Cosima and the Bethmanns
Laon
extent, Cosima Wagner was Jewish, or of Jewish descent. The question
revolves around the family of Cosima's grandmother, the Bethmann
family.
It doesn't matter in itself whether the Bethmanns were Jewish, or of
Jewish descent, obviously. It becomes an issue, indirectly, because
it may shed light on the origin of Cosima's antisemitism. Arguably it
could also shed some light on the nature, as opposed to the origin, of
Wagner's antisemitism.
I starting looking around on this issue because of a claim made by
Kimberley Cornish, author of _The Jew of Linz_, the notorious book
claiming that the Jewish schoolboy that Hitler mentions in _Mein
Kampf_ was none other than the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. (This
strikes me as highly unlikely, though I haven't given it much thought.
I'm forced to read stuff about or by Hitler because of the
Wagner-as-proto-N stuff, but I'm not interested in the man in any
context other than his being a barnacle on the good ship Wagner.)
But this was a different Kimberley Cornish claim: her claim that
Cosima Wagner was halachically Jewish, on the grounds that her mother,
Marie d'Agoult was Jewish, and that Marie d'Agoult was Jewish because
her mother, Maria Flavigny (nee Bethmann) was from a Jewish family:
the Bethmann family. And that therefore Wagner's son Siegfried, also
having a Jewish mother, was likewise Jewish.
So I went looking into what evidence there might be for or against
this. I found more to the claim than I'd expected, though I doubt
that the application of the halachic mother-descent principle to
Cosima or Siegfried (or Marie d'Agoult) has much relevance, since the
Bethmann family had converted to Protestantism, not less than 100
years - and probably much longer - before Cosima's birth.
Anyway, here are some references on the question, including two
biographies of Cosima's mother that have been published in the last
two years. (Some of this material has already been posted elsewhere
in reply to Kimberley Cornish, but it's relevant here too, and I've
salved my conscience on cross-posting by bringing in additional
information for you good people on this board.)
The alleged Jewish origin of the Bethmann family is mentioned in
Eleanor Perenyi's Liszt biography: _Liszt_, Eleanor Perenyi,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974, pages 90-91).
Perenyi says the Bethmanns were Jewish, and left Amsterdam due to
religious persecution, eventually (after a long but unspecified period
in Nassau) settling in Frankfürt and establishing the house of
Bethmann (presumably she means the Bethmann bank) there in 1748.
Perenyi bases her claim:
* partly on noting certain telling evasions in Marie d'Agoult's own
autobiography (when Liszt heard his former mistress was writing an
autobiography, he predicted it would be full of "posing and lies",
which was pretty much on the money); and
* partly on records, apparently of the French Embassy in Berlin, where
Marie d'Agoult's father Maurice de Flavigny worked; de Flavigny, who
married into the Bethmann family, would threaten people who mentioned
his mother's (Perenyi, an irritatingly careless writer, must have
meant "mother-in-law's") Jewish ancestry;
* a reference in the biography, _La Comptesse d'Agoult et son Temps_,
Jacques Vier, A. Colin, Paris, five vols, 1955 - 1962, volume 1, page
326. Vier speculates rather than states that the Bethmann family was
"of Israelite origin";
* that D'Agoult took "Daniel Stern" (ie "Daniel Star") as her pen
name, with Perenyi reading significance and a reference to the Star of
Israel into d'Agoult's choice of a Jewish first name and the family
name "Star": an argument worthy of Rose, Weiner or Millington, that
one;
* but mainly on references on the point in Robert Gutman's Wagner
biography (see below).
The Jewish origin of the Bethmann family is also stated in a recent
biography of Cosima's mother: _The Life of Marie d'Agoult, alias
Daniel Stern_, Phyllis Stock-Morton, John Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore and London, 2000, page 8.
But Stock-Morton obviously copied from Perenyi, with no other research
at all. Perenyi cited Robert Gutman's Wagner biography as her main
source for the Bethmann's Jewishness, but got Gutman's name wrong,
citing him as _Richard_ Gutman. Stock-Morton also cites Gutman as
_Richard_ Gutman, which shows that she read Stock-Morton but never
even bothered to look up Perenyi's main, very readily available,
source.
Another recent biography of d'Agoult (it's odd that two biographies
should happen to come out in the same year, after years of obscurity;
each publisher must be quite annoyed with the other): _Marie d'Agoult:
the Rebel Countess_, Richard Bolster, Yale University Press, New Haven
and London, 2000. This book doesn't make any assertion about the
origins of the Bethmann family, though it does mention that d'Agoult's
uncle Möritz Bethmann created a college for Jews in Frankfürt, at a
time when the city still had a closed, curfewed, ghetto. Hardly
persuasive in itself, but it does fit into a pattern
So both Perenyi and Stock-Morton ultimately derive their authority on
this point from Robert Gutman. His Wagner biography, _Richard Wagner:
The Man, his Mind and his Music_, Robert W Gutman, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, San Diego, New York, London, 1968, 1990, discusses the
issue on pages 210 - 211.
Gutman flatly states that Cosima's grandmother (Marie Flavigny, nee
Bethmann) was "the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a Jewish banker
of Frankfort on the Main," and that Cosima was "ashamed of her descent
from the patriarchal Schimsche Naphtali Bethmann." Unfortunately,
though Gutman seems very positive that he is merely reporting a
well-established fact, he doesn't give a primary source. Which is
problematic, because Gutman isn't always a reliable source.
But I think that Cosima's Jewish ancestry, through Marie d'Agoult and
then Maria Flavigny, nee Bethmann, can be accepted as a fact, on four
grounds:
* While Gutman will omit, distort, embellish and sometimes tell flat
out untruths, he doesn't produce his untruths at random but according
to an agenda: Wagner as proto-Nazi, etc. But the statement about the
Bethmann family is not really connected to Gutman's agenda; the
suggestion that Wagner's wife was of Jewish ancestry not only doesn't
help the case for a proto-Nazi Wagner, but in some senses it can be
said to contradict it. So the main reservation about factual claims by
Gutman does not apply in this case.
* Although Gutman doesn't give a reference for his statement about the
Bethmanns, the patriarch Schimsche Naphtali Bethmann, etc, he is
scholar enough to provide a bibliography at the end; I'm ready to
assume, in the meantime, that one of the books in that bibliography is
his source: I'm especially interested in the books he lists by Robert
Bory, Helen Holdredge, Guy de Pourtales, Walther Siegfried - though
his book was published in Germany in 1930 and is unlikely to be
reliable on anything to do with Jewish ancestry - and William Wallace
- none of which seem to be accessible in Australia;
* Perenyi brings in supporting evidence in addition to Gutman, and so,
in a different sense, does Richard Bolster; so while Gutman might not
stand on his own the additional circumstantial evidence from other
sources tips the balance in his favour on this specific point, I
think;
* Fourth, and most cheering from my point of view, I found a further
authority since I initially set out to write on this topic. _Liszt_,
Derek Watson, The Master Musicians Series, J M Dent & Sons, London,
1989, pages 30 - 31. None of my reservations about Gutman apply to
Derek Watson, and I'm prepared to accept him as authoritive in the
absense of evidence to the contrary.
So as sources on Cosima's Jewish ancestry via the Bethmanns, we have
Derek Watson, plus Robert Gutman, plus Eleanor Perenyi, with support
of somewhat less value from Phyllis Stock-Morton, Richard Bolster and
Jacques Vier. My conclusion is that although the Bethmanns were a
highly respectable family of German protestants, they were of Jewish
descent, and that this fact is likely to have been a significant fact
in 19th century Europe generally, but particularly significant in
Cosima Wagner's life and mind: and perhaps in some senses in Richard
Wagner's as well.
However, while it does seem to be true that the Bethmann family was of
Jewish descent, they had converted to Protestantism at least 100 years
before Cosima was born, and probably much earlier. When Gutman calls
them a Jewish family, he is presumably using the word in a racial
sense, not in a religious sense.
(It's true that many Jews were forced to become nominally Christian in
order to prevent themselves from being murdered by the gentle,
tolerant Christians around them, but privately maintained their
original Judaic faith. But no-one has suggested this of the Bethmanns;
it can't just be assumed, in the absence of evidence.)
Therefore, the Kimberley Cornish observation that Cosima was Jewish in
a religious sense, and therefore so was Siegfried Wagner, has the
weakness that the Bethmanns were not Jewish in religion. So I think
it would be more correct to say that Cosima was partly of Jewish
descent, and that the same was true of Wagner's son Siegfried Wagner.
As for the significance of this, I think it's important
biographically, and could help to explain various ambiguities not only
in Cosima's, but also in Wagner's, obsession with Jewishness. But
interpretation is a different issue; this post is just the sources
I've found on the point.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
Sydney library: _Liszt, Wagner, and the Princess_, William Wallace,
Kegan Paul, London, 1927. That happens to be one of the books listed
in Gutman's bibliography, so it was probably Gutman's source as well.
Obviously some issues arise if Cosima and Siegfried Wagner were of
Jewish descent, or possibly (if the halachic rule does apply, as I
think it wouldn't) Jewish. Both in relation to Richard Wagner's
antisemitism, and also to Siegfried Wagner's stewardship of Bayreuth
in Germany in the 1920s, till his death in 1930. Anyway I'll ask
around about the application of the halachic rule.
Cheers!
Laon
G.Rohringer
This current article questioning whether Cosima
Wagner and Siegfried Wagner were of jewish
ancestry and containing some vague implications
that this may have been the cause of Richard
Wagner's antijewish statements sound like very
old hat . I think such investigations are unproductive.
Regardless of whether one claims to be interested
in facts only, certain consequences spring from
such an inquiry and must not be dismissed.
Firstly there is not a person of any importance
(or sometimes of very little importance) whose
ancestry has not been investigated for a jewish
root. May I remind you of Adolf Hitler himself,
of Alfred Rosenberg, of the Strauss' father, of
Mozart, etc. Now it is again Cosima Wagner's term.
Secondly it has been implied in many instances
that any jewish genes may be related to antisemitism
in the progeny. It has never been clearly stated why
jewish genes in suitable dilution should result in anti-
semitism. Why suggest such a relationship even in
passing?
Thirdly certain people seem to think that antisemitism
in a person of jewish ancestry is something unethical
and contradicts nature and is to be condemned.
I do not believe that semitic ancestry has any more to
do with antisemitic attitudes than purely "aryan" origin.
There just is no evidence for this anywhere and the citing
of case history is not an accepted method of establishing
evidence.
I do not understand why it should be unethical for a
person of jewish ancestry to make anisemitic state-
ments. When analogous statements are made by
others, such as for example a German about Germans,
they are accepted as evidence of intellectual honesty
and forthrightness and genes are not implicated.
I may be missing the point here. If I do, I apologize.
I think the most important take home point is to enjoy
Wagner's music and poetry and imagination, no matter
what genes may have played a role and may have
influenced him and his family.
G.R.
Laon
but then there are very few Wagner topics that haven't come up before.
Or that won't come up again, when someone has a new point, or new
information, to present. (And sometimes when they don't.) I've never
seen these references tracked down before, and a couple of the
citations are relatively recent (2000), so in that sense it's
undoubtedly a new contribution. Certainly every single citation,
except for Gutman, was new to me.
As for interpretation, I did say that it doesn't shed light on the
origin of Richard Wagner's antisemitism, though it may say something
about its nature. Wagner's antisemitism pre-dates his relationship
with Cosima by some years.
On the wider issues, I think you may be leaping to conclusions, a
little bit. To clarify a couple of things. First, I don't think
genetics and antisemitism have anything to do with each other, not in
any sense whatsoever. Not the genetics of the person doing the
hating, nor of the people being hated. It's more about the social and
personal pressures that people come under if they are suspected, or
suspect themselves, of being Jewish or of Jewish descent when growing
up, or themselves raising a family, in an antisemitic culture. Both
Richard and Cosima Wagner grew up, and raised a family, in such a
culture.
Nor do I think that someone who is entirely or partly of Jewish
descent, or suspects they are of Jewish descent, should be condemned
more than other antisemites when they say public or private
antisemitic things. The same is true of homosexuals who make a great
show of condemning homosexuality. In such cases it's easy to accuse
them of hypocrisy, but it's also a bit shallow. Whether they should
be condemned less, because of the presures they were under is a
complex question, and I wasn't planning to go there today. But
information that may be relevant to understanding people is worth
having, and people are free to choose whether they use that
information to excuse or condemn.
As for my agenda, if I can be accused of anything it probably wouldn't
be trying to blacken the Wagners' name. (I can imagine a mouthful of
tea being expelled, from China, in reaction to that sentence. I hope
you're settling in okay, Richard, and I'm not trying to wind you up.)
I need more information before I start interpreting, but there may (or
may not) turn out to be things here that may contribute something, in
a small way, to understanding Cosima, Richard, and Siegfried, and the
different pressures each of them were under. I can't imagine any
information that would excuse Richard or Cosima's antisemitism, or
Siegfried's fund-raising for Hitler, but some information can make
people more humanly understandable, which is a different thing.
But I set off on this issue simply because I read a factual claim that
I found surprising and unlikely, and I looked around to see if it was
true or false. Right now I can only say it's truer than I expected;
I still don't know if the claim is completely true. But I'd have been
equally happy to say that the claim is false, if the references had
happened to go the other way. (Alan Walker's Liszt biography, by the
way, doesn't mention the issue.)
So at the moment I'm presenting information as I find it, and
presenting it without interpretation because:
(1) I'm looking for more information, and at the moment I don't even
have a clear idea of what my interpretation would be; and
(2) if you present information/references first, people are free to
discuss, interpret or ignore as they see fit. Once something's
posted, it's common property, for people to do with what they like.
Cheers!
Laon
G.Rohringer
Thank you for your very sensible reply most of which I agree
with.
I would be interested to know a little more about you. If you
do not mind please e-mail me.
GR
Laon
Great Synagogue as respected interpreters of halachic law, to ask them
about the application of the halachic principle in which "Jewishness"
descends from the mother's side. I asked them if this rule would
apply in a case where the family is of Jewish descent and remains part
of, including marrying among, the Jewish community, but has converted
to Christianity. In particular, where over one or more generations
the mother has been baptised and has in turn baptised her child.
The advice I received is that the halachic rule would not apply in
such a case: the family would not be halachically Jewish. Therefore
it may be reasonable to say that Cosima and Siegfried Wagner were of
Jewish descent, but they could not be said to be halachically Jewish.
Second, in relation to the Bethmann family, I've had another source
pointed out to me: _Richard Wagners Antisemitismus - Jahrhundertgenie
im Zwielicht - Eine Korrektur_, Dieter David Scholz, Parthas Verlag
Berlin, 2000, ISBN 3-932529-69-3.
My thanks to the generous correspondent who provided me with
information on this source. The three points from Scholz, listed
below, are from my correspondent's useful summary; I haven't yet been
able to look at a copy of the book itself.
Scholz goes into the question of Cosima's ancestry in some detail, and
makes the following points:
* The official history of the Bethmann bank does not mention a Jewish
ancestry for the Bethmann family;
* Neither Meyer's _Lexikon_, nor the _Juedischer Lexikon_, nor the
_Encyclopedia Judaica_ claim that the Bethmanns were Jews;
* the Bethmann family were expelled from Amsterdam in the 16th century
as Protestants, not as Jews.
So Scholz makes what appears to be a strong case for the other side.
However nothing is ever simple, and each of those three points is
consistent with the Bethmanns being a German Protestant family who
happen to be of Jewish descent.
I had been planning to contact the Bethmann bank historian, which I no
longer need to do, but I had in any case expected that the bank's
official history would make no mention of this issue, for three key
reasons.
First, in the 19th century the Bethmann family went to some lengths to
deny that they were Jewish. I mentioned that when Maurice de Flavigny
married into the Bethmann family (around 1805), he felt it necessary
to threaten people who referred to his new family as Jewish. A
further example, also given in Perenyi, is that when Amschel
Rothschild visited the Bethmann family home to congratulate them on
the birth of Maria Bethmann (later Maria de Flavigny), Maria's mother
was alarmed by the visit because it would encourage the rumours that
the family was Jewish. These incidents - there are other examples -
are evidence both that the family was denying "Jewishness", which is
unsurprising for a family running a bank in an antisemitic culture,
and also that their denials were not entirely believed. The Bethmann
bank is no longer owned by the Bethmann family, but the Bavarian
Hypo-Vereins group who now own the bank are unlikely to have any
interest in digging up a family issue that was - as a matter of record
- embarrassing to the bank's founders.
Second, it seems that the family and bank's respectability and high
connections, both financial and political, allowed them to survive the
Nazi period unscathed. This is even though the 19th century
identification of the Bethmann family as "Jewish bankers" could hardly
have been forgotten or overlooked in the even more intense
antisemitism of Nazi Germany. I'm not suggesting and I don't believe
that the family or bank did anything untoward in any way whatsoever;
but I think it obvious that the issue would be an extremely sensitive
one.
Third, even now neither Germany nor Europe are free of antisemitism,
and I'm sure the bank would not consider, even now, that it would be
good marketing or business practice to broach the topic.
The family's absence from works such as the _Encyclopedia Judaica_ and
_Juedischer Lexikon_ is likewise consistent who did not want to be
identified as Jewish, though continuing to be involved with and doing
good works for the German Jewish community during the 19th century.
I've mentioned that in the early 19th century a Möritz Bethmann
endowed a Jewish college. My correspondent (who, like me, does not
think that Scholz's points settle the question) adds that the
Frankfürt Jewish Museum is housed in two buildings, one being the
Rothschild Palace, the other a building owned by Cosima's great-uncle,
Simon Möritz Bethmann. Yet another Bethmann (it seems, though this is
not yet confirmed) used his position as Russian consul in Frankfürt,
in the early 19th century, to help persecuted Alsace Jews emigrate to
Russia. These things make clear the Bethmanns' continued involvement
with the Jewish community, but it is also clear that if the Bethmann
family did not want to be identified as Jewish it is not surprising
that their wishes have been respected by the Jewish community.
On Scholz's third point, that the family were expelled from Amsterdam
in a wave of persecution directed against Protestants, there are three
issues. First, even if taken at face value it is consistent with the
picture of the Bethmanns having been a family of Jewish ancestry who
changed their religion. Second, in the persecutions in 16th century
Holland, Jews were expelled together with Protestants. If the
Bethmanns were expelled during a wave of expulsions primarily directed
at Protestants, that does not mean that they were not Jewish. A third
point, less important because until I've read Scholz's book I can't be
sure, is that what Scholz seems to say on this is sufficiently close
to the version given in Marie d'Agoult's autobiography that I suspect
that d'Agoult's autobiography may be Scholz's source. And that source
was credibly described by Perenyi as being artfully evasive on this
topic. But I'd need to find out more about Scholz's sources before
going further with that.
Essentially Scholz is citing certain absences of evidence as being
evidence of absence. But there are reasons why the evidence would be
absent in the places that Scholz looked. And while the evidence was
absent in those sources, it was not absent in other sources, some of
which I've cited.
My conclusion is that the balance of evidence indicates that the
Bethmann family were a family of German Protestants, from Holland, who
were of Jewish descent and remained close to or part of the Jewish
community, though they were not Jewish by religion.
What is much more important, though, is that the evidence very clearly
shows that in 19th century Germany the Bethmann family was widely
believed to be Jewish. And both Cosima and Richard Wagner would have
been acutely aware of this.
I'm nearly done. There's an oddity concerning the birth of Siegfried
Wagner that seems to fit into this picture, but this post is long
enough now, so that oddity can wait for another post.
And after that I'll try to suggest a way of reading all this.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
Scholz, as passed to me. In Nassau, that is, after leaving Amsterdam
but before arriving in Frankfurt, a Bethmann was admitted to a post
that was only open to Christian citizens.
Which means two things: first, I think I'd be wrong in suspecting that
Scholz's source for this early family history was Marie d'Agoult; and
second, it seems likely, since I now think Scholz has a source other
than Marie d'Agoult, that he'd have a non-d'Agoult source for having
the Bethmanns be Protestant even when they were still in Amsterdam.
If that's the case, then my points about Jews being expelled at the
same time as Protestants, and about d'Agoult's unreliability, are
likely to be irrelevant.
Sorry about that. However it doesn't affect my initial point that
Scholz's finding evidence that the Bethmanns were Protestant in
Amsterdam does not contradict the version in Perenyi, Wallace, Gutman,
Watson and others, that the family had converted from Judaism, but
remained close to the Jewish community, and were still being
identified as Jewish by others. What the account in Scholz does, when
put together with other evidence, is set back the date at which the
family converted.
Cheers!
Laon
Otooner
From: pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) wrote in
Message-id: <4f8f3beb.02092...@posting.google.com>:
Snip:
>To clarify a couple of things. First, I don't think genetics and antisemitism
>have anything to do with each other, not in any sense whatsoever. Not the
>genetics of the person doing the hating, nor of the people being hated. It's
>more about the social and personal pressures that people come under if they
>are suspected, or suspect themselves, of being Jewish or of Jewish descent
>when growing up, or themselves raising a family, in an antisemitic culture.
>Both Richard and Cosima Wagner grew up, and raised a family, in such a
>culture.
I'd think one would have a hard time disputing your theorizing on the issue,
but I have difficulty with your conclusion. What evidence do we have that
Wagner imagined himself as a direct descendent of a Jewish bloodline, or that
before publishing his Jewry in Music, he was held up to ridicule for being of
that stock?
What evidence do we have that Cosima was brought up in an anti-Semitic
environment, that she thought she or her natural mother was of Jewish descent
or that her father was an anti-Semite? If we're to postulate, let's start with
a little evidence.
Gone from the German states at the time were the royal edicts condemning Jews,
restricting them to ghettoes or occupations. Jews were as free and privileged,
as were any other members of their kingdom, to be granted full equality under
the new German constitution. They were also recipients of royal patronage (ie:
the case of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer).
Wagner, in his Jewry in Music, complained bitterly of the princes and church
treating them with far too much respect and even admiration.
As for Cosima, she was nothing more that Wagner's lap dog on the issue.
Derrick Everett
> Subject: Re: Cosima and the Bethmanns From: pra...@presto.net.au (Laon)
> wrote in Message-id: <4f8f3beb.02092...@posting.google.com>:
>
> Snip:
>>To clarify a couple of things. First, I don't think genetics and
>>antisemitism have anything to do with each other, not in any sense
>>whatsoever. Not the genetics of the person doing the hating, nor of the
>>people being hated. It's more about the social and personal pressures
>>that people come under if they are suspected, or suspect themselves, of
>>being Jewish or of Jewish descent when growing up, or themselves raising
>>a family, in an antisemitic culture.
>
>>Both Richard and Cosima Wagner grew up, and raised a family, in such a
>>culture.
>
> I'd think one would have a hard time disputing your theorizing on the
> issue, but I have difficulty with your conclusion. What evidence do we
> have that Wagner imagined himself as a direct descendent of a Jewish
> bloodline, or that before publishing his Jewry in Music, he was held up
> to ridicule for being of that stock?
