Daniel Barenboim

On July 7th, the renowned pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim led the Berlin Staatskapelle in part of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. The performance, held at the Israel Convention Center as part of the Israel Festival in Jerusalem, sparked an outcry, with Barenboim being branded as a fascist by some Israelis.

Wagner’s music has for decades been shunned in Israel, still home to over 350,000 Holocaust survivors today. Adolf Hitler’s theories of racial purity and extermination of Jews drew partly from anti-Semitic writings by Wagner, his favorite composer.

Wagner died 50 years before Nazi Germany, but his music was used for Nazi propaganda purposes and was played in the concentration camps. Ironically, some of the greatest interpreters of Wagner are Jews, among them Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, Sir Georg Solti, and more recently James Levine and Barenboim himself.

Barenboim was originally scheduled to perform the first act of Die Walkuere (The Valkyries) with three singers, including the famous tenor Placido Domingo. However, severe protests by Holocaust survivors as well as the Israeli government led the reluctant festival authorities to ask for an alternative program.

Barenboim agreed to substitute the offending piece with Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but expressed regret at the decision. Still, at the end of the concert, he declared that he would play Wagner and invited those who objected to leave.

Decades after, Wagner’s music still holds chilling associations for many Holocaust survivors.

Most of the audience responded with load applause, but a small, vocal minority voiced their disapproval and stormed out of the concert hall. Barenboim spent some forty-five minutes speaking to the audience in hebrew, explaining his rationale behind playing the piece and appealing to the protestors to let the majority hear what they wish.

“This is my personal encore to them,” said Barenboim. “You can be angry with me, but please don’t be angry with the orchestra or the festival management.”

As the piece began, some protesters banged on doors and shouted, but they quietened and left and the performance was completed without any further interference.

The performance has drawn sharp criticism from many parties. Jerusalem's Mayor Ehud Olmert called Barenboim’s actions “brazen, arrogant, uncivilized and insensitive.” Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that he would rather it hadn't been played, noting that “there are a lot of people in Israel for whom this issue is very hard, and it is perhaps still too early.”

Barenboim disagrees. “I don’t want to hurt anybody and I don’t want to force anybody to hear something they don’t want to or cannot because of dreadful associations,” he said. But he argues that these people should not stop others from enjoying Wagner’s music.

Barenboim has said that principles of artistic freedom should be paramount, but he did not wans to “fight like a missionary for Wagner in Israel.”

A decade ago, Barenboim had unsuccessfully tried to add Wagner to the repertory of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. IPO musicians were quite agreeable with his proposal to play Tristan and Isolde, but public outcry stopped his plans.

In 1981, conductor Zubin Mehta had attempted to play exerpts from the same piece as an encore at the end of an IPO concert. A Holocaust survivor jumped onstage and opened his shirt to reveal scars inflicted in a Nazi concentration camp. Mehta halted the performance and was subsequently shouted off the stage.

In recent years, however, Wagner’s music has been played occasionally by some orchestras, radio stations and on cable television in Israel. Last fall the Israel Symphony Orchestra of Rishon Lezion played Siegfried Idyll as part of a chamber music series. The conductor was Mendi Rotan, a Holocaust survivor.

This is indicative of a gradual acceptance of Wagner’s music, not only by the new generation but also older people who have experienced terror under the Germans. Ehud Gross, director general of the Israel Symphony Orchestra said it best: “After 50 years I think we are ready to listen to Richard Wagner. ...We can despise Wagner as a man but appreciate him as a musician.”

At the Israel Festival concert, 67-year-old engineer Michael Avraham supported Barenboim, rapping younger protestors. “You don't have to listen,” he retorted. “You can go home. You didn't go through the Holocaust. I did.” For those survivors who have learnt to accept Wagner’s music, it can help trigger a release of emotions that may have a kathartic effect and help relieve their terrible memories.

Barenboim takes it one step further. “By not playing now, in a way, one is giving Hitler a posthumous right,” he said, conclusing that such a situation was “terrible.” It is especially important to play Wagner, he argues, since the composer has affected the development of music greatly. A key figure in music history, Richard Wagner is notable for his use of leitmotifs as the basis for large pieces and as a musical representation of something non-musical, such as a character, and object, or an idea or concept.

Born to Russian Jews in Buenos Aires, Daniel Barenboim was brought up in Argentina and Israel. He is currently the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.