The Genial Idiot Discusses the Music Cure

There are a lot of books in our home, most of them Leslie's.  One set of old volumes has occupied a prominent location in our den since we moved here nineteen years ago.  We have long since stopped noticing it.  It's decoration, like an art object, just sitting there because, well, what else would we do with it?

The Wit and Humor of America, in ten volumes, edited by Marshal P. Wilder, published by Funk and Wagnalls Company, has copyright dates of  MDCCCCVII (Bobbs-Merrill Company) and MDCCCCXI (The Thwing Company).   The whole thing is online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

So, anyway.  One evening last week Leslie and I were sitting in the den, probably watching something boring  and forgettable on television, when I happened to pick up Volume VI.  Thumbing through it, my eye fell upon the title "The Genial Idiot Discusses the Music Cure" by John Kendrick Bangs.

This turned out to be a short story in which our hero, the Genial Idiot, confers with his doctor, Capsule M.D., about the efficacy of using music to cure physical ills.  In spite of the medical professional's skepticism, the Idiot proceeds to offer copious anecdotal evidence that music does indeed have healing powers and eventually suggests it will soon become a dominant medical treatment modality.   What was apparently just a silly joke over a hundred years ago has now become an accepted treatment in our times.  Thus civilization advances, first comedy, then remedy.

Of course, from my all-too-modern viewpoint, the story is neither funny nor well-written.  I have no way to evaluate how someone would have reacted to it in 1907 or thereabouts.  Probably rolling on the floor laughing, or whatever acronym for ROFL the hipsters used back then.

So, anyway, my interest in Bangs' story was piqued by mentions of composer Richard Wagner, who would have been ever so popular during those times.   And, as you know, Wagner's awful, endless opera music is one of Mixed Meters' favorite bugaboos.

First the Idiot tells the Doctor about claims for the healing power of music which he has read in the press:

It may not be able to perform a surgical operation like that which is required for the removal of a leg, and I don't believe even Wagner ever composed a measure that could be counted on successfully to eliminate one's vermiform appendix from its chief sphere of usefulness, but for other things, like measles, mumps, the snuffles, or indigestion, it is said to be wonderfully efficacious.  

Then, after describing his own experience of how his insomnia was cured by attending both Parsifal and Gotterdammerung, the Idiot adds this:

Clearly Wagner, according to my way of thinking, then deserves to rank among the most effective narcotics known to modern science.   I have tried all sorts of other things - sulfonal, trionel, bromide powders, and all the rest and not one of them produced anything like the soporific results that two doses of Wagner brought about in one instant, and best of all there was no reaction. No splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of having got completely rested up.

Doctor Capsule is unimpressed.  He responds:

You run a dreadful risk, however.  The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, Mr. Idiot.

The Idiot is not worried about getting addicted to Wagner.

I am in no danger of becoming a victim to it while it costs from five to seven dollars a dose.

That's about $120 to $170 in today's money.  Sounds about right for a half-way decent seat at a live opera.  (If we're lucky maybe Martin Shkreli will buy up all rights to Wagner and raise the price by 5000 per cent.)

The Idiot then tells another story about his friend, an artist, whose upset stomach was cured by a neighbor playing Arthur Sullivan's The Lost Chord on a cornet.

As the story concludes our Idiot makes predictions on how music will, in the future, cure nearly all medical ailments and revolutionize the medical industry.

If a small boy goes swimming and catches a cold in his head and is down with a fever his nurse, an expert on the accordion, can bring him back to health again with three bars of Under the Bamboo Tree after each meal.

So, anyway, I'm sure that by now you're anxious to read The Genial Discusses the Music Cure.  It's available widely online.  You can even find audio versions.

For your convenience I scanned and OCR'd and posted the story myself.  Read it right here on Mixed Meters.  It might cure your insomnia better than a Wagner opera.

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For further reading:

• Mixed Meters discusses Wagner as opiate.
• An early MM review of a book which called out to me from Leslie's collection. 
• An MM article about a scrap of paper advertising old medical devices.
• An MM review of a PKD short story involving classical music. 

Tenuous Connections - Richard Wagner and Bill Cosby

Ring Festival LA is gone and forgotten, pretty much.  Has it really been five whole years since the Los Angeles Opera tried to market their production of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle to ten million people by holding a county-wide arts festival?

Only a few really cared much about the underfunded festival one way or the other.  Opposition centered around the fact that Wagner himself was an antisemitic jerk and also that his music was favored by Adolf Hitler.  Absolutely no one in recent history is considered worse than Adolf Hitler. Although Hitler still serves a useful purpose: eventually almost everyone compares almost anyone they don't like to him.  Adolf is our go-to guy when we need to call something the most evil thing ever.

Supporters of the festival used the arguments that Wagner's music was supremely beautiful and his opera plots were about the power of love.  Neither of these points is even slightly true in my opinion.  I wrote a lot about Wagner and Ring Festival LA back in those days.  It doesn't hurt to mention it once in a while.

The notion that people who create successful, respected, well-loved art and entertainment can be totally awful people in real life is pretty widely accepted.  There are a lot of examples.  And irrespective of the personal qualities or intentions of the creator, works of art can be misinterpreted for evil purposes.  Wagner and his operas, used by the Nazis to promote Aryan superiority, are just one excellent example.

But Bill Cosby?  How does he fit into this discussion?

Cosby's fatherly personal image has abruptly crumbled under the weight of evidence that he has been a serial sex offender.  This has led some people to reassess the real meaning and effects of his iconic eponymous television show.  I came across one interesting article which made this point:  "How 'The Cosby Show' Duped America: The Sitcom That Enabled Our Ugliest Reagan-Era Fantasies” written by Chauncey DeVega.  Go read that now.

Here's a quote:

... the politics and values of “The Cosby Show,” which were so attractive to so many and for such a long time, are based on a distorted and inaccurate presentation of the black community, one that has enabled a pernicious type of right-wing “colorblind” racism to flourish.

Here's another:

... the Cosby family was an African-American version of the model-minority myth, one of the favorite deflections and rejoinders of white racists in the post-civil rights era, where there are “exceptional” minorities and the rest are failures because they do not work hard, are lazy, and complain too much about white racism. While unintentional, “The Cosby Show” enabled some of the ugliest Reagan-era fantasies. 

The idea, more or less, is that The Cosby Show presented America with a very upscale black family dealing with problems any white family might have.  The show avoided specific issues of race that would be unique to black Americans.  As a result those whites who were so inclined could reinforce their racist attitudes against less affluent black families.  (Really, go read the article for yourself.)

I claim even less interest and expertise with Bill Cosby than with Richard Wagner.  The Cosby Show show aired in the midst of a 16-year period when (by choice) I had no access to television.

I do remember seeing one episode.  Dr. Huxtable helps a young boy score points with a young girl by suggesting that he cook her a romantic dinner, cleverly substituting tangy BBQ sauce for the spaghetti sauce.  The flavors, he promised, would really impress her.  In the end Claire Huxtable sees through the plot because Cliff had pulled the same stunt on her years before.  Or something like that.  In light of recent revelations you'd have to wonder what other ingredients, ones unmentionable on television, the real-life Cosby might have considered adding to the sauce.

