The real action today is over Richard Wagner.

Richard Wagner was born on May 22nd. The day after my birthday, but, in 1813. He had absolutely no knowledge of Adolf Hitler and the fact his music was used to calm concentration camp populous has nothing to do with the artist or the music.


The Holocaust did not happen because of Wagner, it happened because of Hitler.


...Wagner (click here) was a man of many mistresses, fine food and drink, and the beautiful comforts of life. And his point in the quotation is that to create at the highest level, the Wagnerian creator needs high-level stimulation in all areas of life....


He was a colorful guy. Enjoyed life and its passions.


Richard Wagner's life (click here) journeys from the heights of Romanticism to the movement's supreme crisis which he himself orchestrated. His musical language overturned all the accepted concepts of harmony as it pointed to the beginnings of the post-Romantic period and beyond....


At any rate, the death camps of Hitler used to pay his music. There are contentions it could never be his music because it requires at least one hundred musicians to play his little tunes. So, there are survivors stating his music was played but by recording. Hm?

So, the real controversy comes from Israel itself. The Israel Chamber Orchestra is playing Wagner without regret. I think it is time and there is absolutely no disrespect to any survivors, quite the contrary, it is a rebirth of the innocence of Wagner and the further persecution of Hitler. 

The Israel Chamber Orchestra (click here) plans to play music by Richard Wagner, the composer revered by Hitler, during the annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth next year. The move is controversial in Israel, where the composer's work has been shunned for decades.

The music of Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, is hated in Israel and has been unofficially banned there for decades. But the Jewish Austrian conductor Roberto Paternostro, the musical director of the Israel Chamber Orchestra, is breaking new ground with a plan to perform Wagner's Siegfried Idyll along with works by the Jewish composers Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn and a contemporary Israeli composer next year in a public hall in Bayreuth on July 26, 2011, one day after the annual Wagner opera festival opens there.

"I realize that parts of Richard Wagner's weltanschauung and Bayreuth's relationship to the Nazi regime can neither be justified nor whitewashed," Paternostro said in a statement. "Yet I am convinced that it is possible to convey the musical significance of Wagner in a new and sophisticated way to the generation which is now coming of age without having to ignore the burdens or historic responsibility."


I applaud Conductor Paternostro for his bravery while dedicated to music and its appreciation in the way it is to be appreciated. Many in Israel are looking forward to the concert, even some survivors.