Schoenberg and Wagner

  - Comprehending the Incomprehensible -

It has been said that to understand Wagner one must be Jewish.  Well then
I can only hope to be enough of an honorary Semite that I will not go as
badly afoul as Hitler, who I recall once hearing allegedly had some Jewish
blood in him: just not enough to properly understand Wagner it seems.

Ever since Wagner's time when Hermann Levi premiered his Parsifal some
of the finest and profoundest interpreters of Wagner's music have been
Jewish.  All reports suggest that Mahler's Wagner had an extraordinary
burning intensity without equal, and amongst the admirers of his Wagner
interpretation he included the young Adolf Hitler.  One can get a glimpse
of the sort of intensity he commanded in the recording of Act I of Die
Walkeure by Mahler's pupil Bruno Walter, who was also of Jewish descent.
Wagner of great intensity can also be heard from Otto Klemperer, again
Jewish.  More recently of course there we have seen Solti, Levine, Maazel,
and Barenboim.  I was fascinated to learn that Claude Levi-Strauss'
favourite composer was Wagner and that he is again Jewish.

So why is it that it should pay to be Jewish to understand Wagner
properly? The answer is I think simple.  It is because it inoculates one
from degenerating into the simple minded understanding of Wagner from the
perspective of Rassentheorie (race theory) and in particular exclusively in
terms of his anti-Semitism.  It guarantees one can see so much more than
such vulgar tripe.  It guarantees one can see the essence of Wagner art
which remains so originally pure and idealistic.  It shows just how
completely and utterly irrelevant all anti-Semitism is to the proper
appreciation of Wagner's ART.

Schoenberg said of Wagner shortly after fleeing from the Third Empire to
America:

   When we young Austrian-Jewish artists grew up, our self-esteem suffered
   very much from the pressure of certain circumstances. It was the time
   when Richard Wagner's works started its victorious career, and the
   success of his music and poems was followed by an infiltration of
   his Weltanschauung, of his philosophy.  You were no true Wagnerian
   if you did not believe in his philosophy, in the ideas of Erloesung
   durch Liebe, salvation through love; you were not a true Wagnerian
   if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could
   not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic
   essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, Judaism in Music.'

   Wagner, perhaps not sure of his own pure Aryan blood, gave Jewry a
   chance: 'Out of the ghetto!' he proclaimed and asked Jews to become
   humans, which included the promise of having the same rights on German
   mental culture, the promise of being considered like true citizens.

   But it was not in the destiny of Jews to develop like Wagner desired.
   It was not our destiny to disappear, to meld and assimilate with
   Germans or any other people.

   What always happens with ideas when camp followers develop them also
   happens in the case of Wagner: if Wagner were relatively mild, so
   his followers were harsh; if Wagner gave the Jews the possibility of
   living like citizens, his followers insisted on nationalism; if Wagner
   considered only the mental and moral accomplishments of Jews, his
   followers stated the racial differences.

Indeed it is too easy to forget that what Wagner was really trying to do in
his essay "Das Judentum in der Musik" was to attack Myerbeer, whose music
was a runaway success before the musical public.  Wagner's attack on him
was like that of a Nono directed against a Lloyd-Webber.  Unfortunately
rather than just accusing him of merely making art subservient to financial
success Wagner had to ascribe this to his ethnic background, albeit in a
way which reflected his Marxist anti-capitalist thinking.  Marx wrote in
1843:

   The Jew has emancipated himself in Jewish fashion, not only, in that
   he appropriates financial power for himself, but also in that with
   him and without him money has turned into world dominance and the
   practical spirit of the Jews has become the practical spirit of the
   Christian world.

That is why Wagner writes in his essay "Das Judentum":

   Take part ruthlessly in this bloody fight of redemptive rebirth
   through self-annihilation, then we shall be united and without
   difference!

