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Part I
Note: This is a greatly expanded and updated version of an essay that first appeared on TOO in 2012.
A long line of books and documentaries have explored Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his putative role as the spiritual and intellectual godfather to Adolf Hitler. In the Jewish-dominated cultural milieu of the contemporary West, this meme has taken on such a life that Wagner’s name is seldom mentioned today without the obligatory disclaimer that, while admittedly (and unfortunately) a musical genius, his reputation is forever sullied by his standing as a morally-loathsome anti-Semite. A consequence of this is that, for many people, Wagner “has become symbolic of everything evil in the world.”[A1]William Berger, Wagner Without Fear: Learning to Love—and Even Enjoy—Opera’s Most Demanding Genius (New York, Viking, 1998), 373.
Richard Wagner was a one-man artistic and intellectual movement whose shadow fell across all of his contemporaries and most of his successors. Other composers had influence; Wagner had a way of thinking named after him. A significant biographical feature of the composers that followed Wagner was how they grappled with his legacy. Some, like Bruckner and Strauss, imitated him; some, like Debussy and Bartok, rejected him; and some, like Hugo Wolf were almost paralyzed by the immensity of his achievement. Wagner’s influence extended to writers and intellectuals like Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, Baudelaire, Eliot, Nietzsche and Shaw. Given his huge impact on Western culture, Bryan Magee has strong grounds for his contention that “Wagner has had a greater influence than any other single artist on the culture of our age.”[A2]Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.
Wagner was a deeply polarizing figure in his lifetime, and no other composer has provoked such extreme antipathy or adulation. It has been said that his music has been loved and hated more immoderately than that of any other composer. Wagner was notoriously unscrupulous in his personal life—but his sexual and financial misdemeanors pale into insignificance beside the vastness and originality of his compositions. Even the anti-Wagnerites have had to acknowledge the enormity of his achievement, and his most fanatical detractors (a great many of them Jewish) have reluctantly agreed with the Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who wrote of the Ring: “Whatever one might think of Wagner’s titanic work, no one can deny the monumental nature of the task he set himself, and which he has fulfilled; nor the heroic inner strength needed to complete the task. It was truly one of the greatest artistic endeavors which the human mind has ever conceived.”[A3]Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 195.
The essence of Wagnerian opera lies in the music which deepens and subtilizes the overt meaning of the storyline. Profound, far-reaching psychic changes are accomplished through the music with little or no help from the words, and Wagner’s oeuvre includes some of the most powerful scenes in all opera. Wagner’s music dramas are notable for their use of leitmotifs, musical phrases associated with an idea or character. Not simply accompanying the libretto, they reveal the subconscious feelings of the characters or anticipate what will happen later in the story. There is no one-for-one correspondence between a leitmotif and the concept, idea or emotion that is first attached to it. The leitmotif has a potential to develop—but to develop musically. Scruton observed how “by implanting the principal of musical development in the heart of the drama Wagner is able to lift the action out of the events portrayed on the stage, and to endow it with a universal, cosmic and religious significance.”
One hundred and forty years after his death, Wagner retains a cultural prominence that surpasses any of his contemporaries. The excellence of his music has ensured its popularity has never waned, and Wagner is still well represented on recordings, on radio, and in the theater. Wealthy Wagner devotees travel the world in pursuit of live performances of his fifteen-hour, four-night opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Every year thousands still make a pilgrimage to the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth where in 1876 he inaugurated a festival devoted to his own music. The appeal of Wagner’s music, libretti and stagecraft have ensured his music dramas remain useful to opera companies around the world as a reliable income source, even in straitened economic times.
It is, however, Wagner’s standing as “a notorious anti-Semite,” and the intellectual establishment’s obsession with him on this basis, that has increasingly shaped his image in the popular consciousness. Wagner’s reputation is now so thoroughly tainted that one almost never encounters a serious examination of his ideas. For some, Wagner’s anti-Semitism diminishes or even invalidates his accomplishment as a composer. As the commentator Adrian Mourby noted: “The notion that artists don’t have to be as beautiful as the works they create is a commonplace now—except in the case of Wagner. ‘Judaism in Music’ is what has made him the unforgivable exception.”[A4]Adrian Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” The Guardian, July 21, 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,360...0.html
Judaism in Music
Kevin MacDonald observes in Separation and its Discontents that Richard Wagner is perhaps the best known intellectual who focused on the Jewish domination of culture.[A5]Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1st Books Library, 2004), 60. Wagner first expounded on what he saw as the pernicious Jewish influence on German art and culture in his 1850 tract Das Judenthum in der Musik (usually translated as Judaism in Music or Jewishness in Music), which was published under pseudonym in 1850.[A6]Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 79-100. http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/JudaismInMusic.pdf Wagner’s essay took up the theme of a previous article by Theodor Uhlig in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that was critical of the “Hebraic art taste” that Uhlig thought manifest in Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Le Prophète.
Wagner attempted in his essay to account for the “popular dislike of the Jewish nature,” and “the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews.” He concludes that Germans instinctively disliked Jews due to their alien appearance, speech and behavior, noting that “with all our speaking and writing in favor of the Jews’ emancipation [i.e., the result of German high-mindedness and dedication to abstract principles of human rights], we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.”[A7]Ibid.
(Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 79-100. http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/JudaismInMusic.pdf) Wagner here simply stated an obvious fact: that Germans, like all other racial and ethnic groups, were ethnocentric, and this colored their interactions with a fiercely-competitive, immensely ethnocentric resident outgroup like the Jews. According to Wagner, “We are deliberately distorting our own nature if we feel ashamed to proclaim the natural revulsion aroused in us by Jewishness. … Despite our pretended liberalism we still feel this aversion.”[A8]Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), 349.
Wagner argued in Judaism in Music that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial because they had no connection to the genuine spirit of the German people. He observed that: “So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer. … Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it.”[A9]Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit. Jews had not fully assimilated into German culture, so did not identify with and merge themselves into the deepest layers of that culture, including its religious and ethnic influences—the Volksgeist. According to Wagner, “our whole European art and civilization … remained to the Jew a foreign tongue.” The Jews “through an intercourse of two millennia with European nations” had never fully abandoned the posture of “a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on.” The entry of the Jews into nineteenth-century European society was, for Wagner, the infiltration of an alien and antagonistic group whose success symbolized the spiritual and creative crisis of German and European culture.
The same thesis was advanced by Zionist intellectuals like Ahad Ha’Am (the pseudonym of Asher Ginsburg). Kevin MacDonald notes that both Wagner and Ginsburg “developed the idea that Jews could not have their own artistic spirit because they failed to identify completely with the surrounding culture.”[A10]MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 184. In Wagner’s view, higher culture springs ultimately from folk culture. In the absence of Jewish influence, German music would once again reflect the deeper layers of German folk culture. For Wagner, “Judaic works of music often produce on us the impression as though a poem of Goethe’s, for instance, were being rendered in the Jewish jargon. … Just as words and constructions are hurled together in this jargon with wondrous inexpressiveness, so does the Jewish musician hurl together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master. Packed side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in motleyest chaos.”[A11]Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.
For Wagner, Jewish art was characterized by imitativeness, and therefore, by shallowness and superficiality. This was exemplified by the compositions that dominated the music scene of his time. From the depth and intensity of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the music of the concert hall had descended to the comparative superficiality of Mendelssohn—who had diverted the “tempests of revolution” into soothing salon music. Similarly, opera had fallen from the musical-dramatic peaks of Gluck and Mozart to the barren flatlands of Meyerbeer and Halevy. For Wagner, all that was meretricious in Grand Opera could be ascribed to the Jewishness of its composers—whose work amounted to a series of glib surface effects. He writes: “Of necessity what comes out of attempts by Jews to make art must have the property of coldness, of non-involvement, to the point of being trivial and absurd. We are forced to categorize the Jewish period in modern music as the period of consummate uncreativeness—stagnation run to seed.”
Writing in 1988, philosopher and cultural historian Bryan Magee observes that “to write works of this kind was to make use of art as a mere means—a means of entertainment, a means of giving pleasure and getting to be liked, a means of achieving status, money, fame. For Jews it was a means of making their way in an alien society.”[A12]Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 27. It certainly worked for Meyerbeer, with the first hundred performances of Le Prophète in Berlin alone netting him 750,000 marks—almost 200,000 marks more than the entire sum Wagner received over nearly two decades from his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria.[A13]Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 83-4.
Wagner’s thesis has been roundly condemned by Jewish commentators, and yet the Jewish academic David Rodwin, while labelling Wagner’s essay “a vile anti-Semitic screed,” admits there is substantial truth in the “aesthetic eclecticism” that Wagner identified as a unifying feature of Jewish composers.[A14]David Rodwin, “Wagner Was Right: Eclecticism and the Jewish Aesthetic,” (Los Angeles: 2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkfGEqo3YjQ Separation and its Discontents, 98.< [A16] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 24. Regarding Wagner’s attribution of “imitativeness” as a particularly Jewish trait, Jacob Katz likewise acknowledges that: “Jewish qualities may quite naturally appear—for better or for worse—in artistic creations of Jews, even of those who have joined non-Jewish culture. It would therefore be preposterous to dismiss categorically all observations from the mouths of anti-Semites as prejudicial misconceptions.”[A15] Magee calls Wagner’s thesis “unbelievably original” and notes:
One does not need to share Wagner’s view of Mendelssohn, who came from a Christianized and highly assimilated family, to see that his argument is substantially correct. … A really great creative artist is one who, in freely expressing his own needs, aspirations, and conflicts, articulates those of an entire society. This is made possible by the fact that, through his earliest relationships, mother tongue, upbringing, and all his first experience of life, the cultural heritage on which he has entered at birth is woven into the whole fabric of his personality. He has a thousand roots in it of which he is unaware, nourishing him below the level of consciousness, so that when he speaks for himself he quite unconsciously speaks for others. Now in Wagner’s time it was impossible for a Jewish artist to be in this position. The ghettos of Western Europe had only begun to be opened in the wake of the French Revolution, and their abolition was going on throughout the nineteenth century. The Jewish composers of Wagner’s day were among the very first emancipated Jews, pastless in the society in which they were living and working. They spoke its language with, literally, a foreign accent.[A16]
According to Magee, Wagner failed to notice that he was describing a transitional phenomenon—that the creations of Jewish composers would inevitably become “deeper” and more culturally authentic as the descendants of emancipated Jews assimilated into their host societies. Magee cites the emergence of Mahler and Schoenberg in the late nineteenth century to illustrate his point.
Drawing on the thesis of Heinrich Laube’s book Struensee, Wagner argued in Judaism in Music that Jews had also degraded German art by introducing their commercializing spirit into it. In February of 1848, at the funeral of Wagner’s mother, Laube had commiserated with his friend Wagner, equating the sadness of the hour with their mutual despair at the state of German art and culture, noting that “On the way to the station, we discussed the unbearable burden that seemed to us to lie like a dead weight on every noble effort made to resist the tendency of the time to sink into utter worthlessness.” As the preface to Struensee makes clear, this “worthlessness” consisted in the flowering of Jewish commercial values. Wagner’s only remedy was to “plunge dully and coldly into the only thing that could cheer me and warm me, the working out of my Lohengrin and my studies of German antiquity.”[A17]Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) 360. Regarding the Jewish tendency to convert art into a branch of commerce, Wagner writes:
[All] is turned to money by the Jew. Who thinks of noticing that the guileless looking scrap of paper is slimy with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes of the arts … have invented … from two millennia of misery, today the Jew converts into an art-bazaar. … We have no need first to substantiate the Jewification [Verjudung] of modern art. It springs to the eye and thrusts upon the senses. … But if emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must hold it crucial above all to assemble our forces for this war of liberation. But we shall never gain these forces by merely defining the phenomenon [of Judaism] in an abstract way. This will be done only by accurately knowing the nature of that involuntary feeling of ours which utters itself as an instinctive repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence. … Then we can rout the demon from the field … where he has sheltered under a twilit darkness … which we good-natured humanists ourselves have conferred on him.[A18]Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.
For Wagner, Judaism was the embodiment of the bourgeois money-egoist spirit, and he observes that: “When our social evolution reached that turning-point at which the power of money to bestow rank began to be openly admitted, it was no longer possible to keep the Jews at bay. They had enough money to be admitted to society.” Wagner believed that Jews “will continue to rule as long as money remains the power to which all our activities are subjugated.” He later confessed to his fellow composer friend (and future father-in-law) Franz Liszt, “I felt a long-repressed hatred for this Jewish money-world, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. An opportunity arose when their damnable scribbling annoyed me most, and so I broke forth at last.”[A19]Richard Wagner, letter of April 1851 trans. by W. Ashton Ellis, In: Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt 1841-1853, (London: 1897; repr. 1973), 145. In Judaism in Music Wagner finds the plea for Jewish emancipation to be “more than commonly naive, since we see ourselves rather in the position of fighting for emancipation from the Jews. The Jew is in fact, in the current state of the world, already more than emancipated. He rules.”
While stressing the harmful effects of the Jewish financial domination of German society, Wagner believed that the Jewish manipulation of language and art was infinitely more pernicious than their control over money. In his essay “What is German?” (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s) he states that culture, not economy, lies at the heart of German identity, and that Jews had bought the German soul and turned German Kultur into a sham, a mere image; and in doing this had destroyed “one of the finest natural dispositions in all the human race.”[A20]Richard Wagner, “What is German?” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 4 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 151-69. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagwi...er.htm
Wagner believed that the German people had been endowed with a uniquely rich inner life which had been forged during the crucible of the Thirty Years War. The body of the nation had almost been annihilated, “but the German spirit had passed through,” and amidst the physical ruins the Germans once again realized they were a nation of the spirit. This spirit had been preserved in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the German spiritual mission in the world was to proclaim “that the Beautiful and the Noble came not into the world for sake of profit, nay, not for the sake of even fame and recognition.”[A21]Ibid. (Italics in the original)
(Richard Wagner, “What is German?” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 4 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 151-69. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagwi...er.htm) Wagner thus viewed the new festival theater he built in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in 1876 as the Grail Castle of a reborn, spiritual Germany. Far from the cosmopolitan theaters owned and operated by city-dwelling Jews, Bayreuth would allow the German nation to regain a sense of its true self by experiencing the mythic force of its own ancient epic—the Nibelungen. Through Bayreuth, Wagner wanted to reclaim German art and culture from that “race of mediators and negotiators whose influence was … to spread its truly ‘international’ power more and more widely over Germany.”[A22]Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 376.
Wagner repeatedly observed (and lamented) the fact Jews had stormed the fortress of German high culture and had successfully “brought the public art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew.”[A23]Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit. A host of Jewish middlemen had gained a hold over the critical press, publishing, theaters, operas, orchestras, art galleries and agencies. This Jewish cultural ascendancy in Germany was, of course, to reach its zenith in the Weimar Republic. Despite his stated views, Wagner twice refused to sign the “Anti-Semites Petition” of 1880 (presented to Bismarck) which complained about the very economic domination that so troubled him. The Petition, which quickly won 225,000 signatures, stated:
Wherever Christian and Jew enter into social relations, we see the Jew as master, the indigenous Christian population in a subservient position. The Jew takes part only to a negligible extent in the heavy labor of the great mass of the nation. But the fruits of his [the German’s] labor are reaped mainly by the Jew. By far the largest part of the capital which national labor produces is in Jewish hands. … Not only do the proudest palaces of our large cities belong to Jewish masters whose fathers and grandfathers, huckstering and peddling, crossed the frontiers into our fatherland, but rural holdings too, that most significant preservative basis of our political structure fall more and more into the hands of the Jews. … What we strive for is solely the emancipation of the German Volk from a form of alien domination which it cannot endure for any length of time.[A24]Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 52.
Cosima Wagner gave several explanations for her husband’s refusal to sign the petition, among them that he had already done as much as he could for the cause, that a petition he had signed against vivisection had failed, and that the new appeal was addressed in servile language to Bismarck, who by this time Wagner loathed.[A25]Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 75. Wagner deplored the “Jewishness” of the new German empire, which he thought, thanks to Bismarck, had turned out to be a real-politischer state, rather than a truly German one. In 1878, Wagner wrote that “Bismarck is creating German unity, but he has no conception of its nature. … His conduct is a disgrace for Germany … his decisions have brought forth from the Jews a petition of thanks.” When Bismarck spoke out against the Anti-Semites Petition it only confirmed Wagner in his conviction that Bismarck had “a pact with the Jews.”[A26]Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 372.
For Roger Scruton, central to Wagner’s genius was his determination to use his art to escape from the increasingly commercialized world of art he detested—a world “where value is price and price is value,” and where entertainment is considered more important than art. Wagner escaped “to a garret, high above the market place” in conscious reaction against the sentimentality and disingenuousness of the art and music at his time.
The operas of Wagner attempt to dignify the human being in something like the way he might be dignified by an uncorrupted common culture. Acutely conscious of the death of God, Wagner proposed man as his own redeemer and art as a transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world. The suggestion is visionary, and its impact on modern culture so great that the shockwaves are still overtaking us. … In the mature operas of Wagner our civilization gave voice for the last time to its idea of the heroic, through music that strives to endorse that idea to the full extent of its power. And because Wagner was a composer of supreme genius, perhaps the only one to have taken forward the intense inner language forged by Beethoven and to have used it to conquer the psychic spaces that Beethoven shunned, everything he wrote in his mature idiom has the ring of truth, and every note is both absolutely right and profoundly surprising.[A27]Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2000), 69.
Wagner fled from the commercialized world of art into the inner realm of the imagination. He believed the idealism and heroism of a bygone age could be rekindled again. He strove to create a new music public that would not just identify with the Germanic heroic ideal, but embrace it as part of an idealistic nationalism that eschewed the bourgeois values of the mid-nineteenth century. In this endeavor, he strived to connect at an emotional rather than a rational level with his audience. As Wagner once wrote of his Ring cycle: “I shall within these four evenings succeed in artistically conveying my purpose to the emotional—not the critical—understanding of the spectators.”[A28]Richard Wagner, “A Communication to my Friends,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 1 (London: 1895; repr. 1966), 269-392. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagcomm.htm This was in keeping with his dictum that art should be “the presentation of religion in a lively form.”
It was precisely this quality in Wagner’s works that most repelled the Frankfurt School music theorist and leading Wagner critic T.W. Adorno, who likened Wagner’s famous system of leitmotifs to advertising jingles in the way they imprinted themselves on the memory. For Adorno, Wagner’s musical innovations led to feelings of disorientation and intoxication that seduced audiences and rendered them docile and dangerously susceptible to political persuasion. In every crowd applauding a Wagnerian work, Adorno insisted, lurked “the old virulent evil” of “demagogy.” Elizabeth Whitcombe notes that
Adorno believed that Wagner’s work is “proselytizing” and “collective-narcissistic.” Adorno’s complaint about the “collective-narcissistic” quality of Wagner’s music is really a complaint that Wagner’s music appeals to deep emotions of group cohesion. Like the Germanic myths that his music was often based on, Wagner’s music evokes the deepest passions of ethnic collectivism and ethnic pride. In Adorno’s view, such emotions are nothing more than collective narcissism, at least partly because a strong sense of German ethnic pride tends to view Jews as outsiders—as “the other.” It is also not surprising that Adorno, as a self-consciously Jewish intellectual, would find such music abhorrent.[A29]Elisabeth Whitcombe, “Adorno as Critic: Celebrating the Socially Destructive Force of Music,” The Occidental Observer, August 28, 2009. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/08/adorno...ritic/
Adorno’s jaundiced assessment of Wagner was encapsulated in Woody Allen’s quip that: “When I hear Wagner I have the irresistible urge to invade Poland.” Scruton points out that Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion (which so perturbed Adorno) was already doomed when Wagner first conceived it. The main problem being that:
[Wagner’s] sacerdotal presumptions have never ceased to alienate those who feel threatened by his message. Hence modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in their turn to make a mockery of the dramas [in so-called Regietheater/Eurotrash productions]. Of course, even today, musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of the television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.
As Michael Tanner has argued, in his succinct and penetrating defense of the composer, modern productions attempt to “domesticate” Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human trivia, usually in order to make a “political statement” which, being both blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the drama. In contemporary Wagner productions we see exactly what the transition from modernism to the “post-modern” world involves, namely, the final rejection of high culture as a redemptive force and the ruination of the sacred in its last imagined form.[A30]Scruton, Modern Culture, 69.
In the conclusion to Judaism and Music, Wagner asserts of the Jews that “only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasverus—going under!”[A31]Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Ibid.
(Scruton, Modern Culture, 69.) Although this has been taken by some commentators to denote actual physical annihilation, in the context of the essay it refers to the eradication of Jewish separateness and traditions. Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of the German-Jewish political writer and satirist Ludwig Börne by abandoning Judaism. In this way Jews will take part in “this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment; then we are one and un-dissevered!”
Wagner was calling for the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German culture and society. He thus offered to take Hermann Levi, the first conductor of his last opera Parsifal, to be baptized. Under the influence of Darwinian thinking (promoted in Germany by Ernst Häckel), Wagner later came to favor expulsion over conversion, and thus paralleled the trajectory of German anti-Semitism over the course of the nineteenth century, which “shifted from demands for Jewish assimilation by intellectuals such as Kant and the young Hegelians in the early part of the century, to an increasing emphasis on the ethnic divide separating Germans and Jews.”[A32]MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 165.
Wagner republished Judaism in Music under his own name in 1869 with an extended introduction, leading to several protests by Jews at the first performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In the introduction he writes: “Whether the downfall of our culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element I am unable to decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am unacquainted.”[A33]Richard Wagner, “Some Explanations Concerning ‘Judaism in Music,’” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 77-122. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagju...a2.htm In that year Wagner wrote a letter to the French philosopher Edouard Schoure in which he lamented that the assimilation of Jews into French society was preventing the French people from discerning the “corrosive influence of the Jewish spirit on modern culture.”
The second edition of Judaism in Music was published in the same year as Wilhelm Marr’s influential Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Jewishness over Germanism). Historian Richard Evans claims that by the end of the 1870s Wagner had read Wilhelm Marr’s essay and had “broadly agreed with it.”[A34]Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 33. In 1878, Wagner confessed that “It is distressing to me always to come back to the theme of the Jews. But one cannot escape it if one looks to the future.” In his late essay “Religion and Art” (1881), he described the Jews as “the plastic demon of the decline of mankind,” and declared: “I regard the Jewish race as the born enemies of humanity and everything that is noble in it; it is certain we Germans will go under before them, and perhaps I am the last German who knows how to stand up as an art-loving man against the Judaism that is already getting control of everything.”[A35]Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 377-8.
