Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah—PART 1

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.”[1]

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.”[2]

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.”[3]

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.”[4]

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.[5] 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.[6] 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.”[7] 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.”[8]

A 1910 English language edition of Judaism in Music

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.”[9] 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.”[10] 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.”[11]

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.”[12] 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.[13]

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.[14] 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.”[15] 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.[16]

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.

Richard Wagner

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.”[17] 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.[18]

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.”[19] 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.”[20]

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.”[21] 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.”[22]

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.”[23] 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.[24]

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.[25] 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.”[26]

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.[27]

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.”[28] 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.[29]

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.[30]

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!”[31] 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.”[32]

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.”[33] 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.”[34] 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.”[35]

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.

Go to Part 2.


[1] William Berger, Wagner Without Fear: Learning to Love—and Even Enjoy—Opera’s Most Demanding Genius (New York, Viking, 1998), 373.

[2] Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.

[3] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 195.

[4] Adrian Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” The Guardian, July 21, 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,345459,00.html

[5] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1st Books Library, 2004), 60.

[6] 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

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), 349.

[9] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[10] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 184.

[11] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[12] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 27.

[13] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 83-4.

[14] David Rodwin, “Wagner Was Right: Eclecticism and the Jewish Aesthetic,” (Los Angeles: 2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkfGEqo3YjQ

[15] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 98.

[16] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 24.

[17] Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to

Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) 360.

[18] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[19] Richard Wagner, letter of April 1851 trans. by W. Ashton Ellis, In: Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt 1841-1853, (London: 1897; repr. 1973), 145.

[20]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

[21] Ibid. (Italics in the original)

[22] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 376.

[23] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[24] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 52.

[25] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 75.

[26] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 372.

[27] Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2000), 69.

[28] 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

[29] 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/

[30] Scruton, Modern Culture, 69.

[31] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Ibid.

[32] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 165.

[33] 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

[34] Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 33.

[35] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 377-8.

 

 

43 replies
  1. Salomon dumont
    Salomon dumont says:

    ‘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’

    The author disagrees with this point I take it? Personally I find Mahler very overrated.

    • Poupon Marx
      Poupon Marx says:

      I considered it and rejected it. Just purely on utilitarian grounds, it is a dead end. An abstraction with no root or relation. This might as well be a numbing tumbleweed. With steel guitar.

    • moneytalks
      moneytalks says:

      Christians have lost the war to the Jews whom are not going to “let” any underground secret society assemble a military force that could rise up and defeat the jewmasterss .

      Time to consider a new religion that effectively resists self-enslavement to the chosenhite jewmasterss .

      • Poupon Marx
        Poupon Marx says:

        “Time to consider a new religion that effectively resists self-enslavement to the chosenite jewmasterss .” An open ended comment that creates an open ended assuaging effect, similar to “We need to…”, or “Somebody should…”. A throw-away, like a caffeine high.

        I have provided for you a link and path that is concrete, historical, proven, cogent and tamper resistant. That is the https://www.diamondway-buddhism.org
        and: https://junginla.org/about/cgjung/

        <blockquoteJung concluded that the current myth of our time does not meet the psychological needs of the individual. What is missing in our age of hyper-rationalism is the capacity to re-connect with our lost instinctual nature. He coined the term individuation for the inner process which propels each of us toward greater wholeness. This process is directed by the uniting archetype, the Self, which is, paradoxically enough, both the center and the entirety of the psyche. Jung reminded us that our own wholeness and the healing of the world soul, the anima mundi, are dependent upon each one of us developing a more conscious relationship with those unexplored or rejected parts of ourselves which lie hidden in the unconscious and which he termed the shadow.<blockquote

        Without individuals achieving a Whole Self, a collective effort is impossible to achieve. This is axiomatic, and the beginning, not incidental, to salvation and reversal of our situation. Take any group, athletic, military, research, or any endeavor, the collective achievement will depend on the additive effect of individuals: number X individual quality. Outward and external manipulations that exclude this ineluctable quality are doomed to failure from the outset.

  2. Gerry
    Gerry says:

    The Victory of Jewishness over Germanism

    The greatest and most serious danger facing not only Germany but also Russia today if not the entire world is a teaching that has made its way into most Christian Churches in the West anyway and western politics is the demonization of Germany and Russia as the nations of Gog and Magog from Ezekiel Chapters 38 & 39. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/08/gog-magog-and-george-bush/ It can be summed up with the word millennialism. In the prophetic literature of the Old Testament it clearly teaches a millennial age under a Jewish Messiah from Jerusalem. Now if any bothered to go to the Book of Revelation one would see that yes indeed Christ Jesus will rule from Jerusalem for an entire millennium after which something very strange unfolds. We have the mentioning of a Gog/Magog event which eerily resembles exactly what we find written in Ezekiel. So the question becomes is this the same prophecy from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel? If it is which by the way I fully explain in my book Lies, all Lies by Gerry Fox is in fact true then what we have here is a grave error of interpretation. Too many in the Church and among the Zionists are totally and completely ignorant of this thinking that we are the generation set to see this great war which will usher in this millennium.
    It is because of the rise of Nazism and Communism these two nations of Russia and Germany are demonized accordingly and IT HAS TO STOP!!! AND IT HAS TO STOP IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!!

