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The Effect of Richard Wagner’s Music and Beliefs
watchman in Act II, and limps and stumbles about the
stage in Act III, blinking with embarrassment when Eva
turns away from his ingratiating bow at the song
contest.
11
For an audience member today, Beckmesser’s qualities would not
automatically stand out, but people watching the opera before 1945
would have understood Beckmesser’s characterization and what it
implied about his ethnicity.
12
Millington states that Beckmesser is
represented as the outsider from the very beginning of the play and “is
made painfully and cruelly aware of his Otherness in the course of the
opera.” In the serenade in act 2 of
Die Meistersinger
, for instance,
Beckmesser shows himself to be “utterly incapable of matching the text
to appropriate musical phrases.” Because the serenade sounds very
similar to the traditional bel-canto aria that Wagner was trying to
eradicate, the scene may suggest that Beckmesser has an old, reactionary,
and outdated style. Furthermore, when Beckmesser sings, he wrongly
accents certain syllables and sings with disjointed rhythms, largely
parodying the Jewish cantorial style. Whereas the protagonist Walther
von Stolzing can sing beautiful melodies, Beckmesser can only manage
to release a garbled sound.
13
This musical characterization of
Beckmesser provides a good example of the differences between the
Jewish caricature and the German one. It is difficult to deny that
Beckmesser “was invested with traits conforming to the anti-Semitic
stereotypes,” and his encapsulation of the characteristics embodied in
Wagner’s “Das Judentum” “is a startling fact that almost of itself
provides proof of Wagner’s anti-Semitic intent in
Die Meistersinger
.”
14
Wagner’s writings deal consistently with the concept of degeneration,
the idea that Germany’s heritage is “threatened by a swarm of dark and
physiologically inferior Jews from the East.”
15
In his book
Richard
Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination
, Marc Weiner analyzes
physiological differences, according to Wagner, between the eyes, the
11
Barry Millington, “Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in ‘Die
Meistersinger?,’”
Cambridge Opera Journal
3, no. 3 (1991): 249.
12
Patrick Lo, “‘The Most German of all German Operas’: An Analysis of
Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and its Influence on Hitler’s Nazi
Ideology,”
International Journal of the Humanities
7, no. 9 (2009): 86.
13
Millington, “Nuremberg Trial,” 247–251.
14
Ibid., 255.
15
Marc. A Weiner,
Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination
(Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 307.