Neuwirth/Breslauer - Die Stadt ohne Juden, PHACE/Paz, 15 November 2018

Milton Court Concert Hall

Images: Mark Allan/Barbican

PHACE

Nacho de Paz (conductor)

The rediscovery of Hans Karl Breslauer’s 1924 silent film, Die Stadt ohne Juden (‘The City Without Jews’), has involved a degree of reconstruction. Based on Hugo Bettauer’s novel of the same name, published two years earlier, the film was long thought lost and had indeed pretty much disappeared from broader public consciousness. Olga Neuwirth saw the first fragmented discovered in the Netherlands when she was twenty-two; further material for the ‘new’, present version was later spotted in a Paris flea market, but this reconstruction and restoration by the Austrian Film Archive almost certainly diverge from what was originally seen (especially when it comes to the ‘dream’ conclusion). Neuwirth’s approach from the head of the Vienna Biennale to compose a new score to accompany performances came as a consequence of that Paris rediscovery. She initially declined, not least since she was at work on her new opera for Vienna, Orlando, but was eventually persuaded to take a break from work on that score. The co-commission comes from the Barbican Centre, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, ZDF/ARTE, and the Basel Symphony Orchestra.

Bettauer’s novel seems to have been darker than the film. (I say ‘seems to’, since I must rely on secondary information, not yet having had chance to read it for myself. I shall now certainly try to do so.) His other writings include treatments of US ‘interracial’ marriage and various women’s issues. He was also an early victim of Austrian Nazism, condemned as a ‘red poet’ and ‘corrupter of youth’, and murdered in 1925 by Otto Rothstock, a dental technician and (most likely) party member. Breslauer, on the other hand, seems to have been an opportunist: happy to make films with Jews, to introduce scenes of Viennese Jewish life – fascinating as historical documents too – into the film, scenes not present in the book, yet also willing later on to join the Nazi Party and to make propaganda films. Such is obviously in itself a fascinating, disturbing context for a twenty-first-century composer, let alone one so socially and politically aware as Neuwirth.

It is, of course, impossible for us not to view a film about Vienna, sorry Utopia, let alone a film in which that city votes to expel its Jewish population – here with the happy ending that it staves off economic collapse by welcoming that population back, a Jewish hero also getting the girl – through post-Holocaust spectacles. That said, it does us no harm and indeed much good to attempt additionally to view it from a 1920s standpoint. (That holds even, perhaps especially, when we are trying to come to terms with what would later ensue.) Neuwirth’s score, for live ensemble of amplified instruments and tape, plays with distance and avoids the potential Romanticism – as she sees it – of writing portentously for a large orchestra, as was initially requested of her. There is an irony here that it is tempting to view in part as Jewish; I cannot help but think Heine would have approved. It was important for Neuwirth not to fall into the trap, as, following Hanns Eisler, she see it, of mere representation. Nevertheless, she employs fragments of found material, be it Austrian popular song, sonorities of the twenties (for instance, saxophone salon music) to bridge the gap between ‘then’ and ‘now’. This is emphatically not something to consign to ‘history’, nor should it be. The excellence of performances from PHACE under Nacho de Paz, perfectly synchronised with the demands of film accompaniment, did likewise. Neuwirth’s longstanding interest in film – at eighteen, she studied both film and music, before opting to concentrate on the latter – takes, after Long Highway, another productive turn.

In brief discussion with Bryony Gordon beforehand, Neuwirth related the irony of having arrived in London to hear Theresa May echo the words of the Utopian Chancellor on ‘leadership’. This is not, repeat not, an issue to be consigned to ‘history’. Alas, as history shows us time and time again, by the time we start to think, artistically to create, it is almost always too late. We ‘citizens of nowhere’: we know, like the Windrush Generation, like our EU27 brothers and sisters, where May’s Utopia will lead.

Polyphony/Britten Sinfonia/Layton - St John Passion, 30 March 2018

St John’s Smith Square

Evangelist – Nick Pritchard

Christ – Neal Davies

Anna Dennis (soprano)

Helen Charlston (mezzo-soprano)

Hiroshi Amako (tenor)

Ashley Riches (bass)

Polyphony

Britten Sinfonia

Stephen Layton (conductor)

This was the first time, I think, since having moved to London that I had attended a Bach Passion performance on Good Friday here. More often than not, I had been in Germany, either for a Passion in Leipzig (most recently in 2011) or for Parsifal (most recently last year). A change is as good as a rest, though – sometimes, at least. This proved an impressive, indeed moving, performance from a good cast of soloists, the chamber choir, Polyphony, the Britten Sinfonia, and conductor Stephen Layton. An eighteenth-century church, ‘Queen Anne’s footstool’, is a not inappropriate venue, of course; the warmth of the St John’s, Smith Square acoustic certainly helped balance a certain dryness in what one might characterise as an ‘period-ish’, rather English approach.