No matter how little familiarity I claim with that show or with television of the era, I certainly have far far less personal experience with the issues of being black in America.  Like many, in 2008 I expected that having a black U.S. president would inaugurate some sort of post-racial era.  Instead, by his very skin color, Obama seems to have heightened our long-term racial tension.  Somewhere I read a trenchant comment that while the U.S. might be "post-racial" it certain isn't "post-racist".

Being a rapist, however, doesn't make Bill Cosby or his television show or his comedy racist.  The argument here is that he presented himself and his fictional black family in such a way that certain white people could use it to convince themselves, as they looked in the mirror each morning, that they weren't really racists.  Liking the Cosby Show was tremendously reassuring to them as they went about their daily lives actually discriminating against the real, less affluent black people they encountered (and probably others as well.)  Sort of absolution by television.

So, what's the point here?  Is there really a comparison to be made between The Ring Cycle and the Cosby Show?  How can an endlessly turgid grand opera about gods whose petty squabbles result in the destruction of civilization and a situation comedy about the petty daily issues of wealthy New York family who just happen to be black people have anything in common?

The answer is not in the creative works themselves nor is it in the personal failings of their creators.  The answer is in the eyes of the beholders.  And in our ears.  And in our hearts and minds.  And if darkness lives in our hearts and our minds already - be it jack-booted Nazi antisemitism or good old fashioned American-as-apple-pie racism - then an otherwise simple entertainment becomes fertilizer for evil.

And when you mix shit into the earth it helps grow both flowers and weeds.   Sometimes you must wait a while to figure out which are the weeds.  Culture and civilization ought to demand that we do our best to pull the weeds.

Hey, I said it was a tenuous connection.

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Here's another ending I wrote for this post:

Whether watching grand opera or television sitcoms, whether listening to singers or stand-up comedians, it is a dangerous thing to completely suspend your disbelief.  Enjoying a performance comes with a small bit of responsibility.  It's a really small bit, but it is a real bit.

Sure, it's super easy to give oneself up mindlessly to the massive numbers of seductive entertainments our culture offers us so casually.  There needs to be just a little bit of situational awareness somewhere way back in everyone's mind as they watch and listen.  This would help keep art and reality separated.

So, the next time you enjoy made-up stories about marauding zombies or conspiratorial politicians or young people on their own for the first time seeking love in the big city or black people or mythical gods or just about anything, remind yourself to take a quick step back and reflect on how you're reacting.  Consider whether this entertainment is reinforcing your better qualities - or your worse ones.  Remember that in reality, reality is a lot more complicated than you'll ever see on a stage or television.

Good luck sorting that out.

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Read Mixed Meters' post Mommy, who is Michael Jackson?
Here are all the MM posts labeled "television"
Here are all the MM posts labeled "Wagner"

Ring Festival LA - three years later

This is Mixed Meters third anniversary post memorializing Los Angeles Opera's attempt to hold an arts festival that would somehow make the music of Richard Wagner relevant to Los Angeles California.  I'll also discuss a history of the unofficial Wagner ban in Israel and then a Jewish actor's love letter to Wagner's music in the form of a film which, in my opinion, does a good job of discussing Wagnerian music's sordid involvement with Hitler and the Nazis.

RING FESTIVAL LA PLUS THREE

In November 2008 Placido Domingo announced:

“Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles.” 

Read the whole initial press release here.  The festival happened in 2010.  Read more about it here.

At this point I think we at Mixed Meters (we in this case being the euphemism for me, David Ocker) are the only ones who think about this subject any more.  And it's entirely possible that I'm the only person who had any sort of defining moment as a result of their festival, as it got me interested in the relationships between Hitler, the Nazis, Wagner and his endlessly turgid music.

Last December the LA Times reported that LA Opera had paid off the $14,000,000 loan which squeaked them through their Ring cycle production. That loan was controversially co-signed for by the nearly 10 million residents of Los Angeles County thanks to the actions of our 5 elected Supervisors.

Since their go-round with Wagner LA Opera has been sticking with crowd-pleasing opera classics.  Although next year they will dip their toe into living memory by presenting Philip Glass's 1976 Einstein on the Beach.  My late 70's self would be thrilled.  My current self thinks Einstein is probably somewhat less boring than Wagner but still not worth sitting through.  (Addendum: they're also doing Billy Budd, premiered when I was three months old.)

Here's a cartoon to lighten the mood.

THE RING OF MYTHS - WAGNER: BANNED IN ISRAEL

In the endless discussion of why Wagner was such a creep, a prime topic is his anti-semitism.  Of course the extreme anti-semitism of his descendants and their support of Wagner's most influential and anti-semitic fanboy, Adolph Hitler, come up repeatedly.

Often one of the talking points in these discussions is the unofficial ban on the music of Wagner in the nation of Israel.    This subject still hits the news periodically.  I mentioned a development in my LA Ring Festival 2-year memorial.    The ban dates from November 12, 1938 when conductor Arturo Toscanini removed the overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from a concert by the Palestine Symphony Orchestra to protest the Nazi-organized anti-Jewish riots known as Krystallnacht three days earlier.

A fascinating book published in 2001 details the history of this ban: The Ring of Myths, The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis by Na'ama Sheffi.  

Interesting facts abound.  For example, right after the war any music with lyrics in the German language, even works by Mahler, was deemed unsuitable by the public.  The music of Richard Strauss was banned along with Wagner's (although unlike Wagner it has since achieved greater acceptance).  In 1953 Jasha Heifetz was physically attacked and slightly injured by a man wielding an iron pipe.  His motive?  The violinist insisted on playing a work by Strauss in Israel.

Throughout The Ring of Myths prominent musicians paternalistically promote adding Wagner's music to the Israeli concert repertoire despite knowing there will be strong public opposition.  Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim, I'm talking about you.  Their excuse is that Wagner is somehow essential to music history or orchestral technique.  This line of reasoning rings rather hollow in my ears - but my readers probably already know what I think of Wagner's music.

Sheffi does her best to help an outsider keep Israeli politicians, political parties and newspapers, across the entire spectrum from left to right, straight.  Uphill work!   Because most of the primary sources of this story (like newspaper articles and the archives of the Israel Philharmonic) are all written in Hebrew, this book gives a non-Israeli a chance to follow what would otherwise be a closed discussion.

The Ring of Myths clearly shows that the reasons for continuance of the Wagner ban have changed over time.  In the early years of the state of Israel anything even remotely connected to Germany would be protested.  As the relations between Israel and Germany improved (often represented by Israelis driving Volkswagens or Mercedes), Richard Wagner continued as an emotionally-charged symbol of the Nazis.   This emotion repeatedly got caught up in the arcane ebb and flow of Israeli politics.  In Israel, of course, religion colors most political debates.

Sheffi succinctly outlines these shifts in her preface:

In the 1950s and 1960s Wagner was an important argument for the factions opposing the restoration of ties with Germany; in the 1970s he was a vehicle for the anger of intellectuals at what they termed Israeli hypocrisy; in the 1980s he was a key figure in the struggle over the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust; and in the 1990s he served the national ultra-Orthodox religious ideology, which calls on Israelis to content themselves with Hebrew culture and stop copying the ways of the gentiles.

