Lawmakers Want No Wagner in Israel

It has been 118 years since the death of Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, but the playing of his music in Israel continues to be a matter of epic emotion.

A special session of the Israeli parliament on Wednesday unanimously demanded that organizers of the upcoming Israel Festival cancel a Wagnerian concert.

The 19th century German composer was an outspoken anti-Semite and an ideological and musical inspiration to Adolf Hitler. The operatic strains of his works were played at Nazi death camps and party meetings.

“Our brothers were slaughtered and strangled with Wagner’s music as the requiem,” said Zeev Boim, a member of the Knesset, or parliament, from the ruling Likud Party. “We are an ancient people who prevailed by the force of memory, and Wagner is a component in our collective memory that represents shame.”

An especially harsh condemnation came from Shaul Yahalom of the National Religious Party, who opened the Knesset session. He accused the government of participating in a form of Holocaust denial by refusing to block the performance.

“We belittle our memory and the essence of our culture,” Yahalom said. “It will be no great disaster if the Jewish people do not hear Wagner for generations.”

If the government does not step in to stop the concert, he added, then the people of Israel must boycott it. “The people who attend must know they are stabbing Jewish history and human morality in the back,” he said.

Even Israeli Arab lawmaker Abdul-Malik Dehamshe, who is not inclined to agree on many issues with his Jewish colleagues, concurred.

“I am not prepared to listen to this music,” he said, “because listening to it would immediately make me think that this composer issued a death sentence against an entire nation.”

The Knesset then voted to demand that the concert be canceled.

The decree is not binding but increases pressure on organizers of the annual festival, which is state-funded and a major international arts event. It also serves as prelude to a case before the Israeli Supreme Court that attempts to block the playing of Wagner’s music. The case, based on a petition by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, will be heard later this month.

On July 7, the penultimate day of the six-week festival, Argentine-born Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim is scheduled to direct the Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra in a selection from Wagner’s “The Valkyrie.” Tenor Placido Domingo and soprano Deborah Voigt would star.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav also has asked that the Wagner concert be eliminated from the festival.

While opponents argue that performing Wagner is a painful affront to Israel’s community of Holocaust survivors, Barenboim, the festival directors and a number of musicians maintain that the composer’s artistic genius must be separated from his indisputably odious opinions. In a democracy, they say, there is no place for musical censorship.

Israel’s decades-long boycott of Wagner has slowly eroded over time. In October, the symphony orchestra in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Le Zion played Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll.” One man, whose family perished in the Holocaust, attempted to disrupt the performance by standing and rattling a metal noisemaker.

In 1981, Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra maestro Zubin Mehta slipped in an encore rendition of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” at a Tel Aviv concert. Barely had Mehta raised his baton when the audience erupted in fistfights and an usher charged the stage declaring that the performance would proceed “over my body” as he ripped open his shirt to expose Nazi-inflicted scars.

That was believed to have been the first public performance of Wagner since the 1948 founding of the Jewish state.

Yossi Tal-Gan, general director of the upcoming Israel Festival, defended inclusion of Wagner but also said through a spokeswoman that if the Israeli government formally requests canceling the concert, “we will consider the options.”

Wagner is despised not just because of the adoration Hitler bestowed on him but for his writings and railings against Jews and what he perceived as their undue influence in German music circles. His operas are seen by many as brilliant but loaded with images that reinforce the myths of Aryan superiority.

Louis Garb, a tenor who retired from the Israeli Philharmonic 15 years ago and is working against the performance of Wagner, said it is impossible for him to separate the music from the ideas.

“If someone offered me the opportunity to sing at the Met or La Scala tomorrow and the condition was to cut off my finger, I’d pick up an ax now,” he said. “But if they said the condition was to perform Wagner, I’d say thanks but no thanks.

“There is nothing harder for me, someone whose life is dedicated to music, to speak against music,” he said. “But some things are more important.”