Adorno and Wagner

In December of 1949, Arnold Schoenberg wrote to the famous musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt about Adorno's book, Philosophie der neuen Musik:

I have never been able to bear the fellow [Adorno] ... it is disgusting the way how he treats Stravinsky. I am certainly no admirer of Stravinsky, although I like a piece of his here and there very much—but one should not write like that.

A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life. P335

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno

Academics are human beings who are hardly above petty personal malice and emotive spleen venting. Although his insights into his own composition teacher, Alban Berg, are incisive, Adorno is notorious for his endless shrill polemics against Stravinsky. While I tend to think that Adorno makes some interesting points in his critiques of Stravinsky, he labours his point so much that even Schoenberg regards him as having gone way too far, to the point of condemning his invectives as “disgusting”. Adorno was prone to these sorts of petty spleen venting tirades, not only against Stravinsky, but also against Wagner.

Theodor Adorno is one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School of social philosophy, which combines neo-Marxist thought with the influence of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freudian psychoanalysis. As Adorno was half Jewish, a son of a Jewish father and an Italian mother, and was forced to flee the National Socialist regime and their murderous persecution of what they called “Judeo-Bolshevism”. The rise of fascism forced Adorno to accept that the course of the twentieth century was completely failing to stick to the narrative of the strict political script followed by classic Marxists. Instead, he turned to explanations based on psychoanalytic and other sociocultural influences, particularly focusing on the rise of the popular mass media. This amounted to the suggestion—heretical to classical Marxists—that explanations of events in world history based purely on control over industrial “infrastructure” and modes of production had now grown wholly inadequate, since, unlike in the post-industrial revolution age of Marx, a key to power in the modern information age was now the so-called Fifth Estate of the media. Who has control over the “truth” now had control over power.

At his best, Adorno’s critiques can be powerfully biting and deeply insightful. The fact that Adorno is coming back into fashion today is highly welcome. However, as with all human beings, he was far from infallible. Far more than Nietzsche, Adorno is the mother of all misunderstandings when it comes to Wagner. Adorno is responsible for the highly fashionable sport of Jew spotting in Wagner’s works. It seems the very height of irony that, far from coming from the Nazis themselves, the ideas about Beckmesser and Mime being Jewish originate from Adorno. This idea was completely unknown to the National Socialists, as not a single scrap of evidence has ever emerged that they ever once interpreted characters in Wagner in such a way. Obviously, Adorno's idea that Wagner’s works were absolutely teaming with a synagogue full of crypto-Jews was a polemical idea intended as a petulant attack. It has been pointed out that this use of the “accusation” of a character being Jewish is in itself anti-Semitic, but this reflects Adorno’s deep underlying Marxist indifference as an assimilated half-Jew with a German identity, towards traditional Judaism and Judaic culture. Indeed, anyone who even remotely thinks of Adorno as being in any way Jewish is profoundly guilty of the same biologically deterministic racism as the Nazis themselves.

More recent right-wing writers such as Hartmut Zelinsky and Joachim Köhler do little more than plagiarise Adorno in misusing his writings as a springboard to further their own right-wing political agendas that do little more than give false validity to perversely Nazified art interpretations. Far from using his Critical Theory to sharply criticise National Socialism, Adorno has inadvertently issued them with the stamp of his validity.

Adorno's Wagner polemics also stem from a humourless and bluntly literal reading of Nietzsche's emotive satirical attacks on Wagner. When you read Nietzsche on Wagner, it is all too easy to see that you might as well be reading a book on Paul McCartney by ex-wife Heather Mills—you take the endless personal invective with a pinch of salt, a bemused smile, and occasional gratitude for flashes of genuine insight born of an intimate long-term relationship gone sour. I have always been taught that going public for the sake of revenge with shrill polemics dressed as scandal mongering tell-alls, freely embellished with rank gossip about former intimates and confidants shows a complete lack of class—though I do believe the term that Nietzsche likes to lecture us about is not "class", but "nobility". It would seem there is more than a touch of ape left in the Nietzschean Overman. Adorno, however, takes all of this satirical monkey business deadly seriously, without showing the slightest hint of a sense of humour.

A good example of this sort of shameless gossip mongering is in Nietzsche's famous accusation of Wagner becoming a rabidly anti-Semitic Reichsdeutsch (The Case of Wagner). Yet, when Wagner's Jewish friend and impresario, Angelo Neumann, asked him about whether there was any truth to the rumours about an association with a Berlin nationalist anti-Semitic movement:

An anti-Semitic movement which was then very active in Berlin went to the trouble to proclaim Richard Wagner as their chief apostle, leading Georg Davidsohn, their authorised publicist, whose friendly relationship with Bayreuth is well known, to write to me to direct me to the serious danger of the Berlin undertakings should the opinion be spread that Wagner took part in the agitation.

