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One of the most prominent and long-standing debates in Wagner scholarship has been the question as to what extent-if at all-Wagner’s personal and theoretical racism can be reconciled with his music. While most critics have acknowledged the racial overtones of Wagner’s theoretical works-notably, in his notorious essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik”-few, however, have been willing to consider the possibility that Wagner’s music and music-dramas are imbued with the same racial tenets. Of the more recent studies, Jakob Katz’s The Darker Side of the Genius, (1986) for example, while acknowledging the anti-Semitism of Wagner’s theoretical works, warns against reading too much of this into his musical works.
Studies of the post-Holocaust era in particular have been most conspicuous in their attempts to reconstruct a sanitized image of Wagner by playing down his racism, most probably as part of an effort to overcome the events of the recent past. Other critics, eager to trace the roots of the Nazi mind in nineteenth-century cultural figures, have considered it more appropriate to evaluate Wagner after Hitler and Nazism in an attempt, ultimately, to ascertain how far Wagner participated in the anti-Semitic ideology that led eventually to the Holocaust. Even Thomas Mann, much of whose writing was indebted to the music and thought of Wagner,[i] acknowledges in a letter of 1949 to the “painful interrelationships which undeniably exist between the Wagnerian sphere and the National Socialist evil,” not only “in Wagner’s questionable literature” but also “in his music, in his work, similarly questionable.”[ii] It is precisely the appropriation of Wagner by the Nazis and uncritical attitudes towards Wagner in general which Mann questions in his essay “Die Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners,” an essay which contributed in part to his flight into exile in 1938.
The division in Wagner scholarship over the problem of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s music-dramas is demonstrated an another recent study, Wagner: Race and Revolution (1992) by Paul Lawrence Rose: Firmly convinced that Wagner was not only overtly anti-Semitic, but that his anti-Semitism informed much of the content of the music-dramas, Rose’s position is diametrically opposed to that of Katz. His aims are, however, closest to those of Marc Weiner in his-the most recent-study on this particular aspect of Wagner.
However, Rose’s shortcomings, according to Weiner, lie in his failure (or neglect) to analyze the musical content, which ultimately leaves a gap, once again, between the image of Wagner as philosopher of art, and Wagner as musician. It is here that Weiner hopes to bridge the gap by ascertaining the connections between Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his music-dramas in their full capacity.
Weiner emphasizes the social-aesthetic agenda of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the central poetic idea would be communicated through the combination of visual and acoustic elements; and in doing so, Weiner raises the question as to how much Wagner’s anti-Semitism shapes this poetic idea. Weiner proposes that Wagner’s racial sentiments are fundamental to his aesthetics and in fact constitute “the very raison d’être of his works for the stage,” of which music is an integral part; and, moreover, that these ideas would have been easily comprehended by his contemporary audience since they shared the same convictions about signs of racial, sexual, and national identity.
Focusing on the body as a point of departure, Weiner argues that it is through corporeal imagery that Wagner propagates notions of national identity which are, ultimately, founded on perceptions of difference. It is on the body, Weiner continues, that difference in identity (be it sexual, racial or national) is most easily perceived. Representations of difference through the body emerge in Wagner’s works are not only visually apparent, claims Weiner, but also emerge in the various manifestations of different physicality: in the sound, smell, and the gait-all of which find expression in each aspect of The Total Work of Art. The body, then, becomes a metaphor for the most idiosyncratic theories of Jewish “Otherness” which, as Weiner continually insists, were borrowed from “a host of culturally pervasive bodily images that were part of the composer’s culture . . . as manifestations of real, universally verifiable, and collectively perceived difference.”
Weiner structures his argument around this central notion of corporeal iconography in order to show how Wagner literally ‘incorporates’ some of his most vehemently anti-Semitic ideas into the his musical works. Thus, the study reveals “a host of” purportedly Jewish types, discernible through their different appearance, smell, and sound. Each chapter is devoted to one of these aspects, and each chapter methodically examines the figures whose characteristics are based on the anti-Semitic stereotypes, many of which (and thus, much of Weiner’s argumentation) are drawn from (and are reliant on) the theories of Wagner’s own theoretical writings, in particular, “Das Judentum in der Musik,” “Die Kunst und die Revolution” and Oper und Drama.