This was certainly not a Roman Catholic Bach in the vein of, say, Nikolaus Harnoncourt – but nor, after all, was Bach a Roman Catholic. Nor was it really a very German Bach we heard, or perhaps better, nor was it one of the many German Bachs we heard. What was more on my mind, than placing the performance within performance tradition, however, was the thorny matter of anti-Semitism. Such has, of course, been a preoccupation of British news reporting over the past few days. Moreover, having been working on the life and work of Arnold Schoenberg for quite some time now, musical and linguistic coding – as well as more overt violence – have been very much in my thoughts too. What do we do about a text, a sacred text no less, which, were it from anywhere other than the Bible, we might approach with greater apprehension? It is a particular problem with St John’s Gospel, and a particular problem within that, of the telling of the Passion. What, moreover, do we do about those turba choruses, in which Bach’s musical mastery, his extraordinary ability to characterise the crowd, add a further layer of discomfort? I do not know. I am certainly not saying that we should necessarily change the words, either of Bach’s work, or the Gospel; nor, however, am I saying that we should not at least consider making such changes on occasion. I do think, however, that, in a post-Holocaust age, in which the Church has been forced to confront long-standing anti-Semitism amongst its earthly sins, we cannot airily declare that there is no problem, that this is ‘just’ a work of art; nor indeed that a work of art, however ‘great’, is far too important to be implicated.

For those choruses truly proved the beating heart, Christian, (anti-)Semitic, or otherwise, of the drama that unfolded here. Taken generally, yet not unvaryingly, at quite a speed, there was fury in them? Whose fury, though? The (Jewish) crowd’s? Ours? If the latter, then what was our fury concerned with? Those who crucified Christ? And if so, what might that mean on earth as well as in theology? The changing role of Bach’s choir, after all, prompts us to consider our own relationship to it. When it sings the chorales – here, quite beautifully, and occasionally, arrestingly, a cappella – it seems to be ‘us’, as congregants and/or audience. We feel its pain, and/or it ours. It comments, like a Greek Chorus; and yet, also, like that Chorus, it participates. Not for nothing was it a crucial model, more so even than Handel’s oratorio choruses, for Schoenberg’s children of Israel in Moses und Aron.

Another particular strength, I thought, was a keen sense of soloists, almost as figures in an aural painting, coming on stage to portray and to reflect. That is what they do in their arias and other solos, of course, but it somehow came across both with particular differentiation and yet also interconnection on this occasion. I am not quite sure I can explain how or why; perhaps it was just that each of the soloists was on fine form. Lines were clean, yet far from un-emotional. There was, however, no attempt to impose ‘emotion’, least of all anachronistic or otherwise inappropriate, heart-on-sleeve emotion upon the music. All manner of approaches can work, of course, but this did – and it seemed, rightly or wrongly, to be something of a collective decision. Much the same can be said of the playing of the Britten Sinfonia, I think. I might sometimes have missed a little greater warmth, especially from the strings, but my ears adjusted soon enough, and I came to appreciate the performance very quickly for what it was, not for what it was not. Obbligato passages were always well taken, without a hint of narcissism. As voices seemed to emerge from the choir – even though they did not, at least literally so, in this case – so did instruments sound very much as if emerging from the greater instrumental collective. Guiding this all, with a determined dramatic presence, yet also due musical collegiality, were the wise presences of Nick Pritchard’s intelligent, finely sung Evangelist and, of course, Layton as conductor. 

This was, then, not just an observance, insofar as a concert can or should be; it also made me think. And all the time, I kept returning to the turbulence of that seething opening chorus – as, I think, does Bach. Wagner himself never wrote a finer, more complete, more troubling instance of music drama.

Where it all began: Schoenberg's birthplace in Vienna

Composers' birthplaces – the birthplaces of ‘great men’: usually, although not always, men – are strange things; or they often are. Mozart’s in Salzburg has little to show of intrinsic interest, beyond, crucially its location, and yet is treated as a treasure beyond compare. Wagner, by contrast, is made to seem an embarrassment in Leipzig, the house on the Brühl having been demolished in 1886, and the city apparently having proffered as little acknowledgment on the site itself as it can possibly get away with. Having assembled, as research for a forthcoming biography, a list of notable ‘Schoenberg places’ in Vienna – for the most part, I should admit, having had it assembled for me by Therese Muxeneder of the Arnold Schönberg Center – it remained for me to put together a route. I decided that I must begin at the beginning. And so, I consulted my Viennese public transport planner, far more accurate than its London equivalent, a reflection upon, amongst other things, the greater stock Vienna, long 'Red', places upon public transport and, more broadly, the res publica.

 

Soviet memorial (taken in October)

Schwarzenberg statue (taken in June)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Palais Fanto, still under restoration after a summer fire above, I headed towards Karlsplatz. I passed through the Schwarzenbergplatz Scylla of the Soviet war memorial – always an excellent reminder of Austria's and Vienna's partition, and, in a more general sense of Vienna's easterly location, farther east than Prague and indeed two of the former Yugoslav state capitals – and the Charybdis of the statue built at Francis Joseph’s command in honour of Charles Philip, Prince of Schwarzenberg. The prince was the victorious Austrian commander at the 1813 Battle of Leipzig (in whose aftermath, in Leipzig, Wagner had been born); it is after him, rather than his reactionary nephew, who had brought Francis Joseph to the throne and, in an irony that becomes greater with hindsight, had called in the Russians to suppress the revolts of 1848-9, that Schwarzenbergplatz took its name. The southern part of the square, in which the Russian memorial stood was, until 1956, renamed Stalinplatz. I could go on and on; as ever, in Vienna, ghosts haunt, multiply, refused to leave you alone. They are more overt than, say, in Berlin; which are more persistent, I really cannot say.

