Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

by Michael Haas

  The Language of Assimilation: Die Neue Freie Presse

  In his memoirs, Julius Korngold, the music critic of Vienna's leading newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse, and successor to Eduard Hanslick, mentions his good fortune at being born during the ‘age of Liberalism’. On 20 December 1927, the same year that the writer and journalist Joseph Roth wrote his extended essay entitled Juden auf Wanderschaft, the Neue Freie Presse ran a front-page article celebrating ‘60 years of Liberalism’. In it, we find not only a concise and lucid exposition of the historic and political processes that resulted in one of the most inclusive and wide-ranging European constitutions of the age, we also sense, as with Roth's essay, the reactionary powers gathering steam in the years running up to National Socialism. Juden auf Wanderschaft tries to come to terms with what Roth saw as an inevitable development; the leader-writers of the Neue Freie Presse may have even sensed the same with their salute to 60 years of Liberalism aimed at a still undeclared but clearly present enemy.25 This was hardly surprising since the paper had been founded in 1864 by the Jewish journalists Max Friedländer and Adolf Werthner, and was published and edited from 1879 by two other Jews, Eduard Bacher and Moritz Benedikt. Benedikt was the only journalist whom the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph would meet. The Neue Freie Presse became the primary German-language paper offering a secular and politically liberal perspective and, with its flotation on the Viennese stock exchange in 1871, it was established as one of the leading papers published in the German language. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was its cultural editor, and Richard Wagner's favourite ‘Jewish’ hate-figure, Eduard Hanslick, Professor of Aesthetics at Vienna's University, was its principal music critic. With regular articles and features by Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Nordau, Felix Salten, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and even Karl Marx, it was the paper of the liberal, educated bourgeoisie, a demographic in which Jews were becoming ever more prominent. Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday sums it up nicely by referring to the paper as ‘a Temple of Progress’ and goes on to write, ‘With its distinguished exposition on events, its cultural authority and its political prestige, it came to represent for the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy the same as The Times for the English speaking world.‘26

  Though life had become progressively better for Jews since the 1848 Revolution and the emancipation of 1867, the rise of Jewish scholars and intellectuals to the top of the professional classes – and even to the nobility – took place in less than a generation. Such rapid progress would not go without resentment. The ideals of the Austro-Hungarian Constitution of 1867 and Germany's Constitution of 1871 were directly responsible for creating the dynamic cultural environments in both German states prior to the rise of Nazism. It could be argued, as the 1927 article in the Neue Freie Presse makes clear, that the wide-ranging liberalism of these constitutions also allowed the emergence of a pan-German, exclusionist nationalism.27 To try to understand the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews, we need to turn to Wagner, in many ways the father of German anti-Semitism based on ‘race’ rather than religious adherence, and as a composer, a central figure within this story.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wagner and German Jewish Composers in the Nineteenth Century

  Stern tells us the latest joke: H. is busy imitating his adored Wagner as composer; he's written an operatic trilogy: ‘The Ring of the Never-Last-Long’: 1) Unfreed; 2) The Wantons; 3) Twilight of the Ghetto

  Als neuesten Witz erzählte Stern: H. eifere seinem Liebling Wagner als Componist nach; er habe eine Operntrilogie geschaffen: Der nie gelungene Ring: 1. Niefried. 2. Die Willkür. 3. Ghettodämmerung.

  Viktor Klemperer, Diaries, 27 March 1937

  Wagner's Judaism in Music

  In Richard Wagner's 1850 polemic Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music)1, several features demand special attention. Not only can the document be seen as a template for what was still to come, but it also offers a reflection of the period in which Wagner lived and wrote. The impulse to produce the pamphlet grew out of a casual reference to a work possessing a ‘Hebrew flavour’ that was made by Wagner's friend Theodor Uhlig in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The gusto with which Wagner addresses this point becomes apparent within the first paragraph. It is equally clear that he is addressing a subject that already enjoys common currency. As with most demagogues, he writes as if addressing ‘Everyman’ and expressing an opinion that all are thinking but none dare say. It is the tabloid approach, but using language that is at once lofty and condescending, while making frequent self-regarding references to ‘the people’ in the safe assumption that his readers believe that Jews are hardly the same species. He published the work twice: under the pseudonym of ‘K. Freigedank’ (K. Freethinker) in 1850, and under his own name in 1869.

