AS regards his literary productions, that which provoked most discussion and engendered a good deal of acrimonious hostility towards him was “Judaism in Music.” No one knowing Wagner, and writing any reminiscences of him, no matter how slight, could omit reference to this subject. Any such treatment would be incomplete, though it would be easy to understand such omission, for no friend of Richard Wagner would elect to put him in the wrong, nor care to admit that his attitude towards the descendants of Abraham, in certain phases, was as unreasoned, and perhaps as ungenerous, as that of earlier anti-Semitic agitators of the fatherland. However, an impartial critic must confess that in Wagner’s attacks on the Jews and their treatment of art, he has, in much that he says, force and truth on his side. Unfortunately, much of the cogency of his reasoning is weakened in the eyes of many by the introduction of the names of two of his prominent contemporaries, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, both of Hebraic descent. His attack is put down to personal spite, jealousy born of anger at the success of his rivals. Never was charge more groundless. Richard Wagner was high above such small-minded enmity. His was a nature incapable of mean, paltry envy. Rancour was not in him. Yet how could an attack upon “Judaism in music” be maintained without indicating Semitic composers, in whose works supposed shortcomings and spurious art were to be found? That he was not animated by any personal motive I am convinced, and that the things he wrote of lay deep, deep in his heart, I am equally persuaded. Finding in me a partial antagonist, he debated the question freely. Perhaps, too, it was a subject impossible of exclusion from our discussion, since, when he came here (London) in 1855, or three years after his Jew pamphlet had been published, the press spared not its sneers and satire for a man who only saw in the grand composer of “Elijah” “a Jew,”[7] the man Wagner, whom “it would be a scandal to compare with the men of reputation this country (England) possesses, and whom the most ordinary ballad writer would shame in the creation of melody, and of whose harmony no English harmonist of more than one year’s growth could be found sufficiently without ears or education to pen such vile things.”

To understand this “Jew” question thoroughly, one should remember the admiration, the just admiration, in which Mendelssohn was held in this country. He was the idol of English musicians. That he should have been “assailed” by Wagner because of his Hebraic descent was unpardonable. This was the spirit of hostility with which the larger proportion of the press received him, seeing in him the personal enemy of the “Jew” Mendelssohn. And thus it happened that references to this question were continually being made, and discussions, occasionally of an angry character, were thrust upon us. What Richard Wagner wrote in 1852, the date the paper was first published, he adhered to in 1855, and what is more, in 1869, when he was master of the situation, he somewhat pertinaciously appended a letter to the original indictment, from which he did not recede one step.

When Wagner had almost attained the zenith of his fame, at a time when his weight and genius were admitted, he then deliberately placed on record that years of his earlier suppression and ostracism from great musical centres were due, and due alone, to the power wielded by the Jews, and their determination to keep his works out of sight where possible.

The article, “Judaism in Music,” was originally published in “Die Neue Zeitschrift,” under the nom de plume of “Freethought.” At the time the journal was edited by Franz Brendel, and when the subject-matter of the article is known, it will be admitted that the editor was courageous, and perhaps no one will be surprised at the hostile acts which followed. Poor Wagner seems to have been much troubled at the difficult position in which he had placed his friend. No sooner had the article appeared, he told me, than about a dozen of Brendel’s co-professors at the Leipzic conservatoire sent forward a petition to the directors of the Institute urging the dismissal of the editor, but, though the signatories of the document were such names as Moritz Hauptmann, David, Joachim, Rietz, Moschelles (all Jews), Brendel retained his post. Of course there was no attempt at withholding the name of the real author; it was at once admitted. It was a bold act to first publish the paper in Leipzic, for though Richard Wagner’s birthplace, it had received, as it were, a Jewish baptism from the lengthened sojourn of Mendelssohn there.

Certainly the article contained enough to create enmity on the part of the Jews. It opened with an assertion that one has an involuntary and inexplicable revulsion of feeling towards the Jews; that, as a people, there is something objectionable in them, their person repellant, and manner obnoxious. Now when it is remembered that Wagner’s daily visitor during his first sojourn in Paris was Dessauer, a Jew, that the man who brought about his own death for love of Wagner was a Jew, and that the music-publisher Schlesinger, his friend, was also a Jew, it will be confessed that this was a startling charge to come from him. I must add that Wagner always insisted it was not a personal question, and pointed out that some of his staunchest friends were Jews.

Then he further asserted, in the “Judaism” pamphlet, that it mattered not among what European people the Jew lived, he was always a foreigner, and our wish was to have nothing to do with him. This, again, was surprising, for Wagner was not slow to admit the loyalty of the people of Shiloh to the government of the country in which they were domiciled, and there is no doubt they are eminently patriotic, calling themselves by the name of the country in which they live. Indeed, it cannot be contended that the Jews are one nation; they are many.

