Das Judenthum in der Musik
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Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewry in Music), (in German spelt after its first publication ‘Judentum’) is an essay by Richard Wagner, attacking Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular, which was published under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZM) of Leipzig in September 1850. It was reissued in a greatly expanded version under Wagner’s name in 1869. It is regarded by many as an important landmark in the history of German anti-semitism.
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The Original Article of 1850
The first version of the article appeared in the NZM under the pseudonym of ‘K. Freigedank’ (K. Freethought'). In a letter to Franz Liszt of April 1851 Wagner gave the feeble excuse that he used a pseudonym ‘to prevent the question being dragged down by the Jews to a purely personal level’.
At the time Wagner was living in exile in Zurich, on the run after his escapades in the 1849 revolution in Dresden. His article followed a series of essays in the NZM by his disciple Uhlig, attacking the music of Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète. Wagner was particularly enraged by the success of Le Prophète in Paris, all the more so because he had earlier been a slavish admirer of Meyerbeer, who had given him financial support and used his influence to get Wagner’s early opera Rienzi, his first real success, in Dresden in 1841. He was also emboldened by the death of Mendelssohn in 1847, the popularity of whose conservative style he felt was cramping the potential of German music. Although (despite the claims of Rose in his book Wagner, Race and Revolution (1992) and others) Wagner had shown virtually no sign (perhaps none at all that is provable) of anti-Jewish prejudice previously, he determined to build on Uhlig’s articles and prepare a broadside that would attack his artistic enemies, embedded in what he took to be a populist Judaeophobic context.
Translations from the work given below are from W. Ashton Ellis’ 1894 version, which gives some idea of the author’s verbosity. The usual English title of the essay, ‘Judaism in Music’, follows Ashton, but is quite misleading. The article has nothing to say about the practice of Judaism as a religion, of which Wagner knew next to nothing. It is an attack in Jewry and on commercialism in music – as it happens at the time ‘Judentum’ in German also carried the meaning of ‘commercialism’ or ‘haggling’ (cf. the Victorian use of the words ‘to jew’); therefore there is an intended, if not very amusing, pun in the title.
Wagner claims that the work was written
‘to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof’.
Wagner holds that Jews are unable to speak European languages properly and that Jewish speech took the character of an 'intolerably jumbled blabber', a 'creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle' , incapable of expressing true passion. This, he says, debars them from any possibility of creating song or music.
‘Although the peculiarities of the Jewish mode of speaking and singing come out the most glaringly in the commoner class of Jew, who has remained faithful to his fathers' stock, and though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they shew an impertinent obstinacy in cleaving to him.’
There is little novelty in these ideas, which are largely lifted from the theories of language and speech of the French Philosophes of the 18th century.
The music produced by composers such as Mendelssohn, whom Wagner damns with faint praise, is 'sweet and tinkling without depth'. Meyerbeer, who was still alive at the time of publication, is attacked savagely for his music (and for the fact that audiences enjoy it) but without being expressly named.
The essay is riddled with the vulgar abuse typical of many Judaeophobic publications of the previous few centuries. However Wagner did introduce one strikingly repulsive and new image, which was to be taken up after him by many later anti-semitic authors.
‘So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it […] there was nowhere to be found a Jew-composer […] Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgement in it – yet merrely to destroy it. Then indeed that body’s flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect-life: but who in looking on that body’s self, would hold it still for living?’
‘Only those artists who abandoned their Jewish roots – were that possible - could at all express themselves artistically’ claims Wagner; and after, in this context, giving some patronising near-endorsements of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, he apostrophises the Jews in terms that have since been much discussed:
‘Bethink ye, that only one thing can redeem you from your curse; the redemption of Ahasuerus – Going under!’
Reception of the 1850 Article
It should be borne in mind that NZM had a very small circulation – no more, in J-M Fischer’s estimate than 1200 or so. Virtually the only response was a letter of complaint to the editor of NZM from Mendelssohn’s old colleague Ignaz Moscheles and other professors at the Leipzig Conservatory. Fischer has found virtually no other substantial response. The article, which Wagner had hoped would be a sensation, and bring him in some money as a journalist, sank like a stone. Nearly all of Wagner’s associates, including Liszt, were embarrassed by the article and thought it was a passing phase (which it was not) or a mere fit of pique (which, in part, it was).
1850-1869
In his major theoretical statement, Oper und Drama (1852), Wagner made similar objections about Meyerbeer. But otherwise, although Wagner’s personal letters contain occasional jibes about Jews and Judaism there was no suggestion over future years that he was likely to return to the attack or revive his earlier anonymous article. However in his notebook for 1868 (known as the 'Brown Book') there appear the ominous words ‘Consider Judentum.’ It is not clear what provoked this. Amongst the contributing factors may be the death of his ‘enemy’ Meyerbeer in 1864, Wagner’s own relative security under the patronage of the King of Bavaria, and increase in his personal confidence now that his Ring cycle was under way and he had completed his operas Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. An intriguing possibility is that, having received his mother’s correspondence (which he subsequently burnt) from his sister in 1868, he discovered that his biological father was the actor and musician Ludwig Geyer, and feared that Geyer was Jewish (which he was not) and that he himself might be Jewish as well. He may therefore also have been influenced by thoughts of his wife Cosima, who was if anything more stridently anti-Semitic than he.
The 1869 Version and After
For whatever reason, in 1869 Wagner republished the essay with an addendum as long as the original, and under his own name. With a pompous self-satisfaction lacking in the original frenetic effort, this second part seeks to contextualise Wagner’s anti-Jewish feelings in the setting of later nineteenth-century German politics, whilst continuing to snipe at the dead Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer and bringing in other dead musicians, including Schumann, on Wagner’s side.
