The LA Times reports that County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich wants to change the “focus” of the Los Angeles Opera’s upcoming festival around Wagner’s Ring Cycle. His actual statement isn’t online, but the Times quotes him as protesting that the “countywide festival is an affront to those who have suffered or have been impacted by the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialistic [sic] Worker [sic] Party.” Wagner, as you know, “inspired Hitler and became the de facto soundtrack for the Holocaust.” I’m no historian of the Final Solution, but it is generally acknowledged that most rank and file Nazis didn’t share Der Führer’s enthusiasm for Wagner and Bruckner, so it’s debateable at best whether Wagner’s music was the soundtrack to the Holocaust, de facto or no.
Antonovich’s solution?
“Delete the focus on Wagner and incorporate other composers as headliners including Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Schumann, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and others.”
“Delete the focus! Incorporate other composers! Schnell! Schnell!!!”*
Two big giant barrels of irony are needed to fully appreciate the supervisor’s intervention. The first and largest will be absorbed when one thinks about all the artists who emigrated to southern California in the 1930s to escape the Nazis, and who knew more about Wagner than, maybe, the entire current population of Los Angeles. Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno…to ban Wagner from this place seems as if it’d be pretty much impossible. And Schoenberg, after all, wrote Survivor from Warsaw in LA. The programs LA Opera has planned around the festival should be fascinating.
The second irony barrel would be used in order to think through conductor and LA Opera music director James Conlon’s efforts at restoring composers banned by the Nazis to the canon at the LA Opera, Ravinia Festival, and elsewhere. A couple of months before the Ring Cycle commences, Conlon will be leading Franz Schreker’s 1918 masterpiece Die Gezeichneten, and with the gravely brazen sensuality on display in that ultra-Romantic work, maybe the supervisor will find an actual work to criticize, and not go after the extracurricular scribbling of a German composer who has, by the way, been dead since 1883.
*Antonovich did not say this