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Bodies of evidence Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. xvi + 439 pp.

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Bodies of evidence Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. xvi + 439 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Thomas Grey
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Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , July 1996 , pp. 185 - 197
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Tracing the after-effects of Wagner's anti-Semitism from the later Wilhelminian era through the Third Reich has been a particular concern of Hartmut Zelinsky. See, for example, Sieg oder Untergang: Sieg und Untergang. Kaiser Wilhelm II, die Werk-Idee Richard Wagners und der ‘Weltkampf’ (Munich, 1990).Google Scholar

2 Bynum, Caroline, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective’, Critical Inquiry, 22 1 (Autumn 1995), 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid., 6.

4 I wonder, for example, about the all-important category of ‘voice’ in opera. While the singing voice is pre-eminently a product of the singer's physical body, doesn't it also serve to lift the dramatic character out of that physical, ‘accidental’ body and encourage us to construct an ideal, musical, ‘fictional’ body for that character? The distinction between seeing opera and hearing it on disc – fundamental to the modern experience of opera – further complicates the question.Google Scholar

5 For all his readiness to speak out against the Jews in prose or in conversation, Wagner was well aware that an explicidy anti-Semitic opera was an impossibility. While art was becoming rapidly politicised by the mid-nineteenth century, the high-minded composer of idealistic ‘music dramas’ would never have dreamed of composing an overdy political, prosaically realist social manifesto; the Ring may legitimately be read as a utopian-socialist, anti-capitalist allegory, but one can't imagine Wagner himself re-casting it in the manner of a modern, realist novel by Dickens or Zola.Google Scholar

6 See for instance the discussion of passages from Art and Revolution on pp. 37–8 and 48–9, and from The Art-Work of the Future on pp. 45, 61 and 181. The latter context cites a passage from The Art- Work which laments the present potential for the ‘enemies’ of the Volk to ‘suck their life's blood from the wasted strength of [that] Volk, as long as they – themselves unable to sire – devour to no end the fertility of the Volk in their [the enemies'] egotistical existence’ (see Wagner, , Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen [Leipzig and Berlin, 1911], III, 54).Google Scholar On the other hand, Weiner all too often derives exaggerated claims from the ‘evidence’ of the writings, such as that ‘the eye always has racist implications in Wagner's thought’ (p. 36) or that Wagner somehow connected Italian opera with the Jews (e.g., p. 153, p. 157). It is ironic that Weiner uses as his principal source for the writings Borchmeyer's, DieterJubiläumsausgabe (Frankfurt, 1983), which notoriously omits all the offending anti-Semitic texts. The decision to supplement this with the Julius Kapp edition (Leipzig, 1911) rather than the ‘standard’ series of German editions issued between 1887 and the Volksausgabe of 1911–16 compounds the inconvenience of his citations of the original texts.Google Scholar

7 See especially chapters 4 and 5 of Paul Rose, Lawrence, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, 1992), 49–88. Because Weiner has set his sights so determinedly on the bodies of Wagner's characters and on the role of pejorative racial ‘iconographies’, he has relatively litde to say about this familiar socio-historical reading of the Ring.Google Scholar

8 Chapter 4 (‘Club Foot, Heroic Foot’) is predicated on the notion (as proposed by Sander Gilman) that up through the nineteenth century Jews were believed to suffer from congenitally weak or ‘flat’ feet. Weiner also points to mythical and folkloristic associations between lameness and artisan-smiths (Vulcan, Wieland) and between devils, Jews and an irregular gait or ‘sub-human’ feet (264–72). Since this catalogue of associations extends to ‘demons, spirits, and dwarves’ of Germanic folklore (p. 272), we are reminded that some of the purportedly ‘racist’ imagery Weiner would identify with the Nibelungs may simply have to do with their overt, literal identity, as a ‘race of dwarves’. Pursued in eitherdirection though, the argument can become circular.Google Scholar

