Richard Wagner and Anti-Semitism

The composer Richard Wagner emotes both sympathy and disdain, depending on who you are talking to.

Wagner's music and lyrics were sources of inspiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (see here, here and here, among many others) due to the former's virulent anti-semitism. Wagner's hatred of Jews is without question.

Yet, there are many people - including a fair chunk of Jewish musicians - that have been trying to get people to stop thinking about Wagner's rage and start listening to Wagner's music. This includes the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1981, which played selections from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" to an audience that had mixed opinions.

With this in mind, here is an interesting piece by A.J. Goldmann in The Jewish Daily Forward about Wagner's opera "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg." This is the opera that Hitler claimed to have attended more than 100 times, and Joseph Goebbels called "the incarnation of our Germanness." That's quite the recommendation, wouldn't you say?

But seriously, Goldmann's piece cleanly deconstructs the opera and proves that people should listen to the beauty of Wagner's music. The history behind the opera and its composer is what it is - and it ain't pretty - but that shouldn't prevent a person from attending a performance. As Lydia Goehr, professor of aesthetics at Columbia University, put it:

"Art is not meant to be there just to make you happy. Go enjoy the music, and realize that sometimes the beauty of the music conflicts with the awfulness of the text."

I couldn't have said it better myself.