Are We Actually Bothered by Wagner’s Antisemitism?

I am not here to talk about the ifs, ands, or buts of Wagner’s antisemitism, decide which operas show what degree of German nationalism, or which passages are examples of a supposed genius that transcends his racial tribalism. I begin from the position that Wagner and his music are inextricably enmeshed with the wider antisemitic swell in Europe at the end of the 19th century that was eventually concretized by movements such as Karl Lueger’s Austrian Christian Social Party and national identity crises like the Dreyfus Affair in France, to say nothing of what followed. Today, as a society that on the surface openly decries antisemitism and also continues to consume Wagnerism in heaps, we either have intellectually rationalized and sequestered which aspects of Wagnerism are acceptable to engage with, or, we just aren’t that bothered by his antisemitism. I suspect that Wagner’s enduring position at the center of classical music culture despite the massive literature and cultural debate devoted his antisemitism has more to do with moral ambivalence than intellectual rigor.

Is moral ambivalence on a large scale something that can actually be curtailed? What role, if any, does morality play in how we listen to music in 2022? Do we listen to music just as a pastime or does it have a deeper significance for us? Questions such as these are currently attracting attention from various sources. The 2021 study by Preniqi, Kalimeri, and Saitis titled “Modeling Moral Traits with Music Listening Preferences and Demographics” explores the importance of music in predicting a person’s moral values. In its modeling, this study used two basic moral foundations. Individualizing is based on “fairness and care … the basic constructs of society are the individuals and hence focuses on their protection and fair treatment.” The other broad category, Binding, is founded on the values of “purity, authority and loyalty and is based on the respect of leadership and traditions.” The researchers found that a taste for classical music is more predictive of the Binding moral foundation than the Individualizing foundation.

One obvious problem with this study for the purposes of the present essay is the term “classical music.” As we know, this genre category contains anyone from Wagner or C.P.E. Bach to the early microtonalist Ivan Wyschnegradsky. In this essay, the discussion revolves around whether we should separate Wagner from other composers within “classical music.” The main idea I want to grab from Preniqi, Kalimeri, and Saitis is that on some level, yes, taste in music and moral values are in fact intertwined in the make-up of who we are. This isn’t particularly surprising. If the act of listening can inspire us, make us sad, or soothe us, then it seems reasonable that this experience would be tied to our values and beliefs. There are, however, some other loose ends in what this study covers… 

What exactly are we talking about when we say “music” and “listening” in the context of concert music or pieces that are considered “works of art?” We can borrow from the postmodern school of Northrop Frye and consider nothing but the work on its own material terms or we can go the route of Lydia Goehr who sees music as a social phenomenon that is inextricably tied to the cultural time and place in which it is written/ performed/heard.

For Antoine Hennion, music “is everything on which it relies.” He wants to understand music as a mediation between individuals and the world they inhabit. This means that when we say “music” or “classical music” or “Der Meistersinger” we are also talking about “all the details of the gestures, bodies, habits, materials, spaces, languages, and institutions that it inhabits.” Preniqi, Kalimeri, and Saitis might suggest adding morality to that list. This view suggests that “what music is,” is nothing more than the value given to it by the customs, habits, beliefs, and spaces that surround it. So, the value of music is mutable.

Benefitting from the fact that Wagner died 130 years ago, and we all agree antisemitism is bad, we should be able re-pot his music into our morally sound and politically correct present and get back to singing along to Walter’s “Prize Song” guilt free. We believe that since we live with a different ethos that Wagner, that our enjoyment of his music is fully separate from his ethos. Furthermore, in a culture where Larry David has reclaimed Jewish stereotypes and transformed them into a certain type of cynical empowerment, the “Jewish” attributes of the aesthetically impotent Beckmesser, Walter’s rival, which served as a dog-whistle for 1860’s audiences fall on largely non-dog ears in 2022 (of course, in Larry David’s case, this only works because, as a Jew, his humor is taken in the second degree).

