By Gigi Yellen-Kohn, JTNews Correspondent
Conductor Asher Fisch is in Seattle to conduct Wagner’s Lohengrin for Seattle Opera. Maestro Fisch is music director of the New Israeli Opera and of the Vienna Volksoper. Correspondent Gigi Yellen-Kohn recorded an interview with Fisch for her evening music program on KING-FM. She invited the conductor to address the JTNews audience about the controversial ban on performances of Wagner’s music in Israel.
JTNews: You run an Israeli opera company. How would you suggest Wagner be performed, if allowed?
Ascher Fisch: The attempts to conduct Wagner so far were in the concert hall. It should be on the opera stage, and not in the concert hall because it’s less of a provocation if you do it there.
I think it should be prepared and educated because unfortunately the ban on Wagner in Israel is based mostly on ignorance by all sides. People don’t know when he lived, what he said, why he’s really banned. And he’s the only thing banned!
JT: From the other side, my understanding is that there were Shoah survivors who had to listen to this in the camps. I guess you could come back and say they had to listen to Mozart, too, and Beethoven?
Fisch: They listened to Lehar! Lehar was really Hitler’s favorite composer. We just performed [Lehar’s] Merry Widow in Israel and nobody said anything. We perform Orff’s music – Carmina Burana is a very popular piece in Israel – and Orff is the one who composed the music to the Nazi games, the Olympic Games in 1936.
JT: You grew up in Jerusalem. What was your first experience with Wagner?
Fisch: I hardly heard Wagner when I was growing up. I had a neighbor across the street who was a conductor in Germany, Chanan Schlesinger. Unfortunately, he never got into musical life in Israel. He was a true lover of Wagner music, and he heard Wagner records all day long. This was my only exposure as a young kid growing up in Jerusalem. I was exposed to everything else, but of course very little Wagner.
For me, the big shock was when I went to work for Daniel Barenboim in Berlin in 1992, and the first task I had to do was to prepare Parsifal for him. It’s like starting first-year medicine with liver transplant operation!
JT: Right, so here you are, the two Israeli guys…
Fisch: The two Israelis, speaking Hebrew or German in Germany, and I have the best singers in the world…and this was for me, I didn’t know this thing exists! It is so different than any other style of music, or style of opera; and then the years I spent with Barenboim I got to cover the entire Wagner repertory and since then I’ve conducted Wagner.
JT: Are the two of you sort of on the same wavelength about this Wagner question?
Fisch: Oh yeah, he’s much more militant than I am.
JT: If you wanted to take your opera company in Israel and produce a Wagner opera…
Fisch: I would lose my job, probably. The chairman of the board of the opera, he called me a Nazi-lover and said he’ll kick me out of the opera, you know. This was in a so-called civilized discussion. It’s a very, very hot issue in Israel.
JT: So, if you got your way and next year were able to produce a Wagner opera – you and I can both imagine the things in the streets, and editorials and such. What would you say to those who say you’re desecrating the memory, to the Shoah survivors, to those who say you’re helping to erase a piece of history that we shouldn’t erase? You would go back with them and say, “Let me educate you about the source of Wagner’s anti-Semitism”?
Fisch: Yes, I will say two things. I will say, one, you don’t have to come and see the performance. I would say that, unlike other conductors who’ve tried, I come from a Shoah survivor family. Both my parents lost their entire families in the Shoah. So nobody can come and blame me for desecrating the memory of the Shoah.
I will tell them that for some people, banning, avoiding, suppressing is the way to deal with it. For other people, like my mother…my mother left Europe from Vienna, lost her entire family in Vienna and came to Israel. When I became a music director of an opera house in Vienna, for her it was closing the circle, and in a way prevailing, in a way winning, revenging, whatever you want to call it. She came to Vienna proud.
If my mother feels that she lost her entire family and her son is now a music director in the same city, is this really such a demeaning thing? Are you giving away your pride by doing that? Or, on the contrary, do you prove that you have overcome?
The president of Israel, who is of Iranian origin, he said, “I don’t understand how can Israelis work in Germany and live there.” Who is he to judge? I am much closer to the facts and to the history than he is. And you know what he said in one interview? He said, “Yeah, I think we should ban the music of Mahler.” He was so ignorant about it that he mixed Mahler and Wagner. And that’s what you hear from politicians. They don’t know. They know that it’s a good thing not to like Wagner.
I keep thinking of Chanan Schlesinger, my neighbor. In the early ‘30s, Jews in European orchestras, in German orchestras, were not allowed to play Wagner anymore. The ban on Wagner for Jewish musicians was imposed by Hitler. Now, all these orchestras, they had 30, 40, 60 percent Jewish musicians. Who played Wagner, if not Jews in Europe? So, in effect, we’re perpetuating this ban! For me, why not allow Jews to play, really, what was their most personal, intimate music?
Q: And the music itself-it’s just music to you? The music is not speaking hatred?
A: Absolutely not hatred. It is speaking, sometimes, German pompous militarism, in Lohengrin, in Parsifal, in Meistersinger, for sure. But it’s not hateful. I think it’s written with a lot of love, with love for beauty, and he knew how to compose. He was a great composer.
Many composers in the 19th century were anti-Semitic. They say Beethoven was, I don’t really know; Chopin was definitely anti-Semitic. Wagner did write this one article, but he did not go back to his ideas at the end of his life. It was more his family, and above all his wife, Cosima, who wanted to maintain the anti-Semitic legacy of the Wagner family. But it was not him.