10 August 2001 Friday 19 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1422
Art, politics can't be separated: Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo-II
By Edward W. Said
AESTHETICALLY, of course, this is a sound, not to say absolutely predictable area for a classical musician to concentrate on: it includes the great works of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Richard Strauss, plus, of course, many other composers in the French, Russian and Spanish repertory at which Barenboim has excelled.
But the core is Austrian and German music, music that for some Jewish philosophers and artists has sometimes presented a great problem, especially after World War Two. The great pianist Arthur Rubenstein, a friend and mentor of Barenboim's, more or less refused ever to go to Germany and play there because, he would say, as a Jew, it was hard for him to be in a country that had slaughtered so many of his people. So already, there developed a sense of estrangement in many of his Israeli admirers about Barenboim's residence in Berlin, in the heart of the former capital of the Third Reich, which many living Jews still consider to bear within it today the marks of its former evil.
Now it is all very well for others to say, be broad-minded and remember that art is one thing, politics quite another. In actuality this is a nonsensical position, derided precisely by most artists and the very musicians whom we most revere. All of the great composers in one way or another were political, and held quite strong political ideas, some of them, in the case of the early Beethoven who adulated Napoleon as a great conqueror or Debussy who was a right-wing French nationalist, quite reprehensible from today's perspective. Haydn, as another example suggests, was a servile employee of his aristocratic patron, Prince Esterhazy, and even the greatest of all geniuses, Johann Sebastian Bach, was always fawning at the table or at the court of an archbishop or a duke.
We don't care about these things today because since they belong to a relatively remote and distant period. None of them offends us quite so sharply as one of Thomas Carlyle's racist pamphlets in the 1860s, but there are two other factors that need consideration as well. One is that music as an art form is not like language: notes don't mean something stable, the way a word like "cat" or "horse" does. Second, music for the most part is trans-national; it goes beyond the boundaries of a nation or a nationality and language.You don't have to know German to appreciate Mozart, and you don't have to be French to read a score by Berlioz. You have to know music, which is a very specialized technique acquired with painstaking care quite apart from subjects like history or literature, although I would argue that the context and traditions of individual works of music have to be understood for purposes of true comprehension and interpretation. In some ways, music is like algebra, but not quite, as the case of Wagner testifies.
Were he a minor composer or someone who composed his work hermetically or at least quietly, Wagner would have been slightly easier to accept and tolerate. But he was incredibly voluble, filling Europe with his pronouncements, projects, and music, all of which went together and all of which were larger than life, more impressive, more deigned to overwhelm and compel the listener than those of every other composer. At the centre of all his work was his own fantastically self-concerned, even narcissistic self, which he considered in no uncertain way to embody the essence of the German soul, its destiny, and its privileges. I obviously cannot enter a discussion here about Wagner's work, but it is important to insist on the fact that he sought controversy, he demanded attention, he did everything for the cause of Germany and himself which he conceived of in the most extreme revolutionary terms.
His was to be a new music, a new art, a new aesthetic, and it was to embody the tradition of Beethoven and Goethe, and, typically, it was to transcend them in a new synthesis. No one in the history of art has attracted more attention, no one more writing, no one more commentary. Wagner was ready made for the Nazis, but he was also - and this mustn't be forgotten - welcomed as a hero and a great genius by other musicians who understood that his contributions utterly changed the course of western music.
During his lifetime he had a special opera house, almost a shrine, built for him and the performance of his operas in the small town of Bayreuth, which is still the site of an annual festival where only Wagner's music is played. Bayreuth and the Wagner family were dear to Hitler's heart, and to add a further complexity to the matter, Richard Wagner's grandson, Wolfgang (himself a former Nazi), still controls the summer festival at which Barenboim has conducted regularly for almost two decades.
Nor is this all. Barenboim is clearly an artist who overturns obstacles, crosses forbidden lines, and enters in taboo or forbidden territory. This doesn't automatically make him a fully-fledged political figure at all but he has made no secret of his unhappiness with Israel's occupation and went so far in early 1999 as to be the first Israeli to offer his services gratis to play a concert at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. For the past three years, first at Weimar and this year in Chicago he has brought together young Israeli and Arab musicians to play music together, in a daring enterprise that tries to rise above politics and conflict into the totally non-political art of interpreting music together.
He is clearly fascinated by the Other, and categorically rejects the irrationality of a position that says that it is better not to know than to know. I agree with him that ignorance is not an adequate political strategy for a people, and, therefore, each in his own way must understand and know the forbidden Other. Not many individuals think this way, but for me, as well as a growing number of others, this is the only intellectually coherent position to take.
This doesn't diminish one's defence of justice or solidarity with the oppressed; it doesn't mean abandoning your identity; it doesn't involve looking the other way so far as real politics are concerned. It does mean that reason, understanding, and intellectual analysis, and not the organization and encouragement of collective passions such as those that seem to impel fundamentalists, are the way to be a citizen. I have long subscribed to these beliefs myself and perhaps this is one reason why Barenboim and I have our differences and yet have remained friends.
The total rejection, the utter irrational condemnation, the blanket denunciation of complex phenomena such as Wagner is an irrational and finally unacceptable thing, just as in our situation as Arabs, it has been a stupid and wasteful policy for so many years to use phrases like "the Zionist entity" and completely refuse to understand and analyze Israel and Israelis on the grounds that their existence must be denied because they caused the Palestinian nakba. History is a dynamic thing, and if we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people, we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place, and that Israelis are all - man, woman, and child - doomed to our eternal enmity and hostility.
Nothing historical is frozen in time; nothing in history is immune to change; nothing in history is beyond reason, beyond understanding, beyond analysis and influence. Politicians can say all the nonsense they wish and do what they want, and so can professional demagogues. But for intellectuals, artists, and free citizens, there must always be room for dissent, for alternative views, for ways and possibilities to challenge the tyranny of the majority and, at the same time and most important, to advance human enlightenment and liberty.
This idea is not easily dismissed as a "western" import and therefore inapplicable to Arab and Muslim, or for that matter, Jewish societies and traditions. It is a universal value to be found in every tradition that I know of. Every society has conflicts in it between justice and injustice, ignorance and knowledge, freedom and oppression. The point is not simply to belong to one side or the other because one is told to, but to choose carefully and to make judgments that render what is just and due to every aspect of the situation. The purpose of education is not to accumulate facts or memorize the "correct" answer, but rather to learn how to think critically for oneself and to understand the meaning of things for oneself.
In the Israeli case about Wagner and Barenboim, it would be the easiest thing to dismiss the conductor simply either as an opportunist or as an insensitive adventurer. Similarly, it is reductive to say that Wagner was a terrible man with reactionary ideas in general, and therefore his music, no matter how wonderful, is intolerable because it is infected with the same poison as his prose. How would that be demonstrated? How many writers, musicians, poets, painters would be left if their art was judged by their moral behaviour? And who is to decide what level of ugliness and turpitude can be borne in the artistic production of any given artist? Once one starts to censor, there is no theoretical limit.-Copyright Edward W. Said, 2001
Concluded
The first part of this article appeared in Wednesday's issue.
© The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2001