Wagner’s antipathy towards the Hebrew people was, he felt, partly inherited by him as a German. He knew them to be observant, discerning, energetic, and ambitious, yet he could not put away from him an instinctive feeling of repugnance, and could not understand why the “Musical World” and the London press should so severely flagellate him because of his attitude towards the Jews. He found the Semitic race regarded here in an entirely different manner from what it was in Germany. Here it was much the same as in France. Civil disabilities had been removed, and the Israelites had proved themselves as great patriots as English Christians, one, Mr. Solomons, filling the post of alderman of the city of London at the time Wagner was here. This Mr. Solomons had been, with others of his co-religionists, previously elected a member of Parliament, and Wagner used often to express his wonder how a man waiting for the advent of the Messiah could sit in a house of Gentiles. Wagner marvelled, too, how the citizens of London could permit the Jews to amass such a large proportion of the wealth of the country, but he soon came to admit the force of the argument, that special laws having been enacted against them, preventing the acquisition of land, denying them the professions, and restricting them to certain trades, it was unreasonable, after having driven them to mean occupations, to reproach them for not having embraced honourable professions. I pointed out to him that in bygone centuries, when the Germans were barbarians, this much-despised people had produced poets, men of letters, statesmen, historians, and philosophers, all, too, of such brilliant genius as would add lustre to any galaxy of modern luminaries. He was struck by this, and, as his bent was art, fully admitted the poetic fancy and genius of the harpist David, the imagination of Solomon, and other of the old Hebraic writers.

And yet he would insist on the truth of his own assertion in the pamphlet. “If in the plastic art a Jew has to be represented,” he said, “the artist models after an ideal, or, if working from life, omits or softens those very details in the features which are the characteristic of the countrymen of Isaiah.”

As regards the histrionic art, he laid it down that it is impossible to picture a Jew impersonating a hero or lover without forcing a sense of the ridiculous upon us. And this feeling he felt of an actor, irrespective of sex. It would not be difficult to destroy this argument now: the names of Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, Patti at once cross the mind. He asserted that their strength in art lay in imitation and not in creation.

In speech, too, the Jew was offensive to him. The accent was always that of a foreigner, and not of a native. The language was spoken as if it had been acquired, as something alien, and had not the ring of naturalness in it; for language, he argued, was the historic growth of a nation, and the Jew’s mother tongue, Hebrew, was a dead language. To the Jew, our entire civilization and art had remained a foreign language. He could only imitate it; the product, therefore, was artificial; and as in speech, so in song. “Notwithstanding two thousand years of contact with European peoples, as soon as a Jew spoke our ear was offended by a peculiar hissing and shrill manner of intonation.” Moreover, he contended, in their speech and writing there was a wilful transposition of words and construction of phrases, characteristics of an alien people, also discernible in their music. These racial characteristics which Wagner asserted were repugnant, were intensified in their offensiveness in his eyes by an absence of genuine passion, i.e. strong emotion coming deep from the heart. In the family circle he allowed the probability of the Jews being earnest and impassioned, yet in their works it was absent. On the stage he would have it that the passion of a child of Israel was always ridiculous. He was incapable of artistic expression in speech, and therefore less capable of its expression in song; for true song is speech raised to the highest intensity of emotion.

It will not be difficult to call to the mind the names of celebrated Hebrews, great as histrionic artists, who at once appear to confute this statement; and for my part, one name is sufficient, viz. Pauline Viardot Garcia, though it will be admitted, on closely examining Wagner’s feeling, there is a vein of truth in it, which grows upon one on reflection.

And then Wagner turns towards the plastic art, and examines the position of the Jew under that art aspect. He states as his opinion that the Hebrew people lack the sense of balance and proportion, and in this he sees the explanation of the non-existence of Jewish sculptors and architects. Now it is regrettable that Wagner should have committed himself to so faulty a statement. The sculptor’s art was not practised by the Jews, because it was prohibited by the Mosaic law, and to this day strict Hebrews would not fashion “any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.” But Wagner was of opinion that the Jew was too practical to employ himself with beauty, and yet he was unable to explain the Jew’s acknowledged supremacy as a connoisseur in works of art.

In such a general indictment, it is hardly to be expected that Wagner would have omitted the vulgar charge of usury, nay, he even went so far as to assert that it was their chief craft. This, I told Wagner, was hardly generous or fair on his part. By persecution and restriction of the Jew to certain trades we had driven him to the tables of the money-changers, and then charged, as crime, the very vice persecution had engendered.

