Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination

by Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner

This book addresses one of the most hotly contested debates in contemporary cultural the question of how anti-Semitism figures in the operas of Richard Wagner. Until now, scholars have generally acknowledged Wagner's anti-Semitism but have argued that it is irrelevant to the operas themselves. Marc A. Weiner challenges that traditional view by asserting that anti-Semitism is a crucial, pervasive feature in Wagner's operas.
Weiner argues that the operas exemplify and contribute to a vast collection of images that are patently anti-Semitic - and that were readily recognized as such by nineteenth-century German audiences. These images were associated particularly with the body.
Through a careful examination of Wagner's music, libretti, and stage directions, Weiner reconstructs iconographies of corporeal images - iconographies of the eye, voice, smell, gait, and sexuality - that were essential to the operas and were "associated with anti-Semitism and the longing for an imagined German community."

Genres: Music

439 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 1995

Reviews

[Maxwell DeMay · Rating 5 out of 5]

3 / 4 : Read!

[19th-century German composer has a few things to say about The Jews.]

Every once and a while, a piece of scholarship comes along, razor-sharp, w/ a not an insignificant bone to pick. This does not miss. The notion that if we acknowledge Wagner's well-documented and prolific essays on race, we can treat his music or his "art" as separate is completely demolished. Save your comments about separating the art from the artist for elsewhere. Wagner's music, to its core, exists in service of a pernicious and all-encompassing ideology and it's difficult to justify his continued presence in the modern repertoire, much less his near-ubiquity.

While none his operas feature Jews, per se, they feature creatures meant to evoke, w/o exaggeration, every stereotype of what for audiences of the time, considered a different race entirely. Their parts are written in an exaggeratedly high range and assigned to bass-baritones to suggest an unpleasant, screeching, nasal quality. Their clumsy and nearly club-footed gait in the more rhythmically complicated triplet formations that define their character entrances and melodic material (not to mention unflattering stage direction where they are told to trip over themselves.) Their malodorous-ness is suggested w/ little comedic musical farts. The cumulative effect is endlessly vulgar and obnoxiously heavy-handed. Saying that, no, those are Nibelungs and they are a fantasy race or Jews didn't exist in 16th-century Germany are rather flimsy deflections. These are not subtle jabs that can be papered over by some nimble dramaturgist. Remove the bigotry and you have no opera left.

Professor Wiener, like any good academic, is claiming to not be taking a simple stand in what has become a pro- vs. anti-Wagner struggle but I have no such compunction. Wagner's stuff's just not very good. Sorry.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to imagine that this book would have been conceived if Wagner had not written Das Judentum in der Musik and a few other antisemitic writings, which kind of goes to discredit its thesis that the post-revolutionary operas contain, on their face, antisemitic depictions that would have been immediately obvious to their creator and contemporary audience. Weiner uses Wagner's own antisemitic writings as a key to understanding the "Jewishness" of his villains. And he pretty much treats villain and Jew as equivalent - it's suggested that even the barely present Melot has Jewish characteristics. Though Loge in Das Rheingold shares many of the "Jewish" characteristics Weiner finds in other characters, this is only mentioned in an endnote; it isn't clear why, in the text, the author decided to ignore this character completely in favor of rather repetitious reassessments of Beckmesser, Mime, Alberich, and, to a lesser degree, Klingsor and Kundry.

In his introduction Weiner writes:

Thus I will argue that both Wagner and his contemporaries perceived his works through associations – linking a given set of values and beliefs to specific bodily imagery – that may no longer be automatically evoked in performance today; it will be my task to reconstruct hypothetically these associations within which Wagner’s essays and music dramas could have, and indeed may have, resonated for the composer and his nineteenth century audience.