Part II
Wagner’s Racial Thinking
In addition to his concern about the baleful Jewish influence on German culture, Wagner, under the influence of Darwinism and the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, became increasingly concerned about the fate of the White race generally. Wagner met Gobineau in Rome in 1876 and again in Venice in 1880 when he read the French author’s bestselling An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Wagner thought that Gobineau had demonstrated in this famous essay that “we should have no History of Man at all, had there been no movements, creations, and achievements of the White man,” and was taken with his pessimistic notion that Western society was doomed because miscegenation would inevitably lead to the degeneration of the White race. He nevertheless disagreed with Gobineau’s claim that this degeneration was unstoppable. In his essay “Hero-dom and Christianity,” Wagner writes that: “We cannot withhold our acknowledgment that the human family consists of irremediably disparate races, whereof the noblest well might rule the more ignoble, yet never raise them to their level by commixture, but simply sink to theirs.” The Jews, however, offered a unique exception to this general rule:
The Jew, on the contrary, is the most astounding instance of racial congruence ever offered by world history. Without a fatherland, a mother tongue midst every people’s land and tongue he finds himself again, in virtue of the unfailing instinct of his absolute and indelible idiosyncrasy: even commixture of blood does not hurt him; let Jew or Jewess intermarry with the most distinct of races, a Jew will always come to birth.[B1]Richard Wagner, “Religion and Art,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 211-52. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr0...26.htm
While accepting many of Gobineau’s basic premises, Wagner, in his 1881 essay about the German people entitled “Know Thyself,” rejects the idea of Aryan superiority and writes about the “enormous disadvantage at which the German race… appears to stand against the Jewish.” Furthermore, when Gobineau stayed with the Wagners for five weeks in 1881, their conversations were punctuated with frequent arguments. Cosima Wagner’s diary recounts one exchange in which Wagner “positively exploded in favor of Christianity as compared to racial theory.” Wagner proposed that a “true Christianity” could provide for the moral harmonization of all races, which could, in turn, help prevent the physical unification of the races, and thereby the degeneration of the White race through miscegenation:
Incomparably fewer in individual numbers than the lower races, the ruin of the white races may be referred to their having been obliged to mix with them; whereby, as remarked already, they suffered more from the loss of their purity than the others could gain by the ennobling of their blood. … To us Equality is only thinkable as based upon a universal moral concord, such as we can but deem true Christianity elect to bring about.[B2]Richard Wagner, “Hero-dom and Christianity,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 275-84. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/waghero.htm
Wagner had first developed the idea of a revolutionary new Christianity in the opera text Jesus of Nazareth (1849), which depicted Jesus as redeeming man from the materialism of the “Roman world … and still more, of that [Jewish] world subject to the Romans. … I saw the modern world of the present day as a prey to the worthlessness akin to that which surrounded Jesus.”[B3]Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 264-74. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagknow.htm Wagner here drew heavily on Kant’s critique of Judaism. Enslaved to the Law, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ message of love; Jewish egoism and lovelessness had led Judas to betray Him. The Jews had preferred “power, domination… [and] the loveless forces of property and law, symbolized by Judaism.”[B4]Quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 361. Wagner’s hope for the emergence of a “new Christianity” to act as a bulwark against miscegenation and the degeneration of the White race has not transpired, although some Jewish commentators see it as having being realized in the ideology and practices of National Socialism.
For the Jewish music critic Larry Solomon, in Richard Wagner “all the racist historical models from Luther to Fichte, Feuerbach, Gobineau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Chamberlain, come to full maturity.”[B5]Larry Solomon, Wagner and Hitler, (Online article: 2002) http://solomonsmusic.net/WagHit.htm Yet, despite the irate epithets routinely directed at Wagner, most of his assertions are objectively true—not least his many warnings about the dangers of the Jewish economic and cultural domination of Western nations. The evidence shows that the races are unequal intellectually and physically, and race mixing does lead (on average) to the cognitive decline of the more intelligent racial party to the admixture. It should also be noted that Wagner’s racial views were mainstream opinions at the time he expressed them—including among the leading Jewish intellectuals I cited in my review of Jews & Race—Writings on Identity and Difference 1880-1940.
Wagner’s views on the Jewish Question strongly paralleled those of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Both Wagner and Herzl saw the Jews as a distinct and foreign group in Europe. Herzl saw anti-Semitism as “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about by the Jewish persecution of gentiles. Jews had, he claimed, been educated by Judaism to be “leeches” and possessed “frightful financial power.”[B6]MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 57. For Herzl, the Jews were a money worshipping people incapable of understanding any other motives than money. Kevin MacDonald notes in Separation and its Discontents that Herzl argued that “a prime source of modern anti-Semitism was that emancipation had brought Jews into direct economic competition with the gentile middle classes. Anti-Semitism based on resource competition was rational.” Herzl “insisted that one could not expect a majority to ‘let itself be subjugated’ by formally scorned outsiders that they had just released from the ghetto.”[B7]Ibid., 54.
(MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 57.) Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim notes that “Wagner’s conclusion about the Jewish problem was not only verbally similar to Herzl’s” but that “both Wagner and Herzl favored the emigration of the German Jews.”[B8]Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” Blog post, Undated. http://www.danielbarenboim.com/index.php?id=72 Despite their convergence of opinion on the Jewish Question, Herzl avoided the opprobrium posthumously heaped on Wagner; intellectual consistency being the first casualty of Jewish ethnic warfare through the construction of culture.
Jewish Responses to Wagner’s Ideas
Basically ignoring whether Wagner’s views on Jewish influence on German art and culture had any validity, a long line of Jewish music writers and intellectuals have furiously attacked the composer for just having expressed them. In his essay “Know Thyself,” Wagner writes of the fierce backlash that followed his drawing “notice to the Jews’ inaptitude for taking a productive share in our Art,” which was “met by the utmost indignation of Jews alike and Germans; it became quite dangerous to breathe the word ‘Jew’ with a doubtful accent.”[B9]Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” op. cit. Wagner was surprised by the hornet’s nest he had stirred up, and in a letter to the composer Franz Liszt noted that “I seem to have struck home with terrible force, which suits my purpose admirably, since that is precisely the sort of shock that I wanted to give them. For they will always remain our masters—that much is as certain as the fact that it is not our princes who are now our masters, but bankers and philistines.”[B10]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 352.
Wagner’s critique of Jewish influence on German art and culture could not be dismissed as the ravings of an unintelligent and ignorant fool. Richard Wagner was, by common consent, one of the most brilliant human beings to have ever lived, and his views on the Jewish Question were cogent and rational. Accordingly, Jewish critics soon settled on the response of ascribing psychiatric disorders to the composer, and this has been the stock approach ever since. As early as 1872, the German-Jewish psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann offered a psychological assessment of Wagner that was widely reported in the German press. He claimed Wagner was suffering from “chronic megalomania, paranoia … and moral derangement.”[B11]Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany, op. cit. Cesare Lombroso, the famous nineteenth-century Italian-Jewish criminologist, branded Wagner “a sexual psychopath.”[B12]Christopher Nicholson, Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007) 131.
Later, drawing on this approach, and with the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis and Expressionism in art and music, the habit arose of treating Wagner’s operas as journeys into the inner life of their creator. Scruton observes that:
From the first days of psychoanalysis, Wagner’s works were singled out as both confirming and demanding a psychoanalytic reading. Their super-saturated longing, their cry for redemption through sexual love, their exultation of Women as the vehicle of purity and sacrifice—all these features have naturally suggested, to the psychoanalytic mind, incestuous childhood fantasies, involving a fixation on the mother as wife. Such is the interpretation maintained by [the Jewish psychoanalysts] Max Graf and Otto Rank, both writing in 1911. Thereafter the habit of reading the works in terms of the life became firmly established in the literature.1183
Such interpretations have strongly influenced the discussion of Wagner’s works—“revenge on Wagner” has for some time been “an almost obligatory part of the intellectual’s apprenticeship.” Books like Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne and Joachim Kohler’s Richard Wagner: Last of the Titans continue a now venerable tradition in regarding “anti-Semitism as the meaning and Oedipal confusion as the cause of just about everything the master composed.” Even the respected British musicologist Barry Millington frequently writes “as though anti-Semitism is somewhere near the top of Wagner’s musical and intellectual agenda.”
The denigration of Wagner in the post-World War II era, spearheaded by Jewish musicologists and intellectuals like T.W. Adorno, established the pattern of treating his works as expressions of a deeply pathological personality, where the musicological task at hand was to “analyse them as exhibits in a medical case study, and to create the impression that we can best understand them not for what they say but for what they reveal about their creator.” Adorno condemned Wagner as a symbol of all that was hateful in the culture of nineteenth-century Germany. Scruton notes how Adorno’s criticisms of Wagner were deeply influenced by “the Holocaust and all that it meant concerning the roots of German nationalism.” Wagner’s autobiography is regularly trawled for evidence of psychopathology and “for the proof—however fleeting and arcane—that in this or that respect he was just as ordinary as the rest of us, even though the mind revealed in the book is one of the most extraordinary and comprehensive that has ever existed.”
In 1968, the Jewish writer Robert Gutman published a biography of Wagner (Richard Wagner: the Man, his Mind and his Music) in which he portrayed his subject as a racist, psychopathic, proto-Nazi monster. Gutman’s scholarship was questioned at the time, but this did not prevent his book from becoming a best-seller, and as one source notes: “An entire generation of students has been encouraged to accept Gutman’s caricature of Richard Wagner. Even intelligent people, who have either never read Wagner’s writings or tried to penetrate them and failed … have read Gutman’s book and accepted his opinions as facts.”[B13] The long-time music critic for The New York Times, the Jewish Harold Schonberg, was one of them, describing Wagner in his Lives of the Great Composers as “Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman … and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.”[B14]Harold Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 268. Likewise, for Jewish music critic David Hurwitz, Wagner was “an obnoxious, jackboot-stomping Nazi pygmy.” He regards Verdi, that other great opera composer of the nineteenth century, as “so overwhelmingly more important and deeper and more emotionally significant and a more finished and talented composer than Wagner could ever aspire to being.”[B15]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ax4N2B4GNs&t=662s
Video Link According to the composer Thomas Adès, Wagner is more than bad; he is pathologically bad, and his “music grows parasitically … It has a laboratory atmosphere—a sort of fungus.”
Another prominent refrain from Jewish commentators like Jacob Katz, the author of The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism, is that Wagner’s concern about the Jewish influence on German culture stemmed from his morbid jealousy of all the brilliant Jews around him like Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Heine. Taking up this theme, the music writer David Goldman insists that “Wagner ripped off the scenario for his opera ‘The Flying Dutchman’ from Heine and knocked off Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’ overture in the ‘Dutchman’s’ evocation of the sea. Wagner tried to cover his guilty tracks by denouncing Jewish composers he emulated, including Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner was not just a Jew-hater, then, but a backstabbing self-promoter who defamed the Jewish artists he emulated and who (in Meyerbeer’s case) had advanced his career.”[B16]David P. Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” Tablet, August 17, 2011. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/mu.../muted Boroson, writing in the Jewish Standard, likewise claims Wagner’s envy of Meyerbeer’s success “played a pivotal role in Wagner’s suddenly becoming a Jew-hater.”[B17]Warren Boroson, “Richard Wagner—The Devil Who Had Good Tunes,” Jewish Standard, August 7, 2009, 16.
Numerous sources trace Wagner’s anti-Semitism to his perception that a clique of powerful Jews (led by Meyerbeer and Halevy) had thwarted the staging of his Rienzi in Paris, and “at his dependence on money lenders, mostly presumably Jewish, at this time.”[B18]Michael Steen, The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (London: Icon Books, 2005), 464. Carr notes that from early in his career Wagner’s profligacy “put him in hock with moneylenders who were usually Jews.” Already in Magdeburg where he courted his first wife Minna, “he railed at having to deal with the ‘Jewish scum’ because ‘our people’ offered no credit. In Paris he pawned his goods to Jews and did work he felt was menial for, amongst others, Maurice Schlesinger, a Jewish music publisher. Schlesinger’s cash helped ward off starvation but that made the struggling composer feel no better.”[B19]Carr, The Wagner Clan, 83. Magee notes that the two and half years Wagner spent in Paris trying and failing to establish himself was “the worst period of deprivation and humiliation he ever had to suffer.”[B20]Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 26.
Invoking Freud, the Jewish music writer Marc A. Weiner in his Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, claims that: “Wagner’s vehement hatred of Jews was based on a model of projection involving a deep-seated fear of precisely those features within the Self (diminutive stature, nervous demeanor and avarice, as well as lascivious nature) that are projected upon and then recognized and stigmatized in the hated Other.”[B21]Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 6. Weiner’s view echoes that of the Jewish psychiatrist Theodore Rubin who views anti-Semitism as a “symbol sickness” that involves envy, low self-esteem and projection of one’s inner conflicts onto a stereotyped other.[B22]Theodore Isaac Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind (New York: Barricade, 2011), 12.
All these various theories, where Wagner’s criticism of Jewish influence is made a scapegoat for his own psychological frustrations, vastly overemphasize the irrational sources of prejudice, and effectively serve to clothe Jews in defensive innocence. According to these theories, anti-Jewish statements are never rational but invariably the product of a warped mind, while Jewish critiques of Europeans always have a thoroughly rational basis.
A Self-hating Jew?
Another well-worn theory has it that Wagner may have been part-Jewish, and that his anti-Semitism was his way of dealing this unedifying prospect (a variation of the “self-hating Jew” hypothesis). It is claimed that Wagner’s biological father was not his presumed father, the police registrar Friedrich Wagner who died of typhus shortly after Wagner’s birth, but his stepfather, the successful actor and painter Ludwig Geyer. However, there is no evidence that Geyer had any Jewish roots. In his biography of Wagner, John Chancellor states plainly that he had none, and “He [Geyer] claimed the same sturdy descent as the Wagners. His pedigree also went back to the middle of the seventeenth century and his forefathers were also, for the most part, organists in small Thuringian towns and villages.”[B23]John Chancellor, Wagner (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 6. Magee is even more categorical, stating, “Geyer was not Jewish, and it had never occurred to anyone who knew him to think that he might be. He came from a long line of church musicians; for generations his forebears had been Lutheran cantors and organists in the town of Eisleben. There was nothing Jewish about his appearance that might have misled people who were ignorant of his background.”[B24]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.
Chancellor blames Friedrich Nietzsche for first raising the question of Geyer’s possible Jewishness to add extra sting to his charge of illegitimacy, after the philosopher famously fell out with Wagner after years of close friendship. In his 1888 book Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner), Nietzsche claimed that Wagner’s father was Geyer, and made the pun that “Ein Geyer ist beinahe schon ein Adler” (A vulture is almost an eagle)—Geyer also being the German word for a vulture and Adler being a common (but not exclusively) Jewish surname. Magee, while agreeing that Nietzsche undoubtedly intended to rile Wagner with the suggestion of his possible Jewish ancestry, believes Nietzsche’s words also represented a jibe of a quite different kind.
Wagner, a provincial with a regional accent, a lower-middle class family background, and a long personal history of penury, had risen late in life to walk with kings and emperors; and somewhere along the way (strikingly reminiscent of Shakespeare, this, as so often) he allotted himself a coat of arms. This was revealingly (it shows what he thought his descent was), the “Geyer” coat of arms, prominently featuring a vulture against the shield while the kings and emperors would have been displaying their royal or imperial eagles. I think it is more than likely that Nietzsche was being sarcastic about Wagner’s self-promotion to the arms-bearing ranks of society with his “a vulture is almost an eagle.”[B25]Ibid., 360.
(Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.)
If, as has been often claimed, Wagner was concerned with denying the possibility that Geyer may have been his father (because of Geyer’s possible Jewish ancestry), why would he have adopted the Geyer coat of arms and insist it be prominently displayed on the cover of his autobiography? This obvious fact did not deter Gutman who contended that Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima tried to outdo each other in their anti-Semitism because they both had Jewish roots to conceal. While offering no proof Geyer was Jewish, Gutman insists that Wagner in his later years discovered letters from Geyer to his mother which led him to suspect that Geyer was his biological father, and that Geyer might have been Jewish. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was, according to Gutman, his way of dealing with the fear that people would think he was Jewish. Derek Strahan recycles this discredited theme, noting that:
Geyer’s affair with Wagner’s mother pre-dated the death of Wagner’s presumed father, Friedrich Wagner, a Police Registrar who was ill at the time young Richard was conceived, and who died six months after his birth. Soon after this, Wagner’s mother Johanna married Ludwig Geyer. Richard Wagner himself was known as Richard Geyer until, at the age of 14, he had his name legally changed to Wagner. Apparently he had taken some abuse at school because of his Jewish-sounding name. Could his later anti-Semitism have been motivated, at least in part, by sensitivity to this abuse, and by a kind of pre-emptive denial to prevent difficulties and suffering arising from prejudice?[B26]Derek Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” Online article, Undated. http://www.revolve.com.au/polemic/wagner.html
According to the only evidence we have on this point (Cosima’s diaries, 26 December 1868) Wagner “did not believe” that Ludwig Geyer was his real father. Cosima did, however, once note a resemblance between Wagner’s son Siegfried and a picture of Geyer.[B27]Quoted in John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 1. Pursuing the theme that anyone who expresses antipathy toward Jews must be psychologically unhealthy, Solomon draws a parallel between Wagner and Adolf Hitler in that “both feared they had Jewish paternity, which led to fierce denial and destructive hatred.”[B28]Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit. For Magee, these theories, which are now widely entrenched in the Wagner literature, are the “crassest falsehood.” Moreover, “the idea that Geyer might have been Jewish, or even that Wagner thought that he might have been, is pure fabrication, distilled nonsense.”[B29]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.
Part III
Wagner’s Music Dramas as Coded Anti-Semitism
T.W. Adorno and Wagner biographer Robert Gutman began a modern Jewish intellectual tradition when they proposed that Wagner’s antipathy to Jews was not limited to articles like Judaism in Music, but included hidden anti-Semitic and racist messages embedded in his operas. Numerous Jewish writers have taken up this theme and encouraged audiences to retrospectively read into Wagner’s operas latent signs of anti-Semitism. The gold-loving Nibelung lord Alberich in Siegfried is, for instance, supposedly a symbol of Jewish materialism. Solomon writes that Alberich is clearly “the greedy merchant Jew, who becomes the power-crazed goblin-demon lusting after Aryan maidens, attempting to contaminate their blood, and who sacrifices his lust in order to acquire the gold…”[C1]Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.
Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (originally written in 1845), is frequently touted as his most anti-Semitic opera. The character Beckmesser, who is incapable of original work and resorts to stealing the work of others, is said to symbolize the lack of Jewish originality that Wagner highlighted in Judaism in Music. According to Gutman, Beckmesser was modeled after Eduard Hanslick, the powerful half-Jewish music critic who constantly disparaged Wagner. Beckmesser purportedly draws directly on a common fund of nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes: he shuffles and blinks, is scheming and argumentative, and is not to be trusted. He slinks up the alley behind the night watchman in Act II, and limps and stumbles about the stage in Act III, blinking with embarrassment when Eva turns away from his ingratiating bow at the song contest. Furthermore, when he sings, he wrongly accents certain syllables and sings with disjointed rhythms, parodying the Jewish cantorial style. For British musicologist Barry Millington, the fact that Wagner invested Beckmesser with such traits “is a startling fact that almost of itself provides proof of Wagner’s anti-Semitic intent in Die Meistersinger.”
At the 2017 Bayreuth Festival, Barrie Kosky—the first Jewish director to stage a work at the festival—played up such notions, portraying Beckmesser with stereotypical Jewish features (see the lead photograph). In the production, Kosky embedded the opera’s setting of Nuremberg in the twentieth century as the birthplace of the race laws enacted by the National Socialists, the setting of the NSDAP’s giant torch-lit rallies, and the scene for the postwar show trials of Hitler’s henchmen. Kosky’s “edgy” production won rapturous applause from an audience that included Chancellor Angela Merkel. Spiegel Online called the production “chillingly relevant” in using Wagner’s anti-Semitism to take on “hatred of Jews” in today’s Europe. Die Welt said Wagner’s “toxic ideology” had always been an “elephant in the room” which Kosky had ingeniously opted to make “the actual subject of his staging.”
Like Beckmesser, the characters of Mime in the Ring and Klingsor in Parsifal are also widely identified as Jewish stereotypes, although none of these were actually identified as Jews by Wagner in the libretto. Mime is, for Solomon, depicted by Wagner “as a stinking ghetto Jew” while “Siegfried represents the conscience-free, fearless Teuton, he feels no remorse. … He is glorified as the warrior hero of the Ring, the archetypal proto-Nazi.”[C2]Ibid.
(Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.) Unconcerned at the lack of any real evidence for his thesis, Solomon maintains that virulent racism “permeates all aspects of his music dramas through metaphorical suggestion. Wagner is always just a step away from actually calling his evil characters ‘Jews,’ even though it was obvious to his contemporaries.” He claims that Wagner was too clever to identify Jews in his music dramas, especially after the critical reactions he received to his essay Judaism in Music. “His intent was far more artful and covert, but nevertheless still political: to reach his audience on an emotional, subliminal level, bypassing their critical faculties.” In the final analysis, Wagner’s operas are, for Solomon, “tools of racist, proto-Nazi hate propaganda, written for the purpose of redeeming the German race from Jewish contamination, and for expelling the Jews from Germany.” Moreover, the malign influence of Wagner continues insofar as “the subtext of racist metaphors has not diminished in Wagner’s operas, so they will continue to exert a subliminal influence.”[C3]Ibid.
(Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.)
In his book Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1997), Marc A. Weiner likewise argued that Wagner deliberately used the characters in his operas to promote his sociological theories of a pure Germany purged of Jewish influence. According to Weiner:
Wagner’s anti-Semitism is integral to an understanding of his mature music dramas. … I have analyzed the corporeal images in his dramatic works against the background of 19th-century racist imagery. By examining such bodily images as the elevated, nasal voice, the “foetor judaicus” (Jewish stench), the hobbling gait, the ashen skin color, and deviant sexuality associated with Jews in the 19th century, it’s become clear to me that the images of Alberich, Mime, and Hagen [in the Ring cycle], Beckmesser [in Die Meistersinger], and Klingsor [in Parsifal], were drawn from stock anti-Semitic clichés of Wagner’s time.[C4]Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” op. cit.
For Weiner, Wagner’s anti-Semitic caricatures can be readily identified from their manner of speech, their singing, their roles, and their body language. “All of the stereotypical cardboard, cookie-cutter features of a Jew … show up all over the place in his musical dramas.” Under Weiner’s deconstruction of Wagner’s characters it emerges that his Teutonic heroes are “invariably clear-eyed, deep-voiced, straight-featured and sure-footed. The Jewish anti-heroes have dripping eyes, high voices, bent, crooked bodies and a hobbling, awkward step, with these embodied metaphors all serving to reinforce the ideology of racism.”[C5]Quoted in Lisa Norris, “Jewish Dwarfs and Teutonic Gods,” H-Net Reviews, September 1997. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1318 In response to Weiner’s critique, one is reminded of the aptness of Goldwin Smith’s remark that the “critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as bigotry of religion. This accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentile and unclean.”[C6]Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 56.
Numerous Jewish commentators cite Wagner’s Parsifal, the last of his music dramas, as his most racist opera. Gutman, for example, labels it “a brooding nightmare of Aryan anxiety.” According to Jewish academic Paul Lawrence Rose in his book Wagner, Race and Revolution, Wagner intended Parsifal to be
a profound religious parable about how the whole essence of European humanity had been poisoned by alien, inhuman, Jewish values. It is an allegory of the Judaization of Christianity and of Germany—and of purifying redemption. In place of theological purity, the secularized religion of Parsifal preached the new doctrine of racial purity, which was reflected in the moral, and indeed religious, purity of Parsifal himself. In Wagner’s mind, this redeeming purity was infringed by Jews, just as devils and witches infringed the purity of traditional Christianity. In this scheme, it is axiomatic that compassion and redemption have no application to the inexorably damned Judaized Klingsor and hence the Jews.[C7]Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner, Race and Revolution (Yale University Press, 1998), 166.
