Wagner Without Fear

by William Berger

  Now think of Hans Sachs’s final monologue, where he warns about “foreign influences.” The German word is welscher, which implies foreign in a Latin (French or Italian) sense. Sachs’s nationalism may be noxious, but his caution against foreign influences under which “no prince will understand his people” is no idle paranoia. (Incidentally, it is the word welscher that one commentator, Charles Osborne, translates plainly as “French.” Osborne goes on to say that this line is especially evil since it inspired Hitler’s policy of eradicating French culture. This is exactly the sort of irresponsible nuttiness that keeps us from truly confronting the evil in Wagner’s thought. Furthermore, it shows an ignorance of the character of Hitler, who, for all he may have damaged French culture, loathed Berlin, worshipped Paris, and said bluntly that his favorite building in the world was the Paris Opéra!)

  A nation without geographical borders must be defined by race, a fact proven by the continued existence of the Jews. The Germans tended to attribute their cultural debasement to political realities, but the flourishing of Jewish culture was a reproof to gentile Germans.

  ANTI-SEMITISM

  If you mention the name Richard Wagner to the average person, the first adjective they will associate with it is “anti-Semitic.” This is not a gratuitous association. Wagner was intensely and obsessively anti-Semitic, growing more so as the years passed until it appeared to be almost the only thing he thought about. History is full of anti-Semites, but few who made it so much a part of their lives as Wagner.

  The first targets of Wagner’s anti-Semitism were individuals, but this quickly devolved into a pseudo-theory of everything that was wrong with Judaism, and the problem this posed for Germany. We have already seen how Wagner’s resentment of Meyerbeer (and, to a certain extent, Mendelssohn) found expression in the pamphlet “Judaism in Music.” The composer Halévy also informed Wagner’s demonography. Halévy and Wagner were on agreeable social terms during the Paris years, and the agreeable and modest Halévy once said he had no idea why he was so successful with the Parisian public. Wagner understood this comment to mean Halévy was merely composing for the money, and praised him for being the first Jew he had ever met who was honest enough to admit it. The publisher Maurice Schlesinger and the critic Eduard Hanslick came within the sights of Wagner’s guns, and Wagner disparaged Heinrich Heine, a witty writer to whom Wagner was indebted for, among other things, much of the story of The Flying Dutchman.

  These were among Wagner’s perceived Jewish enemies from real life. In Wagner’s characters, there is the case of Beckmesser in Meistersinger, who is clearly a dig at Hanslick but who was also dangerously perceived as an implied dig at Jewish music in general. (Here, logic really begins to fall apart. Some early listeners perceived a satire of synagogue singing in Beckmesser’s serenade. That’s a stretch. Besides, Beckmesser’s defining characteristic is pedantry. What is so pedantic and rule-bound about Jewish music?) About Parsifal, one can say anything and get away with it, so we cannot hope to summarize anti-Semitic views of that work. Suffice to say that many have seen it, and continue to see it, as a plea for a purification of the world from Jewish influence. The last important Wagner character of this category is Alberich. Many anti-Semites chose to see Alberich as the prototypical Jewish capitalist, sworn off love and dedicated solely to wealth and power. (Again, Marx’s view of the Jewish role in European society was dangerously close to this as well.) In each case, Wagner had of course written fictional characters, and people read their own agendas into them. However, and this point must be stressed, Wagner never lifted a finger to contradict any of these hypotheses.

  Many apologists for Wagner point to his several important friendships with Jewish individuals: Samuel Lehrs, Catulle Mendès, and Karl Tausig, his companion and copyist in the Vienna years. In the Bayreuth years, there was Wagner’s invaluable assistant, the brilliant Josef Rubinstein, who lived at Wahnfried, and of course Hermann Levi. Rubinstein and Levi both seem to have some conflicts about their backgrounds, so they might not be the best alibis available. There was also the impresario Angelo Neumann, who did so much to promote Wagner’s works outside of Bayreuth. This interesting person seems to have been comfortable with his own Judaism, even to the point of making gentle jibes on the subject in his letters to Wagner and Cosima (who were not amused). As invaluable as Neumann became to Wagner, however, he never became part of the Bayreuth inner circle.

  The fact that “some of his best friends were Jewish” does little to exculpate Wagner from his anti-Semitism. It does, however, make us wonder what the exact nature of his problem was. Psychologists and cultural historians struggle with the issue to this day.

  It is also interesting to note how Wagner distanced himself from the institutionalized anti-Semitic movement in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s. There was a famous incident in which Pastor Stroecker, an insanely anti-Semitic and enormously popular and influential Lutheran preacher in Berlin, circulated a petition asking the Reichstag to rescind Jewish emancipation laws it had recently passed. Wagner refused to have anything to do with Stroecker’s petition or his movement, and said so publicly. Wagner was evasive on his motivations, however, stating merely that he had lost all faith in governments and that the problem was not one that had a political solution. One person who did sign the petition, expecting Wagner and the whole Bayreuth crowd to follow suit, was Hans von Bülow, who was especially embittered by Wagner’s noncompliance. It was around this time that Bülow made his miserable joke that he would have had more professional success with Wagner if he had gotten himself circumcised.

