Was Richard Wagner a Racist

Answer 1

The vast majority of opinion is that his operas were not racist, but a very small minority believe that at least one, Parsifal, was racist. It really is a personality thing, especially mixing up the man with his works. The link below will help explain, especially under 'Racism and Nazi appropriation'

Answer 2

As a composer, he continues to be an issue. That issue is hot in Israel. Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism throws a considerable shadow over his person and his work.

Definitely. As far as we know, he first expressed anti-Semitic views only in his late 30s. It is not clear why he started doing so. The usual assumption is that it had something to do with his horrendous experiences in Paris about a decade before, when he was trying to make a career writing operas. The leading opera composer in Paris at that time was the German Jew Giacomo Meyerbeer, who tried to help Wagner around 1840 - mostly without success. This lack of success seems to have convinced Wagner that Meyerbeer was secretly working against him, perhaps out of jealousy of a possible rival. Wagner is then supposed to have extended his antipathy towards Meyerbeer to his race.

Whether this is true or not, it's fairly clear that Wagner was not an anti-Semite before about 1850. In his youth he had a crush on his elder sister's friend Leah David, and in Paris he befriended the Jewish scholar Samuel Lehrs, of which he later recalled to his even more anti-Semitic wife Cosima that it was "one of the most beautiful friendships of my life."

He expressed his anti-Semitism in print and verbally, in public and in private. His most notorious publication is the 1850 essay "Judaism in Music", which contains scurrilous remarks on the innate offensiveness of Jewish mannerisms, especially their mode of speech. He reprinted this essay in 1869, which cemented his reputation as one of Europe's leading anti-Semites. He also wrote other essays containing this topic. His private expressions of anti-Semitism are recorded in the two volumes of his wife's diaries, which begin in 1869, and in many of his letters.

Many great artists were anti-Semitic: Chaucer, Luther, Dürer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Mussorgsky and T.S. Eliot, to name a few. The difference between Wagner and the others just named is that they gave overt expression to their sentiments in the work for which they are justly remembered. One of the most well-known examples is Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice in which Shylock's unfair treatment is seen as being justified because he was a Jew. The character Fagan in Dickens' Oliver Twistis a very unsympathetic portrayal, full of what were regarded as Jewish stereotypes.

Wagner never did this in his work. Some scholars today have tried to show that his operas and music dramas are covertly or conceptually anti-Semitic, with limited success; many, if not most, scholars do not hold this view. One of the first to do so was Robert Gutman in his Richard Wagner: the man, his mind and his music. He devotes two chapters to showing how the fundamental idea behind Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, is that of racial (as opposed to cultural) anti-Semtism: the "pure blood" of the (supposedly Aryan) Grail knights is in danger of being "infected" by the evil magician Klingsor (purportedly a standin for Jewish characteristics). A more recent attempt is Marc Weiner's Richard Wagner and the anti-Semitic imagination, which tries the same argument for all of Wagner's late operas, adding that Wagner's own audiences (remember that anti-Semitism then was respectable in many quarters) would have understood and approved the implicit anti-Semitic stereotypes allegedly embodied in the characters of Mime in the Ring, Beckmesser in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and (as we've just seen) Klingsor in Parsifal. Both of these have been heavily criticised by reviewers, who show that they rely more on the writers' own assumptions than on anything in the texts of Wagner's actual operas, and that the evidence Weiner in particular uses does not support his argument.

The reason that Wagner's anti-Semitism has attracted so much attention is that he was one of Hitler's favourite composers. This raises more questions: why isn't there the same reaction to Bruckner, for example, who Hitler certainly loved, even more so than Wagner, according to some? Why is Wagner's music banned in Israel when (to the best of my knowledge) that of Richard Strauss, Franz Lehar and Carl Orff (especially his Carmina Burana) aren't - despite the fact that these three lived in Hitler's Germany and were to some degree complicit in the Third Reich?

Answer 3

yes he was a racist, he was also anti-semantic even though he was born in a Jewish family.