Bayreuther Blätter broadcast the racist theories of Paul de Lagarde, Arthur de Gobineau, and, most noxiously, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Wagner’s daughter Eva and became the intellectual leader of Bayreuth after Wagner’s death. Although the composer feared that his disciples would make him look ridiculous, he failed to restrain them. Indeed, he singled out for praise several articles that delivered tendentious racial interpretations of his works.
Inevitably, anti-Semitism seeped into discussion of the music itself. Even in Wagner’s lifetime the jabbering, gesticulating villains in the operas—the dwarves Alberich and Mime and the half-human Hagen in the Ring, the pedant Beckmesser in Meistersinger, the evil magician Klingsor in Parsifal—were sometimes understood as cartoons of Jews. Gustav Mahler believed that Mime embodied the “characteristic traits—petty intelligence and greed” of the Jewish race. “I know of only one Mime,” he added, “and that is myself.” The names of Wagner’s villains could double as code words for Jews. When the right-wing composer Max von Schillings complained in a letter to Strauss that “Alberichs” in the Prussian Culture Ministry were undermining true German art, we can guess that the Jewishness of those agitators, chief among them Leo Kestenberg, prompted the Wagnerian association.
No work by Wagner acquired a more threatening aspect than Parsifal, which the composer created concurrently with his late prose writings on race and regeneration. According to Cosima, he once read aloud from Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races and then went to the piano to play the opera’s Prelude. The plot lends itself all too easily to racial exegesis. King Amfortas is suffering from an obscure wound, which appeared on his body after he succumbed to the mysterious Kundry; he would seem to be the modern German whose blood has mixed with inferior races, thus becoming “Jewified.” Kundry is the female version of the Wandering Jew, who laughed at Christ on His way to the Cross and is now condemned to wander the earth; in a previous life she was Herodias, Salome’s mother. Klingsor prepares to use her again to strike his final blow against the knights. Only Parsifal, the “pure fool,” can resist the advances of Klingsor’s slave. “Verderberin!” he shouts. “Corrupter! Stand away from me! Forever and ever, away from me!”
By remaining pure of blood, Parsifal is able to banish Klingsor, regain the lance that pierced Christ’s side, and preside over the healing of the company of the Grail. As Parsifal holds the spear aloft, Kundry falls dead. Many anti-Semites wished that the Jews themselves could disappear so magically, with a stroke of the Meister’s bow.
Richard Strauss, circa 1933, was the model of the Jewified German. His son, Franz, had married Alice von Grab, the daughter of the Czech-Jewish industrialist Emanuel von Grab. Writers of Jewish ancestry had contributed to almost all of his operas to date: Hedwig Lachmann had made the translation on which Salome was based; Hugo von Hofmannsthal had written the play Elektra and the librettos for Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella; and Stefan Zweig was by then working on the libretto for Strauss’s next opera, Die schweigsame Frau. Two years later the Propaganda Ministry would note in horror that the vocal score of Die schweigsame Frau displayed the names of no fewer than “4 Juden”: Zweig; the publisher Adolph Fürstner; the composer Felix Wolfes, who made the piano arrangement; and, curiously, the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson, who wrote Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, on which the opera was based, and who was not Jewish in the least.
How Strauss became a prize exhibit of Nazi culture is a tangled tale. In his youth he had hardly been a political or cultural reactionary; his first opera, Guntram, unsettled conservative Wagnerians with its anti-collectivist message, and in following years he became Germany’s foremost representative in the marketplace of international modernist decadence. In 1911, Siegfried Wagner, a composer far more modestly talented than his father, bemoaned the fact that Parsifal was being performed in theaters “contaminated by the misfortune-gestating works of Richard Strauss.” The sardonic, anarchic side of Strauss’s character persisted as late as 1921, when he proposed to the critic Alfred Kerr the idea of a “political operetta” set against the chaos of postwar Germany, featuring “workers and industrial councils, prima-donna intrigues, tenor ambitions, resigning directors of the old regime,” together with “the National Assembly, war societies, party politicking while the people starve, pimps as Culture Ministers, criminals as War Ministers, murderers as Justice Ministers,” and, somewhere in the middle, a “true German Romantic” composer who engages in uncouth behavior, flirts with conservatory girls, and, “as a respected anti-Semite, takes donations from rich Jews.” Alas, nothing came of this promising plan.
