Performing Wagner’s Music in Israel

With all due respect, I am unsympathetic to Daniel Barenboim’s defense of a planned guest performance of “Die Walkure” at the upcoming Israel Festival (Commentary, May 22).

As long as Jewish opposition to Wagnerian music is viscerally associative rather than merely argumentative, any response to that opposition must be sensitive and deferential. It is not a matter of right and wrong; it’s simply a matter of courtesy.

Jim Torcivia

Westlake Village

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Barenboim’s defense of performing Richard Wagner’s music in Israel does not deal with the central basis for the objections to Wagner there. It was not just Wagner’s music but his ideas that were favorites of the Nazis. Wagner was a leading proto-Nazi theorist. He was not only bitterly anti-Semitic in his personal life but wrote a famous essay condemning Jewish influence in German arts and letters. His writings inspired further development of Nazism in Germany. As for the right to hear Wagner’s music: If any Israeli “purist” wants to hear Wagner’s music, he can buy a record and play it privately all he wants. The issue is whether Israeli culture should include the public promotion of the works of a leading proto-Nazi.

Larry Selk

Los Angeles

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As a musician and a Jew, I have struggled silently for many years over the Wagner question. For many of us, finding an answer has been as elusive as untying the Gordian knot. Israel’s obligation to its non-Jewish citizenry has little to do with the reasons for performing or not performing Wagner.

But I would like to offer Maestro Barenboim a possible answer. As a Jew I think it would be both courageous and liberating to simply once and for all say: “We have defeated the ignorance of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler and no longer wish to be held in bondage to that grim past. We are better than that.”

Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, et al. have long turned to dust, as has Wagner. Yet Wagner’s glorious music lives on, and it should not continue to be tainted for the sake of holding on to that past.

It’s time to extricate ourselves from this dilemma. For Barenboim to perform Wagner with the Israel Philharmonic (both for the 80% Jewish and the 20% non-Jewish population of Israel) would be, I believe, the ultimate victory over anti-Semitism and Nazism.

Arthur B. Rubinstein

Music Director

Symphony in the Glen

Los Angeles