  One of the most fascinating contemporary résumés of Wagner's tract comes from his nemesis at the Neue Freie Presse, Eduard Hanslick, who finds himself the object of attack in Wagner's 1869 revision. In the 9 March issue of the same year, Hanslick tells us perhaps all we need to know about the tract itself and offers a marvellous depiction of the way that both sides viewed this debate:

  Richard Wagner has augmented his usual practice of self-glorification over the years with an increasingly industrious sideline in pamphleteering. Most recently, we have been treated to something called Judaism in Music. Jews are apparently ‘the most abhorrent beings of all creation’ – and a Jew happens to be any- and everyone who doesn't choose to worship at the shrine of Richard Wagner … [Wagner] sets forth with the accusation of enmity in the press, and ‘not just in Germany but also France and England’. Behind this finely woven web of animosity stands, according to Wagner, ‘a cabal of Jewish intrigue’ directed specifically against him. Ever since his tract Judaism in Music appeared in a Leipzig music periodical in 1850, everyone who spurns the eating of ham and pork also spurns the works of Richard Wagner and never misses an opportunity to avenge themselves. Wagner further informs us that his tract was widely read and caused enormous offence, though astonishingly enough the essay was published not under his own name but that of a certain Mr Freethinker [Freigedank]. […] Of course it fits Wagner's sense of self-importance that the entire cultural establishment, along with all of its journalistic partners, carries around a grudge acquired from an anonymous article published some 19 years ago in Leipzig. […] I have to admit that I found myself only aware of Wagner's illustrious pamphlet of 1850 with the publication of its present up-date. […] Indeed, [according to Wagner] the rot would appear to have started with the publication [of my book] On Musical Beauty. ‘[Hanslick] won his reputation as an aestheticist in order to acquire a position in a leading paper where he could declare all of my work as null and void.’ Further, my ‘Nimbus’ is such that all papers, the world over, have taken up this tone. […] [Wagner further writes] Leipzig has ‘been musically baptised into Jewry’ thanks to its long association with Mendelssohn. Leipzig is now ‘the undisputed capital of Jew-music’. The brochure continues in this obnoxious and hateful manner. […] It was in the ‘Jew-Music capital’ that the plot ‘that Wagner should henceforth be ignored’ was hatched: ‘More than just ignored, he should be punished in all of his musical and literary efforts.’[…]

  After his attack on journalism, he moves rapidly to theatre directors. As he puts it […] ‘You have no doubt wondered why following the rapid success in all German theatres of my early works, these very same theatres have reacted with lazy indifference to my later ones; my works were popular before the start of the Jew-agitation and it was quite impossible to halt their success.’ […]

  Not every theatre in the land can match the Court Opera of Munich as a pre-natal clinic for Richard Wagner's musical offspring. Wagner even allows his passions to lead him to the impertinent accusation that correspondence with directors of the court operas in Berlin and Vienna convinces him that not only was it their intention that [his] operas not play in their own theatres, but that they would do wh
at they could ‘to stop performances anywhere’. […]

  The biggest lie, my apparent Jewishness, I put down to a man deranged by anger, not unlike the Rabbi in Heine's Disputation who went everywhere with an open knife in order to circumcise harmless and unsuspecting Christians. […]2

  Wagner [finally] stumbles over the name of Robert Schumann about whom he has to say something hateful […] ‘Compare the two periods of Schumann's output: the one full of plastic creativity, the other flat bombast’. And what could the cause of this change be? Could it be, as we have always assumed, the nervous condition under which he tragically suffered and died? Of course not! Wagner informs us that the reason lies in the exposure of Schumann to Jews! If Wagner's pamphlet had until now only seemed ridiculous, it now appears to be deeply repellent. With this, we slam shut this tiny booklet that will win the author few friends and most likely not add appreciably to his Jewish enemies. Wagner's characteristics can only be of psychiatric interest. This most hopeless case of self-idolatry has reached such an unimagined height that there is simply no oxygen left for normal brain functions. One can only recall Wagner's Old Testament predecessor, King Nebuchadnezzar, who for so long believed himself to be a god that over time he turned into an ordinary ox, eating grass – and eventually found himself turned into an opera by Verdi.3

