08 August 2001 Wednesday 17 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1422
Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo
By Edward W. Said
A FUROR has erupted in Israel which deserves very close attention. I refer to the case of the remarkable pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim - a close personal friend of mine I should say at the outset - and a performance he gave on July 7 in Israel of an orchestral extract from one of Richard Wagner's operas.
Since that time, he has been subjected to vast amounts of commentary, abuse, and amazed expostulation, all of it because Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was both a very great composer and a notorious (and indeed deeply repulsive) anti-semite, who well after his death was known publicly as Hitler's favourite composer and commonly associated, with considerable justification, with the Nazi regime and the terrible experiences of the millions of Jews and other "inferior" peoples that it exterminated.
Wagner's music has been informally banned in Israel so far as public performance is concerned, although his music is sometimes played on the radio and recordings of his music are on sale in Israeli shops. Somehow, to many Israeli Jews, Wagner's music - rich, extraordinarily complex, extraordinarily influential in the musical world - has come to symbolize the horrors of German anti-semitism.
I should also add that even to many non-Jewish Europeans, Wagner is barely acceptable for some of the same reasons, particularly in countries that underwent a Nazi occupation during World War Two. Because some of his music sounds grandiose and "Germanic"(however one takes that misused adjective) and because he was a composer exclusively of operas, his work is so overbearing and so deeply concerned with the Germanic past, myths, traditions and achievements, and because he was such a tireless, verbose, pompous prose expounder of his mostly dubious ideas about inferior races and sublime (Germanic) heroes, Wagner is a difficult person to accept, much less to like or admire.
Nevertheless, he was an unquestionably great genius when it came to the theatre and to music. He revolutionized our whole conception of opera; he totally transformed the musical system; and he contributed ten great masterpieces, ten operas that remain among the very great summits of western music. The challenge he presents, not just to Israeli Jews but to everyone, is how to admire and perform his music on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to separate from that his odious writings and the use made of them by the Nazis. As Barenboim has frequently pointed out, none of Wagner's operas have any immediately anti-semitic material in them; more bluntly, the Jews he hated and wrote about in his pamphlets are simply not at all to be found as Jews in his musical works.
Many critics have imputed an anti-semitic presence in some characters that Wagner treats with contempt and derision in his operas: but they can only be imputations of anti-semitism, not instances of it, although the resemblance between caricatures of Jews that were common at the time and Beckmesser, a derisory character in Wagner's only comic opera Die Meistersinger vor Nuremberg are actually quite close. Still, Beckmesser himself is a German Christian character in the opera, most certainly not Jewish. Clearly Wagner made the distinction in his own mind between Jews in reality and Jews in his music, since he was voluble about the former in his writing, and silent on them in the latter.
In any event, Wagner's works in Israel have by common consent been left unperformed, until July 7, 2001. Barenboim is head of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Berlin State Opera, whose orchestra he was leading on a tour in Israel for the three consecutive concerts presented in Jerusalem. He had originally scheduled a performance of Act One of Wagner's opera Die Walkure for the July 7 concert, but had been asked to change it by the director of the Israel Festival, which had invited the German orchestra and Barenboim in the first place.
Barenboim substituted a programme me of Schumann and Stravinsky, and then, after playing those, turned to the audience and proposed a short extract from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde as an encore. He opened the floor to a discussion, which ensued with people for and against. In the end, Barenboim said he would play the piece but suggested that those who were offended could leave, which some in fact did. By and large though, the Wagner was well received by a rapturous audience of about 2,800 Israelis and, I am sure, extremely well performed.
Still, the attacks on Barenboim have not stopped. It was reported in the press on July 25 that the Knesset committee on culture and education "urged Israel's cultural bodies to boycott the conductor...for performing music by Hitler's favourite composer at Israel's premier cultural event until he apologises." The attacks on Barenboim by the minister of culture and other luminaries have been venomous, even though despite his birth and early childhood in Argentina, he himself has always thought of himself as an Israeli. He grew up there, he went to Hebrew schools, he carries an Israeli passport along with his Argentinian one. Besides, he has always been thought of as a major cultural asset to Israel, having been a central figure in the country's musical life for years and years, despite the fact that, since he was in his teens, he has lived in Europe and the United States most of the time, not in Israel.
This has been a result of his work, which has afforded him many more important opportunities outside rather than inside Israel. After all, to have conducted and played the piano in Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna, Salzburg, Bayreuth, New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, and places like them elsewhere has always overshadowed the mere fact of residence in one place. To some extent, as we shall see, this cosmopolitan and even iconoclastic life has been a source of the anger directed against him since the Wagner incident.
But he is a complex figure nonetheless, which also explains the furor over what he did. All societies are made up of a majority of average citizens - people who follow along all the major patterns - and a tiny number who by virtue of their talent and their independent inclinations are not at all average, and in many ways, are a challenge and even an affront to the usually docile majority. The problems occur when the perspective of the docile majority tries to reduce, simplify, and codify the complex and unroutine people who are a tiny minority. This clash inevitably occurs - large numbers of human beings cannot easily tolerate someone who is noticeably different, more talented, more original, than they are - and inevitably causes rage and irrationality in the majority.
Look at what Athens did to Socrates, because he was a genius who taught young people how to think independently and sceptically: he was sentenced to death. The Amsterdam Jews excommunicated Spinoza because his ideas were too much for them. Galileo was punished by the church. Al-Hallaj was crucified for his insights. And so it has gone for centuries. Barenboim is a gifted, extremely unusual figure who crossed too many lines and violated too many of the many taboos that bind Israeli society.
It hardly needs repeating that musically speaking Barenboim is almost overwhelmingly unusual. He has every conceivable gift available to the individual who wants to be a great soloist and conductor - a perfect memory, competence and even brilliance in technical matters, a winning manner before the public, and above all, an enormous love of what he does. Nothing musical is beyond him or too difficult for him to master. He does it all with a seemingly effortless mastery, a talent that every musician alive today acknowledges about him. But it isn't that simple. His formative years were spent first in Spanish speaking Argentina, then in Hebrew speaking Israel, so already he is neither one nor the other nationality purely and simply.
Since his late teens he hasn't really lived in Israel, preferring instead the cosmopolitan and culturally more interesting atmosphere of Europe and the United States, where as I said earlier, he occupies the two most prestigious positions in all music, one as conductor of the best American orchestra (Chicago), the other as director of perhaps the greatest and one of the oldest opera companies in the world (Berlin State Opera). Meanwhile, he continues his career as a solo pianist.
Quite obviously living that kind of itinerant life and achieving the kind of recognition he has had has come not with a studious compliance with standards set by ordinary people but by exactly the opposite, that is, a regular flouting of conventions and barriers. This is true of any unusual person who must live well beyond the conventions of ordinary bourgeois society. No important achievement in matters of art or science is accomplished by living within the boundaries designed to regulate social and political life.
But it gets more complicated. Because he has lived and travelled so much, and because he has a gift for languages (he can speak seven fluently), Barenboim is in a sense at home everywhere and nowhere. One result is that his visits to Israel are limited to a few days a year, though he keeps in touch by phone and by reading the press. Another is that he has lived abroad, not just in the US and Britain, but in Germany, which is where he spends most of his time now. One can imagine that for many Jews for whom Germany still represents what is most evil and anti-semitic, Barenboim's residence there is a difficult pill to swallow, more particularly in that his chosen area of music to perform is the classical Austro-Germanic repertory, in which Wagner's operas are at the very centre. -Copyright Edward W. Said, 2001
To be concluded
© The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2001