Better to know

Wagner was played in Israel for the first time this July. Conductor Daniel Barenboim has been widely criticised for breaking the taboo. Edward Said says this raises two sets of questions. Can we like Hitler’s favourite musician, dissociating the artist from the man? And how can we justify ignorance of the Other? This is something Arab intellectuals who reject all contact with Israel should think about.
by Edward W Said

A furore has erupted in Israel that deserves close attention: the case of the remarkable pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim - a close friend of mine - and a performance he gave in Israel in July of an orchestral extract from one of Richard Wagner’s operas. Barenboim has been subjected to vast amounts of commentary, abuse and amazed expostulation, all because Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was both a very great composer and a notorious (and deeply repulsive) anti-semite. He was Hitler’s favourite composer and his works are commonly associated, with justification, with the Nazi regime and the terrible experiences of the millions of Jews and other inferior peoples that it exterminated. Wagner’s music has been informally banned from public performance in Israel, although it is sometimes played on the radio and recordings are on sale in Israeli shops. To many Israeli Jews, the music rich, extraordinarily complex and influential in the musical world symbolises the horrors of German anti-semitism.

I should add that even to many non-Jewish Europeans, Wagner is barely acceptable for some of the same reasons, particularly in countries occupied by the Nazis during the second world war. Because some of his music sounds grandiose and Germanic (however one takes that misused adjective), because he was a composer exclusively of operas, overbearing and deeply concerned with the Germanic past, myths, traditions and achievements, and because he was such a tireless, verbose, pompous prose expounder of dubious ideas about inferior races and sublime (Germanic) heroes, Wagner is a difficult person to accept, much less to like or admire.

Nevertheless, he was an unquestionable genius of the theatre and music. He revolutionised our whole conception of opera; he totally transformed the tonal musical system; and he contributed 10 masterpieces, operas that remain among the summits of Western music. The challenge he presents, not just to Israeli Jews but to everyone, is how to admire and perform his music while separating it from his odious writings and the way the Nazis used them. As Barenboim frequently points out, none of Wagner’s operas have any immediately anti-semitic material: the Jews he hated and wrote about in his pamphlets are not to be found, as Jews, in his musical works.

Many critics have imputed an anti-semitic presence in some characters that Wagner treats with contempt and derision, but such accusations can only be imputations not instances, although the resemblance between caricatures of Jews that were common at the time and Beckmesser, a derisory character in Wagner’s only comic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürenberg are actually quite close. But Beckmesser is a German Christian character, most certainly not Jewish. Clearly Wagner made the distinction in his own mind between Jews in reality and Jews in his music, since he was voluble about them his writing, and silent about them in his music.

Barenboim is head of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Berlin State Opera, whose orchestra he was leading on tour in Israel for three consecutive concerts presented in Jerusalem. He had originally scheduled a performance of act one of the opera Die Walküre for the 7 July concert, but had been asked to change it by the director of the Israel Festival, which had invited Barenboim and the German orchestra. Barenboim substituted a programme of Schumann and Stravinsky and then, after playing those, turned to the audience and proposed a short extract from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an encore. He opened the floor to a discussion. In the end, Barenboim said he would play the piece but suggested that those who were offended could leave, which some did. By and large, the Wagner was well received by a rapturous audience of about 2,800.


Since then the attacks on Barenboim have not stopped. It was reported on 25 July that the Knesset committee on culture and education “urged Israel’s cultural bodies to boycott the conductor … for performing music by Hitler’s favourite composer at Israel’s premier cultural event until he apologises”. The attacks on Barenboim by the minister of culture and other luminaries have been venomous, even though, despite his birth and early childhood in Argentina, Barenboim has always thought of himself as an Israeli. He grew up there, he went to Hebrew schools, he carries an Israeli passport along with his Argentine one.

Barenboim has always been thought of as a major cultural asset to Israel, having been a central figure in its musical life for years although, since his teens, he has mostly lived in Europe and the United States his work has afforded him many more important opportunities outside Israel. To conduct and play the piano in Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna, Salzburg, Bayreuth, New York, Chicago and Buenos Aires always overshadowed the mere fact of residence in one place. This cosmopolitan and even iconoclastic life has to some extent been a source of the anger directed against him since the Wagner incident.

