Richard Wagner and the Jews, by Milton E. Brener (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2005). 343 pp.

R. J. STOVE writes from Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of A Student’s Guide to Music History and a contributing editor to The American Conservative.

A century and a quarter after Richard Wagner’s death, the observation of Wagner scholar Bryan Magee remains pertinent: “there are two Wagners in our culture, almost unrecognizably different from one another: the Wagner possessed by those who know his work, and the Wagner imagined by those who know him only by name and reputation.” (Magee of all people can bear personal testimony to this. An otherwise benign friend of his, on seeing the Wagner discs in Magee’s record collection, blurted out: “I had no idea Bryan was a bit of a Nazi.”) When writing about every other great composer, a certain listening and scorereading knowledge is usually considered desirable. Wagner alone generates torrents of prose from the musically uninterested, as the 1968 anti-Wagner diatribe by New York academic Robert Gutman demonstrates. Conjectures that would be universally ridiculed if applied to Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert are treated as gospel when Wagner is their subject, and preferably their victim. It would be tempting to blame Gutman’s effort—as one Wagnerian has openly done—on overindulgence in mindaltering 1960s campus drugs, save for the plethora of comparable misrepresentations among subsequent Wagnerphobes, who ignore the most basic requirements for factchecking and honest quotation. Sometimes one wonders if a sane Wagner-related book can be printed anywhere today.

Now we know: it can. Louisiana-based Milton E. Brener, whose writing has often appeared in Opera News, Opera Canada, and elsewhere, has produced an account of permanent value. His study’s sheer unpretentiousness is a salutary shock. Instead of mindlessly rehashing Wagner’s modern foes—or, for that matter, modern friends—Brener has consulted source materials usually ignored, and thereby conveys what Wagner actually said as opposed to what he might have said. Where Wagner’s meaning is ambiguous, as it periodically is (in what, after all, were journals and letters never meant for publication), Brener says so, rather than proclaiming his own glosses with maniacal certitude. What is more, Brener seems to have visited every extant German and Swiss building where Wagner ever worked or lived. And mirabile dictu, he cherishes Wagner’s actual music, explaining—in language that any moderately bright adolescent could understand— why it matters, where Wagner innovated, where he upheld existing traditions, and how his work changed the world of music

Brener’s title immediately raises two questions. To what extent, if any, did Wagner’s openly expressed alarm at Jews in general (an alarm most conspicuous in his 1850 essay Judaism in Music) form a central dogma of his thinking, either before or after his marriage to Cosima von Bülow? And what effect did this have on his practical dealings with specific Jews? On the first of these enquiries, Brener is forthright as early as page three: “I do not believe that, at the deeper levels, the man who created Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal and Der Ring des Nibelungen could possibly have been the monster that so many have painted.” On the second, Brener combats, and lastingly vanquishes, those critics who have construed Wagner as callously exploiting Jewish individuals for his own cynical ends. Wagner’s relations with five Jews in particular—pianists Carl Tausig and Joseph Rubinstein; conductor Hermann Levi; impresario Angelo Neumann; and journalist Heinrich Porges—prove to have been of the most remarkable complexity and ambiguity. On the other hand, there was nothing ambiguous about Wagner’s sexuality, although numerous Bavarian gossips accused the composer of sharing both King Ludwig II’s sexual orientation and his bed.

Unlike those slanderers, Brener maintains a cool detachment throughout his examinations of the evidence. This evidence includes an increase in thoughtless, generalized anti- Jewish remarks during Wagner’s last fourteen years (1869-1883), such remarks having been faithfully noted in his wife’s diary, which remained unpublished till 1974. They may be connected with his increasingly erratic health, and with the propinquity of Cosima (who herself—like her father Liszt and her first spouse Hans von Bülow—was hardly reticent in sniping at “Israelites”). Brener sums up his overall findings as follows: “[Wagner] judged all individuals…not by their ethics, morals, strength of character, or religion, but by their artistic talent or their willingness to help in a great cause, namely his own. There is not an instance in his well documented life wherein he refused the help or the friendship of anyone because he or she was a Jew, or anything else.”

Discussing Judaism in Music itself, Brener makes several points seldom spelt out elsewhere. That Wagner himself felt some embarrassment about his screed is suggested by his insistence on publishing it pseudonymously, signing it “Free Thought” [Freigedank], although as soon as it appeared the public recognized his authorship. Brener, conceding that the pamphlet “transcends the bounds of logic or rational human understanding,” hints by his marshalling of data that conventional interpretations of Wagner’s motives have been the wrong way around. Rather than hating his imagined opponents— notably Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer, both of whom had shown him goodwill—because they were Jews, Wagner seems to have done the opposite: invoked their Jewishness because he hated them. Brener emphasizes the especial silliness of the essay’s attacks on the recently dead Mendelssohn, whom he had once personally liked, and whom he stupidly castigated for not being Beethoven: “There must have been hundreds of composers of the day […] none of whom, or whose works, would have shown to advantage in such a comparison.” Since Brener has helpfully reproduced the essay as an appendix, the reader may judge for himself Brener’s conclusions (which include acquitting Wagner of having advocated mass racial violence in the essay’s last paragraph).

