SOURCE: Weiner, Marc A. “Introduction: Wagner and the Body.” In Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, pp. 1-33. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Weiner scrutinizes the racial implications of Wagner's depiction of the body in his operas.]

There is no anti-Semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew, which is composed of mimetic cyphers.

—Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Gleaming or dripping eyes, a resonant or screeching voice, the bodily aromas of youthful love or the stench of sulfur and flatulence, the steady tread of a muscle-bound warrior or the lopsided, hobbling gait of a diminutive, hairy, goatlike creature whose skin is ashen or deathly pale—these are images of the body through which Richard Wagner metaphorically expressed his theories concerning the failings of nineteenth-century Europe and his vision of a superior and future Germany. For Wagner the body is the site in which the ideological becomes visible; it is both metaphor and physical reality, a vehicle for communicating abstract aesthetic and social concepts and, at the same time, a physiological manifestation of the purported veracity of the issues with which it is associated. But while the ideas with which Wagner identified the body in his essays and music dramas were often novel, iconoclastic, and even weird, the corporeal images through which he expressed them were not his invention but part of a widespread motivic vocabulary laden with specific connotations in his culture. The body in Wagner's works thus takes on two dimensions: it both expresses—virtually incorporates—his revolutionary theories concerning social-aesthetic issues and reveals him to be, like his contemporary audience, a member of his culture steeped in beliefs and values characteristic of his age.

This book accordingly, examines two interrelated subjects: the function of corporeal images within Wagner's theoretical reflections and music dramas, and the iconographic traditions in his culture from which he drew these images. I approach Wagner from two complementary vantage points: as an idiosyncratic, iconoclastic individual who created some of the most innovative works of the nineteenth century, and as a man steeped in—and hence representative of—a host of beliefs and ideological forces that defined his age. The configurations of his personal makeup, though often unusual, shed light on the assumptions and pressures shared by his contemporaries, and their values also often illuminate beliefs and associations involved in the creation of Wagner's works. Beliefs concerning the body provide a nexus linking the composer's personal agenda and the response granted his works by his nineteenth-century audience, for by using bodily imagery, Wagner was able to evoke specific associations linked to the body in his culture and to grant his ideas a degree of persuasive credibility to a nineteenth-century audience that can only be imaginatively reconstructed today. I hope to show that Wagner's music dramas did not only come to be associated with ideas ranging from anti-Semitism to the longing for an imagined German community through the composer's many pronouncements on these subjects and through his later association with Nazism (though many of his apologists make precisely this argument) but through a host of culturally pervasive bodily images that in his world were already understood as signs of racial, sexual, and national identity.

Since the nineteenth century, and especially since the end of World War II, such ideological implications in Wagner's writings and music dramas have been increasingly denied or repressed as the cultural vocabulary of the world in which he is read and performed has changed, thereby making what I believe in his time was an obvious dimension of the Wagnerian artwork an issue of open debate in the post-Wagnerian age. But in Wagner's world, the body was the site in which identity could be read (and for Wagner, that meant above all racial identity), and its signs are everywhere apparent, both as metaphor and as physiological phenomenon, in his works. Inscribed upon the body, Wagner read the signs of everything he despised in the modern world and discerned in it the possibility of a different social order as well.

Any discussion of the body in Wagner's thought must begin with the psychological significance of racial identity for the composer, because in his time the appearance of the body was deemed an obvious and reliable indication of race, and throughout his life Wagner strove to distance himself from the ‘race’ of Jews with whom he feared comparison. For those critics receptive to the arguments of depth psychology, there is no question but that Wagner's documented hatred of Jews was intimately connected to the composer's uncertainty regarding his paternal heritage. It is possible, they argue, that Wagner feared his father was Jewish. It has become a staple of Wagnerian scholarship that Wagner never knew whether his father was Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, who died six months after the composer's birth, or the actor, poet, and portrait painter Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, whom Wagner's mother married nine months after the death of her first husband and whom Wagner may have suspected of being a Jew.¹ (Some scholars have also maintained that Wagner was even worried about his mother's potentially Jewish pedigree.)² Shortly after Wagner's death, in 1888, Nietzsche played upon this fear in Der Fall Wagner (The case of Wagner) in his pun concerning the name of Ludwig Geyer. After having come to know the composer's hopes, frustrations, and fears through years of nearly familial intimacy, it was Nietzsche who suggested to Wagner that he create a family crest containing not an eagle (Adler) but a vulture (Geier), and Wagner indeed used such a crest as the frontispiece in the private first edition of his autobiography Mein Leben (My life) of 1870. … Playing upon the two names—Adler and Geier—replete with racial associations, Nietzsche lampooned in 1888 the racist composer's pretensions to Germanic ‘purity,’ implying instead that Wagner may well have been (and presumably feared being) precisely that creature most removed from the German in his own thinking—a Jew: ‘Was Wagner even a German? … His father was an actor named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an eagle. … I admit my distrust of every point that is only attested to by Wagner himself. … He remained … true to himself even in the biographical,—he remained an actor.’³ In nineteenth-century European culture Nietzsche's point was clear: Wagner's father could have been a Jewish artist. Nietzsche exaggerates the point by erasing the ambiguity of the father's identity—an ambiguity that Wagner acknowledged when he accepted Nietzsche's suggestion for the two images in the family crest—but he preserves it when he implies that the vulture ‘is almost an eagle [Adler].’ Nietzsche's attack was of a posthumously personal nature, for it was based upon insight into the mind of the composer available to few.

Yet we must not ground our argument on remarks Wagner may or may not have made to his philosopher friend, for even if he did not discuss the matter with Nietzsche, Wagner's preoccupation with the uncertainty of his father's identity, laden with racial implications, is still discernible in virtually all his most celebrated music dramas. The postrevolutionary, technically most iconoclastic of his works for the stage focus time and again on figures who either have never known their fathers (Siegfried, Tristan, and Parsifal), did not know their true identity (Siegmund and Siegfried do not even know their fathers' names), or lived with them only for a short time before they disappeared (Siegmund) or died during the hero's youth (Walther von Stolzing), dramatic testimony to the importance of the motif in the composer's thinking.⁴ (I feel that the degree of such repetition saves the critic from the accusation of the intentional fallacy, for it suggests, if nothing else, the composer's heightened fascination or preoccupation with a motif, without reducing his works to mere embodiments of his personality.) But what if that long-lost father were in fact not the shining image of a knight or hero but its opposite in Wagner's system of thought and culture—a Jew? Perhaps the most celebrated instance of Wagner's horror at the all-too-autobiographical potential of the hated Jew was the moment when he may have recognized his own image in his first description of the Nibelung dwarf Mime, contained in the verse draft of Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried) of 1851 (which Wagner later revised and retitled Siegfried, the third of the Ring dramas [1876]). Theodor W. Adorno pointedly argues that Wagner expunged the following, initial description of Mime of 1851 from the final text of the music drama precisely because the dwarf appears here so similar to Wagner himself:

Mime, the Nibelung, alone. He is small and bent, somewhat deformed and hobbling. His head is abnormally large, his face is a dark ashen colour and wrinkled, his eyes small and piercing, with red rims, his grey beard long and scrubby, his head bald and covered with a red cap. He wears a dark grey smock with a broad belt around his loins: feet bare, with thick coarse soles underneath. There must be nothing approaching caricature in all this: his aspect, when he is quiet, must be simply eerie: it is only in moments of extreme excitement that he becomes exteriorily ludicrous, but never too uncouth. His voice is husky and harsh; but this again ought of itself never to provoke the listener to laughter.⁵

