Wagner, the Communist?

New York University

UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

Author: Professor:

Ian Fales Shanker Satyanath 1 Introduction

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a composer, conductor, and theatre director known primarily for his work in opera, and he revolutionized the world of opera through his conception of the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art,” where he synthesized all aspects of the opera including the visual, dramatic, and musical arts. He advanced the musical language to aﬀect all future classical music, to a point where no composer of this era or after could escape his inﬂuence. Most notably, he introduced extreme chromaticism, rapidly shifting tonal centers, and elaborate systems of leitmotifs to his operas and these compositional techniques became the backbone of modern art music (Weiner 1997).

However, Richard Wagner was also a polemicist with controversial and explicit antisemitic views. His many writings, including his infamous essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”), expressed hostile views towards Jews that were already on the rise in Germany leading up to World War 2 (Weiner 1997). While some of his closest friends, colleagues and supporters were Jewish, he held malicious views towards Jews as a nation throughout his career, and more intensely towards his last years. The point of contention for historians today is whether this antisemitism bled into his music, and how this affected audience perception of his operas. Many argue that specific antagonists, namely Mime from Die Ring, Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, and Klingsor in Parsifal, personify specific Jewish stereotypes, and while they are never iden- tified as explicitly Jewish, they match the writings of Wagner on how a Jew “behaves” (Weiner 1997). The opposing camps deny these allegations, citing the lack of material confirming if any of Wagner’s contemporaries viewed his music dramas as antisemitic, and the fact that many of Wagner’s colleagues were of Jewish origin.

This debate was catalyzed following the tragedy of the Holocaust, and many historians postulate whether Wagner’s inﬂuence in the years prior aﬀected the success of the Nazi regime. Once Hitler consolidated power, he appropriated his operas as an embodiment of the German spirit, and multiple productions of Die Meistersinger were

1 sponsored by the Nazi regime. Wagner was forcibly associated with the Nazi regime, and this link continues to aﬀect his image and inﬂuence how historians interpret his music (Dennis 2003).

Studying Wagner through a lens that does not consider the Holocaust or World War 2 is necessary to deduce how audiences would interpret his operas in that era, but this is exceptionally difficult. The goal of this paper is to quantify the effect of Wagner’s music on the politics of the last Weimar Republic in an effort to create a nonpartisan interpretation of his legacy. Specifically, the paper tries to find evidence that exposure to Wagner’s operas, especially his most antisemitic and nationalist compositions, primed audiences to support the Nazi regime or other nationalist political parties.

With the vast literature on the antisemitism present in Die Ring, Parsifal, and Die Meistersinger as well as other strong nationalist themes in Parsifal and Die Meistersinger, I believed these operas provided the mechanism for “treatment,” which is exposure to the antisemitic, and nationalist ideologies embedded into his operas. Con- trolling for key demographic variables as well as preexisting antisemitism, I test the exposure to Wagner’s operas before 1928 against the vote share of varying political parties/presidential candidates during elections spanning from 1928 to 1933. While the results did not match my original hypothesis, they yield interesting results that contribute further to the debate, as well as provide implications for further research.

2 Literature Review

The two facets of Wagner’s ideology most pertinent to this paper are his antisemitism and his nationalism. They are both represented heavily in his operas and are themes central to the platform of the Nazi party, and the presentation of these themes to audiences is the mechanism through which opera-goers received “treatment”.

2 2.1 Antisemitism

The literature of quantitative studies on Wagner’s antisemitism is near nonex- istent, but the qualitative debate surrounding Wagner’s ideology within his music is ongoing. His antisemitism is undeniable, as he made many public statements regarding Jews throughout his career, but historians continue to question the presence of this antisemitism within his music dramas. One bloc asserts that certain characters of certain operas represent the most obvious Jewish stereotypes of the time and that Wagner designed these characters with the understanding that audiences would be sensitive and aware of these underlying implications. The other bloc denies these theories on the premise that little documentation exists of Wagner’s contemporaries acknowledging these antisemitic tropes, and that World War 2, along with Hitler’s idolization and weaponization of Wag- ner, made future critics more sensitive to potential antisemitism in his compositions that was otherwise unquestioned.

I believe that Wagner’s audiences were keenly aware of the Jewish stereotypes of the day, and Wagner’s messages were clear in his operas. Through the characters of Beckmesser, Mime, and Klingsor, Wagner creates a harmful image of the Jew based oﬀ a character he had previously described in his writings, and the plot of each character’s respective opera successfully ostracizes, others, and/or humiliates these characters. I next explain the context of Wagner’s antisemitism and the role of each of these characters in his operas.

Wagner’s most infamous and explicit antisemitism is seen in his essay “Das Judenthem in der Musik” (”Jewishness in Music”), an essay in which he attacks the way Jews produce and interact with music. He claimed Jews speak European languages improperly or as an alien; they lack the ability to express true passion and, because music is assumed as an extension of language, compositions by Jews are unable to translate true emotion, only imitative works. He attacks speciﬁcally the composers Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, for he felt their styles, limited by their Jewishness, were inhibiting the potential of German music (Wagner and Fischer 2010).

