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While English professor Sun Hee Gertz delves into literature of the late Middle Ages, her students explore topics as varied as anti-Semitism in the librettos of Wagner and the intersection between literature and Eastern contemplative practices. |
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Meet the researchers:
Finding your own conclusions
Interview with Matthew Gilbert
Matthew Gilbert is completing a double-major in English and music. He talked about his senior honors thesis research on the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner (1818-1883). Wagner is famous for his four operas based on German mythology: Das Rhinegold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung, which combine to form Der Ring des Nibelungen. He was also infamous for his anti-Semitism.
How did you come to work with Professor SunHee Gertz and do a thesis in English?
I was in her Chaucer class. She seemed like she had a firm grasp on university life and student involvement. And she seemed like someone I could trust. That's a big deal with me. I asked her to be my academic advisor and she agreed. Then I was invited to do an honor's thesis in English and I decided I'd rather work on it with her than with anyone else. I tried to think of something that I was familiar with to use as my thesis topic. In English, if you have a second major, it has to be integrated into your thesis topic. This was tricky, because English and music are so different. Music is a non-discursive form of expression, while English is discursive, that is, it's based on the spoken and written word.
Tell me about your research topic.
What I'm going to do is an examination of arguments people have put forth about the social values they see in the composer Richard Wagner's work, and how they think his writing and music convey these values. It seemed like a good focus for some of the controversies surrounding him. He wrote quite a bit of literature that upset people and he wrote quite a bit of music that made people happy--until they took a close look at his music and saw how his politics entered in. To understand that love/hate relationship, you need to understand how his literary writing and music go hand in hand. The best arguments about his value system come from an examination of both. I'm not going to take a side in any of the arguments, but I want to examine the ways in which people construct them. It's music and literature-where are the connections, what makes an argument work? Is it heavier on literature or on the music? Often people's assertions about his values might be ambiguous or speculative. There's a lot of politically-oriented material in his work, his anti-Semitism, in particular.
A project like this could be a very big topic, so SunHee recommended that I just focus on a single opera by Wagner, and I chose Siegfried. The character Siegfried personifies the German national hero who stands in contrast to the Niebelungs---trolls who are the alleged anti-Semitic creations manifested in his work. People have interpreted Siegfried as containing dramatic devices and characters that reflect values Wagner had written about in prose form, usually anonymously. He didn't like to put his name to a lot of things. In an essay titled Judaism in Music, Wagner blatantly describes anti-Semitic stereotypes in relation to music. He asserts, for example, that Jews could only imitate great music, and have screechy voices. One of his funniest comments regarded his belief that Jews had club feet; he wondered how a musician could beat time with a club foot. Really ridiculous stuff. (Interviewer's note: Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) was published under the pseudonym K. Freigedank.)
Was it mostly his anti-Semitism that people have objected to, or were there other unpopular values that he held?
Everything you associate with bigotry today he had a problem with, except, and I found this bizarre, homosexuality. But that might be because one of his greatest patrons, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was an alleged homosexual. Some of his close associates were, too.
He sounds like an unpleasant person, even though he wrote great music.
That's the consensus. When you read his biography, you'll get in his corner, and then he'll do something to totally blow it. Then he gets you in his corner again and blows it again. He's such a complex person. It seems like he could have been capable of a lot of good or a lot of bad. He put the good into his music and the bad into his life.
So you're focusing on the opera Siegfried. Are you going to be using just this article on Judaism or will you be encompassing a wider range of his writing?
In addition to Judaism in Music, there's the libretto to Siegfried--the arias, the recitatives. There's literature there-it's just sung.
Are you going to be looking at the music itself as well? Can you talk about your analysis in this regard?
What I can do is give an example. In Judaism in Music Wagner wrote about how he thought that Jewish melodies were bland, repeated a lot of notes, and were basically very poorly constructed. He used the standards of music established since the Baroque-era in which a melody has a high point and ending point and certain constructive elements, rather like a sentence. Each note is a word and the whole melody is a sentence. The characters that supposedly convey an anti-Semitic construction in Siegfried are the Nibelungs (trolls) Mime and Alberich. Then there's Siegfried--the blonde, blue-eyed, Aryan, German national hero. Siegfried's singing line has a nice shape to it and is very reflective of the accompanying harmonies. Then you have Mime and Alberich--they sing the same note in a screechy way and the melodic line is of poor musical construction, melodically and rhythmically. When you compare the construction of the music with what's described in Judaism in Music, it seems to be pretty good evidence for the argument that he incorporated his anti-Semitic beliefs into his music. You have the contrast between terrible music and wonderful music in the same opera.
There was a class offered on this at Clark that I took called Richard Wagner, the Jews and the Nazis (German 192). It had to do with how Hitler was inspired by Wagner. It's where I got a lot of my background knowledge. It's being offered again this spring by Professor Kaiser. He's been working for years on what I'm doing now, and I'm hoping he'll be my second reader.
Wagner sounds like he had a real axe to grind.
He had a lot of personal issues, too. In his lifetime he borrowed at least five times the amount of money he ever made. He was an unfaithful in his marriage. Your basic "scumbag" in many ways. He had loyalties to no one, except to people who gave him money or professional help.
Is there a biography of him that you would recommend?
The problem with writing about Wagner is everyone has a bias. Either they think he's a jerk and they don't give him credit for anything, or they're people who love his music and are willing to sweep the other things under the rug. There's one very good, unbiased biography by Derek Watson, called Richard Wagner: A Biography. And try his autobiography--Wagner wrote it about 20 years before he died.
Does the Watson biography comment on Wagner's music, or does he mostly focus on the personal aspect?
He pretty much sticks to the personal information. Although he did describe the time when Wagner was writing his opera Tristan and Isolde. Apparently he was very sick-sort of detached from reality, but heard some waterfalls, and in the sound of the waterfall heard these cascading E-flat major chords that served as an inspiration to him for the prelude to Tristan. Some of his most profound writing, actually.
Can you comment on what you see as the advantages and disadvantages of doing research as opposed to taking the standard course load?
A disadvantage would be if you're a procrastinator, which I am! I know a lot of people who do papers at the last minute, in an eight or ten hour stint. But an advantage is that a project of this size teaches you to budget your time, as opposed to doing it at the last minute. This project has really helped me to get on track with that. I'm being concerned with things ahead of time now.
An advantage would be that you're doing something meaningful. It's not a class that everyone else is taking. You're finding your own conclusions. They don't have to be the conclusions the teacher has. It's like your baby. And it's really a good introduction to the world of research. I'd like to go on to grad school and this is what the next few years of my life would be like.
Doing a thesis is a risk, but it's a safe risk. You're working very closely with your advisor, you get a lot of attention, a lot of help. If you get in a big jam, you can be helped. And by the time you get done, the things you'd have learned would keep you from having big problems of that kind in the future. It's something you've got to do eventually, so you might as well do it here.
So that's part of what your advisor is there for, to keep you on track.
Yes. I had no idea about how to write this thing. There are so many things to think about at once. But Professor Gertz helped me break it up into chapters, take it one piece at a time. Even the biggest project is small when you do it in chunks. That was very helpful. If I can say one thing to people who are thinking about doing research, it's: don't be scared. It's a great opportunity, and somehow it all works out.
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Additional Resources
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Matthew Gilbert
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Taking risks in order to learn