Review: Wagner by Michael Tanner
Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews
Tanner, a Cambridge philosopher and opera critic for the Spectator, offers analyses of the plots of Wagner's operas, the intellectual themes projected by them, and an evaluation of the music that is (for most of us) their justification. Tanner's discussion of The Ring is superb and makes an otherwise very uneven book required reading. He often overstates (arguing, for instance, that Tristan is one of the two great religious works in Western music, along with the St. Matthew Passion), and he generally loads his analytical dice to minimize or even delete Wagner's faults. While almost all serious music lovers include Wagner on their shortlist of the ten greatest composers, Wagner is for Tanner far more serious business than merely music. For him the purpose of his art is to change our lives. That makes his life very important, and Tanner's selective treatment of it is regrettable. Except for a mention in the four-page chronology, Tanner doesn't note the twice published Jewry in Music, Wagner's ferocious demand for racial purity in German music.
The bold print emphasis is mine. The trouble is that the pathetic reviewer of the almost as pathetic book (a Tory view of Wagner is almost as dodgy as a Nazi one) in question fails to give a bibliographic citation for where Wagner makes any such claims. If he wants to cite Wagner as a believer in alien abduction or as a fellow flat earther, it's a free world: just do us the favour of giving us the exact bloody bibliographic citation. That is, the primary bibliographic citation, not the secondary reference in a book which refers to another secondary, tertiary, quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and denary etc reference ad infinitum, each claiming to cite the non-existent original reference. The trouble is that in the Wagner literature, you are sure to find the centenary reference that cites the fictitious primary reference with complete and utter confidence.
I have dealt with Das Judentum in der Musik in enough detail in other threads already, and I won't repeat myself too much on that subject, except to say that I have just gone through the German Urtext yet again to check that there is no demand at all for any sort of racial purity in that essay in music whether German or otherwise. I can assure you that no matter how many times you read it, absolutely nothing of the sort can be found in there whatsoever—nor for that matter in any other essay. What Wagner does say in Judaism in Music is that music is an extension of language, and that a music grows out of the deepest emotional and spiritual sense of being culturally rooted in a mother language.
Wagner's attacks on Mendelssohn are based on the fact that Wagner claims that Mendelssohn had lost touch with his real Jewish cultural roots and soul. What Wagner essentially argued was, that, as a self-hating Jew who had converted to Christianity, Mendelssohn could still never feel really German enough to feel a true heartfelt emotional and spiritual affinity to the German language, but nor did he have a real spiritual mother tongue to fall back on either, since Hebrew was, in those times, almost a dead language. Culturally, he was in lost in limbo—an uprooted Wandering Jew. The argument is that Mendelssohn's self-hatred for his true Jewish identity had caused him to lose touch with his inexorable Hebrew spiritual and linguistic roots, which has to be the basis of musical composition: the painful fate of being an uprooted, homeless people with neither real fatherland nor mother tongue. The end result is that Mendelssohn is forced to fall back on the use of rigid textbook forms and compose dogmatically "by the book" in "sonata boxes" — "painting by number", so to speak.
In Israel, there is even overt hostility towards Heinrich Heine, who has been denounced for the betrayal of his true Jewish roots by his conversion to Christianity. I doubt there are many Jews who would disagree that Mendelssohn is even more of a bizarre paradox: a Jew pretending to be a pious Prussian Reichsdeutsch. While Wagner was forced into exile, a liberal dissident from his beloved homeland for his part in the Dresden uprisings, Mendelssohn remained the rigidly conservative Lutheran darling of the Prussian Reich to the very end of his days. For this, he was effectively being damned by Wagner as a musically frightfully reactionary Prussian Imperial Reichs-stooge — a self-contradictory, self-hating Jewish one at that. This is how John Edward Toews describes Mendelssohn's situation in Berlin, the heart of Prussia:
The structure and content of the Lobgesang symphony suggests why it was not surprising that Mendelssohn might feel a strong attraction toward the cultural program of the regime of Frederick William IV. Nor is it surprising that Frederick William, Bunsen, and other regime insiders would see their historical and cultural perspectives mirrored in the musical universes of works like the Lobgesang or Paulus.