Passing ‘Johans Klaviersalon’, replete with a picture of Viennese adoptive, Johannes Brahms, ('Leider nicht von...'), Fischer von Erlach's extraordinary Karlskirche, votive church to Charles VI and an intentional compendium of comparative architecture,  and a Karlsplatz Advent Market being assembled before our eyes, I reached Otto Wagner's reassembled Karlsplatz station building, and thereafter took the U4 to Schottenring. The 31 tram would have taken me to the slightly desolate yet somehow also warmly domestic traffic interchange and children's playground that is Gaußplatz (after the mathematician, although until 1868, as the corner pharmacist, Mathilden Apotheke, reminds us, Mathildenplatz), divided between Vienna's second and twentieth districts. It would, had I not been slightly misled by the address I was seeking and alighted too early, at the stop Oberedonaustrasse (actually on Obereaugartenstrasse) No matter: it was a ten-minute walk, the Augarten and Danube Canal on my left, to number five. A good few buildings en route attested to wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction, although not this itself. Did it remain standing? Does it matter now? After all, as how much of any ancient building has not been restored (a word covering a multitude of sins and virtues)?

Gaussplatz

 

Oberedonaustr. 5

And then the building itself: quite handsome in an understated way. Little more, perhaps, to say. I walked the few steps to Gaußplatz, looked around, and found a seat, on which I typed, my telephone battery running low, a few, frankly unnecessary notes for what I have written above. Lest I forget. (It was two days after Remembrance Sunday at home, which had provoked a vicious manufactured furore over Jeremy Corbyn’s bow at the Cenotaph.) And then, I went and looked again, noticed at the entrance the entirely unremarkable bells for those living and working there. Did they care who had been born there? (They would have been unobservant indeed not to have noticed at all.) Should they? It was and is ‘just’ a building, really, although its location might yet yield secrets – or lead one down metaphorical blind alleys.

I crossed over the road. Immediately opposite, at no.4 was another memorial plaque, another Jewish reminder of the Leopoldstadt's (since incorporation, the Second District’s) pre-emancipation ghetto history. Leopold Hilsner was the victim of an anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder, condemned to death in 1900, his sentence commuted by Francis Joseph to life imprisonment; a pardon eventually came in 1918, just before the end of the Great War. Somehow, that seemed to suggest more about Schoenberg than official recognition by an Austrian ministry on the Geburtshaus itself. Vienna, after all, had despised and rejected him: for many reasons, few of them entirely unrelated to his race and religion(s). Having been born there seemed both to mean something and nothing: a thought to revisit, perhaps, at the end. For the moment, it was more a matter of Moses’ O Wort, du Wort das mir fehlt! (‘O word, thou word that I lack!’)

 

 

Which thought and which tabletary image, the Mosaic prohibition notwithstanding, would take me in the afternoon to the Zentralfriedhof; but that is more properly a story for another day.

 

To end, an image, both trite and horrible, from next door to the birthplace:

 

 

Book review: KM Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

KM Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2010), ISBN 9780754663720, pp. xiii + 201, £55. 




Die Muskete, 10 January 1907

 

Gustav Mahler’s time has come, the anniversary years 2010 and 2011 (150 years since his birth and 100 since his death) having intensified the ubiquity of his music. Orchestras and conductors treat it as a calling-card. Even Beethoven has been eclipsed as the concert hall’s favourite symphonist. Yet, not so long ago, things were very different. Mahler’s years in the doldrums have been exaggerated, especially by those anxious to claim that Leonard Bernstein’s direction of the New York Philharmonic catapulted Mahler into the spotlight, a dubious proposition even in the Western Hemisphere. Mahler had numerous earlier, influential advocates. Nevertheless, his music long faced ignorance and disdain. Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance, opined: ‘Intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music made even [!] Mahler a very tolerable imitation of a composer.’ Why might this have been? Did anti-Semitism play a role?

A study of Mahler’s early critics should have much to offer here. As KM Knittel argues in her conclusion (p.168), ‘if there is even the slightest possibility that we have taken over a way of thinking about Mahler and his music from a culture that could not deal with his Jewishness … we owe it to ourselves to rethink what makes Mahler’s music unique, thought-provoking, and valuable.’ Such rethinking, alas, lies without her study. No matter: we can rethink for ourselves. The real problem with Knittel’s book, rather, is that it fails to make a cogent case for anti-Semitic coding of early Mahler criticism: oddly, given the endemic nature of anti-Semitism in Mahler’s Vienna and many of the attacks he suffered as Director of the Court Opera. Despite occasional disclaimers that texts may be read variously, the tunnel-vision of Knittel’s readings counter-productively renders one suspicious of reasonable interpretations in such a vein. She misses an open goal.

