Wagner's Jewish Pallbearers

[Gary Freedman]

The remains of the opera composer Richard Wagner were laid to rest in the garden of his home, the Villa Wahnfried, in Bayreuth, Germany, on Saturday February 17, 1883. He had died in Venice, Italy, on the afternoon of February 13. Wagner's funeral cortege, which proceeded from the Bayreuth train station to his home, featured twelve pallbearers. Two of the pallbearers were Jews, an interesting fact since Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite.

The two Jewish pallbearers were:

Heinrich Porges (November 25, 1837, Prague - November 17, 1900, Munich) was a Czech-Austrian German choirmaster (Chorleiter), music-critic. He was a son of Simon Porges (1801 - September 4, 1869) and his wife Charlotte (1801 - September 4, 1869). He married Wilhelmine Merores. He was the father of Elsa Bernstein. He was supposedly an illegitimate son of Franz Liszt (and President Barack Obama is supposedly a citizen of Kenya!).

Wagner had requested Heinrich Porges, a member of his circle and an able writer as well as an accomplished musician, to 'follow all my rehearsals very closely and note down everything I say, even the smallest details, about the interpretation and performance, so that a tradition goes down in writing'. In the opinion of the eminent Wagner scholar, Curt von Westernhagen, Porges's conscientious record shows 'amazing insight and perception' since what distinguishes it is his 'ability always to locate the endless detail of Wagner's instructions in an overall intellectual context'.

Hermann Levi (November 7, 1839 – May 13, 1900) was a German Jewish orchestral conductor. Levi was born in Gießen, Germany, the son of a rabbi. He was educated at Gießen and Mannheim, and came to Vinzenz Lachner's notice. From 1855 to 1858 Levi studied at the Leipzig conservatorium, and after a series of travels which took him to Paris, he obtained his first post as music director at Saarbrücken, which post he exchanged for that at Mannheim in 1861. From 1862 to 1864 he was chief conductor of the German opera in Rotterdam, then till 1872 at Karlsruhe, when he went to Munich, a post he held until 1896, when ill-health compelled him to resign. Levi's name is indissolubly connected with the increased public appreciation of Wagner's music. A longtime friend of Wagner, he conducted the first performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882, and was connected with the musical life of that place during the remainder of his career. He visited London in 1895, and died in Munich in 1900 and was interred in a Mausoleum in the grounds of his villa later that year in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.