Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • February 13, 2013 frontations. An undeniably great composer, Wagner was a rather nasty article. He was an adulterer, a bad check artist, and a savage literary anti-Semite. During his unappreciated early career, Wagner’s “Music of the Future” was largely overshadowed by the cheery, but conventional music of Felix Mendelssohn and the stagey but enjoyable operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer -- both childhood converts from Judaism. Wagner was also an exiled revolutionary, while Mendelssohn had been a personal friend of the King of Prussia, the most conservative of German rulers. In a vicious essay called “The Jew in Music,” Wagner asserted that the Jews only wrote music for the money. This was utterly grotesque in Mendelssohn’s case because Mendelssohn was a child prodigy whose father owned the Berlin bank where Wagner kept his money. Mendelssohn started writing music before he knew people needed money. Wagner had Jewish friends all his life, and the essay was obviously inspired by malevolent envy. Given Hitler’s adoration for Wagner’s music, a great many first-generation Israelis found Wagner’s music traumatic -- so much so that a great many younger Israelis had never heard Wagner’s music, at least in concert. Barenboim set out to change all this, but he hit a few snags. “Wagner, the person, is absolutely appalling, despicable, and in a way very difficult to put together with the music he wrote, which so often has exactly the opposite kind of feelings -- noble, generous, etc.,” Barenboim wrote. “Wagner did not cause the Holocaust.” After arguments back and forth, Barenboim, conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle, played a concert in Israel by Robert Schumann -- a friend of Mendelssohn’s -- and by Igor Stravinsky, a Russian Orthodox Christian. Then he offered the audience the option of staying or leaving when he conducted Wagner. This touched off a 30-minute debate, which ended when a minority of the audience filed away quietly and the majority sat through “Prelude and Liebestod” from “Tristan and Isolde” -- and applauded loudly at the conclusion. Shortly, a committee of the Knesset called for Barenboim to be declared persona non grata in Israel, while other members of the Knesset dissented. Finally, Barenboim received the annual $100,000 Wolf Prize for the arts. Wagner in Israel may be iffy, but freedom of speech there is in excellent health. Parenthetically, several of the greatest Wagner conductors of recent times, including Erich Leinsdorf and the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine, and several of the greatest Wagner performers, including Friedrich Schorr and George London, have been Jewish. So are a heavy proportion of the American opera fans. About the time he was gradually introducing Wagner to Israeli audiences, Barenboim and his friend Edward Said founded the West-Eastern Divan. They were encouraged by Yo Yo Ma, the Chinese cellist and organizer of the “Silk Road” concerts that offered musical tours of East Asia with traditional instruments. All three wanted to use musical harmony as a path of peace and understanding. The name of the group was inspired by a collection of poems written by Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe, who based his German poetry on Persian originals after he taught himself Farsi as an adult -- no mean feat. He is said to have had an IQ over 200. Goethe wanted to foster understanding between West and East, like Yo Yo Ma. Barenboim and Said focused most intently on Israel and Palestine. The selection of Beehoven’s Ninth Symphony - generally the Number One choice at the annual year-end concert on WQXR -- was abundantly clear, since the last of Beethoven’s symphonies begins with magnificent chaos and concludes with a tribute to human brotherhood, Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” The casting of the Feb. 3 concert at Carnegie Hall was probably no accident. The first voice heard was bass-baritone René Pape, born in Dresden, scene of a famously gratuitous Anglo-American incendiary air raid followed by 50 years of Soviet oppression. The tenor, Piotr Beczala, was a Pole. His country suffered the highest per capita losses of any nation in World War II, with Hitler and Stalin about equally culpable. The soprano, Diane Damrau, is from Germany. That country had seven million dead, including 650,000 civilians from air raids and two million from forcible evictions from the East. The mezzo-soprano, Kate Lindsey, is from Richmond, Virginia, which was burned to the ground in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. Joe Miller, a red-headed guy from Knoxville, Tennessee, also Civil War turf, conducted the Westminster Choir from Princeton. All were superb. Some people spent Super Bowl Sunday saying, “Go, team, go!” I spent mine mumbling, “Stop, team, stop!” Stop the hate, stop the glorified violence that hits the innocent along with the guilty, and stop the habit of designating entire ethnic groups as villains. Study the motivations of the political leaders to promote wars. The world would not be a better place if Barenboim, Said, Pape, or Beczala had been terminated at the level of immediate ancestors due to extreme prejudice. Last week, most of the country watched the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, thousands of people were listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on WQXR performed at Carnegie Hall by the West-Eastern Divan, an orchestra of young Israeli, Palestinian, and other musicians willing to stick their necks out in the hope of peace in the Middle East. Daniel Barenboim, the co-founder and conductor of the West-Eastern Divan, is a religious Jew, so much so that his first wife, Jacqueline du Pre, converted to Judaism when they married. He is a citizen of Argentina, Israel, and Spain, where the West-Eastern Divan is based. The performers collaborate at the cost of a great deal of hostility from their respective communities. “West-Eastern Divan is not an orchestra to make music,” Barenboim said on Super Bowl Sunday. “It’s a way of life. What we really do together is the most important thing we all do.” Specifically, they celebrate a culture that transcends nationality or the more drastic forms of patriotism and extols the similarities of humanity. “The very existence of this orchestra is controversial,” WQXR announcer Jeff Spurgeon noted during the intermission. He was right. Barenboim got an early start at controversy. Born in Argentina in 1942 to Russian Jewish parents, he studied piano with his mother, and gave his first concert in Buenos Aires at the age of seven. The family moved to Israel in 1952, when the Jewish state was very much at risk. In 1954, the family went to Salzburg, in the heart of Mozart country, where Barenboim took conducting classes with Igor Markovitch. That summer, Barenboim performed for Wilhelm Furtwängler, who called young Barenboim “a phenomenon” and invited him to perform Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. Barenboim’s father felt it was too close to the end of the Holocaust for a child of Jewish parents to perform in Berlin. Furtwängler had been tarred with the Nazi brush by his jealous younger rival, Arturo Toscanini, but Furtwängler opposed anti-Semitism in the arts, protected his Jewish secretary from deportation, and helped a number of Jews escape, though he had remained in Germany. Furtwängler died the same year he offered Barenboim a concert in Berlin, but remained a central musical figure and ideal for Barenboim, who also studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the famed teacher of harmony and composition. Barenboim’s artistic controversies revolved around his belief that the spirit of the composer, rather than the metronome marks, as discovered for Beethoven in particular, should affect the conductor’s handling of the music. This works for some people: Barenboim has been knighted in Britain, elevated to the Legion D’Honneur in France, given the German Willy Brandt Award and a roster of other honors, and honored with the Price of Asturias Concord Award in Spain. He holds seven Grammys. For two decades, he was a regular conductor at Bayreuth, the theater built by and for Richard Wagner. Wagner was the catalyst of Barenboim’s earlier con- A Super Bowl for soul and spirit Ho-Ho-Kus Top competitors Cameron McIndoe was recently named the school-level champion in the National Geography Bee held at Ho-Ho-Kus Public School. Anthony Gurunian was the first runner-up. Cameron will compete at the state level by taking the National Geographic Society written exam.