The Vexatious Wagner
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The production, a traditional one acquired from Düsseldorf Opera in Germany, was designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, designer of the Metropolitan Opera’s “Meistersinger.” John Keenan, assistant to James Levine at the Met, will conduct the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Lead roles will be sung by bass-baritone James Johnson (Hans Sachs), soprano Twyla Robinson (Eva), tenor John Horton Murray (Walther von Stolzing) and bass Hans-Joachim Ketelsen (Beckmesser).
Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” is a love story, a comedy, a historical spectacle and a celebration of German music and culture. It is also one of the most dangerous operas ever written, having been a favorite of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich.
At a panel discussion May 5 at Hebrew Union College -- “Wagner: The Man and His Art,” sponsored by the HUC-University of Cincinnati Center for the Study of Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems – panelist Anne Arenstein explained:
“I grew up in Cincinnati hearing all kinds of music in my home. My dad loved instrumental music from opera, especially Wagner’s.” Arenstein, opera/theater critic for City Beat and assistant curator for studio and family programs at the Taft Museum of Art,, gradually became aware that Wagner was not welcome in the Jewish community. She learned that “Here Comes the Bride” (the wedding march from Wagner’s “Lohengrin”) was not used at Jewish weddings, but not exactly why. In college, she learned that much opera fostered nationalism. Then she attended a Cincinnati Opera production of “Die Meistersinger” in 1982 at Music Hall:
“It was a splendid production, with Viennese-Jewish conductor Julius Rudel on the podium -- until the final 20 minutes, when Sachs sings his ode and the chorus chimes in on the purity of German art. As that massed choir sang and those orchestral fanfares rang out, I scrunched back in my chair as if I were at a horror film. All you had to do was switch the costumes for brown shirts and arm bands and move the scenery to a beer hall and it could be Munich in 1933. All the knowledge I had about context, about history, disappeared because I saw and felt viscerally how music can be exploited to unfathomable ends. I was really scared.”
Arenstein said she has gained a broader perspective since then. “Certainly, the world has not forgotten. If anything, the intensity, the remembrance has gotten stronger, but I think the outcry against equating anti-Semitism with Wagner’s music has died down.”
Set in 16th-century Nuremberg, “Die
Meistersinger” is based on actual historical figures and events. Nuremberg was home at the time to one of the
most important Mastersinger guilds in the German-speaking world. The opera’s main character, cobbler Hans
Sachs (1494-1576), was one of the most famous of the Mastersingers. The Mastersingers extended the tradition of
the medieval “Minnesingers” (troubadours) by cultivating German song, and held huge,
outdoor song festivals.
As the story unfolds, a young knight, Walter von Stoltzing, and Eva Pogner, daughter of Mastersinger Veit Pogner, have fallen in love. However, Eva’s father has promised her to the winner of a song competition to be held the next day. The town clerk, Beckmesser, a buffoon who knows the rules of composing master songs without being able to write one himself (Wagner’s swipe at the music critics of his day), aims to win the competition and Eva. Sachs’ apprentice David tries to help Walther, who flunks his audition for the contest, but is nevertheless determined to marry Eva. Sachs, a widower who also loves Eva, knows he could win the contest if he wanted to, but decides to defer to youth and help the young lovers instead.
There is a nighttime brawl, as Eva and Walther try to elope as Beckmesser serenades beneath her window. Sachs lends Walther his talents as a poet in order to write a prize song. Walther shows up for the contest, where Beckmesser makes a fool of himself. Sachs invites Walther to sing, which he does, winning Eva’s hand and designation as a Mastersinger. Sachs and the townspeople celebrate with a triumphal ode to German music.
Production and performance of Wagner’s music is banned in Israel. Attempts to do so, even as an encore following concerts of other music, have provoked heated reactions from Israeli citizens. Asked to comment from the audience at the HUC discussion, opera historian Charles Parsons noted that Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” was not performed by Cincinnati Opera between 1941 and 1945. However, it was back on the boards in 1946, “in four performances, as if to make up for lost time." It has remained a hardy perennial ever since.
This comparison does not stand up, said Israeli-born panelist Jonathan Cohen, associate professor in Talmud and Halachic Literature at HUC and director of the HUC-UC Ethics Center. “There is a difference between the decision to refrain from producing operas that are associated with an enemy state or enemy culture at the time of war, and the decision to ban for a long period of time music that became so profoundly identified with a genocidal regime, and was destructive beyond description of a particular people or culture. There is a distinction in order of magnitude.”
Also on the HUC panel was singer/actor Steven Goldstein, associate professor of acting at CCM. “I am a singer and a traditional Jew who loves singing Wagner” (Goldstein covered both Mime and Loge in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle for Seattle Opera). When asked by a Jewish paper in Seattle how he felt about Wagner’s anti-Semitism, he replied that “no music holds tumah (ritual impurity in Hebrew). The man is a man. The music itself is pure.”