Some commentators (notably Gutman) believe that Wagner was the son of
Ludwig Geyer, officially his step-father. Nietzsche insinuated that
Wagner believed this and also that Geyer was of Jewish extraction. Gutman
explains the close resemblance of Wagner to his siblings by the assertion
that they too were children of Geyer. Wagner himself told Cosima that he
did not believe that Geyer was his father. Investigations into the
ancestry of Geyer have not shown any Jewish descent at all, so the whole
business appears to be a red herring introduced by Nietzsche for no other
reason than bitterness and perhaps jealousy.
> What evidence do we have that Cosima was brought up in an anti-Semitic
> environment, that she thought she or her natural mother was of Jewish
> descent or that her father was an anti-Semite? If we're to postulate,
> let's start with a little evidence.
Cosima was brought up in France and, unlike Wagner, in an anti-Semitic
environment. Her husband, by contrast, had grown up in a predominantly
Jewish quarter of Leipzig. It might be argued that Cosima's anti-
Semitism was the result of growing up in an anti-Semitic culture but I do
not think that the same could be said of Richard Wagner. His anti-
Semitism had its origins, according to at least some of his biographers,
in his relationship with Meyerbeer.
--
Derrick Everett (deverett at c2i.net)
==== Writing from 59°54'N 10°36'E ====
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/index.htm
Laon
> but I have difficulty with your conclusion. What evidence do we have that
> Wagner imagined himself as a direct descendent of a Jewish bloodline, or that
> before publishing his Jewry in Music, he was held up to ridicule for being of
> that stock?
Hi Otooner,
Thanks for your points. However, you may be arguing with the wrong
guy.
These posts haven't been about the issue of whether Richard Wagner
was, or imagined himself to be, of Jewish descent. Only about Cosima.
On Richard Wagner my view is that:
* Wagner was Geyer's son; and
* He believed himself to be Geyer's son; but
* Geyer was not of Jewish descent; and
* it has been claimed that Wagner _thought_ that Geyer was of Jewish
descent, and that people around Wagner thought this too, and gave him
a hard time about it, but I've never seen a citation to direct
evidence to establish these claims.
I used to believe the stories that (for example) Wagner's schoolmates
taunted the young Wagner for being Jewish through Geyer's side; these
claims are widely accepted by secondary sources. But these days I'm
troubled by the absence of a single primary source on the point, not
one memoir, not one diary, not one letter that I'm aware of, that
refers to Wagner having believed he was of Jewish descent through
Geyer, or that refers to Wagner being teased on the point. So, though
I've believed this story in the past, my position these days is closer
to agnostic.
But I haven't been posting about the Geyer issue. On the Bethmann
issue, however, I've cited several sources other than Robert Gutman,
and some of those citations in turn refer to contemporary records and
accounts. So I think the Bethmann issue, on Cosima's side, is a
different kind of case.
> What evidence do we have that Cosima was brought up in an anti-Semitic
> environment, that she thought she or her natural mother was of Jewish descent
> or that her father was an anti-Semite? If we're to postulate, let's start with
> a little evidence.
These are two separate issues. The first is whether Cosima brought up
in an antisemitic environment. The answer is that yes, clearly she
was. Her environment was 19th century Europe. You cite edicts
repealing various forms of legal discrimination against Jews, but that
hardly means that antisemitic views were abolished along with those
laws. Quite the contrary. There are plenty of reputable,
non-axe-to-grind histories that can be cited on that general point of
history.
The second issue is what Cosima thought about her ancestry. I've
cited two kinds of evidence: first, I cited a number of sources and
authorities who state, as a matter of fact, that the family was of
Jewish decent: Derek Watson, Eleanor Perenyi, William Wallace, Robert
Gutman (Gutman is not convincing on his own, but here he's not on his
own but part of a chorus), with support from Phyllis Stock-Morton and
Richard Bolster. Second, I gave examples in the Bethmann family
history where the issue had come up and caused embarrassment to family
members; for example Maurice de Flavigny threatening people who
accused the family of being Jewish, according to records in the French
Embassy in Berlin cited by Eleanor Perenyi; Marie Bethmann panicking
at a home visit from a Rothschild, because of the boost it will give
to rumours that the Bethmann family are Jewish.
I haven't tracked down a direct reference by Cosima herself to this
issue, but I wouldn't be surprised if - given the extent to which this
would be an unwelcome topic with Cosima - no references have been
preserved.
But there is a common-sense test, which is: given that a multiplicity
of citations and sources indicates that:
(1) the family was of Jewish ancestry, despite having converted a long
time ago to Protestantism, and
(2) the family were widely believed to be of Jewish ancestry, and
(3) the family resisted this identification, on the one hand... AND
(4) given Cosima's well-established hyper-sensitivity on such issues
on the other hand: -
given all this, what are the chances that Cosima would have been
unaware of these aspects of her family's history?
I'd be inclined to rate those chances as being as close to zero as
makes no difference. I find it unimaginable that Cosima was somehow
kept in ignorance.
The issue affects Richard Wagner as Cosima's husband and as the father
of their children; and it has nothing to do with the better-known
Geyer issue.
I just dropped by the board, and I'm answering this specific post
before crashing after an ill-spent weekend. There's a bit more
evidence to present yet, but I'll have some more time shortly. Only
after that will I start theorising.
There are two other points in reply to Otooner, but I'll leave them as
postscripts.
Cheers!
Laon
PS # 1:
> Wagner, in his Jewry in Music, complained bitterly of the princes and church
> treating them with far too much respect and even admiration.
Yes, but Wagner was an antisemite, so that his perception of reality
was distorted by his bigotry. Wagner's testimony on the social
position of Jews in 19th century Germany, or Europe, after
emancipation, is somewhat worse than useless.
PS # 2:
> As for Cosima, she was nothing more that Wagner's lap dog on the issue.
I think that it's generally accepted that Cosima was considerably more
strongly antisemitic than her husband.
Kimberley Cornish
As the author of what Laon refers to as "the notorious book" "The Jew
of Linz" and the person whose post on
http://classicals.com/music/RichardWagner(1813-1883)hall/cas/169.html
was responsible for Laon starting this discussion, I would like to
clear up one or two misconceptions:
1. A minor point first; I am male, though Laon's reference to "her
claim .." is evidence that he hasn't read my book. (There is a
picture of me, unmistakable as to sex, on the cover of the hardback
and the brief biographical details on both the hardback and paperback
English editions use masculine pronouns.)
2. The material Laon posted, as he says, "in reply to Kimberley
Cornish" in fact supports what I wrote about the Bethmanns being
Jewish. I acknowledge the thoroughness of his research efforts.
3. Laon writes "I've been advised of one more source, kept in a
Canberra but not a Sydney library: _Liszt, Wagner, and the Princess_,
William Wallace, Kegan Paul, London, 1927." The reference in Wallace
to the Bethmanns being Jewish was passed on to Laon by me in an
e-mail, as was the information that it is available in the Australian
National Library in Canberra. The reference might have been, as he
states, new to him, but it is rather ungallant in a public post
referring negatively to my work not to acknowledge this.
4. Laon seems to think there is some sort of weakening effect with
respect to one's Jewishness if one fails to participate in religious
observance.While this is probably true of one's FELT Jewishness, the
ONLY criteria for Jewishness are (a) descent in the female line from a
Jewish mother or (b) recognised conversion as per the precedent of
Ruth to Naomi "Whither thou goest I will go .. thy people my people
and thy God my God." This is enshrined in 4(b) of Israel's Law of
Return, and Laon's consultation with Sydney authorities who gave a
contrary opinion, while admirable from the point of view of scholarly
diligence, changes nothing.
5. It follows therefore, that both Cosima Wagner and Siegfried Wagner
were Jews.
6. Laon writes "Therefore, the Kimberley Cornish observation that
Cosima was Jewish in a religious sense, and therefore so was Siegfried
Wagner, has the
weakness that the Bethmanns were not Jewish in religion." ALL I have
asserted is that both Cosima and Siegfried count as Jews under the
Halachic principle enshrined in The Law of Return. There is no
"weakness" in this and I certainly never asserted that either was a
practising Jew. Why it should be described as a weakness is unclear to
me. I have NEVER asserted "that Cosima was Jewish in a religious
sense" if that means anything over and above the Halachic inheritance
rule.
7. I have reasons for thinking the apostate Jewish state of the
Bethmanns, Joachims and Wittgensteins might be very important indeed
from the perspective of religious accounts of the origins of the
Holocaust. I would be happy to correspond individually with any
members of this group who want to take the matter further. Such people
should first read the entire original thread (including the argument
about to whom Hitler's first recorded anti-Semitic comment was
addressed) on http://classicals.com/music/RichardWagner(1813-1883)hall/cas/169.html
Sincerely,
Kimberley Cornish.
Laon
Three humble apologies.
First, deep apologies for getting your gender wrong. I have a
Kimberley acquaintance who is female, and so I had automatically and
unthinkingly fixed it in my mind as a female name. Which, of course,
it is not. I meant no offence at all.
Second, on the word "notorious" I apologise for that too. Though it
was more of a careless usage than a critical one. That is, the nuance
I was thinking of was "widely known and highly controversial";
"notorious" covers that meaning, though I'd agree that it can spill
easily over into meaning something like, "widely condemned, and
rightly condemned", which is not the meaning I wanted to convey. To
give an idea of what I intended, there are books that I greatly admire
that I think of as "notorious", an example being _The Satanic Verses_.
_The Origin of Species_ was also a "notorious" book, in the sense I
was thinking of. I meant it as a statement about its reception, not
about the merits of its case, which I can't really seriously judge.
On the question of _The Jew of Linz_'s thesis, I'm sure I offended you
by saying I thought the thesis seemed "highly unlikely, though I
haven't given it much thought". I'm sorry for giving offence on that,
but I'm less inclined to accept that this was an unreasonable thing to
say. I had a difficulty that you will surely recognise in relation to
books you have not read, which attract a great deal of attention and
comment, but which are on topics that are not directly in one of your
spheres of interest. (And I'm not actually interested in Hitler
except in the one narrow context of scraping certain Hitler-related
myth off Wagner's shoes.) Anyway, everybody who reads at all gets a
great deal of information about new books that they have not read,
though media discussion, reviews, the opinions of friends whose
opinions they respect, etc. And you form quick judgements on the
issues that don't directly grab you, as you go.
An analogy might be the way you might consider a book by an AIDS
dissident, that argued in a responsible way that infection with the
HIV virus does not lead to AIDS. Me, I don't know the virology, and I
don't care enough (about virology) to make any serious attempt to find
out. Such a book may be extremely well argued, and may contain a
compelling case, and what's more it might even be true. But I'm
afraid I would react in the way that most people would, and that I
suspect you might react, which is to think that the book's thesis
seems improbable. People make unqualified personal judgements of
approximately this kind all the time; I think OJ Simpson killed his
wife, and that flouride is good for your teeth, though there may be
very good arguments against both propositions. I don't have any
expertise on either issue.
But there's one other point on that topic. I hadn't received any
information from you when I expressed that judgement. If I had
received that information I wouldn't have expressed it. Partly
because, as I said to you, the school document on Jewish kids,
including Ludwig Wittgenstein, at the same school at the same time as
Hitler did seem to be "remarkable". But the main reason I said my
"unlikely" remark then but wouldn't say it now is that on the 20th of
September, when I posted the remark, you were merely an author, an
entirely impersonal personage; once you became a correspondent, I
wouldn't have said such a thing. It's the difference between a
personal and impersonal statement.
Finally, my third and unqualified apology on not crediting you
directly for the tip on William Wallace. I made it clear that I'd
been given the information and that someone other than me deserved
credit; but I apologise for not naming you as the source. I wasn't
intending to be ungracious, and I did point out that I didn't get the
credit for finding that reference, so that wasn't my difficulty. My
quandary concerned revealing private correspondence, which is why I
referred to the source of the reference impersonally. That's been my
general rule in relation to correspondence; in fact I've been given
other information on this very topic by somebody who didn't want to be
brought into the argument, which I also credited as someone else's
contribution without naming the person. But in fact I should have
asked your permission to name you, and then done so. So I apologise
for that.
I will make two other points on questions of fact and interpretation,
but my first priority is this slew of apologies, and I'd rather let
them stand alone. Argument can come later.
Cheers!
Laon
Kimberley Cornish
It would be churlish not to accept what you have said. Accordingly,
the matter is now past.
Sincerely,
Kimberley Cornish.
P.S. My own interest in Wagner concerns his account of musical
composition and his relations with the Wittgensteins and with Joseph
Joachim, cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (As you know, Wittgenstein -
later the famous Cambridge philosopher - was a school-fellow of Adolf
Hitler.) I have argued in the post referred to in my previous that
Wittgenstein was the object of Hitler's very first recorded
anti-Semitic abuse. Any additional information your undoubted research
talents might turn up on the tangled
Wittgenstein/Wagner/Cosima/Liszt/Joachim relationships would, in my
opinion, contribute to understanding the Holocaust. Joachim, acting
from Berlin's Royal Academy of Music, was leader of "the Music-Jews"
whom Wagner and Cosima railed against. The field is wide open and who
knows what further matters shall emerge? In a matter of such
importance, more can be achieved if people work together rather than
in opposition. Let us go forward.
Laon
this instance the issue of disagreement is relatively subtle.
I've argued that the Bethmans are of Jewish descent, and maintained
cultural and family ties to the Frankfurt Jewish community, but were
not Jewish in terms of Jewish law, because the family had converted to
Protestantism a long time ago. Kimberley, on the other hand, argues
that they are not only of Jewish descent but fully Jewish in terms of
religious law.
For the practical purposes of the argument I'm slowly expounding, this
difference doesn't make much difference, but it's still worth trying
to narrow the difference down.
I cited various references that I think demonstrated descent. But I
also noted that the Bethmann family had been Protestant Christians for
a long time, at least a couple of hundred years according to Dieter
Scholz. Moreover, various respected lists of Jewish families and
family names don't include the Bethmanns. And while I know
approximately nothing of halachic law, I spoke to two rabbis who are
respected by other rabbis as extremely learned and authoritative in
this area; they said when a Jewish family had converted to
Christianity, and baptised their children, the children of those
baptised female-persons-of-Jewish descent would not be Jews in terms
of halachic law. That is the case with the Bethmanns.
In response Kimberley cited Israel's Law of Return.
First, I'd observe that a law is by definition the result of a
political process, and responds to political agenda, though this law
is certainly based on religious ideas. As I understand it, at the
time the law of return was drafted Israel was encouraging immigration
and therefore its politicians had an interest in drafting the
principles in the law of return in as wide terms as they reasonably
could. It is concerned to achieve a certain practical result. That
is, it is not a complete statement of the various reservations and
nuances that I'm told exist in the vast body of halachic law.
But, second, even as drafted it seems to me that the law of return
would not include the Bethmanns as Jewish. The key words are (as
kindly sent to me by Kimberley Cornish):
"4A. (a) The rights of a Jew under this Law and the rights of an oleh
under the Nationality Law, 5712-1952***, as well as the rights of an
oleh under any other enactment, are also vested in a child and a
grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a
Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, _except for a person who
has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion_. [My
emphasis.]
[...]
4B. For the purposes of this Law, "Jew" means a person who was born of
a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a
member of another religion."
In this case, a Bethmann ancestor changed his religion, approximately
voluntarily, in the 1600s, thus being excluded from the rights
allocated to "Jews" under section 4A. Since those rights accrue to
all persons who are Jews, it logically follows that by excluding such
persons, section 4A is saying that they are not Jews.
Did the Bethmann who converted to Christianty do so "voluntarily"?
Logically, yes. You might not count the conversion made by a Bethmann
ancestor in the then-intolerant climate of Amsterdam. But if you
don't count that conversion, then it must logically follow that the
family who arrived in the safer atmosphere of Nassau, were "really"
Jews. In which case the continued Christianity of that generation of
Bethmanns represents a voluntary switch from Judaism to Christianity.
And those Bethmanns and their descendants demonstrably remained firmly
Protestant Christian, baptising their children, attending church, for
generation upon generation.
Therefore, the Bethmanns who became Christians so long ago are not
covered by the right of return according to section 4A. Nor,
therefore, are their descendants, generation after generation of
people who were voluntarily Christians.
It therefore seems to follow that the Bethmanns of the 19th century,
descended from several generations of Christian Protestants, are not,
as section 4B requires, "person[s] who [are] born of a Jewish mother."
This is essentially the advice I was given by the rabbis.
As I say, from my point of view the question is not centrally
important, because it does seem to be clear that in the 19th century
the Bethmanns were widely _perceived_ to be Jewish, and that is what's
more important, in terms of explaining human behaviour.
And now on to the oddity about Siegfried's baptism.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
baptism. Cosima's diary entry reads:
"At 4 o'clock the christening takes place. Helferich Siegfried
Richard Wagner behaves tolerably well. Merry gathering afterward.
Semper's hanging lamp is inaugurated."
_Dairies_, 4 September 1870 (volume 1, page 266.)
Finding the beginning of the story, and its meaning, involves tracing
three threads:
1. The significance of Cosima's series of gifts to Wagner in 1869 -
1870;
2. The Wagners' (counting Cosima as a Wagner, though she was then a
von-Bülow-Liszt) relationship with the Sempers; and
3. Cosima's grail-like quest for the lamp.
And tracing those threads leads to certain issues concerning the
Bethmanns, and the family of Richard and Cosima Wagner.
Before beginning I'll acknowledge another debt, this one to David
Conway, whose site alerted me to how odd the incident of the lamp
really is, though I first read about it in Köhler's _Wagner and
Nietzsche_ book. My own exploration of the background for the lamp
took me in a different direction from David Conway's, but it's his
very entertaining site that sparked my interest. It can be found at:
http://www.smerus.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/lamp1.htm
Two other pieces of throat-clearing. First, most people know a lot of
the following information; I mention some quite basic things to
provide a context, not because I think people don't know those things.
Second, when talking about their marriage I use the names Cosima and
Richard. That's not for folksiness and familiarity, but because
that's who they were in the context of their marriage. For various
reasons including sexual politics, it seems inappropriate to follow
the standard practice of calling Cosima by her first name but Richard
by his family name; in this context they were both Wagners (ignoring
the detail of the late marriage, for now).
1 The gifts of family
The story begins at the commencement of Cosima's _Diaries_, on 1
January 1869. The situation is that Cosima von Bülow-Liszt is
pregnant to Richard Wagner, their third child but the first with a
reasonable chance to be christened as a genuine Wagner, of married
Wagner parents. But that's only if only the divorce with her first
husband, Hans von Bülow, will come through. There is much uncertainty
on this.
Reading the early pages of the Diaries - the period I'm focussing on
is 1 January 1869 to Siegfried's baptism on 4 September 1870 - you see
Cosima alternating between happiness and despair; and over both
emotions there is fear. Cosima has risked everything for the chance
of happiness with the "friend", Richard, but she is also aware that
she has broken up one family and could easily lose the new one.
She is utterly and unreservedly in love with Richard, gloriously happy
when he's with her, though she will plunge into despair at the
slightest quarrel. She is also racked with guilt whenever she thinks
about her husband, the inadequate though very decent Hans. She
returns to that theme of guilt again and again, writing in solitude
while Richard works. But behind all that there is fear.
Her fear is not unreasonable. In 1869 everything in Cosima's family
experience, and everything she knows of Richard's family experience,
points to the fragility of families, how easily they can be broken or
lost. Cosima's own parents, Franz Liszt and Marie d'Agoult, could
have jointly filled two or three volumes of any 19th century European
edition of _Who's Had Who_, while Liszt's menage with Carolyne von
Sayn-Witgenstein was even less emotionally successful as a family.
Cosima also knows that Richard's first marriage was destroyed by
mutual incomprehension and infidelity, and that his birth family was
traumatised, more than once, by death. And though Richard seems to be
in love with her, she knows she has previously faced some stiff
competition from attractive women (and she probably suspects that she
will again).
Having found each other, Cosima and Richard both seem actually
terrified of losing the other. Richard often tells Cosima his dreams,
and from 1869 to his death in 1883 Cosima duly records the same
terrible dream: Richard's recurring and worst nightmare is that Cosima
will decide to leave him. Cosima has similar dreams and fears:
Richard dead, Richard gone.
Reading the diaries we can see Cosima responding to her fears in two
ways. First, she makes herself indispensable, perhaps modelling
herself on Anna Magdalena Bach as the self-consciously
self-sacrificing supportive wife of the great composer. In this she
succeeds completely, and those of us who love Richard Wagner's music
owe Cosima Wagner an enormous debt, even if she never manages to
appear to posterity in an especially likeable light.
In addition, after Siegfried's birth, on 6 June 1869, Cosima begins
following up objects and issues related to family backgrounds, both on
her side and on his. She acquires a number of symbolic family
objects, mostly from Richard's family background, as gifts for
Richard.
On her side of the family Cosima's contact is initially motivated by
practical rather than symbolic concerns. She would like to show
Wagner that her family is one worth merging with, and how better to do
that than to use her links to the wealthy Bethmanns to raise some
money for the Wagner household?
She contacts her sister Claire, who (Thursday 23 September 1869)
informs her that "Maman has again become insane!" "Maman" is the
Countess Marie d'Agoult, daughter of Maurice de Flavigny and Maria
Bethmann. Further letters are mentioned on 24 September, 26 November,
and 2 December 1869. The last of these references show that Cosima is
trying to shake money out of the Bethmann family tree. Cosima refers
(2 December 1869) to "my money". Does she mean an inheritance? Or
has Cosima acquired the Wagnerian habit of imagining sources of funds,
in the hope that they might become real?
On Claire's advice Cosima writes (2 December 1869) to Count Flavigny,
son of the Maurice de Flavigny who married Cosima's grandmother, Maria
Bethmann Flavigny. His reply arrives on 9 December: "He calls himself
my uncle, but he does not send me any money," complains Cosima. But
the following day she is still trying to pull family strings: "In the
evening business letters (Count Flavigny, Rothschild, etc)."
Whether or not she succeeded with the money (I suspect not, though I
don't know), Cosima also worked hard on family roots at the symbolic
level. There are more Diary references to Geyer at this time than at
any later period. For example on January 11 1870 she and Richard read
Geyer's letters to Richard's mother together, Cosima declaring herself
very moved by them. Richard replies, "He sacrificed himself for us."
(As we will see, Cosima's campaign to obtain the Dresden lamp begins
somewhere about this time.)
But her delving into Richard's past goes further than that. On Monday
January 1870 she blames the maid for breaking "the Geyer-Wagner cup,
which I gave to R." This is only the first of a series of
similarly-themed gifts to be mentioned, and she soon finds a
replacement, recording on Monday March 7 1870 that:
"The folder with the portrait of Geyer has arrived; I present it to R.
with a little poem (it should have come just a month ago). It gives
R. much pleasure. 'Everything you do has resonance and meaning,' he
says."
