Abstract

If Wagner's notorious essay "Das Judentum in der Musik" of 1850—which claims that Jews are rootless, grotesque of appearance, insensitive to language, wedded to commerce, and thus divorced from culture—has been the object of frequent comment in the Wagner literature, its immediate appearance in French has been largely ignored. In this article, after opening comments on the pseudonym that Wagner adopted in the first publication, and the dedicatee he selected for the second, the three journals in which the French translation appeared in the fall of 1850 are reviewed, and their editors are discussed. The surprising career of the French translator—whose name, Friedrich Jakob Schütz, has not appeared in modern Wagner studies—is considered, as is the quality of his translation. The article thus reveals a little-known aspect of the history of Wagner in France.

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