Eine in Berlin damals sehr regsame antisemitische Bewegung die sich bemüht hat Richard Wagner als ihre Hauptapostel zu proklamieren, veranlaßte Georg Davidsohn, der verdienten Publizisten, dessen freundschaftliche Beziehungen zu Bayreuth wohl bekannt sind, an Schreiben an mich zu richten und die ernste Gefahr für das Berliner Unternehmen hinzuweisen, wenn die Meinung verbreitet würde, Wagner habe an die Agitation persönlich Anteil.  

My own translation from the German edition of Personal Reflections on Wagner (Erinnerungen an Wagner) p139 by Angelo Neumann. The published English translation of the book can be found here.

Neumann got a reply from Wagner in February of 1881 emphatically denying these rumours:

I distance myself completely from the modern "anti-Semitic" movement. In an upcoming issue of der Bayreuther Blätter, a passage will appear by me that will vigorously state how it is impossible for me to associate with that movement...

My translation from German edition of Personal Reflections on Wagner (Erinnerungen an Wagner) p139. 

The Berlin anti-Semitic unrest of 1879-81 is mentioned in Know Thyself published in February of 1881, where Wagner dismisses it as "dunkel und Wahnvoll"—"dark and full of madness".  Wagner also obliquely mentions an anti-Semitic pastor referred to only as "unsere Herren Geistlichen ... in ihrer Agitation gegen die Juden" (our dear clergymen in the agitation against the Jews). He was referring to pastor Adolf Stöcker who founded a party called the Christian-Social Workers Party, later renamed the Christian Social Party (p.259 of Stefanie Hein's Richard Wagners Kunstprogramm im nationalkuturellen Kontext). Cosima records Wagner's reaction in her diary on the 14th of November, 1879 to a sermon by Adolf Stöcker:

A second sermon from Pastor Stoecker brought R[ichard] to exclaim: Alas! Not just the Jews, but every creature seeks to further their own interest. It is us, we of the state, who condone such things. So too the stock exchange, in the beginning a free, decent institute—what have we permitted to become of that? And he spoke of the current debts that the states gets into and how that once again only drives the evil speculative spirits!

Eine zweite Rede vom Pfarrer Stoecker bringt R. darauf, aufzurufen: Ach! Nicht die Juden sind es, ein jedes Wesen sucht sein Interesse zu fördern, wir sind es: wir der Staat, die wir solches gestatten. So auch die Börse, anfänglich eine freie gute Institution, was haben wir daraus werden lassen. Und er erzählt von der jetzigen Anleihe, welche der Staat macht und die wiederum nur ein Vorschub diesem bösen spekulativen Geiste leistet!

In fact, Wagner was quite aggressive to the point of downright rudeness in his staunch refusal to have anything to do with the early völkisch movement. When the early völkisch ideologist, Bernhard Förster, who married Nietzsche's sister, approach Wagner to start an anti-Semitic newspaper, Cosima writes in her diaries that Wagner wrote back to him:

Dr Förster send us an invitation for the founding of an anti-Semitic newspaper. R[ichard] recalled that had written to him from Naples: 

“You should take a look to see if you fit into Prince Bismarck’s junkyard [Kram], and it looks like you fit into the junkyard, because you’ve adopted his entire programme. It looks like we Bayreuthers with our ideals are going to be very isolated”.  

Dr. Förster schickte ihn einen Aufruf zur Gründung einer anti-semitischen Zeitung. R erzählt, daß er von Neapel aus ihm geschrieben zu haben: 

»Sehen Sie, ob Sie in Fürst Bismarcks Kram passen und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen«, —und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen, denn Sie adoptieren sein ganzes Programm. »Wir Bayreuther mit unseren Ideen werden sehr einsam bleiben”.«

Cosima Tagebuch: p672 Sonnenabend 22ten Januar 1881. My own translation

Nietzsche, on the other hand, is shameless in latching onto such wild rumours that were circulating around after their split, about Wagner's alleged association with the anti-Semitic movement inspired by the likes of Adolf Stöcker, and passes them off as though they were fact. Never once does Nietzsche mention the fact that Cosima Wagner—with whom Nietzsche was completely besotted—remained true to her French Catholic anti-Semitic upbringing as a virtual orphan, by showing even greater contempt for Jews than Wagner ever did.

