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Richard Wagner

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Thor, God of Thunder
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« Reply #15 on: July 26, 2007, 10:08:19 pm »

Parsifal and Race
 


Wagner's last card

As Cosima recorded in her diary on 28.3.1881, Richard Wagner called Parsifal his 'last card'. In the immediate context what he had in mind was a retort to Gobineau, who had characterized the Germans as the 'last card' of nature. 
[Dieter David Scholz, program book for Parsifal at the Berlin Staatsoper, March 2002]
 t has become impossible, when discussing his dramas and in particular the last of them, Parsifal, to avoid the topic of Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism and the claim, forcefully advanced by Robert Gutman in 1968, that Wagner was a racist. I do not mean, of course, that these subjects should be ignored. Indeed they deserve to be addressed. What is unfortunate is that discussion of them soon turned into a war of words in which truth was the first casualty.

iven the posthumous association of Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival with Hitler, who was an enthusiast for Wagner's music, and by extension with Nazism it was inevitable that commentators, especially in Germany, would regard Wagner's dramas as tainted by Nazism. In the vanguard of those who attacked Wagner and his heritage in the postwar period was Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, Wagner's dramas were inherently "völkisch". Adorno suggested that some of the characters, such as Mime and Klingsor, were anti-Semitic caricatures. Given Richard Wagner's frequent anti- Semitic remarks, many have found this claim plausible. Recent commentators have built upon Adorno's view of Wagner and his works, some of them (notably Hartmut Zelinsky and Barry Millington) developing ingenious theories about subtly-coded anti-Semitic and racist messages that they allege are cleverly hidden, deep in Wagner's libretti.

n 1968 Robert Gutman published a popular book about Wagner (Richard Wagner: the Man, his Mind and his Music) in which he portrayed his subject as a racist, psychopathic, proto-Nazi monster. Despite the reservations expressed by reviewers about the quality of Gutman's scholarship, this book has been a best-seller; especially in the USA, where an entire generation of students has been encouraged to accept Gutman's caricature of Richard Wagner. Even intelligent people, who have either never read Wagner's writings or tried to penetrate them and failed -- the situation is not made any more favourable to Wagner in the English-speaking world by the scarcity of good translations -- have read Gutman's book and accepted his opinions as facts. Since Gutman's book was a seminal contribution to the ill-tempered debate about Wagner's alleged racism, the relevant sections of the book will be considered at length in this article.


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n chapter 15 of his Wagner book, Robert Gutman put forward a remarkable interpretation of Parsifal. So remarkable that one might be tempted to believe that both this chapter and some fantastic passages earlier in the book (such as his analysis of Tristan und Isolde) had been written under the influence of the "mind-expanding" drugs that were popular on US campuses at that time. Ignoring all considerations of chronology and taking no account of the available, relevant documentation (e.g. Wagner's letters to Mathilde Wesendonk) concerning the lengthy creative process which resulted in Parsifal, Gutman produced an interpretation of Wagner's last drama as a racist tract in which homosexuality and vegetarianism were prominent themes. According to Gutman, the libretto of Parsifal was rooted in ideas that preoccupied Wagner in the last years of his life, specifically 1878-82. This is Gutman's central thesis concerning Parsifal.

utman knew that Wagner, like many intellectuals of his time, had been interested in the writings of Charles Darwin, whose books Wagner read during the 1870's. Ignoring the fact that the first Prose Draft of Parsifal had been written long before this, Gutman supposed that the underlying ideas of Parsifal were those of social Darwinism. He suggested that the embattled community of the Grail had been alarmed to observe natural selection working against its distinctive Aryanism ... here was the decisive racial crisis that grew into an uncompromising struggle for power. So the distress of Monsalvat that emerges during act one -- and which has deepened by act three -- of Wagner's drama is, according to Gutman, a racial crisis.

here seem to be many people -- some of them both intelligent and educated -- who take for granted that this account, in terms of racial crisis, homosexuality and vegetarianism, is a valid (or even the only possible valid) interpretation of Parsifal. After all, what else could the work be about other than race, pederasty and diet? In recent years Gutman's ideas have been repeated and developed in a stream of books about (and mostly against) Wagner and his ideas (as their authors claim to understand them). The result is that, at least in the English-speaking world, there is a widespread perception and often a deep-rooted conviction that Wagner hated specific racial minorities, that this hatred was the source of his creativity, and that it found its fullest expression in the libretto of Parsifal. If anyone points out that none of this is even remotely true, they can only expect to be shouted down by those whose prejudices are stronger than their concern for facts.


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