Klarinet Archive - Posting 000379.txt from 2004/01

From: Dan Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Wagner
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:39:55 -0500

Joseph Wakeling wrote:

> Dan Leeson wrote:
>
> << I became aware of the racist contents of a number of his operas (The Ring
> cycle, Meistersinger, Flying Dutchman, and Parsifal, for example), that I
> stopped playing and even listening to Wagner's music. >>
>
> That's an interesting comment. I am not really familiar with Wagner's music
> but I came across this debate recently in reading the collected
> conversations of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Barenboim was pretty
> emphatic that if you just take the text of the operas, as they are, they are
> not racist or anti-semitic, and that it's our interpretation (e.g. presuming
> that certain characters are meant to be Jewish) that makes them so. Said
> was less convinced by this, pointing out that certain characters fit into
> the mould of various racist stereotypes of the time even if they weren't
> explicitly identified as such. But of course in modern times those
> stereotypes don't necessarily apply and we are not obliged to interpret them
> in such a way.
>
> It seems to me that this fits quite nicely into the point Tony Pay has
> raised on several occasions about the difference in attitude between the
> question "What is the text?" and "What is the composer's intention?"
>
> -- Joe
>

You are quite correct in pointing out that nothing in the text of
Wagner's operas can be shown to be explicitly racist. The matter is
much more subtle than that, and Wagner was too intelligent to use his
operas as political tracts.

What IS there are medieval stereotypes that he believed applied even to
his times, and that he was perfectly prepared to resucitate so as to
bring these evil ideas to the attention of 19th century Europe. They
deal with physical elements of the human body, which Wagner was conviced
were borne by hateful, murderous, physically and intellectually deformed
people. The objects deal with feet, sight, speech, smell, and the
mixing of races (whatever races are - Maybe Wagner knew. I don't).

In speaking of the composer's intentions, I find them so unmistakably
horrid that I have, as I indicated, completely moved away from the man's
music. I don't ask anyone else to do this. That is simply how I handle
racism at Wagner's level. Every must move to the sound of their own
drummer.

Perhaps an analogy might help explain the situation. In the 1800s,
white men, painted in blackface, demonstrated the most disgusting
qualities of Afro-Americans that they could display. Their songs, dress,
style of speech, and depictions were designed to show that blacks were
so lazy and stupid, that they were almost a different species, and
certainly not decent and human as with America. Thus, it was OK to
behave in a fundamentally hateful way towards blacks. There were hardly
any (if any) references to the alleged desire on the part of black men
to possess white women, for to do so would have really inflamed the
audience's passion in a way that was unnecessary and counterproductive.
But such think was an outcome of the basic idea that blacks were savages.

Today one never sees such shows. It would be inconceivable to have a
public display of such vulgar bigotry.

Well, and very roughly, that's what certain Wagner operas contain, but
at a level so subtle that it requires a reexamination of medieval ideas
on race in order to understand exactly what Wagner was saying.

Dan Leeson >
leeson0@-----.net

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org