Regrettably, the 1869 publication did not mark the last of Wagner’s sallies into print on the Jewish question. Far from it. Particularly in the last five years of his life he returned to the topic in essays and pamphlets like Modern in 1878 and Religion und Kunst (Religion and Art) in 1880, as well as Erkenne dich selbst (Know Thyself) and Heldentum und Christentum (Heroism and Christianity), both in 1881. He also mentioned Jews frequently in letters and made many private comments about them, diligently recorded by Cosima who even in the worst of her many nightmares surely never dreamed that her diary, meant for her children, would one day be made public in full. One might think, or at least hope, that this mass of material would clarify Wagner’s position. In fact the opposite is true because the Jewish issue becomes entangled with a host of others, including vegetarianism, vivisection, temperance, socialism and eastern religion – all heavily laced with doses of Schopenhauer and, at the very end, a dash of diluted Gobineau. Downing this heady brew can bring an occasional flash of insight but only at the serious risk of a bitter aftertaste and bad indigestion. These late works, sometimes called the ‘regeneration writings’, offer great scope for selective quotation both by those who seek to show that Wagner was a vicious antisemite and by those keen to prove the opposite – or at least to indicate that he was not such a bad chap after all.
Taking the defence case first, we find Wagner in July 1878 claiming that ‘if the Catholics consider themselves to be of a higher rank than we the Protestants, then the Jews are of the highest rank, the oldest’.5 The Master was here responding to Levi, who would conduct Parsifal four years later; with his sadly habitual self-abasement Levi had groaned that as a Jew – and a rabbi’s son at that – he felt himself to be a ‘wandering anachronism’. So it might be argued that Wagner was simply making a rare effort to be kind to a man he and Cosima later found plenty of occasions to torment. But only four months afterwards Wagner told Cosima that ‘If ever I were to write again about the Jews, I should say I have nothing against them, it is just that they descended on us Germans too soon, we were not yet steady enough to absorb them.’6 In other words, like Shakespeare’s Cassius, Wagner reckons that the fault ‘is not in our stars but in ourselves’. Three years later he takes up the point again in Erkenne dich selbst, referring to ‘the Jew’ as ‘the most astonishing example of racial consistency that world history has ever offered’. Wagner acknowledged that Jews had become virtuosi in the vile art of handling money, but he charged that ‘our Civilisation’ had invented the system it now bungled. It was Germans, in the first place, who needed to go in for intense self-searching. Hence the title of his essay.7
It is hard not to notice a certain admiration in these remarks, albeit tinged with envy and even fear. Stretching a point, you might almost conclude that Wagner rather wished he were a Jew himself (and as we shall shortly see, some people claim he really was). He certainly had many Jewish friends; from Samuel Lehrs, a sympathetic philosopher from the dog days in Paris, to Joseph Rubinstein, ‘house pianist’ at Wahnfried; from Heinrich Porges, a young conductor who backed Wagner when he was at a particularly low ebb, to Angelo Neumann, that opera director and impresario who, with Wagner’s blessing, took the Ring on tour across Europe. The list can easily be lengthened. Wagner did indeed partly turn against Heine and humiliated Levi, but he double-crossed and wounded countless non-Jews too. Friendship with Wagner meant total devotion verging on slavery. Many people readily made that sacrifice and among those Wagner most prized were Jews. Had he lived in the Nazi era, Wagner’s personal contacts would surely have been regarded with the utmost suspicion, at least for as long as he found any Jews to befriend.
Despite all that, the prosecution evidence is at least as bulky. Probably its most shocking item is Wagner’s retort that all Jews should be burned, during a performance of Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), a play espousing religious tolerance by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a (Gentile) friend of Moses Mendelssohn. All sorts of extenuating circumstances have been offered to try to account for this monstrosity. It emerged late in Wagner’s life (on 18 December 1881) when he was in increasing pain and prone to still more splenetic outbursts. It was made in private and meant to be what the indefatigable Cosima calls ‘a drastic joke’ – a notable insight into Wagnerian humour. And it came in the context of a hobnob about a recent theatre fire in Vienna in which some nine hundred people died, nearly half of them Jews. If everyone’s off-the cuff remarks were recorded for posterity, so the Master’s defenders argue, who would escape censure?
