Wagnerspectrum

Schwerpunkt Jüdische Wagnerianer

Udo Bermbach, Dieter Borchmeyer, Sven Friedrich, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Arne Stollberg, Nicholas Vazsonyi, Udo Bermbach, Dieter Borchmeyer, Sven Friedrich, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Arne Stollberg, Nicholas Vazsonyi

• Verlag: Königshausen & Neumann
• Jahr: 2014
• eBook-ISBN:
  9783826080180
• Thema: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Thema: Musik

Aufsätze zum Schwerpunkt: H. Warshaw: "No One Can Serve Our Cause Better Than You" - Wagner's Jewish Collaborators After 1869 – D. Jütte: "Mendele Lohengrin" und der koschere Wagner - Unorthodoxes zur jüdischen Wagner-Rezeption – C. Nöthlings: Wagner goes Jewish - Franz Rosenzweig und der Traum vom jüdischen Weltendrama – J. Le Rider: Otto Weininger - ein Frauen-, Juden- und Selbsthasser als Wagnerianer – I. von der Lühe: "Universitätsprofessor mit goldener Cigarettendose" oder: "Man spürt nichts als Kultur" - Alfred Pringsheim – S. B. Würffel: Theodor W. Adorno – A. Daub: "Ein allzu geheim gebliebener Wagner" - Ernst Bloch als Wagnerianer – H. R. Vaget: Hans Mayer in Bayreuth – T. Pfleger: "Richard Wagner, ich hasse dich, aber ich hasse dich auf meinen Knien" - Haltungen jüdischer Wagner-Dirigenten gegenüber Wagners Antisemitismus; ein Arbeitsbericht – M. Schmidt: Die Kehrseite der Ideologie - Zur "jüdischen" Kunst Wagners – Aufsätze – U. Bermbach: Wagner und Gobineau - Zur Geschichte eines Missverständnisses – Besprechungen / Bücher – CDs / DVDs

Aufsätze zum Schwerpunkt

“No One Can Serve Our Cause Better Than You”

Wagner’s 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: “Richard and I discuss the curious attachment individual Jews have for him; he says Wahnfried will soon turn into a synagogue!”¹

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 Wagner’s 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 Wagner’s 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, Wagner’s 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 colleagues’ Jewishness, and his own well-known attitudes about the Jews. The chief difference between the two readings, then, is one of perception: whether Wagner’s ability to overlook an individual’s 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, 19^th-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 “War of the Romantics” 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 Wagner’s 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 colleague’s 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 Wagner’s 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 ‘60s, Wagner’s correspondence with and about Carl Tausig and Heinrich Porges demonstrates no concern with the young mens’ 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: Wagner’s Jewish friends were now obsessively evaluated in light of their Jewishness – 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 Jews’ 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 Wagner’s essay itself ineradicably changed Wagner’s personal relationships with Jews. Unlike its first pseudonymous appearance in 1850, Judaism in Music had now appeared under Wagner’s 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 man’s 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 – telltale signs of a fundamental difference in kind.

The most noticeable of them may be the word “touching.” As evidenced by Cosima Wagner’s 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 “touches Richard by saying that, as a Jew, he is a walking anachronism.” [emphasis in the original] On August 1, “A visit from the conductor Levi, by no means unpleasant, and as Richard says, in his Jewish way he is very touching.” In 1879, again: “In the evening Parsifal … While [Joseph] Rubinstein is playing, even singing quietly, and Levi listening with great emotion, Richard says softly to me, “What touching figures they are!” (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 Wagner’s Jewish donors and admirers. About Bernard Löser, a donor introduced to Wagner by Carl Tausig, we hear the following: “Richard at the same time goes with Tausig to seek out “the touching Jew” Löser, orders cigars for him, and gives him his pamphlets in gratitude.”⁴ (May 7, 1871)

As the first passage quoted above indicates, these Jews were “touching” 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 Wagner’s 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: “Without once looking back, take ye your part in this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment, then are we one and un-dissevered!”⁵ He was as good as his word; Levi had become a frequent presence at Wahnfried, and Rubinstein’s “touching” plight sufficiently moved Wagner that he invited him into his home, where Rubinstein lived for most of the last 10 years of Wagner’s 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 “touching” Jewish friends was directly linked to the fact that they seemed to have accepted his theory of Jewishness as a tragic misfortune – and accepted him as their best hope of redemption.

But the Jews in Wagner’s 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 individuals’ potential for aiding his artistic enterprise, Wagner made strategic use of their insecurities and fears surrounding their perceived Otherness-the same “touching” 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 Jews’ 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 “regenerative work of deliverance,” and in so doing, secure their release from the evils previously described. When the enlarged edition of 1869 appeared under Wagner’s own name, he felt free to say what he had only been able to hint at in 1850: namely, that the “regenerative work” 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 Wagner’s Jewish friends: “certain 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.”⁶ Both in 1850 and 1869, then, Wagner was speaking not only ab...

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