REPOST - Richard Wagner: Judaism in Music (1850): Part 1 of 2
Claire McIntosh
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.
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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.
End of Part 1
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