3 A central facet to translating Wagner’s ideology to his audience is the awareness of the audience to Wagner’s Jewish tropes. Pre-1945 concertgoers immediately understood the “common stock of antisemitic stereotypes” in his works, and only after the Second World War did “such ideological implications” become “increasingly denied or repressed, as the cultural vocabulary of the world in which he is read and performed has changed” (Millington 1991). As a result, a commonly understood facet of Wagner’s work became a topic of debate. Shifting societal expectations have allowed a “widespread dis- avowal of precisely the racist and exclusionary dimension of his essays and music dramas” that were so obvious to his prewar audiences (Weiner 1997). For the sake of the experiment, we will assume audiences easily follow the Jewish tropes that Wagner presents.

The most notable example of antisemitism in Wagner’s operas is cited from his famous work Die Meistersingers von Nuremburg. In this opera, set in 16th century Nuremburg, the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs and his guild of mastersingers pursue their craft and/or music following a strict foundation of rules and traditions. A goldsmith’s daughter, Eva, and a knight, Walther von Stolzing are in love, but Eva can only marry the winner of an upcoming song contest, as per tradition. Sachs decides to tutor Walther on the art of songwriting in order to help him win the contest, while the town clerk Sixtus Beckmesser threatens to steal Eva’s hand in marriage with his own song. This challenger Beckmesser is the antagonist of the plot, and his odd mannerisms are accompanied by moments of public humiliation brought on by the aryan and nationalist Walther von Stolzing. It is this character and his storyline that are said to represent both harsh Jewish stereotypes and Wagner’s personal antisemitism.

Wagner’s version of the Jew of his operas is described in detail in “Jewishness in Music,” where he defines the Jew as one who shuffles and blinks, schemes and argues, and cannot be trusted. Wagner’s Jew is incapable of creating true art or being part of an authentic artistic endeavor, and “the exceptions are so rare and special... they only confirm the general rule.” The Jew speaks the language of the country in which they reside, but they “speak it always as an alien,” and this then causes music created by

4 Jews to lack “all capability of therein expressing himself idiomatically, independently, and conformably to his nature” (Weiner 1997). As a result, the successful Jewish artist is a thief and plagiarist.

This harsh and speciﬁc stereotype of a Jewish person is brought to life in the character of Beckmesser. Barry Millington explains how Beckmesser “slinks up the alley behind the night watchmen in Act II,” “limps and stumbles about the stage in Act III,” and “blinks with embarrassment when Eva turns away from his ingratiating bow at the song contest.” He steals the song that he thought belonged to Sachs and attempted to claim it as his own, personifying the thieving and unoriginal Jew. Beckmesser “fulﬁlls the classic role of the scapegoat,” representing many of the negative themes throughout the plot (Millington 1991). On the most individual level, Beckmesser is a clear representation of how Wagner believes Jews to be.

However, Beckmesser must also be considered in a broader societal context. Die Meistersinger was written during a period of strong German nationalism. In the 1860s, the German economy was surging with industrial growth and social cohesion, encouraging a powerful wave of national feeling, but Wagner, along with a large middle- class bloc, was concerned over the sacriﬁce of traditional German values. In his essay “Was Ist Deutsch?” Wagner explains that foreign interest groups, namely the Jews, ﬁlled vacancies in German society, and the German spirit became “a repugnant caricature” of itself (Millington 1991). Wagner’s spite towards this loss of traditional values is seen in Beckmesser’s embodiment of the “Other,” and how “painfully and cruelly aware of his Otherness” Beckmesser becomes in the course of the opera. Compared to other Wagnerian villains, such as Klingsor or Alberich, Beckmesser’s plight is one-dimensional and shallow; the audience is not engaged with his story as they are with other antagonists of Wagner. This is considered an important principle of his operas, and Millington asserts that “Wagner’s hatred for everything [Beckmesser] represents is so total that for once he loses his sure dramatic touch” (Millington 1991). Beyond just his individual character, Wagner asserts that Beckmesser intrinsically doesn’t belong within the society of the

5 mastersingers, cementing his role as an outsider.

Like Beckmesser, Mime, from Wagner’s Die Ring, personifies many of the Jewish stereotypes Wagner describes in his writing, such as his “petty cleverness, greed, and all the complete musically and textually excellent jargon [Yiddishized German]” (Tusa 2014). In Die Ring, the plot revolves around a magical ring forged by the dwarf Alberich that grants total control over the world, and it draws from mythical gods, heroes, and creatures that fuse elements of German and Scandinavian myths and folk-tales. The character Mime is the brother of Alberich, and in the third opera of Die Ring, Siegfried, we see Mime and his fostered son Siegfried. Throughout the story, their relationship is tumultuous, with Mime showing despair towards Siegfried and Siegfried eventually hating Mime. In addition to Mime exemplifying the Jewish stereotypes shares with Beckmesser, historians argue Mime’s character represents a much more personal relationship to Wagner, that is his disdain for opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. In Wagner’s essay ”Oper und Drama”, Meyerbeer’s Jewish origin is alluded to with a metaphor for creative deficiency; Wagner states Meyerbeer is “like the starling that follows the plowshare in the field and joyfully pecks up the exposed earthworms.” Acknowledging the link between Meyerbeer and Mime from the fact that Wagner refers to them both as “starlings,” historian Michael Tusa argues that Wagner’s anti-Jewish sentiments in the Die Ring are also in reference to his hostile feelings towards Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer’s shortcomings as a composer are attributed to his Jewish origins, mirroring Mime’s shortcomings. Further, Siegfried’s loathing of Mime is seen as a direct tie to Wagner’s personal feelings to Meyerbeer (Tusa 2014).

