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Richard Wagner

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Thor, God of Thunder
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« Reply #15 on: July 26, 2007, 01:39:19 pm »



in Liebethaler Grund near Pirna
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« Reply #16 on: July 26, 2007, 09:36:12 pm »

Wagner's influence and legacy

Wagner made highly significant, if controversial, contributions to art and culture. In his lifetime, and for some years after, Wagner inspired fanatical devotion amongst his followers, and was occasionally considered by them to have a near god-like status. His compositions, in particular Tristan und Isolde, broke important new musical ground. For years afterward, many composers felt compelled to align themselves with or against Wagner. Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf are indebted to him especially, as are César Franck, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Pfitzner and dozens of others. Gustav Mahler said, "There was only Beethoven and Wagner". The twentieth century harmonic revolutions of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg (tonal and atonal modernism, respectively) have often been traced back to Tristan. The Italian form of operatic realism known as verismo owes much to Wagnerian reconstruction of musical form.

Wagner made a major contribution to the principles and practise of conducting. His essay On conducting (1869) advanced the earlier work of Hector Berlioz and proposed that conducting was a means by which a musical work could be re-interpreted, rather than simply a mechanism for achieving orchestral unison. The central European conducting tradition which followed Wagner's ideas includes artists such as Hans von Bulow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan.

Wagner also made significant changes to the conditions under which operas were performed. It was Wagner who first demanded that the lights be dimmed during dramatic performances, and it was his theatre at Bayreuth which first made use of the sunken orchestra pit, which at Bayreuth entirely conceals the orchestra from the audience.

Wagner's concept of leitmotif and integrated musical expression has been a strong influence on many 20th century film scores, including such examples as Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and John Williams' music for Star Wars. American producer Phil Spector with his "wall of sound" was strongly influenced by Wagner's music. Wagner also heavily influenced rock composer Jim Steinman and led him to create what he called Wagnerian Rock. The rock subgenre of heavy metal music also shows a Wagnerian influence with its strong paganistic stamp. In Germany Rammstein and Joachim Witt (his most famous albums are called Bayreuth for that reason) are both strongly influenced by Wagner's music. The movie "The Ring of the Nibelungs" drew both from historical sources as well as Wagner's work, and set a ratings record when aired as a two-part mini-series on German television. It was subsequently released in other countries under a variety of names, including "Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King" in the USA.

Wagner's influence on literature and philosophy is also significant. Friedrich Nietzsche was part of Wagner's inner circle during the early 1870s, and his first published work The Birth of Tragedy proposed Wagner's music as the Dionysian rebirth of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist decadence. Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, believing that Wagner's final phase represented a pandering to Christian pieties and a surrender to the new demagogic German Reich. In the twentieth century, W. H. Auden once called Wagner "perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived", while Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust were heavily influenced by him and discussed Wagner in their novels. He is discussed in some of the works of James Joyce although Joyce was known to detest him. Wagner is one of the main subjects of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which contains lines from Tristan und Isolde and refers to The Ring and Parsifal. Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine worshipped Wagner. Many of the ideas his music brought up, such as the association between love and death (or Eros and Thanatos) in Tristan, predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud.

Not all reaction to Wagner was positive. For a time, German musical life divided into two factions, Wagner's supporters and those of Johannes Brahms; the latter, with the support of the powerful critic Eduard Hanslick, championed traditional forms and led the conservative front against Wagnerian innovations. Even those who, like Debussy, opposed him ("that old poisoner"), could not deny Wagner's influence. Indeed, Debussy was one of many composers, including Tchaikovsky, who felt the need to break with Wagner precisely because his influence was so unmistakable and overwhelming. Others who resisted Wagner's influence included Gioachino Rossini ("Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour"), though his own "Guillaume Tell," at over four hours, is comparable in length to Wagner's operas.

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« Reply #17 on: July 26, 2007, 09:38:08 pm »



Controversies
Wagner's operas, writings, his politics, beliefs and unorthodox lifestyle made him a controversial figure during his lifetime. In September 1876 Karl Marx complained in a letter to his daughter Jenny: "Wherever one goes these days one is pestered with the question: what do you think of Wagner?" Following Wagner's death, the debate about his ideas and their interpretation, particularly in Germany during the 20th Century, continued to make him politically and socially controversial in a way that other great composers are not. Much heat is generated by Wagner's comments on Jews, which continue to influence the way that his works are regarded, and by the essays he wrote on the nature of race from 1850 onwards, and their putative influence on the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler.