The last stage was most interesting to me since I often think that classical music has become a kind of religion for certain people.  This is most obvious in the cult-like behavior surrounding Richard Wagner's music.  People who argue in favor of Wagner seem to do so based on their deep personal, emotional belief in the power of his music.  This primary dogma informs each new debate in a logically unassailable manner.  Such fundamentalism is, in my opinion, just as basic to most organized religion as it is to Wagnerism.

Sheffi ultimately argues that Israelis can and should find better ways of commemorating the Holocaust than by symbolically banning Wagner.  Maybe.  I think that as a symbol Wagner is permanently stained by Nazism, just as the swastika has been.  Wagner and his music will continue as a symbol of Hitler and the Nazis for a long time to come.

WAGNER AND STEPHEN FRY

Stephen Fry, a famous English actor, is a Jew.  Some members of his family perished in the Holocaust.  Fry is also a big fan of the music of Richard Wagner.  He has explored the resulting existential tension  in a movie entitled Wagner and Me.  

It opens on a rehearsal of the Prelude to Act 3 of the opera Siegfried and then cuts to scenes of Bayreuth Germany home of the infamously famous Bayreuth Festival founded by and dedicated to Wagner himself.

Fry's narration, often exited, breathless, even awestruck, takes an immediate stab at explaining why this place is so important:

Well, for anyone who loves Wagner as I do this place is Stratford-upon-Avon, Mecca, Graceland all rolled into one.

Yep.  Fry's description of this shrine puts Wagner on the same level of not just great artists like Elvis Presley and William Shakespeare, but right up there with an actual religious prophet worshipped by a billion and a half people.  I keep sayin' - Wagner is a religious thing.

At first Fry wanders aimlessly around the Festspielhaus like a kid in a candy shop, gleeful, astonished and amazed by the smallest things because everything he sees or touches has some connection to Wagner.  He says "Oh, I wish I were a Valkyrie sometimes."

Then, standing in a hallway hung with pictures of conductors (we are shown Hermann Levi, about whom Wagner might have said "some of my best friends are Jewish") Fry gets around to explaining why he likes Wagner's music.

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first heard Wagner's music on my father's grammophone.  It was the overture to Tannhäuser one of his earlier operas and it did something most extraordinary to me.  I've always loved music.  I've always been hopeless at performing it, couldn't really play an instrument,  certainly can't sing, but it's made me do things inside.  It's released forces within me.  And no music has done it like Wagner's.

Later he refers to Wagner's music as "gut-wrenching", but I don't think those are the internal forces he has in mind.  Blessedly, Fry never tries to project his Wagner epiphany on other people.  Although he revisits the "it does things to me" theme, he keeps the revelations personal throughout the movie at least until the very end.  Fry continues:

To experience the music I love in the composer's own theater is something I've dreamed of doing for as long as I can remember.  But it's no secret that my passion was also shared by Him.

"Him" (Fry intones "Him" dripping in villainous overtones) is Hitler who pops up on the screen just at that moment, shown seig heiling from a window of Bayreuth

And like me he felt the magnetic pull of Bayreuth.  I'm Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust so before I take my seat in the Festival House I need to feel sure I'm doing the right thing.

Fry drops back from this ominous foreshadowing and gives us fine little essays about Wagner's biography and why his music is important plus some clips of opera productions. He meets Wagner's great-granddaughter, has a piano lesson on the Tristan chord, travels to Russia.  The photography of beautiful scenery, ornate opera halls and fairy-tale castles is exceptional.  Eventually he gets back to the Hitler question in two interviews.

One is with Dr. Joachim Köhler, author of a controversial book Wagner's Hitler, The Prophet and His Disciple.  They talk in the Nuremberg stadium where the Nazi rallys were held (think Triumph of the Will) and then Fry reflects alone on the Wagner/Nazi connection.

I suppose I think of it like this, imagine a great beautiful silk tapestry of infinite color and complexity that has been stained indelibly. It's still a beautiful tapestry of miraculous workmanship and gorgeous color and silken texture but that stain is real and I'm afraid Hitler and Nazism have stained Wagner. For some people that stain ruins the whole work. For others it is just something you have to face up to.

Later he talks to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp because of her musical abilities.  He asks her "Am I betraying my Jewishness by playing Wagner and liking him?".  Her answer:

I think everybody has to come to terms by themselves.  I would never forbid anybody to listen to Wagner.  If it was the music without the drama one wouldn't probably argue with it.  But apart from the fact I would never have the patience to sit for 5 hours and listen to so much noise.

And, at the end, of course, Stephen Fry decides that indeed he can listen to Wagner at Bayreuth, that he can ignore the stain and that he is doing the right thing.  We see him, ticket and pillow in hand, eagerly entering the concert hall for opening night at Bayreuth.  And we should forgive him his besotted love of Wagner's music because he did ask the hard questions and faced up to the negative associations directly.

Finally he tells us that, if we've never heard it before, we should give Wagner's music a try.  He concludes:

I still believe, as firmly as I believe anything, that his work is important and is on the side of the angels.  It is fundamentally good.  

Yes, it comes down to a matter of belief.  He believes in Wagner the same way people believe in imaginary gods.  You accept the faith or you don't.  I think Mr. Fry is to be commended for not whitewashing the bad parts of his story but he completely fails to explain, exactly, what is so good, so angelic about Wagner or his music.  (Granted, he does explain why Wagner is so important.  Even I agree that Wagner is important.  I just wish he could be made less so.)

In the final analysis, you listen to this music and it does something inside of you, something gut-wrenching, or it doesn't.  That reaction - or lack of it - seems to determine your attitude towards Wagner and his music, probably for the rest of your life.  More than that, unless you were a Holocaust survivor, a person's attitude towards the music further seems to determine one's outlook on how Hitler manipulated Wagner as a symbol.   The entire topic has been reduced to dogma and symbols.  And just like in religion, a believer either has to accept the dogma and venerate the symbols or stay out of the church.

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Previously I've written a lot about these subjects. Here are links which will show articles marked with these tags:
Ring Festival LA
Richard Wagner
Hitler and Nazis
Naturally, there's a lot of overlap.

The most cogent discussion of Wagner's music in contemporary culture was a lecture given by Leon Botstein as part of Ring Festival LA at the Hammer Museum.  (Skip to about 40 minutes.)  This was discussed in the MM post Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish.




Beating a Dead Horse Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Ring Festival LA. . . Na'ama Sheffi. . . Stephen Fry

LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - two years later

It's been two years since I devoted Mixed Meters to the subject of Ring Festival Los Angeles.  Hardly anyone seemed to notice but I learned a lot about myself.

I'd like to stay in the top Google search results for the term "Ring Festival LA".  To that end an occasional extra post on the subject couldn't hurt - like once a year - because someone might still notice.

Two years later there doesn't seem to be much more to say about the subject.  Los Angeles has moved on from its semi-close encounter with Richard Wagner's endless magnum opus, the Ring of the Nibelungs.

