by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, August 10, 1998
A few months ago, I had lunch with Wagner. We met at an Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan. The conversation was engaging, in a high-strung, German sort of way. Nevertheless, I found myself distracted. I kept studying the man’s face: his nose, which jutted out with beakish force; his eyebrows, which arched precipitately over the eyes; his chin, which was wide and peculiarly solid; and, most of all, his eyes, which were clear and bright and fixing. I seemed to be looking at the face of Richard Wagner, the most dangerous artist of the nineteenth century. It was, in fact, the face of Gottfried Wagner, the composer’s fifty-one-year-old great-grandson. He was in town to talk to his publisher about a memoir he has written, “Twilight of the Wagners,” whose American edition will appear next year.
It’s a strange kind of autobiography—a quarrel with an ancestor who has been dead since 1883. Gottfried, a musicologist who wrote his dissertation on Kurt Weill, views his great-grandfather as a prophet of Nazism and as an unambiguously political composer. He attacks his grandmother Winifred for befriending Hitler, and he attacks his own father—Wolfgang, the current director of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth—for concealing the family’s dismal history. He writes that the festival and the city at large have been infiltrated by neo-Nazi elements, with skinheads demonstrating nearby in sympathy. He writes that James Levine and Daniel Barenboim are hypocrites for conducting in Bayreuth in spite of their Jewishness. As a result of his agitations, he is no longer welcome at the festival. Last year, the war over Bayreuth filled columns in European newspapers. Things may be no different at this summer’s festival, which runs until August 28th. In addition to performances of “Die Meistersinger,” “The Flying Dutchman,” the “Ring,” and “Parsifal,” there will be a symposium on Wagner and the Jews.
Gottfried is not clinically insane, as one Wagnerite has suggested, but he is plainly in the grip of an obsession. “I, Gottfried, am saying farewell,” he told me. “I will not go on with this permanent discussion of Wagner.” Yet go on he does. There is a grim irony in his jeremiad: Although he attacks the cult of heredity and racial purity, he defines himself by the blood flowing in his veins. Indeed, he represents himself as a redeemed and purified member of the brood. Wagner is the perfect labyrinth, from which there is no escape.
A similar tension grips the other modern Wagner controversy—the unofficial ban on Richard Wagner’s music in Israel. The Israeli parliament held hearings on the issue in June, and a related symposium at the New Israeli Opera, whose music director is campaigning against the ban, was disrupted by shouts from the audience. Since Israeli orchestras a few years ago began playing the music of Richard Strauss for the first time since the founding of the state, it is now only Wagner—the Unforgiven—who has an asterisk next to his name. The irony is that the Israeli ban seems to follow the same logic as Wagner’s own edicts on Jewish music. The scholar Thomas Grey has put it this way: “If we dismiss Wagner’s diagnosis of ‘Jewishness’ in music as the bigoted drivel it seems to be, how do we go about ascertaining anti-Semitic traces in his music?”
Anti-Semitic or not, Wagner’s operas are once again in ascendance. For the first time in more than a decade, there are voices strong enough to put his heroic roles across. This month, the Seattle Opera is presenting a new production of “Tristan und Isolde,” with two of the best younger Wagner singers, Ben Heppner and Jane Eaglen, as the doomed lovers. In the 1999-2000 season, the Metropolitan Opera will use the same singers in its first revival of “Tristan” in fifteen years. Leading conductors still make Wagner a pillar of their careers, and most of them are not troubled by the anti-Semitic question. Levine and Barenboim, who conduct every summer at Bayreuth, have firmly set it aside. They have every right to do so: musicianship comes from devotion, not deconstruction. But listeners can have a more ambiguous relationship with the sound offered them. We can sympathize with Stéphane Mallarmé, who hailed “le dieu Richard Wagner,” and, at the same time, we can understand W.H. Auden’s description of Wagner as “an absolute shit.”