Once again many of Wagner’s supporters were in despair at this unnecessary provocation. Even Cosima doubted that it was wise. By this time of course Wagner was a well-known figure and the reprint brought many counter-attacks, amongst which may be mentioned: Joseph Engel, "Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music, a Defense" ("Richard Wagner, das Judentum in Musik, ein Abwehr"); E. M. Oettinger, "An Open Love-Letter to Richard Wagner" ("Offenes Billetdoux an Richard Wagner", Dresden, 1869); and A. Truhart, "Open Letter to Richard Wagner" ("Offener Brief an Richard Wagner" St. Petersburg, 1869).
However the fuss about the reprint was little more than a storm in a teacup. Far more important, in terms of publicising Wagner's anti-Jewish feelings, was his stream of essays and newspaper articles over following years, up to and including that of his death in 1883, which directly or indirectly criticised Jewish individuals or the Jews as a whole. These coincided with the growth of anti-Semitism - in the sense of a movement to withdraw the civic rights extended to Jews during the 19th century, and particularly on the unification of Germany in 1870 - as a significant force in German and Austrian politics. Anti-semitic leaders indeed made approaches to Wagner requesting his support: although he never offered such support officially, nor did he dissociate himself from their policies.
Wagner and the Jews
Notwithstanding his public utterances against Jewish influence in music, and even his utterances against specific Jews, Wagner had numerous Jewish friends and supporters even in his later period. Included amongst these were his favourite conductor Hermann Levi, the pianists Carl Tausig and Joseph Rubinstein, the writer Heinrich Porges and very many others. In his autobiography, written between 1865 and 1870, he declared that his acquaintance with the Jew Samuel Lehrs whom he knew in Paris in the early 1840s was ‘one of the most beautiful friendships of my life’. There remains, therefore, something enigmatic about Wagner's personal attitude; probably he was able to persuade himself that what he wrote needed to have nothing to do with what he felt or what was convenient for him.
Recent Reception
Das Judentum was an embarrassment to the early Wagnerites and was rarely reprinted in the early 20th century, except as part of his ‘Collected Works’. Fischer has found no significant critical comment on the essay. Before the Nazi period there was just one reprint of the essay itself, in Weimar in 1914. It is therefore very unlikely that it was read by Hitler or any of the Nazi hierarchy during the development of the Nazi movement (or later) and there is no evidence of this. During the Nazi period there were just two publications: in Berlin in 1934 and in Leipzig in 1939. Neither of these seem to have been large editions.
Das Judentum is not quoted or mentioned by early writers on Nazism in the 1950s such as Hannah Arendt. Interest in the work seems to have revived in the 1960s with new awareness of the Shoah following the Eichmann trial. In this context some have suggested that Wagner's advice for Jews to 'go under' was intended as a call for their extermination, as planned by the Nazi regime, but there is no justification for this. In fact the 'Ahasuerus' Wagner had in mind was a character from a play by Achim von Arnim, a 'good' Jew who voluntarily sacrifices himself saving other characters from a fire. He certainly meant no more than 'Jews must sacrifice their separate identity for the common good' - doubtless a contemptible idea, but not a murderous one. Whilst it is certainly the case that the Nazis deliberately took 'ownership' of Wagner for their purposes, it would be succumbing to their propaganda to identify the composer too closely with their policies. Note that Wagner died five years before Hitler was born in 1889.
Some writers - e.g. Bryan Magee - have sought to make a qualified defence of Wagner's originality of thought in Das Judentum, despite the acknowledged nastiness of its contents. A closer examination of Das Judentum's sources however renders even this defence otiose.
Although therefore it is perhaps inappropriate to bring forward Das Judentum as a major milestone in German anti-Semitism, the same cannot be said for Wagner’s attitudes to the Jews in general. Adolf Hitler glorified Wagner's music, and is said to have claimed that "there is only one legitimate predecessor to National Socialism: Wagner". Wagner's music was frequently played during Nazi rallies. Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, was a close friend of Adolf Hitler's and ran the Bayreuth Festival of Wagner's music from the death of her husband, Siegfried, in 1930 until the end of World War II, when she was ousted. During the Nazi regime, the Nazi hierarchy was required regularly to attend (generally much against its will) performances of Wagner operas. Thus Germans of the Nazi era, even if they knew nothing about music, and knew nothing of Wagner’s writings, were told clearly that Wagner was a great German, and had his anti-Semitic views clearly spelt out to them.
Because of these factors, performances of Wagner's works in the modern state of Israel did not occur during the twentieth century, by consensus. In recent years many Israelis have argued that it may be possible to appreciate his musical talents, without implying acceptance of his beliefs. A public performance in Tel-Aviv in 2001 of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde, conducted as an unprogrammed encore by Daniel Barenboim, left its audience partly delighted, partly enraged.
Publications
- R. Wagner (trans. W. Ashton Ellis). Judaism in Music and other Writings . London 1995. ISBN 0803297661
- Jens Malte Fischer (in German). Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’. Frankfurt 2000.ISBN 3458343172
- Paul Lawrence Rose. Wagner: Race and Revolution. London 1992. ISBN 057117888X
- Bryan Magee. Aspects of Wagner. Oxford 1988. ISBN 0192840126
External links
- Wagner's music being played in Israel
- Full text of Judaism in Music, by Richard Wagner, translated into English by William Ashton Ellis. Check the accuracy of this article for yourself!
- 'A Vulture is almost an Eagle' - the Jewishness of Richard Wagnerde:Das Judenthum in der Musik