Given that, I was expecting a good deal of material that would put Wagner’s works in a theatrical and cultural context specific to the period 1850-82 which would provide support for the author’s interpretations and some justification for thinking that those interpretations were potentially how Wagner and his audience understood the operas. But we pretty much get just Weiner’s interpretations – occasionally backed up by sometimes tendentious quotations from Wagner’s copious prose writings. His main discussions of reception come from a decade or more after Wagner’s death – and then are pretty specific to German and British sources where antisemitic ideology became associated with Wagner enthusiasm; but Wagnerism was a wider European phenomenon by that time and had diverse manifestations in different countries and cultural circles.

Weiner is a very perceptive reader and listener: on the basic level of determining the immediate meaning of a passage, I didn't find anything to disagree with in his many textual and musical analyses. Though sometimes I felt he left out pertinent information, I did not feel it was done with the intention of misleading the reader or illegitimately strengthening his argument. It's when he gets to the deeper significance of events that I found myself raising objections.

It's not always clear on what level Weiner sees the antisemitism of the operas working. Though he often refers to various characters as "Jews", he explicitly denies that they can be literally seen as such in the context of the dramas; he occasionally uses the prefix "pseudo-" to distinguish Wagner's "Jewish" characters from actual explicit portrayals of Jewish characters. His argument requires that the reader accept an unspoken, almost taken-for-granted, agreement between Wagner and his contemporaries that he was depicting Jews and that criticising their role and potential influence in late 19th century German society. Given the relatively large number of Jewish theatergoers who attended the operas as well as some not insignificant direct collaborators who were Jewish, the lack of almost any kind of documented protest (see 2. a. below) of these relentless attacks seems incredible and constitutes what seems to me a definite refutation of Weiner's basic contention.

Here are, chapter by chapter, the main depictions in the operas and, in a few cases, the not explicitly antisemitic prose writings where Weiner finds "the antisemitic imagination" leaving its mark. My comments follow each observation.

1. a. Wagner's comparison of the Gesamtkunstwerk with Greek tragedy as a communal experience. Weiner understands the homogeneity of the ancient Greek community as having a parallel in Wagner's mind with a racially homogenous German Volk.
[I do not think this is an accurate reflection of the content of these essays; in his early days in Switzerland, Wagner had a broader idea of community and “folk”. In Opera and Drama he wrote

Who then is the people? In the sum total of the body politic, can a separate party, a particular fraction of the said body claim the name for itself alone? Rather, are we not all alike “the people,” from the beggar to the prince?

This question must therefore be answered according to the conclusive and world-historical sense that now lies at its root, as follows:

The “folk” is the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective want. To belong, then, all those who recognize their individual want as a collective want, or find it based thereon: ergo, all those who can hope for the stilling of their want in nothing but the stilling of a common want, and therefore spend their whole life’s strength upon the stilling of their thus acknowledged common want.

And in] Acts: The Autobiography Of Wolfgang Wagner [Wolfgang Wagner, in describing his perceived mission in Bayreuth, quotes this from Art and Revolution:

Just as Greek art embodied the ethos of a fine nation, so must the art of the future transcend all national boundaries and embody the spirit of fee humanity; its national features must be no more than an ornament, the charm of individual diversity, not an inhibiting restriction.

Weiner seems to be extending the homogeneity of the Greek community into Wagner's immediate post-revolutionary conception, using the composer's later nationalism as justification.]

1. b. Weiner uses Beckmesser's distortion of Walther's Prize Song as a precise illustration of Wagner's descriptions of the Jewish distortions of German art in Das Judentum in der Musik.
[Weiner persuasively argues that the distortions of language described in the essay are precisely reflected in the libretto. It is questionable, however, whether an audience would recognize this as antisemitism rather than more general verbal play.]

1. c. The Ring as racial propaganda: the Volsungs are Germans, establishing their identity in contrast to the dwarves (Jews) and in recognizing mutual family resemblance.
[This is purely Weiner's reading, more influenced by racial "science" that postdates the Ring than anything contemporary with its composition.]