Cosima Wagner

Cosima was young enough to be Wagner's daughter and she outlived him by almost half a century. The legacy of Wagner's music effectively made her a millionaire, and she mutated into Bayreuth's arch reactionary-conservative matriarch, who oversaw the appalling Nazification of the Festivals. Yet Nietzsche utterly adored her, and never once wrote a harsh word about her.

In the throes of a madness engendered in his brain (possibly by tertiary syphilis), Nietzsche wrote a letter to Cosima inscribed with nothing other than the words "Ariadne, I love you. Dionysus". In the asylum at Jena, Nietzsche said "my wife, Cosima Wagner, has brought me here". This appears to have originated from a conversation that took place during a visit by Hans von Bülow to Nietzsche in 1872, when he likened himself to Theseus and Cosima to Ariadne, who had left Bülow for the god-like figure of Wagner-Dionysus. See Walter Kaufmann: Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p357.

Not only does Adorno lap up every invective by Nietzsche, he condescends to confer upon Nietzsche's emotive personal attacks and grotesque satirical caricatures, a veneer of quasi-academic respectability. In short: he rather humorlessly takes every satirical word deadly seriously. In this post I will attempt to dissect out the foundations of Adorno's blindly uncritical acceptance of Wagner's deeply personal polemics against his former Meister. There are two aspects of Adorno's polemics against Wagner:

1. Blame it on Bakunin. An anti-Bakunian resentment projected onto Wagner following the success of the pro-Democratic Centrists in the German 1918-19 Revolution. 

2. Blame-Shift onto Wagner. An attempt to cleanse Nietzsche's notoriety as a proto-fascist thinker by using Wagner as a convenient scapegoat upon whom to shift all blame.

1. Blame it On Bakunin

The first of the two origins of Adorno’s Wagner polemic has its foundations in the political circumstances of the 1918-19 German Revolution that lead to the foundation of the Weimar Republic.

If, in contemporary America, we have the Democrats and the Republican representing the political left and right, in Weimar Germany the main parties that emerged were the National Socialists (NSDAP) on the right, with the left being split right down the middle between the Communists (KPD) and the Social Democrats (SPD). If you can imagine how divisive the effect would be of splitting the Democrat vote in America today between two bitterly antagonistic leftist parties caught in a hostile gridlock, that is the situation you had in the Reichstag.

To vote in the Weimar Republic for the NSDAP—the only right-wing party large enough to meaningfully oppose the left—was just like voting for the Republicans. Just as moderate Republicans, who thought George Bush II had gone too far, still voted for him by convincing themselves that he was still better than the alternative, so too did moderates of the German centre right convince themselves that Hitler had to be better than the "commies" on the other side. Moreover, Hitler was their "saviour" from the real threat of Bolshevism. However, the main voter  attraction of the NSDAP was actually their appeal to "fix the economy" following the Wall Street crash.

In the 1932 elections, the NSDAP won 230 seats, the SPD won 133 seats, followed by the KPD in third place with 89 seats. The left-wing parties were so divided by inter-fighting that they failed to form a coalition strong enough to oppose the NSDAP. The left were hopelessly divided, and the right conquered.

Voting day in Berlin, 31st of July, 1932

The ideological difference, that so divided the KPD and the SPD, emerged during the German 1918-19 Revolution. The SPD wanted to create a socially progressive democratic state through which social change could be effected by democratic means. The KPD wanted to close the door on any right-wing counter revolutionary putsch by establishing a "dictatorship of the proletariate": a totalitarian state that dispensed with democracy:

The Russian Revolution swept away democracy and replaced it with the dictatorship of the workers' and soldiers' council. The Social-Democratic Party unequivocally rejects Bolshevik theory and methods for Germany, and declares its commitment to democracy.

Vorwärts: Dictatorship or Democracy. 21 October, 1918. Quoted in Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, P130

As was pointed out by Schnellenbacher in a meeting of the KPD at the time of the German Revolution, the tensions between the SPD and KPD were really just an re-enactment on the political stage of the polemics "between Marx and Bakunin" (Bericht über den 2 Parteitag der KPD quoted in Broué P319). The anarchist-socialist thinker, Michael Bakunin, had denounced Marx's theories as a pseudo-science that would lead to another form of monarchic despotism by self-appointed Red Emperors.

