Klarinet Archive - Posting 000093.txt from 2007/05

From: "Kelly J. White" <cealleach@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Wagner
Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 21:26:38 -0400

Dan,

THank you for your e-mail. What you discuss is interesting and I
will look for Paul Rose's book so I can read it.

- Kelly

On May 12, 2007, at 10:02 AM, dnleeson wrote:

> -----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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