Richard Wagner: Judaism in Music (1850)
Hang Mordecai
About this Title
Source: Judaism in Music
By Richard Wagner (Translated by William Ashton Ellis)
The Theatre
Richard Wagner's Prose Works
Volume 3
Pages 79-100
Published in 1894
Original Title Information:
Das Judenthum in der Musik.
Published in 1850
Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen : Volume V
Pages 66-85
Reading Information:
This title contains 8278 words and is presented in 2 parts.
Estimated reading time between 24 and 41 minutes.
Notes are indicated using parenthesis, like (1).
Page numbers of the original source are indicated using
square-bracketed parentheses, like [62].
Preface:
Wagner's 1850 article "Judaism in Music" caused the German press,
which even then had a large number of influential Jews in it, to rain
abuse on him. The German Jews had just been "emancipated," a few
decades before and large numbers of Eastern Jews were swarming into
German cities. He respected the Jews for their successes but loathed
both their means and their ends. He found them distasteful to look at
and distasteful to talk to. Wagner felt the natural repugnance one
feels in looking at Jews or listening to them speak is an indication
of their destructiveness. To him they are totally alien, and their
culture smothers the German spirit.
As long as money is the center of power, the Jew will rule, and Wagner
wondered if the Germans would ever be free of them. Germans need
emancipation from the Jews, whom the Germans had just emancipated, he
says. The Jews have never had an art of their own. They are just
parrots or mimics with no true passion and no true calm -- outlandish,
odd, indifferent, cold, and unnatural.
In the appendix he relates the Jews' reaction to his "Judaism in
Music." In the press, which Jews and German liberals dominated, they
blasted him with name-calling, claiming that he was mad, a criminal,
and a Jew-hater. Rather than attacking "Judaism in Music" directly and
risking a debate, they made sure his operas got bad reviews and
relentlessly attacked him and his friends on other issues.
Well worth reading.
________________________
Judaism in Music.
(01)
IN THE 'NEUE ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR MUSIK' not long ago, mention was made of
an "Hebraic art-taste": an attack and a defence of that expression
neither did, nor could, stay lacking. Now it seems to myself not
unimportant, to clear up the matter lying at bottom of all this - a
matter either glossed over by our critics hitherto, or touched with a
certain outburst of excitement. (02) It will not be a question,
however, of saying something new, but of explaining that unconscious
feeling which proclaims itself among the people as a rooted dislike of
the Jewish nature; thus, of speaking out a something really existent,
and by no means of attempting to artfully breathe life into an
unreality through the force of any sort of fancy. Criticism goes
against its very essence, if, in attack or defence, it tries for
anything else.
Since it here is merely in respect of Art, and specially of Music,
that we want to explain to ourselves the popular dislike of the Jewish
nature, even at the present day, we may completely pass over any
dealing with this same phenomenon in the field of Religion and
Politics. In [80] Religion the Jews have long ceased to be our hated
foes, - thanks to all those who within the Christian religion itself
have drawn upon themselves the people's hatred. (03) In pure Politics
we have never come to actual conflict with the Jews; we have even
granted them the erection of a Jerusalemitic realm, and in this
respect we have rather had to regret that Herr v. Rothschild was too
keen-witted to make himself King of the Jews, preferring, as is
wellknown, to remain "the Jew of the Kings." It is another matter,
where politics become a question of Society: here the isolation of the
Jews has been held by us a challenge to the exercise of human justice,
for just so long as in ourselves the thrust toward social liberation
has woken into plainer consciousness. When we strove for emancipation
of the Jews, however, we virtually were more the champions of an
abstract principle, than of a concrete case: just as all our
Liberalism was a not very lucid mental sport (04) - since we went for
freedom of the Folk without knowledge of that Folk itself, nay, with a
dislike of any genuine contact with it - so our eagerness to level up
the rights of Jews was far rather stimulated by a general idea, than
by any real sympathy; for, with all our speaking and writing in favour
of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by
any actual, operative contact with them.
Here, then, we touch the point that brings us closer to our main
inquiry: we have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence
possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to
vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as
stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid
ourselves thereof. Even to-day we only purposely belie ourselves, in
this regard, when we think necessary to hold immoral [81] and taboo
all open proclamation of our natural repugnance against the Jewish
nature. Only in quite the latest times do we seem to have reached an
insight, that it is more rational (vernünftiger) to rid ourselves of
that strenuous self-deception, (05) so as quite soberly instead to
view the object of our violent sympathy and bring ourselves to
understand a repugnance still abiding with us in spite of all our
Liberal bedazzlements. (06) To our astonishment, we perceive that in
our Liberal battles (07) we have been floating in the air and fighting
clouds, whereas the whole fair soil of material reality has found an
appropriator whom our aerial flights have very much amused, no doubt,
yet who holds us far too foolish to reward us by relaxing one iota of
his usurpation of that material soil. Quite imperceptibly the
"Creditor of Kings" has become the King of Creeds, and we really
cannot take this monarch's pleading for emancipation as otherwise than
uncommonly naïve, seeing that it is much rather we who are shifted
into the necessity of fighting for emancipation from the Jews.