Michael Bakunin

In Statism and Anarchy Bakunin wrote:

Ultimately, from whatever point of view we look at this question, we come always to the same sad conclusion, the rule of the great masses of the people by a privileged minority. The Marxists say that this minority will consist of workers. Yes, possibly of former workers, who, as soon as they become the rulers of the representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from  the governing heights of the State; they will no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their claims to rulership over the people. Those who doubt this know very little about human nature. . . the pseudo-People’s State will be nothing but a despotic control of the populace by a new and not at all numerous aristocracy of real and pseudo-scientists.

The attitude of the KPD was that a democracy would only open the back door to counter revolutionary putschists. The establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", based on the assumption of the perfect scientific objectivity of Marx's scientific principles, was the only guaranteed way of closing the back door.

The position of the SPD at the centre-left of politics is often described as Centrist. Wagner, who participated in the pro-Democratic Dresden uprising of 1849, clearly rejected the Marx-Engels Communist Party Manifesto of 1848, while remaining sympathetic to the socialist cause. Wagner said in The Fatherland Union Paper:

Do you think that you scent in this the teachings of communism? 

Are you then so stupid or wicked as to confound a theory so senseless as that of communism with that which is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the human race from its degraded servitude [to money]?

Wagner was clearly ideologically right in step with his close friend Bakunin, who, unlike Wagner, failed to evade arrest for his participation in the uprisings. Wagner further called for democracy and the right to vote. This pro-Democratic and anti-Communist stand by Wagner in the 1848-49 Revolution places him as a fore-runner of the Centrist position of the SPD during the 1818-19 German Revolution.

Adorno's polemic against Wagner, Versuch Über Wagner (Essay on Wagner, often mistranslated as In Search of Wagner), was written between 1937 and 1938 in London and New York, after the NSDAP had taken total control over the Reichstag, shutting out its KPD and SPD opposition, forcing Adorno into political exile. In Adorno’s pro-KPD politics of the period, he was clearly resentful towards Wagner’s Bakunian and dismissive attitude towards the "dictatorship of the proletariate" as just another totalitarianism. Adorno appears deeply resentful that democracy had opened the back door by which the NSDAP could creep into the Weimar Reichstag. That is, Adorno merely wants to say that Wagner’s pro-democratic Centrist position makes him responsible for the ascendency of the NSDAP in the Reichstag. Either you support the KPD's revolutionary and anti-democratic position, or be damned as a pro-Nazi.

The reason for Adorno's hostility is that the Centrist position really did give the NSDAP a back door route by which to gain a foothold in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic, from which Hitler eventually clawed himself into a position of absolute power. Adorno's claim here is that had the KPD gotten its way in forming a dictatorship of the proletariate, any chance of the NSDAP taking a foothold would have been closed off. Ergo, Wagner and his SPD Centrist heirs are responsible for allowing the NSDAP a place in the Reichstag in the first place.

Adorno's dogmatic Marxist attitude at this time is that you must be a "scientific socialist", because if you are not, you might as well be a card carrying Nazi. This is why Adorno explodes with such violent hostility towards Bakunin and Wagner. In the polemic between Bakunin and Marx, Adorno predictably takes the side of Marx. Adorno sums things up well:

Der Wagnersche Verrat ist ein Stück bürgerlicher Revolution selber. 

The Wagnerian betrayal [of Marxist principles] is in itself a kind of bourgeois revolution.

Adorno: Versuch Über Wagner my own translation from Gesammelte Schriften, Die Musikalische Monographien; Band 13, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986, P130.

What Adorno is really calling a "bourgeois revolution" (bürgerliche Revolution) is the German Revolution of 1918-19, which old-fashioned Marxists even today regard as a "failed revolution". The revolutionary Marxist camp felt betrayed by the pro-Democratic Centrists (who were admittedly complicit in the capture and brutal executions of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht).

In the same essay, Adorno is openly incensed by Wagner's rejection of revolutionary Communism in the introduction to his own Kunst und Revolution, added much later for publication within a complete edition of his writings. Adorno quotes the following passage from this introduction in which Wagner alludes to the failed Paris Commune, but draws a line between his own more abstract anarchistic socialism and overtly revolutionary Communism:

The author, however, could been placed in gravest peril through his frequent association with Communism, were he were to appear in Paris today with this present writings on art [Wagner's Art and Revolution], because he obviously positions himself, in opposition to “egoism”, on the side of this most taboo denomination. I think now though, it comes as no surprise that the measured German reader, to whom this conceptual contrast is immediately apparent, is concerned whether he should place me among the supporters of the recent Paris Commune. Yet I do not deny, in this regard (the same Feuerbachian writings being interpreted in exactly the same sense), that Communism is the antithesis of Egoism, though not with the vigour as you see emanating from me here, since this concept expresses less a sociopolitical ideal than a principle, which is understood according to the “people” [Volk] in the sense of the incomparable productivity of pre-recorded primordial society, and this conceived in its fullest extent as once again constituting the universal essence of the future.