The first chapter proper opens promisingly, surveying artist Alfred Roller’s verbal portrait of Mahler. It is good to have Roller’s original German quoted in footnotes, though Knittel appears throughout to have used Norman Lebrecht’s existing translation rather than furnished her own. That may seem pedantic, but when dealing with the nuances of linguistic transmission, reference to words actually used will help. When interpretation commences, claims immediately become questionable. Roller’s ‘failure to address the obvious issue of circumcision inadvertently emphasises its association with castration’. Perhaps, but assertion replaces argument. Moreover, it is odd, in discussion of the body, to lack reference, explicit or implicit, to writers such as Foucault, Lacan, and Žižek. An oft-acknowledged progenitor, however, is Marc Weiner’s ‘brilliant’ (p.160) Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Weiner’s inability or disinclination, during discussion of Parsifal, to distinguish between circumcision and castration does not augur well.

Moving on to discussion of Mahler’s wife, Alma, it is doubtless revealing that she writes (p.41), ‘So much irritates me: his smell, the way he sings, the way he speaks,’ but failure to consider words such as ‘I don’t believe in him as a composer,’ as possessing weight of their own or other possible justifications almost renders one sceptical concerning anti-Semitism undoubtedly present. Alma’s descriptions are surely more interesting when ambiguity is permitted, indeed explored. That she decided to marry Gustav in order to ‘cure’ him of Jewishness is asserted (p.43) without a shred of evidence. In its absence, many will follow Mahler’s near-definitive biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, considering documented dedication of a performance of Die Zauberflöte to Alma and her mother’s attempted dissuasion to have played some role. Roller’s positive physical descriptions most likely betray (p.47) ‘his unconscious absorption of … cultural markers of difference’. Such is lost, however, in a morass of implausible assertions. Doubtless a considerable part of such work will have to remain highly speculative; it is not thereby invalidated. Consideration of alternatives might nevertheless prove fruitful.

The villain, bizarrely, is Wagner. Weiner et al. at least make him the villain of his own story. Here, echoing Joachim Köhler’s monocausal explanation of the Second World War (Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker), newspaper critics err on account of, or at least in sympathy with, Wagner’s Das Judent[h]um in der Musik [not ‘Music’, p.53], unhelpfully conflated by Knittel with his Oper und Drama, so that anything in the latter automatically betokens anti-Semitism. Wagner’s criticism of Berlioz’s ‘mechanical means’ of orchestration is read as anti-Semitic, though Berlioz was never thought to be Jewish and Francophobia seems a better candidate – as well, perish the thought, as misplaced cultural criticism. William Ashton Ellis’s outdated translation of Wagner is employed, so that we have no opportunity to compare Wagner’s actual words with the critics’.  Is Wagner, even if one takes the most hostile approach to him, the sole lens through which to view musical critics’ anti-Semitism? Unlikely, to put it mildly. And yet, we read (p.108): ‘The juxtaposition of surface versus depth, the implication that Mahler has nothing to say, and the emphasis on noise or novelty rather than music and ideas can all be traced to beliefs about the inferiority of Jewish music, as articulated by Richard Wagner.’ And so, without presenting any evidence that Max Vansca’s 1907 review of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was indebted to Wagner or intended anti-Semitically – and both may well have been the case – why should we heed the forthright ‘moral of Vansca’s review …: Mahler will reveal himself eventually as a Jew – by writing banal or second-hand melodies’? Something more than bald assertion is required. On the rare occasion when we learn something a little more about a critic, Robert Hirschfeld, it is illuminating, though I remain unconvinced that Hirschfeld’s likening Mahler to George Bernard Shaw (p.135) in terms of technique and playing with irony reveals anti-Semitism. More needs to be said about other critics: background, influences, etc.

Racialist theories languish unexplored, Knittel near silent even concerning Vienna’s own leading anti-Semites. Georg Schönerer and Karl Lueger are merely name-checked, declining comparison of their anti-Semitism with the critics’. When claiming, ‘in a critical sense, anyone could be a Jew,’ Knittel neglects to invoke Lueger’s celebrated claim to decide who was a Jew. She does not mention even in passing the young Hitler’s fervent admiration of Mahler’s Wagner interpretation. Despite repeated please for contextualisation, anything not incriminating Wagner is excluded. Gustav Klimt is ignored. When dealing with cultural history and its politics, other arts, other discourses, will not only provide important material – no one would claim that music existed in a vacuum here – but also suggest what may or may not have been unusual about music. Perhaps that helps explain why strange claims abound, for example (p.49): ‘While Mahler’s Jewish background may seem unimportant now – or indeed, something to be purposely excluded from discussion…’. No evidence is given for unimportance or exclusion; in reality, the contrary would seem to be the case. Knittel then footnotes a few other studies on Mahler and anti-Semitism, enigmatically commenting, ‘I will not dwell on the limitations of the other studies’, before confusing ‘infamous’ and ‘notorious’.