The figure of Mime is a vehicle for the representation of a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes from Wagner's time (as I will discuss in detail in chapters 1 to 4), and, given Wagner's small stature, large head, and excited demeanor made note of by so many of his acquaintances, his decision to suppress this passage from the final text of the Ring may be a clue to the psychological investment underlying his exploitation of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the creation of a number of figures in his music dramas.⁶ Wagner's vehement hatred of Jews may have been based on a model of projection which itself suggests a deep-seated fear of precisely those features within the Self (diminutive stature, nervous demeanor, and avarice, as well as a lascivious nature) that are projected upon and then recognized and stigmatized in the hated Other. If Adorno is correct, the incident illustrates both Wagner's secret potential affinity with his image of the Jew—his surreptitious fear concerning his own paternity and the nature of his genetic and even artistic identity—and his violent desire to disavow such an affinity. In the final version of Siegfried, bereft of its initial description of Mime, Wagner's answer to that most tenacious and pernicious of questions—am I a Jew? or could others perceive me as one?—would find its most violent dramatic expression. (Many of Wagner's contemporary detractors exploited this possibility, presenting the composer as a caricature of that being he most despised. …)

Wagner inherited his belief in the physical difference of the Jew from a host of traditions within German culture. In his world, the Jew's difference was discerned in his purportedly idiosyncratic corporeal signs (such as stature, voice, smell, hair, gait, gestures, sexuality, and physiognomy) that I will discuss in detail in the following chapters. Belief in such signs thus links Wagner's personal psychological needs—and the corporeal images of his essays and music dramas—with the larger cultural vocabulary of his time. His own psychological dynamic concerning Jews—documented through his letters, essays, and autobiographical writings (as well as in Cosima Wagner's diaries) and, I will argue, discernible in his music dramas—would be of only anecdotal interest were it not for the shared beliefs it betrays, for though Wagner often stylized himself as a Promethean, romantic genius creating original works out of a void, his theoretical writings and the music dramas based upon them demonstrably incorporate those images of the body that were part of the culture in which he lived—and to which he wished to communicate. A key to the ideological function of such signs in that culture is that they are never recognized as the products of collective fears; instead, they are simply deemed credible indications of physiological reality. Both Wagner and his contemporaries believed that things are as they appear, but that belief itself was fueled by psychological needs and social tensions, especially when it was applied to groups that were identified as different and rejected by a society seeking to establish its own identity. His statement that ‘there must be nothing approaching caricature’ in Mime's appearance (the emphasis is Wagner's) betrays the psychological function of the aesthetic representation of the Jew for the composer and for his fellow nineteenth-century Germans, because in formulating such a wish, Wagner sought to efface the image of the Jew as a cultural construct, insisting instead that it was true to life and ‘real.’⁷

At least since Foucault there has been no shortage of investigations into the status of the body within Western culture as the site upon which values are inscribed.⁸ Far from constituting a value-free, neutral, and objective entity, the body has emerged as an iconographic map upon which are found the signs of commonality and of difference imagined there by Western minds to ensure the sanctity and the identification of borders of community. It was precisely to the establishment of such borders that Wagner devoted his life's work. Many studies have been done in recent years on the various corporeal iconographies of racial and sexual difference that developed within nineteenth-century European culture and that came to form a standard repertoire through which those deemed foreign, such as blacks, Orientals, Gypsies, and Jews, were viewed, as well as those deemed sexually deviant or disenfranchised, such as homosexuals, masturbators, and women. It is within the context of these standard, stereotypical bodily images that Wagner's musical-dramatic creations should be understood as cultural constructs of, for his time, enormously evocative power, because the libretti, stage descriptions and directions, and the dramatic music Wagner wrote, often intended to portray fundamentally different kinds of human beings, employ precisely those value-laden images of the body with which he and his contemporaries were familiar.⁹

Given the voluminous nature of Wagner's extant letters, diaries, and autobiographical writings, as well as Cosima Wagner's lengthy diary entries, we have a remarkable wealth of information that provides insight into the composer's concern with the physical appearance of others as a clue to their identity, as well as with his own body, health, and appearance. Wagner's pronouncements on these subjects are couched in terms suggesting neurotic compulsions and compensations; his preoccupation with diet (especially his penchant for a strict vegetarianism), ill health (ranging from his remarks on gastrointestinal maladies to diseases of the skin [erysipelas] and cardiovascular deterioration), and various cures (he was especially interested in the nineteenth-century literature on the regenerative powers of water) emerges as the psychological flip side of his aggressive portrayal of himself as larger than life and loftier than his mundane contemporaries. As the Self suffers physical deterioration within a world that stigmatizes and categorizes physical difference, it threatens to revert in the eyes of the would-be superior being (and of the would-be superior community) to the status of the hated and feared object of derision—to resemble the image that the Self has so vociferously rejected. No wonder the Volsungs, Walther von Stolzing, and Parsifal—who represent the German community in the Ring, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Wagner's final music drama—are so exaggeratedly bursting with health, youthful exuberance, and blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty; they are the longed-for image of the Self designed as a counter to that all-too-familiar part of Wagner's own physical (and psychological) identity he so adamantly refused to recognize as his own—a physical identity that in the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic imagination came dangerously close to that of the Jew.¹⁰

Owing to the associations that attended physical appearance in nineteenth-century Western culture, the moment Wagner employed the body as a metaphor for his often highly idiosyncratic theories concerning the arts and society, his unusual ideas took on connotations that were already grounded in the repertoire of racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and homophobic imagery central to his age. That is, many of Wagner's ideas concerning social-aesthetic revolution may have been iconoclastic or new in his time, but when he couched them in diverse metaphors of the body, he connected in the minds of his contemporary audience these novel ideas with all the ideological baggage associated with corporeal iconographies in his culture. One could argue, of course, that the opposite is true, that it was their exclusionary connotations that led Wagner to employ such value-laden images in his essays and music dramas in the first place; but it is less important to determine which came first—the cultural context or the poetic intent—than to appreciate how the metaphors in Wagner's theories and their dramatic representations lent his works powerful and reprehensible connotations in the nineteenth century that have been lost or repressed since his time. By using corporeal signs, Wagner was able to express his ideas in an evocative, metaphorical, symbolic, and nonexplicit manner that resonated against a repertoire of physiological images linked in his culture to contemporary prejudices and fears.