But that's not all. Also in early 1870 she obtains and presents to
Richard a bust of his uncle, Adolph Wagner. And Ludwig Geyer's old
cap arrives; Richard is delighted, and plans to pass it down to young
Siegfried when he becomes big enough to wear it. Cosima does not
mention obtaining this last relic, but given the trend of her
activities at this time it can hardly have come from anyone else.
So what is the "resonance and meaning" of these gifts from Cosima to
Richard? In fact the symbolism seems clear enough, and symbolism is
crucially important in this family.
Cosima wants to make herself the conduit through which Richard gains
increased physical and emotional ties to his family of origin. By
doing so she not only links him more closely with the idea of family
heritage and roots, but she associates herself with those roots. Her
efforts with her own side of the family began with money, dunning the
Bethmanns and the Rothschilds (the Rothschilds being as far as I know
friends, not relatives, of the Bethmanns), before also taking a more
symbolic tack. But in these _Diary_ entries we see Cosima, happy to
have found this family with Richard, but fearful about its stability:
and she sets about building a history for her new family, as the
uniting of two great and worthy family backgrounds.
Which will bring us to the lamp, but there are other issues (eg
Gottfried Semper) to cover first.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
In another sense the story begins in 1837, when architect Gottfried
Semper (1803-1879) designed and built the Dresden Synagogue. He also
designed the interior, the colour schemes, fittings and even the
sacred objects, including the ner tamid, or eternal flame.
(Description of the ner tamid and something about its symbolic meaning
comes later.)
Semper also designed the Hoftheater in which Wagner had his first
taste of success, with the Dresden premiere of _Rienzi_. That's what
drew Wagner to Dresden in 1843, to take up the post of Assistant
Kapellmeister. Wagner soon met and befriended Semper. They became
close, if difficult friends. Even their frequent shouting matches,
though alarming to their calmer friends, only served to emphasise the
degree of kinship between these two powerful and prickly egos.
They used to meet at the house of composer Ferdinand Hiller, who kept
a salon for Dresden intellectuals. Wagner would later say that Hiller
and Joachim were the two musicians he most despised. Wagner's
antisemitism is clearly an issue here, but not the sole explanation;
otherwise why did he despise Hiller but not, for example, Halevy?
There must have been a specific reason for the breach, but I don't
know what it was.
(I turned up a weird though strictly irrelevant factoid while trying
to find out, though: it must be some sort of parable, though I have no
idea about its meaning. Anyway, in 1827 the young Hiller was at
Beethoven's deathbed, and took the opportunity to snip a lock of hair
from the great man's head; this was lucky because about 110 years
later Hiller's grandson used the lock of Beethoven's hair as payment
for his escape from Nazi Germany.)
The friendship was tested under fire with the 1849 Dresden revolt, in
which Wagner took an important and rather dashing role, and Semper
designed the barricades. Not every revolution can boast of
architecturally designed barricades. Semper and Wagner escaped when
the revolt was put down, though both were tried and given heavy
sentences in absentia.
But they remained friends, with ups, downs and intermissions, until
Semper's death in 1879. Wagner's loyalty to Semper over the years
demonstrates that seldom-acknowledged better side to his nature.
Wagner repeatedly worked to help Semper get commissions and positions,
including helping him secure his position (1855 - 1871) as Professor
of Architecture at the Zürich Polytechnic.
He also called in Semper in 1868 when it appeared that he might be
able to build the opera house of his dreams at Munich. Unfortunately
Ludwig II's courtiers were hostile to the plan, and to Wagner, and
managed to frustrate the project until it broke up in disarray. The
blame for the project's failure lies with court officials, but the
frustration told on Semper's and Wagner's relationship. Wagner began
dealing with the officials to try to ensure that Semper was paid for
his work. The Court deliberately delayed Semper's payment; Semper was
understandably frustrated and some of this frustration was directed at
Wagner. Wagner then exploded at Semper. A sulky silence ensued,
which lasted for some years.
They reconciled in 1875, when Wagner invited Semper to Bayreuth.
Wagner admitted to Semper that the Bayreuth Festspielhaus incorporates
several aspects of Semper's Munich Festival Theatre design, though
Wagner had neither sought Semper's permission nor paid him. On the
other hand Semper acknowledged that the breach had been largely his
fault, writing to Wagner that he had blamed people trying to help (ie
Wagner), instead of the actual villains in the piece.
It is Semper who designed the ner tamid, and it is through Semper that
Wagner became aware of it, visiting the Dresden Synagogue to admire
his friend's work. This may also be the origin of Wagner's experience
of synagogue music, which he derisively describes in _Das Judentum_,
though there's also his (very) early childhood in Liepzig's Bruehl
district, and various other possible connections there.
The 1869 - 1875 estrangement between the Sempers and the Wagners had
its comic side, however. It meant that when Cosima began trying to
obtain a copy of the Semper synagogue lamp, she had to go to the most
extraordinary lengths to keep Semper at arms length, since the Sempers
and the Wagners were not supposed to be speaking. But that'll have to
be the next post.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
It's not clear whether the quest for the lamp was Richard's or
Cosima's idea, nor when the search began. I think it's possible that
Cosima took on the quest at her own initiative, and that she kept it
as a surprise for Richard.
The possibility is partly founded on analogy with Cosima's earlier
gifts, which were surprise gifts, and partly on the way the relevant
_Diary_ entries are written. Early mentions of the quest seem
curiously guarded, with Cosima mentioning a lamp but giving away no
details until it arrived. As Richard sometimes read the _Diaries_,
this coyness may suggest Cosima taking care to preserve a surprise.
However this is only one possible interpretation: the evidence is
equally consistent with Richard having suggested the quest for the
lamp, or the idea having arisen jointly, with Cosima agreeing to
undertake the project.
If Cosima initiated the quest, that would raise the question of how
she knew about the lamp, as it seems unlikely that Cosima would ever
have found her way into the Dresden Synagogue. But she could easily
have heard about Semper's beautiful design from Richard, fretting to
her about his relationship with Semper and remembering the good old
days at Dresden, or from Semper himself.
In any case, it seems that Cosima's interest in Semper, and perhaps in
Semperian lamps, began shortly after Siegfried's birth. On Thursday
August 19 1869 she wrote: "While I am working with the children a
package arrives from Professor Nietzsche: Semper's lecture on
architectural styles. Read it with interest, spoke about it to R. at
lunch, both of us regretting we were no longer in touch with Semper."
The next day they agreed, "Altogether it is a great pity that Semper
is now writing instead of building."
Cosima was reminded of Semper again on Thursday September 23, 1869:
"Semper's theatre in Dresden completely burnt down. This made me
think of Semper's unlucky star. His great genius virtually
unemployed, his works destroyed!"
Cosima's sudden interest in Semper's work seems significant, as does
Nietzsche's involvement in obtaining a copy of Semper's lecture. The
Wagners may have "regretted" that they were not speaking to the
Sempers, but they did nothing to heal the breach. Therefore Semper
had to be approached incognito and through a third party, and
Nietzsche was the first to take on that role.
Cosima had another problem: the March 1869 reissue of _Das Judentum_,
which rightly exposed Richard to ridicule and attack. One strand of
that attack came from satirists and cartoonists noting Wagner's own
resemblance to antisemitic Jewish stereotypes and the high proportion
of Jews among his friends and associates. (On November 26 1869 Cosima
complained about a "very unpleasing" picture of Richard that "makes
him look like Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer!") So Cosima feared that if
the news leaked out that the Wagners were seeking a Judaic religious
artefact, and that this was somehow linked to the birth of their son,
great would be the laughter and derision.
So the quest for the lamp had to be kept secret from Semper, who held
the original designs, and from the lamp's Jewish owners, who might
leak the whole embarrassing story to the newspapers if they realised
that they were dealing with the Wagners.
Cosima therefore enlisted the services of that helpful - if slightly
odd - young man, Herr Professor Nietzsche. Nietzsche work in
obtaining the copy of Semper's lecture may or may not be related to
the lamp, but on Monday 25 January 1870, there is a definite
reference: "For me a letter from Professor Nietzsche and a Semper
drawing."
Nietzsche's collected letters for this period flesh out that _Diary_
entry. On 23 January 1870, we find a letter from Semper to Nietzsche,
suggesting that the synagogue, or the jewellers Meyer and Noske, would
know which company had made the lamp, and might therefore be able to
make another copy. Semper also enclosed a half-size drawing of the
Dresden synagogue lamp, which 'can naturally be made available for the
lady of whom you speak.' (_Nietzsche Briefwechsel_, vol II ii, page
121.)
Nietzsche passed Semper's letter and drawing on to the lady of whom he
spoke. Cosima was delighted; she spent the next day preparing a
letter to Semper, which presumably asked him to supply certain
additional details needed if a copy of the lamp were to be made. She
dictated this letter to the children's governess, so that the copy
sent to Semper was not in Cosima's name, nor her handwriting. The
following day, 27 January, she wrote again to Nietzsche (this letter
not mentioned in the _Diary_), thanking him and asking him if he would
write again to Semper, forwarding the letter written and signed by the
governess.
The rest of this correspondence is lost (Cosima later destroyed every
letter that Nietzsche had send to her). Nietzsche may have considered
the subterfuge with the governess to be dishonourable, though he
probably did comply with Cosima's request and forward the letter on to
Semper, though subsequently bowing out of the business.
In any case, by the time of the next definite reference to the lamp we
find Nietzsche out of the picture and new go-betweens set in motion.
On Tuesday 24 May 1870 Cosima visited a jeweller who she had asked to
go and see Semper, presumably to settle further details about the
lamp's design and manufacture. The jeweller reports that Semper
"received him at first hostilely, then gradually began to give some
explanations." Semper's irritability may suggest that he guessed that
this sudden and mysterious interest in the synagogue lamp came from
the Wagners; on the other hand irritability seems to have been a
fairly common mood for Semper.
The following day Cosima wrote "to Pusinelli about the hanging lamp."
Pusinelli was an old Dresden friend, who knew Cosima as well as
Richard. (Pusinelli had sent a friendly greeting to Cosima only the
week before, on 12 May 1870.) Pusinelli's task would probably have
involved asking the synagogue or Meyer and Noske for the name of the
company who made the lamp, and then commissioning another copy from
that company, providing them with Semper's drawing and the other
information obtained by Cosima.
We note Cosima worrying on 1 June 1870 that she hadn't heard from
Pusinelli. In the meantime another long-term project came to
fruition: her marriage to Hans von Bülow was finally annulled on 26
June 1870, leaving Cosima and Richard free to marry, and allowing
Siegfried's long-delayed baptism to go ahead, with Siegfried baptised
of married parents.
On Thursday 11 August 1870 the lamp arrived at Lucerne. The Wagners
went for a drive together, but while Richard visited the parson Cosima
went her own way, to inspect and collect the lamp. The following day
the lamp was installed in the Wagner residence at Triebschen: "The
hanging lamp is put up, but will not be used before Fidi's
christening. It pleases R. and is really handsome," Cosima wrote on
Friday 12 August 1870.
And on 25 August 1870 Richard and Cosima Wagner were married at last.
The way was now clear for Siegfried's baptism, which duly took place
at 4 o'clock on Sunday 4 September 1870, with the Wille and Bassenheim
families in attendance. The weather provided appropriate drama for a
Wagnerian event, with "a terrible thunderclap" just as proceedings
commenced. Despite the grumblings of the heavens, Cosima was pleased
to be able to record: "Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner behaves
passably well. Merry gathering afterward. Semper's hanging lamp is
inaugurated."
To assign a meaning to this lengthy quest, and to the "inauguration"
of the synagogue lamp at Siegfried's baptism, we need to look at the
symbolic meanings of the ner tamid, both its traditional meanings and
the meanings it might have had for the Wagners.
Out of time for now.
Cheers!
Laon
Gustav Schoen
> They used to meet at the house of composer Ferdinand Hiller, who kept
> a salon for Dresden intellectuals. Wagner would later say that Hiller
> and Joachim were the two musicians he most despised. Wagner's
> antisemitism is clearly an issue here, but not the sole explanation;
> otherwise why did he despise Hiller but not, for example, Halevy?
> There must have been a specific reason for the breach, but I don't
> know what it was.
The Hillers were despised. And Wagner never came to America. I don't
know the circumstances in detail of course. But after all, Wagner
eventually succeeded to found the Bayreuth Festival and with that
succeeded to raise himself a legacy so instead of doing the similar in
USA when it still was new found land.
I don't know if mistrust due to rumour talk about "sexual perversion"
(what that now meant to the people of the 19th century and too often
was used politically) played any role. Therefore it is more
interesting that Wagner broke with the Hillers, but not Halévy.
Ferdinand Hiller, of course, was a remarkable man of capacity, but
perhaps Halévy could be considered a more safe choice to work with
(Wagner studied his works as well as Meyerbeers in the same period),
as long as such lasts, as he seemed skilled and original enough for
that, but more independent not belonging to a in the time prominent
musical clane.
Speaking of the different proposals for the foundation it is, of
course, hard to tell which had turned out to be the richer era for
this music.
I can't tell of course, because I don't know much enough about the
biographical details. But surely Der Rote Buch, Der Braune Buch and
Mein Leben and Cosimas diaries inhold secrets. Here is about all that
is from the printed version of the diaries:
"We think of America, never return to America"
C.W.T. I 1049-51 of 13 May 1877
(This seems to have been seriously meant. The answer, six weeks later
is yes.)
And a later note:
"Rehersal till one, then to Mr and Mrs Lewes for Lunch and then with
them to the studio of Burne-Jones, the pre-raphaelite. Lovely delicate
painting, he himself rather pleasant. At 8 in the evening the concert,
many members of the royal family and a fairly full house. Herr Unger
is already hoarse in the Lohengrihn duet and declares the problems
with the Forging Songs. We decide to repeat Wotans Farewell, but find
that Herr Hille had already gone home - utter confusion."
(14 May 1877)
Gustav Schoen
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: schoe...@sverige.nu (Gustav Schoen)
Newsgroups: humanities.music.composers.wagner
Subject: Re: Cosima and the Bethmanns
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NNTP-Posting-Host: 195.54.138.254
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Laon wrote:
> They used to meet at the house of composer Ferdinand Hiller, who kept
> a salon for Dresden intellectuals. Wagner would later say that Hiller
> and Joachim were the two musicians he most despised. Wagner's
> antisemitism is clearly an issue here, but not the sole explanation;
> otherwise why did he despise Hiller but not, for example, Halevy?
> There must have been a specific reason for the breach, but I don't
> know what it was.
The Hillers were despised. And Wagner never came to America. I don't
know the circumstances in detail of course. But after all, Wagner
eventually succeeded to found the Bayreuth Festival and with that
succeeded to raise himself a legacy so instead of doing the similar in
USA when it still was new found land.
I don't know if mistrust due to rumour talk about "sexual perversion"
(what that now meant to the people of the 19th century and too often
was used politically) played any role. Therefore it is more
interesting that Wagner broke with the Hillers, but not Halévy.
Ferdinand Hiller, of course, was a remarkable man of capacity, but
perhaps Halévy could be considered a more safe choice to work with
(Wagner studied his works as well as Meyerbeers in the same period),
as long as such lasts, as he seemed skilled and original enough for
that, but more independent not belonging to a in the time prominent
musical clane.
Speaking of the different proposals for the foundation it is, of
course, hard to tell which had turned out to be the richer era for
this music.
I can't tell of course, because I don't know much enough about the
biographical details. But surely Der Rote Buch, Der Braune Buch and
Mein Leben and Cosimas diaries inhold secrets. Here is about all that
is from the printed version of the diaries:
"We think of America, never return to Germany"
Laon
though.
But since you took the Hiller issue further, I checked all the
"Hiller" references in _Mein Leben_, and I see that in 1848 Wagner
offered Ferdinand Hiller some "helpful advice" after Hiller's opera
_Conradin von Hohenstaufen_ stiffed in Dresden after only four
performances. And I can imagine that getting "helpful advice" from
Wagner might make one dislike Wagner slightly, especially if one is a
fellow composer. And then Wagner would be all puzzled because that
person didn't seem to like him any more, and decide not to like that
person, and so it goes. So that may the origin of the breach, which
widened over time. Anyway, I'll continue with findings on Cosima and
the Bethmanns, Siegfried's baptism, the synagogue lamp and so on.
4 The meanings of the lamp
For advice and information on traditional meanings of the synagogue
lamp, or ner tamid, I have the good folks at the Jewish Museum in
Sydney to thank, plus relevant sections of the _Encyclopedia Judaica_
and some on-line resources on Judaism. But errors in interpretation
will be my own.
Traditional meanings
In the 19th century a synagogue lamp, or ner tamid, was generally a
large and ornate hanging oil lamp with a single flame; the ner tamid
designed by Semper and obtained for Siegfried's baptism was of this
kind. A ner tamid tends to be quite an imposing object, even in the
large space of the synagogue, where it will generally hang at the
front of the synagogue, in front of the aron kodesh, the holy ark that
contains the books or scrolls of the Torah.
"Ner tamid" means "eternal light". In its simplest form the ner tamid
is considered to be a symbol of the radiance of faith, and of god's
presence, being both a physical and a spiritual light emanating from
the temple.
Once the ner tamid flame has been lit, it should not be allowed to go
out. Members of the congregation are expected to give money to
contribute to the upkeep of the flame, and those who do are mentioned
in prayers. (These days synagogues generally use electric light for
the ner tamid, which seems rather unromantic, somehow. Presumably the
standard arrangement includes battery backup in case of power cuts.)
There seem to be three main schools of thought about the deeper
historical symbolism of the ner tamid. The _Encyclopedia Judaica_
says that the ner tamid is a symbolic reminder of the menorah (seven
or in one case eight branched lamp) that burned continuously in the
Great Temple at Jerusalem, just as a synagogue is itself a smaller
reminder of the Temple.
The menorah of the Temple was kept permanently lit, in obedience to
the god YHWH's instructions in Exodus 27:20, after leading the Jews
out of Egypt:
"And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee
pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn
always." (The lamp referred to is presumably the menorah whose
specifications are given by YHWH in Exodus 26:31-37.)
The Romans, under Titus, seized the menorah from the temple in 68 CE,
shortly before the start of the Diaspora, which began around 70 CE and
accelerated after Masada in 73CE. (The second Temple was destroyed in
70 BCE, and the third Temple has not yet been built, so I'm not sure
about the status of the temple from which Titus did his looting.) So
the ner tamid keeps alive the memory of the menorah, as the eternal
flame in the great temple.
Other sources say the ner tamid is associated with the Great Temple's
continuously burning incense altar in front of the ark. Others
associate the ner tamid with the symbolic idea of god's divine
presence, or Shekhinah.
In some Sephardic synagogues there may be two nerot tamid (plural of
ner tamid). One symbolises the menorah or incense altar, as in most
synagogues; the second one has a distinct meaning, symbolising the
pillar of fire that guided the Children of Israel out of Egypt,
through the wilderness, to Israel. For which see Exodus again,
especially Exodus 40: 34-38.
So we have the ner tamid as:
* Symbolic reference to the menorah looted from the Great Temple; and
* Implicitly to the preserving of that cultural memory throughout the
Diaspora: -
while also being symbolic of: -
* The radiance of faith;
* God's presence; and
* A guiding light for those in the wilderness.
Some of those meanings probably carry over, in adapted form, to the
inauguration of the lamp for Siegfried's birthday.
Wagnerian meanings, in relation to Siegfried's birth and baptism
Joachim Köhler and David Conway both suggest explanations for the
Wagners' acquisition of the synagogue lamp. Köhler seems to think
that it was all part of Wagner's scheme to humiliate Nietzsche by
making him run round after various nick-knacks, that Wagner decided
that he wanted, at whim.
That's quite a good theory by Köhlerian standards, having only the
weaknesses that:
* Nietzsche was only involved at the beginning of the quest, which
continued for a long time without him;
* We don't know that the quest for the lamp was Richard's idea, and
there are some reasons (admittedly not strong) for thinking it may
have been Cosima's initiative;
* We do know, however, that it wasn't Richard who enlisted
Nietzsche's help, but Cosima; and
* The quest for the lamp was obviously no whim, but a long campaign
connected to an emotionally important event.
So it's pretty sound, as Köhler theories go.
David Conway's theory is that the Wagners had intended to get the ner
tamid for their wedding, where it would be used to represent a sort of
triumph against their enemies the Jews. Unfortunately they had to
inaugurate it at Siegfried's christening instead, because it didn't
arrive in time for the wedding.
That theory has the weakness that in reality the ner tamid arrived on
11 August 1870, comfortably before the wedding on 25 August 1870. If
there had been any intention of using it for any purpose but
Siegfried's baptism, it could have been so used. But on 12 August
1870 Cosima noted that the ner tamid had been installed at Triebschen,
but said that it would not be used before Siegfried's christening.
There is no question that the ner tamid was obtained specifically for
the baptism.
David Conway wanted to have the ner tamid intended for the wedding
because his theory could not ring true if the lamp were meant for the
baptism. This is because of the semiotic (apologies, but for once
it's the right and only word) differences between a wedding and a
baptism. You might well have a ribald, even a malicious, wedding
present or event, but you don't get that at a baptism. A wedding is
in a sense a celebration of experience, while a baptism is a
celebration of innocence.
So the idea that Cosima would put so much work into obtaining the lamp
solely in order to add a malicious and derisive element to Siegfried's
baptism simply does not ring true. Which is why David Conway didn't
advance that idea, and argued instead that the ner tamid had been
meant for the wedding. (It's clear that David Conway simply missed the
August 1870 _Diary_ entries concerning the arrival of the ner tamid
and its dedicated use for the baptism, by the way. I think his site
is excellent, and that there is no way that he deliberately omitted
inconvenient information.)
So to assign a meaning to the lamp and its inauguration, we have to
work with what we know and what seems psychologically credible.
Siegfried's baptism, as the child of married Wagners, was an event of
tremendous emotional significance for Richard and Cosima. It was a
sacred event for them because of their intense and obvious pride in
and love for their son, and because his baptism as a legitimate (more
or less) Wagner was the confirmation, in many ways more so than the
wedding itself, that a real family had been formed.
Out of time again. I'll try to put it together in the next post.
Arohanui!
Laon
Derrick Everett
> The Romans, under Titus, seized the menorah from the temple in 68 CE,
> shortly before the start of the Diaspora, which began around 70 CE and
> accelerated after Masada in 73CE. (The second Temple was destroyed in
> 70 BCE, and the third Temple has not yet been built, so I'm not sure
> about the status of the temple from which Titus did his looting.)
The second Temple was restored and extended by Herod the Great. Work
began in 18 BCE.
