Das Judenthum in der Musik

"Das Judenthum in der Musik" (German for "Jewishness in Music", but normally translated Judaism in Music; spelled after its first publications, according to modern German spelling practice, as ‘Judentum’), is an essay by Richard Wagner which attacks Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. It was published under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZM) of Leipzig in September 1850 and was reissued in a greatly expanded version under Wagner’s name in 1869. It is regarded by some as an important landmark in the history of German anti-semitism.

The first version of the article appeared in the NZM under the pseudonym of K. Freigedank ("K. Freethought"). In an April 1851 letter to Franz Liszt, Wagner gave the excuse that he used a pseudonym "to prevent the question being dragged down by the Jews to a purely personal level".

At the time Wagner was living in exile in Zurich, on the run after his role in the 1849 revolution in Dresden. His article followed a series of essays in the NZM by his disciple Theodor Uhlig, attacking the music of Meyerbeer’s opera Le prophète. Wagner was particularly enraged by the success of Le prophète in Paris, all the more so because he had earlier been an admirer of Meyerbeer, who had given him financial support and used his influence to get Wagner’s early opera Rienzi, his first real success, staged in Dresden in 1841.

Wagner was also emboldened by the death of Mendelssohn in 1847, the popularity of whose conservative style he felt was cramping the potential of German music. Although Wagner had shown virtually no sign of anti-Jewish prejudice previously (despite the claims by Rose in his book Wagner, Race and Revolution, and others), he was determined to build on Uhlig’s articles and prepare a broadside that would attack his artistic enemies, embedded in what he took to be a populist Judeophobic context.

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