Erkenne Dich Selbst

EITHER ONE LIKES Richard Wagner or one very definitely does not. It is seldom that anyone is indifferent to the theorist of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Reactions to Wagner's music are instinctive since the music appeals to the instincts. Wagner's music is more than music. How many other composers wrote their own opera libretti? Nietzsche warned that Wagner was a false magician, and many Wagnerians do describe their emotions akin to intoxication or enchantment. "I was caught in the flow of an ocean and have remained caught ever since" wrote Edourad Dujardin ecstatically in 1882, having heard and seen Wagner's Ring for the first time, in London in 1882. Charles Baudelaire wrote an adulatory letter to Wagner in 1860 ("the greatest musical joy that I have ever experienced"), a letter intended in part to redress the balance, since the official reception to Wagner in the press, in contrast to the concert hall, was at the time often very hostile.

In his introduction Marc Weiner argues against hiding away from Wagner's anti-Semitism or denying its key role in his work. Many people have done so apparently, despite the obvious importance of Wagner's anti-Semitism in his own life, and his insistence on the crucial importance of the Jewish role in culture. This is made clear in his writings, notably Das Judentum in der Musik. The "unwillk|rlich Abstossende" (involuntary repellence) which Wagner admits feeling towards the Jew is the repellence felt by Siegfried towards Mime. A few lines later Wagner writes,

"It is not necessary to underline the Jewish penetration of modern art; it hits you in the eyes and is self-evident at every turn...Our whole European art and civilization have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue..Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization"

By suggesting that it is possible to enjoy the music while at the same time not shying away from the acknowledgement of the original message of racial exclusion, Weiner raises the dilemma concerning the amorality of art. What is said about Wagner could be said of Nietzsche and others. We may reject an artist's politics but in the cases of the committed artist we cannot understand the work of art and ignore it. The question then arises can we even properly appreciate it? To what extent is say Christian faith necessary to an enjoyment of Paradise Lost? Perhaps we can say that we may enjoy the form of the work, but its content will remain alien to us and Wagner would have been the first to insist that form and content must be interwoven for the creative piece to succeed. Professor Weiner has simply pointed out at great length what should have been obvious, namely that anti-Semitism is crucial to Wagner's Weltanschauung, not only as expressed in his writings or private views, but also in his operas.

Wagner borrowed from Hegel (Ph„nomenologie des Geistes) the notion that we develop an awareness ourselves through our recognition of others. The Greeks saw in their drama a reflection of their essential selves. "Art is nothing other than the fulfilment of a longing to recognize oneself" (sich selbst zu erkennen). One recognizes oneself in work of art and in so doing establishes and reinforces one's place within a group. "These two notions constitute the fulcrum of his nostalgic and utopian thoughts" (!)

Interesting is the emphasis which the writer places on Wagner's socialistic views on music. The different physical configurations of the theatres of Ancient Greece and the modern world of opera, epitomised by the Paris Opera House, reflect two functions of art, the one based on community, the other on hierarchy. Wagner based his conception of the Theatre at Bayreuth on the Greek model: it was to have no boxes and be intentionally egalitarian. In šber deutsches Musikwesen, Wagner wrote that

"We...may rightfully assume that music in Germany branches out to the lowest and most inconspicuous social strata, yes, perhaps has its roots here...Among those simple unadorned souls; where the goal is not to entertain a large mixed audience, art divests itself of every coquettish outward trapping"

Wagner's description in 1840 of a Protestant congregation elaborates:

"The glory of German vocal music blossomed in the church; the opera was left to the Italians. Even Catholic church music is not at home in Germany, but instead exclusively Protestant church music....In the older Protestant churches ...in place of fancy trappings, the simple chorale sufficed, sung by the whole congregation and accompanied on the organ....The passion music (of Bach) is based on the Saviour's sufferings as told by the Evangelists....the most important passages, even the chorale itself, which truly was sung by the whole congregation."