What remains? An interesting selection of extracts from Viennese newspaper critics. An expanded edited collection of such criticism might have been more helpful than an argument that probably needed more time to be honed. We never approach the nub of why Mahler’s (partial) decision to write programme music was understood to indicate Jewishness, whereas undoubted resolutions to do so by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss were not. Must there not have been something more to the matter, given that the genre’s foremost practitioners were certainly not Jewish? Knittel’s reading is not necessarily invalidated, yet complexities require consideration, not evasion. A chapter on Strauss criticism holds out promise, but its argument turns out to be: Mahler was Jewish and Strauss was not, therefore identical criticisms of Mahler and Strauss are and are not anti-Semitic. As for the claim that Strauss turned his back upon modernism because it was perceived as Jewish, it is arresting, but where is the evidence? One can imagine the contrary being claimed, that he was returning to a comfortable classicism akin to that of Mendelssohn. 

It is a tedious hallmark of reviews that they berate the writer for not having included something else. I nevertheless cannot help but wonder at the exclusion of discussions by composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky – Jewish, spurned by Alma – and Arnold Schoenberg, and musicologists such as Guido Adler and Heinrich Schenker. Stefan Zweig is dismissed (naïvely?): ‘it must be said, … a rather naïve and self-centred man’. Such figures would, despite their exceptionalism, have something to say about prejudices of ‘mere’ critics and reasons for hostility extending beyond or illuminating anti-Semitism.

Mahler’s time having come – he predicted to Alma that it would, when Strauss’s had ended – might even signal acceptance, indeed approbation, of ‘Jewish’ aspects to his music. Alternatively, even if they exist, that may have little connection to his present esteem. Our view may depend upon preference for Bernstein’s Mahler as agent of personal redemption or Pierre Boulez’s Mahler as modernist godfather.  We should not, however, decide upon the outcome before conducting the investigation.

 

Alas, more vindictiveness towards LPO and now OAE musicians...

What a pity that the Daily Telegraph, which today published an excellent letter, in which many signatories protest at the LPO suspensions, should also now publish, albeit only as a blog item, a call (click here) for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to follow suit. The piece is so riddled with errors and general offence, and is so often lacking in logical coherence (basic, let alone dialectical), that it is probably not worthy of further comment, but here are just a few points immediately worth making:

• ' Would they ['the Lefty [sic] music establishment] have responded with equal outrage had the orchestral players been suspended for attacking the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra [etc.] ...?' Leaving aside the question of how many of us calling upon the LPO management to reverse its position could claim membership of any 'establishment', the answer is of course, 'yes'. The issue at hand is not whether we agree with the call from the 'LPO Four' and many others to cancel the Israel Philharmonic Prom. (For what it is worth, I was not at all in agreement with the call to boycott, and I know that many others were not.) It is the suspension of musicians as a consequence merely of having identified themselves as members of the LPO, without any implication that they were speaking on its behalf. I should have the same view no matter what the content of their letter to The Independent. 'Attack', moreover, is a problematical word to have employed, since it might well be read to implying a connection, when there was none, between LPO and OAE members signing the letter and the protests that subsequently took place in the Royal Albert Hall.
•  'the East-Western Divan, whose Arab members represent some of the most vile regimes on the planet'? No, they do not represent any regime: that is part of the whole point of the orchestra. Indeed, many of the young Arab musicians experience great difficulty as a consequence of their membership of this inspiring project. Moreover, but a passing acquaintance with Goethe might have informed our writer that the organisation is called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
• ' Orchestral managements, it seems, are being forced into a corner. No longer will they be able to censure players who publicly associate their brands with offensive or extremist Left-wing views. But Right-wing ones?' And why should they censure players on account of their political opinions, 'offensive or extremist', or otherwise? As for referring to orchestras as 'brands', that is not a conception I or anyone else I know holds of music-making, whether professional or otherwise.
• 'It's not as if the management is short of reasons to take action: defamation of the company name, demeaning the company by behaving in a discriminatory fashion, talking to the media without consent etc.' So an orchestral musician is a slave, who may not speak to 'the media without consent'?
• 'The OAE, it seems, is willing to associate itself with discriminatory views against Israel and Israelis.' Given earlier talk of 'defamation', the orchestra in question may wish to pursue that claim further.
• The mention of anti-Semitism deserves to be treated with contempt, not least given the high proportion, were one inclined to measure it, of Jewish support for the musicians. A classic attempt (which, in a mirror image of the language used here, would doubtless be dubbed 'right-wing extremist') to close off discussion by cynically invoking the dread word should not be permitted to succeed. And no, these are not 'self-hating Jews' or self-hating anyone-elses, another classic, cynical response to such objections.

Book Review: Barry Emslie - Wagner and the Centrality of Love

This review was published quite some time ago, in The Wagner Journal, 4/2 (2010), pp.92-96, but I thought it might still be of interest...

