As we prepare for our Grand Finale concerts this weekend, we wanted to share this message from the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus regarding the performance of works by Richard Wagner.
Several chorus members started a conversation about how to approach the controversy that Wagner continues to provoke. Both the artists who perform his works and the audiences who experience them may be troubled by Wagner’s history of anti-Semitism and wholesale adoption by the Nazis many years after his death. You’ll hear the chorus repeatedly sing “Heil,” which means “Hail.” In Latin texts, we would sing “Ave.” Hearing “Ave” to honor and welcome the visiting dignitary in Die Meistersinger wouldn’t likely cause discomfort, but hearing “heil” might. Even knowing the context may not lessen the negative charge in hearing the word most closely associated with the Nazi salute. Other texts extol the virtue of German arts and the assertion that those who create them are masters of high art.
Wagner was a man of his time, composing during the fierce nationalism of the mid-nineteenth century. He is considered a musical genius, and credited with many innovations that shaped the course of Western music, such as melding the artistic forms of music, libretto, theater sets. He was the first to write “leit-motifs,” those musical themes associated with specific theatrical characters (think: Darth Vader’s Theme, or Hedwig’s Theme in the Harry Potter movies). Wagner’s text expresses explicit nationalism, which is troubling today given how it was embraced and weaponized by the German government in the 1930s and 40s.
Wagner’s well-known and openly expressed anti-Semitism was concerning during his lifetime—and sometimes explained as a “personal” attack on individual competitors who happened to be Jewish, rather than a consuming ideology. But its explicit adoption later by the Nazi regime, along with their idolization of Wagner as a symbol of German culture, makes him a controversial figure to this day beyond his less-than-exemplary patterns of fleeing debt and flagrant womanizing.
As Leonard Bernstein said: “How can so great an artist—so prophetic, so profoundly understanding of the human condition, of human strengths and flaws, so Shakespearean in the simultaneous vastness and specific detail of his perceptions, to say nothing of his mind-boggling musical mastery—how can this first-class genius have been such a third-rate man?” (Quoted from the Smithsonian magazine: The Brilliant, Troubled Legacy of Richard Wagner)
We can imagine separating the artist from his art, as was previously the ideal in academic art history. Zubin Mehta even brought Wagner’s work to Israel in the 1970s. Perhaps more valuable than ignoring the sins of the artist is to understand them and learn from them—not forgive and forget them, but remember—and appreciate the art despite them.
Yours in music,
Members of the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus
