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"Why Wagner? Why not Meyerbeer?......."

From The International Jerusalem Post, November 10, 2000

by Eugene Blum

TEXT:

In recent months, there has been almost fanatical support for the performance of Richard Wagner's compositions in Israel, and last month Wagner music was indeed played, in Rishon Lezion, amid the heckling of a Holocaust survivor.

The struggle for playing Wagner is founded on pillars of clay. Conductor Mendi Rodan began the onslaught in earnest with his remark in a number of American articles that he considers performing Wagner "a kind of revenge" an act of cultural freedom that the Nazis wouldn't have tolerated.

What he ignored, however, is the fact that almost a century before Hitler prohibited the playing of compositions by Jewish composers, Wagner had launched a vicious three decade attack on the Jews, aiming to essentially ban all composers, performers, and conductors (including Hermann Levi) of Jewish ancestry from working in Germany.

It was an intense campaign that knew virtually no bounds, except for those who were of personal aid to Wagner's career. Through the years, it grew to such proportions that many well-known writers, such as Harold Schonberg, Robert Gutman, and Peter Gay, began to refer to Wagner's antisemitism and racism in such terms as "lunacy" and "psychotic behavior" in essays, critical reviews, columns, and biographies.

In his 1850 Jewry in Music, Wagner condemned all Jews, calling for their destruction as a people. In his 1881 Know Thyself, he then berated the German people for failing to heed his original call, urging them to awake, so that there would be no more Jews.

It was his "Great Solution" that Hitler was to adopt in his own philosophies, along with much of Wagner's prose from his Bayreuther Blätter, which preceded and rivaled effusions of Julius Streicher's Nazi paper Der Stürmer.

What attracted many of his most ardent supporters was the way he described his art, as he liked to call it, as containing the power to change politics, elevate culture, and illuminate religion. It's an opinion that seems to be shared by far fewer these days.

Although his music does have an extremely devoted following, at times approaching fanaticism, there have been indications over the past few years that interest in it may be waning.

When Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel, in its October 2, 1999 edition, listed Germany's 15 favorite operas, Wagner didn't even make the list. He also missed the top 10 for the Met in recent years and has fared no better on the Russian front. In Nashville, Tennessee, a city laden with fine universities and concert halls, the local opera company managed to fill just 65 percent of the house when performing Wagner. Baltimore, probably fearing the same problem, brought in three major Metropolitan Opera stars in introducing his work to its audience.

Why all this hysteria In Israel about Wagner's music, especially when it is readily available on the radio and in music stores?

I, for one, would have thought the first choice of composers to reintroduce to Israel would've been Giacomo Meyerbeer, who sat at the height of popularity in Europe for over a half century and also was the first victim of Wagner's virulent antisemitism.

Meyerbeer's operas, once considered some of the most important and beautiful ever written, are as rare in Israel as hen's teeth. Most Israelis today have never heard his name, and many Israeli musicians have never heard more than a few notes of his music, if that many. Wagner, of course, declared Jews -- including Meyerbeer -- incapable of writing anything other than synagogue music and inherently inept at correctly speaking the language.

Other composers, however, saw Meyerbeer in quite a different light. Chopin, for one, after attending the premier of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable wrote: "If ever magnificence was seen in the theater, I doubt if it reached the level of splendor shown in Robert le Diable... It is a masterpiece... Meyerbeer has made himself immortal."

So why is there not a louder demand for Meyerbeer's music? His compositions were once hailed by opera-goers throughout the world. One would think this the proper moment in time for Israelis to again allow him Ills rightful place in the sun.

One approach might be to invite the Berlin Staatsoper company that recently presented such a highly acclaimed version of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable in Germany to present its production to the Israeli pubic next year. Or, perhaps the board members of the Israel Opera Company and the Israel Philharmonic might want to catch this outstanding production in an attempt to introduce it to the concert halls and opera houses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The writer is working on a political biography of Richard Wagner.