v Another attempt to end the eighty-year-old ban on playing works by the antisemitic German composer Richard Wagner in Israel took place on Friday, when the public broadcasting corporation aired one of his works.
The taboo was broken on a request programme of Kol Ha’Muzika, the public broadcaster’s classical music radio channel, when an extract from the third and final act of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) opera was introduced.
But a few minutes after the music began, the broadcast suddenly went silent. After half a minute, the introducer read out the names of the musicians and singers, who had performed the music under conductor Daniel Barenboim at the Bayreuth Festival in 1991. Then the music resumed until the end of the extract.
According to Haaretz, the public broadcasting corporation received a number complaints over the broadcast. In a statement, the corporation said that its policy had not changed and “Wagner’s work will not be broadcast on Kol Ha’Muzika, out of consideration for the pain that this would cause to Holocaust survivors among our listeners” and that the presenter had made “a mistake”.
The sudden break in the middle was put down to “a technical failure.”
For eighty years, even before the foundation of Israel, symphony orchestras and opera companies have refrained from playing Wagner, due to his well-known antisemitic views and the popularity his music and writings had among the Nazi party elite.
The first time a performance of Wagner was cancelled was in the wake of Kristallnacht in 1938 and ,with a few exceptions, the taboo has remained ever since.
The taboo remains despite leading Israeli musicians expressing the opinion that Wagner should be played because of the importance of his music.
In 2001, Daniel Barenboim caused a scandal when, conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle orchestra at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem, he asked the audience whether he should play a piece from Wagner, which was not on the programme, as an encore.
Some left angrily but a majority of the audience remained and he played the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde.
