Wagner's Argument On Jewish Artists And Their Music

Question 1: One of Wagner’s main arguments against Jewish artists and their music were that the musicians could only produce inferior derivations of pure European art they could never fully express themselves. Wagner seemingly held the belief that Jewish musicians were not able to fully comprehend modern European languages because they were “merely learnt” by Jewish artists and therefore “have remained…a foreign tongue” (Wagner, 7). Wagner’s impression was that Jewish artists works’ expressivity was limited due to the fact that, from Wagner’s perspective, Jewish artists didn’t have the capacity to fully understand the complexities of modern European languages and therefore lacked the ability to properly use these languages to convey profundity,
Wagner’s descriptions of Semitic dictions also manifest in a more physical form during one of his most famous groupings of operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in the form of a dwarf, Alberich. This character in his opera is generally accompanied by extremely dissonant chords and the libretto sections for Alberich are typically not as well pronounced as other characters’ vocals (Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen Score and Libretto). Because of this Alberich, for most people, is seen as an embodiment of Wagner’s prejudices and serves as a physical type of evidence that he believed Jewish artists’ nature, appearance, and tonal qualities of both their speech and music were grating to the senses of true
One of the larger similarities was that Nazi ideology as well as Wagner both thought Jewish art was merely a facsimile of true European culture because Jewish artists, even if they were German or any other variety of European, “would always think and act like Jews... [therefore] Jews could never really pursue an authentically German culture, but only contaminate that culture with their own innately Jewish sensibility” (Steinweis, 17). This ideology was expressed by Wagner throughout his work, Das Judentum in der Musik, because he felt that Jewish musicians were unable to create true European art because their Jewish qualities seeped into every aspect of their works, making their art instantaneously not European. Nazi beliefs mirrored this way of thinking as they thought it was important to separate themselves from any cultural aspect or artist that they considered to be “contaminated by alien influences” (Steinweis, 17). Another stark similarity between the views of Nazism and Wagner’s personal beliefs was that Jewish musicians were seen as an aesthetic blight on German culture. Wagner’s views on Jewish musicians’ aesthetics applied to their displeasing sounds, among other complaints, in their works that could only be the product of their Jewish ancestry trickling into their art and eliminating any actual semblance of German aesthetics. According to Wagner,