The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  None of that proves there are no Jews in Wagner’s work, only that if they are there they must be in disguise. But who might they be and what are we supposed to think of them? A popular suspect is Mime, the wheedling, double-crossing dwarf in the Ring who for his own nefarious aims brings up the young Siegfried. Mahler for one said he was sure Mime was meant to be a Jew but curiously added, ‘I only know one Mime and that is me. You would be amazed what there is in that role …’17 To which Wagner might have responded, ‘You can’t be Mime – because I am.’ At least, Wagner began to describe Mime in detail in an early stage direction for Siegfried but gave it up because, according to the German writer and musician Theodor Adorno, he probably thought he was coming too close to portraying himself. That incident has naturally been used as ammunition by those who argue that Wagner feared he was indeed Jewish; but perhaps Adorno was over-interpreting and Wagner did not see a self-portrait, just a caricature of a Jew of precisely the sort that he wanted to keep out of his Ring. Then there is Beckmesser, the town clerk in Die Meistersinger, whose fussy manner and high-pitched voice are held by some scholars to be Jewish, just as his disagreeable ditties in Acts II and III are held to be like synagogue chant. But all these unpleasant elements can well be explained in other ways too.

  It is easy to scorn the theory of disguised Jews in Wagner’s work as the product of an over-fertile imagination; to claim that Mime is just a vile dwarf and Beckmesser an allegedly ‘typical’ town clerk. Since at least 1906, when a critic seriously claimed to find evidence in the music of Götterdämmerung that Brünnhilde was pregnant after her roll on the fire-encircled rock with Siegfried, Wagnerians have been reading things into the scores that common sense suggests are simply not there. Once in a while, though, it is worth at least suspending judgement, and that is the case here. Might not characters like Mime and Beckmesser be sending coded antisemitic signals that would have been more readily apparent to audiences in and around Wagner’s time than in our own? One modern study in particular amasses enough evidence to suggest this could well be so.18 But even if it were, that does not mean Wagner in his music dramas simply damns Jews and extols non-Jews. If Mime is a Jew so presumably is Alberich, who is invested by Wagner’s music not only with nastiness but with tragic grandeur. Kundry is a character for whom one feels in sum more attraction and pity than abhorrence. And what of the supposed Aryans? Siegfried has one or two great moments, especially when he dies, but he is manifestly naive if not stupid. Wotan is a philanderer, liar and cheat. If Wagner intended to put over a clear racial message he did not do it very well. Perhaps when he got down to composing rather than theorising, the characters he created took on lives of their own. Or perhaps the music simply reflects Wagner’s ambivalence on the whole question from the very start.

  Where did it come from, Wagner’s confusing intermingling of fierce hostility to Jews with respect and even friendship for them? There must have been more to this peculiarly personal mix than the impact of traditional, widespread antisemitism. So there was, but red herrings by the shoal complicate the search for it. Nietzsche produced one of the first and biggest of them when, consumed with the anti-Wagnerian fury of his late, post-Tribschen phase, he asked whether the composer was really German at all. Writing in a postscript to Der Fall Wagner (The Wagner Case) in 1888, Nietzsche claimed it was hard to discover any German characteristics in Wagner, mysteriously adding that ‘Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein Adler’ (A vulture is almost an eagle). To those in the know this was a pun meant to shock. Ludwig Geyer was the name of Wagner’s stepfather, whom Nietzsche reckoned was Wagner’s real father. It is possible that Wagner thought so too, or at least did not rule it out, although when Cosima once faced him with the question he replied, apparently with no special display of emotion, ‘I do not believe so.’19 Anyway, to return to the pun, Adler was a common Jewish name. Ergo: Wagner, according to Nietzsche, was Jewish – or nearly.