2. a. Beckmesser's melismatic vocal line meant as a parody of cantoral style.
[This is the one point Weiner makes which I am aware was also raised by Wagner's contemporaries, mentioned in Cosima's diaries and cited as coming from a Jewish correspondent. Wagner laughed at the notion as absurd, which I find fairly persuasive; it seems unlikely he would dissemble to Cosima if the charge had any validity.
Weiner also mentions protests by the Jewish community against Meistersinger at its premieres in Mannheim and Vienna (pg. 123). He implies that this was due to the perceived antisemitic elements of the work, but they were in fact in reaction to Wagner's 1869 republication of Das Judentum in der Musik, the first under the composer's own name.]

2. b. Alberich and Mime contrasting "rich" and "poor" Jewish stereotypes: Mussorgsky's Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle.
[This at least is contemporary evidence. But, really, how similar is the music? The solemn, deeper, slower Goldenberg contrasted with the nervous, higher-pitched Schmuÿle is more reminiscent of the Wanderer / Mime dialogue than Alberich / Mime.]

2. c. In W's story "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven"the crass, musically insensitive English tourist represents Jewish attitudes toward the art. French and Italian taste also Judaicised.
[This section highlights Weiner's tendency to extend Wagner's antisemitism well beyond his own stated concepts. If Wagner mentioned foreign musical taste be "judaicized", then every critical depiction of a non-German becomes an instance of antisemitism.]

2. d. The Heldentenor voice as an innovation: a lower male voice to characterize Teutons vs. the high pitched Jewish male voice.
[This is not a bad account of the innovation of Wagner's writing for tenor, but comes nowhere near a convincing argument that a preference for a darker vocal sound from male operatic heroes is antisemitic. Anyway, the high-pitched voice argument only accounts for half of Weiner's "pseudo-Jews": Alberich and Klingsor certainly don't fit the pattern.]

2. e. Klingsor's castration and Amfortas' wound marks them as similar, but somehow only the former is "Jewish" - his emasculation evokes both circumcision and male menstruation (that's what the man says).
[It seems to me the distinction between Klingsor's self-mutilation and Amfortas (likely genital) wound cannot be convincingly parsed in this way.]

3. a. Scent is used, as with sight and sound, to identify similar (pleasant odors) and dissimilar (stinks) beings.
[This is of course, unlike sight and sound, purely subjective, evoked by the text, but Weiner is acute enough as a textual critic to make this a reasonable topic.]

3. b. Alberich's sulfuric smell and Mime's cooking stench are examples of foeter Judäicus. (Weiner now refers to Alberic et. al. as "pseudo-Semitic" figures rather than unequivocally as "Jews" as has often been his habit to this point.)
[Weiner doesn't seem to realize, or at least doesn't openly admit, that Nibelheim is subterranean, which would account for both its sulphuric stench and association with blackness.]

3. c. Beckmesser associated with the smell of pitch, driven away by the scent of the elder tree. is "one of the most anti-Semitic dramas ever to have appeared on stage." [A minor objection: the pitch is applied to the Beckmesser's shoes by Sachs, so it's not devilishly self-generated; part of the general plot against the Marker. As for the last quote: Overstatement much?]

3. d. Wagner has eliminated foul smells in his sources when they attach to heroic figures, specifically the noisome wounds of Tristan and Anfortas.
[An interesting observation, but I suspect of limited relevance. I would think that Wagner adapted his plots from general outlines (rather than specific descriptive details) of his sources and added sensual details as the story developed.]

3. e. In Parsifal, sexuality is a negative quality, therefor seductive pleasant smells are now associated with Amfortas and Kundry, pseudo- or actual Jews.
[A convenient distinction; when the physical characteristics of Wagnerian villains change from the antisemitic tropes Weiner has previously defined, he nevertheless manages to maintain their status as Jews.]

