Forbidden Music (8 page)

Mendelssohn's popularity in England meant that the conservatory in Leipzig would later attract such British luminaries as Arthur Sullivan, Charles Stanford and Ethel Smyth, among many others. Both Mendelssohn and
Moscheles believed that music must aspire to the classical purity of a past age. When Wagner's arch-enemy Eduard Hanslick became a professor of music and aesthetics (in effect the precursor of musicology) at Vienna's university, and published his manifesto
Vom Musikalisch-Schönen
(
Of Musical Beauty
) in 1854, it became clear to Wagner that Jews were camouflaging their lack of innovation and individuality by wrapping themselves in a mantle of reverence for the past.

This could hardly have been less true of Meyerbeer, who was happy to pursue as much new theatrical ‘effect’ as possible. His innovation and mastery of musical theatre would influence Wagner far more than the latter cared to admit. To shroud any suspicion that this might have been the case, his attacks of Meyerbeer were relentless. The hundreds of Wagner's references to Mendelssohn pale beside those he makes of Meyerbeer.
²²
Where Meyerbeer differs from his younger compatriot Jacques Offenbach was his fundamental sense of German identity. Both Meyerbeer and Offenbach were Prussians, though Offenbach's family became Prussian through Prussia's acquisition of the Rhineland in 1815, whereas Meyerbeer's family came from the long-held Prussian region of Brandenburg. Like Meyerbeer, Offenbach was groomed by his ambitious father as a virtuoso and, until 1849, he appeared as a noted cellist accompanied by the likes of Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and Felix Mendelssohn. With the success of
Orphée aux enfers
in 1858, his reputation as a composer was secure. For Wagner, Offenbach's works were the embodiment of all that was superficial and fatuous: gratuitous music by a Jewish composer that only charmed and flattered without exciting any deeper resonance. In Wagner's anti-Semitic tracts, Offenbach is so beneath contempt that he hardly merits a mention, yet references in letters and memoirs make it clear that Offenbach was to Wagner the very epitome of the facile musical Jew: able to appeal to a large public and merely interested in making money. The only Jewish composer who escapes condemnation is Jacques Fromental Halévy, though he too, according to Wagner's
Autobiographical Sketches
of 1842, was ‘like all Parisian composers, interested only in having at least one big success, then lying back and enjoying the resulting income’.
²³
Halévy was not German and he comes into Wagner's line of fire more for being French than for being a Jew, though he faces the same charge of being disinterested in music but obsessed with financial reward.

If we take Schumann, Chopin and Berlioz, and place them in direct comparison with Moscheles, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, it is possible to understand some of Wagner's musical arguments while disagreeing with his conclusions. The question is not so much in regard to the quality of their
music, but to the conditions that allowed their works any kind of lasting place in the repertoire. Moscheles, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Offenbach had started as virtuoso performers. Had they not, it is doubtful that circumstances would have allowed them to make their subsequent mark as composers. It can be taken as understood that a Jewish Berlioz or Wagner would never have entered the musical mainstream since neither was a virtuoso instru-mentalist. Wagner's view that Mendelssohn's compositions consisted of facile note-spinning blithely overlooks the same quality in many of the works by his father-in-law, Franz Liszt, or the demonic violinist, Niccolò Paganini. Mendelssohn's aspiration to Mozartian purity, free of artifice and devoid of effect, was not far from Rossini's ideals and had philosophical origins in the Enlightenment idea of music as not just an art, but as a natural science. These Kantian views would have been seen by many at the time as logical and the result of empirical analysis; but to Wagner and Liszt, such values were already old-fashioned and in conflict with their understanding of Schopenhauer's metaphysical philosophy of the will that disparaged the rational thinking of the past and embraced the more impassioned mood at the root of Romanticism.

The European Enlightenment saw music as trans-national and trans-linguistic in its discourse, sharing many of the same scientific qualities as mathematics. John Locke's view that all men were born fundamentally equal, and with an equal potential for rational growth, was an underlying belief of the period that defined Mozart's reception as a child prodigy. Mozart, whose background offered no obvious access to the aristocratic society he reached as a
Wunderkind
, appeared to confirm to Jews that assimilation and acceptance within the highest circles of society was achievable for them as well. The reasoning of the age was that childhood was simply the first stage in the development of rational and equal citizens in a democratic and egalitarian world. As such, Mozart became a symbol not only for the ambitious who lived on the margins of society, but as a demonstration that every child harboured enormous potential. Music as a natural science had laws, but the brilliance of Mozart, and later Mendelssohn, showed how these laws themselves could be used to expand the non-verbal discourse that was the fundamental nature of music.
²⁴
The extraordinary originality of both Mozart and Mendelssohn lay in their dazzling application of existing models, not by reinventing them. The virtuoso composers Moscheles, Mendelssohn, Ferdinand Hiller and Meyerbeer all came from wealthy Jewish families from German cities. As such, they were greatly influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment, the
Haskalah
, which made them well aware of the artistic and aesthetic value (as well as the social advantage) that came from assimilation.

The view later propagated by Wagner that national character was the absolute determinant of musical expression came long after Mozart's death and followed the rise of post-1848 Romanticism and its frequently obnoxious elder relative born during the French Revolution, Nationalism. This idea is expounded in its own chapter from Wagner's 1850 manifesto
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft
(
The Art-work of the Future
). To Wagner, music was the logical expression of nationhood and since Jews were only pseudo-Germans, their attempts to compose German music were doomed to failure. They did not possess the true Germanic soul.
²⁵
The more defined these ideas became, the more bombastic the debates were between Wagner and his contemporaries regarding national character and how music should develop. Towards the end of the century, the camps were well delineated, with Brahms representing the ‘old’ school of German music and Wagner and his followers representing the ‘new’. The ‘old’ school, despite some bourgeois anti-Semitism from the likes of Robert and Clara Schumann, became a by-word for philo-Semitism. It was this that led German nationalists and supporters of Wagner's new-German School to aim blatantly anti-Semitic attacks at non-Jewish composers such as Brahms and Bruch.

