Should Israel ban Wagner?
At the Jewish webzine Tablet this morning, I offer reluctant support for Israel’s de facto ban on public performance of the music of Richard Wagner. The brilliant journalist David Samuels, a frequent contributor to New Yorker and The Atlantic, has just become Tablet’s literary editor–a conservative antipode, I hope, to the likes of Leon Wieseltier. David has asked me to write on classical music for his desk.
Daniel Barenboim and other left-wing Israel musicians draw a parallel between suppression of Wagner and the occupation of Judea and Samaria–maybe not the best way to win friends and influence people. But the issue is trickier than it appears. I conclude (paraphrasing Mark Twain) that banning Wagner’s music is a better idea than it sounds:
The Nazis embraced Wagner not by accident or opportunism but because they recognized in him the cultural trailblazer of the world they set out to rule.
It should not be the business of any state to impose moral criteria on artists; in that case one might ban Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which Beethoven thought immoral…Art, nonetheless, does not reside in the clouds of Mount Parnassus. It has consequences in the real world in which ordinary humans live and suffer, and society in extreme cases must draw a line. Wagner may not have been the only anti-Semite among the composers of the 19th century, nor even the worst, but he did more than anyone else to mold the culture in which Nazism flourished. The Jewish people have had no enemy more dedicated and more dangerous, precisely because of his enormous talent. In a Jewish state, the public has a right to ask Jewish musicians to be Jews first and musicians second. With reluctance, and in cognizance of all the ambiguities, I think the Israelis are right to silence him.
Most of my musician friends will be horrified. I struggle with the issue myself, among other reasons because hearing Wagner live on the opera stage helps us understand why the West went down the drain at the turn of the 20th century, as I argued in First Things here and here. What do you think?
I would argue that a ban on Wagner’s music should be dependent on the extent to which it deprives Wagner — or his heirs and assigns, he having assumed room temperature a while ago — of revenue and kudoi.
I believe that the Bayreuth Festival is still under the control of Wagner’s descendants. Let the German government bar them from any association with it, and then discussion can proceed anew.
Not being a Jew, I suppose it is none of my business, but I can understand why one would ban him, and perhaps more directly, Richard Strauss. Strauss actually was a NAZI. The danger, as you point out, is where you draw the line, and also to what extent the works are or can be separated from the author. Dutchman and RosenKavalier are profoundly beautiful works.
The real issue with dealing with both of these men is that they typified the idea and danger of thought or hate without consequence – there is strong evidence that in Wagner’s case he was a generalized misanthrope, not just an anti Semite. supposedly. on cackling over breakfast at the deaths caused by a fire during a Zionist meeting in Vienna, Cosima roundly berated him for going too far in his antisemitism. Wagner’s reply was that it was not that they were Jews, but they were people, and that all people disgusted him. This may explains his fascination with the Ring and a generalized inferno, not merely an antisemitic one. Strauss was a Nazi, but had to be removed (gently) because he did not actively pursue the anti Jewish purges of the musical establishment that his leaders wanted.
Both of these men embraced horrible ideologies, and I but mostly never really acted on them. They did, however, set the stage or at least provide intellectual and aesthetic “cover” for those who did. This happens a lot. How many fellow travelers in hid or denied the Bolsheviks’ crimes when they were apparent to anyone who kept their eyes open. Witness Andre Gide who was sickened on his first guided trip to the Workers’ Paradise. How easy it is to support the crimes of others in the abstract where it serves our domestic ideologies: Noam Chomsky seems to have made a career of this, and never held to account.
Thoughts do have consequences – when expressed with great art, they can cause great evil, whatever the actual behavior of the authors. Art, however, can transcend even the sickness of it’s creators. It might be better to look at all the works, see the good and the evil, and understand from that how we damage ourselves through irresponsible thinking – that is believe in without understanding the logical outcome(s) of our beliefs.