Loyal Wagnerites argue that the Wagner Case, as Nietzsche called it, is a matter of false association. The music—with its visceral strength, its power of hypnosis, its trajectory from destruction to transformation to redemption—can serve as a soundtrack to almost any idea one cares to impose on it. Feminists, democrats, Fascists, and sadists have taken heart from it. The operas are gloriously schizophrenic: they trumpet tales from Germanic mythology, and also relate subtle narratives of bourgeois decline. They are filigreed with hesitations, regrets, resentments, and betrayals worthy of the later Henry James. (The “Ring” can be read as the story of an aristocrat who grows bored in a loveless marriage and builds a palace he cannot afford. He cuts corners, and the world ends.) If you include the sixteen volumes of Wagner’s writings, the ten thousand items of his correspondence, and the innumerable gaseous pronouncements preserved in the diaries of his devoted second wife, Cosima, you have a classic playground for paranoiacs. Wagner is the Dealey Plaza of the nineteenth century: the excess of data can be rearranged to match every theory under the sun.
Wagner put the power of his music behind his theories, and, thus, the world paid attention. Any artist can bat around stupid prejudices; almost none can consistently smack them outside the ballpark of culture and into the streets of history. Should an artist be punished because he happened to fascinate a lunatic who was born six years after he died? No—but it’s not enough merely to acknowledge that Hitler was an enthusiast of Wagner. The relationship between the two men had an uncanny aspect: Hitler saw himself as Wagner’s servant, disciple, executor. Because Hitler scholars have not taken music seriously as a social realm, or even checked basic musical sources, the full story of Hitler’s obsession with Wagner has not been told. My encounter with Gottfried Wagner inspired me to do some digging in the New York Public Library. While reading back and forth in the collected writings and sayings of Hitler and Wagner, I had a clammy sense of family resemblance.
II.
Wagner had the grandest, craziest kind of nineteenth-century life. It is divided, like one of his librettos, into three perfectly balanced acts. 1813-42: Drunken-wastrel years; early struggles; down and out in Paris. Then success in Dresden with the disorganized grand opera “Rienzi.” 1842-64: Increasing difficulties as opera director in Dresden; initial public bewilderment over the breakthrough music dramas “The Flying Dutchman,” “Tannhäuser,” and “Lohengrin”; dabblings in proletarian politics. Total disaster during the revolution of 1848: he consorts with Bakunin, is pursued by police, and flees to Switzerland. His marriage disintegrates amid hopeless “Tristan und Isolde” affairs. Somehow, in this insane time he begins “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” the largest work of art in history. 1864-83: At a moment of financial catastrophe, the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria saves him from prison and offers a masochistically selfless friendship. “Tristan und Isolde” opens the floodgates of the mature Wagner sound; “Die Meistersinger” demolishes his least favorite critic, Eduard Hanslick. The Wagner festival opens in Bayreuth with the première of the four-day “Ring.” In the mansion of his old age, in the company of Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, he labors over the mystery of “Parsifal.” He goes to Venice and dies. His last statement is a racist pamphlet.
The story can be told at delightful length, as it is in Ernest Newman’s four-volume biography and in Wagner’s bombastic, deceitful, snakily charming memoirs. Yet the melodrama of the career pales beside the interior vastness of Wagner’s creative life. He was, for himself, a landscape in which he could roam at will: he could stare up at the mountains of his intellect and descend into the valleys of his resentment. His egoism was not of the boasting, “I am the greatest” kind. Rather, it consisted in a proliferation of selves. Where another man might consider the relationship of himself to the world, Wagner considered the relationships of his various selves to one another: Am I a poet or a composer? Am I a visionary or a prophet of doom? Am I a bourgeois sentimentalist or a social revolutionary? There was a Charlie Rose in his head whose topic every night was Wagner. The most important of these dialogues was the one between the poet and the composer. Wagner could, in fact, claim equal originality in the two pursuits. It was the force of his literary imagination that gave his operas their epic breadth and psychological shading. And it was the violence of his polemical style that made him a factor in the history of hate.
