoply Beckmesser, by virtually taking surreptitious peeks at the manuscript...is not able to grasp the image and essence....and in its place produces a travesty:

Morgen ich leuchte in rosigem Schein,

voll Blut und Duft

geht schnell die Luft;--

wohl bald geronnen

wie zerronnen,--

im Garten lud ich ein--

garstig und fein. (NM, 133)

[Tomorrow I shine in rosy shimmer, full of blood and aroma the air goes quickly--surely soon curdled , as if evaporated,--in the garden I invited--ugly and fine.]

Walther's version is a very dull, awful, pious version of a minnelied and Beckmesser's idiotic transposition has an unintended goofy charm to the contemporary ear. It is inviting to see it as a lampoon of a defunct poem. Wagner has no such intention, however. He is determined to make Beckmesser despicable, in a particularly antisemitic way, with his incomprehension, his grasping for gold and pure German women and culture, and he is rightly and finally beaten and expelled by the Volk. The music says this more clearly than the text. The Prize Song is one of our great songs, and Beckmesser's song a fine musical joke.

Weiner makes a case, based on Wagner's antisemitic tracts, about Mime and his brother Alberich, the Niebelungen. The case seems strikingly persuasive here, and it is supported by Mahler as a sophisticated part of the "interpretive community" who says: "'No doubt with Mime, Wagner intends to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits--petty intelligence and greed--the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested.'" (Weiner, p.143) And similar cases, of varying persuasiveness, based on various traits drawn from Wagner's tracts, are made by Weiner for Klingsor, Hagen, Kundry--seducers, masturbators, the impotent, all varieties of Jewish degenerates in Wagner's eyes.

The tendency of the argument is clear enough, and the case is carefully if not always persuasively made. The problem with the book is in fact its repetitiousness, as the same armaments are brought out repeatedly for every trait and every character. The editors at the University of Nebraska Press seem not to edit, unfortunately, and Weiner was allowed to plod ahead as if every chapter were an independent public lecture in which everything must be explained all over again.

Weiner's conclusion is that the music has survived its "interpretive community" and the codes can and will be ignored by the modern audience, which is freed by time to respond to Wagner without his bigotries, but he reminds us that we should not ignore Wagner's intentions.

Personally, I refuse to receive Wagner's works as he would have had them received, and the fact that our culture is not Wagner's may constitute our redemption (to use one of his favorite terms) from the Wagnerian agenda and may allow us to experience his breathtakingly beautiful and stirring musical-dramatic accomplishments as works that can be enjoyed despite their initial intended message of racial exclusion. That, however, is altogether different from insisting that such a message never existed at all. (p.29)

This strikes me as a sane and generous conclusion, too generous to my taste about Wagner's "musical-dramatic accomplishments." But I still find something too pious in Weiner's position. To appreciate an art independent of the creator's moral design seems inevitable when work is obscure by virtue of its esoteric frame of cultural reference or historical distance. But once we have had a Panofsky explain the iconography of the Medieval paintings whose radiance alone once seemed sufficient, we can never see them the same way again, even merely by knowing that the iconography is operative when we find ourselves unsure of its details. While Wagner's "interpretive community" has dissolved in time, the explainers of the codes like Weiner have not. In fact there have been many explainers of the presence of Wagner's antisemitism in his art, and we should remember as well its contribution to Nazi ideology in our violent century. What do we do with our knowledge and how do we keep from bringing it to bear?

And Ezra Sims' test is a severe one: "the more a person expects--or allows--his social ideas (however well or ill intended) to generate and validate his art, the more they actually invalidate it." I think there is no serious doubt about whether Wagner's antisemitism was one of the forces that generated his art. How much? How detachable from the music? Shouldn't the emphasis fall more heavily on the "despite" in Weiner's formulation, and isn't there a defiance of Wagner involved in hearing his Gesamtkunstwerk without his racist agenda, and in purest form, without his words? Perhaps we should enjoy this with a gleeful defiance! After all, when we think of the durability of the sounds we make, music has it way over all forms of speech but poetry, meaning much better poetry than Wagner's, great works of criticism will be buried by a bouncy jig, and we should celebrate the fact that music outlasts absurd libretti and moral brutality and that what survives of Wagner will have nothing to do with the texts of the operas.