Israel gets in a flap again over Wagner

Israel gets in a flap again over Wagner

News

norman lebrecht

December 23, 2021

A leading Israeli lender, Bank Discount, unwittingly inserted the Ride of the Valkyries in its latest ad campaign (click here to watch).

Up rose the guardians of correctness in fury that Wagner might be underpinning their mortgage.

The music, we’re told, has now been changed.

Comments

  • Rabengeraun says:

    Will they ever let this one drop – Wagner did not cause the Holocaust

    • Jbl says:

      Don’t judge!

    • Knowthehistory says:

      Try to see it from another angle. You still have people in Israel who survived Auschwitz. People who have tattoo stamps on their arm. Those people survived Auschwitz but saw lots of their family members and friends get killed while music by Wagner was sounding all over the camp. Often people had to walk to the gas chamber while Wagner was played in the background.
      It is not about dropping this issue but it is more about the respect towards the few survivors who still live in Israel and try not to be reminded of their time in Auschwitz in a stupid TV commercial. I call that respect!

      • Novagerio says:

        Knowthehistory, are you sure they also boycott Mercedes Benz, Porsche, BMW, Krupp, Siemens, Farben, BASF, Fanta & Coca Cola, Nestle and Bayer products?

      • Marshall says:

        Well, “know the history” should do some research and know the history. There is NO EVIDENCE that Wagner was played at the death camps. Another one of those myths of history which once it gets a hold, never is corrected. Perhaps there is still a reason to debate W’s music over this issue, but unfortunately many of the admired people in European culture were anti-Semites to one degree or another-too many to count-so where do we began? An irony is that “Jews” have often been great supporters of W’s art.

        But I suppose in this particular cultural/historical moment almost everyone of the past has sins that should cause their memories to be eradicated.

        • John Borstlap says:

          American scholar Leon Botstein has explained why people from Jewish descent loved W’s music and ignored his antisemitism. Since W considered ‘Jewishness’ as an alien and destructive world view (Welstanschauung), ‘assimilated Jews’ considered antisemitism not applicable to them, so they felt free to ignore the whole issue. Also enthusiasm for Wagner and his operas was a sign of being modern, progressive, and very German, so it helped to show them as completely ‘Germanic’.

          People form Jewish descent played an important role in supporting the arts and especially music. The ‘Jewish community’ in Vienna, for instance, were an important part of the haute bourgeoisie who were great patrons of the arts.

      • esfir ross says:

        Wagner music never played by camp orchestra-not enough musicians. Witness by Lasker. Don’t blame Wagner but your ignorance.

      • ThrownOutOfTheKremlinForSinging says:

        As I recall from Primo Levi’s books, the music in Auschwitz was mostly cheesy band-music and syrupy waltzes of the Johann Strauss type.

        • John Borstlap says:

          I always found Strauss waltzes eerily fascist! Look at that Vienna ball thing, everybody lined-up in military fashion.

          Sally

    • Harry says:

      But he did approve of the tsarist pogroms in Russia and wished Bismarck would do the same in Germany.

      • HugoPreuss says:

        Not to mention that his little pamphlet “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (Judaism in Music) was a theoretical trailblazer for antisemitism. It is not just anti-jewish, it is outright antisemitic in a rmodern racial interpretation of the issue – several decades before others came up with similar ideas.

        I have taught about (and had students in my political theory classes read) Wagner’s essay. It is truly disgusting from the first to the last word.

        • ThrownOutOfTheKremlinForSinging says:

          The main reason Wagner went from being sort of passive to being the rabid anti-Semite of the famous essay was largely his relationship with Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer was wealthy, and hugely popular, and a good friend and big fan of Wagner, and he helped Wagner with loans, gifts, and promotions with his connections in the music-production world. And then, suddenly and without apparent reason, Wagner turned against him. Most likely Wagner just couldn’t stand knowing that without Meyerbeer’s help, he likely would not have succeed. That’s why Meyerbeer is one of only two Jewish composers Wagner mentions by name in the essay. (The other was Mendelssohn.)

