Liebe Diskutanten,
mir kommt bei diesem Austausch die oben genannte Fragestellung zu kurz.
Ich stelle deshalb einen Text von der eejh-Liste hier ein und hoffe, daß dieser zur Versachlichung beiträgt.
Viele Grüße
Iris
Von: Daniel Leeson
Gesendet: Dienstag, 15. Mai 2001 19:37
An: Eastern European Jewish History
Betreff: [eejh] Wagner/Barenboim and some facts in the matter
I would much prefer it if Daniel Barenboim learned something about coded 19th century antisemitism before he shoots off his mouth about Wagner’s opers being „not anti-Semitic.“ The Ring (except for Walkure), Meistersinger, and Parsifal are nothing but a litany of antisemitic statements from first scene to last. And it is a shame that a man so well-trained musically and so competent as Barenboim, doesn’t know a damn thing about which he speaks.
Let me be specific.
ANTISEMITISM IN DIE MEISTERSINGER
The opera takes place in medieval Nuremberg and tells of a guild of singer/poets. Entry into the guild was based on the applicant’s singing and his ability to craft the poetry on which his song would be based.
Rules of text and song were strict, with little toleration for any deviation from orthodoxy.
However, to no small degree, this opera is an autobiographical „roman a clef“ in which the genius-hero, Walther (read „Wagner“), breaks the rules of song but creates masterpieces. The villain, Sixtus Beckmesser, represents Wagner’s archenemy, the forces that insist on adherence to doctrine. Beckmesser, who is not a Jew and who could not have been a member of the guild if he were, is, however, an accumulation of nineteenth century antisemitic cliches, the personification of every unsavory aspect about Jews espoused by Wagner.
Specifically, Wagner believed that Jews shuffle and stagger, their eyes squint, they are belligerent, designing, and unscrupulous, all characteristics that Beckmesser displays in the course of the opera.
Furthermore, and most important to the character of Beckmesser, is his absolute deficiency of musical talent, his inability to craft poetry, and his lack of metric or rhythmic sensitivity, any one of which should have made him unfit to be a member of the guild. Wagner’s view on the Jew’s inability to contribute to the world of culture is described in his essay Jewishness in Music: „In this language and this art the Jew can produce only imitative sounds and counterfeit goods - he cannot write truly eloquent poetry or create works of true art.“ Elsewhere in this same essay, Wagner writes, „If the Jew [is] incapable of articulating artistically his feelings and intuitions through speech, how much more incapable he must be of articulating them through song.“
Yet, like the Jew who, in Wagner’s eyes, used devious and unscrupulous practices to gain entry into German society, Beckmesser has somehow become a member of the guild of singers, though how he passed the entrance examination at some previous time is incomprehensible.
Unlike every other guild member, Beckmesser has no craft but earns his living as the town notary. Despite his inadequacies, he has become a „marker,“ measuring the worth of potential members for the guild and judging the merit of aspiring candidates. He criticizes the slightest deviation from doctrine, and is the very thing that Wagner hates, a critic. On this matter, it is worth pointing out that an early name for the character of Sixtus Beckmesser was „Hans Lich,“ almost a duplicate of Wagner’s nemesis, Eduard Hanslick, the so-called „Bismark of critics.“ The name change to Sixtus Beckmesser occurred very early in the creative cycle, but the fact that Wagner even considered this humiliation for a man who he regarded as an archenemy (and of Jewish ancestry, though he was a Christian) is notable.
But it is in Beckmesser’s singing style that the most revealing picture makes itself known, for what he sings and how he sings it is a parody of the rhythms and vocal inflections of synagogue chant. Further, it is music that is very high, in fact, far too high for the bass voice specified by Wagner. It is example of the effeminate high voice that parodied the result of castration, which was confused with circumcision by the ignoramus.
Beckmesser’s performance as a poet/singer is so incompetent that the reactions to him from the citizens of the town range from cynical disrespect to outright ridicule. His ardent and pathetic serenading of the wrong woman leads to a riot. And he is a thief, too, stealing another’s poem for use as the text for his own song. But even in this he fails because, in Wagner’s eyes, Beckmesser cannot be a musical person even when given satisfactory raw material and coached in its proper use by a master. Here the parallel to the unpoetic, inarticulate, and unmusical Jew is unambiguous.
