That boldest of Wagnerians, Barry Millington, has declared with the confidence of a prosecuting attorney that antisemitism is "woven into the fabric" of Wagner's operas, not merely stitched onto their surface, not merely lurking in a character's hooked nose or usurious cunning, but threaded warp and woof to constitute their very souls.
Now there are those who have made a sport, a parlor game almost, of hunting Jewish caricatures through the Wagnerian forest. Theodor Adorno led this safari decades ago, and his followers have bagged their quarry faithfully: Beckmesser with his pedantic scribbling, Alberich with his subterranean gold-lust, Mime with his scheming, craven industry. These are the trophies mounted upon the wall of Wagnerian shame, and the critics congratulate themselves on their marksmanship. But Millington is alleging something more dangerous than a caricature. He is alleging a structure. He is saying that the architecture of the thing, its very metaphysics, is infected.
Let us, then, submit to the test the one opera that seems most immune to such accusations. Let us take Tristan und Isolde, that sublimest of love-poems, that most rarefied of Schopenhauerian ecstasies, that drama without villains, without politics, without race or nation, set in a mythological Celtic nowhere, and let us ask whether even here, even in this most celestial of artistic achievements, the anti-Jewish animus has been woven in.
It has. Ladies and gentlemen, I intend to prove it.
I. The Accused Opera
The story is simple enough in its surface. Tristan, that noblest of knights, conveys the Irish princess Isolde across the sea to Cornwall, there to become the bride of his uncle, King Marke. Isolde, who has loved Tristan, and whom Tristan has loved, though both have suppressed that love in the name of feudal honor, seethes with rage at the indignity. A love potion is drunk, though whether it creates love or merely licenses what was already there is one of the opera's great ambiguities. The lovers fall. The world discovers them. Tristan is wounded. He dies. Isolde follows him in the great oceanic dissolution of the Liebestod. The end.
What could be Jewish about this? Where is the ghetto? Where is the money-changer, the legalist, the dark and clannish Other? There is none. And that, precisely, is what makes the case so interesting, and so damning.
For the antisemitism in Tristan und Isolde does not wear a face. It wears a metaphysic.
II. Day and Night — or, The Cosmological Villain
The central dramatic opposition of this opera is not between two characters, nor between two nations, nor between love and duty, though all of these are present. The central opposition is between Day and Night, between the world of sunlight, of honor, of feudal obligation, of visibility and judgment and law; and the world of darkness, of dissolution, of the death of self, of the oceanic annihilation that Wagner, following Schopenhauer, understood as the deepest truth of existence.
In the great Act II duet, Tristan and Isolde do not merely curse their circumstances. They curse the Sun itself. Day is their enemy. Day is the realm of Wahn, delusion, the lie of individuation, the false world of names and contracts and thrones. Night is their salvation, their homeland, their God. Into the Night they long to dissolve, not to sleep, but to cease, to become undifferentiated, to shed the terrible burden of being a self at all.
O sink hernieder,
Nacht der Liebe,
gib Vergessen
daß ich lebe—— Tristan und Isolde, Act II
O descend upon us, Night of Love, give us the forgetting that we live. The prayer is not for happiness. It is for the annihilation of the conditions under which happiness is impossible. And those conditions are the conditions of Day.
Now ask: what sort of God rules the Day? What divinity presides over law, contract, visibility, jealousy, the demand for precise satisfaction of grievance, the enforcement of oaths and the punishment of their violation? What God surveys his creation from on high and finds it good, finds this sunlit world of individual souls and binding covenants a thing to be preserved and enforced rather than escaped and dissolved?
The answer, I submit, is written in every page of the Hebrew Bible.
III. Lucifer, or The Light That Deceives
Here we must do a little etymology, for the etymology is essential. The name Lucifer does not mean, as the popular imagination supposes, the prince of darkness. It means the light-bearer. From the Latin lux, light, and ferre, to carry. It is the Latin name for Venus as she appears before dawn, the morning star, and Jerome's Vulgate renders the Hebrew Helel ben Shachar, the "shining one, son of the dawn" of Isaiah's taunt against Babylon, as Lucifer. The fallen angel is, definitionally, a sun-figure. Not darkness, but false light. Not absence, but a radiance that blinds rather than illuminates. Not the void, but the world.
Lucifer is the prince not of darkness but of this world, of the kosmos, the realm of appearances, the prison-house of individuation. Christ himself names him so: "the prince of this world shall be cast out" (John 12:31). Paul elaborates: he is the god of this age, who has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4). The sun creates the prison. That is Lucifer's office.
