can’t help but thinking of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode when Larry was whistling Wagner while waiting at the movie theater and got in trouble with another jewish guy. Cracks me up
Quoth Skopo:
Is this really logical? I mean, there are no non-stereotypical indications that Alberich is Jewish, are there? As it stands, you can interpret the character as being offensive to dwarves, but I can’t see how you can interpret him as being offensive to Jews. Why is it offensive to Jews to say “money-grubbing is bad”, if you don’t say that Jews are money-grubbing?
As for the topic at hand: I can’t condone the man’s personal views, of course, but what I’ve heard of his music is very good. Of course, there’s a selection effect here, and I’ve probably never heard his “bad quarter hours”, but he was certainly capable of some first-rate work.
I think this says a lot about how the meaning of Alberich, and I should add Mime’s, characters can change with the times. In today’s culture, we don’t tend to associate “money-grubbing” automatically with those anti-semitic characterizations of Jewish behavior. I mean, I’ve never considered the Ferengi on Star Trek to be “Jewish” but just greedy and profit-driven.
But in Wagner’s day, wasn’t it pretty common, especially for people with anti-semitic tendencies like Wagner, to associate money-hoarding particularly with Jewish caricatures? I can’t think offhand of any character bearing those characteristics in pre-modern European art and literature who wasn’t identified as Jewish.
I also recall that Wagner associated Jewish art with atonality, and that characters like Mime, whose singing style is horribly weak and atonal, are meant to reflect that bizarre notion of his. I’d have to look up the particular citation from Wagner’s writings, but I seem to remember that he pretty much intended characters like that to embody his anti-Semitic beliefs.
My experience with 19th-century art is that anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews are fairly common, and so that context probably favored the stereotypical associations of money-hoarding with Jews.
When I listen to the Ring Cycle, I prefer to think of Alberich and Mime as just nasty dwarves, without any particular cultural overtones. If there’s any evidence that one could depict a money-grubbing character in 19th century art without those anti-Semitic connotations, then I’d like to know so I can jettison those nagging suspicions about Wagner’s intentions for the Nibelungen. It would make Wagner much more enjoyable to listen to.
Even though Wotan’s dialogues with Erda would still drag on too long (good example of those bad quarter-hours)…
I’ve never seen a Wagner opera in it’s entirety and doubt if I could take it, but I love playing “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral” and I played something from Parsifal, something like “Procession of the Knights of the Holy Grail” which was nice, both band arrangements.
I played in the Wilmette (North Shore suburb of Chicago, high Jewish population) Concert Band for one winter holiday concert as a favor to the conductor. We were playing something from Wagner, I forget what it was, but the conductor (also Jewish) introduced it something like, “We’re going to play something by Wagner. He was a Nazi, but he wrote some wonderful music.” Kind of awkward…
And CalMeacham, I love:
This board is refreshingly more light-hearted than the geniuses in GD. And I mean that in the most “I feel inferior” way.
Sorry its entirety…
or is it it’s? Ugh.
Other than Alberich himself, you mean?
It still seems to me that if Alberich is interpreted as being offensive to Jews, then the offense must lie with the interpreter. To put it into syllogistic form, we have
Alberich is money-grubbing
Money-grubbing people are Jews
Therefore, Alberich is a Jew
Alberich is a Jew
Alberich is money-grubbing
Therefore, Jews are money-grubbing
It’s a circular argument. You can’t conclude anything about Jews unless you first assume your conclusion. And I could just as well argue that he’s supposed to be Chinese, or Hindu, or Irish.
To my ears, Wagner’s music is bombastic, unfocused, and overwrought dreck. He was in many respects the Andrew Lloyd Weber of his day.
Dwarves in good ol’ pagan Scadanavian myth are always very materialistic.
It’s one thing to say you don’t like Wagner’s music or his politics. But to compare him to Andrew Lloyd Weber–well, that’s just cruel!
It seems that anti-Semites often relied on such circular reasoning. The traits that they imposed on their awful caricatures of Jews don’t tell us anything about how Jews really were in the nineteenth century. They tell us more about the anti-Semites and how idiotic their cultural views were.
In a similar manner, in English art and literature, fighting and drunkenness were stereotypical characterizations of Irish characters. Again, these characters reveal a lot about English prejudices in the nineteenth century, and nothing about how real-life Irish were. If Wagner hated the Irish, and gave the villains in his pieces such behavior as brawling and drunkenness, then I think it would be fair to say that those characters embodied certain anti-Irish stereotypes.
Maybe I’ve been misinformed about Wagner’s beliefs. But I was always under the impression that he conferred some of the nastier mischaracterizations of Jewish characters onto the Nibelungen. Probably Mime, with his atonal singing, is the more fully anti-Semitic caricature than Alberich. But again, I had thought the traits that Wagner gave the dwarves, especially the money-grubbing and bad singing, were stereotypically “Jewish” as defined by nineteenth-century anti-semitism–let me again stress that these traits bore no relation with reality at all.
If I’m wrong about any of this, please correct me. As I said above, if Wagner did not intend Alberich and Mime to convey anti-Semitic stereotypes, then it would make Wagner’s music much more pleasant to listen to.
Wumpus has pointed out that the traditional depictions of the Nibelungen as materialistic predate nineteenth-century anti-semitism. Can we then conclude that Wagner’s depiction of them did not carry any anti-Semitic connotations?
I hope so. But his own beliefs, as expressed in his writings, did conform to such intolerance, and that still lowers Wagner as a person in my eyes.
Still a great artist, however.