  Whatever else was going on in the murky mind of Richard Wagner, his main point, made over and over again in his writings, was that Germans had failed to develop their own national culture. In other words, the same problem that Germans faced regarding the French and the Italians was magnified with the Jews, who actually lived among the Germans. Personal and communal insecurity of identity is at the root of his whole problem. This is not intended to exonerate—there is no exoneration—but merely to understand the problem in context. It explains how Wagner was able to say, in his 1881 essay “Know Thyself” (which is yet another exhortation to the Germans to identify and nurture a national culture), that the Jews were “probably the noblest race of all.” Jews, Wagner understood well, knew who they were.

  VEGETARIANISM

  When Friedrich Nietzsche first arrived for dinner at Wagner’s home in Tribschen, he announced that he was a vegetarian. “You are an ass,” was Wagner’s typically blunt reply. In the following years, vegetarianism, or at least the concept of it, began to loom large in Wagner’s life and thought. In fact, it became one of the mainstays of his confused, confusing creed.

  Wagner’s view of history (based on the intense study of everything other than history itself, which he rarely read) led him to believe that the two main causes of racial degeneration were intermarriage and meat-eating. There’s no use wondering where he got these ideas—they don’t come from anywhere. But this is what he thought. His private newspaper, the Bayreuther Blätter, and the essays of his last six years base much of their arguments on this assumption.

  This has led people to assume, naturally, that Wagner was a vegetarian. Biographers tend to write around the issue, but people remember that two of Wagner’s foremost fans, George Bernard Shaw and Adolf Hitler, were both vegetarians. Now that Cosima’s Diaries are available, it is apparent that Wagner never actually became a vegetarian himself. He talked about it, but continued to eat meat. At one point, he considered an all-dairy diet, surely the most unusual remedy ever devised against the chronic flatulence from which he suffered.

  The interesting point here is the huge disparity between what Wagner wrote and what he actually did, a disparity that plays into his anti-Semitic writings as well. Wagner always appeared to be shocked when Jewish people expressed concern about working with him. Remember his letter to Levi after the critical point of the Parsifal fracas—a fracas that Wagner went out of his way to rub in
Levi’s face: “Come [to Wahnfried] and get to know us as we really are.” Wagner felt no more compunction about writing this line than he felt about eating steak while preaching the evils of meat-eating. He was, as was stated at the beginning of the chapter, utterly impossible.

  Cosima’s Diaries are strangely reticent on the whole subject of food. Of course, she writes about art and music and the creation of great masterpieces, so one forgives her for omitting such mundane details as what was on the lunch table. Yet she does spend paragraphs telling us what medicines everybody in the family was taking, other trivia such as disagreement with the gardener, and an excruciatingly detailed account of the daily progress of Wagner’s digestive system. It is almost as if she were more interested in food as it left the body than as it entered.

  The few references she does make to eating are strange. Once, she records that Richard ate a beefsteak for lunch, and makes no further mention of the matter. The two other references to flesh-eating are intriguing, and she only makes them because Wagner felt unwell afterward. The first was after he ate salami in Pisa, and the second after he ate shellfish in Palermo. Both times she refers to these meals as “dietary lapses.”

  It’s enough to make one wonder if Wagner was secretly keeping kosher for some diabolical reasons of his own! Certainly, many people who keep kosher, when eating with nonkosher people, simplify the whole matter by saying that they are “basically vegetarian.” This is not meant as a serious suggestion based on years of scholarship—merely a passing observation on the strange lives of the Wagners. Besides, it would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? At the least, it would explain what Wagner meant to Levi when he said “as we really are,” and why he would even consider an all-dairy diet.

  ANTIVIVISECTIONISM

  The third mainstay of Wagner’s pseudo-philosophy, after anti-Semitism and vegetarianism, was antivivisectionism. This debate over whether it was ethical to dissect live animals in the interests of science was a huge issue in Wagner’s time, and is scarcely less so even in our own. Wagner prided himself on his love of animals (notwithstanding that his dog Robber, it will be recalled, ran away from him twice). Those who advocated scientific progress at any price, and they were many in the late nineteenth century, thought antivivisectionism was an unaffordable sentiment. Wagner came to loggerheads on this issue with the crown princess of Prussia, who was firmly in the camp of the vivisectionists. They had previously disagreed over the Jewish issue. Apparently, they were not the only two in Germany who sensed a connection between these issues.

  Wagner said there was no hope for the German Reich as long as vivisectionism continued. His ideal of Germany was an Aryan brotherhood without Jews, without meat, and without live-animal dissections. One wonders why he didn’t seek his Utopia somewhere in northern India, where he might have found such a place already in existence, but this never occurred to him. In any case, given the disparity between his words and his actions on the first two subjects, we might wonder if Wagner also secretly dissected live animals in the basement of Wahnfried.

