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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Some okay stuff, some silly stuff; unreliable,
By Laon (moon-lit Surry Hills) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wagner: Race and Revolution (Hardcover)
As I see it Rose puts four main arguments. 1 German antisemitism in the 19th century is substantially different from other European strands of antisemitism. I'm not qualified to comment on that, except that Rose doesn't bring out much evidence.2 German political culture of the 19th century is inherently and ineluctably antisemitic. I'd accept "largely" antisemitic; but Rose wants to make an essentialist case, that you couldn't be a 19th century German radical without being antisemitic, and he fails to support that. Instead we get rhetoric, some of it as heated as Wagner's own. 3 Wagner was always antisemitic, even before 1850, when antisemitic references started to appear in his letters and articles. There it's safe to say that the evidence disproves Rose's case; see, for example, Jacob Katz's "Wagner: The Dark Side of Genius", a book which condemns Wagner's antisemitism on the basis of better research and less tenditiousness. Not only does Rose not actually make his case here, but he couldn't. 4 There is coded antisemitism in Wagner's operas. Here Rose abandons all pretence to academic standards and writes some very silly things. For example he argues that "Die Walku:re" is antisemitic because it depicts incest and adultery sympathetically; but adultery is against the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments is a Jewish document. Wagner's, and "Die Walku:re"'s rejection of the 10 Commandments is therefore antisemitic. Where this leaves Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, and every other opera librettist, poet and dramatist in human history is not clear. By reasoning like this they must all be antisemites. In "Der Fliegende Hollander", Rose argues, Senta's entire village is an antisemitic depiction, because they value money over other values; therefore they must be meant as Jewish. When someone starts looking for antisemitic depictions, and comes up with the idea of a Jewish fishing village in the middle of the Norwegian fiords... when arguments like that are seriously put forward, we know two things. First, that the writer has lost the plot. Second, that the people who should have read the book before publication and got rid of embarrassing silliness like that, weren't doing their job. I don't know much about the history of 19th century antisemitism in Europe; but Rose's material on Wagner is so hopelessly unreliable and ill-thought-out that it calls into question the reliability of his other material. There's another comment on this book, apparently written by a believing Marxist, that claims that Wagner made a mistake in making his gods and Nibelungs, in the "Ring", morally equivalent. No, that wasn't a mistake; that was Wagner's _point_. Both the Nibelungs and the gods are involved in a struggle between the values of love and the desire for power. Both the gods and Nibelungs choose power, not love. Wagner was on the side of love, and that is why he makes both sides fall. Even though Wagner was a flawed human being (but a human being, not a monster; he had a kind and considerate side as well as a selfish and manipulative side), the "Ring" is one of the greatest works of art ever created. And its message is pacifist, pro-love and anti-power, and (ironically, given Wagner's own racism) anti-racist, in showing the moral equivalence of all the different struggling peoples in the "Ring". The writer of the other comment is right to say that Wagner was a shallow and inconsistent political thinker. But that means that not all of his ideas are bad. His antisemitism shames Wagner's memory as much as the antisemitism of Marx, Bakunin, Proudhon, Schubert, JS Bach, Schumann, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Dostoevsky, TS Eliot and so on and so on, shames theirs. But Wagner's defence of love over power, in the "Ring", strikes me as politically, as well as artistically, not without merit. Rose makes a mistake in reading antisemitism into works that don't contain it, and another mistake in not recognising that Wagner's works have some moral merit which should not be thrown away. Laon
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
extremely slanted and unrelieable,
By Fabert (New York City, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wagner: Race and Revolution (Paperback)
Michael Tanner has noted that on the subject of Wagner and anti-Semitism, nobody ever changes their opinion. It may in a sense seem useless, therefore, to go on and point out the many fallacies and preposterous arguments that Rose has put forth in this book, as those who profess to like it (which in this case means only that they agree with its opinions, as nobody who does so will derive much pleasure in reading about this topic) will go on doing so whatever new facts they are presented with. The only hope one can have is that the newcomer will turn instead to Jacob Katz's far more judicious study on "Richard Wagner: The Darker Side of Genius." If he or she should find that work insufficient, then let them turn to Rose. It is a sign of how far the lunatic fringe of Wagner scholarship are willing to go in their vitriolic accusations that they frequently charge Katz, who was an eminent Jewish scholar specializing in the dark history of anti-Semitism, of being an 'apologist' for Wagner, as his condemnation was not sufficiently severe. But contrary to Rose's hallucinations, no serious scholar today 'denies' Wagner's anti-Semitism--this is only the nasty accusation this reckless writer throws at all of his critics who fail to submit to his own extravagant thesis that "hatred of Jewishness is the hidden agenda of virtually all the operas" (p. 170)