This theory sits rather incongruously alongside the fact that when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Parsifal was condemned as “ideologically unacceptable” and unofficially banned throughout Germany after 1939.[C8]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366. In his diaries Goebbels dismissed the opera as “too pious.”[C9]Quoted in Carr, The Wagner Clan, 182. If Parsifal truly is the racist opera that Rose alleges, one might have expected it to have been given a place of prominence in the Third Reich.
In Wagner, Race and Revolution, Rose claims the philosophical revolution brought about by Kant in the late eighteenth century was a response to the Jewish Question, with Kant’s transcendental idealism intended as liberation from the shackles of Jewish ways of looking at the world. The corollary of this, for Rose, is that Schopenhauer’s philosophy (with its heavy debt to Kant) is thoroughly infused with anti-Semitism, and, consequently, Wagner’s Schopenhauerian opera Tristan and Isolde is deeply anti-Semitic. Rose proposes that: “Such is the most fundamental anti-Jewish message that underlies the apparently ‘non-social’ and ‘non-realistic’ opera composed in Wagner’s Schopenhauerian phase, Tristan.”[C10]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373. Magee trenchantly observes that:
We are no longer surprised when he goes on to tell us that “Hatred of Jewishness is the hidden agenda of virtually all the operas.” It is no good Wagner trying to slip this past Professor Rose by making no mention of it: Rose is not to be so easily fooled. … Rose often sees the omission of any mention of Jews or Jewishness as being due to anti-Semitism, and this enables him throughout his book to expose anti-Semitism in undreamt-of places, in fact in all forms of art and ideas that are not either Jewish or about Jews. … Writers like Professor Rose can be endlessly resourceful in arguing that the apparent absence of something is proof of its presence. … Such a procedure is intellectually fraudulent from beginning to end.[C11]Ibid., 373; 377 & 380.
(Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373.)
Jewish music critics and intellectuals, like those cited above, have enthusiastically seized upon Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried for having backed their various theories about the inherently anti-Semitic nature of Wagner’s operas, and Wagner’s firm standing as a moral pariah. Gottfried Wagner has made a virtual career out of attacking his ancestors—constantly denouncing his great-grandfather and other family members as evil anti-Semites. In his book The Wagner Legacy, he declares: “Richard Wagner, through his inflammatory and anti-Semitic writings, was co-responsible for the transition from Bayreuth to Auschwitz.”[C12]Gottfried Wagner, The Wagner Legacy: An Autobiography (Sanctuary, 2000), 240. In writing his Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy, Gottfried Wagner had, according to Solomon, “in an act of self-imposed moral obligation and great personal sacrifice, restored to his roots the conscience that Wagner and Hitler took away.”[C13]Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit. Gottfried Wagner appeared at a symposium at the American Jewish University in 2010 where he continued “to set the record straight today. Always on the side of the Jews, he stopped off on Shabbos to mingle with congregants at a local temple.”[C14]Carol Jean Delmar, “Let the Truth be Heard!,” Ring Festival LA Protest Campaign, June 14, 2010. http://ringfestlaprotest.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/g...-2010/
Despite all the claims made about the allegedly anti-Semitic nature of Wagner’s operas, Strahan points out that it is equally possible to point to cultural references in Wagner’s work that are sympathetic to the Jewish place in European culture. For Strahan, “the hero of the early opera The Flying Dutchman is synonymous with the ‘Wandering Jew,’ the Dutchman’s endless journeying analogous to that symbol of the Jewish Diaspora.”[C15]Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” op. cit. Wagner himself referred to his eminently non-Jewish personification of redemption through love, the Flying Dutchman, as an “Ahasverus of the Ocean.” Despite this, Rose argues that Wagner’s making the Wandering Jew a Dutchman was itself an anti-Semitic act, claiming that: “Wagner’s use of this universalized figure of a wanderer has a profoundly anti-Semitic implication; for Wagner’s heroes—and especially the Dutchman—are able to achieve redemption precisely because they are not Jewish.”[C16]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373.
Wagner explicitly states in Judaism in Music that what makes Jews such unsatisfactory characters in real life also makes them unsuitable for representation in art, including dramatic art. He writes:
In ordinary life the Jew, who as we know possesses a God of his own, strikes us first by his outward appearance which, whatever European nationality we belong to, has something unpleasantly foreign to that nationality. We instinctively feel we have nothing in common with a man who looks like that. … Ignoring the moral aspect of this unpleasant freak of nature, and considering only the aesthetic, we will merely point out that to us this exterior could never be acceptable as a subject for a painting; if a portrait painter has to portray a Jew, he usually takes his model from his imagination, and wisely transforms or else completely omits everything that in real life characterizes the Jew’s appearance. One never sees a Jew on the stage: the exceptions are so rare that they serve to confirm this rule. We can conceive of no character, historical or modern, hero or lover, being played by a Jew, without instinctively feeling the absurdity of such an idea. This is very important: a race whose general appearance we cannot consider suitable for aesthetic purposes is by the same token incapable of any artistic presentation of its nature.[C17]Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by Bryan Magee, In: Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 375.
In this passage (first published in 1850 and then again unchanged in 1869), Wagner totally rejects the idea of Jews playing characters and characters playing Jews on stage, stating categorically that the Jewish race is “incapable of any artistic presentation of his nature,” and leading into the statement with the words: “This is very important.” Magee notes that here Wagner “positively and actively repudiates the idea of trying to present Jews on the stage; and if we seek an explanation of why he never did so, here we have it.” Wagner would not, contrary to the wishes of many of his friends, have gone out of his way to publish this again in 1869 if, as alleged, he had just done the opposite and made Beckmesser a Jewish character in Die Meistersinger which had premiered the previous year.[C18]Ibid., 375-6.
(Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by Bryan Magee, In: Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 375.)
Wagner produced thousands of pages of written material analyzing every aspect of himself, his operas, and his views on Jews (as well as many other topics); and yet the purportedly “Jewish” characterizations identified by Adorno, Gutman and countless others are never mentioned—nor are there any references to them in Cosima Wagner’s copious diaries. It can hardly be argued that Wagner was hiding his true feelings for he took great pride in speaking out fearlessly and vociferously on the subject of Jews, and did not worry about offending anyone. None of Wagner’s supposedly obvious characterizations were ever used in the propaganda of the Third Reich. To identify such characters as Beckmesser, Alberich, Mime, Klingsor and Kundry as Jews is, therefore, entirely speculative.
The Jewish pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim makes the point that: “Whoever wants to see a repulsive attack on Jews in Wagner’s operas can of course do so. But is it really justified? Beckmesser, for example, who might be suspected of being a Jewish parody, was a state scribe in the year 1500, a position that was unavailable to Jews.”[C19]Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” op. cit. Barenboim is also quick to point out that Wagner’s anti-Semitism did not prevent his music from being performed by Jews even after Hitler came to power. In Tel Aviv in 1936, for example, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra—precursor to today’s Israel Philharmonic—performed the prelude to Act 1 and Act 3 of Lohengrin under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. “Nobody had a word to say about it,” Barenboim observes. “Nobody criticised [Toscanini]; the orchestra was very happy to play it.”
Even Nietzsche, who attacked Wagner on numerous occasions for his personal anti-Semitism, never alleged there was anti-Semitism in the operas. Moreover, the audiences that flocked to Wagner’s works all over the world did not seem to perceive their supposedly obvious anti-Semitic subtexts for, as Magee points out, “in the huge literature we have on the subject, unpublished as well as published, the question arises rarely until the middle of the twentieth century.”[C20]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 374. For Magee, a great many writers (especially Jewish writers) are simply “swept forward by the momentum of their own anger” into alleging the omnipresence of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s operas. “To a number of them it comes easily anyway, for they are adept at finding anti-Semitism in places where no one had detected it before. … At the root of it all is an unforgiving rage at the mega-outrage of anti-Semitism—and at the root of that in the modern world is the Holocaust.”[C21]Ibid., 373; 380.
(Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 374.)
“Sarcasm and Satire Run Riot on the Stage”
Even when not overtly propagandistic like Kosky’s 2017 production of Die Meistersinger or the 2013 Düsseldorf production of Tannhäuser which depicted people dying in gas chambers, productions of Wagner’s operas in the modern era almost invariably seek to satirize the drama in order to subvert the message Wagner attempts to convey. Scruton observes that, notwithstanding the increasingly tiresome preoccupation with dissecting The Ring for anti-Jewish and proto-fascistic themes and images (and counteracting them), Wagner’s celebrated tetralogy is also, on a more basic level, problematic for opera producers because its “world of sacred passions and heroic actions offends against the skeptical and cynical temper of our times. The fault, however, lies not in Wagner’s tetralogy, but in the closed imagination of those who are so often invited to produce it.”1203
The template for modern productions was set with the Bayreuth production of 1976, when Pierre Boulez sanitized the music, and Patrice Chereau satirized the text. Scruton notes that:
Since that ground-breaking venture, The Ring has been regarded as an opportunity to deconstruct not only Wagner but the whole conception of the human condition that glows so warmly in his music. The Ring is deliberately stripped of its legendary atmosphere and primordial setting, and everything is brought down to the quotidian level, jettisoning the mythical aspect of the story, so as to give us only half of what it means. The symbols of cosmic agency—spear, sword, ring—when wielded by scruffy humans on abandoned city lots, appear like toys in the hands of lunatics. The opera-goer will therefore very seldom be granted the full experience of Wagner’s masterpiece.
This certainly describes the Ring I attended in Melbourne in 2016. While the soloists and the orchestra were excellent, the postmodernist, Eurotrash-inspired production detracted from the power of the music and drama. Following established precedent, much of the action was set in a space akin to an industrial wasteland. Siegfried’s heroic forging scene was lampooned by being set it in a tawdry apartment replete with fluorescent lighting, microwave, bar fridge and bunk beds. Fafner (meant to have transformed himself into a dragon) was depicted as a transvestite-like figure smearing make-up on his face and appearing naked on the stage.
Productions like these deliberately sabotage Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion. They let “sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.”
Part IV
Wagner and National Socialist Germany
Richard Wagner has long been reviled by Jews as the intellectual and spiritual precursor to Adolf Hitler who, according to William Shirer, once declared: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”[D1]William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Random House, 2002), 101. This line is spoken by the Hitler character in the 2008 Hollywood film Valkyrie (the Wagnerian title of the film being taken from the codename for the failed Wehrmacht plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944). For music critic Larry Solomon, no other composer in history had a greater impact on world events than Richard Wagner; and “his devastating political legacy is second only to Adolf Hitler.”[D2]Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit. In his book Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind: A Psychiatrist Explores the Psychodynamics of a Symbol Sickness, Theodore Rubin states that a psychologically sick Adolf Hitler “borrowed from the almost equally sick anti-Semitic Wagner.”[D3]Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, 127. Jewish activist and prolific writer on anti-Semitism, the late Robert Wistrich, likewise proposed that: “Wagner’s essentially racist vision of Jewry would have a profound influence on German and Austrian anti-Semites, including the English born Houston S. Chamberlain, Lanz von Liebenfels, and above all on Adolf Hitler himself.”[D4]Robert S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Mandarin, 1992), 56.
This widely accepted notion of a direct intellectual line of descent from Wagner to Hitler has, however, been challenged by historians like Richard Evans who points out that “the composer’s influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated,” and that while Hitler “admired the composer’s gritty courage in adversity,” he “did not acknowledge any indebtedness to his ideas.”[D5]Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York, Penguin, 2005), 199. Magee likewise maintains that “if one studies the intellectual development of the young Hitler one finds no evidence that he got any of his anti-Semitism from Wagner.”[D6]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 362. While Evans and Magee slightly overstate their case, they are right to attempt to put the issue of Wagner’s influence on Hitler into a more rational perspective.
Wagner’s intellectual influence on Hitler was mainly secondhand through his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who developed some of Wagner’s ideas in his bestselling 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which did influence Hitler’s ideas on race and the Jewish Question. The man who founded the library at the National Socialist Institute in Munich, Friedrich Krohn, compiled an inventory of the titles borrowed by Hitler between 1919 and 1921. The four page list contains over a hundred entries. Listed alongside Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is the German translation of Henry Ford’s The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, and condensations of titles such as Luther and the Jews, Goethe and the Jews, Schopenhauer and the Jews, and Wagner and the Jew. Clearly Hitler had some exposure to Wagner’s anti-Jewish writing.[D7]Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (New York: Vintage, 2010), 50. It is also clear that Hitler read and greatly admired Wagner’s autobiography, and the title of his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was conceivably modeled on Wagner’s Mein Leben (My Life).[D8]Guido Knopp, Hitler’s Women, trans. by Angus McGeoch (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003) 158. According to German historian Guido Knopp, “It was not just the title, but also one of the key sentences, that Hitler copied from Richard Wagner. Just as the composer has written in Mein Leben: ‘I decided to become a composer,’ so did the prisoner [Hitler] now write: ‘I decided to become a politician.’”[D9]Ibid., 169.
(Guido Knopp, Hitler’s Women, trans. by Angus McGeoch (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003) 158.)
In his book Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, Timothy Ryback notes that among the books that found their way into Hitler’s vast private collection was a biography of Wagner by Chamberlain entitled Richard Wagner: The German as Artist, Thinker, Politician.[D10]Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 134. This book contains only a few minor references to Jews. In 1933, Hitler received a volume entitled Wagner’s Resounding Universe which was inscribed by its author, Walter Engelsmann, to “the steward and shaper of the descendants of Siegfried upon the earth.”[D11]Ibid., 146.
(Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 134.) Among the books found in the bunker complex after the fall of Berlin in 1945 was a 1913 treatise on Wagner’s Parsifal.[D12]Ibid., 239.
(Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 134.) Wagner’s ideas clearly exerted some influence on Hitler’s intellectual development. However, just three known volumes on Wagner (with none by Wagner himself) out of an estimated 16,000 books in Hitler’s collection at the time of his death, hardly suggests Wagner’s intellectual influence was “profound.”
There is certainly no evidence to support the extravagant claim of Joachim Fest in his biography of Hitler that: “Wagner’s political writing was Hitler’s favorite reading, and the sprawling pomposity of his style was an unmistakable influence on Hitler’s own grammar and syntax.” Fest even ventured to claim that Wagner’s “political writings together with the operas form the entire framework of Hitler’s ideology,” and that in these he “found the granite foundation for his view of the world.”[D13]Joachim Fest, Hitler (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 56. This assessment of Wagner’s influence on Hitler is utterly rejected by Jonathan Carr in his 2007 book The Wagner Clan. Carr makes the point that:
If Wagner’s works really were “the exact spiritual forerunner” of Nazism, surely the Fuhrer of all people would have drummed that point home ad infinitum. But one looks to him in vain not only for fascist interpretations of the music dramas but, stranger still, for direct references to the theoretical writings. There is, indeed, surprisingly little evidence that Hitler read Wagner’s prose works, though he evidently did borrow some from a library before he rose to power and the wording of some of his speeches indicates that he imbibed at least Das Judentum in der Musik. Why then did he not use the Master more clearly as an ally, especially in his anti-Semitic cause? In Mein Kampf, for instance, he notes that his early hostility to Jews owed much to the example set by Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna. He also praises Goethe for acting according to the spirit of “blood and reason” in treating “the Jew” as a foreign element. He pays no similar tribute to the Master, indeed he only mentions Wagner by name once in the whole book (although he refers elsewhere to the “Master” of Bayreuth).[D14]Carr, The Wagner Clan, 187.
In one of three brief references to Wagner in Mein Kampf, Hitler reflects on his early experiences attending Wagner’s operas: “I was captivated. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth master knew no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas, and today it still seems to me a great piece of luck that these modest productions in a little provincial city prepared the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.”[D15]Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by James Murphy (Bottom of the Hill, 2010), 23. Among the “great men” in history that Hitler singled out in Mein Kampf were Luther, Frederick the Great, and Wagner. He praised Wagner as a “combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person” which he regarded as “the rarest phenomenon of this earth. And it is that union which produces the great man.”[D16]Ibid., 488.
(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by James Murphy (Bottom of the Hill, 2010), 23.)
Despite the paucity of evidence for Wagner having exercised the high level of intellectual influence on Hitler that is widely alleged, for the Jewish music writer David Goldman, Wagner’s name is eminently worthy of execration on the basis that he “mixed the compost heap in which the flowers of the twentieth century’s greatest evil took root.” According to Goldman:
The Nazis embraced Wagner not by accident or opportunism but because they recognized in him the cultural trailblazer of the world they set out to rule. … Wagner may not have been the only anti-Semite among the composers of the 19th century, nor even the worst, but he did more than anyone else to mold the culture in which Nazism flourished. The Jewish people have had no enemy more dedicated and more dangerous, precisely because of his enormous talent. In a Jewish state, the public has a right to ask Jewish musicians to be Jews first and musicians second. With reluctance, and in cognizance of all the ambiguities, I think the Israelis are right to silence him. [Goldman here refers to the unofficial ban on performances of Wagner’s music in Israel][D17]David Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” op. cit.
For Goldman, Hitler’s intellectual debt to Wagner and the “proto-Nazi” nature of Wagner’s musical dramas are unambiguous. Magee questions the idea that Wagner’s works inherently support National Socialist notions of heroism, and notes that Wagner’s last opera Parsifal (frequently cited as Wagner’s most “racist” opera) was denounced by the regime in 1933 for being “ideologically unacceptable” and was not performed at Bayreuth during the war.[D18]Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366. Moreover, while Wagner’s music and operas were frequently performed during the Third Reich, his popularity in Germany actually declined in favor of Italian composers like Verdi and Puccini. In the theatrical year in which Hitler came to power, 1932–33, there were 1,837 separate performances of operas by Wagner in Germany. The number of performances then went steadily down until, by 1939–40, they were less than two-thirds of that figure, 1,154.[D19]Ibid., 365.
(Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366.) Evans notes that by the 1938–39 opera season, Wagner had only one opera in the top fifteen most popular operas of the season, with the list being headed by Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.[D20]Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201.
It is well known that the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance prior to their evacuation from Berlin in April 1945 was of a scene from the conclusion to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to an audience that included Speer, Dönitz and Goebbels. Likewise, when the Reich Radio announced Hitler’s death, the funeral march from Götterdämmerung was played. With these events in mind, Wagner’s music has been used in countless Third Reich documentaries—in the process consolidating the misleading impression that Wagner’s music was uniquely bound up with the cultural politics of the National Socialist state.
It is clear that the supposed National Socialist fascination with Wagner, to the extent it genuinely existed, was mostly Hitler’s inspiration. Hitler’s boyhood friend, August Kubizek, noted in his book The Young Hitler I Knew that what made the young Hitler so receptive to Wagner’s operas was not the composer’s political outlook, but rather Hitler’s own “constant, intensive preoccupation with the heroes of German mythology,” and Wagner’s ability to translate “his boyish dreams into poetry and music” which satisfied “his longing for the sublime world of the German past.”[D21]August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84. Kubizek writes that, “listening to Wagner meant to him not a simple visit to the theater, but the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that trance, that escape into a mystical dream-world which he needed in order to sustain the enormous tension of his turbulent nature.”[D22]Ibid.
(August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84.)
Kubizek describes the time they first went to a Wagner opera—Rienzi, an early work by Wagner that established him as a composer. “We were shattered by the death of Rienzi,” he writes of that fateful evening in 1906, “and although Hitler would usually begin to talk immediately after being moved by an artistic experience, and to voice sharp criticism of the performance, on this occasion Adolf remained silent for a long time.” Rienzi was a Roman who rose to be tribune of the people but was then betrayed and died within the ruins of the Capitol. Kubizek described how his friend suddenly announced with “grand and thrilling images,” how he would lead the German people “out of servitude to the heights of freedom.”[D23]Ibid., 118.
(August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84.) According to Kubizek, Hitler’s decision to become a politician “was seized in that hour on the heights above the city of Linz,” when “in a state of complete ecstasy and rapture,” he transferred the character of Rienzi “to the plane of his own ambitions.”[D24]Ibid., 116-8.
(August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84.) Describing that fateful night to Winifred Wagner in 1939, Kubizek claims that Hitler solemnly declared “In that hour it began!”[D25]Ibid., 118-9.
(August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84.)
Hitler heard Tristan and Isolde at least thirty or forty times during the Vienna phase of his life. At one stage, he even wrote a brief sketch for a Wagner-style opera entitled Wieland the Smith. Gretl Mitlstrasser, the woman who managed the daily running of the Berghof “recounted numerous stories of Hitler’s private ‘communing’ on the property… when he held late-night vigils on the Berghof balcony, watching the Untersberg bathed in moonlight; when he let the ethereal strains of Wagner’s Lohengrin fill his study as he watched the jagged cliffs peek through the enfolding mists.”[D26]Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 176. Hitler had a bust of Wagner by Arno Breker in his private quarters, and in his table talk once claimed that “when I listen to Wagner I hear the rhythms of a bygone world.”[D27]Nicholson, Richard and Adolf, 21.
In the 1920s, Hitler became a friend of Wagner’s children and grandchildren, and particularly of his English-born daughter-in-law Winifred, who joined the NSDAP in 1926, and who proposed marriage to him. She later wrote that “the bond between us was purely human and personal, an intimate bond founded on our reverence and love for Richard Wagner.”[D28]Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 152. In the summer of 1933 she found that hundreds of foreign ticket reservations for that year’s Bayreuth Festival had been cancelled, threatening its financial viability. Lieselotte Schmidt, a close friend of Winifred, noted at the time that “we have been frozen into isolation. The hate campaign against Bayreuth, which is at root of purely Jewish origin, stops at nothing in its lies and unpleasantness.” When the matter came to Hitler’s attention, he summoned Winifred to Berlin, and Schmidt noted that: “She flew there, and within a quarter of an hour we had the necessary help—and how!” The festival was made exempt from all taxes during the Third Reich, and Hitler donated 50,000 Reichsmarks of his own money for each new production.[D29]Ibid., 181.
(Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 152.)
Evans points out that Hitler’s personal patronage meant that “neither Goebbels nor Rosenberg nor any of the other cultural politicians of the Third Reich could bring Bayreuth under their aegis.”[D30]Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 200. Winifred Wagner and the managers of the Festival were “granted an unusual degree of cultural autonomy” by Hitler, and Knopp states that “It is a fact that even the Bayreuth productions during the Nazi era hardly display any evidence of distortion for propaganda reasons.”[D31]Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 189. Hitler was a regular guest at the Bayreuth festivals between 1933 and 1939, and on his fiftieth birthday Winifred arranged for him to be presented with the manuscript draft to Wagner’s Rienzi and original scores of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, as well as a sketch for Götterdämmerung.[D32]Ibid., 193.
(Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 189.)
When considering Wagner’s posthumous relationship with the National Socialists, we need to draw a clear distinction between Hitler as an individual and the Third Reich as a regime. Magee is careful to do so:
It was not the case that the Nazi regime in general was devoted to Wagner, or did anything to promote his works. Many people nowadays write and talk as if Wagner provided a sort of sound-track to the Third Reich, and that on organized party occasions there was always, or usually, Wagner. This conception has become a cliché on film and television, where it is usual for any depiction of the Nazis to be literally accompanied by Wagner’s music, for preference at its most brassy and bombastic, as in the Ride of the Valkyries or the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, and played very loud. The whole picture that this conjures up, and is meant to conjure up, is false.