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« Reply #18 on: July 26, 2007, 09:40:24 pm »



Antisemitism

Prior to 1850 there is little evidence that Wagner held any strong views on Jews. However, in that year he published "Das Judenthum in der Musik" (originally translated as "Judaism in Music," by which name it is still known, but better rendered as "Jewishness in Music") under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The essay began as an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner's contemporaries (and rivals) Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture. Wagner wrote that the German people were repelled by Jews due to their alien appearance and behavior: "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." He argued that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial, because they had no connection to the genuine spirit of the German people.

The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner repeated similar views in several later articles, such as "What is German?" (1878), and subsequent memoirs of him often recorded his derogatory comments on Jews. Although many have argued that he suggested only that Jews should suppress their Jewish-ness, others have interpreted sections of his writing literally, to mean wiping out or burying the Jewish people.

Some biographers have suggested that antisemitic stereotypes also appear in his operas. The characters of Mime in the Ring, Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, and Klingsor in Parsifal are thought to be Jewish stereotypes, though they are not explicitly identified as such in the libretto. These claims are disputed. In all of Wagner's many writings about his works, there is no mention of an intention to caricature Jews in his operas; nor does any such notion appear in the diaries written by Cosima Wagner, which record his views on a daily basis over a period of 8 years.

Despite his disparaging views concerning Jews, Wagner continued to have Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters throughout his life.
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« Reply #19 on: July 26, 2007, 09:43:08 pm »



Racism & Nazi appropriation

Some biographers have asserted that Wagner in his final years came to believe in the racist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau, and that this is reflected in the opera Parsifal. Wagner showed no significant interest in Gobineau until 1880, when he read Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. However, Wagner had completed the libretto for Parsifal by 1877, and the original drafts of the story date back to 1857.

Despite this lack of chronology, it is sometimes claimed that Parsifal is a racist opera which reflects Gobineau's influence. Wagner's own writings show that he was very interested in Gobineau's idea that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior" and "inferior" races. However, he does not seem to have subscribed to Gobineau's belief in the superiority of the supposed Germanic or "Nordic" race.

Wagner's writings on race would probably be considered unimportant were it not for the influence of his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who expanded on Wagner and Gobineau's ideas in his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a work proclaiming the superiority of Aryan races which later became required reading for members of the Nazi party.

Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner's music, and used it to extol his heroic mythology of the German nation. There continues to be debate about the extent to which Wagner's views might have influenced the Nazis. As with the works of Nietzsche, the Nazis used those parts of Wagner's thought which were useful for propaganda and ignored or suppressed the rest. For example Joseph Goebbels banned Parsifal in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, due to the perceived pacifistic overtones of the opera. Although Hitler himself was obsessed by "the Master" many in the Nazi hierarchy were not, and, according to the historian Richard Carr, most Nazis deeply resented the prospect of attending these lengthy epics at Hitler's insistence.

As a consequence of this appropriation by Nazi propaganda, Wagner's operas have never been staged in the modern state of Israel. Although his works are broadcast on Israeli government-owned radio and television stations, attempts to stage public performances in Israel have been halted by protests, including protests from Holocaust survivors
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« Reply #20 on: July 26, 2007, 09:46:05 pm »



Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, Venice, where Wagner died.
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« Reply #21 on: July 26, 2007, 09:47:28 pm »



the memorial 1904
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« Reply #22 on: July 26, 2007, 09:49:18 pm »

Wagner controversies

The German composer Richard Wagner was a controversial figure during his lifetime, and has continued to be so after his death. Even today he is associated in the minds of many with Nazism and his operas are thought to extol the virtues of Aryan supermen. The writer and Wagner scholar Bryan Magee has written:

"I sometimes think there are two Wagners in our culture, almost unrecognizably different from one another: the Wagner possessed by those who know his work, and the Wagner imagined by those who know him only by name and reputation."

Most of these perceptions arise from Wagner's published opinions on a number of topics. Wagner was a voluminous writer and published essays and pamphlets on a wide range of subjects throughout his life. (Many of Wagner's writings are available online in English translations at The Wagner Library.) While his music-dramas have an immediate appeal, Wagner's writing style is verbose, unclear and turgid, which has greatly added to the confusion about his opinions.