> Joachim Köhler and David Conway both suggest explanations for the
> Wagners' acquisition of the synagogue lamp. Köhler seems to think that
> it was all part of Wagner's scheme to humiliate Nietzsche by making him
> run round after various nick-knacks, that Wagner decided that he wanted,
> at whim.
Köhler is a crank. Although the ignorant seem to find him convincing, so
maybe I have to concede that he is a clever crank. Wagner never had any
"scheme to humiliate Nietzsche".
> A wedding is in a sense a celebration of experience, while a baptism is
> a celebration of innocence.
Perhaps in a poetic sense. In Catholicism both baptism and matrimony are
sacraments, i.e. signs of divine grace. In Protestantism they are not
usually regarded as sacraments (e.g. in the Anglican Church they are
excluded by article 25, which accepts as sacraments only those "ordained
of Christ our Lord" at the Last Supper).
Marriage and baptism are similar in that both ceremonies involve vows,
i.e. commitments. In a Christian marriage ceremony it is the couple who
make vows to each other. In a baptism ceremony it is the person baptised
who makes the vows; except in the case of an infant, on whose behalf vows
are made by his or her "godparents", who also make a commitment to ensure
the child's spiritual and moral education.
Note that when Kundry is baptised she does not make any vows.
Laon
And thanks, re the date of the Temple's restoration. Presumably its
"destruction" in 70 BCE was some way short of "reduction to rubble".
I did make a quick Internet search to find out what state the Temple
was in, in 68 CE, but just found lots of loopy sites predicting
Armageddon if the Third Temple is built, most of these people thinking
the end of the world would be a good idea.
On the subject of wedding and baptism ceremonies, I wasn't thinking of
the formal and sacramental meanings, but of the quite different
behaviours and emotions that the two different ceremonies seem to
evoke in people. There are things you'd do at one that you wouldn't
do at the other.
My experience of weddin's is that people indulge heavily in alcohol
and other drugs of choice, over-eat, say terribly inappropriate
things, and try to have - or succeed in having - sex with people
they're not supposed to have sex with, and so on along those lines. Or
at least I do; I've been to some good ones. Baptisms, on the other
hand, may involve some drinking afterwards, but they're on the whole
much less raucous affairs, with loving attention directed at baby and
mother, rather than at your glazed-eyed fellow guests. It's a much
quieter and more intimate thing. So some things that might
conceivably be a good joke at a wedding would be unthinkable for a
baptism.
So David Conway's idea that the lamp was acquired in a kind of
derisive spirit, as a triumph over the Wagners' enemies, didn't really
ring true given the effort put in to acquire it, when an object that
wasn't going to be respected would have been easy to acquire. But the
theory rings even less true of an object dedicated for a baptism,
especially a baptism that was as emotionally important to the parents
- "sacred" was meant metaphorically, but it's not too strong a word -
as Siegfried's.
Anyway, I'm working towards winding this up.
4 The meanings of the lamp continued
Let's look at what we have:
* The Bethmann family were a Jewish family in Amsterdam, who
converted to Protestantism and subsequently moved to Frankfürt, where
they established the Bethmann bank. The Bethmanns were still widely
considered to be a Jewish family in the 19th century, and they were
still in closely supportive contact with the Jewish community;
* Cosima was descended from the Bethmann family; her grandmother was
Maria de Flavigny, nee Bethmann;
* thus though Cosima is not Jewish, she is of Jewish descent, as are
her daughters and son Siegfried.
So far so good, and all of it no doubt creating certain difficulties
for the new (in 1869) Wagner menage. It's perhaps also relevant that
shortly after Cosima moved in with him for good, with another child on
the way, Richard republished his antisemitic essay, _Das Judenthum in
Musik_, this time under his own name. Coincidence? Maybe not.
Anyway, we've also seen that when Richard and Cosima finally live
together, Cosima begins to collect artefacts from their family
history. These artefacts and symbolic objects include the
Geyer-Wagner cup, Geyer's portrait, Adolph Wagner's portrait, the
Geyer cap and perhaps others. Richard is moved by Cosima's work in
obtaining and presenting these items, saying what she is doing "has
resonance and meaning".
Cosima also makes contact with her own family of origin, the
Jewish-descended de Flavigny Bethmanns, in an effort to raise some
money for the Wagner household. I haven't been able to discover
whether these efforts were successful. The quest for the lamp is
next, chronologically, seeming to begin soon after Siegfried's birth.
Both chronologically and in symbolism it seems part of Cosima's focus
on "relics of family."
So putting all that together, my reading of this affair is that:
(1) We never truly know what happens in the past and in people's
heads, but that all the same, taking everything together:
(2) The likeliest explanation of the acquisition and inauguration of
the synagogue lamp seems to be that it is indeed at least partly a
symbolic recognition of the Jewish part of Siegfried's ancestry, from
Cosima's side of the family.
I think that's remarkable enough in itself, and I want to avoid
exaggerating its significance. Wagner had no objection to intimate
relationships with people he thought of as Jews (for example Judith
Gautier, at the pink-pantied end of the "intimacy" continuum) but I'm
not suggesting that he thought of Cosima as "Jewish", nor did he think
that his children with Cosima were "Jewish".
Still, neither Richard nor Cosima could be unaware of the Bethmann
family history. Wagner quite likely had the Bethmanns in mind, along
with the Rothschilds, when he excoriated "Jewish bankers" in the 1865
_Was ist Deutsch?_ essay. The ancestry existed, it had caused
embarrassment for the Bethmann family in the 19th century, and no
doubt it caused discomfort chez Wagner. But there are reasons,
consistent with Wagner's views, why he and Cosima would want, at least
once and in private, not in public, to acknowledge rather than ignore
the existence of that partial Jewish ancestry.
First a digression on what Richard thought about Cosima, in this
context. Taking the _Judenthum in Musik_ essay as a guide, since he
chose to republish it at about this time, we see that the traits
Wagner thought of as supposedly Jewish included:
* the Yiddish accent;
* ironical distance from and non-participation in the local culture,
in this case German culture;
* awkwardness in the use of local language, suggesting that the
speaker is not thinking in the language they are speaking;
* lack of dignity, inability to be silent, etc;
* failure to see the deeper spiritual and cultural roots of great
art; while:-
* acutely perceiving how the outer forms of great art can be
replicated in order to create more commercially oriented art; and so
on.
Wagner thought of these traits (along with a range of other
stereotypes) as behavioural/cultural rather than racial. Jews could
lose those traits, and Germans could acquire them.
And it seems clear that Wagner discerned no trace of these traits in
Cosima. He possibly felt differently about Cosima's mother, Marie
d'Agoult, but I haven't found clear evidence on the point. The two
_Mein Leben_ references to that histrionic thrower of scenes and
crockery, taken together, indicate no more than a guarded dislike. By
the way, Liszt is generally thought of as one of history's great
pantsmen, cutting a swathe through the best-upholstered beds of Europe
and all that, but any tendency to envy the man has to be tempered by
the thought of living with the ghastly Countess Marie d'Agoult and the
even ghastlier Princess Carolyne. He had terrible taste in women, or
terrible luck, and no wonder he became a priest.
Just the same, Wagner also believed that it was important for people
to reach into and access their cultural roots: he applied this to
German culture in particular but not only to German culture. Thus
black nationalist WEB Dubois, for example, applied Wagnerian ideas to
argue for a Black American cultural renaissance using the best blues
music as black "mastersongs". (The Wagnerian term is Dubois.) And
even in Wagner's _Judenthum_ essay we find this:
"The only musical expression his own people can offer the Jewish
composer is the ceremonial music of their worship of Jehovah: the
synagogue is the only source from which the Jew can draw popular
motifs for his art that are intelligible for himself."
Wagner then goes on to the famously offensive passage deriding the
"musical divine service in a popular synagogue" as "nonsensical
gurgling, yodelling and cackling". But before that he argues that
this music can be imagined as having been "sublime" in its original
and pure form, that purity since having been lost.
If we transmute the attitude expressed here to a less antisemitic
context, we can see a train of thought that might lead the Wagners to
obtain for Siegfried a symbolic object from a synagogue, if it is a
work of art that the Wagners consider to be "sublime" and beautiful,
and whose symbolism contains elements that seem particularly likely to
appeal to the Wagners.
Again, I'm not wanting to exaggerate the importance of this: Siegfried
was baptised as a Protestant Christian. His parent did not consider
him to be Jewish; the lamp seems to have been no more than a
recognition of one aspect of his various families of origin through an
object that has Jewish "meaning and resonance". And no doubt it also
had a number of other symbolic meanings that would have appealed to
the Wagners, though a synagogue lamp will always have specifically
Jewish significance.
The lamp was "inaugurated" after the baptism and apparently after the
"merry gathering": perhaps the non-family guests had gone home before
the Wagners turned their attention to the lamp. "Inauguration"
clearly meant the lighting of the eternal flame, which flame would
perhaps become a sort of symbol connected to the young Siegfried.
(Maybe it was even in his room, the wick turned right down, as a sort
of nightlight.)
I feel that it's likely, not on evidence but on psychological grounds,
that there was some sort of ceremony and words said with the
inauguration, or lighting, of the lamp. The _Diary_ entry for that
day may be skimpy but other _Diary_ entries show that the Wagners were
great inventors of ceremonies.
On a long shot I had a look at the Bris, or Berit Milah, circumcision
ceremony, which is in a sense an approximate equivalent to the baptism
ceremony (and in other senses it's not). But having looked at it, I
doubt if the Wagners drew on that ceremony much or at all. All that
can reasonably be guessed about the inauguration of Siegfried's lamp
is that it wouldn't be surprising if aspects of the traditional Judaic
symbolic meanings, for example the ideas of eternal light, spiritual
purity, divine presence and guidance in times of trouble, were in
there somewhere.
And you can step some way past the evidence and speculate, but that's
about as far as even speculation can take us.
One last thing: this reading involves the assumption that the Wagners
are able to acknowledge the Jewish part of the Bethmann heritage in
private, once, in an essentially respectful way, while continuing to
express antisemitic attitudes in public and in private. That's not as
unlikely as it seems, for two reasons:
* First, the Wagners seem to have had an extraordinary ability to
partition off closely related topics, so that they could hold and
expound two completely contradictory attitudes at once; and
* Second, that sort of self-contradictory thinking seems not to have
been uncommon in the antisemitic climate of 19th century Europe
(without commenting on the 20th and 21st centuries), where some people
with Jewish ancestry, including those were Jewish by halachic law and
by religion, sometimes expressed horrendously antisemitic attitudes.
Various motives exist, some involving psychological issues - denial,
self-loathing, etc - and some involving conscious survival strategies,
eg attempting to deflect antisemitic attention away from themselves
and their families.
This is nearly done now, though there's a bit more to be said about
consequences.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
1 On synagogue-based lighting systems
I am indebted to David Conway for the following two pieces of
information.
First, Siegfried's synagogue lamp has disappeared. The Wagners would
almost certainly have taken it on the move from Triebschen to
Bayreuth, but the lamp is no longer to be found at Wahnfried. It
might have been destroyed by bombing, but more likely it was looted by
one of the US soldiers who carried off various items from Wahnfried
and the Festspielhaus. So the Semper ner tamid may be sitting, quite
mysteriously, somewhere in an American attic. Though, garage sale
culture being what it is, it might have even found its way back to a
synagogue by now.
Second, there's another link connecting Wagner, synagogues and lamps.
When Wagner dedicated Bayreuth with that first performance of
Beethoven's ninth symphony, there was not yet enough lighting
installed for the requirements of the performance. So Wagner
approached the Bayreuth synagogue to ask if he could borrow the
synagogue chandelier for the occasion. The rabbis generously agreed,
thus providing the Festspielhaus' first lighting system. Symbolism of
some sort? I shouldn't be surprised.
2 Two additional sources on the Bethmann ancestry
I've come across two additional citations on the Bethmanns' Jewish
ancestry. They don't add much because I've already cited references to
the issue in other books by the same authorities. One is William
Wallace. I've already cited Wallace's 1927 biography of Liszt, which
was Robert Gutman's source for his statement that the Bethmanns were
descended from the Amsterdam Jewish patriarch Schimsche Naphtali
Bethmann.
I've since located an earlier book by Wallace, a rather episodic
Wagner biography called _Richard Wagner, as he lived_, published Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co Ltd, J Curwen & Sons, London, 1925. This
book says the Bethmanns, Cosima's family of origin, are descendants of
Schimsche Naphtali Bethmann in Amsterdam, but also mentions a possible
alternative descent through the Bethmann-Hollweg family. (page 129.)
However this was an error, which Wallace himself tacitly acknowledged
in his later book on Liszt, which gave only the Amsterdam origin. All
sources agree that the banking Bethmanns are descended from the
Amsterdam Bethmanns, including quite early sources such as Marie
d'Agoult's autobiography. In his book on Liszt, after two years'
further research, Wallace quietly withdrew his alternative suggestion.
However there is a Bethmann-Hollweg connection, and it is relevant in
the context of a different issue. I'll come back to the
Bethmann-Hollwegs.
Likewise, I've already cited Derek Watson's 1989 Liszt biography,
where he mentions the origin of the Bethmann family. But Watson gives
a little more more detail in his earlier Wagner biography, _Richard
Wagner: A Biography_, Derek Watson, J M Dent and Sons Ltd, London,
Melbourne, Toronto 1979.
"Cosima's childhood and her marriage to Bülow afforded her little
happiness. After Liszt's separation from Marie d'Agoult, the three
children were placed in the care of Liszt's mother in Paris. In 1850,
when Cosima was not quite thirteen, the Princess Wittgenstein
persuaded Liszt to hand the children over to her own governess from St
Petersburg, Madame Patersi, a tyrannical septuagenarian who travelled
to Paris and at once submitted them to her strict regime. This
background, lacking the love and normal joys of childhood explains
much of Cosima's later personality. She was ever-conscious of being
Liszt's bastard child and spent much of her life attempting to create
a mask of frigid respectability which deceived few people. Her
maternal grandmother had a Jewish father and so all her life Cosima
sheltered behind a vicious anti-Semitism." (pages 150-151.)
The "Jewish father" of "her maternal grandmother" is the banker Simon
Bethmann, father of that Maria de Flavigny Bethmann who was in turn
the mother of Cosima's mother, Marie d'Agoult.
3 The Bethmann-Hollweg connection
In an earlier post in this series I wondered how come the Bethmann
Bank survived the Nazi era intact. After all, since the Bethmann's
Jewish ancestry was an issue in the 19th century, as Perenyi among
others made clear that it was, then it should have been even more an
issue in the intenser antisemitism of the Nazi period.
Part of the answer, almost certainly, is the political career of
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. There's sufficient evidence, though
too boring even for me to cite, to show that the Amsterdam Bethmanns
and the Bethmann-Hollwegs were related. Anyway, Theobald (sometimes
spelled Theobold) had impeccable conservative credentials, and he was
Chancellor of Germany 1909 - 1917. In short, by the 20th century the
Bethmanns were extremely highly connected, and so long as they did not
overtly oppose the Nazis they were unlikely to come under any
pressure.
Moreover the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws defining "Jewishness" applied
not a halachic test but a "grandfather" test: one Jewish grandparent
of four did not make someone Jewish, while two out of four was
problematical; three or four Jewish grandparents out of four was -
ultimately - a death sentence.
The 20th century Bethmanns would have had their Jewishness
sufficiently "diluted", in terms of this law, not to be subjected to
persecution. The Bethmann's Jewish ancestry would certainly have been
noted, just the same; the SS kept their genealogists very busy indeed.
Though too distant to bring down active persecution, the Schimsche
Naphtali Bethmann ancestry would be sufficient to prevent Bethmanns
from holding certain offices in the Nazi hierarchy, such as SS
membership. It's hard to imagine that they would have considered that
any hardship whatsoever.
4 Consequences
To keep this post merely too long, instead of far too long, I'll hold
off discussion of consequences of the Bethmann ancestry till a later
post.
Cheers!
Laon
Mike Scott Rohan
from pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) contains these words:
{snip}
> Second, there's another link connecting Wagner, synagogues and lamps.
> When Wagner dedicated Bayreuth with that first performance of
> Beethoven's ninth symphony, there was not yet enough lighting
> installed for the requirements of the performance. So Wagner
> approached the Bayreuth synagogue to ask if he could borrow the
> synagogue chandelier for the occasion. The rabbis generously agreed,
> thus providing the Festspielhaus' first lighting system. Symbolism of
> some sort? I shouldn't be surprised.
Ah. Sheds a whole new light on Par..........sorry.
Cheers,
Mike
--
mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk
Mike Scott Rohan
from pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) contains these words:
{snip}
> My experience of weddin's is that people indulge heavily in alcohol
> and other drugs of choice, over-eat, say terribly inappropriate
> things, and try to have - or succeed in having - sex with people
> they're not supposed to have sex with, and so on along those lines.
Weren't at that Russian wedding I was at on Saturday, were you?
Cheers,
Mike
--
mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk
Derrick Everett
> Second, there's another link connecting Wagner, synagogues and lamps.
> When Wagner dedicated Bayreuth with that first performance of
> Beethoven's ninth symphony, there was not yet enough lighting installed
> for the requirements of the performance. So Wagner approached the
> Bayreuth synagogue to ask if he could borrow the synagogue chandelier
> for the occasion. The rabbis generously agreed, thus providing the
> Festspielhaus' first lighting system. Symbolism of some sort? I
> shouldn't be surprised.
>
>
I have some difficulties in believing this story. Firstly, the
performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on 22 May 1872 was part of the
celebrations surrounding the laying of the foundation stone of the
Festspielhaus, which was therefore not in immediate need of lighting.
Secondly, I doubt that there was a synagogue in Bayreuth at that time.
Laon
> > Second, there's another link connecting Wagner, synagogues and lamps.
> > When Wagner dedicated Bayreuth with that first performance of
> > Beethoven's ninth symphony, there was not yet enough lighting installed
> > for the requirements of the performance. So Wagner approached the
> > Bayreuth synagogue to ask if he could borrow the synagogue chandelier
> > for the occasion. The rabbis generously agreed, thus providing the
> > Festspielhaus' first lighting system. Symbolism of some sort? I
> > shouldn't be surprised.
Derrick wrote:
> I have some difficulties in believing this story. Firstly, the
> performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on 22 May 1872 was part of the
> celebrations surrounding the laying of the foundation stone of the
> Festspielhaus, which was therefore not in immediate need of lighting.
> Secondly, I doubt that there was a synagogue in Bayreuth at that time.
After a wee bit of further checking, it seems that you're right about
your major point. Though on the other hand it does seem there was a
synagogue in Bayreuth at the time, and that chandelier lighting
provided by them was required for the performance. But overall the
simplest approach is to say that I was, as they say, as it were,
completely wrong.
My problem was that I had read David Conway carelessly, and it was the
foundation stone and not the theatre that the event concerned. What
Conway said was this: "When Wagner organised a performance in Bayreuth
of Beethoven's 'Choral Symphony' to celebrate the laying of the
foundation stone of his Festival Theatre, he needed additional
lighting in the hall to enable the choir and orchestra to follow their
scores. He asked to borrow the new gas-chandelier of the Bayreuth
Synagogue, and the council of the Synagogue agreed to this - their
letter of permission still exists."
I took "Bayreuth" to mean Wagner's Bayreuth theatre, which was
emotionally attractive to lumps like me, but not quite accurate.
But another source of information, having read my post, said this:
"[The chandelier] was not lent to Wagner for the Festpielhaus, which
did not yet exist, but to brighten up the Markgraefliches Opernhaus in
the centre of town, where Wagner conducted Beethoven's 9th on May 22nd
1872 to mark the laying of the Festpielhaus's foundation stone. The
opera house was (and is) next door to the synagogue, so the chandelier
did not have to be moved far.
"When the Nazis plundered the synagogue on "Reichskristallnacht" in
November, 1938, they did not set light to it for fear the flames might
spread to the opera house. It is claimed by some in the Wagner family
that the synagogue was spared thanks to the intervention of Winifred
Wagner. If she intervened at all, then it was surely to make sure the
opera house her grandfather so rightly admired did not go up in
flames."
In short, the Synagogue chandelier was lent for the initial 9th
symphony performance, but that was for the existing Bayreuth Opera
House and not for the new Festspeilhaus.
So... the loan of the synagogue chandelier for the first important
Wagner performance at Bayreuth in 1872 in the neighbouring and
existing Bayreuth opera house, and not for the new Wagnerian Bayreuth
theatre.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
People who find a new fact tend to be very pleased with and excited by
their shiny new discovery. And they can easily fall into the trap of
thinking that everything in their field of inquiry must be related to
and reinterpreted in the light of their wonderful new fact.
I haven't found a new fact but at best assembled and noted connections
between some facts that have already been published. Still, some of
the material about the Bethmanns, the late-1868-early-1869 merging of
the Wagner and Liszt-d'Agoult-de Flavigny-Bethmann families, Cosima's
search for family relics and symbols, and the procurement of the
synagogue lamp for Siegfried's 1870 baptism, strikes me as
extraordinary. And finding some of that material, especially the
connections between certain diary references and correspondence,
was/is kind of exciting for me, which maybe suggests how dull my life
is when I'm not at weddin's. Anyway, my point is that the temptation
is to over-emphasise the importance of this material, and I'll try to
avoid that.
Still, the first consequence I'd suggest relates to one of the most
ruinous decisions Wagner ever made: the January 1869 decision to
republish _Das Judenthum in der Musik_.
Family matters and _Das Judenthum_
The union of Richard and Cosima in late 1868 to mid 1869 is certainly
the most momentous event in either of their lives, a fruitful event
for both of them but also an extremely stressful one. It's in this
period that Wagner made what may have been morally the worst and
personally the most disastrous decision of his life, both for his
contemporary reception and his lasting reputation: the decision to
republish _Das Judenthum in der Musik_.
The relevant Diary entries show that Wagner mulled over the
republication for weeks, beginning on or after 16 November 1868
according to an entry in the Annals, and making the final decision
alone, during a walk on 21 January 1869, according to Cosima's
_Diaries_. Unfortunately, while Cosima's Diary entries show her own
misgivings over the decision, they don't record anything about the
issues Wagner was taking into account as he deliberated.
My reading, on trying to read the relevant Diary entries in relation
to public and private events, is that the decision to republish
_Judenthum_ partly derives from Wagner's stressful family situation,
particularly the question of Cosima's Bethmann ancestry, at least as
much from external triggers. But before looking at that case, I'll
look at the various explanations that have previously been advanced.
There's been surprisingly little discussion on why Wagner decided to
republish, despite agreement that it was in every sense an appallingly
bad decision. The Gutman-Weiner-Zelinsky-Köhler-etc school seem to
assume that no explanation is necessary beyond the observation that
Wagner was mad and bad. And since the _Judenthum_ essay really is mad
and bad, it can be tempting to think that madness and badness are
sufficient explanations. But while madness and badness are part of
the explanation for Wagner's having written the essay, they don't
explain why it happened to be republished at all, nor why the
republication should happen in early 1869.