If, as Hennion says, music only has the meaning we give it, we should be able to safely enjoy Wagner, right? That should mean that we in fact are able to clean Wagner’s music of the traits which have brought him such popularity among racist, xenophobic, and often violent groups. This, I believe, this is exactly the claim made by the vast majority of those who keep Wagner in such a central position within classical music culture. I am not so convinced however that the nobility and intellectual due diligence of that claim are as legitimate as many purport them to be. The answer lies somewhere between Hennion and Frye: the context of a work can and does change over time but its material qualities are fixed and concretely discernible. No matter how we cut it, the last 30 minutes of Der Meistersinger firmly cement the work in the realm of nationalist almost xenophobic propaganda. No matter how a modern production might reframe its portrayal of Mime, it will always be a re-framing of what was a caricature of Jewish traits in Wagner’s eyes.

Through one way or another, we create a distance between ourselves and the aspects of his music that we find distasteful while we treat the parts we enjoy with warm familiarity. We are told and we know that Wagner and important parts of his music are antisemitic but do we, as individuals in 2022, actually recognize it and experience it as anti- semitic?

A couple summers ago, my American family was visiting some Dutch family friends of ours. While at the dinner table my family was being made more and more squeamish by the apparently broken faucet of curse-words that was our friend’s mouth. After about 20 minutes, my father explained, “listen, just you know, in the US, in this sort of company, no one uses the language you are using.” After laughing about it together, the lesson was learned but it remains fascinating, and hilarious, to see the differences in how people curse in different anglophone communities. In its most basic sense, the speaker’s experience of his words, which is conditional on his own context, was wholly different from the listener’s, who belongs to a different context.

The situation with Wagner’s antisemitism is not dissimilar to this situation except that instead of geography, the primary metric of our cultural separation is time (in Wagner’s case however, he wasn’t just parroting something he picked up, he genuinely believed in his ideas). For instance, if we take Mel Gibson as precedent, Wagner would have been cancelled, Louie C.K.-style, immediately if we transplanted today’s political-moral sensibility to 1850, the year Wagner’s Jewishness in Music was published. If we take things in the other direction and an antisemitic artist wanted Sixtus Beckmesser to be genuinely offensive and have racially provocative traits that today’s audience would recognize, the artist would probably make reference to Israel or Williamsburg and Borough Park in New York City. The point being, discrimination has a context and Wagner’s brand of antisemitism and his context, as he lived it, has faded.

The farther back we go in history, the less we register the moral discrepancy between our world today and the cherished cultural artifacts of the past. We ridicule the opulence and inconceivable wealth of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk but Versailles is a gorgeous example of taste and architecture. Putin is a war criminal and tyrant but we have fully assimilated Julius Caesar into western poetic and philosophical cultural heritage while blatantly ignoring the imperial, proto-colonialist, and bellicose foundation of the Roman Empire.

All of this to say that, I just don’t think we are that bothered by Wagner’s anti- semitism. We talk about it a lot but what effect do these discussions actually have? If the machinations of today’s cancel culture are devastating enough to inflict irreversible consequences in less than twenty-four hours with the surfacing of a single accusation, shouldn’t it follow that, if Wagner’s antisemitism registered in any meaningful way today, he would already be long gone?

Here we stand. Wagner was antisemitic. After a reading of Hennion (and I strongly suggest reading his work), we can say that his music is antisemitic. Following Preniqi, Kalimeri, and Saitis, we understand that there is a measurable link between our moral values and the music we enjoy. Does this mean we, as classical music lovers, are all probably antisemitic? If we answer no, then one of two things must be true. Either we don’t actually see Wagner as antisemitic or we just aren’t really that bothered.