"I can’t listen to that much Wagner, ya know? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland. "
– Woody Allen
I am no Wagner expert, but I don’t think there’s much room to doubt that the man was personally anti-Semitic. Whether he was unusually anti-Semitic for his time or how much this influenced his work are questions open to debate, but he was certainly no friend to Jews. Interestingly, Richard and Cosima Wagner’s anti-Semitism is one of the causes that eventually led to the breakup of their friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche. (The other main cause was Parsifal.)
In re the OP, I’m no opera expert either but I do know an opera expert (and aspiring opera singer), and she hates Wagner. Which is unfortunate, since she’s a 6’ blonde soprano.
Note, however, that Wagner’s idea of a German identity aren’t exactly original – he (and many others in that era, especially Goethe) borrowed a lot from Johann Gottfried von Herder.
Some thoughts that occured to me after I posted last night:
In an earlier post, I compared Wagner’s personal character to Picasso’s, saying that although I disliked the personalities of either man I still admired the artists. I then qualified some of my appreciation for Wagner by referring to what many scholars have pointed out are anti-Semitic overtones to several of the villains in Wagnerian opera, and stating that I found those aspects uncomfortable.
I’m thinking a lot more about that, thanks to Chronos’s questions. Would I have ever considered any of Wagner’s character portrayals to be overtly anti-Semitic if I hadn’t heard music scholars refer to them as such? Are those overtones really there in Wagner’s art, as we know they are in his personal beliefs? Or are we, in the aftermath of Hitler’s appropriation of Wagner, reading more into those characters than Wagner intended us to?
I really don’t know the answers to these questions, but it all reminds me of some of my experiences with Picasso’s work–namely, the allegedly misogynistic aspect of his portrayals of women. There’s no disputing that Picasso was an awful husband/boyfriend/lover. However, several feminist scholars argue that his personal misogyny carried over into his artwork, and that we can’t really understand his portraits of women without considering that aspect of his personal character.
Until a few years ago, I always rejected that argument. I didn’t think we should read into Picasso’s paintings those aspects of his personal relationships, and I insisted that an artist’s work should not be considered straightforward expressions of that artist’s personal beliefs. Art is much more complex than that, and artists who work on commission (for example) will paint portraits of individuals whom they dislike or for whom they hold no real feelings–and they can make those portraits immensely flattering.
So, I was in Paris a few years ago, and visited the Musee Picasso for the first time. It was the first time in a while that I had viewed so many paintings by Picasso in one place. As I roamed through the galleries, some of my older impressions of Picasso’s work stayed in place–e.g., I loved the Blue Period and Rose Period, found his Cubist work interesting up until 1940 or so, and found his later work largely devoid of interest to me.
And then, I noticed some recurring traits in his portraits of women. Many of them seemed almost violent–Cubist paintings always fracture the represented object into jagged planes, but with his women, this fracturing seemed more brutal than it had to be. I reflected back on the feminist interpretation of Picasso’s work as misogynist to its core, and thought to myself, “maybe those scholars have a point.”
And I have to say that since that visit, I’ve never liked Picasso that much anymore.
Am I being fair on Picasso? Probably not. There are some really wonderful paintings by him (like in the aforementioned Blue and Rose periods), and if he’d only painted Guernica, he’d still merit a place in my personal “Hall of Fame” of artists. And perhaps I’m allowing myself to be unduly influenced by certain scholarly interpretations of Picasso’s work.
But that’s how I feel, and I haven’t really been able to explain or justify it. I’ve never written on Picasso, so maybe I should focus on him one day and see what I can dig out of my personal impressions of Picasso’s work when compared to those scholars’ interpretations.
I don’t suppose this goes very far in resolving the debate over whether or not Wagner’s work reveals any anti-Semitic prejudices, but thought I’d share anyway.
Well, Goethe was a LITTLE earlier (1749-1832). And I’m not saying that the idea of a German National Identity was original with Wagner. Nor with Bismarck. It was, y’know, a movement.
Check out Thomas Mann’s 1900 novel Buddenbrooks to see what properly-educated 1870s German musicians thought of Wagner’s music! (Not much!..saw it as leading to the destruction of sane and rational thinking, and to crazy wild sex with girls.)
Anything that leads to crazy wild sex with girls can’t be all that bad. 
Some Wagner is Okay. Ride of the Valkyries and such. Most of his stuff (esp. his operas) are a bit avant garde for my taste.
As an undergrad studying Vocal Music Education, I have to come into contact with opera every now and again. Unfortunately, I don’t like Opera. ESPECIALLY Wagnerian Opera, which is the worst, followed closely by French Opera.
From an education aspect, it is very hard to get students to look at opera in a positive or even neutral sense, because Wagnerian Opera (i.e. loud women with horns) has become a steriotype in our society.
One of my most memorable television experiences was watching the Ring cycle done on PBS several years back by (I believe) the Met. Fabulous. And there is NO composer of opera from whose music I would rather listen to excerpts, even my beloved Puccini. Wagner’s use of the lietmotif makes listening to his operas wonderful, because you always get such great forshadowing thorugh the music. Too bad Tolkein wrote after he was gone.
As for the “boring stretches”, well, frankly, all opera can be “boring” if by that you mean periods where the music being sung isn’t particularly interesting. The best condemnation of his works would be that they tend to be too long.
Till the day I die, I will see in the music which ends Das Rheingold the gods marching across the bridge Bifrost into Valhalla, led by Wotan to their glory, and their eventual end. I shall do so with the same goosebumps covering my arms even as I type this…