Wagnerspectrum: Schwerpunkt Jüdische Wagnerianer

Von Udo Bermbach (Editor), Dieter Borchmeyer (Editor), Sven Friedrich (Editor) und Nicholas Vazsonyi (Editor)

Aufsätze zum Schwerpunkt: H. Warshaw: “No One Can Serve Our Cause Better Than You” - Wagner’s Jewish Collaborators After 1869 – D. Jütte: „Mendele Lohengrin“ und der koschere Wagner - Unorthodoxes zur jüdischen Wagner-Rezeption – C. Nöthlings: Wagner goes Jewish - Franz Rosenzweig und der Traum vom jüdischen Weltendrama – J. Le Rider: Otto Weininger - ein Frauen-, Juden- und Selbsthasser als Wagnerianer – I. von der Lühe: „Universitätsprofessor mit goldener Cigarettendose“ oder: „Man spürt nichts als Kultur“ - Alfred Pringsheim – S. B. Würffel: Theodor W. Adorno – A. Daub: „Ein allzu geheim gebliebener Wagner“ - Ernst Bloch als Wagnerianer – H. R. Vaget: Hans Mayer in Bayreuth – T. Pfleger: „Richard Wagner, ich hasse dich, aber ich hasse dich auf meinen Knien“ - Haltungen jüdischer Wagner-Dirigenten gegenüber Wagners Antisemitismus; ein Arbeitsbericht – M. Schmidt: Die Kehrseite der Ideologie - Zur „jüdischen“ Kunst Wagners – Aufsätze – U. Bermbach: Wagner und Gobineau - Zur Geschichte eines Missverständnisses – Besprechungen / Bücher – CDs / DVDs

• Sprache: Deutsch
• Herausgeber: Königshausen & Neumann
• Erscheinungsdatum: 30. Sept. 2014
• ISBN: 9783826080180

Buchvorschau

Aufsätze zum Schwerpunkt

No One Can Serve Our Cause Better Than You

Wagner’s Jewish Collaborators After 1869

Hilan Warshaw

The plethora of Jewish assistants and devotees surrounding Richard Wagner has long been a subject of special interest. Wagner himself frequently remarked on the phenomenon; most often, he found it expedient to treat the topic either with affected surprise or indignation. Cosima Wagner reports in her diary entry for January 13, 1879: Richard and I discuss the curious attachment individual Jews have for him; he says Wahnfried will soon turn into a synagogue!1

As Wagner was well aware, it was apparently paradoxical for the author of Judaism in Music to enjoy longstanding collaborations with such Jewish associates as Carl Tausig, Hermann Levi, Joseph Rubinstein, Angelo Neumann, and Heinrich Porges. Beginning in Wagner’s own lifetime, commentary on this phenomenon has often followed one of two distinct approaches. The first approach argues that for Wagner, the Jewishness of these individuals was a matter of relative insignificance, trumped by their value as collaborators, and Wagner’s personal affection for them. This reading was first advanced by Wagnerian apologists such as Julius Lang (who is further discussed below), and it has been reiterated by biographers from Curt von Westernhagen to Michael Tanner and Milton Brener. In the second, more critical interpretation, Wagner’s relationships with his Jewish associates were marked by exploitation and even cruelty; far from indicating any lapse or inconsistency in his anti-Semitism, their presence at Wahnfried was tolerated only insofar as Wagner was dependent on their efforts on his behalf. Proponents of this view have included Robert W. Gutman, Peter Gay, Paul Lawrence Rose, and Hartmut Zelinsky.2

As different as these two camps often are in their tone and underlying premises, they share a basic assumption: that Wagner maintained these relationships despite his colleagues’ Jewishness, and his own well-known attitudes about the Jews. The chief difference between the two readings, then, is one of perception: whether Wagner’s ability to overlook an individual’s Jewishness when it suited him is a sign of broad-mindedness belying his anti-Semitic pronouncements, or rather of opportunism and hypocrisy.

In this essay, I will argue for a third approach, which is also suggested in the course of my documentary film about the topic: namely, that after the republication of Judaism in Music in January 1869, Wagner associated with his Jewish colleagues not in spite of their Jewishness but, in large part, because of it. In other words, Richard and Cosima Wagner felt that their associations with Tausig, Levi, Rubinstein and others were practically and artistically advantageous, for reasons that were specifically attributable to their reactions to the republished essay.

