Das Judentud in der Musik

Yesterday, for a variety of reasons, I finally sat down and read this notorious screed of Wagner's about which throughout my life I have heard such awful things.  Despite its proto-Postmodernist willful ambiguity and convoluted indirection--and beneath a contemptibly snobby, patently phony professorial affect--it's clear to me what he meant:  (1) Mendelssohn nearly suffocated himself in the neo-classical, linear conservative tradition (agreed).  (2) Meyerbeer wrote nothing but awful vulgar noisy claptrap for vulgar noisy people (couldn't have said it better myself).  (3)  Wagner simply can't get his head around the fact of what a stone genius Heine was, or admit, for one second, how wonderfully beautiful Schumann's songs set to lyrics of Heine are.  (4) The animadversions on Jews and Jewishness are quite simply stupid and negligeable in the way that ALL German philosophy is pompous and stupid and much concerned to demonstrate the truth of things which aren't so--and aren't even, really, at all interesting.  Hegelian Idealism.  Viennese Depth Psychology.  Phrenology.  Bullshit.

The thing is, this is all pretty much a defense of himself by a man who had written, or was about to write Tristan und Isolde, die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and der Ring des Niebelungens--not to mention the 'Siefried Idyll'--(arguably, the greatest music ever written) and if that's how other people's music sounded to him...Well, I admit I'm troubled by his dismissal of Bach.  But he hit Mendelssohn, with his 'Reformation Symphony,' square on the head, as he did the vulgar, noisy awfulness of Meyerbeer.  And Heinrich Heine of course was a nasty, squalid sort of person (as was Wagner), but I don't think, really, it had anything to do with his being Jewish.