Wagner's explanation
Wagner himself claimed that he republished in answer to a question
from the Countess Marie Muchanoff, who asked him why it was that he
was so often vilified in the press, by which they both meant "the
Jewish press". He claimed that the best way to provide an explanation
for this was to republish the essay. That would (he argued) prove
that the attacks on him were in retaliation for this essay, and at the
same time it would show that the attacks on him were unfair, because
the essay (he said, and probably thought) does no more than tell the
truth. Wagner's explanation seems a perfect example of the
faux-naivety that he sometimes adopted, when at his most malicious.
The reference to Marie Muchanoff's puzzlement seems obviously
disingenuous, an excuse invented after the decision had been made. I
would have dismissed it completely, except that Wagner wrote to Hans
von Bülow on 28 December 1868, shortly after the Annals note, saying
that Marie Muchanoff had expressed amazement about his alleged ill
treatment in the press, and this amazement "should be put to an end."
So Muchanoff's question really was on Wagner's mind during the time he
was considering republication, and may genuinely be one factor in the
decision. Still, my suspicion is that the "consider Judenthum again"
note pre-dates Muchanoff's well-meaning inquiry, and that Wagner
merely found it convenient to link his reconsideration of the essay to
Muchanoff's question.
Katz's explanation
Jacob Katz, in _The Darker Side of Genius_, argued that Wagner's claim
that Muchanoff's question sparked his decision to republish was at
least partly sincere. Katz said that Wagner still felt that he was
being persecuted by Jewish-owned newspapers because of the _Judenthum_
article, but that they would never actually mention the article.
Wagner therefore decided to get the matter into the open by
republishing, so people would be able to see and understand the reason
for this alleged Jewish hostility to his work. Hopefully they would
judge the essay favourably, and so dismiss the attacks on his work.
At the same time Wagner could take new swipes at additional enemies
accrued over the last 19 years. (Hanslick was a friend in 1850, when
the essay was first published, but not in 1869: so he gets a serve in
the 1869 version.)
Katz also noted but didn't support a theory that Wagner had simply
wanted to stir up interest in his work, on the ground that any
publicity is good publicity.
Fischer's explanation
Jens Malte Fischer's recent book _Richard Wagners Das Judentum in der
Musik_, Insel Taschenbuch 2617, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt, 2000, takes a
broadly similar tack to Katz, suggesting the following reasons:
* Wagner was infuriated by the various anti-Wagner machinations at
Munich;
* He believed that many of those opposing him were Jewish;
* He therefore believed that he was the target of a Jewish conspiracy,
and decided to strike out against it; and also:-
* Wagner was annoyed that Ludwig refused to share his antisemitism.
(My thanks to a generous correspondent for providing this from
Fischer's book, which hasn't yet made its way to the Sydney, New South
Wales or Australian National university libraries.) I might add, in
Fischer's vein, that Wagner was annoyed that the king had a new
favourite, a Jewish homosexual actor who Wagner singles out for attack
in the 1869 version of the essay.
The Katz and Fischer explanations - essentially that Wagner saw Jewish
enemies out to get him at Munich and wanted to strike back at them -
may be somewhat weakened by the timing. Wagner didn't decide to
republish _Judentum_ until 21 January 1869, and by then Munich affairs
were well over. Wagner had since been on holiday in Italy, and he was
soon to make his first trip to Bayreuth. The Diary entries for the
period in which he mulled over the question of republication show no
sign that the Munich debacle was especially on Wagner's mind at this
time: he was much more interested in family matters and getting on
with composing _Siegfried_. And did Wagner really want to strike out
against the king, on whom he was still financially dependent?
I think these explanations are certainly part of the explanation for
Wagner's decision to republish; it's just a question of priorities.
David Conway's theory
David Conway takes a different approach, saying that the note in
Wagner's Annals, "Consider Judenthum again", the first sign that
Wagner is toying with the idea of republication, was written one week
after Wagner's visit to his sister Cäcilie in Leipzig. (That note is
one of a series of annotations written following the date 16 November,
but before the next date Wagner specified, which was 25 December. I'm
not so sure that we know exactly when Wagner made that note. But
that's a quibble; the note must have been written somewhere between
mid-November and mid-December, which is basically the right time.)
Conway says that it was during Wagner's visit to Cäcilie that he had
his suspicion confirmed that he was Ludwig Geyer's son and not the son
of Carl Friedrich Wagner. Conway also suggests that Wagner believed,
incorrectly, that Geyer was of partially Jewish descent, so that he
likewise was of partly Jewish descent. The republication of _Das
Judenthum_ was therefore a reaction to this news and a pre-emptive
strike, intended to divert attention away from his own share of Jewish
ancestry.
This revisits an old issue: whether Wagner's antisemitism was a
defensive reaction to his own suspicion that he was himself of Jewish
descent. In the meantime I'm not going to use that theory, though
there's a relevant and interesting suggestion in William Wallace's
previously cited Wagner book that I'll try to explore, along with
another avenue. Anyway, it seems that I can't ignore the Geyer issue
(though I had intended to), but I'll leave it to a later post.
My version
First, all explanations for an action taken 133 years ago are going to
be speculative. My explanation stays as close as I can to
contemporary records, especially the _Diaries_ and some contemporary
letters, but it's still only speculation. Anyone who reads this knows
that it's only speculation, of course; I'm just pointing out that I
know it too.
The entries in Richard's Annals and Cosima's Diaries for the period in
which Wagner was considering whether to republish _Judenthum_, around
mid-November 1868 to 21 January 1869, show concern over family issues
in the foreground: the merging of Cosima's and Richard's families, and
especially Cosima's fears and guilts over this. Money worries,
another Wagnerian hardy perennial, also emerged to the foreground from
time to time.
Resentments over the frustrations and political game playing in Munich
seem to have receded to the background by January 1869. On 20 January
1869, the day before Richard made his decision, there was an indignant
reference to a contract he'd been asked to sign concerning the
_Meistersinger_ rights, but that's a slightly different issue and in
any case an isolated reference. Still, the Wagners had left most such
things behind when they left Munich behind for their two-month Italian
holiday, from which they'd just returned as the Annals end and the
Diaries begin. Moreover the recent news on the Munich front was good:
_Die Meistersinger_ had had a successful premiere, and Wagner was
getting favourable reviews there and elsewhere.
Considering the focus on family issues in the Wagners' own records,
the apparent distance, after the Italian holiday, from Munich's
stresses, and the recent positive reception for Wagner's works,
especially for _Die Meistersinger_, explanations that link the
republication only to adverse external events are likely to be missing
something important.
My speculation is that Wagner had family matters, and specificsally
Cosima matters, on his mind at this time. He would have felt that
Cosima's ancestry through the Bethmann side of her family was
potentially embarrassing to his new family. As Katz says, Wagner
wrongly thought that his critics already knew about his 1850
publication of _Judenthum_; he therefore thought that his critics were
already in a position to use that essay against him, so republication
wouldn't make things worse, in that sense. In fact he thought they
were already using it against him, but always without actually
mentioning the essay itself.
Therefore, I suspect that Wagner's thinking was approximately along
the following lines. Because his enemies already knew about the
essay, they would have noticed that he had backed away from
republishing it when a collected edition of his essays was printed in
1867. In 1867 his silent withdrawal of the essay from that edition
would (he thought) have been noted with satisfaction, but it wasn't
worth using against him.
But in 1869 things were different. Richard's relationship with Cosima
was now in the open. Cosima was already vulnerable to press attack as
the scarlet woman who had left her husband for one of the most
notorious artists in Europe; and her ancestry, also no secret, would
provide his enemies with a new angle for attacking him and Cosima.
That angle was: the great critic of the Jews had found a Jewish(ish)
mistress, a lady who liked antisemites so much that she married one
and was now living in sin with another, and as a result the great
critic now had to eat his words about the Jews. Had he not backed
away from republishing _Das Judenthum_ when it should have been part
of the 1867 collected essays? The press ridicule would be ribald, not
only about himself, but also about Cosima and possibly the children.
Hence the attraction of the pre-emptive strike, not just for his own
sake but for his family's. If he republished he would direct fire
away from his family circumstances and back to his essay, and anyway,
he believed that the essay would put his enemies on the defensive
rather than the attack. Certainly (he would no doubt have thought
with satisfaction) he could add a few lines to give the likes of
Joachim and Hanslick something to think about.
That's a speculative reconstruction of a thought process, on which
I'll make four comments. First, the line of thought I'm suggesting
for Wagner is an essentially paranoid one. But there's ample evidence
that his thinking around this time in particular really was somewhat
paranoid. Wagner assumed that the press were more hostilely obsessed
by him, and more aware of his affairs (in every sense), than was
really the case.
Second, my speculated line of thinking rests on the assumption that
Wagner would make an aggressive decision, to go on the attack if he
thought it would ward the retaliation away from Cosima and onto
himself. This does not sentimentalise Wagner. He was a bad man in
all sorts of contexts, and especially so in the context of
_Judenthum_, but he could be a fiercely loyal father and husband -
leaving aside that penchant for adultery, of course. And Wagner's
life, letters and Cosima's _Diaries_ amply illustrate that he was apt
to think that attack is the best means of defence.
A third point is that the _Diaries_ show that Richard and Cosima were
both under considerable stress at this time. Anyone who has merged
two families, or watched friends or relatives go through the process,
will be aware that at least some of the decisions made at such a time
will not reflect their makers at their rational best. (Not that
Wagner was big on rationality at the best of times; but it's
reasonable to assume a higher irrationality quotient than usual.)
My fourth point is that I am not suggesting that this is the sole
reason for Wagner's decision to republish. The knowledge that he
could no longer hide the relationship with Cosima and the fact that
they were now merging families are likely to have triggered his first
reconsideration of the essay, and to have been a major factor in the
decision to republish. But no one explanation is likely to be
complete.
The considerations raised by Katz and Fischer are likely also to have
been important parts of the mix. Wagner did believe he and his works
were under attack and that the critics leading the attack were Jewish.
And he seems to have believed that republication would both make it
clear why he was being attacked and show that the attacks were
unreasonable, since the essay only told the truth. (I'm speaking of
Wagner's perception of reality, obviously.) At the same time, Wagner
can't have minded the consideration that he could use the
republication to pay off some more recent scores, giving a serve to
Joachim, Hanslich and others.
It's also likely that Wagner was still committed to the essay's thesis
that Jews were responsible for the trivialising of arts and culture in
Germany, France and elsewhere. However the evidence generally
indicates that he didn't expect republication to have any effect in
that regard; it seems more likely that his reasons for republication
were personal rather than doctrinal.
I do have one further theory, one so radical that it's not surprising
that no one seems to have ever thought of it before. Cosima returns
over and again to the household's shortage of money. Wagner had a
controversial essay omitted from his recent collected works, which
might bring some badly needed cash into the household. This
suggestion is so unusual that it could make a headline: Author
publishes for money!
So in sum, I'd say the following considerations led to the fateful
1869 republication of _Das Judenthum_:
* A pre-emptive strike intended to divert attention from various
ironies concerning Cosima's Jewish ancestry;
* An attempt to show up his Jewish (he thought) critics, by revealing
that they were only getting at Wagner because of this essay, and to
give readers the chance to judge the essay (favourably, he thought)
for themselves;
* The wish to strike out at certain individuals, with Meyerbeer and
Mendelssohn joined by Joachim, Hanslick, and various others;
* Wagner still thought that Jews were responsible for the trivialising
of arts and culture in Germany, France and elsewhere, though he did
not expect the essay to have any effect on this;
* Money: sometimes even a scoundrel will write, or publish, for money.
There are other consequences that may flow from the Bethmann issue,
but probably its likely influence on the _Judenthum_ republication
decision is one of the most drastic. I'll come back to some other
consequences, but having found a couple of unexpected things about the
Geyer issue, I probably have to re-visit it first, though I'd planned
to avoid it entirely.
Cheers!
Laon
Tauser
might you have meant "rabid"?? (although 'ribald' is apt)
Excellent exposition!
Tauser
Derrick Everett
> David Conway takes a different approach, saying that the note in
> Wagner's Annals, "Consider Judenthum again", the first sign that Wagner
> is toying with the idea of republication, was written one week after
> Wagner's visit to his sister Cäcilie in Leipzig. (That note is one of a
> series of annotations written following the date 16 November, but before
> the next date Wagner specified, which was 25 December. I'm not so sure
> that we know exactly when Wagner made that note. But that's a quibble;
> the note must have been written somewhere between mid-November and
> mid-December, which is basically the right time.)
For the benefit of any readers who do not have Wagner's Annals to hand,
the relevant part (entries for November-December 1868) reads as follows:
16 Nov. Cos[ima] arrives with Loldi and Eva alone.
Delayed decision explained.
My part of the house occupied by C[osima] and the children.
Little from without.
Within: dictation of biography, Siegfried score.
Beginning December, Swabian parlour maid: nursery furnished.
Judith Mendès [Gautier].
Write to Porges about book he is to write.
Nohl: trouble over sketches.
Many deaths: start register.
Reminiscences of Rossini.
Hans [von Bülow] writes.
Negotiations with Vienna.
Dingelstedt.
Berlin -- Mimi [Marie von] Buch.
Eckert engaged.
Caviar and herring: Leipzig.
[Oswald] Marbach: Medea evening.
Otherwise much Körner and some Schiller.
Finish fair copy of Siegfried Act I.
Consider Judaism again.
Claire Charnacè: something Mathilda-ish.
Abdominal trouble with serenity of heart.
Cos[ima] -- suffering mostly.
Genelli. His Outlines to Homer.
1 black and 4 white songs from old times.
Birthday [Cosima's] Christmas,
children as butterfly angels.
25 Dec. ...
> Conway says that it was during Wagner's visit to Cäcilie that he had his
> suspicion confirmed that he was Ludwig Geyer's son and not the son of
> Carl Friedrich Wagner.
> Conway also suggests that Wagner believed, incorrectly, that Geyer was
> of partially Jewish descent, so that he likewise was of partly Jewish
> descent. The republication of _Das Judenthum_ was therefore a reaction
> to this news and a pre-emptive strike, intended to divert attention away
> from his own share of Jewish ancestry.
The theory that Richard Wagner was concerned about the possibility that he
was of Jewish descent through his step-father Ludwig Geyer is one that we
have discussed here before. My take on this theory is: (1) it is a red
herring dragged out by Nietzsche at his most malicious, and (2) that Wagner
was sincere when he told Cosima that he did not believe that Geyer, the
actor and painter, had been his biological father. From a comparison of
portraits of Ludwig Geyer, Richard Wagner and his brother, I can see no
reason for Wagner to have believed that Geyer was his father.
[Gutman, however, explained the resemblence of Richard to his siblings by
the bold hypothesis that Geyer was the father of all of them. In doing so
he ignored the difficulty presented by the inconvenient lack of any physical
resemblence between Richard and his step-father.]
Mike Scott Rohan
from pra...@presto.net.au (Laon) contains these words:
{snip}
> So in sum, I'd say the following considerations led to the fateful
> 1869 republication of _Das Judenthum_:
> * A pre-emptive strike intended to divert attention from various
> ironies concerning Cosima's Jewish ancestry;
> * An attempt to show up his Jewish (he thought) critics, by revealing
> that they were only getting at Wagner because of this essay, and to
> give readers the chance to judge the essay (favourably, he thought)
> for themselves;
> * The wish to strike out at certain individuals, with Meyerbeer and
> Mendelssohn joined by Joachim, Hanslick, and various others;
> * Wagner still thought that Jews were responsible for the trivialising
> of arts and culture in Germany, France and elsewhere, though he did
> not expect the essay to have any effect on this;
> * Money: sometimes even a scoundrel will write, or publish, for money.
>
This is extremely good, certainly worth publishing in itself. That
said, I don't agree with several parts of it, notably the pre-emptive
strike theory. Even for Wagner it would be fairly batty reasoning;
such republication would risk stirring up far more Cosima-related
controversy than it dampened.
Bear in mind that while Wagner felt the attacks on him came from a
Jewish-oriented press, the attacks themselves -- at least the ones I
have read -- were not on his anti-semitism. They concentrated on his
pretensions, his "unlistenable" music, his left-wing politics and
above all his morals and his extravagance. The press attacks were not
aimed at intellectual circles, but at the ordinary citizens of the
newspaper-reading classes, largely bourgeoisie great and small.
Anti-semitism could only have been a really effective charge among
intellectuals. Beyond them, anti-Jewish views were common enough so
that the attackers could not rely on them as a charge; whatever they
themselves thought, for the man in the street it might even have been
a draw. It would have been like attacking a New South Wales politico
in the 1950s for being anti-abo, instead of taking all those
"fact-finding" junkets to Europe....
The rest I think is much more convincing, and fits the pattern of
Wagner's behaviour in other situations. Wagner certainly seems to
have seen the republication as a riposte of some kind. No doubt he
mentions the Princess's request to camouflage any motive so
undignified, show his gentlemanly reticence being overcome by the
noble lady's interest etc etc. And he would much rather show himself
as renewing a general alarm than striking back at specific enemies,
who should be beneath his elevated notice.
He may also have wished to demonstrate to the world at large that his
attack in "Judentum" had been reasoned and well motivated, something
wholly different from "mere" anti-Jewish prejudice of the common sort
-- as to some extent it is. That it nevertheless stemmed largely from
the same prejudice, and is a tortuous rationalization of it, is
something Wagner himself may well not have realized. He always liked
to see himself as lofty and high-minded, and to present himself that
way to the world. He may therefore, as you say, have felt
republication would show him in a better light.
The same feeling would make him see republication as something of a
duty, even if, as you say, he did not expect it to have any effect.
We part company, though, on the money issue. From what I know of the
economics of publishing a pamphlet in those days, you usually
expected to lose money, or at least not to make anything significant.
It was an accepted way of getting your views across to the public,
but even a famous and controversial name would not guarantee a large
sum, because the royalty system as such did not operate. What you
usually got, at best, was a flat fee, or a percentage of the mark-up
on whatever quantities your publisher could sell to booksellers,
newsvendors and other distributors, and naturally to get the widest
coverage you had to keep this low. Wagner may have had the clout to
make different arrangements in this case, but I suspect not. At best
it would bring in some pocket-money -- though of course anyone who
lives by the pen never scorns this!
But as I said, good argument!
Cheers,
Mike
--
mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk
Kimberley Cornish
I console myself about having being called a "Nazi dupe" and a
"scoundrel" in earlier posts on this site with the thought that while
gentlemanly behaviour is not what it once was, neither is England and
one must sadly adapt to more barbarous times. On the other hand, the
matters being discussed are of such absolutely colossal importance
that I cannot but persist in urging people to investigate my
Wagner/Hitler/Wittgenstein hypothesis a little further. Accordingly, I
swallow some pride and, for scholarship's sake, make my plea:
I shall refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein's family as the Wittgensteins and
the aristocratic German family of the same name as the
Sayn-Wittgensteins. (The Sayn-Wittgensteins date back to the twelfth
century and Count Henry of Sayn, as a prominent German aristocrat even
then, was accused of heresy by the Papal inquisitor Conrad of Marburg
in 1233, who preached the Crusade of 1213. The Sayn-Wittgensteins have
featured prominently in German history for nearly a thousand years,
not least as Teutonic Knights and Cosima's father was intimately
connected with Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein. Some of this
material has been presented in the abortive "Crusader" post on this
website and I shall not rehash matters here, except to register
amazement that nobody seemed to think that Wagner's connection to
Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein might not be worth investigating
in the context of the knightly background of von Eschenbach's
"Parzival" and the demonstrable dating of the origins of the
Sayn-Wittgensteins to von Eschenbach's time.)
The Jewish Wittgensteins had acquired their Wittgenstein name from
being Court-Jews at the Sayn-Wittgenstein court. Ludwig Wittgenstein's
grandfather was a very rich Leipzig merchant and his son Karl was to
become the premier industrialist in the Austro-Hungarian empire and
the man who industrialized what was to become Czechoslovakia.
Fanny Figdor, Ludwig Wittgenstein's grandmother, was the niece of
Joseph Joachim's mother. She adopted the young Joseph Joachim and
raised him, first in Vienna and then in Leipzig, where she moved on
marrying Ludwig Wittgenstein's grandfather. In Leipzig, Mendelssohn -
who founded the Leipzig Conservatory - was a frequent visitor to the
Wittgenstein home and he took the young Joachim/Wittgenstein on tours
of England. The Wittgenstein daughters were taught music by Clara
Schumann.
In Vienna, Karl Wittgenstein set up his salon at the Palais
Wittgenstein and entertained Brahms, Mahler, Labor, Joachim, Sibelius,
the critic Hanslick and the conductor Bruno Walter, amongst many other
luminaries over a period of nearly half a century. Karl's son Paul
commissioned pieces by Ravel and Prokovieff and supported Korngold in
America. The family, in other words, straddled the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as very first rank patrons of music.
They were, however, arch foes of Wagner during his lifetime. Cosima
fumed against Joachim/Wittgenstein and held his malign influence to be
the reason the Kaisermarsch could not be played in Berlin at the
celebrations of the 1870 victory over France. Likewise, in Vienna,
Hanslick was on the side of Brahms and the Wittgensteins against
Wagner.
Now Derrick has kindly provided entries from Wagner's Annals for the
period November-December 1868, which include the line "negotiations
with Vienna". Given the manifest power of the Wittgensteins over
Viennese cultural life it is reasonable to expect a Wittgenstein hand
opposing Wagner. My question is then; Does anyone have any details of
Wittgenstein influence and patronage of the Vienna Opera House and of
music generally in Austria?
In the related field of Art, Wittgenstein dominance was near total,
Karl being the financier of the Secession building, of the Secession
movement and patron of Klimt. I appear to be the first to have
suggested that Hitler's school-fellow, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein
might be referred to specifically in "Mein Kampf". Before my book,
critics took the young Hitler to have been essentially an ignorant
country yokel, with no connection to any Jewish family of any
significance. If I am right, however, the matter of a
Hitler/Wittgenstein connection really is of absolutely critical
historical importance. The relation between the Wittgensteins and
Wagner then becomes likewise of very first importance. Laon's ongoing
investigation of my point about the Bethmann's Jewish origins has
clearly been fruitful. I was not aware of the Bethmann-Hollweg
connection to the German Chancellorship that he turned up. May I
commend this matter of Wittgenstein/Wagner connections to the group as
likely to be of even greater importance.
Sincerely,
Kimberley Cornish.
Kimberley Cornish
My sentence "The family, in other words, straddled the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as very first rank patrons of music" should
obviously have read "The family, in other words, straddled the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as very first rank patrons of
music". Sorry about that.
Sincerely,
Kimberley Cornish.
Laon
> Various kind things, though he disagreed with my suggestion that the Cosima/Bethmann issue influenced the decision to republish _Das Judenthum_.
