Klinghoffer in Brooklyn Heights

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever composers, yet debate continues over the possible presence of anti-Semitism in his works. Nothing directly links characters, or the libretti of his operas with Judaism. However, plenty of Wagner’s own writings - from publicly published articles to letters and diary entries - prove, beyond doubt, his feelings towards Jewish people. Furthermore, a question mark also hangs over when and why Wagner developed such views. What follows is an attempt to trace the extent of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas through examining works from the beginning, middle and end of his prolific career. Wagner was a founder of ‘ontological anti-Semitism’; ‘hostility toward the Jews that concentrates on their being rather than their religion or economic practices, or any one particular attribute.’ (Sokel, 1991, p154.) From a musicological direction of entry, we can thus begin our analysis by dismissing the possibility any implicit anti-Semitism was unintentional due to ignorance. Wagner’s intentions and implied meanings are based on his views, the culture in Germany at the time, and any other people or events which may have affected these operas. A ‘cultural anti-Semitism’ was present in 19th century Germany and ‘for Wagner, Jewishness was a necessary evil’ in order ‘to define Germanness.’ (Millington, 2013, p186.) I shall thus attempt to trace the presence of anti-Semitism throughout Wagner’s career by looking at his two most popular operas; Rienzi and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and his final opera, Parsifal.

Jewish Social Studies, 2009

"This article examines the reactions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European Jewish musicians to Richard Wagner’s classic antisemitic essay, “Judaism in Music.” The voluminous debates about Wagner’s antisemitism have overshadowed the question of his essay’s impact on Jewish musicians and Jewish musical identity. Strikingly, two of the key intellectual architects of the concept of modern Jewish music, Lazare Saminsky and Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, embraced selective aspects of Wagner’s myth even as they called for a new kind of Jewish musical nationalism. Recovering their responses to Wagner helps explain the role of antisemitism in the formation of modern Jewish musical aesthetics and cultural nationalism in the Russian Empire and Ottoman Palestine. The article concludes with a discussion of the lingering questions of Wagner’s appeal and controversy among contemporary American and Israeli Jews."

Modern Drama, 2005

Commentary, 2022

New Theatre Quarterly, 2013

For the past twenty-five years a key piece of evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has been identified in the Grimm Brothers’ anti-Semitic tale ‘The Jew in the Thorn-bush’ and a possible allusion to this in the text of Walther’s Act I ‘trial song’. This article argues that the passages in question are better explained with reference to a medieval poetic tradition still prevalent in nineteenth-century German culture involving the vocal contest between birds, paradigmatically the owl and the nightingale. Since the twelfth century, the owl and the nightingale have debated the merits of high and low art, religious themes, social forms, poetic diction and more. The associations of pedantry and harsh, coarse vocal character with the figure of the owl maps readily onto the negative traits of Beckmesser, just as the contrasting associations of the melodious nightingale with springtime, courtship and ‘natural’ musicality align with traits of Wagner’s artist-hero, Walther von Stolzing. Rather than displacing the possible anti-Semitic reading of Beckmesser, however, this alternative reading of the Beckmesser–Walther antagonism through the lens of avian conflict or debate poetry relocates that reading within a broader discursive and figurative context, one that is more commensurate with the possible role of anti-Semitic subtexts within Wagner’s music dramas in general.

In secular Jewish American music, the 1950s through 1970s are often viewed by scholars and musicians as a period of discontinuity. Building on Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (2002) call for a greater understanding of music from this time, I show that the work of second generation klezmorim, the children of immigrant klezmorim, maintained the traditional characteristics of their predecessors and foreshadowed the creative innovations of the klezmer revitalization beginning in the late 1970s. Drawing from recordings of select second generation klezmorim- Ray and Sammy Musiker, Sidney Beckerman, and Marty Levitt- and from interviews with Pete Sokolow, Dave Levitt, Margot Leverett, and other contemporary klezmorim, I will present the repertoire of the selected performers that demonstrates the trends in mid-century Jewish instrumental music. The mid-century klezmorim did not merely preserve a waning tradition, they primed the scene for the changes to follow, through the continued development of the bulgar genre, incorporation of popular American dance styles, more rapidly changing and complex harmonic progressions, and increased use chromaticism and the major scale. These klezmorim inhabited an audiotopia, a social space and time of musical contradiction, where the seemingly opposite binaries of Jewish cultural tradition and American popular culture, religious and profane, English and Yiddish coexisted. Their careers, repertoire, and musical advancements are evidence of the shifting sensibilities in Jewish music and the increasing fluidity of Jewish American identity throughout the twentieth century.

For the past twenty-five years a key piece of evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext in Wagner's Die Meistersinger has been identified in the Grimm Brothers' anti-Semitic tale 'The Jew in the Thorn-bush' and a possible allusion to this in the text of Walther's Act I 'trial song'. This article argues that the passages in question are better explained with reference to a medieval poetic tradition still prevalent in nineteenth-century German culture involving the vocal contest between birds, paradigmatically the owl and the nightingale. Since the twelfth century, the owl and the nightingale have debated the merits of high and low art, religious themes, social forms, poetic diction and more. The associations of pedantry and harsh, coarse vocal character with the figure of the owl maps readily onto the negative traits of Beckmesser, just as the contrasting associations of the melodious nightingale with springtime, courtship and 'natural' musicality align with traits of Wagner's artist-hero, Walther von Stolzing. Rather than displacing the possible anti-Semitic reading of Beckmesser, however, this alternative reading of the Beckmesser-Walther antagonism through the lens of avian conflict or debate poetry relocates that reading within a broader discursive and figurative context, one that is more commensurate with the possible role of anti-Semitic subtexts within Wagner's music dramas in general.

EUI Working Papers HEC 2010/01 "Cultural Representations of Jewishness at the Turn of the 21st Century", 2010