For example, as I will discuss in chapter 1, Wagner believed modern, hypercivilized culture (which he associated with Jews) to be distressingly superficial, and tradition-laden and communally defined German culture (as he characterized it) to be wonderfully authentic, worthy of veneration, and ‘deep.’ But, as I will show in chapter 2, Wagner invested this polarized spatial metaphor of superficial (as inferior) and deep (as superior) with polarized, fundamentally antithetical images of the Jewish and German bodies that were taken from his culture. Wagner's image of the Jewish voice was that of an instrument virtually higher than, and hence physiologically altogether different from, the Teutonic voice; as Sander Gilman has shown, such an image is to be found in European culture both in the early nineteenth century (as reflected in the works of Rossini) and in the period immediately following Wagner's death (as discernible in the music of Richard Strauss).¹¹ Thus, the polarization of high versus low voices in Wagner's music dramas has a metaphorical dimension (‘high’ culture being inferior to the ‘deep’ essence of German culture) that was singularly Wagnerian but that found aesthetic manifestation in an image of the body that was part of the composer's culture, in which such images were not seen as ideological constructs but as manifestations of real, universally verifiable, and collectively perceived difference. This image in Wagner's vocal music suggests a connection between the physiological dimension of musical material and its function as an ideological metaphor that resonated within the context of the cultural vocabulary of Wagner's time but that, since the early twentieth century (since Strauss), is no longer automatically evoked in performance today. The issue is not simply that Wagner intended to convey his notion of Jewish culture as different through the metaphor of his elevated vocal music (though I believe he did) but rather that the image of the Jewish body in which he expressed his idea made sense both to him and to his audience as members of an interpretive community that no longer exists; Wagner and his audience viewed the Jewish body as physiologically different from that of the non-Jew, and both heard the Jew's voice as a manifestation (and, in Wagner's anti-Semitic caricatures in Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and Parsifal, as a representation) of that difference. Couched within a corporeal sign that was widely accepted as real, Wagner's notion of a Jewish threat to the development of German culture may have—literally—sounded familiar in its metaphorical-physiological setting to his nineteenth-century audience.

Thus I will argue that both Wagner and his contemporaries perceived his works through associations—linking a given set of values and beliefs to specific bodily imagery—that may no longer be automatically evoked in performance today; it will be my task to reconstruct hypothetically these associations within which Wagner's essays and music dramas could have, and in deed may have, resonated for the composer and his nineteenth century audience. As the cultural context in which the works are performed and the essays are read undergoes transformation, so too do the associations that an opera-going and reading public brings to a work. Ironically, however, such a shift in the horizon of expectations—which Wagner, like any artist living within a given cultural context, no doubt took for granted when writing his works—has led to a widespread disavowal of precisely the racist and exclusionary dimension of his essays and music dramas that would have been so obvious to a nineteenth-century audience. Wagner never included the word Jude in his works for the stage because he didn't need to; the corporeal features deemed obvious signs of the Jew in his culture would have made the anti-Semitic nature of his representations of purportedly Jewish characteristics self-evident in his time, but it is precisely the lack of such irrefutable connections between anti-Semitic intent and musical dramatic representation that has led, since the end of World War II, to a widespread rejection of the notion that Wagner's works ever contained a racist dimension.¹²

The music dramas of no other composer have been the object of such a pervasive desire among scholars, stage directors, and the general public alike to rid them of the ideological and specifically racist component with which—as I hope to demonstrate—they were conceived and initially performed and received. Such widespread disavowal has involved at least four distinguishable yet intimately related strategies: scholars have (1) minimized the extent of anti-Semitism in Wagner's life; (2) disavowed any connection between the artist's ‘private, personal’ antipathies and his works; (3) sought to separate Wagner's theoretical and essayistic pronouncements from a discussion of his music dramas; and (4) above all, and with only a few noteworthy exceptions, refused to acknowledge any ‘evidence’ of racism ‘in’ Wagner's music, restricting instead, when hard pressed, analysis of the relationship between Wagner's documented Judeophobia and the makeup of his works to an examination of his libretti, and this often in only a most superficial fashion.¹³

With the exception of Adorno's iconoclastic and pioneering Versuch über Wagner (In search of Wagner) of 1952, it has only been within the last twenty-five years, since the publication of Robert W. Gutman's often-maligned but perceptively critical Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music of 1968, that a public discussion has unfolded concerning the relevance of Wagner's anti-Semitism to an appraisal of his music dramas.¹⁴ This omission is due in part to a historical factor. When, in 1933, Thomas Mann made light of Wagner's theoretical writings, dismissing them in his celebrated essay ‘Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners' (The sorrows and grandeur of Richard Wagner) as an aberration not worthy of serious attention, he laid the foundation for a host of future scholars who would write numerous examinations of Wagner's life and dramas that would eschew discussion of the composer's writings concerning the reformation of society and what Wagner believed to be the role of Jews in the corruption of the modern world. ‘What I [objected] to,’ Mann wrote, ‘right from the beginning—or rather, what left me totally indifferent—was Wagner's theory. In fact, I have hardly ever been able to convince myself that anyone could ever have taken it seriously.’¹⁵ While Mann may not have intended to draw attention away from Wagner's anti-Semitism (he had in mind above all the arguments in Oper und Drama [Opera and drama] of 1851 concerning the interrelationship of the arts), his remarks, given his stature in the world of letters in general and in German studies in particular, nevertheless paved the way for postwar defenders of Wagner who would dismiss the composer's essayistic writings as a personal matter or an aberration, as mere marginalia, and hence as unnecessary to an appreciation of the works for the stage. In this way such explicitly anti-Semitic Wagnerian texts as “Das Judentum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”), “Modern” (Modern), “Erkenne dich selbst” (“Know thyself”), and “Was ist deutsch?” (“What is German?”) (as well as a number of other equally but less explicitly racist tracts) were shelved in the post-Holocaust era as scholars focused on more palatable features of the Wagnerian music dramas.

It was not until Dieter Borchmeyer's Das Theater Richard Wagners: Idee, Dichtung, Wirkung of 1983 (1991: Richard Wagner: Theory and Theater) that a scholar seriously addressed the relationship between Wagner's essays and his musical-dramatic production.¹⁶ But though he rigorously and extensively discusses many of the theoretical, sociocritical writings as a key to an understanding of the dramas, Borchmeyer stopped short of taking the anti-Semitic tracts seriously and consequently omitted them from his ten-volume collection of Wagner's works published in Germany by the Insel Press on the centennial anniversary of Wagner's death. Borchmeyer maintained that those who ‘object to a beautification [Beschönigung] of Wagner's image’ could read these texts elsewhere, and even stated that their omission, ‘for reasons of the intellectual level’ of the edition, was ‘rather to be welcomed [eher erfreulich]’ (ds 10: 185). Thus, while for the first time a scholar recognized the fundamental link between Wagner's pronouncements on social and aesthetic reform and his music dramas, such a link was incomplete, for it silenced the essential component of Wagner's racism both within his model of utopian revolution and in the motivic makeup of his ‘Artworks of the Future.’¹⁷

Such an omission, with only few exceptions, has been typical of a pervasive post-Holocaust approach to Wagner. To an extent this is understandable, given Wagner's association with the National Socialists, which is embarrassing to his apologists and seen by them as an unfortunate exploitation and falsification of Wagner's works rather than as a consistent legacy of his thought—which is not to say that Wagner was a Nazi avant la lettre, but only that the National Socialists saw in Wagner's writings and works for the stage formulations of many of their ideas. Examples of scholarship's penchant for ignoring or refusing to take seriously the anti-Semitic dimension of Wagner's works can be seen in the popular studies by Martin van Amerongen, Carl Dahlhaus, Martin Gregor-Dellin, Burnett James, Brian Magee, L. J. Rather, Geoffrey Skelton, Ronald Taylor, Peter Wapnewski, Derek Watson, and Curt von Westernhagen, to mention only some of the most prominent Wagnerian specialists of the last quarter century, as well as in many others writing in a similar vein.¹⁸ Until most recently, a lone voice in the landscape of scholarship on Wagner was that of Hartmut Zelinsky, who has continually attempted to draw public attention to the need for consideration of Wagner's anti-Semitism in a discussion of the composer's theoretical and dramatic works, but he has been largely ignored (or vituperatively ridiculed) by the majority of the scholarly community.¹⁹

