Wagner Music: A Sensitive Subject in Israel

Jenny Badner, Voice of America
June 5, 2001

A recent controversy in Israel is serving as a reminder how sensitive the country remains about anything that can be linked to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. The organizers of the Israel Arts Festival recently announced that they would not go ahead with plans to perform the music of Richard Wagner. Though the German composer died in 1883, his music is for many Israelis forever linked with Hitler and the Holocaust.

The music, from the opera "De Walkuere" by 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner, was supposed to be performed in July at Jerusalem's Israel Arts Festival.

It was going to be a private concert performed by world-renowned conductor Daniel Berenboim of the Berlin Philharmonic and soloist Placido Domingo.

Recently, the concert was called off because of public outrage.

More than 50 years after the end of World War II, the music of Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, remains a sensitive subject in Israel.

The festival's director, Yossi Tal-Gan, says the public outcry against the performance forced the board of directors to reconsider their decision to perform Wagner's music at Israel's most prestigious music festival.

"Two lists of values came, one against the other," he said. "The value to play as a festival anything we think is appropriate, artistically. From the other side, being sensitive to public reaction, especially when we talk about the Holocaust. What I learned from this is that the Holocaust is not only affecting survivors, who most of them are over 70 now, but the second generation and sometimes even the third."

Since the creation of Israel, there has been a de-facto ban against performing anything by the composer whose music, during the Nazi-era, accompanied nearly every public appearance by Hitler.

But that taboo seemed to be fading. In the past decade, Wagner's music has been played on state radio, and last year, a small local Israeli orchestra performed one of his operas for the first time in the country's history.

Mr. Tal-Gan says that like a growing number of Israelis, he saw no problem with the performance, especially since Richard Wagner was not the only anti-Semitic musician, and he died 50 years before Hitler came to power.

"There were many anti-Semitic musicians and artists [throughout] history and that is why we said we have to separate the artist from his art," he said. "And even when people raised the fact that Beethoven's music was heard in the camps, not Wagner's music, but Beethoven. Strauss lived in the Nazi period and he was an active Nazi, so we said, why are they kosher and Wagner is not?"

But opponents say Wagner is different, no other composer is as closely linked with Hitler. They say the symbolism of playing his music in Jerusalem, with a Jewish-Israeli conductor and a German orchestra would have been insensitive to aging Holocaust survivors.

Walter Zvi Bacharach is a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor who lives in Israel. He is also an emeritus professor whose branch of study is the roots of antisemitism. He says Richard Wagner did more than write music. He was the first to formulate the ultra-nationalist German ideal that included exterminating the Jews.

"There are new generations who say, from their point of view, that you should not mix up art for the sake of art, with personal concepts," said Mr. Bacharach. "In the case of Wagner, I can not agree with that, because Israel represents a Jewish state and this man has pledged for the Jewish disappearance. So a state that represents the Jews enjoying the art of somebody who wants you to disappear that seems to me very radical."

Conductor Daniel Berenboim has said he understands why some people oppose listening to Wagner, but argues they should not stop others who want to attend a performance.

Israeli Composer Sergiu Shapira of Israel's Rubin Academy listens to Wagner's music at his home in Jerusalem. He says he values the composer who changed the notion of opera and set the stage for the development of atonal music.

"I think that everybody should know Wagner, should hear Wagner and especially the students in the academy must learn the technique of Wagner," said the composer. "Wagner is revolutionary in the musical technique, especially in the harmonic conception of the 19th century."

The Israel Festival's Yossi Tal-Gan says the debate has taught him that the music of Wagner, for Israelis, remains a symbol of Nazism. But he says that many symbols in Israel, especially those related to Germany, have changed.

"Many symbols disappeared in the past. Like the Volkswagen from Germany, like the relations with Germany, like the German language," said Mr. Tal-Gan. "So many symbols in society, not only the Israeli society change, so I cannot foresee what will happen in two years, five years or 50 years."

Conductor Daniel Berenboim, and the Berlin Philharmonic, have agreed to replace the performance of Wagner's "De Walkuere" with Robert Schumann's "4th Symphony" and Igor Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" at this year's Israel festival. Stravinsky was critical of Wagner. But ironically, some Israeli musicologists have credited Wagner with laying the foundation's for the Russian composer's own atonal technique.

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