Richard Wagner’s Jewish Problem

I’m dismayed and perplexed that a Jewish conductor recently performed a Richard Wagner opera in Perth and that some Jews attended the performance.

Music is obviously an expression of the composer's feelings and worldview. That's why music is often described and discussed in the context of the composer's frame of mind at the time and place it was composed. For this reason, I could not countenance attending a Wagner performance. He promulgated many anti-Semitic views over the course of his life. He frequently accused Jews of being a harmful foreign element in Germany and called for the annihilation of Jewish culture. He conceived the terms "Jewish problem" and "final solution," which Nazism later adopted.

Wagner and his "Bayreuth Circle" were the "intellectual" and "spiritual" fathers of genocidal Nazism. Hitler and his regime were inspired by Wagnerian thought and music. Hitler said that that "there is only one legitimate predecessor to national socialism: Wagner" and venerated him, saying, "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner." He was so enraptured with him that he is quoted as having said "Richard Wagner is my religion."

Wagner's first and most controversial anti-Semitic essay was "Das Judenthum in der Musik", originally published in 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift under the pen-name "K. Freigedenk" ("free thought") and later under his own name. It that essay, Wagner expressed his fervent revulsion for what he described as "cursed Jewish scum" and described Jews as "hostile to European civilization" and "ruling the world through money." He said that "Judaism is rotten at the core and is a religion of hatred," described the cultured Jew as "the most heartless of all human beings" and referred to Jewish composers as being "comparable to worms feeding on the body of art." He claimed that the German people were repelled by Jews due to their alien appearance and behavior — "freaks of Nature" with "creaking, squeaking, buzzing" voices — so that "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." 

In the conclusion to the essay, he wrote of the Jews that "only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus – going under!"

Music critic Barry Millington said that “Anti-Semitism is woven into the fabric of the music of Wagner.”

I ask those who claim that they can ignore Wagner’s repulsive philosophy and focus in isolation on the music, to consider the following example of his art explicitly expressing his anti-Semitism.

In Parsifal, Wagner’s final opera, Kundry, is explicitly Jewish. Kundry is the archetypal Jew of medieval myth, the wandering Ahasuerus, cursed to roam the world eternally for mocking Christ on the cross. To music of an inexpressible weariness, she confesses: “I saw Him—Him—and laughed!” For this sin of laughter, she is damned to wander “from world to world,” seeking a redemption that always eludes her. Like the Jews of Das Judentum in Musik, she longs for community but remains forever outside it. Desperate for salvation, she is cursed to be nothing but a source of corruption. When her salvation does at last arrive, in the grand reconciliation of Parsifal’s third act, it is consummated by her death, thus perfectly fulfilling Wagner’s chilling conclusion of Das Judentum in Musik: “one thing only can redeem you [Jews] from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus—Going under!”

Wagner’s second wife, Cosima recorded in her diary on 28 March1881, that Wagner considered Parsifal “a retort to Gobineau”, who had characterized the Germans as the “last card” of nature, probably a reference to his despair that evolution was destroying his beloved, superior "Aryan race..."

After Wagner's death in 1883, Wagner's family continued to promote his vile anti-Semitic ideology, and became a central focus for Jew baiters and radical right-wing Germans. His daughter Eva married Houston Chamberlain, an Englishman who crafted the ideology for Nazi racism in his notorious book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century." Bayreuth became a meeting place for fascists and extreme right-wing Wagner fans that came to be known as the Bayreuth circle. Winifred Wagner, the English-born widow of Wagner’s son Siegfried, said in the 1970s: “If Hitler were to walk in through that door now, for instance, I’d be as happy and glad to see and have him here as ever…”