Listen Now: Wagner Through a Jewish Lens

Source: The Jewish Community Centre Of San Francisco


Wagner Through a Jewish Lens—The Enigma of Wagner’s Genius and Anti-Semitism
With Deborah Lipstadt, Randy Cohen and Joshua Kosman

A very insightful and highly interesting panel discussion. I believe, in part, stimulated by SF Opera new Ring Cycle.

Podcast: Click to Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:42 — 25.5MB)

Overview from JWeekly.com 

He warned of the “harmful influence of Jewry on the morality of the [German] nation,” and that “the Jew has no true passion to impel him to artistic creation.”

That wasn’t Hitler at some torch-lit Nuremberg rally. It was composer Richard Wagner, writing 80 years before the advent of Nazism.

Richard WagnerNo artist stirs up as much Jewish unease as Wagner. To this day, the very thought of his music causes some Jews, especially Holocaust survivors, intense stress.

Yet Wagner was by all reckoning one of the great creative geniuses of all time.

With next month’s opening of the San Francisco Opera’s production of the Ring cycle — the epic four-part, 15-hour “Der Ring des Nibelungen” — the sturm und drang over Wagner will get an airing at a Thursday, May 26 panel discussion at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.

Titled “Wagner Through a Jewish Lens: The Enigma of Wagner’s Genius and Anti-Semitism,” the discussion features historian Deborah Lipstadt, former New York Times columnist Randy Cohen and moderator Joshua Kosman, the classical music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The problem is deceptively simple,” says Kosman of the panel’s topic. “[Wagner] left this unbelievable artistic legacy that cannot and should not be denied, and which has enriched the cultural world for 150 years.”

But, he adds, “he also had a host of amoral political and personal views that many would find repugnant today. Furthermore, his ideas then came to a certain ugly fruition after he was dead.”

That “ugly fruition” was, of course, the Nazi co-option of Wagner’s music as the soundtrack to a reborn Teutonic nationalism, subsequently perverted into the Holocaust.

For Hitler’s Germany, the ride of the Valkyries went right past the smokestacks of Auschwitz.

With the Ring, Wagner invented what he called the music drama, an outsized blend of theater, music, singing and spectacle. Its influence on all subsequent music and opera cannot be denied, yet the use of his music by the image-conscious Nazis twisted it into an aural symbol of genocide.

Kosman notes that for Holocaust-era Jews, “Wagner’s music was used as a symbol for terror. It’s a musical swastika, a totem for a very specific historical event. But it doesn’t follow from that that Wagner was a Nazi before his time or that we can blame the crimes of Hitler on Wagner. Certainly not on Wagner’s music.”

Former New York Times ethics columnist Cohen has pondered the ethical dilemma surrounding Wagner. It comes down to this: Can one separate the art from the artist? Or, in Wagner’s case, do the artist’s vile beliefs taint the music itself?

“The librettos themselves contain symbols that were understood to be anti-Semitic,” Cohen says of the four operas that make up the Ring cycle. “There can’t be anti-Semitic math. There can’t be anti-Semitic physics. But when it comes to opera, the answer is yes, there can be.”

Many scholars agree that the loathsome dwarfish race of the Nibelung depicted in the Ring represent the Jews.

On the other hand, Cohen concedes that Wagner was a product of his times, which in the case of 19th century Germany meant a period of virulent anti-Jewish hatred. Similarly, 20th century German composers such as Richard Strauss and Carl Orff openly worked for or belonged to the Nazi Party.

Yet nobody calls for boycotts of Orff’s “Carmina Burana.”

“Must you forswear participating in a work [of art] if the creator of that work is a truly vile person? “ Cohen asks. “I believe the answer is no, but it is a reasonable question. What moral standing must you give to people who have a close connection to the Holocaust? [Wagner’s] music is so imbued with suffering and death and tragedy.”

While fully acknowledging the dark side of Wagner, both the man and the music, critic Kosman can’t help but love the aesthetic power of the Ring.

“The more I get to know Wagner and the cycle, the more I am in awe of it,” he says, “of its majesty and depth and great theatrical fervor. It is long, yes, but there is no flab, nothing in the Ring you could cut.”