Finally, there is the matter of Beckmesser’s participation in a song contest that directly challenges Walther, the opera’s hero. Beckmesser’s purpose in this foolish act, which results in further humiliation for him, has to do with the contest’s prize being the beautiful daughter of a wealthy fellow guild member; i.e., the image of Beckmesser is that of a talentless and incompetent older man having sexual pretensions for a young, pure German maiden as well as lust for wealth, this description summarizing Wagner’s opinion of Jews.
The characteristics exhibited in Beckmesser generally pass unnoticed by contemporary audiences, mostly because our generation has little experience with coded nineteenth-century antisemitism. The heritage of the Shoah has gone far to desensitize us to all but the naked, uncamouflaged, and flagrant use of antisemitic acts. Our sensitivity to how the German world saw Jews at the time of the premiere of Master Singers has been changed, and it is not so easy for the contemporary world to recognize the characteristics of coded nineteenth-century antisemitism. For example, we no longer remember the antisemitic Grimm fairy tale, „The Jew in the Thornbush“, that contains plot parallels to this opera.
Early performances of Master Singers suggest that its reception was not uniformly positive. There were hostile demonstrations, but it is not clear if these were because of Wagner’s essay on „Jewishness in Music“, the opera as a whole, the composer, or the character of Sixtus Beckmesser. But it was the Jews who were blamed for the disturbances when the audiences were said to be full of „distinctive physiognomies“ ready „to take their revenge on [Wagner].“ Wagner’s wife, Cosima, wrote that „the [Jews] are spreading a story … that ‚Beckmesser’s Song‘ is an old Jewish song that R[ichard] was trying to ridicule. In consequence [there was] some hissing in the second act.“
Wagner’s antisemitic subtlety in Master Singers is matched by his cunning in depicting Jewish characteristics in The Ring. In that monumental music drama he would employ all of the artifacts used to characterize Beckmesser and add a few more including references to the blood libel and the dangers of race mixing.
ANTISEMITISM IN THE RING
It is possible to tell the story of The Ring, but the collection of characters, plots, and subplots make it difficult to understand. There are gods, goddesses, giants, gnomes who live beneath the earth, mermaid-like creatures who inhabit the Rhine river, mortals, and other roles difficult to categorize.
The Ring is a pagan tale of sorcery and incest that presents an incomprehensible mythology as a rational philosophy for the world, but it is strong enough stuff to allow the modern listener to become drunk in its embrace. Rarely has the art-loving world been presented with such a deceit as this attempt at a complete work of art, for it is a tangle of falsehoods and pathetic arrogance run amok, where trivial opinions are made into pompous and ponderous utterances, and bankrupt personal pursuits are elevated to matters of universal significance. Like every other written utterance of Wagner, The Ring is largely egocentric. But here it of such vast proportions as to be a stage work in which Wagner’s personal fantasies were transformed into the future of the German people.
Excluding those few characters who are neutral, the personalities of the drama fall into two groups having opposite characteristics. One such group is the „Volk,“ roughly translated as „the race“ or „the nation,“ not „the common people.“ The other is the „outsider“ who differs from the Volk in many specifics.
Wagner assigns various characteristics to the good Volk, and then displays the opposite attributes as present in the evil outsiders. One such characteristic is that the Volk walk in a poised and confident way while the outsider staggers and stumbles. This stage device is derived from the medieval superstition that Jews had goat’s feet. In the middle ages, the billy goat was presented as a symbol of satanic lechery and the devil’s most usual disguise. The Jews, believed to be Satan’s minions, were also accused of having the same attribute. That the Jew’s feet were shod in public was interpreted as using the cloak of civilization to disguise his corruption. This acceptance of Jewish deviltry gave rise to the concept that the Jewish foot could not function at a normal gait; i.e., the Jew stumbled and staggered. In The Ring, the gnomes walk in this fashion while the Volk are surefooted (a characteristic also seen in the stumbling of Beckmesser as contrasted with the graceful dancing of the townspeople in Master Singers).
In Sander Gilman’s The Jew’s Body (1991), further significance is given to the Jew’s feet. They became a source of disease and the pace at which Jews walked was perceived as a sign of their affliction. The seventeenth century Orientalist, John Schudt, commented that the crooked feet of the Jews made them physically inferior and, ultimately, the general belief about the Jew’s feet influenced liberal efforts to include them in the modern state. This is particularly true with respect to serving in the military where it was believed that Jews would be worthless as soldiers. In Austria, for example, weak feet were said to be the main reason why Jews inducted into the military were subsequently detached.