Not 'annihilation', but SELF-annihilation [Selbstvernichtung] not 'racial
cleansing' but becoming united in a common cause.  That is what Wagner's
essay "Das Judentum" is still all about, despite the angry polemical form
that it takes.That is also why Wagner wrote distancing himself from German
anti-Semitism which he recognised as being fundamentally alien to his
ideals:

   I stand my distance from the contemporary 'anti-Semitic' movement.
   Appearing in the next 'Bayreuther Blaetter' is an essay which will
   express in a manner how it has become spiritually impossible for me
   to relate to that movement.

Wagner's anti-Semitism differs fundamentally from that of Hitler's as does
his vegetarianism differs from that of Hitler's.  Hitler had of course
copied his vegetarianism from Wagner.  However Wagner's vegetarianism was
something he had inherited from Schopenhauer, who had in turn taken the
idea from Buddhism.  This vegetarianism went hand in hand with Wagner's
pacifism, his late opposition to German militarism, and the idea that all
forms of violence were barbaric eruptions of the Blind Will.  Indeed that
is the real significance of the episode in which Parsifal foolishly kills
a swan: it symbolises Wagner's opposition to all bloodshed whether against
man or animal.  T.S.  Elliot went so far as to proclaim Wagner art as
opening the path to the salvation of the West by the wisdom of Eastern
Philosophy.

In contrast to Schoenberg, Stirling Newberry previously wrote of Wagner:

>What is missing in Satoshi's commentary, because it is missing in Mann's,
>and in many other people's - is the actual connection between Wagnerism
>and Hitlerism.  The "ism" in both cases is intentional.

Despite all I have written there is indeed a deep connection between
Wagner-ISM and Hitler-ISM.  That much I cannot deny.  History shows that
and I cannot argue against that.  But what Schoenberg's statements and the
relevant quotation from "Das Judentum" makes clear is that there is also
a profound difference between Wagner and the hysterical Wagner-ISM of the
rabble that became his 'followers'.  Surely that mindless rabble, that
herd and mob was that which bleated 'Hail Hitler'.  That Schoenberg was
so capable of distinguishing between the two, was why he was still capable
of being inspired by that in Wagner which was so full of the innocent and
noble idealism of Wagner's original inspiration.

How Schoenberg's Dodecaphony evolved out of Wagnerian hyperchromatism
and his use of (to use Schoenberg's expression) unstable so-called vagrant
harmonies is a story which has been told often enough that I will not
repeat it.  What we do not realise often enough is how he is as much his
spiritual heir.  It is with this that I shall hail Schoenberg - not Hitler
- as Wagner's truest successor.  The one follower stands in a relationship
to Wagner not dissimilar to that of Moses to Aaron.  Like Aaron perverts
Moses' word so too did Hitler fundamentally pervert that of Wagner's.

Thomas Mann wrote of Wagner's Ring:

   Back to the origin, to the origin of all things and its music!  For
   the depth of the Rhine with its shimmering golden treasure, in which
   its Maidens flirtatiously inactivated - that was that most innocent
   original state of the world, untouched by greed and curses.  At once
   it was the beginning of music.  Not only of mythical music: the
   poetic musician would grant the very myth of music itself, a mythical
   philosophy and creation poem of music, its synthesis of a richly
   ordained symbolic world out of the flowing depth of the Rhine's E
   flat triad.

Of course Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron represents just that return to the
primordial origin.  It is a return to the primordial wisdom of the Old
Testament and to the figure of Moses alone in the vast desert.  Nothing
more could have been deeply and faithfully Wagnerian than that return to
the primordial origin.  There Moses reveals himself as the true spiritual
successor to Wotan.

Most remarkable of all is the presentation of Judaism from German
philosophical perspective deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
(both of whom Schoenberg had read).  God is presented in Moses as das
Nichts (the Nothing), because he cannot be 'represented'.  God is the das
Unvorstellbare, which translates only roughly to 'the Unrepresentable'.
Yet there is much more to this word than that.  It seems to have escaped
general notice that title of Schopenhauer's main work is "The World as Will
and REPRESENTATION", "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung".  Therein lies
the true philosophical meaning of the term 'representation' found in the
expression 'the Unrepresentable'.  In the philosophical sense of the word
here it could equally have been translated as the Unimaginable, the
Unthinkable, the Inconceivable, the Indescribable ('das Unbeschreibliche')
the Incomprehensible beyond the capability of the human mind of grasping.
In short it is Kant's 'in-itself' - that which is beyond comprehension by
the human mind - God Himself.

