Music: Wagner No Aryan?

In Germany, every crop-haired infant Siegfried, every pig-tailed little Brünnhilde counts Richard Wagner one of Nazidom’s special heroes. Composer Wagner not only glorified pagan German gods and goddesses in his Ring of the Nibelungs; he and his wife Cosima were also openly antiSemitic, believed and spread the racial nonsense preached by Count Joseph Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Yet Wagner himself was perhaps what Nazis call non-Aryan. He may have been the son of a supposedly part-Jewish actor named Ludwig Geyer. Last week this old contention, long pishtushed by German Wagnerites, was bolstered by new evidence.

In the first two volumes of his mammoth Life of Richard Wagner, scholarly Biographer Ernest Newman, musicritic of the London Sunday Times, viewed the Geyer issue from a safe perch on the fence. In the third volume, published this week (Knopf; $5), Mr. Newman let himself carefully down on the non-Aryan side. Fundamental premise: Geyer was a lodger in the household of Police Actuary Carl Friedrich Wagner in Leipzig; there is no evidence that he was not there in the late summer of 1812, when Johanna Rosina Wagner conceived the child who was to be called Richard. New evidence:* in the early summer of 1813, Frau Wagner journeyed with her newborn infant smack through the middle of a Napoleonic war to visit Geyer, who was playing at a spa in Bohemia. She left six moppets—the youngest aged two—at home in Leipzig. Contrary to the custom of the times, Richard was not baptized until twelve weeks after his birth. His legal father died three months later. Widow Wagner married Geyer the following summer, bore him a daughter six months after the wedding.

Says Biographer Newman: “Is it not difficult to resist the conclusion that, in some degree or other, her journey was, in fact, a flight from a home that had all at once become impossible for her, and that in taking only her recent baby with her she was taking from Carl Friedrich something for which he may have believed he had no call to feel any paternal enthusiasm? … It certainly looks … as if the gallant opponents of the theory of the Geyer paternity have been defending a lost cause.”

* Published in the Zurich Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1933-