Barry Emslie, Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love (Boydell Press: Woodbridge,Suffolk, 2010). viii + 312pp. £50. ISBN: 978-1-843-83536-3

I enjoyed reading this book – an observation which may sound banal, but is no minor point. Books should be intended to be read, a point too often forgotten by their authors. That cannot be said of Barry Emslie, who writes engagingly, carrying one along with his way of thinking, and driving one to think for oneself. For instance, he writes amusingly of Kundry’s kiss, ‘The male is indeed fortunate if he not only doesn’t have to settle with the father before he usurps his place, but is also rewarded by a maternal kiss that is both a sensual pleasure and a religious benediction.’ (p. 238) A couple of sentences on, Emslie pithily dismisses ‘all decent and thereby false Wagnerites’. If only the opera houses of the world would unite and similarly lose their chains. The important point is that no one, but no one, will write a book on Wagner with which anyone, let alone everyone, else wholeheartedly agrees. One is bound, then, to be provoked: no bad thing. The question is, how? The greatest of Wagner’s critics, such as Nietzsche and Adorno, sometimes make one want to throw their books against the wall but also open up new possibilities, which, even if modified strenuously and severely, point toward a more sophisticated understanding of Wagner’s work. That is surely what anyone who cares about Wagner would wish to glean. And so, if I talk more in this review about that with which I take issue, it is partly because I have been positively provoked to take issue rather than negatively to discount.


I could not disagree more when Emslie calls the Ring ‘a mess’, except when he goes on to write of the ‘bad fit’ between its ‘sprawling story […] and Wagner’s compositional method’ (p. 55). Like George Bernard Shaw, Emslie sees incoherent collapse in Götterdämmerung, though he makes a more substantial case. It is perhaps not irrelevant to note here that the word ‘empirical’ arises too often, seemingly intended to signify a sort of common-sense (English?) corrective to German idealism rather than a highly ideological construct in its own right. Misunderstandings can follow. Emslie surely identifies Brünnhilde too closely with Wagner (p. 92); she is a character rather than a mouthpiece. He likewise misses the point of Brünnhilde’s refusal to return the ring to Waltraute (p. 91), though, in that she considers herself married and will therefore never give up her wedding ring, a point quite germane to Emslie’s broader concerns. However, if there is much to disagree with in the lengthy Ring chapter’s first part, ‘Contradiction, disorder and musical language’, I found that considerably more diverting than the concluding section on incest, which meanders somewhat, a little unclear as to its goal. Is incest quite so crucial to Wagner’s world-view as Emslie argues, both here and subsequently?


If Emslie cannot take this artistic ‘swindle’ as seriously as many of us, he clearly admires much of Wagner’s dramatic work: if not Götterdämmerung, then certainly Die Walküre, and still more Tristan, writing (p. 135), ‘When Marke sings of his love for Isolde […] anyone who is not deeply moved should never go anywhere near another performance of Tristan und Isolde again.’ Here Emslie valuably corrects a common misunderstanding of Stabreim, pointing (p. 155) to the importance of assonance as well as alliteration, and to the wider relationship with ‘sound effects in poetic language […] what the Germans tellingly call “the Lyric”’. Moreover, Emslie seems to stand in awe of Parsifal, rightly pointing to the importance of Christianity, which, given many commentators’ concerns, is more necessary than one might reasonably expect. It is, however, unfortunate that we should read ‘it is Easter’ (p. 242) for the third act, when of course it is Good Friday. Given Wagner’s concerns with the Cross, the Saviour, and  whether the latter might be brought down from the former, the Church calendar is not unimportant.


But let us address the concern of the book’s title more directly: love as a ‘unifying concept’ (p. 2) in Wagner’s work, albeit ‘seen – prima facie – in the context of two separate and arguably opposed categories: the spiritual and the sensuous’ (p. 3). Tannhäuser is explored in this respect. Moving on to Wagner’s uncompleted dramatic project Jesus of Nazareth, Emslie makes the interesting point (p. 32) that, for Wagner, an attack upon private property must first be an attack upon marriage. In his conclusion, Emslie neatly encapsulates the unifying concept and some of its implications (p. 291): ‘Wagner’s agenda, especially in the music dramas, is to plant as deeply as possible a concept of heterosexual love that turns out to be the royal road to a complex nexus of virtues: discovery of the true self, knowledge at its deepest and most abstract, physical bliss, redemption from sin and suffering, and (ultimately) renunciation of the world.’ The problem for Emslie is that this necessarily involves love’s dialectical opposite: hate, which for Wagner, it is claimed, manifests itself especially in his anti-semitism – love for the German nation entails hatred of the Other. It often has done, in different forms, but Wagner’s nationalism, such as it is, tends to be more ambiguous than is allowed here; it can permit of more than one dialectical opposite, for instance universalism. Indeed, I recall not a single reference to Wagner’s contrast in The Artwork of the Future between the national and the ‘un-national’ or ‘universal’. Whereas Greek tragedy had been ‘generically national’, the artwork of the future would represent the second of the ‘two principal moments in mankind’s development’ (‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’, in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 4th edn, 16 vols. (Leipzig, 1911) [SS], iii.61). In another of the Zurich reform writings, Art and Revolution, we read that the Athenian spectator had been reconciled with ‘the most noble and profound principles of his people’s consciousness’, whilst Wagner’s envisaged post-revolutionary audience would celebrate its membership of ‘free humanity’, a ‘nobler universalism’ ('Die Kunst und die Revolution,' in ibid., iii, 30, 23, 39). One may take the attitude that such words contradict Wagner’s practice, but they merit attention.


