Wagner and Anti-Semitism

A symposium at the Hammer Museum on Feb. 9, 2010 at 7:00 

Note:  to see the video of the symposium, please navigate to:  http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/252351 

On Feb. 9 at 7:00 the Hammer Museum in Westwood will sponsor a lively evening of conversation on the question of Wagner and anti-Semitism.  In this panel, moderated by Kenneth Reinhard (Departments of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA) three prominent scholars of Wagner will present their views on these questions.  Leon Botstein is the President of Bard College and the  music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.  He is the Founder of the annual Bard Music Festival, which focuses on one composer each summer for an intensive series of concerts, lectures, and panel discussions; last year’s festival was entitled “Richard Wagner and His World.”  David J. Levin is a Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the Department of Germanic Studies, and part of the Committee on Cinema & Media Studies and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies; he is the Executive Editor of Opera Quarterly and the author of many articles, and the books Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal and Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky.  Marc Weiner is a Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Germanic Studies; he is the author of many essays on German culture and opera, and the books Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination and Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative.   

Some of the questions that will be addressed in this conversations include the following: 

There is no question that Wagner resented the success of Jewish composers in Paris such as Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, when his own music was receiving much less attention, and that he expressed viciously anti-Semitic views about what he saw as their decadent influence on modern music in his writings, notoriously in his essay “Jewishness in Music” (1850; 1869).  But the question of whether his anti-Semitism plays a role in his operas is much less clear, and has been further muddied by the fact that, many years after Wagner’s death, Adolph Hitler himself championed Wagner’s music, and was a close friend of the Wagner family. But what did Wagner actually write about the Jews?  His infamous essay on “Jewishness in Music” is generally only read in English in a very poor early 20^th century translation; there is in fact a much better one available by Stewart Spencer: what is the effect of reading the more accurate translation?  Does it make Wagner seem more or less anti-semitic?  What does Wagner really say in this essay – it’s easy to find nasty bits to take out of context, but what is his argument?   

Furthermore, how can productions of Wagner’s operas reflect, inflect, or deflect the question of anti-semitism in his works?  What is the responsibility of the modern dramaturge or director?  To be “faithful” to the text (which often means simply continuing traditional interpretations, whether or not they are Wagner’s apparent intentions) or to reinterpret the works in ways that bring out perhaps neglected or latent textual meanings, not for the sake of sanitizing Wagner, but perhaps to criticize him, or to retrieve meanings that are often ignored or simplified.  How does this work in terms of the anti-semitic characters or moments of operas such as the Ring, Parsifal, or Meistersinger?  How have specific modern productions (such as the famous Boulez production of the Ring in the 70s or the current Bayreuth production of Meistersinger) grappled with these issues?  

Finally, can one venture to speculate about whether Wagner has indeed been, in certain ways, “good for the Jews”?  That is, how have Jewish musicians, writers, and artists appropriated and deployed Wagner’s radical innovations for their own purposes, leading to otherwise unavailable transformations?  (e.g., Schoenberg, as well as the various “Recovered Voices” composers – Schreker, Zemlinsky, Ullmann, Schulhoff, etc. – many of whom adored Wagner and composed very much in his wake, and used him to create “Jewish” works like Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron).  Is there such a thing as a Jewish attraction to Wagner?  And if so, how might we account for it?  Might we even go so far as to suggest that there is something “Jewish” about his music, despite his own evident anti-semitism?