He is a complex figure, and the complexity also explains the furore. All societies are made up of a majority of average people, who follow all the major patterns, and a tiny number who, by virtue of their talent and independent inclinations, are not at all average and in many ways are a challenge and even an affront to the usually docile majority. The problems occur when the majority tries to reduce, simplify and codify the complex minority. This clash inevitably occurs many people cannot easily tolerate someone who is noticeably different, more talented and original than they are and causes rage and irrationality in the majority. Athens sentenced Socrates to death because he was a genius who taught the young how to think independently and sceptically. The Amsterdam Jews excommunicated Spinoza because his ideas were too much for them. Galileo was punished by the Church. Al-Hallaj (1) was crucified for his insights.

Barenboim is a gifted, extremely unusual figure who crossed too many lines and violated too many of the many taboos that bind Israeli society. Exactly how is worth detailing. Musically speaking, Barenboim is overwhelmingly unusual. He has every conceivable gift of the great soloist and conductor a perfect memory, competence and even brilliance in technical matters, a winning manner before the public and an enormous love of what he does. Nothing musical is beyond him or too difficult for him to master. He does it all with a seemingly effortless mastery, a talent that every musician acknowledges.

But it isn’t that simple. His formative years were spent first in Spanish-speaking Argentina then in Hebrew-speaking Israel, so he is neither the one nor the other nationality. Since his late teens he has not really lived in Israel, preferring instead the cosmopolitan and culturally more interesting atmosphere of Europe and the US. He occupies two of the most prestigious positions in all music: as conductor of arguably the best American orchestra and as director of one of the world’s greatest and oldest opera companies. Meanwhile he continues his career as a solo pianist. Obviously, he did not live that kind of itinerant life nor achieve such recognition through compliance with standards set by ordinary people but by the opposite, a regular flouting of conventions and barriers. This is true of any unusual person who must live beyond the conventions of ordinary bourgeois society. Few important achievements in art or science are accomplished by living within the boundaries designed to regulate social and political life.

But it gets more complicated. Because he has travelled so much and because he has a gift for languages (he can speak seven fluently), Barenboim is at home everywhere and nowhere. His visits to Israel are limited to a few days a year, though he keeps in touch by phone and by reading the newspapers. He has lived abroad in Germany, which is where he spends most of his time. One can imagine that for many Jews for whom Germany still represents what is most evil and anti-semitic, Barenboim’s residence there is a difficult, especially since his chosen area of music to perform is the classical Austro-Germanic repertory, in which Wagner’s operas are at the centre (in this, he follows Wilhelm Furtwangler, the greatest German conductor of the 20th century, also a complex political figure).

War wounds

Aesthetically this is a sound, even predictable area for a classical musician: it includes the great works of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Richard Strauss, plus many other composers in the French, Russian and Spanish repertory at which Barenboim has excelled. But the core is Austrian and German music, which has sometimes presented a serious problem to Jewish philosophers and artists, especially after the second world war. The great pianist Arthur Rubenstein, a friend and mentor of Barenboim’s, refused ever to go to Germany and play there because as a Jew, it was hard for him to be in a country that had slaughtered so many of his people. So there was already a sense of estrangement in many of his Israeli admirers about Barenboim’s residence in Berlin, in the heart of the former capital of the Third Reich, which many living Jews still consider to bear the marks of its former evil.

It is all very well to say, be broad-minded and remember that art is one thing, politics quite another. But this is a nonsensical position, derided by most artists and the musicians we most revere. All of the great composers were political and some held quite strong political ideas. The early Beethoven adulated Napoleon as a conqueror. Debussy was a right-wing French nationalist, reprehensible from today’s perspective. Haydn was a servile employee of his aristocratic patron, Prince Esterhazy, and even the greatest of all geniuses, Johann Sebastian Bach, was always fawning at the table of an archbishop or a duke.