The Weimar era brought many disappointments. While Krenek’s Jonny and Weill’s Threepenny Opera played to packed houses, Strauss’s artful if sometimes overprecious operatic comedies—Intermezzo, Die ägyptische Helena, Arabella—met with mixed success. By the end of the twenties he had gone a long time without a hit, and insecurities were gnawing at him. Coincidentally or not, his politics slid to the right. When, in 1925, a young journalist named Samuel Wilder—soon to become Billy Wilder, director of Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot—knocked on Strauss’s door to ask his opinion of Mussolini, the composer expressed admiration for the dictator. Strauss met Mussolini more than once, and the two men evidently shared their disgust for artistic modernism. Later in the decade, Count Harry Kessler attended a luncheon at Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s and recorded in his diary that Strauss had spoken in favor of a dictatorship. But the composer had little to say about Hitler himself. The name first crops up in Strauss’s published utterances in November 1932, when, in the wake of the most recent German elections, he matter-of-factly wrote, “Hitler is apparently finished.”
The protagonist of Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf, is a stubborn, tough-minded, self-reliant man who finds himself transformed into a Nazi stooge. In much the same way, Strauss’s philosophy of self—“The laws of my mind determine my life,” to quote Guntram—left him defenseless before Hitler’s seductions. Nazism was itself the product of egoism, nihilism, cynicism, and amoral aestheticism. Hitler relished the role of the munificent prince: he displayed avid interest, made knowledgeable comments, behaved bashfully around his favorites. That the master of Germany should have assumed a servile air in Strauss’s presence was thoroughly flattering. The two men first talked at length at the Bayreuth festival of 1933, when Strauss stepped in to conduct Parsifal after Toscanini had withdrawn in protest. The composer mentioned various matters that concerned him, including the idea of using film and radio revenues to support theater. He also put in a good word for the Jewish conductor Leo Blech. “I thank you,” Hitler said simply.
Certain of Hitler’s defining musical experiences took place against the familiar backdrop of Austria in the spring of 1906. He made his first trip to Vienna at the beginning of May, venturing forth from his hometown of Linz. On May 7 he sent his friend August Kubizek a postcard mentioning that he would see Tristan at the Court Opera the following night and The Flying Dutchman the night after. In a second card he gave his impression of the acoustics: “Powerful waves of sound flood the room, and the murmur of the wind gives way to a terrible frenzy of surging sound.” The third card said: “Today 7:30–12 Tristan.” Hitler stayed in Vienna for several more weeks, and he would have had time to go see Salome in Graz. Manfred Blumauer, the only scholar who has thoroughly investigated the matter, leaves open the unanswerable question of whether or not Hitler actually made the trip. Either way, he did tell Franz and Alice Strauss, in 1933 or 1934, that he had attended the Graz performance. Alice recounted the conversation to Blumauer decades later. At this meeting or another like it, Hitler apparently kissed Alice’s hand, despite the fact that she was Jewish.
The Tristan that Hitler saw in Vienna in 1906 was the famous production that originated under Gustav Mahler. Alfred Roller, the painter and stage designer, used a semi-abstract, Symbolist interplay of color and light to heighten the mysteries of Wagner’s score. Riveted by the spectacle, Hitler formed the ambition of studying painting and opera direction under Roller. He managed to obtain a letter of introduction from his mother’s landlady, who had connections in Vienna. But when he moved to the imperial city, in February 1908, he failed to follow up on the invitation,