Wagner was indeed never quite as drastic in public as he was in private. But in his final essays, alongside the kind of admiration quoted above, he railed against Jewish influence in the press, scorned state moves to bring about full Jewish emancipation and even called Jews ‘the plastic demon of the decline of mankind’.8 It is hard to be sure just what he meant by ‘plastic demon’, but it sounds pretty dreadful and that, no doubt, was the main thing. We also know that he had good things to say, albeit not consistently, about Marr and Stöcker as well as several other notable antisemites of the day. Cosima reports in 1879 that ‘I read a very good speech by Pastor Stöcker on Judaism. R.[ichard] is for total expulsion. We laugh over the fact that really, it seems, his essay on the Jews marked the start of the struggle.’9 So in private at least, according to his wife, Wagner backed the idea of expulsion that he had raised only as a very distant theoretical possibility in his reissued Judentum brochure a decade before.
Why then did Wagner not sign that petition repeatedly thrust under his nose in 1880 by Bernhard Foerster urging, among other things, that Jewish immigration be restricted? What could he possibly have against it, except perhaps a feeling that the wording was too weak? Cosima gave several explanations, among them that her husband had already done as much for the cause as he could, that a petition he had signed against vivisection had proved a failure and that the new appeal was addressed in servile language to Bismarck, whom by this time the Master loathed. Besides, even Wagner found the over-persistent petitioner lacked balance – a judgement too mild by far. A few years later Foerster and his wife Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s bigoted and mendacious sister, founded a colony called Neu Germania aimed at raising a pure Teutonic race in Paraguay. When the project flopped Foerster committed suicide. Wagner died before this crazy scheme was launched, but he was rightly wary of the early planning for it. Explaining his failure to back the petition in a letter to Neumann, whom he addressed as ‘Dear friend and benefactor’, Wagner stressed that ‘I have absolutely no connection with the present “anti-semitic” movement.’ He added that a forthcoming article (Erkenne dich selbst) ‘will prove this so conclusively that it will be impossible for anyone of intelligence to associate me with that movement’.10
That little word ‘present’ in the Neumann letter suggests Wagner was not against antisemitism as such, an implication the Master’s apologists tend to overlook. Wagner surely did feel that his own approach to the Jewish question (‘drastic’ private outbursts apart) was on a higher level than that of mere petitioners and politicians, but he had a more pressing reason than that for shunning the Foerster initiative. Cosima’s ex-husband von Bülow had signed the petition although, he grumbled, Jews would boycott his concerts as a result and cause him a sharp drop in income. He went ahead all the same because, he said, he wanted to show ‘civic courage’ and thought Wagner would sign too. When Wagner failed to join in, von Bülow was livid, but he should not have been surprised. Wagner had been preaching against what he regarded as excessive Jewish influence in music for decades and in 1880 he had a single, financially disastrous, Bayreuth festival behind him. He must have reckoned he could bear the consequences of too overt an act of so-called ‘civic courage’ still less than von Bülow.
So is the truth of the matter that Wagner aired his real antisemitic views in private but was cautious in public so as not to lose backing from Jews and their allies? Not altogether. Even in private Wagner found good things as well as bad to say about
Jews, and while in public he fell short of endorsing expulsion (let alone burning) his comments were often manifestly offensive. A more credible explanation is that Wagner was muddled and inconsistent. That does not only apply to his attitude to Jews. In Religion und Kunst, for example, he draws an apocalyptic (and thoroughly modern-looking) picture of the arms race, warning that ‘art, science, courage and honour, life and property could one day go up in the air through an incalculable oversight’.11 Had he forgotten the glee with which he greeted the Franco-Prussian war a decade before; how he had voiced hope that Paris would be burned to the ground ‘as a symbol of the world’s liberation’; how he had composed a tub-thumping Kaisermarsch, probably the worst of his late works, to mark German victory?
