Wagner and Hitler

While his operas celebrate a mythical German past, where teutonic heroes like Siegfried with ‘noble’ values are idolised, ‘leit motifs’ form a defining part of his work. Leit motifs, are musical phrases and scales culturally attached to individual characters, places, ideas and races. To understand this, let us look at the opera ‘Die Meistersinger’, often touted as the most anti-Semitic of his works. The main character ‘Beckmesser’ is portrayed in congruence to many nineteenth-century anti-Semitic stereotypes. 

The high pitched nasal voice (inferior to the ‘deep’ German voice) the ‘foetor judaicus’ (Jewish stench), the ashen skin colour, and deviant sexuality associated with Jews are explicit in this work. Barry Millington, the author of article entitled “Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in ‘Die Meistersinger?” ‘Beckmesser’ is said to be the typical amalgamation of anti-Semitic characteristics: scheming, shrewd and not to be trusted. Millington states that Beckmesser is represented as the outsider from the very beginning of the play and “is made painfully and cruelly aware of this. 

He sings with an odd accent and disjointed rhythms, adding to his outsider status.” In Marc Weiner’s book ‘Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination’, he analyses physiological differences, according to Wagner, between the eyes, voice, smell, and feet of the Jew and of the Christian German. This notion is apparent in Die Meistersinger when Jewish ‘Beckmesser’ and ‘Eva’ who is “the purest of German maidens,” almost unite in marriage. Their unification warns the end of a pure German race, threatening ‘contamination’ by an inferior one (a continually recurring theme in other operas written by Wagner). It seemed as if Wagner was obsessed with this ‘fantasy about pure origin,’ which revolved around the desire for a pure, unified German state.

Anti-Semitic music notwithstanding, Wagner was also at the forefront of the political arena. In 1850 he wrote his most famous article entitled ‘Das Judentum in der Musik,’ or ‘Judaism in Music.’ His prejudice toward the Jewish people can be seen clearly through his writing. Wagner proclaims that “every non-Jew is viscerally repulsed by Jews.” He writes that Jews were incapable of original creativity, both in music and literature and had no connection to the German spirit, and were thus capable of producing only shallow and artificial music. His wife, Cosima Liszt, and several of his children turned the famed performances at Bayreuth, which Wagner founded during his lifetime, to a venue of oppression against Jewish artists. 

Wagner developed Cosima's anti-Semitism beliefs to an extent that derogatory references to Jews occur, on average, on every fourth page of her 5,000-page journal according to her biographer George Marek. Wagner helped hoist anti-Semitism out of dirty bars or scarcely read pamphlets and into the comfortable milieu of the middle class, said theater and literary scholar Jens Malte Fischer.  In his essays such as and ‘What is German?’ (1878) and ‘Know Thyself’, he writes against Jewish assimilation. Biographers like Robert Gutman note that in his final years, Wagner developed interest in the racialist philosophy of his dear friend Arthur de Gobineau, the belief that Western society was doomed because of miscegenation between ‘superior' and ‘inferior' races. Wagner was “always reading ‘The

The Ring Cycle features the dwarf character Aelberich, based on the dwarf of the same name in the German medieval epic poem The Song of the Nibelungs. He is a vertically challenged, sex-crazed villain whose theft of the gold at the beginning of Das Rheingold—the prelude to the Ring Cycle— leads to a variety of events.

During the Romantic Era, rising nationalism served as a catalyst for national pride and political movements. Wagner spoke and wrote about the importance of national pride, kindling fires of nationalistic sentiments of the aristocracy, coupled with his model of a pure German race.

Hitler’s infatuation with Wagner, and how it shaped his anti-semitic ideologies:

The Wagner family was closely associated to Hitler. In his younger years, Hitler befriended Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred and spent many evenings with the Wagner family. (This was, of course years after Richard Wagner had died). The family’s strong anti-semitic views, left an imprint on Hitler. The family endorsed the Nazi party soon after Hitler rose to power, Winifred and Hitler shared a close, long-lasting friendship, as is evident from their letters. Not only did Hitler love Wagner’s music, but he also had a strong connection with Wagner’s immediate family while in political office.

In essence, Hitler felt connected to Wagner and his music, fuelling his love for the ideas of Wagner. According to music historian Joachim Köhler, Hitler claimed in 1925 to have seen all of Wagner’s operas many times and spent his money down to the last penny just to be able to listen to his music. Supposedly, Hitler saw Tristan und Isolde at least thirty to forty times and knew much of the opera by heart, able to sing and hum it at a whim. 

This obsession is made apparent with Hitler’s support to the Wagner Bayreuth festival, possession of original opera scores, and the fact that he kept Wagner’s music scores in his knapsack during World War 1. Hitler himself admits his infatuation with Wagner, saying in Mein Kampf, “that from the very first time I saw a production of one of Wagner’s operas, I was enraptured by it.” This primary source supports the truthfulness of secondary accounts below written by men such as Rauschnigg and Hanfstaengl. In addition to Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf, he also spoke highly of Wagner to others. 

His words to Rauschnigg as recorded in the uncovering book ‘Hitler Speaks’: “I recognize in Wagner my only predecessor… I regard him as a supreme prophetic figure.” This quote provides the most compelling and accurate evidence for the connection between the  two men. It is safe to say that this was not a mere liking of a man’s music; this was a full-fledged idolatry. He, apparently, told one of his architects that Wagner’s music was the cause that inspired him to unite the German nation, just as ‘Rienzi' tried to do for the Roman state in one of Wagner’s works. (Observed by Hans Rudolf Vaget) According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s political confidant and pianist, full interweaving of embellishments, counterpoint and arguments were exactly mirrored from the prelude from the opera ‘Die Meistersinger’ during his speeches. Both Hitler and Wagner held racist views, wanted a pure Aryan race, were artists and politicians and feared they were of Jewish descent.

Hitler uses the word ‘Jewification’, originally coined by Wagner speaks of ‘egoism' as a trait pure Aryans reject in his autobiography. ‘Mein Kampf’ was also written on paper that had been supplied by Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred, one of Hitler's earliest supporters. The Wagners' magazine ‘Bayreuther Blatter’ published a barrage of anti-Semitic propoganda and even endorsed Hitler politically in 1923. The writer quotes an anecdote about Hitler in which he states that he is building his ‘religion’ out of ‘Parsifal,’ an opera which even Frederich Nietzsche, once a dear friend of Wagner, described as an abomination.

Authored by: Zoravar Mehta