Vienna’s moral dilemma regarding Richard Wagner

Viking Fusion

2 years ago

VIENNA – Known as much for his music as his antisemitism, Richard Wagner and his towering musical legacy present a dilemma for Vienna and its visitors. Cancel him? Embrace his music but acknowledge his bigotry? It is a dilemma for admirers, critics, and scholars alike.

The juxtaposition in this city of Wagner with another of its adopted sons, Mozart, is striking. Mozart is part of Vienna’s brand. Wagner? Not so much.

Andrea Winklbauer has been curating exhibitions at the Jewish Museum of Vienna for 20 years. Her exhibit “Euphoria and Unease” in 2014 traced Wagner’s story and his impacts on Jewish people in Vienna.

The title of the exhibition referred to the euphoria people feel for his music and, simultaneously, unease for his legacy and connections to Nazism, she said. Wagner believed the Jewish people should be destroyed.

On one end of the spectrum is Arnold Schönberg, a Jewish composer in the late 1800s, who found Wagner important to his own work. He took what Wagner had started in a completely new direction. Winklbauer said Schönberg could be considered one of Wagner’s many fans.

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In the 1900s, every part of cultural production was influenced by Wagner, she said, including work being done by theoreticians, musicians, painters and architects. Wagner’s impacts are still seen in opera and music today, from the way operas are viewed to the featuring of his music in films. Wagner’s music is seen in films ranging from the 1900s with Birth of a Nation to the 21^st century with Sonic the Hedgehog.

In the lobby of Hotel Royal sits the piano Wagner used when he composed *Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg*. The hotel is two minutes from St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the center of Vienna.

Wagner even influenced staging. Before Wagner, operas were performed with a theater’s lights on. This changed with Wagner’s opera, The Ring, in the mid-1800s.

“He led the lights [to be] turned off in his opera house,” Winklbauer said. “It was not common to turn the lights off. He forced his audience to focus on the stage and the thing that was happening there.”

Even 174 years after his death, Wagner’s antisemitism is still being debated, as well.

Winklbauer said in Israel, it is controversial to listen to Wagner, though people still do. Even outside of Israel, Wagner’s antisemitism is brought to the forefront when debating the morality of listening to his music.

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“Many of them say music is one thing and his antisemitism is another thing,” she said. “One should not mix them and enjoy the music and forget the rest.”

Winklbauer has different views on Wagner, however, saying that he is partly “responsible for the Holocaust.”

“His reputation and the high esteem of everyone in art? He also brought antisemitism on the level of which it was accepted,” she said. “I think without him antisemitism would have been there too, but many people who were antisemites later would have had to feel ashamed to some extent.”

She said Wagner’s status as “the godfather of antisemitism” is a cause of what eventually became the Holocaust.

Wagner’s life and legacy pose a recurring question in the arts, which is, can one separate the artist from the artistry, the man or woman from his or her music? Wagner’s towering status as a musical genius demands a reaction, but so do his antisemitism, narcissism, and misogyny.

–Emma Bellantoni