Longer Views (19 page)

The anti-Semitism is there right after the Dresden account in the odious essay he composed within a year of fleeing the devastated city, “Jewry in Music”: Jews cannot write great music because their relation to culture is foreign, secondary; and because they have no usable musical culture of their own they are in an inauthentic relation to the mainstream of music tradition . . .

Anti-Semitism, indeed, so pervades
Mein Leben
, in everything from Wagner's digs at the Jewish composer Mendelssohn (whose rediscovery of Bach's music Wagner championed and at whose house Wagner was sometimes a guest) to his final repudiation of Meyerbeer, a Jew and the most popular opera composer of the day (as well as, for a period, a supporter of the young Wagner), that one only wonders how, for the length of the Dresden uprising, Wagner manages to put it aside. But what truly disarms about Wagner's anti-Semitism is just how modern—and how familiar—it sounds.

If Wagner represents the creation and the subsequent dissemination of the modern in artistic attitudes, we must remember that on several
national fronts,
the
modern experience is that of the concentration camp and genocide. Wagner, his four-part Festival Play, and his philosophy are so intimately connected with one of those fronts that the question of the relationship between a national concept of art and a nation's political practice must be raised, however we decide to answer it.

I should like to take on, both for agreement and disagreement's sake, the criticisms of Wagner made by Theodor Adorno in
In Search of Wagner
; written between autumn of 1937 and spring of 1938, in London and New York. Adorno claims Wagner is an anti-intellectual composer; he is gestural, rather than developmental. Wagner intentionally abandoned the entire classical range of developmental techniques to make his music more democratic, more accessible. In place of development, Wagner substituted the insistent hearable and comparatively simple repetition of the leitmotif. This decision for simplification and democratization was made before the coming of music's mechanical reproduction would educate hundreds of thousands to a familiarity with just that classical range—the same educative process that would reduce Wagner's music to kitsch.

Adorno was not the first to voice this criticism. And Debussy had defended Wagner against it well before Adorno's book, with his observation that, indeed,
Tristan und Isolde
was nothing
but
development from one end to the other! But Wagner would probably not have said so. (“Unending melody”—the term Wagner wanted—is
not
continuous development.) While clever, Debussy's remark is finally disingenuous.

Adorno's comments mirror Nietzsche's late and somewhat disturbed quip over the already-mentioned swelling Wagnerian literature (which Nietzsche himself twice contributed books to, as well as several essays). In
The Case of Wagner
; published five years after Wagner's death, Nietzsche wrote:

Not every music so far has required a literature: one ought to look for a sufficient reason here. Is it that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or is he afraid of the opposite, that it might be understood too easily—that one will not find it difficult enough to understand?

I should like to essay my own analysis of the social allegory presented in the
Ring
. Writing
The Perfect Wagnerite
during the height of the explosive anti-Semitic feelings ignited by the Dreyfus Affair, Shaw (it would seem) felt that the anti-Semitic elements could be politely skipped over and the work could still make its point. I believe that unless we trace clearly its massively anti-Semitic strands, the work is historically unreadable. Whatever one thinks of it, or however unacceptable one finds it
today, clearly the major outline of the social allegory presented in the
Ring'
s prologue,
Das Rheingold
, is that it was the Jews (Alberich) who gave up human love for wealth and power, by the initial seizure of the Rhinegold. And in
Siegfried
, the
Ring's
third opera, clearly the allegory runs along the following lines: the heroic spirit of the West (Siegfried) grows up through being nurtured by a tradition of Jewish skepticism and social cynicism (Mime); but that heroic spirit will only come into its own when it learns to repudiate and finally throw off that tradition (Siegfried kills his foster father, Mime), because that tradition is ultimately greedy, petty, destructive and is bent on enslaving the spirit for its own ends. The point of course is that the Nibelungen are—in terms of Wagner's allegory—not
just
Jews; they are workers, they are bohemians, they are all that was considered socially marginal by the nineteenth-century Christian German middle classes. But Wagner certainly meant them to be read
largely
as Jews. And in his allegory it is, of course, the Jewish infiltration of the ruling classes (the Gibichungs) in the person of the halfling Hagen that brings about their downfall.

Indeed, the allegory may be more specific than this.

