Klarinet Archive - Posting 000092.txt from 2007/05

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Wagner
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 12:02:08 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Kelly J. White [mailto:cealleach@-----.net]
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 5:22 PM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: Re: [kl] Wagner

I am a lurker how has been reading these emails about Wagner.
Dan,
you mention in your second paragraph that there are 'details and
subleties involved' in Wagner's antisemitism and music. Can you
give
some examples of those? I would be interested in your opinions
and
thoughts on examples of Wagner's antisemitism in his music.

regards,
- Kelly

OK Kelly, I'll give you some examples, but it is ugly and painful
stuff, and I'll limit myself only the issues in "The Ring." What
we are dealing with here is metaphor, and not subtlties of text,
which is why the average listener sees, hears, and finds nothing
hateful in the plot.

It is possible to tell the story of The Ring, but the collection
of characters, plots, and subplots make it difficult to
understand. There are gods, goddesses, giants, gnomes who live
beneath the earth, mermaid-like creatures who inhabit the Rhine
river, mortals, and other roles difficult to categorize.

The Ring is a pagan tale of sorcery and incest that presents an
incomprehensible mythology as a rational philosophy for the
world, but it is strong enough stuff to allow the modern listener
to become drunk in its embrace. Rarely has the art-loving world
been presented with such a deceit as this attempt at a complete
work of art, for it is a tangle of falsehoods and pathetic
arrogance run amok, where trivial opinions are made into pompous
and ponderous utterances, and bankrupt personal pursuits are
elevated to matters of universal significance. Like every other
written utterance of Wagner, The Ring is largely egocentric. But
here it of such vast proportions as to be a stage work in which
Wagner's personal fantasies were transformed into the future of
the German people.

Excluding those few characters who are neutral, the personalities
of the drama fall into two groups having opposite
characteristics. One such group is the "Volk," roughly translated
as "the race" or "the nation," not "the common people." The
other is the "outsider" who differs from the Volk in many
specifics.

Wagner assigns various characteristics to the good Volk, and then
displays the opposite attributes as present in the evil
outsiders. One such characteristic is that the Volk walk in a
poised and confident way while the outsider staggers and
stumbles. This stage device is derived from the medieval
superstition that Jews had goat's feet. In the middle ages, the
billy goat was presented as a symbol of satanic lechery and the
devil's most usual disguise. The Jews, believed to be Satan's
minions, were also accused of having the same attribute. That
the Jew's feet were shod in public was interpreted as using the
cloak of civilization to disguise his corruption. This
acceptance of Jewish deviltry gave rise to the concept that the
Jewish foot could not function at a normal gait; i.e., the Jew
stumbled and staggered. In The Ring, the gnomes walk in this
fashion while the Volk are surefooted (a characteristic also seen
in the stumbling of Beckmesser as contrasted with the graceful
dancing of the townspeople in Master Singers).

In Sander Gilman's The Jew's Body (1991), further significance is
given to the Jew's feet. They became a source of disease and the
pace at which Jews walked was perceived as a sign of their
affliction. The seventeenth century Orientalist, John Schudt,
commented that the crooked feet of the Jews made them physically
inferior and, ultimately, the general belief about the Jew's feet
influenced liberal efforts to include them in the modern state.
This is particularly true with respect to serving in the military
where it was believed that Jews would be worthless as soldiers.
In Austria, for example, weak feet were said to be the main
reason why Jews inducted into the military were subsequently
detached.

Another example of a characteristic with hidden antisemitic
meaning is that of vocal patterns. Wagner's formulation of a
large-scale male and female voice, for example, the "heroic
tenor", is used for the Volk whereas the outsiders sing in
distinguishing non-Volkish ways. The gnomes in The Ring have
high and piercing voices, the same coded message for the
confusion between castration and circumcision as found in Master
Singers, as well as a related claim connecting circumcision with
effeminacy in the Jewish male. Thus the Volk sing with heroic
qualities while the outsider screams in a high-pitched voice.

Going beyond the visual and acoustic, Wagner employs the allegory
of smell to evoke images of character. The outsider is often
accompanied by sulphurous fumes and the noxious stenches that
emanate from them. The central theme of this coded idea is
especially despicable because it is based on the belief of the
"Jewish stench," or "foetor Judaicus."

The assertion that the Jew has a distinctive and unpleasant odor
is a particularly grave accusation, first because of the origin
alleged to be the stench's cause, and second because of the
several ways Jews were said to act in order to eliminate it.
Common belief during the middle ages associated good spirits with
emitting a pleasant fragrance while evil spirits, particularly
Satan and his minions, gave forth an obnoxious stench. For
example, when the coffin of St. Stephen, the martyr, was opened,
his body was said to have filled the air with a sweet fragrance
that insinuated the odor of sanctity. In the case of the Jews,
the stink was said to be a punishment for their crime against
Jesus.

The Jews were said to have two ways to eliminate the smell, one
of which involved murder and cannibalism; i.e., it was necessary
to kill Christian children to obtain their blood for ritual
purposes, one of which occurred during Passover. Jews were said
to consume cups of this blood as an alleviate for the Jewish
stench. The other choice was acceptance of baptism. A direct
quote from the time states that "the water of baptism carried off
the Jews' odor" and that this left them with a fragrance "sweeter
than that of ambrosia floating upon the heads touched by the
sanctified oil."

This disgusting accusation even went beyond those expressed in
the extreme anti-Jewish rhetoric of Martin Luther, causing him to
say, "So long as we use violence and slander, saying that [the
Jews] use the blood of Christians to get rid of their stench ...,
what can we expect of them?"

Another discriminatory feature used by Wagner is that of vision.
Poor eyesight is a class attribute that was never applied to
anyone but Jews. The medieval view was that Jews were blind to
Christianity, that the synagogue was veiled, etc. Statues of a
blindfolded woman, an allegory representing "the synagogue
defeated," still decorate churches in Europe. One stands today
in an alcove on the exterior of Strasbourg's cathedral, and
postcards of it may be purchased at nearby shops. This notion
eventually was concretized as weak eyes which, among other
things, causes squinting and blinking, characteristics found in
the outsider. Wagner carried the idea of good vision of the Volk
to a higher dimension in suggesting that they recognize each
other by glance alone, and they can "see" the outsider as being
different.

Finally, in The Ring, Wagner gives coded messages about the
dangers of race mixing. The character Hagen who has a gnome
father but a Volkish mother, bears no good maternal
characteristics. Instead he retains the depraved character of his
father, namely that of a liar, usurper, and villainous murderer.
But his racially pure counterpart, Siegfried, the product of an
incestuous twin brother-sister relationship, is an idealized hero
who is handsome, honest, virtuous, and brave, and whose most
significant flaw is that he is too trusting of strangers.

It has been argued that every representation of a negative
physical characteristic should not automatically be interpreted
as an antisemitic statement. This is a perceptive and valuable
criticism, but not as applied to these five specifics, none of
which are in the least extreme. As Paul Rose said in Wagner:
Race and Revolution, "If Wagner, with the supreme artist's
infallible intuition, never intruded his racialist theories into
his works of art, this does not mean that the art is free of
racist content. It simply means that Wagner was too subtle an
artist to reduce his operas to the level of political tracts."

There's a lot more, but Paul Rose's book is a valuable one.

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

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