ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-JUDAISM IN ROMANTIC MUSIC (Part 2: Richard Wagner)
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Richard Wagner’s “On Jewry in Music,” first published pseudonymously in 1850 and finally published in pamphlet form under Wagner’s (1813–83) own name in 1869, is one of the most-discussed documents of musical anti-Jewishness in Romantic music. In Part 1 of this post I showed how Wagner’s generation — the so-called “Romantic generation” born between about 1800 and 1820 — construed their anti-Jewish ideas in terms of culture, speech, and language, deriving from the non-Jewish world’s preconceptions against Jewishness as a religious phenomenon in the late 1700s. In this Part I show something of how this context informed Wagner’s anti-Jewish ideas as he laid them out in his notorious tract.
Please note, though, that research has shown that in its own day Wagner’s anti-Jewish tract was far less read and discussed, and therefore less influential, than it became during the rise of Nazism in the early twentieth century, and than it is today. Wagner, owing to the cultural authority his name had acquired by the 1920s, was an essential source of cultural propaganda for the anti-Semitic facet Nazism in the early twentieth century, but that was a matter of the Nazis’ having reached back into a relatively obscure past in their search for a German cultural hero rather than of Wagner’s own ideas having fertilized (if that’s the word — and it may be, given what was typically used for fertilzer in the late nineteenth century) the soil in which Nazism rooted. The main musical source of that fertilization was Franz Liszt, who generally gets off easily in modern scholarship but actually exerted a much more powerful and pernicious influence than Wagner did.
I’ll talk about Liszt in Part 3. For now, here are Wagner and his immediate context:
Anti-Judaism came to embrace issues of Jewish culture and language as well as religion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One widely employed strategy that dominant Christian culture employed in order to reduce conflict between themselves and Jewish minorities was to “allow” Jews to gain entry into professional and personal arenas that were otherwise forbidden them by converting to Christianity and, usually, adopting a Christian surname.
This strategy, which posited Christian “tolerance” of Jews who converted and in many quarters was intended to lead to Jewry’s assimilation into Christian-dominated society, was forcefully contested in legal and political terms from the French Revolution onward. Meanwhile, millions of European and American Jews who still had to endure anti-Jewish stereotypes and caricatures, regardless of their conversion status, were caught and vulnerable in the resultant complex of negotiations of cultural, political, and religious identity. Charles-Valentin Alkan, who was certainly sensitive but no more so than (e.g.) Frédéric Chopin or Robert Schumann, was portrayed in his lifetime (and still is) as hopelessly eccentric and prone to writing music whose conspicuous technical difficulty was a mask for its supposed superficiality — one of the most ubiquitous anti-Jewish tropes. The influential theory of sonata form advanced by Adolf Bernhard Marx (who converted to Lutheranism as he was beginning his professional life in Prussia at the age of 24) may be construed as a music-theoretical enactment of the politics of Jewish emancipation in the 19th-century German lands. The wealth that Giacomo Meyerbeer, who remained faithful to his ancestral faith, earned from his highly successful operas provided handy ammunition for anti-Jewish folk who saw him as emblematic of Jewish greed and invasive success in Christian society. Poet and critic Heinrich Heine made no secret of the fact that he converted to Protestantism as a professional necessity, describing the confessional change as “the ticket of admission into European culture” and mocking Felix Mendelssohn for his success in Protestant church music. The latter instance is particularly telling, for in fact neither Mendelssohn nor his older sister, Fanny Hensel, ever subscribed to Judaism: although both were raised Lutheran and never received any instruction in Judaism, to their contemporaries who professed that Jewishness was a function primarily of faith they remained ever Jews.
The Romantic Generation also produced two of the most influential anti-Jewish tracts of the 19th century — both written by composers whose outlook on Jewishness was shaped by the early 19th-century form of anti-Judaism that cast Jewishness and its ostensibly pernicious contamination of European culture as a matter not just of faith, but also of culture and language.
The first of these was Richard Wagner’s notorious Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewry in Music), first published under the pseudonym “K. Freigedank” (C[harles] Free-thought) in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1850 ( Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 33 [1850]: 101–7, 109–12) and eventually released in expanded form under Wagner’s own name in 1869 (Leipzig: J. J. Weber). Paralleling ideas and themes in Wagner’s other writings and music (such as the stammering, reactionary Jew Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Das Judentum explains “the involuntary repellence that the nature and personality of the Jews possesses for us” as a natural response to “the be-Jewing of modern art” (“Verjüdung der modernen Kunst”), which itself was a result of the “decisive . . . effect that the Jew exerts on us through his speech” (emphasis Wagner’s). “The Jew Mendelssohn,” Wagner asserts, was incapable of greatness and depth because he, typically for Jews, spoke European languages “merely as learned,” and thus was doomed to a superficiality that was anathema to the depth that Wagner and other anti-Jewish Germans liked to discover in non-Jewish (especially German) art.
Moreover, because Wagner’s Jews stood “outside the pale of any [European] community, stood solitarily with [their] Jehovah in a splintered, soilless stock, to which all self-sprung evolution must stay denied, just as even the peculiar (Hebraic) language of that stock has been preserved for [them] merely as a thing defunct,” that community had by definition “taken no part” in the development of European art and could only mimic the poetic arts of expression. Such self-expression as “the cultured Jew” (der gebildete Jude) could muster was necessarily repugnant artistically — for it would express the voice and the soul of “the most heartless of all human beings” (der herzloseste aller Menschen).
Originally published at https://cooperm55.wixsite.com on July 5, 2023.
