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.
ALTHOUGH WAGNER died 50 years
before the Nazis came to power, Hitler venerated him, proclaiming that “whoever
wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.” He was so
enraptured with him that he is quoted as having said, “Richard Wagner is my
religion.”
Hitler also became a friend of Wagner’s son Siegfried. After
Sigfried’s death in 1930, Hitler remained very close to his English-born widow
Winifred, a passionate Nazi and anti-Semite who had befriended him early in his
career.
Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried visited Israel in 1996, giving
lectures condemning his great grandfather’s obsessive hatred of Jews, stressing
that Wagner’s anti-Semitic views were far more important to him than his music.
Gottfried was regarded as the black sheep of the family, which disowned him, and
he came under attack from neo-Nazi groups.
For Jews, and in particular
for survivors, Wagner is not just another anti-Semite. He is bracketed with
Nazism, and can be said to have been a forerunner of those who paved the way for
the Shoah. On top of this, Bayreuth, the location of the festival, was renowned
as a center for Nazi “cultural” activity.
Under such circumstances, it is
surely shameful for an Israeli chamber orchestra, perceived to be representative
of the Jewish people, to be linked to such an evil person.
It truly
requires a person to act in a schizophrenic manner to say that they can enjoy
this man’s music and close their eyes to his evil actions. But even more so, the
heartlessness of Israelis ignoring the sensitivities of Holocaust survivors
represents a stain on our dignity and national identity.
Elan Steinberg,
vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their
Descendants, accused the Israeli orchestra leaders of being “tone deaf.” He
condemned the performance as “a disgraceful abandonment of solidarity with those
who suffered unspeakable horrors by the purveyors of Wagner’s
banner.”
For the Israeli Chamber Orchestra to have actually gone to
Germany to perform his works in Bayreuth, where he was glorified by the Nazis,
is truly a national disgrace.
ileibler@netvision.net.il