Tobin - Is Wagner Worse Than the Nakba?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
10 June '12..





(As Jonathan Tobin has written here, Wagner has been, and continues to be a "touchy subject" within Israel, and while not concurring 100% with his thoughts on this matter, the question he raises, "Is Wagner worse than the Nakba?", is a powerful one. Y.)

It was probably inevitable. When the Eretz Israel Orchestra announced plans last month to hold a concert of works by Richard Wagner in Tel Aviv it was likely that somebody would find a way to cancel it. The music of the great anti-Semite has not been played in the country since the 1930s, and the ire of Holocaust survivors as well as the often-hypocritical efforts of those attempting to enforce the informal ban on Wagner was bound to generate pressure to spike the event.

The ban is hypocritical and foolish. Yet the cancellation of the concert planned by the Israeli Wagner Society is interesting not so much because preventing Wagner from being played live in the territory of the Jewish state is ridiculous, but because it was the result of a decision by Tel Aviv University, whose auditorium had been rented for the occasion. TAU revoked its permission for the concert because it claimed the sponsors had not revealed their purpose when they paid for the hall. True or not, it showed that there are just some things the university will not allow to take place on their property. But coming as it did less than a month after the same institution granted its approval for anti-Zionist students to hold a “Nakba Day” commemoration in which the founding of Israel is treated as a “disaster,” it does call into question the judgment of those at the school about what is truly offensive to Jewish sensibilities.

Honig - Free to love Wagner

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
05 August '11

http://sarahhonig.com/2011/08/05/another-tack-free-to-love-wagner/

Negligible reports tucked away below the fold of forgotten inside pages oftentimes signify much more than the scant attention accorded them. So it was with news that the Israel Chamber Orchestra played Wagner in Germany at the Bayreuth Festival dedicated to his veneration. This perhaps constituted the greatest break yet of Israel’s unofficial, socially accepted taboo on public performances of Richard Wagner’s music (as distinct from listening in private).

Nonetheless, easygoing apathy greeted a story that yesteryear would have instigated riots. Classical music is anyhow the preserve of shrinking clusters of cultural aesthetes, once numerous and influential in our midst. Today, they’re judged esoteric and hardly anyone cares.

Moreover, several false premises paint Wagner-aversion as ludicrous and outdated. Wagner’s music, we’re told, shouldn’t suffer because Hitler appropriated it. The composer, after all, died half a century before the Third Reich.

Another premise is that our loathing for Wagner is insular and generation-based. Hear ICO chairwoman Erela Talmi: “The atmosphere has changed, and those people who were at the concentration camps are either weaker or no longer with us, and those who voiced their [anti-Wagner] opinions are only a few and it’s hard for them to be heard now.”

Subtext: The dead and dying survivors’ eccentricities sprang from exaggerated, no-longer-relevant emotionalism. Presumably we’re now free to love Wagner.

New outlooks signify the enlightenment of the new postmodern Israeli, fashionably unfettered by unpleasant Jewish history.

The vogue today is altogether to downplay anti-Semitism and view Israel-bashing as just deserts for the Jewish state’s policies. Indeed, post-Holocaust political correctness spawns cleverly camouflaged anti-Semitism – not less dangerous, but less in-your-face. No such sanctimonious constraints prevailed prewar, not even among the artistic elite, whom some of us misguidedly credit with a higher moral stature.

A cursory cyber-search will yield a nauseating bounty of gut-churning Jew-revulsion by a veritable pantheon of cultural icons. Most of us would be knocked for a loop to discover who contributed to it.

Yet we don’t blacklist the output of T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, H.G. Wells, Pushkin, Rodin, Renoir, Cezanne, Liszt, Brahms and many other cult giants, just because they viscerally abhorred the likes of us. It was bon ton in their milieu. We can separate their art from their odious pronouncements.

Wagner’s sinister underside, though, sets him far apart from the garden-variety creative anti-Semite, who merely did the acceptable thing when vilifying Jews with virulence that would send today’s incredulous Israelis reeling.

