Israeli orchestra breaks a taboo

An Israeli orchestra made history on Tuesday with a concert in Bayreuth, the spiritual home of Hitler's favourite composer Richard Wagner, and received a standing ovation.

“It was a joy for us to play Wagner here,” said Roberto Paternostro, conductor of the Israel Chamber Orchestra, after the first-ever performance by an ensemble from the Jewish state in the German town.

The concert was not on the official programme the 100th Bayreuth Festival dedicated to Wagner's works that opened with great pomp Monday in the concert hall built by the composer in the 1870s on the famed Green Hill.

However the taboo-breaking concert of around two hours, dominated by music by Jewish composers like Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn but finishing with Wagner's “Siegfried Idyll”, has been a major talking point.

Wagner died in 1883 and Hitler was greatly impressed by his music with its use of epic Germanic and Norse mythology, becoming a frequent guest of the family and the festival.

As a child Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson who died in March 2010 after running the Bayreuth festival for 57 years, used to call the visiting Nazi dictator “Uncle Wolf”.

Wagner's work has been off-limits in Israel as a result and his music is subject to an unwritten ban.

When Israeli-Argentine conductor Daniel Barenboim led the Berlin Staatskapelle in a performance of an excerpt from Wagner's “Tristan und Isolde” in Jerusalem in 2001, dozens of audience members stormed out.

Wagner's great-granddaughter Katharina Wagner, who since 2009 has run the festival with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, sat in the front row for Tuesday's concert.

The concert has still set some tempers flaring, however. The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants called it “an act of moral failure and a disgraceful abandonment of solidarity with those who suffered unspeakable horrors by the purveyors of Wagner's banner”. — AFP