So I thank him for the kind words, and likewise thanks to Tauser.
But I'll have another go at explaining why it seems to me that the
Cosima/Bethmann issue, and the formation of the new Wagner menage, is
likely to be a leading issue in the decision to republish _Judenthum_.
It's speculation, but reasoned speculation based on two assumptions,
one of which is substantiated by contemporary documents while the
other follows logically from the first.
The first assumption is that Wagner was a paranoid thinker in general,
and in particular that Wagner had two ideas, which were incorrect and
fateful:
* His newspaper critics and the hostile powers in the music business
already knew about _Das Judenthum_; and
* They knew and cared more about his private life than was the case.
This assumption is substantiated by various _Diary_ references and
Wagner letters, and is agreed to by sensible non-axe-grinding Wagner
critics like Jacob Katz, for example. I'd add that at that particular
time Wagner would have been more paranoid than usual because of his
family stresses; but Wagner's normal degree of paranoia is enough for
the assumption to be reasonable.
The second assumption follows logically from the first. Because
Wagner thought that _Judenthum_ was already known to his critics, and
he thought his enemies were watching and spreading stories about his
private life, he would also think that to do nothing, that is, to
withhold _Judenthum_ from republication even as his prose works were
being collected and published, would be an action, a noteworthy
decision that could have consequences, every bit as much as
republishing would be an action.
A number of things follow from those two reasonably well supported
assumptions. First, it is reasonable to assume that Wagner thought
that his failure to republish the essay in the 1867 edition had
already been noticed, triumphantly, by those hostile critics who, he
believed, knew the essay and had their eyes on him. It's not only
logical for Wagner to hold that belief, given his premises, but it's
fairly convincing in terms of character and emotion.
And that brings us to his situation in 1869. In 1867 the consequences
of withholding the essay were (he thought) only that his enemies
thought they had won a withdrawal, a backing down. I suspect that
that thought would have galled him considerably, and this would also
have affected his decision-making in 1869. But in 1869, because the
relationship with Cosima was now out in the open, a new risk existed,
at least in the view of a man who thought that his enemies knew about
his essay and about his private life.
In 1869 it would seem that he could be accused not only of cowardice
in keeping the essay out of print (as in 1867), but also of hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy issue, what's worse, involved his new menage with
Cosima of the Jewish Bethmann family, and his silence on _Judenthum_
now Cosima was in his bed.
(I'm putting this in the terms that a newspaper story could be
written; though I think Wagner's premises were in general paranoid, it
is probably true that a satirical journal like _Kladderdatsch_, for
example, would be quite capable of something along those lines. Note
to Tauser: I did mean to use the word "ribald", in relation to
Wagner's expectations of the newspapers.)
What's more, by keeping _Judenthum_ from the press as his other essays
were republished, at the same time as openly and scandalously living
with Cosima, it would be in character for Wagner to think that he
would not only be giving his enemies a target for their ridicule -
Cosima, and his relationship with her - but he would be emboldening
them by seeming to be backing down.
So my argument that the Cosima/Bethmann issue affected Wagner decision
to republish is closely linked to the idea that Wagner thought the
essay and his private life were already in the hands of his critics,
so that non-publication had likely consequences just as republication
would have consequences.
Moreover, the same assumptions that made Wagner think that there would
be consequences from "backing down", as he saw it, also led him to
underestimate the consequences of republication.
Because he thought that his enemies in the media and the music
business already knew about the essay, he thought that republication
would cause a fuss, but he seems to have no idea what it would really
bring. He seems to have expected two main results, both of which
would be positive:
* He would have closed off the avenue of ridiculing him via Cosima, by
showing that his new family had made no difference to his views or his
willingness to express them; therefore republishing turned his family
into a non-issue, and so any return fire would be directed at him, not
his family;
* His enemies already knew the essay, he thought, so nothing would
change in that regard and he thought no further damage could be done
to him in that line; however he seemed to have expected that other
people who didn't know the essay would no doubt be struck by how true
and fair (etc) the article was, and so on balance he would be better
off.
Put that together with the other considerations mentioned in the
previous post on this, and I think we have a full explanation of the
republication decision. Moreover it is more closely matched than
previous explanations to the issues that appear to have been on
Wagner's mind at the time he was making this notoriously bad and mad
decision.
I can't prove it, of course; I can only argue that it fits the
evidence and is psychologically plausible. Anyway, if there weren't
disagreements, life would be pretty damn tedious.
Oh, yeah: on the question of money, his publisher seems to have been
actively interested in issuing the essay. So I assume that it was
expected to bring in a bit of money to the Wagner household, and at
that time every little bit would have helped. But I have no idea
whether Wagner got an advance, nor what he received as the edition
sold. Still, he was an experienced hack journo, and I'd expect that
he knew how to squeeze money out of a publisher. Topic for further
research, I guess. Possibly not by me.
Thanks also for your other comments, particularly about Wagner's
self-perception, which I entirely agree with.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
The Ludwig Geyer issue is one of the chestnut Wagner arguments, like
why Siegmund invokes the "Renunciation of Love" motif when he grasps
Nothung. And the Geyer combatants seem some time ago to have reached
a sort of weary truce on the topic: whether or not Geyer was Wagner's
real father, Geyer wasn't Jewish, so the issue doesn't make much
difference anyway, at least in relation to Wagner's antisemitism.
I've changed my mind on Geyer at least a couple of times over the
years. For the last year or so my position has been that Geyer was
very likely Wagner's father, that Wagner alternated between strong
suspicion and belief that this was the case, and that since no-one
contemporary seems to have suggested that Geyer was Jewish, the
question has little to do with Wagner's antisemitism. That was my
view, and I hadn't intended to touch on the issue in this thread. But
I've found a couple of things that reopen a couple of aspects of the
Geyer issue, so I am writing about it. Reluctantly.
It may be helpful to start by getting get some dates clear. Ludwig
Geyer, according to Newman (volume 1, page 29), first became an
intimate of Karl Friedrich Wagner and his wife Johanna Wagner (Richard
Wagner's mother) in late 1800, and according to Glasenapp (English
edition, Vol 1, pages 42-43) started living in the Wagner home just
after Johanna's 30th birthday, which means late 1808. Richard Wagner
was conceived in around August 1812, and born in May 1813. Carl
Friedrich Wagner died in October 1813.
In fact there isn't just one Geyer issue; there are five Geyer issues.
They are:
1 Was Ludwig Geyer the real father of Richard Wagner?
2 Did Wagner suspect/believe that Geyer was his real father?
3 Was Geyer of Jewish descent?
4 Was it suspected/believed, by Wagner and/or others, that Geyer was
or might be of Jewish descent?
5 So what?
Once again, most people will already know most of what follows. The
proportion of new material is again quite low, but I still have to
restate the familiar to show where the small amount of new material
fits.
1 Was Ludwig Geyer the real father of Richard Wagner?
Actually, this issue could probably be settled. We could dig up
Geyer's bones or ashes, take a DNA sample from them, and compare that
sample with DNA samples from Wolfgang. Me, I'd put $1000 on a match,
and for me $1 is a very big bet. I only play poker for matchsticks.
But short of DNA testing, we'll have to make do with circumstantial
evidence.
The strongest arguments in favour of the Police Actuary Karl Friedrich
Wagner being the father of Richard Wagner are:
(i) Karl Friedrich Wagner was married to Richard's mother Johanna
Wagner, and even as late as the 19th century it was statistically
quite common for the father of a child, whose mother is married, to be
the man who is married to the child's mother;
(ii) Richard physically resembled his older brother Albert Wagner, who
is certainly Karl Friedrich Wagner's son, being conceived before
Johanna, at least, met Ludwig Geyer;
(iii) The letters between Ludwig Geyer and Johanna Wagner, at a time
when they should be intimates if Geyer is Richard's father, used the
"Sie" form of address;
(iv) Wagner once said to Cosima, "Geyer was not my father."
On the first point it's only necessary to observe that there are many
counter-examples, and in the case of the Wagner household there are
clear indications, discussed below, that this is likely to be one of
the counter-examples.
On the resemblance between Karl's son Albert Wagner, and the younger
brother or half-brother Richard Wagner, it's only necessary to point
out that both certainly had one parent in common, their mother.
Having half their genetic inheritance in common is enough to explain a
resemblance. Moreover, Cosima noted a resemblance between Richard's
son Siegfried Wagner and Ludwig Geyer, which would imply genetic input
from Geyer. However, people who are quite unrelated often happen to
resemble each other, and really it's unwise to place much weight on
arguments by resemblance, in either direction.
(Two other "resemblance" arguments have been made. One is that Karl
Wagner was once described as a small man with a big head, which was
also the case with Richard Wagner. But there is no known portrait of
Karl Wagner, and we simply don't know whether there was any
significant resemblance between him and Richard Wagner. The "small
man with big head" claim should probably be accorded the same weight
that Newman gave the work of a French "expert", a M Bélart, who
claimed all sorts of phrenological resemblances between Ludwig Geyer
and Richard Wagner. That is, no weight at all. The other argument is
that Richard Wagner's handwriting resembles that of Karl Wagner's
brother Adolph Wagner. However Adolph Wagner helped bring up Richard
after Geyer's death, and direct influence is a more likely explanation
than some otherwise unknown genetic influence on handwriting.)
On the third point, Newman notes (and gives examples demonstrating the
point) that it wasn't unusual at that time, and even in the late 19th
century, for lovers and engaged couples, even after some years of
courting, to use the "Sie" form of address in letters. "Sie" was no
evidence against intimacy, even sexual intimacy. There's more on the
letters, but that can come under the arguments for Ludwig as Richard
Wagner's father.
The fourth point, that Richard once said to Cosima, "Geyer was not my
father", I'll hold off comment on until my next post in this thread,
which will concern what Wagner thought or suspected on this issue.
The main arguments for Ludwig Geyer as father of Richard Wagner are:
(i) Karl Wagner's alleged exhaustion and sickness.
Richard Wagner was probably conceived in late August 1812, though if
the reports that he was a small and sickly baby mean he was born
somewhat premature, he might have been conceived up to a couple of
months later. Some authorities have suggested that by August 1812
Karl Wagner was a sick and exhausted man, and unlikely to have been
rogering women and siring children, while Geyer the lodger, on the
other hand, was very much up and about. Certainly Karl Wagner had
only 15 months to live, at the most likely time for the conception of
Richard Wagner.
However, it seems that Karl Wagner was only worked to exhaustion from
the commencement of the French campaign in Saxony, in August 1813, and
his fatal sickness began with the outbreak of typhus in Leipzig in
October 1813. These times are well after Richard's conception. Is a
man who falls sick and dies in late 1813 too sickly to have sex in
late 1812? He might possibly be, but one can't assume that's the
case. A better reason for the disruption of marital relations (as a
social worker would put it) between Karl and Johanna Wagner is
suggested by Richard Wagner himself.
(ii) Actresses, infidelity and "filling Karl's place"
_Mein Leben_ starts by saying that Richard Wagner is the son of Karl
Wagner. However it also provides a series of hints that indicate that
Wagner's suspicions on his parentage were alive in 1865, when he began
dictating his autobiography.
Wagner tells us that the home situation around the time of his
conception was that Karl Wagner was paying court to an actress,
Wilhelmine Hartwig. He would lie to his wife, telling her that he was
working late at the office while he spent time with Wilhelmine. On
one occasion he backed his claim to have worked late by claiming to
have ink on his hands, but did not present these for inspection; when
Johanna insisted, his hands turned out to be clean. Moreover, Wagner
said that Karl "was not free of a gallant warmth of feeling" for
various other actresses.
So, Wagner continued, "while the Police Actuary was spending his
evenings at the theatre, the worthy actor Geyer generally filled his
place in the family circle (im Schosse seiner Familie), and, it seems,
had often to appease my mother, who complained, rightly or wrongly, of
her husband's inconstancy."
The word translated as "inconstancy" is "Flatterhaftigheit", which
also means "infidelity". And in the phrase "the family circle", the
translator has nicely preserved another Wagnerian pun: also a common
Shakespearian pun. The word translated as "circle", "Schosse", can
mean "lap" as in the German idiom "in the lap of the family", but it
also means "womb". So when Wagner talks of Ludwig Geyer consoling
Johanna by filling the unfaithful Karl Wagner's place in the family
womb, it's hard not to suspect that Wagner is trying to tell us
something.
(iii) Johanna's visit to Teplitz
The thing that put it beyond doubt for Newman and many others is
Johanna's 150-mile journey from the family home in Leipzig to Ludwig
Geyer's new lodgings in Teplitz in July 1813. Why, people ask, would
a woman travel 150 miles with a two-month old baby in war-time through
enemy occupied territory, during the Napoleonic invasion, to meet a
man unless that man was emotionally important to her? In particular,
unless it was to show the man the newly-born baby?
And there's the fact that Richard Wagner's baptism was delayed for a
highly unusual three months: that is, young Richard was not baptised
until after Johanna had been to talk with Geyer, and shown him the new
baby.
But while that might seem to place the matter beyond doubt, nothing in
Wagner is ever "beyond doubt". One counter-argument is the point that
actually Geyer had invited both the Wagners to come and visit him at
Teplitz, Karl and Johanna. So the invitation itself was apparently
respectable. The only extraordinary thing is that Johanna decided to
go on her own after Karl Wagner was too busy to leave Leipzig.
But (say I) surely Geyer would have known, when issuing his
invitation, that Karl Wagner, as Police Actuary, could not possibly
accept such an invitation during the emergency of the war.
Invitations to both partners of a marriage, which can only practically
be accepted by one partner, are not exactly an uncommon technique in
the annals of adultery.
Curt von Westernhagen in Vol 1 of his Wagner biography (Wagner: A
Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, London, New York,
Melbourne, 1978, page 7) suggests a different counter-argument: that
Johanna often visited Teplitz in the summer, and that Teplitz was
perfectly safe during that stage of the Napoleonic campaign, so there
is nothing to be explained. Which would be all very well if it was
only a matter of how things would be once Johanna had arrived in
Teplitz, but in reality Johanna had to travel through a war zone to
get there. Westernhagen's attempt to present the journey as
unremarkable is quite unconvincing.
My feeling is that Johanna's war-time journey is too extraordinary to
be presented as a routine holiday. And that Geyer's invitation to
both Wagners to come and visit merely put a respectable face on an
invitation that could only in practice be accepted by Johanna. That
is, Newman's conclusion that this was a journey in which Johanna went
to show Geyer his new son, and discuss questions concerning the
baptism, is still far the most likely reading of this event.
(iv) The Cäcilie letters
In October 1868 Wagner visited his sister Cäcilie, who was certainly
Ludwig Geyer's child as she was conceived after Karl Wagner's death
(though not much after). Cäcile seems to have shown Richard letters
between Ludwig Geyer and Johanna Wagner, some of which were written
before Karl Wagner's death and some of which were written after. It
seems that some of these letters are now missing; what we have is
suggestive but not definite.
However the set that Richard Wagner saw seem to have confirmed his
suspicion that Geyer was not only Cäcilie's father but also his own.
When Cäcilie gave Richard the letters as a Christmas present in
December 1869, Wagner wrote back (14 January 1870) saying that from
the letters, "it was possible for me to gain a deep insight into the
relations between these two in difficult times. I see now with
absolute clearness, though I must consider it extremely difficult to
express myself on those relations as I see them. It looked to me as
if our father Geyer, with his self-sacrifice for the whole family,
believed he must atone for a guilt." Wagner's choice of words
indicate that the letters told him something important about his
mother and Geyer, about which he found it difficult to speak. And he
refers to Geyer as "our father Geyer."
It's been argued that the "guilt" that Wagner mentioned, the "Schuld"
that made Geyer take responsibility for Johanna and the children, was
just a money debt and not something deeper. It's also been argued
that Wagner's words "our father Geyer" didn't really mean he was
acknowledging that Geyer was his father. And so on. Those arguments
have some validity; the letter to Cäcilie doesn't actually contain a
clear statement along the lines, "Geyer was your father and mine."
For that and other reasons it is possible to read the letter as less
than a definite statement. Still, the easiest and most obvious
reading is that the letters convinced Wagner that Geyer had committed
a sin that was likely to make him feel responsibility for Johanna and
the children (and the most likely "guilt" that might have that effect
is an affair with Johanna while Karl was alive) and an acknowledgment
that Geyer was the father of both Richard and Cäcilie.
There are a couple of further points about the surviving letters
between Ludwig Geyer and Johanna, which strongly indicate (though not
quite proving beyond all doubt) the existence of an intimate
relationship between them, before Karl Wagner's death. For example on
29 December 1813, when Karl Wagner had been dead for only five weeks,
Ludwig wrote to Johanna apologise for something, it's not clear what.
But he promised that he would stop being "jealous", and he asked
Johanna to do the same.
At the time of Karl's death Ludwig was in Dresden, and visited Leipzig
only once (to find new lodgings for Johanna and the children) between
Karl's death and his sending that letter. No doubt Ludwig was a
charming man and a fast worker, but that's still a lot of ground to
travel in just five weeks from the day Johanna became a widow, with
only one actual meeting between them in that time. Again it seems
difficult to read this letter, referring to jealousies between him and
Johanna, without concluding that an intimate relationship between
Ludwig and Johanna existed before Karl's death.
Moreover, when Geyer wrote to Johanna, clearly indicating that he is
going to propose (11 February 1814), he wrote, "I have a great deal to
say to you, and I impatiently await the time when I can have a
heart-to-heart talk with you on the cosy sofa." [Another translator
gives that "cosy sofa" as "dear old sofa"; I haven't seen the German
text.] Again the suggestion is not only of intimacy between them but
of familiar rather than new intimacy. It suggests a long-established
relationship, that had to have become established during Karl's
lifetime.
(v) Cäcilie's conception
Cäcilie was born on 26 February 1815, which suggests that she was
conceived in late May 1814, just six months after Karl's death, and a
not-quite-respectable seven months after Ludwig and Johanna married.
Again, that suggests a fast progression to intimate relations, on
Johanna and Ludwig's part, if the relationship did not already exist
while Karl was alive. But that point has already been made.
(vi) Richard Geyer
It's suggestive but not conclusive that young Richard originally took
the name Geyer, not Wagner. This is generally dismissed as merely
being a matter of the child taking the name of the step-father. It's
been argued that it would have been simplest for young Richard to have
the name of the man who was acting as his father, and therefore the
name question is not much of an indication one way or the other.
That seems reasonable enough on the surface. But there are two other
points. First, none of the other Wagner children, the ones who were
clearly Karl Wagner's children, took Geyer's name. Not even Ottilie
Wagner, was was only two years old when Karl Wagner died and Geyer
adopted her. Only Richard.
Moreover, when Richard Geyer attended the Dresden Kreuzschule after
Geyer's death, he was entered in the roll as "Wilhelm Richard Geyer,
son of the deceased Court-player Geyer." [This school roll seems to
have been unearthed by William Wallace, op cit, page 300.] Now it
would be understandable if Wagner had been entered as Geyer's son on
an official document while Geyer was alive: again, it would simplify
relationships for young Richard and for his teachers. But it is odd
that Richard was still recorded as Geyer's son after Geyer was dead.
Why preserve such a fiction when it no longer had any point, unless of
course it wasn't a fiction?
(vii) The "Cossack": an only son?
Another argument is a highly subjective one, and comes in two parts.
The first is that Geyer himself seems to have had a special affection
for Richard, of all the children, which some say indicates a parental
love rather than the benevolence of a step-parent.
Another of Geyer's letters, this one of 22 December 1813, asks Johanna
Wagner to "light a beautiful tree for the Cossack - I should like to
rough it up with that lad on the sofa." Geyer's nickname for the
young Richard Wagner, apparently already a holy terror, was "the
Cossack." Another letter to Johanna (14 January 1814) not only shows
a fatherly love for young Richard but also makes me like the man
Ludwig Geyer very much indeed: "The Cossack's wildness can be nothing
short of divine; for the first window he smashes he shall have a
silver medal! God protect you!" (Cited in Derek Watson's Wagner
biography, op cit, page 21.)
Another argument, advanced by William Wallace (op cit, page 306), is
the unscientific but still interesting suggestion that although Wagner
was one of nine children, throughout his life he behaved (stubborn,
intractable, volatile etc) like an only son. If he was Geyer's son he
was, in one important sense, an only son, and would in his most
formative early years have been loved and spoiled as such. That's not
the sort of argument that would change anyone's mind on this issue,
but it does feel to me like a valid insight.
(viii) Police Actuary versus poet, painter, dramatist, actor, musician
Some people have thought that Karl Wagner was too dull to have had a
genius like Wagner for a son, and on the surface the argument seems
compelling. Who makes the most likely father for Richard Wagner? A
bureacratic Police Actuary, or a multi-talented artist like Geyer?
But I'm only mentioning this argument for completeness' sake. First,
hereditary traits don't work in such a simplistic way. Second, Karl
Wagner was obsessed by the theatre and the arts, which is probably how
he got to meet Ludwig Geyer in the first place. So Wagner had the
theatre in his blood regardless of which father he had.
(ix) Nietzsche
Nietzsche's remarks on this topic will be addressed in the next topic,
concerning what Wagner believed about his parentage.
Summing up, these arguments do not prove that Ludwig Geyer was Richard
Wagner's father. That is probably not something that could be proved
except by DNA testing. But I have to say that it seems clear that the
balance of probabilities leans very far in Ludwig Geyer's favour.
This is probably the uncontroversial conclusion, these days. Still,
some things I mentioned, for example the Dresden school roll, were new
to me. (Though none of this is actually new material.)
Seems that the rest of the Geyer issues will have to wait for another
post.
Cheers!
Laon
Derrick Everett
<snip>
> In fact there isn't just one Geyer issue; there are five Geyer issues.
> They are:
> 1 Was Ludwig Geyer the real father of Richard Wagner?
> 2 Did Wagner suspect/believe that Geyer was his real father?
> 3 Was Geyer of Jewish descent?
> 4 Was it suspected/believed, by Wagner and/or others, that Geyer was or
> might be of Jewish descent?
> 5 So what?
Even when a topic has been discussed as much, here and elsewhere, as that
of Wagner's paternity, it is worth reviewing, especially when the review
is as thorough and considered as the one you have offered. It should be
noted that Wagner's many biographers are divided on the question of which
man was the biological father. In recent years there has been a tendency
to favour Geyer as the father, although the evidence for this conclusion
seems, to me at least, to be less than overwhelming.
Young Richard's registration in 1822 as a pupil of the Dresden Kreuzschule
under the name of Richard Geyer was, I thought, common knowledge -- it is
for example mentioned in Millington's biography. I do not find the
continued use of the name Geyer odd or remarkable in any way, since
Richard Geyer was the only name by which the boy had been known, at least
formally; although like all beloved children he would have had many names,
such as "little Cossack". The death of Ludwig Geyer the previous year
would not have been sufficient reason for the boy to revert to the name on
his birth certificate.