In the last year Los Angeles Opera has begun paying back the $14 million loan which I and my fellow Los Angeles County residents cosigned (via our elected representativs) when the ring cycle production soared WAY over budget.  We in the 99% don't get the interest from the payback - a private bank gets all the profit.

Here's a cute cartoon which the New Yorker ran late last year.

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There is Ring Festival LA news of a sort from Europe.  It appears that Achim Freyer, artistic doyen of LA's comic book Ring production, one which many Ringnuts hated, is directing another Ring cycle in a similar style (to judge from the pictures) in the German city of Mannheim.  The opera company over there is certainly not touting the Los Angeles connection.  Why should they?  Mannheim first became a world-class capital of music more than a quarter millenium ago well before the first Spanish mission was ever built in Southern California.

You can read about the Mannheim Achim Freyer production in a pdf document entitled The New Mannheim Ring.  Statements from German politicians remind me of our own politicos quoted in LA Opera's early press releases.

Mannheim has plans to release a DVD of their production.  Had the LA Opera gone into a bit more debt to fund documentation of their accomplishment the lasting benefits of the Los Angeles Achim Freyer Ring might have increased.  That was an opportunity lost, in my opinion.  I'm sure our county Supervisors would have been glad to add an extra 3 or 4 mil to their loan guarantee to fund a DVD.  All the Opera had to do was ask.

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Finally, there's a recent development in the unofficial Israeli ban on performances of the music of Wagner.  Here's an article from the newspaper Haaretz entitled Tel Aviv University cancels Wagner concert after angry protests.  (The Guardian has this article on the subject.)

Tel Aviv University says that the Israel Wagner Society booked their concert hall without mentioning what was on the program.  One might wonder what else the "Israel Wagner Society" might perform if not Wagner.  Mendelssohn?  Somehow the news got out.  Haaretz quotes a spokesman for the University

You deliberately concealed this basic fact from us...We received angry protests calling to call off the controversial event...[which] would deeply offend the Israeli public in general and Holocaust survivors in particular.

Uri Chanoch, described as deputy chairman of the Holocaust Survivors Center (I can't find any information about that group), is quoted

This is emotional torture for Holocaust survivors and the wider public in the state of Israel. 

Wagner provided inspiration for the Nazis, and there is a direct link between him and the Holocaust. The fact that Wagner's music will be played in public and the fact that the concert was being advertised, are hurtful and damaging.

Even now Jewish survivors of World War II associate Wagner's music with the persecution and destruction they endured under the Nazis.  Their emotions inform my belief that we must stay aware of how Richard Wagner's operas and antisemitism inspired Hitler towards execrable discrimination and mass murder.

Someday soon there will be no more surviving Holocaust survivors.  Later generations will need to remember on our own how the Nazis used Wagner.  The Nazis proved that music can serve evil in our modern world.  If such massive misuse of music happened once it could happen again in another place and another time using someone else's music.

By remembering Hitler when we perform Wagner, we give ourselves the best chance for preventing recurrences of such despicable and immoral behavior.

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Here's an article about the formation of the Israel Wagner Society.

The Mixed Meters post LA Opera's ring Festival LA - one year later includes a list of all Wagner, Hitler and Ring Festival related posts.

Cartoons by Kaamran Hafeez

Still Angry Two Years Later Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . Los Angeles Opera. . . Richard Wagner. . . Wagner's Ring

LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - one year later

I stumbled across an events list for the San Francisco Opera's Ring Festival and I was reminded that just one year ago Los Angeles was in the throes of a similar event.

Apparently San Francisco, much more savvy about the place of opera in our culture, has avoided some of LA's sillier Festival features:

• In San Francisco there are apparently no marches to the ocean by helmeted, singing Wagner fans beginning on the same day (starting nearly at the same place) as marches by helmeted neo-Nazis waving swastikas. 
• By all accounts no San Francisco County Supervisor has introduced a resolution suggesting that Wagner does not deserve to be honored by a county-wide festival.  Nor have the Supervisors there had to co-sign for a huge loan to keep the opera production afloat.  
• I am unaware of any demonstration by Lyndon LaRouche supporters outside the opera house in San Francisco.
• And San Francisco has no lavish comic book-inspired production of Wagner's operas to sink it into $6,000,000 of debt.  (Has LA Opera paid that off yet?)

I wonder if San Francisco Opera has opened a beer garden outside War Memorial Opera House like the one last year outside the Music Center?  Endless operas can make a guy thirsty.



As better and better topics kept presenting themselves, I devoted nearly every Mixed Meters post for about three months to various aspects of Ring Festival LA and Wagner's legacy.  (See the end of this post for a complete list.)  Readership dropped as a result.  Apparently opera fans are not interested in contrarian views about their sacred music.  And non-opera fans are not interested in anything about opera. 

But, as it says prominently on Mixed Meters, this is a blog about me, David Ocker.  Even I wondered why I spent so much time obsessing about an event that was terribly easy to ignore.  And, if nothing else has changed in Los Angeles because of the LA Opera Ring, at least I gained some insight into my own emotional responses.  Unless you're my personal friend there's no reason you should care.  Even then, it doesn't much matter.

My motivations for all that effort can be sorted into three categories: my musical background, my Jewish background and my Los Angeles background. 

My Musical Background

My musical education - formal and otherwise - was always focused on the future of music, music as a forward looking thing.  I have always been intrigued by novelty, by the desire to know what happens next.  Even in high school I was constantly looking for new and wild things to listen to.   Eventually new music became my career - even if it wasn't my own music.  While I agree that there is much classical music that is beautiful, I recoil at the notion that it is somehow intrinsically superior music.

Unsurprisingly, there's an awful lot of music which I don't like.  I have strong opinions about music.  In particular I dislike a host of 19th century music and an awful lot of opera.  As such, Wagner is the quintessential music I would like to avoid.   In the context of my musical background, Wagner, probably the most unavoidable historical composer ever, is the prototypical example of everything I hate about music - endlessly long, crude-oil thick, college-lecture boring, evangelically sermonistic, narcotizingly stupefyingly heavy and musically irrelevant to the future.

My Jewish Background

I'm not a religious Jew but I am Jewish both socially and culturally - my parents got that much through to me.   When I was a kid the Holocaust was not particularly a big deal in our family.  Still, the incredible importance of the subject was somehow hammered home to me.  It was something that we were supposed to remember, "never forget".  "Who could forget?" I wondered.  I concluded that forgetting during my lifetime was not possible.

While my parents strongly encouraged my musical interests, they pointedly didn't listen to Wagner.  They told me that Jews didn't "do" Wagner.  The one time in my life when I saw my parents protest anything politically was at a symphony performance.  I was about 10 or 11.  They got up, along with other Jewish people, and left the concert to avoid hearing a Wagner overture.  Besides this one event I never once saw them attend a protest meeting, write a letter to the editor or get upset about politics.

Holocaust survivors in Israel didn't want to listen to Wagner.  They had good reasons.  Whatever those reasons were, they are the same reasons my parents taught me about Wagner's music.  In my opinion a County-endorsed public Wagner festival starkly represents the very act of forgetting the things which should not be forgotten.

