Richard Wagner settled in Zürich in 1849, and there wrote an anti-Semitic article, "Das Judenthum in der Musik" ("Judaism in Music"), which appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift over the pen-name "K. Freigedenk" ("free thought"). It was written, Wagner says,
- "to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof".
The essay called Jews "freaks of nature":
- The Jew—who, as everyone knows, has a God all to himself—in ordinary life strikes us primarily by his outward appearance, which, no matter to what European nationality we belong, has something disagreeably foreign to that nationality: instinctively we wish to have nothing in common with a man who looks like that. ... Passing over the moral side, in the effect of this in itself unpleasant freak of Nature, and coming to its bearings upon Art, we here will merely observe that to us this exterior can never be thinkable as a subject for the art of representment.
- In the first place, then, the general circumstance that the Jew talk the modern European languages merely as learnt, and not as mother tongues, must necessarily debar him from all capability of therein expressing himself idiomatically, independently and conformably to his nature.
- Although the peculiarities of the Jewish mode of speaking and singing come out the most glaringly in the commoner class of Jew, who has remained faithful to his fathers' stock, and though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they shew an impertinent obstinacy in cleaving to him.
Wagner's "Judaism in Music" states that (page references are to William Ashton Ellis' English translation of Richard Wagner's Prose Works, which follows the 1869 revision):
- Jews are hateful (passim);
- Judaism is rotten at the core; a religion of hatred (PW3 p90-1);
- Jewish composers are comparable to worms feeding on the body of art (PW3 p99);
- Jews are hostile to European civilisation (PW3 p84-5);
- Jews rule the world through money (PW3 p81);
- The cultured Jew is "the most heartless of all human beings" (PW3 p87);
- The Jews should, like Ahasuerus, "go under" (PW3 p100)
The combination of anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings and German themes in his music appealed to Adolf Hitler, who glorified Wagner's music, stating that "there is only one legitimate predecessor to national socialism: Wagner". Wagner's music was frequently played during Nazi rallies. Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, was a close friend of Adolf Hitler's and ran the Bayreuth Festival of Wagner's music from the death of her husband, Siegfried, in 1930 until the end of World War II, when she was ousted.
Because of these factors, performances of Wagner's works in the modern state of Israel did not occur during the twentieth century, as per communal consensus. However, in recent years many Israelis have argued that it may be possible to appreciate his musical talents, without implying acceptance of his beliefs. As such there was a public performance in 2001 of a work by Wagner by conductor Daniel Barenboim, which the audience was receptive to.