According to the present constitution of this world, the Jew in truth
is already more than emancipate: he rules, and will rule, so long as
Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings
lose their force. That the historical adversity (08) of the Jews and
the rapacious rawness of Christian-German potentates have brought this
power within the hands of Israel's sons - this needs no argument of
ours to prove. That the impossibility of carrying farther any natural,
any 'necessary' and truly beauteous thing, upon the basis of that
stage whereat the evolution of our arts has now arrived, and without a
total alteration of that basis - that this has also brought the public
Art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew, however, is
the matter whose grounds we here [82] have to consider somewhat
closer.
What their thralls had toiled and moiled to pay the liege-lords of the
Roman and the Medieval world, today is turned to money by the Jew: who
thinks of noticing that the guileless-looking scrap of paper is slimy
with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes of the arts,
with untold strain consuming lief and life, have wrested from the
art-fiend of two millennia of misery, today the Jew converts into an
art-bazaar (Kunstwaarenwechsel): who sees it in the mannered
bricabrac, that it is glued together by the hallowed brow-sweat of the
Genius of two thousand years? - We have no need to first substantiate
the be-Jewing of modern art; it springs to the eye, and thrusts upon
the senses, of itself. Much too far afield, again, should we have to
fare, did we undertake to explain this phenomenon by a demonstration
of the character of our art-history itself. But if emancipation from
the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must
hold it weighty above all to prove our forces for this war of
liberation. Now we shall never win these forces from an abstract
definition of that phenomenon per se, but only from an accurate
acquaintance with the nature of that involuntary feeling of ours which
utters itself as an instinctive repugnance against the Jew's prime
essence. Through it, through this unconquerable feeling - if we avow
it quite without ado - must there become plain to us what we hate in
that essence; what we then know definitely, we can make head against;
nay, through his very laying bare, may we even hope to rout the demon
from the field, whereon he has only been able to maintain his stand
beneath the shelter of a twilight darkness - a darkness we
good-natured Humanists ourselves have cast upon him, to make his look
less loathly.
[
The Jew - who, as everyone knows, has a God all to himself - in
ordinary life strikes us primarily by his outward [83] appearance,
which, no matter to what European nationality we belong, has something
disagreeably (09) foreign to that nationality: instinctively we wish
to have nothing in common with a man who looks like that. This must
heretofore have passed as a misfortune for the Jew: in more recent
times, however, we perceive that in the midst of this misfortune he
feels entirely well; after all his successes, he needs must deem his
difference from us a pure distinction. Passing over the moral side, in
the effect of this in itself unpleasant freak of Nature, and coming to
its bearings upon Art, we here will merely observe that to us this
exterior can never be thinkable as a subject for the art of
re-presentment.: if plastic art wants to present us with a Jew, it
mostly takes its model from sheer phantasy, with a prudent ennobling,
or entire omission, of just everything that characterises for us in
common life the Jew's appearance. But the Jew never wanders on to the
theatric boards: the exceptions are so rare and special, that they
only confirm the general rule. We can conceive no representation of
an antique or modern stage-character by a Jew, be it as hero or lover,
without feeling instinctively the incongruity of such a notion. (10)
This is of great weight: a man whose appearance we must hold unfitted
for artistic treatment - not merely in this or that personality, but
according to his kind in general - neither can we hold him [84]
capable of any sort of artistic utterance of his (11) [inner] essence.
By far more weighty, nay, of quite decisive weight for our inquiry, is
the effect the Jew produces on us through his speech; and this is the
essential point at which to sound the Jewish influence upon Music.
(12) - The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he
dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an
alien. As it lies beyond our present scope to occupy ourselves with
the cause of this phenomenon, too, we may equally abstain from an
arraignment of Christian Civilisation for having kept the Jew in
violent severance from it, as on the other hand, in touching the
sequelae of that severance we can scarcely propose to make the Jews
the answerable party. (13) Our only object, here, is to throw light on
the aesthetic character of the said results. - In the first place,
then, the general circumstance that the Jew talks the modern European
languages merely as learnt, and not as mother tongues, must
necessarily debar him from all capability of therein expressing
himself idiomatically, independently, and conformably to his nature.
(14) A language, with its expression and its evolution, is not the
work of scattered units, but of an historical community: only he who
has unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community, takes
also any share in its creations.
