By Clemency Burton-Hill

The world is celebrating 200 years since the birth … Richard Wagner – but not Israel, where his music is taboo. Is it fair that Wagner’s works are tainted by his anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ enthusiasm for them?

A controversial production … a Wagner opera … one of the major German opera houses has been cancelled because … harrowing scenes involving Nazis.

"Egoism, overweening ambition, opportunism, deceit, spite, jealousy, arrogance, philandering, profligacy and racism." Such is the "formidable catalogue" … personal attributes, according to scholar Barry Millington, of which Richard Wagner stands accused.

Certainly there are few cultural figures as divisive as the composer, polemicist, dramatist and conductor born … Leipzig on 22 May 1813. Yet nobody, whatever their thoughts on the man, can overstate Wagner’s significance … music. The extremity and the force … his genius altered forever the course … the art form … a way that only a handful … others – Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg – have ever done.

Wagner’s output is already recognizable … millions who have no interest … classical music. This year it will be harder than ever to avoid not just the Ride … the Valkyries and the Bridal March, but everything else besides. From Sydney to London, New York to Berlin, Melbourne to Seattle, Milan to Bayreuth, his work – which is not exactly neglected in other years – is at the forefront … programming everywhere.

Brand new complete Ring Cycles, gala concerts, debates, discussions and documentaries are all scheduled, many … stellar casts. And operas such as Parsifal, the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin will be presented countless times – along with the soaring five-hour epic Tristan and Isolde, whose evocation of sex, love and infatuation was so radical that Wagner once told his muse Mathilde Wesendonck that if the work were ever to be "performed well» he feared «it would be banned."

One country that will not be partaking … the birthday celebrations is Israel, where Wagner’s music is, effectively, banned. The boycott has little to do with the searing psychological realism attained in Tristan and Isolde though, and everything to do with the fact that for many Israeli Jews, Wagner’s music carries irrevocably the taint … its association with and appropriation … the Nazis.

(To be continued)

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Источник:

BBC

COUNTERPOINT 10 May 2013

Is Wagner’s Nazi stigma fair?

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