Until the final scene, the Hamburg State Opera’s November 2002 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg had proceeded without comment. Everyone was primed to applaud the hymn to “holy German art” that brings Richard Wagner’s four-hour pageant to a climax. Then came the bombshell. Midway through Hans Sachs’s monologue about honouring German masters over “foreign vanities”, the music came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly one of the mastersingers started speaking: “Have you actually thought about what you are singing?” he asked. No one had experienced anything like it in an opera house. There followed a lively stage discussion - some of it shouted down by outraged members of the audience - about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the context of 19th and 20th century German nationalism.
For the many Wagnerites who had paid good money to see the show, such an interruption was inexcusable. Followers of Wagner regard his music as sacred. They don’t like their idol being dragged into the modern world. For others, the Hamburg production - which is still hotly debated - went to the heart of what Wagner means today. Peter Konwitschny’s staging had a simple but provocative message: given all we know about Wagner’s ideology and the way it guided Hitler to the Final Solution, can we really allow Hans Sachs’s call for racial purity to pass without comment?
The Hamburg Meistersinger was one of the most radical statements ever made about Wagner in a stage production, but it was a small comment amid the wealth of research and reappraisal that has been going on in academic circles for the past three decades. And the deeper people dig into Wagner’s ideology, the more it stinks. It not only reveals the extent of his influence on the Nazis, it also raises questions about how far Wagner’s anti-Semitism permeates his works.
Wagner has always been controversial. During his lifetime he horrified as many as he attracted - thanks to his unbridled egoism, his habit of running up huge debts wherever he went, his free-and-easy way with married women and his political activism, which led to his exile from Germany after the failed 1848 revolution in Dresden.
Wagner’s music dramas have the same divisive effect. More than a century ago Mark Twain complained of “wonderful moments and horrible half-hours”. It’s not just the inordinate length that people object to; it’s the Teutonic heaviness, the extreme emotionality, the element of ritual. To appreciate Wagner you have to be willing to enter into the mystique of his dramas, which involves studying the text and getting to grips with its symbolism. If you don’t, you spend hours listening to obscure narratives, waiting for the big tunes and sudden advances, which are few and far between.
But for every person who is repelled, another is hypnotised. You don’t have to be well versed in classical music to enjoy Wagner. Think of the millions who thrilled to “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. All you need is an ability to discern simple melodies and bugle calls. Wagner keeps bringing them back in different guises, sustained by a great deal of harmonic tension over long stretches, before a slow resolution takes place. He had a unique concept of Gesamtkunstwerk - the complete artwork involving music, text, dance and scenery, all of which he devised himself. Wagner was a visionary, a vital link between Romanticism and the modern world.
People who love Wagner - and there are hundreds of Wagner societies around the world - do so in a completely different way to those who love Mozart. It’s almost a sickness: there is something in his make-up that compels idolatry. Like his texts, his music is full of dark desires and impulses, often of a sexual nature, touching parts of our subconscious we may not be fully aware of and may not even like. Played out on stage, his dramas provide a form of release, a way of simultaneously expressing and sublimating those desires.
Most Wagnerites see the man and his art as two separate entities. The last thing they want is to have to come to terms with all the problematic, unsavoury things in Wagner’s works that are rooted in his personality and psychology. That’s why productions such as Hamburg’s Meistersinger, which interpret Wagner through the looking glass of his life and his impact on 20th century German history, provoke so much outrage.
In the English-speaking world such interpretations are taboo: we never experienced the trauma of coming to terms with a Nazi past, and we take a less intellectual view of opera than the Germans. Until the 1970s they were also taboo in Germany - and still are at Bayreuth, the shrine founded by the composer solely for the performance of his works. Most Germans of the postwar era knew that Hitler loved Wagner’s music and was a habitue of Bayreuth, where swastikas bedecked the stage during the Third Reich; but the ideological link between Wagner and Nazism was not mentioned in polite society.