But the Jew has stood outside the pale of any such community, stood
solitarily with his Jehova in a splintered, soilless stock, to which
all self-sprung evolution must stay denied, just as even the peculiar
(Hebraïc) language of that stock has been preserved for him merely as
a thing defunct. Now, to make poetry in a foreign tongue has hitherto
been impossible, even to geniuses of highest rank. Our whole European
art and civilisation, however, have remained to the Jew a foreign
tongue; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution [85] of the
one, so has he taken none in that of the other; but at most the
homeless wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on. In this
Speech, this Art, the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch - not
truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings. In
particular does the purely physical aspect of the Jewish mode of
speech repel us. Throughout an intercourse of two millennia with
European nations, Culture has not succeeded in breaking the remarkable
stubbornness of the Jewish naturel as regards the peculiarities of
Semitic pronunciation. The first thing that strikes our ear as quite
outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the
voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle (15) :add
thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our
nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our
phrases - and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of
an intolerably jumbled blabber (eines unertraglich verwirrten
Geplappers); so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention
dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning
of its intrinsic what. How exceptionally weighty is this circumstance,
particularly for explaining the impression made on us by the
music-works of modern Jews, must be recognised and borne in mind
before all else. If we hear a Jew speak, we are unconsciously offended
by the entire want of purely-human expression in his discourse: the
cold indifference of its peculiar "blubber" ("Gelabber") never by any
chance rises to the ardour of a higher, heartfelt passion. If, on the
other hand, we find ourselves driven to this more heated expression,
in converse with a Jew, he will always shuffle off, since he is
incapable of replying in kind. Never does the Jew excite himself in
mutual interchange of feelings with us, but - so far as we are
concerned - only in the altogether special egoistic interest of his
vanity or profit; a thing which, coupled with the wry expression of
his daily mode of speech, always gives to such excitement a tinge of
the ridiculous, and may rouse [86] anything you please in us, only not
sympathy with the interests of the speaker. Though we well may deem it
thinkable that in intercourse with one another, and particularly where
domestic life brings purely-human feelings to an outburst, even the
Jews may be able to give expression to their emotions in a manner
effective enough among themselves: yet this cannot come within our
present purview, since we here are listening to the Jew who, in the
intercourse of life and art, expressly speaks to us.
Now, if the aforesaid qualities of his dialect make the Jew almost
(16) incapable of giving artistic enunciation to his feelings and
beholdings through talk, for such an enunciation through song his
aptitude must needs be infinitely smaller. Song is just Talk aroused
to highest passion: Music is the speech of Passion. All that worked
repellently upon us in his outward appearance and his speech, makes us
take to our heels at last in his Song, providing we are not held
prisoners by the very ridicule of this phenomenon. Very naturally, in
Song - the vividest and most indisputable expression of the personal
emotional-being - the peculiarity of the Jewish nature attains for us
its climax of distastefulness; and on any natural hypothesis, we might
hold the Jew adapted for every sphere of art, excepting that whose
basis lies in Song.
The Jews' sense of Beholding has never been of such a kind as to let
plastic artists arise among them: from ever have their eyes been
busied with far more practical affairs, than beauty and the spiritual
substance of the world of forms. We know nothing of a Jewish architect
or sculptor in our times, (17) so far as I am aware: whether recent
painters of Jewish descent have really created (wirklich geschaffen
haben) in their art, I must leave to connoisseurs to judge;
presumably, however, these artists occupy no other standing toward
their art, than that of modern [87] Jewish composers toward Music - to
whose plainer investigation we now will turn.
The Jew, who is innately incapable of enouncing himself to us
artistically through either his outward appearance or his speech, and
least of all through his singing. has nevertheless been able in the
widest-spread of modern art-varieties, to wit in Music, to reach the
rulership of public taste. - To explain to ourselves this phenomenon,
let us first consider how it grew possible to the Jew to become a
musician. - From that turning-point in our social evolution where
Money, with less and less disguise, was raised to the virtual patent
of nobility, the Jews - to whom money-making without actual labour,
i.e. Usury, had been left as their only trade - the Jews not merely
could no longer be denied the diploma of a new society that needed
naught but gold, but they brought it with them in their pockets.
Wherefore our modern Culture, accessible to no one but the well-to-do,
remained the less a closed book to them, as it had sunk into a venal
article of Luxury.
Henceforward, then, the cultured Jew appears in our Society; his
distinction from the uncultured, the common Jew, we now have closely
to observe. The cultured Jew has taken the most indicible pains to
strip off all the obvious tokens of his lower co-religionists: in many
a case he has even held it wise to make a Christian baptism wash away
the traces of his origin. This zeal, however, has never got so far as
to let him reap the hoped-for fruits: it has conducted only to his
utter isolation, and to making him the most heartless of all human
beings; to such a pitch, that we have been bound to lose even our
earlier sympathy for the tragic history of his stock. His connexion
with the former comrades in his suffering, which he arrogantly tore
asunder, it has stayed impossible for him to replace by a new
connexion with that society whereto he has soared up. He stands in
correlation with none but those who need his [88] money: and never yet
has money thriven to the point of knitting a goodly bond 'twixt man
and man. Alien and apathetic stands the educated Jew in midst of a
society he does not understand, with whose tastes and aspirations he
does not sympathise, whose history and evolution have always been
indifferent to him. In such a situation have we seen the Jews give
birth to Thinkers: the Thinker is the backward-looking poet; but the
true Poet is the foretelling Prophet. For such a prophet-charge can
naught equip, save the deepest, the most heartfelt sympathy with a
great, a like-endeavouring Community - to whose unconscious thoughts
the Poet gives exponent voice. Completely shut from this community, by
the very nature of his situation; entirely torn from all connexion
with his native stock - to the genteeler Jew his learnt and payed-for
culture could only seem a luxury, since at bottom he knew not what to
be about with it.
