7 Pro and contra Wagner
The Wagner problemInSearch for a MethodSartre says of Paul Val ́ery that he is ‘a petit-
bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit-bourgeois
intellectual is Val ́ery’ (Sartre 1968 : 56 ). The case of Richard Wagner
gives us the analogous ‘Wagner was a resentful, vicious anti-Semite, but
not every resentful, vicious anti-Semite was Wagner.’ In the light of the
Holocaust it is, however, not enough to leave it at that. Anti-Semites in
nineteenth-century Germany – who included a significant proportion of
the German population, including Karl Marx – should not be equated
with real Nazi perpetrators or fellow-travellers, but neither should they
be seen as wholly blameless. At the same time, even though context
cannot excuse everything, one should take account of the differing per-
formative effects of texts and artworks in differing historical situations.
What does make Wagner a real problem in relation to the questions
posed by the present book is his main contribution to the ideology
of the Holocaust, the reprehensible essay, ‘Judaism in Music’ ( 1850 ),
which he insisted on re-publishing and explicitly defending against crit-
icisms in 1869 , thereby compounding the damage. The effects of the
essay’s odious contentions persist into the Nazi period, when Jewish
music is banned because it was supposed to involve a ‘Jewish’ musical
essence of the kind Wagner invokes in the essay.
Were it not for Wagner’s anti-Semitism in this essay and other writ-
ings, such as the essay ‘Modern’, there would be little reason to regard
the intense controversy generated by his work as meaning that it should
be rejected as morally indefensible, even where it is anything but morally
attractive.Das Rheingold, for instance, is remarkable for having not one
character who is in any way admirable. However, the following example
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