'Wagner's Jews': can we separate art from the man?

While the celebrations marking Richard Wagner's bicentennial show he is still respected as a composer, the controversy over his notorious political leanings shows few signs of abating. Last year, Tel Aviv University was forced to cancel a performance by the Israel Wagner Society amid an outcry, continuing an Israeli tradition of unofficially boycotting his work. During his anniversary month in May, Dusseldorf's opera house pulled a Nazi-themed staging of Tannhauser after its premiere. Hilan Warshaw's new film Wagner's Jews seeks to explore the composer's complicated relationships with the Jewish musicians with whom he worked closely, often to his own surprise. Can it ever be possible to appreciate Wagner without reference to his anti-Semitism and nationalism? Can his work ever hope to find a genuine popular audience among a public for whom Wagner is a byword for operatic bombast and unpleasant political views? Should we be more willing to focus on the work itself or can we never really separate the art from the man?

Пікірлер: 35

  • @JoelFinkel
    @JoelFinkel8 ай бұрын

    The main theme that runs through every Wagner opera is Redemptive Love. And the main message of "Parsifal" is that Compassion is the key that opens the door to a state of Grace. Tell me how that is anti-human. It was a relatively minor crime of the Nazis that they appropriated his music, which makes misrepresenting him quite easy. An example is the discussion of Siegfried that lacks any understanding, let alone passing consideration, of Siegfried's development. Nor, may I add, of Wagner's own development.

  • @jjturner4424
    @jjturner44243 жыл бұрын

    Wagner was an antisemite, but he was also the finest opera composer ever. Both can be true at once.

  • @ZipSlipHollingbrook
    @ZipSlipHollingbrook3 жыл бұрын

    It's and easy question: How great was the art, and how bad was the man?

  • @jabbapop
    @jabbapop9 жыл бұрын

    I can't believe anyone is still asking this question. What a #sick world we're living in.

  • @clarkewi
    @clarkewi2 жыл бұрын

    Art and politics should not be mixed. There can be no denying that Wagner's productions were monumental, innovative and ground breaking. I advise anyone that doesn't believe it to go see a Wagner Opera performed by a first rate orchestra in a magnificent opera house.

  • @gregoringles6429
    @gregoringles64297 жыл бұрын

    It is funny to see these Jews cry about true genius. "What will we do?! admit reality?! NO! NEVER!"

  • @dragonslayer7627

    @dragonslayer7627

    6 жыл бұрын

    Exactly.

  • @bunniesforsale4667
    @bunniesforsale46677 жыл бұрын

    It's okay to compartmentalize and separate the man from his art, for the sake of the art, but it's unethical to distance the man's art from the man.

  • @robertjones4709

    @robertjones4709

    6 жыл бұрын

    Since when is questioning or investigating Jews and Judaism unethical? YOU are an anti intellectual and also a moral coward since you hide behind the holocaust to slander he who is a giant among piss wiilies

  • @Mayan_88694

    @Mayan_88694

    Ай бұрын

    You can’t separate the art from the artist, Wagner was evil

  • @Truthseeker1515
    @Truthseeker15158 жыл бұрын

    Mythology is both dangerous and beautiful.

  • @robertjones4709
    @robertjones47096 жыл бұрын

    I understand an American pop star on tour called Wales the Alabama of Great Britain I have reported him to the Anti Celtic Society with a request to destroy his reputation. How dare he insult my ancestry and equate Thomas and Burrton with coal miners

  • @fdmds5
    @fdmds55 жыл бұрын

    @6:22 Oh Please ! Really!??? Holocaustal??? 🙄

  • @robertjones4709
    @robertjones47096 жыл бұрын

    I feel no need to separate anything. Wagner is just another scapegoat for many of the great lies of history, what Wagner meant when he said we have kicked in the ass by two thousand years of (among others) GOD CHANTERS

  • @Buttneckification
    @Buttneckification10 жыл бұрын

    I am able to separate the music of Wagner from the man myself, because quite frankly, the music is a cut above most other music. (especially for it's time.) It is indeed "electrifying" as mentioned by the guy sitting on the left in this debate. I am not a holocaust survivor, so it is easy for me to separate the music from the man.