The fact that Wagner had Jewish colleagues and adherents should not, in itself, be surprising. As David Conway, Leon Botstein and others have rigorously documented, 19th-century Jews were historically disposed to be deeply invested in the musical life of their time, whether the music was Wagnerian or not. In the so-called War of the Romantics between the Wagnerian/Lisztian and Brahmsian schools of composition, Brahms as well as Wagner was surrounded by numerous Jewish proponents and champions.3 It is primarily Wagner’s well-documented anti-Semitism that has caused his relationships with Jews to seem anomalous, then as now. And yet there is something qualitatively different here. Unlike for Brahms, a colleague’s Jewishness was almost never simply a personal detail for Wagner. It was a deeply relevant, often crucial, aspect of their relationship, one that Wagner deliberately drew on for maximum advantage to himself and his artistic enterprise.

As I have mentioned, I am speaking chiefly of the period from the republication of Judaism in Music in 1869 to Wagner’s death in 1883. For most of his life, until he republished the essay at age 55, Wagner was indeed capable of friendships with Jews in which their Jewishness was not a central factor. In the 1850 and ‘60s, Wagner’s correspondence with and about Carl Tausig and Heinrich Porges demonstrates no concern with the young mens’ religion; he attributes none of his personal impressions of them, either positive or negative, to their Jewish origin. Their Jewishness goes similarly unmentioned in the text of Mein Leben. After the essay was republished, however, a remarkable change took place: Wagner’s Jewish friends were now obsessively evaluated in light of their Jewishness – including Tausig and Porges, as well as most new Jewish acquaintances that Wagner made after this time.

Several factors had doubtless contributed to this elevation of Jewishness into a cardinal obsession. For one thing, Wagner was now living with the equally anti-Semitic Cosima. The Jews’ political status was also changing: in 1869, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck granted Jews full civil rights in all territories controlled by Prussia, a move which Wagner greatly resented. Most important, the republication of Wagner’s essay itself ineradicably changed Wagner’s personal relationships with Jews. Unlike its first pseudonymous appearance in 1850, Judaism in Music had now appeared under Wagner’s own name, expanded with a warlike addendum that considerably exceeded the inflammatory tone of the original work. From now on, no Jew who encountered Wagner could be ignorant of the sentiments he had signed his name to. My purpose here is to examine the ramifications of this new situation for Wagner as he continued to work and socialize with Jews for the remainder of his life.

II.

Wagner was surrounded by young male acolytes for much of his career, both Jewish and not, many of whom were invited to share his home. In many ways, the outlines of such relationships proved to be quite consistent, regardless of young man’s religion: these young admirers provided Wagner with intellectual stimulation and entertainment, as well as a corps of motivated and gifted assistants. With the Jewish disciples after 1869, however, there are noticeable and persistent differences in how the Wagners describe them, as opposed to their non-Jewish counterparts – telltale signs of a fundamental difference in kind.

The most noticeable of them may be the word touching. As evidenced by Cosima Wagner’s diaries, Wagner and Cosima found their young Jewish friends emotionally moving in a particular way that was unique to them. On July 2, 1878, we hear that Hermann Levi "touches Richard by saying that, as a Jew, he is a walking anachronism. [emphasis in the original] On August 1, A visit from the conductor Levi, by no means unpleasant, and as Richard says, in his Jewish way he is very touching. In 1879, again: In the evening Parsifal … While [Joseph] Rubinstein is playing, even singing quietly, and Levi listening with great emotion, Richard says softly to me, What touching figures they are! (April 10, 1879)

While this characteristic was most often ascribed to young Jewish musical associates, it was sometimes extended to the much larger network of Wagner’s Jewish donors and admirers. About Bernard Löser, a donor introduced to Wagner by Carl Tausig, we hear the following: Richard at the same time goes with Tausig to seek out the touching Jew Löser, orders cigars for him, and gives him his pamphlets in gratitude.4 (May 7, 1871)