My Los Angeles Background

While I still regard graduate school advice that I should move to New York as misguided, it would have been useful for me to experience an actual, intense creative new music scene someplace while I was still young.   But I had the notion that such a community could be created right here in Los Angeles.  After all, this town is big and has musical talent and media and patrons and foundations up the wazoo and it has had periods of intense creative activity in other fields - for example modern art or pop music.  I spent a lot of my youthful energy trying to make new music in Los Angeles happen.

Over the decades I've concluded that I was wrong: a Los Angeles new music scene patterned after my own dreams just isn't possible.   Sorry, it won't happen in LA.  (Please, prove me wrong before I die.)  The serious new music that Los Angeles wants to focus its attention on is almost always created elsewhere.  "Elsewhere" in this context mostly means Europe.  This pattern began even before Stravinsky and Schoenberg and continues to this day.  Sometimes audiences are happy with East coast music.  "Elsewhere", "Europe" "East Coast" all begin with E.  What does that mean?  

The Los Angeles of 2010 Ring Festival did not turn out like the one I imagined in 1976 when I took up residence in Los Angeles.   In November 2008 I was surprised by just how badly things had turned out in this regard when I read Plácido Domingo's announcement that

"Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles."

Can you imagine my disappointment?  Not only was a forward-looking music scene not going to happen here, but Domingo, an icon of music from Elsewhere, was announcing that we would henceforth define Los Angeles musical life around four boring operas based on medieval German mythology composed by a self-promoting anti-Semite who died more than 125 years ago.  What has that got to do with the future of any thing?  I can't think of anything less representative of Los Angeles.

Here's Plácido's quote in context:

More than a century ago, composer Richard Wagner conceived his epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen as a festival event that completely engaged the city of Bayreuth, Germany. In 2010, LA Opera will join forces with more than 50 cultural and educational institutions in Los Angeles to stage Ring Festival LA.  “Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles,” said Plácido Domingo, LA Opera’s Eli and Edythe Broad General Director. “The presence of so many of LA’s cultural, educational and civic leaders clearly demonstrates that the city’s creative forces can be brought together through a cultural festival — in this case, a festival based on LA Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.”

Can Plácido really have thought that a festival centered on the Ring could define the cultural history of Los Angeles?  Not even all of Los Angeles - could he have possibly thought that the Ring would define the history just of music in Los Angeles?  Even just serious music?  Apparently so.  I am still infuriated by the thought.

Aside from my distaste for Wagner's music and Hitler's complicity in Wagner's legacy, the idea that music in Los Angeles - where I've lived well over half my life and don't expect ever to leave - could be defined by Wagner and his music is simply despicable.  Domingo was talking long term - he used the word 'history' after all - not just for the few weeks of the festival itself. 

Reading that quote was maddening, exasperating.  I wondered how could they could have the gall to even think thoughts like that.  While it's true that opera is relatively unimportant in Los Angeles, let me remind everyone that he was also suggesting that RFLA would be the biggest thing since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival - which was a massively big deal.  Fortunately that part of his plan turned out to be purely hot air.

I assume that Plácido is paid an awful lot of money to guide Los Angeles Opera.  Local opera fans seem to adore him.  He draws extra paying customers when he sings.  Moreover, the patrons of the opera must trust his judgement because they take his advice.  Indeed, part of his job is to help define what serious music in Los Angeles will become over time.  And the vision he brought us was "Bayreuth on the Pacific!"  It's simply shameful.

Compare his vision of Los Angeles - supported by millions upon zillions of dollars - with the vision I thought I might have a chance of creating back in the Los Angeles of the 70s and 80s.  Do you think that confronting the disparity of those images might still make me upset?  Don't bother to answer, I'll just tell you ... yes, it did.  A lot.  

And, frankly, there was nothing I could do about it except bitch.  So what did I do?  I bitched.

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As a final wrap-up of the subject, here's a list of the articles (plus teaser quotes) in which I bitched about Ring Festival LA:

1. November 21, 2008 Ring Festival L.A. - Wrong Festival L.A. "this festival, as it was announced, will be far from representative of the arts community as a whole. In fact it is elitist in the extreme." 
2. July 16, 2009 Mike Antonovich and Ring Festival L.A.  "requesting that the “Ring Festival LA” shift the focus from honoring composer Richard Wagner, to featuring other composers as headliners, to provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent."
3. July 21, 2009 Wagner with an Asterisk "This suggestion will in no way impede efforts by our local oligarchy to get Los Angeles recognized as a great European city by producing their very own Ring."
4. February 17, 2010 A Windfall of Musicians "The combination of some of Europe's greatest musicians with two local music enthusiasts, Peter Yates and Lawrence Morton, turned L.A. into the bloodiest cutting-edge music scene anywhere for many years."
5. March 24, 2010 Wolfgang Wagner (1919-2010) "'Once we have rid the world of the Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators, then you, Wieland, will run the theater of the West and you, Wolfgang, the theater of the East."
6. April 5, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Begins  "If you really speak about the festival's significance to the culture of Los Angeles, I'm afraid Plácido's statement has The Big Lie feeling about it"
7. April 20, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Meets Hitler's Birthday  "Has no one at Ring Festival LA noticed that this is one small step in the exculpation of Adolph Hitler?  Maybe they don't care about this aspect as long as the event involves Wagner in some way.  Maybe there's been drinking at RFLA as well.  Maybe they're ROFL."
8. May 29, 2010 Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring Cycle In One Second  "the work of one California composer who, almost 50 years ago, dealt conceptually with the problem of Wagner's Ring."
9. June 9, 2010 Composers of the Nazi Era "And if some music is good, I suppose it follows that some other music is bad, degenerate.  This attitude is the beginning of a slippery slope.  At the bottom of that slope you will find the story of how the Nazis used and abused music. "
10. June 16, 2010 Kenton Wagner "If there is a Hell (which I personally doubt) Richard Wagner is there being forced to hear this album over and over for all eternity."
11. June 17, 2010 Wagner Inspires Pop Music "Apparently, someone, somewhere thinks every popular musician in the whole world during the last 150 years somehow owes their musical style to Richard Wagner.  What a sad world it would be if that were true."
12. June 20, 2010 Wagner Invades Poland "The comparison of Wagner's Ring to an opiate is apt."
13. June 26, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish "as Ring Festival LA "leader" Barry Sanders said "We're not putting lipstick on a pig in this thing.""
14. July 9, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi "Wagner fans do not want to talk about that elephant.  The elephant is Adolf Hitler."
15. July 18, 2010 Hitlerdammerung "Hitler actually got to perform his part from a Wagnerian plot and recreate a bit of German mythology at the same time, spilling real blood and burning real cities."
16. August 15, 2010 A Modest Proposal For Replacing Placido Domingo at LA Opera "With the Ring in its rear view mirror Los Angeles Opera could decide to now set itself the goal of really creating a defining moment in Los Angeles culture.  The first thing it would need to do is thank Plácido for his services and send him packing. "
17. April 8, 2011 Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments "Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money."
18. June 7, 2012 LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - two years later  "By remembering Hitler when we perform Wagner, we give ourselves the best chance for preventing recurrences of such despicable and immoral behavior."

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A good deal of this post was reworked from private email correspondence with my friend John Steinmetz, who prompted me to explore the reasons for my emotional reaction to Ring Festival L.A. Thanks, John.

