Mezzotints in modern music /

by James Huneker

I

If it had been hinted a quarter of a century ago that in Richard Wagner’s veins there flowed Semitic blood, roaring laughter would have streaked critical Europe. The race Wagner reviled in speech and pamphlet—although he never disdained its financial generosity—the hated Jew, daring to claim kinship with him, might have set in motion the mighty spleen of the master, and perhaps the world would be the poorer for another Das Judenthum in der Musik. Wagner’s hatred of the chosen race is historical. Benefits ever forgotten, he never lost a chance to gibe at Meyerbeer, to flout some wealthy Hebrew banker. Yet gossips have been at work subjecting the Wagnerian pedigree to keen scrutiny. There is a well-defined legend at Bayreuth, at Leipsic, that Wagner was the natural son and not the stepson of Ludwig Geyer, his mother’s second husband. Of course this is not so, for it would make Wagner a half Jew, the actor Geyer being of Jewish descent. Wagner, they say, resembled him more in features, tastes and temperament than he did his putative father, the worthy police magistrate.

A musical authority, whose name I withhold by request, called my attention to the curious fact that the portrait of Wagner’s father does not hang upon the walls of Wahnfried. Perhaps as Geyer was the father Wagner best remembered he did him the honor of placing his picture in juxtaposition with his mother’s in the Bayreuth home. There is no other sound evidence that may be pressed into service for this fugitive theory. Friedrich Nietzsche, after the rupture with Wagner, openly called him a Jew born in the Judengasse—the ghetto of Leipsic—and this latter assertion happens to be true. Another hot-headed hunter of degeneration, Heinrich Pudor, makes the same statement.

In critical circles there seems to be a disposition to avoid challenging these facts for they asperse the memory of a good mother. Mr. Krehbiel laughs at the story as silly, summoning as witness the fact that Wagner’s elder brother resembled him in a striking manner. I place little credence in the rumor, believing it to have originated with Nietzsche and revived later by Pudor. There is much in Richard Wagner’s polemical writings—his almost insane hatred of the Jews—and in the sensuous glitter and glow of his music that suggests the imagination of the Oriental. Some of it is certainly unlike any music made by a German—indeed, to me, with their vibratile rhythms, their titanic and dramatic characterization, the Wagner plays suggest the Celt, for the Celt, as Matthew Arnold wrote, has natural magic in his poetic speech, and magical in their quality are the utterances of Wagner.

“Was Wagner German at all?” asks Nietzsche, a rabid hater of the Christ idea, who first threw Schopenhauer overboard, only to do the same for his Wagner worship. He continues: “We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner he has learned to imitate much that is German—that is all. His character itself is in opposition to what has hitherto been regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician! His father was a stage-player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the ‘Life of Wagner’ is fable convenue, if not worse. I confess my distrust of every point which rests solely on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride enough for any truth whatsoever about himself; nobody was less proud; he remained, just like Victor Hugo, true to himself even in biographical matters—he remained a stage-player.”

Naturally, all that Nietzsche writes about Wagner may be challenged, although he is fairer to the great music-dramatist than Max Nordau. Nordau really borrowed Nietzsche’s denunciatory thunder, and then abused the sadly stricken philosopher for having assailed the musician. Altogether a very Nordau-like proceeding.

I should like to believe, but cannot, that Schopenhauer ruined Wagner. This is one of Nietzsche’s favorite contentions. The fact is, the artist was stronger than the philosopher in Wagner. The reflective man in him was generally overcome by the man poetic. Witness Tristan and Isolde, which was composed, as Wagner confessed, in direct defiance of his pet theories. Even the pessimism of the Ring never crowds out the dramatic power of the work. Who would wish to cut from Die Meistersinger Hans Sachs’ beautiful monologue? It is the passing of a cloud over the shining sun. All thoughtful humans are pessimistic at times, but the strong man and woman soon tire of the cui bono and find work near at hand. Wagner was caught in the currents of his time, though he really escaped many metaphysical vortices. That he was any more a Christian than a Schopenhauerian at the end of his life I doubt. Wagner was primarily an artist and, as an artist, could not help seeing the artistic possibilities in the superb ceremonial of the Roman Catholic Church; could not help feeling the magnificent story of the Christ; could not escape being touched by the beauties of pity, of redemption, and by the Quietist doctrines of Buddhism filtered through the hard brain of Arthur Schopenhauer. All these elements he blended dexterously in Parsifal, and we know with what result.

Keep in your mind that Wagner the artist was a greater man than Wagner the vegetarian, Wagner the anti-vivisectionist, Wagner the revolutionist, the Jew hater, the foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, and greater than Wagner the philosopher. It is a mistaken partisanship that attaches to his every word deep significance. He dearly loved paradox, and his versatility was such that he wore many masks. Not that I doubt his sincerity, but the enormously emotional nature of the man, his craving for artistic excitement, his agitated life often led him to write and speak in misleading terms. Wagner was not a Christian; he was not a passive Buddhist—far from it; he was no lover of the Jewry, and his pessimism, like Schopenhauer’s, was thin skinned. Both men were desperately in earnest and both enjoyed life—one in execrating it, the other in works of beauty.