Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater

By Caroline A. Kita

This study “brings to life a circle of writers and composers, with analyses of their major, minor . . . and forgotten works of Jewish music theater” (Abigail Gillman, author of Viennese Jewish Modernism).

During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical views of compassion.

These Jewish artists, including Gustav Mahler, Siegfried Lipiner, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Stefan Zweig, and Arnold Schoenberg, reimagined biblical stories through the lens of the modern Jewish subject to plead for justice and compassion toward the Jewish community. By tracing responses to antisemitic discourses of compassion, Kita reflects on the explicitly and increasingly troubled political and social dynamics at the end of the Habsburg Empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253040541

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT A PHILOSOPHICAL AND aesthetic discourse of compassion that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century German culture and that became the focal point of a movement toward cultural renewal in Vienna between 1876 and 1918. It traces the influence of the idea that art, in particular music and theater, could awaken compassionate understanding by encouraging the audience’s identification with the suffering subject onstage and, in so doing, transform society. This vision of cultural renewal through compassion claimed to restore a communal consciousness in the fragmented modern world, but, in reality, it was predicated on the exclusion of the Jew, a figure deemed incapable of compassion or of creating compassionate art. This book reveals how five German-Jewish artists in Vienna responded to the construction of Jewish difference at the heart of this discourse of compassion in their symphonic, choral, and dramatic works. Mobilizing the universal language of music, these artists destabilize the binaries of German and Jew and reenvision compassion as the basis for an inclusive community.

As the capital of the vast Habsburg Empire that dominated eastern and central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna was the seat of an aging monarchy and a Catholic culture defined by deeply ingrained traditions of religious theatricality and Baroque grandeur. It was also home to a diverse population, including a large number of Jews from the empire’s eastern provinces. At the turn of the century, this multinational state became increasingly divided along political, religious, cultural, and class lines. Yet amid the sense of impending dissolution, fin-de-siècle Vienna, as it became immortalized in the writings of historian Carl Schorske, attracted vibrant communities of artistic creativity and intellectual innovation.² Many found inspiration in a discourse of religious-artistic cultural renewal derived from the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.³ A focal point of their desire for a cultural rebirth was the aesthetic and ethical ideal of compassion. In compassion, awoken through the transcendent powers of myth, drama, and music, they found an empowering force for spiritual revitalization and social change.

Yet within the temple of art the signs of fracture were many. With the exclusion of Austria from the formation of Germany in 1871, and the economic upheaval of the stock market crash of 1873, powerful mass political movements began to form in Vienna, shaking the core of these utopian visions of a renewed society. The rise of German nationalism and the election of Mayor Karl Lueger in 1897 in particular brought deeply ingrained religious, cultural, and racial prejudices against Jews to the forefront of public discourse. Moreover, as Lueger’s popular dictum, Wer Jud’ ist, bestimm’ ich (I’ll determine who is a Jew) reveals, the definition of who or what was considered to be Jewish was a shifting target. The state of precarity facing persons of Jewish heritage, regardless of their degree of identification or affiliation with the Jewish religion or the Jewish community in Vienna, left an indelible mark on this generation.⁴

Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna investigates these tensions through the musical and dramatic works of five German-Jewish artists who shaped the language, forms, and cultural products of Viennese Modernism’s spiritual awakening: Siegfried Lipiner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Stefan Zweig. To do so, it engages the framework of Jewish difference, which, according to Lisa Silverman, describes the dialectical, hierarchical framework that encompasses the relationship between the socially constructed categories of ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew.’⁵ This lens acknowledges Jewishness not as a fixed category but rather as a constantly evolving process of defining and redefining borders between insiders and outsiders, belonging and Otherness. The works examined in this study, which each reflect deeply personal engagements with questions of identity and community, provide prime case studies for exploring the idea of Jewish difference. On the one hand, these works were shaped by a shared language and cultural idea of Germanness that was also inflected by the ideals of totality and theatricality found in Austria’s Catholic Baroque culture.⁶ On the other, they drew on a common spiritual language drawn from their authors’ and composers’ Jewish heritage: the idea of being Chosen, the shared values of critical thought and commentary, a common history of diaspora, transience, and homelessness, and a passionate commitment to the principles of justice. Their negotiations of identity, myth, and history remain highly idiosyncratic and distinct from those emerging in Vienna’s Orthodox Jewish community and political and cultural Zionist movements. Instead, under the guise of their biblical alter egos, Abel, Cain, Jacob, and Jeremiah, these writers and composers articulate their experience as mediators between Christian and Jewish faith traditions, caught between two worlds and yet resisting complete identification with either one.