Now, our modern arts had likewise become a portion of this culture,
and among them more particularly that art which is just the very
easiest to learn - the art of music, and indeed that Music which,
severed from her sister arts, had been lifted by the force and stress
of grandest geniuses to a stage in her universal faculty of Expression
where either, in new conjunction with the other arts, she might speak
aloud the most sublime, or, in persistent separation from them, she
could also speak at will the deepest bathos of the trivial. Naturally,
what the cultured Jew had to speak, in his aforesaid situation, could
be nothing but the trivial and indifferent, because his whole artistic
bent was in sooth a mere luxurious, needless thing. Exactly as his
whim inspired, or some interest lying outside Art, could he utter
himself now thus, and now otherwise; for never was he driven to speak
out a definite, a real and necessary thing, but he just merely wanted
to speak, no matter what (18) ; so that, naturally, the how was the
only 'moment' [89] left for him to care for. At present no art affords
such plenteous possibility of talking in it without saying any real
thing, as that of Music, since the greatest geniuses have already said
whatever there was to say in it as an absolute separate-art. (19) When
this had once been spoken out, there was nothing left but to babble
after; and indeed with quite distressing accuracy and deceptive
likeness, just as parrots reel off human words and phrases, but also
with just as little real feeling and expression as these foolish
birds. Only, in the case of our Jewish music-makers this mimicked
speech presents one marked peculiarity - that of the Jewish style of
talk in general, which we have more minutely characterised above.
Although the peculiarities of the Jewish mode of speaking and singing
come out the most glaringly in the commoner class of Jew, who has
remained faithful to his fathers' stock, and though the cultured son
of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they
shewan impertinent obstinacy in cleaving to him. Explain this mishap
by physiology as we may, yet it also has its reason in the aforesaid
social situation of the educated Jew. However much our Luxury-art may
float in wellnigh nothing but the aether of our self-willed Phantasy,
still it keeps below one fibre of connexion with its natural soil,
with the genuine spirit of the Folk. The true poet, no matter in what
branch of art, still gains his stimulus from nothing but a faithful,
loving contemplation of instinctive Life, of that life which only
greets his sight amid the Folk. Now, where is the cultured Jew to find
this Folk? Not, surely, on the soil of that Society in which he plays
his artist-rôle? If he has any connexion at all with this Society, it
[90] is merely with that offshoot of it, entirely loosened from the
real, the healthy stem; but this connexion is an entirely loveless,
and this lovelessness must ever become more obvious to him, if for
sake of food-stuff for his art he clambers down to that Society's
foundations: not only does he here find everything more strange and
unintelligible, but the instinctive ill-will of the Folk confronts him
here in all its wounding nakedness, since - unlike its fellow in the
richer classes - it here is neither weakened down nor broken by
reckonings of advantage and regard for certain mutual interests.
Thrust back with contumely from any contact with this Folk, and in any
case completely powerless to seize its spirit, the cultured Jew sees
himself driven to the taproot of his native stem, where at least an
understanding would come by all means easier to him. Willy-nilly he
must draw his water from this well; yet only a How, and not a What,
rewards his pains.
The Jew has never had an Art of his own, hence never a Life of
art-enabling import (ein Leben von kunstfähigem Gehalte): an import,
a
universally applicable, a human import, not even to-day does it offer
to the searcher, but merely a peculiar method of expression - and
that, the method we have characterised above. Now the only musical
expression offered to the Jew tone-setter by his native Folk, is the
ceremonial music of their Jehova-rites: the Synagogue is the solitary
fountain whence the Jew can draw art-motives at once popular and
intelligible to himself. However sublime and noble we may be minded to
picture to ourselves this musical Service of God in its pristine
purity, all the more plainly must we perceive that that purity has
been most terribly sullied before it came down to us: here for
thousands of years has nothing unfolded itself through an inner
life-fill, but, just as with Judaism at large, everything has kept its
fixity of form and substance. But a form which is never quickened
through renewal of its substance, must fall to pieces in the end; an
expression whose content has long-since ceased to be the breath of
Feeling, grows senseless and distorted. Who has not had occasion [91]
to convince himself of the travesty of a divine service of song,
presented in a real Folk-synagogue? Who has not been seized with a
feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror mingled with the absurd,
at hearing that sense-and-sound-confounding gurgle, jodel and cackle,
which no intentional caricature can make more repugnant than as
offered here in full, in naïve seriousness? In latter days, indeed,
the spirit of reform has shewn its stir within this singing, too, by
an attempted restoration of the older purity: but, of its very nature,
what here has happened on the part of the higher, the reflective
Jewish intellect, is just a fruitless effort from Above, which can
never strike Below to such a point that the cultured Jew - who
precisely for his art-needs seeks the genuine fount of Life amid the
Folk - may be greeted by the mirror of his intellectual efforts in
that fount itself. He seeks for the Instinctive, and not the
Reflected, since the latter is his product; and all the Instinctive he
can light on, is just that out-of-joint expression. If this going back
to the Folk-source is as unpurposed with the cultured Jew, as
unconsciously enjoined upon him by Necessity and the nature of the
thing, as with every artist: with just as little conscious aim, and
therefore with an insuperable domination of his whole field of view,
does the hence-derived impression carry itself across into his
art-productions. Those (20) rhythms and melismi of the Synagogue-song
usurp his musical fancy in exactly the same way as the instinctive
possession of the strains and rhythms of our Folksong and Folkdance
made out the virtual (21) shaping-force of the creators of our
art-music, both vocal and instrumental. To the musical
perceptive-faculty (22) of the cultured Jew there is therefore nothing
seizable in all the ample circle of our music, either popular or
artistic, but that which flatters his general sense of the
intelligible: intelligible, however, and so intelligible that he may
use it for his art, is merely That which in any degree approaches [92]
a resemblance to the said peculiarity of Jewish music. In listening to
either our naïve or our consciously artistic musical doings, however,
were the Jew to try to probe their heart and living sinews, he would
find here really not one whit of likeness to his musical nature; and
the utter strangeness of this phenomenon must scare him back so far,
that he could never pluck up nerve again to mingle in our
art-creating. Yet his whole position in our midst never tempts the Jew
to so intimate a glimpse into our essence: wherefore, either
intentionally (provided he recognises this position of his towards us)
or instinctively (if he is incapable of understanding us at all), he
merely listens to the barest surface of our art, but not to its
life-bestowing inner organism; and through this apathetic listening
alone, can he trace external similarities with the only thing
intelligible to his power of view, peculiar to his special nature. To
him, therefore, the most external accidents on our domain of musical
life and art must pass for its very essence; and therefore, when as
artist he reflects them back upon us, his adaptations needs must seem
to us outlandish, odd, indifferent, cold, unnatural and awry; so that
Judaic works of music often produce on us the impression as though a
poem of Goethe's, for instance, were being rendered in the Jewish
jargon.