    Germany and Russia have got absouloutly nothing whatsoever to do with the prophecy of Ezekiel 38 and 39. Nothing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Armageddon however, is entirely different beast altogether.

  3. Sanjay P.
    Sanjay P. says:

    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.

    • Poupon Marx
      Poupon Marx says:

      ” 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.”

      I believe you are in error, specifically with the causation direction of downward direction and change of German culture.
      The “people” and their taste and predilection do not determine outcome or direction. The group is too amorphous.

      The following will illustrate my point. Steve Jobs, the founder and savior of Apple, during his introduction of the iPhone and various quantum improvements and innovation to the entire line, was asked about his method and decision and vision. The interviewer was quite surprised when he asked Jobs if he used “focus groups”, or surveys/sampling of his customer base to determine what customers would like and prefer. Jobs said no to all. He simply created the conceptual and concrete framework within himself wholly, and directed the implementation. His opinion was the average person was unable to conceptualize and imagine something out of their daily existence.

      Another example is the quality of American television in the 1950s. It was high quality, in many cases upper brow and didactic and edifying. The audience for this was smaller, as television was more of an exclusive purchase. Aiming ABOVE the general tastes and preferences of the general population is preferable to aiming below. The latter is exactly what the {{{Cult}}} did starting from the 60s. While it might be euphemistically called democratization, it must said that this will cause a decline in standards and tastes. What the people want-which in many cases is a result of manipulation-should be tempered with wisdom and vision of the fewer. In the time of Verdi in Italy, one could travel through the country and hear peasants and common people singing tunes from his latest operas or shorter works. Likewise with Rossini. An exercising of cultural vanguards should have considerable influence.

      • Sanjay P.
        Sanjay P. says:

        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.

  4. Sanjay P.
    Sanjay P. says:

    Testing, testing. My apologies. I am not sure how this quite works. Does the message appear in real time, is it reviewed first, do I receive a message if not approved. Well, I shall just have to wait to find out. Thank you.

    —–

    (Mod. Note: 1. Message does not appear in “real time”; 2.Comment is reviewed before approval; 3. You will not be notified. Hope that helps, and thank you for asking and commenting!)

  5. Poupon Marx
    Poupon Marx says:

    Very few people, including perhaps the author of this article, know and appreciate that Wagner was inspired and admired Buddhism. As a Buddhist myself, this spirit of Wagner’s is instantly identifiable. A synopsis from Richard Wagner and Buddhism:

    It is little known that Richard Wagner was among the very first Westerners to appreciate Buddhism and that he was the first major European artist to be inspired by this religion. In 1856, in the prime of his creativity, the 33-year-old artist read his first book about Buddhism. Madly in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, a beautiful but happily married woman, he conceived two deeply connected opera projects: Tristan und Isolde which he went on to compose and stage, and Die Sieger (The Victors), an opera scenario based on an Indian Buddha legend translated from Sanskrit. These two projects mirrored Wagner’s burning desire for the consummation of his love and the necessity of renunciation. This Buddhist opera project occupied Wagner’s mind for decades until his death in 1883. Indeed, the composer’s last words were about the Buddha figure of his scenario and his relationship with women. Urs App, the author of The Birth of Orientalism (University of Pennsylvania Press) and the world’s foremost authority on the early Western reception of Buddhism, tells the story of Richard Wagner’s creative encounter with Buddhism and explains the composer’s last words.

    I will leave it to the reader to explore the influences of Buddhism and Indian spirituality further. These are manifest in his art in several forms:

    http://www.the-wagnerian.com/2014/01/the-use-of-buddhist-and-hindu-concepts.html

    Wagner has to be acknowledged as the exalter prototype Man, honest with himself, driven to Truth and Ultimate Reality. Such an intrepid soul is rare enough, but rarer still is the Man who will be singularly driven toward this goal. To him, it is of essence and necessity, not an option or accessory. Wagner paid a price for his fidelity to himself and his soul.

    His revulsion for Judaism, its expression of pathologies and malignancies, was accompanied by his derived doubtfulness of the authenticity of Christianity, its spiritual basis, and its EFFECT on misdirection, willful denial, and paralysis and perversion of his Germanic peoples. In the world of machines in which I mastered, there are successes and there are failures. Some by design were seemingly planned and built to fail. Some were the result of sloth, false economy, and other negatives.

