JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This cartoon appears in Punch in 1879, and it clearly show’s the bitey Mr. Punch’s proclivities towards the rise of the “music of the future”. Over the years Punch had seen little value in the new music possibilities, the form and function of which is on display in this kinetic appreciation of a hyper-functioning orchestra. There is a considerable stab made at Richard Wagner (as we can see in the scores on the floor), the composer who perhaps (along with his considerable supporter, Franz Liszt) was at the deepest heart of the publishing end of the “music of the future”.
Wagner published his views on the development of music and art in general for the future in Das Kunstwerke der Zukunfts (1849), and then more specifcally to music in Zukunfstmusik (“La Musique de l’Avenir”) in 1850. But little of that feels like very much to me at all, given the other work he was completing in 1850–Das Judenthum in der Musik. In some circles the work is translated as “Jewishness in Music” and also “Judaism in Music”, but this is far too polite–what Wagner was talking about was “Jews in Music” or “The Jew in Music”, as it was a savage attack on the place of Jewish people in music and of Judaism as a whole. It is a virulent and nasty work, first published anonymously to protect Wagner’s “freedom” (as he called it) and then again–unable to leave it alone–in 1869, proudly under his own name. The work is widely seen as a hallmark of German antisemitism and an embarrassment to Wagnerians, and in some editions of Wagner’s complete collected works, it is forgotten. On the other hand, it wasn’t just here that Wagner’s antisemitic views are made known–he was a prolific writer, and his work against the Jews appeared numerous times in newspapers and other periodicals, playing the same tune.
I’m okay with the man’s name on the floor.