          • John Borstlap says:

            But there was also another component: Meyerbeer was corrupt, and to a great extent ‘bought’ his successes: with his clever business mind he manipulated fraudulent opera managers, and before a premiere he invited all the critics on a lavish banquet sprinkled with champagne, ensuring that enthusiastic reviews kept the promise of consecutive pleasures alive. In spite of all of Wagner’s character flaws, when his art was concerned he was entirely without compromise. He wanted to ‘conquer the musical world’ through the power of his music and not simply with easy, cheap effects and money (like Meyerbeer). W’s disgust of a primitive and corrupt music life got personified in Meyerbeer and he disentangled his connection to save his artistic conscience. That he thereby was ethically in the wrong, he must have considered ‘collateral damage’.

        • V. Lind says:

          Amazed your students did not have you cancelled, suspended or fired, for teaching anything so (in this case genuinely) offensive. Implies a couple of things: Jewish students are not snowflakes, and perhaps non-Jewish students don’t find it all that offensive.

          Obviously you would be teaching it critically, but the very existence of a violation in Tess of the D’Urbervilles got some Canadian students agitating for “trigger warnings,” the silly little beggars. The same students would have needed a cannon warning from you!

    • Wagner was an avowed and active anti-Semite who was an architect and precursor to the Jewish Holocaust….the greatest crime ever committed against humanity…His vile thoughts influenced and added to this crime and his music/art was worshiped by Nazi murderers of the highest rank to the ordinary guilty party members of the day. Wagner, his music, his art and his philosophy regarding the Jewish race is equally as sick as the members of the gestapo, ss and einsatzgruppen who murdered more than 30,000 Jews over a period of 48 hours. Including my entire maternal family whose fate was Auschwitz. Why should Israel, which was born out of the ashes of the Jew hatred Wagner supported, support his music, to remind the remaining survivors and their children of this wicked, evil composer. Not necessary and who really needs it?

      • goody 2 shoes says:

        Yes. And please take away all knives Austrians and Germans, while were at it!!!

      • Novagerio says:

        “Wagner was an avowed and active anti-Semite who was an architect and precursor to the Jewish Holocaust” – and yet, Wagner chose the son of a rabbi to premiere Parsifal.
        “Architect of the Holocaust”? Give yourself a break.

  • Zeev Mazor says:

    They changed it already

  • Nijinsky says:

    Norman, I’m really sorry about that, but you’ll have to check with my clock to see if I’m really joking or not, which I don’t know either…..

    “a FLAP!?”

    Oh, and you don’t know that Jesse Norman is one of them!? Cozy with it!?

  • music lover says:

    why is it a problem to play Wagner in Israel ?

    • John Borstlap says:

      Because he organised the holocaust, 60 years after his death – he was a far-sighted composer of the ‘music of the future’.

  • Alviano says:

    Pity. The Ride of the Valkyries is the best part.

  • V. Lind says:

    I realise that there are historic sensitivities involved here, but I do wish that Israel could move past its antipathy to the music of Wagner. The affection of Hitler for it was not Wagner’s fault — he was as noisy in his support of other German composers — and if it is really a matter of Wagner’s own anti-semitism, there might be a good few other beloved composers who also ought to be boycotted.

    Anti-Semitism was not as far as I know a factor in any of Wagner’s music. And its practice was a sad fact of his times and beyond, and his was probably not much more malign than the next guy’s. Which is not any justification for it, nor a minimisation of its nastiness, but Wagner is picked out for official opprobrium in Israel in a way no other anti-Semitic composer, writer or artist ever has been.

    It is impossible for me to be able to comprehend the antipathy felt by anyone Jewish to this deeply unfortunate association, let alone to the citizens of Israel, so many of whom are directly descended from victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Perhaps it is too deep and too bitter to be transcended. But it is a pity, as a man who may well have been very unlovely managed to create a music that is so very great, even inspiring, to so many of us.