Naturally Wagner had the right to change his mind, although even in his last years mention of Paris and the French (barring one or two favoured individuals like Judith Gautier) could draw from him a venom hardly compatible with his theoretical pacifism. Something of the same goes for his theoretical vegetarianism. In the Tribschen days we find Wagner scorning Nietzsche, who had refused meat on the grounds that it was ‘ethically important not to eat animals’.12 A few years later at Wahnfried, Wagner in principle adopted Nietzsche’s stance – partly for the same moral reason, partly because by this time he had decided that eating the flesh of slaughtered beasts was mainly responsible for the degeneration of mankind. If man were to return to the right road he had to go over to a vegetable diet. Wagner even urged mass migration from northern climes to sunny spots where people would feel less impelled to tuck into juicy steaks. Most accounts nonetheless suggest that when it came to moving from theory to practice the Master honoured vegetarianism more in the breach than the observance. When two acolytes heeded his words in 1880 and really did give up meat, Wagner was contemptuous. ‘R[ichard] sees his ideas reflected back at him as in a distorting mirror,’ Cosima sighed, ‘a great perception mistakenly converted into a petty practical act.’13
Not that Wagner thought vegetarianism alone would be enough to regenerate mankind. Great art, notably the Gesamtkunstwerk, had to make available again the sacred content that the church had lost when, Wagner claimed, it had perverted the teaching of Jesus Christ and become obsessed with empty dogma. At the same time man had to embrace a true religion founded on compassion and through which all races, even the lowest, could be purified by Christ’s blood. Exactly how this is to be achieved Wagner does not say, but at least one argument for his antisemitism slips out here. He raises strong doubts over whether Jesus really was a Jew, and anyway deplores Judaism on the grounds that compassion is not at the heart of it. Here Wagner follows the involved, not to say contorted, reasoning of his hero Schopenhauer, who argued that Judaism wrongly held the world to be improvable, thus encouraging false optimism and fruitless activity. Only faiths such as Buddhism that advocated denying the self and the world were capable of generating acceptance of one’s fate, and hence compassion for one’s fellow men – stranded, as it were, in the same ghastly boat.
One reaction to all this is simply to ridicule it, as Bernard Shaw notably did in a despatch from Bayreuth six years after Wagner’s death. Shaw reflected that being a Wagnerian had once meant commitment to nothing more than relishing the music: ‘What it commits a man to now, Omniscience only knows.’ He went on:
Vegetarianism, the higher Buddhism, Christianity divested of its allegorical trappings … belief in a Fall of Man brought about by some cataclysm which starved him into eating flesh, negation of the will-to-live and consequent Redemption through compassion excited by suffering (this is the Wagner–Schopenhauer article of faith); all these are but samples of what Wagnerism involves nowadays. The average enthusiast accepts them all unhesitatingly – bar vegetarianism. Buddhism he can stand; he is not particular as to what variety of Christianity he owns to; Schopenhauer is his favourite philosopher; but get through Parsifal without a beefsteak between the second and third acts he will not.14
Shaw (a practising vegetarian, incidentally, unlike Wagner) did not say whether being an ‘average enthusiast’ also meant implicitly accepting convoluted ideas about race and Jews. If this topic crossed his mind then he evidently felt that raising it in such an article would spoil the fun. But by underlining even jokingly how much Wagnerism had become a near-impenetrable jungle of faiths, fads and fancies, he puts his finger on the core of the matter.
Right up to the end Wagner the over-productive writer and incessant talker failed to make himself clear – not just on the admittedly woolly topic of regeneration in general, but on racism and the Jews in particular. When he maintains that even the ‘lowest races’ can be purified through Christ’s blood, does that mean everyone can be – therefore also Jews, whom he actually refers to in another context as of ‘the highest rank’? If it does, why does he rant about expulsion or (in passing) worse? Or is it only those Jews that fail to convert who will have to suffer serious consequences? Would conversion alone be enough? In Judentum he had implied it would not be, without specifying what else was needed. Questions upon questions which, if they simply referred to the nasty private hang-up of a fine composer, would hardly be worth putting. But Wagner the incorrigible self-publicist was bandying his undigested ideas about at a time of hitherto unparalleled Jewish emancipation and the backlash to it. By leaving the door wide open to interpretation he gave the most implacable of antisemites – then and later, in Bayreuth and beyond – scope to select what they wanted from his huge output and to use his prestige as an artist to bolster their cause. It is not enough to pass off Wagner’s stance as irrelevant or even as something of a joke. It was deeply and dangerously ambivalent.
