Wagner\'s Autobiography has thrown a good deal of light on certain obscure episodes in his career, but it has signally failed to satisfy the world\'s curiosity on perhaps the most interesting point of all—the question as to who was Wagner\'s father. Was it the Leipzig police actuary, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, or the actor, painter, poet, singer, dramatist and what not, Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, who married Frau Wagner some nine months after the decease of her first husband? Under normal circumstances the question would have little or no interest except for the sort of people who dearly love a scandal, even if it be a century and a quarter old. What gives the question its piquancy to-day is the fact that Geyer was a Jew—or at least has always been held to have been one. Now Wagner hated Jews all his life with an insensate hatred, and to have it proved that the composer himself was a Jew on his father\'s side would give a malicious pleasure to many people to whom Wagner\'s whole character is a trifle repugnant. Moreover Wagner was always insisting on the specially German quality of his life\'s work; and again it would be amusing if it should turn out that the greatest "national" art-work of modern Germany was the creation of a Jew. As might be expected, those who have a bone to pick with Wagner on any subject under the sun are delighted to point at this supposed bar-sinister in his escutcheon. Wagner did not like Brahms, and so he accused poor Johannes of being a Jew. It was therefore natural that the out-and-out Brahms partisans should hail with glee any opportunity of making a retort in kind upon Wagner. This is attempted by Sir Charles Stanford in a preface to a volume of Brahms\'s compositions recently issued by Messrs. T. C. & E. C. Jack. He affirms afresh—what we all knew quite well—that Brahms was of the purest Teutonic blood; and, in his opinion, "the humour of the situation reaches its climax when it is discovered that the very man who attacked any music or musician of Jewish connection was himself tarred with the brush with which he had been endeavouring to orientalise his blue-eyed, fair-haired, and high-instepped German contemporary." So confident, it will be seen, is this statement of the Hebraic origin of Wagner that any plain man, unversed in these matters, who happens to read Sir Charles Stanford\'s preface, will naturally assume that Wagner\'s Hebraism is as universally admitted as the death of Queen Anne. Yet Sir Charles offers no evidence as to Wagner being a Jew; he simply tells us that the fact has been "discovered."
geyer
LUDWIG GEYER.

Where and when, we may ask, was this "discovery" made? We know that there has long been tittle-tattle current to the effect that Wagner\'s real father was not the police official whose name he bears, but the brilliant actor, musician, painter and dramatist, who came to the rescue of Wagner\'s mother in the early days of her widowhood, and married her some nine months afterwards. For the last generation or two a certain number of people have been going about the world shaking their heads mysteriously and darkly hinting at what they could tell if their lips were not sealed. The root of the legend is a notorious remark of Nietzsche\'s. That philosopher had seen one of the privately printed copies of the Autobiography about 1870, and his query in the postscript to Der Fall Wagner, "was Wagner a German at all?" and his point-blank statement that "his father was an actor of the name of Geyer," were supposed to have their justification in the Autobiography. It was confidently asserted that when that appeared the truth would be made known to all the world in Wagner\'s own confession. Well, the Autobiography has appeared, and what Wagner says there is that Friedrich Wagner was his father. There is not the shadow of a hint in the book that Geyer was anything more than a friend of the family. (Mr. James Huneker, who discusses the subject in an essay in his book The Pathos of Distance (1913) thinks he sees such a hint, and a pretty broad one, in one passage that he quotes; but the wish, I imagine, is father to the thought: few people would care to put the construction upon it that he does.) Mr. Huneker as good as asserts that the commencement of the Autobiography has been tampered with. The reputation of Villa Wahnfried in editorial matters is certainly not of the best; but after the express assurance that has been given the world that the Autobiography has been printed just as Wagner left it, something more than mere suspicion is required to bolster up a charge of such atrocious bad faith. Mr. Huneker tells us that "the late Felix Mottl [the conductor], in the presence of several well-known musical critics of New York City, declared in 1904 that he had read the above statement" (i.e. "I am the son of Ludwig Geyer"). That is a little staggering: but again one prefers to think that Mottl or someone else was mistaken, rather than that Cosima and Siegfried Wagner have been guilty of an incredible piece of literary dishonesty. As for Mr. Huneker\'s further "fact"—that there are portraits of Wagner\'s mother and of Geyer at Wahnfried, and none of Friedrich Wagner—that is easily accounted for; no portrait of the latter has ever been traced, with the exception of a small pastel, while Geyer was an artist and fond of painting himself.

