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Congratulations to NYT writer Michael Kimmelman, whose post-mortem on Katharina Wagner's Bayreuth Meistersinger contains a sentence that beats all world's records for running, standing and equivocation:
(More on Kimmelman's column over at Sounds & Fury.)
The approach is not, in the abstract, without merit, Beckmesser having always seemed a proto-Jew to Wagner, awaiting modern redemption; the opera’s end comes across as the screed it always seemed.La Cieca leaves it to her cher public to debate whatever ideas might be teased from this morass of weak passive voice; she'll get the ball rolling by asking, "What exactly is a 'proto-Jew' and what qualities of the character of Beckmesser would tend to make him "seem" proto-Jewish?"
(More on Kimmelman's column over at Sounds & Fury.)
Labels: cher public, nyt, wagner
POSTED at
12:10 PM
15 Comments:
The simple answer is that in the Christian tradition, starting with the gospels, Jewish beliefs were characterised as legalistic and pedantic. (Christianity started as a split from the Pharisee sect, whose religious practice was punctilious, although their doctrines were Hellenized and comparatively liberal. As often, the Christians, especially Paul, slagged off with extreme vehemence the group from which they had just split. Peter and Paul had a bitch fight at Antioch about ritual compliance, which Paul is generally regarded as having won.) This fed into the enlightenment racist stereotype of the prissy Jew, which informs both Beckmesser and Mime.
But, yes, it's really sloppy writing.
HE: I'm with you until the end of the penultimate sentence, because I don't offhand recall Wagner's objecting to Jews on the specific grounds of pedantry. That's as opposed to their myriad other artistic "flaws" he wrote about so copiously, e.g., lack of originality, trivial viruosity, inability to connect deeply with language. Of course, I may be wrong about this, and I'd appreciate being pointed toward texts where Wagner addresses pedantry as a Jewish trait.
I'm not jewish, but I can be prissy and pedantic with the best of them:
There is no passive voice in the excerpt quoted. It is terrible, weasely writing and the author is simultaneously trying to say something and then deny he was saying it but no passive voice.
La Cieca wrote: Of course, I may be wrong about this, and I'd appreciate being pointed toward texts where Wagner addresses pedantry as a Jewish trait.
He never did to my knowledge.
ACD
P.S. I take it you saw my post singling out this same graf of Kimmelman's wherein I characterized his Beckmesser comment as utter rubbish.
You're right, Michael: on review, I guess all that "seemed" felt so passive that I read it as actual passive voice. (La Cieca heartily dislikes the use of the word "seem" unless advised to do so by counsel. There's little chance of Beckmesser suing the Times, surely.)
Farris is right about passive voice, but I'm not sure I could prove from the excerpt quoted that Kimmelman was "trying to say something."
Remember this excerpt the next time you feel like complaining about Bernard Holland! He may not know opera the way opera-folks do, but he hears with a musician's ear and writes in English!
The more frequently the literary flow is interrupted (particularly with commas), the more salient the equivocation. This is indeed a stunning example.
Barry Millington has been promoting the idea of Beckmesser-as-Jew at at least since an article in 1993. The problem is that his argument depends on a whole host of tiny, unrelated items that no one had ever noticed before him and certainly no one had ever put together in the way he had. As Michael Tanner notes in his book, Wagner, "Wagner was often subtle, but he didn't write in code. It might have occurred to Millington, Alias Holmes, that Wagner, in the cause of his crusade [against Beckemsser-as-Jew] should have rendered his message to the German nation somewhat more accessible" (p, 16), just as the original author might have been somewhat more accessible.
The Christian historian Eusibius in c.300 AD mentions that there was some Christian lore at the time that why Paul turned Christian suddenly was not the vision on the way to Damascus, but that Paul's teacher Gamaliel refused to let him marry Gam.'s daughter. So, Paul's great conversion was actually a fit of spite. Odd, but that was in Christian lore in very early times.
Yes, a bit like Mohammed having revelations that just happened to be very convenient to him at the time. They even used to make jokes about it in his day ... but today??? Fatwah, anyone?
I'm still trying to figure out what "proto-Jew" means. The prefix "proto-" generally means "First in time, earliest, original, primitive"(OED), so under this definition a "proto-Jew" would be (I guess) an early Isrealite. Perhaps the writer meant "proto-Christian" if he wanted to imply that Beckmesser exhibited "Christian" qualities without technically being one. I don't know; some editor at the NYT was asleep on the job.
Seriously, "proto-Jew"? I would like to know what Kimmelman thinks he meant by that. "Proto-Christian" is a reasonable alternative suggestion, if you buy into the silly idea that Wagner's operas are merely proselytizing Christian propaganda and Beckmesser is simply awaiting redemption, or however it was phrased. Despite the opening scene taking place in a church, there really isn't ANYTHING religious or specifically Christian about Meistersinger.
I've never understood what people find about Beckmesser that is supposedly "Jewish." He's crotchety, petty and annoying, sure...but it's a pretty shallow analysis that says any annoying character in a Wagner opera is supposed to be a stand in for "the Jew." What about Siegfried? He's pretty fucking irritating most of the time.
I think the key is how other characters in Meistersinger relate to Beckmesser. I think it's pretty clear that Sachs finds him, at times, exasperating. But if this anti-Jewish theory is going to hold up, where Beckmesser is "the Jew," then he has to be fundamentally what is wrong with Nurnberg society, and he has to be expunged. That's the only thing that would make sense. But that's not what happens.
Wagner put Beckmesser in the Guild of Mastersingers not because Beckmesser is evil or has cheated his way in somehow, but because a) he's talented and erudite enough to belong there and b) he is a recognized expert -- recognized by the other mastersingers -- on rules and tradition. Wagner thought rules and tradition were hugely important, but also felt strongly that they shouldn't stand in the way of a new, good idea, that they must always be constantly re-evaluated. This is the Sachs position, in between Beckmesser, who has no ear for anything modern, and Walther, who has no patience and wants to just do away with everything that came before without ever coming to appreciate it. And Beckmesser's ultimate fate is that his inflexibility and curmudgeonhood gets him laughed at. That's all.
And while Sach's final ode can seem kind of terrifyingly fascist viewed through the post-WWII prism of history, when you actually look at the words, there's something to it. I mean, Germany's government has changed pretty radically a few different times even since Wagner's day, just over a century ago. But through all of that, we still have Goethe and Beethoven and Durer and even Wagner himself. "Germany" as a political entity may wax and wane or even come and go, but these folks will always be hugely important artists and their contributions remain undimmed regardless of Germany's fate.
I've never bought the "Beckmesser as Jew" theories because the character is so obviously a parody of Eduard Hanslick.
Baritenor: actually, the Hanslick connection tends to support the "Jew" theory. The connection between Beckmesser and Hanslick isn't just because the parody is obvious; in early drafts, Wagner called the character "Hans Lick." But Hanslick was widely reviled as a Jew by his detractors (his mother was ethnically Jewish, but he was raised Catholic), and I believe that included Wagner. That "smear" campaign was so effective that even now you can Google "Hanslick Jewish" or some variant thereof and come across several websites which will state with confidence that Hanslick was a Jew.
I was aware of the Hanslick-Jewish smeer (or should that be schmear?), but what I meant was that I think Beckmesser is a parody of a specific "jew rather than the generalizied "Jew".
You know, I can't think of a single Jewish Singer who performs Wagner. Are there any, or will I be the first when I sing the Song to the Evening Star in Recital next month?
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