Today that link is being openly explored, not least in books such as Joachim Kohler’s Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple. Germans have reached the point where they feel it is not only possible to discuss it, but essential to do so if the true nature of the man and his work is to be understood.
Wagner’s writings on Jews have long been in the public domain. In his essay Jewishness in Music (1850) he argues that “The Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but he always speaks it as a foreigner... The Jew can only imitate, he can create neither poem nor work of art.” In What is German? (1865) Wagner complains of “this invasion of German essence by an utterly alien element” - by which he clearly means the Jews.
As an ambitious but penniless young composer Wagner had to borrow money from Jews. He resented the fact that inferior Jewish composers enjoyed huge success while he struggled to gain a foothold. Anti-Semitism was rife in 18th and 19th century Germany - there are traces of it in Bach, Goethe and the Grimm brothers. But no controversy attaches to them, because they did not turn their views into an ideology. Nor were they idolised by the Fuhrer.
Contrary to what diehard Wagnerites claim, Nazi ideology was not a distortion of Wagner’s ideas. It was an amplification, taken to horrendous conclusions. Wagner’s ideas were in turn a development of an important strand of 19th century German thinking - the concept of Sonderweg, or special calling. Many German writers and philosophers thought they had a mission to reverse the moral and spiritual decay to which they believed humanity was falling victim. Judging by his later “Regeneration” writings (1878-81), Wagner saw interbreeding between races as a prime cause of that decay.
The idea of racial decline, and of German mentality being inherently superior, is integral to everything Wagner stood for. He saw himself as a redeemer, a notion his wife Cosima and her acolytes adopted as their creed. He gave the Aryan saviour-hero a dominant role in his operas. Siegfried is the incarnation of the sun-hero who would set Germany back on the true path - an idea that had existed in German mythology since the Middle Ages. Parsifal has characteristics of an Aryan Jesus. Wagner identified with his saviour-heroes as much as he did with the tortured figures (Wotan, Tannhauser, the Dutchman) that embodied his struggle between the sexual and spiritual.
It doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to see Hitler setting himself on this pedestal - the same Hitler who was given paper by Wagner’s English daughter-in-law to write Mein Kampf, who was welcomed into the arms of the Wagner family at Bayreuth throughout the 1930s, who allowed himself to be portrayed as Lohengrin in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will; the same Hitler who murdered millions of Jews.
How far Wagner allowed his prejudices to spill over directly into his music is open to debate. Just as he claimed to be able to “smell Jewish music” simply by listening to it, critics and academics at the forefront of Wagner scholarship say there are tell-tale signs in his music - the crushed notes and whining that characterise Mime, Alberich and Beckmesser, for example - which 19th century audiences would have recognised as a lingua franca for representing Jews. It’s not hard to see Mime, the dwarf killed by Siegfried, as a caricature of the imitative Jew cited in Wagner’s polemical writings. The same goes for Beckmesser, the defeated suitor in Meistersinger.
It wasn’t Wagner’s fault that the Nazis developed his ideas on racial purity to such a horrendous extreme. And it wouldn’t do today if every production interpreted Wagner in the context of the Third Reich. Wagner’s genius as a creative artist lies every bit as much in the allegorical depth of his dramas, susceptible to any number of interpretations, as in the power of his music. He never made anything explicit: his works deal in symbols, metaphors, ideals and the transcendent.
But it seems pointless to deny that there are pronounced racist elements in Wagner’s ideology, that they formed a subtext in his works, and that they were adopted by the Nazis. Those that deny it usually have too much of an emotional investment in Wagner. They don’t want to admit his works might be tainted.
Call it anti-Semitism, call it political incorrectness - you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist in Wagner. What we need to do is find ways of confronting it. The most interesting Wagner productions today are those, like the Hamburg Meistersinger, that address the difficult ideological issues inherent in the works. That’s why, more than 120 years after his death, Wagner is more contentious than ever.
Andrew Clark is the FT’s chief music critic.
