Courting Oblivion

I thank Edward Rothstein, Terry Teachout, and James Loeffler for their sympathetic and illuminating responses to my essay. They have raised a number of issues, like the sordid history of Nazi-era Bayreuth, and the dramatic significance and purported “Jewishness” of certain Wagnerian villains, that I think any adequate account of Wagner must address, and I will try to do so in the bulk of my comments below.

About other things, like Terry Teachout’s thought-provoking meditation on the relevance of Wagner’s anti-Judaism to the situation in Europe today, I feel less competent to pronounce, while James Loeffler’s fascinating discussion of how Jewish musicians and composers have grappled with “their” Wagner would require, if I were to do justice to it, a more extensive response than I can give it here. On these matters, I hope I may be forgiven for simply reiterating my gratitude. But I would like, in closing, to add a few further words on the nature of Wagner’s art itself, the way that it exerts its power over us, and its relation to both religion and politics.

The corruption of Bayreuth was as rapid as Edward Rothstein says, and began with Wagner himself: its house organ, the Bayreuther Blätter, was the vehicle for many of his pettiest screeds, as well as for important essays like Religion and Art. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law and one of the pre-eminent racist propagandists of the 20th century, closed out his life there. Bayreuth was at the forefront in the Nazification of German music, and this was quite predictable given its founder’s well-known nationalism and bigotry. All of this is well-established, but none of it implies what it is sometimes taken to imply: either that Bayreuth was a major source of Nazi ideology or that the capitulation of German high culture to Hitler would not have happened without it. In truth, this capitulation was depressingly complete across the board.