Wilhelm Richard Wagner

From Philosopedia

Wagner, Wilhelm Richard (1813–1883)

Wagner is the German composer whose operas are said to represent the fullest musical and theatrical expression of German romanticism. Instead of using the sharply differentiated recitative and aria, he used a continuous flow of melody, calling his operas “music-dramas” to signify their fusion of text and music.

Wagner’s operas include Rienzi (1838–1840), The Flying Dutchman (1841), Tannhäuser (1843–1844), and Lohengrin (1846–1848).

A participant in the Revolution of 1848, Wagner fled to Dresden. Aided by Liszt, he escaped to Switzerland where he stayed for ten years. His Der Ring des Nibelungen (1852–1874) is a tetralogy that embodies his aesthetic principles, and in 1872 Wagner moved to Bayreuth, Bavaria, where he completed the Ring cycle and built a theater. His later compositions include Tristan und Isolde (1857–1859) and Parsifal (1877–1882), called a sacred festival drama.

Many authors claim that Wagner was anti-Semitic. W. H. Auden described him as “an absolute shit.” James Wood in The New Republic (29 July 1996) compared Wagner’s with T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism:

Eliot’s eccentric praise of the Jewish poet [Isaac Rosenberg] is consistent with his larger deprecations. “That a Jew can do this!” registers the surprise of the anti-Semite. What is it to write like a Jew? Richard Wagner explains: “The Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but always speaks it as a foreigner.” A Jew cannot compose German music; when he purports to do so, he deceives. The Jewish composer could only compose music as a Jew by drawing on the “ceremonial music” of the synagogue service, a “nonsensical gurgling, yodelling and cackling.” These “rhythms . . . dominate his musical imagination”: they are irresistible. So while the talented Jewish composer is disqualified by his race from composing German music, he is disqualified by his talent from composing Jewish music. Rosenberg was luckier. He was able, by “almost a miracle,” to write in English “like a Jew.” The difference between Eliot’s anti-Semitism and Wagner’s is defined, on this point, by the possibility of this “miracle.”

The composer’s fifty-one-year-old great-grandson Gottfried Wagner, who has written an autobiography, Twilight of the Wagners, was interviewed by Alex Ross (The New Yorker, 10 August 1998), who observed,

• It’s a strange kind of autobiography—a quarrel with an ancestor who has been dead since 1883. Gottfried, a musicologist who wrote his dissertation on Kurt Weill, views his great-grandfather as a prophet of Nazism and as an unambiguously political composer. He attacks his grandmother Winifred for befriending Hitler, and he attacks his own father—Wolfgang, the current director of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth—for concealing the family’s dismal history. He writes that the festival and the city at large have been infiltrated by neo-Nazi elements, with skinheads demonstrating nearby in sympathy. He writes that James Levine and Daniel Barenboim are hypocrites for conducting in Bayreuth in spite of their Jewishness. As a result of his agitations, he is no longer welcome at the festival. . . . Gottfried is not clinically insane, as one Wagnerite has suggested, but he is plainly in the grip of an obsession.

Gottfried, however, holds that Wagner

• allowed Hermann Levi, a Jew, to conduct the premiere of Parsifal for no other reason than that King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was supporting Wagner and paying for the premiere, ordered him to. The King, who liked Jews, brought enormous pressure on Wagner. Wagner fought till the last moment and treated Levi sadistically, ordering him to convert. Levi refused.
• did not sign the anti-Semitic petition of 1881, not because he wished to protect the civil rights of Jews, but because the petition was insufficiently restrictive to Jews. By 1880, Wagner was contemplating ridding Germany of Jews entirely. How this was to be accomplished, Wagner left to a future generation.
• portrayed all his major characters in depth, including his “Jewish villains.” The fact that Wagner was capable of creating multi-dimensional figures does not make him less of a Jew-hater or less of a revolutionary german chauvinist. His portraits of the Germanic gods sometimes show them as being venal, selfish and stupid, and capable of being deceived by the dwarfish [translation: Jewish], hairy and clever Jewish types. Wagner was an artist—an evil artist.

Contemporary Jews appear divided about Wagner: one group holds that Israel needs to lift its ban on performances of Wagner’s music in public halls and outdoor venues. Another group holds that the ban should remain. Wagner was a follower of Schopenhauer, who is often termed “the philosopher of pessimism” and one of the first of avowed atheists. (Ironically, Schopenhauer did not care for Wagner’s music.) Of Wagner, McCabe wrote:

All admit that he was an atheist and radical—he took part in the revolution of 1848—in the first part of his life but when he produced Parsifal in 1882 Nietzsche (who had once been his greatest admirer) and others charged him with having lapsed into mysticism. It is clear that he was then in a romantic and more or less mystic mood, but all experts admit that he never returned to the Christian faith.

The chief writer on his religious ideas, Otto Hartwich, says: “Wagner was a Christian in a large sense, though not a man of the Church. He had little taste for the other-worldly speculations of dogmatic theology and none at all in the Church’s pressure on faith and conscience.” In other words he began to admire what he believed to be the Christian ethic–hence the bitterness of Nietzsche who thought it the worst feature of Christianity—and no more. The British musical critic and freethinker Ernest Newman, who has a work on Wagner, reminds us that by the age of fifty all his greatest work had been done (while he was an atheist) and his intellectual powers were now less vigorous though his art was still great.

{CE; BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}