Barry Emslie, The ‘Volk’ That Wagner Loved to Hate: A Reply to Derek Hughes

November 2017, Volume 11, Number 3, 27–34.

In a brace of valuable and scholarly articles in this journal Derek Hughes maintains that Wagner has been misrepresented and maligned. He argues that the accusations of racism and, more specifically, anti-Semitism are often exaggerated and sometimes wholly unmerited. Above all, Wagner has been misunderstood because not enough attention has been paid to the ‘hinterland’, to the broader question of German–Jewish relations in the 19th century. While this is surely to some extent true, I believe that Hughes’s mitigation is, to put it mildly, a bit of a stretch. Moreover both articles, while covering a lot of bases, show the danger of neglecting common sense. Most striking of all, their attention to detail has led to an over-evaluation of particular trees at the expense of the wood, at least with respect to Wagner himself. This is unfortunate when the aim is to rehabilitate someone who was surely a creative genius – and a significant thinker.