There are issues of history, intellectual and political, with which I am uneasy, for instance, the highly contentious claim (p. 188) that, by the time of Napoleon’s death blow, the Holy Roman Empire ‘had long been a joke’. Much recent work has highlighted the Empire’s 18th-century vitality. Moreover, its borders were not unstable in the way that Emslie supposes (p. 189). The Reich of blessed memory was not a state, more a legal and a cultural framework – a point relevant to Die Meistersinger. Its millennium in existence surely answers the writer’s question (p. 286): why a thousand years for the (successor but one) Third Reich? Emslie’s early references to Hegelian ‘synthesis’ may mislead the reader through employment of too positive a term. Hegel never employed the all-too-common formula, thesis–antithesis–synthesis, which vulgarises the sublating concept of Aufhebung: an invaluable, well-nigh untranslatable term for German cultural commentary, encompassing negation, preservation, mediation and more. ‘Mediated unity’ is probably as good as one can get; yet, if one can employ the German term Volk, surely one can Aufhebung too. Emslie does later (p. 235), though in a way that implies final resolution, rather than an invitation to further negation. This may or may not be what Wagner wanted. I do not think that he achieved it, even, as Emslie suggests, in Parsifal, and it is certainly not what Hegel meant. It seems to be implied in a ‘thereafter’ (p. 21) that Schopenhauer was a chronological successor rather than contemporary to Hegel. That ‘thereafter’ should pertain to most Schopenhauer reception, Wagner’s included, but not to Schopenhauer himself, an important point given his chronological proximity to the German Romantics. However, the thesis of Wagnerian presentiments concerning Jürgen Habermas, via Hegel’s Jena writings (p. 46) – the latter more important, I think, than Emslie allows – is a fascinating prospect, which deserves further attention.


An interesting point made is that drama ‘as genre is customarily focused on individuals and all its greater connotations (whether Fate, the Gods, the tribe, the nation, class struggle etc.) are difficult to dramatise in terms other than in the destinies of subject/actors’ (p. 138). It is a pity Emslie goes on to say that whilst ‘this is not an uninteresting conundrum – Marxist aesthetic theorists, for instance, tore into each other in the early decades of the twentieth century as they tried to come to terms with all the issues it raised – it is not strictly relevant here.’ For it is highly relevant to Wagner, whether in analysis of his own works or his legacy to theorists of different hues, and indeed to artists of the 20th century. Schoenberg springs immediately to mind, likewise Brecht; so does Die Meistersinger. Wagner’s dramas are distinguished from treatises in various ways, but one is the inherent tendency for radicalisation in drama, or at least in successfully dynamic drama. Ideas, abstractions, ‘greater connotations’, call them what one will, may at some level actually be more deeply probed through dramatic than analytical means, partly because of the way characterisation allows such exploration. This is not quite what Wagner says in Opera and Drama, but nor is it remote from that. It would have been interesting to hear more from Emslie on this, not least given his subsequent concentration upon nation and race. However, no book will be able to address everything; to suggest fruitful tangents on which the reader may choose to embark is a good deal of its purpose. Likewise, given Emslie’s continual, quite justified, insistence on the centrality of heterosexual love – the qualifier is usually attached – I wondered whether we should at some point be treated to a ‘queering’ of Wagner. There is certainly ripe material here; a starting point might have been Hans Werner Henze’s divining ‘something disagreeably heterosexual […] in all those rampant horn calls’ heard in Götterdämmerung (Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, tr. Stewart Spencer (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 207). Sadly, that was not to be, the sole, brief mention of homosexuality (p. 121) leading nowhere in particular. Perhaps the purpose was simply to suggest; again, a single book cannot accomplish everything.


We should return, however, to the posited dark side. More important than the ‘German’ to Emslie is the negative form of Wagner’s ‘love’, the ‘inimical, allegedly inadmissible bloodline’ (p. 198) of the ‘loveless’ (p. 217) Jews. Indeed, blood and race colour a great deal of this book. It is here that the writer truly goes on the attack, having little time for those he considers Wagner’s ‘apologists’. I do not consider myself an ‘apologist’, the writer’s favoured term for those who take a different view, nor a ‘literalist’, an ‘acolyte’ or a ‘loyalist’. It is certainly not the case that, in the face of evidence, I seek to excuse Wagner. When I challenge the general thesis of anti-semitism in the music dramas, I have given the matter some thought. Emslie is quite right to argue that ‘you cannot, or at least should not, put a firewall around the music dramas’, though one may still not accept that ‘the anti-semitic issue […] is an essential ingredient’ (p. 203). He is also right to argue that ‘there has to be an argument about interpretation’ (p. 205); likewise that it is not enough, though surely important, to point out that none of the music dramas ‘explicitly attacked Jews’ (p. 204). An argument concerning interpretation may begin in all sorts of places, yet there are worse places than with Wagner (and Cosima). None of the ‘accusers’, or whatever one might call them – were one inclined to regard them as Them – seems able to explain why Wagner did not once ever draw attention to an anti-semitic text or subtext. If Wagner’s 1869 decision to republish Das Judentum in der Musik was ‘courageous’ (p. 201) – I fail to see it as especially so – then why did he demonstrate such little courage in the present respect? He might well have failed to do so had this been an issue that cropped up once or twice – Beckmesser seems the most plausible of the usual suspects – but for something that has an allegedly ‘unparalleled epistemological function […] within Wagner’s conscious Weltanschauung’, and which is therefore alleged to permeate anything and everything? Emslie rightly, however, points to the lack of division of labour, more Romantic–nostalgic than Marxian, in Meistersinger. And though I do not see the prospect of Eva and Walther eloping as constituting betrayal of Nuremberg (p. 171), if one does, it fits well with the nasty, völkisch, almost totalitarian nationalism Emslie discerns. After all, Sachs prevents them from escaping.