Finally, these writers and composers shared an understanding of their experiences as German-Jews as deeply musical—at times dissonant and cacophonous, but fundamentally in tune with a universal human spirit. Thus, while their works engage in the construction of the Jew in opposition to the Austrian/German/Christian, they also seek to dissolve difference through musical-poetic languages based on polyphony and antiphony and forms such as the lied and the oratorio. Emerging from deeply personal spiritual quests, these works offer a new framework for reading fin de siècle Viennese culture—one that reflects the complex negotiations behind the construction and performance of religious and cultural identity.

Compassion, Difference, and the Jewish Question

Compassion has roots in ancient Greek philosophy and in almost all modern religious traditions.⁷ It defines how humans of different standings and situations are able to relate to one another through the universal experience of suffering. Martha Nussbaum claims it as a basic social emotion, for to feel compassion, we must recognize the inherent value of the Other, believe that their pain was unwarranted or unjust, and be able to put ourselves in their place, to imagine this same suffering inflicted upon us.⁸ The final stage of compassion is the most complex, for it calls for a creative response to the observation of another’s pain, the ability to conceive of hypothetical situations and radically alternate futures. Thus, compassion encapsulates not just the feeling of sympathy but also the action that it inspires, the spark toward inner transformation. It is an experience created by particular circumstances and performed by individual actors.

The performative aspect of compassion is the basis for Aristotle’s theory of tragic art.⁹ In his Poetics, Aristotle claimed that the identification with the plight of the tragic hero inspires pity (eleos) and terror (phobos), which in turn engenders a moment of catharsis through which the audience is purified and transformed. Philosophers of the German Enlightenment, most notably Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, offered a critical reassessment of Aristotle’s views on compassion and the theater. In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769), Lessing wrote that it is not terror (Schrecken) but fear (Furcht) that the audience feels. This fear, he claims, is self-driven; in identifying with another person, one’s own anxieties are brought to the surface:

[Aristotles] Furcht ist durchaus nicht die Furcht, welche uns das bevorstehende Übel eines anderen, für diesen andern, erweckt, es ist die Furcht, welche aus unserer Ähnlichkeit mit der leidenden Person für uns selbst entspringt; es ist die Furcht, daß die Unglücksfälle, die wir über diese verhängt sehen, uns selbst betreffen können; es ist die Furcht, daß wir der bemitleidete Gegenstand selbst werden können. Mit anderen Worten: Diese Furcht ist das auf uns selbst bezogene Mitleid.

[(Artistotle’s) fear is by no means the fear excited in us by misfortune threatening another person. It is the fear which arises for ourselves from the similarity of our position with that of the sufferer; it is the fear that the calamities impending over the sufferers might also befall ourselves; it is the fear that we ourselves might thus become objects of pity. In a word, this fear is compassion referred back to ourselves.]¹⁰

By identifying compassion as the intersection of the ethics and aesthetic affect, Lessing set a powerful precedent for the theater as a space of personal and communal self-discovery. Ruth HaCohen describes the complex relationship between the sufferer and the observer of suffering evoked in this tradition of tragic art in terms of a spiral metaphor. She claims that theater enacts compassion when the internal protagonists of an artwork and the external audience are drawn to view the object of compassion not as a direct reflection of themselves (the mirror image) but as developing along a similar trajectory.¹¹ For HaCohen, the sympathetic worlds that emerge from these dynamics of compassion blur the lines between reality and fiction yet can also encourage critical awareness. The writers and artists examined in this study all aspired to compose works that might mobilize this dual effect of compassion, ultimately envisioning that the consciousness created through compassionate art might inspire the realization of inclusive community in their own time.

