Richard Wagners "Das Judentum in der Musik"

Wagner's essay of late 1850 took up a debate that had been waged in German music periodicals all that year; he also used many of the concepts and terms of his predecessors. What was new in his essay was a "proto-racism, " an implication that the Jews' alleged negative qualities were fixed in their nature. Wagner was influenced by the general atmosphere among German intellectuals and by his failures in Paris, which he blamed on the domination of musical life by Jews and especially by Meyerbeer. In 1850 the essay attracted little attention. In 1869 Wagner republished it, this time with a preface and a long postscript. By then, he had developed a paranoid belief in a Jewish conspiracy against him. In the postscript he describes the Jews' destructive power and predicts that they will be "thrown out by force." Argues that this phrase refers to expulsion, not extermination; and that the famous demand that ends both versions of the essay, that the Jews find salvation by "ceasing to be" ("Untergang") also refers not to extermination by an external force but to self-sacrifice (a favorite theme in his operas). The republication was greeted by a storm of protest. But ten years later the antisemitic movement honored Wagner as its precursor, though he distanced himself from it because of its vulgarity. Assesses the influence of the essay up to and through the Nazi period and even afterwards. Pp. 139-196 contain the 1850 version of the essay, with footnotes indicating the changes in ; the 1869 version, together with the preface and postscript of the 1869 version. Pp. 197-356 contain reactions of Wagner's contemporaries. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)