The last character accused of carrying Wagner’s ideology is Klingsor from Par- sifal. In Parsifal, the knight Parsifal is on a quest to recover the Holy Grail for his people, the Knights of the Grail, after it had been stolen by Klingsor, the antagonist who was denied entry into the Knights’ guild and then set himself in opposition to them. The relationship between Klingsor and the Knights of the Grail personiﬁes most clearly the notions of the “Volk” and the “alien outsiders” explained in Wagner’s “Jewishness

6 in Music.” Historian Hektor K. T. Yan explains that Klingsor embodies the most extreme example of the alien outsider in German society. He is foreign, but he has an intimate understanding of the community, and Yan ties this idea with Wagner’s notion of the “cultured Jew.” This is one who has made every eﬀort to assimilate, such as a Christian baptism, but they remain undeniably Jewish and only more isolated within society. Klingsor, in an eﬀort to become one of the “knights of the holy grail,” castrated himself to appear more “chaste”, but the knights saw this “extreme” measure as “un- natural” and “disgusting” (Yan 2012). Klingsor took extreme measures to assimilate but ended up further ostracizing himself. Even Klingsor’s leitmotif in Parsifal is “in sharp contrast” with the major leitmotivs presented beforehand. Klingsor is represented with heavy chromaticism and an awkward dotted rhythm, emphasizing his “otherness” (Yan 2012). Altogether, he stands apart from the very clear ingroup of the knights, and his Jewishness is central to his character.

Beckmesser, Mime, and Klingsor have been the focal point of the Jewish question within Wagner’s music, and these characters are viewed by many as “coded warnings about the threats posed by Jews” to the health of German society (Tusa 2014). While there is a lack of quantitative literature on Wagner’s operas, I believe these three characters and the plots surrounding them primed audiences for the years leading up to the rise of the Nazi regime, strengthening the already powerful wave of antisemitism preceding World War 2.

2.2 Nationalism

Wagner’s nationalism is based most overtly in Die Meistersingers, an opera set in 16th century Nurnberg. Hitler himself claimed this opera as the soundtrack of the Nazi regime, and through his praise of this opera, catalyzed the controversy of Wagner’s music. Richard Stock, along with other Nazi Wagnerians, believe Wagner’s historic Nurnberg represented a “sanctuary of Germanness” poised against the “enemies of German unity and traditional German cultures” (Dennis 2003). Once Hitler seized power, he enjoyed a

7 “Meistersinger binge” and arranged a series of performances. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, propagandized this opera further, stating that there is “no work in all the music literature of the German Volk that so closely relates to our times and our spiritual condition” in a speech published in multiple national newspapers (Dennis 2003).

The Nazi regime proudly claimed this opera as their anthem and politicized it as “the most German of all German operas,” but even before their reign, Wagner’s nationalist ideals were understood by audiences. In his essay “Was Ist Deutsch?”, Wagner expresses concern that amidst an era of exceptional economic and industrial growth, traditional German values were being sacriﬁced. He asserts that foreign interest groups, namely the Jews, ﬁlled vacancies in German society, and the German spirit became “a repugnant caricature” of itself (Borchmeyer, Maayani, and Vill 2000).

Themes of nationalism are also present in Parsifal; In Adorno’s ”In Search of Wagner”, the grail knights are seen as a racist and religious foreshadowing of the 3rd Reich, and Karl Marx even called Wagner a “neo-German-Prussian State-Musician” in response to Parsifal (Adorno 2005). Paul Lawrence Rose claims this opera represents a “triumph of the Aryans” over Beckmesser and his form of outsider (Rose 1992). Nietzsche famously viewed Parsifal as Wagner’s “decaying” and “despairing” retreat “before the Christian cross,” insisting that Wagner, towards the end of his life, fell onto religion and based his nationalism in his devout German Protestantism (Bokina 1997). The themes of fraternity and exclusivity throughout Parsifal support the claim of Wagner’s strong German nationalism.

3 Argument and Hypothesis

While Wagner’s personal writings and Hitler’s propagandization of Die Meis- tersingers solidify the presence of antisemitism in his work, this paper attempts to sep- arate the eﬀect of exposure to his operas alone. This is done through the mechanism of social priming by drawing from the audience’s strong sense of antisemitism and na-

8 tionalism. The antagonists from Wagner’s operas represent the most vivid antisemitic tropes of Wagner’s personal writings. With the assumption that audiences were aware of these tropes during this time period, the exposure to such clear stereotypes from such a renowned composer within the revered artform of opera will encourage audiences to adopt this ideology and later be more likely to vote for the Nazi regime and Hitler.