Lessing’s comments also reveal compassion to be a concept fraught with contradictions. Indeed, critics of compassion claim that its subjective nature, while positing a deeper, more primal emotive connection between humans beyond their rational capabilities, make it an insufficient basis for determining the morality of actions. From the position of the suffering figure, Lessing notes, compassion can be read as pity. Pity, understood as a superficial or false sense of sympathy, does nothing to alleviate the sufferer, only insulting his or her dignity.¹² It is Mitleid translated as pity that Friedrich Nietzsche critiques when he describes it as a manipulation of the emotions of the Other, a power play by the weak to contaminate the strong and healthy spirits.¹³

The idea of Mitleid most directly passed down to the writers and composers examined in this study emerged from a philosophical discourse found in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. I follow Christopher Janaway in translating this term as compassion not pity, because it was based in the desire to dissolve difference.¹⁴ In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818/1819), Schopenhauer wrote that the ability to feel with the suffering of the other was the true basis of all ethical human action. He identified compassion, along with aesthetic contemplation and ascetic resignation, as the means by which individuals temporarily free themselves from worldly suffering and gain insight into the deeper truths beyond the phenomenal world.¹⁵

Despite its universal claims, Schopenhauer’s understanding of compassion was also marked by an anti-Jewish discourse deeply ingrained in the German idealist philosophical tradition. In his essay, Über die Religion, (On Religion), published in Parerga und Paralipomena in 1851, Schopenhauer maintained that Jews were beholden to the law of a distant, vengeful God and must therefore be composed of a different essential substance than Christians. In this way, he continued what Michael Mack has identified as a pseudotheological form of antisemitism in the German idealist tradition, which, employed a secularized and politicized Christian theology over and against an essentialized idea of Judaism.¹⁶ Drawing on the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach, who envisioned Jewish obedience to God’s commandments as evidence of their imagined immutability (incapacity for change) and enslavement to the objects of material life, Schopenhauer used narratives from the Hebrew Bible to construct an idea of the Jewish worldview as realistic, materialistic, and optimistic — in direct opposition to his own philosophy of religion.¹⁷ Over the course of the nineteenth century, these ideas found resonance in the emerging scholarly discipline of Comparative Mythology, which employed similar readings of the violence and tragedies of the Hebrew Bible to claim an innate Jewish incapacity for sympathetic understanding.¹⁸ In the aesthetic realm a similar discourse emerged, which claimed the art of the uncompassionate Jew reflected an uncompassionate nature—artificial and derivative, rather than authentic. In particular, Jews were seen to be incapable of producing true music and could only imitate or create sounds that were maligned as noisy and cacophonous rather than musical and harmonious, a discourse Ruth HaCohen has identified as the musical libel against the Jews.¹⁹

The case studies presented in each chapter of this book trace how Lipiner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig critically engaged with these paradigms of compassion and compassionate art in their musical and dramatic works. By returning to key stories of the Hebrew Bible, the brotherly conflicts of Cain and Abel and Jacob and Esau, and the personal struggles of Jacob and Jeremiah, these writers and composers deconstruct modern categories of Jewish Otherness and offer new models of community that integrate and include the Jewish subject.

Music and Biblical Theater as Compassionate Art

This book investigates musical and dramatic works that evoke the legends of Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures to reflect critically on compassion as a means of transcending religious and cultural difference. In presenting the genesis of these symphonies, oratorios, and dramas, I reveal how these writers and composers seized upon the modernist impulse to discover new modes of art, merging traditional forms in some cases and radically fragmenting others. That many of these works remained unfinished demonstrates the quixotic nature of their authors’ and composers’ visions, but, however incomplete, they remain a critical documentation of the experimental impulses in music and theater at this time.

In each of these works, the Bible serves as a kind of primal text, or origin story, although they reflect various degrees of fidelity to this source. As Henry Bial notes, biblical dramas can encompass a range of dramatic works, including those intended as explicit dramatization of episodes from the sacred Scriptures of the Christian and Jewish tradition; to those in which the Bible and its characters served as inspiration for new narratives; to those that employ a biblical setting with essentially invented stories and characters.²⁰ Remaining relatively close to their Hebrew Bible sources, Lipiner, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig’s works fall into the second category—what Bial terms biblical fan fiction. Schoenberg’s oratorio, which takes as its inspiration the story of Jacob from the book of Genesis while quoting from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew and alluding to the Book of Revelations in the Christian New Testament, is closest to the third category. Biblical references in Mahler’s Second and Third Symphony appear primarily in his programs and published texts about these works. Yet, when his song settings are read alongside Lipiner’s biblical drama, Adam, they reflect a complex, intertextual, and intermedial interchange between poet and composer on compassion and religious difference. Mahler’s symphonies played a critical role in translating Lipiner’s theories of compassion into a musical idiom that would greatly impact the next generation of writers and composers, who likewise found in the stories of the patriarchs and prophets compassionate heroes and antiheroes rooted in both modern Jewish and Christian mythologies. For Lipiner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig, these biblical figures came to represent their own complex, modern identities as mediators of Christian and Jewish traditions.