  Mendeslssohn's Shadow

  Before the emancipations of 1867 and 1871 in Austria and Germany, many Jewish composers – prominent among them, Jacob Liebermann Beer, better known as Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Jacob (Jacques) Offenbach – left for France. Felix Mendelssohn, who since his family's conversion to Christianity had taken on the additional name of Bartholdy, was the exception, having found more acclaim in Britain. With works such as Lobgesang and the oratorios Paulus and Elijah, and with his revival of Bach's St Matthew Passion, Mendelssohn showed a reverence for tradition that would become a feature of German and Austrian Jewish musical assimilation.

  Wagner aims many of his most barbed attacks at those Jews whose financial circumstances allowed them the luxury of both artistic and social confidence, but who, despite these advantages, continued to seek comfort in the past rather than the future. He interprets as racially shallow the precarious social position obtained by recently assimilated Jewish musicians. To Wagner, their over-caution when composing resulted in blandness, which they compensated for by their use of dazzling technique. Their music, in his view, resides on the outer shell of virtuosity rather than within the inner spirit. By plumbing spiritual depths, something of which he believed Jews were intellectually and culturally incapable, composers communicated at a deeper level that propelled music towards the future. In the writings of both Richard Wagner and the diaries of his wife Cosima, Mendelssohn is mentioned on hundreds of occasions.4 Wagner suggests, for example, that Mendelssohn was incapable of writing something as complex and self-revealing as an opera, while ignoring the vast number of popular operas written by utterly forgettable non-Jewish composers.5 He praises Mendelssohn for his talent, cultivation and sensitivity, while at the same time turning these attributes into barriers to deeper spiritual communication. He accuses Mendelssohn of taking his musical models, such as Bach, from the past while remaining singularly incapable of transmitting the deeper meaning of Bach's works. According to Wagner, Mendelssohn only touches us when he ‘lets us notice his spiritual impotence’.6

  Throughout this entire tirade, he never ceases to damn Mendelssohn by praising him as the perfect student, only pleasing to us if we are in need of simple ‘entertainment with perfect structures, sequences, dazzling and tweaking out the most perfect arabesques’.7 He also goes on to condemn Mendelssohn as an interpreter of past German masters for preferring fast, superficial, tempos. Later he accuses the Mendelssohn ‘school’ of ‘avoiding emotion’ and not employing ‘expressive effects’.8 He describes Mendelssohn's performances of Bach as so ‘effect-free’ that he felt himself transported to a ‘Hellenic synagogue’ and needed thereafter to seek musical solace from Liszt in order to restore his faith.9

  Wagner's very personal experiences bring him to the conclusion that Jews are physically so different from other European races that they could never be used to represent heroes or romantic leads in the theatre: ‘If the outward appearance of the Jew is inappropriate for transmitting artistic ideas of this or that dramatic character, should one not question if the Jew's inner being is incapable of artistic expression?‘10 He also damns their use of language. One of his many contentious points is the view that every non-Jew is viscerally repulsed by Jews. He mentions this reaction as being ‘psychological’ and ‘instinctive'; for a tract deriving from the middle of the nineteenth century, Wagner is quite free with the use of ‘scientific’ terms that compensate for his lack of hard evidence. He cites Jewish liturgical music as proof that the Jew does not live in today's world, but languishes in a petrified past. He states that the majority of music-lovers are interested in music's future and couldn't care less about its past. As we come to the last part of the tract, it becomes clear that Wagner is settling grudges and perceived slights. He proceeds to denigrate as thoroughly as possible both Mendelssohn, whom he names, and Meyerbeer, who remains anonymous. Mendelssohn's early death in 1847, which Wagner describes as ‘the death that Mendelssohn's guardian angel sealed at the right time by closing his eyes permanently,‘11 presumably made him an easier target than Meyerbeer, though there is also the very faint chance that Wagner may have recalled his youthful debt to Meyerbeer. The chances of this are slim, since there is absolutely no mistaking his target, and the language is not pleasant.

