Forbidden Music (7 page)

Mendeslssohn's Shadow

Before the emancipations of 1867 and 1871 in Austria and Germany, many Jewish composers – prominent among them, Jacob Liebermann Beer, better known as Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Jacob (Jacques) Offenbach – left for France. Felix Mendelssohn, who since his family's conversion to Christianity had taken on the additional name of Bartholdy, was the exception, having found more acclaim in Britain. With works such as
Lobgesang
and the
oratorios
Paulus
and
Elijah
, and with his revival of Bach's
St Matthew Passion
, Mendelssohn showed a reverence for tradition that would become a feature of German and Austrian Jewish musical assimilation.

Wagner aims many of his most barbed attacks at those Jews whose financial circumstances allowed them the luxury of both artistic and social confidence, but who, despite these advantages, continued to seek comfort in the past rather than the future. He interprets as racially shallow the precarious social position obtained by recently assimilated Jewish musicians. To Wagner, their over-caution when composing resulted in blandness, which they compensated for by their use of dazzling technique. Their music, in his view, resides on the outer shell of virtuosity rather than within the inner spirit. By plumbing spiritual depths, something of which he believed Jews were intellectually and culturally incapable, composers communicated at a deeper level that propelled music towards the future. In the writings of both Richard Wagner and the diaries of his wife Cosima, Mendelssohn is mentioned on hundreds of occasions.
⁴
Wagner suggests, for example, that Mendelssohn was incapable of writing something as complex and self-revealing as an opera, while ignoring the vast number of popular operas written by utterly forgettable non-Jewish composers.
⁵
He praises Mendelssohn for his talent, cultivation and sensitivity, while at the same time turning these attributes into barriers to deeper spiritual communication. He accuses Mendelssohn of taking his musical models, such as Bach, from the past while remaining singularly incapable of transmitting the deeper meaning of Bach's works. According to Wagner, Mendelssohn only touches us when he ‘lets us notice his spiritual impotence’.
⁶

Throughout this entire tirade, he never ceases to damn Mendelssohn by praising him as the perfect student, only pleasing to us if we are in need of simple ‘entertainment with perfect structures, sequences, dazzling and tweaking out the most perfect arabesques’.
⁷
He also goes on to condemn Mendelssohn as an interpreter of past German masters for preferring fast, superficial, tempos. Later he accuses the Mendelssohn ‘school’ of ‘avoiding emotion’ and not employing ‘expressive effects’.
⁸
He describes Mendelssohn's performances of Bach as so ‘effect-free’ that he felt himself transported to a ‘Hellenic synagogue’ and needed thereafter to seek musical solace from Liszt in order to restore his faith.
⁹

Wagner's very personal experiences bring him to the conclusion that Jews are physically so different from other European races that they could never be used to represent heroes or romantic leads in the theatre: ‘If the outward appearance of the Jew is inappropriate for transmitting artistic ideas of this or that dramatic character, should one not question if the Jew's inner being is
incapable of artistic expression?‘
¹⁰
He also damns their use of language. One of his many contentious points is the view that every non-Jew is viscerally repulsed by Jews. He mentions this reaction as being ‘psychological’ and ‘instinctive'; for a tract deriving from the middle of the nineteenth century, Wagner is quite free with the use of ‘scientific’ terms that compensate for his lack of hard evidence. He cites Jewish liturgical music as proof that the Jew does not live in today's world, but languishes in a petrified past. He states that the majority of music-lovers are interested in music's future and couldn't care less about its past. As we come to the last part of the tract, it becomes clear that Wagner is settling grudges and perceived slights. He proceeds to denigrate as thoroughly as possible both Mendelssohn, whom he names, and Meyerbeer, who remains anonymous. Mendelssohn's early death in 1847, which Wagner describes as ‘the death that Mendelssohn's guardian angel sealed at the right time by closing his eyes permanently,‘
¹¹
presumably made him an easier target than Meyerbeer, though there is also the very faint chance that Wagner may have recalled his youthful debt to Meyerbeer. The chances of this are slim, since there is absolutely no mistaking his target, and the language is not pleasant.

