I believe that Richard Wagner has been the victim of character assassination, which was started in his era but has come to full fruition in our own. While certainly Wagner does have character flaws, he is accused—casually, ubiquitously, and with no or little supporting evidence—of a whole host of faults, most of them exaggerated, and rarely counterbalanced with any sense of his goodness beyond musical genius. The result is that his true personality and character have been buried under an avalanche of mud. My introduction to that topic is here. I give a short introduction to his personality and character so that you can better understand the various charges here. I cover these traits: megalomania here; sexist, womanizer and wife-stealer – part 1 here, part 2 here; his problems with money and, consequently, friendship is here; the issue of his morality, hypocrisy and lying here. The first part of how his reputation got into the mess it is can be found here and the second here. The series concludes here with some thoughts about biography and a selected bibliography.
There
is no doubt in this modern age, particularly post-holocaust, that the
most troubling aspect of Wagner’s character revolves around his
anti-Semitism. There are many ways in which to view it, and
much has been written on it.1
I have thought, and read, about this issue more than any other, and
I will be writing a number of posts to try to articulate my position
and view it from a variety of lenses. I suspect these sections will
get reworked and reordered as I write and reflect back on the posts
as they emerge.
Since
I am in the midst of my “character study” of Wagner, to write about the Jewish issue now would interrupt that effort. But I obviously need to
acknowledge for these character posts that Wagner was, in fact,
anti-Semitic. Even in this area, though, people exaggerate the
claims about his anti-Semitism and assert things about his views that
are simply untrue. I will write about all that later, but for now I
want to make some broad points, many of which I will return to in more
detail and with more—I hope—finesse.
To
start off, let me just give a very brief background of Wagner’s
milieu. In mid-19th century Germany, most people—no
matter if they were friend or foe of Jews’ civil rights and
integration into society—had views that in our present age would be
considered stereotypical and anti-Semitic, to wit: that Jews were vulgar and shady characters who were adept at making money through unsavory means, plus they were foreign and, as their culture was perceived at the time, undesirable in the society. That said, a large number—perhaps a majority—felt these perceived
traits of their culture developed due to the legal barriers erected
against the Jews and would go away or greatly diminish with the
advancement of Jewish civil rights and assimilation into the larger
culture. Thus, it was a tolerant period, as a historian of the
period, Jacob Katz, reports, “rooted in the more or less emphatic
hope that the Jewish minority, in its economic, social, cultural, and
perhaps even religious particularity, would in the course of time
disappear.”2
Wagner
held the ubiquitous stereotypes about the Jews, which was
unremarkable given the zeitgeist. What was different—and
considered rather shocking and impolite at the time—was that he
disseminated these views via his writings, most particularly Das Judenthum in der Musik.
3
It was published anonymously in 1850 and reprinted under his name in
1869. In this essay, in a nutshell, he makes these arguments
about the Jews: first, he claimed that since Jews were a foreign
element within Germany that they, therefore, could not write authentic and deeply
passionate German music; secondly, that Jews made a business out of
art, degrading it; thirdly, that Jews gave Germans—he assumed all
would agree—the creeps because they were, in fact, creepy. It was
the last point that people most strenuously objected to
then and now. He concluded his essay with the pro-assimilation
position, which was in-line with the times, but his airing of
his animus to Jews was decidedly not.
Pre-holocaust,
his writings about Jews views were treated as, essentially, not in
good taste and part of his general character of being unable to hold
his tongue about anything. At that point, it was still relatively
socially acceptable to be anti-Semitic, so the urge to write about it
critically didn’t exist as it does now. However, post-holocaust,
there has been a profusion of literature on the subject, particularly
in the last several decades. According to Wagner scholar Thomas Grey, the focus of
scholarly inquiry now “has to do with the consequences of these
facts, either for our understanding of the operas or for any possible
consensus regarding Wagner’s implication in the murderous
anti-Semitic polices of the Nazi regime that came into power fifty
years after this death.”4
Beyond
the serious, but often biased, academic inquiries into the role of
Wagner in inspiring or otherwise abetting the Nazi movement that
emerged about 50 years after his death, Wagner has been demonized
and mythologized within Israel—and to a lesser extent, the rest of
the West—and used as lightening rod for the anger against Nazi
Germany. In her book, The Ring of Myths: Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis, the Israeli historian Na’ama Sheffi explores the process of the rerouting of the righteous Jewish anger towards Germany through the scapegoating of Wagner. She explores how this process helped smooth the path for Israel to create political and
economic ties with West Germany in the 60s. Consequently, as Terry
Kinney summarized in this review of Sheffi's book:
By
the 1980s and 1990s the Wagner controversy had reached such a level
that Wagner had been completely disassociated from his historical
context. Indeed, proponents of Wagner performances frequently had to
remind their readers that Wagner was not actually alive during the
Nazi era, such was the level of knowledge concerning the real Richard
Wagner.