    And I occasionally wonder if it is just being used as a useful symbol to a generation in danger of forgetting. Many Israelis profess to like the music — even the controversial Barenboim Tristan encore in 2001 or thereabouts was met with as much approval as disapproval — some walked out, yelling “fascist” and the like, but enough stayed for the music to be played. From a Guardian article at the time:

    *The debate, carried out in Hebrew, was lost on almost all of the orchestra. Holocaust survivors were in both camps. Michael Avraham, 67, an engineer, said: “Wagner was a giant anti-semite but also a great musician. I’m against his views, but not his music.”*

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_Musik “Das Judenthum in der Musik”

      (German for “Jewishness in Music”, but normally translated Judaism in Music; spelled after its first publications, according to modern German spelling practice, as ‘Judentum’) is an essay by Richard Wagner which attacks Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. It was published under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZM) of Leipzig in September 1850 and was reissued in a greatly expanded version under Wagner’s name in 1869.

      It is regarded by some as an important landmark in the history of German antisemitism.

      • John Borstlap says:

        Why don’t people get worked-up about the even more vitriolic antisemitism of Otto Weininger, himself from Jewish descent? The book had an enormous influence at the beginning of the last century, and is many more times crazy than Wagner’s antisemitism.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Weininger

        The reason is that Weininger did not contribute anything to culture or philosophy, apart from his absurd rant. But he had more influence on nazi ideology than Wagner.

      • John Borstlap says:

        A good overall view of the sources of nazism. Interestingly, Wagner is not even mentioned.

        And what is particularly striking about these sources, is the total lack of humanism and Enlightenment thinking. With the crumbling of credibility of Christianity as a result of the then developing materialist, ‘objective’, scientific world view, there seemed to open-up a hughe gap in a ‘deeper’ understanding of the world, hence the many competing world views in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Nobody had seen the implications so clearly as Nietzsche, and he discussed this with Wagner in the period they were passionate friends. It was the abolition of religion as the ultimate explanation of the world which was the cause of the following confusion of paradigms and values. Wagner’s Parsifal attempted to fill this gap, with disappointing results.

    • M McAlpine says:

      ‘It is impossible for me to be able to comprehend the antipathy felt by anyone Jewish to this deeply unfortunate association, let alone to the citizens of Israel, so many of whom are directly descended from victims and survivors of the Holocaust.’ So why not just let Israel get on with it. The antipathy to the music of a deeply unpleasant man with deeply unpleasant personal views is not a crime.

    • John Borstlap says:

      As said elsewhere (in vain, it appears): Wagner’s antisemitism was a cultural critique of industrialisation and wild capitalism, clothed in racist terms, and mixed with personal resentment due to unbearable humiliations he had to endure during his first stays in Paris.

      https://johnborstlap.com/was-wagner-a-bad-person/

      When confronted by people about his antisemitism and in the same time happily collaborating or socializing with people form Jewish descent, he said: ‘It’s not personal’. I.e. it was cultural, philosophical, political. The grave and stupid mistake was to think ethnicity had something to do with industrialisation and capitalism. But he was not alone in this.

      • Enquirer says:

        Or, in other words “I’m not a racist. Some of my best friends are black”.

        “It’s not personal, it is cultural, philosophical, political” is a perfect definition of systemic racism.

        • John Borstlap says:

          No, it is comparable with the idea that muslim immigrants in Europe only become ‘real Europeans’ as soon as they leave Islam, which of course they don’t (the religion forbids it). It is all very twisted thinking.

          If Wagner had understood the difference between ethnicity and culture, he had understood that a ‘bad banker’ or ‘bad industrialist’ was just that, entirely distinct from the question whether he were or were not descending from Jews. In his time, there were many protests against W’s pamflet, especially from the intellectual elites, who had no difficulty seeing through the nonsensical suggestion. Among many other intellectuals and artists, Nietzsche had a deep contempt for W’s antisemitism, as Brahms (who socialized with many people from Jewish descent in the Viennese haute bourgeoisie) simply found it stupid.

          It WAS stupid, after all. In spite of W’s great intellect, it was untrained. This is demonstrated when you look into his libretti, you will find many absurdities next to great texts, deep insights into the human psyche next to juvenile nonsense.

