Wagner & Said: Off-key

Wagner’s anti-Semitism

Sir, – David Matthews (July 25) terms me “the severest of Wagner’s critics” and quotes Edward Said’s description of me as “a fundamentalist . . . a Khomeini of the arts”. Though I take any insult from Said (himself a noted patron of extremism in the arts and politics alike) as a compliment, the more serious point at issue – whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism can be read into his operas – is one where many more moderate listeners may incline to Said’s view that Wagner’s anti-Semitism stopped at his musical doorstep. I am afraid, however, that this comforting thought is coming increasingly to be seen as a false friend. Analysis of the musical, as well as the dramatic and philosophical content of the operas, clearly shows an anti-Semitic intent. For example, Jean-Jacques Nattiez has exposed how Wagner cleverly inserted a nasty little musical parody of Meyerbeer’s “Jewish” style into Alberich’s exchanges with the Rhinemaidens, even to the point of doubling the voice line in the cellos à la Meyerbeer. And there are of course the well-known more blatant caricatures of Jews in Meistersinger and Siegfried, whose first act was described by no less a Wagnerian than Mahler as soaked in anti-Semitism, both musically and dramatically.

Said, of course, in his usual extremist way, would take it that analysis of this kind would doom one to perpetual stagings of Wagner that would accentuate the anti-Semitic content of the operas. At the notorious Bayreuth conference on Wagner and the Jews in 1998, I was pointedly asked about this. Not at all, was my answer – how boring it would be to have a party-line prescription for a sole, politically correct way of doing Wagner. What Said and his admirers refuse to admit, though, is that anti-Semitism is certainly one of the central themes of Wagner’s operas, along with broader human concerns, and it is certainly worth bringing this out on occasion, as with Patrice Chereau’s centenary Bayreuth production of the Ring. No one – not I, nor my like-minded colleagues including Barry Millington, Marc Weiner and Gottfried Wagner – would wish to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the operas if they wish to remain oblivious to their intrinsic anti-Semitism. But for any self-styled critical expert or even enthusiast to keep on denying that the anti-Semitism is there is a failure of critical honesty and indeed of real understanding of Wagner. As the late Michael Dibdin wrote in reviewing my book, knowing the anti-Semitism is there, “we must continue to listen to Wagner, but listen uncomfortably”.

PAUL LAWRENCE ROSE
Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.