Wagner and the meaning and effect of art

Where freedom of expression and moral responsibility clash.

By DANA GORDON
youth protest wagner_311 (photo credit: Karolyn Coorsh)
youth protest wagner_311
(photo credit: Karolyn Coorsh)
The debate over "Wagner and his music: good or evil" goes all the way back to Richard Wagner's era, the mid 19th century in Europe.  He was, after all, the composer of not only a major corpus of powerful music, but of many published and widely read anti-Semitic essays and utterances, including "Jewishness in Music," one of the ur-texts of modern anti-Semitism.  And his music was used by the Nazis as emblematic of true German feeling — which is what Wagner consciously designed it to be. 
Recently The Jerusalem Post ran several articles, by Ashley Rindsberg, Susan Hattis Rolef, and Jacob Gross, in response to the cancellation of a Wagner concert at Tel Aviv University because of the protest of the Holocaust Survivors Center. 
Although these articles were written from both sides of the debate, they all brought to our attention insights which help explain why Wagner and his music are abominations and should not be heard – except in the study of 1) the history of music, 2) how subtle and insidious evil can be, or 3) how evil can be propagated through art. 
Theodor Herzl, as quoted by Hattis Rolef on June 10, finds "Wagner's opera as a lesson in propaganda: how to manipulate people through art," as if this were a positive quality of Wagner's art.  Herzl was among the many well-meaning intelligentsia and art lovers of his era who were crazy for Wagner, exemplifying the blind love of mystification found in specious precincts of the avant-garde.
Herzl clearly understood the propagandistic impact of Wagner's powerful music.  Yet Herzl mistakenly saw this stirring quality as good, as if it could be used to convince people to do the right thing.  But propagandistic power is a tool to be used for good or evil, which brings up the question of the morality of making art that can do this — and, if someone's art or technique is used for evil, is it then art at all?  There is a difference between a design tool and art. 
And even though Herzl had a strong hunch that the Jews' days in Europe were numbered, he didn't understand how much Wagner's music contributed to this.  Nonetheless, his failure to understand does not invalidate the truth of Herzl's other profound insights that led to the founding of Israel.
The high regard for Wagner's music developed during his own time. In 19th century Germany, where music was a dominant art form and expression of the German soul, his music became a touchstone for cultural power. Concurrently, many people were already concerned about the fate of Jews in Europe.  Both of these phenomena increased as World War II and the Holocaust approached.  A young Hitler read anti-Semitic writings avidly and was a devotee of Wagner. In Mein Kampf, he names three heroes of the German race: Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and Richard Wagner.
Anti-Semitism didn't just drop onto modern Europe in the 1930s.  All along, some observers were well aware of the contradiction between Wagner's great fame as an artist and his strong influence as an anti-Semite.  Of course, one cannot expect that even these people knew of the Holocaust to come – though many suspected something like it.  However, now that we know the strong impact Wagner had on the Nazis and the German self-regard as the master race, we cannot listen to Wagner's music as if we do not know. It would be dishonest, or at best naive.
It is disingenuous to claim, as Hattis Rolef does, that "all" serious musicologists deny that Wagner's music reflects Nazi ideology. This is simply not true.  These claims ignore the peer pressure on musicologists and commercial pressure on orchestras to accept Wagner. This claim is true about Wagner only in a literal, simplistic sense: Wagner died before the Nazis formed.  But the ideas and beliefs that motivated the formation of the Nazis and of the Final Solution were very much alive in Wagner's day and he was a central figure in abetting them.  The technical mastery and stirring appeal of Wagner's music have turned the hearts of many who ought to know better, but just cannot deny themselves the pleasure of his music. If they really understood it, they would find no such pleasure.
On June 7, Rindsberg delves into and isolates a very important aspect of Wagner's music. He tells us of Wagner's obsession with a manifestation and idealization of sadomasochism in German high culture: Liebestod, the idea of love-death, death as redemption of love. And what kind of love?  An unleashed love that has the power to "free man from restraint and from nature and from existence." Thusly Rindsberg shows how a pathology is justified, a misconceived love of self, a narcissism, as a sacrifice to the rise and redemption of German culture. And how is this redemption to occur?  For both Wagner and Hitler, it will be through the death of the Jews, who have, via their successful liberation and assimilation, hijacked and poisoned the purity of German culture. 