Perhaps rather than banning the works – let us look at them in context – not to excuse their evil but to recognize it. This may be too painful, however, and one cannot fault the Israelis if they choose to ban.
Richard Strauss had a Jewish daughter-in-law, and his collaboration with Goebbels saved her life. His case is a bit more complicated.
Dear Mr. Goldman – I had not realized that he had a Jewish daughter in law, and I agree his case is complicated, but if anything it can show the disconnect in many minds between ideology and behavior in many people. This is disastrous in the case of artists, because the ideology is transmitted to those who have no disconnect.
Spengler,
In the debate over whether “the medium is the message” or “the message is the message,” I lean toward the latter.
The route by which you come this reluctant support of the localized censorship of one composer is esoteric, tortuous and fraught with numerous conjectural steps in many areas of human activity (though fairly solid ones, I’m sure.) There is room for doubt, so I’m tempted to respond “in dubio pro tradito.”
It is well-argued, and if indeed Wagner set out, consciously or intuitively, to break down all concept of Covenant as it inheres in music, it may well be fair for Israel, the Jewish Homeland, to single him out as just too explicitly antithetical to the meaning of Jewish people as the elder bearers of the knowledge of the Covenanting God. However, too many Jews have joined in this deconstruction and will, I fear, continue do so.
If your characterization of Wagner is correct, and I agree that it is, he not only wrote the Soundtrack to Nietzsche, and the Third Reich, but to the Sixties and really the rest of the 20th century as well. It would seem then that Christians would also find it necessary to ban Wagner as the Father of all “If it feels good, do it” music, and all his children as well. But perhaps the situation is not quite so dire. Wagner’s music is as much hilarious as it is profound (yes, it can be both,) as much a joke as it is a manifesto (witness his most incisive American expositor Chuck Jones in “What’s Opera, Doc?”) Once Ouroboros lays in to that tail, the deconstructor can be deconstructed, too.
I lean, ambivalently, towards absolutism in matters of free speech. Best to have these things out in the open. I’m inclined to think this comes under that heading, so, for now, I’d say it’s a mistake, albeit a small one especially given your caveats. But neither am I “horrified” by the idea. Free speech is very important, but it is not a suicide pact.
“Should Israel ban Wagner?”
Yes. Along with other notorious genocidal anti-Semites, like those working for the BBC, UN, WCC, most Western European media outlets, the NYT and the AP.
Banning any form of art (unless it is clearly inciteful hate speech) is dangerous for a true democracy committed to freedom of expression.
That said, one wonders why anyone would want to perform or listen to Wagner.
Edgar Degas was a public anti-semite, but he is still one of my favorite painters, especially his paintings of laundresses and women ironing.
Lots of artists (both on canvas and musical) were anti-Semites, given the predominant thought of Europe, both then and today.
Chopin was a notorious anti-Semite who threw Jews out of performances if he knew they were in his audience. Lest you think this is just an 18th/19th century phenomenon, the composer of the music for Zorba the Greek (I forget the Nazi scumbag’s name), recently said that Jews are the root of all evil.
This sort of psychotic, insatiable, irrational Jew-hatred seems endemic to Europe, and it will never end.
To the eternal shame of the neo Hellenes he is Mikis Theodorakis, and far from a Nazi, is a typical Greek multi millionaire communist – living in that strange juncture where the extreme right and extreme left merge in their anti Semitic sewer. A useful reminder that Fascism, National Socialism and Bolshevism are all heresies of the Social Democratic movement in the late 19th century – and kept the anti Semitic heritage of Marx himself alive ( no he was NOT writing ironically about Jews, whatever his apologists say – just look at his comments on Disraeli to his uncle and how he chortled when he used this to get more money out of his sap of a relative).
“he is Mikis Theodorakis, and far from a Nazi, is a typical Greek multi millionaire communist – living in that strange juncture where the extreme right and extreme left merge in their anti Semitic sewer.”
