AufsĂ€tze zum Schwerpunkt âNo One Can Serve Our Cause Better Than Youâ
Wagnerâs Jewish Collaborators After 1869
Hilan Warshaw
The plethora of Jewish assistants and devotees surrounding Richard Wagner has long been a subject of special interest. Wagner himself frequently remarked on the phenomenon; most often, he found it expedient to treat the topic either with affected surprise or indignation. Cosima Wagner reports in her diary entry for January 13, 1879: âRichard and I discuss the curious attachment individual Jews have for him; he says Wahnfried will soon turn into a synagogue!â1
As Wagner was well aware, it was apparently paradoxical for the author of Judaism in Music to enjoy longstanding collaborations with such Jewish associates as Carl Tausig, Hermann Levi, Joseph Rubinstein, Angelo Neumann, and Heinrich Porges. Beginning in Wagnerâs own lifetime, commentary on this phenomenon has often followed one of two distinct approaches. The first approach argues that for Wagner, the Jewishness of these individuals was a matter of relative insignificance, trumped by their value as collaborators, and Wagnerâs personal affection for them. This reading was first advanced by Wagnerian apologists such as Julius Lang (who is further discussed below), and it has been reiterated by biographers from Curt von Westernhagen to Michael Tanner and Milton Brener. In the second, more critical interpretation, Wagnerâs relationships with his Jewish associates were marked by exploitation and even cruelty; far from indicating any lapse or inconsistency in his anti-Semitism, their presence at Wahnfried was tolerated only insofar as Wagner was dependent on their efforts on his behalf. Proponents of this view have included Robert W. Gutman, Peter Gay, Paul Lawrence Rose, and Hartmut Zelinsky.2
As different as these two camps often are in their tone and underlying premises, they share a basic assumption: that Wagner maintained these relationships despite his colleaguesâ Jewishness, and his own well-known attitudes about the Jews. The chief difference between the two readings, then, is one of perception: whether Wagnerâs ability to overlook an individualâs Jewishness when it suited him is a sign of broad-mindedness belying his anti-Semitic pronouncements, or rather of opportunism and hypocrisy.
In this essay, I will argue for a third approach, which is also suggested in the course of my documentary film about the topic: namely, that after the republication of Judaism in Music in January 1869, Wagner associated with his Jewish colleagues not in spite of their Jewishness but, in large part, because of it. In other words, Richard and Cosima Wagner felt that their associations with Tausig, Levi, Rubinstein and others were practically and artistically advantageous, for reasons that were specifically attributable to their reactions to the republished essay.
The fact that Wagner had Jewish colleagues and adherents should not, in itself, be surprising. As David Conway, Leon Botstein and others have rigorously documented, 19th-century Jews were historically disposed to be deeply invested in the musical life of their time, whether the music was Wagnerian or not. In the so-called âWar of the Romanticsâ between the Wagnerian/Lisztian and Brahmsian schools of composition, Brahms as well as Wagner was surrounded by numerous Jewish proponents and champions.3 It is primarily Wagnerâs well-documented anti-Semitism that has caused his relationships with Jews to seem anomalous, then as now. And yet there is something qualitatively different here. Unlike for Brahms, a colleagueâs Jewishness was almost never simply a personal detail for Wagner. It was a deeply relevant, often crucial, aspect of their relationship, one that Wagner deliberately drew on for maximum advantage to himself and his artistic enterprise.
As I have mentioned, I am speaking chiefly of the period from the republication of Judaism in Music in 1869 to Wagnerâs death in 1883. For most of his life, until he republished the essay at age 55, Wagner was indeed capable of friendships with Jews in which their Jewishness was not a central factor. In the 1850 and â60s, Wagnerâs correspondence with and about Carl Tausig and Heinrich Porges demonstrates no concern with the young mensâ religion; he attributes none of his personal impressions of them, either positive or negative, to their Jewish origin. Their Jewishness goes similarly unmentioned in the text of Mein Leben. After the essay was republished, however, a remarkable change took place: Wagnerâs Jewish friends were now obsessively evaluated in light of their Jewishness â including Tausig and Porges, as well as most new Jewish acquaintances that Wagner made after this time.
Several factors had doubtless contributed to this elevation of Jewishness into a cardinal obsession. For one thing, Wagner was now living with the equally anti-Semitic Cosima. The Jewsâ political status was also changing: in 1869, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck granted Jews full civil rights in all territories controlled by Prussia, a move which Wagner greatly resented. Most important, the republication of Wagnerâs essay itself ineradicably changed Wagnerâs personal relationships with Jews. Unlike its first pseudonymous appearance in 1850, Judaism in Music had now appeared under Wagnerâs own name, expanded with a warlike addendum that considerably exceeded the inflammatory tone of the original work. From now on, no Jew who encountered Wagner could be ignorant of the sentiments he had signed his name to. My purpose here is to examine the ramifications of this new situation for Wagner as he continued to work and socialize with Jews for the remainder of his life.