I find it incomprehensible that no one, for instance, among the biographers of Wagner I have read (and they approach a dozen) has even asked the question, if only to answer it yes or no, if any of the mine owners in the Dresden area were Jewish; or, indeed, if there were any mines owned specifically by a pair of Jewish brothers.

However unpalatable a confirmation might be, to me the four operas clamor, one way or another, for an answer.

When Wagner had completed
Parsifal
, he was set on having the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi conduct its premiere at Bayreuth. Levi was understandably dubious; Wagner's anti-Semitism was, by this time, blatant and notorious. Wagner invited Levi to Wahnfried, Wagner's home at Bayreuth, and prepared a banquet for him at which Jewish wines were served and traditional Jewish foods were prepared. Wagner's argument was great-hearted—and, ultimately, convinced the not-insensitive Levi. Given the fact that Levi was, in Wagner's estimation, the finest conductor in Europe, it was particularly important, Wagner argued, for
Parsifal
, the work of a famous and committed atheist, but nevertheless based on a Christian myth, to have a Jewish conductor. This would be a way of stressing that it was the mythic and universal significance of the story that Wagner intended to signify—and not any narrow, sectarian interpretation. It would be a gesture, declared Wagner, toward brotherhood among all peoples.

Nietzsche had already broken with Wagner. At least part of the reason was that he felt the great atheist artist, by choosing a Christian religious
story, was pandering to the bourgeoisie, which Nietzsche—and, until then, Wagner—claimed to hold in contempt. Another reason for the break was that Wagner had taken an untoward—and unwanted—interest in the younger man's masturbation and campaigned to have it ended medically! Which was paramount, however, at this date it is hard to say.

Levi consented to Wagner's request. He conducted Wagner's last opera; on Wagner's death, he was one of Wagner's pallbearers—and, till his own death, one of Wagner's staunchest defenders.

Levi's defense of Wagner is precisely what one would expect of a nineteenth-century intellectual at home with the philosophy and cultural presuppositions of his time: Wagner's anti-Semitism does not represent the authentic Wagner. Anti-Semitism was not central to Wagner's being. Rather, for Levi, Wagner was still the great republican revolutionary who wished to promote universal brotherhood. Like the young Hegel, like the young Nietzsche, Levi wished to cut off all that was idiosyncratic, anomalous, and marginal about Wagner, as he saw it—unaware that such margins and such centers are wholly a product of personal perspective—which is the same as personal blindness. Indeed, it is not till Theodor Adorno's 1964 (!) study,
The Jargon of Authenticity
, that we commence a critique firmly identifying the problem to be the concept of the authentic/inauthentic as valid for the subject in the first place. It is the notion that such personal centers (one) exist and (two) are constitutive of the subject that creates the problem. This and similar critiques are what have slowly opened us up to the postmodern notion that the subject is constituted across a split (rather than around a center), a notion that begins, of course, with Freud's idea of the conscious/unconscious dichotomy in
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), but which has been further radicalized by thinkers such as Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida in the 1950s and '60s.

My own feeling is that Wagner's treatment of Levi does not mitigate Wagner's anti-Semitism—from Cosima's diaries and Wagner's own late articles in his own paper, the
Bayreuther Blätter
, we know that by his last years, even after
Parsifal
, such feelings in him grew obsessive. But one could, indeed, cite Wagner's similarly warm and respectful treatment of any number of his other Jewish friends. A particular case in point is Heinrich Porges, whom Wagner asked to the rehearsals of the
Ring
at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 to take down those incredibly revealing notes on the production that have facilitated performances ever since.

Anyone interested in almost any aspect of mid-nineteenth century romantic art should read the “Introduction” by this earliest, erudite, and most intimate Jewish commentator on Wagner. (
Wagner Rehearsing the Ring: An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth
Festival
[
Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876]
began to appear in sections in the
Bayreuther Blätter
in 1881.) It is a wonderful compendium of nineteenth-century critical tropes, some already sedimented for a century or more and some radically new and vibrant with mid-romantic fervor, all of them welded into a brief, impassioned defense of the Wagnerian enterprise. Indeed, Porges's whole study is equally illuminating. And though the Nazis later suppressed this “Jewish commentary” on the Master, there is no mention in it of anything overtly anti-Semitic.

