RUTHFULLY YOURS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2001 IN AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL REVIEW

Last month, a singular event in Israeli cultural history occurred. The music of Richard Wagner (1813-83) was played at a concert of the Israel Festival by Argentinean-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. Tempered flared and some Israeli public figures called for boycotting Barenboim in future musical events. These developments have renewed controversy over the logic and consistency inherent in such a ban.

Why the ban on Wagner? Ironically, Wagner was played at the first concert of the then Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936 when Arturo Toscanini showed his solidarity with Jews by undertaking the journey to Tel Aviv in the middle of the Arab Revolt to lead the newly-formed orchestra of émigrés from Nazi Germany.

This changed, however, with the advent of the Nazi genocide; Wagner occupied a pre-eminent place in Hitler’s personal Valhalla and in the political and cultural life of the Nazi regime – and thus in the memories of many of its survivors. Additionally, as Wagner’s own great-grandson Gottfried – a personal friend, I should note – has indicated, Wagner’s compendious political writings consistently urge Nazi elimination of Jews from German life and it does not take a detective to find antisemitic stereotypes and encoded political messages in his operas instantly recognisable to Wagner’s contemporaries.

Gottfried’s thesis has occasioned controversy. One only had to witness him and the Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt arguing the point over lunch last year to appreciate the potential for disagreement. At any rate, it should remain possible, as Andrew agrees, to appreciate the composer’s work without subscribing to (but neither denying) his ideas expressed off stage, and the message of Wagner’s writings, for those who peruse them, is unmistakable. This is why other antisemitic composers, have not met with a similar ban. Extermination is not to be equated with mere dislike, or even hatred. For these reasons, periodic attempts by conductors, including Barenboim, to introduce his works into Israeli concert programmes failed.

This changed in July. Barenboim, in bringing the Berlin State Opera to Jerusalem, decided to schedule Act One of Wagner’s opera, Die Walkure. However he acceded to the Festival organisers’ request to drop the Wagner piece, substituting a programme of Schumann and Stravinsky. In the end, however, Barenboim, chose to force the issue by playing the prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde as an encore. The concert audience learned of his decision only at the end of the programme when Barenboim stepped forward to inform them of his intentions, suggesting that those who might be offended ought to leave, which a small number of people did. The Wagner piece was played and enthusiastically received by those who remained.

Depending on who you ask, Barenboim is a principled idealist for violating a ban with which he disagrees, or a contemptuous elitist who arrogated to himself the right to ignore the sensitivities of his host society. The former is certainly the view of his friend, Palestinian ideologue Edward Said, who has not let the occasion pass without a sustained assault on Israeli society in his regular column in the Egyptian daily, Al Ahram.

That might be scant surprise for those who know Said’s record of opposition to Israel’s very existence. But there is more to it than that. Said has been one of very few Arab intellectuals to condemn the epidemic of antisemitic propaganda in the Arab world. Early in the year, he opposed the convening of a Holocaust denial conference in Beirut. He has also publicly disagreed in the past with Barenboim’s trivialising of Wagner’s antisemitism as unexceptional in its nineteenth century context.

In his column, Said borrowed a romantic conception of the intellectual hero pitted against “bourgeois” (his choice of term, not mine) society’s philistinism to applaud Barenboim’s action. But with this device he is saying, and seeking to say, more about Israel than about Wagner, and more about himself than about Barenboim.

As his interesting memoir, Out of Place, discloses, Said has made a virtue out of the necessity of his lack of belonging, arguing that to be dislocated is, for an intellectual, one of the few places worth being. It is not too fanciful to see parallels, even justification, in his defence of Barenboim’s action with his own much-criticised actions in public life.

Two years ago, revelations emerged that Said had politically touched up his life, Helen Darville-like, by misrepresenting his own privileged Egyptian childhood as one of wholly fictitious Israeli-induced exile. The truth of his past is now indirectly owned by Said, whose account in Out of Place accords fully with these revelations and implicitly contradicts much of what he once said and wrote of his early life. All this and more give a patina of special pleading to his defence of Barenboim.

For political and personal purposes, Said converts Israel into a hateful vision of his own devising, robbed of its humanism and enlightenment values, just the sort of society that would pillory Barenboim, not merely for his decision on Wagner, but for his “cosmopolitan and even iconoclastic life”.

Whatever, one makes of Said’s politics, his defence of Barenboim is essentially feline. Far from being reviled, Barenboim has been fetted for years in an Israel that loves its orchestras and musicians and has contributed not a few luminaries to the performing arts. It is bad faith for Said to denigrate a society he wishes to dismantle for faults he cannot credibly lay at its door, though his sentiments doubtless go down well in Cairo.

In view of the agonising past, Israelis have been remarkably welcoming to Germans, thanks largely to the statesmanship of chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt. The trade between the two countries is considerable, Germany is Israel’s best European friend and German cars, computers and electrical products are everywhere to be seen in Israel.

In short, Israel is not a society that nurtures antipathy or unduly hugs the woes of the Nazi German past in its dealings with the democratic German present. Perhaps, in permitting itself all things German, the one symbolic act it allows itself in deference to the past is the ban on public performance of Wagner (his music being otherwise freely available commercially).

I admit to having been in two minds about this for many years. As someone who enjoys Wagner (at least in small doses) I used to think the ban unreasonable. If Holocaust survivors didn’t want to hear Wagner, they need not go to concerts just as they need not buy his CDs and tapes. Then, years ago in Israel, it was put it to me that Holocaust survivors should not be effectively excluded from the nation’s musical life in the world’s only Jewish state by the insistence of other Jews who mercifully escaped similar traumas to hear Wagner.

This argument had much to commend it, but I found it hard to reconcile with the reality of a vigorous Israeli cultural life in the Western tradition. Values are not innately harmonious, and a choice has to be made sometimes between worthy but incompatible ones on a scale of interest.

On balance, I think Israel forfeits less by maintaining the ban on public performance of Wagner during the lifetime of Hitler’s survivors than it does in disregarding their sensitivities. Clearly, such a judgement cannot apply elsewhere and at some undefined but recognisable point in the future, Wagner can and probably will be played in Israel. Until then, Barenboim – and Said – should let the matter lie.