Nor was he less severe towards the cultivated Jew, charging him with a desire to disown his descent, and wipe out his nationality, by embracing Christianity, but whatever his efforts, he remained isolated in a society he did not understand, with whose strivings and likings he had no sympathy, and whose history and development had remained indifferent to him.

With such convictions, strong and deep, it follows that Wagner would not allow that Hebraic tonal art could be acceptable to European peoples. The Jew, he said, was unable to fathom the heart of our civilized life; he could not feel for or with the masses. He was an alien, and at the utmost, the cultured Jew could only create that which was trivial and indifferent to us. Not having assimilated our civilization, he could not sing in our heart’s tones. He could compose something pleasant, slight, and even harmonious, since the possibility of babbling agreeably, without singing anything in particular, is easier in music than in any other art. When the Jew musician tried to be serious, the creative faculty was entirely absent; all he could do was to imitate the earnest, impressive speech of others, and then the imitation was of the parrot kind, tones, without the purport being understood, and occasionally exhibiting an unconscious gibberishness of utterance. Now this seemed to me the denial of pure feeling to the Jew, and so I sought to get from Wagner precisely what he did mean by his charges on this point in the “Judaism” pamphlet. Music, I urged, was the art of expressing feelings by sounds; did he deny feelings to the Semitic people? “No.” Then it is only the mode of utterance, I urged, to which you so strongly object. But he would not wholly subscribe to this view, though he confessed it was an important element in the question. His view was, that the true tone poet, the genius, was he who transfixed in immortal tones the joys and sorrows of the people. “Now,” said he, “where is the Jew’s people to be found, where would you go to see the Hebrew people, in the practice, as it were, of unrestrained Judaism, which Christianity and civilization have left untouched, and where the traditions of the people are preserved in their purity? Why, to the synagogue.” Now if this be admitted, Wagner has certainly made out a strong case. Truly, the folk melody proper of the Hebrews is to be found in the song service of the synagogue, and a dreadful tortuous exhibition it is. As Wagner said, “it is a sort of ‘gargling or jodelling,’ which no caricature could make more nauseous than it is in its naÏve seriousness.” There was the proper sphere for the Hebrew musician, wherein to exercise his art, and when he attempted to work outside his own people’s world he was engaged in an alien occupation. The melodies and rythmical cadences of the synagogue are already discernible in the music of Jewish composers, as our folk melodies and rhythm are in ours. If the Jew listened to our music and sought so dissect its heart and nerves, he would find it so opposed to his own cult, that it were impossible for him to create its like from his own heart; he could only imitate it. Following up this reasoning, Wagner argued that the Hebrew composer only imitated the external of our great composers, and that his reproductions were cold and false, just as if a poem by Goethe were delivered in Jewish jargon. The Hebrew musician threw the most opposed styles and forms about, regardless of period, making what Wagner called, with his usual jocularity, a Mosaic of his composition. A real impulse will be sure to find its natural expression, but a Jew could not have that, since his impulse would not be rooted in the sympathies of the Christian people. Then he enters into a description of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, or of the men and their music. Of Mendelssohn he says:—

No one, judging dispassionately, will contend that Wagner has exceeded the legitimate limits of criticism. It is not dogmatism, since he appealed to the reasoning faculty and adduced proof in favour of his deduction. The context of the article naturally imparts additional force to his statements. Mendelssohn is credited with the highest gifts, natural and acquired, and yet falls short in the production of a masterpiece that appeals direct to the heart, because by ancestry and surroundings he has stood without the pale of our European civilization, and consequently has not assimilated the feelings of the masses.

In his observations upon Meyerbeer he says:—

This criticism upon Meyerbeer is caustic and unsparing. Yet even now public opinion has testified to its veracity. It is not making too bold a statement to say that no musician of taste, no musician—it matters not of what nationality or school—of to-day will accord Meyerbeer that exalted position he occupied when Wagner had the temerity to show the sham and unreal art in the man. At that time, now nearly forty years ago, Richard Wagner suffered severely for his fearless and outspoken criticism. Personal jealousy was freely hurled at him as the paltry incentive of his article. I frankly admit, with an intimate acquaintance of Wagner’s feelings regarding Meyerbeer, that he despised the “mountebank,” hating cordially the thousand commercial incidents Meyerbeer associated with the production of his works. Schlesinger told me indeed of well-authenticated instances where Meyerbeer had gone so far as to conciliate the mistresses of critics to secure a favourable verdict. It can easily be understood that Wagner could not help feeling contempt for such a man, for when he himself came to London in 1855, he absolutely refused to call on any single critic, notwithstanding I impressed upon him how necessary and habitual such custom was. The result we know. He offended them all.