Several of his writings have achieved some notoriety, in particular his essay Judaism in Music ("Das Judenthum in der Musik"), a critical view on the influence of Jews in German culture and society at that time. His attitudes to the unification of Germany were complex: he disliked the first German Chancellor Bismarck, however he often expressed his belief that German Art should be extolled and protected, most notably in Hans Sachs' final oration in his opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. The essays he wrote in his final years were also controversial, with many readers perceiving them to employ an endorsement of racist, Aryan beliefs.

Wagner was also promoted during the Nazi era as one of Adolf Hitler's favourite composers, and Hitler is alleged to have said that "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." [3] Historical perception of Wagner has been tainted with this association ever since, and there is debate over how Wagner's writings and operas might have influenced the creation of Nazi Germany. Finally there is controversy over Wagner's paternity. It is suggested that he was the son of Ludwig Geyer, rather than Carl Friedrich Wagner and some of his biographers have suggested that Wagner himself believed that Geyer was Jewish.

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« Reply #23 on: July 26, 2007, 09:49:59 pm »

Paternity

Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813, the ninth child of Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service and Johanna Rosine Wagner[4]. Wagner's father died of typhus six months after Richard's birth, by which time Wagner's mother was living with the actor and playwright Ludwig Geyer in the Bruehl, at that time the Jewish quarter of Leipzig. Johanna and Geyer married in August 1814, and for the first 14 years of his life, Wagner was known as Wilhelm Richard Geyer. Wagner in his later years discovered letters from Geyer to his mother which led him to suspect that Geyer was in fact his biological father, and furthermore speculated that Geyer was Jewish. [5][6][7] The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of Wagner's closest acolytes, and proof-read Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben. It may have been this closeness that led Nietzsche to claim in his 1888 book Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner) that Wagner's father was Geyer, and to make the pun that "Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein Adler" (A vulture is almost an eagle) —Geyer also being the German word for a vulture and Adler being a very common Jewish surname. Despite these conjectures on the part of Wagner and Nietzsche, there is no evidence that Geyer was Jewish, and the question of Wagner's paternity is unlikely to be settled without DNA evidence.

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« Reply #24 on: July 26, 2007, 09:51:06 pm »

Antisemitism

Prior to 1850 there is no record of Wagner expressing any particular antisemitic sentiment. Indeed his first sweetheart was a Jewish girl, Leah David. However as he struggled to develop his career he began to resent the success of Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer and blamed them for his lack of success, particularly after his stay in Paris in 1840 - 1841 when he was impoverished and reduced to music copy-editing. His first and most controversial essay on the subject was "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Jewishness in Music"), originally published under the pen-name "K. Freigedank" ("K. Freethought") in 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. In a previous issue Theodor Uhlig had attacked the success in Paris of Meyerbeer's Le prophete, and Wagner's essay expanded this to an attack on "Jewry" in all German art. The essay purported to explain popular dislike of Jewish composers, such as Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, who is not mentioned by name but is clearly a target. Wagner wrote that the German people were repelled by Jews due to their "alien" appearance and behaviour: "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." He argued that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial, because they had no connection to the genuine spirit of the German people.

In the conclusion to the essay, he wrote of the Jews that "only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus — going under!" Although this has been taken to mean actual physical annihilation, in the context of the essay it seems to refer only to the eradication of Jewish separateness and traditions. Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of Ludwig Börne by abandoning Judaism. In this way Jews will take part in "this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment; then are we one and un-dissevered!"[10] Wagner was therefore calling for the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German culture and society - although there can be little doubt, from the words he uses in the essay, that this call was prompted at least as much by anti-semitism as by a desire for social amelioration. (In the very first publication, the word here translated as 'self-annulment' was represented by the phrase 'self-annihilating, bloody struggle').[11] The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagner repeated similar views in several later articles, such as "What is German?" (1878). Wagner's anti-semitism was thus motivated largely by religion and cultural factors, not by race or physical appearance.