The church chorus is thus the vox populi. This recalls for Wagner the Greek chorus, in which the chorus was not presented to the audience as something new, but as a reflection of themselves, instantly recognizable. An implied tension in Die Meistersinger concerns two types of music, the German and the Jewish, the Lutheran chorale which appears in the Festwiese scene in Act 3, and the Jewish synagogue chant, high pitched and distanced from the people, intellectual, parodied in Beckmesser's nocturnal serenade in Die Meistersinger and discussed by Wagner in Das Judentum in der Musik. Similarly the fetish of the rules as shown by Kothner and Beckmesser, the rules engraved in the Tabulatur, recalls the Judaic religion, which lays down rules of conduct for the smallest details of daily life. The semitic insistence on ritual and the regulation of comportment, which is common to Islam and Judaism, was an indication for many writers including Alfred Rosenberg, of the difference between Judaism and true Christianity, which was a doctrine not of appearance but of the soul. Christ's denouncing of the Pharisees can be understood as a violent renunciation of the religion of "fetishism".

Roman Catholicism, with its Popes, tiaras and ritual of every kind, was for Rosenberg proof of the corruption of much of Christianity by Judaism. (National Socialism, no stranger to rules, regulations and ritual, might ironically be accused of being itself corrupted by Judaism on the same grounds!)

Wagner rejected elitist music, even though his own music feted at Bayreuth, became in time a place of musical pilgrimage for the high and mighty of the Second and later the Third Reich.

The argument that Wagner's music was intentionally egalitarian within the folk community surely invites contrast and comparison with Verdi's popular operatic music. Verdi is conspicuous in this study by his absence. A pity: a comparison between the two ideals of equality in theory and as developed in two different operatic traditions would have been riveting. A Wagner and Verdi study comparable to Steiner's study of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy has yet to be written.

A key element in Wagner's operas is recognition, of oneself and of others.

"Only that which loves can make itself understood, and to love means to acknowledge the other person and thus at the same time recognize oneself". (DS 6:38)

This is in contrast to the contractual relationships of the capitalist world. It is the very antithesis of the free market community in which relationships are built and destroyed on the basis of financial advantage. Wagner's operas propounded a profoundly socialistic view of the world. Love consists in the recognition of the profound similarity of my brother/sister. True love is destiny...it is not happiness, it is not advantage, but it is joy and it is acceptance. It is also sacrifice, the very word so antithetical to all capitalist notions of gain and loss, in which sacrifice only makes sense when it is made in order to gain an advantage which outweighs the loss. The woman who does not sacrifice for her man is for Wagner, "the most unworthy and repulsive thing in the world". Wagner's opera was the union of the female principle of music and the male principle of words (poetry). Jewish opera as in Meyerbeer or Halivy or Mendelsohn was sterile because indifferent to language, therefore only 'female'.

A paradox of Wagner's achievement, according to Weiner, is that Wagner was attempting to build an art form of the future with the perceptions and stereotypes of nineteenth century Germany, particularly as the related to Jews. In other words, a large part of the enjoyment of Wagner's operas becomes impossible to the extent to which we have discarded such presumptions and prejudices.

Weiner does not state, but the implication is there, that anti-Semites are in some respects better equipped to enjoy the operas because they are anti-Semites and therefore do not have to "suspend their disbelief" and think themselves into the Wagnerian world, the images being instinctively apprehended. There is an opening here for a wide-ranging debate about the nature of value in art. Does a work of art possess intrinsic value independent of its cultural context? This question, associated with a mainly left inspired cultural critique of Western art and the supremacy of the Western artistic canon, is in fact of immense potential interest to anyone who wishes to argue that art is not universal but cultural, meaning that the question of the "worth" or "importance" of a work of art cannot be meaningfully posed without first establishing the cultural context of the work. But Weiner does not enter into this debate: had he done so, he would have exceeded by far the intentions of his book.

The importance of this work lies in its conclusive argument that Wagner's theoretical essays, especially his anti-Semitic views, are reflected in his music, indeed that his music is in large part incomprehensible should its intrinsic anti-Semitism be overlooked. Jewish and Aryan characteristics are presented in stereotype form in the operas visually and orally. The Jew looks different, smells different and sounds different. The characteristics of Beckmann's voice in Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, nasal and high pitched, are typically Jewish. This book is full of interesting even startling comparisons, for example between the characters of Nietzsche and Hagen. Unsurprisingly, the work presumes that the reader will not sympathise with the "iconographic codes of Wagner's time", as Weiner puts it, but this hardly matters. The book puts the admirer of Wagner on the spot: in effect it says to them, either admit that you enjoy Wagner so much because you do indeed sympathise with some or all of those "iconographic codes" or resign yourself, sure in the knowledge of your moral superiority, to never fully being able to appreciate the beauty of a music seeped in prejudices so alien to you. Wagner's music is an invitation to you to know yourself better.

Dominic Campbell

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