While Wagner could not have intended to help specifically the Nazi regime with his work, the use of music as a political vehicle was not a new concept, and Wagner had intention of perpetuating his ideology through his music, just as he did in his essays. Social psychologist Bill Thompson explains in “Music in the Social and Behavioral Sci- ences” that specifically opera and its literary basis “makes it a facile tool for political propagandizing” (Thompson 2014). 17th-century Baroque Italian composers celebrated a “heroic ideal” and the “supremacy of the state” through characters “used as allegorical representations” (Thompson 2014). The Hapsburgs of Vienna and Louis XIV commis- sioned operas filled with nationalism from composers Lully and Quinault. For example, depictions of “savages” from the Americas were used as “entertaining exoticisms” while also cementing the idea of the king’s “beneficent imperialism” (Thompson 2014).

A parallel example to Hitler is that of Stalin’s statist music reeling in the “ex- perimental” music of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Stalin repressed the compositions of these composers in an effort to forge a “soviet realism” that he deemed appropriate for the country. While viewed as an extension of Romanticism, it was considered rather conservative for composers at the time, and Shostakovich and Prokofiev had to adjust their compositional styles to fit Stalin’s mold. The outcome was music that reflected Stalin’s vision of the state which went on to alter audiences’ and the world’s perception of Russian music (Weickhardt 2004).

Politically charged music is not a new concept, and the goal of this paper was to quantify the eﬀects of Wagner’s opera by regressing the popularity of his operas by city in Germany with the vote share of Nazi regime. By understanding the latent eﬀects that the characters of Beckmesser, Mime, and Klingsor can have on audiences as well as the

9 mindset of audiences of that era, we can understand how Wagner’s music dramas could have impacted the reception of the Nazi regime in the following years.

4 Data and Statistics

Table 1: Descriptive Statistics

Variable Observations Mean Standard Dev Min Max

Number of Operas 2115 0.06 0.518 0 10

% Jewish Population 1039 0.531 1.034 0 15.9

1.Antisemitic Operas 2115 0.013 0.112 0 1

Number of Operas (Strauss) 2115 0.013 0.242 0 7

% Employed in Industry 1042 31.968 16.213 4.1 77.7

1.Pogrom in 1349 1297 0.181 0.385 0 1

1.Pogrom in 1920s 1398 0.027 0.163 0 1

This paper uses data from the Loewenberg Annals of Opera, a database of operas from 1597 to 1940. It lists operas chronologically by premier and provides the city of the premier. It also provides all city premiers of the country of origin, and other noteworthy international premiers through the time period (with some exceptions). This database is in no way complete, but for composers like Wagner and Strauss, it provides a helpful proxy for their operas’ popularity within Germany. The rationale of using only an opera’s premier is that once an opera is shown in a city, that production will last a few months, and other productions will take place in the years following. In other words, after an opera is shown in Berlin, I am assuming that the opera will be shown enough times to administer the treatment eﬀectively to the population of Berlin.

Without the data on the performances between the premier and the beginning of the Nazi party votes, I chose to treat the presence of an opera premier as a dummy variable

10 for that particular city and tally the number of operas premiered in a city from 1842, the date of the ﬁrst successful Wagner opera staging of Rienzi, to 1928 (Loewenberg 1955). I acknowledge the large assumption that operas will continue to be performed following their premier, but many of Wagner’s opera are part of the mainstream opera canon and are performed continuously today, including his most antisemitic and nationalist operas. Further, his less popular operas, such as Die Feen and Tannhauser, were never performed in a city before 1928 that didn’t also feature a performance of one of his popular and problematic works. With this logic, the treatment would be successfully administered where his more popular operas are staged.

The Weimar vote data comes from widely-used dataset found on the Inter- university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). This dataset provides election breakdowns by city from 1919-1933 of the Weimar Republic as well as key demographic statistics such as religion and employment status, and the primary experiment will be between the number of Wagner’s operas premiered in a city against the vote share of the Nazi party or Hitler in each election.

My controls focused on population statistics, preexisting antisemitism, and opera popularity. With the dataset provided by the ICPSR, I control for the propor- tion of Jewish population by city as well as the percent of the population employed in industry as a proxy for the relative development of each city. With the data gathered by Nico Voigtlander and Hans-Joachim Voth, I control for preexisting antisemitism by city. In their paper “Persecution Perpetuated,” these researchers found continuity “on the local level” between pogroms against Jews during the Black Plague, violence towards Jews in the 1920s, and votes for the Nazi Party ((Voigtl¨anderand Voth 2011). I control for pogroms in 1348 and the 1920s to provide continuity and robustness to my data.

To control for any eﬀects of opera or classical music in general on my experiment, I include data on another inﬂuential and German-centric composer, Richard Strauss. He premiered a similar amount of music before the Nazi regime took power and with relative success, though no one could compare to the success of Wagner during this period.