3. f. The reference by Wotan to himself as licht Alberich in contrast to schwarz Alberich is as much an expression of racial "othering" as of a basic affinity.
[I think it likely that, the opposition of the two characters being basic to the drama, Wagner wished here to emphasize affinity. See (or rather, hear) the transformation of the "Ring" motiv to "Valhalla" in the first interlude of Das Rheingold.]

3. g. Klingsor and Kundry, with he Arabian affinities, represent Jews in their Oriental aspects.
[Stage directions and pictures from the first, composer-supervised, production bear out the oriental (near eastern) flavor, but far more Islamic than Judaic.]

3. h. Both Meistersinger and Parsifal contain baptisms which protect against or exorcise Jewish malevolence.
[The baptism in Meistersinger fits thematically with St. John's Day. Kundry may, in fact, be a Jewish character given her backstory; at any rate, her baptism definitely represents a Christianization of the character.]

4. a. The Nibelungs' limping ties them in with mythical smiths, but also with Pan who became the Christian devil, associated in the Middle Ages with Jews. The dwarves' limp is contrasted with the rhythmically regular strides of Siegmund, Siegfried, and the Wanderer.
[One has to go rather deep in the trail of associations to find the specifically Jewish referents here, which are, at best, indirect.]

4. b. Beckmesser limps in Act 3 after his beating, which adds to his Jewish characteristics. [Does Weiner miss that Beckmesser's impaired walking is due, at least in part, to the thinness of his soles, the result of Sachs' rigorous "marking"?]

4. c. Kundry's gait changes after her return to Montsalvat. [But this is noted by Gurnemanz before not, as Weiner implies, after her baptism.]

5. Hagen's paleness, social isolation, and premature aging are representative of chronic masturbation.

Clearly we should not think of Hagen as an onanist in any literal sense, engaging in solo-sexual gratification behind the scenes as the drama unfolds. Hagen is no more literally a masturbator than Beckmesser, Alberich, or Mome are literally to be understood as Jews (an impossibility, given Beckmesser's social position within sixteenth-century Nuremberg and the timeless, mythic setting of the Ring). Rather, like them, Hagen is an aesthetic construct that functions as a screen upon which Wagner and his contemporaries projected and/or in which they recognized diverse signs of difference connoting shared prejudices and fears.

[It seems Weiner wants to use this as a kind of closing argument; he piles a lot on what he considers evidence for his conclusion: Wagner's letter to Nietzsche's doctor, various 19th century medical authorities (including Fliess and Freud), a passage from Kleist. He seems to be saying: You, late 20th century reader, haven't recognized the characteristics of the chronic masturbator because the terms of our understanding the practice have changed so radically; therefore consider that the same is true of the antisemitic imaging in these works - evident to their contemporaries, but almost invisible to us. My sense is however, that due largely to its rather scurrilous and bawdy nature, for many readers this will be a step too far, and rather than convincing his audience Weiner will conclude by being laughed off the stage like Beckmesser at the end of Meistersinger.]

[Daniel Chevallier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not every piece of evidence in this book is convincing. In fact, the inclusion of some such pieces rather baffles me. That said, the case laid out in this book (as well as in other writings like Millington, 1991) is convincing enough that I think no Wagner fan can responsibly claim at this point that his anti-Semitism did not show its face in his musical works.

[Monte Stone · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weiner thinks Wagner's operas are riddled with anti-Semitism. The villains are all Jewish stereotypes and even the music is meant depict stock anti-Semitic tropes about the Jewish body, gait, voice, and odor. Weiner states very matter-of-factly that German audiences from the premiers onward understood and accepted this. Trouble is, he cites not one contemporaneous book, article, letter, or other source in support of this. Responding to his critics in the afterword of the paperback edition he states he is only reporting an interpretation that was "available" to 19th century German audiences, which is directly at odds with the book's text. He goes on the state that the absence of contemporaneous sources is actually a virtue; the anti-Semitism in the operas was so obvious that no one felt compelled to talk or write about it. This is the essence of post-modern historicism. God help us.