That these biblically inspired works were all written, composed, or performed in Vienna is unsurprising given the long tradition of biblical theater in Austria, dating back to the Middle Ages. Performances of biblical texts in the form of miracle and mystery plays had often served as a highlight of Christian feast days. By bringing the scriptures to life, these works served both to educate and to instill a sense of community through the enactment of ritual as public spectacle. Much like Greek tragedy, from which they drew inspiration, music played a primary role in these performances, serving both to intensify the dramatic effect of the work and to encourage audience participation.

The modern rebirth of biblical drama in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century drew on this tradition of religious theatricality found in Austria’s Baroque Catholic culture and appeared in a variety of forms. On Vienna’s opera stages at this time, works such as Carl Goldmark’s Queen of Sheba (1875) and Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905) emphasized an idealized, sensualized, and romanticized Orient, while the city witnessed at the same time a boom in large-scale amateur choral dramas and communal biblical theater that promoted a largely conservative, Catholic cultural agenda.²¹ A leading figure in the amateur theater movement was the poet Richard von Kralik, who is most well-known for his cofounding of the short-lived Sagengesellschaft (Saga Society) with Siegfried Lipiner and Gustav Mahler. His Weihnachtsspiel (Christmas Play 1893) and Osterfestspiel (Easter Festival Play 1895), along with his revival of the Spanish Baroque playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Corpus Christi play, Das große Welttheater (The Great Theater of the World) in 1897, were performed in venues from the city hall plaza to the Musikverein, and played an important role in garnering public interest in biblical theater in Vienna at this time.

However, Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna examines the musical and dramatic works of Lipiner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig in a different light, reading them as reflections on pseudotheologies of antisemitism that can be traced to their critical readings of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Because the idea of the uncompassionate Jew that they were seeking to deconstruct was based in selective readings of the Hebrew Bible, they returned to this very text as inspiration for their own works. In so doing, they recast the prophets and patriarchs as icons of the shared tradition of Judaism and Christianity, as models of resistance to dualistic thinking, and ultimately as embodying the seeds of a modern German-Jewish identity.

Finally, while Vienna also witnessed the emergence of a Yiddish theatrical scene through the establishment of the Jewish Stage, the Jewish Artists’ Cabaret, and the Jewish Art Theater at this time, the writers and composers in question were not directly engaged in the endeavor to establish a Jewish National Theater, nor were they writing primarily for a Jewish public.²² Their works were written in German, draw broadly from the Hebrew and Christian Bible, and cannot be classified as focusing on an exclusively Jewish narrative of the biblical text.²³ They did, however, seek new ways of articulating Jewishness that both recognized the distinct cultural contribution of Judaism and viewed it as part of a shared tradition that could be reconciled with their German cultural heritage.

Wagnerian Trauma and Jewish Difference

The artist who set the standard for epic festival theater and who also defined compassionate art for these writers and composers was the composer Richard Wagner. The pivotal role of the Wagnerian legacy in European culture writ large and in fin de siècle Vienna in particular has been the subject of numerous monographs and studies over the course of the past several decades.²⁴ Wagner offered a language and form for capturing the desire for community outside the confines of religious dogma or tradition. His monumental four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848–1876) staged the apocalyptic downfall of the gods and a new society based on love, while Parsifal (1880), a Bühnenweihefestspiel, or consecration play for the stage, reimagined the dramatic potential of religious ritual, presenting a compelling narrative of community redeemed through compassion. Wagner’s paradigm of compassionate art was widely admired and adopted by the next generation of writers and composers, particularly among German-Jews, who found in his call for a rebirth of German culture a unique opportunity for cultural assimilation.²⁵

Jewish Difference and the Arts, however, seeks to probe further the engagement of German-Jews in the production, dissemination, and critique of the composer’s ideology for the theater. In particular, it focuses on how five German-Jewish writers and composers, living in Vienna at a highpoint of antisemitic sentiment, responded to the language of Wagner’s cultural critiques, which popularized Schopenhauer’s configuration of the Jews as uncompassionate and merged these discourses with popular cultural stereotypes of the Jews as unartistic and unmusical.