11 Strauss was a controversial figure during this era, for he accepted Joseph Goebbel’s offer to serve as the “first president of the Reich Chamber of Music” in 1933 (Petropoulos 2014). However, he joined under complex circumstances. Historian Peter Paret under- stands Strauss as “no admirer of Hitler” and one who “could live in any environment that did not seriously interfere with his work,” and Strauss even hoped to “mitigate the regime’s negative influences on music in Germany” (Petropoulos 2014). While his com- placency with the Nazi regime is not commendable, he does not charge his music with any form of political ideology that would affect this experiment. Further, his association with the regime began after the scope of this paper, and his politics before that period were considered pragmatic and apolitical at best. As one of the few comparable composers to Wagner during this era, and residing in the same country with the same career trajectory, controlling for Strauss’ opera premiers before 1928 is the best way to address any influences of the popularity of opera in general at the time.

5 Results

After running my experiments, I found the results did not match my hypothesis. All regressions were run with a different Reichstag election testing for the vote of the Nazi party or Hitler. I tested seven elections between 1928 and 1933, and none showed significance for the presence of Wagner’s operas. The first five regressions show the elections of the Reichstag, where the Nazi Party ran for representation in government. The last two show the presidential elections of Hitler against Von Hindenburg and other candidates.

While the null hypothesis cannot be rejected, it is worth noting the signiﬁcance in a key control, the percentage population employed in industry. This signiﬁcance is consistent with Hitler’s platform of antimodernism and his appeal to the rural lifestyle, going along with the insights from my main argument.

To address any possible regional eﬀects that may be skewing the data, such as Wagner’s success or Hitler’s campaigns throughout diﬀerent regions of Germany, I added

12 Table 2: Nazi Party Vote Share and Number of Operas

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) VARIABLES 20-May-28 14-Sep-30 31-Jul-32 11-Nov-32 5-Mar-33 13-Mar 10-Apr-32

Number of Operas -0.028 -0.141 -0.815 -1.159 -1.428 -1.210 -1.159 (0.413) (0.792) (1.257) (1.184) (1.058) (1.042) (1.235) % Jewish Population 0.207 0.125 -0.425 0.498 0.053 -0.003 -1.078 (0.319) (0.609) (0.956) (0.922) (0.823) (0.792) (0.938) 1.Antisemitic Operas -0.584 2.167 3.942 4.967 4.639 4.855 4.151 (1.794) (3.430) (5.551) (5.232) (4.671) (4.605) (5.455) Number of Operas (Strauss) 0.309 0.231 1.161 0.864 1.304 0.369 0.905 (0.670) (1.277) (2.003) (1.881) (1.679) (1.662) (1.969) % Employed in Industry -0.002 -0.112*** -0.304*** -0.258*** -0.353*** -0.279*** -0.331*** (0.015) (0.030) (0.048) (0.046) (0.041) (0.039) (0.047) 1.Pogrom in 1349 0.248 -2.959*** -5.324*** -4.407*** -4.600*** -3.994*** -5.509*** (0.516) (0.997) (1.576) (1.509) (1.347) (1.301) (1.541) 1.Pogrom in 1920s -0.052 -1.908 2.138 0.752 2.742 1.615 4.402 (1.091) (2.136) (3.409) (3.276) (2.925) (2.828) (3.350) Constant 3.308*** 24.729*** 51.996*** 45.410*** 60.090*** 43.561*** 53.082*** (0.632) (1.218) (1.910) (1.899) (1.696) (1.584) (1.876)

Observations 351 342 335 313 313 340 340 R-squared 0.003 0.071 0.150 0.125 0.235 0.166 0.182 regional fixed effects. These fixed effects are at the Walkreis level, and these Walkreis were the Weimar Republic’s equivalent of voting districts. While the initial set of controls did not change much, the significance seen across different Walkreis of the Weimar Republic continue to follow the Nazi regime’s platform and different regions’ voting patterns.

Table 3: Regional Fixed Eﬀects Added

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) VARIABLES 20-May-28 14-Sep-30 31-Jul-32 11-Nov-32 5-Mar-33 13-Mar 10-Apr-32

Number of Operas 0.410 0.851 0.891 0.638 -0.095 0.296 0.548 (0.471) (0.974) (1.483) (1.423) (1.333) (1.299) (1.494) % Jewish Population -0.074 0.604 -0.335 -0.428 0.142 -0.523 -0.654 (0.325) (0.672) (1.011) (0.975) (0.913) (0.884) (1.016) 1.Antisemitic Operas -1.991 -2.210 -2.857 -1.446 -0.627 -1.034 -2.043 (1.646) (3.394) (5.286) (5.078) (4.758) (4.632) (5.325) Number of Operas (Strauss) 0.236 -0.194 -0.082 -0.330 0.363 -0.426 -0.872 (0.736) (1.518) (2.279) (2.183) (2.046) (1.997) (2.296) % Percent Employed in Industry 0.022 -0.055 -0.238*** -0.221*** -0.306*** -0.271*** -0.286*** (0.016) (0.034) (0.050) (0.050) (0.046) (0.044) (0.051) 1.Pogrom in 1349 -0.542 -1.991* -2.367 -2.524 -2.575* -2.854** -2.795* (0.499) (1.043) (1.574) (1.548) (1.450) (1.373) (1.578) 1.Pogrom in 1920s -1.267 -2.466 1.443 -0.149 2.125 0.718 3.760 (0.941) (1.993) (3.054) (2.995) (2.806) (2.676) (3.076) Constant 3.048*** 22.143*** 48.603*** 44.043*** 57.602*** 43.240*** 50.221*** (0.650) (1.330) (1.997) (2.020) (1.893) (1.750) (2.012)