Unlike his contemporaries, Wagner literally put his money where his mouth was. He was consciously and actively Judeophobia’s standard-bearer. He avidly financed and abetted Jew-hating societies in mid-19thcentury Germany, and fervently propagated the then-new racial anti-Semitism.

He was a leader, not a follower.

Leibler - Israelis performing Wagner in Germany – a national disgrace

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
27 July '11

http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=3036


The Israel Chamber Orchestra on Tuesday performed Wagner’s opera Siegfried Idyll at the Bayreuth Opera Festival. It was the first time an Israeli orchestra had played Wagner in Germany.

The conductor, Roberto Paternostro, whose mother and other relatives were Holocaust survivors, agreed that “Wagner’s ideology and anti-Semitism were terrible, but he was a great composer.” He opined that Wagner’s worldview should be treated separately from his music. Paternostro conceded that not enough time had passed for Wagner to be played in Israel, but felt it was appropriate to do so in Germany. “The aim in the year 2011 is to divide the man from his art.”

The orchestra’s chief executive, Erwin Herskovits, went further, telling Reuters that “there is great pride and excitement… This is not just another concert. It is a once-in-a-lifetime concert.” With works from Jewish composers Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn (banned by the Nazis) also being played, he said that “it was like a mission to be here playing Jewish music by Jewish musicians from the Jewish state… It was a victory concert.”

But Wagner’s history cannot be so summarily dismissed. He was a central pillar in the anti-Semitic character of Nazism. In fact, Wagner even coined the terms “Jewish problem” and “final solution,” which subsequently became central to the Nazi vocabulary.

In his notorious essay titled “Judaism in Music,” first published in 1851, Wagner expressed his extreme revulsion for what he described as “cursed Jewish scum” and declared that the “only thing [that] can redeem you [the Jewish people] from the burden of your curse [is] the redemption of Ahasverus - total destruction” - a code term for expelling Jews from society. In this essay, Wagner described Jews as “hostile to European civilization” and “ruling the world through money.” He argued that “Judaism is rotten at the core, and is a religion of hatred,” describing the cultured Jew as “the most heartless of all human beings” and referring to Jewish composers as “comparable to worms feeding on the body of art.”

Wagner’s family continued to promote his vile anti-Semitic ideology. His daughter Eva married Houston Chamberlain, an Englishman who crafted the ideology for Nazi racism in his notorious book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. After his death, Wagner’s family became a central attraction for radical right-wing Germans.

The controversy over Wagner

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking/JPost
15 October '10
Posted before Shabbat

A debate over whether it is appropriate for an Israeli orchestra to play the music of the notorious anti-Semite Richard Wagner has again been resurrected.

The Jewish boycott of Wagner's music was initiated in 1938 following Kristallnacht when the Nazis burned synagogues and instituted massive nationwide pogroms against Jews. In 2001 during the Israel Festival in Jerusalem Daniel Barenboim conducted a selection of Wagner's music which led to demonstrations and the then mayor Ehud Olmert condemned Barenboim's initiative as "brazen, arrogant uncivilized and insensitive."

A few weeks ago Katherina Wagner, the German composer's great granddaughter, sought to visit Israel to formally invite the Cameri Israeli Chamber Orchestra to inaugurate the forthcoming session of the Bayreuth Festival in Germany - an annual event promoting Wagner's music. Her intentions were leaked to the media and created such a maelstrom, that she canceled the visit. But Cameri announced that it still intended to perform at the festival, although it undertook not to play or even rehearse Wagner's music in Israel.

There certainly is a case to be made that if we were to boycott all anti-Semitic writers, artists and composers, we would be isolating ourselves from a very substantial proportion of the culture of the Western world. Besides, many pose the question "What has music got to do with politics?" Moreover, why should there be so much fuss over the music of a lone anti-Semitic composer who died nearly 130 years ago? And if we are going to ban Wagner, why not also ban music created by other anti-Semitic composers such as Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Chopin?

Yet if one drew a red line in the gradation of anti-Semites, identifying those who had a real impact on events leading up to the mass murder of Jews, Wagner would certainly stand out far beyond "traditional" anti-Semites.

(Read full post)

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