Ultimately, though, the argument concerning the dramas remains circular: Wagner hates the Jews; certain characters and characteristics are bad; these characters and characteristics must be Jews; Wagner hates the Jews…. It is not clear why one should not do the same with Frenchmen or Jesuits; or rather, it is not clear why one should do it with any group. If ‘the Jew’, that is Alberich, ‘turns to gold and silver as substitutes for what might have been’ (p. 218), do we say this of Fafner too? Perhaps, at a push, Fasolt, once Loge advises him to take the ring? Presumably, since race and blood are so crucial, we should have to allow Fasolt, since brothers could hardly be of different races, and yet, he  could hardly have suddenly become a Jew at that point. And if Emslie calls Siegfried ‘a non-Jew if ever there was one’ (p. 260), one must ask why. What of a letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, in which Wagner contrasts the Messiah with the Jews who thought he would turn out to be an agent of political liberation: ‘Believe me, all our political freedom fighters strike me as being uncannily like the Jews.’ (Letter of 15 June 1862, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), 546.) One might just as well, then, though quite absurdly, claim that Siegfried is really ‘a Jew’. For if one permits that there might be  something else at work, the whole ‘racist’ edifice collapses. Opposition to Jewish culture and religion is amenable to a less ‘literalist’ approach to plot detail; fundamental, as opposed to more incidental, racism is not. Renunciation of love, conversion of gold into capital, power-lust, and so on, issues that are treated onstage and in Wagner’s own comments upon his work, may actually be his fundamental points. It is possible that he might have wished to conceal ‘epistemological’ anti-semitism, but given the nature and the volume of his pronouncements, that seems highly implausible and requires explanation. If we permit that Wagner’s opposition to ‘Jewishness’ may partly have reflected some other concern(s), that opposition loses its ascribed function. This is not to say that what remains is unworthy of comment, simply that it cannot fulfil so ambitious a task. It seems more plausible to see Wagner’s reaction to Jewishness, in all its varieties, as in good part a consequence of his identification of ‘the Jew’ with the capitalist, instrumentalist modernity the composer so abhorred.


Sometimes Emslie runs into trouble when it comes to music. This is a difficult matter when writing for the elusive ‘general reader’, but one which, to the author’s credit, he does not shirk, though the brief description of the music of Tristan (p. 151) sounds merely naive. One issue may seem merely nomenclatural, when Emslie writes, in his author’s note, ‘Unlike Wagner, I have chosen to use the term “music drama” exclusively for all the theatrical works from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal, and the term “opera”’ for the three preceding works. However, whilst the ‘traditional’ distinction between music drama and Romantic drama is not absolute, it serves a useful purpose, and Emslie’s redrawing of the boundaries confuses. ‘What’s in a name?’ one may ask, though, as the author elsewhere avers, the Lohengrin-like answer may be, ‘more or less everything’ (p. 17). For this reclassification sometimes appears to lead to treating works such as Tannhäuser as if they were ‘music dramas’ in the usual sense (p. 61), even though later on, Emslie, citing Arnold Whittall (p. 64), acknowledges development in Wagner’s method. It is true that the precepts of Opera and Drama are to some extent born of practical compositional experience – the works preceding Das Rheingold – yet, like Wagner’s leitmotifs themselves, they look forward as much as back. It is surely more revealing to follow Carl Dahlhaus in acknowledging a ‘qualitative leap in the evolution of symphonic style’, for which the traditional usage acts as shorthand (‘Wagner’s Place in the History of Music’, tr. Alfred Clayton, Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller, Peter Wapnewski and John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1992), 110). A few typographical errors are more or less inevitable, though there are perhaps too many here. Many will find the split infinitives easier to overlook than I do. Nevertheless, I repeat that I enjoyed reading Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love. It has given me much to ponder, much to contest. Other readers will doubtless respond in similar fashion.

To follow the debate that ensued, click here.

Wagner and anti-Semitism (II)

In July, I flagged the debate concerning Wagner and anti-Semitism on the online pages of The Wagner Journal between Barry Emslie and myself. Having both made five contributions, we have now drawn to a close. The complete discussion may be found here and (second page) here.

Wagner and anti-Semitism

A debate commences between Barry Emslie, author of Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love, which I recently reviewed in The Wagner Journal, and me, concerning the issue of anti-Semitism and Wagner's music dramas. The intention is that this should be ongoing, for a while at least, but the opening two contributions are now online. Click here.