A Response to Hans Rudolf Vaget's "Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose"

Abstract

Although book reviews are often avowedly polemical, some can be so mercilessly critical that the extentoftheir vehemence seems to point to issues beyond the subject matter under discussion. In our opinion, this is the case with Hans Rudolf Vaget's review of Paul Lawrence Rose's Wagner: Race and Revolution. One might ask what could propel a scholar to engage in such an extended, and, at times, even strident, public denunciation of another scholar's work. One answer, of course, could be the tenor of Rose's own text, which is every bit as polemical as Vaget's review, leading Vaget to note its uncommon emotion and breathtaking radicalism (222). What he fails to mention, however, is that Rose himself is responding to a tradition of Wagnerian scholarship that denounces or ignores any attempt to draw connections between Wagner's explicitly anti-Semitic writings (e.g., Das Judentum in der Musik, Was ist deutsch?, Erkenne dich selbst, Modern, and others) and his music dramas, a tradition represented by those scholars Vaget cites as exemplars of a balanced and judicious approach to Wagner (Borchmeyer, Dahlhaus, Katz, Lee, Voss, Wapnewski), as well as by many he does not (van Amerongen, Gregor-Dellin, James, Kaiser, Magee, Rather, Skelton, Taylor, Watson, and von Westernhagen, to name only the most popular). That is, Vaget's critique of Rose does not exist in an intellectual, ideological, or historical vacuum, but is itself part of a tradition against which Rose polemicizes. Those scholars who argue that Wagner's anti-Semitism is important for an understanding of his artworks have been ridiculed (as seen, for example, in Dahlhaus's and Kaiser's attacks on Zelinsky, and Wapnewski's on Gutman),1 and have themselves adopted a discourse often marked by angry indignation, an anger that Vaget seems not to understand even as he himself adds fuel to the fire.