Richard Wagner: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Let’s face it, folks. Richard Wagner—whose one-act opera Das Rheingold is the main event of the DPAA’s April Masterworks and Opera offerings—was not a nice man.

Nah. Forget that.

He was a real S.O.B. Con man. Adulterer. Egotistical narcissist. Anti-Semite.

If Wagner was alive today, he’d be a prime candidate for cancellation. (In Israel, he’s been cancelled for decades.) But I, nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, embrace his works. Enthusiastically. I’m thrilled to be conducting our Rheingold production!

The Good

The art Wagner created—sprawling, magnificent, influential, endlessly fascinating—transcends who he was and how he behaved. This month’s Rheingold production is a prime example. Stirring music. Fabulous singing. Innovative stagecraft. A cast of Norse-mythology-inspired gods, dwarves, and giants who are all too human in their attributes and actions. A sprawling dramatic vision that’s also an intimate drama of three dysfunctional families. A story of greed and lust for power that resonates with political, economic, and social events of every historical era. And the whole opera’s built on an orchestra that churns with music that illustrates the story and illuminates each character’s underlying emotions and psychology.

I’ve been fascinated with Wagner’s music since college. He was the topic of my never-quite-finished Master’s thesis (which eventually morphed into a January 2010 Classical Connections Series concert and the DPO’s world-premiere recording of the original 1840 version of Wagner’s Faust Overture). His music is exciting, colorful, and revolutionary—the absolute pinnacle of 19th century German Romanticism.

I think you’ll find our Rheingold one of the most engaging, thrilling, stimulating couple of hours you’ve spent in a theater—at least since saw your last big blockbuster movie. Indeed, if Wagner was alive today he’d be creating superhero movie franchises…as screenwriter, producer, director, costume designer, lighting designer, cinematographer, special effects designer, and—yes—composer!

The Bad

Con man: Wagner had opulent tastes. Paid for with other people’s money. He borrowed from friends, enemies, and benefactors to finance projects and never paid them back. One of his most famous operas—The Flying Dutchman—was inspired by a storm-tossed sea passage from Riga to London as he fled creditors. His greatest achievement—the four-opera Ring of the Nibelung cycle, of which Rheingold is Part One—came to be only because Wagner talked King Ludwig II of Bavaria (the “Mad King Ludwig” of Disneyland’s “Cinderella Castle” fame) into fully bankrolling it, plus a Wagner-designed theater in which to perform it.

Composer as con man? No big deal. The history of western classical music is full of deadbeat composers.

Adulterer: Wagner serially cheated on his wife, then after her death he broke up the marriage of his friend and musical collaborator, conductor Franz von Bülow—after Wagner and von Bülow’s wife had carried on a five-year affair that produced three (count ‘em, 3) children.

Composers incapable of respecting marriage vows (theirs and others’)? Nothing too special there!

Egotistical narcissist: Wagner thought he was the greatest composer of all time. He only had a kind word to say about two others: Beethoven and Liszt. Beethoven because he was—well—Beethoven. Liszt because he was extremely influential and championed Wagner’s music. (Liszt also because he became Wagner’s father-in-law after Wagner married Cosima Liszt von Bülow!)

Wagner wasn’t the first egotistical narcissistic composer. Nor the last. But he was probably the best. Best egotist. Best narcissist. Best composer.

The Ugly

Anti-Semite: Guilty. Along with millions of his fellow 19th-century Europeans.

What makes Wagner’s case particularly thorny is that he put his anti-Jewish sentiments in writing in an 1850 article titled “Judaism in Music”. This litany of hate caught the attention of bigots from later generations—one particular 20th-century mustachioed German bigot in particular. Wagner must bear full responsibility for his words, and at least partial responsibility for their echoes.

I won’t quote Wagner’s article here—just paraphrase. That’s not to protect you from what he wrote. It’s to protect you from his tedious purple prose. Here’s the gist of Wagner’s argument: although Jews had been “emancipated” from European ghettos in the 1830s and 1840s, they never assimilated into mainstream European culture, so the music of Jewish composers was artificial, insincere, and unworthy.

Wrong, except maybe for the “emancipated” part.

Why did he say that? What set him off?

In the mid-19th century, Paris was the center of Europe’s musical world. Wagner wrote “Judaism in Music” halfway through an unsuccessful two-decade-long campaign to establish himself as Paris’ top-dog composer. The Jewish composers Wagner railed against in the article (Felix Mendelssohn, Jacques Halévy, and Giacomo Meyerbeer) were all more famous than he was. Mendelssohn, in his role as editor of an influential music magazine, had refused to cover the premieres of Wagner’s operas Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman. Halévy’s operas were the toast of Paris, and Wagner believed their popularity blocked his operas from getting produced. And Meyerbeer—the most influential composer in Paris at the time—had “betrayed” Wagner by not pushing harder for a Paris premiere of Renzi—an opera that Wagner had meticulously designed to check every box of the French Grand Opera style.

Yes, Wagner hated these three Jewish composers (never mind that Mendelssohn’s father had converted the family to Lutheranism when Felix was 7 years old). And Wagner was smart enough to know that an article titled “I Hate These Guys Who are More Famous than Me” wouldn’t get much traction. But he knew that a screed like “Judaism in Music” would flourish in the rich anti-Jewish soil of mid-19th-century Europe.

Wagner’s words were despicable, but his actions revealed that the hatred was personal, not religious. He collaborated with many Jewish musicians who performed and championed his music. Jewish pianist/composer Carl Tausig made piano arrangements that helped popularize many of Wagner’s operas. Hermann Levi—son of a rabbi and court conductor to King Ludwig—was the best conductor around, and was such a strong proponent of Wagner’s musico-dramatic ideas that he was entrusted with the premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal, notwithstanding the opera’s themes of Christian faith and redemption. Go figure.

What to Do?

Here’s where I come down in the end: despise the man, love the music. If—like most of the Israeli classical music world—you shun Wagner because of what he wrote in that article, I think you’re missing out on some of the greatest music ever written and on a groundbreaking approach to theatre that still resonates in our cultural lives nearly two centuries later. If—like that mustachioed Nazi murderer—you embrace the music because of the garbage of “Judaism in Music”, I think you’re beyond salvation.

There’s a valuable lesson here. Words have meaning. Words have power. Words can kill. Words spoken or written in public can take on a life of their own, because you never know who will quote your words and use them for their own nefarious purposes. You never know what horrors your words may be called upon to justify.

I revile “Judaism in Music”. But I love and defend Wagner’s music. Starting, this month, with Das Rheingold. Come see it. Then join us at the post-performance Talkback and we can discuss…