    I should not need to expound or proselytize toward the failures and shortcomings of this religious set of teachings. I grew up in Central Texas with urban, suburban and “country” influences all around me. Cowboys and military dependents, as well as the children of middle class and “working class” families attended the excellent public-locally controlled schools. I saw and see first hand that mainstream Bible Protestantism correlated economic status and accumulation with the degree of Divine Favor. If you’re rich, then God approves of you by this benevolence. Tune into Joel Ostend and Pastor Hagee and the Mega Church assholes and be prepared to expectorate upon hearing that the Jews are God’s Chosen Peeple, and that Israel is Holy Land. I call it the Order of the Vasoline Machine Gun. I’ve written enough of the absurdities, perversions, and fraud of the very pillars of the Catheter Catholic Church

    I have spent time in Germany, German Switzerland, and had German friends. I do not consider the German peoples to be especially spiritual at all. What spirituality the Germans had in the 19th Century was distorted, starved, and misdirected by its Christian and materialistic focus and predilections. The integral weakness and debility of Christianity is its “other” nature, outside of the individual. A figure exist who is the ultimate authority and must be obeyed without debate of discussion. It sets rules that must be followed, in legalistic and concrete details. It creates a code of permissions and prohibitions and proscriptions. It enforces conformity by suppression and threats by promising and inflicting pain and dread. It was created by design to produce a subservient and unquestioning people, “sheep” by metaphor to be led by a pastor (my flock), in the Catholick Chucks the higher prelates have a curved cane to loop around the neck of the little lambs. It’s baaaaaad. Christianity depends on being scared straight. It also envisages an ideal persona of submissiveness and devaluation, a perversion of true humility. This interlocks with the implicit masochism of the individual ideal Christian to sacrifice himself for what he knows not clearly.

    These inversions are concrete and observable in the declaration by “Christians” that sacrificing their lives for the lifting up of the oppressed in Arab countries is worth their termination of existence. After beating the shit out of folks, then they will be more receptive to Come To Jesus. We are treated to combat troops forming a prayer circle in Iraq and Afghanistan entreating the Lord to protect them, before going to kill the heathens for the Great Military and Government Complex so that people like Liz(ard) Cheney can buy some more baubles and cars. A group of humble Christians went to Congresswoman Cheney, politely and submissively asked her to vote against America marching off to war-to expand and plunder for plutocrats and kleptomaniacs. Her Christian response was that she didn’t care that American boys and girls get blown up and killed, as long as it served the American Empire. This moral slipperiness and ambiguity is a la carte for Christians, Muslims, and Jews-all Abrahamic religions, unrelieved of internal contradictions and external absurdities.

    It is obvious that Wagner fled FROM Christianity and its ambivalence and handicapping of his believing Germans at the hands of the Jews. As with all their invasions and evasions, it is the intellectual, religious, and business elites that facilitate gain of function of {{{The Cult}}}. Each has its reasons, whether confounded, avaricious, or inadequate personality derangement. Christianity does and did NOTHING to awaken or inhibit the Christian sheeple to this menace and prevaricated takeover. “Love Yer Enamas As Yerself”. “Turn The Other Cheek” (so the swelling will be symmetrical), “The Meek Will Inherit The Earth” (6 feet under). None of this makes any sense and is counter to survival and revival. In fact, it’s beyond stupid. It’s inane.

    Wagner sensed all of this. To me, the greatness of Wagner is seeking The Natural Order, The Ultimate Reality behind images, conditioning, and general noise. You may call it Transcendence, Quest For Truth, Search For Meaning. All the same. Transfiguration and Transmogrification are outward forms, being limited to sensory stimulus and perception.

    I believe Wagner is the representation of Nietzsche’s Superman, which might be better termed Infinite Man. Wagner and especially Cosima fell out with Nietzsche I believe because he could not measure up to his own ideal.

    • Gerry
      Gerry says:

      @ Poupon Marx

      Wasn’t Mozart a freemason?

      As for the rest of your argument the Christian Church believe me St. Paul would be just as horrified at the state of affairs as you have expounded. Spend some time sir with Dr. Walter Martin here https://youtu.be/tSDvu3NWBnI
      and you’ll see a different Christianity.
      As for Germany she had a great, great, leader in Count Ludwig Von Zinzendorf and the Moravians.

      • Poupon Marx
        Poupon Marx says:

        I consider what you wrote to be wrong, irrelevant, and not germane. I don’t care what anybody or what content is in the Bible. It is legalistic, external, arbitrary and confusing set of mandates, prescriptions, and spiritually shallow confounding and contradicting statements. Ceding absolute authority to arbitrary source is a DOA for a people’s advancement. While that might work for drones and worker bees, it is static and stultifying.

        “If it doesn’t work, I am not interested”, is the de facto motto of those who efforts are must be measurable on outcomes. Christianity-given the current situation of Euro-Man-has failed utterly and completely to provide guidance, protection, direction, or even cover. Moreover, the entire number or organized entities-exemption of Orthodox and Middle East Coptics, etc-is actively engaged in diminishing the existence of “Whites” while actively promoting unrestrictive immigration and integration.

        It is worse that useless, it is analogous to a catheter in the vein as a vehicle to inject poison and parasites. You and other like-minded people need to wake up before it is too late. This cyclical repetition of failure and denial is similar to Marxists and Communists, who despite millions killed and uncountable failures and catastrophes directly attributable, still continue to attempt to re-establish and reaffirm. Perhaps the thread of thought is: “Well, it failed several thousand times, but that’s because it was administered improperly. If we try it again, maybe this time will work”.