Wagner was relentless. He could be accused of most of the deadly sins, but not of sloth. Max Nordau, the author of the turn-of-the-century best-seller “Degeneration,” correctly diagnosed his condition as that of a “graphomaniac”—a person who displayed a “stubborn perseverance in one and the same fundamental idea.” This explains the technique of the leitmotiv; it also explains the extreme redundancy of the prose writings, their crazed intensification of language. (On one page of an essay on Beethoven, the word “annihilation” appears five times.) Wagner’s energy was often manifested as sheer sonic violence. His orchestra is overwhelming not just in volume but in the thrumming density of the texture in all registers, and especially the bass. He also knew when the ear had had enough: he made sudden gifts of quiet and tenderness. Act III of “Die Walküre” begins with the Ride of the Valkyries and ends with Wotan’s heart-stopping farewell to the unruly Brünnhilde, whom he has consigned to a flame-ringed rock. For a few precious minutes, the music settles into a lullaby of murmuring violas and cellos, an oasis in the wasteland of Wotan’s rage. Wagner keeps working the dialectic of brutality and compassion, and another turn of the screw always awaits. “Die Walküre” ends with the white noise of the Magic Fire.
Wagner began as a writer of bland Beethovenian overtures and intermittently lively Romantic operas. He formed strong ideas but failed to develop them. He was too protective of his inspirations to send them through the intellectual hazing process that a classical development entails. In his overture to “Rienzi” he presents one splendid theme and admires it from all angles: it sits there like a diamond on velvet. Aware of the weakness of his structures, Wagner decided that the genre, not he himself, must change. If he could not write a Beethovenian symphony, the symphony was defunct. If he could not write grand opera, grand opera must be destroyed. Opera would mutate into a new genre—“music drama”—into which the dying genes of the symphony could be spliced. The fact that other composers were still composing symphonies did not faze him. Musical culture, he insisted, had grown stale and meretricious. Either it tried to gull the public with a mishmash of styles or it retreated into pretentious re-creations of the past. It happened that there were two composers who typified those tendencies. Meyerbeer was the master of grand opera, moving from success to success as Wagner’s efforts failed to gain ground. Mendelssohn was the leader of the “historical” wing—and a conductor to whom Wagner had submitted his Symphony in C. Both men were friendly toward him, if not hugely enthusiastic. Both were Jewish.
In 1848, as Europe was convulsed in revolution, Wagner exploded. His decision to join a Dresden uprising in early 1849 seemed less a gesture of solidarity with the masses than an act of self-destruction. In exile in Zurich, he abandoned any attempt to ingratiate himself with the musical establishments of Europe. He gave up, for a time, writing music; instead, he threw himself into a campaign of verbal bombast and abuse. “I have an enormous desire to commit acts of artistic terrorism,” he wrote to his new ally, Franz Liszt. To his friend Theodor Uhlig he wrote, “Works of art cannot be created at present, they can only be prepared for by means of revolutionary activity, by destroying and crushing everything that is worth destroying and crushing.” By “revolutionary activity” Wagner meant aesthetics, not politics. Later, he believed, the new aesthetics would somehow create a new politics.
His major essays—“Art and Revolution,” “The Art-Work of the Future,” “Opera and Drama,” and “Judaism in Music”—were an innovative mixture of theory and thuggery. Much of their rhetoric came from the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who called for a transformation of Christianity into a religion of nature, selfless love, and “pure humanity.” Feuerbach protested what he called “absolute,” “egoistic” ideologies. Wagner saw a similarity between the cold, loveless Judeo-Christian religion described by Feuerbach and the cold, lifeless musical genres with which he had had scant success. Once again, a growing obsession with the Jews lurked underneath: Feuerbach considered the idea of the “absolute” a Jewish invention. Above all, he condemned the concept of the all-powerful Jehovah, who brings about the “creation out of nothing.” Such views influenced the text, and possibly even the music, of the “Ring.” The prelude to “Das Rheingold”—a hundred and thirty-six bars of E-flat major, rising from nearly inaudible bass tones—depicts a world that has always existed and is gradually coming into view. It is the opposite of the “creation out of nothing,” which, Feuerbach wrote, “had its origin only in the unfathomable depth of Hebrew egoism.”
Wagner’s anti-Semitism was, in outline, typical of his time and place. It was, however, uncommonly personal and intense. Wagner scholars used to segregate the 1850 article “Judaism in Music” from the other essays, explaining that it was a momentary, regrettable outburst of choler. All the essays, however, are filled with coded language about the Jews, to which Feuerbach provides the key. For example, in hailing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Wagner refers contemptuously to those egoistically absolute musicians who will be crushed by the work’s power. Switching to the second person, he speaks man to man:
Do what you will: look away from Beethoven, fumble after Mozart, gird yourself round with Johann Sebastian Bach; write symphonies with or without choruses, write masses, oratorios—sexless opera-embryos!—make songs without words, operas without texts!...We look without fear toward that great annihilating blow of destiny which will make an end of this whole unwieldy monstrosity of music, clearing space for the Artwork of the Future.