In den allergrößte Gefähr könnte aber der Verfasser durch seine häufige Anziehung des Kommunismus gerathen, wenn er mit diesen vorliegenden Kunstschrift heute in Paris auftreten wollte; denn offenbar stellt er sich, dem »Egoismus« gegenüber, auf die Seite dieser höchst verpönten Kategorie. Ich glaube nun zwar, daß der gewogene deutsche Leser, welchem dieser begriffliche Gegensatz sogleich einleuchten wird, über das Bedenken, ob er mich unter die Parteigänger der neuesten Pariser Commune zu stellen habe, ohne besondere Mühe hinauskommen wird. Doch will ich nicht läugnen, daß ich auf diese (den gleichen Feuerbachschen Schriften in demselben Sinne entnommene) Beziehung des Gegensatzes des Egoismus durch Kommunismus, nicht mit der Energie, wie es von mir hier geschehen ist, eingegangen sein würde, wenn mir in diesem Begriffe nicht auch ein sozialpolitisches Ideal als Prinzip aufgegangen wäre, nach welchem in das »Volk« in dem Sinne der unvergleichlichen Produktivität der vorgeschriftlichen Urgemeinschaftlichkeit auffaßte, und dieses im vollendesten Maaße als allgemeinschaftliches Wesen der Zukunft wieder hergestellt dachte.

The same rejection of revolutionary Communism in preference for parliamentary democracy was previously already expressed in his Fatherland Union Paper. In rejecting Marx's Communist Party Manifesto, Wagner sided with his friend, Michael Bakunin, alongside whom he took part in the Dresden uprisings. Bakunin supported the democratic movement together with Wagner. Wagner can no more be called a counter-revolutionary or reactionary Nazi for his rejection of revolutionary Communism than Bakunin. The only difference is that in the late Regeneration writings, Wagner starts to yearn for a primordial sense of social communality as a means of regenerating a lost humanity. In essence, it is the sort of anarchistic communalism advocated by Bakunin in his essay Revolutionary Catechism:

The internal reorganisation of each country on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes. Necessity of recognising the right of secession: every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation has the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate ... With the dissolution of a “unity” imposed by violence, the units of society will be drawn to unite by their powerful mutual attraction and by inherent necessities. Consecrated by liberty, these new federations of communes, provinces, regions, and nations will then be truly strong, productive, and indissoluble.

My emphasis 

It is a communalistic social movement that rejected musket toting violence as a means of imposed social change, and instead embraced a return to a primordial sense of community that went hand in hand with Buddhism, vegetarianism, pacifism, and an outright rejection of patriotic nationalism, in a way that anticipates the hippies of the mid-20th centuries. For an example of Wagner's violent rejection of patriotic national, see his 1864 essay Über Staat und Religion (Concerning State and Religion), where he writes that:

The act of the renunciation of selfishness consummated the in patriotic act actual is however a so violent an endeavour, that it is impossible to ever stop it in the long run. Furthermore, the delusion that drives them is still just as strongly intermixed with a really selfish way of thinking, whose relapse within the matter-of-fact, purely selfish mood of everyday life happens remarkably quickly, and this sentiment continues on to encompass the entirety of life. Patriotic delusion [patriotische Wahn] therefore requires an abiding symbol, onto which it can append itself even in all-prevalent everyday moods, so that in case of the reappearance of an emergency it may once more extract its powers of agitation, for example as the flag of war that we may follow to into battle . . . Injustice and violence against other states and peoples has therefore always been the most vigorous expression of patriotism.  

Die in der patriotischen Handlung vollzogene thatsächliche Entäußerung des Egoismus ist jedoch immerhin eine bereits so gewaltsame Anstrengung, daß sie unmöglich immer und auf die Dauer anhalten kann; auch ist der Wahn, der dazu treibt, noch so stark mit einer wirklich egoistischen Vorstellung vermischt, daß der Rückfall aus ihm in die nüchterne, rein egoistiche Tagestimmung gemeiniglich auffallend schnell vor sich geht, und diese Stimmung selbst die eigentliche Breite des Lebens auszufüllen fortfährt. Der patriotische Wahn bedarf daher eines dauernden Symboles, an welches er sich selbst bei vorherrschender Alltagsstimmung heftet, um an ihm, im wiedereintretenden Nothfalle, sofort wieder seine erregende Kraft zu gewinnen; etwa, wie die Kriegsfahne, der wir zu Schlacht folgten . . . Ungerechtigkeit und Gewaltsamkeit gegen andere Staaten und Völker ist daher von je die wahre Kraftäußerung des Patriotismus gewesen.

