Today, an Israeli orchestra will be the first ever to perform at Bayreuth. Stephen Moss talks to the musicians risking controversy
The hot ticket in Bayreuth on Tuesday will not be Die Meistersinger in the Festspielhaus, but an orchestral concert at the less imposing Stadthalle. That's assuming the Israel Chamber Orchestra goes ahead with its concert, so intense is the controversy provoked by its visit to the place which the street signs proclaim as Wagnerstadt ? Wagner town.
Such is the degree of antipathy in Israel to Richard Wagner, an antisemite who was a musical inspiration for Hitler, that any visit by an Israeli orchestra to the Bavarian town in which he founded the festival devoted to his operas would be sure to cause argument. But the Israel Chamber Orchestra is going further, performing Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, the lyrical 20-minute symphonic piece he wrote for his wife Cosima. Visiting Wagner town is bad enough, say the Wagner-haters back in Israel, but to play his music is beyond the pale.
The orchestra's visit was the initiative of its music director, Roberto Paternostro. "Wagner's ideology and antisemitism were terrible," he declared, "but he was a great composer. The aim is to distinguish between the man and his art."
Paternostro approached Katharina Wagner, co-director of the festival, who was enthusiastic about a performance by the orchestra that would lay to rest the ghosts of Hitlerism that haunt Bayreuth. "We would not play Wagner in Israel because of the sensitivities of Holocaust survivors," Omri Raveh, principal oboe and artistic co-ordinator of the orchestra, tells me in between rehearsals, "but we were invited to play in Bayreuth as a symbol." Raveh accepts that Wagner was an antisemite, but argues that a purely orchestral piece such as the Siegfried Idyll cannot embody antisemitism, and that many other great composers such as Chopin and Liszt were also antisemitic.
The Siegfried Idyll will be the final work in a carefully constructed programme which also features Prayer by the Israeli composer Tzvi Avni. Raveh says the concert will be an emotional occasion, and there is no chance of the orchestra pulling out because of protests back home. "We are committed to it 120%," he insists.
He accepts that the orchestra will be vilified by some in Israel. "One member of parliament argued that our budget should be cut, but the minister of culture quickly quashed that idea," he says. Wagner's music is not formally banned in Israel, but since 1938 there has been an informal embargo and the few occasions on which it has been broken have been dramatic ones.
In 2001, Daniel Barenboim had wanted to perform Die Walk�re with a German orchestra in Jerusalem, but was forced to abandon the idea because of opposition. He had the final word, however, playing the prelude to Tristan and Isolde as an encore in an otherwise Wagner-less concert and inviting those who didn't want to hear it to leave. Amid much door-slamming, some did. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, described Barenboim's action as "cultural rape".
The case against Wagner conflates several different arguments. Even in an antisemitic age his bilious outpourings, especially in his 1850 essay Das Judenthum in der Musik, produced public protests at performances of his work. But Wagner's views should not of themselves debar his works. The question is to what degree antisemitism is embedded in his oeuvre.
By playing an orchestral piece ? especially this ode to love ? the Israel Chamber Orchestra is on safe ground. But Raveh dodges the issue when I ask him whether he thinks the operas are antisemitic, claiming he doesn't know them well enough to pass judgment. The critic Barry Millington has argued that Die Meistersinger has antisemitic elements, and others have seen Parsifal as a call for racial purity.
There is still an interesting discussion to be had over the content of his operas, but what can be discounted is the direct connection between Wagner and Hitler that some seek to draw. Wagner was not a Nazi avant la lettre. Socialist and green interpretations of the Ring cycle are at least as legitimate as those that would portray Siegfried as a stormtrooper come to cleanse the world. The Israel Chamber Orchestra is right as well as brave to take on its critics at home: only if we play Wagner can we engage with the sometimes disturbing complexities of his art.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/26/israel-chamber-orchestra-wagner-bayreuth
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