Richard's conversation with Cosima on 26 December 1868, recorded in her
diary entry for that day, should not be ignored. It would be naive to
assume that Richard always told Cosima the whole truth, however, and on
this occasion, as on others, it it likely that his words had more to do
with what he wanted Cosima to believe than with what he believed.
Much has been written about Johanna's journey to Teplitz with the infant
in 1813. As Deathridge and Dahlhaus remarked in New Grove, the purpose of
the journey is still unknown and it only serves to deepen the mystery.
Unless and until there is some conclusive DNA or similar evidence, we
cannot know whether Carl Friedrich Wagner the clerk or Ludwig Geyer the
actor and painter was Richard's biological father. He did not know for
certain which of them. It is possible that his mother did not know
either. What is certain is that "father Geyer", as Richard habitually
referred to Geyer, was the father-figure in the first eight years of
Richard's life.
Richard's uncertainty is revealed by the family crest that he concocted
with the help of Friedrich Nietzsche. The crest contains two symbols: a
vulture (Geier) and the constellation of the Great Bear (der Wagen). This
might be interpreted as showing that Richard Wagner regarded each of these
men as his father.
We know that Geyer was not of Jewish descent, at least not in the few
centuries through which his lineage has been traced. Nietzsche's
insinuations about Geyer, which are not supported by any other source,
have led several of Wagner's biographers (including Gutman and Taylor)
astray. Even if Wagner had speculated about his ancestry, there is
nothing to suggest that he believed that he was Jewish; although we
cannot rule out that possibility.
Does any of this matter? Only I think in so far as it relates to
Richard Wagner's search for his own identity, in an age when those around
him were searching for a national identity. In the end he concluded
that he was not only German, but the definitive German, the most German
of all men. He did not doubt that he was thoroughly German because he
defined what it was to be German. It was inevitable that Nietzsche would
ask the rhetorical question: "Was Wagner a German at all?"
Tauser
important thing is that, although we might be able to prove paternity via DNA
testing, Richard Wagner throughout his life was never sure about this issue and
it could never be resolved for him.
This is what wound up his emotional mainspring.....and inspired a theme in all
of his musicdramas: who am I and where did I come from?
Tauser
Laon
> The words "thorough and considered" for which I thank him, and also:
> Young Richard's registration in 1822 as a pupil of the Dresden Kreuzschule
> under the name of Richard Geyer was, I thought, common knowledge -- it is
> for example mentioned in Millington's biography.
I did think the fact that Wagner was registered at school under the
name Geyer was well known; but the more specific fact that the full
entry of his registration included the words "son of the deceased
Court-player Geyer" I thought is less known. That fact is not in
Newman, Glasenapp, Watson, Chancellor, Gutman, Ellis, Kapp, Pourtales,
Westernhagen, or even Newman, nor various early Wagner biographies
like Runciman, Becker, Chamberlain, Lidgey and others. And it's not
in Millington's discussion of the Geyer question in _The Wagner
Companion_. But Millington's actual Wagner biography was one of the
few major biographies I wasn't able to access while looking at this
stuff. I'll have to check it out later.
But in any case I agree that it does not settle the matter that only
Richard, alone of the children officially attributed to Karl Friedrich
Wagner, was given the name "Geyer", though his older sister was only
two when Geyer adopted her. Nor does it settle the matter that
Richard Geyer was registered at school at Richard Geyer. Nor does it
settle the matter that Richard Geyer was registered as the son of the
Ludwig Geyer, even after Geyer had died. No single piece of evidence
of this kind would settle the matter. It's more the cumulative weight
of a lot of pieces of evidence that leans the balance of probabilities
towards Geyer being the father.
And Tauser said that the key issue was what Richard Wagner thought on
the point; and I agree. That was the next issue on my list, and I
didn't get to it in that initial post on Geyers because there turned
out to be more evidence than I expected, even if it was all
circumstantial. And things refused to stay simple. The remaining
Geyer issues shouldn't take anything like that much space. I'll cover
what Richard Wagner seems to have thought about the Geyer issue in
this post: - though I'm only going to discuss what Wagner seems to
have thought were the facts of the case, that is the purely surface,
informational level. Deeper issues, like what his feelings might have
been about these questions, and how his feelings might have affected
his work and ideas, I'll have to come to later, after I've covered the
third and fourth Geyer issues.
So the Geyer issues I suggested were:
1 Was Ludwig Geyer the real father of Richard Wagner?
2 Did Wagner suspect/believe that Geyer was his real father?
3 Was Geyer of Jewish descent?
4 Was it suspected/believed, by Wagner and/or others, that Geyer was
or might be of Jewish descent?
5 So what?
In relation to the second question I don't have much new information,
but at least I'm offering a new theory that might explain some
apparent contradictions.
2 Did Wagner suspect or believe that Geyer was his real father?
It's clear beyond any reasonable doubt that Wagner _suspected_ that
Geyer was his real father. It's less clear whether he actually came
to believe that Geyer was, or was not, his father.
I've mentioned the hints that Wagner gives in _Mein Leben_, concerning
the relationship between Ludwig Geyer and Johanna Wagner while Karl
Wagner was out bothering actresses. That passage would have been
dictated in around 1865. And there's the 14 January 1870 letter to
Geyer's acknowledged daughter Cäcilie, in which Wagner talks gravely
about the relationship between Ludwig and Johanna, and calls Geyer
"our father." There are other references around this time in which
Wagner refers to Geyer in letters and Cosima's _Diaries_ as "my
father".
Glasenapp, who knew Wagner, mentioned in his biography that "The idea
that the deceased [Geyer] might even have been his real father he
[Wagner] repeatedly expressed as a possibility in conversation with
intimate friends, of whom we could name several." So there was a
period when Wagner was discussing the issue with Glasenapp and other
friends, not just with Nietzsche.
On the other hand there's the _Diary_ entry for 26 December, 1878 (not
1868), in which Cosima noticed a resemblance between young Siegfried
and the portrait of Ludwig Geyer, and asked Richard whether Geyer had
been his father. Richard replied, "That I don't believe. My mother
loved him [Geyer] - elective affinities."
By the way, by "elective affinities" Wagner meant the idea, common at
the time and convenient in cases of suspect parenthood, that a child
may come to resemble some person if, while the child is in the womb,
the mother thought about that person at certain critical times. (Only
a hundred or so years earlier a "scientific curiosity" had been widely
reported, which was an extreme form of the elective affinities theory.
In the early 1700s a woman - I think in England - was reported to
have given birth to a duck after an unfortunate incident during her
pregnancy in which she was frightened by a duck. This now seems like
a joke, but at the time it was taken seriously, at least by the same
kind of people who quite recently believed there was a Face on Mars.)
So Wagner seems to have had his suspicions around 1865, when dictating
_Mein Leben_. It seem probable, in the absence of evidence to the
contrary, that the suspicion he hints at in _Mein Leben_ is a
long-held one, which perhaps went all the way back to the days when
Wagner was Richard Geyer. It's my feeling that Wagner's suspicion
does go back that far, but I couldn't prove it.
Things seem to have hardened some way towards confirmation in November
1868, when Wagner seems to have first seen Cäcilie's collection of
Geyer's letters to Johanna, and December 1869, when Cäcilie passed
them on as a Christmas present. He subsequently talked to various
friends about it, including Nietzsche, unburdening himself on a
somewhat sensitive matter. Just how sensitive the issue could be is
something I'll come to when discussing the next two issues, on whether
Geyer was Jewish, or whether it was likely that Wagner and others
thought that he might be Jewish(ish).
So Wagner had entertained the idea for a long time, and in 1869-1870
and subsequently he seemed happy enough to think of himself as
possibly or probably Geyer's son, and to discuss it with friends. But
in December 1878, the remark to Cosima shows that he had soured on the
the possibility, and he denied Geyer's fatherhood. What had changed?
It's only a speculative connection, but my feeling is that Wagner may
have "shut down" on the issue after Nietzsche's apostasy, which had
become undeniably obvious earlier in 1878. Wagner realised that he
had given potentially embarrassing information to someone who had
turned out to be an enemy, and who might use it against him.
(And Nietzsche eventually did use the confidence against Wagner,
though there may be a kind of honour in Nietzsche's continuing to keep
the secret while Wagner was still alive, only publishing it in May
1888. On the other hand Newman is less convinced of Nietzsche's
honour, and suggests that Nietzsche _told_ the story everywhere, and
only refrained from putting it _in writing_ during Wagner's life.) In
either case, I think it likely that Wagner's alarm at Nietzsche's
apostasy inclined him to be more careful with loose talk on the Geyer
question, and to start moving to put a stop to it. Therefore, among
other things, his negative response to Cosima in December 1878.
That is a speculative explanation that has the merit of fitting the
known facts. That in itself doesn't mean that it's the right
explanation, of course.
It's noteworthy, though, that there seems to have been a general
shut-down on this issue from about 1878 onwards. For example
Glasenapp helped Wagner, or Cosima, to hide the issue by fudging a few
dates to make it appear that Geyer came into the picture rather later
than was actually the case.
Thus the first edition of Glasenapp's Wagner biography said that
Ludwig and Johanna married in 1815, two years after Karl Friedrich
Wagner's death. Giving the real date, August 1814, would have been
dangerous because it reveals a hurried wedding necessary to lend some
respectability to Cäcilie's birth; and that would open up questions
that affect Richard's birth, and conception. Other early biographies
written by Bayreuth hangers-on also give that false 1815 wedding date,
for example Charles Lidgey's _Wagner_ (J M Dent & Co, London, 1904,
page 2.)
When the "mistake" was pointed out, Glasenapp's next edition removed
the incorrect date but, tellingly, did not supply the correct,
embarrassing, date. The Ellis edition of Glasenapp likewise fails to
supply any of the dates that suggest that Ludwig and Johanna's
relationship pre-dates Karl Friedrich Wagner's death. Chamberlain's
biography likewise fudges the facts a little: and while Chamberlain
never knew Wagner, he would certainly do Cosima's bidding.
So I think there is a context to Wagner's December 1878 denial of
Geyer's paternity: that Wagner feared that the issue was in the hands
of one enemy, and though that enemy, Nietzsche, might be honourable
enough to keep the confidence to himself, it was now time to button up
on that topic.
So the conclusion is that Wagner certainly suspected, and probably
thought, that Geyer was his father. Though he wanted to put a stop to
the speculation after Nietzsche turned against him.
3 Was Geyer of Jewish descent?
This one's easy. The answer is "probably not, and it doesn't matter
much; it's the perception that counts".
Geyer's ancestry has been traced back to the early 1600s, and the
genealogical exercise turned up Protestant after Protestant, including
church organists and so on, but no Jewish ancestors. Personally, I'm
not especially impressed by the fact that the ancestors have been
tracked back to 1600. That's only a couple of generations back from
Geyer's parents, which is no time at all in relation to the kind of
memory that 19th century Europeans seem to have been able to hold in
relation to Jewish origins. Therefore this frequently cited
genealogical table doesn't dispose of the issue quite as thoroughly as
some writers, Magee for one, would claim. However, no one has ever
found a Jewish ancestor for Geyer, and since it's the perception and
not the reality that's important, I'll leave the issue with a hearty
"probably not".
The next question, about 19th century perception in relation to
"Geyer" and Jewishness, is a very different thing, and one where I
start departing from current orthodoxy a bit, and I'll leave that to
be a separate post.
Cheers!
Laon
PS: I should add that Glasenapp said, of Johanna Wagner, that "if
there was a secret there to be preserved, then his mother took it with
her to the grave and never confided it to him or to any of the other
grown children." He most likely would have had information direct
from Wagner.
Also, two errata on my previous post. First, in noting Wagner's hint
that Ludwig Geyer replaced Karl Friedrich Wagner in Johanna Wagner's
womb, I gave the German as "im Schosse seiner Familie", which should
have been "im Schosse der Familie." My memory helpfully wanted to
improve things a little. Sorry.
Second, I kept referring to Karl Friedrich Wagner as Karl. But he was
generally referred to by his second name; I should have called him
Friedrich. (Which was the standard practice, for heaven's sake, and I
don't know what I was thinking of: Wilhelm Richard Wagner and
Helferich Siegfried Wagner are two other guys best known by their
second names.)
Kimberley Cornish
My on-going genealogical labours turned up the following snippet at
http://www.royalancestries.com/page693405.htm
"Minor members of many prominent European Royal Families are often the
subject of great interest. Relatively obscure to most, they often
possess fascinating ancestry. Two interesting cases in point, are
Princess Elisa Radziwll and Princess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.
Both princesses were unlucky in love. Princess Elisa was the great
love of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, King of Prussia. If not for the
machinations of Prince Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and Privy
Councillor von Raumer, she might have lived to become Empress of
Germany. Princess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach suffered a much
similar fate. She had the misfortune to fall in love with a member of
a famous Jewish banking family. Much to her dismay, her family found
the choice of her affections not a suitable mate, in response to their
view, Princess Sophie took her own life. Please enjoy their ancestry
detailed below."
Admittedly. prominent Jewish banking families aren't that uncommon.
The names Rothchild, Warburg and Bethmann spring to mind. (Karl
Wittgenstein sat on the board of Credit Anstalt, but he was primarily
an industrialist; not a banker.)It would be interesting to know the
name of the "prominent Jewish banking family" referred to, though I
haven't been able to turn up anything further on this since I came
across the reference yesterday. One for Laon to chase up on the topic
of this thread, perhaps.
The other snippet, that a Sayn-Wittgenstein was involved in a
Radziwell being prevented from marrying Kaiser Wilhelm I and becoming
(given the later guiding hand of Bismark) Empress of Germany, was also
new to me. Nineteenth cenury rumours about royalty occupied much the
same social role then as Hollywood gossip does today. It doesn't
usually make the history books, but for all that, gossip about royalty
was widely known and commented on at the time. I imagine that since
the Princess Elisa business involved the King of Prussia, Wagner would
have known about it. Forbidden love and all that. Would Caroline
Sayn-Wittgenstein have known about it, given the role of Prince
Wilhelm zu Sayn-Wittgenstein? Just a note, for interest's sake.
Regards,
Kimberley Cornish.
P.S. I have a vague memory that the Nazis made a propaganda film out
of one of these two topics, but then my knowledge of Third Reich films
is far from exhaustive and it's a two decades since I've done any work
on this - which work focused on Jude Suss anyway. Any Nazi film gurus
out there?
Laon
It's a little past the period I'm interested in, but I did have a go
at seeing if I could find out anything about the unfortunate Sophie,
Princess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Duchess of Saxony, 1888 - 1913, who
tried to marry a Rothschild, Warburg or Bethmann, and topped herself
when she was prevented from doing so. But despite googling for it
using the obvious keywords, then a range of reasonably ingenious and
lateral-thinking words, I got the big zilch. Nada. It's a class
piece of gossip, but those royals seem to have managed to have kept it
off the internet, which is more than you can say for the Windsors...
I'll try a couple of other avenues next time I drop by the library.
In further response to Derrick's post:
Having thought more about Wagner's 1878 denial that Geyer was Wagner's
father, I think I was wrong in only expressing Wagner's shift from
acceptance (circa 1870) to denial (1878) in terms of Wagnerian image
management: the need to batten down the informational hatches once
Nietzsche had gone AWOL. But I think that it's also possible that
Wagner was, as Derrick says, sincere. Sincere in a sense, anyway.
That is, it wasn't so much, exactly, that Wagner re-considered the
evidence that seemed to have previously convinced him, but more that
he reconsidered the consequences of keeping the Geyer possibility
open. And having decided that he didn't like the consequences, he set
about changing his mind to fit the desired outcome. And damn the
evidence. So that in a sense he was sincere when he answered Cosima
in the negative.
Anyway, the fourth part of this series on Geyers is possibly the most
controversial. Anyway, we'll see.
4 Was it suspected/believed, by Wagner and/or others, that Geyer was
or might be of Jewish descent?
So far all I've done is go laboriously through bits of evidence and
argument in order to come round to conclusions that were already
pretty much mainstream in the first place. But it's around this point
that I finally head off the beaten track and reach the stuff that
actually led me to reconsidering the Geyer issue.
I think the current consensus is this. The Geyer paternity issue,
though interesting and perhaps related to the tendency of Wagner's
characters to have issues about fatherhood and name, has nothing to do
with the development of Wagner's antisemitism, since Geyer wasn't
Jewish and no-one even thought of thinking that Geyer might be a
Jewish name until Nietzsche raised the question.
That's what I'd come round to thinking, and I still thought this when
I began this thread. I don't think it any more.
Westernhagen, expressing the consensus, says that Geyer is not a
Jewish name. Magee, in his _Wagner and Philosophy_, is very cross
with people who raise the issue at all; he concedes that there are
Jewish families with the Geyer name, but denies that the name at all
suggests Jewishness.
The points that follow are the reasons I've come to doubt this
consensus.
(i) The Rabbi of Old-New Land
One of the first things that set me thinking that the consensus may be
wrong was coming across a book by a political figure whose doctrines
had a drastic impact on 20th century history, and who was passionately
inspired by Wagner's music.
I refer of course to the 1902 novel _Altneuland_, by Theodor Herzl,
the founder of Zionism.
Anyway, _Altneuland_ is a borderline-science-fiction novel about a
utopian socialist Zionist community. At one point the good guy
Steinbeck (more properly one of a group of good guys; it is after all
a socialist novel) takes on an unscrupulous ultra-orthodox rabbi, who
wants to limit access to the new utopia to Jews only. The name Herzl
chose for his ultra-purist, Jewish-exclusionist villain was ... Geyer:
Rabbi Geyer.
[_Altneuland: Old-New Land_, Theodor Herzl, translated Paula Arnold,
Haifa Publishing, Haifa, 1960.]
Now it's just about possible - though I doubt that it's the case -
that by choosing the name Rabbi Geyer, Herzl was having a little joke
at the expense of his musical god, Wagner. But even if he were (and
as I say, I don't think he was), the Rabbi character's name would
still have to be a name that Herzl's predominantly Jewish audience
would recognise as appropriately and typically Jewish in character.
Herzl chose "Geyer" for this purpose.
(ii) The jazz singer of the Great Southern Land
And that reminded me that the woman generally acknowledged as
Australia's greatest female vocalist, a useful word that doesn't mean
the same thing as "singer", is Renee Geyer. And since this is a
music-related place I'll mention that she has a great blues voice but
middle-of-the-road music tastes; back when her voice was at its best
she poured Mantovani stringy gloop all over her records, making them
unlistenable. So I'm a lukewarm fan, though I do own a live and
gloopless recording of her doing a genuinely great version of (Mr)
James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's World".
But Renee Geyer is also Australia's most famous Jewish vocalist, the
daughter of Auschwitz survivors who set up a successful business on
arriving in this country. Her father, Geyer, figures in the
biographies of many Australian Jewish refugee families, as the man who
met them, introduced them to the Jewish and the wider Australian
community, helped them find housing, work and so on. It's not that
important an example; it's just that our Renee happens to have been
sitting in my vinyl collection, with me not previously noticing the
possible relevance to another musical Geyer.
(iii) Geyers in the New World and elsewhere
So having been hit by two instances in a row, one an emblematic use of
Geyer as a name for a purist Jewish character, and the other mere
happenstance, I did a bit of Googling, and found that Geyer is a
reasonably common Jewish name today. For example Rebecca Geyer of the
US National Council of Jewish Women, Igor and/or Yitzhak Geyer of
Derech Emet, an organisation countering the work of Christian
missionaries in Israel, Judah Geyer of the Mississippi Jewish Defence
League, Nancy Geyer who runs the dating service at the Dallas Jewish
Community Centre, and much, much more of that sort of thing.
I also found a lot of Geyers where there's no indication one way or
another. In short, in general it's not surprising to find that a
Geyer is Jewish; but nor would you automatically assume that if
someone is a Geyer, then that person has to be Jewish.
(iv) Tragic history in Poland and Hungary
But delving into genealogies I found that a lot of Jewish Geyers were
murdered in the Holocaust, from Budapest and other places in Hungary,
from villages in Poland, also from Vienna and so on. I won't give
details here, as it seems inappropriate. But my tentative conclusion
is that while Geyer may not be a name that is strongly associated with
Jewish descent in Germany, it seems (though I still need to do more
checking) that the name Geyer is significantly associated with Jewish
descent in Poland and Hungary.
(v) Polish Jews and the Brühl
Which brings us back to Wagner's birthplace in the Brühl, the Jewish
district in Leipzig, a city not far from Poland (the distance varying
with the border, over the years). Leipzig was at the time a common
first destination for Polish Jews moving into the German states.
The result is that it may not be so surprising if young Richard
Geyer's contemporaries thought that a Geyer from the Brühl was not of
German extraction, but rather of Polish Jewish descent.
It happened that Richard's "Vater Geyer" was actually of German rather
than Polish origin, but the name plus the place of origin offered a
real opportunity for teasing, and it's hard to see a bunch of children
passing up a good opportunity. Especially since there are indications
that young Richard was not an especially popular child, with his
contemporaries.
So this seems to give fresh life to the old theory, largely rejected
in recent years, that the young Wagner/Geyer was teased in antisemitic
terms in relation to his name and probable paternity, and that
therefore he had particular reason to sharply distinguish himself from
"Jewishness".
Wagner's perception of the meaning of the name "Geyer" is likely to
have been much the same as his schoolfellows. His mother was reticent
on any topic related to Geyer, and Wagner did not have access to Otto
Bournot's early-twentieth century research tracing Ludwig Greyer back
through a line of Protestant Germans, through a church organist who
possibly knew JS Bach, back to the 1600s. He may have known of
Florian Geyer, the heroic and undeniably German aristocrat who fought
on the peasants' side in an early 1600s peasants' revolt. But he
probably also knew, or knew of, Hungarian and Polish Jewish Geyers in
the Brühl and in Dresden.
I need to check further on Geyers in Poland, but in the meantime I
offer this interim theory: While a Geyer settled in most parts of
Germany might not be marked as Jewish, a Richard Geyer from the Brühl,
with a family of no very fixed abode, could easily have been marked
out as of Polish Jewish extraction.
Two other points.
(vi) Names: Birds, trees, animals
William Wallace (op cit, 1925, page 301) held out for an actual Jewish
ancestry for Geyer, although he was aware of Otto Bournot's
genealogical research. His argument is that the Geyer, or Geier, name
was created by an edict, pre-1600, in which Jewish families were
ordered both to convert to Protestantism and to abandon their original
Jewish names for new names that had to be within certain specified
parameters.
He gives examples of a number of similar proclamations requiring
Jewish families to take up non-Jewish names, a Napoleonic decree of
1808, and a 1787 order made in the Austrian Empire, also affecting
Bohemia and Prussia, that required Jews to take Biblical but
non-Hebraic surnames. Families who refused were forcibly given
unattractive new surnames, such as Hunger, and Durst.
