1
Wagner starts his argument with referring to generally acknowledged dislike for Jews, noticed among people worldwide. The author defines it as “a rooted dislike of the Jewish nature” (Wagner 79). At the beginning of the article, the author claims this dislike to be almost completely irrespective of Arts, and Music as the particular art form.
Nevertheless, he emphasizes the meaning of Hebrew, which influences Jews’ speech in the most direct way, and its effect in Music. Wagner believes that the ancient language, spoken by the representatives of this ethnicity, is one of the main reasons why Jews are so recognizable and treated as different. The language itself is ancient and alien, while learnt no any modern European language is their mother tongue, and it cannot come unnoticed. For this reason, poetry created by Jews in a foreign language cannot achieve the highest rank: they can only follow, copy and after-speak what they’ve already heard. In this regard, compared to poetry, Music is in the winning position. While it depends on language to a certain extent, “qualities of his dialect make the Jew almost incapable of giving artistic enunciation to his feelings and beholdings through talk, for such an enunciation through song his aptitude must needs be infinitely smaller” (Wagner 82).
If a song is considered a higher level of talk, “Music is the speech of Passion” (Wagner 82), so Jews are able to express what is difficult to say in foreign language with the means of Music. Wagner describes the great significance of Music as the phenomenon of self-expression, calling a song “the vividest and most indisputable expression of the personal emotional-being” (Wagner 82). Thus, we can rightly suppose that any form of Jewish art is borrowed or adapted, except a Song. According to Wagner, Jews always reveal what folk they belong to due to the features in their appearance or accent they speak with. Consequently, they are not able to fit in the public taste with Singing, but may wit in Music in the meaning of melody (Wagner 82).
Wagner points out that certain factors (again, related to ethnic and mental peculiarities) made it possible for Jews to become outstanding musicians. As Wagner believes in a close ties between poetry and music, Hebrew language and Jewish speech are of the great importance for him, when it comes to the discussion of music (Wagner, 81). In comparison to other existing art forms, Music is recognized as the only one, where Jews are able to demonstrate their skills or talents, or rather it somehow became possible for a Jew to become a musician (Wagner 82).
2
When art has become a significant part of the life of society, and as it is the easiest to learn (taking into account previous arguments, here Wagner speaks about Music exactly), some pieces by Jewish composers became outstanding.
Interestingly, Wagner still assumes that there are Jewish born with a musical gift – people, who can be talented even though they are representatives of this folk, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy is considered to be one of them. According to Wagner, Mendelssohn demonstrated that Jews may own and create “the finest and most varied culture, the highest and the tenderest sense of honour [] one single time to call forth in us that deep, thatheart-searching effect which we await from Art” (Wagner 85).
At the same time, Wagner judges the composer, who reduces the achievements of artists working in the same field to some vague, fantastic, obscure and almost shadow forms. Music he created, though the best example from what Jewish have ever created, is indefinite and very far from fulfillment. For him, it seems that composer’s mood is guided by the feeling of incapacity. The personality behind his music pieces is powerless, and the individuality confesses in his own impossibility. Thus, Wagner provides two angles of his vision of Jewish music, which are two different expressions of Judaism in Music: people, including Wagner, as he claim, are sympathetic for Mendelssohn’s Music as for his personality, but cannot praise Jewish music as the highest form of art.
According to Wagner, there are several reasons for this. Firstly, he cannot forget about the fact that Jews like to earn money easily, so he is completely certain that “what the cultured Jew had to speak [] could be nothing but the trivial and indifferent, because his whole artistic bent was in sooth a mere luxurious, needless thing” (Wagner 83). With their interests lying outside art, Jews are not able to focus on something more valuable and meaningful. The greatest pieces of art are created in the sake of art and self-expression, not making money.
Secondly, Wagner assures that there is no possibility of talking in art without saying any real thing and conveying a message. When someone has spoken out these things before (and they did spoke) now nothing original left but to copy. Wagner does not find any of these attempts successful, for they are more likely to remind the way a parrot copies human speech by repeating some words it hears but newer understands (Wagner 83). In this regard, it becomes much more complicated for any composer to create something worth admiration.
