Wagner in Tel Aviv [2] Irad Atir

Destigmatizing Wagner in Israel: An interview with Irad Atir

Israel’s stance on Wagner is based on total ignorance of the man and his philosophy, says Irad Atir, who did his PhD on Wagner and Israel and would like to share his insights with the Israeli public. Atir also talks in this connection about Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, who admired Wagner a great deal and purportedly once said that on days on which no Wagner operas were performed, he felt uninspired to keep working on his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Herzl even considered using the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser for the future state’s national anthem. Atir points out that half of Wagner’s works were actually banned in Nazi Germany, of all places.

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Irad Atir, how does a 30-year-old Israeli come up with the idea of writing his PhD about Richard Wagner, of all people?

I’ve been interested in music since childhood - and I’ve always been especially keen on opera. I’m not just a musicologist who did his PhD on Wagner, but also a pianist and composer and I teach composition and conducting.
To me, Wagner has always been a very special artist, and not only on account of his musical abilities, but because he was a universal genius, a very gifted man, a total artist active in many fields. Wagner composed, wrote, gave stage directions and designed the Bayreuth Festspielhaus [Festival Theatre], in which to this day only Wagner operas are performed, which is what it was built for in the first place. Wagner wrote more essays, articles and reviews than any other composer. His theoretical writings run to 16 volumes. So Wagner’s art encompasses not only music, but also the articulation of his own sociopolitical ideology. It was in particular the Israeli attitude towards Wagner that motivated me to delve into this subject and research it in depth. I wanted to find out whether the Israeli attitude towards Wagner is actually justified.


And what’s your conclusion? Is the Israeli position justified?

Israel's attitude is based on the horrible claim that Wagner was a Nazi. This is the opinion of most Israelis, who don’t even know Wagner died six years before Hitler’s birth. This theory of Wagner as an anti-Semite is a shallow gloss on the reality. In addition to Wagner’s criticism of the Jews, in many of his writings I came upon harsh criticism of the German people as well as a nuanced view of Jews. When he was old, for example, Wagner said that if he were to write about the Jews again, he’d say nothing negative about them. The Jews, he said, just came to the Germans too early, when Germans were not yet ready to take in this element.
In 1881, Wagner told Bavaria’s King Ludwig II that he would welcome humane treatment of the Jews. Wagner never acted anti-Semitic, even if he does come out against Jewry in his writings. On the contrary, Wagner worked together with Jews, and many of his devotees were Jews who gave him financial and artistic support. Before his essay on Das Judentum in der Musik [Judaism in Music], you won’t find any anti-Semitic remarks from Wagner. Instead, he praised two Jewish composers, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Giacomo Meyerbeer, to the skies. To him, they were Germans in every respect. After the publication of Das Judentum in der Musik, Wagner continued to be influenced by both, though particularly Mendelssohn, and made no secret of his reverence for him. Wagner quotes Mendelssohn in his operas, even in some quintessentially German motifs. People should always be measured by their deeds and not their words. And Wagner’s behaviour towards Jews was anything but anti-Semitic. He even refused twice to sign an anti-Semitic statement that was submitted to Imperial Chancellor Bismarck calling for restrictions on the rights of Jews in the Reich. Wagner refused to help fund an anti-Semitic newspaper. In 1881 he told his Jewish opera director Angelo Neumann that he was at odds with the anti-Semitic movement of his time in many respects and was working on an essay that would clearly express that so his name would no longer be associated with the movement.


Noah Klieger has been studying Wagner for many years and knows his writings. He sees Hitler as the man who carried out Wagner’s racist theory. Klieger is convinced that if Wagner had been alive many years later, he would have endorsed the mass murder of millions of Jews. What do you think of that?

Klieger’s opinion that Wagner would have endorsed the Nazis is in my opinion wrong. If Wagner already refused to sign this political declaration, then he wouldn’t have backed the Nazis either, which would have been going a great deal farther. Nor would he have broken off contact with many Jews who’d worked with him, Hermann Levi, for one. Wagner insisted that Levi conduct the premiere of his last opera, Parsifal. Levi was one of the pallbearers at Wagner’s funeral, along with Heinrich Forges, also Jewish.