Just as words and constructions are hurled together in this jargon
with wondrous inexpressiveness, so does the Jew musician hurl together
the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master. Packed
side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in
motleyest chaos. As in these productions the sole concern is Talking
at all hazards, and not the Object which might make that talk worth
doing, so this clatter can only be made at all inciting to the ear by
its offering at each instant a new summons to attention, through a
change of outer expressional means. Inner agitation, genuine passion,
each finds its own peculiar language at the instant when, struggling
for an understanding, it girds itself for utterance: the Jew, [93]
already characterised by us in this regard, has no true passion
(Leidenschaft), and least of all a passion that might thrust him on to
art-creation. But where this passion is not forthcoming, there neither
is any calm (Ruhe): true, noble Calm is nothing else than Passion
mollified through Resignation. (23) Where the calm has not been
ushered in by passion, we perceive naught but sluggishness
(Trägheit):
the opposite of sluggishness, however, is nothing but that prickling
unrest which we observe in Jewish music-works from one end to the
other, saving where it makes place for that soulless, feelingless
inertia. What issues from the Jews' attempts at making Art, must
necessarily therefore bear the attributes of coldness and
indifference, even to triviality and absurdity; and in the history of
Modern Music we can but class the Judaic period as that of final
unproductivity, of stability gone to ruin.
By what example will this all grow clearer to us - ay, wellnigh what
other single case could make us so alive to it, as the works of a
musician of Jewish birth whom Nature had endowed with specific
musical gifts as very few before him? All that offered itself to our
gaze, in the inquiry into our antipathy against the Jewish nature; all
the contradictoriness of this nature, both in itself and as touching
us; all its inability, while outside our footing, to have intercourse
with us upon that footing, nay, even to form a wish to further develop
the things which had sprung from out our soil: all these are
intensified to a positively tragic conflict in the nature, life, and
art-career of the early-taken FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY.
He has shewn us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific
talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and
the tenderest sense of honour - yet without all these pre-eminences
helping him, were it but one single time, to call [94] forth in us
that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from Art (24)
because we know her capable thereof, because we have felt it many a
time and oft, so soon as once a hero of our art has, so to say, but
opened his mouth to speak to us. To professional critics, who haply
have reached a like consciousness with ourselves hereon, it may be
left to prove by specimens of Mendelssohn's art-products our statement
of this indubitably certain thing; by way of illustrating our general
impression, let us here be content with the fact that, in hearing a
tone-piece of this composer's, we have only been able to feel
engrossed where nothing beyond our more or less amusement-craving
Phantasy was roused through the presentment, stringing-together and
entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished
figures - as in the kaleidoscope's changeful play of form and colour
(25) - but never where those figures were meant to take the shape of
deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart. (26) In this latter
event Mendelssohn lost even all formal productive-faculty; wherefore
in particular where he made for Drama, as in the Oratorio, he was
obliged quite openly to snatch at every formal detail that had served
as characteristic token of the individuality of this or that
forerunner whom he chose out for his model. It is further significant
of this procedure, that he gave the preference to our old master BACH,
as special pattern for his inexpressive modern tongue to copy.
Bach's musical speech was formed at a period of our history when
Music s universal tongue was still striving for the faculty of more
individual, more unequivocal Expression: pure formalism and pedantry
still clung so strongly to her, that it was first through the [95]
gigantic force of Bach's own genius that her purely human accents
(Ausdruck) broke themselves a vent. The speech of Bach stands toward
that of Mozart, and finally of Beethoven, in the relation of the
Egyptian Sphinx to the Greek statue of a Man: as the human visage of
the Sphinx is in the act of striving outward from the animal body, so
strives Bach's noble human head from out the periwig. It is only
another evidence of the inconceivably witless confusion of our
luxurious music-taste of nowadays, that we can let Bach's language
be spoken to us at the selfsame time as that of Beethoven, and flatter
ourselves that there is merely an individual difference of form
between them, but nowise a real historic distinction, marking off a
period in our culture. The reason, however, is not so far to seek: the
speech of Beethoven can be spoken only by a whole, entire,
warm-breathed human being; since it was just the speech of a music-man
so perfect, that with the force of Necessity he thrust beyond Absolute
Music - whose dominion he had measured and fulfilled unto its utmost
frontiers - and shewed to us the pathway to the fecundation of every
art through Music, as her only salutary broadening. (27) On the other
hand, Bach's language can be mimicked, at a pinch, by any musician who
thoroughly understands his business, though scarcely in the sense of
Bach; because the Formal has still therein the upper hand, and the
purely human Expression is not as yet a factor so definitely
preponderant that its What either can, or must be uttered without
conditions, for it still is fully occupied with shaping out the How.