The particular monstrosity he has in mind is Mendelssohn, who revived Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” who wrote the “Songs Without Words,” and who, at the time of Wagner’s writing, was dead. Wagner was beginning to fight an Eternal Jew—a figure who might be dead in one place but was alive in another. If it wasn’t Mendelssohn in Leipzig, it was Meyerbeer in Paris or, later, the critic Hanslick in Vienna.
Did such a Jew appear in mythological disguise in the libretto and music of the “Ring”? Here we get into the most controversial area of Wagner studies: the search for musical anti-Semitism. The focus of attention is Alberich, the ruler of the Nibelung dwarfs and the forger of the enviable Ring. The scholar Marc Weiner has argued that Alberich’s quarrelsome, rhythmically irregular style matches various points in Wagner’s critique of the musical habits of the Jews. Is this so? It’s a matter of deciding between intention and execution. At first, the dwarfs did seem to be metaphors for Jews. In the 1848 prose sketch for the “Ring,” Wagner says of the Nibelungs, “They burrow with restless, unsettled activity (like worms in a dead body) through the intestines of the earth.” Two years later, in “Judaism in Music,” he calls the Jews a “swarming colony of worms in the dead body of art.”
As Wagner got deeper into the “Ring,” however, his conception of the dwarfs seemed to change. Alberich may be an agent of decline, but he also behaves with admirable consistency, even with a perverse kind of rectitude: according to legend, the Ring belongs to the one who forswears love, and Alberich alone makes that sacrifice. The loyalty of the Nibelungs is emphasized most in “Götterdämmerung,” as Alberich schemes with his half-human son, Hagen. In the quietly awesome first scene of Act II, Alberich urges Hagen, “Be true! Be true!” Hagen is nothing if not true. Reaching for the Ring at the end of the opera, he plunges to destruction. In an early sketch, Wagner even imagined Alberich as the last figure seen onstage before the curtain falls: “He sinks, with gestures of despair.” The whole cycle might be read as Alberich’s tragedy.
Did Wagner harbor a secret sympathy for the Jews? The critic Joseph Horowitz suggests as much in a paper he is delivering at the symposium in Bayreuth. He calls Wagner “a master portraitist of marginality” and argues that the dwarfs are an exaggerated but not mean-spirited portrait of ghetto Jews. Perhaps, but it may also be that a growing regard for the Nibelungs led Wagner to abandon his putative Jewish allegory. Alberich and kin may have been too good, too true, to be Jewish. In his last years, Wagner told Cosima that the dwarfs were really Mongols.
The same ambiguities crop up in “Die Meistersinger,” that almost humane comedy set among the Mastersingers of sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Beckmesser, the villain of the piece, is a cartoon of Eduard Hanslick, the Viennese critic who attacked Wagner as an arrogant radical and who advocated the conservative aesthetics of Brahms. The fact that Hanslick was of Jewish descent has fascinated some commentators. Barry Millington, for example, has argued that Beckmesser’s grotesqueries mock not only Hanslick but also traits of Jewish singing as Wagner perceived them. But in two respects Beckmesser fails to match the Jewish stereotype. In the first place, wise old Hans Sachs indicates that Beckmesser can rejoin the community once he has got his comeuppance. If Beckmesser were Jewish, he could never be fully accepted. Second, Beckmesser makes a fool of himself in love—in spite of Wagner’s notion that the Jews were fundamentally loveless. So Beckmesser, like Alberich, isn’t quite nasty enough to be Jewish.