9 Sander Gilman has identified a residue of this tradition in the ensemble of Jews ‘quarrelling over their religion’ in Strauss's Salome; see ‘Strauss and the Pervert’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), esp. 317–22,Google Scholar and ‘Opera, Homosexuality, and Models of Disease’ in Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, 1988), 155–81. Gilman is interested in the context of contemporary social and medical discourse, and does not attempt to trace this topos in theatrical traditions, which could easily be done, I suspect (for example, in the Viennese popular theatre of early and mid-century).Google Scholar

10 Beckmesser is similarly described as alternately ‘shrieking’ and ‘raging’ (kreischend, wütend) during the Act II finale of Die Meistersinger. The book's dust-jacket illustration depicts the score of this passage (Mime, ‘in höcbster Wuth’) running through or across Wagner's outsized forehead, evidendy as an emblem of the ‘anti-Semitic imagination’ in action; the image of the composer reproduced here is a contemporary Viennese caricature alluding to the ‘Jewish’ affinities of Wagner's physiognomy, so that Mime's Wuth becomes, amusingly, an expression of Wagner's own ‘Jewish self-hatred’, as this is sometimes diagnosed with respect to supposed insecurities about his parentage and appearance.Google Scholar

11 Weiner also deserves credit for his aperçu – both witty and apt – that Mime is the quintessential operatic Jewish mother (p. 85). After all, in Act I of Siegfried he divides his time between upbraiding his surrogate son for his churlish ingratitude and making soup for him. Mime's domestic habits, incidentally, lend some credence to Weiner's otherwise rather tenuous search for olfactory signs of a foetor judaïcus attending racially suspect characters in Wagner's operas. The notion of & foetor judaicus or ‘Jewish odour’ that forms the point of departure for chapter 3 apparendy stems from traditional perceptions of the Jews' ‘lack of personal hygiene and … their supposedly indiscriminate penchant for garlic’ (p. 212). The Arthur Rackham illustration of ‘Mime and the infant Siegfried’ reproduced on p. 86 portrays a distincdy unkempt Mime imploring the petulant barbarian-toddler to ingest a bowl of soup, while direcdy above Mime's outstretched hand there hangs on the wall of their cave dwelling what appears to be a string of garlic bulbs (Weiner notes this detail in passing: see p. 213).Google Scholar

12 See Richard Wagner Stories and Essays, trans, and ed. Osborne, Charles (New York, 1973), 33. It is surprising that Weiner never cites the one passage in which Wagner direcdy addresses the issue of Jewish ‘singing’. Immediately after analysing the objectionable ‘difference’ of Jewish speech (as Yiddish or Mauscheln), he asserts diat the same objectionable qualities would necessarily be exacerbated in Jewish singing, since song is in essence ‘speech heightened by passion’ (p. 29). Wagner describes Jewish speech as tending towards the ‘ridiculously vehement’, which quality, we can infer, would be amplified in the Jew‘s singing voice, according to Wagner. While no direct claim is made regarding a characteristic range of the Jewish voice, there is a very suggestive textual parallel between this description of the Jew's ‘ridiculously vehement’ speech patterns and a letter from Wagner to Rudolf Freny, an early interpreter of Beckmesser: ‘Boundless passion, but without the strength to express it’, Wagner describes the role; ‘The extremely high notes are of course only vehement or ridiculous speech accents, not singing’ (Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans, and ed.Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington [New York, 1988’, 815).Google Scholar Millington cites the letter to Freny (Millington, , ‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?’, this journal 33 [1991], 247–60, here 257), but does not mention the parallel to the account of Jewish speech (and song) in the 1850 article.Google Scholar

13 One would like to know, incidentally, how Nazi-era productions portrayed the relevant characters. Surely if the alleged caricatures were as universally recognised in the late nineteenth century as Weiner suggests, they would still have been available - even irresistible - to at least some directors in Hider's Germany?Google Scholar

