Music and Antisemitism

The first of a few books that deal with anti-Semitism in music - Michael Marissen's Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion  - arrived last week. It was an exciting read, quite unlike anything I have seen before, but did not completely satisfy. The field is obviously Marissen's specialism: not only is there a vast background knowledge of the life and works of Johann Sebastian Bach, but there is also a well-informed spine of key texts on anti-Semitism (some of these, such as those by Gavin Langmuir, I need to read myself). These two fields are integrated well and with obvious experience, but with this comes an over-conciseness which spoils both the argument and the reading experience of the book. Despite Marissen's claim that the text is for academics and hobbyists alike, there is a clear expectation of Christianity - or at least familiarity with Christian terminology. The word 'passion', for example (quite a key one in this book!) is never explain...

It is perhaps surprising that the week in which 'subjectivity in Gustav Mahler's symphonies' was the topic of discussion I failed to find anything interesting to write about. Issues of anti-Semitism around Mahler's career and reception have been studied in depth elsewhere (I now have a copy of Knittel's 'Seeing Mahler' and intend to read it over the winter vacation; Adorno's writings on Mahler are also on my list).  My thought when a tutor remarked that Mahler's annotation of the word weh 'pain' at key points of his manuscripts showed a rupture of self-aware narrative in the music, however? Weh = Vey  = Mahler is a serial kvetch. Bibliography: Abbate, C. (1991). Unsung voices : Opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century (Princeton studies in opera). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barham, Jeremy. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (The Cambridge companions complete collection). Cambridge University Press. Greene, D....

Compared to Marina Frolova-Walker (see my previous post), Richard Taruskin is on the ball. Despite his penchant for extremely long sentences and words that only he seems to know the meaning of, Taruskin sets an example for raising issues of anti-semitism in his musicology, analysis, and history. In his book 'Defining Russia Musically', not only is there an index entry for 'anti-Semitism' - and 'anti-Semitism of,' for various composers - but chances to talk about it are grasped fully. No composer, critic, or musician who exhibited anti-semitic views is left unexposed, and rightly so: to pass over anti-semitism is to discount its validity as a form of racism. This means going after Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky; even Mikhail Glinka, whose personality is seldom revealed in literature. A large section is also devoted to Igor Stravinsky's active support for fascism in Italy and the Third Reich; the extent and explicitness of his hatred for ...

A book with the title 'Russian Music and Nationalism' is always going to be ambitious; a book with that title and only 400-odd pages is always going to leave some things out. Marina Frolova-Walker's book of that name, however, makes a notable emission which I could not leave unmentioned. Of course, Frolova-Walker's exploration of the music of Glinka and the Kuchka is fascinating and extremely well-researched, but there is a plain ignorance of Jews throughout. Not only is there no index entry for 'Jews' - as might be expected given the millions-strong population in Russia during the nineteenth century - or 'Jewish (folk) music' - as might be expected given the strong influence on generations of non-Jewish Russian composers - but there is a clear avoidance of Jewish matters when dealing with Jewish composers. In a rare passage on Anton Rubinstein, a successful performer and composer from Podolia in the Pale of Settlement, Frolova-Walker writes: 'For th...

Analysis last week consisted of the first movement of Johannes Brahms' third Piano Trio (Op. 101). For inspiration I was directed to the famous essay by Arnold Schoenberg, 'Brahms the Progressive'. Though the essay itself was fascinating - and certainly helped with the task in hand - it was to another of Schoenberg's essays that I was drawn to: the 'Two Speeches on the Jewish Situation'. Dating from 1934 and 1935 respectively, they give a good idea of Schoenberg's approach to assimilation: namely that Jews should escape to America. What is most fascinating, however, is the section at the start of the later speech on the experience of being a young Jewish composer in 1890s/1900s Vienna. Schoenberg notes the very real impact that Richard Wagner's tract had on not only the reception but also the self-confidence of him and his contemporaries. This psychological barrier to success is far-less cited than the physical. Though Schoenberg and many other Jewish co...