Did Richard Wagner Inspire Hitler or Did He Inspire ‘Star Wars’? And Does It Matter?

The whole question of modernity, in new assessments of the German composer and his work

By Vladislav Davidzon for Tablet Magazine

While Wagnerian fanatics undeniably include a contingent of what one critic memorably referred to as “leathery old Nazis,” these are now no longer taken seriously. After a period of intense academic/historical skirmishing in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, recent advancements in Wagner studies scholarship have settled our understanding of the genealogical sources of his ideas. His anti-Judaism belonged to the Utopian, anti-clerical family of the sort held by Marx and Bauer as well as drawing on the race theorists and social Darwinism circulating at the time: His overriding obsession with purity of German myth and language metastasized easily into a crusade for purity of race. Adorno’s once crankish position that Wagner’s work was the decisive element linking the 19th-century rebirth of German Romanticism to the development of National Socialism now approximates something akin to received wisdom. Hitler’s love for the work, epitomized by his identification with the character of the sensitive misunderstood (and eventually victorious) artist Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers From Nuremberg) is a fait accompli matter in the opera’s patrimony and will most likely forever encrust the works with a grimy layer of infamy.

Given that Wagner’s music has clearly stood the test of time, what remains is a host of delicate and unresolved questions about the implications of the composer’s anti-Semitism and other toxic affinities: Was Wagner merely acting as a vessel for commonly accepted ideas? Are the anti-Semitic tropes interwoven into the formal properties of the music and operas themselves? If music, as Wagner’s defenders often proclaim, cannot be fascist, what about the contents of the librettos? If the librettos are indeed not anti-Semitic, does that justify the lifting of Israel’s unofficial ban on reciting his works? Writing in the New York Review of Books last summer, the conductor Daniel Barenboim, perhaps the most ardent living champion of Wagner’s rehabilitation, began his eloquent vindication of the right to play Wagner in Israel with the observation that “perhaps no other composer in history sought to combine such obviously incompatible elements in his works.”

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