We don’t much care about these things today because they belong to a relatively distant period. None of them offends us so sharply as one of Thomas Carlyle’s racist pamphlets from the 1860s (2). But there are two other factors that need consideration. One is that music as an art form is not like language: notes don’t mean something stable, the way a word like cat or horse does. Second, music for the most part is transnational; it goes beyond the boundaries of a nation or a nationality and language. You don’t have to know German to appreciate Mozart, and you don’t have to be French to read a score by Berlioz. You have to know music, which is a specialised technique acquired with care, quite apart from subjects like history or literature, although I would argue that the context and traditions of individual works of music have to be understood for purposes of true comprehension and interpretation. In some ways music is like algebra, but not quite, as the case of Wagner testifies.

Were he a minor composer or someone who composed his work hermetically or at least quietly, Wagner’s contradictions would have been easier to accept and tolerate. But he was incredibly voluble, filling Europe with his pronouncements, projects and music, all of which went together and were larger than life, more impressive, more designed to overwhelm and compel the listener than those of any other composer. At the centre of all his work was his own narcissistic self, which he considered to embody the essence of the German soul, its destiny and its privileges.

It is important to insist on the fact that he sought controversy, he demanded attention, he did everything for the cause of Germany and himself, a cause he thought of in the most extreme revolutionary terms. His was to be a new music, a new art, a new aesthetic, to embody the tradition of Beethoven and Goethe and to transcend them in a new universal synthesis. No one in the history of art has attracted more attention, more writing, more commentary.

Wagner was ready made for the Nazis, but he was also - and this must not be forgotten - welcomed as a hero and a genius by other musicians, who understood that his contributions utterly changed the course of Western music. During his lifetime he had a special opera house, almost a shrine, built for him and the performance of his operas in the small town of Bayreuth, still the site of an annual festival where only his music is played. Bayreuth and the Wagner family were dear to Hitler’s heart, and Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang still controls the festival at which Barenboim has conducted regularly for almost two decades.

Fascination of the Other

Nor is this all. Barenboim is clearly an artist who crosses forbidden lines, and enters taboo territory. This does not automatically make him a completely political figure, but he has made no secret of his unhappiness with Israel’s occupation and went so far, in 1999, as to be the first Israeli to offer his services free to play a concert at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank. For three years, the first two at Weimar and this year in Chicago, he has brought together young Israeli and Arab musicians to play music together, in a daring enterprise that tries to rise above politics and conflict into the non-political art of interpreting music.

He is clearly fascinated by the Other, and categorically rejects the irrationality of a position that says that it is better not to know than to know. I agree with him that ignorance is not an adequate political strategy for a people, and therefore each in his own way must understand and know the forbidden Other. Not many individuals think this way, but for me, as well as a growing number of other people, this is the only intellectually coherent position. This doesn’t diminish one’s defence of justice or solidarity with the oppressed; it doesn’t mean abandoning your identity; it doesn’t involve looking the other way with real politics. It does mean that reason, understanding and intellectual analysis are the way to be a citizen, and not the organisation and encouragement of collective passions, such as those that seem to impel fundamentalists. I have long subscribed to these beliefs myself and perhaps this is one reason why Barenboim and I have our differences and yet remain friends.

The total rejection, the condemnation, the blanket denunciation of complex phenomena such as Wagner are irrational and unacceptable, just as, in our situation as Arabs, it has been a stupid and wasteful policy for so many years to use phrases like the Zionist entity and refuse to understand and analyse Israel and Israelis on the grounds that their existence must be denied because they caused the Palestinian nakba. History is dynamic, and if we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people, we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place, and that Israelis are all doomed to our eternal enmity and hostility.


This idea is not easily dismissed as a Western import and therefore inapplicable to Arab and Muslim, or for that matter, Jewish societies and traditions. It is a universal value to be found in every tradition that I know of. Every society has conflicts between justice and injustice, ignorance and knowledge, freedom and oppression. The point is not to belong to one side or the other because one is told to, but to choose carefully and to make judgments that render what is just and due to every aspect of the situation. The purpose of education is not to accumulate facts or memorise the correct answer, but to learn how to think critically and to understand the meaning of things.