Supporting this thesis, Evans maintains that there was a “lack of interest” in Wagner “on the part of almost everyone in the Party leadership except Hitler himself.”[D33]Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201. In 1933, Hitler ordered that each Nuremberg Rally would open with a performance of Die Meistersinger, although these performances were very unpopular with other Party functionaries who had be ordered to attend. Evans notes that when Hitler “entered his box he found the theater almost empty; the party men had all chosen to go off to drink the evening away at the town’s numerous beer halls and cafes rather than spend five hours listening to classical music. Furious, Hitler sent out patrols to order them out of their drinking-dens, but even this could not fill the theater. The next year was no better. … After this Hitler gave up and the seats were sold to the public instead.”[D34]Ibid.
(Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201.)
While Joseph Goebbels seems to have shared some of Hitler’s affinity with Wagner, and often visited Bayreuth, his diaries reveal no special insights into Wagner’s works or ideas, and nor do his public speeches. He praised Die Meistersinger as “the incarnation of all that is German.” It contained everything “that defines and fulfills the cultural soul of Germany.”[D35]Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 184. The 1933 Bayreuth Festival was opened by Goebbels with the words: “There is probably no work so close in spirit to our age and its intellectual and psychological tensions as Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. How often in recent years has its rousing chorus, ‘Wacht auf, es nahet gen dem Tag’ (Awake for morn approaches), echoed the faith and longing of Germans, as a tangible symbol of the reawakening of the German people from the deep political and spiritual slumber coma of 1918.”[D36]Ibid., 182.
(Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 184.)
Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect, and later also his armaments minister, was another Bayreuth regular, ostensibly motivated more by duty than genuine interest. He notes in his memoirs that Hitler often discussed Wagner with Winifred and seemed to know what he was talking about. Evidently Speer did not know enough to be sure.[D37]Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184. For the leading ideologist of the party, Alfred Rosenberg, the real National Socialist musical model was Beethoven who “took fate by the throat and acknowledged force as the highest morality of man. … Whoever understands the essence of our movement knows that there is a drive in us all like that which Beethoven embodied to the highest degree.” While he also believed Wagner embodied the strength of the “Nordic soul,” Rosenberg criticized the composer’s Gesamtkunstwerk approach, noting that “the inner harmony between word content and physical content is often hindered by the music. … An attempt to wed these forces destroys spiritual rhythm and prevents emotive expression.”[D38]Ibid.
(Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184.)
Rosenberg was certainly not alone in his view. The general manager at Bayreuth during the Third Reich, Hans Tietjen, made the point after the war that “In reality, the leading party officials throughout the Reich were hostile to Wagner. … The party tolerated Hitler’s Wagner enthusiasm, but fought, openly or covertly, those who, like me, were devoted to his works—the people around Rosenberg openly, those around Goebbels covertly.”[D39]Quoted in Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 366. Aside from the hostility to Wagner grounded in aesthetics and ideology, Carr makes a more general point:
The truth is that many Nazis, in high and low places, were bored to tears by Wagner. There is nothing very odd about that. Lots of people past and present who may well have a certain interest in other music will run a mile to escape a seemingly interminable evening with the Master. Too few tunes, too many scenes in which people stand about for ages apparently doing nothing much. The point is only worth stressing here because the Nazis are reputed to have had a special affinity to Wagner’s music. The evidence suggests this was simply not so.[D40]Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184.
It has been sometimes alleged that Wagner’s music provided a “soundtrack to the Holocaust” and was played at concentration camps during wartime. The German historian Guido Fackler claims that Wagner’s music was sometimes used at the Dachau concentration camp in 1933 and 1934 to “reeducate” political prisoners through the beneficial exposure to nationalistic music.[D41]Guido Fackler, “Music in Concentration Camps 1933-1945,” trans. by Peter Logan, Music & Politics, Undated. http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics...r.html There is, however, no documentary evidence supporting claims that Wagner’s music was used in this way during the war. Larry David mocked this urban legend (and the unhealthy Jewish obsession with Wagner) in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where he is rebuked by a Jewish stranger for whistling a Wagner tune in the street.[D42]To view this scene see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nS66Ivbvc
Conclusion
The ethno-political motivation that underpins the construction of Richard Wagner as moral pariah is exemplified by the contrasting way that Jewish commentators have reflected on the life and legacy of the Jewish composer Hanns Eisler who once declared Wagner to be “a great composer, unfortunately.” A committed Marxist, Eisler began in 1930 a long-standing collaboration with the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. With Hitler’s ascent to power, Eisler left Germany and eventually settled in Hollywood, where he was nominated for Oscars for writing the music for the films Hangmen Also Die (1942) and None but the Lonely Heart (1944). In 1947, Eisler appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee, and despite the intercession of Albert Einstein, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, was deported to East Germany in 1948 where he remained for the rest of his life, writing music for the totalitarian state (including its national anthem, and the Comintern anthem). Eisler collaborated with T.W. Adorno in 1947 to produce the book Composing for the Films. Instead of reproaching Eisler for his ardent commitment to a regime and ideology that destroyed millions of lives, Jewish commentators invariably portray him as the innocent victim of the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, and then of the HUAC hearings and the Hollywood blacklist.
The Jewish-dominated intellectual and media elite eagerly invoke Wagner’s life and legacy as a salutary lesson in the evils of anti-Semitism and White nationalism. Constructing Wagner as moral pariah allows the composer and his works to be constantly used as a springboard for intensive reflections on “the Holocaust,” the evils of white racial feeling, and the moral necessity of state-sponsored multiculturalism and mass non-White immigration to the West. Only these policies, after all, will ensure that Wagner’s “morally loathsome” intellectual legacy (which amounts to a proposal for a European group strategy in opposition to Judaism) can never again find a receptive White audience—by progressively doing away with White people altogether.
In the meantime, the construction of Wagner as an anti-Semitic exemplar and moral pariah ensures the composer, whose achievement far surpasses that of any Jewish composer, can never become a locus of White racial pride and group cohesion. Richard Wagner has been a particular target for Jewish denigration because of his strong and unashamed ethnic and racial identification, and for his willingness to publicly oppose Jewish influence. This, together with his status as one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that the world has ever seen, endows him with rich potential to re-emerge as a rallying point for White Nationalists. The rebirth of a strong sense of racial feeling among White people will be greatly aided by reclaiming cultural heroes like Richard Wagner from the manufactured taint of moral censure that distorts their popular remembrance.
Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.
Notes
[A1] William Berger, Wagner Without Fear: Learning to Love—and Even Enjoy—Opera’s Most Demanding Genius (New York, Viking, 1998), 373.
[A2] Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.
[A3] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 195.
[A4] Adrian Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” The Guardian, July 21, 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,345459,00.html
[A5] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1st Books Library, 2004), 60.
[A6] Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 79-100. http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/JudaismInMusic.pdf
[A7] Ibid.
[A8] Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), 349.
[A9] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.
[A10] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 184.
[A11] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.
[A12] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 27.
[A13] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 83-4.
[A14] David Rodwin, “Wagner Was Right: Eclecticism and the Jewish Aesthetic,” (Los Angeles: 2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkfGEqo3YjQ Separation and its Discontents, 98.< [A16] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 24.
[A17] Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) 360.
[A18] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.
[A19] Richard Wagner, letter of April 1851 trans. by W. Ashton Ellis, In: Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt 1841-1853, (London: 1897; repr. 1973), 145.
[A20] Richard Wagner, “What is German?” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 4 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 151-69. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagwiger.htm
[A21] Ibid. (Italics in the original)
[A22] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 376.
[A23] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.
[A24] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 52.
[A25] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 75.
[A26] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 372.
[A27] Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2000), 69.
[A28] Richard Wagner, “A Communication to my Friends,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 1 (London: 1895; repr. 1966), 269-392. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagcomm.htm
[A29] Elisabeth Whitcombe, “Adorno as Critic: Celebrating the Socially Destructive Force of Music,” The Occidental Observer, August 28, 2009. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/08/adorno-as-critic/
[A30] Scruton, Modern Culture, 69.
[A31] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Ibid.
[A32] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 165.
[A33] Richard Wagner, “Some Explanations Concerning ‘Judaism in Music,’” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 77-122. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda2.htm
[A34] Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 33.
[A35] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 377-8.
[B1] Richard Wagner, “Religion and Art,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 211-52. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wlpr0126.htm
[B2] Richard Wagner, “Hero-dom and Christianity,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 275-84. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/waghero.htm
[B3] Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 6 (London: 1897; repr. 1966), 264-74. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagknow.htm
[B4] Quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 361.
[B5] Larry Solomon, Wagner and Hitler, (Online article: 2002) http://solomonsmusic.net/WagHit.htm
[B6] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 57.
[B7] Ibid., 54.
[B8] Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” Blog post, Undated. http://www.danielbarenboim.com/index.php?id=72
[B9] Richard Wagner, “Know Thyself,” op. cit.
[B10] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 352.
[B11] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany, op. cit.
[B12] Christopher Nicholson, Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007) 131.
[B14] Harold Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 268.
[B15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ax4N2B4GNs&t=662s
[B16] David P. Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” Tablet, August 17, 2011. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/75247/muted
[B17] Warren Boroson, “Richard Wagner—The Devil Who Had Good Tunes,” Jewish Standard, August 7, 2009, 16.
[B18] Michael Steen, The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (London: Icon Books, 2005), 464.
[B19] Carr, The Wagner Clan, 83.
[B20] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 26.
[B21] Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 6.
[B22] Theodore Isaac Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind (New York: Barricade, 2011), 12.
[B23] John Chancellor, Wagner (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 6.
[B24] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.
[B25] Ibid., 360.
[B26] Derek Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” Online article, Undated. http://www.revolve.com.au/polemic/wagner.html
[B27] Quoted in John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 1.
[B28] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.
[B29] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 358.
[C1] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.
[C2] Ibid.
[C3] Ibid.
[C4] Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” op. cit.
[C5] Quoted in Lisa Norris, “Jewish Dwarfs and Teutonic Gods,” H-Net Reviews, September 1997. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1318
[C6] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 56.
[C7] Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner, Race and Revolution (Yale University Press, 1998), 166.
[C8] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366.
[C9] Quoted in Carr, The Wagner Clan, 182.
[C10] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373.
[C11] Ibid., 373; 377 & 380.
[C12] Gottfried Wagner, The Wagner Legacy: An Autobiography (Sanctuary, 2000), 240.
[C13] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.
[C14] Carol Jean Delmar, “Let the Truth be Heard!,” Ring Festival LA Protest Campaign, June 14, 2010. http://ringfestlaprotest.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/gottfried-wagner-at-the-american-jewish-university-june-6-2010/
[C15] Strahan, “Was Wagner Jewish: an old question newly revisited,” op. cit.
[C16] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 373.
[C17] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by Bryan Magee, In: Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 375.
[C18] Ibid., 375-6.
[C19] Daniel Barenboim, “Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians,” op. cit.
[C20] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 374.
[C21] Ibid., 373; 380.
[D1] William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Random House, 2002), 101.
[D2] Solomon, “Wagner and Hitler,” op. cit.
[D3] Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, 127.
[D4] Robert S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (London: Thames Mandarin, 1992), 56.
[D5] Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York, Penguin, 2005), 199.
[D6] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 362.
[D7] Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (New York: Vintage, 2010), 50.
[D8] Guido Knopp, Hitler’s Women, trans. by Angus McGeoch (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 2003) 158.
[D9] Ibid., 169.
[D10] Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 134.
[D11] Ibid., 146.
[D12] Ibid., 239.
[D13] Joachim Fest, Hitler (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 56.
[D14] Carr, The Wagner Clan, 187.
[D15] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by James Murphy (Bottom of the Hill, 2010), 23.
[D16] Ibid., 488.
[D17] David Goldman, “Muted: Performances of Wagner’s music are effectively banned in Israel. Should they be?” op. cit.
[D18] Magee, Wagner and Philosophy, 366.
[D19] Ibid., 365.
[D20] Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201.
[D21] August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Geoffrey Brooks (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), 84.
[D22] Ibid.
[D23] Ibid., 118.
[D24] Ibid., 116-8.
[D25] Ibid., 118-9.
[D26] Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, 176.
[D27] Nicholson, Richard and Adolf, 21.
[D28] Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 152.
[D29] Ibid., 181.
[D30] Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 200.
[D31] Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 189.
[D32] Ibid., 193.
[D33] Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 201.
[D34] Ibid.
[D35] Knopp, Hitler’s Women, 184.
[D36] Ibid., 182.
[D37] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184.
[D38] Ibid.
[D39] Quoted in Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000), 366.
[D40] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 184.
[D41] Guido Fackler, “Music in Concentration Camps 1933-1945,” trans. by Peter Logan, Music & Politics, Undated. http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics/archive/2007-1/fackler.html
[D42] To view this scene see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nS66Ivbvc
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That photo of Hanns Eisler… sheesh. In the immortal words of Edward D. Wood, Jr.: “Now that’s an alien!”
Outstanding essay – a real tour de force.
Since Adorno takes up such a central place in this essay, which I have read while listening to Parsifal, and the characterization as anti-Semitism as a principle of projection by psychopaths is declared, it is only appropriate to repeat what Adorno himself actually had to say about the German race. I have finally found the source again:
https://taz.de/Kaschierte-Unsicherheit/!805988/
Translated to English:
But, oh no, after having helped them to execute their plans of total extermination, US whites are now concerned about Jews being mean to them. Oh no, I feel so bad already!
Jacques Barzun said what was wrong with Wagner and his whole project was that it was painfully bourgeois. All that muddy dragging, drudging Sturm und Drang. Just what your average shopkeeper loves.
Meanwhile, for the intellectual elites of the upper and lower classes, Mozart is light, clear, incisive, accessible, modest and gladly partakes of lowly folk music influences.
If Wagner were to observe the world today, he would simply say, “I told you so and you didn’t listen.”
Why is it that Jews disappeared in China and yet remained distinct and thrived in the west? This is most pertinent now that China will once again become the middle kingdom.
A bird can fly because it can, otherwise it can not. Nothing can make it fly if it can not.
With that proviso stuck in, Wagner could prove anything!
Reminds me of a guy I played Cowboys and Indians with as a kid. It was impossible to defeat him in a battle. Once I snuck up behind him and held the cap gun to his back as I pulled the trigger. “You Missed!”, and he declared victory once again as he whirled and fired his own pistol.
Put me in a spaceship to Mars with a choice between Wagner or Mahler, I’ll take Mahler every time. People have their preferences in music, and I like the many renditions of Wagner operas where there are no words. I can tolerate the singing in Parsifal so long as I avoid looking at brochures with those lyrics. Horrible!
Music buffs ought to consider Chéreau’s version of the Ring of the Nibelung. With the DVDs a person has the glorious ability to skip through the dreck and focus on the wonderful.
Richard Wagner died in 1883. The fact he was a “dick” in more ways than one doesn’t really bother me in 2021. I listen to his music when I feel like it. But it’s a fact Bruckner is played on my CD player a lot more than Wagner. And Mendelssohm at least as much.
…… Wagner’s views on the Jewish Question strongly paralleled those of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Both Wagner and Herzl saw the Jews as a distinct and foreign group in Europe. Herzl saw anti-Semitism as “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about by the Jewish persecution of gentiles. Jews had, he claimed, been educated by Judaism to be “leeches” ……
Significant
and wagner cannot be fully appreciated except in the berlin philharmonic, von karajan, studio recordings. whoever dislikes wagner must listen to these. his opinion will change.
the bayreuth circle, nietzsche, darwin, american eugenics, etc…as stephen hicks has observed, there’s a reason why so many very high brow jerries were nazis before 1933.
Really interesting essay.
By the way, I am not someone with a huge knowledge of classical music but I do recommend Wagner.
For beginners – and I have never progressed beyond that humble stage – I would recommend listening to parts of the music without lyrics. For example the Siegfried Idyll mentioned, or Magic Fire Music, or the Love`s Death from Tristram and Iseult, or the Tannhauser overture, or the Flying Dutchman overture
Well, if you are not even a beginner, you can start with that old Apocalypse Now favourite, the Ride of The Valkyries!
To be fair, Wagner had his own share of critics among goys as well at the time.
I personally don’t like Wagner all that much, compared to other, earlier musicians (besides his obvious genius, he’s just too loud or bombastic for me).
But I think many Jews love Wagner. Despite supposedly being banned in Israel, and the constant charge of “anti-semitism”, many productions of his operas in other countries have a large Jewish audience. I think it’s like with the Nazis, they have a love-hate relationship.
In his book “Human Accomplishment”, Charles Murray attempted to assess the excellence of giants in various fields by a statistical analysis of reference works, such as encylopedias — counting the number of times a creator was referenced.
When he completed his ranking of the greatest composers, he presented his ranking to musicologists as a reality check, as a thoughtful analyst would do.
The most frequent question Murray got from the musicologists before presenting his ranking was “OK, who were the highest ranked after Wagner?”
People who know music know Wagner was the greatest. We will never see his like again.
Wagner is uniquely great, essentially inventing a new musical idiom for each of his major operas (the 4 of the Ring counting as 1 here), to the point most people wouldn’t guess they are by the same composer, versus e.g. Mozart nearly always being instantly recognisable as Mozart
Wagner’s final work, Parsifal, is unrivalled and unforgettable; one understands why Claude Debussy spoke of being haunted by it and unable to escape its hold over his mind
Parsifal also stands as an attempt to re-paganise Christianity, significant for the debate amongst today’s youth as to whether European culture should remain ‘Christian’, or whether it is healthier to simply jettison all Jewish-derived religiosity
Here’s the chorus from the pagan-eucharist scene in Parsifal, a quick compelling window into the greatness of Wagner
Video Link
The Jews were emancipated following the Napoleonic wars. How is it possible that after only 50 years, when Wagner wrote his book on Jewishness in Music, that he believed that these recently emancipated Jews now dominated and ruled Germans?
This is a masterful essay and will require the number of readings to assimilate. I was surprised to read that Theodore Herzl would acknowledge that the offensive behavior of his fellow Jews instigated anti-Semitism.
Stick to the dumb dindu act. Stay away from culture. That way, you won’t sound pretentious, as here.
Also, it might help if you acknowledged from whom you stole the quote.
Agreed. My parents are upper-middle-class Jews who attended the San Francisco Opera and raved whenever Wagner was performed.
Daniel Barenboim is an internationally renowned pianist and conductor. He was forced to leave Israel when they tried to prevent him from conducting Wagner with the Tel Aviv Symphony. Currently he runs an Orchestra of Israeli and Palestinian musicians called the West-Eastern Divan. This is their performance of the Chorale from Beethoven’s 9th: https://youtu.be/ChygZLpJDNE
Video Link
I’m not very well versed in Wagner. I love the overture to Tannhäuser but other pieces that I have heard are not appealing to me. That’s because I don’t like pagan mythology from any culture: https://youtu.be/SRmCEGHt-Qk
Video Link
Not to belittle the scholasticism of this amazing review of Wagner’s life and work, but I did not find him very appealing. He seems petty and irascible regarding Jews. I also felt that while the author gives considerable attention to the Jewish critics of Wagner, in his conclusion he seems to blithely dismiss them without providing a convincing rationale.
I also don’t like Mozart particularly. Beethoven is by far my favorite classical composer. I enjoyed the Hollywood movie about him called Immortal Beloved. It poses a very interesting idea behind Beethoven’s deafness portrayed beautifully in this scene: https://youtu.be/7qWbcosJdtU
Video Link
I read in a biography of Beethoven that his admirers in England were trying to convince him to move there at the end of his life and follow in the footsteps of Handel. And presumably he would have done that had he not died prematurely of an illness.
yes, this seems to be the plan .. unless everyone wakes up.. they will continue the execution of their plan,
First they took our banks, (then they took over our governments, then they took over our military, then they took over our industries, then they did 9/11 and used us to get someone else’s oil, then they did Covid, to establish the fear they needed to implement their tyrannies, next is 5g and the diseases that will bring, ..)..and now they want what is left. All they time they have used their private ownership of the media to convince us that all is well.. .. but the water has already risen above the threshold of the front door. .
Anti-Semitism goes way back in Europe, especially in Germany and eastern Europe – long before even Luther (“The Jews and their Lies”). If the jews hadn’t always tried to cheat people, they wouldn’t be so hated. Wagner predates Hitler and even the German youth walking groups 1896-1933) didn’t want jews involved in what they knew as a German cultural effort which the jews couldn’t hope to take part in. Even JFK said that in time, Hitler would be recognized as one of the greatest men who has ever lived (I believe that will happen).
Then Herzl, now Soros:
In Rare Jewish Appearance George Soros Says Jews and Israel Cause Anti-Semitism
JTA, November 10, 2003
Wagner’s greatness is proof against the toy popguns and squeaky denunciations of his venomous little Jewish detractors.
Anti Semites. Anti Semites
Where is Chuck Schumer? Sanctions against UK
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10185707/Israels-ambassador-UK-evacuated-LSE-security-guards.html
What a brilliant and well-researched essay! Thanks to Unz Review for publishing this.
I have always found the Jewish vehemence toward Wagner somewhat amusing. Even more so the eagerness of Jews to record and concertize the works of Bach–a very dedicated Lutheran–in spite of Luther having written that it was a profound moral failure not to kill a Jew if one had the opportunity.
Jews are the Agents of Anti-Christ. In fact, they Own, and collectively Are, Anti-Christ.
Anyone that dares to stand for either Christ, or, European Norse tradition, are the Jew’s focus of rage and evil attack.
Wagner elevated Norse and Euro themes to a crescendo of beauty and power that the Jews despise.
Why then, should Wagner not despise the evil Jews?
Someone- I forgot who- once said: Wagner’s writing is as “significant” as are Nietzsche’s musical compositions.
As for Wagner & Jews:
Video Link
Thank you for this outstanding essay.
Hoping it will be read far and wide, not only among musicians and music students either. I intend to forward it and hope others will do the same.
A worthy tribute to an artistic titan.
Also a catalogue of the jackals and hyenas who attempt to despoil the name and reputation of a great man. Notable leaders among this dreck are of course Jews, as we have come to expect and past generations knew from experience. Shape-shifting purveyors of filth and depravity, the use of (now discredited by all but the most servile) Jewish psychobabble wherein a Lie poses as Truth and vice-versa … Expelled from 109 territories … an unparalleled record of deceit, theft, murder on so industrial a scale that it seems that is their nature … how is one to view it otherwise when their behaviour is so consistent over time ?
However not all Jews join in this libel. Mevashir says about his fellow Jews who appreciate Richard Wagner, there is mention of Jews who attribute “anti-semitism” to the conduct of Jews … this website is the property of Ron Unz, who is Jewish, as are several of the writers.
Alternatively, is there anything as sickening as the “running dogs” of the hyenas and jackals who destroy their own people for a paycheck, or to appear “progressive” … many such in academia, as “journalists” and in politics … worthless and contemptible wretches as they must now even themselves realise that they are.
Did Wagner practice Christianity? Which denomination?
Beethoven was a devout Catholic and Bach was a Lutheran (I believe). What was RW?
The Catholic Church rather forcefully condemned the pagan elements of NS Germany. So to the extent that they were derived from or inspired by RW he also would be condemned.
However, the Church also sought to sequester Jews from Christian society. It’s not a coincidence that the same Napoleon who emancipated the Jews of Europe also sacked Rome and imprisoned the Pope in France. So I think the Roman Catholic Church would appreciate Wagner’s concerns about Jews encroaching on German culture.
Devastating comment. But this article portrays Wagner as a legitimate social philosopher. Do you disagree?
Tastes differ. Not having anything against Wagner, it’s, I’d say, about opera as such.
Wagner’s Gesammtkunstwerk is doomed to failure from the get-go. The same goes for all operas. Opera is, essentially, a tenor trying to bang a soprano with a bass interfering with it.