Still Angry One Year Later Tags: Ring Festival LA. . . Los Angeles Opera. . . Richard Wagner. . . Wagner's Ring

Hitlerdammerung

Recently I wrote about Composers of the Nazi Era by Michael Kater the third book in a fascinating trilogy about Nazis and music.   I've also finished reading another third book in another fascinating trilogy.  This one, published last year, is called The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans.

The first two books of Evans' trilogy are called The Coming of the Third Reich (ending with Hitler becoming chancellor) and The Third Reich in Power (ending just before the outbreak of war).  Evans deals with a comprehensive list of political, economic, cultural and social issues on both homefront and warfront.  Together the three books tell how and why the Nazis rose to power, how they prepared German society for war and then how they set out to conquer Europe or die trying.  The subject is vast and complex, but the writing is clear and well organized.

I started this trilogy back in the days of George II, the U.S. President known for WMDs in Iraq, "faith based" intelligence, and Guantanamo Bay.  For his efforts Bush was regularly compared with Adolf Hitler.  "Could that be true?" I wondered.   

The Coming of the Third Reich, which only dealt with Hitler's rise to power, made it clear how patently absurd a Bush/Hitler comparison was -- on any level.  Since then, the details I've learned about Nazi history, filled as it is with vicious, immoral, absurd and obscene behavior, have made me more proud to be an American citizen (and, coincidentally, less tolerant of Ring Festival L.A.)

This is a picture of dead bodies collected after the firebombing of Dresden.  The Third Reich at War is filled with death.  People die on nearly every page.  On many pages hundreds die, or thousands, or even tens of thousands.  Much of the slaughter was directly from combat or mass extermination.  Countless military prisoners on forced death marches and slave laborers in work camps died from starvation, disease and exposure.

At certain points in the book Evans reveals the number of calories provided daily by German food rationing.  On page 43 he reports:

The rations allotted to Poles in Warsaw were down to 669 calories a day by 1941, in comparison to 2,613 for the Germans (and a mere 184 for the Jews.)

Just imagine doing backbreaking work on 184 calories per day.  No doubt Jews who complained were told that they were lucky to get that much.

Beyond mere death, The Third Reich at War contains countless stories of brutal, vicious savagery.   In the preface Evans describes his subject matter as "shocking and depressing almost beyond belief."  While one might sympathize with an historian, it is impossible for us to comprehend how people actually endured such conditions - sometimes for years on end.

Beyond the stories of politicians, generals and armies, Evans also draws on memoirs, diaries and letters of average people caught up in events.  These perspectives give the book some of its most vivid and personal moments.  In the following excerpt (page 217), he quotes a German Lieutenant-Colonel who investigates a cheering crowd of people in Lithuania where women are holding up their children to get a better view of what is going on.

On the concrete forecourt of the petrol station a blond man of medium height, aged about twenty-five, stood leaning on a wooden club, resting.  The club was as thick as his arm and came up to his chest.  At his feet lay about fifteen to twenty dead and dying people.  Water flowed continuously from a hose washing blood away into the drainage gully.  Just a few steps behind this man some twenty men, guarded by armed civilians, stood waiting for their cruel execution in silent submission.  In response to a cursory wave the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wood club in the most bestial manner, each blow accompanied by enthusiastic shouts from the audience.

The complete tale of the Nazis has an aura of inevitability about it.  Today, of course, we know how the war turned out.  But as early as 1941, even before Pearl Harbor, Nazi military planners realized that Russia and England (with U.S. help) could produce enough military equipment to win the war.  At some point even Adolf Hitler must have realized that Germany would inevitably lose.  What did he decide to do when faced with this situation?  Rather than concede defeat, he decided to take Germany down in flames.

Since I was reading all this during Ring Festival L.A. I laughed with the realization that the story of Adolf Hitler's destruction might make a good opera.  But such an opera already exists.  It is Gotterdammerung, the conclusion of The Ring of the Nibelungs, by Richard Wagner, Hitler's musical muse.  Instead of "Twilight of the Gods" this real-life story becomes "Twilight of Hitler".

Yes, Hitler actually got to perform his part from a Wagnerian plot and recreate a bit of German mythology at the same time, spilling real blood and burning real cities.  Hitler's military code name was "Wolf" - the Wagner family called him "Uncle Wolf".  The god Wotan uses the name Wolf in Die Walkure while slumming with mortals.  Wotan eventually goes down in flames as Valhalla falls in ruins.  Hitler's body is cremated outside his bunker in a bombed out Berlin.

I wonder if the Ring has ever been produced that way - with swastika-wearing Valkyries riding motorcycles and Wotan with a little toothbrush mustache in a snappy military outfit.     Over the last year or so I've gathered that Wagner's fans don't much like being reminded of Hitler's fondness for Wagner - so I'm guessing such a production has yet to be mounted.

"The Stab in the Back" is an interesting point of correlation between Nazi history, German mythology and Wagner's Ring.  Hitler and indeed any German who had endured the loss of World War I understood the phrase "the Stab in the Back" - blaming loss of the war not on military defeats but on internal sabotage, especially by Jews and socialists.   There was no truth to it but it served as a rationale for violent suppression of internal dissent and resistance.  Here is a 1919 political cartoon showing the Stab in the back.

Evans writes how the Stab in the Back motivated Hitler near the end of the war (on page 687)

[Field Marshall] Model's murderous actions paralleled those of Hitler himself and reflected a similar mentality.  The more desperate the military situation became, the more vital it seemed to such men to eliminate anyone who might threaten the regime from within.  Obsessed to the end with the imaginary precedent of 1918, Hitler did not want another 'stab in the back'.

The Stab in the Back would have been a familiar concept to all Germans from centuries of folklore.  It can be found in the Niebelunglied, a 12th century epic, where the hero Siegfried, whose body is impervious except for one spot on his back, is killed by Hagen who has tricked Siegfried's wife Kriemhild into revealing the location of that spot.

Wagner's Stab in the Back happens in Act 3 of Gotterdammerung when Siegfried is murdered by Hagen.   Siegfried, Brunhilde's lover, is given a magic potion to make him forget about her and then, disguised as Gunther, seduces her for him as a favor.  When Brunhilde discovers she's been duped she accuses him but he swears that it didn't happen.  Later, given the antidote to the potion, he admits to the seduction and is killed for lying about it.  Or something like that.  (I don't think this aspect of the plot is reflected in Third Reich history.  Maybe someone will suggest a connection.)

This picture shows the moment of the Stab in the Back from the Metropolitan Opera production (watch this bit on YouTube).

William L. Shirer, in his 1959 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes specifically about how The Ring of the Nibelungs and especially Gotterdammerung is reflected in the course of Nazi history (page 102):

It is the stupendous Nibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its primitive mythos.  Often a people's myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany.  ...  Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen -- these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves.  With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs -- an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Goetterdaemmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of self-willed annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. ...  It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him

I'm not sure how historian Richard Evans would react to journalist Shirer's notion of the mythic precedents for Nazi behavior.  In The Third Reich at War Evans does tell us about Hitler's relationship to Wagner during the war years.  After discussing Hitler's love of Anton Bruckner's music, he writes (page 579):

Despite all this, there was ultimately, in Hitler's view, still no substitute for Wagner.  In 1940, on his way back from his brief visit to Paris, he called in at Bayreuth to attend a performance of Twilight of the Gods.  It was to be his last.  Immersed in the conduct of the war, and increasingly reluctant to appear in public, he went to no more live musical performances after this.  Yet he never lost his belief in the power of music.