In the case of Wagner and Barenboim, it would be easy to dismiss the conductor either as an opportunist or as an insensitive adventurer. Similarly, it is reductive to say that Wagner was a terrible man with reactionary ideas, and therefore his music, no matter how wonderful, is intolerable because it is infected with the same poison as his prose. How could that be demonstrated? How many writers, musicians, poets, painters would there be left if their art were judged by their moral behaviour? And who is to decide what level of turpitude can be tolerated in the production of any given artist? Once one starts to censor, there is no theoretical limit. I would think that one must be able to analyse a complex phenomenon such as Wagner in Israel or, to give another example analysed by the brilliant Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, the question of how to read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for an African today, and to show where the evil is and where the art is.

A mature mind should be able to hold together two contradictory facts: first, that Wagner was a great artist and, second, that Wagner was a disgusting human being. Unfortunately, one cannot have one fact without the other. Does that mean that Wagner should not be heard? Most assuredly not, although it is obvious that an individual still troubled by the association of Wagner with the Holocaust does not need to inflict Wagner on him or herself. All I would say is that an open attitude towards art is necessary. This is not to say that artists shouldn’t be morally judged for their immorality or evil practices; but that an artist’s work cannot be judged solely on those grounds and banned accordingly.

Analogy with the Arabs

One last point, and one further analogy with the Arab situation, is worth making. During the heated Knesset debate a year ago as to whether Israeli high school students should have the option to read Mahmoud Darwish, many of us took the vehemence with which the idea was attacked as a sign of the closed-mindedness of orthodox Zionism. Many people, deploring opponents of the idea that young Israelis would benefit from reading a major Palestinian author, argued that history and reality could not be hidden forever, and that censorship had no place in the educational curriculum.

Wagner’s music presents a similar problem, although there can be no denying that the terrible associations of his music and ideas are a genuine trauma for those who feel his work had immediate relevance to the Nazis. But blocking out the existence of a major composer like Wagner will not work. If Barenboim had not performed his music in Israel, some one else soon would. A complex reality always bursts in, no matter how you try to seal it out. The question then becomes how to understand the Wagner phenomenon, rather than whether to recognise its existence, which is an inadequate response.

In the Arab context, the campaign against normalisation with Israel, while a more urgent and actual challenge (Israel is practicing modes of daily collective punishment and murder against an entire people, whose land it has illegally occupied for 34 years) shares features with the Israeli taboos against Palestinian poetry and Wagner. Our problem is that Arab governments have economic and political relationships with Israel, while groups of individuals have tried to impose a ban on all contacts with Israelis. The ban on normalisation lacks coherence since its reason for being, Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, hasn’t been alleviated by the campaign: how many Palestinian homes have been protected from demolition by anti-normalisation measures, and how many Palestinian universities have been able to give their students instruction because of anti-normalisation? None, alas, which is why I have said that it is better for a distinguished Egyptian intellectual to come to Palestine in solidarity with his or her Palestinian comrades, perhaps to teach or give a lecture or help at a clinic, than it is to sit at home preventing others from doing so.

Complete anti-normalisation is not an effective weapon for the powerless: its symbolic value is low, and its actual effect is passive and negative. Successful weapons of the weak - as in India, the American south, Vietnam, Malaysia - have always been active, and even aggressive. The point is to make the powerful oppressor uncomfortable and vulnerable morally as well as politically. Suicide bombing doesn’t achieve this, and neither does anti-normalisation, which in the South African liberation struggle was used as a boycott against visiting academics in conjunction with other means.

That is why I believe we must try to penetrate the Israeli consciousness with everything at our disposal. Speaking or writing to Israeli audiences breaks their taboo. Their fear of being addressed by what their collective memory has suppressed led to that debate about Palestinian literature. Zionism has tried to exclude non-Jews and we, by our unselective boycott of even the name Israel, have helped rather than hindered this. In a different context, this is why Barenboim’s performance of Wagner, although genuinely painful for some, has the salutary effect of allowing mourning to move on to another stage, toward the living of life, which must go on. Perhaps I haven’t caught all the many nuances of this complex set of issues, but the main point has to be that real life cannot be ruled by taboos and prohibitions against critical understanding and emancipatory experience. Those must always be given the highest priority. Ignorance and avoidance cannot be adequate guides for the present.

  • The staff - Contact us

  • ✪ Republishing enquiries

    tel: +1 336 686 9002

    email: rights@agenceglobal.com

  • LMD around the world