As the first passage quoted above indicates, these Jews were touching because they recognized and suffered from the alleged curse of their Jewishness: the notion, which Wagner had outlined in Judaism in Music, that the Jews as a whole are condemned to creative sterility and outsider status. To Wagner’s mind, the Jews who sought out his patronage after the republication of the essay were the very definition of the exceptional Jews he had envisioned at the conclusion of the essay: solitary souls motivated to undergo the nearly impossible ordeals required to overcome the innate deficiencies of their Jewish character. In return, Wagner had promised them an open door: Without once looking back, take ye your part in this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment, then are we one and un-dissevered!5 He was as good as his word; Levi had become a frequent presence at Wahnfried, and Rubinstein’s touching plight sufficiently moved Wagner that he invited him into his home, where Rubinstein lived for most of the last 10 years of Wagner’s life. As in all human relationships, the conditions and premises of affection are as revealing as the fact of affection itself. The special tenderness Wagner felt towards his touching Jewish friends was directly linked to the fact that they seemed to have accepted his theory of Jewishness as a tragic misfortune – and accepted him as their best hope of redemption.

But the Jews in Wagner’s orbit were also individuals who could be profoundly helpful to him: because of their talents, professional position, financial resources, or a combination of these. To maximize such individuals’ potential for aiding his artistic enterprise, Wagner made strategic use of their insecurities and fears surrounding their perceived Otherness-the same touching predicament that called forth a certain unique sympathy. Critical outbursts against the Jews, then, were not anomalies, nor were they counter-productive to establishing the desired working relationships. Rather, they were critical tools in activating the Jews’ internalized feelings of inferiority, and thus motivating them towards greater adherence to what was presented as the best option for self-improvement.

The pattern had been set in Judaism in Music itself. After describing the objectionable qualities of the Jews, and the negative consequences of their social influence, Wagner issued an open call to the few exceptional Jews to support the regenerative work of deliverance, and in so doing, secure their release from the evils previously described. When the enlarged edition of 1869 appeared under Wagner’s own name, he felt free to say what he had only been able to hint at in 1850: namely, that the regenerative work that Jews should support was none other than the Wagnerian direction in art, which naturally epitomized all of the organic qualities that had been temporarily suppressed by the alien musicality of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn. In advocating for his art, Jews would join the noble company of Wagner’s Jewish friends: certain self-sacrificing, veritably sympathetic friends, whom Destiny has brought to me from out the kindred of that national-religious element of the newer European society … I could take courage from the knowledge that these cherished friends stand on precisely the same footing as myself.6 Both in 1850 and 1869, then, Wagner was speaking not only about the Jews, but to the Jews. Judaism in Music is, in its way, a classic example of a bipartite advertisement: a depiction of a dismal status quo, followed by a sales pitch for the solution that will solve all the woes previous described.

In 1869, the urgency of this pitch was considerably compounded by Wagner’s introduction of the open question of solving the Jewish problem by physical force, should the Jews prove incapable of contributing to our nobler human qualities. Significantly, Wagner expresses logistical doubts about such a solution, but no moral doubts:

Whether the downfall of our Culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element, I am unable to decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am unacquainted. If, on the contrary, this element is to be assimilated with us in such a way that, in common with us, it shall ripen toward a higher evolution of our nobler human qualities: then is it obvious that no screening-off the difficulties of such assimilation, but only their openest exposure, can be here of any help.7

The alternatives outlined for Jewish readers were stark: one might either join the few exceptional souls such as Wagner’s own self-sacrificing, veritably sympathetic friends, or one might be among the mass whose destructive potential merits violent ejection, although as Wagner points out, the political forces to accomplish this may not yet be in place.

Wagner gambled that a certain number of Jews would understand the essay in this light, and respond by being fervently motivated to serve his cause; and he was right. The same strategy – prodding the Jews’ insecurities in order to mobilize them to greater service – can be frequently seen across Wagner’s personal relationships with his Jewish adherents themselves.

A prime example of such a strategic interaction is Wagner’s correspondence with one of his key Jewish allies, Carl Tausig, soon after the republication of Judaism in Music in 1869. The republication had caused Wagner serious anxiety that he had sabotaged his own mounting popular success by reissuing the incendiary publication. Initially, it seemed that he had cause for concern; a new production of Lohengrin in Berlin was postponed due to the outcry over the article, and Wagner’s publisher reported that the scandal had somewhat detracted from the success of Rienzi at the Paris Opéra. Wagner was therefore gratified to receive the following telegram on April 7 from Tausig, who had just attended the long-delayed opening of Lohengrin in Berlin: "Colossal success of Lohengrin. All Jews reconciled. Your devoted Karl."8

For the previous ten years, Tausig – whom Wagner had first met as a radiant teenaged prodigy – had harnessed his renown as a pianist to aid Wagner’s cause. Both in Vienna and Berlin, he had introduced Wagner to wealthy supporters, arranged fund-raising concerts for Wagner, and popularized Wagner’s music through his own virtuosic piano arrangements. Recently, however, the two had fallen out of contact. Wagner’s response to Tausig’s message was a brilliant exercise in persuasion, aimed at confirming Tausig’s continued support – and hopefully enlisting him to become even more active on Wagner’s behalf.