That this is not simply an academic matter is borne out by the Wagner renaissance that has pervaded both the academic landscape and popular culture with ever-increasing fervor for the last twenty-five years, as reflected not only in a glut of publications and conferences on the figure and his works but especially in the films and televised broadcasts of Wagnerian performances that have reached a wide, diversified, and often enthusiastic audience. A case could be made, for example, that the current spectrum of Wagnerian stage productions is defined by (or, some would say, fraught with) the same ideological issues that inform (or are either ignored or suppressed from) current Wagnerian scholarship. In the last twelve years two complete, and in terms of their ideological implications, antithetical productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen have been broadcast on American television that demonstrate manifest parallels between Wagnerian scholarship and dramaturgy, the ideological underpinnings of which have yet to be examined in a comprehensive fashion. Each production constituted a rejection of the kind of approach found in the other. The first, broadcast in 1983, was directed by Patrice Chéreau in 1976 for the centennial celebration of the tetralogy's premiere in Bayreuth and caused international controversy due to its iconoclastic and, many felt, irreverent and willful staging of the dramas.²⁰ The neo-Marxist and, given its ideological agenda, surprisingly postmodern thrust of Chereau's direction emphasized the political implications of the cycle, including its anti-Semitic content.²¹ Presenting the work as a product of the nineteenth century, complete with attire from the period and numerous references to the initial growth of industrialization, Chereau emphasized the anti-Semitic implications of the Nibelung dwarves. The other production was designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen and directed by Otto Schenk for the Metropolitan Opera over a period of several years in the late 1980s and broadcast complete in the early 1990s; it used modern stage technology in an attempt to fulfill what the designer and director interpreted as Wagner's original scenic intentions, while at the same time effacing Wagner's use of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes.²² The result was a series of neo-Romantic tableaux that glossed over the political and racial tensions in the cycle, emphasizing instead its motifs of nature and fairy tale imagery.

One parallel between these productions and recent Wagnerian scholarship lies precisely in the tension between those who directly address the issue of Wagner's anti-Semitism and those who either make light of it or simply ignore it altogether (or who admit that it is important, but lambaste anyone who discerns evidence of it in Wagner's work). Another is the popularity that both the conservative production and the apologetic publications have enjoyed, which is quite different from the resistance, skepticism, and general distaste with which the academic and general public alike have greeted the less adulatory staging and more overtly critical studies of Wagner and his works. Because, as I will argue, Wagner's music dramas were intended and initially understood as programmatic documents of a racist utopian agenda, the tendency of numerous scholars, stage directors, and apparently a large and grateful public as well to make light of this dimension of his theoretical reflections and music dramas emerges as troubling indeed.

It was only recently that two writers, Paul Lawrence Rose and Barry Millington, have seriously considered Wagner's anti-Semitism as pertinent to a discussion of both the libretti and the music of his dramas, but, ironically, their work demonstrates a problem for which Wagner's champions are grateful, namely, the problem of analyzing Wagner's music in connection to his anti-Semitism. Instead, they primarily establish connections between the composer's private pronouncements concerning Jews, reflected in his letters and Cosima Wagner's diaries, his essays, and the texts of his stage works, while nevertheless maintaining that his racism also found expression in the musical material. This is even the case in Rose's controversial and highly informative Wagner: Race and Revolution (1992), in which the author devotes only four pages, for example, to the caricatures of Jews in the Ring.²³ While Millington's article, ‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Antisemitism in Die Meistersinger?’ does attempt to reveal elements of racism in the specific musical material of that drama, it is, given its spatial restrictions, necessarily cursory.²⁴

Thus, whether for methodological reasons (as in Gutman, Zelinsky, and Rose) or due to a desire to separate and save the work of art from the tribulations of nasty sociopolitical reality, a common feature of the writings of both Wagner's severest critics and his most ardent apologists has been the paucity of discussions linking Wagner's ideological program and his musical material. Derek Watson, for example, notes that both Nietzsche and Gutman attack the man even as they admit their admiration for his works; but Watson makes this claim in defense of Wagner and of the beauty of his artistic creations and implicitly seeks solace therefore in the notion of musical art as inviolate: ‘Wagner was a musical dramatist and the greatest part of his work can only be fully understood through the music. Most of the prejudice against his art ignores the music completely.’²⁵ On the other side of the debate, such a penchant for distinguishing between the greatness of the music and the meanness of the man can be found in Leon Stein's The Racial Thinking of Richard Wagner, and here, too, such a division serves to save Wagner's art from the undeniable shortcomings of his personal animus, as seen in such statements as the following: ‘If, in truth, Wagner's music were felt to distil the same evil as his ideas there would be every reason for condemning it. … But, even accepting those moments when his music and his racial thinking may seem to spring from the same emotional morass, the greatest part of his art may be understood and appreciated as music rather than an expression of his racial and political thinking.’²⁶ A similar claim is even made by Jacob Katz in his book-length examination of Wagner's anti-Semitism when he writes: ‘In fact, without forced speculation, very little in the artistic work of Wagner can be related to his attitude toward Jews and Judaism.’²⁷ The discussion by Katz is the kind deemed sound and judicious by Wagner's supporters, for while he cannot help but make mention of the composer's more heinous pronouncements and writings on Jews, he does so with the understanding that such matters have no bearing on an evaluation of the music. Time and again, Wagner's champions separate the man and the music even as they censure anyone who cannot prove that the anti-Semitism of his life and writings has a demonstrable connection to his aesthetic production. Such is the case with the response of those defenders who have criticized Zelinsky most vociferously for his analyses of Wagner's anti-Semitism, for they have repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that he—perhaps Wagner's most outspoken critic of the 1970s and 1980s—has little to say about Wagner's music.²⁸ This is the very argument raised in one of the most vituperative attacks thus far from a scholar who prefers a more palatable and respectable Wagner, a Wagner worthy of veneration: Hans Rudolf Vaget's review of Rose's Wagner: Race and Revolution from 1993: ‘One of the striking features of Mr. Rose's book is its distribution of weight: approximately 90٪ of the text is devoted to Wagner's political and metapolitical utterances, only some 10٪ to the operas. … one would expect a detailed engagement with the poetic and musical texts of the operas … the only manifestations of [Wagner's] creativity that really matter’ (my emphasis).²⁹ These remarks are actually based on—and mask—a fear of acknowledging the more repugnant features of Wagner's works, and I suspect this fear propels much of the writing on the figure that would divorce Wagner's personal antipathies and his Judeophobic essays from his aesthetic production. Tellingly, Vaget's criticism manifests his desire ultimately to shield and to protect the works from the kind of ideological issues with which Rose is concerned, as another passage from his review makes apparent:

If Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal were indeed vehicles for the propagation of anti-Semitism, as Mr. Rose believes, they would have no place in any cultural practice that we consider acceptable, and we could not, in good conscience, go on listening to the music of Wagner as though it were music like any other. What is ultimately at stake, then, is the survival and acceptance of Wagner's musico-dramatic oeuvre as an indispensable element of Western culture.³⁰

This is the key issue, the ideological agenda and impasse behind the remarkably (and otherwise inexplicably) vehement criticism against anyone who entertains the possibility that Wagner's anti-Semitism may be related somehow to his music, for it is precisely in order to preserve that music as above reproach that so many of Wagner's critics disavow any relationship between it and the composer's writings on social issues, especially those that openly manifest his racism. Even as the defenders of the ‘Master of Bayreuth’ criticize his detractors for not demonstrating that their attacks on Wagner's thought are pertinent to a discussion of his aesthetic material, they take solace in the purportedly inviolate nature of those works, because they feel (naively, I believe) that if the music dramas are understood to represent morally nefarious ideas, then they as listeners will be morally obligated to reject the works as a whole. For this reason they argue (either explicitly, as in Vaget, or implicitly, as in the writings of many of the other critics cited thus far) that the anti-Semitism is of interest only if it can be demonstrated to be pertinent to an analysis of the music, assuming, of course, that it cannot. At the same time, those who do address Wagner's anti-Semitisim unfortunately have yet to provide the kind of extensive demonstration their opponents demand.