  Nietzsche produced no facts to back up his heavy hint and nor has anyone else since. On the contrary, records going back to the seventeenth century show the Geyers were Protestant church musicians. That has not stopped Nietzsche’s pun gaining the force of an oracle, seemingly bolstered by bits and pieces of circumstantial ‘evidence’. Take Wagner’s birthplace, the Brühl area of Leipzig. This has often been described as ‘the Jewish quarter’ and it is true that it was a centre for Jewish merchants, especially when the regular Leipzig trade fairs were under way. But in 1813, when Wagner was born, fewer than a hundred Jews lived there, a minority of its population. Why did the Wagners set up their home in the Brühl? Probably because it was handy. Carl Friedrich Wagner, Richard’s ‘official’ father, worked in an office nearby as a police actuary. Then there is Wagner’s appearance; a smallish body with an oversized head and a prominent nose – attributes of ‘Wagner the Jew baiter’ satirical cartoonists during and after his day gleefully stressed. Add Wagner’s hyperactivity, his love of learning, indeed his genius and you have plenty of familiar elements, positive and negative, of caricatures of Jews. That does not amount to proof that Wagner really was Jewish. Did Wagner nonetheless think he might be? If so, there is no record of it. Some argue that the very absence of evidence shows Wagner’s shame was so deep that he never brought the matter up. With that puerile approach you can ‘prove’ anything.

  How a Leipzig Jew gradually became “Richard Wagner. This drawing published in the Viennese satirical magazine “Der Floh” (undated) was prompted by rumours that Wagner had a Jewish father. Although no firm evidence has ever emerged to back up these tales, they persist even to the present day.

  (Taken from “Musik und Musiker in Karikatur und Satire”

  by Karl Storck, Oldenburg 1910)

  A partial but more persuasive explanation for Wagner’s antisemitism is that, from early in his career, his profligacy put him in hock with moneylenders who were usually Jews. Already in Magdeburg where he courted Minna, he railed at having to deal with ‘Jewish scum’ because ‘our people’ offered no credit. In Paris he pawned his goods to Jews and did work he felt was menial for, among others, Maurice Schlesinger, a Jewish music publisher. Schlesinger’s cash helped the Wagners ward off starvation but that made the struggling composer feel no better. Quite the opposite: he became ever more resentful and desperate. But none of that, surely, would have brought the eruption of Judentum without Meyerbeer, the opera king of Paris and Europe when Wagner was a mere serf.

  Naturally Wagner envied Meyerbeer’s phenomenal success with public and press alike. It would have been odd had he not done so. The first hundred performances of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète in Berlin alone netted the composer 750,000 marks, almost 200,000 marks more than the entire sum Wagner received over nearly two decades from King Ludwig. During 1850, when Judentum first appeared in Leipzig, the influential Neue Berliner Musikzeitung carried fulsome reports on Meyerbeer and his work in almost every issue: Wagner was mentioned in only six brief dispatches and Lohengrin, premiered by Liszt in Weimar in August, was variously spelled Longrie and Lognin. Even a composer with an ego far smaller and a skin much thicker than Wagner’s might well have felt miffed. But there was more behind Wagner’s fury than that. He had obsequiously begged Meyerbeer for help and he had gone down the Meyerbeerian opera road with Rienzi – even scored a local hit with it in Dresden. In short, his enmity was directed not least – perhaps mainly – at himself, not because he feared he was Jewish but because he felt he had debased himself before Jews. He even half admitted as much in a letter to Liszt. Describing Meyerbeer as ‘infinitely repugnant’ to him, Wagner remorsefully added that basically he had himself to blame for having ‘wilfully allowed’ himself to be taken in.20

  For all its later notoriety as ‘a classic antisemitic text of the nineteenth century’, Judentum created only a short-lived stir among a limited public when it first appeared. The Leipzig Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, where Wagner placed the piece, was an insider publication with only some eight hundred subscribers and probably not more than tw
o thousand readers. Although its editor, Franz Brendel, later claimed the article had caused a ‘real storm’ in the German press he was (unsurprisingly) exaggerating his own clout. There was indeed a set-to in Leipzig music circles and one or two shafts were hurled at ‘Freigedank’ from further afield. But the fuss soon died down – and once down it stayed dormant for years, not just because Wagner failed to launch another public onslaught but because the time was not ripe for one. Germany had entered that decade or more of deceptive lull that followed the failed uprisings of 1848–9. The political status quo seemed confirmed, the energy for new strife was either exhausted or channelled into revolutionising the economy, not the social order. Given this unreceptive national mood, the fierce piece of 1850 fluttered into a black hole.