  • @eddiethom4911
    @eddiethom4911 Жыл бұрын

    Unless you have faced brutal antisemitism, it’ll be difficult to separate the man from the music & I think that’s fair & in reason just as much as it’s also possible for those who don’t have that trauma to make that separation.

  • @tmsphere
    @tmsphere8 жыл бұрын

    Herzl was also an Antisemite and left colonial gibberish of a philosophy that demanded European Jews take notes from the Antisemite and leave their ancestral homeland that homeland whose topography and culture they helped shape for centuries without whom even Wagner would have been impossible

  • @fdmds5
    @fdmds55 жыл бұрын

    Wagner I have a feeling that his music is not only alive and well but will get more so because of the actions in the middle east.

  • @stevenframe4644
    @stevenframe46449 жыл бұрын

    Whilst I can fully appreciate the undeniable power, originality and ground breaking aspects of Wagner, to say that not only was he a "cut above" for his time but to say that his music has never and will never be matched by any other composer is nonsense, quite apart from certain of his contemporaries who were also creating new and forceful music, you then have the advent of composers like Debussy (Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune 1894) Stravinsky - (Le Sacre du printemps 1913) Bartok - (The Miraculous Mandarin 1918 - 1924) as for his music, it was remarkable and beautiful in parts (especially the instrumental pieces, Overtures, Preludes etc.), but also it was permeated with long winded lengthy boring elements, on the issue of his anti-Semitic views this will always cause ambivalence in people whether to focus on the work itself or can we never really separate the art from the man (Stephen Fry and Daniel Barenboim both of Jewish descent) are two contemporary examples of this ambivalence, for them the music has won through.

  • @robertjones4709
    @robertjones47096 жыл бұрын

    Notorious? Who says? Bullshit.

  • @hja1891
    @hja18913 ай бұрын

    In Japan and China Wagner is very famous...because in some operas are Buddhism elements . Diary cosima Wagner ..todays he is talking all the day about Buddah.. ( Nietzsche , Schopenhauer ? ) The premiere of Parzival was made by Hermann Levy, a Jew . It could be that Wagner should have left Germany because of the Nazis... Who are You to judge.. by the way: Jews are not the most important people in the world..but they consider they are. During the progroms in Russia ..many went to Germany and England...where they received the best education. Please stop blame Wagner and Germany too. Wagners Music is greate and innovative and believe it or not ..he is a german like many other famous Persons in history.

  • @robertjones4709
    @robertjones47096 жыл бұрын

    Let them scream their heads off, but the time has come to undo the greatest lie in history. Moses was an Egyptian and "chose" the Hebrews to hear his new religion. His ten commandments are simply the active voice version from the passive voice renderings in the Book of the Dead by candidates for the after life... I have NOT done the following. There are over a hundred. THE MAN (Moses) changed ten of them to "thou shall" thus creating LAW and Authority. The great historic lie of a GOD giving HIS LAW to a very special people came six hundred years later when a few of the nation returned from Babylon and began to put an oral tradition on paper. i.e putting hebrew square pegs in egyptian round holes.

  • @bunniesforsale4667
    @bunniesforsale46677 жыл бұрын

    32:00 Clearly this guy is so in love with Wagner that he is trying to give him a pass, so that he won't feel guilty enjoying his music. The man was a phenom and a monster. Considering the actions that followed in the wake of his greatest disciple, Hitler, I can clearly say that you can't take what he preached for granted. The same was done with Trump and look at us now.

  • @robertjones4709

    @robertjones4709

    6 жыл бұрын

    Do you separate the thief, womanizer, and murderer David, from Israel?

  • @JACKSONVILLE1200
    @JACKSONVILLE12007 жыл бұрын

    Wagoners music is crap!! I don't get it!! It's all bees sounding nonsense!! Not a batch on beethoven

  • @dashlamb9318
    @dashlamb931823 күн бұрын

    Wagner sucks.