After some warm words of thanks for Tausig’s splendid telegram, Wagner offered a detailed defense of his decision to reissue the essay:

"To see this old piece again may have been very painful for many people – and more especially for those who are totally innocent. I could have been spared all this, and they, too, could have been spared … But the unprecedented insolence of the Viennese press on the occasion of the Meistersinger, the continual, brazen lie-mongering about me … have finally persuaded me to take this step, regardless of the consequences."

What is particularly notable here, given his deep affection for Tausig, is the contrite tone. Nowhere else do we see Wagner conceding that his essay was very painful for Jews; nowhere else does he rush to explain what drove him to take such a rash step. Had Tausig meant to include himself in the ranks of All [the] Jews who were offended by the essay, but were now reconciled under the influence of the triumph of Lohengrin? If so – or if Wagner suspected so – his next move was even more audacious. Wagner continued:

"But I have now given some really intelligent Jew all the material he needs to give the whole question a new and, no doubt, beneficial twist, and to assume a highly significant attitude towards this most important of all our cultural concerns. I know there must be such a person: if he does not dare to what it is his business to do, then it is with immeasurable sadness that I shall have to concede that I was right to describe Judaism – or more especially modern German Judaism--as I did, and if I leave the description to stand, as I have done … I have already encountered a very great deal of good-naturedness, especially on the part of Jews. Let one of them show real courage, only then will I rejoice!"9

Wagner clearly hoped that Tausig would himself volunteer to be the really intelligent Jew who would defend him in the continuing fracas over Judaism in Music. It is worth pausing to examine the extraordinary pressure that Wagner here brings to bear upon the young man’s shoulders. According to the letter, should Wagner fail to find his hoped-for Jewish defender, it would prove in his mind that he was correct in his negative assessment of the Jews. If, on the other hand, someone (such as Tausig) agrees to issue a public apologia for the essay, the results would be highly beneficial; Wagner even dangles the hope that he may consequently revise his critique of the Jews in the future. (… and if I leave the description to stand, as I have done.)

Tausig knew that Jews who stopped actively supporting Wagner had found themselves publicly vilified. In his new addendum to the essay in 1869, Wagner had devoted considerable space to attacking the writers Berthold Auerbach and Eduard Hanslick, the musicians Ferdinand Hiller and Joseph Joachim, and other prominent Jewish figures. Wagner had once considered all of them close friends, just as he did Tausig; but they had all failed to show real courage– that is, to support him adequately – in recent years. (Wagner assumed that in all these cases, this was due to their indignation over the first appearance of Judaism in Music in 1850.) Tausig may well have wondered whether there would be personal consequences for him should he disappoint Wagner; in Wagner’s letter, the extended emphasis in the print, abrupt conclusion, and unaccustomed lack of a cordial salutation before the signature, all create an impression of sternness and even anger.

As this exchange suggests, Wagner was carefully scrutinizing his Jewish supporters to see whether they would continue to support him in the wake of the republished essay, or join the ranks of apostates like Joachim and Hiller. Always of a somewhat paranoid cast of mind, Wagner felt particularly insecure now, in the face of the adverse reactions to his essay in Berlin and Paris, among other cities. From 1869 onwards, Wagner’s Jewish helpers would have to prove themselves exceptionally devoted in order to keep his trust.