In Wagner's opinion, German music would for ever remain a foreign tongue to Jewish composers, implying that the cultural assimilation they were seeking could never end in full integration. These views are ageless and one need only recall in recent times the huge influx of Chinese, Korean and Japanese performers of Western classical music who have been objects of the same prejudice; the opinion that newly assimilated minorities must dazzle in order to impress is obviously not new. That Wagner could smash the existing mould of music-theatre and altogether change how music was perceived goes equally without saying. That he could do so more easily than Mendelssohn, unhampered by the grudging anti-Semitic bigotry of the cultural environment in which he worked, is fundamental to understanding how music developed in German society. As it happened, the conditions that coloured the reception of Wagner and Mendelssohn earlier in the nineteenth century continued throughout the later assimilation phases: forward thrusts by one group are balanced – or impeded – by an obsessive clinging to the conventional by more cautious new arrivals.

It is fascinating to compare Wagner's views of Mendelssohn as being facile and superficial with those of the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Heine saw Mendelssohn as representing the essence of German
gravitas
. He spills a good deal of ink on the subject of Judaism and Christianity, while being remarkably candid about his own conversion. In
Lutetia
, Heine speculates on why Mendelssohn remained unpopular in France. In a direct comparison
between Rossini's
Stabat Mater
and Mendelssohn's oratorio
Paulus
, he writes:

When assessing Wagner's hostility towards Mendelssohn, it is worth remembering that he was attacking a man who had died at the tragically early age of 38 (not far off Wagner's own age at the time he was firing off polemics from the relative safety of Zurich having fled from Germany in 1849). He had yet to compose the
Ring
,
Tristan
,
Meistersinger
or
Parsifal
.

Wagner and the Jews, the Jews and Wagner

By the mid-1850s, Wagner's obsession with Mendelssohn seems to have lessened somewhat; and by 1872, he is happily corresponding with the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, whom he regularly addresses as ‘honoured friend’ and even later, ‘most valued friend’. Levi went on to conduct the premiere of Wagner's most ardently Christian work,
Parsifal
, while politely declining Wagner's (or more likely Cosima's
¹³
) entreaties to convert. Levi wrote to his father on 13 April 1884: ‘Even his fight against that which he calls “The Jewish elements” in music and modern literature comes from the most honourable motives. That it does not betray the small-minded hostility of, say, the landed-gentry or self-righteous Protestantism is proven in his treatment of me, Joseph Rubenstein and his earlier close relationship with Tausig, to whom he showed the deepest affection. The most wonderful thing to happen in my life has been the privilege of being near such a human being. For this, I thank God daily.‘
¹⁴
Levi is certainly correct in his assessment of
Wagner's relationship with Tausig, who had apparently reassured Wagner in correspondence that ‘all Jews were reconciled’ with him. In answer to this, Wagner wrote back that Jews would in fact be well advised to read his
Judaism in Music
pamphlet.
¹⁵

Wagner was also outwardly grateful to Moritz Szeps, the Jewish proprietor of Vienna's
Wiener Tagblatt
, which was the more progressive counterweight to the rabidly anti-Wagnerian
Neue Freie Presse
.
¹⁶
The
Wiener Tagblatt
was the more widely read of the two papers at the time, and it was rumoured to be the mouthpiece of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Rudolf. Another apparent softening in his attitude to Jews came in 1880, when Wagner refused to sign Bernhard Förster's anti-Semitic petition demanding that Bismarck retract the rights accorded to Jews in the constitution. However, Wagner's essay from 1881,
Erkenne Dich selbst (Know yourself
), goes well beyond any of his previous anti-Semitic writings. He denounces as ludicrous the laws that allow Jews to see themselves as Germans – ‘it's like the law in Mexico authorising all Negroes to see themselves as white’.
¹⁷