14 Millington, ‘Nuremberg Trial’.Google Scholar

15 Millington marshals a small sample of evidence that Beckmesser might have been perceived by late nineteenth-century audiences as embodying Jewish stereotypes, while noting that protests against early performances of Die Meistersinger were mostdirecdy motivated by the reissue of Judaism in Music, with a lengthy new preface, in 1869. Weiner, on the other hand, states categorically that ‘the notary's high and florid singing’ was recognised as ‘the composer's ridicule of Jewish art and of the Jewish physiognomy [?]’ (p. 123), citing an entry from Cosima Wagner's diaries (4 July 1869) that makes no such claim.Google Scholar

16 Millington, ‘Nuremberg Trial’, 252.'Google Scholar

17 One possible exception would be the thematic linkage of castration with Jewish ritual circumcision (pp. 185 ff), but it is not clear to what degree that link – of medieval origin – still resonated in nineteenth-century anti-Semitic thought.Google Scholar

18 Weiner argues that sweet smells (Düfte) are ‘consistently’ associated with an incestuous motif in Wagner (principally the union of Siegmund and Sieglinde), and hence with a notion of racial regeneration through an ‘incestuous’ inbreeding of the Germanic Volk. Whatever one makes of Wagner's deployment of the incest motif in Die Walkiire or of the chronology of Wagner's racial thinking (which is another problem here), these claims for a broader network of associations between Duft and incest or racial breeding strike me as tenuous at best. Though Wagner, in his systematic concern with realising ideas ‘for the senses’, does occasionally convey the notion of smell through poetic description and musical character, the category can hardly claim more than a marginal position in his works. None the less, Weiner's speculations on the possible inclusion of a new layer of sensory experience to the synaesthetic Gesamtkumtwerk (p. 241) have potentially amusing ramifications: Bayreuth equipped wirh ‘Odorama’, as it were, or perhaps – more economically - with ‘scratch-'n-sniff’ programmes?Google Scholar

19 Adorno says as much himself, or at least implies it; see In Search of Wagner, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (Manchester, 1981), 88.Google Scholar

20 ‘Der festeste fällt, sinkt er dir [Kundry] in die Arme, und so verfällt er dem Speer, den ihrem Meister selbst ich entwandt.’ This text makes it clear that Klingsor is speaking of the knights in general. Penetration by this spear in its defiled, ‘infected’ state produces an effect analogous to venereal infection, a chronic ‘wound’ or infection of the blood that will not heal. Similarly, when Klingsor's captive warriors engage in batde with Parsifal, the latter wounds them with one of their own weapons; observing this action, Klingsor remarks suggestively: ‘each one carries away with him a wound. Let it be so! And let the whole race of knights thus bring about its own demise’. The presence of ‘syphilitic’Google Scholarimagery in Parsifal has recently been discussed by Linda and Michael Hutcheon, although only from the perspective of heterosexual transmission, in ‘Syphilis, Sin and the Social Order: Richard Wagner's Parsifal’, this journal, 7 (1995), 261–75.Google Scholar

21 On Krafft-Ebing, see Gilman, Sander, ‘Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and Degeneration’, in Degeneration: The Darker Side of Progress, ed. Chamberlin, J. E. and Gilman, Sander (New York, 1985), 79.Google ScholarOn the perceived affiliations of Jews and homosexuals, see Gilman, ‘Strauss and the Pervert’ (n. 9), which also mentions an association of homosexuality with high or cracking voices (p. 323). Klingsor's part emphasises a high register, for a bass, though not as exaggeratedly as Beckmesser.Google Scholar

22 In his discussion of the Mime–Alberich scene in Siegfried Weiner cites one of the very few pieces of compelling evidence offered in the course of the book that at least certain people near to Wagner's time really did perceive elements of anti-Semitic caricature in some figures: in a letter of 1898 to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Gustav Mahler observed that ‘no doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews (with all their characteristic traits – petty intelligence and greed) the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested’ (p. 143).Google Scholar

23 See this journal, 6 (1994), 181–7 (esp. 185–7).Google Scholar

24 ‘Hermann Levi's Shame and Parsifal's Guilt: A Critique of Essentialism in Biography and Criticism’, this journal, 6 (1994), 125–45 (see esp. 138–45).Google Scholar