I feel compelled to point this out every time somebody says this. I don’t care what 10,0000 leftist professors and journalists say, the Nazis were far-left. They were big government totalitarians; far-right would imply that they are extremists in wanting no government – in theory, an anarchist (the so-called anarchists today are in fact just Marxist thugs). They were a rival branch of the Marxist faith, not a rival faith to Marxism. I think that was first made clear by Hayek.
The relationship of Naziism to Communism is like that of Sunni to Shia or Catholic to Protestant.
Yes they are related – the point is that all of these movements came from the left, i.e. the social democrats. For example, Mussolini was the leading socialist journalist/editor prior to the First World War.
I’m not a Jew so my question may be unrealistic. Is it not possible to separate the music from the musician, the painting from the painter or the poetry from the poet?. Banning Wagner’s music says “no it is not possible”. For myself, I find that I am unable to answer my own question.
When I listen to Wagner, I don’t think about the Nazi’s. Why should I think about the Nazi’s while hearing Wagner’s music? Is there an expected and assumed automatic association?
That’s getting all tangled up with a man’s psyche…..I’m not capable of that kind of thought process…..what do I know about Wagner’s psyche? What can I possibly know about that?
Absolutely nothing. All this gets very circular and smoky.
Spengler, what you call narcissism is more broadly part of the romantic impulse and thus present in a huge swathe of art on which I doubt you would call for a ban. I have no problem with the idea that Jews or any group might choose an informal ban on certain artists but when you also argue that we need to keep Wagner available for historical lessons, the argument becomes fuzzy. Is an informal Jewish ban on Wagner needed because we need one extreme symbol of a wider pathology, a taboo?
I am curious why you would never perform Bruckner – is it largely because he was Hitler’s favorite or because you have more broadly a revulsion of German late Romanticism? And if not Bruckner, where does it end? Delius?(I had a little debate with myself the other day whether Lehar’s Merry Widow had a place on my ipod – he had a (half?) Jewish wife who was officially Aryanized by the Nazis whom Lehar embraced to some extent; and yet his music speaks to a turn-of-the-century Viennese culture that was both infused with Jewish impulses and, perhaps, a deadly decadence…)
Anyway, we need a lot of reflection on whether to declare outright that the West’s fall into romanticism and narcissism is necessarily antithetical to a renewal of covenantal culture. The situation is paradoxical. Yes, the romantic’s belief in his/her/multi-gendered autonomy and uniqueness is a lie; but it is in some respects an inevitable or necessary lie in the modern world and marketplace. I have seen you dismiss with a smirk the false “friends” of the Facebook generation but I am not convinced that classical models can gain much traction today unless, perhaps, they are picked up and used variously by the self-modelling narcissists in the creation of new models for each other in some kind of centrifugal or omnicentric interaction and even covenating we can’t yet understand or appreciate.
Ban or don’t ban, it won’t have any difference. Israel’s enemies who want to destroy her, and the enemies of Jews globally, are not Aryan-worshipping neo-Pagan Nazis from Germany. They are … Muslims. Globally. Pakistani jihadis in Bombay took the extra effort and time to torture and murder Jews at Chabad House in their anti-Indian jihad controlled by Pakistan’s ISI. None of these guys knew or cared about Wagner. Or anything German, or Pagan, or suchlike.
The main center of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe is in the UK, and Scandinavia, fueled by explosive Muslim growth, and secondarily in France. The only thing Germans of today can even muster the enthusiasm for invading is a fabulous Gay disco, and even that’s an open question.
Wagner is the last War. Of a Europe that literally no longer exists. Europe belongs to … the people who had kids. Muslims. Turks, Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and more. Those are the people who will control Europe, who will make its future. And they simply don’t care about Wagner.
I referred specifically to the Adagio of the 7th Symphony with its association with Hitler. I’m not against performing Bruckner in general, although I agree with Brahms and Heinrich Schenker that his music is overrated. Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admire, likes his liturgical music, and there is no reason the Church should not perform it if it meets their requirements.
