The Importance of Being Unfaithful to Wagner

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 4 · 25 February 1993

From Michael Tanner

Edward Said’s article (LRB, 11 February) allegedly reviewing various books on Wagner, but actually written with a very different subject in mind, is so amorphous that it is hard to deal with it any more coherently than it is written.

A few factual points. Said refers to Wagner’s ‘15 operas’, while I’d have thought that it was a minimum qualification for writing on him that one knew he composed 13. Said writes of ‘ “Young Siegfried”, the germ from which The Ring of the Nibelung gradually emerged’. But whatever the germ was, it certainly preceded ‘Young Siegfried’, which Wagner only wrote after ‘Siegfried’s Death’, when he had realised that there was too much in that work that needed explaining, and which itself was preceded by several plans. Said writes that Wagner’s ‘obsession with water dominates all his operas – Tristan, the Ring, the Dutchman and Parsifal especially’. I can’t readily call to mind an obsession with water in Die Walküre or Siegfried, let alone Tannhäuser or Die Meistersinger. Admittedly, the first act of Tristan takes place on board a boat; by Said’s standards that may well qualify as obsessional.

Said thinks that Wieland Wagner’s revisionist stagings’ at Bayreuth were ‘followed variously there and elsewhere by Patrice Chéreau, Götz Friedrich, Ruth Berghaus’. But he fails to note that while Wieland was intent on realising his grandfather’s concept of the ‘purely human’ which die dramas expressed, Chéreau and the rest have all been dedicated to deconstructing them, locating them in the time they were written, or in the future, but emphatically not to being more faithful to Wagner than he was to himself. It is a fundamental difference. But Said hardly seems to be au fait with Wagnerian productions. He apparently thinks that the iconoclasts are a brave little bunch of rebels, whereas in fact they represent the increasingly dreary orthodoxy, and ‘faithful’ productions are very much the exception. And his praise for Hermann Prey’s Beckmesser in the current Met production of Meistersinger is, bewilderingly in the context, praise for something closer to Wagner’s idea than ‘the neurotic, black-suited Shylock figure regularly trundled out’. Black-suited, yes, since that is appropriate to a town clerk; but I have never seen a production in which Beckmesser was a Shylock figure. When and where were or are they to be found?

While expressing agreement with Nattiez’s advocacy of ‘infidelity’ to Wagner, both in production and in conducting, Said claims that ‘the sheer beauty and force of the music give coherence to the experience of seeing the music dramas staged. This is clearly what moved and impressed exceptional Wagnerians like Proust, Thomas Mann and Mallarmé.’ But how many experimental interpretations did they see and hear? Non sequiturs of this kind sprout at such a rate in Said’s article that one is left in a kind of fog.

Light, of a kind, at last penetrates when Said gets on to Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution. This absurd book has been sufficiently dealt with elsewhere. But Said’s individual contribution to its critique is to attack it as a Palestinian, and his article ends – it is clearly Said’s telos – with an attack on Israel and its treatment of Palestinians, including those who are at present barely surviving in no man’s land. However sympathetic one may be to them, and to Said’s grievances against Israel in general, surely a review of books on Wagner is not the place to expound his views. ‘Nebulous, obsessive, overstated, impractical and imprecise’ is how Said characterises Wagner’s ideas about water. It is also how one might fairly characterise Said’s views about Wagner, and the whole of his thinking in this shoddy piece, until he arrives at the one subject that concerns him, by which time Wagner has – to continue the aqueous metaphor – evaporated.

Michael Tanner
Corpus Christi College,

Vol. 15 No. 5 · 11 March 1993

From Alexander Rose

I am writing in response to Professor Edward Said’s review of my father’s book, Wagner: Race and Revolution (LRB, 11 February). Professor Said has made a number of factual mistakes, as well as some rather excited accusations. First, Paul Lawrence Rose is not at Haifa University – he is currently based at Pennsylvania State University, following his move from the University of Toronto. Said finds it difficult to keep his emotional outbursts in check. He accuses Rose of endorsing ‘both the Iranian (and other Muslim) authorities who wish to ban The Satanic Verses, and those many historical victims of Western culture who advocate expunging Dead White Males and their views from academic curricula’. This amateurish attempt at portraying Professor Rose as a narrow-minded, censorious, politically-correct academic only illustrates more clearly Said’s worrying propensity to resort to name-calling and other childish games.

