Alfred Rosenberg Contra Richard Wagner

One of the publications by a prominent member of the National Socialist ("Nazi") Party during the years of the German Third Empire (Dritte Reich) that has been least studied is that of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which had sold over a million copies by 1944. Rosenberg was also for a while a contributor to the Völkischer Beobachter during its early years. He had joined as one of the earliest party members, well before Adolf Hitler, and was also a member of the Thule Society.

Alfred Rosenberg

Here is what Rosenberg has to say about Richard Wagner in this seminal Nazi Party publication:

The technique of language is held to be the prerequisite of every great aesthetic representation. The formative will of the poet emerged only through the medium of language. As long as the word describes a human conflict, relates an event or mediates a thought process, it is not furthered by music. Any accompanying music destroys the medium of the transference of the will and thoughts. This is revealed in the narration by Tristan in the first act, in Wotan's dialogues with Brünnhilde, in Alberich's curse and in the song of the Norns in the prelude to the Twilight of the Gods. Everywhere that there is the medium of a thought structure, the orchestra steps in the way. The same holds for almost all crowd scenes: In powerful swelling up tonal pictures, the assertions of the people vanish completely. The public only hears inarticulated loud outcries and sees only upraised hands. This does not lead to form, but to chaos. One should compare, for example, the beginning of Egmont with Brünnhilde's arrival at the castle in Burgundy. Goethe's crowd scene shows the greatest plastic liveliness. A few words from the left and the right represent the thoughts and the mood of whole human classes. The community in Egmont gives to this individual a real penetrating strength. A musical accompaniment during this mass scene would rob it of every measure of character. Apart from the expectation that Brünnhilde reveal her secrets of soul before the assembled people, her gestures—accompanied by music—develop in the word tone drama into a constricting scene which is not criticised solely out of enthusiasm for the will of Wagner. Here the tone has killed the word [Hier hat der Ton das Wort erschlagen]. 

This occurred because it was dogmatically asserted that during the music drama [ein Dogma im Musikdrama], the music must not cease for a moment. However much this is justified in the seizures of leadership at the beginning of the Rheingold, in the second and third act of Tristan and in the third act of the Meistersinger a barrier is formed, preventing the word from guiding one into the soul of Tristan, Mark and Hans Sachs. Beethoven's music for Egmont is the deepest of all music drama. But this music would not enthral the listener to such an extent if the conflicts between Egmont and Orange or between Egmont and Alba were accompanied by the orchestra.

Rosenberg: The Myth of the 20th Century (translator not stated), p283 (my bold emphasis)

 It is a fascinating attack on Wagner. He dismisses music-drama as a mere "dogma". The ending of Götterdämmerung is condemned outright as a being little more than utter "chaos". The music accompanying Wagner's drama is dismissed as an irrelevant interjection that "destroys" the effect of the words.  Rosenberg even says that Wagner's music slaughters ("erschlagen") the text. There could hardly be a more outright dismissal of Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk than this. Beethoven is clearly being exalted as being a higher example of German music and Goethe of drama than anything in Wagner.

It certainly helps to lend credence to what Brian Magee tells us:

Brian Magee tells us:

As Heinz Tietjen, who had been general manager at Bayreuth during the Nazi era, said after the Second World War: ‘In reality the leading party officials throughout the Reich were hostile to Wagner . . . The party tolerated Hitler's Wagner enthusiasm, but fought, openly or covertly, those who, like me, were devoted to his works - the people around Rosenberg openly, those around Goebbels covertly.’ This was chiefly because the political and social tendencies of these works, if taken in the least bit seriously, were contrary to everything the Nazis stood for. During Wagner's career up to and including the writing of the Ring libretto his political views were radically left-wing ...

From Magee: Wagner and Philosophy, Penguin Books 2001 

However, in his books Inhumanities, David B. Dennis tells us that:

[T]he smoking gun proving incontrovertibly that Nazis brandished Wagner's work in its eliminationist anti-Semitic plot is found in Völkischer Beobachter reception of the Ring of the Nibelungen. It was in the tetralogy that National Socialist Wagnerians perceived the "Meister's" voice as most perfectly harmonizing with that of the "Führer." Dennis Inhumanities, P218

Dennis cites nazified interpretations of The Ring by Josef Stolzing and Julius Bittner in the Völkischer Beobachter. However, these figures are extremely minor figures in the history of National Socialism compared to the towering figure of key party ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.  It makes it all the more inexplicable as to why Dennis systematically chooses to ignore the published writings of Rosenberg, who clearly favoured Nietzsche over Wagner. Rosenberg's own polemic against Wagner probably reflects the influence of Nietzsche's polemic, The Case of Wagner.

There is no doubt that the writings of Alfred Rosenberg cast grave doubt over the thesis of the universal acceptance of Richard Wagner within the National Socialist movement, let alone the exceedingly peculiar speculation by Joachim Köhler that the entire movement consisted of nothing but the enactment of Wagnerian opera on the world's stage. It is little surprising that historians feel gravely insulted by Köhler's aggressive dismissal of decades of in-depth academic analysis of the immensely complex structural phenomenon of National Socialism in favour of a simplistic reduction of an indescribably tragic episode of human history to little more than grand opera.