It seems that powers of various modes of expression (words, sounds, pictures/colors, ..) are clearly separated & by combining them you won’t get anything superior, but basically- inferior (just consider opera, which is clearly inferior, in its best examples, to drama as regards dramatization & emotional power in depiction of human condition). People are dying and singing for half an hour while dying.
Let’s be frank: operas are comical. When they try to pose as tragedy, you get a dreadful soap, bad taste on steroids.
Who could take this seriously?
Video Link
Modern-day Lutherans have renounced Luther’s overt anti-Semitism. There is a large Christian library and public reading room in the heart of downtown Jerusalem, financed by the Norwegian Lutheran Church. I utilized it many times and it is a great resource fully staffed by Messianic Israeli believers in Christ who live on a Christian Moshav outside of Jerusalem:
This article is erudite, tendentious &, in some areas, correct.
I won’t elaborate on Jews, I wrote enough about them already.
Wagner’s cult was built around his high aestheticism, dominant from the 1870s to WW1. One should be deaf, blind & mute not to see that Wagner’s vision is that of medieval Catholicism in the quasi-Teutonic garb & has little or nothing to do with “Germanism”- whatever that may mean.
Of course Wagner was, technically, a Protestant; of course he was a German; of course his “ideology” was some mushy pan-Germanic faux-Teutonic universal Northern mythology.
But Nietzsche was, in his critique of Wagner, partially right. Wagner’s “soil” is not some Teutonic forest- it is Paris, the city of lights; his world-view is that of medieval (not the 19th C) Catholic Christianity (not some vaguely Christian or Protestant); his passions & creative energies are fueled by medieval French romances & troubadours in the highly aestheticised & eroticized late 19th C sensibility; even the original Nibelunglied is a retelling of (early) British & French romances.
Wagner’s variant of high medievalism, Catholic mystique & super-charged eroticism has nothing to do with supposedly heroic Teutonic barbarians – basically healthy manly yokels. Nietzsche’s critique was perspicacious, but it applies to him, too- they both were emblematic late 19th C decadent aesthetes obsessed with sex & art, not with “heroism” which existed only in their imagination.
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took
Only know classic rock, country, R&B, soul, disco, not into classical music or opera.
But I do know that Jews have no musical talent to speak of and they have ruined the music industry.
EXCELLENT article and very interesting. WAGNER was right. HITLER was right. Dr. William Pierce was right. Norman Lincoln Rockwell was right. Joe McCarthy was right. Henry Ford was right. ON AND ON AND ON…….. Funny how all the quacks, the kooks, the “anti-Semites” aka someone who doesn’t approve of Jews ruling over them, the “racists,” etc., HAVE ALL PROVEN TO HAVE BEEN RIGHT. David Duke was talking about the border in the late 1970s when Donald Trump was going around NYC discos trying to nail some coked up broad.
Cue: I Was Made For Loving You by (((KISS))) * only decent song these guys ever came out with. Wonder if Donnie was doing that awkward dance of his to this very popular tune in 1979.
In the 18th Century, Opera was a minor art form closely associated with Italy. Those composers who ventured into Opera, such as Handel and Mozart, invariably used Italian libretti, even if very few of the audience were able to understand it.
So it remained until well into the 19th Century, when, almost overnight, it was claimed to be the supreme art form, the total work of art, or gesamtkunstwerk in German. The principal beneficiaries of this sea-change were Wagner and Verdi, who were suddenly elevated into the top league.
I accept that Wagner and Verdi were major artists, but major artists in a minor art form, which does diminish them and their importance. Many lovers of classical music, like myself, have no high regard for Opera. We can take it or leave it: more often leaving it. True, there are many fine overtures and individual arias, but an awful lot of forgettable or soporific stuff as well. Every art form has its conventions, and Opera’s are highly artificial indeed, so I’ve never found it appealing.
You did mention Tannhauser. It is by far Wagner’s best orchestral piece, the only one that can match the symphonic suites of Sibelius, the most technically complex of the great composers.
The article was well-written and informative, and Wagner is an interesting figure. But Opera is a minor art form. It is not central to traditional Western culture.
I’ve read some of Wagner’s writings & they’re simply bad 19th C journalism, shallow- and, sometimes, entertaining. They belong to the same category of silly dated pamphlets as Dostoevsky’s political analyses or Nordau’s rants on degeneration.
Larry David is obnoxious and therefore fun to watch
Despite regular exposure to Wagner at an early impressionable age, I have never even the slightest impulse to kill the wabbit.
Wagner was right:
Wagner had first developed the idea of a revolutionary new Christianity in the opera text Jesus of Nazareth (1849), which depicted Jesus as redeeming man from the materialism of the “Roman world
The Template for bringing back original Christianity (not Judeo-Christianity) is in Hudson’s book:
https://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/and-forgive-them-their-debts/
Judeo Christianity and Finance Capitalism emerged in the years from when Jews were kicked out of Spain (1492) and Bank of England (1694). The National Socialist Intelligence never made the connection. The source of Jewish power prior to 1492 was usury on the East West Caravan routes, and then post 1694 was usury on credit as money, and stock market capital. Finance and Stock Capital funded Cromwell and Protestantism, as well as undermining the Catholic Church e.g. indulgences.
If you cannot define the problem you cannot combat it.
The distinct appearance then was more prominent than now. Whites are an admixture of races, with Jews likely more admixed with Neanderthal, hence the latent atavistic physical characteristics.
An all white population is attuned to white/Cro-Magnon physiognomy, whereas a mixed race population is taught to ignore atavistic racial characteristics. In other words, if something is “off” with a white kid, nobody notices it anymore, whereas in the past – they would have.
Hook noses, sloping forehead, receding jaw line, high squeaky voice, occipital bun, facility with counting and numbers were/are characteristics of Jews. Going back further in time, Jews probably had longer trunks and shorter legs, while also being hirsute (Being hairy is a Semite characteristic).
Germans of that day also observed Jews, who when conversing with each other, would gesticulate with their arms, a latent characteristic now being bred out by miscegenation with whites. The religion also taught that bathing was unnecessary, so Jews smelled then, but today they bathe.
Hence your race is doomed. The vast majority of white have inferior minds, stuck in the gutter. You can not see the few bright lights of Nietzsche and Wagner.
Can you imagine Mendelsohn screeching as they unveil the conquer of the world.
I feel sorry for you.
The typical Jewish response to Wagner essentially validates the composer’s sentiments and criticisms of the so called chosen people.
Jewry is grasping, greedy, shallow, self centered; its world view is subterranean and its aesthetic tastes incredibly low brow.
Since the Jewish collective cannot compete with its gentile hosts, it must disparage and calumniate everything that is beautiful. The Holocaust death worship is a case in point. If they cannot truly participate in the great works, they must ruin and destroy them by association with a macabre and lurid fiction.
Of course there are individual Jews who break through this paradigm, but they are exceptional. The more they truly appreciate the great works of the past, the more likely they are to repudiate their hatred for the Truth and the truly beautiful and sublime- the more truly human they become.
What is quoted above bears repeating:
Modern and post modern “art” is a Jewish pyramid scheme, based upon the price inflation of worthless junk and the commodification of ugliness and the ignoble. This extends to all areas of the fine arts, but is most evident in modern/post modern painting.
Jews hate Wagner so much, that Jewish Film Actors Guild composers (Hans Zimmer) plagiarize his music as if Wagner was their personal ghost writer. Even today, Wagner’s music is still banned from being performed in Israel. What’s despicable is the worlds greatest Music composer, who died 7 years before Hitler was born, is now the most famous music composer anti Semitic and Nazi supporter the Zionist kosher world have ever known. This before anti semite and Nazi we’re words yet to be used.
Richard Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen, conducted by Sir George Solti was the most expensive recording project of its time. It started in 1958 and wasn’t finished until 1965. What started as a mono recording, ended up in stereo as that’s how fast recording technology changed while the Ring was in production.
Anyone interested in supporting Wagner’s family and estate should buy a copy before it is banned and censored from the world to hear.
Richard Wagner – Der Ring Des Nibelungen – Sir George Solti – DECCA
Note: This is a 14 CD set
For additional info on how it was recorded: John Culshaw – Ring Resounding – Viking Press
Btw, Great article, bravo.
Jews SUCK at comedy as well. The only Jew who was a decent comic IMO was Rodney Dangerfield.
Hell, I always thought Steven Wright might be a Jew, he looked kind of Jewy. NOT A JEW. That explains why I liked his routine.
Best comedians IMO
Blacks. Yeah, I know, they really aren’t useful in anything that matters, but some are talented in fields like comedy and music. Take a look at the classic skit, “The Black White Supremacist” by Chappelle. That is comedy gold, man. “He divorced her because she was a nigger lover.” ROTFLMMFWAO.
White Southerners
Northeastern White ethnics like Eyetalians and Irish.
Jews and female comics are the worst comedians out there. And the absolutely worst of the worst is a female Jewish comic. Good gawd, talk about lame.
I guess if you’re a big fan of traditional Yiddish Music, you would also find Wagner’s music a bit deep to understand or comprehend.
Your linked examples prove my point.
Meyerbeer was pretty similar to Wagner, opera wise. With the detail that Wagner was about 1000X better and I am at a loss to understand why Wagner would even mention him.
Also: you could get all of Wagner’s writings from Amazon the last time I looked a couple years ago. Low signal/noise and I had to skim a lot but there are some gold nuggets in there. Somebody should do a big budget movie Ring cycle with real opera singers and CGI sex symbols. Like Abba is doing a show now without flesh blood performers since they are all in their seventies with negative sex appeal.
When Wagner’s biggest music fan, the mad King of Bavaria King Ludwig, financed the construction of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus or Bayreuth Festival Theatre in Bayreuth, Germany, built under guidance and direction by Wagner and King Ludwig and dedicated solely to the performance of Wagners stage works for which it was specifically conceived and built, using state of the art lighting and stage set design including the worlds first movable and rotating stage never before seen.
It took modern pop entertainment acts (Pink Floyd) to do what Wagner was doing 100 years earlier.
Until you’ve experienced a week in Bayreuth at a Ring Festival, you haven’t seen nothing.
Wagner wasn’t doing typical opera as performed by typical Italian opera theatre. Wagner was pushing the limits of multimedia before multimedia was invented.
Wagner’s Ring is a spiritual music experience, not a fun and dance comedy opera of yore. That’s like comparing Mel Brooks Bride of Frankenstein to Lord of the Rings.
My favorite Dolly Parton tune has to be “Jolene.” She also did a wonderful collaboration on this song with Melissa Etheridge. Never really was a big Kenny Rogers fan, but enjoyed some of Parton’s music. Favorite Dolly Tunes are:
Jolene
Here You Come Again
I Will Always Love You
Oops. I did REALLY like one tune by Kenny Rogers, it was “She Believes In Me.” That one goes out to Denise. I love you darling.
Love Wagner or hate him – that’s a decision for individuals. When the pissant state effectively bans this composer because the Nazis loved him is hypocritical beyond belief. Especiallly since the Apartheid state is the closest thing in the world today to Hitler’s Nazi regime in terms of national behavior.
Other instances are more evidence of the Zionists displaying their political control. The first link has the audio of the concluding (choral) part of the tone poem Finlandia.
The second has a transcript of the lyrics so as to follow the singing.
https://www.songlyrics.com/usma-cadet-glee-club/on-great-lone-hills-lyrics/
There are quite a few hymns written for this section of Finlandia, and in my opinion this one is the best. It’s also the least-heard, for it’s Bad Bad Bad because European Nazis like it. Hell’s Bells – am I supposed to stop eating deviled eggs because somebody discovers they’re a favorite food of a band of Nazis somewhere?
After the Pluto encounter by the New Horizons spacecraft, it was redirected to a 22 mile rock in the outer Solar System. The provisional name was Ultima Thule, but that got changed to Arrokoth, “a word that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.” Why ditch the perfectly fine first name?
I’m sick and tired of all the effort by the Zionist New Nazis to try to divert attention from the fact they’re the spirtual heirs of the genuine Old Nazis of Germany.
Could anything stand in greater contrast to this Jewish noise:
Than this?
statements like this:
amount to cleaning out the septic tank and carefully preserving the detritus in the freezer.
No, “the Apartheid state” is not at all comparable to “Hitler’s Nazi regime”.
The goals and behaviors of each were as different from each other as can be.
The failures of the categorical comparison can be readily listed after a few moment’s thought by anyone who’s spent time reading the numerous articles and books on Unz forum. Over-indulgence in pop culture-TV historicity, on the other hand, produces the erroneous comparison you expressed. That is by design, and not for your betterment.
Failing the willingness to make that rational analysis, here’s another clue as to how “Hitler’s Nazism” and “the Apartheid state” (zionist Israel) differed in the years of the zionist wars on Europe:
–> In the middle of 1945 (until almost 1950), millions of German civilians were dead; those not dead were starving and homeless; 70% of Germany’s cities had been reduced to rubble, many bombed twice and thrice by Allied air forces whose goal was to kill as many Germans as possible and to destroy their dwellings, culture, and soul
–> At that same time, by mid-1945, millions of Jews had migrated from Poland and Russia to Germany and thence to other European states, to Britain, to South America, to USA, and to Palestine, where a new land, new cities, new homes, new universities and hospitals had been built for them. By 1948, while Germans were still being forced to renounce their music, their art, their literature in exchange for work, food and housing, Jews in Palestine declared a State exclusively for Jews.
It’s not so much about being a “revisionist” or a “Hitler-lover;” it’s simply that comments that make Nazism the equivalent of “the Apartheid state” smack of intellectual laziness. Or ignorance.
My god. What a stupid reply. Like, triply stupid. Blissfully un-self-aware stupid. Inadvertently funny stupid.
PS I regret the harsh, smart-ass tone of my comment.
I wish I had opened with this: “Like you, Zachary Smith, I consider Sibelius’s Finlandia a most memorable and meaningful piece of music and poetry.” One of the themes of Brenton Sanderson’s essay on Wagner seems to be that Wagner considered the creation of art and music to be a spiritual exercise undertaken for its own sake, not to make money or achieve fame; Finlandia is a prime example of art-as-spirituality. Don’t know if it still is, but Finlandia used to be a hymn in the United Methodist hymnal.
But I have to insist:
This statement:
is wrong-headed and counter-productive.
Nothing is more bourgeois than worrying about being bourgeois. (Cf. goodwhites today).
Barzun is the go-to guy for midwits looking for jusification.
He’s also one of the original “there are no races/every nation is a mongrel” guys (Columbia U after all) so take that into consideration when evaluating his idea of “intellectual elite”.
Robert Conquest, when contemplating a new edition of his history of Soviet atrocities, The Great Terror, thought of retitling it “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”
“Put me in a spaceship to Mars with a choice between Wagner or Mahler, I’ll take Mahler every time. ”
Sounds like one of those sci-fi jokes, where the convince the useless citizens to embark on a “bold adventure” that involves shoving them in a rocket and shooting it off, away from the rest of us.
Please take all the Mahler cds with you, along with Bernstein’s corpse.
“Wonder if Donnie was doing that awkward dance of his to this very popular tune in 1979.”
Here ya go:
“. Somebody should do a big budget movie Ring cycle with real opera singers and CGI sex symbols. Like Abba is doing a show now without flesh blood performers since they are all in their seventies with negative sex appeal.”
That’s a brilliant idea, and fully consonant with the idea of the Total Work of Art. Arguably film itself is just that, the true Total Work of Art rather than opera.
Donnie has absolutely no skills on the dance floor. I know he is 70 something but I think I saw an earlier clip of him doing what I call “The Mr. Business Man Dance” at one those phoo phoo shindigs at his pad with his buddy Epstein & Ghislane. I swear these Upper Crust “elites” are some of the lamest fucks you have ever seen in your life.
Cue: You Should Be Dancing by The Bee Gees * you have to hand it to Travolta, that sucka could dance.
Also this quibble from the fine article:
In Occult Paris Tobias Churton claims Debussy’s Paris was dominated by the shadow of Wagner, everybody including Debussy worshiped him, and a bunch of Debussy’s mission was to attempt for France what Wagner did for Germany. Wagner was selling more tickets then than anybody.
IF I am not mistaken Donnie and Pat Buchanan both denounced David Duke as a “racist” years ago. hehe. Nice. You have a man who stands up for White civil rights and he is denounced as a racist by Trump and Buchanan. Lest we forget what Eric Trump said about Duke. There is your savior, people.
Frederick the Great caused serious damage speaking too much French amongst Germans.
One thorough look at Occupied Palestine tells me the man was [and still is] right.
But, like all others, he stands in the shadow of Beethoven, regardless of his moral affiliations.
Where did I say Wagner practiced Christianity?
Learn to read.
Be as it may- this text is very erudite. While I do not agree with many of its theses, it is very interesting to read about so many Jewish psycho musicologists & similar riff-raff obsessing over Wagner. I knew they, as an ethnicity, are hyper-sensitive about Wagner. What I didn’t know is that there are so many psychotic individuals completely insane about anything Wagnerian.
1 or 2, I’d say- OK. But, 10 to 20… hey, that’s way too much.
Yes, though imho nothing can be expected from so-called churches, at least in the west, who are totally corrupted into “churchianity”, having a form of religion but no power and are mere servants of the children of satan.
Another view is that National Socialist Germany was a de facto Christian State. This was expressed by Theology Doctor Prof Cajus Fabricius in 1937, translated into English for overseas understanding and still available as “Positive Christianity in the Third Reich”. Link herewith for anyone so interested.
https://archive.org/details/positive-christianity-in-the-third-reich-by-cajus-fabricius_201906
I am just reporting what numerous musicologists and conductors answered in a few representative surveys: ranking among 100 and 250 classical composers, they’ve chosen the trio at the top: Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, Bach being preferred by musicologists & Beethoven by conductors. From 4 to 6, almost invariably 4 names pop up, two of them being stable: Handel and Wagner, while Haydn and Brahms fluctuate as candidates for no. 6 of Joe Sixpack.
Top 20 always include Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Chopin, Verdi, Liszt, Stravinsky, Palestrina, ….
It also seems that most people just can’t stand Beethoven’s Wellington’s Sieg.
I would say that JS Bach stands alone. After all, wasn’t it Rossini who said, “Bach is Bach as God is God”?
Then Beethoven and Mozart or Mozart and Beethoven.
After that, Haydn, Wagner, Handel, Brahms, Wagner, Chopin, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Liszt, Palestrina, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, in whatever order.
Would Wagner have approved of the Nazi and Easter European fascist Judeocide? The hostility to Wagner among Jews after that horror is quite understandable, but it is lessening with the passage of the years.
Lists! NO Schubert?! He of the ‘Divine Spark’ as Beethoven observed.
By Sibelius’ time the fire was dimming. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert et al produced works of genius as a butcher does sausages (what a poor analogy)pouring out as if inspired. Then over the century after, the flow began to lessen, more dross was there among the gems, until you reach atonality and other introverted essays in navel-gazing for the cognoscenti. There was a brief reprieve in the Soviet with Prokoffief and Shostakovitch, but today, what is there? Philip Glass? Heaven help us. The Western musical tradition is defunct, dead, buried and audiences prefer the old stuff because it is good and raises one’s spirits and brings you joy.
It’s not Jewish shit. It is modernist shit.
Classical/concert music is dead from, say, the 1930s/40s. It doesn’t exist anymore except for a few, very few people who could be regarded as an esoteric sect.
Nobody, except almost sectarians, listens to that production. One can check music shops & similar areas & will find that, statistically, 99% of concert music repertory what customers buy & listen to belongs to the era that ends with WW1 or around. Early Stravinsky, some Schoenberg’s pieces, Orff, perhaps some Honegger…and that’s it. John Cage, Stockhausen …nothing.
This is, give or take- noise.
Nobody cares for it. Nobody listens to it. Even if we put aside the central repertory (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Palestrina, Brahms, …), I bet that old-timers like Hildegard von Bingen, Machaut, Ars Antiqua, Gregorian chant… outsell all composers from the 1940s on by so wide a margin that it would be tasteless to mention it.
The point is- music, serious Western/global music has vanished because the communication has been broken. The rest is not silence- but noise.
Ladies & gentlemen, meet Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Or, even better- John Cage who should be better put in a cage, or, to educate him- in the Gulag:
The same goes for visual arts where the last painters worth looking at were, say, Schiele, Klee, Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich (here, I’m not so sure), Delaunay, de Chirico, Rouault & a few others.
Warhol, Pollock …pooh, nothing.
Imaginative literature has been spared of that dismal fate simply because we don’t communicate in brush strokes or music notes. That’s why stories or novels written from 1950 to 2020 can- at least, some of them, still be read & enjoyed.
One can read & enjoy Mann, Yourcenar, Lampedusa, Canetti, Garcia Marquez, Singer, Moravia, Grass, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, McCarthy, Grass, even Leonov, Coetzee, Borges, Thomas Berger, Faulkner’s “The Mansion” or Grossman’s “Everything Flows”.
With music,it’s preaching to the converted. Only one great work stands out, Orff’s “Carmina”, and a few popular, but lesser works by Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Ravel… but that’s, more or less- finished.
They don’t speak to mind/body/soul as did Richard the Lionheart:
or Henry VIII:
Off topic:
“His putative role as the spiritual and intellectual godfather to Adolf Hitler”
That was Dietrich Eckart. He was the spiritual father of Hitler and the NSDAP. As far as the party in general, Rosenberg was the philosopher of the NSDAP, and Darre was it’s social theorist.
My favourite type of music is from the Baroque era (ca 1600 — 1750).
For example —
GF Händel (edition no. 1)
Antonio Vivaldi (Mandolin & Lute)
Tomaso Albinoni (Oboe)
Information
https://www.baroquemusic.org/
“A long line of books and documentaries have explored Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism”
Let’s start the DECONSTRUCTION.
Jews are NOT ‘Semites.’ They are NOT the ‘Chosen People.’
Dr. Elhaik’s DNA study proved that.
Dr. Schlomo Sand’s book, ‘The Invention of the Jewish People” is also out there.
Arthur Koestler, a Nobel-Prize winning author, in his last book, ‘The Thirteenth Tribe’ alluded to this, in 1976.
ALL THREE….. ARE JEWS.
It is time to EXPOSE WORLD JEWRY for the LIARS they are.
Oh, and for the crime of DEICIDE.
“Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.” – Matt. 27:25
No one can remove that self-imposed curse; not even a Patriarch or Pope. Only by denying their very Jewishness, and converting to Christ, can a Jew remove this anathema.
That’s a distinction in terminology but not a real difference. The two are virtually interchangeable when it comes to the fine arts and architecture, or culture as a whole.
Jewry thrives and dominates in the age of money and commodification, since it lays the foundations for it. As a collective is not capable of providing a qualitative substitute for beauty and sublimity; thus it seeks to divert art in the direction of a commodity by degrading it and drowning it in a sea of mediocrity and ugliness. It invents a new pseudo-aesthetic ideal to better serve the over arching purpose of money making. So the hack and fraudster take the place of the artist and composer, in deference to the gallery owner and dealer, and the music or art (((critic))).
Christians often say they hate the sin and not the sinner, perhaps they are taking this a bit too far with people who refer to themselves as Jews. EVEN IF SOME of these people are the Jews of the Bible, did not God break his covenant with Jews because they REFUSED to obey even God Almighty? WHY would a Christian seek to genuflect before a group of people who are anti-Christ or at the very least refuse to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
And this Jew ass kissing goes beyond religion. Some of the biggest whores and Jew ass kissers out there claim to be “atheists” like the half Jewish Bill Maher. Maher goes off about how he is too cool for religion but then has Michael Scheuer on his show and suddenly Maher is kissing Israel and Jew ass shamelessly. He took it almost to a level on par with that blimp, John Hagee or Mike Cucklebee.