In 1943 Hitler must have decided that Gotterdammerung was too close to real life because he canceled performances at Bayreuth.  After the loss at Stalingrad, the bloody turning point of the war in which as many as two million people died, he stopped listening to Wagner entirely.

In 1945, for the last concert by the Berlin Philharmonic before evacuating the city, they performed the final immolation scene - that's where Brunhilde, riding her horse, carries the ring onto the funeral pyre and perishes in the flames.  With the city soon to be overrun by Soviets, do you think anyone could miss the connection between opera and real life?

In private, Hitler, under intense pressure from the war, started listening to more escapist fare.  His favorite operetta was The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar, a work filled with lovers who attend parties.   The sheer power of this light-hearted music apparently overcame Hitler's essential anti-Semitism since he must have known that the libretto was written by two Jews and that Lehar himself was married to one.  Recently the record collection from Hitler's Berlin bunker has surfaced.  Remarkably, it contains recordings of performances by Jewish musicians such as Artur Schnabel and Bronislaw Huberman. 

It's amazing that the Fuhrer himself could not avoid personally enjoying certain Jewish music.    His rise to power had been based on the premise that anything Jewish was bad.  He had commanded all traces of Jewishness in Germany to be wiped away.  Anti-semitism was the one essential, non-negotiable Nazi dogma.  But if those Mozart librettos which were created by a Jew had to be rewritten, why not Lehar's?   One can only wonder how Hitler rationalized such contradictions to himself.

Chances are that he tried not to think about any of this.  Guilt was not something anyone accuses Hitler of being riddled with.  We'll never know how well he succeeded in avoiding these subjects.  Probably quite well.  I suspect he could enjoy The Merry Widow without ever once being bothered by the fact that it was a partly Jewish creation.  Faced with loss of the war, a few Jews probably didn't seem relevant.  And he was The Fuhrer - no one would dare criticize him for his listening choices.  He never had to make the excuse "But I can separate the Jew from the music."

Just as Hitler could ignore a Jewish librettist or pianist, today's Wagner fans can enjoy The Ring of the Nibelungs without ever once being bothered by an anti-Semitic composer.  The quality common to the most zealous, most impassioned fans of opera is an ability to be completely absorbed in the music.  Rochus Misch, a survivor of Hitler's bunker, described how Hitler listened to music during his last days:

He just sat there, completely sunk in the music. The Fuhrer needed distraction.

In this year of 2010, the year of the Los Angeles Ring cycle and County-sanctioned Ring Festival LA, our musical and political leaders have shown real talent for avoiding the subject of Hitler's connection to Wagner.  Faced with a smattering of dissent, they chose to argue that Wagner's personal anti-Semitism is no longer relevant.

L.A. Opera offered the reward of an evening of musical escapism at the opera for those who wanted it, an evening of separating the anti-Semite from the music.  Decades earlier, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Hitler used music the same way when he needed to cope with bad news from the front, except that he spent his evenings separating the Semite from the music. 

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How about a cartoon where Bugs Bunny meets both Goring and Hitler.  The music, by Carl Stalling, has a few good Wagner references. It's called Herr Meets Hare - you can watch it here, but here are some stills.

The painting of the horny, hairy Nazi arm holding a score marked Nibelungenring is by Arthur Szyk from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.   Thanks to my buddy Kubilay Uner for the George Grosz drawing called "Memory of Wagner".

What would Hitler be listening to if he were still alive?

Here's a Timewatch episode (in 5 parts) about Hitler's last days and what most likely happened to his body.

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This post is a loose sequel to Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

Other Mixed Meters posts which flog a dead composer or a dead dictator or a local opera company:

• Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish (Leon Botstein's comments on the video are highly recommended)
• Typography can remind us that Wagner was a bad guy: Wagner with an Asterisk
• How Ring Festival LA could have avoided problems: Ring Festival LA, Wrong Festival LA
• Wagnerites and Nazis march in Los Angeles on the same day: Ring Festival LA Meets Hitlers Birthday
• Wagner in the Nazi extermination camps: Ring Festival LA Begins
• One California composer's response to the Ring: Listen to Wagner's Entire Ring in One Second
• Another California composer's response to the Ring: Kenton Wagner
• Not all music was influenced by Wagner: Wagner Inspires Pop Music
• Just Say No to Drugs and Wagner: Wagner Invades Poland
• The man who couldn't make LA an opera town: Placido Domingo, High Culture Meets Pop Culture

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Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

(This is a sequel to my previous post Suppose Wagner Had Been a Jew)

When Richard Wagner and his Ring of the Nibelungs is discussed these days (as it has been repeatedly in Los Angeles because of L.A. Opera's production and county-wide Ring Festival) there is an elephant in the room.   Wagner fans do not want to talk about that elephant.  The elephant is Adolf Hitler.

Hitler, who was inspired to dictatorship by Wagner's opera Rienzi, who failed in his attempt to write a Wagnerian opera, who carried Wagner scores in his backpack during World War I, who began Nazi rallies with Wagner's music, who ordered his officers to attend Wagner operas, who sent wounded soldiers to the Bayreuth Festival for spiritual recovery, who was a groupie of Wagner's family and used that connection as a legitimization of his own right to power over Germany,  said:

Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.

Conversely, whoever wants to understand Wagner must confront Hitler's negative influence over the composer's legacy.  This legacy takes two forms: musical and political.  Wagner wrote both operas and essays.

Even today Hitler exerts real and pernicious influence over our views about Wagner.  At least it should.  Some people try to forget that these two guys are linked together in hell for all eternity.

We must never forget that the destruction which Hitler brought to Europe, and to the Jews, stains Wagner's memory and artistic creations.  Hitler used Wagner in a way which no other composer has ever been used.  In this respect Wagner is unique.  When Wagner is performed or discussed, Hitler must be mentioned. 

Here's a picture of Adolf dedicating a German national monument to Wagner on March 6, 1934 in Leipzig. The little kid in uniform is a nice touch.  Hermann Goebbels, on the right, looks bored.  Not all Nazis liked Wagner but all Nazis did what Hitler told them to do.  He told them to listen to Wagner.

At the mention of Hitler, fans of Wagner's music bristle and quickly respond with stock, pre-scripted disclaimers intended to absolve Wagner.

They say "Wagner died before Hitler was born."  True enough.  Today we need to remember not only the effect Wagner had on Hitler, but also how Hitler influenced the general perception of Wagner, as a person, as a writer, as a musician.  To make the point yet again: the important issue is remembering how Hitler used Wagner to further hatred and destruction.

They say "Some of Wagner's best friends were Jewish." Equally accurate.  Of course Wagner tried to convert those Jewish friends to Christianity.  That was not friendly.  Later, Nazis used Wagner's vile essay about Jewishness In Music as a study text for school children.  Nothing that the Nazis did to the Jews was friendly.