Said expresses concern for my father’s ‘tragic legacy as a survivor of the Holocaust’, and describes him as being an Israeli. In fact, and unfortunately for Said’s argument, Rose was born in Britain. Said just cannot keep himself from indulging in tub-thumping exercises on behalf of the Palestinians, even in a review ostensibly about Wagner. By asserting that Rose is an Israeli with an obsessive hatred of Germany, Edward Said is trying to equate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Nazi genocidal policies. As he says, ‘every Zionist leader of the Left, Right or Centre … was in favour of ridding Palestine of Palestinians, by all means necessary, force and bribery included.’ Said thus implies that Israel plans the systematic extermination or expulsion of its minorities by a method similar to that of the Nazis. Said criticises Wagner: Race and Revolution as ‘all too easily [collapsing] art, history, genocide into each other’. Perhaps Edward Said could heed his own advice.

Alexander Rose
Magdalene College, Cambridge

Vol. 15 No. 6 · 25 March 1993

From Edward Said

Had he confined himself to correcting an uninteresting typing error in my review of several books on Wagner, Michael Tanner would have done something marginally useful (Letters, 25 February). Instead he goes on to produce a bully-boy letter which is about the silliest and most bad-tempered piece of pedantic turf-guarding by an aggrieved and mean-spirited so-called professional expert that I’ve read in a long time. Mostly he just blathers on about how I shouldn’t be allowed to write about Wagner, no doubt thereby telling us he’s the one who ought to have done it. Enraged by these unedifying thoughts, he totally misses the point of what I did say: that given Wagner’s vast output and its even vaster criticism, trying to decide what is ‘essential’ about him is a difficult, if not impossible goal to realise. Hence my remarks about the need for imagination and taste (infidelity) in thinking about and producing Wagner. The water fixation that I mentioned, Tanner brushes aside rather recklessly; yet the merest acquaintance with the operas – 14, if one includes Die Hochzeit, not 13 as he alleges – shows a considerable attention to water. I didn’t say ‘all’, I said ‘most’ of the operas: besides, when the irascible Tanner says, again recklessly, that he can’t recall any water in Walküre, he typically passes over the opening moment of the opera, Siegmund’s ‘Ein Quell! Ein Quell!’, after which Sieglinde offers him not bread, not wine, not love, but, yes, water: ‘Labung biet ich dem lechzenden Gaumen: Wasser wie du gewollt!’ Walküre opens with a thunderstorm and ends with a magic fire, precisely the pattern that not I, but the ingenious Matthais Theodor Vogt, discerns in Wagner’s work. Yes, and Siegfried has water too, as when Siegfried in Act I looks in the stream (‘zum Klaren Bach’) to discover that he isn’t related to Mime, and in Act III Brünnhilde makes much of that very same stream. As for Tristan, the foolishly mocking Tanner may wish to consult Susan Sontag’s superb essay on the opera. ‘Wagner’s Fluids’, published some years ago in this very paper.

Since he can’t get any of the small points right, Tanner botches the slightly bigger ones a lot more. I said that Wieland Wagner started a trend in Bayreuth away from late 19th-century naturalism; this was followed (as in ‘coming after’, not ‘copied’) by many other directors, using many different methods, but all in directions away from 19th-century naturalism. Tanner can’t deal with this at all (one supposes him still to be counting the operas and checking for references to water, stymied by the question of how many references make up an obsession) and he is just as incapable of figuring out what to do with Nattiez, Mallarmé, Proust and Mann, whom he can’t quite seem to place. To Mallarmé and Proust, Wagner was avant-garde.