I always say that IF a Hitler rises to power in America, watch all these muh Israel and muh Jew lovers change overnight. haha. Nancy Pelosi and Lindsey Graham would be the biggest Notsees out there.
I heard an OPINION that one of the reasons the Jews rejected Jesus Christ because he came to Earth in the form of a lowly carpenter. No grand entrance, no way this could be the Messiah. I guess they picture the Messiah to be decked in gemstones and gold. My, my, my. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle……….
Wow.
Gotta say —
I was patting myself on the back because dumb peasant ME recognized Anna Netrebko.
I recognized her because I’ve seen her in several of the HD video casts from Metropolitan Opera to a neighborhood theater, which is where I learned what little I know about opera.
These HD simulcasts were sponsored by the Neubauer family — Mr. Neubauer was born in “mandate Palestine” and has supported numerous Jewish and Israeli causes and institutions.
According to wikipedia, the HD presentations were Peter Gelb’s idea, and he’s been running it for over a decade.
So thank you, Jews, for bringing some of the finest European opera music — and Anna Netrebko — to thousands of people around the world.
Covi craziness hit in the middle of the 2019-2020 opera HD season, and it was a bitter pill that the remainder of the season was cancelled.
I put Wagner as an important link in the German Turn from Kant to Schopenhauer to Wagner to Nietzsche to Jung to Habermas. And along the way the Germans invented psychology and reinvented Chemistry and Physics.
Oh, and from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Wagner the Germans created western music.
Wagner, of course, was the guy that invented movie music before they invented movies!
And Wagner invented the Jungian archetypes before Jung thought about it.
Yes, I like all the Wagner operas, especially the Ring and Parsifal.
Two takeaways from the article were that Hitler was the only Nazi that liked Wagner and that Hitler had a 16,000 book library. Really? Hitler read books? Or did people just give him books?
Fallacies.
A. is irrelevant and immaterial. Whether worrying about being bourgeois is bourgeois or is not bourgeois does not in the least mean that Wagner’s music is not bourgeois. Nor that bourgeois art is not cheesy, hyper-inflated, self-aggrandizing, solipsistic, phony, pretentious, anti-intellectual, tasteless, and self-indulgent. Because Wagner’s music is bourgeois. And bourgeois art is cheesy, hyper-inflated, self-aggrandizing, solipsistic, phony, pretentious, anti-intellectual, tasteless, and self-indulgent, among other distasteful things.
B. Yeah, Barzun is the go-to guy for dimwits who need some talking points for trying to badmouth Marx. Like you.
C. You idiot. You know nothing about his race book. FYI, what particularly aroused his contempt were the French boneheads who thought that the aristocracy and the lower classes belonged to separate races. Yes, races. And believing in that kind of utter stupidity is exactly the kind of boneheadedness idiots of your ilk glory in, so no wonder you don’t like his trenchant critique.
He said: “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” I guess he’s wrong about that. He championed the great traditional European tradition. I guess he’s wrong about that. He opposed campus political demonstrations. I guess he’s wrong about that. He opposed students talking back to teachers. I guess he’s wrong about that.
You just did a quick Google-scan and think you know Barzun. You don’t know shit.
You obviously don’t “know” music. (As if “music” is something that can be “known.”)
What’s the difference between Frankenstein and the Lord of the Rings?
No dwarves were hurt in the filming of the Lord of the Rings.
Personally, and these are all matters of individual ‘taste’, I think that Rachmaninov is a major composer, and, of course was a major artist.Ditto Shostakovitch and Prokoffief and a few others. But generally ‘ classical’ music is dead. Likewise painting, sculpture etc, where ‘market values’ ie ‘What you can get away with’ as Andy Warhol called ‘art’, rule, and the ‘product’ is mostly sensationalist commodity tripe. A visit to the hideous Tate Modern some years ago was an ordeal, from the talentless compradore traitor Ai Wei-wei’s crap on the ground floor, and from the late Impressionists and Expressionists onwards. That God for the Gaugin Exhibition which we were there for. In contrast, Indigenous Australian art, particularly painting, being still an expression of an ancient culture, is amazingly various and vital.
Absolute nonsense. Jews constitute only a part of high modernism in arts, with Gentiles clearly dominant: Picasso, Matisse, Delaunay,Klee, Rouault, Malevich, de Chirico, Dali, ..;, Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Musil, Mann, Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, Byeli, Mayakovsky, ..; Stravinsky, Berg, Hindemith, Honegger, Orff, Prokofiev, ..
Auschwitz had a very nice library aswell.
Why?
I never understood Wagner and Nietzsche’s guilt-by-association with the Nazis. They died decades before the Nazis appeared. Yeah, the Nazis liked them, but so what? They also probably liked beer and sauerkraut, and no one demonizes that.
Plus, Nietzsche was certainly not an anti-semite, more an anti-Christian, and while Wagner was an avowed anti-semite, so what? Many other people were at his time. Also, he seemed to be a bit of an asshole in general, so I don’t know if that was more part of his character.
Truth is, Jews are just in general oversensitive pricks. Yeah they suffered but so did everyone.
Agreed, but they’re not typically “modernist”.
You mean the Soap-o-caust. Don’t pull punches. Don’t sugar coat it. People need to hear the cold hard truth. Then they’ll be able to face up to the Lampshades and Death Wanker.
“Dying is easy.
Comedy is hard.”
Ed Wynn, his last words.
Who’s your daddy?!
Jews own the pop music catalog, lock, stock, and barrel. Youtube is the greatest juke box ever created.
I rue the day they expelled me.
The pop music was grand.
Nobody owns anything my friend, it is all just temporary and can be TAKEN at any time. The GOOD will be rewarded in Heaven and the BAD, well lets just play a request.
Cue: Highway To Hell by AC/DC
Since your list is quite inclusive, it would be quite tedious and time consuming to distinguish between the frauds and the meritorious.
The Jews- as collective- are not producers. Insofar as their control over the “interpretive community” via their creeping influence in the press and academia, lay the groundwork for an artistic paradigm in which their members benefit- either as dealers, gallery owners, or “prestigious critics”- a la Tom Wolfe’s “Cultureberg.”
The Jewish aesthetic is bound up with pure commercialism and ultimate indifference to beauty or sublimity, since the Talmudic mindset inculcates a skeletal and purely utilitarian view of nature, truth, and aesthetics. If there is any style that can be labelled “Jewish” it would be something like voluptuous ugliness.
A Pollack, Rothko, Picasso, Cage,Warhol, Duchamp or Chagall could churn out productions on a virtually industrial scale, whereas a serious great work-whether a musical composition, a great painting , or sculpture-must adhere to limits which are quite time consuming and require extraordinary talent and ability. Assembly line productions of pseudo-art are perfect to the Jews, as turnover is everything. Hence, the victory of quantity over quality and profit over aesthetics.
The same is true of architecture, but the consequences for aesthetics and function are even worse. One can hang up a hideous painting or place sculpture, and just as easily take the former down and with a little more effort, remove the latter, but a hideous monstrosity of a building must be demolished at enormous expense.
With modern architecture, just as with modern art in general, it is mostly the Jew who pays the piper and calls the tune.
The ((Jews)) did the same to Jesus and to other authentic Jews, who modeled themselves on Moses and attempted to beat back the malignant and avaricious ((Jewish)) character, until they lost the battle.
Germans lost the battle as well, because crass and grasping English scum were eventually bought off by ((Rothschild)) and his ilk and used as tools to start an internecine, Anglo-Saxon war. And because Hitler was a fanatic and a megalomaniac who walked right into ((Jewish)) traps.
Today, finally, the brightest English are finally seeing the error of their ways, and that their worst elements ignored the literary warnings from authors like Dickens about the true nature and character of the ((Jews)).
Perhaps there are even authentic Jews who can finally see the evil oozing from the black souls of ((Jews)).
When you think about it, the ((Jews)) are really hanging by the thinnest of threads and reliant upon a bodyguard of the lowest, cut-throat, careerist, ((Jew)) stooge scum walking the earth — scum that has gotten dirtier and dirtier from GW Bush to Joe Biden.
It might not be long now until a new Moses emerges to wipe ((Jewish)) and ((Jew)) stooge scum off the face of the earth once and for all — or at least for another 2000 years until the human race has forgotten just how evil ((Jewish)) and corrupt ZOG scum truly is.
Yeah, Wagner was anti Jewish – if Wagner was alive today I’d bet he wouldn’t like Black Hip Hop Gangster rap music or the worst forms of hard core porn everywhere or CNN’s coverage of BLM Black lives matter riots, mass looting.
How about Billy Joel mating with Christie Brinkley arguably the most beautiful Nordic model/actress in my life.
What was the result…
Their daughter is an ugly skank.
If you want to read the greatest hits of the greatest minds negative comments about the JQ – the place to go is :
“Anti Zion” by Grimsted – it’s still on the internet under the Colechester collection (something like that).
Some of most interesting quotes are by Winston Churchill, Nietzsche, Mark Twain, HG Wells.
Lots of great Js on the Js – Disraeli, Jacob Schiff.
One has to ask….
“If the Shoe fits…..”
Thanks for your thoughts. You’re pretty brave to write something like that on this site, that seems to venerate RW and anything/anyone that despises Jews. (If you really think that Wagner’s artform was second rate and trivial, what does that say about Hitler who admired him more than any other musical figure?)
I am an amateur regarding classical music. I enjoy certain things but have not explored it deeply. I don’t like Mozart or Bach and favor Beethoven Handel and Haydn. My favorite opera is La Boheme but admittedly I have not seen too many opera productions. I find the opera scene pompous and unappealing and its ticket prices out of my league by a long shot:
I’ve been refraining from commenting here because in truth I am appalled at the extremity of Jew-hatred being expressed here. I can only hope that my suspicion is true that one purpose of TUR is to allow such antipathy to be vented and then harmlessly dispersed into the netherworld.
I find it humorous that Wagner thought Jews are lousy musicians and ugly and incapable of being actors or actresses. I have a friend who is an elder in a Lutheran Church. He has Irish and Germanic ancestry and claims to have a great fondness for Jewesses. He finds them physically attractive much more than Goyesses, while I think exactly the opposite. (A lot of Jewish attractiveness is related to their sense of identity and purpose which they are inculcated with from birth. A gorgeous woman who thinks of herself as a lowclass slut is far less appealing that an attractive woman who knows her worth and has self-esteem.) At any rate, in America music and theater are so dominated by Jews that it’s hard to even picture Wagner’s objections to them. I admit that much of Hollywood stuff is crap, but still the music scene, both popular and classical, has a very heavy Jewish presence. Would Wagner really hate Neal Diamond and Simon&Garfunkle? Leonard Bernstein? I imagine he would find contemporary German Schlagermusik totally repulsive, although I enjoy it:
The ending to that clip about Wagner was pretty funny, but David makes me wince as an all too typical Jewish shmuck and disrespector of Christian culture. Borat ditto.
If you are a musicologist, may I ask you this question: I’ve taught myself to play piano. I do it mainly as a form of physical therapy to force my left hand to become more dextrous. I’ve read that pianists and violinists have more developed brains since they are ambidextrous. At any rate, while playing the musical scales I noticed that the scale of C-major is all white keys as is the scale of A-Minor. So I think an obvious question is why not call the key of C in actuality A so the scale would run A B C D E F G instead of the more awkward C D E F G A B? The name of each key is totally arbitrary I assume, hence my question.
A person named Dr Lorraine Day in California is a vicious Jew-hater and once wrote to me that Jewish music is permeated with minor keys because their culture is depressing and degenerate. Then I discovered that Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies are both in minor keys and wrote to her but she never replied: https://www.goodnewsaboutgod.com/topics.htm
But her claim made me wonder if in fact A-major is so designated because in reality minor keys are superior to major keys since they have more depth pathos and subtlety. Do you see my point?
Jews are just in general oversensitive pricks
They also suffer from a severe case of self-importance.
Your snideness leads me to conclude yet again that you are: A re-educated German (type FRG-Merkel & Co.).
Check out the artwork of MoeSad ((whistleblower)) Victor Ostravsky that blends espionage with eroticism and seduction:
http://victorostrovsky.com/product-category/metaphors-of-espionage-metaphors-of-espionage/
http://victorostrovsky.com/product-category/seduction/
Finally check out John 1:
https://www.worldchangers.org/Bible-Study/Articles/Grace-and-Truth-Come-by-Jesus-Christ
http://www.lavistachurchofchrist.org/LVanswers/2012/11-08c.html
Check out the artwork of MoeSad ((whistleblower)) Victor Ostravsky that blends espionage with eroticism and seduction:
http://victorostrovsky.com/product-category/metaphors-of-espionage-metaphors-of-espionage/
http://victorostrovsky.com/product-category/seduction/
These were my comments on this article I posted at The Occidental Observer:
A very informative historical article, my appreciations for your work! Yes, the Ashkenazim, I trust, were indeed commercializing the arts; however, it was the German masses facilitating this act by patronizing the Ashkenazi products, not to mention allowing these foreigners to live in Germany in the first place, the result of the recently emerging and fruitioning Enlightenment values, the product of European genetics no longer being adequate for Group Selection in the current environment. Either the genetics changed via mechanisms such as mutations and/or gene frequency shifting, or the environment changed to one to which the European genetics possessed no contingency plans to adapt to.
On a personal note, for me, Wagner’s music is not enjoyable (aside from a few short ubiquitously recognized and popularized musical excerpts). I do however very much enjoy a variety of other composers, such as Handel, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Haydn, etc., but limited to the exclusively instrumental compositions; I never cared for Operas, which I find to be unneeded over-indulgence in sensuality. It’s as if dysgenics/mutational load were increasing ADD-type behavioral traits and decreasing the potency of the population’s dopaminergic systems, resulting in instrumental compositions no longer being considered sufficiently satisfying and thus requiring sensual visualizations. However, I speculate.
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My understanding is that you quite correct with respect to the level of control the Ashkenazim has wielded over cultural products, as well as economic and political ones – this is conclusively documented by endless sources, and I have been reading this website ever since it first came online, and before that, Prof. MacDonald’s articles on his website since it first came online mid-1990s. I just have a hard time accepting the level of environmental malleability on the European brain that is often suggested here. But perhaps you are correct and I am just using myself as an anecdote. I personally may just contain a rare combination of genes. You see, at age 18 to 19, I had no intellectual thoughts. And my IQ is closer to average than above. But then in college at 20, I noticed Hispanics behaving primitively. My natural inclination was to simply look at the situation the same way I make conclusions about the behavior of all animals – birds have bird genes, Apes have ape genes, and likewise, Hispanics have uniquely Hispanic genes. I didn’t need Marxist cultural indoctrination – I just had my natural inclinations, my “instincts.” I of course did a quick lookup on the internet, which was relatively new at the time, and very quickly in the search results came across relevant websites on ethnic differences, and I just accepted the information right away because it seemed logical. I again did not need any Marxist indoctrination. Around this time, I used to be Democrat. The first cloning of an animal was carried out, and speculations were made on how humans may use it to augment society by cloning geniuses. I just immediately accepted this as a desirable thing, it was ‘instinctual.’ However, I shorty heard that the Democrats wanted to criminalize cloning humans. One hour after hearing this, I decided to no longer be a Democrat – I instinctively saw that they actually were opposed to human advancement. Again, I am not that intelligent. But, perhaps typical Europeans are different. It is accepted by readers of this site that the nature of African behavior is due primarily to genetics, not environment; on the other hand, current European behavior is attributed to Cultural Marxist indoctrination, not their current state of genetics. Thus, it is believed that personality traits and intelligence has a higher heritability in Africans than in Europeans. I still have much to learn, and there are some things I may never be able to learn or understand due to intellectual limitations. Perhaps this may be one such area. Perhaps we can agree that both environment and genetics need to be optimized for an ethnicity to maximize their prosperity. It’s like inoculating people from infections – the genes for the immune system need to be optimized, but also the microbes themselves (the environmental variable) must be removed.
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A race may produce offspring that acquire genes or mutations that are not adaptive. Historically, under strong Darwinian selection, such offspring are removed from the gene pool, either by nature, or the culture via man-made societal norms: gene-culture coevolution model. Jesus Christ may have been such an offspring, either born with low ethnocentrism and thus wanting to universalize Judaism, or being born with psychopathology and wanting to acquire personal resources by fabricating a religion to gain followers who would thus provide him with such resources. Since he genetically deviated from the adaptive norms of the Jewish people, he was “appropriately” delt with, as one would expect under Group Selection. However, his teachings were appealing to the much less ethnocentric Europeans – the chance for Salvation for all people of all backgrounds, so it spread quickly. And, the protocols of this new religion changed over time – it became more European in nature, and more adaptive to the evolutionary needs of Europeans in their unique environment. Christianity was actually remodeled, as MacDonald has explained, to in fact help them compete better with the Ashkenazim, whom were realized to actually be a hostile competing group. As the Ashkenazim came to realize that Christianity was now being used, once again, as a weapon against them, it was natural for them to criticize it, even today. So, this is my understanding of the whole matter, and I reference MacDonald and Woodley of Menie.
Open question to all the Wagnerphiles here. If Wagner really was debauched in his personal lifestyle, what grounds does he have criticize Jews? It reminds me of the people who complain about Jews as war profiteers and purveyors of vices like alcohol drugs and pornography. While those roles may be quite nefarious, nobody is forced to utilize their services. I challenge those who hate these kinds of Jews to ask themselves why their cultures so often succumb to their evil seductions.
I’ve read that Goebels was a notorious skirt chaser. I don’t know if it’s true or just slander against the NS-regime. But if true it’s bewildering because his wife Magda was very beautiful. Goebels in fact was pretty ugly looking. He has the facial physiognomy often attributed to Jews of a recessed chin and weak features and of course he was extremely small and unimposing physically.
There’s a spiritual principle that to create a pearl you need a piece of sand aggravating and irritating the oyster. This may be the role of unbelieving Jews. Rather than complain about them take actions to safeguard your communities and maybe to do spiritual outreach to the Jewish vice-mongers to change their behavior as well.
I need to study your comment more, but do you have a background in biology or population genetics? Your perspective seems quite unique!
There has been a lot of talk recently about the political beliefs of German musical composer Mr. Richard Wagner regarding the ethnic competition between Europeans and the Ashkenazim. I once again looked up the Enlightenment, and my understanding of the matter was again reinforced regarding how the Europeans brought all these conflicts upon themselves by replacing their traditional Group Selected beliefs with the new Individual Selected traits of the Enlightenment, which engendered the emancipation of the Ashkenazim, allowing them to thus freely practice their extreme ethnocentrism in direct competition with the Europeans, and then successfully out-competing them. The Enlightenment was about replacing the survival wisdom of their ancestors – strong Religiosity, Ethnocentrism, Patriarchy, Monumentalism, etc. – with the new five pillars of the Enlightenment: Atheism, Multiculturalism, Individualism, Feminism, and Homosexuality. Why the mentality of the Europeans changed at this time in the mid 1700s is difficult for me to fully comprehend. I don’t have the data on whether the mortality rates were starting to decline in the 1700s, resulting in more mutated offspring being born. Or, it can be that by the 1700s, Europeans became too intelligent due to the mini-ice age and intense Group Selection, and this increase in intelligence was not accompanied by an increase in strength of their Religiosity, Ethnocentrism, and various other adaptive instincts, and thus their higher intelligence made them question their survival behaviors such as Religiosity and Ethnocentrism; they reasoned out the conclusion that their new Enlightenment values were better than their traditional Group Selected beliefs. As a result of the Enlightenment, Europeans went on a crusade to equalize all the races and genetically diversifying their own gene pool. The Ashkenazim then just continued what the Europeans started, taking control of the helm. To me, it seems that Mr. Wagner, while accurately describing the behavior of the Ashkenazim, is ignoring the more prominent role of his own ethnicity in the matter. In fact, a significant reason the Ashkenazim can do what they do is because the European elites made alliances with them in exchange for personal gains (Individual Selection) at the cost of the evolutionary fitness of their own race. I read the historical writings of Mr. Andrew Joyce where he describes how Europeans Kings have usually invited the Ashkenazim into their kingdoms to use them as financial loaners, tax collectors, and administrators due to their high intelligence, Industriousness, and willingness to be ruthless in their extraction of wealth from the citizens and passing along that wealth to the Kings after taking a percentage for themselves. And, if you look at the Ashkenazim today, one can observe the countless European elites that do their bidding in exchange for personal gain. All those European faces in Congress, as Governors, as company executives, as military leaders, etc. What if the European elites were much more Group Selected (higher ethnocentrism and in-group altruism)? Woodley of Menie speculates that for Europeans, in their historical environment benefited better by being less ethnocentric, resulting in greater genetic diversity that caused rare geniuses to be born that invented weapons and other tools that allowed them to conquer more ethnocentric groups who did not have such geniuses. But the cost of this European Strategy is that you often get Genetically Psychopathic elites, such as the Kings who usually made alliances with the Ashkenazim for personal gain. And, since the Industrial Revolution, the percentage of the elites that were Psychopathic has increased exponentially due to lower mortality rates where much more mutated and dysgenic elites are born. On a final note, consider all those typical Europeans serving in the military and police services. Both the military and law enforcement exist to exclusively serve the ethnic interests of the Ashkenazim, yet Europeans still serve in these organizations without any regard to their ethnicity’s well-being. These Europeans are practicing Individual Selection, serving their individual evolutionary advancement at the cost to their ethnicity. This is a complete collapse of Group Selection of the Europeans brought on by 250 years of dysgenics and mutational load.
I’m not an expert on Wagner. From what I have gathered his criticisms were mainly about the art. Artists are notorious deviants so lifestyle should not come as a surprise, German or Jew.
All humans are weak and given to impulsive behavior. The Jew knows how to exploit this for destructive ends. The moral weakness in man become the crack in which he enters. Could you resist a beautiful woman or great wealth? Hard to say is it not?
Goebbels wasn’t much to look at but he was a charmer and had a set of perfect teeth, not a common sight in those days. That combined with power meant he had his pick of beauties to sample. Like so many men he took full advantage of his new won position.
The marriage to Magda was never about love. They in fact got married because Hitler fancied it, and they both wanted to get closer to him. Magda was actually madly in love with Hitler, and in ways Goebbels was too.
All the ladies loved Hitler.
This latter possibility does not seem feasible. Jesus and his followers were not wealthy at all. Jesus said of himself The son of man has nowhere to lay his head. Judas betrayed him for a fairly meager sum of money. True enough the Church that descended from him has become fabulously wealthy but not Jesus or his immediate followers.
I have read that around the time of Jesus Judaism was extremely popular throughout the Roman Empire. I have seen estimates that 10% of Roman pagans converted to Judaism. I have also seen estimates that 50% of Jews following the Roman destruction of Jerusalem converted to Christianity throughout the Empire. So yes they were competing religions.
I have never read McDonald’s, but one way that Judaism victimized Christians is by insisting that Christians not be granted the exemption from emperor worship that have been granted to Jews. This was the reason so many Christians were martyred for their faith. Jews were never forced to choose between their religion and Caesar. And they endeavored to make sure Christians would not enjoy this favored privilege.