        At this point in my life, “devout” Christians like Amy Come Barrett-“We, my Black adopted Haitian children, and whole family cried over George Floyd’s death”.

        Haiti Awash in Christian Aid, Evangelism

        https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna35262608

        Christians Fight to Bring Adopted Kids Home from Overseas

        https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/june/international-adoption-coronavirus-travel-state-dept.html

        At this point, I am too disgusted and repulsed by the actions and stupidities of Christianity in the main, to continue.

        • TJ
          TJ says:

          I would look at how and why Judeo-Christian replaced straight Christian. Jews with their fake money hegemon should have had an easy time of it. Scofield is known, but few know of Scofield’s main backer, bigshot jew S. Untermyer. I presume the Judeo- part came from Jews and not from Christians. How many fake Christians accepted the monetary jab [bribe]? And became C. Zionists because filthy lucre rules. . .John Hagee et al.

          A little search into origins of the term Judeo-Christian:

          >>>It was not until the middle decades of the 20th century that “Judeo-Christian” become a political term. In the 1930s, when anti-Semitism was on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic, Judeo-Christian language began to be used by interfaith organizations such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews to indicate a common religious cause. It served to signal opposition to pro-fascist America Firsters, who were increasingly using “Christian” as a signature term, giving their organizations names such as the Christian American Crusade, the Christian Aryan Syndicate, and the Christian Mobilizers. During the war, Judeo-Christian rhetoric became more common. Indeed, ground zero of this means of affirming a shared religious basis for western values was the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York — the site of the large convocations of liberal academics and intellectuals held annually from 1940 by the Conference on Science, Religion and Philosophy in Their Relation to the American Way of Life, Inc. Organized by Lyman Bryson of Columbia Teachers College and JTS’ Louis Finklestein, the Conference originated, in Carl Friedrich’s words, “essentially as a rallying point for Judeo-Christian forces in America against the threat presented to them by the Axis ideology and actions.” Such was the clash between the civilization of Western liberal democracy and Fascism.

          After the war, “Judeo-Christian” gained widespread popularity, as pastors, politicians, and pundits seized on the term to mobilize the spiritual forces of America against “godless” communism — its second civilizational clash. As Daniel Poling, president of the Military Chaplains Association of the United States, asserted at the association’s 1951 convention, “We meet at a time when the Judeo-Christian faith is challenged as never before in all the years since Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees.” The following year, in a speech before the Freedoms Foundation, President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower famously declared, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Less famously, and in such a way as to make clear that he was speaking of the principle of democracy, he continued, “With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” I have long thought that Eisenhower picked up the usage as president of Columbia University thanks to the influence of the Conference on Science, Religion and Philosophy.

          Notwithstanding the inclusionary impulses behind it, and (as it were) the imprimatur of JTS, Judeo-Christian terminology provoked significant Jewish ambivalence. As early as 1943, a well-known publicist named Trude Weiss-Rosmarin called it “a totalitarian aberration” to tie Jewish-Christian goodwill to a shared religious identity. In 1970, the writer and publisher Arthur A. Cohen published The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, a collection of articles in which the Judeo-Christian tradition was denounced as the invention of German Protestant higher critics interested in promoting a “de-Judaizing of Christian theology” that “could not be more evident than in the pitiful inability of the Protestant (and to a slightly — but only slightly — lesser extent, Catholic) Church to oppose German National Socialism.” That, of course, turned the history of the term’s use upside down. Cohen’s book nevertheless received a warm reception that signaled a general fatigue with the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which an enthusiastic reviewer for the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal called “the catch-all of textbook writers, Western Civ. Lectures, Brotherhood Week toastmasters, and Jews and Christians who cannot think of anything else to speak of to one another when it comes to religious convictions.” As America left its cold war consciousness behind, “Judeo-Christian” began to take on more negative connotations. In “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” a widely read article published in Science magazine in 1967, the medievalist Lynn White blamed “the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation” for instilling in Western society an ethic of exploitation of the natural world.*

          The sense among progressives that “Judeo-Christian” had outlived its usefulness opened the door to using “Abrahamic” as a substitute, especially after 1979, when the Iranian Revolution thrust politicized Islam onto the world stage. For example, after the attacks of September 11, Roland Homet, an Episcopal layman and international lawyer, described attending an interfaith forum that came to the conclusion that coercing others to adopt our values “does not represent the best of the Abrahamic tradition.” “Abrahamic” was, however, much less frequently used to point to a common value system than to designate what Judaism, Christianity, and Islam themselves had (or did not have) in common. Thus, in 1990, New York Times religion columnist Peter Steinfels noted “the strong refusal of the Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — to identify God with the world.” In 2009, Barack Obama issued a proclamation noting that the “rituals of Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha both serve as reminders of the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world’s major religions.”<<<

          https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/mark-silk-history-term-judeo-christian

      • Pierre de Craon
        Pierre de Craon says:

        Wasn’t Mozart a freemason?

        Yes; so was Haydn. Both were practicing Catholics, but it remained licit for Catholics in the Habsburg domains to join a Lodge until the definitive papal condemnation of Freemasonry in 1825.

