'The musicologist Jens Malte Fischer...refers to a well-attested story about Gustav Mahler, who, after a performance of Siegfried, expressed his annoyance with the actor who played the Mime: "It is, after all, indisputable that Mime is disposed by Wagner to be a caricature of a Jew, but surely it is not necessary to exaggerate this trait so shamelessly."' I have to quibble just a bit here. This story is the recollection of a single person, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, whose memoir was published 12 years after Mahler's death. A single-source anecdote doesn't become "well attested" just because it gets passed around a lot. Corroboration would add gravitas, but apparently it doesn't exist.
If Beckmesser was such a clear Jewish caricature at the turn of the century why didn't the National Socialists see it that way because they didn't as David Dennis (Loyola University Chicago) has shown. And this time the claim is not based on one testimony but on research of all possible written sources of the Third Reich. I will post an article on this topic later on.
'The musicologist Jens Malte Fischer...refers to a well-attested story about Gustav Mahler, who, after a performance of Siegfried, expressed his annoyance with the actor who played the Mime: "It is, after all, indisputable that Mime is disposed by Wagner to be a caricature of a Jew, but surely it is not necessary to exaggerate this trait so shamelessly."' I have to quibble just a bit here. This story is the recollection of a single person, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, whose memoir was published 12 years after Mahler's death. A single-source anecdote doesn't become "well attested" just because it gets passed around a lot. Corroboration would add gravitas, but apparently it doesn't exist.
If Beckmesser was such a clear Jewish caricature at the turn of the century why didn't the National Socialists see it that way because they didn't as David Dennis (Loyola University Chicago) has shown. And this time the claim is not based on one testimony but on research of all possible written sources of the Third Reich. I will post an article on this topic later on.