I don’t believe Jews at the time of Christ were referred to as Ashkenazim. Even though many Jews lived in the Roman Empire, I think most of them were Mediterranean and would be considered ethnic Judeans. Paul of Tarsus claimed to be of The Tribe of Benjamin. Did he look distinctively Jewish as compared to the Romans and Greeks who lived in Tarsus? I don’t know when the concept of Ashkenazim arose. The Sephardic Jews had settled in Spain which was part of the Roman Empire.
Although Christianity has very high moral demands, it is an easier religion to practice than Judaism with its extreme liturgical practices and ritual commandments. We might say that Christianity emphasizes quantity over quality. Jews have always considered themselves intellectually superior to Christians because of their facility with Talmudic study. But at some point their envy was provoked by the sheer quantitative mass of Christians along with their considerable wealth. It seems in contemporary times the Jewish financial elite has managed to stage a hostile takeover of this Christian prosperity using Christian politicians and businessmen as their agents and operatives.
Someone mentioned Billy Joel. Has anyone seen that cat lately? Good gawd, he was ugly enuff when he was young but now? I guess we all get the face we deserve as we age. hehe. Someone on here posed a picture of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon as well. Those guys like Joel, were ugly even in their prime but now they look like monsters. haha.
Thank you for your very interesting comment. No I don’t judge Goebbels for being promiscuous. I certainly have had many moral failings in my life.
It’s interesting that his first names were Paul Joseph. These are two names of considerable confliction towards Jewish people. Joseph was the brother hated by the rest of the family, sold into slavery, and then rose to prominence as the viceroy of Egypt who persecuted his brothers for a time. Joseph is a favorite Old Testament antitype of Jesus in Christian literature:
The Apostle Paul wrote many harsh things about Jews. But modern Bible scholars tend to think that his critique was about Jewish Christians, who sought to impose Jewish practices on Gentiles, rather than against unbelieving Jews. This could apply to the “synagogue of Satan” expression in the Book of Revelation as well: an indictment of Judaizing Christians rather than of unbelieving practitioners of Judaism.
Hitler was Goebbel’s matchmaker? How did he put those two together? Magda is a stunning looking woman. Why didn’t Hitler take her for himself? Did Magda and Eva Braun get along?
This is a fascinating clip of Goebbels introducing Hitler’s birthday performance of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1942. He doesn’t seem like a very charismatic person. More like a very morose and introverted person. But it’s hard to tell from a short video clip.
This clip from the same concert — the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth — really evokes conflicting feelings. On the one hand the entire concert hall is filled with people in Natsi military uniforms. On the other hand the words of Beethoven’s Chorale speak about Joy and the Universal Brotherhood of Man. It’s about the most incongruous combination one could imagine, no?
https://youtu.be/b67EWtEXnUk
Or would people here truthfully argue that the Natsis were committed to promoting Beethoven’s vision of joyful human Brotherhood and that the Jews were the only obstacle to realizing it?
Check out Barry Manilow. I guess he reinforces the claim in this article that Jewish artists are all about commercialization, since he made his Fame and Fortune recording advertising Jingles for corporations:
How about this one, playa
Cue: Come And Get Your Love by Redbone
My friend, unless you are copying and pasting these comments from another source, it’s hard to believe that you have an average IQ. These are extremely insightful and subtle ideas that you are conveying!
Regarding your question of why Europeans in the 1700s abandoned more traditional ideologies, philosopher Michael Ruse writes a lot about the creation-evolution debate. In one of his books, I believe the following, he says that the 30 years war between Protestants and Catholics in the 1600s exhausted Europeans and made them extremely cynical about the ability of religion to promote harmony rather than strife and bloodshed in European societies and this opened the way to the enlightenment. He specifically mentions the famous poem Dover Beach of Matthew Arnold:
https://poets.org/poem/dover-beach
Hitler wanted his subordinates to be family men. Philandering was a bad look. He did not take her for himself because she did not interest him in that way. He had his pick of beautiful ladies too, but in order to reinforce his image as Führer he would never marry or commit to an open relationship. He was married to Germany.
Hey now. Barry is alright with me. I dare you to act gangsta while listening to ” I Can’t Smile Without You. ” I will say this before God and all of mankind, I “likeded” that song.
Okay everyone, a one, a two, a tree, hit it.
Cue: I Can’t Smile Without You by Barry Manilow
Was he truly celibate do you think? He was something like an Emperor and Pope combined! If all the things they say about him are true, that he was a vegetarian and abstained from alcohol and caffeine, as well as appreciating fine art and literature, then he was on a much higher moral plane than any of his major adversaries FDR Churchill and Stalin. Perhaps history will vindicate him. If the Israelis were smart they would admit that Hitler was a great leader and that his assistance was crucial to the establishment of their State.
Are you sure? I get the sense that sauerkraut lives at the edge at least of demonization.
Just when I think I’ve got all you Jew-haters figured out, you throw me a curveball like this one! Manilow is not only a commercialized cheap Jewish musician but he’s a faggot. Two strikes against him from an NS point of view. Can’t you at least be consistent?
He looks like some kind of weird Peter Pan ghoul in this picture. To his credit he had one Irish Catholic grandmother; the other three were Jews.
These last two stanzas of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem reflect his disillusionment with religion as a source of inspiration for mankind and instead exalts the notion of individualized committed love. Philosopher Michael Ruse sees this as indicative of the mindset that was liberated in the Enlightenment and paved the way for secular humanist values to replace religion. He also says this is the reason that Darwin’s ideas were so quickly accepted by the European civilization that had become exhausted by religious warfare.
They will milk Wagner for all its worth to beef up their already bulging pockets by interloping … why waste an opportunity to bilk others when so much money is left on the table?
You are not capable of figuring me out, Einstein. hehe. I am Trinity aka El bueno.
Cue: The Theme From The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Oh and cue up: Midnight In Memphis by Bette Midler
You’re confused: The subject of this thread is not beautiful women, but beautiful music.
That’s the usual trick:
You hide a shallow piece of music behind a beautiful female face and every male gets excited.
Maybe I am dumb, but I couldn’t understand anything from the text. In what language are they singing? After all, there is supposed to be a plot in “Hoffmann’s tales”…
The entire Ring cycle was recorded in stereo from day one. Indeed, Decca had been recording everything in stereo since 1957, and the company’s earliest stereo recordings had been made about three years prior—that is, not long after the earliest RCA and Columbia stereo tapings. The only holdout was the EMI consortium, which moved entirely to stereo only in 1958 (it might even have been 1959 for British EMI).
I should add that the preceding comments refer solely to these companies’ classical catalogs. Pop music producers dragged their feet a lot longer, in no small part because the people they were selling to didn’t especially care about stereo for quite some time.
To return to the Solti Ring: All four operas were released in two LP formats, mono and stereo, as was customary for almost twenty years.* At least here in the States, Das Rheingold, the first of the four to be recorded and released, was for a time easier to find in the mono LP format, especially outside the big cities. This did not continue to be the case with Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, and Walküre, however (that being the order of their recording and release).
Although I do not share your high opinion of Solti’s conducting—many of his singers are, however, of the highest quality—I emphatically agree about Culshaw’s Ring Resounding. I had the good fortune to meet him once, quite briefly. He was as modest and self-effacing a man as I have ever encountered.
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* They were all also released as splendid-sounding 7.5 ips open-reel tapes and, later, audio-compromised cassette tapes, but that’s a topic for another day on another thread.
Hitler is well-known to have suffered from coprophilia, a rather nassty psycho-sexual condition.
‘The Jew..’. Do you mean there is only one? He does get about!
‘Among’ Jews, Dumbo. Not all, but those who lost family are entitled to hate whomsoever they wish. If they judge Wagner unfairly it’s OK. He’s dead, so won’t be harmed. If some Palestinians hate Jews, if some Vietnamese hate Americans, if some former miners hate Thatcher, I’m quite happy with that.
Wein, Weib & Gesang!
Do beautiful woman & music not go hand in hand?
Must music not be beautiful for it to be “music”, just like art has to beautiful?
Can ugliness be art?
Is the heart simple?
Beautiful Anna & Elina are singing the original Les Contes d’Hoffmann in froggy lingo.
Offenbach’s soul must have been dancing…sensing Anna & Elina from top to toe in the home of the Walzer: “Who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long.”
Cheers to you, Perez…
Thanks for spotting my error in mono to stereo evolution of the Ring recording. I could have sworn Gordon Parry mentioned that in 1974. Then it dawned on me, it may have been Dolby noise reduction that came along sometime in the sixties, during which piece, I’m can’t remember, launching Ray Dolby Laboratories, and the rest is history.
In any case, it was in my opinion, the greatest music recording production in the history of recorded music.
No other recording of the complete Ring even comes close. Wagner was certainly a divine intervention in the making of this majestic pieces of musical art.
Thanks again.
I prefer this Memphis song:
And these:
This seems to have been true.
But he was committed to Eva Braun.
“I’ve been refraining from commenting here because in truth I am appalled at the extremity of Jew-hatred being expressed here”
As a KIKE, if your race would JUST ONCE admit their evil, and the utter destruction you and yours have wrought on Western Civ, since the crime of DEICIDE, I might believe you. But you won’t, so I don’t. EVERYTHING DESERVING OF THE JEWS WILL COME TO PASS.
Until then, Ps. 139:22 “Do I not hate those who hate You, O LORD, and detest those who rise against You? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them as my enemies.”
“The Most High also hated sinners, and he will repay the ungodly with punishment. 7 Give to good people, and don’t assist sinners. – Sirach 12:5-7
St. Philaret of Moscow stated: “Love your personal enemies, hate the enemies of Christ, destroy the enemies of the fatherland.”
Ορθοδοξία ή θάνατος
“Live in peace with your enemies, but only with your Personal Enemies, and NOT the ENEMIES OF GOD.” – St. Theosodius of the Kiev Caves Lavra
And, in the Vulgate (the RC translation) “…the passage telling us to love our enemies used the word “inimicus” in the Latin translation, which means personal enemy. This word was used as opposed to the word “hostis”, which mean the public, or political enemy. So obviously Christ did not teach us to love the people who want to kill us; we are simply to love our brethren and forgive their petty transgressions.”
“…as a matter of fact, Jesus did not ask his listeners to “love” their persecutors in the Sermon on the Mount; rather, he urged prayers on their behalf. It is even more important to realize what Jesus meant when asked the audience to love their enemies. In the Greek, he refers specifically and only to “private” enemies (echthros) not to “public” or “alien” enemies (polemoi).27 Unless one keeps such distinctions in mind, a Christian hermeneutics of mission can easily degenerate into pathological altruism.28 The existential distinction between friend and enemy cannot be dissolved by transforming Christianity into a deracinated, cosmopolitan cult of the Other. National Jesus knew better than to mistake historical choice for ontological essence.”
– Global Jesus versus National Jesus: The Political Hermeneutics of Resurrection: Andrew Fraser
I wonder if Mevashir has any thoughts on this article.
First, he is a prick, but I don’t take comedians too seriously. They’re good if they make me laugh; I don’t consider them emotionally-mentally mature enough to be even pissed at them. They’re like spoiled children.
Unfortunately, I can’t help you because I am a theoretical physicist, not a musicologist & my technical knowledge on the subject is weak. I know more about musical aesthetics, but this is quite another field. As for your therapy, I think it’s innovative, but I don’t know whether it would work, satisfactorily.
Theoretically, you can find numerous studies about music & brain, it’s easy – just, I’d advise you to contact some professionals to see if your approach is conductive to your goals. On the other hands- if you enjoy it, go for it. To hell with the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.
Computers Can Now Tell What Songs You’ve Listened to Just by Using Brain Scans
https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-scans-can-now-reveal-the-songs-you-re-listening-to
Computers Can Now Tell What Songs You’ve Listened to Just by Using Brain Scans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_music
Neuroscience of music
https://mappingignorance.org/2018/05/02/music-maths-language-and-the-brain/
Music, maths, language… and the brain
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacecm6tsnov2bek34l54prxvdlrcp5oiysgjnqk2jzjpag6htyzmpuk?filename=Stefan%20Koelsch%20-%20Brain%20and%20Music-Wiley-Blackwell%20(2012).pdf
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebrid7ktlcegvasc7wyvyuvpyqrgb7bbpvpa3dokgmz2reafq4igi?filename=Michael%20H.%20Thaut%20%28editor%29%2C%20Donald%20A.%20Hodges%20%28editor%29%20-%20The%20Oxford%20Handbook%20of%20Music%20and%20the%20Brain-OUP%20Oxford%20%282019%29.pdf
https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=BAE9715C57FCD3A64765FCEB3459AFA5 (expanded edition)
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacecs5ieqowdvmje34yc4i5y4qjxamsmhuvutwmfjpaejatwj4vgrts?filename=Oliver%20Sacks%20-%20Musicophilia_%20Tales%20of%20Music%20and%20the%20Brain-Alfred%20A.%20Knopf%20%282007%29.pdf
I wonder if you knew my uncle Burton Richter, who was a theoretical particle physicist and director of SLAC at Stanford? He also spent time working at CERN in Switzerland. He died two years ago. I saw him shortly before he passed and he told me he had been sent to Iran as part of a special investigative commission under Obama to check out the Iranian nuclear program. He told me he thought the Israelis were vastly exaggerating the Iranian threat and should not be trusted.
https://stat.hevra.haifa.ac.il/~yuval/misc.html
https://www.yuvalnov.org/temperament/
This is an article by an Israeli mathematician on the great problem in music of equal temperament. You probably will find it fascinating and also better able to comprehend it than I am. I find the mathematical principles behind music fascinating. Apparently it’s a big part of the philosophical worldview of the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece.
Thank you for the information you shared with me. I appreciate that you are willing to relate on the level of ideas rather than inflammatory rhetoric and prejudice. I also think your background in physics is perfect to consider my question about C-Major versus A-Minor. Sometimes an outsider can bring a fresh perspective to an obvious question that experts have never considered.
I think this other question is perfect for your background. In a major scale the intervals in the keys are step step half-step step step step half-step. Why is it that if you apply the same intervals in reverse going down it doesn’t sound right at all? In other words the musical appeal of the scale is only when you do the steps in ascending order rather than descending. Shouldn’t the mathematical proportions of the neighboring notes be the same whether you go up or down?
OPEN QUESTION TO TUR READERS
After reading about the claims of some commenters here that Jews have a homeland in the Birobidjan Russian Autonomous Republic, I wrote to them asking whether Jews can move there from all around the world. They responded to me with a Russian language pdf that was scanned rather than converted directly to Russian text and hence I cannot feed it into Google translate. If anyone on this site reads Russian (Iris?) I would be grateful for a summary of this response. It appears here on my google drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lxFLRDgg0jSk_jB3VfMnzop3tg1w4MsH/view?usp=sharing
It’s not very long, only about 200 words I estimate (in the spirit of Ron Unz).
Thanks and Spacibo!
“Our time is characterized by an incapacity to look evil in the face.” (Jorge Luis Borges)
No, I didn’t know him, but Burton Richter was a great physicist, real physicist (unlike so many poseurs roaming the physics field now). Also, although I haven’t been following that thing closely, I guess he was right, too, about Israelis & Iran. Iran has been doing this for years and years and years and ….what? A country of such potential can have old-fashioned nukes if they really want to, in a rather short time.
As regards Pythagoras & music- I’m still not sure. Certainly, he was right with musical intervals; then, Greeks were all about harmony, which they saw both in music & mathematics. And yet, mathematical Platonism (which is elaboration on Pythagoras) seems to be something like misunderstanding. Some great mathematicians were sort of Platonists (Goedel, Grothendieck), some- not (Poincare, Brouwer). Platonists think that mathematical objects exist as such, outside of our skulls & that our empirical world is, at its core, mathematical (so that we don’t invent math for description of physics, but math is somehow the essence of physical reality).
Where Platonists are wrong is that they dismiss some supra-mundane world where such mathematical objects would reside independently of human consciousness, which was the original Plato’s idea – Plato had built upon Pythagoras. Without supra-physical math worlds, mathematical Platonism doesn’t make much sense.
Music and mathematics were more closely connected before the developments in modern mathematics in the past 200 to 300 years, when mathematics progressively became so complex that our notions of harmony ceased to be intuitively acceptable. Shortly- math is too complex to be “harmonious”.
Music, on the other hand, still is “harmonious”- we can easily detect irritating noise. It doesn’t mean that the power of music is confined to conventionally defined harmonies (Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is powerful, although not conventionally harmonious; the same with Beethoven’s late quartets).
Brain scans show that math & music regions in the human brain are different, so that although there is something linking math and music, they are forms of experience & cognition which differ- and they both differ from the language capability.
They say that basically you have to know Russian language to move in. That’s more or less-all.
Thank you! I hope this proves to others on this site that Birobidjan is not a feasible Homeland for non-ethnic-Russian Jews!
Thank you for this fascinating reply. It might surprise you to know that apparently the Talmudic scholars were Platonists. In his famous commentary on the Torah text, medieval exegete Rashi explains a verse about Moses giving instructions to build the Tabernacle in the wilderness that he first was shown an ideal Heavenly form of this sacred object and in the end based his instructions on that form. I think this is a Platonic concept.
I found in my time in Orthodox Judaism that they tend to respect Plato, even if they don’t understand him very well, but they instinctively hate Aristotle and see him as the inspiration for Catholic scholastics like Augustine and Aquinas who formulated official Catholic anti-Jewish policies.
There even is a claim in some Orthodox circles that King Solomon gave philosophical and religious principles uniquely tailored to each culture, so Plato for the Greeks Confucius for the Chinese etcetera. I imagine Hindus and Chinese would take issue with this claiming that their cultures are much older than Solomon who is dated to about 900 BC.
You knew Gordon Parry? Color me green!
It does, but it shouldn’t.
AMEN
Would you please be so kind to answer my question: In what language are they singing?
It doesn’t seem to be French.
It’s complicated.
Talmud had been composed from ca. 200 to 600 AD/CE. As regards Jewish philosophers, Philo of Alexandria was a Platonist through-and-through, but he lived in the Roman empire during, I think, Caligula & didn’t bother with rituals too much.
Normative Orthodox Judaism is mostly about the law & not too concerned with “philosophy”. Kabbalah, on the other hand, is a marriage of Judaic law, Platonism, Gnosticism, Pythagoreanism & everything imaginable.
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebvx6tklnrqt35quggisiy5qpadh3twnoxc2qyf3gejgoeodwd7zy?filename=%28Very%20Short%20Introductions%29%20Joseph%20Dan%20-%20Kabbalah_%20A%20Very%20Short%20Introduction-Oxford%20University%20Press%2C%20USA%20%282005%29.pdf
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebygydjsi7rur4cjuay5bjaearsu3uukewuy46xqln5elc7rz4hpm?filename=Professor%20Moshe%20Idel%20-%20Absorbing%20Perfections_%20Kabbalah%20and%20Interpretation-Yale%20University%20Press%20%282002%29.pdf
Here is a review of MacDonald’s research:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180531125044/http://www.neoeugenics.net/mac.htm
Again thanks. You seem very knowledgeable. Are you familiar with Gerald Schroeder? He was an MIT-trained nuclear physicist and after many years working on the US nuclear weapons program he moved to Israel, became a rabbi, and teaches at Aish HaTorah Yeshiva:
It appears that the New Testament also is Platonic:
The link he provides appears to be only instrumental. But many comments below the link are in Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTXIXkeWnEo
This link has them singing clearly en Español: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rujs7hVxvXU
It’s really quite remarkable that, 170 years after the the single greatest cultural figure of the 19th century published his most notorious bit of writing – Das Judenthum in der Musik – there’s still no competent English translation.
William Ashton Ellis? Are you kidding me?
No, in his link the two beauties are singing. Can you sing without using a language?
What does the libretto say bout the text?
Charles Osborne, a popularizing music critic of a generation ago, edited a volume called Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays (Open Court Publishing: La Salle, IL, 1973). Its primary distinction is a fresh translation (by Osborne himself) of “Das Judentum in Musik” that is a marked improvement on Ashton Ellis’s. Neither the hardcover nor the paperback reprint (1991) is especially hard to find though both editions are long out of print. The paperback’s ISBN is 9780812691467, and the hardcover’s is 9780912050430; the search engine at BookFinder.com reveals many copies available for less than fifteen dollars.
As usual, Jews are the masters of both sin and deception, and they ALWAYS project their 0wn sins back onto the goyim.
The Jews of the Frankfurt School fled Germany after Hitler was voted into power. They fled the morally decrepit Weimar “Republic” they had created that so closely mirrors our current predicament that we could say that it rhymes.
Theodore Adorno, a Jew and supposedly a “classical musician”, was one of those Frankfurters, and he was a key player in MKUltra and the corruption of the baby boomers through Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. It is said that Adorno wrote most of the Beatles songs, and he held the rights to the music and eventually his estate sold those rights to Michael Jackson.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah” is the Jews greatest contribution to music, just like Greta’s “Bla, Bla, Bla” is their greatest contribution to stopping “climate change”. So when it comes to people using music to mislead a culture into its own oblivion, jews are the masters. Wagner doesn’t even start to compare, and he didn’t even start to comprehend the evil that lurks in the genes of “god’s chosen clot-shot injecting people”.
The language being sung is French. The music is the celebrated Barcarole that opens what is usually called either the “Venice act” or the “Giulietta act” of Les contes d’Hoffmann. This act was composed as act 3 of the opera—which in toto consists of a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue—but for most of the past 150 years it has been performed as act 2. It is only within the last twenty years or so that producers and opera houses have shown an inclination to follow the composer’s preferences.
The tale of the score’s and the composer’s misfortunes and misadventures is a long one and not suitable for retelling in the present context.
Here follows the full text of what Garança (as Nicklausse) and Netrebko (as Giulietta) sing.
Some reading on this:
https://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-i-tried-to-transplant-the-musical-heart-of-apocalypse-now
I looked at your link and saw that it is a very long article over 30 pages. I hope to print it out and study it next week. But from a cursory glance I think MacDonald makes one mistake. He’s correct about Jewish inbreeding and eugenics practices. But he overlooks that this creates a countervailing effect to their high IQ which is a high incidence of mental illness and other forms of personality disorder that undermine the effectiveness of the group.
I would say that very generally speaking Judaism vs. Christianity represents the conflict between quality versus quantity. Christians are obviously vastly more numerous than Jews, and while Jews exult about their superior intellect and wealth, the sheer enormity of the Christian population carries an impressive power all its own.
An important theme in the Bible is that God vindicates the humble. Like the statement of Jesus which is in Psalms also that The meek shall inherit the earth. Jews are often anything but meek, particularly the secular Jews who love to flaunt their wealth and their power. If you have any kind of faith in God, their attitude cannot succeed in the long run and will be cast down and utterly repudiated.
I don’t like jooz but they do very well at winning Nobel prizes in Science ( the only Nobels that matter). Jooz make great scientists and that is very important.
Atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers comprise 10.5% of total Nobel Prize winners; but in the category of Literature, these preferences rise sharply to about 35%. A striking fact involving religion is the high number of Laureates of the Jewish faith – over 20% of total Nobel Prizes (138); including: 17% in Chemistry, 26% in Medicine and Physics, 40% in Economics and 11% in Peace and Literature each. The numbers are especially startling in light of the fact that only some 14 million people (0.2% of the world’s population) are Jewish. By contrast, only 5 Nobel Laureates have been of the Muslim faith-0.8% of total number of Nobel prizes awarded – from a population base of about 1.2 billion (20% of the world‘s population).
merci, Pierre.