They say "There are no specific references to Jews or anti-Semitism in Wagner's operas."  I tend to agree.  Others have pointed out anti-Semitism in the operas.  In his writings -- the second pillar of Wagner's patrimony -- there is a great deal of anti-Semitism which should make us sensitive to even the most obscure anti-Semitic reference in the operas.  And with certain audiences, such as those during Wagner's or Hitler's lifetimes when anti-Semitism was rife, even an obscure reference would have been enough to make a strong anti-Semitic point.

They say "Lots of other famous artists were anti-Semitic."  Again, this is correct.  Those other artists did not repeatedly author essays of political hatred to accompany their art and did not inspire insane military dictators.  Wagner is an exclusive case in that he was influential both as composer and as political commentator.  It is improper to excuse Wagner because of our feelings about other artists.

They say "Wagner is not responsible for the Jewish Holocaust."   Of course Wagner was not directly responsible for the Holocaust.  Even Hitler never issued a written order to kill all the Jews.  However, Wagner was one of many foot soldiers in the long crusade of hostility which ended with an entire supposedly civilized European nation simply winking as their government murdered millions of innocent people.  All German anti-Semites who lived before 1945 bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, if only indirectly.  Wagner, through his written suggestions that the Jews should be gotten rid of, deserves a larger share than many others.

They say "The Nazis chose only those ideas of Wagner with which they agreed and ignored the rest."  And I say "How is that different from what you do?"  We all interpret Wagner's writings and music so that they best support our personal opinions and aesthetics.  The Nazis did it and now both supporters and detractors of Wagner do it. 

They say "We love Wagner's music so much that we don't care about all the bad stuff."  And I say "That could be a problem for you."  Ignoring the facts is not a good life strategy.

They say "You can't tell me what not to listen to."  You're right, I can't.  And I won't because censorship is bad.  What I am telling you is that there are lots of required program notes to read before you decide to listen to Wagner.  One important topic in those notes is how and why the Nazis censored music.

They say "We can separate the man from the music."  To which I respond "Living with your head in the sand is a bad way to listen to music."

They say "Wagner's music is about universal themes of love and redemption."   If you say so.  I doubt it matters.  In any case Wagner does not hold a monopoly over that subject.  You might try searching out some other artworks on the same theme.  Maybe attend a movie.   Movies love love and redemption.

Here's a picture of Hitler kissing Winifred Wagner's hand at Bayreuth.  Were they lovers or redeemers?

They say "Wagner would have not supported National Socialism."

Over 35 years passed between Wagner's death and the creation of the Nazi party so of course there's no way Wagner could have formally supported it. But I suspect Wagner would have joined the party if it had been around early enough.   Wagner liked attention.  The Nazis, especially the most important Nazi, Hitler, paid lots of attention to Wagner.

Some in Wagner's family actively supported Hitler.  This is most especially true of his daughter-in-law Winifred, who might have slept with Hitler, and his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who joined the party and wrote extensively in support of it.  Hitler visited Chamberlain on his deathbed. Maybe he attended Chamberlain's funeral - I've read both.   Wagner's grandson Wolfgang, who went on to run Bayreuth, was a Nazi officer.

To be fair, Wagner's granddaughter Friedelind (in the hat) supported the Allies during World War II by helping create a psychological profile of Hitler.  And Wagner's great-grandson Gottfried has been excommunicated from the family for suggesting that they come clean about their connections to Hitler.  I suspect lots of juicy details are still secret.

Let's do an easy thought experiment about the importance of Richard Wagner's failure to support National Socialism.  Ask yourself: how would history have changed if Wagner had in fact joined the Nazi party?

This thought experiment involves the use of alternative history, similar to what I did in my last post Suppose Wagner Had Been a Jew.  Alternative History means positing a slight revamping of actual events and then asking how history would have been changed because of it. 

The alterations I'm suggesting are small.   We must only move the founding of the Nazi party several decades earlier so Richard Wagner can formally join during his last years.   The party would likely remain a fringe crackpot group until after World War I when the loss of the war, political strife and economic disaster allowed them to seize control of Germany.  As a Nazi member Wagner, both famous and controversial, would have given the party much higher standing.

Meanwhile, the philosophical bases of Nazism were already in place during Wagner's life and some were well known to him.  For example, Arthur de Gobineau wrote about racial theory and strongly influenced the Nazis.   Gobineau met with Wagner.  As the Rush Limbaugh of his time Wagner wrote a positive essay about Gobineau.  Wagner's future son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose writings would also strongly affect Nazi attitudes, attended Bayreuth the year before Wagner died.  It is not unreasonable to assume that he met Wagner and that they talked politics.

But who would have been a plausible founder of the Nazi party?   Many people around Wagner could have done the job.  Even his wife Cosima.  She was quite the anti-Semite.  There were many German politicians who we could pick. 

I have a different suggestion based less rigidly on history.  My candidate is more volkish than any politician.  I think that the original founder of the National Socialist party in the early 1880s should have been Hitler's father Alois.  He wasn't really a politician but, judging by his picture, he certainly looks like a demagogue.  So much so that Adolf Hitler might have gotten his oratorical style via heredity.   Once Alois passes on, Adolf would rise to become "leader" in place of his father - like another Kim Jong-Il.

 (Here's a picture of Alois Hitler, fun guy.)

Once Adolf Hitler himself assumes leadership of the Nazis it doesn't matter much whether the party has already existed forty years or one year.   Either way Hitler would still claim that the best way to understand his politics is to understand Wagner.  His statement was true then and it's true today.

So save yourself the trouble of denying that Richard Wagner would have supported National Socialism.  It's a moot question.  It doesn't matter whether Wagner would have joined the Nazis and worn a red swastika on his arm.  Things would turn out very badly either way.

Today in 2010 Los Angeles, now that cheering for the Ring has stopped and Placido Domingo has flown to his next gig, and even in the future after the Opera's deficit is paid off, the responsibility to remember the victims of Wagner's greatest fan will remain.  It is too soon to forget so great an evil.  Remembering Nazi history should remain an essential duty for anyone who chooses to listen to Wagner.

Adoring Wagner does not allow you to ignore Hitler. 

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Here's an interesting essay about Wagner's role in late 19th-century German anti-semitism.

The pictures of the Wagner monument dedication and of Wini with Wolf came from YadVashem.org photo archive

Wagner with an Asterisk: a Mixed Meters post suggesting a simple method Los Angeles Opera could have used to make the Wagner-Hitler connection obvious to everyone.

Hitler was mostly called just "Der Führer", the leader.  Here's a list of Kim Jong-il's titles.  Very amusing.

The picture of the elephant wearing a swastika comes from here. It may not be a Nazi elephant, only an Aryan one.

Before the LA Opera Ring performances, Rabbi Harold Shulweis wrote this article suggesting that Wagner's music be heard and Wagner's writings be read

Here's a fun comment by Elise, a fan of Wagner.

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Love and Redemption Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Adolf+Hitler. . . Ring Festival LA. . . Gobineau. . . Houston Stewart Chamberlain