While Tausig did not take up the challenge of personally penning an apologia for Judaism in Music, he did make the text of Wagner’s letter available to Julius Lang, a Wagnerian propagandist in Berlin who was preparing just such a project. Lang’s pamphlet, On the Reconciliation of Jewry with Richard Wagner, published in 1869, points to Wagner’s friendships with Jews as evidence that there is nothing in Judaism in Music that ought to offend genuinely cultured and forward-thinking Jews. Among these friends, he mentions a highly respected art-loving banker, who has left a portion of his small savings to the Wagner Foundation; and of course the faithful Tausig, who has "with rare disinterestedness and self-sacrificing devotion delivered the wonderfully successful piano score of Die Meistersinger." Lang published the text of Wagner’s letter to Tausig at the beginning of the publication, presenting it as a prime piece of evidence for Wagner’s symbiosis with right-minded Jews. In passing the letter along to Lang, Tausig took up the gauntlet Wagner had flung down – to do his part to positively influence public opinion of Wagner’s essay, as one of Wagner’s Jewish friends.10

Far more important for Wagner’s cause was the fund-raising apparatus that Tausig soon set in motion on behalf of Wagner’s planned theater in Bayreuth. Tausig volunteered to mastermind the required funding effort, in addition to his already exhausting schedule as a touring pianist and pedagogue. He threw himself into Bayreuth with a real frenzy, noted Cosima.11 Tausig conceived the plan to finance the Bayreuth Festival by selling patron certificates through a Society of Patrons, and he willingly took on the duties of organizing and facilitating the project. He was simultaneously engaged in recruiting a special orchestra to give benefit concerts for Bayreuth under his baton. Tausig himself would undoubtedly have gone on to play a leading musical role in Bayreuth had he not suddenly died of typhus fever in 1871 at the age of 29, while on a concert tour in Leipzig.

This pattern of targeting Jews’ feelings of vulnerability figures prominently with Wagner’s later Jewish associates as well, especially Hermann Levi and Joseph Rubinstein. As the son of a rabbi, Levi was unusually sensitive to anti-Semitism; he admitted that the fraught situation of being a Jew in Wahnfried caused him to be excessively subservient. Levi’s protégé and admirer Felix Weingartner reported:

There was a continual spiritual and physical bowing that I found painful … One day, gathering up my courage, I asked my friend why he permitted even the Wagner children to be impudent to him, and in public, without protest. Levi gave me a grim look and stammered in a rough voice, Of course, it’s easy for you in this house, you – Aryan!"12

Joseph Rubinstein presented a particularly striking situation in this regard. In his first letter to Wagner in 1872, Rubinstein had immediately announced that he was a Jew seeking redemption:

I am a Jew. By telling you that, I tell you everything. All those characteristics noticeable in the present-day Jews, I too possess. My condition largely worsens, since I recognize that the Jews have to perish. How should I, however, not also perish, since I am myself a Jew? I cannot perish by baptism; only death is left to me. I have already tried to commit suicide. …

After thus baring his deepest vulnerabilities, he coupled his confession with an offer of contributed labor:

"Could I not be useful to you with the performance of the Nibelungen? I believe that I understand this work, even if not completely. I look to you, then, for help, for the help I urgently need."13

Clearly, this despondent young man had thoroughly assimilated the message of Judaism in Music. Indeed, when Wagner died in 1882, Rubinstein literally followed the essay’s call for Jewish self-annihilation by taking his own life. Until then, he served the Bayreuth Festival as an unstintingly devoted musical copyist, arranger, rehearsal pianist, and contributor of propagandistic articles to the Bayreuther Blätter.

Wagner’s ability to manipulate Jewish insecurity was widely remarked on at the time. The liberal critic Ludwig Speidel noted incredulously: Wagner treats the Hebrews like mangy dogs, and in return they follow with tails between their legs and lick his hands with pleasure … Certainly, these paradoxical phenomena belong to the amazing effects that derive from Wagner’s personality.14 The anti-Semitic theorist Eugen Dühring was even more acerbic, suggesting that Wagner’s Jewish patrons were buying an indulgence for the sin of their Jewishness:

Those of the Jewish tribe contributing to the Bayreuth Orpheus cult are hereby absolved of their Jewish characteristics. This is more than an indulgence. Herr Wagner seems to think he had attained the art, mediated through Wagner Societies and patronage certificates, of redeeming the Jews from themselves – something even Christ not once managed to achieve.15

Wagner himself was lucidly aware that with his Jewish supporters, he had cultivated a uniquely motivated and reverent corps of allies. Describing the impresario Angelo Neumann to King Ludwig II in 1880, he wrote that Neumann is strangely energetic and extremely devoted to me, in a way which – oddly enough! – I find now only among the Jews.16

In this period, Wagner was also collegial with a second tier of Jewish associates who did not have the same level of personal access to Wagner as Levi and Rubinstein did. Two of the most notable among them were the impresario Neumann, who brought Wagner fame and much-needed revenue through his touring Wagner Theater; and Georg Davidsohn, the owner and editor of the daily Berliner Börsen-Courier, and one of Wagner’s main representatives in Berlin.