Wagner certainly is part of what you call the Romantic impulse, but he takes matters to a different level, as in the incest theme in the Ring cycle. See the links in the article for more discussion.
And I’m not anti-German. My religion forbids me to attribute the sins of the fathers (in this case grandfathers and great-grandfathers) to the children.
I think it is advisable and common-sense’ to “separate the art from the personal and political beliefs of the artist.”
I don’t like Pete Seeger’s politics but I enjoy his music. I don’t appreciate the Nazi background and sympathies of Phillip Johnson, the architect, but I can use his buildings and appreciate his architectual creations.
David,
Thanks for the clarification. Maybe one day you can write a piece on how you understand the various Biblical passages on the sins of the fathers. I think most people, including myself, are aware of how our parents’ and grandparents’ sins have shaped us and in some ways trapped us for a time, not that we can hold this up as much of an excuse for our own conduct or resentments. Certain cultural pathologies do get inherited and it is important, on one hand, for religion and human thought to warn about this. Despite what Whiskey argues, it is important to talk about Wagner, not because many Muslims care about the music, but because Westerners remain stuck in certain cultural ruts we’ve inherited from our forebears. It’s rather obvious by now that the West in general hasn’t learned the larger lessons of the Holocaust, as we see the renewal of anti-Jewish resentment in “high” culture, along with a disrespect of individual freedom and initiative that is our way out of our forebears’ binds.
If I understand him right, Spengler/Goldman is only supporting a de facto ban (public shame, if you will), not a ban by law. I, too, wouldn’t support a ban by law.
If it’s not banned by law, then it becomes a personal decision.
For example, I will never watch a Jane Fonda movie. Or listen to Pete Seeger sing. Nor would I buy a copy of Hitler’s personal artwork. It doesn’t matter what their talents might be. I just won’t add to their success, I won’t help make them admirable creatures in any way. And I am free to give crap to those who do.
However, I’m not an absolutist about this. There is one pro-Nazi opera that I did enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmYIo7bcUw Legs.
There are still survivors in Israel. Nobody can say because the Nazis took the music and did this, whatever the composer thought and speak as if …
So government should do as little as it can. Let the people speak.
Wagner personally I could live without. Metallica of classical for me. Not bad but,
Banned by state? Probably a very bad idea for rather obvious reasons. Boycot by public and/or musicians? Why not, but then — if you are a mathematician, would you boycott ideas of Teichmüller (as hardcore Nazi as they came), or, to lesser extent, of Rolf Nevanlinna?
Mathematics is different; it truly is abstract, although it is not always value free. Music is intimate, personal communication.
I’d like to boycott all antisemites, but there are too many of them throughout history. So how about just boycotting one as a token?
Besides, what David said.
Welcome to PJM, David. To carry over the discussion from the previous thread:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a7db2310-b769-11e0-b95d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1VJqRJfsN
FT: Putin seeking Eurasian union
Again, I rather think Russia would learn from Germany’s experience with the EU and never allow Ukraine or Belarus to get ahold of legitimate ruble printing presses, lest its hard won ruble-euro and ruble-dollar band get disrupted (seems like Kudrin has kept it at 30 rubles to the buck since 2008, with some hiccups along the way). Russia remains a very cash-heavy economy despite the explosion in consumer credit and the few Russians willing to take a mortgage rather than take the usual Moscow real-estate plan — inherit it or embezzle enough money to get an apartment inside the garden ring. The legit middle class Muscovites at least got some help from the Sobyanin administration by the expansion of Moscow proper out beyond MKAD to the southwest of the city, meaning Moscow has a very good chance of rivaling Beijing for the largest in Eurasia within a generation.
But David has hit the nail on the head very well…Putin wants the labor/births those Ukrainian/Belarussian workers/re-Russians would provide, even if that means Ukraine outside the tourist mecca Crimea (and particularly the most anti-Russian parts around Lvov) are demographically hollowed out.