Perhaps the real aim in all this was not to hound Hanslick but to trap him. The critic saw a picture of himself brutalized onstage; at the same time, he heard bright, clear, almost Mendelssohnian music that appealed to his sensibilities. Hanslick’s first reaction to “Die Meistersinger” was negative, but he later revised his opinion and declared it his favorite among the Wagner operas. He also felt the need to deny that he was a Jew. Wagner’s victory was complete. Over and over, in such cases, he was crafty beyond measure. He was conscious that many Jews admired his music, and that some of them helped to sustain his gaudy life style. Under pressure, he always backed off a bit from his most extreme positions. And he gave his doubters one unimpeachable, apolitical masterpiece—“Tristan und Isolde”—in which Feuerbach’s incendiary philosophy gave way to the world-weariness of Schopenhauer, in which love and death conquered all, and in which music ran riot over language.
All the same, he leaned in his last years toward overtly political art. In “Parsifal” he started to take down the magic shield of ambiguity which had prevented his most noisome notions from running amok. Here the racial science that he had lately been devouring showed in the dialogue and in the stage directions. For example, theorists had sorted the races into “Aryan” and “Semitic” categories, including among the latter both the Jews and the Arabs. Wagner, in the “Parsifal” libretto, gave Arab and Jewish associations to the degenerates of the piece. We are told in the dramatis personae that the evil magician Klingsor has a castle “facing the Arab part of Spain.” Kundry, Klingsor’s unwilling accomplice in the seduction and corruption of the Knights of the Grail, is identified as a traveller in Arabia and is described as “reddish-brown-skinned.” At the same time, she is a female counterpart of the Wandering Jew: she has been wandering the earth in search of redemption ever since she laughed at Christ on the way to Golgotha. She is a composite Semite, who must be kept at bay, and her redemption is death. “Parsifal” is a White Mass, a ceremony of purification. Hitler knew it well.
III.
At the turn of the century, many young men were spellbound by Wagner. The allure was musical: Wagner’s harmony was built on suspension, evasion, anticipation. Each hovering “Tristan” chord—the four-note “half-diminished” chord that appears throughout the operas, from “Rienzi” to “Parsifal”—exemplified the mood: it could resolve in various directions, and it was also curiously stable and self-contained. Each chord seemed to say, “Watch and wait.” Or, “The time is nigh.” Or, “You are the one.”
Many German writers chronicled the heady experience of the Wagner spell. Thomas Mann saw it as both a thrill and a threat. In his novels he imitated the slow, hypnotic heave of the music, but at the same time he criticized the state of mind that forgot itself in the flow, that lost itself in dangerous fantasies. Arthur Schnitzler took up the same theme in his 1908 novel, “The Way Into the Open.” The scholar Marc Weiner has drawn attention to a remarkable passage in Schnitzler's novel, in which a young man, a would-be opera composer and director, falls under the spell of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Vienna Court Opera:
The lights were dimmed, the prelude to the third act began. Georg heard languid ocean waves breaking on a desolate coast and the mournful sighs of a fatally wounded hero vanishing in bluish-thin air.... His hopes ran farther and higher. Perhaps only a couple of years would pass—and harmonies he himself had discovered would sound through a wide and festive space; and the audience would listen with rapture....Did he know, then, whether he was given the power to hold men through his art, like the master who was heard here today? To be victorious over the petty considerations and bereavements of everyday life?
This fictional picture has a real-life parallel that is, to say the least, eerie. On May 8, 1906, Adolf Hitler witnessed the same production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Vienna Court Opera. He was seventeen years old. He was a painter, he dreamed of becoming an opera director, he made amateurish efforts at Wagnerian composition. He wrote a postcard home in a state of obvious excitement: “Today 7:30-12 Tristan.” On another postcard he wrote, “Powerful waves of tone flood the room, and the murmur of the wind gives way to a terrible roaring frenzy of sound.”
It is common knowledge that Hitler was fascinated by Wagner’s music. There is, however, more to the story than can be found in the Hitler literature. His first trip to Vienna, in 1906, hardly rates a mention in the standard biographies, and yet its influence on such a vague young mind must have been profound. Anyone who knows the Viennese musical scene of that period has to be curious for more detail. For example, who was the conductor for that May 8th performance of “Tristan”? Brigitte Hamann, a scholar who has written the authoritative study of Hitler’s early years in Vienna, states that the name of the conductor cannot be found. She apparently did not bother to ask the Vienna Opera. The company informed me that the conductor was Gustav Mahler. Therefore, Hitler saw in front of him, on one of his first nights in Vienna, the charismatic Jewish emperor of musical Vienna. This lends credence to a surprising claim by Hitler’s boyhood friend August Kubizek to the effect that Hitler had “the greatest admiration” for Mahler in his youth. Kubizek also tells us that Hitler’s veneration of Wagner was so fierce that he committed to memory large portions of Wagner’s famously turgid prose.