In tracing these responses to Wagner and Schopenhauer’s writings on compassion and the Jews, this book suggests that these writers and composers were operating in response to a kind of Wagnerian Trauma, which Michael Steinberg has identified as a crisis in the theater and music that resulted from the composer’s merging of ideologies of nationhood, cultural homogenization and aesthetic totalization.²⁶ A critical component of Wagner’s ideology was the weeding out of what he defined as the decadent, foreign, Jewish, Other from the pure German artwork. As Assaf Shelleg has noted, German-Jewish artists encountering this language found themselves in a double-bind, compelled either to appropriate the exclusionary rhetoric of Wagner or to invert his message and create a self-defined Jewish art that then reified his very binaries of Jew and non-Jew.²⁷ Indeed, many German-Jewish writers in Vienna such as Otto Weininger, whose 1903 dissertation, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), claimed that Judaism was a psychic constitution that must be overcome, adopted Wagner’s antisemitic language at this time.

The authors and composers examined in this work encountered and responded to this trauma in a variety of ways. At times, they evoke the same stereotypes that Wagner used and proliferated, staging Jewish voices as noisy and unmusical and Jewish bodies as deformed or contorted. Moreover, in focusing primarily on masculine minds and bodies, they appear fixated on recuperating Jewish masculinity in the face of antisemitic categorizations of the Jew as weak and effeminate.²⁸ In classifying the highly contradictory depictions of Jewish subjects in these artworks, one should be wary of moving too quickly to claim them as projections of Jewish self-hatred, a term that risks reducing to absolute negative terms experiences and perceptions of Jewishness.²⁹ In the cases of Lipiner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig examined in this book, I identify the figures coded Jewish as fruitful sites for probing more deeply questions of cultural and religious identity at the turn of the century.

This book takes as its point of departure the idea that these German-Jewish artists were well aware that they lived and acted in a world that was shaped by Jewish difference, and it claims that they engaged this idea directly in their musical and dramatic works. Drawing on theories of gender performance, Silverman’s paradigm of Jewish difference proposes that the project of defining the Jew (and, by contrast, the Austrian) was one to which both Jews and non-Jews contributed and reflects varying and shifting degrees of self-identification with these two cultural ideals.³⁰ By employing a cultural language of compassion in which particular categories of the Jew and Jewishness were already embedded, the artists examined in this study were certainly implicated in this process. Yet, I identify the construction of Jewish Otherness in their works as a means both to draw attention to the limits of the binaries of Jew and non-Jew, Jew and Catholic/Christian, and Jew and German/Austrian and to problematize and transform stereotypes of the Jews in their time.

To aid understanding of these unique characterizations of German-Jewish experience, Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna also draws on the framework of Jewish subjectivity. While Jewish difference reads as the ways in which Jewishness was performed, constructed, and perceived in the public sphere, Jewish subjectivity emphasizes the experiences and interior perceptions of individuals and their expression through aesthetic modes. It focuses in particular on what Scott Spector describes as the "intricate, complex, and self-contradictory ways in which historical actors perceive their place in the world in contrast to how they are perceived by others, or how they are ordered within relatively rigid external systems."³¹ The works examined in this study, many of which were described by their authors as deeply personal confessions, uniquely capture their own shifting understanding of Jewishness, which was often in the public sphere a hindrance but served in their private lives as a source of creative energy. Tracing the genesis and evolution of these works in the context of their artist’s developing views on compassion offers, I claim, a more nuanced picture of how German-Jewish artists navigated their role as cultural mediators. Theirs was not a one-way street of acculturation or assimilation but rather a continual process of blurring and redrawing borders.³²

A leading figure in the critique of Wagner’s paradigm and the reconfiguration of compassionate art to reflect the voice of the German-Jewish subject was the poet and philosopher, Siegfried Lipiner. Best known today for his close friendship and intellectual exchange with the composer Gustav Mahler, Lipiner was a prolific writer and speaker in Viennese intellectual circles at the turn of the century. His writings on