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Going Full Circle with Wagner
David B. Green / Geneva
(GTG / Carole Parodi, Courtesy Grand Theater of Geneva) |
Every few years, if not more often, debate flares up in Israel over the long-term unofficial ban on public performance of the works of Richard Wagner. Playing Wagner isn�t against the law: His records are available in stores, and Israel Radio�s publicly funded classical station has broadcast his music for years. But attempts by the management of both the Israel Philharmonic and the New Israeli Opera to introduce Wagner into even their informal repertory have been met with repeated opposition by subscribers.
Wagner�s undisputed anti-Semitism, it would seem, his heirs� close links with Hitler�s regime, and the Fuehrer�s praise of the 19th-century composer as his inspiration ("at every stage in my life I come back to him," he said at one point), not to mention the more subtle argument that Wagner�s works are loaded with subliminal anti-Jewish themes and motifs, have all placed him beyond the pale for many Jews, not all of them Holocaust survivors.
The argument that plenty of great artists have disliked the Jews, and we don�t boycott them, only gives extra strength for some to the argument that Wagner is different. He is the exception that proves the rule (the rule being that this is not a censorial society). We do not ban Wagner because we hate him, say the boycotters; we leave his music unplayed so as to avoid causing unnecessary pain to the thousands of Israelis for whom his name is inextricably and multifariously affiliated with the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, the Wagnerians among us don�t give up. In late March, the Israel Symphony Orchestra of Rishon Letzion announced that its Fall 2000 season would include the performance of Wagner�s lyrical "Siegfried Idyll" - a breach of the boycott that may succeed because of the secondary stature of the musical organization, because the non-operatic work is seen as relatively benign, and maybe just because times are changing.
Daniel Barenboim, who grew up in Israel, has been known for some time as a Jew who will enthusiastically conduct Wagner, even at Bayreuth, where the Ring cycle, Wagner�s largest and most controversial musical opus, was first performed in its fullness. But Moshe Leiser, who is in the middle of a vast, multi-year project to stage the cycle in Geneva, must be unique in not only his Orthodox background, but in successfully transplanting Holocaust imagery into the Ring.
Leiser and his artistic partner Patrice Caurier are mounting their provocative Ring at the Grand Theater of Geneva, and have received the full support not only of the theater, but also of local critics and opera-goers, who last year turned the first installment of the cycle, "Das Rheingold," into a sellout show. This month, the Theater premieres Leiser and Caurier�s new production of "Die Walk�re."
Leiser, 44, may seem an unlikely character to be directing Wagner, though he doesn�t see it that way. Born into an Orthodox family in Antwerp, he first took the stage in school plays under the direction of his Polish-born father, a Hebrew teacher. As a child, Moshe also sang in his synagogue�s choir. Rebellion occurred during a year in Israel, when he came to study at the rigorous Kerem B�Yavneh yeshivah, near Tel Aviv. "I was there when the Yom Kippur War broke out. The yeshivah was dismissed, and I went off to sing for soldiers at the front." The following spring, after the terrorist attack on the northern town of Ma�alot, he went to play music for young survivors in the hospital. "I performed for hours; none of them reacted because they were still in shock. Then they started to applaud. It was very moving."
But when Leiser returned to Kerem B�Yavneh, the yeshivah�s chief rabbi began to berate him for wasting his time on music. "I was shocked," he recalls, "and I yelled at him and broke his door." Then, not dropping a beat, Leiser remarks, "The next year I was in film school." The by-then secular Leiser studied film for four years, when he decided his real interests were theater and opera.
These he learned on the job. In 1983, he went to Lyons to help out his friend Patrice Caurier, who was directing a performance of "The Abduction from the Seraglio." He was asked to stay on, and he and Caurier have been a team ever since - Moshe says they�re a hevruta, as if they were partners who learned Talmud together in yeshivah - collaborating on more than 50 shows, at Spoleto, Leeds, the Welsh National Opera, and also, each year, at Geneva. Now, the pair intend to work their way through the Ring: "Walk�re" this year, "Siegfried" in 2001, and "G�tterd�mmerung" in 2002. "�"
Leiser says that as a Jew, he has "no problem staging Wagner, because he�s a genius." He doesn�t deny the composer�s anti-Semitism, but says it�s wrong to equate that with Nazism, though he acknowledges that "it�s natural that the Nazis used his art for propaganda." At the same time, he and Caurier bring their own vision to the work. "It�s impossible," he says "to do the Ring without thinking what the Rhine gold was." (In the operas, the gold ring gives its possessor incomparable power, but it is also cursed.) His answer: "It was gold taken from bodies."
THE GRAND THEATER�S EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, Marcel Quill�v�r�, told The Report that Leiser and Caurier "envisioned the �Rheingold� beginning after a holocaust. And the only holocaust we know of is the Jewish one." Their clues are visual; Leiser-Caurier don�t play with the libretto. And, said Quill�v�r�, "the work was so accurate, it worked naturally." Still, he says that he and director general Ren�e Auphan "had some reservations" at first. "All those corpses on stage." When the curtain rises, the audience sees a mountain of dead bodies covered by a sheet. "Alberich is standing there removing each sheet and taking each corpse. We saw a light inside each one; that was the gold."
Audiences were haunted not only by the memory of the Nazi gold that the Swiss bought from Germany during the war, but also of the atrocities then taking place in Kosovo, where the allied war was under way. "Our audience is quite conservative, but no one walked out. And the critics were very enthusiastic." (A critic in the International Herald Tribune, who found the entire production more comic than ominous, indeed commented that the mass grave "made one wonder what any Swiss bankers in the audience might have made of it.") Loge, the fire god, was played as a court Jew. Leiser: "Wotan and the other gods know that they need the wisdom of that semi-god, but that he�s not �one of us.�"
This year, "Walk�re," the story of the incestuous, ill-fated love between Sieglinde and Siegmund, doesn�t have any Holocaust references. "It�s an opera of disillusionment," says Leiser, "but I think the [cycle] is too fantastic to be reduced to one dramaturgic approach." The Ring, concludes Leiser, "takes a very pessimistic view of humanity. It�s the product of someone who believed in revolution and was disappointed in it. [For Wagner,] there are no gods anymore, just a dubious humanity."
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