Hitler made a telling reference, later in life, to his early visits to the Vienna Opera. Hans Frank, the Nazi Party lawyer and later Governor-General of Poland, recorded the following late-night monologue:
The record-player was pulled out and the Führer picked out some records. First the “Parsifal” Prelude, conducted by Muck in Bayreuth.... In our lonely silence there sounded the sacred tones of the last work of Richard Wagner, his Master. As they died away, he said pensively: “Out of ‘Parsifal’ I am building my religion—the solemnity of the Mass without theological party-bickering. With a brotherly bass-note of true love, without theatrical humility and empty formal babbling....” Then we heard the Funeral March from “Götterdämmerung,” this indescribably splendid music, the most grandiose that Wagner composed. “I first heard it in Vienna. In the Opera. And I still remember, as if it were just today, how completely agitated I was when I had to walk past some yammering Jews in caftans on my way home. It’s impossible to think of a more irreconcilable combination. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this Jewish filth!”
The spectral ghetto Jew also appears in “Mein Kampf.” Hitler says he encountered him during a long walk, recoiled in disgust, and asked himself, “Is this a German?” It was at that moment, he says, that deep hatred of the Jews first welled up in him. Given that “Jews in caftans” seem to wander from one context to another in Hitler’s memory, we have to wonder whether any such figures existed. Were they a distorted reflection of the Jews who thronged musical Vienna? It is certainly strange that Hitler should have seen the greatest Jewish musician of the age one night in Vienna and on another night been disgusted by Jews outside the theatre.
Hitler’s monologue suggests something else: that he knew how to speak the Wagnerian dialect. Gottfried Wagner, the anti-Wagner, speculates that “Mein Kampf” was consciously Wagnerian in style. To test that idea, I prepared a list of Wagner buzzwords and went searching for them in the pages of “Mein Kampf.” (My task was made easier by a neo-Nazi Web site, from which I downloaded the text of Hitler’s book; I could then use the search function on my computer to look for clusters of Wagnerese.) Wagnerisms do occur from time to time. For example, Hitler does not fail to make use of the unlovely word that Wagner invented: Verjudung, Jewification. He speaks of “the inner Jewification of our people.” He also speaks of “egoism” and “selfishness” as traits that pure Aryans reject. Wagner condemns the same in “The Art-Work of the Future,” writing, “Only when the ruling religion of egoism...is pulled up root and branch can the new religion step forth.” “The Jew,” Hitler says, “never possessed a culture of his own.” Wagner says, “The Jew never had an art of his own.” Granted, such phrases circulate throughout anti-Semitic literature and cannot be traced back definitively to Wagner. However, it is likely that Hitler first encountered them in his youthful study of Wagner’s writings.
There is another link between Wagner and “Mein Kampf”: the book was written on paper that had been supplied by Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred. The Wagners and their in-laws had been marching toward Hitlerism for some time, and Winifred became the most respectable of Hitler’s early supporters. Wagner’s magazine, the Bayreuther Blätter, had already published an incredible barrage of Aryan and anti-Semitic propaganda. The Wagner loyalists like to suppose that the Bayreuther Blätter movement was an aberration that appeared only after the composer’s death, but there is little difference between the articles that were published during his lifetime and those that came after it. Wagner alone made Bayreuth a magnet for iffy minds. It was inevitable that Hitler would show up there. He did, in 1923, and Winifred at once perceived in him “the saviour of Germany.” The young Munich rabble-rouser decked himself in the trappings of the Bayreuth ideology, which included vegetarianism, agitation for animal rights, campaigns against vivisection, and bits of Buddhism and Indian lore. And he began doting on the youngest Wagners, in a grandfatherly way. “Sometimes, Hitler’s car crept up the drive after midnight,” Friedelind Wagner recalled in her memoirs. “Late as it was, he never failed to come into the nursery and tell us gruesome tales of his adventures.”