II.
Wagner was surrounded by young male acolytes for much of his career, both Jewish and not, many of whom were invited to share his home. In many ways, the outlines of such relationships proved to be quite consistent, regardless of young manâs religion: these young admirers provided Wagner with intellectual stimulation and entertainment, as well as a corps of motivated and gifted assistants. With the Jewish disciples after 1869, however, there are noticeable and persistent differences in how the Wagners describe them, as opposed to their non-Jewish counterparts â telltale signs of a fundamental difference in kind.
The most noticeable of them may be the word âtouching.â As evidenced by Cosima Wagnerâs diaries, Wagner and Cosima found their young Jewish friends emotionally moving in a particular way that was unique to them. On July 2, 1878, we hear that Hermann Levi âtouches Richard by saying that, as a Jew, he is a walking anachronism.â [emphasis in the original] On August 1, âA visit from the conductor Levi, by no means unpleasant, and as Richard says, in his Jewish way he is very touching.â In 1879, again: âIn the evening Parsifal ⊠While [Joseph] Rubinstein is playing, even singing quietly, and Levi listening with great emotion, Richard says softly to me, âWhat touching figures they are!â (April 10, 1879)
While this characteristic was most often ascribed to young Jewish musical associates, it was sometimes extended to the much larger network of Wagnerâs Jewish donors and admirers. About Bernard Löser, a donor introduced to Wagner by Carl Tausig, we hear the following: âRichard at the same time goes with Tausig to seek out âthe touching Jewâ Löser, orders cigars for him, and gives him his pamphlets in gratitude.â4 (May 7, 1871)
As the first passage quoted above indicates, these Jews were âtouchingâ because they recognized and suffered from the alleged curse of their Jewishness: the notion, which Wagner had outlined in Judaism in Music, that the Jews as a whole are condemned to creative sterility and outsider status. To Wagnerâs mind, the Jews who sought out his patronage after the republication of the essay were the very definition of the exceptional Jews he had envisioned at the conclusion of the essay: solitary souls motivated to undergo the nearly impossible ordeals required to overcome the innate deficiencies of their Jewish character. In return, Wagner had promised them an open door: âWithout once looking back, take ye your part in this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment, then are we one and un-dissevered!â5 He was as good as his word; Levi had become a frequent presence at Wahnfried, and Rubinsteinâs âtouchingâ plight sufficiently moved Wagner that he invited him into his home, where Rubinstein lived for most of the last 10 years of Wagnerâs life. As in all human relationships, the conditions and premises of affection are as revealing as the fact of affection itself. The special tenderness Wagner felt towards his âtouchingâ Jewish friends was directly linked to the fact that they seemed to have accepted his theory of Jewishness as a tragic misfortune â and accepted him as their best hope of redemption.
But the Jews in Wagnerâs orbit were also individuals who could be profoundly helpful to him: because of their talents, professional position, financial resources, or a combination of these. To maximize such individualsâ potential for aiding his artistic enterprise, Wagner made strategic use of their insecurities and fears surrounding their perceived Otherness-the same âtouchingâ predicament that called forth a certain unique sympathy. Critical outbursts against the Jews, then, were not anomalies, nor were they counter-productive to establishing the desired working relationships. Rather, they were critical tools in activating the Jewsâ internalized feelings of inferiority, and thus motivating them towards greater adherence to what was presented as the best option for self-improvement.
The pattern had been set in Judaism in Music itself. After describing the objectionable qualities of the Jews, and the negative consequences of their social influence, Wagner issued an open call to the few exceptional Jews to support the âregenerative work of deliverance,â and in so doing, secure their release from the evils previously described. When the enlarged edition of 1869 appeared under Wagnerâs own name, he felt free to say what he had only been able to hint at in 1850: namely, that the âregenerative workâ that Jews should support was none other than the Wagnerian direction in art, which naturally epitomized all of the organic qualities that had been temporarily suppressed by the alien musicality of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn. In advocating for his art, Jews would join the noble company of Wagnerâs Jewish friends: âcertain self-sacrificing, veritably sympathetic friends, whom Destiny has brought to me from out the kindred of that national-religious element of the newer European society ⊠I could take courage from the knowledge that these cherished friends stand on precisely the same footing as myself.â6 Both in 1850 and 1869, then, Wagner was speaking not only ab...