Not just once or twice, but over and over again Wagner rails and rages against the utter madness [Wahn] of patriotic nationalism. So much for the unsubstantiated insinuation by Adorno that Wagner's use of the expression Volk denotes some sort of militant völkisch Romantic Nationalism. Adorno has read anachronistic 1930s National Socialist völkisch ideas—totally alien to Wagner—into his works.

However, Wagner's communalistic pacifism is something that Adorno is violently hostile to. As a "scientific socialist", Adorno regards this sort of thing as "sentimental socialism", and outright condemns Wagner's late pacifism, as expressed in the following quoted passage, as nothing more than "bourgeois nihilism" (Wagner quoted in Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften, Die Musikalische Monographien Band 13, Suhrkamp, P144):

...the ever advancing art of war turns ever further away from the mainspring of moral force towards the development of mechanical force. Here, the most brutal power of the elemental forces of nature are arranged into an artificial play, in which, despite all of its mathematics and arithmetic, the Blind Will mixes itself in, breaking loose in its own way once more with elemental power. 

From Religion and Art (1880) 

...die fortschreitende Kriegskunst wendet sich immer mehr, von den Triebfedern moralischer Kräfte ab, auf die Ausbildung mechanischer Kräfte hin: hier werden die rohesten Kräfte der niederen Natur-Gewalten in ein künstliches Spiel gesetzt, in welches, trotz aller Mathematik und Arithmetik, der blinde Wille, in seiner Weise einmal mit elementarischer Macht losbrechend, sich einmischen könnte.  

Religion und Kunst (1880). Gesammelte Werke Band X, Seite 323 

I wonder what Wagner would have said about nuclear weapons with its roots in the mathematical formula of e=mc2.

Wagner repeatedly denounces war in his late writings as an evil eruption of the primordial Will. The only instance in which Wagner thought that a war had been just was the American Civil War leading to the abolition of slavery:

In the evening R. talks about America and the American war with admiration as the only war with a humane purpose

Vol II p382 15th July 1879 Cosima Diary  

Vol II p382 15th July 1879 Cosimas Tagebuch: Abends spricht R. über Amerika und den amerikanischen Krieg mit Bewunderung als des einzingen Krieges zu einem humanen Zweck

Why Adorno is so bitterly hostile towards Wagner's passionate pacifist stance is left totally unclear. One suspects that Adorno is infuriated by Wagner's later rejection of bloody armed political revolution as an effectual solution to the ills of societies. However, at this fairly early formative period in Adorno's career, he can still be observed clinging to the Marxist dogma that automatically decries Wagner for his "bourgeois nihilism", for ever advocating the idea that enlightened social change could be effected by non-violent and pacifist means.

For Adorno of 1937-38 any pacifist who decried social change through bloody revolution was a "bourgeois nihilist"

For Adorno, all you have to do to prove someone is a Nazi, is to show they reject Marxist "scientific socialism" and violent revolution. Adorno uses Wagner's rejection of violent communist revolution as the basis of his polemic to insinuate that whoever rejects the bloody violence of Marxist revolution must be deemed a Nazi: Wagner and the pro-democratic SPD included. Democracy allowed the NSDAP into the Reichstag and so Wagner and other pro-democracy advocates are no better than Nazis, is his logic. Adorno fails to ask the question whether rejection of violence and communism in favour of democratic socialism is sufficient proof that anyone is a Nazi. However, Adorno is well beyond caring—he is so blind with rage towards the NSDAP, as well as the SPD that failed to stand up to them—that he ferociously vents his spleen on his scapegoat, Wagner. By making Wagner his whipping boy, Adorno seems to have deluded himself into thinking that he has raised himself to the status of Nietzschean Übermenschlichkeit. 

Yet despite Adorno's classical Marxist roots, you can already see how a fundamental change in his thinking is beginning to form in his mind around the late 1930s. In his Essay on Wagner, he is breaking with any Marxist structuralist explanation of current world events by making Wagner the scape-goat of a German Sonderweg. Analysis of historical events based solely on economic infrastructure is beginning to be replaced by a historicism informed by wildly speculative psycho-babble placed humbly at the service of a salaciously spleen-venting Nietzschean polemic, implying that a single composer could narrate the destiny of whole nation for a half century after his death.