        Need I add that virtually everything in P. Marx’s rant is false and most of it is childishly offensive, too?

  6. Pierre de Craon
    Pierre de Craon says:

    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 strikes me as a marked improvement on Ashton Ellis’s. Though both editions are out of print, neither the hardcover nor the paperback reprint (1991) is especially hard to find. The paperback’s ISBN is 9780812691467, and the search engine at BookFinder.com reveals many copies available for less than fifteen dollars.

    In re Wagner’s title, it seems a bit odd that most read it as being the German equivalent of “Judaism in Music.” In German, “Judentum” is also, even primarily, how one refers to Jews collectively; that is, Jewry—now regarded as a rather old-fashioned, out-of-favor term despite (or perhaps because of) its extraordinarily apt suggestion of a vast but imprecisely defined realm where Jews and Judaism are supreme and unchallenged. (Think of the much more familiar parallel term “Christentum,” Christendom.) Wagner’s essay complains eloquently of both Judaism and the Jews, of course, but the crux of his concern is what the undesirable presence of the Jews had done and was continuing to do to music and high German culture as a whole. Thus, “Jewry in Music” or even “The Jewish Presence in Music” might be a somewhat more germane translation than the usually given one.

  7. Al Ross
    Al Ross says:

    Amen to all that , Pierre and thank you for it.

    Occasionally , Jews may surprise us . As you doubtless know , Schenkerian Analysis was a product of an ” Austrian” Jewish musicologist who greatly admired German high culture – almost to the point of being “more German than the Germans, ”

    Apologies in advance for a link which may contain rather more than than required, re Schenker :

    https://www.musau.org/parts/neue-article-page/view/54

    • Pierre de Craon
      Pierre de Craon says:

      This article on Schenker is absolutely riveting, especially as 99 percent of it is news to me! While you are correct in thinking that I am familiar with Schenkerian analysis—I saw my first Schenkergraph (so labeled) in my teens—virtually the only thing I ever knew before today about Schenker the man was that he and Furtwängler had a profound mutual admiration. (In common with a great many young people then and now, I thought that there was nothing useful to be learned from reading a biography. Live and learn.)

      So thanks are appropriate, yes, but congratulations, too—the latter because one would be hard pressed, I think, to find an article that better illustrates the aesthetic and societal problem that is Wagner’s focus in “DJiM.” That is to say, the most notable aspect of the article, to me at least, is in the way that its author makes no attempt to conceal his puzzlement as to why a Jew, any Jew, would think it a good thing to become no-holds-barred member of any Gentile society.

  8. anonym
    anonym says:

    Jewish “imitatative” music is bound to fail when attempting to imitate German heroic and epic music. It’s all in the instinctive feeling, the way the melody swells and falls, and without genuine feeling it’s bound to sound schmaltzy and overblown, like a caricature.

    The genuine epic feeling still exists in modern German music, for example in Kraftwerk (Europe Endless), Neu (ISI), or anything Michael Rother.

    Jewish music generally falls into two categories: pathetic kitsch or pseudo intellectual cerebral music. Brill building dittys about smelling flowers and holding hands, or atonal mathematical spectacles. Both mind numbing. Even when they do a good imitation, with catchy hooks, like Dylan, the cerebral cold calculation becomes obvious when contrasted to Neil Young or Townes Van Zandt, who’s music is filled the genuine emotion.

    Since Jews own the music industry, most music – regardless how genuine the artist is – it’s gonna come out affected in the other end of the production line. Today’s music seems to have combined the two categories: shallow lyrics about love, set to postmodern sound spectacles. Completely devoid of genuine emotion, and so fake that it boggles the mind.

    Thankfully there’s still a lot of good music being made, underneath the suffocating Jewish plastic blanket, but it’a not being promoted or played in the media.

  9. Seraphim
    Seraphim says:

    Wagner was demonized for his ‘putative role as the spiritual and intellectual godfather to Adolf Hitler’.
    It may sound paradoxical that the greatest influence on Hitler was the youth opera ‘Rienzi’ which had nothing ‘anti-semitic’ or ‘germanic’ and Wagner himself somehow repudiated. Hitler himself explained his fascination with Rienzi: ‘At the age of twenty-four this man [Cola Di Rienzo], an innkeeper’s son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more”. That’s why the Party Rallies were opened in the accords of Rienzi’s Overture.
    Perhaps Wagner distanced himself from Rienzi because critics were joking that “Rienzi is Meyerbeer’s best opera”. Meyerbeer supported Wagner, introduced him to other musical celebrities (Jews) and helped him in staging it at the Opera of Dresden.
    As to the musical preferences of Hitler it is of notoriety that his favorite piece was the Viennese operetta ‘The Merry Widow’, by Franz Lehar! Despite the fact that the libretto was written by two Jews, and Lehar was married to a Jewess (that Hitler declared ‘Ehrenarierin’). Performances of the ‘Merry Widow’ during the Third Reich largely surpassed any Wagnerian ones.