  In Wagner's opinion, German music would for ever remain a foreign tongue to Jewish composers, implying that the cultural assimilation they were seeking could never end in full integration. These views are ageless and one need only recall in recent times the huge influx of Chinese, Korean and Japanese performers of Western classical music who have been objects of the same prejudice; the opinion that newly assimilated minorities must dazzle in order to impress is obviously not new. That Wagner could smash the existing mould of music-theatre and altogether change how music was perceived goes equally without saying. That he could do so more easily than Mendelssohn, unhampered by the grudging anti-Semitic bigotry of the cultural environment in which he worked, is fundamental to understanding how music developed in German society. As it happened, the conditions that coloured the reception of Wagner and Mendelssohn earlier in the nineteenth century continued throughout the later assimilation phases: forward thrusts by one group are balanced – or impeded – by an obsessive clinging to the conventional by more cautious new arrivals.

  It is fascinating to compare Wagner's views of Mendelssohn as being facile and superficial with those of the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Heine saw Mendelssohn as representing the essence of German gravitas. He spills a good deal of ink on the subject of Judaism and Christianity, while being remarkably candid about his own conversion. In Lutetia, Heine speculates on why Mendelssohn remained unpopular in France. In a direct comparison between Rossini's Stabat Mater and Mendelssohn's oratorio Paulus, he writes:

  Heaven preserve me from speaking ill of so worthy a master as the creator of Paulus, nor would it remotely occur to [me] to doubt the deep under-lying Christianity of the oratorio because Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy happens by birth to be a Jew. But I simply cannot suppress the observation that by the time Mendelssohn had converted to Christianity at the age of thirteen …, Rossini had already left it and given himself entirely to the worldly delights of opera. [With the Stabat Mater] he has now dreamt his way back into the Catholicism of his youth. … One seems to proffer the view that in order to be sincere, Christianity (in art and music) must be both bloodless and pale. … No, it is not the outer dryness that makes for true Christianity, but an inner ebullience that can neither be baptised into nor learned. … As such, I find Rossini's Stabat Mater far more Christian than Mendelssohn's Paulus, despite Rossini's enemies who praise the latter as the very essence of the faith.12

>   When assessing Wagner's hostility towards Mendelssohn, it is worth remembering that he was attacking a man who had died at the tragically early age of 38 (not far off Wagner's own age at the time he was firing off polemics from the relative safety of Zurich having fled from Germany in 1849). He had yet to compose the Ring, Tristan, Meistersinger or Parsifal.

  Wagner and the Jews, the Jews and Wagner

  By the mid-1850s, Wagner's obsession with Mendelssohn seems to have lessened somewhat; and by 1872, he is happily corresponding with the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, whom he regularly addresses as ‘honoured friend’ and even later, ‘most valued friend’. Levi went on to conduct the premiere of Wagner's most ardently Christian work, Parsifal, while politely declining Wagner's (or more likely Cosima's13) entreaties to convert. Levi wrote to his father on 13 April 1884: ‘Even his fight against that which he calls “The Jewish elements” in music and modern literature comes from the most honourable motives. That it does not betray the small-minded hostility of, say, the landed-gentry or self-righteous Protestantism is proven in his treatment of me, Joseph Rubenstein and his earlier close relationship with Tausig, to whom he showed the deepest affection. The most wonderful thing to happen in my life has been the privilege of being near such a human being. For this, I thank God daily.‘14 Levi is certainly correct in his assessment of Wagner's relationship with Tausig, who had apparently reassured Wagner in correspondence that ‘all Jews were reconciled’ with him. In answer to this, Wagner wrote back that Jews would in fact be well advised to read his Judaism in Music pamphlet.15