“Parsifal” was the Wagner opera that Hitler found most inspiring. In the Bayreuther Blätter, Wagner had hinted—and let others state outright—that the piece was the saga of an Aryan Christ: the Knights of the Grail are a racial élite suffering from degeneration, and Amfortas, their king, has a mysterious wound that was brought on by the impure kiss of Kundry. Amfortas says that his blood is “sinful”—tainted. Hitler echoed that language dutifully. He once said, “We must interpret ‘Parsifal’ in a totally different way....The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood.” He then hummed the famous motif of “Knowing through compassion.” And when Hitler spoke of the intermixing of the races in “Mein Kampf” he called it a “sin”—not a word he was given to using very often.
Hitler’s most momentous allusion to “Parsifal” came in three speeches he delivered between 1939 and 1942—speeches in which he reported on the progress of the Final Solution in a curious code. The key to the code is a strange scene at the center of the opera. Kundry is explaining to Parsifal the origin of her curse, her mockery of Christ: “I saw Him — Him / and — laughed / And he glanced at me,” she remembers, haltingly. Three funereal trombones intone chords of B major, but they are hedged in by strangulated repetitions of the screaming chord of Amfortas’s wound. The harmony keeps dribbling away into disconnected tendrils of notes. There is an atmosphere of damp, chilly menace. This is the sound of Golgotha: “The Saviour on the cross, blood everywhere,” Wagner told Cosima. Blood is the image that fits the music: it seeps and drips. Above, in the winds, there is a weak, stuttering kind of laughter.
In January of 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler said, “Very often in my life have I been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at [ausgelacht]....I believe that the Jews of Germany are now choking on their formerly resounding laughter.” He added that he would make another prophecy: if the Jews were to plunge the world into war, the result would be the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Then, in September of 1942, Hitler said, “The Jews once laughed at my prophecies [haben einst gelacht], even in Germany. I do not know if they are still laughing today, or if their laughter has not already subsided. I can only affirm now: their laughter will everywhere subside.” And in November of that year he said, “I have always been mocked as a prophet. Of those who formerly laughed [die damals lachten], there are countless numbers who are no longer laughing today, and those who are still laughing now may not do it for much longer.”
This horrible leitmotiv of Jewish laughter—which appears as the ultimate Hitler enigma in Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, “Explaining Hitler”—may well come out of “Parsifal.” Furthermore, there is an eerie foreshadowing of Hitler's language in the scene of Good Friday Spell, when the knight-messiah looks out over a blossoming meadow and thinks of the flower maidens who tempted him. “I saw them wither,” he murmurs, “those who once smiled on me." Ich sah sie welken, die einst mir lachten.
IV.
Wagner’s angriest modern critics have suggested that he would have approved of Nazi Germany if he had lived to see it. His angriest defenders answer that he would have been horrified by the uses to which his music was put. The argument is a foolish one: Wagner was a man of the nineteenth century, Hitler a man of the twentieth. Wagner could not have pictured the world that Hitler lived in, much less Hitler himself. Still, it has to be noticed that Hitler developed crucial parts of his philosophy not by distorting Wagner but by taking his words literally. Hitler was the ultimate, if not the perfect, Wagnerite. The most disturbing resemblance between the two men has to do not with content but with style—the relentlessness, the monomania, the manipulation of reality in the service of one idea, the blend of mysticism and hate. And in both men hate only grew with the years. Some members of Wagner’s generation who had been brutally anti-Semitic in their youth muted their rhetoric, or even became apologetically pro-Jewish, in later years; the novelists Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube are two examples. Wagner never relented. Even his much lauded friendships with individual Jews were suspect: they had a sadomasochistic element. The pianist Joseph Rubinstein, for example, approached Wagner and asked for salvation from his Jewishness.
Did Wagner’s hatred somehow drive his genius? You could see in him the same twisted outlook that Anthony Julius has detected in T.S. Eliot: the reliance on anti-Semitism as a “muse,” as a gruesome guide to poetic truths. Wagner wrote to Liszt that his hatred of the Jews was “as necessary to my nature as gall is to the blood.” He also spoke of “hatred as pure passion.” In the “Ring,” Brünnhilde finds “redemption through love.” Can one also find redemption through hate? This may be the import of the great scene in “Götterdämmerung” that is given over to the nighttime scheming of Alberich and Hagen. “Hate the happy,” Alberich says as the orchestra plays lush “Tristan” chords in sequence.