But his main complaint seems to be my ‘telos’ (note the fancy word), which was my account of Paul Lawrence Rose’s book. In the first place he is quite wrong to argue that it has been ‘sufficiently dealt with elsewhere’. What an odd thing to say, since I was reviewing the book in the LRB and not ‘elsewhere’. Imagine what would happen to authors if a review ‘elsewhere’ were thereafter to disqualify the book for comment ‘here’. Here is where I was discussing Rose, not elsewhere and this, our by-now hopelessly confused Wagner tyro cannot rationally accept. Actually I thought that bad as he was. Rose was worth discussing since he brings up the question of Wagner’s politics, something about which Tanner literally ventures nothing. If a book suggests that Wagner is totally anti-semitic, should not be thought of as writing anything but anti-Semitic hateful music, and therefore should not be performed in Israel, surely a reviewer is entitled actually to report the argument and then go on to connect the argument with similar practices, those identical political practices of denial and exclusion, that exist in Israel? Ever so anxious to guard against infringements of his little piece of territory, Tanner continues to bluster, arrogating entirely to himself the right to decide what is or is not appropriate to reviews of books on Wagner. Never mind that Wagner speaks about these political, metaphysical, aesthetic matters at enormous length; never mind that many (but not enough) critics have talked about them too. What Tanner wants is only his laundered (note the water fixation) and specialised Wagner, with canons and orthodoxies imposed by critics like Tanner. Who appointed him anyway?

The fact is that Tanner is precisely the regressive and literal-minded purist decreed by Cosima to be a guardian at the Wagner shrine, a mentality which my whole review was directed against. Banish everything except what was declared orthodox at Bayreuth, implies Tanner. This puts him in the general fundamentalist category occupied by Paul Lawrence Rose, except that Rose, while wrong-headed about the music, is able to lake seriously the proposition that Wagner is a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, with much to say to contemporary audiences. No, says Tanner, we want just the things we’re told to want by the official Wagner dogma, and damned be the rest.

With reference to Alexander Rose’s letter, only two points need to be made. One, everything I ascribed to Rose is in his book and was given in my review as a direct quotation. Two, the jacket of the copy I was sent for review identifies Paul Lawrence Rose as Hecht Professor of History at the University of Haifa in Israel. I cannot be responsible for the way Rose chose to identify himself in Wagner: Race and Revolution. Appendix B, called ‘Wagner in Israel’, is identified as being written for a Jewish and Israeli audience.

Edward Said
Columbia University, New York

From Paul Lawrence Rose

It’s not every day that the author of a reasonably scholarly book on Wagner can find himself described in the LRB (11 February) as a ‘Khomeini of the arts’ who endorses the Islamic ban on The Satanic Verses. Edward Said seems to be so unhinged by an appendix in my book, Wagner: Race and Revolution, which supports the banning of public performances of Wagner in Israel that he jumps in his usual illogical way to the assumption that I would favour a universal ban on Wagner. Such a ban would be not only unenforceable, but ridiculous. I took pains at a meeting of the New York Wagner Society on 25 February to emphasise that I was in favour of performing Wagner outside Israel and that I did not subscribe to the opinion that anyone who liked listening to Wagner was a covert anti-semite. Nor did I claim there – or in my book – that there is only ‘one’ message in Wagner, as Professor Said alleges, but rather that an awareness of the hidden anti-semitic agenda in the operas is essential to a full understanding of their creative meaning and power.

Such a ludicrous invocation of Khomeini may inspire objective readers to wonder about the soundness of Professor Said’s often expressed opinions on Orientalism and the Palestinian issue. In his review he bangs on quite irrelevantly about the evil Israeli victimisation of the innocent Palestinians. He seems to be under the illusion that Zionist references to the possible ‘transfer’ of the Arab population of Palestine are comparable to the expulsion of the Jews from Germany canvassed by Wagner in 1869, as well as by the mainstream of German anti-semites in the 19th century. I would have thought it blatantly obvious that there can be no comparison between the ‘transfer’ of a German-Jewish population which was devotedly loyal to the German state and Zionist consideration – often under conditions of war – of the transfer of an Arab population which was in large part the sworn enemy of the Jewish state. Moreover, transfers or exchanges of hostile or irredentist populations have been a valid solution of international conflicts in this century and have frequently been approved both by the League of Nations and by the United Nations.