What this and the case of Levi point up more than anything else is, first, how insistently modern the form of Wagner's anti-Semitism was: rationalized, depersonalized, intellectualized, with intermittent moments of liberalism, and constantly excused by what has now become a hopeless cliché: “But some of my best friends . . . !” Second, it shows ultimately how little threatened Jews such as Levi and Porges felt in the face of such ideas in those pre-Dreyfus days. We must remember, as Hannah Arendt points out in her study
The Origins of Totalitarianism
, anti-Semitism as a virulent political plank in various hard-edged political platforms did not begin till 1886—that, indeed, anti-Semitism was so violently to change its practical implementation and material extent, if not its rhetoric, in these later years of the nineteenth century that Arendt can assign its very “invention” (along with that of South African and Rhodesian racism) to that year, at the end of an explosion of printing and political pamphleteering unheard-of before in history. Presumably after that date, Porges and Levi might have felt somewhat differently.

I should also like to discuss Wagner's musical theories, which, put briefly, hold that, while the words tell the story, the singer's melody portrays the character's expressed emotions, with the orchestra painting in the same character's inner psychology, memories, and associations during the Wagnerian monologue. Wagner remained an artist, I suspect, because he specifically abjured using his orchestra to signal to the audience what
they
were supposed to be feeling (see the incident of the incidental music in Gutzkow's play at the Dresden Opera), but wanted it rather to depict meticulously, even objectively, what was happening inside the characters that could neither be said nor sung in words. The opera composer, he declared in
Opera and Drama
, was above all a psychologist.

In light of those theories I would have to mention how an editor of the French journal,
La Revue Wagnerienne
, Edouard Desjardin, a handful of years after Wagner's death, wrote a novel,
Les Lauriers sont coupés
, in which, by his own statement, he tried to do in words what Wagner
had done in music. James Joyce read that novel, was impressed with the method's potential, and from it took the idea of “stream of consciousness” or what is sometimes called “silent monologue” or “
monologue intérieur
” I would also recall for you how Joyce's Stephen, who like Wotan in the
Ring
carries an ashplant, when he raises it to strike the chandelier in the Nighttown bordello cries out, “
Nothung!
”—Siegfried's cry as he forges his sword.

At the conclusion of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, Joyce had his young hero write in his journal:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Well, both the sentiment
and
the metaphor were Wagner's; and that uncreated conscience was a recreation of the nineteenth-century
Zeitgeist
(now moved to Ireland), the
sine qua non
of art as religion.

I'd like to discuss the Wagnerism in which the whole of Eliot's
Waste Land
, as well as its major source, Jessie L. Weston's
From Ritual to Romance
, are sunk. Miss Weston's book on the significance of the Parsifal legend, you will recall from its preface, was inspired by her 1911 visit to Bayreuth, and is, after all, a continuation of the work begun in her first book of 1896,
The Legends of the Wagner Dramas
.

Is it wholly attributable to the political climate after the Second World War that, during the 1950s and '60s, one could sit through college class after college class dealing with
The Waste Land
, in which, while Webster and Kyd were ceaselessly discussed, Wagner, the most frequently quoted writer in the poem, was not mentioned? This suppression did nothing to diminish Wagner's influence; it only denied it its name and mystified it, making it that much harder to seize, analyze, and combat. Today there seems to be afoot a concomitant academic enterprise to find the roots of modernism in every nineteenth-century artist
except
Wagner. This is not difficult to do. The point is that most of Wagner's ideas were not his own, whether they were about the ends of art or the Jews. (Baudelaire wrote in his diary: “A fine conspiracy could be organized for the purpose of exterminating the Jewish race.” And even before Wagner—under the pseudonym of K. Freigedank—published “Jewry in Music” in two parts on the 3rd and 6th September 1850 in the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
, Wagner's friend Heinrich Laube had written, “. . . there are only two ways to solve the Jewish question. One must either fully annihilate the Jews or completely emancipate them.”) But it was through Wagner that these ideas were disseminated to become
part of the very codes by which the general middle class, first of Europe, then of the United States, learned to recognize art, even if the name Wagner, over two World Wars, was erased from that recognition.