While taking Marx's side against Bakunin, Adorno is also moving away from Marx, and in it we see the birth of the sort of Critical Theory for which the Frankfurt School became renown. History was failing to follow the lines of the plot with the Utopian happy-ever-after ending narrated by Marx, and Adorno squarely foots the blame on Wagner for derailing the narrative of world history from its predetermined Marxist storyline. In his history of the 1848 revolution Mike Rapport went so far as to follow Adorno in writing:

It was still a long way from 1848 to 1933 but one disillusioned German 'fourty-eighter' who was a harbinger of that dark future was the composer Richard Wagner... 

Rapport P144 1848: Year of Revolution, Hachette Digital, London, 2008

How Wagner's support for democracy made him responsible for Hitler is left wholly unclear in the typical bizarre alien abduction methodology that has become the gold standard even in the best academic publications. Today it seems accepted practice that whenever Wagner's name is even so much as mentioned you can expect some of the best academics to be instantly reduced to abject hysteria. Such is Adorno's legacy.

Mixed in with this is Adorno's violent hostility towards Wagner's beloved Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer dared to denigrate Hegel, one of Adorno's heroes, as a "charlatan". Adorno clearly intensely hates Schopenhauer because of his relentless polemics against Adorno's beloved Hegel, and seeks to extract vengeance on Wagner for uttering such blasphemy. Yet, Adorno remains blind to how Wagner remained profoundly influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach well after he had discovered Schopenhauer. Here is an excellent example where Wagner expresses Schopenhauerian ideas in thoroughly Hegelian language with the expression "Aufhebung of the Will":

However, as he himself is alone is that which strives against himself, so his rage expresses itself as a nothing other than its self-negation. The only thing that can finally bring him to his realisation of that which can neutralise suffering is compassion, which as the abolition [Aufhebung] of the Will expresses the negation of a negation, which we understand by the rule of logic as an affirmation.

Da er aber doch selbst wiederum allein nur dieses sich Entgegenstrebende ist, so drückt sein Wüten nichts Anderes als sein Selbst-Verneinung aus, und hierüber zur Selbstbesinnung zu gelangen darf endlich nur das dem Leiden entkeimende Mitleiden ermöglichen, welches dann als Aufhebung des Willens die Negation einer Negation ausdrückt, die wir nach Regeln der Logik als Affirmation verstehen.

Religion und Kunst (1880) Band X Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen 

Wagner interprets the Schopenhauerian Aufhebung as a Hegelian negation-of-negation and thus an affirmation. That is a clear rebuttal against Adorno's accusations of nihilism, and all done using the sort of Hegelian phraseology that Adorno himself was well versed in. Adorno equally failed to realise that he had let in Schopenhauerianism through the back door in the form of the pervasive influence on his own thinking of Siegmund Freud, whose thinking is Schopenhauerian through and through.

Still, it all seems such a shame. There is hardly a single respectful discussion of the influence of Feuerbach or Bakunin in Adorno's writings on Wagner. There is not a single mention of Shaw's socialist Perfect Wagnerite. There is no sympathy for Wagner for possibly being forced to dissociate himself with the revolutionary political socialism of the Paris Commune in an age of censorship, and the passing of anti-socialist laws in Germany: something that Wagner would have been self-conscious about after ten years in exile as a fugitive for his pro-democratic activities. Wagner was probably forced to present a romanticised pacifist communalism, as an artfully disguised form of socialism.  He even fails to notice that Wagner anticipates Adorno's own Critical Theory with his dismissal of the art of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer as Luxuskunst, a concept anticipating Adorno's own savage critique of popular culture and its "commodity music". These represent massive errors in judgement on Adorno's behalf.

Even Adorno's criticism about Wagner being vulgarly populist are nonsense when you consider that in his lifetime, Wagner was considered at the very vanguard of the avant garde and struggled for widespread acceptance while constantly under attack from the conservative old guard who regarded his Zukunftsmusik (music of the future) with immense suspicion, often regarding it as immoral modernism. Wagner's music is even more tonally unstable and closer to atonality than the vast majority of pop music consumed today, a hundred and fifty years after his death. For teenagers brainwashed by the capitalist music industry of our times, Wagner's music must sound incomprehensible in its still radical modernity.

Nonetheless, however vicious and blind Adorno's angry little polemic may be, one should maintain some sympathy for Adorno given that this essay was written by one deeply confused man caught up in the emotional and political turmoil of the most apocalyptic chapter in all of human history. Academics are human in their greatness and in their foibles.

