Wagnerism and Stockhausen Syndrome On the Concert Program
“[Felix] Mendelssohn has shown us that a Jew can have the richest abundance of specific talents, be a man of the broadest yet most refined culture, of the loftiest, most impeccable integrity and yet not be able—not even once, with the help of all these qualities —to produce in us that deep, heart-seizing, soul-searching experience that we expect from art.”1 These words were published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik2 (“New Journal of Music”) in 1850 as part of an article called Das Judentum in der Musik (following Davon Conway’s convention: “Jewry in Music”). The article, signed by K. Freigedank (“K. Freethought”), is now considered a watershed moment in the history of German anti-Semitism. It may strike contemporary readers as strange that an article published in a music magazine—whose circulation never exceeded 2,000 subscribers—would now be seen as a landmark precursor to the racist nationalism that gripped Germany in the 20th century. But the attack on Mendelssohn was also aimed at the inclusive and liberating nationalism of the late Enlightenment Vormärz, the period of German history which preceded the failed revolution of 1848. Mendelssohn, born into a highly prominent Jewish family and baptized Christian at age seven, was a leading force of German music in the 1840s. His position reinforced that socially and culturally prominent Jews were so incorporated into German culture that they, as in the case of Mendelssohn, could also be enthusiastic cultural nationalists. Felix Mendelssohn—whose grandfather was the Jewish enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn— launched the revival of public interest in Bach through a performance of the Matthäus-Passion and was the composer of Paulus, an oratorio which begins with the stoning of St. Stephen by the Jews. Freigedank outed himself in 1869 as Richard Wagner, with a somewhat toned-down republication of the essay. For Wagner, something
Friday October 1
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