Observations 351 342 335 313 313 340 340 R-squared 0.021 0.030 0.081 0.077 0.147 0.127 0.114 Number of V1 33 33 33 33 33 33 33

To clarify the results of the regional fixed effects, I grouped the 35 Walkreis in their respective cultural regions and tested for these broader regional effects in 6 cultural regions of Germany. The results reflect well the subtle cultural variation within Germany.

13 In geographer John O’Loughlin’s research paper “The Electoral Geography of Weimar Germany,” he explains that Nazi party “aimed its platform at blue-collar workers, but. . . had unexpected success in rural areas,” but this success was split “along lines of inheritance traditions” (O’Loughlin 2002). In the Catholic regions of the south and west, local communities followed partible inheritance traditions where land was split equally from own to children, while the North and Northwest had traditions of impartible inheritance. The party’s platform for bolstering private property was ignored by the former and well- received by the latter, and this tendency is reflected in the data. Westphalia, the region on the west-most side of Germany, and Bavaria, the southernmost region, were significant and negative, indicative of the primarily catholic population and their inheritance traditions. Middle Germany and Lower Saxony of central and north Germany were slightly significant and positive, reflecting their rural protestant population.

Table 4: Broader Regional Fixed Eﬀects Added

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) VARIABLES 20-May-28 14-Sep-30 31-Jul-32 11-Nov-32 5-Mar-33 13-Mar-32 10-Apr-32

Number of Operas -0.105 -0.349 -1.166 -1.398 -1.442 -1.476 -1.539 (0.362) (0.773) (1.181) (1.145) (1.015) (1.011) (1.167) % Jewish Population 0.244 0.426 0.487 1.233 0.713 0.466 -0.326 (0.283) (0.603) (0.911) (0.905) (0.802) (0.778) (0.899) 1.Antisemitic Operas -1.058 1.630 2.290 3.299 2.767 3.624 2.788 (1.578) (3.355) (5.221) (5.064) (4.487) (4.467) (5.161) Number of Operas (Strauss) 0.354 -0.104 0.348 0.235 0.694 -0.135 0.100 (0.586) (1.245) (1.880) (1.816) (1.609) (1.608) (1.858) % Employed in Industry 0.010 -0.084*** -0.253*** -0.236*** -0.316*** -0.256*** -0.284*** (0.015) (0.032) (0.048) (0.047) (0.042) (0.041) (0.047) 1.Pogrom in 1349 -0.331 -1.722 -2.485 -2.659* -2.541* -3.171** -3.028* (0.491) (1.057) (1.615) (1.596) (1.414) (1.370) (1.582) 1.Pogrom in 1920s -0.982 -2.183 3.502 2.159 3.798 2.190 5.615* (0.964) (2.102) (3.236) (3.209) (2.843) (2.769) (3.199)

Middle Germany 2.735*** 2.006 4.521* 4.701* 0.545 6.255*** 4.880** (0.729) (1.552) (2.361) (2.484) (2.201) (2.020) (2.333) Lower Saxony 4.660*** 2.591 3.163 2.887 -1.158 3.943* 2.520 (0.843) (1.787) (2.695) (2.746) (2.433) (2.306) (2.664) Westphalia 0.897 -3.354** -8.545*** -5.695** -8.523*** -3.139 -7.583*** (0.714) (1.529) (2.346) (2.322) (2.057) (1.974) (2.280) Bavaria 7.316*** -0.296 -8.463*** -5.577** -8.398*** -0.199 -7.117*** (0.806) (1.712) (2.583) (2.527) (2.239) (2.209) (2.552) Baden-Wottemburg 2.287*** -4.502** -6.513** -3.797 -4.209* -1.652 -7.102*** (0.851) (1.806) (2.725) (2.666) (2.363) (2.330) (2.692) Constant 0.758 23.949*** 51.439*** 45.120*** 61.467*** 41.674*** 52.623*** (0.650) (1.388) (2.093) (2.121) (1.879) (1.791) (2.069)

Observations 351 342 335 313 313 340 340 R-squared 0.252 0.137 0.269 0.204 0.315 0.236 0.288

These results continue to inform the Wagner debate. Potentially, the audiences receiving treatment had little overlap with Hitler’s constituency. In Daniel Snowman’s

14 Figure 1: Map of Germany’s Broad Cultural Regions book The Gilded Age: A Social History of Opera, he explains that Napoleon’s reforms in 17th century France created a new middle-class audience base for operas. Opera became an activity for the middle-class and more people began seeing opera in France and surrounding countries as they began adopting similar economic reforms. Snowman also cites Wagner’s reimagination of opera and how it dramatically popularized opera and continued to bring in new audiences (Snowman 2010). With this understanding, I assumed enough middle- and lower-class voters would have seen Wagner’s performances and received treatment. However, Hitler’s constituency also consisted of primarily rural voters, many of whom likely did not have access to major city opera houses. This could have led to insigniﬁcant results due to much of Hitler’s target constituency being untreated by Wagner’s operas, and the treated group being already very unlikely to vote for the Nazi party.

