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JULIAN SCHVINDLERMAN, a Jerusalem-based political analyst, holds a master’s degree in Society and Politics of Israel from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Why Israel’s Rishon Letzion Symphonic Orchestra found it appropriate to reintroduce the thorny debate concerning public performances of Richard Wagner’s music while Israel is consumed with a resurgent, violent uprising by Palestinian protesters is beyond comprehension.
True, the performance had probably been planned for some time; the orchestra members had been practicing for months, and so on. But to proceed with the concert the same day a synagogue had been desecrated in Efrat, just one day after a suicide bombing in Kfar Darom (traumatic even though only the terrorist was killed), and while residents of Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood went to bed with bullets whizzing over their heads (shot by Palestinians from the nearby village of Beit Jallah), does not speak well of the orchestra’s sense of fitness with reality.
Of course, other artistic and cultural events have also taken place during this current period of instability. But this one was different — full of moral and societal implications. An Israeli orchestra, for the first time before a public audience, would perform a symphonic work by Richard Wagner — the composer whose music was adopted by Hitler and whose antisemitic writings contributed to the shaping of Third Reich ideology.
Predictably, the concert was not free of incident. Before the first notes of «Siegfried Idyll» could be heard, a group of audience members stood and left the auditorium in silent remonstration. But an elderly man chose a noisier form of protest: for several minutes in succession he energetically sounded a noisemaker he had carried into the performance hall for the express purpose of disrupting the concert. The man’s name was Shlomo, a survivor whose entire family had perished in the Holocaust. One member of the audience tried to restrain him, but only with the help of two ushers was Shlomo finally silenced. Afterward, he was led outside the auditorium into the flashing of cameras and the flurried questions of journalists anticipating this kind of incident. The orchestra’s conductor, himself a Holocaust survivor, ignored the entire episode and continued playing Wagner’s music. A few minutes later, the performance ended with the enthusiastic applause of the audience. Outside, asked by a journalist why he had brought the noisemaker with him, Shlomo retorted, «because I couldn’t find a bomb.»
This is not the first time that the Rishon Letzion Orchestra has challenged conventional wisdom. A decade ago, it added to its repertoire works by Richard Strauss — whose music had also been banned in Israel due to the composer’s ties with the Nazi movement. Nor is this orchestra alone in its tenacious fight for “freedom of artistic expression” in the Jewish state. In 1981, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra chose to play an excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an encore after an otherwise uncontroversial performance. After announcing the selection, conductor Zubin Mehta invited those who might disapprove to leave the auditorium. Some did choose this option — including two violinists. But an usher, who apparently had not understood Mehta, jumped onto the stage when he recognized the strains of Wagner and, dramatically, removed his shirt to expose the scars he still bore from World War II. At that point, Mehta chose to stop the performance.
Ten years later, in 1991, the Israel Philharmonic made another attempt to insert a work of Wagner into their concert season schedule, but had to remove it after subscribers complained. Finally, this October, the Rishon Letzion Orchestra won a legal battle over the issue that pitted them against both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Holocaust survivors organizations, and the concert was consequently allowed to take place as scheduled.
Those who support the public playing of Wagner’s music in Israel argue that the «man should be separated from his work.» They point out that by appreciating his music they are not celebrating Wagner’s antisemitic ideology, but rather paying tribute to a creative genius whose art, unfortunately, became associated with the Nazi Party. Wagner, they remind us, died half a century before Hitler’s ascent to power, although they admit that his fiery antisemitic ideology influenced Nazi thought.
Another point raised by Wagner music advocates, and recently upheld by Israel’s Supreme Court, is based essentially on the intellectual fetish of modern Liberalism: absolute freedom of expression, according to which Israeli orchestras, for example, have the right to express themselves artistically at their own discretion. If this expression offends a third party, so be it — even if that third party happens to include survivors of the most indescribably painful tribulation in modern history. Freedom of expression, taken to its extreme, trumps everything.
When the debate was first introduced into the public arena in 1981 by the Israel Philharmonic, a Haifa University professor observed that two clashing symbols were at play. Wagner went down in history as a cultural symbol of Nazism, no less than the swastika; particularly from the Jewish perspective, both became deeply associated with suffering and evil. Could the Israel Philharmonic, as a cultural symbol of the Jewish state, ever be comfortably integrated with a cultural symbol of the Nazi movement, any more than the Star of David could be placed alongside the swastika?
But there also appear to be two sets of rights essentially at issue: on the one hand, the legitimate right of an individual to play or listen to the music he or she enjoys, and on the other, the right of another individual not to be offended by that music. How to reconcile the two? Today, under the umbrella of freedom of expression, virtually anything can see the light of day regardless of its objectionable content — from pornographic «art» to the antisemitic writings of the most rabid neo-Nazi. Protected by this right, for example, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a proven forgery, is currently bought and sold quite legally and freely in most countries of the Western world.
But here’s one suggestion. Those Israelis who fervently wish to play or hear Wagner’s music can do so — either privately in Israel, or publicly in Austria, Germany, and elsewhere. With certainty, however, that right should not extend to the public performance in Israel of music that is so intimately associated with the physical and emotional scars borne by so many citizens of the Jewish state. Let’s call the rights of the survivors and their families the Right to Emotional Integrity — one that should be regarded as superior on the scales of justice and common sense.
But contrary to what the barons of Israeli culture want us to believe, the question of whether or not Wagner’s work should be performed in Israel goes far beyond «freedom of expression» to something much more essential in Israeli, or any, society: In effect, to force this kind of extraordinarily sensitive issue on grounds of some absolute personal right to artistic enjoyment, enrichment, or fulfillment — all pleasures that can, and often should, be postponed when overshadowed by weightier considerations — is the worst kind of abject insensitivity and collective selfishness. The image of an old man, a survivor of the Holocaust, being escorted from a theater, in Israel of all places, under music reminiscent of the gas chambers — and this as his more «culturally enlightened» co-nationals look down condescendingly upon him — can be seen as a triumph of expression only through the kafkaesque lens of contemporary Western Liberalism.
No, as long as one, single survivor of the Holocaust remains in the Jewish state, there is no place for Wagner and his music here.