May 2013 contains a special date. May 22 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of great German opera composer and pioneering conductor Richard Wagner (1813-1883).
And why should anybody in the Jewish community who isn’t a classical music fan care? Because unfortunately, Wagner had a powerful effect on Jewish history as well as on music, and that fact remains a flashpoint today.
Many renowned artists in the history of Western civilization have been anti-Semites. They include British poet William Shakespeare and novelist Charles Dickens; Polish composer-pianist Frederic Chopin; American poet Ezra Pound and novelist Ernest Hemingway; French painter Edgar Degas and novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine; Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky — to name just a few. Yet their anti-Semitism seems almost incidental, expressed in recorded remarks here and there or in just a few instances in large bodies of work (one Shakespeare play, one Dickens novel, etc.).
Among such artists, Wagner was extraordinary. He didn’t just write music. He produced tracts, books, and articles, several of which denounced Jews ferociously. His “Jewishness in Music” stands in the history of anti-Semitism with such texts as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”), the Czarist Russian forgery “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.”
The problem isn’t just that Wagner was more blatantly anti-Semitic than other artists. Living in the mid-to-late 19th century, Wagner became one of the exemplars of the Romantic Era’s “artist as hero” ethos. As such, he attained a prestige that made some people in Germany and beyond regard his mostly half-baked opinions on non-musical subjects as nearly infallible.
This gave Wagner’s anti-Semitism more clout than it otherwise would have had, especially in Germany. Scholars dispute how much Wagner’s opinion writings directly influenced Hitler and the German Nazi Party; but there is no question Hitler adored most of Wagner’s operas and did all he could to associate them with himself and his regime.
In truth, that Hitler was a Wagner fan may have given Wagner’s anti-Semitism more emphasis than it actually warrants in doing justice to him. Wagner’s personality was complex and humanly inconsistent, in this and other areas of his life. He never joined an anti-Semitic organization; he stayed on friendly terms with several Jewish musicians; and for all his attacks on Jewish composers, he to the end of his life admired French Jewish composer Jacques Halevy.
Nevertheless, the association with Nazi anti-Semitism exists and is inescapable. Therefore, Wagner’s music is under a de facto ban in Israel today; and attempts to break that ban have sparked vehement protests.
I wish there could be a compromise over performing Wagner in Israel. Words can be anti-Semitic, but the materials of non-vocal music — melody, harmony, counterpoint, form, instrumental color — cannot. In those realms, Wagner was a master and an important innovator, and Israeli orchestral musicians miss out on important professional self-development if they can’t perform Wagner’s music.
Besides, as a music major and someone who has studied and sat through a good share of Wagner’s operas, I believe the orchestral excerpts from his operas are his best and most significant music anyway. Therefore, I think Israeli orchestras should perform those, but Israeli opera companies should avoid staging the operas.
But Wagner’s challenge to us today goes beyond his anti-Semitism. More than the other anti-Semitic artists, Wagner’s work and life — and he often was a nasty person even without his bigotry — raise questions about the relationship between morality and art and art’s status in our civilization.
Is the deployment of artistic technique and skill more important than the morality of an artist or of an artwork’s content? Can a morally bad person create authentically great art? Can or should artistic works be separated from morality or the morality of artists? Can artistic greatness redeem or even justify an artist’s moral failings? Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “The poet skims off the best of his life and puts it in his work. That is why his work is beautiful and his life bad.” Is that a good excuse or just a rationalization?
Such issues constitute major themes in U.S. Jewish novelist Chaim Potok’s two books about fictional artist Asher Lev. “The Gift of Asher Lev” (1990) has a scene in which Asher and his art-disparaging Orthodox father argue about Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. His father has read something about Picasso and says Picasso “was not a nice man.” Asher says, “Niceness and greatness are two very different qualities.” His father replies, “Not in Yiddishkeit [Jewish life and values], Asher.”
But if niceness and greatness are supposed to be inseparable in Yiddishkeit, they often are clearly separable in Western secular culture in ways that seem dangerous. Stars of stage, screen, and music don’t just become famous. They become objects of obsessive popular and news media attention that verges on idolatry. Their (usually unqualified) opinions on political and social issues get taken seriously; and their good and bad behavior often gets imitated.
Wagner raises these issues with a greater intensity than does any other artist in any medium. He shows what can happen when art and artists become gods.
I have heard Jewish and non-Jewish artists and fans contend that involvement in or appreciation of the arts can “make you a better person.” Well, as someone who has been deeply involved with music for much of my life, I can tell you that studying and enjoying the arts can and do:
• promote enjoyment of life;
• bring at least some people together (many of my best friendships have been made over music);
• and help provide emotional glue for cultures and societies.
But involvement in the arts by itself does not necessarily make people morally better. Wagner and his Nazi fans prove it. That lesson alone makes it worthwhile to contemplate the 200th anniversary of this wonderful and terrible man’s birth.
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