Art and artists
Jun. 16—Nobody knew me when I checked into the most recent meeting of the Wagner Society of Santa Fe. I had been invited as a guest, and as I sat down in the back row of the Quail Run community clubhouse, I had to grapple with a very simple conundrum.
I'm Jewish, and German composer Richard Wagner probably wouldn't have accepted me in his society.
You see, Wagner was not just a revolutionary composer of profoundly powerful operas; he was also a prolific purveyor of rabidly antisemitic thoughts, most famously in his published essay Jewishness in Music but also in his voluminous personal correspondence.
In Jewishness in Music — published under a pseudonym in 1850 and under his own name in 1869 — Wagner tried to express his society's "involuntary repellence" to "the nature and personality" of Jewish people, and he sought to "vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognize as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof."
His words weren't strictly academic; they had real-world impact on real people. His final opera, Parsifal, was conducted at its premiere by a Jewish man, Hermann Levi, and historical accounts indicate that Wagner sought to have him baptized as a condition of his participation. (Levi was apparently saved by the "woke" intervention of Bavarian King Ludwig II, and he maintained a close relationship with Wagner's Bayreuth Festival for decades. But after Levi, the festival didn't have a Jewish director lead any of Wagner's operas until Barrie Kosky broke the barrier in 2017.)
Wagner's philosophies — repugnant as they may be — don't just mark him as a man of his time. They mark him as a man who had significant influence on the generations that followed. His music was used to devastating effect in propaganda films like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935), and Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies all began with a performance of the overture from Wagner's opera Rienzi.
There is one school of thought, in fact, that says that Wagner's music cannot be divorced from its history. The State of Israel, which wasn't established until 1948, has to this point refused to allow a single Wagner opera to be performed within its borders.
Elsewhere, Wagner's music continues to have an overwhelming amount of relevance. Innumerable brides have walked down the aisle to the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin without having any idea who wrote it. The pomp and circumstance of Ride of the Valkyries took on new meaning in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and in The Blues Brothers by John Landis. Charlie Chaplin, who boldly made his spoof The Great Dictator in 1940 as a reaction to having seen Triumph of the Will, lampooned both Hitler and Wagner's Lohengrin in the dancing globe scene. The Marx Brothers got in on the act with the same opera; just one year earlier, in their 1939 film At the Circus, the band plays the prelude to the third act of Lohengrin as they slowly drift out to sea.
But Wagner's music in pop culture isn't a phenomenon confined to old movies.
Over the last 20 years, Wagner's music has been used to great dramatic effect in films as disparate as Jarhead (2005), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Melancholia (2011), and Tár (2022). That's a war flick, a fantasy, an apocalyptic vision, and a fictional musician biopic, for the record.
What does that tell us at this point? His music is beyond the ability to boycott.
The great composer died in 1883, and he isn't around to speak for himself.
In life, he believed uncharitable things about his fellow humans.
But in death, his music is whatever you make of it — and you owe it to yourself to seek it out in its natural context.
Spencer Fordin, Staff Writer