Hermann Levi’s remarks about Wagner speak for themselves. To him, Wagner was one of the best and finest of men, which many of his fellow men did not understand because they took his banter too seriously, too literally. To Wagner it was glaringly obvious that it was mere raillery. The great Goethe was no better. Only future generations will understand, says Levi, what a great artist Wagner was. In Wagner’s time, the only ones who knew that were those closest to him. Levi thanked God daily for the wonderful good fortune of being close to Wagner – the great opportunity of his lifetime.
In his operas Wagner presents the complex relations between Germans and Jews, and there are good and bad on both sides. Wagner had a vision of a classless free world. Klieger associates Wagner with racial theory, saying that Wagner didn’t see Jewishness as merely a religion, but as a social category, as a way of life. He did indeed view Jews who clung to their Jewishness as a danger, but he welcomed Jews who were willing to assimilate into German society. Towards the end of his essay Das Judentum in der Musik, Wagner cites the example of the literary critic Ludwig Börne, who had “renounced” Jewishness and let himself be baptised. It’s perfectly clear to me that what Wagner had in mind was not the physical extermination of the Jews, but the assimilation of the Jews into German society. That is what he wished for.


So have they got the wrong man?

Jews are very sensitive, particularly since the Holocaust. Any criticism of Judaism is anti-Semitism or Nazism – regardless of the period in which it is expressed. In Israel there are people who boycott Wagner not on account of his anti-Semitism, but because he has become a symbol or because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of survivors. But these feelings are fuelled with misinformation and myths. "Wagner as a symbol" can be refuted. Hitler admired Wagner at the outset and was influenced by him. It took him time to comprehend Wagner’s real message, at which point, in 1939, he banned stagings of Parsifal, since the opera was too religious and Christian. Hitler was even less pleased by the theme of man’s salvation through reconciliation and compassion. In 1942 Hitler forbade performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen after he realized it was about the end of tyranny, of the reign of the gods. The Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) seemed to him like the collapse of his own Reich. By way of provocation, the BBC’s Allied radio service would play Die Götterdämmerung as an allegory portending the collapse of the Third Reich. So in Germany nearly half of Wagner’s works were boycotted at the time, which does raise  some questions about Wagner’s symbolic function.

Theodor Herzl was a great fan of Wagner. On days on which no Wagner operas were performed, he’d feel uninspired to keep writing his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Herzl even considered the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser for the new state’s national anthem. At the second Zionist Congress in 1898, the Tannhäuser Fantasias were played along with other music. It’s quite conceivable that Herzl was influenced by Wagner’s ideas, such as the segregation of the Jews.

Those who associate Wagner with various ideologies should get to know him well first. Many Israelis – young and old alike - would reconsider and let his music be played if they got the overall picture on Wagner. It is often mooted that the survivors are more sensitive to this issue. But I don’t see any such disparity. Both, young and old people alike, are misinformed. When I talk about my research findings and present my interpretation of Wagner, people of very different ages are dumbfounded. They’re suddenly faced with new information. My research paints a completely different picture of Wagner. That’s why it’s so important to me to share my insights with the Israeli public.


The music that inspired the visionary of the Jewish state is banned in Israel, whereas works by hardcore Jew-haters can still be played undisturbed?

There are other great artists who endorsed Nazi ideology and who are not boycotted in Israel, but actually studied at university. I could name a whole bunch in the same breath with the philosopher Karl Jung. In the field of music I can point to two: to the composer Carl Orff, who was an enthusiastic party member and whose works, like Carmina Burana, have been played in Israel since the year one, and Franz Lehar, who was also a party member and Nazi stalwart and whose operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) is performed in Israel too. Hitler admired this piece. Richard Strauss was the victim of a similar boycott. Till 1990 he was likewise boycotted in Israel because for a year he oversaw the composers [as president of the State Music Bureau from November 1933 to 1935] in the Third Reich. As a matter of fact, Strauss did not support the Nazis, and even came out publicly against them. When violinist Jascha Heifetz played one of Wagner’s works in Israel – that must have been in the first years after the Shoah – a survivor, whose identity remains unknown to this day, apparently struck him on the arm with an iron bar, after which he didn’t go back to Israel till the ’70s. There has always been ignorance and fanaticism about people unfairly labelled as Nazis.




The interview was conducted by Dor Glick, journalist and online editor at Goethe-Institute Israel.