WHY RED HEIFER PRESS OPPOSES “RING FESTIVAL LA”

Just recently, Carie Delmar of OperaOnline.US informed me that the City of Los Angeles is planning a ten-week long, city-wide festival in honor of the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-83), whose opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelungs” is currently being produced by LA Opera in a historic first for that company and this City. Unfortunately, the realization of such a festival would be a serious provocation to the Jewish Community and to other ethnic and gender-based communities that make up the richly variegated population of our City.

There is no question that Wagner was an inspired musical and creative genius with enormous significance in the development of western music, or that the performance of his operas (especially the circa 15-hour “Ring” Cycle) is a signal artistic achievement for any opera company. The problem is that Wagner conceived his operas (both music and words) as propaganda for his outspoken “ideology” of Germanic racial and cultural supremacy, anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, and nationalistic entitlement. In some European cities, an announcement like LA Opera’s glowing Press Release of November 3, 2008 (attached herewith), promising everything but a tickertape parade, would have sparked citywide antifascist demonstrations. Is this the kind of cultural hero our City should be celebrating?

While much of Wagner’s text strikes today’s educated listeners as adolescent if not idiotic, the direct influence of his ideas on the subsequent development of the Nazi agenda, and on Hitler personally, is thoroughly documented and indisputable. Like Hitler himself a fanatic with messianic delusions, Wagner went so far in his megalomania as to raise a national shrine dedicated exclusively to the performance of his own works. That shrine, the Festspielhaus in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, continues to function as an annual Wagner Festival, whose lingering associations with the Nazi era and Nazi nostalgia have been exposed and denounced by none other than Gottfried Wagner, a great grandson of the Composer. (Twilight of the Wagners, New York: Picador, 1997).

It is bad enough that our City is planning to honor this icon of the Nazis. However, it is clear that the organizers have drawn inspiration from Bayreuth. That makes it even worse. “The L.A. festival will seek to imitate Bayreuth's example by mounting an international publicity campaign to attract cultural tourism,” writes Reed Johnson in the LA Times (Nov 3, 2008). Just whom does this City imagine it is catering to with this invitation? Whom or what does this City imagine it is going to celebrate?

LA Opera claims, with transparent disingenuousness, that it only wants to honor Wagner’s music, not the man. But how does it imagine it can separate between the artist and the person, between the vessel and the content? Read what Wagner himself wrote on that very question:

“I can only hope to be understood by those who feel a need and inclination to understand me . . . . As such I cannot consider those who pretend to love me as artist yet deem themselves bound to deny me their sympathy as man . . . . The severance of the artist from the man is as brainless an attempt as the divorce of soul from body and . . . never was an artist loved nor his art comprehended, unless he was also loved—at least unwittingly—as man.”

("A Communication to my Friends", quoted in Milton E. Brewer, Richard Wagner and the Jews, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co.,2006, p. 81)

The truth is, our City’s and cultural leaders know very well that a Festival in honor of Wagner is much more than a musical celebration, and that Wagner the composer cannot be distinguished from Wagner the ideologue: “The idea of having a festival where the whole city participates is very Wagnerian,” explains LA Opera’s Music Director, James Conlon: “This takes on proportions that fit with the extraordinary personality of Richard Wagner, for whom nothing was too large.” (LA Opera Press Release.) “Ring Festival L.A. . . . follows Wagner’s lead in conceiving his monumental four-opera cycle ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ as both a cultural and civic happening,” acknowledges the Times (ibid.). Indeed, the Ringfest, according to the Times, will involve the participation of the Los Angeles County Museum, the Getty Trust, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Center Theatre Group, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Colburn School, the Griffith Observatory, the Latino Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, UCLA and USC, among others, not to mention several posh restaurants set to feature German cuisine—and even a German-style beer garden—for the duration. Again according to the Times, “each of the roughly 50 participating institutions will develop activities that will touch on some aspect of Wagner’s artistry or a dimension of the vast conceptual, philosophical and aesthetic universe in which the masterwork orbits.”

Little more than 70 years ago, many hundreds of musicians, writers, artists, and scientists, fleeing from that same “conceptual, philosophical and aesthetic universe,” took refuge in Los Angeles, where they injected intellectual brilliance, talent, and European sophistication and refinement into the then notoriously provincial cultural life of this City. Even the movie industry—the “Golden Age of Hollywood”—owes a great debt to those very refugees. Many of them were the sole survivors of large families extinguished in the Holocaust. Those survivors had children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. All of them—and, yes, Baruch Hashem, many survivors are still among us—still carry those terrible scars within them.

Today, moreover, Los Angeles is home to a large and diverse ethnic and cultural population, most of whom would have been considered “undesirable” in Wagner’s idealized, or Hitler’s actual, Germany. And while it may be possible for some people to enjoy a Wagner opera for the music and the spectacle without taking seriously what the characters are actually saying, or what their author was advocating, or what he stands for in the eyes of so many admirers and detractors alike, one cannot watch our City administrative and artistic leaders as they connive, behind a rosy cloud of mystification, to turn Los Angeles into another Bayreuth without noting the climate of apprehension and mistrust already being generated as a result.