There were several reasons that these individuals were not granted the heightened intimacy with Wagner that Levi and Rubinstein had. For one thing, Neumann and Davidsohn had spouses and children of their own; they therefore did not have the time, or perhaps also the inclination, to spend days on end in colloquies with the Wagners at Wahnfried. Indeed, Wagner’s friendships with both Porges and Tausig had lost much of their former warmth when those two young men became engaged. For his part, Levi’s attachment to the Wagners increased after his young fiancée died of tuberculosis in 1875. The Wagner household was something of a magnet for lonesome, emotionally vulnerable young men.

Neumann and Davidsohn also differed from the others in that they did not exhibit any evident insecurities about their Jewishness. Indeed, Davidsohn was not only one of the staunchest Wagnerians in Berlin, but one of the most implacable foes of anti-Semitism; his liberal paper was a leading scourge of the anti-Semitic political movement that arose in Germany in the late 1870s.17 Heated post-dinner discussions about the Jews, such as Wagner often treated Levi and Rubinstein to, would likely have held little appeal for Davidsohn or Neumann.

Wagner’s interactions with these important partners tended to be courteous and professional. Indeed, such was Wagner’s regard for Neumann that he was willing to consider allowing him to add Parsifal (originally meant to be seen exclusively at Bayreuth) to the repertoire of his touring Wagner company. The way in which the matter was resolved aptly illustrates the mutual trust between the two men. Neumann recalled:

"He was just about to sign the contract, when suddenly he paused. With his pen poised over the paper he sat there lost in reflection; then suddenly turning to me, he said in a low, gentle voice: ‘Neumann, I did promise you– and if you insist, I’ll sign the contract. But you would be doing me a great favor if you should not insist at this time. I’ve pledged you my word – no one shall ever have Parsifal but you.’

I answered: ‘Master, if you say I should be doing you a great favor, then naturally that is quite enough for me!’ Wagner wrung my hand and kissed me eagerly, saying with touching emphasis, ‘Thank you, Neumann, thank you!’ and so closed one of the most important incidents of my life."18

Wagner saw Neumann and Davidsohn relatively rarely. When they did visit, it was for a few full hours in which important decisions would have to be reached, often on matters of mutual financial advantage; in particular, Wagner knew that Neumann’s productions of his work had saved his family from the threat of ruin after the financially calamitous Bayreuth Festival of 1876. Relationships founded on such terms were relatively free from musing about personal matters – or dithering about Jewishness. It was not that Wagner and Cosima did not make the usual acidic anti-Semitic comments about Neumann and Davidsohn behind their backs; they did, although less so with Neumann. It was that they would never have dreamt of expressing such thoughts to their faces. Levi and Rubinstein – the house-Israelites, as Wagner called them – were a different matter.

I do not mean to suggest that any of these relationships were entirely exploitative on Wagner’s end, or that their benefits were one-sided. On the contrary, it is clear that all the Jewish individuals in question benefited greatly from their contact with Wagner. Neumann became a wealthy man through the success of his touring Wagner productions; Hermann Levi’s posthumous reputation rests chiefly on his having been the first conductor of Parsifal, in an interpretation long considered definitive; on Wagner’s recommendation, Heinrich Porges was installed as arts editor of the Süddeutsche Presse. The Wagners helped organize Joseph Rubinstein’s acclaimed series of Bach concert-lectures in Berlin, an accomplishment for which he was well known at the time. It is true that some of these gestures were also self-serving – Porges’ tenure at the Süddeutsche Presse gave Wagner a valued ally in the press, and Rubinstein was prevailed on to donate profits from his concerts to the Bayreuth fund – but that only supports the larger point: these were mutually beneficial working relationships between artistic professionals, all of whom knew where their best interests lay.