Would Wagner have supported the Nazis? “That’s a huge step,” said Goldstein. “We have no idea what Wagner would do in that time. His anti-Semitism was really pin-pointed against one person more than anybody else, which is Meyerbeer (rival composer Giacomo Meyerbeer). There was a great professional enmity between the two, which probably fueled both of them.”
Arenstein spoke of a recent conversation with Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera. “He (Jenkins) said that if Wagner had been pushed enough, he would have ended up in a concentration camp, because he was out for himself. He hated authority, any kind of authority, and he would not have taken any stuff from Goebbels, even Hitler probably. But that’s pure speculation.”
The path from Wagner to Nazi Germany was a kind of “perfect storm,” said Goldstein. “There was this wonderful egoistic force in Germany, this great man (Wagner) right before the period of the Nazis. You are, of course, going to hold him up and say ‘This is a great star. Let’s make Bayreuth the center of German culture and use him for what he’s good for.’ I don’t blame him for what they did, but you can say that about any other piece of art that was used later on.”
Cohen articulated the basic arguments that have been raised against the performance of Wagner, particularly in Israel: “One is that not only was Wagner the man anti-Semitic and wrote things that were clearly anti-Semitic (the notorious “Judaism in Music” in particular), but his music and writing were causally connected to the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. In other words, his music led people of German culture and nationhood into a kind of pride, insularity and dismissal of other cultures.
" A second argument relates to the symbolic association between Wagner and Adolph Hitler. Hitler loved Wagner’s music and used it. A third argument is that since Israel became a haven for refugees and survivors of Nazi atrocities, the production and playing of Wagner would be especially hurtful to them.”
To Cohen, the ultimate reason to refrain from performing Wagner is that “there is a visceral, gut rejection of Wagner among so many Jews, particularly those who are descendants of, or are otherwise associated with victims of the Second World War and the Holocaust.”
Moderator Rabbi Abie Ingber, founding director of the Office of Interfaith Community Engagement and adjunct professor of theology at Xavier University, addressed the issue of remembrance.
“In Jewish life, we feel this injunction to remember, to remember slavery in Egypt and what arch-enemy Amalek did to the Jewish people as they traversed the desert. What’s fascinating is that in the injunction to remember Amalek, the Jewish world continues to give life to the memory of our greatest enemy. The Jews more than anybody else give Adolph Hitler notoriety and continuity in the telling of the history of civilization. One could argue that if we forgot to remember the Holocaust, we actually would have victory over Nazism and Adolph Hitler.”
In the end, the panelists and the audience agreed that the issue was complex and should continue to be addressed.
Said Cohen: “I think we can establish that there is sufficient sensitivity around this that there are arguments on both sides. I think it relates to context. There is a difference between standing at the corner of Hyde Park and reading “Mein Kampf” and reading “Mein Kampf” in a seminar where it is studied, explained and examined as part of a very dark chapter in the history of humanity. There is a difference between producing and performing Wagner in a particular political and cultural context and in the context of an event such as this. I think there really is no right and wrong answer, but I do see that there is an issue.”
As for forgetting, “if we live our lives by not ignoring anti-Semitism, racism and all the other phobias and isms we have and genuinely work for their eradication, we will remember and not have to address the question of forgetting."
Wagner has had a checkered history at Cincinnati Opera, said Parsons, author of “A Celebration of Cincinnati Opera” (2007).
“When Cincinnati Opera was founded in 1920, there were scenes from ‘Lohengrin.’ The following year the entire 'Lohengrin' was presented and ‘Tannhäuser’ was added shortly thereafter. The number of productions reached a climax in the late 1920s and early 30s. In 1929, for example, Cincinnati Opera presented six performances of ‘Meistersinger’ along with three of ‘Die Walküre’ and ‘Parsifal.’ Shortly thereafter, all Wagner was dropped from the repertoire except for ‘Tannhäuser’ and ‘Lohengrin,’ which were regularly performed as late as 1947. In 1949, ‘Tristan and Isolde’ was added to the repertoire, but after that it was very sporadic.” A 1961 “Das Rheingold” was the first installment of an “aborted” “Ring” cycle, writes Parson in his “Celebration of Cincinnati Opera.”
“After the Opera
moved to Music Hall (1972), there two different productions of ‘Flying Dutchman’
(1975 and 1996). ‘Meistersinger’ was produced in 1982, and I do not remember
any controversy whatsoever,” said Parsons.
"Two of Wagner’s “Ring” operas were produced at Music Hall, “Rheingold” in 1981 and “Die Walküre” in 1978. The 1981 “Rheingold” was to have been staged by Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of the composer. “His contract was bought up,’ said Parsons, “not as a political statement, but as an artistic one. When the Opera board found out there would be Nibelungs with miners’ hats and headlights, they said no.” In the end, it was staged (more traditionally) by Klas Liljefors of the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm. Cincinnati Opera has never produced “Siegfried” or “Götterdämmerung,” the second half of the “Ring” cycle.
Tickets for Cincinnati Opera's "Die Meistersinger" are $35-$212, available at the Cincinnati Opera web site, www.cincinnatiopera.org and by calling (513) 241-2742.