Becoming Historical p 258, Cambridge University Press, 2004
It should perhaps come as little surprise when August Kubizek tells us that Hitler was exceptionally fond of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and that he "never missed" an opportunity to hear it in concert.
As for more on this racial purity nonsense, I can give you bibliographic citations for the precise opposite in Wagner.
Nonetheless there is an inner motive at the base of the present day movement, no matter how little it may be announced by its current principles. We believe that in it we can see the reawakening of the lost spirit of the German people as it motive. The antagonism of the races is spoken of. In this sense we are prompted towards a renewed contemplation of self-awareness, in which relationship here certain human race-types stand in to one another. Here, however, it must first of all be recognised that we can only with much difficulty talk, if indeed at all with any particular specific certainly, about a German "race" that is strongly pronounced and preserved unchanged, as compared to the Jewish one. When experts discuss the issue whether mixed or purely kept races are more valuable to the development of the human race, we only arrive at the decision when we understand what it means by the progressive development of humanity. The obviously more advanced development of the Romanian people or the English, as mixed races, has been praised over the supposedly [etwa] purely kept people of Germanic races.
Dennoch liegt der gegenwärtigen Bewegung offenbar ein innerliches Motiv zum Grunde, so wenig es sich such in dem Gebahren der bisherigen Leiter derselben noch kundgeben mag. Wir glaubten zuvor dieses Motiv als das Wiedererwachen eines dem deutschen Volke verloren gegangenen Instinktes erkennen zu dürfen. Man spricht von dem Antagonismus der Racen. In diesem Sinne wäre uns eine neue Einkehr zur Selbsterkenntniss veranlasst, do wir uns denn deutlich zu machen hätten, in welchem Verhältnisse hier bestimmte menschliche Geschlechts-Arten so einander stehen möchten. Hier müsste denn wohl zunächst erkannt werden, dass, wenn wir von einer deutschen „Race” reden wollten, diese mit einer so ungemein ausgesprochenen und unverändert erhaltenen, wie der jüdischen, verglichen, sehr schwer, ja fast kaum, mit Bestimmtheit zu spezifizieren sei. Wenn die Gelehrten sich darüber unterhalten, ob gemischte oder rein bewahrte Racen für die Ausbildung der Menschheit wertvoller seien, so kommt es für die Entscheidung wohl nur darauf an, was wir unter einer fortschrittlichen Ausbildung der Menschheit verstehen. Man rühmt die sogenannten romanischen Völker, wohl auch die Engländer, als Misch-Racon; da sie den etwa rein erhaltenen Völkern germanischer Race im Kultur-Fortschritt offenbar vorsaustünden.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
That is, he thinks that the Jewish people are a race of such pure Abrahamic stock ("das erstaunlichste Beispiel von Racen-Konsistenz" - "the most astounding example of racial consistency"), that they make the Germans look like a bunch of complete mongrels. In other words Wagner believed in Jewish racial purity but not in German racial purity! The whole problem Wagner has with the mythology of some supposedly "pure" German race being God's Chosen People or Herrenrasse is that the notion is just too Jewish for his taste.
The last sentence where Wagner discusses the mixing of races also makes an allusion to von Gneist's idea that racial intermixing was a source of national strength:
Against those who preached racial exclusivism, the German liberal Rudolf von Gneist insisted in 1872 that "mixed blood" was the key to a nation’s "growth and vitality." In Austria in 1882 a prominent advocate of assimilation, the Jewish industrialist Baron Ludwig von Oppenheimer, saw in English history a model for Austria’s absorption of the Jews. Race mixing among Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Celts had created a dynamic new breed. Intermarriage between Jews and Christians was the bridge to a comparable fusion in Austria.