As quoted in the Amazon summary, “Sheffi
concludes that the choice of Wagner as the target for all their
abhorrence of Nazism and the Holocaust ‘both sins against the man and
obscures the significance of the Holocaust’.”5
To
point towards Wagner as an architect of the holocaust seriously misdirects the locus of historical
culpability. My belief is that, historically and morally, the
responsibility should be directed to Christianity and Christians. They
created the ocean of anti-Semitism, with Wagner simply a small
tributary contributing to the major, and overwhelming, volume.
Of course, Christians did not begin anti-Jewish thought and action. As modern anti-Semitism was built on Christian anti-Semitism, Christian animosity was built on existing pagan animosity, so the blame for the Holocaust can reach even farther back in history. In any case, Christian anti-Jewish sentiment is embedded into the New Testament, which seems clearly to me to be an
anti-Semitic text. Many passages within it put forward the
Jewish stereotypes that still exist today, particularly about Jews and their greed for money. As well, the imfamous line from Matthew 27:24–25 in which the crowd says at Jesus' cruxification “his
blood be upon us, and on our children,” was widely interpreted as a curse on the Jews.6
While
Christians have this or that excuse—all lame to my reading—for
what the New Testament seems to say, they can have no excuse for what
they did, or encouraged, or ignored, for 2000 years, stemming
directly from their sacred text. The Jews were granted
tolerance—that is, they weren’t killed systematically—because,
as Katz summarized, “of the hope that they would convert and step
forward as witnesses of the Christian truth, by the latest at the End
of Days.” 7
David Vital, in his book A People Apart, the Jews in Europe 1789-1939, states the case clearly: “The lesson of Exile in Europe was that as much
by the sword as the word the masters of Christendom had sought to
bring about if not the death of Jewry, at any rate its decimation;
and, failing that, they had sought to ensure that Jews lived out
their lives in the greatest possible moral and material squalor and
degradation.”8
The
Catholic Church, of course, was the central persecutor of the Jews
for most of the time. The reformation brought no improvement. In
fact, Martin Luther was a truly fanatical and despicable anti-Semite. To take a piece from Wikipedia: “Luther
advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbook, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews’ property and money,
and smashing up their homes, so that these “poisonous envenomed
worms” would be forced into labour or expelled “for all
time.” In
Robert Michael's view, Luther's words, “We are at fault in not
slaying them” amounted to a sanction for murder.9
I
agree wholeheartedly with Hyam Maccoby who considered “Hitler the
‘the boil’ in which the poisons of ‘Christian society’ came
to a head.” 10
Now,
to my mind, Christians have not in any significant or real way taken
responsibility for their dominant role in the persecution of Jews
throughout the last two millennium, which clearly was the central source of animus that Hilter manipulated to attempt his ultimate destruction of the Jews. Typical is this Catholic's attempt to shift
the central blame to neo-pagan sources.
Look,
I do believe that Wagner had some, though limited, culpability for
setting the stage that led to the rise of the Nazi’s. When I have finished these posts the extent of his culpability should be clear. But, to give him any fundamental blame is just asinine,
particularly in the context of the overwhelming anti-Semitism—among
many other calamities—of Western Civilization.
More
on some of those calamities—like slavery, genocide or the subjugation of Native peoples, the Inquistion—down the line (but I need to finish the
character section!) But let me leave with this, which pretty much
accords with my thoughts:
Question
to Gandhi on a trip to London: “What do you think of Western
Civilization?”
His answer:
“I think it would be a good idea.”
End Notes
1 For
this section, I am drawing on these sources regarding Wagner’s
anti-semitism. I consider them fair and intellectually honest—though
not necessarily correct in their conclusions or emphasis, which is notoriously difficult with someone like Wagner, who said and
did so many contradictory things. Searching for the true Wagner is
truly challenging, but these authors were diligent in their quest for
balance. Katz, The Darker Side of Genius;
Magee, The Tristan Chord, Appendix 343-380 and Aspects of Wagner, pages 19-28; Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, pages 203-218; Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews; from Deathridge, Muller, Wapnewski, the Wagner Handbook, the article "The Question of Anti-Semitism" by Dieter Borchmeyer, Millington, the Wagner Compendium, pages 161-164. If you read German, I have read very good things about Dieter David Scholz's Richard Wagners Antiseitismus.
