I am a great admirer of the late Amos Elon's history of German anti-Semitism The Pity of it All (2002). One of the most important documents prior to 1933 is Richard Wagner's 1850 essay The Jews in Music, in which he trashes the music of Felix Mendelssohn and the poetry of Heinrich Heine. I've found Das Judenthm in der Musik virtually unreadable, but I returned to it after reading an excerpt of Norman Lebrecht's new book Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847-1947. Lebrecht points out that at his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn had rock star status in Germany:
"His death, at thirty-eight years old, reminds people of Mozart’s at a similar age. Thousands escort his coffin to the railway station and more follow the procession through the streets of Berlin, singing hymns that Mendelssohn composed. Crowned heads send condolences. Queen Victoria is “horrified, astounded and distressed.” Musicians are dumbstruck. To Joachim, “it seemed as if the world had ceased.” Robert Schumann regards him as “the highest authority” in German music. His death briefly halts Germany’s ascent as a musical power. It is a fermata in the history of Western music, an end point."
Shortly after this, Richard Wagner felt compelled (out of jealousy?) to purge German music (and indeed, all German arts) from Jewish influence:
"In exile, [Wagner] writes an article for a small magazine, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, under the pseudonym “K. Freigedank” (the freethinker). Titled “Jewishness in Music,” it attacks Felix Mendelssohn as a “foreign element” that must be expunged from German music. There is, writes Wagner, “an unconscious feeling which proclaims itself among the people as a rooted dislike of the Jewish nature . . . We always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them . . . involuntary repellence.”
The Jew, says Wagner, “speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation but he speaks it always as an alien.” Mendelssohn “showed us that a Jew can possess a wealth of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture, the most exalted and gentle sense of honour, without ever being able to arouse in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect that we expect from music.” If Mendelssohn, the most gifted of Jews, was no more than a pale imitator, it stands to reason—to Wagner’s reason—that no Jew can ever create an original work."
As Amos Elon points out, Wagner's loathing of Jews didn't stop Jews from flocking to Wagner's operas. Nor did it prevent the composer from accepting funding for his concert hall in Bayreuth from the Jewish mathematician and art patron Alfred Pringsheim. Pringsheim's daughter Katia later married Thomas Mann - who was forced to flee Germany with his Jewish wife and his "halb-jüdische" children.
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