The washiness and whimsicality of our present musical style has been,
if not exactly brought about, yet pushed to its utmost pitch by
Mendelssohn's endeavour to speak out a vague, an almost nugatory
Content as interestingly and spiritedly as possible. Whereas
Beethoven, the last in the chain of our true music-heroes, [96] strove
with highest longing, and wonder-working faculty, (28) for the
clearest, certainest Expression of an unsayable Content through a
sharp-cut, plastic shaping of his tone-pictures: Mendelssohn, on the
contrary, reduces these achievements to vague, fantastic shadow-forms,
midst whose indefinite shimmer our freakish fancy is indeed aroused,
but our inner, purely-human yearning for distinct artistic sight is
hardly touched with even the merest hope of a fulfilment. Only where
an oppressive feeling of this incapacity seems to master the
composer's mood, and drive him to express a soft and mournful
resignation, has Mendelssohn the power to shew himself characteristic
- characteristic in the subjective sense of a gentle (29)
individuality that confesses an impossibility in view of its own
powerlessness. This, as we have said, is the tragic trait in
Mendelssohn's life-history; and if in the domain of Art we are to give
our sympathy to the sheer personality, we can scarcely deny a large
measure thereof to Mendelssohn, even though the force of that sympathy
be weakened by the reflection that the Tragic, in Mendelssohn's
situation, hung rather over him than came to actual, sore and
cleansing consciousness.
A like sympathy, however, can no other Jew composer rouse in us. A
far-famed Jewish tone-setter of our day has addressed himself and
products to a section of our public whose total confusion of musical
taste was less to be first caused by him, than worked out to his
profit. The public of our Opera-theatre of nowadays has for long been
gradually led aside from those claims which rightly should be
addressed, not only to the Dramatic Artwork, but in general to every
work of healthy taste. (30) The places in our halls of entertainment
are mostly filled by nothing but that section of our citizen society
whose only ground for change of occupation is utter 'boredom'
(Langeweile): the [97] disease of boredom, however, is not remediable
by sips of Art; for it can never be distracted of set purpose, but
merely duped into another form of boredom. Now, the catering for this
deception that famous opera-composer has made the task of his artistic
life. (31) There is no object in more closely designating the artistic
means he has expended on the reaching of this life's-aim: enough that,
as we may see by the result, he knew completely how to dupe; and more
particularly by taking that jargon which we have already
characterised, and palming it upon his ennuyed audience as the
modern-piquant utterance of all the trivialities which so often had
been set before them in all their natural foolishness. That this
composer took also thought for thrilling situations (Erschütterungen)
and the effective weaving of emotional catastrophes
(Gefühlskatastrophen), need astonish none who know how necessarily
this sort of thing is wished by those whose time hangs heavily upon
their hands; nor need any wonder that in this his aim succeeded too,
if they but will ponder well the reasons why, in such conditions, (32)
the whole was bound to prosper with him. In fact, this composer pushes
his deception so far, that he ends by deceiving himself, and perchance
as purposely as he deceives his bored admirers. We believe, indeed,
that he honestly would like to turn out artworks, and yet is well
aware he cannot: to extricate himself from this painful conflict
between Will and Can, he writes operas for Paris, and sends them
touring round the world - the surest means, to-day, of earning oneself
an art-renown albeit not an artist. Under the burden of this
self-deception, which may not be so toilless [98] as one might think,
(33) he, too, appears to us wellnigh in a tragic light: yet the purely
personal element of wounded vanity turns the thing into a
tragi-comedy, just as in general the un-inspiring, the truly
laughable, is the characteristic mark whereby this famed composer
shews his Jewhood in his music. - From a closer survey of the
instances adduced above - which we have learnt to grasp by getting to
the bottom of our indomitable objection to the Jewish nature - there
more especially results for us a proof of the ineptitude of the
present musical epoch.
