An Israeli orchestra is to perform a work by Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer, Richard Wagner, in a taboo-breaking concert in Germany.
The Israel Chamber Orchestra’s concert in Wagner’s hometown alongside the annual Bayreuth opera festival tomorrow will mark the first time an Israeli orchestra has played Wagner in Germany, Nicolaus Richter, the head of Bayreuth city’s cultural affairs department, said today.
The orchestra started rehearsing the Wagner piece, the Siegfrid Idyll, only upon their arrival in Germany yesterday due to the sensitivities in Israel.
“They didn’t rehearse it at home in order not to create any resistance,” he said. “They rehearsed yesterday, they are doing it for all of today and tomorrow they’ll be ready,” Mr Richter said.
Music by composers banned by the Third Reich, including Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn, will also be played during the concert.
The orchestra will be led by Roberto Paternostro, whose mother survived the Nazi genocide. He is a friend of Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of Wagner and co-director of the Bayreuth festival.
“About a year and a half ago Paternostro had contacted Katharina Wagner about the idea of performing during the Bayreuth Festival,” Mr Richter said. “Wagner thought it was a great idea, and it also is a sign of coming to terms with the past,” he added.
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has observed an informal ban on Wagner’s music because of its use in Nazi propaganda before and during the second World War. The Wagner family also had close connections to the German fascists and their ideology, and performances of the 19th-century composer are kept off Israeli stages and airwaves out of respect to the country’s 220,000 Holocaust survivors.
Some six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe during the war.
Elan Steinberg, deputy head of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, condemned the performance as a “disgraceful abandonment of solidarity with those who suffered unspeakable horrors by the purveyors of Wagner’s banner.”
However, the concert will not be the first Wagner performance by an Israeli orchestra. In 2001, world-renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim angered many Israelis when he played some of Wagner’s music in Israel.
The Bayreuth festival is Germany’s most important festival for classical music. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and many other prominent personalities regularly visit the annual event, which was founded by Wagner himself in 1872.
Israel and West Germany established diplomatic ties in 1965. Since then, Germany has become Israel’s second-largest trading partner.
AP