The Nazis and Germans certainly did achieve complete fulfillment of love-death.  And then, as they suffered a tragic and absurd turnabout far too profound to be ironic, for decades after World War II Germans saw that the very opposite of the Nazi’s desire was simultaneously its result: the utter disembowelment of German culture by the removal of the Jews.
So we see that one of the sources of the evil of Wagner's music is found in part of the content that Wagner consciously put in it.  While this is indeed a strong source of the evil, its very effectiveness — and its power to mislead the best-intentioned — implies that there is more such content and effect in the music.
Music was both victim and instrument of the Nazis. They subverted and perverted all the arts into instruments of policy – which the Communists tried as well.  It is not uncommon historically or contemporarily for governments, political parties, religions, cultural segments, and academic fashion to do this sort of thing.  But the crux in the case of the totalitarianisms is in both the utter subversion of the art and in the horrible, perverted message it is then forced to carry.  An individual is thus forced to be responsible, to make individual judgments about the art (or the purported "art") in all cases.
Music did acquire a particular burden in Germany under and before the Nazis. Wagner's music and anti-Semitism stirred tribal passions in Germany, as they were meant to. Wagner's musical passions and invention were so entwined with his poisoned thoughts on race (and their outcome) that one should not accept his music, as a whole or in part, beautiful as it can seem.  Wagner's music and ideas held central roles in the Nazi pageant, and this was not by accident.
But, it is claimed, his music stirred (what seem to be) legitimate cultural ecstasies as well, and still does.  For me, his music bears a burden that makes it impossible to listen to. However, many respectable cultural voices disagree.  Nevertheless, what moves them was designed to move the Germans to their own perverse "triumph of the will."  Even if you are unable to perceive the evil actually in the music, it ought to make you uncomfortable to listen to music that provoked such evil and stirred such evildoers on an intimate level.
And if Wagner's music should not be accepted, then what of Beethoven, another official favorite of the Nazis?  No one seriously suggests not listening to Beethoven, but why not?  The Nazis could find no real Aryan supremacy agenda in Beethoven, but they could see he was recognized as one of the greatest artists of all time, and he was German and not Jewish. So they used his music. It does curdle my breakfast a little if I am listening to the Ninth Symphony and think of the Nazis enjoying it. The Nazis did an extraordinary amount of damage; it is still not all over with.
However, Beethoven was not only not an anti-Semite, his music was about the struggles for freedom and expression and meaning and beauty in the life of an individual, not about the triumph of the Germanic race.
It is sometimes true that a great artist is not a pleasant chap.  Ludwig had his hang-ups.  But this is not the same as an artist who foments widespread evil.  Some art affirms life in all its dimensions, some affirms only a limited view of art and life, and some art really denies life – in which case I would not call it art.
Of course, neither music itself nor Wagner alone caused the Holocaust.  However, Wagner and his music were instrumental in it, not incidental. Yes, one could legitimately say that the Nazis were even more perverted than Wagner, and Naziism needed additional causes and enablements before its flowers of evil could fully bloom, but this is no defense of Wagner.
Wagner's musical intentions were inextricably entwined with his racism, Beethoven's were not. I doubt the latter was a racist at all. Both composers' musical intentions were entangled with their ideas and emotions, expressed through their music.  We have to judge whose values we accept — and stand for these values, if they are ours.  We have to use our own personal judgment — intuition based on knowledge; it's not a basic rule of life, a basic moral tenet, that one must accept all art, all human products.  Distinctions must be made and each of us is responsible (and to blame) for making them, aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally, and morally.
On June 24, Jacob Gross, another contributor to this debate in The Jerusalem Post, suggested that we can enjoy colors made from primitive life forms without being disturbed by the colors' origins and we can derive faith from a prayer that is attributed in part to the prophet Balaam, a personification of evil symbolized in the bible. The prayer's author recognized truths about Jacob and Israel.  If we can divorce our appreciation of these good qualities from their unpleasant sources, why not divorce the man Richard Wagner from the music he composed?