Now look at Wagner's Day with this in mind. Day in Tristan und Isolde is precisely this: not evil in the crude sense, not darkness, but a blinding worldly radiance that makes the lovers see what is not real and prevents them from seeing what is. Day is the deceiver. Day is the one who tells Tristan that his duty to Marke is more real than his love for Isolde. Day is the one who takes the lover and converts him, mechanically, automatically, into the betrayer, not by malice but by the very structure of its dominion. To live in Day is to be compelled to betray what one most loves.
This is the Lucifer of Christian theology, translated into musical-dramatic terms. And the equation is precise.
IV. The Demiurge, or The God Who Mistakes Himself for God
We must go one step further, into that great heretical underground that runs beneath orthodox Christianity like a buried river: into Marcionism, into the Gnostic schools, into that perennial tradition which dared to ask whether the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were in fact the same being.
Marcion of Sinope in the second century answered: no. The God of the Hebrew Bible, the God of Law, of wrath, of jealousy, of precise contractual demand, is not the supreme God. He is the Demiurge: the craftsman who made the material world, a lesser deity who rules this realm of matter and law and contract but is utterly blind to the spiritual reality that transcends his creation. He demands satisfaction. He enforces covenants. He is, in the famous phrase, a jealous God; and jealousy, the possessive fury of one who cannot bear to be escaped, is precisely the attribute that disqualifies him from being the God of love.
The true God, in this tradition, is the God of pure spirit, of grace, of the dissolution of the material, the God who does not demand but gives, who does not contract but redeems. The God of the New Testament came not to fulfill the Demiurge's Law but to annihilate it from within, to reveal it as the work of a false divinity whose creation is a prison.
Wagner had read his Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer himself drew on this Gnostic tradition, the material world as a fallen realm of illusion, the Will as the blind and devouring force behind phenomena, salvation being the negation of the individual will in an act that dissolves the boundary between self and world. The Night of Tristan und Isolde is Schopenhauerian will-negation set to music. And the Day is the Demiurge's domain, the world the Demiurge made and enforces and will not release.
The chain of equivalences, once you see it, cannot be unseen:
Day · Sun · Lucifer
=
The Demiurge · The God of Law
=
The God of the Old Testament · Yahweh
against which stands
Night · Dissolution · Love-Death · The Christ-Principle
The opera does not need a Beckmesser. It does not need a Jewish character at all. The entire dramatic conflict is the war between Yahweh and Christ, between the God who says thou shalt not and the God who says come unto me and rest, played out cosmically, with the Sun itself as villain and the oceanic dark as savior.
V. Isolde's Fury, or The Old Covenant's Demand
Consider how Isolde opens the opera. She does not weep. She does not pine. She storms. She demands. She invokes the specific terms of her grievance, Tristan's sworn obligation, his debt of honor, the blood-price owed for her slain betrothed Morold, the precise contractual nature of his failure. She wants Sühne, atonement and expiation, the satisfaction of a specific legal claim. She wants not love but justice. Not mercy but the letter of the bond.
Is this not precisely the God of Exodus 20, the God who is qannāʾ, jealous, who demands precise satisfaction of the Law, who will not let the guilty go unpunished, whose mercy is conditional upon the fulfillment of covenantal obligation? Isolde in Act I is not a woman in love. She is the Old Covenant personified, the regime of law and contract that the love potion, that cup of grace, will shatter.
And what is the love potion, if not grace? Not a substance that creates love where none existed, but a gift that liberates love from the prison of law, one that says to Tristan and Isolde: your obligation to Day is dissolved, your contract is abrogated, what you owe each other is not a debt but a destiny. The potion does not bind them. It releases them. It is the New Covenant poured out in a chalice, and that chalice is nothing less than the Holy Grail itself.
VI. Vollbracht, or It Is Finished
Da erdämmerte mild
erhabner Macht
im Busen mir die Nacht;
mein Tag war da vollbracht.— Tristan und Isolde, Act II
There is a moment in Act II when Tristan, fully in the grip of the Night's illumination, surveys the wreckage of his daylit life, the honors he has won, the duties he has fulfilled, the role he has played as the model knight of King Marke's court, and declares: mein Tag war da vollbracht. My Day there was accomplished. Finished. Done. With that, he willingly consumes Isolde's death-draught in atonement.
The word is vollbracht. And any person of Biblical learning will feel, upon hearing it, an involuntary recognition. For these are precisely the last words of Christ upon the cross in the German tradition, Es ist vollbracht: It is accomplished. It is finished. Tetelestai in the Greek of John 19:30. The cry of one who has satisfied, from within the Law's own terms, a demand the Law had made upon all humanity, and in satisfying it, has annihilated it.