    • Pierre de Craon
      Pierre de Craon says:

      I don’t know whether you have been able to hear a recorded or live performance of Rienzi (the latter sort being very, very rare). To the best of my knowledge, the only absolutely complete performance of the opera ever given in the past 120 years (at a minimum) was a 1976 radio broadcast underwritten by the BBC. The entire rationale for the broadcast was archival, the assumptions being that (1) there was so very much music and so much of it was unmemorable that a complete recording or, unlikelier still, a complete performance was barely conceivable, let alone practicable; and (2) the foregoing notwithstanding, no matter how weak the music was, the composer’s significance was such that scholars and specialist music lovers ought to have more to go to than just the score of Rienzi or one of the few so-called complete recordings, none of which cuts less than 25 percent of the score and the one with the strongest conductor and cast (the one on EMI, Hollreiser cond.) cutting about 40 percent!

      The BBC broadcast took six hours, and only about 30 minutes of that was dead-air time. Thus, the opera is comparable in length to Götterdämmerung or Meistersinger, but it utterly lacks the coherence, the dramatic and compositional integrity, of those two masterpieces. Think of all the tedious, repetitious, uninspired ensemble passages in, say, Tannhäuser or (less so) in Lohengrin, and then triple them in length and double them in conventionality—what you’ll get is a pretty fair idea of what the experience of an uncut Rienzi might be like.

      As for Hitler’s reaction to Rienzi, all I can say with any confidence is that by the time he would have seen a staged performance—i.e., the first two decades of the twentieth century—all performances mounted in Germany were cut to around half the length of the full score. In addition, of course, sensitive, receptive young persons are frequently inspired by something that, having reached maturity, they come to see was not a gleaming tower on the horizon but simply a trick of the light that, thank heaven, pointed them in the direction of the tower. In other words, I would be very surprised if, later in his life, Hitler did not come to value the Ring, Tristan, and Meistersinger far more than he did Rienzi.

      And why shouldn’t he enjoy The Merry Widow? It’s a lovely way to pass a few hours. Shame on Hitchcock for associating it in many minds with a psychopathic murderer!

      Lastly, to be fair to all concerned, Rienzi does indeed have Meyerbeerian elements, and as “Meyerbeerian” is an adjective without an up side, Wagner would have had good reason to distance himself from it. (Admittedly, given that Wagner got some notable career assistance from Meyerbeer, he does rather go overboard in “DJiM” in singling Meyerbeer out for abuse. But which of us is without fault?) Besides, Wagner was speaking no more than the truth when, a few years later, he said that he knew of no other composer who had made so remarkable an artistic advance as he had in going from Rienzi to the Flying Dutchman. In the latter opera, virtually every bar sounds like the real Wagner of the near future, and Meyerbeer is nowhere to be found. The much more positive influence taking Meyerbeer’s place is Carl Maria von Weber, specifically Der Freischütz—and Dutchman already either matches or betters Freischütz in cohesion, spookiness, and high romantic drama.

      • Carolyn Yeager
        Carolyn Yeager says:

        Hitler is on record as saying he saw ‘Tristan und Isolde’ 40 times and ‘Der Meistersinger’ 100 times. No such mention of ‘Rienzi.’ So your thinking/reasoning is correct – about ‘The Merry Widow’ too — and it is refreshing to see.

      • Lucius Vanini
        Lucius Vanini says:

        What’s wrong with loving DIE LUSTIGE WITWE? Nichts! Outside of DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG (it’s DIE, not DER–the mastersingers are men but there are more than one!) the Widow is far more life-affirming than anything that Herr Richard wrote, as are those other great German-language comedies DIE FLEDERMAUS and DER ROSENKAVALIER.

        Wagner does seem to have disliked the self-styled “Chosen”–and there’s a strong case that Alberich was his personification of Jewry–but in DER RING he’s already philosophically heading for the destination to which Jewish Leftists today are guiding the West…. Remember, the tetralogy ends with DIE GOTTERDAMMERUNG–that is, a twilight of the higher beings. The last action is Brunnhilde’s self-immolation and the last leitmotif is “Redemption through Love.” Yeah, universal love–no barriers, no walls–meaning integration with all and sundry.

        I find DER RING a mostly boring interpretation of Schopenhauer, and enthuse only at mainly orchestral interludes therein–DR’s “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla,” DW’s “Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music,” SIEGFRIED’s “Forest Murmurs” and DG’s “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” and Funeral March.

        The great Richard did have a relapse of health with the Mastersingers before vanishing testosterone precipitated him into that sick expression of decadence PARSIFAL, to which again he was already on his way in DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN.

        Few things make me think better of Herr Hitler’s mind than that his favorite Oper (sorry, Wagner: “music drama”) was that life-loving and world-loving DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG, my own favorite among the Wagnerian works–not funny to me like FALSTAFF, IL BARBIERE or GIANNI SCHICCHI but such as to make my spirit float to the House’s ceiling, especially the last act….