Wagner's Political and Cultural Legacy

The ‘new’ school of Wagner and his father-in-law Liszt was largely opposed by the musical establishment in Leipzig – paradoxically, Wagner's native city. It was where Mendelssohn had triumphed at the Gewandhaus and the city came to represent the antithesis of Wagnerian ‘Art-of-the-Future’ ideals. It is fascinating to read how this process came about in the memoirs of Alfred Richter, a composer and teacher (and son of the Thomaskirche Kantor Ernst Richter) who became a scrupulous chronicler of Leipzig's ‘golden age’. This important document remained unpublished until its chance discovery in the municipal museum in 2004. Richter recalls working with Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Lortzing and others, and he offers an account of the local reception of Wagner's
Das Judenthum in der Musik
:

Wagner's views undoubtedly helped to shape the nineteenth century and, by extension, the twentieth. The American historian Peter Viereck in an essay from 1941 picks up on a concept communicated to Wagner by an admirer, Constantin Frantz. He called Wagner's political visions ‘metapolitical’, in other words, having the same relationship to normal politics as metaphysics to physics. Viereck uses the concept of ‘metapolitics’ to explain the evolution of Wagnerian thought into full-blooded National Socialism and by so doing, he deals with the very nature of the nineteenth century's
Zeitgeist
. This is a complex evolution that begins with the Enlightenment and continues through the French Revolution, Napoleon and the resulting philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. Starting from this point, Wagner's own political development moves him through the barricades in Dresden with his anarchist comrade Mikhail Bakunin, and ends in Swiss exile. It is along this route that he replaces Hegel with Schopenhauer and finally Feuerbach and, by doing so, evolves from the ‘Latinate’ view of the autonomous individual to the concept of the individual as an element within the collective. This epiphany concerning Wagner's adherence to the German ‘people’ or ‘nation’ had already come as a defining experience with his return from France in 1843. Along with his new-found devotion to the German people or ‘
Volk
’, he abhors the French and the superficial financial motivation of French composers. Indeed, the leitmotif in Wagner's life is the idea of money (Gold) and its power to individualise by creating disparities within an autonomous nation. It fits neatly as the cornerstone into what would soon emerge as a uniquely anti-Semitic variant of German nationalism.

In fact, as Viereck goes on to explain, the Romantic notions of ‘nation’, ‘nationhood’ and ‘the people’ (
Volk
or ‘folk’) were the basis for a rejection of the Enlightenment and therefore required that reason be conquered by
instinct, that law be conquered by passion, form by content, and scientific truth by collective mythology – ultimately, that the ‘dynamic’ conquer the ‘static’.
²⁷
It culminated in the Romantic view that ‘life was its own law’. With such dynamic forces of Germanic self-identification at work, it ultimately seems ironic that the French aristocrat Count Gobineau, with his
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines
, and Wagner's own son-in-law, the English philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, would have the greatest influence in shaping and propagating Wagner's racist views. Even more potent may have been Wagner's own lingering doubts as to whether his father might have been his mother's second husband, the actor Ludwig Geyer, who had lived as a lodger in the Wagner household before the death of Wagner's father. More disturbing for Wagner was the possibility that Geyer was Jewish. Nietzsche claimed he was, but without any proof, and it has never been ascertained whether Geyer was in fact Wagner's father. There were also continuing doubts about the parentage of Cosima Wagner. Her grandmother was the daughter of the Frankfurt banker Simon Moritz Bethmann, whose name and profession may suggest Jewish origins, though these, too, have never been proven. Yet regardless of the exact physical and psychological origins of Wagner's anti-Semitism, Viereck shows how Hitler was able to quote, almost word for word, much of Wagner's musings as being the foundation of his own political ideas. Indeed, Wagner was cited by Hitler as being his favourite ‘political’ writer.

More relevant to music itself was Wagner's specific condemnation of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a composer whose operas dominated the stage during the nineteenth century. His
Robert der Teufel
, better known as
Robert le Diable
, was, from the moment of its Viennese premiere in 1833, the single most frequently performed work in the city until a combination of costs, casting difficulties and, above all, Wagner's attacks had so undermined the composer's credibility that by the turn of the century the opera had lost all support. A hint of its former glory is to be found in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's own opera
Die tote Stadt
(1920), in which
Robert le Diable
features in the storyline. Korngold took it for granted that the public would understand the symbolism of his character Marietta being a dancer who portrayed the spirit of a long-dead satanic nun in
Robert le Diable
.

Meyerbeer was the most prominent and original composer to disappear predominantly as a result of Wagner's directed attacks. Yet such was the cult around Wagner that by 1900, Teutonic Romanticism's belief that change grew out of a disruptive surge produced by a shared national spirit resulted in a voluntary shift away from most nineteenth-century Jewish composers, with Mendelssohn being virtually the only survivor. This change of priority would presage musical developments throughout the twentieth century, where ‘new’
was preferable to the familiar. Jewish nineteenth-century composers were willingly forgotten because they were, supposedly, largely conventional. Wagner had re-interpreted the concept of ‘conventional’ as meaning at best ‘safe’ and at worst ‘inadequate’. Wagnerian idolatry grew, and in Vienna it eventually split into Jewish and non-Jewish adherents. Guido Adler, the father of modern musicology and childhood friend of Mahler, would be prominent in the Jewish Wagnerian Society which viewed Wagner as the prototype of the artist-as-catalyst, a view that would be shared first by Mahler and later by Schoenberg, both of whom would themselves become catalysts during the course of the twentieth century.