Edward Said’s real aim, I think, is to convince Western opinion that the Arabs’ misfortunes are as grievous as those of the Jews in this century. He cannot bear to allow the Jews the singular suffering of their ‘transfer’ and ‘deportations’ during the Holocaust. Hence, the four hundred Arab Hamas deportees are transformed by Professor Said from terrorist enemies of Israel (and indeed of all Jews) into latterday unoffending ‘Jews’ deported by the ‘Judeo-Nazis’ of Israel. In this magical process, Professor Said conveniently forgets those inconvenient Arab proposals to ‘transfer’ Jews not only out of Arab lands and out of Israel, but also out of Europe. These proposals were made long before any Arabs left Palestine as refugees from Zionist settlement: it was Professor Said’s Palestinian brethren who launched the riots to drive out the Jews in 1920, and who carried out the massacres of Jews at Hebron and elsewhere in 1929. And it was the Mufti of Jerusalem who met with Himmler and Hitler to urge them on to the murder of European and Middle-Eastern Jewry alike. There is indeed continuity between Wagner’s idea of expulsion and the policy of ‘transfer’ in the Middle East, but the continuity is to be found in Palestinian Arab mentality rather than in Israeli policy.

Paul Lawrence Rose
Centre for Research in Anti-Semitism,

Vol. 15 No. 8 · 22 April 1993

From Yitzhak Laor

Paul Lawrence Rose (Letters, 25 March) tries to make himself clearer by saying that he wants to confine Wagner’s banning ‘only to Israel’. Then he goes on: ‘I took pains at a meeting of the New York Wagner Society … to emphasise that I was in favour of performing Wagner outside Israel.’ What a pain. Had this not been a symptom of a much vaster political phenomenon, I wouldn’t have bothered commenting on it; but it is yet another example of how our real life here is being kept, mainly by American Jews, as a Museum for Jewish Suffering, or Archive of Jewish History. To put it more bluntly: we are their instrument to fulfil their national fantasy.

One can find very similar reactions in different discourses. One can hear American Jews justify all sorts of ‘historical necessities’ that we ‘have to pay’, as if we had been sent here on some kind of mission on someone’s behalf. Sometimes they go so far as to claim that Israelis can’t determine the future of the colonial conflict in the occupied territories, because the territories are the property of ‘the Historical Jewish People’ (whatever that may mean).

Professor Rose might (or might not) go to any American opera house to see a Wagner performance, while living his American life, and refrain from doing so during his ‘idealistic life’ in Haifa, ‘realising the Zionist dream’. But what about ‘us’? Haven’t we the right to live in a real Israel, to judge for ourselves the rights and wrongs of watching Wagner (or buying pork, or using public buses on Saturdays, or choosing the kind of matrimonial ceremony we want and the religion and nationality of our spouse)? Is it because we are living tombstones of ‘Jewish History’, or ‘victims of Professor Said’s Palestinian brethren’, as Rose, vulgarly, put it in his letter, using again that old worn-out narrative to capitalise on the Israeli-Palestinian colonial conflict in the sixth year of the Intifada, when there isn’t too much doubt about who are the Davids and who the Goliaths, not any more.

Since the cruel, unlawful, stupid deportation of the ‘Hamas members’ (and who proved their membership, Professor Rose?) there has been an extreme escalation of violence here: dozens have died, including many innocent Palestinian children, including innocent Jews. Who needs enemies, with the friends we have?

Yitzhak Laor
Tel-Aviv

From Peter Best

Paul Lawrence Rose says there can be no comparison between the transfer of Palestinians from Israel and the transfer of a German Jewish population that was ‘devotedly loyal to the German state’. The relative loyalties of the German Jews and Israeli Palestinians can help explain their own responses to events but not why the events happened. The fact is that the persecution of both groups occurred because they were perceived as threats; one economic and cultural, the other (having no opportunity to influence economic or cultural events) physical. In both cases people were persuaded that the survival of the state was at stake. In neither case was the solution sensible, humane or appropriate.

