Wagner's Argument On Jewish Artists And Their Music

Question 1: One of Wagner’s main arguments against Jewish artists and their music were that the musicians could only produce inferior derivations of pure European art they could never fully express themselves. Wagner seemingly held the belief that Jewish musicians were not able to fully comprehend modern European languages because they were “merely learnt” by Jewish artists and therefore “have remained…a foreign tongue” (Wagner, 7). Wagner’s impression was that Jewish artists works’ expressivity was limited due to the fact that, from Wagner’s perspective, Jewish artists didn’t have the capacity to fully understand the complexities of modern European languages and therefore lacked the ability to properly use these languages to convey profundity,
inspiration, or significance within their musical works.
The other main argument from Wagner was that Jewish artists’ nature, appearance, and the overall tones in their speech and music were innately vexing to true Europeans solely because the artist was Jewish. This ad hominem argument from Wagner stems from his thought that Jewish artists’ physical representations of their music were aesthetically displeasing due to “the peculiarities of Semitic pronunciation” (Wagner, 7). At this point in Wagner’s argument you can definitively distinguish a tonal shift towards a more personal attack on what he thought were Jewish musical characteristics when he writes about the sounds he hears when he listens to Jewish musicians’ art:
“The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle… so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.” (Wagner, 7).
Wagner uses these derogatory claims of what he feels are Jewish qualities of speech to validate his idea that true Europeans as a whole will always feel a certain amount of dissonance when listening to the works of Jewish artists.
Wagner’s descriptions of Semitic dictions also manifest in a more physical form during one of his most famous groupings of operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in the form of a dwarf, Alberich. This character in his opera is generally accompanied by extremely dissonant chords and the libretto sections for Alberich are typically not as well pronounced as other characters’ vocals (Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen Score and Libretto). Because of this Alberich, for most people, is seen as an embodiment of Wagner’s prejudices and serves as a physical type of evidence that he believed Jewish artists’ nature, appearance, and tonal qualities of both their speech and music were grating to the senses of true
Europeans.

Question 2: Wagner uses Felix Mendelssohn as an example to substantiate his claims against Jewish musicians at several points in his article. The first example was that Wagner felt that because Felix Mendelssohn had a Jewish ancestry that he could not express his music properly in modern European languages. Wagner noted that Mendelssohn modeled his works after Bach, using his works as a “special pattern for [Mendelssohn’s] inexpressive modern tongue to copy.” (Wagner, 12). In this simple statement from Wagner he completely ignores the genius and beauty in Mendelssohn’s art and simply diminishes his works to an expressively vacant shell standing in Bach’s shadow; all of this due to the fact that, in Wagner’s own mind, he felt that Jewish artists lacked the capacity of expression because they could not fully understand the complexities of modern European languages simply due to their heritage (Wagner, 7). Through this argument, Wagner demonstrates that his passionate dislike of Mendelssohn’s work was, in part, due to the fact that he felt Mendelssohn had only produced meagre imitations of Bach’s works.
Another example of Wagner’s arguments was that he felt Mendelssohn’s music was incapable of grasping the listeners’ deepest feelings and emotions simply because of the qualities of Mendelssohn’s music. From this assertion it seems that another reason for Wagner’s dislike of Mendelssohn’s works was that his music possessed qualities that were deemed innately grating to the senses and thus could not evoke the true emotions of the listeners. According to Wagner, Mendelssohn’s Jewish ancestry only allowed the listeners to superficially enjoy the music as a distinctively dissonant fleeting fancy instead of a deeply emotional experience that true European musicians were able to extract through their works (Wagner, 11-12). Wagner writes his views in a way that almost seems to, at first, compliment Mendelssohn’s attempt to extract true emotion from his listeners but his condescending praise morphs into a condemning censure of Mendelssohn’s body of musical works:
“We have only been able to feel engrossed where nothing beyond our more or less amusement-craving Phantasy was roused…as in the kaleidoscope's changeful play of form and colour…but never where those figures were meant to take the shape of deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart.” (Wagner, 11-12).
Wagner uses this argument against Mendelssohn’s musical qualities to substantiate his claims that Jewish artists’ nature, appearance, and the tones in their speech and musical works were irrevocably aggravating to modern European listeners at the time.