  Why then did Wagner suddenly publish a tougher version of Judentum as a pamphlet bearing his own name after a break of nineteen years? In a letter coinciding with the reissue to the young pianist Carl Tausig, yet another of his Jewish friends, Wagner explained that he had been incensed by the ‘unheard of insolence of the Viennese press’ after the Meistersinger premiere in Munich in June 1868.21 By ‘Viennese press’ Wagner meant above all Hanslick, his former admirer turned stern critic. In fact Hanslick’s report was not as vitriolic as Wagner’s fierce reaction might suggest and as has often been claimed. It summed up Meistersinger as an ‘interesting experiment’ that, if taken as the rule, would spell the death of art; but it also called the piece a lot more stimulating than a dozen workaday operas by composers of far less talent. It is hard to read into this simply the personal vendetta Hanslick is widely said to have harboured because Wagner toyed for a while with calling the beastly Beckmesser in Meistersinger Hans-lick instead. What does emerge clearly from the report is Hanslick’s conviction that Wagner was a genius who was taking music down the wrong road.

  Furious though he was about the Meistersinger reaction in particular, Wagner’s decision to republish was more deeply grounded. In that letter to Tausig he also mentioned a ‘constant spinning of lies about me’. And in the introduction to the new Judentum text, he claimed that many baffled people had been asking him why all his ‘artistic doings’ were run down not only in Germany but abroad. The truth is that by this time Wagner had become convinced he was the victim of a far-flung Jewish conspiracy of which Hanslick (of Jewish descent on his mother’s side) was only a part. This drive against him, he believed, had been sparked by the original Judentum article, had continued through the Tannhäuser scandal of 1861 in Meyerbeer-besotted Paris, and showed itself in widespread hostility or silence from the press towards his work. The fact that by 1869 his music was being more widely performed and that he had a growing band of allies, Jews among them, evidently did not impress him. Nor did the pretty muted public reaction to his 1850 text. For Wagner the very lack of a response from his foes, including Meyerbeer, revealed their cunning in deciding not to attack head-on but to undermine him bit by bit.

  In his paranoia, Wagner even saw Jews as at least indirectly connected with his ejection from Munich in December 1865. A few months earlier he had sent King Ludwig a memorandum, harshly worded even by Wagner’s standards, comparing the role of Jews to that of maggots attacking a dying body. Not that Jews alone were lambasted. In the document, which he published in modified form thirteen years later as the essay Was ist deutsch?, Wagner also hit out at various other ‘J’s’ including Jesuits, Journalists, Juristen (lawyers) and Junker (Prussian landowners like Bismarck). But he plainly felt Jews presented the gravest danger, warning the king that action was needed to save the ‘German spirit’ from ‘a shameful doom’. As usual Ludwig rejected his house composer’s anti-semitism; indeed, the following year he visited a synagogue and pledged further backing for Jewish emancipation. In the meantime Wagner was forced to leave Munich and retreated to Switzerland. He had his own political interference as well as jealous courtiers to blame for that. But he surely linked his own fate to that broader danger to the ‘German spirit’ of which he had fruitlessly warned the king.

  Seen in this context, the reissue of Judentum takes on an extra dimension. In 1850 Wagner was aiming largely at Meyerbeer while purporting to write a general piece about Jews and music; in 1869 he was mainly warning of the broader threat he felt Jews posed to Germany while claiming to defend himself against his critics. What had happened in the intervening period? Jews had continued to move bit by bit towards winning full civic rights, in addition to the private influence they already wielded, and in Wagner’s view this spelled a danger of which not even Ludwig, let alone Bismarck, seemed aware. The Master finally decided it was up to him to sound the alarm. He must have felt still more justified when, months after his new text was published, Jews in the North German Confederation and later throughout Germany were formally granted full emancipation. To answer the question posed at the start of this chapter: it was a coincidence that Wagner’s pamphlet and the act of emancipation emerged almost simultaneously. But the two developments were indeed linked and they had been brewing for years.

