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Friday, July 2, 2010

Wagner in Today's World

As part of my summer teaching, I just led a group of students through Das Rheingold. Most were enthusiastic about the music, and Wagner's aggressive stance against the Parisian opera industry drew their sympathy.

Yet even on the first day, the Nazi party's use of Wagner came up. Later, we read some of Wagner's infamous essay "Das Judentum in der Musik" (Jewishness in Music). The class, which was normally talkative and smiling, got cold and uncomfortable: how could such a great composer hold such outrageous views? Eventually conversation picked up. Wagner obviously still has value for modern audiences today, and the students worked through ways of separating Wagner's ideas from his music.

But did Wagner actually separate his art from his ideas? After all, Wagner's essay attacks Meyerbeer (a Jewish composer who dominated the French opera scene) and claims that Jewish people are incapable of real artistic expression - are subhuman, in effect. Wagner's failure to mount a production of his operas in Paris in the 1840s seems to have led to his disillusionment with grand opera, a genre which he came to view as commercialized, privileging the medium (musical display) over the message (drama). Thus Wagner's attempt to fashion an orchestrally-dominated "German" style of music drama in opposition to the conventions of grand opera seems tied to his opposition to music he considered most commercial and Jewish.

But so what? you could say: As listeners, we are not bound to think what Wagner thought. The reader determines much of the message received from a text; we can take a different meaning from Wagner's work than he intended. After all, the music is beautiful; the works remain influential even if only viewed from a musical point of view; their importance as national myth, as part of the zeitgeist of the succeeding generations is hard to ignore. We can't ignore Wagner. All good points and I was pleased with the students for engaging with such a difficult issue.

Yet I'm still disturbed by the topic. It's easy enough to situate Wagner in a distant past, to say that his ideas were wrong but the music he wrote was lovely. It's easy enough to assume that Wagner's nationalist program to create "true German art" in opposition to a "commercial Jewish art" died by 1945 at the latest. But what if the nationalist aspect of Wagner reception is still alive? If someone tells you in 2010 that Wagner is first and foremost a GERMAN (with all the baggage that entails), then what are the implications? Many Israelis seem to understand Wagner solely in terms of his antisemitism. While, as a musician, I applaud Daniel Barenboim's efforts to play Wagner's beautiful music, as a thinking person, I have to wonder: what if the Israelis are right? What if the nationalistic, antisemitic, hateful side of Wagner culture has not died?

For example, see this website http://www.georgehutchins.com/, our local example of Tea-Party fundamentalism. I mean no personal disrespect to Mr. Hutchins, a military veteran, and I should make clear that my own political views are centrist: I don't vote on party lines. Hutchins seems to waging an ardent war against the Republican Party itself, which seems to be distancing itself from his fundamentalist stance.

If you scroll down Mr. Hutchins' page far enough, you will find that an American politician actually used the "Ride of the Valkyries" to promote his political campaign in 2010, and that he did so "to honor German Americans who served America since 1775." (He thinks the piece comes from Goetterdaemmerung, but that's neither here nor there). As a German-American myself, I'm not entirely sure we need special praise ; nor am I convinced we need Wagner to honor us (why couldn't he use Beethoven?) Wagner's political views are an embarrassment, and the further we keep Wagner away from OUR politics, the better. (And who uses an appeal to a German-American audience as a political platform? Yes, there are plenty of people of German heritage in North Carolina, but I'm not aware that we were a political power-base waiting to be tapped.)

More disturbing is Mr. Hutchins' concept of national pride, which is largely of the flag-waving kind. Thus his site refers constantly to "honor" and claims that his supporters are "patriots" (implying that his opponents are...not patriotic - way to respect the dissent essential to a functioning democracy). Hutchins also seems to assume that most Americans are European or English (I'm guessing that makes you white): thus the page "Win the Culture War" (no comment) leads to a picture of Hutchins at Stonehenge, with the caption: "Stonehenge, England, is a...part of our American Heritage, which our ancestors brought with them from Europe, to America."

So Hutchins is a white politician who assumes that the Americans he needs to reach have long European heritages, and he uses Wagner's music to promote his campaign. Yet he's not antisemitic; he is a firm supporter of Israel, etc., etc.

So what gives? Does it really matter if one politician used Wagner in his campaign? Given Mr. Hutchins' avowed respect for the Torah and support of Israel, I think he would be horrified to read "Das Judentum in der Musik." Probably, his use of Wagner is caused by ignorance. At least I hope so. After Auschwitz, I hope that the first thing American people think when they hear Wagner is not "Gee, I'm proud of my German heritage."

Mr. Hutchins seems to think it might be.

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