It is precisely this gap that I address in this book. Wagner's music is not the focus of my study, but I do wish to persuade my reader that discussion of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, including Wagner's personal hatred of Jews, is indeed relevant to an analysis of his works for the stage—and that includes his music—because his music and dramatic texts, as I will show, were intended and initially perceived to evoke a host of corporeal iconographies associated with Jews and with other groups deemed different and therefore foreign in Wagner's time. It is only with the cultural context of that age in mind that the anti-Semitic implications of the music can be demonstrated—indeed, only through consideration of such a context can such a discussion make sense at all.

If one examines the racist iconographies of the body in Wagner's works that were pervasive in nineteenth-century German culture, the ideological component of his essays and music dramas becomes manifestly apparent. These iconographies are found in virtually all aesthetic dimensions of Wagner's works—in the verse his figures sing, in the written descriptions of their physical appearance and attire, in the stage directions indicating how they move, and even in the music Wagner composed for them. Yes, even Wagner's music should be understood within the context of nineteenth-century images of the body as signs of commonality or difference, for it is precisely as somehow ‘physical’ in nature that it was conceived and initially received—as a music that reflected the physical states of the beings it accompanied and portrayed. Already within Wagner's lifetime, and not only later in the nineteenth century and the fin de siècle, his music took on connotations, both in his own writings and within the popular imagination, of an explicitly corporeal nature, because it was intended and interpreted as an acoustical equivalent to the visual impressions made on stage. The notion that it conveyed physical and often specifically corporeal states provides the basis for many of Wagner's theoretical reflections on the Artwork of the Future, which he hoped would appeal not to the intellect (as the all-too-cerebral, Judaized artwork would) but to the ‘feeling’ of the audience through the ‘sensual impressions’ that the musical material and the corporeality of the singing actor would make.³¹ Wagner's remarks on the role of the Gebärde, or ‘gesture,’ in the future art work concern precisely this connection between acoustics and corporeality, between musical and visual motion.³² The following, characteristically convoluted passages from the theoretical reflections in Oper und Drama concerning the development and interdependence of the various arts after the breakup of a lost, unified Gesamtkunstwerk underscore Wagner's own understanding of his music as an acoustical manifestation of physical states that could be perceived through diverse senses:

Gesture—let us understand it as the complete exterior manifestation of the human appearance to the eye … gesture and orchestra melody form … a totality, something comprehensible per se. … Dance-gesture and orchestra … [are] mutually interdependent. … Just as the gesture … manifests to the eye only what it can express, so the orchestra communicates to the ear that which corresponds exactly to this manifestation. … The farther the gesture distances itself from its most specific, yet also most limited basis in the dance … the more manifold and finer it now shapes the sonic figures [Tonfiguren] of instrumental language which, in order to convincingly communicate the inexpressible element of gesture, gains the most idiosyncratic kind of melodic expression.

(DS 7: 317, 312-313)

Central to Wagner's aesthetics is the notion that the ‘orchestral language’ and the physical appearance of the singing actor (whose movement on stage constitutes the visual component of an aesthetic accomplishment also expressed through corresponding sounds) are two interdependent, aesthetically symbiotic manifestations of the poetic idea. The semantic pretensions of Wagner's revolutionary music, then, in terms of his intentions and theoretical formulations, are grounded in the physicality of the body: With bodily movement comes sound, and the sounds of the orchestra are the acoustical correlations to the movement of the dancer and the singing actor. Visual and acoustical phenomena are simply two manifestations of the same being, and thus a physiological icon connoting commonality or difference in Wagner's works will find its expression not only in the visual appearance of the body—in the information granted to the eye—but in its sonic expression as well. As I shall discuss in chapter 1, the eye in Wagner's theories and dramas—so central in this passage—is the organ that discerns the body's physiological features in order to identify the perceived being as a member, or as an enemy, of the community: The eye perceives the body of the other, whose identity as similar or different, friend or foe, is encoded in its appearance. But music is the symbiotic acoustical corollary to visual impressions in Wagner's thought; hearing serves the same function as seeing. Music is an art that appeals to a different sense but that does so in order to convey the same physiological states that the eye discerns through visual impressions. Wagner's music, then, is a sonic expression of the body.

This notion is not solely to be found in Wagner's own interpretations of his works; it is not only a product of his personal imagination, for his contemporaries perceived his music as a corollary to corporeality as well. In Der Fall Wagner (The case of Wagner) Nietzsche expressed the close proximity of the image of the physical body and the new, revolutionary music thus: ‘With Wagner at the beginning there is hallucination: not of sounds, but of gestures. It is for these that he then seeks the sound-semiotics.’³³ By the time Nietzsche penned this observation in 1888, the association of sound and the body within Wagner's works had become central to the understanding of his music dramas in nineteenth-century culture. Tristan und Isolde, for example, came to be viewed by Wagner's contemporary audience as an explicitly erotic work, shocking to bourgeois sensibilities of the time, not simply because of the drama's text but because of the notion that its music itself evoked physiological—and, in this case, overtly sexual—states. Wagner intended his revolutionary music dramas to be perceived in these terms, and his own interpretation of his works appears to have seemed credible to his contemporary audience. The ‘immorality’ of Tristan was attributable in no small part to what were understood in the nineteenth century to be the gestural connotations of the music, as seen (or heard) for example in the incessantly increasing rhythmic pulse of the love duet of act 2, which was understood in Wagner's lifetime to be so obvious and so pronounced an example of the evocation of corporeal reality through music that its performance was often deemed inappropriate for women.³⁴ (Isolde Vetter points out that Duchess Sophie of Bavaria was not allowed to attend the 1865 premiere of Tristan in Munich ‘out of moral considerations’!)³⁵ Thus the notion that the music of Tristan was explicitly sexual and that it included acoustical representations of bodily (sexual) sensations was in part attributable to the idea that the music itself reflected the physiology of its protagonists. This notion was essential to the role of Wagnerian music in German literature of the late nineteenth century, as seen in the works of Thomas Mann and Ferdinand von Saar, for example (which even posited a connection, derived from Nietzsche, between such physiologically mimetic sounds and their effect on the body of the listener), and it was put forth in the twentieth century by Christian von Ehrenfels, George Bernard Shaw, and a host of other enthusiastic Wagnerites.³⁶ In his 1931 ‘Wagner und seine neuen Apostaten’ (Wagner and his new apostates) Ehrenfels would argue that the acoustical material of the music drama evoked the rhythms of sexual intercourse, even claiming that one could ‘point to the bars’ in act 2 of Tristan ‘in which the orgiastic ejaculations of that night twice burst forth and detumesce.’³⁷ If such a response seems all too literal to listeners today, it may serve to underscore the distance between Wagner's world and our own; in Wagner's time, his music—like his texts and stage directions—was both intended and perceived to convey physiological states, and this perception tied in with the pervasive role of corporeal imagery in his works. It is upon this general, widely accepted association of music and physiology that the more specific musical references to the idiosyncratic corporeal imagery of the German and the Jew in Wagner's music dramas are based, which I will address in detail in chapters 2 through 5.