2. Blame-Shift onto Wagner

Sadly, Adorno then continues to endlessly subscribe wholesale to Nietzsche's polemics against his former Meister, while all the while missing out on the fact that Nietzsche's polemics are directed at attacking the socialist in Wagner. I have even shown that the relationship of Tristan with Isolde is a parable of the domination of England over Ireland, leading to the potato famine that killed a million people. It is equally the parable of the domination of man over woman, who is reduced by the power relation to a commodity: a sissy feminism totally unacceptable to the rabidly misogynist Nietzsche. These are the reasons why Nietzsche condemns Tristan as being "decadent".

Adorno fails to see this, but remains so infatuated with Nietzsche that he naively forgives his obvious romanticisations of capitalism. Nietzsche preaches war because he thinks that Wagner's Schopenhauerian pacifism is lilly-livered and only good for "little girls". Does Adorno seriously think too that Nietzsche would have done anything other than dismiss Rosa Luxemburg and the Weimar era "Spartacists" as nothing more than the manifestation of a degenerate "Chandala slave morality"? Yet Adorno not only keeps defending the out-and-out capitalist Nietzsche, but shifts the blame onto Wagner for being a "petty bourgeois anarchistic nihilist". Adorno is not only totally self-contradictory, he is blind to the fact that Nietzsche's anti-socialist polemics about "degenerate slave morality" are deeply and fundamentally directed straight at Wagner.

Adorno is clearly a confused man. He is confused because history is failing to unfold according to Marxist predictions. He is doubly confused because the National Socialists had embraced his beloved Nietzsche as their Dionysian prophet—bizarrely, right alongside Wagner. Adorno's pathetic response is to cleanse Nietzsche of his association with them by scapegoating Wagner. It is just like watching a Punch and Judy show. It is a process of blame-shifting and bashing that continues to this day, with Nietzsche apologists like Walter Kaufmann shamelessly taking full advantage of it. This is how you get the utterly absurd situation where you get right wing nut-cases like Joachim Köhler who want to blame the whole of National Socialism on a man who risked life and limb to fight musket in hand for the sake of liberty and democracy: that is the elephant in the room that these sophists want to explain away.

The other problem is that nobody in the world of philosophy or social sciences considers Wagner their pet theoretical writer in the way they do Nietzsche. As for musicologists, they are excellent at discussing tritones and perfect fourths, functional harmony, and counterpoint, but once they venture into areas that require immense knowledge of history, sociopolitical theory, as well as philosophy they are hopelessly out of their depths. This is why some of the best things I have found on Wagner in recent times have come from historians like Saul Friedländer, Richard J. Evans and Joachim Fest. That means that we have a severe lack of musicologists who are able to defend Wagner against the bullying by their philosophy department colleagues who tend to side with their little pet, Nietzsche. And I can assure you that philosophy graduates are superb when it comes to taking up intellectual cudgels to bludgeon the likes of Wagner with. When they are already armed to the teeth with a fist full of waspish remarks from as brilliant a wit as Nietzsche, by whom they are all still bedazzled, they already have an unfair advantage.

The ultimate tragedy is that Adorno has handed a blank cheque to the political right to shift the blame for the origin of National Socialism from them onto Wagner and the political left. The right wing polemicists can then point to Adorno, a member of their enemy camp, to justify themselves. Voices like those of Saul Friedländer and Dieter David Scholtz pleading for the sane reader to look at the echoes of a revolutionary assimilationist Regenerationist ideology in Judaism in Music are left crying in the wilderness. This leaves the field wide open to the likes of Paul Rose with entire books that insinuate that the foundations of all of National Socialism come from the political left, as though the militant Christian right with their rhetoric about the "synagogue of Satan" had nought to do with it. Whatever Adorno's other virtues, and however awful the personal circumstances that National Socialism had placed him under, his thoughtless spleen venting against Wagner can only be said to have sorely backfired, engendering an unmitigated disaster. Like Schoenberg, we have more than a little cause to call such behaviour "disgusting" for it does Adorno's reputation little good.

The last word on Wagner should belong to another colleague of Adorno, the German-Jewish Marxist-Hegelian philosopher Ernst Bloch:

Ernst Bloch

The music of the Nazis is not the Prelude to Die Meistersinger, but rather the Horst-Wessel-Lied; they deserve credit for nothing else, and no more can or should be given to them.

Quoted from Bloch's Über Wurzeln des Nazismus (1939) in David B. Dennis's essay in Wagner's Meistersinger

I will say amen to that.