        • Tom Phillips says:

          Agreed. A similar argument is made by the vitriolic Israeli-born “ex-Jew” and Hitlerian holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon who claims that he does not oppose Jews “as a race”, only their “identity and politics” and therefore “burning down Jewish synagogues is perfectly legitimate.

  • Corno di Caccia says:

    I agree with many points on here. It’s time they moved on from this old nonsense. Wagner was dead long before the tragedies of the Holocaust happened. As for Wagner’s apparent anti-semitism, a good biography of the composer would explain all.

  • Elizabeth Owen says:

    If I remember correctly, in the Cosima Wagner diaries, she and Wagner discussed how they might convert the Jewish conductor for the first performance of Parsifal to Christianity in one night to enable the very first performance on a Good Friday, to be conducted by a Christian. If he hated Jews so much why choose the “wrong” conductor in the first place?

    • John Borstlap says:

      As explained elsewhere, W needed the Munich Court Orchestra for his premiere, and the MD of that orchestra happened to be Levi, as such appointed by the king. W tried to convince the king that either Levi should be replaced or be converted to Christianity, but the king flatly refused – W could get the orchestra with Levi or not at all. So, W had to accept, and tried to have Levi converted privately, through personal persuasion, but that did not work either. It is a ridiculous story.

  • Jimmy says:

    I think it’s important to understand that the revulsion of certain Jews to Wagner’s music is not based solely on Hitler’s affection for that music. Wagner himself wrote at length about what he called “Judaism in Music.” His essay by that name is a extended exposition of anti-Semitic prejudices and stereotypes that should be reviled by any civilized person today.

    • John Borstlap says:

      Indeed.

      But W was a ‘gifted amateur’ in politics, philosophy, history, and a crank in terms of biology. Knowing that he was a towering genius in terms of music, he thought he could carelessly wade into other fields where he lacked expertise. On top of all of this, although very intelligent, he was not an analytical thinker, never had an academic training, so hence the mixture in his pamflet of personal resentment, cultural critique, and racist rants.

  • Evie says:

    If you watched people being murdered in front of you while Wagner played, you would probably ban him too.

    This denial and false outrage is so tired. Yes, Wagner was not a Nazi, but he advocated for the murder of Jews in music. His music played over the murder of thousands of Jews in the concentration camps. Not only did he inspire Hitler, but Hitler mentioned him as an inspiration by name and said he was the only great German before Hitler.

    That alone should be enough to disqualify him from being performed in the modern world, but the fact that his music is hot garbage and his librettos are worse certainly adds to the reasons to elevate other performers. At least leave the Jewish people alone; they have plenty of reason to hate him.

    • John Borstlap says:

      Wagner did NOT advocate the murder of Jews. He advised to ‘destroy’ Jewishness, as a ‘world view’, hence the connection with industrialisation and wild capitalism. Only later in life he added a helping of misunderstood Darwinism to the mix, muddling the waters even further. Since he was used to express himself in heated terms (like in his music), this could easily be misconstrued. The confusion of the threat of industrialization and capitalism to culture and religion (which was and still is a real threat), with ethnicity, was a fatal misconception.

      • Jimmy says:

        Wagner’s personal views are not misconstrued. They are plainly stated and they are vile.

        Wagner’s essay on Judaism in music, however it might be understood in terms of intellectual history, contains a procession of morally repugnant, expressly anti-Jewish, ideas: Jews are physically, linguistically and morally repulsive; Jews are interested only in money; Jews are separated from the great Volk who provide the wellsprings of music and, therefore, cannot truly participate in German musical life. The jump from Wagner’s ideas to the ideology of the Third Reich is not very far or very difficult.

      • Wagner did NOT advocate the murder of Jews.

        So now you’re a mind reader too.