The people, the rabble and herd who Moses must leads do not understand his
teaching of the Incomprehensible, the Unrepresentable.  They ask:

   Worship? Whom? Where is he?
   But I see him not!
   Where is he?
   Does he look gentle or cruel?
   Point him out! We want to kneel down.
   We want to brings beasts forth to him,
   and gold, wheat barley, and wine!

Moses must make the people - the rabble - comprehend something
incomprehensible.  He must lead them in to something as empty and seemingly
barren as the vast desert, a metaphor of das Nichts, the vast Nothing out
of which Moses emerges and into which he must lead his people.  Here
Nietzsche's influence is felt most immediately.  In Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke
Zarathustra', Zarathustra speaks to the people (to Nietzsche the rabble,
the herd) in a marketplace where they await the appearance of a tightrope
walker:

   "Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the
   frenzy with which you should be inoculated? Behold I teach you the
   Overman: he is this lightning, he is this frenzy."

   When Zarathustra had spoken thus, one of the people cried: "Now
   we have heard enough about the tightrope walker; now let us see him
   too!" And the people laughed at Zarathustra.  But the tightrope walker
   believing that the word concerned him, began his performance.  ...

   When Zarathustra had spoken these words he beheld the people again
   and was silent.  "There they stand'" he said to his heart; "there
   they laugh.  They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these
   ears.  Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with
   their eyes? Or do they believe only in the stammerer?
   (from the Prologue translated by Walter Kaufmann)

In Schoenberg, Moses is the one who stammers and he can speak to the people
only through Aaron, his mouthpiece.  'Meine Zunge is ungelenk: ich kann
denken aber nicht reden/ My tongue is unwieldy: think I can but not speak'
says Moses.  To which the mysterious and terrifying voice from the burning
bush in the desert says: 'Aron will ich erleuchtern, er soll dein Mund
sein!/ Aaron shall I enlighten, thy voice shall he become'.

In the Schopenhaeurian-Wagnerian metaphysic of art, music alone of
all arts stood beyond the picture-representation.  It cut to the very
metaphysical essence of the Unrepresentable itself.  Of course this is
what Kandinsky's (a friend and contemporary of Schoenberg's as well as an
admirer of Wagner) abstract art tries to achieve - no longer was visual art
picture-representation but became akin to music in expressing the essence
of the Abstract-Unrepresentable.  That is why so many of his canvasses
are entitled 'Komposition'.  That is why so many people still react to
Kandinsky abstract art like the people in Schoenberg's Moses to the notion
of God as the Unrepresentable: 'but what does it REPRESENT?' they ask.
The answer is as desolate as the desert into which Moses leads his people:
it represents Nothing (das Nichts).

Yet it is to Hegel we owe the term the Absolute for the metaphysical
Unimaginable.  Along with it comes the belief that art could reach
the essence of the Divine, the Absolute, the Unrepresentable, the
transcendental in-itself of the cosmos that Schoenberg shares with Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Kandinsky - and hence with Wagner.  As Carl Dahlhaus has
shown in his his book 'The Idea of Absolute Music' it is only when the
term 'absolute' is used in this sense of THE Absolute does the idea of
'Absolute' Music become truly comprehensible.  Only then does the true deep
spiritual kinship between Schopenhauer and Wagner become fully visible in
its fullest, noblest and most idealistic vision.

Thus in Schoenberg's Moses und Aron we see an expression of the German
Spirit at its most idealistic as complete as in its expression in Wagner.
It is an expression of that Spirit which as Hans Sachs says will live on
long after the downfall any merely ephemeral 'Reich'.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney
[log in to unmask]