JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

260 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:243
Barenboim always claims to be promoting the “cause of peace,”
though his behavior is the antithesis of that claim. For example, he made no
protest when Hamas banned all musical instruments not mentioned in the
Koran, and he also failed to object when a Palestinian youth orchestra was
disbanded in Jenin because it had performed for Holocaust survivors in
Israel.
His silence in the face of attacks on Israelis speaks volumes. In August
2003, while conducting a Concert for Peace in Spain with an Arab orchestra,
a bus of the Jewish faithful returning from the Western Wall was blown
up. Many infants were among the dead and injured. Instead of using the
Spanish concert to denounce the massacre of Jews, he chose to remain
silent. And, tragically, I can find no comments by him concerning the death
of the Fogel family by Arabs from the village of Avrata, and which
included a three-month-old infant with her throat cut.
Note
Performing Wagner’s music in an orchestra gives one no special
insight into matters beyond a simple understanding of how the music goes.
Orchestral players are specialists in the difficult task of performing specific
orchestral parts, and while some go beyond that because of personal curiosity
and intellectual interest, it is not part of the job. Even some conductors
do not inquire beyond that printed in the orchestral score. A colleague of
mine, who held a principal chair with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for
30 years, knew very little of the characters or the plots of the operas that he
performed so many times, though he carried off his role as a critical orchestral
player brilliantly. In my own case, I have performed the Nutcracker
ballet more than 600 times but have no idea what happens on stage except
that mice are somehow involved, a fact deduced when a heavy mechanical
mouse used for one production wandered off the stage, tumbled into the
orchestra pit, glanced off my head and shoulder, and disabled me for several
weeks.
All this is by way of saying that though I have played a great deal of
Wagner’s orchestral music over the years, the preparation of this article
required considerable study. It was here that I benefited from the specialized
research of some remarkably sophisticated historians and social scientists,
many of whom have spent a great part of their adult lives plowing
deep furrows in this gnarled, unpleasant, and distasteful territory.
In addition to the brilliant Wagner: Race and Revolution of Paul Lawrence
Rose, quoted from above (and with whom I had an exceptionally
useful correspondence, some of which influenced my views about the Bayreuth
conference of August 1998), I mention two other seminal research