Some biographers, such as Theodor Adorno and Robert Gutman[12] have advanced the claim that Wagner's opposition to Jews was not limited to his articles, and that the operas contained such messages. In particular the characters of Mime in the Ring, Klingsor in Parsifal and Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger are supposedly Jewish stereotypes, although none of them are identified as Jews in the libretto. Such claims are disputed. The arguments supporting these purported "hidden messages" are often convoluted, and may be the result of biased over-interpretation. Wagner was not above putting digs and insults to specific individuals into his work, and it was usually obvious when he did. Wagner, over the course of his life, produced a huge amount of written material analyzing every aspect of himself, including his operas and his views on Jews (as well as many other topics); these purported messages are never mentioned.

Despite his published views on Jewishness, Wagner maintained Jewish friends and colleagues throughout his life. One of the most notable of these was Hermann Levi, a practising Jew and son of a Rabbi, whose talent was freely acknowledged by Wagner. Levi's position as Kapellmeister at Munich meant that he was to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, Wagner's last opera. Wagner initially objected to this and was quoted as saying that Levi should be baptized before conducting Parsifal. Levi however held Wagner in adulation, and was asked to be a pallbearer at the composer's funeral.

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« Reply #25 on: July 26, 2007, 09:52:57 pm »

Aryanism

Some biographers have asserted that Wagner in his final years came to believe in the Aryanist philosophy of Arthur de Gobineau. However the influence of Gobineau on Wagner's thought is debated. Wagner was first introduced to Gobineau in person in Rome in November of 1876. The two did not cross paths again until 1880, well after Wagner had completed the libretto for Parsifal, the opera most often accused of containing racist ideology. Although Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races was written 25 years earlier, it seems that Wagner did not read it until October 1880. There is evidence to suggest that Wagner was very interested in Gobineau's idea that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between "superior" and "inferior" races. However, he does not seem to have subscribed to any belief in the superiority of the supposed Germanic or "Nordic" race.

Wagner's conversations with Gobineau during the philosopher's 5-week stay at Wahnfried in 1881 were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner's diary entry for June 3rd recounts one exchange in which Wagner "positively exploded in favour of Christianity as compared to racial theory." Gobineau also believed, unlike Wagner, that the Irish (whom he considered a "degenerate" race) should be ruled by the English (a Nordic race), and that in order to have musical ability, one must have black ancestry.

Wagner subsequently wrote three essays in response to Gobineau's ideas: "Introduction to a Work of Count Gobineau", "Know Thyself", and "Heroism and Christianity" (all 1881). The "Introduction" is a short piece written for the "Bayreuth Blätter" in which Wagner praises the Count's book:

"We asked Count Gobineau, returned from weary, knowledge-laden wanderings among far distant lands and peoples, what he thought of the present aspect of the world; to-day we give his answer to our readers. He, too, had peered into an Inner: he proved the blood in modern manhood's veins, and found it tainted past all healing."
In "Know Thyself" Wagner deals with the German people, whom Gobineau believes are the "superior" Aryan race. Wagner rejects the notion that the Germans are a race at all, and further proposes that we should look past the notion of race to focus on the human qualities ("das Reinmenschliche") common to all of us. In "Heroism and Christianity", Wagner's proposes that Christianity could function to provide a moral harmonization of all races, and that it could be a unifying force in the world preferable to the physical unification of races by miscegenation:

"Whilst yellow races have viewed themselves as sprung from monkeys, the white traced back their origin to gods, and deemed themselves marked out for rulership. It has been made quite clear that we should have no History of Man at all, had there been no movements, creations and achievements of the white men; and we may fitly take world-history as the consequence of these white men mixing with the black and yellow, and bringing them in so far into history as that mixture altered them and made them less unlike the white. Incomparably fewer in individual numbers than the lower races, the ruin of the white races may be referred to their having been obliged to mix with them; whereby, as remarked already, they suffered more from the loss of their purity than the others could gain by the ennobling of their blood...f the noblest race's rulership and exploitation of the lower races, quite justified in a natural sense, has founded a sheer immoral system throughout the world, any equalising of them all by flat commixture decidedly would not conduct to an aesthetic state of things. To us Equality is only thinkable as based upon a universal moral concord, such as we can but deem true Christianity elect to bring about."
Gobineau stayed at Wahnfried again during May 1882, but did not engage in such extensive or heated debate with Wagner as on the previous occasion, as Wagner was largely occupied by the preparations for the premiere of Parsifal. Wagner's concerns over miscegenation occupied him until the very end of his life, and he was in the process of writing another essay, "On the Womanly in the Human Race" (1883), at the time of his death. The work discusses the role of marriage in the creation of races:

"it is certain that the noblest white race is monogamic at its first appearance in saga and history, but marches toward its downfall through polygamy with the races which it conquers."
Wagner's writings on race would probably be considered unimportant were it not for the influence of his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who expanded on Wagner and Gobineau's ideas in his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a racist work extolling the Aryan ideal which later strongly influenced Adolf Hitler's ideas on race.