Question 3: There are an immense amount of similarities Nazi ideology in the arts and Wagner’s claims about the Jewish people.
One of the larger similarities was that Nazi ideology as well as Wagner both thought Jewish art was merely a facsimile of true European culture because Jewish artists, even if they were German or any other variety of European, “would always think and act like Jews... [therefore] Jews could never really pursue an authentically German culture, but only contaminate that culture with their own innately Jewish sensibility” (Steinweis, 17). This ideology was expressed by Wagner throughout his work, Das Judentum in der Musik, because he felt that Jewish musicians were unable to create true European art because their Jewish qualities seeped into every aspect of their works, making their art instantaneously not European. Nazi beliefs mirrored this way of thinking as they thought it was important to separate themselves from any cultural aspect or artist that they considered to be “contaminated by alien influences” (Steinweis, 17). Another stark similarity between the views of Nazism and Wagner’s personal beliefs was that Jewish musicians were seen as an aesthetic blight on German culture. Wagner’s views on Jewish musicians’ aesthetics applied to their displeasing sounds, among other complaints, in their works that could only be the product of their Jewish ancestry trickling into their art and eliminating any actual semblance of German aesthetics. According to Wagner,
this displeasing aesthetic is due to Jewish artists “employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases” (Wagner, 7) which makes Jewish works wholly unbearable on a cerebral level. The same sentiment could be used for Nazi ideology as they too believed Jewish artists, along with other so-called “alien” artists, “contaminated” true German art and were the “cause of aesthetic degeneration” in German culture (Steinweis, 17). The Nazis believed that any type of cultural impact from Jewish artists tainted German culture to the point of disrepair, so much so that Jewish musicians were prohibited from performing or being performed under Nazi rule as to restore and protect the purity of German culture from the venality of Jewish art. During the time of Nazism this hatred and fear of anything foreign lead to the establishment of harsh censorship laws and the creation of blacklists for non-German works of art (Steinweis, 21). It is in these similarities between Nazi ideology and Wagner’s personal thoughts that we see a strong connection to the same underlying feelings of anti-Semitism shared by many prominent Germans throughout multiple generations.

Question 4: I feel that the best examples of the paradox in Wagner’s idea and fear of “be-Jewing” (Wagner, 4) lies within one of his earlier operas, The Flying Dutchman. The Flying Dutchman is an exquisite work of art but the majority of the story was taken from Heinrich Heine whom Wagner mentions by name as a Jewish artist in his article Das Judentum in der Musik. Heinrich Heine was a poet who wrote several works including Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski in which he includes a recapping of the nautical folktale about the Flying Dutchman (Heine, 1833); it was from this section of his book Wagner found his muse to write his opera and cited Heine’s work as his inspiration in his Autobiographische Skizze (Wagner, 1843). At this point in his life Wagner seemed to take no offense to the idea of using a piece of art created by a Jewish poet to in turn create his own art; this is a legitimate paradox created by Wagner’s own claims against Jewish art. The very fact that a work written by Heine could inspire him goes against everything Wagner claimed about the expressivity and artistic value of Jewish artists. Wagner expressly felt that Jewish artists were essentially a scourge to German culture because they “be-Jewed” German works however when he blatantly took Jewish art and added his own German influences he did not feel that this was a case of “be-Jewing” (Wagner, 4). It should also be noted that Wagner was likely also aware of his self-created paradox and in his autobiography Mein Leben his inspiration had changed from Heine’s work, as it was in his earlier life, to an experience he himself had while on a ship in sea (Wagner, 1870). Overall Wagner’s paradox of “be-Jewing” the arts invalidates his own claims against Jewish artists and their ineptitude when it comes to producing beautifully expressive and meaningful works that can inspire other people to create similarly expressive pieces of art.