This rambling tract expresses outrage at the tolerance shown by Christian clergy in accepting the emancipation of Jews, and at their view that Germans are Germans regardless of religious confession. Wagner argues that being a ‘German Jew’ is not the same as being a Protestant or a Catholic German. Surprisingly, he pronounces the death of the pure German race following the Thirty Years War; Jews, however, have remained the ‘purest of all races and it matters not with whom they mix: the Jewish race always dominates’. He fumes that the new political orders, be they democratic, socialist or social-democrat, all rely on Jewish usury to finance their wars. To Wagner, the emancipation of Jews is the emancipation of Jewish capital. In this unseemly context, he confirms the hitherto presumed anti-Semitism of the
Ring
: ‘The cursed Nibelungs’ ring understood as a portfolio of stock market investments confronts us with the alarming reality of invidious world-domination.‘
¹⁸

Dietrich Mack mentions in the introduction to Cosima Wagner's diaries that Wagner was a child of his time and thus maintained a deeply persecuted view of himself. He had an irrational fear of Jews achieving the same civil and legal rights as Christians. Yet Jens Malte Fischer draws a more chilling conclusion when analysing the final moments of
Parsifal
, sung by the concluding chorus, ‘Höchsten Heiles Wunder: Erlösung dem Erlöser!’/ ‘Highest healing miracle: redemption of the Redeemer!’ By the time Nietzsche had broken with Wagner, he had despaired of Wagner's obsession with ‘redemption’.
¹⁹
In every opera, redemption is obtained through either self-annihilation, as with Senta in
The Flying Dutchman
and Brünnhilde in
Götterdämmerung
, or divine
transfiguration denoted by the protagonist ‘falling lifelessly to the ground’: Elsa in
Lohengrin
, Kundry in
Parsifal
, Tannhäuser, Isolde, and so on. The apotheosis of Wagner's redemption-obsession comes when Parsifal appears to redeem the Redeemer himself. From what the Redeemer could possibly require redemption is not clear until Malte Fischer refers us back to Cosima Wagner's diary entry for 25 July 1878: Wagner had been reading aloud from the third part of his tract
Publikum und Popularität
(
The Public and Popularity
) in which he presents the view that Jesus, the Redeemer, as a Jew is anathema, and places him in a state that must demand atonement. Cosima, upon hearing this, quotes back to Wagner the final chorus of
Parsifal
and Wagner confirms that she has understood correctly.
Parsifal
represents Wagner's solution to what he viewed as Christianity's most complex metaphysical contradiction. In the shadow of such intellectual ruthlessness, talent and transcendental creativity, it was intimidatingly difficult to be another composer; if Jewish, it was unimaginable.
²⁰

Jewish Composers at the Time of Wagner

Giacomo Meyerbeer and Ignaz Moscheles are fascinating case studies of just such composers born during the early years of post-revolutionary Enlightenment. Both had ambitious, wealthy parents, and precociousness and virtuosity were considered ‘fast tracks’ into respectable non-Jewish society.
²¹
It was believed that such assimilation was best achieved, as demonstrated by the many Jewish literary and music salons, by the dissemination of culture itself. If Heine, who was nearly the same age as Meyerbeer and Moscheles, converted in order to obtain his apocryphal ‘entrée billet to European culture’, Meyerbeer and Moscheles gained access via their prowess as performers. Moscheles would go on to become the teacher of both Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, though at the time he had already settled in England. It was Moscheles's contacts in London that paved the way for Felix and his subsequent musical successes with Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the British public. Though England was more tolerant than most of the German states, including Moscheles's native Bohemia, he found it ‘convenient’ to have his children baptised Anglican, while remaining Jewish himself. He returned to Leipzig to teach in the conservatory founded by Mendelssohn in 1843 and became its director following Mendelssohn's death in 1847.