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Not going to San Francisco's Ring Cycle? Well look what you are missing: A Ring In Pictures

It would seem that SF Opera's Ring cycle is selling out fast. Considering it only happens every 10 years or so it may be your last chance to to see the Cycle in SF for a while. So, just in case you are still undecided, here, in HD, is what used to be known in my day as a "Photo Feature" of SF's Ring Cycle. I have even added an audio documentary introduction to the Ring, Ring Cycles and the people that go to them - to boot!. Media and Wagner heavy, your computer may enter its own Gotterdammerung - you have been warned!

Click Below To Enter Valhalla - BUT WARNING, MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. (All Images: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera)

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SF Opera Ring Festival 2011: An Over-View

I was looking at the best way to give some overview of San Francisco's Ring Cycle 2011 when I came accross this. It appears that Janos Gereben at the  San Francisco Examiner has done a far better job than I might attempt

"The Ring of the Nibelung," the beloved cycle of Richard Wagner operas, is coming back to San Francisco for the first time since 1999, bringing with it all its splendor and heartbreak.

For almost a century and a half, opera audiences have flocked to any part of the globe where Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung” was being produced.

Now, once again, it’s San Francisco’s turn, and some 40,000 visitors from around the Bay Area and world are expected at the War Memorial Opera House between May 29 and July 3. There will be three cycles of the 17-hour colossus (15 hours of music) divided into four operas (Dates and Booking Information here.)  Including individual productions in the past three years leading up to the complete cycles, the cost of the venture is approximately $24 million.

Ticket income will not cover the cost to the opera, which relies on individual and corporate donations, but the financial, public relations and visitor attraction benefits to The City exceed the expense.

“For San Francisco, having the full ‘Ring’ cycle here is like hosting a Super Bowl or World Cup soccer for the arts,” said Kary Schulman, the director of Grants for the Arts. “We gain not just additional hotel stays, restaurant meals and shopping, but, because these are culture-goers, our other arts and visitor attractions are likely to benefit as well.”

The man responsible for the decision to produce “Ring,” opera general director David Gockley, emphasizes the size of the project, but from another angle.

“It is the most monumental piece of music theater ever conceived by the mind of man,” Gockley said. “Every rational force in our society mitigates against it being done. Yet it is done because there is an urge within us to see the truth and the fate of ourselves as humans played out on a vast, multilayered canvas. For anyone in my position, it is the dream of a career in opera to essay this Everest of challenges.”

So large is that challenge that this will be only the sixth time in the company’s 88-year history that “Ring” is presented. Previous years were 1935, 1972, 1985, 1990 and 1999. The first “Ring” came to The City in 1900, when New York’s Metropolitan Opera performed it on tour in the Grand Opera House, long before the War Memorial opened in 1932.

Beyond size, expense, tradition and fame, at the core of the “‘Ring’ experience” is the experience of basic human emotions expressed in unforgettably powerful ways. What makes it all work is as basic as the anguish of a father (Wotan) over the loss of his daughter (Brünnhilde).

This deep human sorrow hits the audience with unsurpassed impact in a combination of gorgeous music and deeply affecting drama.

“My ‘Walküre’ turns out terribly beautiful,” Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt in 1852, and the century and a half that has passed since only confirmed and amplified his judgment.

Francesca Zambello, who’s responsible for the San Francisco production, said Wagner’s vision of the world “demands a setting in which gods, goddesses, creatures, heroes and mere humans are all equally at home. Many set out on journeys that will take them through terrifying landscapes demanding courage, heart, understanding and sacrifice. As they are transformed, so are we who watch, and [we] sense their stories are also ours.”

Those journeys might sound familiar even to opera newbies: From ancient Nordic mythology to Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, there are recurring stories of the all-powerful ring and what befalls on mortals, and even gods coveting them.

“All of the great themes of the ‘Ring’ — the destruction of nature, the quest for power, corruption, the plight of the powerless — resound through the four operas,” Zambello said.

Unlike traditional staging of the Wagner operas, here “they are not bound to the 19th century’s industrial age, nor to Europe or some leafy Nordic realm of long ago,” Zambello said.

To make this happen, huge forces are coming together. World-famous Wagner specialist Donald Runnicles conducts an orchestra of more than 100. Principal roles are filled by acclaimed singers, and the rest of the cast includes some participants in the Merola Opera Program; veterans of Merola now take on major roles, and there are scores of stagehands, costumers, makeup artists, ushers and others involved.

For the months leading up to the big event in June, local arts organizations collaborate in presenting a wide range of programs centering on the “Ring.”

Zambello said in his (sic) production, American history, mythology, iconography, landscape and “dreams all filtered into our palette as we constructed our stage world.”

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