Fundamental to an understanding of Wagner’s dramas, then, is that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a manifestation of, and indicative of, his nationalism. According to Weiner’s line of reasoning, Wagner’s (and, by extension, Germany’s) conception of self-identity is predicated on the perception and rejection of everything which he is not, namely: foreign! Physical likeness assumes positive connotations and a privileged position in Wagner’s dramas (as is the case, for example, in the incestuous relationship between Siegmund and Sieglinde), because it reinforces the unity of an entire (supposedly homogeneous) community, or Volk; physical difference, however, carries negative connotations and is perceived as a threat to the community. Thus in the first chapter on eyes, Weiner points out how Wagner employs the motif of the recognizing gaze, a recognition of the signs of essential difference, innate foreignness, which would have been perceived as such in the 19th century.
Based on such a logic of opposition, the Jew emerges in various guises in Wagner’s music-dramas as screeching, limping, stinking dwarf: in other words, everything that the non-Jew is not. Linking the visual aspect of the dramas in the first chapter to the voice in the second, Weiner observes that the physiological make-up of the Jews is reflected not only in the musical score, but in the actual voices of the characters. Thus the Nibelungs’ voice (Alberich and Mime) of Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger are significantly higher than those of the preferred race, for whom the new role of the Heldentenor was introduced in order to emphasize this difference. The Jewish characters are assigned voice-parts of a distinctly unheroic quality: screeching tessituras, and coloraturas which did not pertain to German convention-probably in order to characterize and parody the high-pitched nasal sounds of the synagogue, which Wagner describes in his prose works.
At this juncture,
Weiner adds another dimension to his argument, namely: the idea of the
effeminate Jew, which was also a prevalent theme in the pseudo-scientific racial theories of Wagner’s time. Images of the
feminized Jew, discernible through the unusually high-pitched voice, but also
in their “inherently” sterile, unproductive (i.e., non-procreative) nature,
reconfirm general prejudices about the degenerative nature of the Jews. The
most obvious example in which the “feminized” voice is a direct manifestation
of the body-where the visual meets the aural-is in the castrato Klingsor of Parsifal.
The musical score which accompanies Klingsor, amongst other supposedly Jewish figures, is characterized as fairly chromatic, rhythmically at odds with the main body of text (through metrical shifts: triple 3/4 against quadruple 4/4 time) and generally with agitated tempi, which not only serves to underscore the “foreignness,” but also evokes the nervous, shifty, even evil characteristics with which Jews were also associated in the anti-Semitic imagination. In particular, Klingsor’s music is accompanied by the notion of evil and darkness, said to be associated with the key of Bb minor at that time. This aspect Weiner discusses at more length in his chapter on feet, in which he describes how the ungainly gait (limping) of the Jews is likewise reflected in the musical gestures by lopsided syncopation and uneven intervals.
In his chapter on smells, Weiner finds more support for his argument in the assumption (Wagner’s) that olfactory impressions provide more evidence against the threat of the racial (or sexual) Other: the Duft of the former being far preferable to the foetor judäicus of the latter, which is depicted either in terms of a bad stench, or, at best, a sexual, seductive, but therefore prohibited odor (as is the case with Klingsor and Kundry of Die Meistersinger). Perhaps one of the most interesting turns in Weiner’s discussion of sexuality and race is the paradox that, while it was generally believed that Jewish “degeneration” was a direct result of their inbreeding (which subsequently became one of the ultimate taboos of the late 19th century), the preservation of essence for Wagner’s (Germanic) heroes is, conversely, contingent precisely upon their own racial purity. Thus Wagner reverses the logic of the connotations of incest, yet he arrives essentially at the same racial prejudice. It is interesting to note, then, that Thomas Mann’s re-casting of the incestuous twins Siegmund and Sieglinde as Jewish twins in his 1905 novella Wälsungenblut would seem to make an even more pointed criticism of the Jews.
Weiner’s study is a veritable contribution to the field of Wagner scholarship most importantly in his demonstration of how the contemporary social and political conditions shaped not only his dramas, but also his music. As to whether the music, in turn, served to influence the masses, however, remains an area of speculation. Certainly, all such notions of physiological and sexual difference became prominent in the latter part of Wagner’s career; and, Weiner argues, it was Wagner’s intention to communicate such ideologies. But Weiner maintains that while these ideological metaphors would have been recognized as such in their time, this should not detract from an appreciation of the sheer quality of his music. Besides, our cultural and historical distance allows us to listen to Wagner with good conscience, Weiner suggests, thereby avoiding the moral dilemma which has so often troubled Wagner scholars. This is debatable, but invites further speculation into the question of an appreciation of “autonomous” art-independent of the artist’s intentions and a meaningful context-and its role in, or contribution to, society and politics.
[ii] Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke 13, p. 357.