Of course, the most important benefit to Wagner’s colleagues, both Jewish and not, was the opportunity to collaborate and interact with an artist whom they recognized as the genius of the age. This is one reason that the soundtrack to my own film contains a great deal of Wagner’s music – in both the original scores and piano transcriptions by Tausig and Rubinstein. Without the experiential impact of Wagner’s music at the center of the story, viewers (or readers) cannot fairly judge what motivated these young artists to enter Wagner’s orbit.

Once they entered that orbit, it is not that religion, race or politics vanished as categories; it is rather that, as in most day-to-day work environments, such considerations were mostly subsumed in working together towards a common goal – which happened to be the production of artworks of transporting beauty and imaginative power. My point is that in working with Jews, especially those who were closest to him personally, Wagner was able to purposefully utilize the tensions resulting from his anti-Semitic statements and the memory of his essay, in order to further his artistic enterprise - which ultimately meant more to him than anything else.

Indeed, Wagner’s collaborations with Jews were artistically rewarding for reasons that were specifically tied to his collaborators’ Jewish origin vis-à-vis the legacy of his essay. This springs most vividly to view in the case of Hermann Levi and his involvement in Parsifal.

III.

Levi was selected to conduct the premiere of Parsifal as a result of Wagner’s contract with his patron, King Ludwig II, signed in March 1878. This document had specified that "the first performance [of Parsifal] … shall be given with the orchestra, the singers, and the artistic personnel of the Court Theater."19 That naturally included Levi, who since 1872 had been Kapellmeister of the Munich Court Theater.

It is well known that Wagner originally deeply resented the fact that the Jewish Levi would conduct the work; both he and Cosima repeatedly sought to convince Levi to undergo baptism before the premiere. In 1880, Cosima had noted in her diary, a letter from the conductor Levi evokes the remark: "I cannot allow him to conduct Parsifal unbaptized, but I shall baptize them both [Levi and Rubinstein], and we shall all take Communion together."20

What is far less well known is that the Wagners eventually concluded that Levi was an ideal conductor of the work – not in spite of, but because of, his Judaism. In an extraordinary letter that Cosima wrote to Levi in the summer of 1887, she sought to reassure him that she no longer cared whether or not he were baptized:

"You don’t need any other [religion], and the fact that you serve [Christianity] despite your misery makes you her most chosen servant … You have devoted yourself with your whole heart to our cause and done it powerfully … The way nature has made you, no one can serve our cause better than you. I doubt whether the whole of Act Three of Parsifal, for that matter, whether the whole of Act Three can ever again sound as it did under your direction."21

This is a remarkable admission. For Cosima, the spiritual struggles that Levi had experienced as a Jew in Bayreuth had ideally predisposed him to interpret the longing for redemption endemic to Parsifal.

Levi himself shared this assessment. He wrote to Cosima in 1888 about his plans for the following year’s Parsifal production, which he would once again lead:

"Indeed, I have the feeling that I will manage it better than any other [person], and this not despite the fact, but because I have had to take the detour of great suffering and every kind of self-torment to attain what others, the luckier, are given in the cradle."22

Those who witnessed Levi’s performances of Parsifal consistently describe the deeply felt reverence with which he conducted the work. Cosima and Levi were not the only ones to directly link this quality of Levi’s interpretation with his Jewishness. According to Levi’s rabidly anti-Semitic assistant at Bayreuth, Julius Kniese, "Levi – as Wagner has often written of Jews in general – acts as if Parsifal is unfathomable."23 But for Cosima, who assumed control of the Bayreuth Festival after Wagner’s death in 1883, this was part of the point. Parsifal was intended to be a work with an otherworldly mystique. Levi’s outsider status as a Jew uniquely qualified him to appreciate the exalted nature of this artistic sacrament.

Looking back on the convoluted intrigues leading up to the Parsifal premiere, it is clear that this growing realization – that Levi’s Jewishness would motivate him to view the work as a redemptive experience of sacral value – helped to finally persuade Wagner to accept Levi as the conductor, baptized or not.

The broad outlines of Wagner’s attempts to resolve the problem of Levi’s inconvenient Jewishness are well-known: between 1878 and 1881, Wagner and especially Cosima tried on numerous occasions to persuade Levi to undergo baptism. The most egregious incident was on June 29, 1881, when Wagner showed Levi an anonymous letter demanding that he [Wagner] keep his work pure and not allow a Jew to conduct it.24 As if that were not sufficiently inflammatory, the letter also hinted that Levi and Cosima