The Israeli Chamber Orchestra is to perform Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll at the Bayreuth Opera Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, Tuesday at 11:30 A.M.
A protest against the concert will be held in Tel Aviv at the same time.
The Orchestra’s decision violates an unofficial 70-year boycott of Wagner’s music by Israeli orchestras. Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite and a hero of the Nazi regime.
The protest is being organized by Amit Shikli of the Social Leadership Academy at Kfar Tavor, who only heard of the concert Monday. He immediately contacted the pre-military academies, My Israel, HaShomer HaChadash and other Zionist groups and asked for their help in making the demonstration happen.
“The demonstration was born yesterday morning when I and some of my pupils read the outrageous remarks made by [Musical Director of the Israeli Chamber Orchestra] Roberto Paternostro,” Shilkli explained Tuesday. Paternostro, said Shikli, “declared that there is widespread agreement to the concert in Israel, especially from the younger generation.
“This sentence threw me out of balance.”
The protest is a declaration that the concert is not something Israel’s young generation agrees to, Shikli stated. “A Holocaust does not occur in one day. Ideological background and cultural background are needed.” Wagner is among the people who laid the foundations of the Holocaust, he explained, and taking part in a concert dedicated to him is like Holocaust denial.
The protest will take place at 11:30 outside the Stage Arts Pavilion (Golda Center) at Shaul HaMelech Street in Tel Aviv.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Young Israelis protest over the the Israeli Chamber Orchestra's performance of Richard Wagner's music. "We are shocked and insulted."
Arutz Sheva visited on Tuesday the protest in Tel Aviv over a concert by the Israeli Chamber Orchestra at the Bayreuth Opera Festival in Bayreuth, Germany.
The orchestra performed Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite who claimed that Jews were “vermin” and parasites who produced “artificial” and “imitative” music and culture. He concluded that the solution to the problem should be what he called an “Untergang” – a word whose primary meaning is “destruction” – of Jews in general. Wagner was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler.
The protesters were outraged that an Israeli orchestra would perform the music of an anti-Semitic composer who wished to destroy the Jews.
“[Wagner] said that Jews cannot create art and music,” Tal Katz, one of the protesters, told Arutz Sheva. “He didn’t want civil rights for the Jews in Germany.”
Amichai Shikli, another protester, said that “it doesn’t make sense that a public Israeli orchestra will play in a festival that is related directly to the Third Reich and to the Nazi culture.
“We put arts and politics together because Wagner put them together,” added Shikli. “He wrote an article about the Jews and the music. He used his musical talent to spread his vicious opinions about Jews, about the need to ‘clear’ German culture from Judaism.
“We are shocked that an Israeli orchestra is stooping down to the level of going to this festival. We are insulted, not just in the name of the young generation in Israel, but also on behalf of those who can’t protest today: the Holocaust survivors as well as those who didn’t survive.”
