13895 Wagner News 174 - Wagner Society of England

Cover Story
THE CANCELLED ISRAEL WAGNER SOCIETY CONCERT
Tel Aviv University, 18th June 2012
Jonathan Livny
I do not like Richard Wagner. As a matter of fact I personally think (as do most members
of the Israel Wagner Society) that he was a despicable person. Not the fact that he tried
to evade his financial benefactors nor his disrespect for the fidelity of marriage, but to his
unabated, vicious anti-Semitism. Now I know that many composers were extremely anti-
Semitic. It is said of Frederick Chopin that, upon entering a concert hall he would
announce that if there was a Jew in the hall he would not play. Karl Orff and Richard
Strauss were both tainted by their membership of the Nazi party and yet we listen to their
music in Israel in raptured admiration.
So what is it that makes Wagner so different and why is it that his music is
boycotted in Israel? What made it impossible for us in the Israel Wagner Society finally
to break the unofficial boycott of his work? Wagner left clearly written statements of his
virulent anti-Semitism in his infamous Das Judenthum in der Musik and he was, whether
we like it or not, Hitler's idol. Can one separate Wagner as a person from his music? That
is really the motivational force behind my decision to establish a Wagner Society in Israel
and to try and produce the first ever all-Wagner concert, which unfortunately was stymied
a few days after it was announced in my country.
I owe my love of Wagner's music to my father Ernst Loewenstein who was a
Holocaust survivor. He was the only member of a huge family that had lived in Germany
for generations to survive the Nazi death camps. My father escaped with picture albums,
documents and 78 rpm records of Richard Wagner's music. “He was a horrible anti-
Semite” my father would intone “but he wrote Godly music”. Thus as a child I learned
the love and admiration of the music of a genius though a despicable person.
Growing up in Israel as a second generation survivor and being the age of the
country I was born in enabled me to follow carefully the return to normalcy and eventually
to a flourishing Israel – German alliance. Wagner remains the sole remaining vestige of the
boycott of Germany and of goods made in Germany. It is easy to identify with the everdwindling
number of Holocaust survivors when it comes to Wagner. Most people are not,
alas, avid classical music lovers and even less so of Wagner's complicated
Gesamtkunstwerk. Thus when a few vociferous survivors sound the alarm bells whenever
an attempt is made to play his music it is easy to identify with their real or imaginary plight.
I formed the Israel Wagner Society when the Israel Chamber Orchestra was invited
to give a concert in Bayreuth and part of the programme was going to be a piece by
Wagner. When the usual outcry sounded the Orchestra announced that, though it was
going ahead with the performance, it was not going to rehearse the music in Israel. That
was too much. Was the music something contaminating the air? In 2010 I met the Israeli
conductor Asher Fisch in Dresden. He was a last minute replacement to conduct the Ring
when Fabio Lisi dumped the Semper Oper. In the Opera Cafe of the Semper Opera we
dreamed of doing the first ever all-Wagner concert in Israel. (It is interesting to note that
Jews are again amongst the foremost proponents of Wagner's music: James Levine,
Daniel Barenboim, Asher Fisch, Roberto Paternostro and Dan Ettinger, to name but a
few.)
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