Israeli Orchestra to Play Music by Wagner

April 11, 2000

An Israeli orchestra will perform music by Richard Wagner, ending an informal half-century boycott in Israel. The orchestra of Rishon L'Tzion will play Wagner’s "Siegfried Idyll," in a performance on October 27, Ehud Gross, the orchestra's director general announced. Wagner, a virulently anti-Semitic 19th century German composer, wrote the work as a tribute to his wife after their son Siegfried was born in 1869. Holocaust survivors criticized the decision. "The world of music is so great and the fact that Wagner was a source of enrichment for Nazis and Hitler personally really disturbs me," said Shevah Weiss, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and a survivor of the Holocaust. Gross, the orchestra director, also lost family members in the Holocaust.

Wagner's music was often played during Nazi rallies, and he has been described as Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler‘s favorite composer. Thousands of Israelis perceive Wagner as a symbol of the Nazi era, and his music has been unofficially banned in public in Israel ever since the Holocaust. In 1981, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, tried to play a Wagner encore at the end of concert, and a near-riot ensued. In August 1995, a Wagner opera was broadcast on Israel radio for the first time.

While Wagner lived decades before the birth of Nazism, his influence on the Nazi movement and especially on its evil leader, Hitler, was enormous. In a tract published in 1850, Wagner wrote that Jewish music is bereft of all expression, characterized by coldness, indifference, triviality, and nonsense. Wagner also spoke of the "harmful influence of Jewry on the morality of the nation," claiming that the subversive power of the Jews stands in contrast to German character. These ideas, together with the nationalistic character of his operas, provided a fertile feeding ground for Nazi ideology.

In 1985, the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, Germany, opened an exhibition entitled "Wagner and the Jews." Its organizer, museum director Manfred Eger, said the exhibition was a plea not for Wagner but for the truth. "Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism throws a considerable shadow over his person and his work," Eger states in the exhibition. "There are expressions used by him which could have been attributed to the National Socialist (Nazi) violently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer and which are used today to brand him as a proponent of the Holocaust. But there are also remarks in which he retracts some of his earlier pronouncements. Moreover, several of his colleagues and friends were Jews."

In his exhibition, Eger tries to prove that the roots of Hitler's anti-Semitism did not have their origins in Wagner. Eger cites in detail Wagner's friendships with Jews such as the choirmaster Heinrich Porges and the conductor Hermann Levi. Eger attributes Wagner's anti-Semitic rages to jealousy over the success of Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Even today in Israel, there are mixed emotions about playing Wagner‘s music. "I don't believe in tying music to racism. If we did, we would have to stop playing Chopin in Israel -- he too was a rabid anti-Semite," says Nechama Rosler, a violinist with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. "But because Wagner's music arouses such deep emotions, I feel strongly that as long as it disturbs anyone who associates it with the Nazis, with his own or his family's suffering in the Holocaust, Wagner's music should not be played publicly. The function of music, after all, is to soothe, to make the listener feel good, to stimulate or pacify his or her soul. Whoever wants to hear Wagner's music can listen to it in private."

Yaakov Mishori, a leading Philharmonic musician, says that the orchestra should play Wagner. "After all, Wagner died 50 years before Hitler came to power. Moreover, he was a kind of private anti-Semite, refusing to sign any public declarations against the Jews. He actually worked with many Jews. Wagner's public relations man was a Jew named Neumann. Hermann Levi conducted Wagner's works at the time, and a musician named Rubenstein finished the orchestration of some of his operas."

Motti Schmidt, conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, disagrees. "Wagner was a genius. His was a complicated personality -- he was like a many-layered cake -- but he was not a good man. If his music still hurts the feelings of people in this country, we should respect the rights of the minority and not play Wagner."

While Wagner was not directly responsible for the Holocaust, there is no doubt that he was a powerful symbol in the Nazi era. Thus, for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Wagner's music represents a vivid reminder of Nazism.

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