Sir Charles Stanford attempts to support his very dubious thesis by some show of musical argument. He alleges that the most marked characteristic in such little Jewish music as still exists is the continual repetition of short phrases—a method, he says, which Mendelssohn "uses to the verge of monotony" in his later works, and which is visible again in Wagner\'s employment of leading motives. Note, to begin with, the restriction of the use of this method to Mendelssohn\'s later works. Being a Jew, Mendelssohn surely would have betrayed this characteristic in the work of his whole life, if it really be a characteristic rooted in the Hebrew nature. It looks as though the ingenuous argument were that there is no Jew like an old Jew. But it is of even less applicability to Wagner than to Mendelssohn. It is true that in the Ring Wagner worked to a great extent upon short leading motives; but the employment of these was due to the special problems of structure which he was then engaged in working out. Sir Charles Stanford, with his extensive knowledge of Wagner\'s music, must know that the short phrase is not a characteristic of Wagner\'s style as a whole. The phrases in Rienzi, the Flying Dutchman, Tannh?user, Lohengrin, the youthful Symphony, the Faust Overture, and half-a-dozen other works, are as long-breathed as any of Brahms\'s. Moreover Sir Charles Stanford admits that in at least half of his work Wagner was a typical Teuton. He speaks of Brahms\'s melodies as being "long, developed, diatonic, and replete with a quality which may, for lack of a better term, be called \'swing.\'" We get precisely the same qualities in the Meistersinger. Sir Charles Stanford can hardly be serious when he lays it down that Wagner was a typical Teuton when he wrote the Meistersinger, and a typical Jew when he wrote the Ring. But further, is the short thematic phrase a characteristic of the Hebrew composer? Will Sir Charles be good enough to illustrate this point for us from the work of Jewish composers like Mabler and Max Bruch? If, indeed, we are to attribute Hebraic ancestry to a composer on the strength merely or mainly of a certain shortness of melodic breath, there are dozens of composers who would have difficulty in repelling the imputation. Was there ever a composer who habitually worked upon such short phrases as Grieg, for example? Is there anything to equal for brevity some of the themes with which Beethoven worked such wonders? And what precisely is a short phrase? Will some one provide us with a sort of inch-rule and table of measurements, by the application of which we shall be able to say precisely where musical Judaism ends and Gentilism begins?

These are surely very flimsy foundations on which to erect a theory that Wagner was a Jew. It is, of course, not impossible: nothing is impossible in this world. One of the rumours afloat is that Wagner himself, in private, spoke of Geyer as being his father. Again proof or disproof is impossible; though Mrs. Burrell gives a facsimile of a letter from Wagner of the 23rd October 1872 (sending Feustel a certificate of baptism), in which he goes out of his way to call himself "Polizei-Amts-Actuarius-Sohn" (Police-actuary\'s son).

Another branch of the argument is that Wagner was typically Jewish in appearance. I question whether that theory would ever have gained currency except for the back-stairs gossip with regard to his supposed paternity. It has long been a puzzle to the present writer to discover what there is particularly Jewish in Wagner\'s face. It is true that his nose was large and to some extent aquiline; but it is certainly not the nose that we are accustomed to regard as typically Jewish. The portraits of Geyer that we possess do not show a physiognomy that anybody would call peculiarly Hebraic. On the other hand, Wagner\'s mother had a nose not only very prominent and curved like Wagner\'s, but suggesting a Jewish origin far more than either his or Geyer\'s. For the rest there is nothing whatever in Wagner\'s face that could lead anyone to think he was a Jew. Let us take Sir Charles Stanford\'s own test.............