"Wagner's Anti-Semitism and its Relevance to his Music Dramas"

Professor Emeritus, Department of Germanic Studies, Indiana University.

Weiner was Editor of German Quarterly from1997 to 2004. One of many awards Weiner has won is the M Kayen National University Press book award for the Humanities. The award was for the well known book Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Early in his career Marc Weiner had a Richard Wagner Gendenkstaette scholarship to Bayreuth.

In the second half of the 20th century there was widespread reticence, both in Wagnerian scholarship and in the general public alike, to acknowledge and discuss Richard Wagner’s antisemitism, and a refusal to recognize its role in the understanding of his music dramas. But an appreciation of the composer’s thoughts concerning the allegedly nefarious danger Jews posed to the development of German art and society is essential to assessing both the construction of various individual dramatic characters and the ideological implications of the dramatic machinations of many of Wagner’s most celebrated works for the stage.

Through an analysis of a host of Wagner’s essays and central passages from the third of his Ring dramas, Siegfried, the talk will seek to demonstrate the importance of recognizing the role that antisemitism plays in his dramatic project.

Host or Publisher Wagner Society of Scotland