Flash! Wagner Not A Nazi!

In an article written for the Brit Telegraph, political columnist Simon Heffer tells us not to be afraid of Wagner, as Wagner was no Nazi ("Don't be afraid of Wagner. He's not a Nazi"). We doubt that assurance will put at ease the minds of those determined to link Wagner the man with Hitler and the Nazis no matter the absurdity of such a linking given that Wagner died six years before Hitler was born, or lay to rest the uninformed, in-error notion that Wagner's prose writings mark him as a veritable proto-Nazi and so a direct influence on Hitler and the Nazis in that regard. Still, it's encouraging, especially these days, to see in print in a respectable periodical the debunking of such ideas. Even more encouraging is it to read a categorical debunking of that persistent, tendentious, bone-headed, even half-lunatic notion that Wagner's virulent anti-Semitism found its way into his stage works. Writes Mr. Heffer:

There is an enormous literature on Wagner, much of it interesting, some of it utter garbage. Michael Tanner, the opera critic of The Spectator and a man whose knowledge and understanding of the Master and his works are probably unsurpassed this side of Bayreuth, has just added to the corpus. His Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner [not yet available on this side of the pond] wears his immense erudition lightly, and as such is probably the best introduction ever written to this most complex of composers.

Dr Tanner tells the story of Wagner's life; he summarises the plots of the operas and comments on them; he gives an immensely valuable discography (valuable because his own knowledge of the recordings verges on the omniscient, and his judgment is quite exemplary); and he deals, head on, with the question not just of Wagner's anti-Semitism, but of his "links" with the Nazis. Indeed, it is that chapter that constitutes one of the finest and most important pieces of writing on the composer that I have ever read: not least because it should serve to close down an utterly pointless and futile debate about Wagner that has poisoned the study and appreciation of his works for decades.

When I described as "garbage" some of the stuff written about Wagner in recent years, it was some of this line of thought that I had in mind. Dr Tanner is perhaps nearer the mark when he calls it "deranged". There is no doubt that Wagner was anti-Semitic, and a particularly revolting aspect of his character it was too. [...] However, it is a considerable step from [this fact] to the assertions made by some writers that every unsavoury character in the operas is clearly Jewish, that there are "messages" about the general shockingness of Jews that Wagner was seeking to transmit through his operas (which he was so bad at doing, as Dr Tanner points out, that it took until the 1990s for certain geniuses to pick them up)....

Just so. In July 2004, in response to some particularly "deranged" comments on this matter from one Daniel Leeson — a former IBM executive, professional classical musician, one of the world's acknowledged scholarly authorities on all things Mozartian, and a man who should have known better — we wrote in part (the full article, "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste", can be read here):

It's...clear that those [slanderous, racist anti-Semitic] "subtleties" of which Leeson became aware [in Die Meistersinger] would never have been perceived by him as racist anti-Semitic coding had he not worked backwards from his knowledge of the popular association of Wagner's name with Hitler and the Nazis, his knowledge of Wagner's notorious and justified reputation as a rabid anti-Semite ... and his knowledge of Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic prose writings, an anti-Semitism most repulsively prominent in Wagner's twice-published article, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music). If some other composer had written Die Meistersinger using the very same text the entire imbecile anti-Semitic coding business would never have been so much as even imagined — not by Leeson, not by even the fevered brain of the most devout PC academic.

Can one find anti-Semitic overtones and references in the text and characterizations in Die Meistersinger, or in any other of Wagner's operas, for that matter? If one is so disposed, one most assuredly can. One can find pretty much anything one is looking for in Wagner's stage works, an ineluctable consequence of their at-bottom archetypal nature. Archetypes are essentially empty matrices that can be filled-in and fleshed-out in their particulars in multiple ways and at multiple levels by the filler-in-ers and flesher-out-ers, and so if one is determined to find anti-Semitic content in the filling-in and fleshing-out, one can be absolutely assured of not being disappointed. That archetypal quality is not a flaw in Wagner's stage works but their very genius, and a principal source of their timelessness, universality, and astonishing resonant power.

[...]

Soberly considered, Leeson's and certain others' "analysis" of the alleged racist anti-Semitic coding in Die Meistersinger as well as other of Wagner's stage works adds up to nothing more than a manifest and classic case of the obscenity being in the mind of the beholder not the beheld which is itself guilty only of being too deep and too rich for its own good. The proof of that is that it required the assiduous "researches" of a small band of Wagner-hating zealots to "discover" the nefarious and pernicious coding in Die Meistersinger, and this not until after almost 150 years of the opera's constant public exposure, prior to which time the supposed evil coding was not even so much as suspected.

It's long past time that this ugly, tendentious, and utterly blockheaded notion died an ignoble death. Our appreciation and kudos go to Mr. Heffer and, on Mr. Heffer's word, to Dr. Tanner for helping it along to it's richly deserved end.