I thought, I understand some French, but I got nothing from their singing.
It is true that in the area of science, Jews made great contributions, nobody denies that.
What is lacking in your evaluation is the role, their host nation’s education system played in it. Because in their pale-of-settlement, Jews contributed nothing but Talmud sophistications.
And, of course, you overestimate the impartiality of Nobel prizing, which makes your statistics pretty worthless. Like all other highly publicized awards (Oscar, Cannes,…) most Nobel prizes are highly biased.
Or, to put it more bluntly: Nobel Prizes – like most other Western decorations – are a product of the (((ethnic networking))) Kevin McDonald analyses so carefully.
This is particularly evident in the ridiculous Prices for Peace and Literature, where regularly Jews (Elie Wiesel) or their sycophants (Mario Vargas Llosa,…) get honored.
There are a lot of blacks and hispanics among those “jewish activists”.
Its actually not a jewish group– its the LaRouche group.
I know some people who are fanatically against anything pickled as unhealthy and I believe this is a remnant of a previous anti-salt campaign. If you eat 5X a week at McDonald’s and Taco Bell yeah you are getting way too much salt. If you make your own food you probably have nothing to worry about at all as salt in a certain amount is an essential nutrient. A small amount of pickles or sauerkraut is perfectly tasty and good for you! Cabbage is health food although it does make you fart. : )
I guess the ‘leading ideologist’ of the nordicist Nazi Party was not aware that Beethoven was a mixed-race, liberal untermensch who was described by his contemporaries as “brown-skinned”, with “crinkly hair”, looking like “a mulatto” etc.
Btw, the European Union chose Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as its anthem:
https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/anthem_en
Some googling reveals the impact Beethoven (and Shakespeare) had on Wagner:
http://www.the-wagnerian.com/2013/05/wagner-on-beethoven.html
Do you have a source?
Certainly appears not to possess any of these features in this picture…
There are true to life portraits, like the one I posted, and then there are idealized, romanticized portraits. The portrait you posted is the latter, it does not look like the descriptions of Beethoven by his contemporaries who actually eyeballed him:
https://books.google.com/books?id=BC0IBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA306&lpg=PA306&dq=black+beethoven+mulatto+dark+brown&source=bl&ots=t_R_vmczaf&sig=ACfU3U162OWzTSSaF_YBCxmUSG9X0NBAqg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiD_vjh25T0AhXPl54KHRIXCu8Q6AF6BAhFEAM#v=onepage&q=black%20beethoven%20mulatto%20dark%20brown&f=false
Beethoven Pedigree:
http://theomolberg.de/Beethoven/beethovenv.htm
https://www.pinterest.de/pin/480337116482802057/
Beethoven’s father, Johann van Beethoven, was a tenor in the Bonn court orchestra.
Beethoven’s grandfather Ludwig van Beethoven served as Electoral Cologne Kapellmeister. Beethoven’s mother, Maria Magdalena, née Keverich, was married in second marriage to Johann van Beethoven.
Ludwig was their third child.
Mother Maria had five more children after Ludwig; only two of them survived the early child mortality.
Ludwig died in Vienna. 30,000 people attended his funeral:
The cause of his death was considered to be liver disease.
An analysis of Beethoven’s hair, which is still preserved today, showed years of lead poisoning. It is considered to be the probable cause of death. It is considered to be the reason of varying complexions.
Could it be another reason that the selected drawing (no photography at that time) shows a sick LvB?! And it is a scan of a scan of a photocopy… It is like visual „silent mail“ (stille Post).
A faint and of course only speculative reason/possibility could be Rita’s law.
Bottom line: Beethoven was as much black as Hitler jewish.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Ludwig+Beethoven+Bilder&t=opera&iax=images&ia=images
https://dailystormer.in/germany-black-singer-wants-to-exhume-beethovens-body-to-prove-he-was-black/
Korrektur to the partitur:
Beethoven was as black as Wagner Jewish.
Does Hanging All Text Drivers mean hang all Hasbaratrolls?
Unclassy Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize lost much of its value from the time after the First Jewish World War when it became a propaganda tool of the liberal type under Jewish influence und Jewish rule.
Sweden has a Jewish king. All „nordic royals“ are Jewish infiltrators.
Just have a look at the Hackennase and you know the value of a Nobel prize (given to Swinestein, Al Whore, Peres, Rabin, Obimbo and other criminals and imposters):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haakon,_Crown_Prince_of_Norway
In 1935, the Nobel Peace Prize was to be awarded to a criminal Carl von Ossietzky, who had already been sentenced as a traitor. The German Reich objected to this double-moral award. The Swedish committee therefore decided to suspend the Nobel Prize for the year 1935. One year later criminal Ossietzky was retroactively awarded the prize.
Because of the „Swedish“ decision, the German government decided to prohibit Germans from accepting the prize in the future; instead, the German National Prize for Art and Science was established. Until then, Germans had provided the most laureates among all nations in the world.
Since 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize has also honored commitment to “human rights,” and since 2004, in addition, to the environment, and that says it all: unnoble.
The North must start to remember and uphold racy originals carrying the real crown of light instead of Jewish bludgers with white flesh at their disposal.
Well written Sir, and your argument shows how the Holohoax has deeply ruined 20th century culture. Music critics need to grab a copy of my book ‘the Holocaust Myth and Reality’ before writing about Wagner.
Adorno makes his genocidal hatred for indigenous Germans quite clear in that [originally private] passage. But were the German people the only targets of his untrammeled rage and hatred? Let’s take a closer look at the implications of this quote from Sanderson’s essay:
T.W. Adorno and Wagner biographer Robert Gutman began a modern Jewish intellectual tradition when they proposed that Wagner’s “antipathy to Jews” was not limited to articles like Judaism in Music, but included hidden “anti-Semitic” and “racist” messages embedded in his operas.
So Adorno believed very strongly that other people‘s writings contained both exoteric and esoteric meanings. This may or may not tell us anything about the works that he is attempting to deconstruct, but it certainly tells us something about Adorno’s own mindset. Very reminiscent of the constant rants by anti-Whites about supposed “dog whistles” — or the Straussian influence on the early neocons [Irving Kristol* was profoundly influenced by Strauss’s claims about the supposed esoteric meanings of various philosophical works]. But don’t worry, when the neocons shriek incoherently about “spreading democracy,” they mean that literally…
But Adorno is best-known, not for his virulent anti-Wagnerism, but for his infamous screed The Authoritarian [Goy] Personality [AGP], part of the American Jewish Committee-sponsored hate propaganda series Studies in “Prejudice”. This “AGP” concept was taken from the rantings of the infamous insane pedophile jew [and inventor of the Orgasmatron™] Robert Reich, but expanded and popularized. Like Reich, Adorno claimed that when White goyim have intact, normal families, religious faith, and a relatively normal social structure, this makes them more resistant to “tikkuning**” by their semitic “superiors”… and that this lack of susceptibility to semitic propaganda was Very Bad for the Tribe. Adorno variously referred to this instinctive resistance to semitic supremacism as the putative “AGP” and so-called “fascism” [a term whose denotation was notoriously vague and slippery even back then]. “AGP” is a long-discredited semitic canard that is nonetheless still heavily promoted by ignorant, hate-filled semitic supremacists in the current year, while Adorno’s use of the “fascist” trope is perhaps best exemplified currently by the name chosen by the prominent semitic supremacist street gang “antifa” [= anti-“fascist.”]
For a more concrete example of what Adorno really meant when he whined that the White goyim in America were all so-called “fascists,” it’s helpful (again) to look at his private letters, rather than his pilpul designed from the start for publication to the goyim. In a letter to his parents in 1940, Adorno ranted:
“Fascism” in Germany, which is inseparable from “anti-Semitism,” is no psychological anomaly of the German national character. It is a universal tendency …The conditions for it – and I mean all of them, not only the economic but also the mass psychological ones – are at least as present [in America] as in Germany…and the barbaric semi-civilization of this country will spawn forms no less terrible than those in Germany.”
Well OK then:
>All White goyim in Germany AND America are “fascists”
>All “fascists” must be eliminated
It only takes a very basic understanding of the transitive property of toxic semitism to understand what Adorno is really talking about here…
*Kristol’s supposed “ideological journey” from Trotskyism to “non-Communist leftism” to neo”conservatism” can be traced via his intellectual idols of those respective periods — Bronstein [of course], then Trilling, then Strauss. But only a cynic would suggest that the connection between Kristol and the other 3 ran deeper than mere ideology. Did I mention that Kristol’s review of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing focuses on Maimonides as the exemplar of Strauss’s major themes?
Of course, the strong form of the “Strauss-neocon connection” hypothesis mostly serves as a distraction; a more subtle form of the “No Blood for Oil!” canard; an attempt to portray neoconservatism as merely an abstract ideology, rather than what it actually represents — simple semitic supremacism. But in its more restricted sense — the Strauss-Kristol-esotericism connection — it has some validity. Incidentally, it’s often been noted that “democracy” plays the same role in neo”conservatism” that “permanent revolution” does in Trotkyism — an ill-defined, ostensibly-universalist goal whose actual purpose is to serve as a “moral justification” for tikkuning the goyim.
**The exoteric meaning of “tikkun olam” is, of course, something like “heal [or ‘repair’] the world,” But if we examine this ostensible “healing” process a little more closely, what do we find?
The goal of such “repair”, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.
So when semitic people blabber about “healing” or “repairing” the world… they actually mean destroying the world. That’s nice. Remember, it’s not me saying this — it comes straight from Isaac Luria, endorsed and promoted by My Jewish Learning (though some argue it has even earlier roots in the Zohar, a 13th century forgery authored by Moses de León). And it’s a principle that has broad appeal within the Tribe, not just among hardcore kabbalists. Sure, the Haskalah led to a temporary deemphasis of some of the wackier kabbalist doctrines among more rational semitic people, but there was a resurgence of semitic s̶a̶t̶a̶n̶i̶s̶m̶ “mysticism” in the 20th century. In the current year, many “secular leftist” semitic organizations are prone to screech and gibber about “tikkuning the goyim”…
Indeed. Well-written, and it exhaustively documents yet another case of semitic supremacists projecting their own hatred and fear of the goy Other onto the innocent targets of that hatred. Toxic semitism strikes again. What a surprise.
It’s important to look at the larger context when assessing the decline of art in the modern era. It’s not just the putative “artists” themselves — there are obvious issues of financial, marketing, and even covert operations support.
When it comes to visual art, the longstanding semitic hatred of beauty in general, and of representational art in particular, is well-known:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-graven-images/
https://www.yeshiva.co/midrash/17311
And the decline of visual art correlates quite closely with the rise of systemic tribalism, even when the ostensible “artists” are not themselves members of the Tribe of Supreme Victims. For example:
Pollock, you say? Sure, Pollock was a goy — but let’s take a closer look at the course of his career. His meteoric rise from janitor at the Guggenheim to famous “artist” was entirely due to Peggy Guggenheim’s notorious hunger for goy dick and the consequent financial support and publicity that she provided to Jack the Dripper:
In 1943, Pollock briefly worked as a maintenance man at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (forerunner to the Guggenheim Museum). Later that year, Peggy Guggenheim gave him a contract that lasted through 1947, permitting him to devote all his time to painting. His first solo show was held at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, New York (1943).
Peggy Guggenheim organized his first European solo exhibition at the Museo Correr, Venice, in 1950… critic Clement Greenberg organized his first retrospective at Bennington College, Vermont.
Etc.
Without Peggy’s help, Pollock would have died an unknown janitor — and the world would have been a better place for it.
Tom Wolfe’s thesis in The Painted Word might be relevant here as well. He argued that the modern “art” world is constructed in such a way that the ostensible work of “art” is almost irrelevant, and the real focus is on the construction of elaborate, abstract verbal narratives by prominent art critics, which utilize the purported “art” simply as a nidus; a starting place — a “hook.” It should be self-evident that this is a highly-semitic way to manage the “art” world, but just in case:
Wolfe read in Hilton Kramer‘s 1974 Times review of Seven Realists, that “to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial”. Wolfe summarized the review saying that it meant “without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting”
In particular, Wolfe criticized three prominent art critics whom he dubbed the kings of “Cultureburg”: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg.
This was especially comical:
In defense of critics Rosenberg, Greenberg, and Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss noted that each man wrote about art “in ways that are entirely diverse.”
Is is possible that Ms. Krauss might perhaps be a member of the same, uh, Tribe of Entirely Diverse People as Mr. Kramer and the -berg triplets? What do you think?
As noted above, the Guggenheim’s original name was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting… and the trend that Wolfe was critiquing is typically described as “de-objectification” of art.
All politics aside, Wagner was a high genius who revolutionized music. You don’t have Wagner fans traveling from the ends of the earth, to congregate, in a place that is almost considered a holy shrine, for no reason. Of course I’m speaking from the view of my extensive, reading, listening and talking with other people. Some of the best examples of his music are from Herbert von Karajan and the more dated, Hans Knappertsbusch.
Forgot to mention a few other prominent semitic influences on Pollock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock#Influence_and_technique
One definitive influence on Pollock was the work of the “Ukrainian” American artist Janet Sobel (1894–1968) (born Jennie Lechovsky).[
On the promotion/ marketing end, I mentioned “art critic” Clement Greenberg in passing, but didn’t specifically point out that he was one of Pollock’s primary propagandists. And of course, Sidney Janis was almost as effective as the CIA in promoting Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists.
Not to mention his wife Lee:
Krasner’s extensive knowledge and training in modern art and techniques helped her bring Pollock up to date with what contemporary art should be. Krasner is often considered to have taught her husband in the dominant tenets of modernistic painting.
Less important in terms of “artistic” influence or marketing/ financial support, but just as illustrative of the highly-semitic milieu which surrounded Pollock, are the details of his fatal crash:
On August 11, 1956, at 10:15 p.m., Pollock died in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible while driving under the influence of alcohol. At the time Krasner was visiting friends in Europe and she abruptly returned on hearing the news from a friend.[39] One of the passengers, Edith Metzger, was also killed in the accident, which occurred less than a mile from Pollock’s home. The other passenger, Ruth Kligman, an artist and Pollock’s mistress, survived.
Yep — Kligman and Metzger were both early life positive as well. Pollock was himself a goy, but not only were his major patrons and promoters MOTs, but his wife and his mistress were semitic as well. Apart from dribbling paint, the guy’s entire life appeared to focus on alcohol and nailing yentas.
Did I mention that — heavily encouraged by his wife — Pollock was a frequent customer of various s̶e̶m̶i̶t̶i̶c̶ ̶v̶o̶o̶d̶o̶o̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶e̶s̶t̶s̶ “psychoanalysts?” Clearly a classic case of false consciousness/ internalized tribalism.
Adorno clearly used “fascism” and “Authoritarian Goy Personality” as dog whistles for semitic supremacism and virulent, unreasoning anti-White hatred. The use of the term “fascism” declined significantly after WW2, but an NGram shows that the AGP canard was a common anti-White trope from the late 1940s until well into the 1970s.
The gradual shift from less obvious expressions of anti-White hatred like AGP, to the more open ones commonly spewed forth now, tracks the rise of semitic supremacism after WW2, and the associated solidification of the structures of systemic tribalism. In the current year, Adorno’s “AGP” trope is less common. Instead we see more direct semitic assaults on the autochthonous peoples of Europe using terms such as “toxic whiteness”, drawn from entire “academic” fields explicitly devoted to the production of anti-White hate propaganda, such as critical race theory and [anti] Whiteness studies — though sometimes Applebaums, feeling that neither alone is sufficiently venomous, combine the two into “Critical Whiteness Studies.”
You are of course absolutely correct. Thank you for replying in such plain terms to that foolish woman.
I have seen at least a dozen portraits of Beethoven, for all of which he sat, that date prior to 1815, and in none of them is there any suggestion of a negroid cast to his skin. There are also portraits of his younger brother Johann and his unfortunate nephew, Karl—the son of Beethoven’s other younger brother, also named Karl—and they too lack any suggestion of blackness. Given that the proximate causes of Beethoven’s death were advanced cirrhosis, chronic severe edema, and what is now called Paget’s disease, it’s hardly surprising that his skin would change color in the last decade of his life.
All the standard biographies mention that Beethoven’s father, Johann van Beethoven, was sometimes said to look a bit Spanish—I’ve seen just one portrait of him, wherein he looks not at all Spanish—but given (1) that he was half-Flemish on his father’s side and (2) that Spain had occupied and ruled the Low Countries for some 160 years, it is far from inconceivable that he had a Spaniard in his past. Spaniards were pretty damn white, however, until the Jewish-sponsored immivasion of the past forty years.
As it happens, thanks to C-SPAN, I saw the press conference (2005 perhaps? I can’t recall for sure) where the researchers who had painstakingly re-autopsied Beethoven’s remains announced their findings, which included lead levels that were off the charts. I cannot recall offhand the exact number mentioned, but I do clearly recall that Beethoven’s lead level was fully ten times higher than my own had been several years earlier. I mention this because I had heeded my cardiologist’s advice at that time to undergo a lengthy course of intravenous chelation to counter the life-threatening impact of heavy-metal toxicity on my heart. It’s a wonder, then, that with so much lead in his body, Beethoven lasted even to fifty-six!
All of your comments in the present grouping are valuable, and I thank you for them, but this one is, I think, the most valuable of all, in no small part because it draws attention to Wolfe’s wonderful little book, which I first read shortly after its publication. Some people have criticized Wolfe, especially since his death, for failing, here and elsewhere, to “name the Jew.” It seems undeniable, however, that had he been more specific and less veiled in his references to poisonous Jewish influence, the book might now be as hard to find as a hi-res print of Song of the South. Even so, the veil covering “Cultureburg” certainly flirts with full-frontal nudity!
The curious thing is that one comes away from The Painted Word with the sense that, despite all the logrolling and aesthetic dishonesty of the (((contemporary-art establishment))), Wolfe actually likes a bit of this stuff—as do I, as it happens. In contrast, very little in the way of appreciation or even grudging respect is to be found in Wolfe’s equally valuable, equally concise, analysis of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House. Apart from Frank Lloyd Wright, who attracts Wolfe’s admiration more for his cantankerous personality than for his often gravely impractical designs, only the work and the person of Mies van der Rohe—who was by many accounts an almost irresistibly likable man—survive Wolfe’s critical gaze largely unscathed.
That pretty much takes care of Jackson Pollock and his relationship to toxic semitism, but given that the OP was written by Brenton Sanderson, I would be remiss not to mention his excellent series Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Which puts the relationship between systemic tribalism and the decline of visual art in a broader context. Part 3 goes into the relationship between abstract expressionism, the New York “Intellectuals,” and the Frankfurt School — bringing us back to Adorno.
Thank you Pierre,
or may I call you Winnetou?
With Pierre I am reminded of Pierre Brice as Winnetou; favourite books and films of my childhood (which lingers on). Winnetou is very knowledgeable, just, wise, sovereign, like your contributions here. (I do not mean to crawl up your bum. Proles usually dont do that.)
It is very relaxing to read such knowledgeable content like yours.
Have you seen this one too?:
https://dailystormer.in/vienna-rejects-calls-to-remove-statue-of-anti-semitic-mayor/
Does it not go hand in hand with the attack on Beethoven and the Capitol of Music in generell?!
Thanking you with a much loved French girl:
Yeah that would be well outside the Overton window for a mainstream publication in 1975. And he didn’t need to to make it effective — as evinced by the histrionic shrieking it evoked from the promoters of the Culture of Critique, who are notoriously thin-skinned about any critique of their pilpul.
Although Wolfe didn’t marry Sheila Berger until 1978, they had already been together for 9 or 10 years prior to the publication of The Painted Word, so insuring domestic tranquility would be another good reason not to broaden its focus from criticizing/ mocking the more nonsensical aspects of modern “art theory” to a more generalized attack on systemic tribalism…
Of course it probably helped that his [soon to be] wife was a MOT*. And there are aspects of Wolfe’s life that strongly suggest 3-letter agency connections.
But that phrase is plausibly deniable because it’s a great pun. It relies in a single letter: “-burg,” not “berg”. Indistinguishable in spoken English, but entirely different etymologies — and implications — in written English.
Burg — and the related suffix bury, as well as borough/ boro — derive from a German word meaning castle, so by extension, city. And that’s its most common usage in America — as a suffix for city names. It is used as a surname, but its connotations are much more attached to the former meaning: the burg vs. the ‘burbs.
Whereas berg comes from a word meaning mountain or hill [hence “iceberg“. While it’s is relatively common as a suffix for city names in Germany, it’s rarely seen in that context in the US. But berg is, of course, seen relatively commonly in surnames in America as both a suffix and as a standalone surname in MOTs, as well as Germans and Scandinavians. Hence “berg,” like “stein,” is typically taken as a semitic reference.
So “Cultureburg“? That literally means “Culture City.” Not only is it entirely devoid of potentially-offensive implications — it’s a very accurate characterization of the way in which the modern art crowd, the NY “Intellectuals,” etc. themselves view[ed] NYC (many, if not most, NYC goys have the same attitude). But say it aloud and, uh…
I’ve never read From Bauhaus to Our House. Gotta add it to the list.
*Both of his kids married semitic people as well.
I’m delighted to be associated with Winnetou, Kurt; thank you sincerely. Thank you too for your other kind words.
A very dear friend, now deceased (1927–2008), was a Dutchman by birth. Evidently like you, my friend Frits had read all of Karl May’s novels in his youth and retained great affection for them. Because the character with whom Frits identified most closely was Old Shatterhand, you and he would have gotten along splendidly!
Frits had also seen some of the Pierre Brice and Lex Barker films—none of which I’ve seen, alas—but his first loyalty was ever to the printed page.
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The Daily Stormer link is heartening. I have not, thus far at least, held out much hope for resistance from Austria to this latest overwhelming wave of Jewish pestilence embodied in the Third World invasion. I am very happy to have been mistaken.
During a period of decline and the reign of mediocrity, the mediocres slander all historical geniusses.
The mediocres have a twisted relation with everything which is superior, actually they are envious of everything above them.
Hence, for example: Voltaire has to be honoured because he belongs to the canon of eminent men, but if you can find fault in him while you also acknowledge the genius and good influence, for instance, at the same you also point out he was a racist (allegedly), you are on top. The former is the most refined form of slander of the envious mediocre of course. For less refined minds just finds faults.
This happens to many many eminent historical men, Rousseau, Voltaire, Wagner, Liszt, etc.
Oscar Wilde wrote: “the ‘people can only throw mud’, hence, the campaign of the Jews against Wagner is sown on fertile soil, it provides many eager mediocres with mud to throw, and democracy gives every slanderous mediocre eagerly a voice and a podium.
Before we are too critical of Wagner’s personal failings, we should remember that Wagner was a very ill man. If you ever bothered to read a biography of this man, it becomes pretty obvious that he had a few loose screws. Wagner’s illness was not only a factor in his personal failings, but also in his great achievements. If Wagner had been a well man and not been so ill, it is not likely that any of us would have heard of him. Nearly all the great musical composers had substantial psychiatric problems. You might think that psychiatric problems would be a severe handicap, and in most cases they are, but in a few rare cases, certain kinds of psychiatric problems make certain people much more productive and creative than they would otherwise be. Wagner was one of these, as were almost all the other great composers. So my advice with regard to Wagner is this: enjoy the great music. Don’t blame him too much for the personal failings and don’t take the intellectual ideas too seriously either.