15 Further, it is possible that the presence of antisemitism in Wagner’s opera is not an assertion of his ideology, but merely a reﬂection of sentiments already felt by the treatment group. As explained by Ivo Supicic, the idea of music “as a form of communication is. . . actually questioned by many authors.” Even Adorno, one who wholeheartedly asserts Wagner’s antisemitism, claims audiences “listen atomistically and disassociate [with] what they hear” (Supiˇciˇc,Supicic, Supi, et al. 1987). This disassociated listening could be interpreted as audiences simply not absorbing the ideologies present in the plot.

Many factors could have played into my null results, but the data does provide support for opera having at least some effect on audiences’ politics. Following my initial results, I continued to test different political parties and presidential candidates. Inter- estingly, I found significance with the communist party in two elections, the Reichstag elections of May 20th, 1928 and July 31st, 1932. This significance went away when fixed effects were added at the Walkreis level but came back when the broader regional fixed effects were added. These two elections show a positive correlation of around 1.0 between exposure to Wagner’s operas and percentage vote share for the communist party, and these results warrant a reexamination of Wagner’s operas and the political circumstances surrounding them. A second popular reading of Wagner’s politics is through a socialist lens, where critics view many of his utopian settings and indignant nationalist publications as anti-capitalist. In 1848, while the people of Saxony demanded more democratic institutions, Wagner was part of a revolutionary society called the “Fatherland-Union,” where he preached the necessity of bringing theatre “into closer relations with the higher artistic life of the people.” He states in his famous article “Art and Revolution” that the close connection “between political and artistic reform” necessitates “nothing but a revolution” that could finally “give a fair field to real freedom, and real art expression” (Wagner and Baudelaire 2001). He was always critical of capitalist limitations on art, and he acknowledges that when he had the fully financial support of the King of Bavaria, his artistic expression was uninhibited thanks to only “the tender mercies of chance” (Monefiore 1902). The socialist/communist Wagner is viable, and his contemporaries

16 understood his socialist views in his writings, but would these ideologies be transmitted through his operas through the same mechanism as his antisemitism?

Table 5: Communist Party and Number of Operas

(1) (2) VARIABLES 20-May-28 31-Jul-32

Number of Operas 0.931** 1.077** (0.461) (0.448) % Jewish Population 0.129 -0.257 (0.356) (0.341) Number of Operas (Strauss) -0.465 -0.699 (0.747) (0.715) 1.Antisemitic Operas -0.041 -0.593 (2.002) (1.980) % Employed in Industry 0.228*** 0.275*** (0.017) (0.017) 1.Pogrom in 1349 -0.651 -1.101* (0.576) (0.562) 1.Pogrom in 1920s -0.708 -0.624 (1.218) (1.216) Constant -1.154 1.647** (0.706) (0.681)

Observations 351 335 R-squared 0.366 0.465

The primary socialist interpretations of Wagner’s operas come most notably from Die Meistersinger, Die Ring and Parsifal. In Die Meistersinger, the Mastersingers of Nurnberg are often seen as Wagner’s Volk; in antisemitic readings of Wagner, the Volk are seen as the “perfect race” in contrast with the haves, but Wagner himself in his essay “Art and Revolution” explained the Volk as “the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective want” (Beiswanger 1942). With this view, the Mastersingers can be seen as a fraternity of collective spirit. Further, the haves, are those who live “for the enjoyment of their superﬂuity” with needs that are “artiﬁcial, egoistic and false” and they can be read as having greedy capitalistic desires (Beiswanger 1942). This ingroup and outgroup have most often been interpreted as the German nationals and their cultural intruders i.e. the Jews. However, a socialist reading of Wagner can see the Volk as the

17 Table 6: Communist Party with Regional Fixed Eﬀects

(1) (2) VARIABLES 20-May-28 31-Jul-32

Number of Operas 0.903** 1.063** (0.444) (0.434) % Jewish Population 0.265 -0.232 (0.347) (0.335) 1.Antisemitic Operas -0.549 -0.784 (0.718) (0.691) Number of Operas (Strauss) 0.105 -0.273 (1.934) (1.919) % Employed in Industry 0.234*** 0.276*** (0.018) (0.018) 1.Pogrom in 1349 0.271 -0.406 (0.602) (0.594) 1.Pogrom in 1920s -0.118 -0.015 (1.181) (1.189)

Middle Germany -1.709* -1.747** (0.893) (0.868) Lower Saxony -1.469 -2.502** (1.032) (0.990) Westphalia -1.796** -1.324 (0.875) (0.862) Bavaria -5.714*** -4.902*** (0.987) (0.949) Baden-Wottemburg -2.902*** -2.766*** (1.042) (1.002) Constant 0.170 3.177*** (0.797) (0.769)

Observations 351 335 R-squared 0.426 0.512

18 selﬂess socialist society against the capitalist desires of the haves. In Die Meistersinger, the Mastersingers as the Volk and the outsiders as the haves is a possible interpretation by audiences (Fowkes 2014).