Had the two aforesaid Jew composers (34) in truth helped Music into
riper bloom, then we should merely have had to admit tha.t our
tarrying behind them rested on some organic debility that had taken
sudden hold of us: but not so is the case; on the contrary, as
compared with bygone epochs, the specific musical powers of nowadays
have rather increased than diminished. The incapacity lies in the
spirit of our Art itself, which is longing for another life than the
artificial one now toilsomely upheld for it. The incapacity of the
musical art-variety, itself, is exposed for us in the art-doings of
Mendelssohn, the uncommonly-gifted specific musician; but the nullity
of our whole public system, its utterly un-artistic claims [99] and
nature, in the successes of that famous Jewish opera-composer grow
clear for any one to see. These are the weighty points that have now
to draw towards themselves the whole attention of everyone who means
honestly by Art: here is what we have to ask ourselves, to scrutinise,
to bring to plainest understanding. Whoever shirks this toil, whoever
turns his back upon this scrutiny - either since no Need impels him to
it, or because he waives a lesson that possibly might drive him from
the lazy groove of mindless, feelingless routine - even him we now
include in that same category, of "Judaism in Music." (35) The Jews
could never take possession of this art, until that was to be exposed
in it which they now demonstrably have brought to light - its inner
incapacity for life. So long as the separate art of Music had a real
organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven,
there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an
element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the
formative stages of that life. Only when a body's inner death is
manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it - yet
merely to destroy it. Then indeed that body's flesh dissolves into a
swarming colony of insect-life: but who, in looking on that body's
self would hold it still for living? The spirit, that is: the life,
has fled from out that body, has sped to kindred other bodies; and
this is all that makes out Life. In genuine Life alone can we, too,
find again the ghost of Art, and not within its worm-befretted
carcase. - I said above, the Jews had brought forth no true poet. We
here must give a moment's mention, then, to HEINRICH HEINE. At the
time when Goethe and Schiller sang among us, we certainly know nothing
of a poetising Jew: at the time, however, when our poetry became a
lie, when every possible thing might flourish from the wholly unpoetic
[100] element of our life, but no true poet - then was it the office
of a highly-gifted poet-Jew to bare with fascinating taunts that lie,
that bottomless aridity and jesuitical hypocrisy of our Versifying
which still would give itself the airs of true poesis. His famous
musical congeners, too, he mercilessly lashed for their pretence to
pass as artists; no make-believe could hold its ground before him: by
the remorseless demon of denial of all that seemed worth denying was
he driven on without a rest, (36) through all the mirage of our modern
self-deception, till he reached the point where in turn he duped
himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set
to music by our own composers. - He was the conscience of Judaism,
just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern Civilisation.
Yet another Jew have we to name, who appeared among us as a writer.
From out his isolation as a Jew, he came among us seeking for
redemption: he found it not, and had to learn that only with our
redemption, too, into genuine Manhood, would he ever find it. To
become Man at once with us, however, means firstly for the Jew as much
as ceasing to be Jew. And this had BÖRNE done. Yet Börne, of all
others, teaches us that this redemption can not be reached in ease and
cold, indifferent complacence, but costs - as cost it must for us-
sweat, anguish, want, and all the dregs of suffering and sorrow.
Without once looking back, take ye your part in this regenerative work
of deliverance through self-annulment (37); then are we one and
un-dissevered! But bethink ye, that one only thing can redeem you from
the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus - Going under!
K. Freigedank
___________________________
Notes
Note 01: To the opening of this article the editor of the Neue
Zeitschrift appended the following footnote: "However faulty her
outward conformation, we have always considered it a pre-eminence of
Germany's, a result of her great learning, that at least in the
scientific sphere she possesses intellectual freedom. This freedom we
now lay claim to and rely on, in printing the above essay, desirous
that our readers may accept it in this sense. Whether one shares the
views expressed therein, or not, the author's breadth of grasp
(Genialität der Anschauung) will be disputed by no one." -TR.
Note 02: "Erregtheit" - in the N.Z. this stood as
"Leidenschaftlichkeit," i.e. "passion." -TR.
Note 03: In the N.Z. this clause ran: "thanks to our pietists and
Jesuits, who have led the Folk's entire religious hatred toward
themselves, so that with their eventual downfall Religion, in its
present meaning (which has been rather that of Hate, than Love), will
presumably have also come to naught!" -TR.
Note 04: "Nicht sehr hellsehendes (in the N.Z. "luxuriöses")
Geistesspiel." -TR.
Note 05: "Selbsttäuschung"; in the N.Z. "Lüge," i.e. "lie." -TR.
Note 06: "Vorspiegelungen"; in the N.Z. "Utopien." -TR.
Note 07: In the N.Z. "auf gut christlich," i.e. "like good
Christians." -TR.
Note 08: "Elend" may also mean "exile." In this sentence the N.Z. had
"Romo-Christian Germans," in place of "Christian-Germanic potentates."
-TR.
Note 09: This adverb (unangenehm) was preceded in the N.Z. by another,
"unüberwindlich," i.e. "unconquerably"; whereas "instinctively"
(unwillkürlich) was absent from the next clause. -TR.
Note 10: Note to the 1869, and later editions: - "To be sure, our
later experiences of the work done by Jewish actors would afford food
for many a dissertation, as to which I here can only give a passing
hint. Since the above was written not only have the Jews succeeded in
capturing the Stage itself, but even in kidnapping the poet's dramatic
progeny; a famous Jewish "character-player" not merely has done away
with any representment of the poetic figures bred by Shakespeare,
Schiller, and so forth, but substitutes the offspring of his own
effect-full and not quite un-tendentiose fancy - a thing which gives
one the impression as though the Saviour had been cut out from a
painting of the crucifixion, and a demagogic Jew stuck-in instead. On
the stage the falsification of our Art has thriven to complete
deception; for which reason, also, Shakespeare & Co. are now spoken of
merely in the light of their qualified adaptability for the stage. -
The Editor" (i.e. Richard Wagner).