Wallace cited a tradition, though he was unable to give a reference
for it, that in still earlier proclamations, Jews were required to
adopt as a surname the name of a bird, animal, flower, tree, etc. (He
cited _Die Deutschen Personennamen_, Alfred Bänisch, Leupzig 1910, who
gave a number of examples of Jewish family names that derive from the
word for lion, fox, stag, wolf, etc. Funny, in this context, that he
didn't mention "eagle", or Adler.) So Wallace argues that Geyer or
Geier may have been a name assigned to a Jewish family through such a
proclamation.
All I can say on that is that Wallace may be right, but I've looked,
and I can find nothing to either support or undermine that claim.
But the idea has occurred to me that it's possible that in the 19th
century the name Geyer still had a traditional or folk connection to
some forced re-naming of Jewish families, but that this connection got
lost before our time, among other reasons because of the death, damage
and destruction brought about by the Nazis. Plus normal
inter-generational loss of knowledge, especially oral knowledge.
In partial support of that idea, I can't help noticing the way that
practically all the early writers who touch on this topic, many of
whom grew up in the 19th century and directly know about 19th century
attitudes and beliefs in ways that we can't, seem to take it as a
given that Geyer is a Jewish name. While the modern writers, eg
Watson, Magee, Millington, etc, are equally sure that Geyer is not a
Jewish name.
(Gutman is a throwback, in this context; he cites Geyer as a Jewish
name without any apparent awareness that the point is not a
straightforward one.)
But it may be that the views of those earlier writers reflect the
beliefs of Wagner's time more accurately than more recent writers, who
are dependent on written sources only.
But I have no evidence to back that idea. It's just a thought.
The other point was going to be about Nietzsche, and his contribution
to making all this confusion. But I'll have to leave that for another
day.
Cheers!
Laon
Derrick Everett
> Westernhagen, expressing the consensus, says that Geyer is not a Jewish
> name. Magee, in his _Wagner and Philosophy_, is very cross with people
> who raise the issue at all; he concedes that there are Jewish families
> with the Geyer name, but denies that the name at all suggests
> Jewishness.
I incline to caution where Westernhagen is concerned, especially whenever
he wrote about Wagner's anti-Semitism or his revolutionary activities. In
some areas I suspect that Westernhagen was more concerned with hiding the
truth than with revealing it. It might be that Magee has been misled by
Westernhagen. In any case your research indicates that Magee was mistaken
on this point.
> So this seems to give fresh life to the old theory, largely rejected in
> recent years, that the young Wagner/Geyer was teased in antisemitic
> terms in relation to his name and probable paternity, and that therefore
> he had particular reason to sharply distinguish himself from
> "Jewishness".
That is as plausible as any other theory I've read; but I have one
difficulty with your argument. If Geyer was at that time a name common in
the Jewish community, why did Nietzsche find it necessary to add: "a Geyer
(=vulture) is practically an Adler (=eagle) ?"
> In partial support of that idea, I can't help noticing the way that
> practically all the early writers who touch on this topic, many of whom
> grew up in the 19th century and directly know about 19th century
> attitudes and beliefs in ways that we can't, seem to take it as a given
> that Geyer is a Jewish name. While the modern writers, eg Watson,
> Magee, Millington, etc, are equally sure that Geyer is not a Jewish
> name.
>
> (Gutman is a throwback, in this context; he cites Geyer as a Jewish name
> without any apparent awareness that the point is not a straightforward
> one.)
On rare occasions even Gutman can get something right. On the other hand,
Gutman's conviction that Richard Wagner and at least some of his older
siblings were fathered by Ludwig Geyer has, I think, more to do with
Gutman wanting Richard to be of Jewish descent than with any objective
assessment of the evidence.
Laon
> I incline to caution where Westernhagen is concerned ... In
> some areas I suspect that Westernhagen was more concerned with hiding the
> truth than with revealing it.
Yes, I'd agree. I cited Westernhagen not really as a source of
information, but rather as an example showing that a particular line
of argument has been made.
> I have one > difficulty with your argument. If Geyer was at that time a name common in > the Jewish community, why did Nietzsche find it necessary to add: "a Geyer > (=vulture) is practically an Adler (=eagle) ?"
Because my argument includes the point that Geyer seems not to have
been a markedly Jewish name in Germany and in German lineages.
Therefore Nietzsche couldn't expect to make his rhetorical point just
by saying "Geyer" to a general German audience. The Jewish Geyer
families seem to have mainly been Hungarian and Polish: and the Polish
Geyer thing affected the young Richard Geyer because he came from the
Brühl and, well, for the reasons spelled out earlier. But all that
material would have taken Nietzsche a couple of paragraphs to spell
out, and Nietzsche's an aphorism man rather than a
spell-it-out-in-connected-paragraphs man. So for rhetorical purposes
it was easier for him to make the "Geyer/Adler" pun and know perfectly
well that his audience would know what he meant.
But I'll finish my thoughts on Nietzsche's contribution tomorrow, with
luck. I'll be defending his honour, mostly, which just goes to show.
Agreeing with Gutman over something, and now defending Nietzsche: it
feels very strange. If I don't post the Nietzsche stuff (in relation
to "Geyer") tomorrow, it won't be for a few days. After tomorrow I'm
off tramping into the mountains for some days, hopefully not where the
bushfires are, or will be.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
At some point in _Duck Soup_ Groucho announces that he's defending the
honour of Margaret Dumont, "which is more than she'd ever do." My
defence of Nietzsche's honour may turn out to be similarly backhanded,
but I'm going to have a go, anyway.
For this discussion I'll reiterate that the issue is not whether Geyer
was of Jewish descent: the issue is what people, including Wagner
himself, thought in the 19th century.
Once again I'll start by setting out some relevant dates:
* January 1869: _Das Judentum_ re-published;
* April 1869: (or thereabouts, though I put down the reference just a
second ago...) Cosima complained about a Berlin picture of Wagner that
made him "resemble Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer" (ie it made him look
Jewish). Jokes and caricatures seem to have begun from this time,
focussing on the Jewishness of Wagner's appearance, also of his inner
circle and his supporters, and the incongruity of this with Wagner's
antisemitism;
* December 1869: according to Newman, Wagner talked with Nietzsche on
family matters, revealing his belief that Geyer was his father and, it
appears, that he suspected Geyer was of Jewish descent;
* May - August 1878: Wagner and Nietzsche went their separate ways;
* late 1878 - 1888: Nietzsche (according to Newman) started spreading
the story, based on Wagner's heart-to-heart in December 1869, that
Wagner was Geyer's son, and that Geyer was a Jewish actor;
* late 1878 onwards: even more caricatures appeared of Wagner as Jew,
or associated with Jews;
* December 1878: Wagner denied Geyer paternity to Cosima, citing
"elective affinity" theory to explain Siegfried's resemblance to
portrait of Geyer;
* late 1888: Nietzsche published _Der Fall Wagner_, putting the Geyer
story into print for the first time.
Newman's view was that on this topic "all the trails lead back
ultimately to Nietzsche". (_The Life of Richard Wagner, Volume II_,
Ernest Newman, Cassel and Company, London, Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney,
1938, page 561.) That is, every caricature, joke, rumour and
speculation on Wagner's Jewishness can ultimately be sourced back to
Nietzsche.
Newman was not accusing Nietzsche of dishonesty. He agreed with
Nietzsche that Geyer is Wagner's father, and that Geyer is a Jewish
name, only disagreeing on the actual Jewish ancestry of Ludwig Geyer
himself. Newman was only accusing Nietzsche of breaking a confidence.
Newman linked the emergence of caricatures showing Wagner as Jewish
or surrounded by Jews to gossip spread by Nietzsche after the split
with Wagner: "It seems to me highly probable that, as he gradually
drifted apart from his former idol during the late 1870's, Nietzsche
blabbed to other people about the confidence with which Wagner had
favoured him, and so a belief about Wagner's Semitic origin began to
spread through European musical circles." (Ibid, page 563.)
Magee in _Wagner and Philosophy_ took a stronger line. He suggested
that Nietzsche was not telling the truth, so that his statement about
Geyer was simply malicious mischief. "Nietzsche can have known nothing
about Geyer's ancestry except what Wagner told him, and Wagner could
not have said anything about Geyer being Jewish." (_Wagner and
Philosophy_, Bryan Magee, Allen Layne, The Penguin Press, Middlesex,
2000, page 359.) Magee also seems to suggest that the issue began
with the 1888 publication of _Der Fall Wagner_.
I seldom disagree with either Newman or Magee, but the chronology
suggests they are both wrong. Magee especially so.
In reality some sort of cat seems to have released from some kind of
bag shortly after the republication of _Judenthum_, even before the
time of Wagner's heart-to-heart with Nietzsche in 1869. The _Diaries_
indicate that a portrait of Wagner-as-Jew (which may be the first)
followed soon after that republication of _Judenthum_, and while it
may be mere coincidence it seems most likely to be a reaction to the
republication.
There are three possible explanations why anti-Wagnerian satire after
_Das Judenthum_ focussed on Wagner's apparent vulnerability in
relation to Jewish ancestry and relationships.
Two of the explanations assume that awareness and gossip on the Geyer
issue was doing the rounds in the musical world and in newspaper rooms
as one of those delicious stories that can't be published but can be
shared with insiders, with occasional oblique references (but not an
actionable story) reaching print. And there are two possible
explanations of where that awareness and gossip could have came from:
* Some of the children who used to tease young Richard Geyer at
Leipzig and Dresden were now grown up, had noted that young Master
Geyer had become Wagner der Meister, and remembered a few things about
their old schoolmate; or
* Any of the several friends that Wagner talked to (according to
Glasenapp) about his concerns about his parentage. Thus there are
candidates in Wagner's circle, other than Nietzsche, who might have
deliberately or accidentally passed the story on, at a safe distance
from Wagner and perhaps under the influence of beer. The preferred
candidate would be a confidant of Wagner's who was at some point
annoyed with the man. It's an open field.
A third explanation is that there never was a "betrayal". Instead
satirists could have looked at Wagner, especially after the
republication of _Judenthum_, noted the various ways in which Wagner
resembled antisemitic caricatures, also noting his association with so
many Jews, and came up with the joke all by themselves.
Any of those three explanations is possible. I lean slightly towards
the theory that the Geyer story actually resurfaced from one of
Richard Geyer's old school companions, one of his many schoolmates who
hadn't liked him much at school, and who now looked with a sour eye on
the fame of the adult Richard Wagner. After all, your schoolmates are
always with you, growing up at the same time and the same rate as you.
For most of us our old schoolmates can come up with a few anecdotes
about embarrassing youthful indiscretions, but nothing that can really
do us much harm.
But Richard Geyer/Richard Wagner, the bastard from the Brühl, the
antisemite hiding his Jewish dad: that made an unusually good story
(never mind its failure to be entirely true), and unlike most
anecdotes about childhood and adolescence it didn't date. Instead the
Geyer story improved with age, and the reappearance of _Das Judenthum_
only made it sweeter still. A few beerhall conversations would be all
it would take, for the story to be fairly launched.
As for Nietzsche, it's possible that he indulged in gossip from 1878
onwards, but it's not necessarily so. Newman missed the fact that
pictures of Wagner as Semite appeared before the Nietzsche-Wagner
split, and Nietzsche can't have been the source of those. Newman does
give evidence suggesting that the issue rose to greater prominence
after the split. That increase in such references might be due to
Nietzschean rumour-mongering, but it might not be.
Nietzsche certainly broke the confidence in 1888, when he published
_Der Fall Wagner_. But by then Wagner was dead, so that the moral
rules about breaches of confidences become rather less clear. In any
case, if we assume that the jokes linking Wagner to Jewishness derive
from rumours about Geyer, also the Bethmanns, then the story was
already widely known by 1888, though it doesn't seem ever to have
reached print until then.
As for Nietzsche's honesty, it's clear that he was confident that he
was telling the truth, in what he said in _Der Fall Wagner_. And that
certainty is overwhelmingly most likely to have come from things that
Wagner told him.
Nietzsche's bombshell is delivered obliquely, as a footnote to the
first postscript to _Der Fall Wagner_. The footnote has little to do
with the passage to which it is attached, which was: "One pays heavily
for being one of Wagner's disciples. Only quite recently have the
Germans shed a kind of fear of him - the itch _to be away from him_ at
every opportunity.*"
The famous footnote goes:
"* Was Wagner a German at all? There are some reasons for this
question. It is difficult to find any German trait in him. Being a
great learner, he learned to imitate much that was German - that's
all. His own nature _contradicts_ that which has hitherto been felt
to be German - not to speak of a German musician. His father was an
actor by the name of Geyer. A Geyer is practically an Adler. - What
has hitherto been circulated as "Wagner's Life" is _fable convenue_ if
not worse. I confess my distrust of every point attested to by
Richard Wagner himself. He did not have pride enough for any truth
about himself; nobody was less proud. Entirely like victor Hugo, he
remained faithful to himself in biographical questions too - he
remained an actor."
The key sentence is the one after Nietzsche says that Wagner's father
was an actor by the name of Geyer: "Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein
Adler." That is, Geyer (Vulture) might not be recognised by many
Germans as a specifically Jewish name, but Nietzsche hints that it is
similar to Adler (Eagle), which is thought of in Germany as a Jewish
name.
As I've suggested, the reason that "Geyer" was taken to be a Jewish
name in Wagner's case is that he came from the Brühl, the Jewish
district in Leipzig, a first port of call for many Polish Jews
entering the German states, and the name Geyer has stronger Jewish
associations as a Polish name than as a German name. (Just as - as
Magee points out - Meyer is thought of as a particularly Jewish name
in the US, but the name does not have especially Jewish associations
in Germany. Magee, op cit, page 358.) Therefore it was necessary for
Nietzsche to give his German readers a helpful hint.
It appears that in its original form the note made a stronger
statement that Geyer was Jewish, and Nietzsche at the last minute
decided to tone the statement down to a hint. See Nietzsche's letters
to Peter Gast, cited below. (I'm aware that the footnote makes use of
antisemitic ideas, ideas held by Wagner himself among others, about
Jews as clever imitators, etc, and that Nietzsche links those ideas
about Wagner to his hint about Wagner's supposed Jewish ancestry; but
I'm not going there today.)
The sentence, "What has hitherto been circulated as 'Wagner's Life' is
_fable convenue_ if not worse" has caused a great deal of confusion.
("Fable convenue" means a myth that has found general acceptance, by
the way.)
Because Nietzsche saw the draft manuscript of the opening chapters of
_Mein Leben_, it was once widely believed that Nietzsche was basing
his claims about Geyer on the original text of Chapter 1. A myth
developed that in the version that Nietzsche originally saw, _Mein
Leben_ had begun with the words, "I am the son of Ludwig Geyer": the
beginning we now have, in which Wagner says he is the son of Friedrich
Wagner, was supposedly a later substitution made either by Richard or
Cosima, to cover up the Geyer/Jewish question. In reality it is clear
that _Mein Leben_ always began in its current form, with a statement
about Friedrich Wagner followed by hints about Ludwig Geyer.
So Nietzsche's note in _Der Fall Wagner_ may have accelerated the
speculation and rumour-mongering, but it was not the source of that
speculation. A different question, in relation to Nietzsche's honour,
is whether he believed that he was telling the truth: Magee, for
example, seems certain that he did not.
Again, the evidence is very much in Nietzsche's favour: though he was
wrong about Geyer being of Jewish descent, it's clear that he thought
he was honestly reporting something that that knew, most probably from
Wagner's own mouth. In a letter to Peter Gast, 11 August 1888,
Nietzsche said:
"The strongest passages are really in the Postscripts; at one point I
even have doubts whether I have not gone too far (_not_ [Nietzsche's
emphasis] in the facts but in speaking of the facts). Perhaps we had
better _omit_ the note (in which something is suggested about Wagner's
descent."
I see no reason why Nietzsche would lie to Gast. It seems clear that
Nietzsche had no doubts about the truth of what he said. His only
doubt was only about how openly he should say such things.
A week later, on 18 August 1888, he had resolved this doubt. He wrote
to Gast:
"Regarding the _note_, I have made up my mind to _retain it in its
entirety_ (except for a more cautious nuance in the question of
descent). For in a kind of Epilogue I return with great force to
Wagner's falseness; so every hint in this direction becomes valuable."
Nietzsche went on to tell Gast that there were more changes to add to
the version of the Epilogue that Gast was about to receive from the
printer. It's presumably at that late stage that a plainer original
statement that Geyer was Jewish was turned into the "more cautious
nuance" in which Nietzsche suggests that "Geyer" is very close to
"Adler".
(Both these letters are cited from the Appendix, "From Nietzsche's
correspondence", to _The Birth and Tragedy and The Case of Wagner_,
Friedrich Nietzsche, translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann,
Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1967, pages 195-196.)
So overall, it seems that Nietzsche is not guilty of being the
original source of speculation on Wagner's parentage, and nor was he
guilty of dishonesty (though he was incorrect about Ludwig Geyer being
Jewish) in what he hinted at in _Der Fall Wagner_.
I think that's the Geyer and Bethmann information largely laid out,
though I might add some caveats, self-criticisms and hopefully also
some extra evidence etc when I return. All that remains after that is
to talk about what consequences and meanings all this might have had
for Wagner and some of those close to him, and what meanings we might
give it. I'll be off in the wilderness (quite a lot of which seems to
be on fire at the moment) before I have a go at getting my ideas clear
on that.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
a period of being way too busy to do much Wagnerising. This is my
last post on this thread, but mainly because the thread history runs
most of the way across my screen; there's still some stuff on the "so
what" question to come. But this is a wind-up to the factual stuff,
before turning to What It All Means, to the extent that the Bethmann
and Geyer stuff has real consequences.
But first, a correction. The Maurice de Flavigny who was attaché at
the French embassy in Berlin was Marie's brother, not father. (And I
called Perenyi "careless" over exactly this point - which she is, in
other instances, but in this case it was me being careless, not her.)
Second, having had a break, and an opportunity to review and think
about my posts on this thread, I'd say that in general I stand by my
conclusions as set out above. By which I mean that not every point is
proved beyond reasonable doubt, but that the points are based on
evidence, and where the evidence is incomplete my suggestions to link
the available fragments still seem to be the most reasonable I can
think of. So I'm reasonably happy. Two glaring weaknesses are:
Weakness 1: Lack of direct evidence about Richard Geyer's schooldays
I've argued that young Richard Geyer got given a hard time at school,
because at the time he had to have been conceived his mother was
married to someone else, because "Geyer" was a common name among
Polish Jews, and the Brühl district where Richard (and Ludwig) Geyer
hailed from was the Jewish district ion Leipzig, known as a common
first port of call for Polish Jews. As well, he got razzed by his
schoolmates because he wasn't very popular, and kids tend to look for
nasty things to say about a kid who isn't liked: those are the obvious
things they'd find.
I think that's a reasonable and economic scenario (except for a caveat
about the Geyer name, to be discussed below), but it can't be proved.
There was no comment on the matter from Richard Wagner, or Cosima, or
from any other of the usual primary sources. And if any of Wagner's
schoolmates wrote memoirs, those memoirs don't seem to have touched on
their acquaintance with that strange boy Richard Geyer. So in the
absence of primary evidence on the point, the claim that the young
Richard Geyer was teased for being Jewish, or having a Jewish(ish)
father, is backed by circumstantial evidence but it will probably
never be proved. Or disproved, for that matter. It merely seems most
likely.
When he was in Australia a couple of years back, Gottfried Wagner did
an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in which he
said that his great-grandfather had been "humiliated" at school
because his schoolmates thought that Geyer was Jewish. That's odd,
because in Gottfried Wagner's autobiography, _He Who Does not Howl
with the Wolf_, also known as _The Wagner Legacy_, also known as
_Twilight of the Wagners_, or whatever his publisher is calling it
this week, Gottfried suggested that the idea that Richard Wagner had
thought he was Jewish was just a fabrication intended to "vindicate"
Wagner's antisemitism.
In the autobiography Gottfried also accused people at Bayreuth of
changing their tune on that issue from time to time for reasons of
politics and convenience. In Australia, Gottfried didn't acknowledge
or explain his own change of tune on this issue. I doubt if his
change of tune was based on his receiving further evidence on the
point, since it came after Gottfried was persona non grata at
Bayreuth, so he's unlikely to have accessed new evidence from the
Bayreuth archives. Gottfried didn't refer to any documentary
evidence, and he surely would have if he'd really found something on
this point. Moreover, Gottfried's change of tune came well after the
death of Winifred Wagner, who was the last link who might have
received, remembered and passed on a confidence from Cosima Wagner on
that issue.
I mention Gottfried Wagner for two reasons. The first is simply to
point out that he's made a statement each way on this issue, and the
value of his testimony, in either direction, is precisely zero. I'll
come to the second reason for mentioning Gottfried later.
Weakness 2: Polish-Jewish Geyers
At the moment, I've found Jewish families called Geyer, who were
murdered by the Nazis during the invasion and occupation of Poland, a
Rabbi Geyer (a real Rabbi Geyer, not to be confused with Theodor
Herzl's fictitious Rabbi Geyer) buried in a Polish cemetery and other
such findings.
So I do not consider that I have proved that in the 19th century, the
name "Geyer" had Jewish associations in a Polish context, while it may
not have had those associations in Germany. At the moment it's a
hypothesis with some supporting evidence. Hopefully this is something
that can be proved or disproved, and I'm still looking for more
evidence in either direction.
Other than that, I'm reasonably happy with my evidence and my
conclusions. I may be shown to be wrong about something, but at least
I've stayed close to the sources that I've been able to look at.
My third point is a bit of throat clearing before I get down to
discussing the "so what" question, concerning consequences, which
question I'll mostly leave to my next post on this topic. And that'll
be on a new thread.
Anyway, my point is that there are people sympathetic to Wagner, like
Ernest Newman, who agree with the thesis that the young Wagner was
subjected to antisemitic taunting over his "Geyer" parentage, while
other people sympathetic to Wagner, like Bryan Magee, do not support
this thesis.
There are people antipathetic to Wagner, like Robert Gutman, who
likewise accept this thesis, and other people antipathetic to Wagner,
like Paul Rose (from memory), who do not. And there are people
antipathetic to Wagner, like Gottfried Wagner, who both support the
thesis and scornfully reject it: but neither rejecting it nor
supporting it made any difference to his antipathy for his
great-grandfather.
That is, this is not a matter where people do (or at least should)
make up their minds based on whether they emotionally like or dislike
Wagner. There are pro-Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians on both sides of
this issue.
People who read my posts (a vanishingly small number, I expect, at
least while I stay on this) know that I will defend Wagner in relation
to some charges against him - though I wouldn't and don't defend him
from all the charges against him - but that's not why I've reached my
conclusions in this thread. I followed pro and contrary evidence, and
went where they led. What people make of it is up to them.
Consequences next, where I sort out what I make of it.
Cheers!
Laon