A famous communist interpretation of Wagner comes from George Bernard Shaw’s book The Perfect Wagnerite, in which he claims Wagner’s Die Ring is a Marxist allegory of the collapse of capitalism from its own internal contradictions. Shaw asserts that a large portion of Die Ring creates a ”portraiture of our capitalistic industrial sys- tem from the socialist’s point of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic” and the burning of Valhalla at the end of G¨otterd¨ammerung representing the fall of capitalism due to the greed of the main characters over the sacred ring.

In his book Opera and Politics, John Bokina provides an interpretation of Parsi- fal that he labels as “Romantic Anticapitalism” (Bokina 1997). This ideology is a critique of capitalism focused on “certain lost or endangered values from a real or imaginary past” which is in line with Wagner’s fear of a tainted German society. Bokina presents the three acts of Parsifal as the three stages of romantic anticapitalism. Each act is during a time period with a diﬀerent king representing one of these stages; Titurel’s golden age, Am- fortas’ loss of utopia, and Parsifal’s quest for recovery. The ﬁrst act depicts Titurel and the grail knights living in peace without worries of scarcity thanks to their grail that provides them eternal sustenance. The grail is stolen in the second act under Amfortas, symbolizing their loss of utopia. In the third act, the grail is recovered, and utopia is restored (Bokina 1997).

It is possible that audiences interpreted these operas as communist rather than antisemitic, and these operas were among Wagner’s most popular. Perhaps they provided a stronger treatment for audiences than the antisemitic treatment his other operas, and the correlation between Wagner’s operas and the communist party is due to the fact that voters for this party were mostly middle class, not the rural farmers that voted for the Nazi party.

However, we must consider the demographic of concertgoers more critically.

19 While opera was becoming a middle-class activity, it was still a form of cultural capital re- stricted from lower-class constituencies. The Wagner concertgoer was likely middle-class or wealthier, living in an urban setting, and educated. This demographic was possibly already more likely to vote against the Nazi party and for the communist party. Control- ling for specifically the presence of Parsifal and Die Meistersinger was not significant, but neither was the presence of the control composer, Strauss. Perhaps the significance of operas with the communist party suggests a third variable linking access to cultural capital and political alignment.

Regardless, the data provides opportunity to delve deeper into the question of Wagner, and the room for interpretation is endless; this data only adds to the discussion in ways hopefully not yet seen.

6 Conclusion

In my paper, I argued that the antisemitic tropes present in Wagner’s operas would affect the outcome of the elections of Weimar Republic in favor of the Nazi party. This mechanism was based on the idea that opera functioned as a form of political communication through which Wagner transmitted his overtly antisemitic politics to audiences. My results did not reflect this initial hypothesis, and instead I found significant and positive results reflecting that Wagner’s operas affect the vote for the communist party of the Weimar Republic.

The paper has key theoretical and empirical implications. First, it calls for a reevaluation of preexisting literature on Wagner’s antisemitism and its perception by audiences. While in no way is this paper denying the irrefutable antisemitism of Wagner, it questions the relationship between Wagner and his audiences. The evidence supporting the presence of Jewish stereotypes in Die Meistersinger and his other operas rely on the assumption that audiences were privy to the lexicon of stereotypes that historians claimed were commonplace at the time. Wagner’s sentiments towards Jews may have been so commonplace as to not have any eﬀect on audiences in favor of the Nazi party,

20 and instead his operas reﬂect the established social tension leading up to World War 2.

Further, this paper adds to existing literature on the causal mechanisms that exist between music and politics. Wagner’s less commonly shared anticapitalist politics are revealed in Die Ring, Parsifal and Die Meistersinger, and with an audience who presumably did not share this sentiment so strongly, this paper supports the claim that music can eﬀectively change ideologies of audiences.

My work also highlights the nuances of German cultural and geographical regions, adding to the work of O’Loughlin. With regional fixed effects reflecting variations in voting patterns throughout Germany, this paper substantiates the claims of various cultural and religious boundaries and their effects on the Weimar Republic elections.

Acknowledging the limitations of my data being vague and potentially incom- plete, future work could expand upon the proliferation of Wagner’s operas, finding data on more than just the premieres of his and other composer’s operas, but also how commonly and for how long a given opera was performed. With a more complete dataset, new experiments could corroborate the findings of this paper or reveal unknown causal mechanisms. Further, similar experiments can be taken to different composers and regions, in order to expand upon the relationship between music and politics. However, this research requires data that likely no longer exists due to the destruction of World War 2. While this question may not have the opportunity to be further developed, it provides the framework for future research to explore a field that has a distinct lack of quantitative literature.

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