A discussion of the context in which musical mimesis unfolds must take into account the different dimensions of music as a code, all of which are subject to the ephemeral, constantly shifting nature of the expectations of a cultural community. As the cultural context in which Wagner's music dramas were composed and heard changed, so did the connotations initially linked to the iconographies they employed; the associations connected to Wagner's music in his lifetime are not necessarily those of today. One dimension of this music—not having to do with physiology but concerning the association of given ideas with acoustical art in a given cultural context—serves to illustrate the distance between the horizon of expectations in his world and in the culture of the post-Wagnerian age and provides an example of a musical code not based on mimesis: Today, few listeners bring to the perception of a given tonal key the associations that were a staple of musical culture in the eighteenth century and that still held forth in Wagner's time. As several musicologists have pointed out, the fact that specific keys in the Ring cycle are associated with specific dramatic configurations demonstrates the continuing influence in the 1850s of the eighteenth-century Affektenlehre, which linked diverse moods and meanings to specific keys. Wagner may have chosen the key of Bf minor, for example, for his portrayal of the Nibelung dwarves because for the musically acculturated in Wagner's time the key carried connotations of ‘evil’ and ‘darkness’ due to its function in the musical traditions of Europe. The key of Bf minor was described in just these terms by Johann Friedrich Daniel Schubart in his Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Ideas for an aesthetic of the art of tone), first published in 1806 but written in the 1780s: ‘A strange creature, clad quite often in nocturnal garments. It is somewhat surly and assumes a pleasant countenance only on the rarest of occasions. Contempt for God and the world; dislike of oneself and everything else; preparation for suicide, all resound in this key.’³⁸ This is often the key heard in conjunction with the appearance of the ‘evil,’ surly, ugly, strange, and decidedly nocturnal creatures Alberich and Mime; with the exception of suicidal tendencies, Schubart's text could read as a description of the Nibelung brothers, and such connotations would have made the choice of this key appropriate in the mid-nineteenth century, when they were still linked in the minds of the composer and his audience to this tonal material.³⁹ Such a link between sound and meaning is not mimetic, but it is nevertheless associative and temporally (and culturally) defined, linked to Wagner's age, but not to our own, and thus provides an example of one kind of associative pattern involved in the initial reception of Wagner's art.

If such associations attended the conceptualization and the reception (that is, the composition and the performance) of music in Wagner's lifetime, the meaning of the music then would have been somewhat different from what it is today. The issue of the associations evoked by the use of specific keys is but one example of the culturally circumscribed status of Wagner's music as an associative code system.⁴⁰ Music can also function in a more mimetic capacity, as the perception of rhythms of sexual intercourse in Tristan suggests; the temporally and culturally transitory nature of this perception is less pronounced than that of, say, the link between Bf minor and attributes of evil and threatening darkness, but it is still based on the expectations of an audience that assigns meaning to music.

Most important to my investigation, however, is a third level of musical associations, a kind of music that is perceived to refer mimetically to something (an image of a body, for example) that is understood to be real (and that is widely accepted as such) but that is a cultural construct, a stereotype. The bodies of the German and the racial and sexual Other are the examples with which I deal here. With this kind of musical reference, one representation (the ‘gestural’ music, for example) refers to another (the iconography of the body), which is culturally defined. When the interpretive community changes in which such a code (the iconography of the body) functions, so too do the associations members of that community—both composers and listeners—bring to the work of art. As we move away from Wagner's age, the associations of a specifically racist nature linked to the purportedly reliable signs of the body change, because the perception of the body changes. While our age today still has its stereotypes and still locates them in bodily imagery, our spontaneous associations are no longer those of Wagner's culture. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, most scholars would prefer to ignore or disavow altogether the fact that such a dimension ever existed in Wagner's works and view them instead, in terms of their ideological portent, in a cultural and historical vacuum.

Thus, by analyzing a host of corporeal iconographies of difference—racial, sexual, and otherwise—that were central to the Wagnerian artwork and to the culture in which the composer lived, I wish to demonstrate that those strands in the literature on Wagner and those stagings of his works that would disavow (either categorically or implicitly) the role of anti-Semitism in his theories, his libretti, and the music he composed for his works for the stage are either indefensibly wrong or, at best, incomplete. I also wish to expand upon those recent, more ideologically insightful investigations that have not gone far enough in their attempts to show how perhaps virtually all the aesthetic components of Wagner's writings and music dramas (even the music) may have resonated in his time against a cultural matrix of corporeal imagery that lent his concerns a persuasive and obvious credibility that so many of his apologists would repress today. I want to make clear, however, that in discussing the ideological import of the body in Wagner's works, I am engaging in a kind of cultural archaeology which seeks both to reconstruct and to posit a horizon of expectations in a culture in which these works were first received but which no longer exists. That is, my argument will move between the desire to persuade my reader that the associations of which I am writing did actually occur in the minds of some listeners—as seen, for example, in Gustav Mahler's remark that Mime's music was an obvious parody of traits deemed Jewish (discussed in chapter 2)—and that such associations were plausible, given what we know from diverse expressions of the time. I am not insisting that all members of Wagner's culture necessarily responded consciously to his representations of the body in like fashion according to the ideological connotations of the iconographies I analyze here, for what interests me is the cultural context in which a series of related motifs—in a society and in a work of art—may potentially take on ideological meanings, consciously or unconsciously, at a given time. Enough evidence is available today to allow for the hypothetical reconstruction of the ideological parameters within which Wagner and his audience may have perceived the imagery of his works as obvious signs of racial, sexual, and national identity, and such reconstruction, I feel, is particularly necessary in an age that prefers a Wagner cleansed of, as one Wagnerian apologist has put it, ‘the darker side of genius.’⁴¹

I also wish to state emphatically that, unlike Wagner's apologists, I do not feel that one is morally obligated to reject his works or to feel embarrassed about enjoying them as soon as one acknowledges their reprehensible connotations, for such an approach is based on an extremely limited and unimaginative appreciation of the complexity and multilayered ambiguity of the work of art and views it in a cultural vacuum, omitting any consideration of the volatility of the cultural imagination. The concomitant appreciation of Wagner's aesthetic constructs and discernment of their nefarious intended meaning for which I argue is a far cry from the aesthetically, historically, and ideologically simplistic approach of his apologists. It is precisely because they ignore cultural permutations that Wagner's defenders have been forced to make light of the racist and exclusionary dimensions of his works altogether. Personally, I refuse to receive Wagner's works as he would have had them received, and the fact that our culture is not Wagner's may constitute our redemption (to use one of his favorite terms) from the Wagnerian agenda and may allow us to experience his breathtakingly beautiful and stirring musical-dramatic accomplishments as works that can be enjoyed despite their initial, intended message of racial exclusion. …

Notes

1. On the question of Wagner's Jewish ancestry, see Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 1-5; Gutman, Richard Wagner, 4-9; Newman, ‘The Racial Origin of Wagner,’ in Wagner as Man and Artist, 387-414. Leon Stein humorously discusses the repercussions this uncertainty has had on the appraisal of Wagner's music: ‘There are many … who, believing Geyer to have been Wagner's father, and accepting Geyer's Jewish descent as a fact, profess to find definite Jewish qualities in Wagner's music. … To these may be added … the anti-Wagnerian journalists who found the reasons for Wagner's corrupt music in his Jewish descent.’ See Stein, Racial Thinking, 228.

