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]