The Israel Chamber Orchestra and members of the Israel Symphony Orchestra, Rishon Lezion have aroused the hostility of Israeli politicians and have been threatened with funding cuts ahead of a planned concert in which they will play a piece by Richard Wagner at the German composer's Bavarian home town of Bayreuth on July 26.
Here are some details about the controversy in Israel surrounding Wagner's music:
BACKGROUND
-- Israel has unofficially banned Wagner's music for decades. For many, especially Holocaust survivors, his works carry echoes of Nazi Germany's slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War Two.
-- Hitler's theories of racial purity and exterminating Jews were partly drawn from Wagner's anti-Semitic writings.
-- The ban on Wagner predates Israel's creation in 1948. The Israel Philharmonic under its former name, the Palestine Orchestra, imposed it in 1938 following Nazi attacks on Jews in Germany.
-- The Berlin Philharmonic was also barred from Israel because its conductor for more than three decades, Herbert von Karajan, was a Nazi party member. However they came to Israel under conductor Daniel Barenboim in 1990. Karajan died in 1989.
INCIDENTS
-- In 2001 Zubin Mehta, conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, condemned a call by Israeli lawmakers to ban performances by Barenboim over a performance of a work by Wagner.
Barenboim, an Argentinean-born Israeli, told his audience at the July 2001 concert he would play a piece from Wagner's opera "Tristan and Isolde" and said those who objected should leave. Several dozen, some shouting "Fascist" and "Go home," slammed doors as they walked out of the concert by the visiting Berlin Staatskapelle in Jerusalem.
-- In 2000, Israel's Rishon Lezion orchestra broke the taboo against Wagner. The orchestra, conducted by Holocaust survivor Mendi Rodan, played Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll."
-- In 1998, Israel's Tel Aviv opera company shelved plans to perform a Wagner aria after dozens protested.
-- In 1953 on a tour to Israel, revered violinist Jascha Heifetz was attacked by a man with an iron bar after playing a violin sonata by Richard Strauss, who had been head of the State Music Bureau for several years under the Third Reich but who, it was later revealed, detested the Nazis and conformed to help protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and Jewish grandchildren.
Strauss's music is no longer unofficially banned in Israel and is performed and broadcast regularly.
-- Performances by Karajan, one of the most prolific classical recording artists of all time, were also unofficially banned on Israeli airwaves while he was alive.