To my eyes, the problem with Wagner is not whether his music was antisemitic. The problem with Wagner is that his antisemitism doesn’t mean anything to us today. Whereas the power of his music continues to move people and attract new listeners, the language and context of his antisemitism are distant enough that they hardly make an impact on us. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The most recent Wagner scandal happened in Israel in the various episodes where Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta performed Wagner there. The controversy surrounding these concerts originates in the fact that a large number of European immigrants and Holocaust survivors resettled in Israel after World War II. These individuals experienced the anti- semitism associated with Wagner’s music. As Barenboim himself points out, the brand of antisemitism that was at the root of the scandal in Israel had little to do with Wagner’s own context but it nonetheless constituted a real and lived experience of this music for millions of listeners. This experience of Wagner, however, is but a slice of the populations that encounter his music. The way in which it is real for that audience is just as valid as the love that someone like W.E.B. DuBois had for Wagner’s music, despite being fully aware of his racism and intolerance.

The work incumbent on the 2022 Wagnerian is to bring Wagner’s antisemitism to the present day not only as an intellectual or historical fact but to lay it bare for all its human repugnance and absurdity. If the quandary of Wagner’s antisemitism is going to have any meaningful participation in his future reception, it needs to be talked about from an experiential perspective just like his music is. If we intellectualize, identify, and explain it, the hate inherent in this aspect of Wagnerism loses its teeth and this is the first step towards it becoming accepted or ignored. This does not mean that we are required to mention Nazism every time we talk about Wagner. On one hand, the Holocaust opened our eyes to what atrocities antisemitism can lead to, but on the other hand, not even the staunchest Wagner opponents would say that Richard, the man who died in 1883, was responsible for it. The appropriation of Wagner’s music by the Nazis was their own prerogative and the victims of Nazism are well with their rights to refuse cutting ties between Wagner and the Third Reich. If we are to engage with Wagner in good conscience, we need to treat the man and his ideas with the same immediacy that we want to get out of a performance of his music.

There can be multiple strategies in the effort to make Wagner’s ugliness palpable and presently real for today’s audiences. Our own solution in Wagner’s Nightmare is to us humor and laughter as one of the most evident expressions of the present moment. By no means does this angle intend to diminish the significance of the issues at hand. In fact, we intend quite the opposite. Our project is designed to antagonize the ghost of Wagner by bringing his least favorite subjects to fore. This includes performances of music by Mendelssohn in a project dedicated to Wagner but also more lighthearted jabs such as performing repertoire specifically written for the Wagner viola on a standard viola. The worst that could happen would be if the racially charged polemics of Wagner’s art and thought became nothing more than a footnote to his legacy. Through our use of the eternally contemporary devises of ridicule and humor alongside our performances of his compositions, our aim is to bring the uglier sides of Wagnerism to the present with the same immediacy as his music so that audiences might genuinely engage with the full picture of this repulsive and genuinely inspired individual.

Notes and Citations:

 1 This being said, the AUROC scores, which tests the effectiveness of a prediction model, were not especially strong in this study. This suggests that their findings were not as definitive as one might think on first glance. See Fig. 1 of their study. 

Preniqi, Vjosa, Kyriaki Kalimeri, and Charalampos Saitis. “Modeling Moral Traits with Music Listening Preferences and Demographics.” 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00349

 2 See:

- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957.

- Goehr, Lydia.. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

3Hennion, Antoine. "Music Lovers: Taste as Performance.” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 5 (2001): 1-22.

4 Hennion, Antoine. “Music and Mediation, Toward a New Sociology of Music.” in The Cultural Study of Music, A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 2. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.

5 In fact, Wagner did receive backlash from certain quarters after the publication of his essay. The British audience, who venerated Mendelssohn, were particularly put off by Wagner’s aggressions towards the Jewish composer. That being said, considering the lengths he and his vicious pamphlets went to, he still was widely performed and did not suffer consequences as severe as some “canceled” personalities today. The concurrent building/success of Bayreuth was not blocked by the negative response to his vicious pamphlets. See 234-236, Ross, Alex. Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. New York, Picador. 2020, for a review of Wagner’s motivation for writing Jewishness in Music and well as its reception history.