MIDDLE EAST: Breaking the Israeli ban on Wagner's music Israeli orchestra plans performance in Bayreuth

Record ID: 739174

  • Title: MIDDLE EAST: Breaking the Israeli ban on Wagner's music Israeli orchestra plans performance in Bayreuth
  • Date: 2nd November 2010
  • Summary: VARIOUS OF PATERNOSTRO WORKING WITH ORCHESTRA DURING REHEARSAL FOR SEASON OPENING CONCERT
  • Embargoed: 17th November 2010 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVAEZ0KL6AWRSUQ5OXO4OMA4UFHB
  • Story Text: An Israeli orchestra plans to play music by Hitler's favourite composer in Germany, possibly signalling that the days of the Jewish state's unofficial ban on Richard Wagner could be nearing an end.
    Israeli ensembles rarely play Wagner's music citing the feelings of Nazi Holocaust survivors, but with their numbers dwindling through age, once vehement opposition seems to also be fading, allowing more artistic freedom. Attempts over the years by some musicians in Israel to perform Wagner's music have caused audience members to walk out in protest and have triggered emotional public debate. Wagner is also taboo on state-owned media in Israel which largely keeps his work off the air.
    The Israel Chamber Orchestra (ICO) announced in October that it plans to perform in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth during the time of the famed Wagner festival there next July, triggering some criticism but hardly enough in order to cancel the concert.
    Behind the once-unheard of idea is the orchestra's Austrian conductor, Roberto Paternostro, a Wagner expert who is Jewish and who's mother and other relatives are Holocaust survivors. Paternostro said he proposed the idea of the ICO's appearance with Wagner's great-granddaughter, Katharina Wagner whom he said favoured the plan. In what seems like an attempt to lower the profile of the event, Katharina Wagner, who currently jointly runs the Bayreuth festival, cancelled her visit to Israel and the IOC announced they will only rehearse and play Wagner's music while in Germany and not in Israel.
    Although Wagner, who penned anti-Semitic texts, died half a century before Hitler came to power, the Nazi dictator was a fervent admirer and drew on the composer's writings in his own theories on racial purity and exterminating the Jews.
    According to Paternostro, Wagner was a lingering relic of Israel's boycott of old German symbols and that while taboos on other items formerly associated with the Nazi regime had been abandoned, Wagner remained banned.
    "I am convinced that one must separate the personality of an artist and his work. I have had many many discussions about this with friends and not one of us could say what the character of Beethoven or Mozart or Schubert, to say nothing of the discussion of those composers who were closely allied to stalin and the Soviet regime and whose music we also play," Paternostro told Reuters.
    The ICO will play Wagner's Siegfrid Idyll, an orchestral piece, as well as a work by Israeli composer Zvi Avni and music by German-born Felix Mendelssohn and Austrian-born Gustav Mahler, two of the most prominent among Jewish composers.
    "Another thing which is very important to me and to which too little attention is being paid, is that we are going to Bayreuth with our heads up, and we will also be playing Mendelssohn and I think this is also a symbol, and I can't quite understand why one is always getting so excited about this ten minutes of Wagner, and forgetting that we are at the same time playing 60 or 70 or 80 minutes of Jewish music at Beyreuth. And I find that this is also a gesture that must be made in the year 2010," Paternostro added.
    Israeli Holocaust survivors also expressed varying opinions on whether the German composer's music should be played.
    "I was in Majdanek (concentration camp) and I everything I went through there was bad and now when our musicians go to Germany to play Wagner, well I say no, no and once again no," said 75-year-old Hanna Rosenbuch.
    Marti Dotan, 81, another Holocaust survivor said the battle against anti-Semitism could not be won on all fronts.
    "There are so many anti-Semites. Look at Mel Gibson who says that the Holocaust never occurred and nothing happened, and everybody goes to his pictures and everybody sees what he is doing, I mean, you can't fight them all," she said.
    Sociologist Dr. Carol Kidron, of the Haifa University in Israel, says the Bayreuth concert is a good example of a new phenomena among Jews from the second and third generation since the Holocaust. Apart from the passing away of many Holocaust survivors which has weakened the outcry against events of this sort, many younger Israeli are very interested to learn about pre-Holocaust Jewish European history.
    "Wagner's music was part of German culture before the Holocaust, and of course it was tainted by the history of Wagner's anti-semitism, but if today Israelis and Jews around the world are interested in learning about European music and European culture that Jews were very much a part of in many places, so at this point I would say the young people must explore music like Wagner's if they are going to be interested and impacted by the beauty of European culture in general," Kidron told Reuters.
    As the Israeli culture is becoming more pluralistic and people are willing to consider their own needs before ideologies that were once collective, it is easier for younger Israelis to say that culture is above and beyond war and suffering, Kidron added.
    The IOC will play in the town next July but not as part of the festival or on the grounds of the opera house which Wagner designed to host his own expansive works and where he lived the latter part of his life until his death in 1883.
    Orchestra's officials told Reuters that of the 2,000 orchestra subscribers she had heard only one who protested and said she would cancel her season-ticket and among the orchestra members everybody was in favour of the idea of playing Wagner.
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