Derek Hughes, ‘There Was No Need To Spell It Out’: Early Wagner Criticism and the Question of Anti-Semitism. Part 2: ‘Parsifal’ and ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’

As most readers will know, one of the most intense controversies about Wagner’s operas concerns their alleged anti-Semitism. How far are they infused with the anti-Jewish views which Wagner so copiously expressed elsewhere? The search for anti-Semitism is generally conducted as a search for Jew-figures, the most popular candidates being Alberich and Mime, Beckmesser, and Klingsor and Kundry. According to Robert Gutman, Amfortas’s sin is against racial purity – what the Nazis termed Rassenschande. His blood is ‘corrupted by sexual contact with Kundry, a racial inferior, this criminal miscegenation epitomizing the Aryan dilemma’.