All of this can be discovered by anyone who really wants to do so thanks mainly to the evidence of Wagner’s own writings and, latterly, of Cosima’s diary. It is much harder to decide how far, if at all, Wagner’s attitude to race and Jews penetrated his music dramas. Wildly diverging interpretations of Parsifal in particular show that best. Some believe Wagner’s ‘last card’, as he called it, to be racist through and through, a paean to blood purity and exclusivity with Kundry the wandering temptress and Klingsor the castrated wizard as Jewish caricatures. Others see it as a masterpiece of compassion offering what Ernest Newman, the finest English-language biographer of Wagner, called one of the two or three most moving spiritual experiences of his life. After hearing Parsifal during his first visit to Bayreuth in 1883, the young Gustav Mahler – not yet converted from Judaism to Catholicism – evidently felt much the same. ‘When I walked out of the Festspielhaus, incapable of uttering a word,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I knew I had come to understand all that is greatest and most painful and that I would bear it within me, inviolate, for the rest of my life.’15
At least one widely touted myth can be disposed of rather easily, namely that Wagner created Parsifal under the baleful influence of Gobineau. This tale has gone on being told even after the publication of Cosima’s diary in 1976 confirmed it as fiction. The diary shows that it was only in 1880 that Wagner first read a book by Gobineau (and then it was not the most famous one about racial inequality); before that he had met the count only fleetingly in Italy. On the other hand Wagner’s letters show he was already pondering the Parsifal plot right back in the 1850s; he first drafted a libretto in 1865 and completed the final one in 1877. The music was composed between 1877 and January 1882. It is true that Gobineau stayed at Wahnfried for nearly a month in 1881, but Wagner did not rush back to his desk and revamp his work in the light of what his guest had to tell him about race. On the contrary, the two of them argued loud and long. Wagner found the count a fascinating companion but disagreed with his claim that the degeneration of the human race was unstoppable. As Cosima later recorded, ‘He reproaches Gobineau for leaving out of account one thing that was given to mankind – a Saviour, who suffered for them and allowed himself to be crucified.’16
Naturally that chronology does not show Wagner never pondered matters of race at all before he met Gobineau.
We know very well that he did, so it is not in principle impossible that race is at least part of what Parsifal may be ‘about’. The questions really start when you try to pin down that ‘about’ in detail. Is Wagner warning of a Jewish threat to pure Aryan stock? Is he extolling Christian salvation, as so much of his talk in his last years about redemption and the blood of Christ would suggest? Is Buddhist and Schopenhauerian self-denial the key? Is Parsifal in some way all these things together: the essence of religion as Wagner saw it but of no specific faith? If so, what conclusion did he mean us to draw?
Part of the trouble is that while music can have the utmost power and depth it does not possess the precision available to words. Thanks to the sound of the cuckoo and the thunderclaps, we would know without being told that Beethoven’s Sixth is a ‘Pastoral’ symphony. But would we connect his ‘Eroica’ with Bonaparte or even heroism if faced with the notes alone, without the title and some background history? Could there be such a thing as an antisemitic symphony? The questions here are not wholly fair because with Wagner we are dealing with music and words and stage action, a Gesamtkunstwerk no less. But that does not clarify things much, if at all. Not one of the characters in the music dramas is specifically identified as a Jew (with the partial exception of the Flying Dutchman) and no direct references to Jews are made. This seems odd since we are faced with dozens of hours of music drama of almost Shakespearian diversity. With Shylock, the grasping but proud moneylender in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare created one of the most famous and controversial of all stage Jews. Wagner did nothing comparable. The reason may simply be that he felt Jewish characters were not fit for inclusion in his music dramas, or indeed in any stage work of worth. He is on record as saying very much that, although he also claimed that Jews could not be really good actors and later changed his mind.
The Wagner Clan Page 11