The same passion for darkness periodically overtakes the restorative pageant of “Parsifal.” At the end of the Good Friday Spell, after Parsifal’s judgment on “those who once laughed at me,” the cool melody of spring drifts into another quivering “Tristan” chord, and the bells of Monsalvat—the castle of the Grail—suddenly boom in the bass. Wagner took great trouble in the casting of these giant bells, but he did an odd thing: he set them in the key of C, which is not the main key of the opera. At this moment, the bells create a disturbing dissonance—another twinge of the chord of Amfortas’s wound. As the sickly knights file past, the music is repeatedly convulsed by lurches across the tritone, like a grinding of musical tectonic plates. As so often in Wagner, light and dark are fused: emblems of holiness have become terrifying. Even as Parsifal redeems mankind with his spear, there is a sense that the whole thing could come crashing down.
In the end, it may be Wagner’s doleful egoism that frees him from the seemingly unbreakable connection to Hitler. His hatred is utterly self-involved. It is a matter not of “us” versus “them” but of “me” versus “you.” Hitler, by contrast, views himself as the servant of great abstractions; the Jewish enemy is too gigantic to be addressed face to face. Wagner’s second-person attacks—such as “You must learn to die”—have a weird kind of graciousness. He may be a bully, but he is giving you the chance to talk back. Much great thought and art have arisen out of a talking back to Wagner: Nietzsche’s brilliant rants in the last years of his sanity, Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” Mann’s “Doktor Faustus,” even Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The Master’s work carries an implicit challenge: if you do not like this Wagner, become your own. That sense of a challenge, rather than an attack, may explain the puzzling phenomenon of the Jewish cult of Wagner. There were some Jews who abased themselves before him and others who were emboldened by him. One of the latter was Theodor Herzl, who said that he began to dream of a Zionist state during a performance of “Tannhäuser.”
In a perverse way, the catastrophes and upheavals that have followed in Wagner’s wake are further testimony to his power of persuasion, his ability to shake the audience. But is it a good thing for art to change the world? Wagner’s infinite ambitions have had a dubious—even destructive—influence on music itself. He was a monumentalist: he could build only giant structures, not habitable homes. Unlike all great composers before him, he wrote no chamber music, no entertainments, no throwaways for amateur violists and weekend flutists. In his urge to explain, connect, and unify the musical universe, he set a bad precedent for what Ned Rorem has termed “the masterpiece syndrome”: dozens of imitators sought, consciously or unconsciously, to make Ultimate Statements, and in the process the intimate, conversational quality of nineteenth-century music-making broke down. The “Ring” was like a glorious modern cathedral built on the rubble of a village. Where would the congregation come from now? Not necessarily from humble German villages, it turned out. The Bayreuth Festival’s mysterious ticketing system seems to favor C.E.O.s, influential “foreigners, and unstoppable fanatics. The Volk have trouble getting in.
Monumentalism was what Eduard Hanslick denounced in Wagner. The powerful Viennese critic had his persnickety, Beckmesserish qualities, but he could also be strikingly wise. “Wagner’s star will continue to shine in the German operatic firmament—as long as all around is darkness,” Hanslick wrote. He also said, “Wagner’s operatic style recognizes only superlatives, and a superlative has no future. It is the end, not the beginning....He who follows will break his neck, and the public will contemplate the disaster with indifference.” Hanslick foresaw the travails of classical music in the twentieth century—the futile chase after progressively more arcane and irrelevant musics of “the future.” At the same time, he perceived Wagner’s death wish for music: the attitude of “After me—or with me—the deluge.” Wagner exhibited a purely aesthetic kind of intolerance, an inability to coexist with musical equals. What is Bayreuth but Wagner and darkness all around? In an odd way, Bayreuth may be the best argument for keeping the Israeli ban on Wagner in place, for keeping that asterisk next to his name. If there is a place where Wagner alone is allowed to be heard, there should also be a place where Wagner is asked to be silent.