Peter Best
Sydney

From Michael Tanner

Edward Said (LRB, 11 February): Wagner’s ‘obsession with water dominates all his operas’. Said (Letters, 25 March): ‘I didn’t say “all”, I said “most” of the operas.’ Tanner (Letters, 25 February): ‘I can’t readily call to mind an obsession with water in Die Walküre.’ Said (Letters, 25 March): ‘the irascible Tanner says, again recklessly, that he can’t recall any mention of water in Walküre.’ Since those are fair samples of Said’s ability to read me and himself, I don’t think any farther reply is necessary to his letter.

Michael Tanner
Corpus Christi College,

Edward Said writes: How convenient for Michael Tanner to retreat into undergraduate nitpicking, having lost his case on all the essential points about Wagner. There aren’t 13 operas, water is everywhere (this is Vogt’s point anyway), Wieland Wagner’s influence, the importance of Wagner’s politics to his aesthetics, the need for ‘infidelity’, Proust and Mallarmé as avant-garde Wagnerians etc, etc. Aside from that Tanner is a very attentive reader of his own prose.

Paul Lawrence Rose’s letter is both self-incriminating and a retrospective attempt to make his appalling views about Wagner seem reasonable. Rose openly advocates ‘transfer’ of the Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, exactly as the Zionist movement has always advocated that particular policy of ethnic cleansing, and as such zealots as the late Meir Kahane, Rafael Eytan, and other extreme right-wing Israelis more recently have. His moral blindness keeps him from seeing that Jewish settlers from Lithuania, Poland and New York who seek forcibly to dispossess or supplant native Palestinians in their lands are not the exact ethical equivalent of those same Palestinians resisting the invasion; nor can he point to any comparable ‘Arab proposals’ (there were none) to ‘transfer’ Jews.

Besides, I nowhere equate Palestinian suffering with Jewish suffering (that, too, is Rose going over the top), but I do see the tragic consequence of the latter in the former. Of course I can ‘bear’ and feel compassion for the ‘singular suffering’ of Jews during their Holocaust: but why should I, or any other Palestinian, be required passively to accept that Zionists (whose discriminatory ideology commenced before the Holocaust and was infected, like Herzl, with the same ideas about non-Europeans quite Openly proclaimed by white colonialists in Africa and Asia) should walk into our land, and try to throw us out just because they said that God and Balfour gave them the right. How preposterous! And how sleazy of Zionists like Rose to pretend to be outraged! As if the pillaging settlers who still maraud, burn and kill on the West Bank and Gaza are the aggrieved ones! Why when Rose speaks of the Mufti does he not mention that Shamir’s own political group made appeals to the Third Reich also? And note too how there isn’t trace of understanding of Palestinian travails in what Rose says; for him Palestinians who resist Israeli occupation are all terrorists.

Not surprisingly, therefore. Rose’s book on Wagner contains not a shred of musical understanding, but a great deal of blustering about Wagner’s music being infused, drenched in, oozing with anti-semitism. Beethoven’s music is full of nobility, he actually says; Wagner’s is full of violence and hatred. Wagner’s ideas are characterised by Rose as nebulous and vague, on the one hand; directly anti-semitic and virulently racist, on the other. Parsifal, he says, is a parable of how European civilisation is ‘poisoned by alien, inhuman Jewish values’, despite no reference to European or Jewish values in the work. He goes on and on in this vein, making no distinction between prose tract, drama, music: this allows him to state that Wagner was little more than a crazy proto-Nazi who just hap period to write music, and that too is as hateful as his ideas. Rose wants Wagner banned in Israel, and generously allows that it’s OK to perform him elsewhere (that bit of largesse isn’t in the book at all, by the way, so if one wasn’t in attendance at his lecture to the Wagner Society on 25 February it couldn’t be guessed from his book). Of course he implies that listening to or performing Wagner is equivalent to covert anti-semitism: for 250 pages in his book he says that Wagner’s music and art are mainly, principally, centrally about nothing else but hatred of Jews. What does liking or interpreting Wagner mean but that you support anti-semitism?

