A Knight at the Opera

Leah Garrett

Description

A Knight at the Opera examines the remarkable and unknown role that the medieval legend (and Wagner opera) Tannhäuser played in Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book analyzes how three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that era, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and I. L. Peretz, used this central myth of Germany to strengthen Jewish culture and to attack anti-Semitism. In the original medieval myth, a Christian knight lives in sin with the seductive pagan goddess Venus in the Venusberg. He escapes her clutches and makes his way to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope does not pardon Tannhäuser and he returns to the Venusberg. During the course of A Knight at the Opera, readers will see how Tannhäuser evolves from a medieval knight, to Heine's German scoundrel in early modern Europe, to Wagner's idealized German male, and finally to Peretz's pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. Venus herself also undergoes major changes from a pagan goddess, to a lusty housewife, to an overbearing Jewish mother. The book also discusses how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so inspired by Wagner's opera that he wrote The Jewish State while attending performances of it, and he even had the Second Zionist Congress open to the music of Tannhäuser's overture. A Knight at the Opera uses Tannhäuser as a way to examine the changing relationship between Jews and the broader world during the advent of the modern era, and to question if any art, even that of a prominent anti-Semite, should be considered taboo.
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Original Tannhäuser Ballad

2 Heinrich Heine

3 Richard Wagner

4 Theodor Herzl

5 I. L. Peretz

Conclusion

Discussion Questions

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Judaism
• Religion
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612491523
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Knight at the Opera
Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannh user
Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies
Editor
Zev Garber
Los Angeles Valley College
Case Western Reserve University
Managing Editor
Nancy Lein
Purdue University
Editorial Board
Dean Bell
Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
Louis H. Feldman
Yeshiva University
Saul S. Friedman
Youngstown State University
Joseph Haberer
Purdue University
Peter Haas
Case Western Reserve University
Rivka Ulmer
Bucknell University
Richard L. Libowitz
Temple University and St. Joseph s University
Rafael Medoff
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Daniel Morris
Purdue University
Marvin A. Sweeney
Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University
Ziony Zevit
American Jewish University
Bruce Zuckerman
University of Southern California
A Knight at the Opera
Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannh user
Leah Garrett
Purdue University Press / West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2011 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garrett, Leah, 1966-
A Knight at the opera : Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the legacy of der Tannh user / Leah Garrett.
p. cm. -- (Shofar supplements in Jewish studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-601-3 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-153-0 (epdf) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-152-3 (epub) 1. Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883. Tannh user. 2. Tannh user. 3. Heine, Heinrich, 1797-1856. 4. Herzl, Theodor, 1860-1904. 5. Peretz, Isaac Leib, 1851 or 2-1915. I. Title.
ML410.W1A2943 2012
830.9 351--dc23
2011023379
Cover image: Detail from Tannh user by Aubrey Beardsley. From the Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my mother Susan Vladeck, who, like Tannh user s Jewish mother in I. L. Peretz s Mesires-nefesh , always believes that her children are geniuses who can do no wrong. I am very thankful for her constant faith and support.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Original Tannh user Ballad
2 Heinrich Heine
3 Richard Wagner
4 Theodor Herzl
5 I. L. Peretz
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
Index
Acknowledgments
The legacy of Tannh user in my own life has taken almost as many twists and turns as the story I discuss in this book. This book grew out of an essay I published in the journal Jewish Social Studies that sought to account for the influence of Tannh user on Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl and I. L. Peretz. Writing the essay merely piqued my interest in the story, and a few years later I returned to the project to try and fill in some of the missing pieces. In the first version of the manuscript I chose only to write about the legacy in Jewish life and to skip over a full consideration of Richard Wagner s opera. However, in due time I realized that like it or not, Wagner was a central figure in the evolution of the Tannh user meme, and in order to do full justice to the story, he needed to be included.
In the years it has taken to write this book I have pestered many of the most important scholars working in Heine, Wagner, Herzl, and Peretz studies. Profound thanks to Jeffrey Sammons, Dieter Borchmeyer, and Jacques Kornberg. I also am grateful for suggestions I received from Ken Frieden, Paul Lawrence Rose, Daniel J tte, and Michael Hau over aspects of this book. Needless to say, I am completely responsible for any and all flaws. I also wish to give my deepest thanks to Richard Libowitz for his careful and considered line reading of the manuscript, and to the editor of the Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies, Zev Garber, for his enthusiasm for the project. I also wish to thank Rebecca Corbin, Dianna Gilroy, and Charles Watkinson of Purdue University Press, who have made me feel that my book is in extremely capable hands.
