Wagner in San Francisco - The Existentialist Crisis

by Daniel Schifrin, San Francisco

I came to Richard Wagner’s life and work not through music or politics – the usual routes – but through an existential crisis. I was in my late 20s, living and working in Manhattan, and beginning a novel that, I was afraid, owed too much to the influence of Philip Roth. My day job was reporting for the New York Jewish Week, and as part of my beat covering arts and culture I attended a lecture on Wagner at Columbia University by the Jewish literary critic George Steiner.

The talk focused on Wagner’s assertion in his influential essay Judaism in Music that Jews were not an original, creative people but a parasitic one, whose diasporic instincts repelled true art, and could only respond to (as in steal) what true, native Europeans created.
I had barely recovered from the shock of this observation when Steiner, who has carefully studied the anti-Semitic imagination, offered his rhetorical coup: he agreed. The Jewish genius, he said, was better suited to commentary than creation. And while he disagreed with what anti-Semites did with Wagner’s assertion – seeing in the Jewish creative style a moral lesson about their lack of usefulness as citizens – Steiner noted that the essential analysis was correct. Jews were commentators rather than creators.
I took this all very personally, suddenly certain that the novel I had started was not just lacking originality, but was instead defined by borrowings and interpretations – stereotypically Jewish, and suddenly subpar. In which case, Wagner’s stern critique of the Jewish mind applied directly to me, a callow, unmusical young man whose knowledge of the composer extended only to an association with Hitler, and with the literally cartoonish musical satires I absorbed from Bugs Bunny TV shows.

A Twenty-Year Project

In this way began my multi-year project to explore the world of Wagner, and in so doing dig deeper into both the creative experience of the Jewish people, and how the universal power of art and the political goals of artists are often radically divorced from one another.
I have gone about this project consistently but somewhat haphazardly, constantly surprised by the ways in which Wagner’s music, criticism and political afterlife focused other issues in my creative life.
On one end of the spectrum, Wagner’s formal achievements – from the diversity and interconnection of motifs in the Ring Cycle, to the almost unbearable sonic tension in the unresolved chord in Tristan und Isolde – helped me understand what it means to sustain a high level of drama in a long piece of fiction.
On the other end, the constant Israeli debate over whether or not to play Wagner’s work in public concerts has served as a litmus test of how comfortable Jews feel in a post-Holocaust world.
All of these questions have circulated in my public as well as private conversations about Wagner, whether in an academic panel discussion I moderated for the Contemporary Jewish Museum and San Francisco Opera during the 2011 Ring Cycle, or in my forthcoming novel The Garbage Guru, in which differing interpretations of Wagner break up a marriage between two American Jews.

Resolving the Wagnerian Chord

For 20 years, Wagner’s critique of the Jewish bias toward commentary over “pure” creativity has reverberated its way through my life like a musical motif. But I have finally evolved a personal, particularly Jewish, creative response to Wagner: Pure creativity is the province of the divine, while mere mortals – Jews and everyone else – must be content with mixing and matching what already exists. This is how human beings compose their lives.