Clearly there has been a concerted effort to hide the true nature and significance of this tragically complex figure from the many diverse groups of people including, but not limited to, Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals (whom the Nazis gassed and machine-gunned by the millions); to mask the implied insult to the many other ethnic groups whom the Nazis considered “inferior;” and, for that matter, to ignore the affront to women, whom Nazi theory regarded as either breeders or whores—a dichotomy, by the way, that Wagner already made the tormented theme of his early opera, “Tannhaueser.” Nor can one ignore the offense to the memory of the millions of victims, or of those who died fighting for the liberation of Europe.

Let’s be blunt: the people who thought up this boondoggle (and boondoggle it is: “[LA Opera] expects to receive financial backing from city and county funding sources”—in other words, taxpayer dollars!) are being incredibly naive if they think that these “activities” will not hurt, offend, perplex, depress, intimidate or even frighten many thousands of LA residents, or that they won’t give encouragement and validation to individuals whom political correctness has until now inhibited from overt acts and expressions of race hatred.

However, the machers behind this initiative are not so naïve. They are quite well aware of the potential of this “festival” to sow discord, fear and hatred. That is why, trusting in the ignorance, gullibility and apathy of “us the public,” they are trying so hard to put an aggressively upbeat spin on the whole disgusting enterprise (see LA Opera Press Release, attached). “Ring Festival LA will highlight the wealth of arts and culture that is unique to our town,” trumpets LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky: “The festival puts Los Angeles at the forefront of our major international cultural destinations, drawing together visitors from around the world and residents from neighborhoods across our county. It’s truly a celebration for all of us.” (Ibid.) Arch German nationalist Wagner has now become “a citizen of the universe” in LA Opera’s program notes for the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage (http://laoperaring.com/festival/events.php). Similarly, the Jewish refugee talent that streamed into LA during the ’30s has now become simply “German” in LA Conservancy’s program notes (ibid.).

In the same vein, an article by prominent LA attorney Randol Schoenberg (cover story, Jewish Journal, Feb. 19. 2009) trivializing widespread Jewish repugnance for the composer, and speciously absolving him of any responsibility for the Holocaust, suggests: “Those Jews who support the ban on Wagner because they believe that they hear in his music the same German culture that produced the Shoah should take a look in the mirror. Anyone who thinks that German culture and Jewish culture can be separated is fooling himself.” Apparently, then, the Holocaust was simply a matter of Germans gassing Germans. This is the kind of cynical historical/cultural revisionism we can expect from the self-serving promoters of this circus of shame—an example all the more shocking in light of the fact that Schoenberg happens to be President of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, and—surprise!—also a Board Member of LA Opera.

Among Jews, it is a tradition to avoid injecting oneself into public controversy. On the other hand, it seems to me that this case is different, going far beyond anti-Semitism, and affecting many more communities than just Jews—indeed, the whole political climate of the City. Moreover, some of the learned rabbis to whom we turn for guidance at a time like this may not be well informed on all aspects of the Wagner question. That question revisionist propaganda has tried to reduce to one of hypersensitive Jews unjustly biased against a great artist who, like so many others, happened to dislike Jews (“Get Over It,” captioned a full-page photo of Wagner on the front cover of the Feb. 20, 2009, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles!).

But, as I have tried to point out, the issue is not simply anti-Semitism: it goes much deeper, with serious implications for the honor, dignity, and safety not only of our Jewish Community, but of our diverse non-Jewish friends and neighbors with whom we have long-standing harmonious and productive relations. No less an admirer of Wagner’s music than Thomas Mann (the Nobel-Prize-winning German novelist who made Los Angeles his home during his self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany) wrote in 1940, “[Wagner’s work] is the exact spiritual forerunner of the ‘metapolitical’ [i.e., Nazi] movement today terrorizing the world.” (“To the Editor of Common Sense,” in Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. A. Blunden, U. Chicago [1985], p. 202). Hitler himself wrote, “With the exception of Richard Wagner, I have no forerunner.”

In conclusion, “Ring Festival LA” is totally uncharacteristic of this City’s well-established tradition for multiculturalism, ethnic sensitivity and mutual respect. More than likely, the City’s decision makers were manipulated into approving something they had nowhere near the historical and cultural background to evaluate properly. There is still time to stop it, or, as Ms Delmar proposes ("Carie Delmar sounds off on LA's Ring Festival," www.OperaOnline.us), to finesse it into a celebration of something else. In that connection, there are plenty of unsung heroes in this town who fought long and hard to bring opera to LA. Why not honor them?

In any case, to allow this travesty to go forward without voicing a vigorous, well-coordinated, multicultural protest would be, I suggest, shameful and dangerously counterproductive. As LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo promises, “Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles.” Let us make sure we have a say in how our City is defined. Above all, we must, as a matter of principle, reject revisionist and misleading propaganda aimed at railroading our City into a roundhouse of Bayreuth-style Wagnerism and bullying or shaming Jews and other vulnerable citizens into submissive silence.

Please join us in protesting this outrage!

Sholem Gimpel, Publisher

For the full text of the Times article from which I have quoted above, go to:

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-et-artsfestival3-2008nov03,0,4794490.story

LA Opera’s Press Release can be read at:
http://www.losangelesopera.com/press/pdf/Ring%20Festival.pdf

Randol Schoenberg’s article can be found at:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/why_wagners_music_deserves_a_second_chance_20090218/

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