  This time Wagner’s tract did not drop into a void. In contrast to 1850 a storm really did blow up in the press, some performances of Wagner’s works were hissed or postponed and attendance dropped off for a while. Jews were not the only ones incensed. But the setback was not permanent and in private Wagner was much praised for speaking out, especially by antisemites at the time too timid to do the same. That timidity evaporated over the next few years with the rise of national feeling that accompanied victory over France and the founding of the empire. Then came the 1873 stock market crash widely blamed, in the Habsburg empire as well as Germany, on the phantom of Jewish conspiracy. Whereas the anti-Meyerbeer Wagner of the 1850s had been largely ignored, the antisemitic Wagner of the 1870s and early 1880s found himself increasingly in the swim – although not quite in the mainstream. He still had all those Jewish friends, however much he terrorised many of them, and his increasingly baffling world outlook seemed to leave open a door to Jewish ‘redemption’. Although the Master proved useful to the most rapacious antisemites, in part for his record and especially for his fame, he nonetheless brought furrows to their brows.

  Antisemites had no need to worry about ambivalence on Cosima’s part. Both her diary and many of her letters, written both before and long after Wagner’s death, show her abhorrence of Jews to have been complete and obsessive. When there was anything to deplore, from supplies of rotten food for the army to a badly tuned instrument, as like as not Cosima found ‘Israel’ or ‘Jewish revenge’ behind it. She loathed Jewish faces and Jewish beards of which, to her particular irritation, she saw many among the public at performances of Wagner’s works. At least she let the devoted Porges off relatively lightly, simply complaining in her diary that there was nothing obviously Jewish about the young conductor except that he ‘can’t listen quietly’. But for the most part, in contrast to the Master’s bursts of impulse and self-contradiction, his wife’s antisemitism was chillingly implacable.

  On the face of it, Cosima’s prejudice looks harder to explain than Wagner’s. She was not forced to borrow from Jews when young, either through personal extravagance or early career struggles. Nor did she have grounds for the kind of envy Wagner felt for Meyerbeer. Might her antisemitism have been grounded in self-hatred because she feared she was of Jewish descent? This claim has often been made – even, by implication, in the documentation accompanying the exhibition Wagner und die Juden (Wagner and the Jews) organised by the Richard Wagner Museum at Wahnfried in 1985.22 On examination this story turns out to be as ill-founded as the one about Wagner’s alleged Jewish ancestry via Geyer. While it is true that Cosima’s maternal grandmother was a daughter of the noted Bethmann banking family in Frankfurt, it is not correct to say, as many do, that this family was Jewish.23 The mistake is easily made, partly because the name looks Jewish, partly because the rise of the Bethmanns as bankers coincided with that of the similarly influential Rothschilds, who were indeed Jewish, in the same city. But there
is no sign of Jewishness in the Beth-mann genealogy, which can be traced right back to a certain Heinrich Bethmann living in Goslar near the Harz mountains in 1416. It is unclear where the Bethmanns came from and what they were doing before that, but even the most assiduous seeker after possible Jewish ancestry has to call a halt somewhere and the fifteenth century seems a fair place to stop.24 Perhaps Cosima feared she might be Jewish all the same, despite the Bethmanns’ provable lineage, but if so she seems never to have mentioned it. As with Wagner, the self-hatred case can thus be built only on the flimsy grounds of an absence of evidence supposedly caused by shame.

  The root of Cosima’s hatred of Jews most probably lay not in fears about her ancestry but in her intensely Catholic, authoritarian upbringing, followed by her marriage to the antisemitic von Bülow. The evidence is mixed on how far Cosima’s usually absent father, Liszt, felt similar hostility. But there is no doubt that his mistress, Princess Carolyne, despised Jews and it was she who dispatched her old governess to Paris to look after Liszt’s children for years in the illiberal spirit of the ancien régime. It may seem odd that Cosima imbibed her antisemitism in that very city where more than half a century earlier, revolution had, among other things, pioneered Jewish emancipation in Europe. But then time and again in nineteenth-century France the forces of liberalism were driven back by those – naturally including monarchists and the church – who despised the revolution and all its works, not least the boost it had given to the Jewish cause. Not every aristocrat was illiberal, as the example of Cosima’s mother Marie d’Agoult well shows, nor was by any means every leftist a fan of the Jews. But broadly speaking conservative reaction fed antisemitism, and in her teens in particular, Cosima was in the thick of its influence. Her years under Madame Patersi’s thumb in Paris coincided with the breakdown of the Second Republic and its replacement by the Second Empire under Napoleon III – initially at least, an era in which civil liberties and parliamentary power were sharply curtailed.