2. See Gradenwitz, ‘Das Judentum,’ 80.

3. See Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, in Werke, 6.3: 35n. On the crest that adorns the first edition of Mein Leben, see Deathridge, The New Grove Wagner, 2-3. In the 1930s the National Socialists went to great pains to verify Wagner's Aryan pedigree. See, for example, Rauschenberger, ‘Richard Wagners Abstammung und Rassenmerkmale’; in 1938 the Geyer thesis was dismissed in Lange, Richard Wagners Sippe, 86. A not altogether dissimilar dismissal could still be found in 1985, published under the auspices of the Bayreuth Wagner Foundation: ‘Beinahe ein Adler …’: war Wagner selbst ein Jude?' in Eger, ed., Wagner und die Juden, 51.

4. On the significance of this motif for Wagner, see Schickling, Abschied von Walhall, 79.

5. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 24. The translation is Ernest Newman's, as are the emphases. See The Life of Richard Wagner, 2: 346. The passage Wagner deleted is found in Strobel, ed., Richard Wagner, Skizzen und Entwürfe, 99.

6. Adorno puts it succinctly: ‘[Wagner] pursues his victims down to the level of their biological nature because he saw himself as having only barely escaped being a dwarf.’ Adorno, In Search, 25.

7. René Girard's remarks concerning the mechanism of the scapegoat are apposite here, in that he stresses the fact that the individual identified as different must in fact resemble the group that rejects (and sacrifices) him, and that the process of identifying the scapegoat must never be recognized for what it is but instead must seem legitimate, grounded in and justified by ‘reality.’ On the former concept, see Violence and the Sacred, 3, 12, 39, 78-79; on the latter, see the same text, 24, 27, 30, 36, 39, 73, 77-85, 87. See also idem, ‘To double business bound,’ 187-195.

8. Foucault's remarks on the ideology of the body are found in Discipline and Punish (see especially 137ff.); see also his History of Sexuality, vol. 1, and Madness and Civilization.

9. While this kind of observation has become nearly self-evident to much of the nonmusicological scholarly community today, it has seldom been applied to the investigation of music dramas, a remarkable omission considering the political and social status of such works as highly stylized representations of physicality, power, and community. In this context, see Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Woman, and Robinson, Opera & Ideas. As Kittler remarks in a discussion of Wagner, perhaps somewhat too emphatically, ‘The facts of physiology … are just too stupid or subliminal for most critics.’ See his ‘Weltatem,’ 205.

   Two noteworthy exceptions to this tendency to ignore the ideological role of the body in opera are McClary, Feminine Endings, and Gilman, ‘Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siècle,’ reprinted in expanded form in Gilman, Disease and Representation, 155-181. McClary and Gilman discern corporeal iconographies in the musical vocabularies of specific operatic works within the context of the operas' respective cultures, an approach I find of immense value for an examination of the ideological meaning of such powerful and evocative, multi-aesthetic constructs.

   Therefore, I find it disappointing when even one of the most perceptive and persuasive of Wagnerian scholars, Carolyn Abbate in her otherwise superb Unsung Voices, analyzes the semiotic nature of Wagner's music within a cultural vacuum, without consideration of the cultural context in which the music dramas were constructed and received, as if the codes of which she writes were constitutive in all social contexts and equally ideologically informed in different cultural settings. For her discussions of Wagner's works, see 85-118, 156-249. To a lesser extent this is also the case with the semiotic analyses of Nattiez. See his ‘Le Ring comme histoire métaphorique de la musique’; Music and Discourse; and Wagner androgyne, though Nattiez is far more concerned with Wagner's anti-Semitism than most scholars interested in the semiotic nature of his works, as shown, for example in a passage in this latter text: 87-94. If the music is understood at times to convey connotations of physicality, of bodily presence, its semiotic nature immediately assumes an ideological dimension due to the values associated with the perception of the body in Western culture.

10. On the psychological investment in the exaggeratedly heroic nature of Wagner's heroes, see Rattner, ‘Wagner im Lichte der Tiefen-psychologie,’ 780.

11. See Gilman, ‘Strauss.’

12. Another reason, of course, that such anti-Semitic constructions as Beckmesser and the Nibelung dwarves are never labeled as Juden is the fact that the explicit designation of these figures as Jews would have been incompatible with the realistic, historical dimension of Wagner's dramatic configurations; no Jew could have been a prominent notary or town clerk in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, for example, and Jews did not populate the Germanic myths and legends which served as sources for the Ring, but neither such a notary nor the mythological constructions need ‘be’ Jews within their dramatic contexts in order to have evoked the Jew in the nineteenth-century European imagination. It is ironic that it is precisely Wagner's most ardent apologists who fail to appreciate the evocative power of Wagner's multilayered dramatic creations when they argue that the absence of such explicit designations denies the works' anti-Semitic implications: Their reputation for bombast notwithstanding, Wagner's works for the stage are in fact exceptionally subtle and complex constructions based on a host of images and beliefs within German cultural traditions; against the background of the cultural vocabulary of his age, the specter of the Jew—like that of others deemed different and therefore foreign—could have emerged automatically in his time without the aid of a semantically explicit calling card.

13. For an insightful and judicious overview of scholarship on Wagner, see Deathridge, ‘A Brief History of Wagner Research.’

14. See Adorno, In Search, 23-25; Gutman, Richard Wagner. Stein's work from 1950 constitutes an exception to this temporal argument, but he distinguishes between the anti-Semitism in Wagner's life and essays and the ideational implications of the music dramas. See, for example, The Racial Thinking, 233.

15. See Mann, ‘The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,’ 101.

16. See Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, esp. 1-177.

17. Since 1983 Borchmeyer has continued this approach, as his ‘Afterword: A Note on Wagner's Anti-Semitism,’ in Richard Wagner, 404-410, and his review of recent Wagnerian scholarship, ‘Wagner-Literatur—eine deutsche Misere,’ esp. 36-41, make clear.

18. A very fine exception to this rule is the level-headed work of the prominent Wagnerian scholar John Deathridge.

    The apologetic slant of Martin van Amerongen's approach to Wagner is manifested in such statements as the following: ‘Like so many of his philosophical ideas, Wagner's hatred of the Jews is for the most part pure theory. When brought face to face with the reality, he was as flexible as anything’ (Wagner, 58).

    Carl Dahlhaus is generally recognized as one of the foremost authorities on Wagner, but he was contemptuous of any attempts to link the composer's anti-Semitism to his music dramas, as seen, for example, in his vituperative dismissal of the work of Hartmut Zelinsky (see note 19).

    Martin Gregor-Dellin's major work on Wagner is Richard Wagner; Gregor-Dellin's downplaying of Wagner's anti-Semitism is discussed in Zelinsky, ‘Rettung ins Ungenaue.’