  10. Peter
    Peter says:

    Maybe it is fortunate he died before the eventual destruction of Germany in two world wars and the pitiful state of Germany today. I think my deceased parents would feel similarly. When I listen to the music selection below it makes me think of the closing stages of WW II as Germany’s enemies were closing in on her. I think others have put that music to videos or movies as the war was nearing its end.

    One of my favorite Wagner pieces – “Wagner Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s death and Funeral march Klaus Tennstedt London Philharmonic”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXh5JprKqiU

    After a lifetime of being told of Jews high moral character in everything and fierce opposition to prejudice it appears the mask has fallen. Jews have popularized and made it acceptable to express hatred of Whites.

  11. Carolyn Parker
    Carolyn Parker says:

    Christianity is a Jewish invention. The older I get, the more clearly it presents itself as a useful tool, a toxin, and, ultimately, a means by which to immobilize the Goyim through religious manipulation and exploitation. I responded to a pro-Zionist Facebook feed, one attacking the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) Movement seeking sanctions against Israel for the continuing colonization of Palestinian lands. The Facebook feed was directed at college kids and BDS movements forming on campuses. The vast majority of the people commenting on the feed were Christians, speaking out in defense of “Isreal,” and using Christian scripture to do so.

    • TJ
      TJ says:

      “Some call it Communism, I call it Judaism” Rabbi Stephen Samuel Weiss, 1935

      So how many of these good Christians know what the good Rabbi spoke? Why don’t they know?

      Have they heard of Maurice Samuel or Marcus Eli Ravage? Or many others. Do they know that Jews want the White race removed from Earth?

      Is it remotely possible that some group has a lock on 95% of information? They need to be told. . .

      • Poupon Marx
        Poupon Marx says:

        The PREDOMINANT theme and belief of American Protestant, by the numbers:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I424cEN0vsQ

        Proudly, “I am an Israeli.” I grew up with these people. They are broken and walking zombies. Instantly re-programmable. This is Christianity today. Besides the huge amphitheater or these mega-church extravaganzas, they are televised and media savvy, multiplying their effort and effect.

        Realistically, of all the White people in the West, the majority are zombies and programmed to walk over the cliff. There is a middle group that can be “turned” and re-directed, awakened from their somnambulism. There are at most 15% of our people that are action ready, know the score, are fully cognizant and shorn of delusion and denial..

        While this reality might cause despairing hopelessness, one must remember that the American Revolution was conceived and led by a similar percentage. The other 35% assisted passively or relatively actively part time.

        • Leon Haller
          Leon Haller says:

          I’m a Christian, but not I hope one of the zombies. I wonder if your 15% figure isn’t too high, at least in the USA. I would be inclined to say no more than 5% are “aware and action ready”. But then I live in a progressive city/state, work with mostly proggies, and so might lack a balanced perspective (although I do try to keep up with national events and trends).

          • Pierre de Craon
            Pierre de Craon says:

            In all seriousness, Leon, is there any longer such a thing as a balanced perspective? Or if there is, how is one to determine its content or its permeation or its extent?

            Neither you nor I, I think, have any illusions about the media. They are today as thoroughly corrupted as they were during the very worst periods of Soviet rule. To all intents and purposes, every prominent figure in the print or electronic media or on the idiot box might as well call him- or herself Walter Duranty. Indeed, one may legitimately wonder whether the presence or absence of accuracy with regard to the information presented even concerns more than a handful on the receiving end nowadays.

            Nor in these times, unlike the Soviet era, have we yet seen the rise of a requisite number of reliable samizdat sources. Until they appear and, far more important, acquire some unshakable street cred, who in his right mind would confidently form his outlook on the basis of the table-pounding statements of such as P. Mark and Signor Vanini?

            Metaphorically, we are vision-impaired drivers trying to get home safely while engulfed by a pea-souper on a crowded road where half or more of our fellow motorists seem to be utterly inebriated. What’s more, our prescription spectacles no longer correct our sight to within shouting distance of 20/20. Thus, if we do manage to get home in one piece, ordinary prudence suggests that lots of changes ought to be made before we venture forth once more—assuming, that is, that Fauci, Biden, and their ilk elect to permit anyone, even the robotic vaxxed, to go outdoors ever again …

      • Carolyn Parker
        Carolyn Parker says:

        I would agree with you. Most stupidity in the world doesn’t stem from congenital conditions, it exists because the powers that be wish the masses to remain stupid. Similarly, most Jews appear to promote levels of ecumenicalism, universalism, racial egalitarianism, etc., for the rest of us that they do not practice themselves in regard to their own community in its relationships with the rest of humankind. These promotions thus can be perceived as social engineering based on the best interests of their own group: ecumenicalism, universalism, racial and religious egalitarianism serve them well if the broader society adopts these ideologies.

    • Seraphim
      Seraphim says:

      If Christianity is a ‘Jewish invention’ how would one explain the consistent and relentless opposition to and denigration of Christianity by its very ‘inventors’?
      Actually, denouncing Christianity is playing in the Jewish hands.

      • Sanjay P.
        Sanjay P. says:

        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.

