Wagner the Dog

[muman613]

I am glad that there are Israelis who are protesting this news. I heard about this story the other day... That an Israeli Orchestra is prepared to play a piece composed by the nefarious German composer Richard Wagner. Wagners music provided the background track for the Nazis and soothed the spirits of monsters and madmen. Although he was considered talented, his music is a stark reminder to the Jewish people of the Nazi era and his music has been boycotted by Israel for over 70 years.

There are going to be protests over this issue according to this article from INN:


http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/146086

Protest Against Orchestra’s Wagner Concert
Israeli Chamber Orchestra to perform Wagner in Nazi hero’s home town. Simultaneous protest in Tel Aviv.
by Gil Ronen
Published: 26/07/11, 9:13 AM


The Israeli Chamber Orchestra is to perform Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll at the Bayreuth Opera Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, Tuesday at 11:30 A.M.

A protest against the concert will be held in Tel Aviv at the same time.

The Orchestra’s decision violates an unofficial 70-year boycott of Wagner’s music by Israeli orchestras. Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite and a hero of the Nazi regime.

The protest is being organized by Amit Shikli of the Social Leadership Academy at Kfar Tavor, who only heard of the concert Monday. He immediately contacted the pre-military academies, My Israel, HaShomer HaChadash and other Zionist groups and asked for their help in making the demonstration happen.

“The demonstration was born yesterday morning when I and some of my pupils read the outrageous remarks made by Roberto Paternostro,” Shilkli explained Tuesday. Paternostro, said Shikli, “declared that there is widespread agreement to the concert in Israel, especially from the younger generation.

“This sentence threw me out of balance.”

The protest is a declaration that the concert is not something Israel’s young generation agrees to, Shikli stated. “A Holocaust does not occur in one day. Ideological background and cultural background are needed.” Wagner is among the people who laid the foundations of the Holocaust, he explained, and taking part in a concert dedicated to him is like Holocaust denial.

The protest will take place at 11:30 outside the Stage Arts Pavilion (Golda Center) at Shaul HaMelech Street in Tel Aviv.

[muman613]

I thought of the line 'the soundtrack of the Holocaust' and wrote it in my post last night... Today I read that very description in this article from NPR...


http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2011/07/26/138720659/a-tradition-shattered-israelis-play-wagner-at-bayreuth?ps=cprs

A Tradition Shattered: Israelis Play Wagner At Bayreuth


Like all of Richard Wagner's music, performances of his piece Siegfried Idyll, is unofficially — but effectively — banned in Israel.

It's not just that Wagner was an anti-Semite. He wrote a notorious essay called "Jewishness in Music." And after his death, Wagner's family was close to Adolph Hitler. Hitler often the attended the annual Bayreuth Festival, which is devoted to Wagner's music.

Beyond all that, Wagner's music was the soundtrack to the Holocaust; it was played at Nazi death camps. Advocates of the Israeli ban say it should last until there no more Holocaust survivors alive who might hear it.

So what happened last night in Bayreuth, Germany, was noteworthy. The Israel Chamber Orchestra played the Siegfried Idyll with two of the composer's great-granddaughters sitting in the front row.

Roberto Paternostro is the conductor of the Israel Chamber Orchestra. He says, "I've always loved the music of Richard Wagner, first when I was a student in Vienna at the Vienna music school, and later when I conducted it a lot."

He says that when he became the music director of the Israel Chamber Orchestra in Tel Aviv, he wanted to connect those realities: of living in Israel and having a lot of family in Israel, and on the other hand to perform Wagner's music.

[muman613]

That article got me interesting in what RW wrote in his article 'Jewishness in Music'...

I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_Musik

"Das Judenthum in der Musik" (German: "Jewishness in Music", but normally translated Judaism in Music; spelled after its first publication as ‘Judentum’) is an essay by Richard Wagner, attacking Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular, which was published under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZM) of Leipzig in September 1850. It was reissued in a greatly expanded version under Wagner’s name in 1869. It is regarded by many as an important landmark in the history of German antisemitism.
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Recent reception

"Das Judentum" was an embarrassment to the early Wagnerites and was rarely reprinted in the early 20th century, except as part of his collected works. Fischer has found no significant critical comment on the essay. Before the Nazi period there was just one reprint of the essay itself, in Weimar in 1914. It is therefore very unlikely that it was read by Hitler or any of the Nazi hierarchy during the development of the Nazi movement (or later) and there is no evidence of this. During the Nazi period there were just two publications: in Berlin in 1934 and in Leipzig in 1939. Neither of these seem to have been large editions.

"Das Judentum" is not quoted or mentioned by early writers on Nazism in the 1950s such as Hannah Arendt. Interest in the work seems to have revived in the 1960s with new awareness of the Holocaust following the Eichmann trial. In this context some have suggested that Wagner's advice for Jews to 'go under' 'like Ahasuerus' was intended as a call for their extermination, as planned by the Nazi regime, but there is no justification for this. In fact the 'Ahasuerus' Wagner seems to have had in mind was a character from a play ( 'Halle und Jerusalem' ) by Achim von Arnim, a 'good' Jew who voluntarily sacrifices himself saving other characters from a fire. Wagner may have meant no more than 'Jews must sacrifice their separate identity for the common good'; the interpretation that he intended murder was never attributed to him before the Nazi policy of physical extermination. Because the Nazis deliberately took 'ownership' of Wagner for their own propaganda purposes, it does not follow logically that one should interpret the composer's writings only in the context of Nazi policies. Wagner died five years before Hitler was born in 1889.

The essay was omitted from the 'complete' edition of Wagner's prose works issued in 1983 on the centenary of his death,[13] because of its perceived link with Nazi anti-Semitism. A scholarly critical edition, with background material and contemporary comments, was prepared by Jens Malte Fischer in 2000.

Some writers (for example, Bryan Magee) have sought to make a qualified defence of Wagner's originality of thought in "Das Judentum", despite acknowledging its malevolence.[14] However, a full consideration of "Das Judentum"'s contents [15] weakens this argument.

Although it is perhaps therefore inappropriate to bring forward "Das Judentum" in itself as a major milestone in German anti-Semitism, the same cannot be said for Wagner’s attitudes to the Jews in general. His later writings, published when he was a well-known and influential figure, frequently contain aggressive anti-Jewish comments, although at the same time he maintained a circle of Jewish-born colleagues and admirers.

Adolf Hitler presented himself as an admirer of Wagner's music, and is said to have claimed that "there is only one legitimate predecessor to National Socialism: Wagner". Wagner's music was frequently played during Nazi rallies (as was the music of Beethoven, also 'appropriated' by the Nazis).[16] Wagner's posthumous daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner , was an admirer of Adolf Hitler[17] and ran the Bayreuth Festival of Wagner's music from the death of her husband, Siegfried, in 1930 until the end of World War II, when she was ousted. During the Nazi regime, the Nazi hierarchy was frequently required to attend performances of Wagner operas (although they did not necessarily respond enthusiastically).[18] Thus Germans of the Nazi era, even if they knew nothing about music, and knew nothing of Wagner’s writings, were presented with a clear image of the anti-Jewish Wagner as a great German.

Because of these factors, performances of Wagner's works in the modern state of Israel did not occur during the twentieth century, by consensus. In recent years many Israelis have argued that it is possible to appreciate his musical talents, without implying acceptance of his political or social beliefs. A public performance in Tel Aviv in 2001 of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde, conducted as an unprogrammed encore by Daniel Barenboim, left its audience partly delighted, partly enraged.

And now I also recognize another pattern... Richard Wagner and Roger Waters {Antisemitic Pink Floyd member} both share the initials RW...