        Clearly Wagner’s sick, jealous, tainted and misconceived hatred of so called “things” Jewish led to the tragic end of European Jewry with no objection from the gentry of that time dating back to Martin Luther reaching to present day. But I preach to the deaf, n’est pas Mr. Bortslap

        • John Borstlap says:

          When Wagner published his crazy pamflet for the first time anonymously, nobody noticed it, it was completely ignored. When, later in life and when he was famous, he published it under his own name (an extended, ‘clarified’ version), it caused an uproar in the media: a general condemnation. For this reason his wife Cosima had advised against it: not because she did not agree but it could cause harm. The protests were so loud that this created in W’s mind the idea that he was hounded by the ‘Jewish press’. Next to industry and the banking world, it was now added that ‘the press’ were ‘in Jewish hands’.

          It was much later that the pamflet got influential, when antisemitism had gradually become a mental infection througout the bourgeoisie. To think that antisemitism is entirely W’s responsibility is absurd.

    • V. Lind says:

      My major point was that a lot of the antipathy is due to the fact that Hitler loved his music, which is not Wagner’s fault. That it is due to Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a better reason, though, as I said, there were a few other musicians who also were, and they have not been cancelled. A lot more musicians than Wagner were played in the camps, as memoirs of prisoners obliged to “play for time” have revealed.

      But if the association is too painful, then I can understand a great deal of the hostility, and of course it is the decision of the people of Israel and entirely up to them. But apparently Wagner was often played on Israeli radio, and it is clear that many citizens do like the music and would not object to hearing it on a concert stage.

      Your view on the music itself diminishes your overall approach, though I feel that so does your blaming Wagner for Hitler.

    • Tom Phillips says:

      No culturally mature, educated, and rational person (including the vast majority of Jews) would refer to Wagner’s MUSIC as “hot garbage”, whether or not they personally like it. And I – like most other Jews I know -dislike the man but LOVE the music. You do not speak for the majority of “the Jewish people”, only yourself and your ideological soulmates.

  • Paganono says:

    Hitler also liked the blue sky, so get that blue sky out of Israel!!

    • John Borstlap says:

      Hitler was a vegetarian and did not drink alcohol, did not smoke, and loved dogs. This means that one has to love steaks, be an alcoholic, and should smoke cigars while kicking dogs, to prove that one is not a fascist. Life is easy.

  • Gustavo says:

    Elende Beckmesserei!

  • The process did not start in January 1933 with Hitler’s ascendancy to the post of Chancellor. When Richard Wagner wrote his vitriolic essay in 1850, “Judaism in Music”, he linked the forces of European antisemitism to the idea of Jewish perniciousness in the world of music. When the famous composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was forced out of musical life in Vienna about sixty years later, against a clamor of antisemitic statements, we see within the cultural sphere, the power of racist, antisemitic thinking even prior to the First World War.

    https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/musical-legacy.html

  • Nick2 says:

    Was not Cosima a great deal more anti-Semitic than her husband? And it was surely another non-Wagner line woman who really allied the Wagner family to Hitler and his murdering cohorts. The little Welsh girl Winifred who married Wagner’s gay son Siegfried when she was in her teens and he in his 40s became and remained to her death one of the most committed of all Nazis. Whether or not she had an affair with Hitler is immaterial. The fact is she idolized him. So to blame Wagner for the evils espoused by his wife and his daughter-in-law does seem more than far fetched so long after his death.

  • The Effect of Richard Wagner’s Music and Beliefs on Hitler Beliefs and on Hitler’s Ideology

    tinyurl.com/2p83vb3d

    • John Borstlap says:

      If we leave W’s beliefs and theories apart, there is the music to consider. There is one aspect in the music which seems to inspire feelings that is for some people unacceptable: the feeling that the listener can transcend his own limitations and the limitations of society, that there is a whole world ‘beyond’ his own, normal experience of life that he suddenly becomes aware of. This produces the type of courage to overstep normal, rational inhibitions and explore emotional territories untill then unaware. Hence the very different reactions: it can inspire people positively if the depths being plumbed are positive in nature, and it can have negative effects when the music liberates unpleasant demons from unconscious dungeons. Hence Herzl’s idea of zionism and Hitler’s ideas of ‘reborn Germany’ after experiencing the same production of Lohengrin.

      There was a Wagner craze in the 2nd half of the 19th century including in literary and philosophical circles in Europe. French literature and poetry got an enormous boost, stimulated by Wagner’s operas and theories about the underlying unity of the arts. European culture is unthinkable without Wagner, and that is because of the music and what it represents.