  RICHARD WAGNER, ARCHFIEND

  The poet Auden summed it up best when he called Wagner “a regular shit.” Yes, this is the same Auden who concluded that Wagner probably was, all things considered, the greatest artist in history. Auden did not make either of these remarks irresponsibly; he thought about the subject a great deal before arriving at these conclusions. The subject requires serious thinking, and the reader is urged to consult the “Wagner in Print” chapter for more information. Arriving at ill-informed conclusions on the subject of Wagner is all too easy, and presents its own dangers.

  Wagner, the man, has become symbolic of everything evil in the world. His anti-Semitism and his Aryan chauvinism, bad as they were in and of themselves, can hardly be separated now from the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. In addition to this, he is notorious, even among people who do not listen to his music, as little more than a thief, a user of men for their money and their wives, and the supreme example of the artistic megalomaniac.

  No argument from this writer. The problem, however, arises in isolating Wagner as the archfiend of modern cultural history. This has the unhealthy effect of exonerating everyone else. For example, as long as we unthinkingly associate Richard Wagner with Nazism (anachronistic as this may be), then we don’t need to worry so much about such composers as Carl Orff (whose music we hear in every other film score and TV commercial) and Richard Strauss, who was, by all accounts, such an agreeable fellow. In all fairness, there is an occasional buzz about the political associations of Strauss and Orff, but it is hardly on the Wagnerian level. The next production of Der Rosenkavalier in your area will probably not be accompanied by any apologia in the local paper. The next production of Die Meistersinger will. The 1995 Metropolitan production of Meistersinger was greeted by the local papers with articles seeking to separate the journalists’ love of the music from their hatred of the man. Fine, even though nothing new or helpful was said. What is ironic about this is that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, whose entire premise, it could be argued, is implicitly anti-Semitic, was playing at the same time just down the street, and was marketed as “perfect family entertainment.” There were no articles questioning this. A Christmas Carol was acceptable as long as Meistersinger was decried.

  Was there a newspaper article decrying Debussy’s treatment of women the last time his music was performed in your area? The fact is that he abused his feeble mistress to death, even while he composed stunning music. Would anyone blame women, or even men, for boycotting his music because of this? Yet one never reads about this. Nor does the issue stop at artists. Do people who drive Ford automobiles question the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford? It was there, God knows. What about Mercedes-Benz and its active role in the Holocaust? And yet owning a Mercedes remains the goal of many yuppies who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Wagner opera.

  As long as you know you’re supposed to disdain Wagner, you can get away with a lot of other sins. This is the real problem with isolating Wagner as the archfiend of history.

  SO WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL THIS?

  Many people no doubt wish Wagner’s operas would just disappear, taking the memories they carry of the entire painful twentieth century along with them. This will not happen. The work of Richard Wagner is too good—that is, it still speaks humanely to too many people.

  There is concern that the music itself carries a toxic message, and that repeated listening cannot fail to produce an evil effect. This is giving Wagner too much credit. Art does not create good or evil. Worrying about the effect of Wagner’s music is the same sort of reverse thinking that accuses the Beatles and the Bible for the murders committed by Charles Manson.

  Most people just say they appreciate the music, and ignore any messages they don’t like. The artist who created it is a separate issue from the art. The critics are always seeking to exonerate themselves from suspicion if they praise Wagner. It’s getting tiresome. Also, we have seen in the work of Robert Gutman and others that the “love the art, hate the artist” position is only tenable up to a point. History is full of good people but there’s only one Wagner, and this is more than a damned unlucky quirk of fate. Productions that cosmetically address the issues of racism, chauvinism, and anti-Semitism aren’t helping either. Denial never solves anything for long.

  It would be great if Wagner’s operas became the touchstone for real, meaningful dialogue about the issues they bring up. In other words, instead of writing holier-than-thou articles in the papers condemning the horrific thoughts of Richard Wagner, wouldn’t it be excellent if people questioned how much of this toxicity has permeated the rest of our culture? For example, if flag-waving is pernicious at the end of Lohengrin, why is it acceptable at the Democratic and Republican national conventions? Is Hans Sachs’s final monologue fundamentally different from any immigration debate on the floor of Congress? What do people really mean when they use such words as “nation,” “people,” and “freedom” (or Reich, Vo
lk, and Freiheit)? Under what guises do people express anti-Semitism today? Have we really superseded assumptions about racial theories? After all, most of Wagner’s racial theories were based on ideas developed by the French aristocracy, who bear no small responsibility for the development of proto-fascist racial notions. But don’t most Americans still subscribe to these same ideas? Don’t people still talk about coming from a “good family”? If there is any doubt about this, let the reader consider the popular obsession with royalty and titled celebrities. Those titles are based on the same racial theories that led Wagner to some of his worst notions.

  Imagine if people would attend performances of Wagner operas and ask themselves, What was there in this that made me uncomfortable? Then, instead of just attributing it to the fact that Germans are impossible (a racist notion), they might ask themselves, How am I implicated in all this? What outmoded assumptions still shape my thinking? Do I let myself be taken in by people who mask hateful thoughts under patriotism, national security, “what’s good for the people,” or “the safety of my family”? The greatest lesson we could learn from the experience of Wagner is that pretty surfaces often mask senseless and evil content.