Bear in mind how different Richard Wagner is from those examples.  He lived not so very long ago, from 1813 to 1883, and was a brilliant, influential, famous personage who knew very well what he was doing. He was a willing agent of evil who lived at a time we can easily relate to.  He was real, a real human being and he perpetrated this; it was no accident of nature or figment of tradition.  Creating a tremendously complex work of art is not the same as an ancient enemy prophet recognizing that the Israelites were blessed.  And — I’ll have recourse to the ancient Greek moral tradition here, one that contributed much to the civilized world — if you insist on listening to Wagner and his myths, remember the myth of the beautiful, seductive Sirens’ mesmerizing song luring sailors to unpleasant fates.
In our own time, too, the arts can be perverted into instruments of politics.  A ubiquitous example is — rather than specific to government totalitarianism — the one-sided, authoritarian, Marxist-derived teaching (generally called postmodernism) so frequently found in today’s academia.  Because it is so unchallengeable there, it is a kind of mind control.  It is a prime source of the "culture wars" we have been experiencing, our Kulturkampf.  In its mix of art with politics — indeed, typically making politics the center of art — can be found permission for, and cover of, the “new” anti-Semitism: anti-Zionism. Jew hatred disguised as disapproval of Israel.
Any anti-Semitic utterance contributed to the evil fate perpetrated on Jews historically, and continues to, though not every such utterance is intended to do so — as Wagner's certainly were.  A socially acceptable, genteel sort of anti-Semitism pocks the utterances of some of the 20th century's greatest writers.  T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are notable examples of an indefensible defacement of character in certain social classes that cleared up after World War II, only to reappear in the guise of anti-Israelism in the century's last decades.
But are we to reject any artist's work because of such fecklessness?  It may depend on where you draw the lines between stupidity, moral failings, and downright evil. And on how much of the former two qualities you can stomach in order to admire and engage art of significant intellectual achievement. Perhaps the level of achievement in the art acceptably weighs in on how much moral failing one can accept. Maybe you must weigh good and evil in balance, in each judgment of each work of art, or of any other human product. One is tempted to forgive some human failings in artists; even the greatest achievers have feet of clay.  Eliot and Stevens brought the highest achievement and new realms of experience and observation to the art of poetry, and one could ascribe their anti-Semitism as one example of the confusion, incomprehension, and other misled responses to modern reality that amounted to one of the central subjects of their poetry.  Two other relevant examples, the composers Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin, contemporaries of Wagner, were not shy about their anti-Semitism, but there is no serious case for finding it in their music, though one's knowledge of their folly may reduce one's pleasure in the music.
One must ask how much the artist's biography can have to do with the evaluation of their work. Most of us want to know about the artist, though there is a valid school of thought that says you should first (and maybe only) experience and evaluate the art without knowing anything about the artist. One probably should approach art this way.  Still, once you know about the artist, you can’t deny what you know.  It informs you. It is no longer irrelevant. Knowing of T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism certainly gives me feelings of both distaste and guilt when reading his work and this lowers my esteem for it as well as my interest in it.  Should we ignore these particular feelings alone when judging an artwork?  Feeling inevitably comes into the judgment of art.
The late Hilton Kramer, one of the 20th century's greatest culture critics, wrote that "a work of art might transcend the conditions of its creation and acquire an existence and a meaning quite separate from the life that produced it."  Accordingly, Kramer (a Jew) did not reject Wagner's music.  But, in the case of Wagner, he was willing to ignore too much. Wagner's music could not "transcend the conditions of its creation" because these conditions were an inherent part of the content, meaning, form, and effect of the music, and not separable from them. 
Finally, the absolute evil perpetuated in the name of art is hardly a thing of the past. I must move from the sublime to the ridiculous to point this out.  It is unfortunately worth mentioning the name and infamy of Gilad Atzmon before closing.  This notorious, crusading anti-Semite, anti-Zionist preacher of hate, and teacher of lies, is a jazz musician and political activist based in England – though originally a Jew born and raised in Israel.  His music isn’t close to being in the class of achievement we find with Wagner, Chopin or Liszt, but he rides the crest of the wave of the new anti-Semitism, both the genteel socially acceptable kind and the primitive, socially unacceptable kind, in Europe and the UK. He is hardly known in the US. This is no coincidence: anti-Semitism has much less of a presence in the US, even in academia, where it is nevertheless a problem.  It is impossible to separate his celebration as a musician — and the celebration of his music — from his fame as an enemy of Jews.  He doesn't do so himself.  Nor did Wagner.
The writer, whose essays have been published in Commentary Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, and The Jerusalem Post, is based in New York.