Rose obviously hates not only Wagner the man, but Wagner the composer as well. And there is certainly no point in debating musical tastes--if Rose prefers other forms of music to Wagner, that is all well and good. Yet it is rather sad that somebody with no appreciation at all of Wagner's music can still be so obsessed with this figure that he goes on to churn out article after article about how utterly horrendous he is. For all its inaccuracies, 'Race and Revolution' still presents an argument of sorts, and what Rose has to say about Wagner, he says here. His subsequent essays on the topic, which appear in various anthologies, are nothing but a rehash of what he has written in this book. There are no new facts, no new interpretations, just a simple repetition--often in even harsher language--of what he has offered here. In a recent essay, Rose referred to Robert Gutman's biography of Wagner as 'wonderful.' It is an interesting word to come from Rose. 'Wonderful' usually implies joy, enjoyment, pleasure, positive feelings. But for Rose, of course, Gutman's biography is 'wonderful' only for the reason that it too presents a ridiculously twisted image of Wagner, where everything is shown in the darkest possible light, and the man Wagner is viciously caricatured. When Daniel Jonah Goldhagen scored his spectacular success with 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' (in which Wagner's name is mentioned once, incidentally), Rose was green with envy, as his own history of German anti-Semitism has met with nothing but tired skepticism from the historians, and no notice at all from the wider reading public. In fact, Rose is pretty much a failure as a historian. All he has is his apparently life-long crusade against Wagner. And here, admittedly, he has been fairly successful in garnering a support among the Wagner haters; but it is still a sad fate to have to base your entire professional career on something that is so negative in nature. Never, apparently, has Rose felt the inclination to write a study of Schönberg, say, or of Mendelssohn or Meyerbeer. Wagner's attacks on these last two composers are truly detestable; yet they were not all he had to offer, but rather a kind of polemical excursions that would let him blow off steam to be able to focus instead on his own composition. But for Rose, the attack on Wagner is *all* he has. He has given no proof whatsoever of any more positive work that he could return to once he has said his harsh, uncompromising 'truths' about Wagner. The eminent historian Peter Gay has said some severe things about Wagner as well; but he has also written a marvelous biography of Mozart, for instance, which many more people will have read, and with much greater delight. It is scarcely a good sign when a scholar has nothing more to offer than one life-guiding obsession in the form of an intense aversion against one single figure. The fact that Rose's ideas about Wagner's putative belief in a revolution that would not only be 'social,' but 'national' as well (a favorite technique of his to insinuate what he can hardly state openly) are very unpersuasive somehow matters little in this context. As I noted at the outset, those who love to hate Wagner will side with Rose whatever the facts are. In addition, Rose is a conspiracy theorist, so he doesn't need quotes to bolster his argument. To Rose, the fact that Hitler never *once* referred to Wagner on the theme of anti-Semitism means exactly that Hitler got *all* his anti-Semitism from Wagner--that intense personal debt made him be silent about it. It is in the nature of claims like that that they cannot be refuted. Nor can Rose's argument that Wagner was hoping for the annihilation of Europe's Jews. There are no quotes to back that obscene claim up, of course; but Rose presents it anyway, as he *wants* to believe in it. It is interesting to note as well, and wholly predictable, that Rose should insist on using the now discredited work by Hermann Rauschning in his writings on Wagner and Hitler. No serious historian relies on Rauschning any longer. Yet Rose cannot let go off him, for the simple reason that he put some spectacular quotes about Wagner in the Führer's mouth--in particular the often cited remark that Hitler had 'no precursors, with one exception: Richard Wagner'. Rose has to lash out against Saul Friedländer, whose reputation as a historian dwarfs Rose's own, when Friedländer merely confirms that Rauschning is indeed wholly unreliable. And Rauschning, by the way, was a fervent Nazi who was only booted out from the party because of his incompetence. He most certainly was no brave resistance fighter or anything of that sort. But in the fight against Wagner, anyone, even a Nazi, is apparently good enough.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a very insightful work,
By "letsgetreal" (north vancouver ,canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wagner: Race and Revolution (Hardcover)
I think this is an excellent book, contrary to the other reviews listed. It helped me understand several new concepts related to anti-semitism, particularly how Jews were thought of as being responsible for commercializing the German art world and bringing the bourgeois capitalist element to European culture. The book sheds much light on the development of anti-semitism relative to the increasing nationalist and revolutionary spirit in Germany during the first part of the 20th century. Wagner's general psychology and racist attitudes are conveyed very effectively, and his influence on future national socialist ideology is more than apparent. This book added a great deal to my understanding of the roots of European anti-semitism, and I thank the author for this.
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