    Burnett James apologetically opines that Wagner's ‘anti-Semitic leanings were primarily not social and personal, but artistic’ and makes the bizarre claim that the question of Wagner's potentially Jewish background ‘is important because Wagner's entire life-work was based upon ideas and theories that ran counter to the basic tenets of Judaism—and that has nothing to do with any form of anti-Semitism.’ See his Wagner and the Romantic Disaster, 17, 15.

    Amazingly, Bryan Magee states that the argument of Wagner's most notoriously and explicitly anti-Semitic tract, ‘Das Judentum in der Musik,’ ‘was almost unbelievably original, and largely correct.’ See his Aspects of Wagner, 46. Given the fact that this often-cited volume has achieved enormous popularity, such a statement is, to say the least, distressing.

    For evidence of L. J. Rather's discomfort with the association of Wagner and anti-Semitism, see his The Dream of Self-Destruction, 90, 96; see also his Reading Wagner.

    Geoffrey Skelton makes almost no mention of anti-Semitism in his discussion of Wagner's relationship with Cosima, a remarkable omission considering the latter's particularly vicious racism, but on occasion he does make such dismissive comments as the following, apparently intended to mitigate the ‘Master's’ racism through comparison with his contemporaries: ‘He was by no means alone in his antipathy towards the Jews.’ See Richard and Cosima Wagner, 109.

    Ronald Taylor's treatment of Wagner's anti-Semitism is, at best, superficial, as seen in his discussion of ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ in Richard Wagner, 105-107.

    Peter Wapnewski has written a number of books on Wagner that seldom mention the composer's racism; the ideological position of his work may be perceived in the vehemence of his attack on Gutman regarding a comparatively marginal philological matter in Der traurige Gott, 65-67; see also his Richard Wagner and Tristan der Held Richard Wagners. I suspect that the vituperative, contemptuous tone of his response to Gutman is at least partly attributable to Gutman's critical approach to Wagner.

    Von Westernhagen's relationship to Nazism is discussed in Zelinsky, Richard Wagner: ein deutsches Thema, and in Rose, ‘The Noble Anti-Semitism of Richard Wagner.’

19. In addition to the works cited in note 18, see Zelinsky, ‘Die deutsche Losung Siegfried’; ‘Die “Feuerkur” des Richard Wagner oder die “neue Religion” der “Erlösung” durch “Vernichtung”’; ‘Der Plenipotentarius des Untergangs’; ‘Richard Wagners Kunstwerk der Zukunft und seine Idee der Vernichtung’; ‘Der verschwiegene Gehalt des “Parsifal.”’ The denunciation of Zelinsky is apparent in Dahlhaus' ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser,’ and in Kaiser, ‘Hat Zelinsky recht gegen Wagners “Parsifal”?’

20. See Nattiez, ‘Chéreau's Treachery’; ‘“Fidelity” to Wagner’; and Tetralogies. An example of the conservative rejection of Chéreau's direction can be found in Jordan, ‘The Ring-Movie and the Ring-Text,’ 213-218.

21. See Nattiez, ‘“Fidelity” to Wagner,’ 86; Tetralogies, 67, 76, 155, 256.

22. Mike Ashman describes the Metropolitan production as ‘museum creations’ and writes of its ‘misplaced conservative intention to rediscover the presumed literalness of Wagner's stage directions in the spirit of his times,’ a reaction similar to Nattiez's, who writes that ‘the result was an aesthetic disaster for the present-day spectator, assuming him or her to be endowed with even a modicum of taste.’ See Ashman, ‘Producing Wagner,’ 44-45; Nattiez, ‘“Fidelity” to Wagner,’ 82.

23. Rose, Wagner, 68-72.

24. Millington, ‘Nuremberg Trial’; see also Millington's Wagner. For a discussion of musical evidence of anti-Semitism in Parsifal, see his ‘Parsifal.’

25. Watson, Richard Wagner, 318.

26. Stein, Racial Thinking, 233.

27. Katz, The Darker Side, ix-x.

28. See the remarks by Dahlhaus and Kaiser referred to in note 18.

29. Vaget, ‘Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose,’ 233. See also Rasch and Weiner, ‘A Response.’

30. Vaget, ‘Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose,’ 222.

31. Wagner mentioned this idea in an often-cited letter to Theodor Uhlig of 10 May 1851 describing the (as it turned out, all-too-optimistically short-sighted) plan to expand the Ring from a single work to two music dramas, “Siegfrieds Tod” (“Siegfried's death”) and Der junge Siegfried (Young Siegfried): ‘“Der junge Siegfried would have the tremendous advantage,” Wagner claimed, “of conveying the important myths to the audience in the form of a play, in the way one conveys a fairy tale to a child. Everything makes a plastic impact, through sharply focused sensual impressions; everything will be understood.”’ See Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, 4: 44, cited in Abbate, Unsung Voices, 159, from which this translation is taken.

    In her discussion of the shift from an emphasis on narrative to scenic enactment in the genesis of the Ring texts, Abbate stresses both the physical presence on which she believes Wagner came increasingly to rely as he developed his iconoclastic theories of the Artwork of the Future and the persuasive force vouchsafed by the corporeality of the singer, which she believes Wagner hoped would guarantee the veracity of his ideas: ‘The very genesis of the Ring attests to a longing for presentation, for the physical force of embodiment in performance, over [narrative] representation and the suspicions attached to the written and silently read word. … By stripping away narrators whose reliability will always be uncertain, by eliminating narrations whose significance is not wholly assured, by replacing them with visible incidents, Wagner was attempting to ensure belief in his myth. While immediacy, force, and traditional operatic spectacle and action may have been gained, along with them came (he hoped) epistemological certainty’ (Abbate, Unsung Voices, 160).

32. On this concept, see Franke, ‘Musik als Gebärdensprache und das musikalische Gewebe aus “Ahnung und Erinnerung,”’ 179-180.

33. Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, 21-22.

34. For a discussion of the distinction between ‘iconic’ and ‘symbolic’ music (the former intended to sound like what it represents), see Kolland, ‘Zur Semantik der Leitmotive in Richard Wagners Ring des Nibelungen,’ 198-199. Peter Kivy's concept of ‘internal representations’ is similar to Kolland's notion of ‘symbolic’ music, in that by ‘internal representations’ Kivy means those that ‘are not “inherently” representational, but exist merely by virtue of a convention internal to the musical work.’ See Kivy, Sound and Semblance, 52. I would argue, however, that both iconic and symbolic representations are ultimately based on the conventions of a culture.

35. See Vetter, ‘Wagner in the History of Psychology,’ 153.

36. On Wagner's music as a threat to the body in German modernist literature, see my Undertones of Insurrection, 13-14, 18-20; see also Koppen, Dekadenter Wagnerismus, 278-339.

37. Ehrenfels, ‘Wagner und seine neuen Apostaten,’ 10.

38. Cited in Ringer, ‘Richard Wagner and the Language of Feeling,’ 40.

39. On the association of Bf minor with the Nibelungs, see also Bailey, ‘The Structure of the Ring and Its Evolution,’ 53-54.

40. See Ringer, ‘Richard Wagner and the Language of Feeling,’ 42.

41. This is the title of Jacob Katz's attempts to relativize, and hence to make light of, Wagner's anti-Semitism (see note 27).