How can Richard Wagner's conceptual anti-Semitism be expressed
in half-seconds of music? Find out today on cultural critic theater!
tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/richard-wagner-racism-alex-ross
I don't know why that link isn't a link. Anyway, I doubt most of you read the piece,
so here's about a third of it:
Goal-oriented motion is the invariant characteristic of the classics. The composer states a home key (or “tonic”) and moves away from it, almost always to the key of the note a fifth above it (the “dominant”) and returns to the home key at the conclusion. The journey from tonic to dominant and back may be simple, as in the bridge of most popular songs, or tortuous and extended, as in a late Schubert sonata, but this forward-looking expectation drives the music forward. The great composers create suspense, irony, tension—the whole palette of human emotions—by delaying or temporarily diverting the ascent to the dominant and the descent to the tonic, but this framework (or “fundamental structure” in the term of the great Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker) always is there.
Regularity of meter at least at some level always is present in classical music. Mozart habitually writes phrases of irregular length, but we hear them as expansions or contractions of regular phrases. Frequently, the great composers create a higher-level meter that bears the listener on the journey to tonal resolution. The spiritual connotations of goal-oriented motion are profoundly Western; indeed, for this reason it is fair to think of classical music as the most characteristic art form of the West.
The soul’s journey to salvation, or the individual’s journey to redemption, are not pictured but rather recreated in classical composition. It is no accident that the authoritative thinker in modern Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, loved classical music (especially Bach), and ruled that the prohibition against listening to music during the Three Weeks before Tisha B’Av did not apply to “sublime” classical music but only to music of revelry. Among Western art forms classical music comes closest to Jewish time-consciousness, which recreates the past in the present through the public declamation of Torah in emulation of the Sinai revelation, the reliving of the Exodus at the Seder, and the remembrance of creation in the Friday evening Kiddush.
Even the secular music of the great classical composers evokes a biblical, i.e., Jewish, sense of time. As Franz Rosenzweig writes, “Revelation is the first thing to set its mark firmly into the middle of time; only after Revelation do we have an immovable Before and Afterward.” Pre-biblical time by contrast has no necessary direction and no internal direction; it is the time of peoples for whom the past is lost in mist and the future is the unthinking reiteration of the present. It is not a specific time, but only “once upon a time,” the unchanging repetition of life as it is and always will be. The pentatonic music of pre-modern peoples is inherently static (in fact, modern composers borrow from it to slow the march of musical time). Only with the memory of Sinai (or for Christians, Calvary) and the expectation of ultimate redemption does time take on internal differentiation and a sense of necessity. As R. Soloveitchik explains, “Time-awareness also contains a moral element: responsibility for emerging events and intervention in the historical process. Man, according to Judaism, should try to mold and fashion the future. That is exactly why he has been created as a free agent.” Time is not perceived passively, but rather constituted by human intent, which in turn allows for moral differentiation and judgment.
That is precisely what Wagner set out to subvert in his music, that is, our obligation to moral law as well as the constitution of time that arises from it. “Time is absolute Nothing. Only that which makes time forgotten, that destroys it, is Something,” he wrote in 1852 to Theodor Uhlig. In Wagner’s last opera a guardian of the shrine of the Holy Grail says the same thing in so many words: “Here time becomes space.” In other words, time ceases to be time.
Wagner’s anti-Semitism is explicitly racist, but it is also therefore metaphysical: He sets out to subvert not merely the concept of covenant, but the constitution of time demarcated by the Covenant and ultimate redemption.