I began the manuscript while still a member of the English and Judaic Studies departments at the University of Denver, where I was the recipient of an Academy of Learned Sciences Junior Research Fellowship that enabled me to spend a sabbatical year researching the book. Thank you to all the support and guidance I received from my friends and colleagues at the University of Denver. I completed the book while at Monash University, where I have found an exceptionally welcoming and congenial academic home. Thank you here to my friends and colleagues in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and the School of Historical Studies.
My daughters, Sophie and Arwynn, have been raised under the shadow of Tannh user, and to them I am deeply grateful for always reminding me to have fun. And to Adrian, thank you for reading and rereading the manuscript, and for being my best friend and best partner in crime.
Introduction
In July 2001, the well-known Jewish conductor, Daniel Barenboim, leading the Berlin Staatskapelle orchestra, asked his audience at the Israeli Music Festival in Jerusalem if they would like to hear some of Richard Wagner s music during the encore. Wagner had been unofficially banned in Palestine since 1938 in response to Kristallnacht. His music was condemned for two reasons: first, because he was one of the most outspoken and prominent anti-Semites of the nineteenth century, and second, because Hitler was obsessed with Wagner and many Israelis believed that Hitler played his music at the death camps. 1 At the 2001 performance, Barenboim decided to jump headlong into the fire by raising the issue in a public forum. After a heated debate, during which many walked out of the audience in protest, the orchestra played a piece from Wagner s Tristan und Isolde . The performance was followed by a standing ovation.
Few in the audience that night knew that the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was deeply inspired by Wagner s music, and that in fact Herzl wrote the central Zionist manifesto, Der Judenstaat or The Jewish State , while attending nightly performances of Wagner s opera Tannh user in Paris. Moreover, two other major Jewish figures, Heinrich Heine and I. L. Peretz, also found the Tannh user legend an important inspiration for their reconstituted visions of Jewish culture.
This hidden story of Tannh user has never been told before in book form. A Knight at the Opera examines the relationship between the German ballad and these men. Heine, Herzl, and Peretz all turned to Tannh user at a moment in their lives when they were reconsidering their relationship to both Jewish and non-Jewish society, and each found in the German tale of self-sacrifice and redemption a tool to explore a number of questions about their identity and world view. A Knight at the Opera analyzes the evolution of the Tannh user legend as it came into contact with each of the Jewish thinkers, and explores how they changed it into a tool to foster Jewish identity and subvert anti-Semitism.
In the original medieval myth, a Christian knight, Tannh user, lives in sin with the seductive pagan goddess, Venus, in the Venusberg. He escapes her clutches and makes his way to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope does not pardon Tannh user, who returns to the Venusberg to spend the rest of his days with the goddess.
This book traces Tannh user s evolution from medieval knight to Heinrich Heine s German scoundrel in early modern Europe to Wagner s idealized German male and finally to Peretz s pious Jewish scholar in the Land of Israel. Venus will also undergo major changes from pagan goddess to lusty housewife to overbearing Jewish mother.
A Knight at the Opera examines Tannh user as a useful meme to demarcate the relationship between Jewish culture and the broader society during the rise of the modern era. A meme is any cultural entity, such as an idea, a piece of art, or a popular notion such as democracy, that evolves as it moves through culture. By examining the evolution of a meme over time, theorists gain an insight into how a society creates, responds to, and adapts to its cultural environment. Heine s, Herzl s, and Peretz s interactions with Tannh user, which ranged from assimilation to rejection, were largely affected by the significant variations in Jewish culture between East and West. The relationship of Heine, Herzl, and Peretz to the Tannh user meme is one lens through which we can view the struggles and pressures that prominent Jewish thinkers faced as they sought to construct a viable Jewish culture in Europe. This meme is particularly interesting because it also played a large role in German culture through Wagner s opera.
The book examines the chronological evolution of the meme over time: chapter 2 provides an overview of the ballad s history; chapter 3 considers Heinrich Heine s 1837 poem, Der Tannh user ; chapter 4 analyzes Richard Wagner s 1845 opera, Tannh user und der S ngerkrieg auf der Wartburg (Tannh user and the Singers Contest at Wartburg); chapter 4 discusses the influence of Wagner s opera on Theodor Herzl s 1896 Zionist work Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State); and chapter 6 focuses on I. L. Peretz s 1904 Yiddish novella Mesires-nefesh (Self-Sacrifice). Whereas Heine rewrote the 1515 German ballad, and Wagner s opera was based on Heine s work, Herzl and Peretz were both responding to a meme corrupted by a prominent anti-Semite, Richard Wagner.
Each section begins with a biographical discussion. The aim is threefold. First, it will provide access to the backgrounds of these significant cultural figures. Second, it will fill in the larger story of how and why each man decided to rework the folktale. Third, it will set the stage for our understanding of why and how Eastern and Western Jewish upbringings led to different styles of appropriating folk material. We will see that the assimilation-minded German Jews, Heine and Herzl, sought to use the folktale in such