    • Leon Haller
      Leon Haller says:

      Those people are brainwashed. But that does not mean that they speak for the essence of Christianity, nor that Christianity is false. And the notion that Christianity is a “Jewish invention” (except perhaps in the sense that Christ and Paul were Jews) is ludicrous and risible. I know many Jews, from liberal to all-but-white-nationalist. They would all burst out laughing at such a contention. The Jews were the ones who rejected Christ – and who have been doing so ever since. The followers of Christ, who mostly met artificial and gruesome deaths solely because of their fidelity, were hardly part of some plot to sucker the Gentiles. You have a particularly crude and caricatured view of the Faith.

      Perhaps a rough schema is in order:

      1. Is Christianity true or false?

      2. If false, is it (or could it be) nevertheless useful to Western Man?

      3. If true, does it entail race abnegation and Zionism?

      We Christians believe that Christianity in its essential claims is true. Therefore, we place it above love of race and antagonism towards Jews. But we argue further that true Christian adherence, first, requires truthfulness, and second, does not disallow patriotism (whether of family, tribe, city, nation or race). One can have both the Faith and the survival of the West.

      • Lucius Vanini
        Lucius Vanini says:

        LEON HALLER–
        You must be proud of the quintessentially Christian way the Catholic charities are making life pleasant for the myriad invaders of America coming over the Southern Border! They’re emulating their brethren in anti-White crime, in COMECE (“the Catholic Church in the European Union”), so that both countries of which I’m a citizen, Italy/EU and the USA, are blighted by the filthy institution to which you adhere….

        Well, when the professional liar known as the pope says that Italians are bad Catholics/Christians if they don’t welcome black African migrants, all of whom are needy, he’s only telling the truth. When fellow enemy of Europe Merkel says that her politics alone are consistent with Christianity, she too is only telling the truth. Hey, we shouldn’t think of ourselves–let alone place our interests above those of others–nicht wahr?

        Rabbi Saul of Tarsus threw a monkey wrench into the European self-preservation mechanism, effectively castrating masses of future dupes. It took some time, until Europeans became soft and decadent enough actually to practice Christian altruism, but it’s here now, and it surely is obscene!

  12. Swan
    Swan says:

    According to E. Michael Jones, Alberich represents Nathan Rothschild who steals all of Europe’s gold. I don’t know from what he based that on. Anyone?

    • Pierre de Craon
      Pierre de Craon says:

      Jones is engaging in wishful thinking. The moral and behavioral portrait of the character Alberich in “The Ring of the Nibelung” is very much of a piece with his portrayal in the thirteenth-century “Nibelungenlied,” wherein Alberich plays a central part. See also Brenton Sanderson’s apt comments in part 3.

      On the other hand, of course, most of the Jews’ complaints alleging bigotry and anti-Semitic caricature in Alberich and Mime derive from their uncomfortable recognition of their own lust, greed, hate, and envy.

  13. todd hupp
    todd hupp says:

    Wagner really had a deep understanding of the problem and consequences.Exceptional article.

    The Frankfurt School is now in full bloom in the USA – tragically and likely irreversibly.

    Zukerberg et al purchased the election. Accordingly the US Government is now largely under Jewish control: WH (Klain), DOJ,State,Treasury.

  14. John B.
    John B. says:

    Wagner Wagner. Just like many jewish composers he did not focus on melodies and catchy melodies which indeed Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and so on did have superb talent for.

    I do think think the recording of his work that sold the most copies is by a jewish conductor.

    A friend of a friend once offered the interesting theory or opinion that there is a parallel or indeed influence from Wagner on Freud. The struggle as such or something similar might be so.

    Indeed Dostojesky was worried of the whole Russian litteratur sector may become dominated by jews as such.

    And one may ask if dominance of sectors of culture and media from a group who’s traditional culture is much about being critical of the majority populations and often in conflict if one looks at strategy by jews in the field of media, advertising, academia, music industry and literature business.

    Quite often there is also a conflict of interest I suppose. Where many jews want in countries where they are a small minority, massimmigration, political correctness, no debate over crime and race or racial differences or demography and the like.

    In my humble opinion Mr. David Lane and Willian Pierce are two of the foremost writers in history so far. And I certainly disagree with a lot of their ideas (I do think nuclear wars are really bad and killing race mixed couples seems not a great political strategy although I do understand the hatred as such and also the idea of terrorism is something I Ama gainst, and with regards to David Lane, I do think his ideas about women and also robbing women away to the etno state seems a bit not to my liking or whatever).

    But these writers would never be known by average white people due to our political climate as such. And writing about them in a mainstream magazine or newspaper would be the end of careers.

    I guess now also Dostojevsky, Strinberg, Hamsun and Shakespeare are not PC any more. Are they even mentioning these greats of our culture in schools and at universities? Them having had opinions on what many, not all jews do does make them not PC I suppose.

    But I guess also Wagner had more extreme views on jews than these authors although I did read that he changed his views at the end of his life.

    Doesn’t Wagner look slightly East Indian, maybe a bit part gypsy or so-called tattare, but most likely to a very small degree. But that is just going by his looks what do I know…

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