Note 11: In the N.Z. "purely human" stood in the place of "his." -TR.
Note 12: The clause after the semicolon did not exist in the N. Z.
Note 13: This sentence occurred as a footnote in the N. Z., and the
next sentence was absent. -TR.
Note 14: In the N.Z., "in any higher sense." -TR.
Note 15: "Ein zischender, schrillender, summsender und murksender
Lautausdruck."
Note 16: In the N.Z. "durchaus," i.e. "altogether." -TR.
Note 17: "In our times" did not appear in the N.Z. article. -TR.
Note 18: In the N.Z. "but he just merely wanted to speak" appears to
have been skipped by the printer, leaving a hiatus in the sense;
moreover, after "no matter what," there occurred: "sheerly to make his
existence noticeable." -TR.
Note 19: In the N.Z. this sentence was continued by: - "and this was
just the proclamation of its perfect faculty for the most manifold
Expression, but not an object of expression in itself (nicht aber ein
Ausdruckswerthes selbst). When this had happened, and if one did not
propose to express thereby a definite thing, there was nothing left
but to senselessly repeat the talk; and indeed" &c. - Perhaps I may be
forgiven for again recalling Wagner's own parrot, from the Letters to
Uhlig (see Preface to Vol. ii. of the present series). -TR.
Note 20: In the N.Z. "wondrous";
Note 21: "unconsciously";
Note 22: "capacity," as also in the preceding sentence where now
stands "fancy." -TR.
Note 23: "Die durch Resignation beschwichtigte Leidenschaft." In the
N. Z. this ran: "der Genuss der Sättigung wahrer und edler
Leidenschaft," i.e. "the after-taste of true and noble passion
satisfied." The change, or rather advance, of view-point is highly
significant. -TR.
Note 24: In the N.Z. "from Music." -TR.
Note 25: A slight change has been made by our author in the
construction of this sentence, since the time of the Neue Zeitschrift
article; but, while improving the general 'run,' it has given rise to
almost the sole instance of a "false relation" in all his prose. -TR.
Note 26: Note to the 1869, and subsequent editions: "Of the Neo-Judaic
system, which has been erected on this attribute of Mendelssohnian
music as though in vindication of such artistic falling-off, we shall
speak later!"
Note 27: In the N.Z. this stood: "he yearned to pass beyond Absolute
Music and mount up to a union with her human sister arts, just as the
full and finished Man desires to mount to wide Humanity." -TR.
Note 28: "Wunderwirkenden Vermögen" and "eines unsäglichen Inhaltes"
did not occur in the N.Z. -TR.
Note 29: "Zartsinnigen" - in the N.Z. "edlen," i.e. "noble." -TR.
Note 30: The last clause, "but in general" &c., was absent from the
N.Z. article. -TR.
Note 31: Whoever has observed the shameful indifference and
absent-mindedness of a Jewish congregation, throughout the musical
performance of Divine Service in the Synagogue, may understand why a
Jewish opera-composer feels not at all offended by encountering the
same thing in a theatre-audience, and how he cheerfully can go on
labouring for it; for this behaviour, here, must really seem to him
less unbecoming than in the house of God. - R. WAGNER.
Note 32: To the N.Z. article there here was added a foot-note: "'Man
so thun!' sagt der Berliner," i.e. "'It's to be done!' as they say in
Berlin," -TR.
Note 33: This subsidiary clause did not exist in the N.Z. -TR.
Note 34: Characteristic enough is the attitude adopted by the
remaining Jew musicians, nay, by the whole of cultured Jewry, toward
their two most renowned composers. To the adherents of Mendelssohn,
that famous opera-composer is an atrocity: with a keen sense of
honour, they feel how much he compromises Jewdom in the eyes of
better-trained musicians, and therefore shew no mercy in their
judgment. By far more cautiously do that composer's retainers express
themselves concerning Mendelssohn, regarding more with envy, than with
manifest ill-will, the success he has made in the "more solid"
music-world. To a third faction, that of the composition-at-any-price
Jews, it is their visible object to avoid all internecine scandal, all
self-exposure in general, so that their music-producing may take its
even course without occasioning any painful fuss: the by all means
undeniable successes of the great opera-composer they let pass as
worth some slight attention, allowing there is something in them
albeit one can't approve of much or dub it "solid." In sooth, the Jews
are far too clever, not to know how their own goods are lined! - R
WAGNER. - In the Neue Zeitschrift this note formed part of the body of
the text. -TR.
Note 35: In the N Z. this ran: "of Judaism in Art, whereto the actual
Jews have merely given its most obvious physiognomy, but in nowise its
intrinsic meaning. The Jews could never take possession of our art"
&c. -TR.
Note 36: In the N.Z. there appeared: "in cold, contemptuous
complacency," and the sentence ended at the "self-deception" - a
footnote being added, as follows: "What he lied himself, our Jews laid
bare again by setting it to music." Moreover in place of "seemed"
there stood "is," and in the next sentence the predicate "evil" did
not occur. -TR.
Note 37: In the N.Z. "an diesem selbstvernichtenden, blutigen Kampfe."
-TR.