      Albert Schweitzer could only keep going as a doctor in Africa, in extremely challenging circumstances, if he regularly played Wagner recordings. This is merely one of the numerous examples.

  • Corno di Caccia says:

    I’m glad Meyerbeer was mentioned in an earlier post. When Wagner was a struggling opera composer based in Paris, mighty Meyerbeer was a major obstacle in the way of W’s acceptance and progress in the halls of the Paris Opera. This is a well-documented fact. What’s more, Wagner observed much in the social fabric around him, according to what I have read in my research on Wagner and his life and music. He was more than aware of some of the Jewish factory owners exploiting their staff and yet pretending otherwise in public.This knowledge found its way into the Ring Cycle in the character of Alberich and the creation of Tarnhelm – the mask of invisibility and transformation. It certainly provides food for thought as to how all this affected Wagner and his attitudes that were to follow. It’s all there to be read if you take the initiative to find it and not let prejudice get in the way.

  • wiener says:

    Wagner starb 50 Jahre vor der Machtergreifung der Nazionalsozialisten.

  • Agree or disagree? Wagner was an opportunist and friended fans and people who would help promote his career.

    https://www.dw.com/en/the-hateful-side-of-wagners-musical-genius/a-16850818

    • John Borstlap says:

      All those historians got it wrong. The mention the foreground but don’t understand the background and the context. Also they don’t understand the collective inferiority complex which ruled in German lands since the Napoleon wars. Germany never really existed as a nation but as a conglomeration of small, rather backward entities, which had great differences (as they still have). Intelelctuals and artists looked to France and Paris as Europeans in the last century looked at the USA and New York, there ‘it’ all happened. Modernization came from abroad, and was treated with suspicion, because it seemed to make inroads into the spiritual territory of the ‘Volk’, of old local traditions. The notion of ‘alien’ had overtones which are hard to understand for people of today, since the way Germans thought about their territory was very different from today’s antipathy towards ‘foreigners’. It had to do with the wave of early romanticism.

      And then, these historians try to see W as a whole, complete person but the man was a walking contradiction. You can never put all the Wagners into one nice box, label it, and close it for ethical comfort. It is likely that the man had some screws loose.

  • David K. Nelson says:

    I worked for a very large corporation for many years, and part of my work involved national advertising. A shocking amount of money was at stake, both the cost of creation and the cost of running an advertising campaign. No advertisement got approved until it has been mulled over, commented upon, and tinkered with (often for the worse), by many bureaucratic levels within the company, including the highest levels. And because of copyright concerns, the music used always got its own review.

    It is not the goal of advertising to be so controversial or offensive that people react by NOT being customers. And it is the job of every person engaged in advertising review to apply their own knowledge and experience to look for things that might offend in a counter-productive way.

    And interestingly, once an advertiser OK’s “the creative” then the television networks get their own opportunity to run it through their wringer.

    The feeling about Wagner’s music in Israel is well known. The reasons or justifications for or wisdom behind those feelings have been discussed elsewhere. My point is, it’s just a fact on the ground: many in Israel feel strongly negative about this, and customers and potential customers would be among those many.

    And yet it was used in a bank ad. I have to think that the Bank Discount reviews prospective advertising with something approaching the level of care, giving plenty of important people at the bank a chance to weigh in, as advertising received at the Fortune 500 company I worked for.

    The use of Wagner was unwitting according to N.L. — nobody was trying to be daring or to push the envelope by using controversial music. That to me is the striking thing about this particular flap. All those eyes watching the ad were matched by ears that heard the ad, from the ad agency that created it to the bank that OK’d it to the television networks or stations that played it. We are talking about a large number of people.

    And nobody, not one, recognized it as Wagner’s music, or as even MAYBE being by Wagner, or perhaps even vaguely familiar to them from a movie so that questions of rights to use could arise.

    That is how distant classical music has become from common knowledge.

  • Tom Phillips says:

    “Cancel Culture” of the right – almost never denounced by the readers of this blog.

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