This Day in Classical Music History (Wagner Dies, But His Controversies Survive)

Feb. 13, 1883—A heart attack suffered on vacation in Venice may have ended the life of Richard Wagner at age 69, but the tumult he engendered outlived him. It survives, in some ways, even hotter today, as biographers, musicologists, even the entire German nation consider whether this musical revolutionary spurred reactionary politics that infected an entire continent.

The controversy starts, though, with Wagner’s personal life. Over a week ago, Joseph Horowitz’s article in The Wall Street Journal took to task Simon Callow for propagating the “monster” myth about the composer in the actor-biographer’s new book, Being Wagner.

To be sure, Horowitz is correct that Wagner was an early victim of “fake news." The article cites an 1866 newspaper report that, ignoring generous-to-a-fault payments Wagner made his estranged wife Minna, claimed that she had been reduced to poverty following their separation. Horowitz might just as easily have mentioned the rumor that Wagner’s fatal cardiac incident resulted from his argument with second wife Cosima over excessive attention to a 23-year-old soprano who played one of the flower-maidens in his recent triumph, Parsifal.

In one way, it is surprising that so much murkiness has developed around what Wagner did, said, or meant, as he is virtually unrivaled among composers in the documentation he left about himself (approximately 12,000 letters, along with additional prose works that are projected to run to eight volumes when scholars complete the task by 2030).

But, on second thought, such a swirl of rumors might be understandable, as Wagner’s contemporaries believed him capable of almost anything—not just herculean feats of creativity, but also impulsive acts destructive to his livelihood, his family, and his reputation.

How, for instance, could the composer who counted on wealthy patrons to bankroll his outsized ambitions be the same man who cuckolded those benefactors? How could the member of the culturati who counted Jews among his friends and supporters be the same man who wrote the notorious 1850 essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music)—which even Horowitz acknowledges as “egregiously anti-Semitic”?

In fact, amid constant upheaval in his life, anti-Semitism prevailed as a leitmotif in Wagner's thought. As he aged, he edged away from the radical ideology that forced him into exile after 1848. But, even with his late-life embrace of Christianity and German nationalism and his exclusion of much youthful writing that now embarrassed him, he never repudiated his poisonous racial nonsense.

Wagner was hardly the only anti-Semitic major figure in classical music history, nor can he be held solely or even largely responsible for the Holocaust. But his prejudice was virulent; Hitler idolized him; and the element of bombast so present in his music made it a natural culture lodestone for the Fuehrer.

Oscar Wilde, in his inimitable way, sent up that last quality perhaps the best of anyone I have read: “I like Wagner’s music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.”

Not hearing what is being said—when your laughter dies down, just remember that this last effect of bombast is also what allowed millions of ordinary Germans to pay no mind to Hitler when he divulged his mad notions about conquests and scapegoats.