Tristan does not say this by accident. The echo is deliberate, structural, theological. His Day, the day of law and honor and feudal obligation, the day of the Demiurge's world, is vollbracht in the same sense that the Law is vollbracht by Christ: not merely completed but superseded from within, fulfilled and thereby abolished. From this moment, Tristan belongs to the Night. He has accomplished what the Day demanded, and in accomplishing it, has died to it.
The cross and the lovers' couch are, in this reading, the same metaphysical event.
VII. The Betrayer Who Could Not Help Betraying
And yet Tristan is also, in this opera's theology, a betrayer, and this is the most complex and most theologically charged element of the whole drama. He has betrayed Isolde by bringing her to Marke. He has betrayed his own love by following Day's commands. He is simultaneously Christ and Judas.
How can this be? Let us think carefully, for the answer illuminates everything.
Was log der böse
Tag dir vor,
dass, die für dich beschieden,
die Traute du verrietest?— Tristan und Isolde, Act II
Day's dominion is total. Within Day's kingdom, no one can act truly. The very structure of the daylit world, its contracts, its honors, its visible obligations, converts love into betrayal automatically, as a machine converts one form of energy into another. Tristan did not betray Isolde out of malice or weakness. Day betrayed him into it. The question the opera asks, what lies did evil Day tell you, that you betrayed the beloved that was destined to you?, is a rhetorical question. It answers itself. Day told him the lie that honor was real, that contracts were binding, that the sunlit world of kings and duties was the world that mattered. And because Tristan lived in Day, he believed it. He could not help but believe it. That is what it means to live under the Demiurge's law.
Now consider how Christian supersessionist theology has traditionally understood the Jewish role in the Crucifixion. The Jews, in this reading, did not betray Christ out of pure malevolence on their own recognizance. They were blinded by the Law, by the same Demiurge-God who could not see past his own legal-material horizon. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:8 that the rulers of this age crucified the Lord of Glory because they did not know; their ignorance is the ignorance of those imprisoned in the Day. They betrayed their own Messiah, the fulfillment of everything their own scriptures had promised, because Day told them to. They were not simply criminals. They were prisoners who could not recognize their deliverer.
Wagner has encoded this entire theological structure into the drama of Tristan's betrayal. Tristan betrayed Isolde, his own, his beschieden, his destined one, because Day told him she was not his. The guilt and the victimhood are inseparable. He is both complicit and compelled. Which is precisely the theological ambiguity Christianity has always exploited in its treatment of Jewish responsibility: condemned as betrayers, yet the betrayal was necessary for redemption; guilty, yet caused not by malice but by captivity to the Law they could not transcend.
The Day betrayed Tristan into betraying Isolde. And the Day is Lucifer. And Lucifer is the Demiurge. And the Demiurge is the God of the Old Covenant.
The argument holds.
VIII. What Millington Means
We are now in a position to understand, in its full scope, what Barry Millington intends when he says that antisemitism is woven into the fabric of Wagner's operas. He does not mean merely that Wagner disliked Jews, though he did. He does not mean merely that Wagner scattered Jewish caricatures through his dramatis personae, though he did that too. He means something far more fundamental: that the metaphysical architecture of these works, the shape of their conflict, the identity of their villains, the nature of their redemptions, is built upon the supersessionist Christian theology in which the Jewish God is the antagonist of the human spirit.
In Tristan und Isolde, the Jewish God does not appear as a character. He appears as the sun. He appears as every law ever sworn, every contract ever signed, every honor ever pledged under the open sky. He appears as the entire world of Day. And he is defeated, not by argument, not by confrontation, but by dissolution: the lovers sink into the Night and are swallowed by an infinity that his legalism can neither contain nor comprehend.
This is not Jew-spotting. This is something more insidious, and in a certain sense more artistically achieved, than any caricature. For a caricature can be identified and rejected. A metaphysic is absorbed. It enters through the music, through those incomparable harmonies that fail to resolve, through that undulating chromaticism that makes the very foundations of tonality feel like prison bars, and it does its work below the level of argument. The audience does not think: "Yahweh is the villain." They feel: "the world of law and contract and daylit obligation is the enemy of love." And they are moved, perhaps more deeply than by anything else in Western art, to agree.
Wagner's genius was to make the theological case with pure sound. His antisemitism did not need a pamphlet. It had an orchestra.
— ✦ —
I do not say these things to diminish the achievement of Tristan und Isolde. One may hold two things simultaneously in the mind: that this is among the supreme works of human art, and that its metaphysical structure is built upon a theological hostility whose consequences in the world have been catastrophic. The two facts do not cancel each other. They intensify each other. The greater the work, the more seriously its premises demand examination.
Adorno was right that the music thinks. He was perhaps too modest about where it thinks us to.