I had thought that, like Khomeini, Professor Rose at least had the courage of his, to say the least, fundamentalist convictions. Now it appears that he’s just another trimmer who wraps himself in sanctimony and insulting cant. His letter also reveals him to be someone willing to go in for getting rid of Palestinians. Professor Rose and his Wagner are perfectly made for each other.

Vol. 15 No. 17 · 9 September 1993

From Paul Lawrence Rose

Regarding the transfer of Palestinian Arabs, by what possible logic does Edward Said conclude (Letters, 22 April) that I am an advocate, ‘open’ or otherwise, of the transfer of Arabs from Israel? My letter simply pointed out – without approving them – that Israeli transfer proposals relate to hostile Arab populations, whereas Wagner’s proposal of expulsion referred to a Jewish community that was loyal to the German state.

Professor Said challenges me to supply evidence of Arab intentions (‘there were none,’ he asserts) to expel the Jews of Palestine. The historical record shows, however, a continuity of Arab national demands to remove the Jews from Palestine throughout this century. In March 1920, the Palestinian Arab leadership demanded of the Mandatory Government: ‘Either us or the Zionists. There is no room for both elements struggling in the same area.’ In April that year, Taher Aboul Seoud and other influential Arabs requested the British Military Governor to order ‘the immediate expulsion of all Jewish soldiers from the country … Considering the fact that the Zionists are foreigners in this land … [your] ruling be made effective and thus expelling [sic] the Zionists.’ In the same month Mohammed Derweesh, Director of the Arab Club, wrote to Allenby: ‘We declare that we cannot accept the Jews in our country … We declare that we do not accept the Jews neither [sic] as guests nor as neighbours in Palestine.’ In June 1921, the Arab Executive Committee rejected Herbert Samuel’s placatory speech about Arab-Jewish coexistence: ‘Peace and tranquillity would be the rule in Palestine only so long as it was inhabited by one people, possessing one language, one nationality and one interest.’ From its inception, the Palestinian national movement has been mired in this basically rejectionist – or rather, transferrist – mentality, which, alas, hasn’t changed much in the last seventy years, whether one looks at the Palestinian National Covenant or recalls the Arab students’ chants of ‘Transfer the Jews’ at the University of Haifa in 1989. Moreover, as Professor Said well knows, Israel’s Arab neighbours either hold their Jewish populations hostage or, like Jordan, are wholly judenrein states in which Jews cannot by law be citizens or even residents.

Paul Lawrence Rose
Penn State University, Philadelphia

Edward Said writes: Paul Lawrence Rose’s false claims and spurious logic require one last response. All the Palestinians he cites – and neither Taher Aboul Seoud nor Mohammed Derweesh was, or is, well-known – speak as natives watching a wave of European colonists arriving from abroad who were fully intent on settling land that was never theirs. This is very different from those same Jews wishing to transfer the natives out of Palestine. Beginning with Theodor Herzl, who spoke about ‘spiriting the natives away’, the concept of transfer has been a mainstay of Zionist thought and even theory; this is at the opposite extreme from cries of alarm voiced by Palestinians as Jewish colonists brought in by the British appeared more and more to be threatening Palestinians’ existence. Of course the Palestinians were right. Regrettably, Professor Rose, like most Zionists, simply refuses to see these facts and the moral differences in the Palestinian and Zionist positions: it is this that permits him to make the most literally preposterous allegations whereby the victims of Zionist exclusion and oppression are suddenly transformed into terrorists and anti-semites. To make matters worse, Professor Rose speaks of Arab students in Haifa in 1989, where they constitute an embattled and disadvantaged minority in the Jewish state, as if their protests were equal in power and authority to the plans and actions of Israeli transfer-advocates like Rafael Eytan and Meir Kahane, or Rabin and Netanyahu for that matter. General Rabin, one needs to recall, was personally responsible in 1948 for the forced expulsion of over fifty thousand Palestinians from the Lydda and Ramlé area.