The Russia-Israel connection is sure to piss off a few neocons before the relationship turns chilly again, if ever. For now as I’ve said to David many times it dare not speak its name in either the GOP or the Democrat pro-Israel ranks. Sooner or later though I suspect the Kremlins are going to try and drive a wedge between Washington’s pro-Israel and anti-Russia lobbies in some form or another. I’m not sure what that would be, probably leaking a major nano/space software deal with obvious military applications even if the Israelis keep silent on their end.
My money would still be on the Russians rather than the Chinese when it comes to alliances of convenience if Washington truly starts abandoning Israel (though I wouldn’t count ending subsidies for U.S. defense contractors who sell their wares to Israel as abandonment, but rather the U.S. not blocking the international/transnationalist efforts to delegitimize Israel, which are far more important — even Rand son of Ron Paul says he won’t do that). For one thing, China is much further away from Israel than is Russia — Moscow is almost exactly due North of Jerusalem as some Evangelical Biblical prophecy students have been pointing out since the 19th century (though careful research into Dispensationalism with its Russia = the Gog of Ezekiel interpretation only took off in England only after the Crimean War between imperialist Britain and the Russian Empire)
Language matters. And also the energy connections related to Leviathian, and Russia as backdoor diplomacy partner to reach out to those pro-business but secular elements in Turkey hurt by the Erdogan government’s policies. Israel has been giving land back to the Russian Orthodox Church and cultivating very good ties with Patriarch Kirill as it has with the Vatican.
Finally, there’s the question of common adversaries, which do make for strange bedfellows. Russia can never come right out against radical Islam as an ideology given its 10% Muslim minority (though not every non-Slavic Russian is ‘Turkic’ much less thinks of themselves as Turkish, as there’s been a lot of mixing among Tartars with other nationalities, and you could hardly describe Moscow’s one million Georgians + Armenians as ‘Turkic’). But Russia hasn’t hesitated to get ‘wet’ against fundraisers for the Chechen separatists in the Gulf States.
More broadly, Russia also has been attacked by transnationalist types — George Soros comes to mind — as well as those who’ve promoted separatism on its soil, sometimes at U.S. taxpayer expense (here’s looking at you, American Council for Peace in Chechnya). Even the rabid Russian Orthodox nationalist Stanislav Mishin, who won his 15 minutes of fame for being quoted on the Glenn Beck show about American capitalism dying with a whimper, says Russia and Israel ought to be natural allies.
Banning Wagner is an emotional, not a rational, decision by the Israeli public, not the Israeli government (in its power as such). It’s not really imposing moral criteria on artists as you say, or carefully judging his ideas and misdeeds like you did, weighing the evidence and the arguments for and against playing his music in public, but it’s more like a post-traumatic response triggered by him as a Nazi symbol.
It’s not just him being antisemitic, – there were and are many other antisemitic or even Nazi artists and they are not banned, – but being adopted by Hitler and the Nazis as their favorite musician and a symbol and an icon of their worldview. So you say that while Hitler loved Wagner his real favorite composer was Bruckner, but it’s widely believed to have been Wagner, which is also more suitable for the role, so Wagner is the one provoking the painful and angry reactions. Wagner is seen as the “definitive” composer of Nazism, the most representative.
Playing Wagner, like playing any musician’s music, is like paying a homage to his art, expressing respect, appreciation, and in Wagner’s case, being a Nazi symbol, it’s by association like paying respect to the Nazi worldview. It’s like playing the Nazi hymn or exhibiting the swastika in a respectable cultural hall. Doing that in the Jewish homeland stirs strong responses of outrage, anger and revolt in many people, and particularly in holocaust survivors. After all, the Nazis attempted to wipe off the entire Jewish people and succeeded in murdering millions, so it seems a bit inappropriate to afford the composer most indentified with the Nazis a respectable place at the heart of the Jewish haven. It’s far worse and more symbolic than building a huge mosque next to Ground Zero.
