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A tale of two starlings?
Whether or not Richard Wagner's well-documented anti-Semitic opinions find expression in his operatic oeuvre is a question that divides his admirers and critics alike into two broad camps. On the one side are writers such as Theodor Adorno, Robert Gutman, Barry Millington, Paul Lawrence Rose, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Marc Weiner and David J. Levin who argue that certain of his works, especially the Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal, symbolise in various characters and situations the anti-Jewish ideology found in Wagner's writings and private utterances.1Adherents of this viewpoint see in characters such as Alberich, Mime, Hagen and Beckmesser representations of attributes - off-putting physiognomy and behavior, cunning and calculation, greed, emotional shallowness, lack of homeland and native language, artistic sterility and so forth - that Wagner imputed to Jews in his writings, in particular is his notorious essay 'Das Judentum in der Musik', first published in 1850 as an article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. According to this view, Wagner incorporated anti-Jewish symbols in his operas as coded warnings about the threats posed by Jews to the health of German culture.
On the opposite side of the question are such writers as Dieter Borchmeyer, Brian Magee and Hermann Danuser, who separate Wagner's hateful ideology from the messages conveyed by his operas.2The arguments for this position are both empirical and philosophical. The empirical arguments adduce three main points: first, that the operas contain no characters, settings, situations or musical styles that are explicitly identified as Jewish; second, that Wagner himself never pointed in public or private to any features of his operas as symbols of Jewish attributes; third, that there is very little evidence that Wagner's contemporaries understood his operas to contain coded representations of anti-Semitic messages. For these writers, anti-Semitic content in Wagner's operas is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder, a product of the hermeneutic enterprise. More philosophically, one has made the argument that aesthetic experience is not the same as knowledge of historical, biographical and social contexts, and that the meaning of an art-work floats freely, determined not by authorial intention nor by the original historical matrix that gave rise...