It should be noted that all musically literate Wagner commentators from his own day to the present have admitted Wagner’s propensity for vile anti-Jewish outbursts, sometimes aimed at Jewish devotees like Joseph Rubinstein. Compare and contrast this candor with the gross humbug by which socialists, often Jews themselves, have routinely concealed the lifelong, fetid race-hate indulged in by Marx: notably Marx’s descriptions of Ferdinand Lassalle as “little kike,” “water-Polack Jew,” and “Jew-nigger.” (Wagner felt towards Lassalle considerable, albeit bemused, goodwill.)

With typical recklessness Wagner insisted on reissuing Judaism in Music in a revised version, this time under his own name, in 1869. Public outrage caused by its reappearance threatened to make his music unperformable. Those who still think of Wagner as a ruthless social climber, adopting a rigorous career timetable of soaking Benefactor X on Monday and Benefactor Y on Tuesday, know precious little about how he operated. Obsessional self-destructiveness played a much bigger role in his life than careerism ever did: witness his endless youthful fights with successive theater managements; the Dresden revolutionary activism of 1849, which sent him into exile for twelve years; and, even after King Ludwig had become his champion, his fury over Ludwig’s insistence on staging Das Rheingold and Die Walküre without the composer’s approval. The more one reads of Ludwig, however, the more sensible he appears, not least in his gift for compartmentalizing. His Wagner-worship coexisted with a thorough awareness of Wagner’s vices, and of the dangers in Wagner’s lunatic desire to be Bavaria’s unofficial chief minister. Brener—recalling how Ludwig’s tragic demise constituted an early triumph for the Therapeutic State—cites with justified approval the witticism of Wagner biographer Ernest Newman: “He [Ludwig] exhibited so many signs of exceptional sanity it was a foregone conclusion that the world would someday declare him to be mad.” As Brener himself says, “How well the world could use more such madmen.”

The world could use a few more Breners also. His observations about Hermann Levi’s role in Wagner’s later life inspire deep regret that no phonographic equipment ever captured Levi’s clearly astonishing abilities in opera direction. Levi and Porges were among the pallbearers at Wagner’s funeral; Wagner called Levi “dear Best Friend,” and Levi for his part called Wagner “best and noblest of men […]. The most beautiful thing I have experienced in my life is that I was permitted to be close to such a man.” This, notwithstanding Wagner’s eccentric and unfulfilled hopes that Levi would undergo baptism before conducting Parsifal. Brener, like so many persons whose normal writing style indicates great amiability, can, when required, be properly severe. He exposes Gutman’s lofty contempt for scholarly ethics: “[Wagner]’s operatic texts and prose works alike are contorted by Gutman beyond recognition, and mixed in with that author’s opinions in such a fine mesh that it is difficult, and for the uninitiated hardly possible, to tell where one ends and the other begins.” (Gutman has called Parsifal “an allegory of the Aryan’s fall and redemption,” heedless of the fact that the Third Reich banned stagings of the work from 1939 onwards.) Further, Brener devotes almost a whole chapter to revealing the fatuities of the Freudian Peter Gay, who has contended—on no discernible foundation except his own caprices—that Levi, despite his exceptional solicitude for his rabbi father, somehow exemplified Jewish self-hatred. How any form of self-hatred can be reconciled with the ferocious leadership demands of conducting in general, and theatrical conducting in particular, Gay refuses to explain.

No such gaps and implausibilities disfigure Brener’s volume. There do occur a few slips in this work, which a second edition might usefully amend. (Brahms’s Schiksalslied, “Song of Destiny,” is twice misspelled as “Shicksallied” [pp. 224, 227]; and opera composer Peter Cornelius, described [p. 90] as “about Tausig’s age,” was in fact seventeen years Tausig’s senior.) Yet against so much through which Brener has put us in his debt, these solecisms are inconsequential. Brener, by his enthusiasm and erudition, has validated the remark of that superb Wagnerian maestro Sir Georg Solti (himself of Jewish extraction): “To me, anyone who can create such beauty, whether he be half- Jewish, anti-Semite […] or royalist, is first and foremost a musical genius and will remain so as long as civilization lasts.”