Emotionally many Jews simply can’t separate Wagner from the Nazi context. When you say Wagner people think of Hitler. He’s not banned by law, but by a wide popular consensus crossing all social strata. Any Israeli involved in public performance of Wagner knows he’s playing with fire and that it’ll provoke pain and outrage and might have consequences (such as boycotts, shout downs or demonstrations), so most will prefer to avoid it, though many avoid it simply out of sensitivity, not wishing to cause so much pain. For instance, when an Israeli orchestra decided to perform Siegfried Idyll some years ago there was an appeal to the supreme court to stop it. The appeal was rejected. During the performance several public figures left the concert hall to express their protest and an 80 years old holocaust survivor who lost his family in the death camps took out a noisemaker and distrupted the concert. He was forced out of the concert hall by the security guards. Outside there was a small demonstration. So it’s not really a matter of freedom of expression since the authorities do not forbid performing Wagner in spite of it being so emotionally charged and objected to by a majority of Israelis. But as a simple human matter, does it really worth it to have an 80 years old holocaust survivor heartbroken and dragged out by Jewish guards just to allow the performance of the music of a veritable antisemitic creep who inspired Hitler? As genius as it might be, is performing it in Israel worth causing all that pain and trauma to holocaust survivors and all that distress to many others? Can’t people, even artists, just simply have a heart? Just wait a few more years at least until all the holocaust survivors are dead and then they could even play Wagner on their graves without their annoying disruptions.
A Jewish proverb says you shouldn’t mention a rope in a hanged man’s house. Avoiding Wagner in public should be seen first and foremost as the minimal consideration for the feelings of holocaust survivors and their descendants (who grew up in the shadow of their parents’ dark and agonizing experience) and respect for the victims of the Nazis.
ummm what about Guillaume de Machaut, Spengler? Are his music or poetry antisemitic on an intimate level (he apparently incited violence against Jews)? If it is the art and not the artist we are contemplating, then what about cinematic pieces of Soviet propaganda, like “Soy Cuba” or many other, less extravagant, but more vile in their effect?
I don’t know the answer. I do listen to Machaut.
The ban on Wagner reminds me of Chicago’s ban of fois gras. The man on the street is likely to say, “They banned what, now?” It is a safe bet that only a subset of the societal elite can even name one of his works, or sing out one of his melodies if asked. Furthermore, the elites these days are the most self-censorious and politically correct group going, to whom the idea of the Nazis remains the most scandalous and tabooed. Their self-censorious nature is evidenced by these bans themselves. Who would think to ban Wagner? Who would think to ban fois gras? Well, the people who know what these are, necessarily.
One man assembles a throng in the town square, then he very ceremoniously puts on a hairshirt. That’s what these bans look like to me. We have the elites again saying, “Hey, look at me! Look at my earnestness and good intentions!”
Meanwhile, at the back of it all, lies the self-enforcement of a private code among this group of elites. This is another act of political correctness, whose totality of acts winds up allowing one common ideological view and supresses others. Isn’t that kind of how Nazism acted?
So, I’m not happy about the Wagner ban. I don’t blame him for Hitler. Wagner was a deeply flawed man, but he was a master composer of worth.
Tonight on Coast to Coast AM — Harry Dent pulls a ‘Spengler’ says it’s the demographics stupid that explain economic disaster.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2011/08/17
this isn’t foie gras, and it certainly isn’t the machination of elites: Wagner is a grass-roots issue in Israel.
Go to the First Things pieces linked in the post. I entitled one of them, “Why We Can’t Hear Wagner’s Music,” for a reason:
“Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the depths of darkness, riven by dreams, it seems like the vertiginous imaginings of opium.” (Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil, meant this as a compliment.) The twenty-three-year-old Gustav Mahler, after hearing Parsifal, wrote, “I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life.” For the first time in history, a composer lent his name to a cultural movement with ramifications far beyond music. As Adolf Hitler observed in 1943, “At the beginning of this century there were people called Wagnerians. Other people had no special name.”
