In Part 1 of this multi-post I talked about the peculiar ways in which the anti-Jewish elements that were ubiquitous and probably foundational to the worlds of Romantic music derived from the thought of the late Enlightenment, and in Part 2 I said a few words about Richard Wagner’s “On Jewry in Music,” which has become one of the most-discussed of the many anti-Jewish published writings published in the nineteenth century. In this post, I talk about Franz Liszt’s chapter on “les juifs” from his 1859 treatise on the music of the Roma in Hungary – a chapter that is discussed far less than Wagner’s but was actually much more widely read, and therefore more influential, in its day, and therefore more evil in its effects.
But first, two matters of housekeeping:
(1) A personal/professional note: this past year I devoted some space to these and similar writings in my classes on Romantic music. I showed my students the excerpts I quoted in Part 2, and that I quote here. Their responses were spot-on:
Student 1: “So . . . much . . . hate . . .”
Student 2: “So much fear!”
Student 3: “Have these authors [Liszt and Wagner] been held accountable for this stuff?”
I nodded my head in response to the first two, shook it in response to the last. “No, not really.”
(2) Liszt scholarship deals fairly extensively with “Des bohémiens” but barely acknowledges the chapter on “les juifs.” In fact, Liszt biographer Alan Walker speciously tries to attribute this grossly anti-Jewish chapter to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. But his argument doesn’t stand up, and before showing you Liszt’s words I need to explain why it doesn’t:
To begin with, Walker’s statement that the manuscript for the book was delivered to the publisher with obviously inserted material in Sayn-Wittgenstein’s hand is about the second French edition of the book (1881) – if that (we don’t know which pages were inserted by Sayn-Wittgenstein). It says nothing about the first French edition, which Liszt published under his own name back in 1859. Neither does it say anything about the German translation of the book, which was prepared by Liszt’s friend and collaborator Cornelius two years later (Pest: Gustav Heckenast, 1861). Nor does it say anything about the edition that Liszt released in his Gesammelte Schriften (18881): that volume, the last released during Liszt’s lifetime, was an opportunity to Liszt to excise the offending anti-Jewish material if he took exception to it for any reason.
He did not. Walker’s exculpation is untenable because (a) Liszt never distanced himself from this or any other aspect of the first edition; and (b) the first German edition contains the same anti-Jewish material as the first French edition (something that would not have happened if Liszt took issue with that material or it were spurious). The anti-Jewish statements in the first French edition and German edition of Des Bohémiens thus must be regarded as Liszt’s own until convincing evidence to the contrary emerges.
Enough preambling. Here’s the short-and-bitter about Liszt’s anti-Jewish book (all quotations are from the first edition, 1859, whose attribution to Liszt has never been questioned):
Arguably even more influential (though less discussed in modern scholarship) was Franz Liszt’s book Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (On the Gypsies and their music in Hungary; Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1859). Published with the imprimatur of cultural authority that Liszt had accrued during his tenure at Weimar, and a full decade before Wagner publicly acknowledged his authorship of Judenthum in der Musik, Des bohémiens as a whole is a defense of what Liszt characterizes as the greatness and depth of the Roma Gypsies.
But it includes important material that contrasts the Roma with Jews (“les Juifs” and “les Hébreux”), who, Liszt says, “took advantage of the French Revolution’s theses of liberty, equality, and fraternity . . . to use their white, soft, and thin hands [and] their hooked fingers, electrified by copper and silver . . . to buy the fields and vineyards . . . weighing gold and diamonds . . . while counting the great sums extracted through their usurious percents.” Here, too, Liszt asserted the unworthiness of Jewish musicians in Christian culture in terms of culture and language as well as religion. Jews’ music, he argued, could never be great because at the mandate of their religion Jews were a people who shunned self-expression; “the Israelites . . . have never sung of their own feelings. Their enduring discretion . . . [and] their religion of silence have never permitted them to express anything of the impulses of their souls, to sing of the sufferings of their hearts, to recount the pulsing of their passions, of their loves and hates, in that language of the ideal [i.e., music].” Jews, according to Liszt, had used the freedoms created by the French Revolution for their own financial benefit – but Jewish art – unlike that of the Gypsies – had no potential for Romantic greatness because it was only “imitation” and not produced by the inspired impulse of creation.
The influence of Liszt’s book is attested to by its publication and translation history. Two years after the appearance of the original version Liszt’s friend Peter Cornelius released a German translation (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1861); in 1881 a second, expanded version of the original French version was released, and in 1883 German translation of the expanded second edition was released as a part of Liszt’s Gesammelte Schriften (Collected writings; Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel). As late as 1926 the 2nd edition was published in an English translation by Edwin Evans (London: W. Reeves, 1926), and there have been several subsequent publications.
That is a greater dissemination-history than was enjoyed by Wagner’s “On Jewry in Music” even after Wagner found the honesty to release it under his own name rather than a lousy pseudonym. And so Liszt needs to be, in the words of one of my students, “held accountable” for the damage that he did to countless Jewish-identified persons in the late nineteenth century and beyond.
Which takes me back to a point I made in my prefatory rumination for Part 1 of the post: anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are as much a part of the worlds of Romantic music, and how we know those worlds, as are organicism, nationalism, and exoticism, as influential as Beethoven and Liszt and Wagner themselves. Until our world comes to terms with that omnipresent evil in more than a smattering of case-studies – until our world repudiates the findings / verdicts of these influential anti-Jewish voices – we have not rejected their anti-Jewishness at all, but only dressed it up in different clothes. Hence these blog posts, and my inclusion of an entry – necessarily brief, but I hope better than nothing at all – on anti-Jewishness in Romantic music in the Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music.
Up next in Part 4: science validates anti-Jewish prejudice and the world embraces those findings anew.