Thirdly, the previous reason makes it even harder a Jew, for whom “Synagogue is the solitary fountain whence the Jew can draw art-motives at once popular and intelligible to himself” (Wagner 84). While native folk culture and heritage are the main primary sources of inspiration for any artist, Jews have to follow foreign (if not hostile) samples. A Jewish composer “merely listens to the barest surface of our art, but not to its life-bestowing inner organism; and through this apathetic listening alone, can he trace external similarities with the only thing intelligible to his power of view, peculiar to his special nature” (Wagner 85).
Finally, it means that Judaism in Music is something, where there is neither passion nor calm. It is more about other attributes – coldness, indifference, and triviality, which in the end combine into some absurdity.
3
Hitler’s observation about culture and the place of arts in it, as well as their preservation and promotion of the state level, were influenced by personal preferences on the first place and reflected these preferences greatly. The obsession with Wagnerian music cannot go unnoticed in such conditions, and as likely as not may have influenced certain aspects of his attitude to Jews in the whole, which, again, defined national strategies back in 1930s in Germany.
Hitler and his followers believed that art and culture were expressions of race, and that Aryans alone were capable of creating true art and preserving true German culture. This is the cornerstone of national and cultural policy of those times in particular: honoring Germans went hand in hand with humiliating and destroying ethnic minorities.
German novelist Thomas Mann, who had chosen to leave the country rather than leave there under Nazi regime, “regarded the difference as a positive thing, as a source of creativity” (Steinweis 15), and the fact that it is a fundamentally different approach from what was promoted in Germany back then brings Wagner’s and Nazi ideology in the same line, just with a slightly different levels of aggression.
According to Germans, their indigenous culture was contaminated by alien influences, including Jewish. Nazi believed that “Jews, lacking their own country, lived parasitically off their host societies, nourishing themselves economically and culturally at the expense of others” (Steinweis 17). Consequently, they were not able to produce anything worth integrating with authentic German culture, only littering it with low-sort creations instead.
However, contrary to the common belief, this idea was not invented by Nazi, and it becomes obvious after reading Wagner’s essay, where exactly the same viewpoint is expressed: “Now, where is the cultured Jew to find this Folk? [] Who has not had occasion to convince himself of the travesty of a divine service of song, presented in a real Folk-synagogue?” (Wagner 84). What is more, he calls this music revulsion, horror and absurd, cackle and caricature with no sense.
Obviously, this was the first suggestion for further “purification” policies: Nazis, who valued Wagner’s works, chose to nourish the “healthy” and weed out “unhealthy”, which was the synonym to “alien”. Thus, what was considered authentically Germanic was supported by all means and patronage, while everything racially different was excluded and destroyed as a preventive measure in order to avoid the “be-Jewing”.
4
Wagner, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, expresses the great fear of “be-Jewing” of the art. According to him, the common dislike a lot of people feel in regard to Jews is not related to their art. However, while trying to express and explain his viewpoint, Wagner filially tells the opposite, which is one of the paradoxes of his writing.
In his article, Wagner opposes Jewish art, Music in particular, to the European one as lazy, mild, and with complete routine in terms of feelings to sensitive, touching, and moving the deepest feelings, associations, experiences etc. “Jews had brought forth no true poet” (Wagner 88), he claims, and the only more or less form of art which is worth attention is labeled as “Judaism in Music”. While Wagner provides several supports for his claim, he also mentions that everything important has been already said, which leaves no room for new masterpieces. This thought, however, makes vulnerable not just music written by Jewish, but any other music. As a result, according to Wagner, it turns out that Jewish music criticized so much is not much worse than European, though it has much better background and reasons for flourishing.
Works Cited
Steinweis, Alan E. “Anti-Semitism and the Arts in Nazi Ideology and Policy,” TheArts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change, Jonathan Huener and FrancisR. Nicosia (ed.). New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, pp. 79-100.
Wagner, Richard. “Das Judentum in der Musik,” Richard Wagner’s Prose Works,trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. New York and London, 1966; rpt 1894, pp. 15-30.