From Jacques Kornberg: Theodor Herzl — from Assimilation to Zionism
Later in the same essay, Wagner once more questions whether there is any point of even talking about a Germanic race at all:
Despite the emergence of these disadvantages, relative to the Jewish race, in the German race (if we should even believe in such a thing) that seemingly cannot be reconciled at all, we still believe that in order to illuminate the current [anti-Semitic nationalist] movement, the reawakening of something approximating [in ungefähre Berechnung] the German instinct is to be encroached [ziehen]. As we found that it was necessary to refrain from the pronouncement of a pure racial instinct, we ought, in contrast [dagegen], to perhaps permit ourself to investigate a much more elevated goal (that the present-day people can only be aware of in a dark and fully delusory way, as an instinct first and foremost) that is of nobler origins and having a loftier goal — that which must be named as the Spirit of Pure Humanity.
Trotz des sich hier heraustellenden, ganz unausgleichbar dünkenden Nachteiles, in welchem die deutsche Race (wenn wir eine solche noch annehmen sollten) gegen die jüdische sich befindet, glaubten wir dennoch, um die jetzige Bewegung zu erklären, das Wiedererwachen eines deutschen Instinktes in ungefähre Berechnung ziehen zu müssen. Da wir von der Äußerung eines reinen Racen-Instinktes abzusehen uns genötigt fanden dürften wir dagegen vielleicht einem weit höheren Triebe nachzuforschen uns gestatten, welcher, da er dem heutigen Volks doch nur dunkel und wahnvoll bewusst sein kann, wohl zuerst noch als Instinkt, dennoch aber von edlerer Abkunft und höheren Ziele, etwa als Geist reiner Menschlichkeit, bezeichnet werden müsste.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
So Wagner is declaring his Faith — not in the dubious notion of a German race — but in the Pure Humanity of the human race, and its ability to realise its lost nobility. As for the German language itself, Wagner suggests that Sanskrit is a more pure, elevated language, and that all other Indo-European languages "derived" from it — including German — are a degeneration:
of language, which from Sanskrit to the newest European linguistic amalgams, reveal an increasing degeneration.
der Sprache, welche vom Sanskrit bis auf die neuesten europäischen Sprach-Amalgame eine zunehmende Degeneration aufdeckt.
Kunst und Religion (no online link, taken from Band X Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Ed. Fritzsch, Leipzig, 1883)
The path to regeneration, Wagner argues, lies in rediscovering the roots of language in pure humanity itself:
thus, in the true fatherly ground of our speech, we may dig towards the roots of our language, to immediately find assuring information about ourselves, indeed to excavate the genuinely human itself.
so dürfen wir nur in dem wahren väterlichen Boden unserer Sprache nach deren Wurzel graben, um sofort beruhigenden Aufschluss über uns, ja über das wahrhaft Menschliche selbst zu gewinnen.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
Of further relevance is Wagner's idea from the same series of essays that all races will eventually intermix and become indistinguishable from each other:
eine mögliche Gleichheit aller, durch ihre Vermischung sich änhlich gewordener Racen uns gewiss zunächst nicht einer ästetischen Weltordnung zuführen würde, diese Gleichheit dagegen einzig aber uns dadurch denkbar ist, daß sie sich auf den Gewinn einer allgemeinen moralischen Übereinstimmung gründet, wie das wahrhaftige Christentum . . .
a possible sameness of all people made equal to each other through the intermixing of races can only lead to an aesthetically ordered world if this sameness were conceivable when grounded on the winning of a universal moral consensus such as the true Christianity . . .
Heldentum und Christentum, Bayreuther Blätter, September issue, 1881
And while he may have said that some speak of the "antagonism between races" Wagner said to Cosima on 17th December 1881 that "die Racen haben ausgespielt!" — "the races have finished playing each other off". He never stopped believing humanity could rise above its deep ethnic tensions and realise the oneness of its Pure Humanity.
It still didn't stop people trying to claim Wagner for the side of the ideologues beginning to develop their ideas at that time about German racial purity by claiming to read such ideas into his works. Wagner's response was to say to Cosima "An das deutsche Volk habe ich blutwenig dabei gedacht" (14th March 1878) — "I didn't spare so much as a bloody thought for the German Volk". In other words — these idiots should stop reading this bloody pure German Volk drivel into either his prose or musical works!
No comments:
Post a Comment