“Why did Wagner loom so large to his contemporaries? The answer is that he evoked, in the sensuous, intimate realm of musical experience, an apocalyptic vision of the Old World. Wagner’s stage works declared that the time of the Old Regime was over—the world of covenants and customs had come to an end, and nothing could or should restrain the impassioned impulse of the empowered individual. Wagner’s baton split the sea of European culture.”
To follow a more irreverent tangent – well, I can’t be the only person in this thread who listens to Wagner and always hears “Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!” overlaid on top of the music, right? I guess that’s the difference between Jewish Israelis and at least THIS American Jew – they hear Wagner and think of Hitler; I hear Wagner, and think of Bugs Bunny. Either way, it just means you can’t listen to Wagner and think of the music, because you’re always thinking of something else, something repulsive in the case of the Israelis, and comical-and-ridiculous in the case of Americans.
A link to the Chuck Jones version of Wagner’s works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQlmXU1zqfc
What’s the world comin’ to if I’m the first person to link this in a post about Wagner?
I read the First Things essay before I posted. It argued we cannot hear Wagner like those of old. I assent to that. Wagner is no longer a cultural force. He is known only to the elite, as I pointed out. I bet that’s true in Israel, too, although I’ve never been there so I don’t know. But my suspicion is that Jersey Shore has more cultural “truck” than Wagner in Tel Aviv.
Classical music offed itself as a cultural force long ago. That is a pity, but that is the fact. You could play Wagner to the average citizen of the world today and chances are that if he recognized it then he’d recognize it from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Most kids these days don’t even know Bugs Bunny cartoons.
A vanishingly small set of people can even read that magnificent First Things essay you wrote and even know the music theory behind constructing a simple major chord. I bet it’s the same way in Tel Aviv, if I stopped the person on the street and asked, “Quick, what are the notes of a C-Major chord?” No Wagnerian cultural movement exists, or is likely to rear its head anytime soon. You are right, few can even hear Wagner anymore. I can’t remember seeing my first Wagner tee-shirt, or my first Wagner tattoo, or my first Wagner bumper sticker. The “Wagnerians” are curiosities from history.
The only reason Wagner is an issue in Israel is Hitler. Israelis rightfully have a problem with Hitler. Is Wagner to be equated with Hitler, though? It seems to me that Hitler invested Nazism into Wagner. But not just Wagner. Furtwangler went down as Hitler’s boy, despite the fact that von Karajan was the one who joined the party. Hitler adored Nietzsche, he had a statue of Nietzsche built so he could go gaze at it. Should Israel ban Nietzsche, too?
Should they burn his books? Do you see what I mean?
Why are we talking about the daughter-in-law of Richard Strauss being Jewish? Strauss himself was one-quarter Jewish; Johann Strauss the son of a Jewish tavern owner. Mahler was a full Jew. This identification with Wagner’s music did not become so repellent until events took their course.
I don’t know that the Israeli ban is so much a statement as it is a simple reflection of public sensibilities, like common restrictions in forms of dress or undress. We might agree that the neo-Nazi’s (with their deranged Jewish leader) had a right to march in Skokie and distress the many survivors who lived there, and agree that they do not have the right to march in Tel-Aviv.
And it is far better that differences exist universally than it is for universalism to rule thought and behavior.
Speech we hate should be countered by speech we like, right?
Everyone who listens to Wagner should also listen to Anna Russell’s 20-minute Ring Cycle. Start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07E5sLsJQe0
Problem solved.
