Klarinet Archive - Posting 000443.txt from 1998/12

From: Lisa Clayton <lisakc@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Wagner's Ring again
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 20:33:50 -0500

At 12:28 PM 12.07.98 +0000, you wrote:
>Dear Lisa et al.:
>it is perfectly possib;e to listen to Wagner and/or see his works staged
>without being conscious of his anti-Semitism. I think this is a reasonable
>justification for so doing - providing his music is actually to your
>taste.
>Roger Shilcock

This is very true, but say you were reading "Gunga Din" by Rudyard Kipling
and you came upon these lines:

"An' for all 'is dirty 'ide
'E was white, clear white, inside"

If you had no idea what British imperialism meant to the southeast Asian
peoples, and enjoyed the poem but was unaware of Kipling's politics, you
could easily interpret this to mean that the waterboy Gunga Din was rather
filthy, but he had a pure soul.

More Kipling:

"Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child."

It becomes fairly clear at this point what Kipling thinks of non-whites:
half-devils and half-children. And to be somewhat fair to Kipling, the the
poem talks about the British Empire's responsibility to these countries.
Yet, at no point in this poem does Kipling ever cite the humanity of these
peoples in the context of their own culture. In this light, "Gunga Din"
takes on a new, *possibly* truer interpretation: the waterboy's skin is
dark (dirty hide), but his soul is white. At the time that may have been
considered high praise, but the historical cost of that kind of attitude
has been racism, where dark-skinned people are considered inferior to
light-skinned people.

Wagner isn't that much different. He wrote explicitly anti-Semitic tracts,
so we definitely know about his politics. And, like Kipling, he wasn't
really an extremist in his time. And, as Dan has pointed out, he used
anti-Semitic stereotypes in his operas that would have been recognized by
the audiences of the time. It's an interesting quirk of history that this
type of antisemitism has become so unfamiliar to us that we don't easily
recognize it, whereas when we read Kipling's poetry his racism is very
apparent.

So yes, you can enjoy both _Gotterdammerung_ and "Gunga Din" without
understanding the history behind them. However, that understanding does
add more meaning to both works.

Lisa Clayton
lisakc@-----.com

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