JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] ANTISEMITISM IN WAGNERIAN OPERA 247
satisfactory raw material and coached in its proper use by a master. Here,
the parallel to the unpoetic, inarticulate, and unmusical Jew is
unambiguous.
Finally, there is the matter of Beckmesser’s participation in a song
contest that directly challenges Walther, the opera’s hero. Beckmesser’s
purpose in this foolish act, which results in further humiliation for him, is
shaped by the contest’s prize being the beautiful daughter of a wealthy fellow
guild member; the image of Beckmesser is that of a talentless and
incompetent older man having sexual pretensions for a young, pure German
maiden as well as a lust for wealth. This description summarizes Wagner’s
opinion of Jews.
The characteristics exhibited in Beckmesser generally pass unnoticed
by contemporary audiences, mostly because our generation has little experience
with and hardly any memory of coded nineteenth-century antisemitism.
The heritage of the Shoah has gone far to desensitize us to all but the
most naked, uncamouflaged, and flagrant antisemitic actions. Our sensitivity
to how the German world saw Jews at the time of the premiere of Meistersinger
has become clouded, unfamiliar, and distorted by time, making it
difficult for the contemporary world to recognize the subtle characteristics
of coded antisemitism. For example, we no longer remember the Grimm
fairy tale, “The Jew in the Thornbush,” 6 which appeared in 1815 though
derived from a story dating from 1618. Theodore Adorno claimed that
Wagner identified the character of Beckmesser with the “Jew in the Thorn-
Bush,” though his assertion is disputed. 7 It is interesting to note that those
who quarrel with Adorno’s contention have neither experience in the details
of pre 20th-century antisemitism or exposure to antisemitic theater.
Early performances of Meistersinger suggest that its reception was not
uniformly positive. There were hostile demonstrations, but it is not clear if
these were because of Wagner’s essay “Jewishness in Music,” the opera as
a whole, the composer, or the character of Sixtus Beckmesser. But it was
the Jews who were blamed for the disturbances when the audiences were
said to be full of “distinctive physiognomies”—once again, the nose—
“ready “to take their revenge on [Wagner].” Wagner’s wife, Cosima, wrote
that “the [Jews] are spreading a story . . . that ‘Beckmesser’s Song’ is an old
6. See Pat Pinsent, “After Fagin: Jewishness and Children’s Literature,” in
Stanley E. Porter and Brook W. R. Pearson, Christian Jewish Relations Through
the Centuries (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 311-328.
7. See Ritchie Robertson, ed., The German Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of
Literary Texts, 1749-1793 (Oxford University Press, first published as Oxford
World’s Classics, 1999), 63-67; “The Jew in the Thorn-Bush” (1815).