학술논문

Richard Wagner's "Jewish Music": Antisemitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture.
Document Type
Article
Source
Jewish Social Studies. Winter2009, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p2-36. 35p.
Subject
*MUSIC & antisemitism
*ANTISEMITISM
*NATIONALISM in music
*JEWISH musicians
*ANTISEMITISM in literature
*CULTURAL property
Language
ISSN
0021-6704
Abstract
This article examines the reactions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European Jewish musicians to Richard Wagner's classic antisemitic essay, Judaism in Music." The voluminous debates about Wagner's antisemitism have overshadowed the question of his essay's impact on Jewish musicians and Jewish musical identity. Strikingly, two of the key intellectual architects of the concept of modern Jewish music, Lazare Saminsky and Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, embraced selective aspects of Wagner's myth even as they called for a new kind of Jewish musical nationalism. Recovering their responses to Wagner helps explain the role of antisemitism in the formation of modern Jewish musical aesthetics and cultural nationalism in the Russian Empire and Ottoman Palestine. The article concludes with a discussion of the lingering questions of Wagner's appeal and controversy among contemporary American and Israeli Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]