2 Katz,
5
3 Full
text of the article is here. Warning though: the translator Ellis is considered to be horrible
and makes the job of understanding what Wagner means much more difficult
than it should be. Here is a post from the blog Think Classical that makes that point very
well. This blogger’s interpretation of Wagner's article—he translated it himself and it is much clearer and less offensive—is here. This translation problem is compounded by the fact that Wagner
is normally an obtuse writer. Bryan Magee says of his lack of
skill—on page 4 of Aspects of Wagner—“One forms the
conviction that the prose was improvised, poured out without
forethought or discipline—that when Wagner embarked on each
individual sentence he had no idea how it was going to end. Many
passages are intolerably boring. Some do not mean anything at all.
It always calls for sustained effort from the reader to pick out
meaning in the cloud of words. Often one has to go on reading for
several pages before beginning to descry what, like a solid figure
emerging from a mist, it is he is saying.” He is so unclear that
people have come to diametrically opposed opinions about what his
words actually mean. That said, the ending of Wagner's article, quoted
out of context, has been intentionally misinterpreted in horrific
ways that are clearly wrong if you actually read the article.
4 Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, page 203
7 Katz, page 6. Katz also wrote From Prejudice to Destruction 1700-1933 if you want to read a full survey of the rise of the so-called "modern" anti-semitism.
8 Vital,
108
10 As quoted in Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil, 320
There is no doubt in this modern age, particularly post-holocaust, that the most troubling aspect of Wagner’s character revolves around his anti-Semitism. There are many ways in which to view it, and much has been written on it.1 I have thought, and read, about this issue more than any other, and I will be writing a number of posts to try to articulate my position and view it from a variety of lenses. I suspect these sections will get reworked and reordered as I write and reflect back on the posts as they emerge.
Question
to Gandhi on a trip to London: “What do you think of Western
Civilization?”
His answer:
“I think it would be a good idea.”
1 For
this section, I am drawing on these sources regarding Wagner’s
anti-semitism. I consider them fair and intellectually honest—though
not necessarily correct in their conclusions or emphasis, which is notoriously difficult with someone like Wagner, who said and
did so many contradictory things. Searching for the true Wagner is
truly challenging, but these authors were diligent in their quest for
balance. Katz, The Darker Side of Genius;
Magee, The Tristan Chord, Appendix 343-380 and Aspects of Wagner, pages 19-28; Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, pages 203-218; Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews; from Deathridge, Muller, Wapnewski, the Wagner Handbook, the article "The Question of Anti-Semitism" by Dieter Borchmeyer, Millington, the Wagner Compendium, pages 161-164. If you read German, I have read very good things about Dieter David Scholz's Richard Wagners Antiseitismus.
2 Katz,
5
3 Full
text of the article is here. Warning though: the translator Ellis is considered to be horrible
and makes the job of understanding what Wagner means much more difficult
than it should be. Here is a post from the blog Think Classical that makes that point very
well. This blogger’s interpretation of Wagner's article—he translated it himself and it is much clearer and less offensive—is here. This translation problem is compounded by the fact that Wagner
is normally an obtuse writer. Bryan Magee says of his lack of
skill—on page 4 of Aspects of Wagner—“One forms the
conviction that the prose was improvised, poured out without
forethought or discipline—that when Wagner embarked on each
individual sentence he had no idea how it was going to end. Many
passages are intolerably boring. Some do not mean anything at all.
It always calls for sustained effort from the reader to pick out
meaning in the cloud of words. Often one has to go on reading for
several pages before beginning to descry what, like a solid figure
emerging from a mist, it is he is saying.” He is so unclear that
people have come to diametrically opposed opinions about what his
words actually mean. That said, the ending of Wagner's article, quoted
out of context, has been intentionally misinterpreted in horrific
ways that are clearly wrong if you actually read the article.
4 Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, page 203
4 Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, page 203
7 Katz, page 6. Katz also wrote From Prejudice to Destruction 1700-1933 if you want to read a full survey of the rise of the so-called "modern" anti-semitism.
8 Vital,
108
10 As quoted in Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil, 320
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