I read the 1st essay on “First Things” and despite my decades of casual listening to classical music I remain unconvinced that music has the clear causal effect on the listener. For comparison I have spent some time studying and listening to the old ceremonial music of Confucian China and Korea – this music had a very careful theory which defined it. But in the modern age Confucian ceremonial music completely fails in its intended mission: to create harmony between the government and the people. I assert that human perception of music is largely a matter of training (knowledge) and exposure. Very few people are exposed to the opera from 150 years ago and as a result the music has almost no meaning to the vast majority of today’s world.
I have read (and re-read) the Wagner story and that also leaves me cold. To my sensibilities Wagner’s “Ring” operas are inferior works of art, neither enjoyable as pure music nor as a story (I’ll take Beethoven and Mozart over Wagner any day of the week). Banning Wagner seems counter-productive in that such a ban draws attention to a body of works that should otherwise disappear into a well deserved obscurity.
From a purely practical view, I cannot see that it is possible to ban art. But from the same perspective, I think the discussion on whether to ban Wagner should never end.
Whether Israel bans Wagner or not, we can only be certain that the controversy will, in time, fade. According to Mr. Goldman, (whose insights I ordinarily much admire,)”Mathematics is different; it truly is abstract, although it is not always value free. Music is intimate, personal communication.” Nonsense. Music is by far the most abstract of the fine arts; there is no inherent “meaning” in a C Major chord. The communication spoken of is entirely the product of what the listener brings to the party. If in doubt of this, listen to an hour or so of Chinese opera, and see if you can glean the meaning without recourse to the lyrics, (hopefully in translation). Over time, the pain of all our cultural tragedies fade. As the whole Nazi misadventure recedes into history, and becomes more and more an intellectual rather than emotional event, Wagner’s music will come to be appreciated (or not) on its own merits, filtered through the prism of the culture of the future.
There’s no music in a C major chord, either. But there is meaning when Mozart, in the recapitulation of the 2nd movement of his 21st Concerto, brings back the first theme in Ab major rather than in the expected C major. If you want to know how it’s done, I spelled it out in this essay
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/10/sacred-music-sacred-time:
Well played, but still no. The “meaning” inherent in Mozart is still musical, in the Western tradition. Trying to make the musical meaning of Wagner represent the holocaust is like trying to make Mozart represent the Inquisition. The fact is, however, that for the present Wagner’s music equals Nazi Germany in the Israeli public imagination, however illogical the connection. This makes the boycott inevitable: the pain is still too fresh and recent. The only question is how long that connection will be maintained when the holocaust becomes an increasingly distant memory.
There is a Rosetta stone for the “meaning” of music, in art song and (to some extent) opera. Oswald Jonas, Carl Schachter and other theorists have shown just how great composers reproduce the content of poems. I recommend Jonas’ Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker, and the collection of Schachter’s articles published under the title Unfoldings. I was Schachter’s PhD student; it took me three years to make sense of the methodology, but I eventually produced some competent analysis of my own.
99.99% of people who listen to Mozart do not have the remotest clue as to what he is doing; he wrote for a sophisticated audience that understood the nuances. Take the overplayed “Elvira Madigan” movement of the 21st piano concerto: how many listeners even notice that the recapitulation begins in the lower submediant (Ab rather than C), one of the quirkiest strokes in the whole repertoire? To Mozart’s audience, that was a shocker. People don’t know how to listen, and training them to listen takes years.
I cheerfully and willingly yield to your expertise in the subject. However, I see the greatness of a Mozart, and a Wagner to a much lesser degree,to be that one doesn’t have to be an expert to appreciate them. Both have the virtue of good art in that they clearly communicate experience in a way that the common man of today can understand, even though the works are, in the case of Mozart, centuries old. But the experience they communicate has nothing in particular to do with politics or history. Tannhauser just ain’t the Horst Wessel Lied. I think it’s unfortunate that it has that association in the Israeli public mind – it certainly doesn’t seem to have it anywhere else. Perhaps when the pain fades over time, so will this illogical association. And when you get right down to it, what better revenge could there be on the old antisemite to have his works performed in a Jewish state?