BERLIN - An opera by Richard Wagner -- whose music and anti-Semitic writings influenced Adolf Hitler -- will be performed at an open-air theatre built under the Nazis by an orchestra made up of Israeli and Arab musicians conducted by a Jew.
Daniel Barenboim told Germany's Die Zeit newspaper that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded, plans next year to perform the first act of Wagner's "Die Walkuere'' at Berlin's Waldbuehne -- an arena built by the Nazis as part of the complex for the 1936 Olympics.
"Can you imagine that?'' Barenboim was quoted as saying in the interview, released Wednesday. "The Waldbuehne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves.''
Barenboim said the Divan Orchestra, made up of young musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories and neighbouring Arab countries, is "clearly'' the most important musical project of his life.
He and the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said founded the group in 1999 in a gesture for peaceful co-existence in the Middle East.
"I had long pondered how it was possible that such gruesome despots like Hitler and Stalin could be such huge lovers of music,'' he said. "My explanation: For them the music was a kind of secret garden, their own realm, that had nothing to do with real life.''
Barenboim, who was born in Argentina and holds Israeli citizenship, has been known to make provocative musical selections in the past.
In 2001 he caused an uproar in Israel when he broke the country's unofficial ban on Wagner and led the Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra in a performance of part of the opera "Tristan und Isolde.''
He said the Divan Orchestra has also played the opera and that it was the Israeli musicians who chose it -- for the "pure instrumental'' reason that it gave the brass section a lot to play.
"It had purely musical reasoning,'' he told Die Zeit. "With Wagner it is never about the politics or Wagner the person, but about his great music.''