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« Reply #26 on: July 26, 2007, 09:58:29 pm »

Nazi appropriation

About the time of Wagner's death, European nationalist movements were losing the Romantic, idealistic egalitarianism of 1848, and acquiring tints of militarism and aggression, due in no small part to Bismarck's takeover and unification of Germany in 1871. After Wagner's death in 1883, Bayreuth increasingly became a focus for German nationalists attracted by the mythos of the operas, who came to be known as the Bayreuth circle. This group was endorsed by Cosima Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was considerably less complex and more virulent than Richard's. One of the circle was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the author of a number of 'philosophic' tracts which later became required Nazi reading. Chamberlain married Wagner's daughter, Eva. After the deaths of Cosima and Siegfried Wagner in 1930, the operation of the Festival fell to Siegfried's widow, English-born Winifred, who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a fanatical student and admirer of Wagner's ideology and music, and sought to incorporate it into his heroic mythology of the German nation (a nation that had no formal identity prior to 1871). Hitler held many of Wagner's original scores in his Berlin bunker during World War II, despite the pleadings of Wieland Wagner to have these important documents put in his care; the scores perished with Hitler in the final days of the war.

Many scholars have argued that Wagner's views, particularly his anti-Semitism and purported Aryan-Germanic racism, influenced the Nazis. These claims are disputed. Historian Richard J. Evans suggests there is no evidence that Hitler even read any of Wagner's writings and further argues that Wagner's works do not inherently support Nazi notions of heroism. For example, Siegfried, the ostensible "hero" of the Ring cycle, may appear (and often does so in modern productions) a shallow and unappealing lout—although this is certainly not how Wagner himself conceived him; the opera's sympathies seem to lie instead with the world-weary womaniser Wotan. Many aspects of Wagner's personal philosophy would certainly have been unappealing to Nazis, such as his quietist mysticism and support for Jewish assimilation. For example, Josef Goebbels the Nazi propaganda minister banned Parsifal in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, due to the perceived pacifistic overtones of the opera.

For the most part, the Nazi fascination with Wagner was limited to Hitler, sometimes to the dismay of other high-ranking Nazi officials, including Goebbels. In 1933, for instance, Hitler ordered that each Nuremberg Rally open with a performance of the Meistersinger overture, and he even issued one thousand free tickets to Nazi functionaries. When Hitler entered the theater, however, he discovered that it was almost empty. The following year, those functionaries were ordered to attend, but they could be seen dozing off during the performance, so that in 1935, Hitler conceded and released the tickets to the public.

In general, while Wagner's music was often performed during the Third Reich, his popularity actually declined in favor of Italian composers such as Verdi and Puccini. By the 1938-1939 season, Wagner had only one opera in the list of fifteen most popular operas of the season, with the list headed by Italian composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.

Nevertheless, Wagner's operas have never been staged in the modern state of Israel, and the few instrumental performances that have occurred have provoked much controversy. Although his works are commonly broadcast on government-owned radio and television stations, attempts at staging public performances have been halted by protests, which have included protests from Holocaust survivors. For instance, after Daniel Barenboim conducted the Siegfried Idyll as an encore at the 2001 Israel Festival, a parliamentary committee urged a boycott of the conductor, and an initially scheduled performance of Die Walküre had to be withdrawn. On another occasion, Zubin Mehta played Wagner in Israel in spite of walkouts and jeers from the audience. One of the many ironies reflecting the complexities of Wagner and the responses his music provokes is that, like many German-speaking Jews of the pre-Hitler epoch, Theodore Herzl, a founder of modern Zionism, was an avid admirer of Wagner's work.

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« Reply #27 on: July 26, 2007, 09:59:36 pm »



the revealing of the memorial 1903, painting by Anton von Werner (1908)
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« Reply #28 on: July 26, 2007, 10:01:19 pm »



Tristan chord from Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan and Isolde"



orchestral version of Tristan chord



Tristan and Isolde - Prelude

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner
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« Reply #29 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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