The Israeli Opera has a new music director with plenty of ideas -- one of which is six decades old. Asked by a reporter whether he had any plans to program the operas of Richard Wagner in Tel Aviv, David Stern answered in the negative. "I don't think it's such a great loss to Israeli audiences," he added. "I still conduct Wagner in other places around the world, but there are many other things that are worthwhile to conduct here."

Mr. Stern was endorsing a public policy, not expressing a personal preference. Wagner's music is not played in Israel's opera houses or concert halls. This "ban" is not official -- the Israeli Supreme Court ruled a number of years ago that it is not illegal to play Wagner -- but a custom that goes all the way back to the founding in 1948 of the Jewish state. The Wagner ban is said to be unpopular among Israeli musicians, and two prominent conductors, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta, have sought on more than one occasion to scrap it. Yet it remains in force nonetheless, and Mr. Stern's statement suggests that it will continue to be for some time to come.

Why does the state of Israel insist that its musicians not perform such universally acknowledged masterpieces as "Tristan und Isolde" and "Die Meistersinger"? Because their creator was a notorious anti-Semite -- and because Adolf Hitler loved his music. In "Mein Kampf," the book in which he spelled out his plans for world conquest, Hitler called Wagner one of "the great warriors in this world who, though not understood by the present, are nevertheless prepared to carry the fight for their ideas and ideals to their end." Nor was he shrieking just to hear the sound of his voice. Hitler was an aesthete who knew Wagner's operas very well. He was close to the composer's family and, after he came to power in 1933, he made sure that Wagner's music was prominently featured at Nazi Party functions.

Wagner, needless to say, wasn't a Nazi. He died five years before Hitler was born. But his hatred of the Jews, like Hitler's, was more than a mere tic: It lay at the heart of his megalomaniacal vision of the world. Wagner considered himself to be both a great composer (which he was) and a great political philosopher (which he wasn't), and the doctrine he preached was that of German racial purity and triumphalism. To be sure, you won't find explicitly anti-Semitic language in the texts that he wrote for his operas, and he worked closely with a few Jewish musicians. But when it came to Jews in general, Wagner believed that they were a "swarming colony of worms in the dead body of art" and that only one thing could redeem them from "the burden of curse -- total annihilation."

While Wagner's operas are not overtly anti-Semitic, certain of them, "Die Meistersinger" in particular, are intensely nationalistic, and some critics and scholars have argued that their German nationalism has anti-Semitic implications that Wagner expected to be understood by German-speaking audiences. To suggest any such thing, alas, is to run the risk of enraging the hordes of ardent Wagnerites who haunt the world's opera houses and refuse to acknowledge the possibility that their hero might have been less than perfect in his capacity as an artist. (Arguing with a Wagnerite is like sticking your finger in an electric pencil sharpener.)

Mr. Barenboim, who grew up in Israel but now lives in Berlin, is a passionate Wagnerite who remains unalterably opposed to the ban. "In the end it's not Wagner's music itself that's a problem for people of Jewish belief, but rather the association that the Nazis created," he has said. "Not playing Wagner's music only justifies them after the fact." But in Israel, whose residents need no reminding of the lethal consequences of German nationalism, such lines from "Die Meistersinger" as "I beg of you: honor your German masters, thus you will ban disasters!" can still be guaranteed to set alarm bells clanging loudly in the night.

Should any of this matter to Mr. Stern? Plenty of great artists, after all, have written, said and done things that make us shudder today. (Two words: Pablo Picasso.) Wise critics endeavor to separate their bad behavior from the beautiful objects of art that they created. To do otherwise is to run the risk of falling victim to retrospective self-righteousness.

Copyright Wall Street Journal 2009

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