Another example of a characteristic with hidden antisemitic meaning is that of vocal patterns. Wagner’s formulation of a large-scale male and female voice, for example, the „heroic tenor“, is used for the Volk whereas the outsiders sing in distinguishing non-Volkish ways. The gnomes in The Ring have high and piercing voices, the same coded message for the confusion between castration and circumcision as found in Master Singers, as well as a related claim connecting circumcision with effeminacy in the Jewish male. Thus the Volk sing with heroic qualities while the outsider screams in a high-pitched voice.
Going beyond the visual and acoustic, Wagner employs the allegory of smell to evoke images of character. The outsider is often accompanied by sulphurous fumes and the noxious stenches that emanate from them.
The central theme of this coded idea is especially despicable because it is based on the belief of the „Jewish stench,“ or „foetor Judaicus.“
The assertion that the Jew has a distinctive and unpleasant odor is a particularly grave accusation, first because of the origin alleged to be the stench’s cause, and second because of the several ways Jews were said to act in order to eliminate it. Common belief during the middle ages associated good spirits with emitting a pleasant fragrance while evil spirits, particularly Satan and his minions, gave forth an obnoxious stench. For example, when the coffin of St. Stephen, the martyr, was opened, his body was said to have filled the air with a sweet fragrance that insinuated the odor of sanctity. In the case of the Jews, the stink was said to be a punishment for their crime against Jesus.
The Jews were said to have two ways to eliminate the smell, one of which involved murder and cannibalism; i.e., it was necessary to kill Christian children to obtain their blood for ritual purposes, one of which occurred during the Passover Seder. Jews were said to consume cups of this blood as an alleviate for the Jewish stench. The other choice was acceptance of baptism. A direct quote from the time states that „the water of baptism carried off the Jews’ odor“ and that this left them with a fragrance „sweeter than that of ambrosia floating upon the heads touched by the sanctified oil.“
This disgusting accusation even went beyond those expressed in the extreme anti-Jewish rhetoric of Martin Luther, causing him to say, „So long as we use violence and slander, saying that [the Jews] use the blood of Christians to get rid of their stench …, what can we expect of them?“
Another discriminatory feature used by Wagner is that of vision. Poor eyesight is a class attribute that was never applied to anyone but Jews.
The medieval view was that Jews were blind to Christianity, that the synagogue was veiled, etc. Statues of a blindfolded woman, an allegory representing „the synagogue defeated,“ still decorate churches in Europe. One stands today in an alcove on the exterior of Strasbourg’s cathedral, and postcards of it may be purchased at nearby shops. This notion eventually was concretized as weak eyes which, among other
things, causes squinting and blinking, characteristics found in the outsider. Wagner carried the idea of good vision of the Volk to a higher dimension in suggesting that they recognize each other by glance alone, and they can „see“ the outsider as being different.
Finally, in The Ring, Wagner gives coded messages about the dangers of race mixing. The character Hagen who has a gnome father but a Volkish mother, bears no good maternal characteristics. Instead he retains the depraved character of his father, namely that of a liar, usurper, and villainous murderer. But his racially pure counterpart, Siegfried, the product of an incestuous twin brother-sister relationship, is an idealized hero who is handsome, honest, virtuous, and brave, and whose most significant flaw is that he is too trusting of strangers.
It has been argued that every representation of a negative physical characteristic should not automatically be interpreted as an antisemitic statement. This is a perceptive and valuable criticism, but not as applied to these five specifics, none of which are in the least extreme. As Paul Rose said in Wagner: Race and Revolution, „If Wagner, with the supreme artist’s infallible intuition, never intruded his racialist theories into his works of art, this does not mean that the art is free of racist content. It simply means that Wagner was too subtle an artist to reduce his operas to the level of political tracts.“
While it would be possible to level a criticism of overreaction were there to be only one or two instances where Wagner’s utterances could be confused with coded antisemitic statements, the presence of five specifics - feet, smell, voice, sight, and race mixing - as found in three of the four operas of The Ring defies the laws of probability. I suggest that The Ring, with the exception of The Valkyrie, is an anthology of Jew hatred from first note to last, this despite Barenboim’s denial of history.
For reasons that I cannot comprehend, except possibly for his ignorance of antisemitic history, Daniel Barenboim has taken upon himself the role of telling people that, despite Wagner’s personal hatred for Jews, these feelings of his are not found in his operas. In effect, I suggest that Barenboim is both ignorant of the antisemitic details of the Wagner that he conducts, and hypocritical to act as a Jewish apologist for Wagner’s Jew-hating attitude.
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** Dan Leeson **