Should they have used "j-slur" or "k-slur" instead?

So someone who admits to not having even seen the opera gets the Met to shut it down? What utter, absolute bullshit. So it's fine for worldwide audiences to see pieces by Hitler's favorite anti-Semite, Wagner, but John Adams' complicated, multiple-sided analysis gets the axe? Fuck the Met.

Can we get a simulacast of Terry Gilliam's opera production out of London? Please?

By the way, a question worth pursuing is this: the Met simulcasts are broadcast by Fathom Events, who have also noticeably been broadcasting a stream of purely far rightwing propaganda "events" from the likes of Focus on the Family and Glenn Beck. So what I want to know is: was this purely the Met's own decision or are they capitulating to the politics of Fathom Events and its owners? I smell a rat. Fathom Events sure had no problem whatsoever broadcasting an anti-gay program by Focus on the Family just this year. But an opera that offers a complex take on modern politics is somehow too bigoted or controversial for them? Yeah, somebody needs to put Peter Gelb on the spot about Fathom Events and its influence.

The Anti-Defamation League does a lot of garbage like this, and not a lot of actually stopping defamation, discrimination, or ethnic cleansing. They are a self-centred, obnoxious group which bullies people into not doing things that weren't going to hurt any Jews or anyone else.

@ 2, that isn't Wagner's fault. He died years before Hitler was born. Also, most of the other high ranking Nazis were bored to tears by Wagner. His music is seldom performed in public or broadcast in Israel, so there's that if you want it.

General comment: the Met wouldn't use last season's opening opera to make a statement against Vladimir Putin and ghe rising homophobia in Russia as they were under pressure to do. Make of that what you will.

@ 4, I prefer my conspiracy theories to have a little bit of solid evidence.

#9 Yes, Wagner was undoubtedly openly, vehemently anti-semitic. I think what #6 was trying to say was that it wasn't his fault that Hitler became such a big fan. The Nazis also tried to appropriate Nietzsche - who, if anything was vehemently philo-semitic - to the point that even today some ignorant folks try to claim he was some sort of proto-Nazi.

@ 7 So it's automatically a"conspiracy theory" to suggest asking Peter Gelb if the company that broadcasts the simulcasts might have played a role in why this particular broadcast isn't being presented? Particularly when the Met isn't cancelling their own presentations of the broadcast, just the simulcasts? And the broadcast company in question has a record of a reactionary political agenda? I don't think your threshold for what constitutes a "conspiracy theory" (vs. what sound like pretty logical questions to ask Mr. Gelb under the circumstances) is very high.

I do like your note about Gelb's reaction to the Russia situation last year versus his current stance, though. Last year Gelb was all "the Met's not political, we don't let our artistic decisions get caught up in world situations and politics, etc., etc., etc." This year he's sure suddenly changed his tune.

@ 9, Wagner was indeed very much an antisemite, but he wasn't consistent about it, having Jewish friends and colleagues throughout his life. And it's either not present in his operas or, when alleged, is so oblique as to be a weak example. You'll find much worse in the works of others (such as the blatant racism in Mozart's beloved Magic Flute). Hitler loved Wagner for the same reason that millions of others did and still do - gorgeous music, stirring theater, involving plots, and the like. The whole Valhalla thing really caught his fancy, too, it would seem, although he apparently was most fond of Tristan und Isolde.

But @ 10 is correct. The Nazis used Wagner for their purposes, largely with the cooperation of his daughter in law who was running the show at Bayreuth. Now, THERE was an unreconstructed antisemite.

The question of just how truly antisemetic Wagner was is not likely to ever be resolved, given the contradictions between his words and his actions, along with the evidence that his writings weren't terribly influential, either in his own time or with the Nazis themselves. It was also far from his only personal flaw. He was a philanderer, he owed money all over Germany, he was an ingrate to those who helped him further his career, and in general did little to live by the high ideals expressed in his operas (for which he wrote the words, not just the music). Anyone is free to judge him as a terrible person and ignore him on that count. But it wasn't as is his music celebrated a world view which was in conformity with Nazi ideals.

@ 11, Yes, it's a conspiracy theory when all you point out is a bunch of things that happened and say they're connected without evidence. We can suppose there's a connection but we cannot believe it without proof.

For example, you allege Fathom Events is promoting right wing simulcasts without proof that they are actively producing the shows in any way. You don't think the right wingers aren't simply purchasing their services, the way Monty Python, Turner Movie Classics, Riff Trax and others do?

I see evidence that Gelb will bow to pressure from certain groups and not others. We can speculate why - perhaps the ADL has a lot of high rolling Met donors for supporters, while there are few influential LGBT ones. Money talks the most effectively in these situations, after all.

@10 Nietzsche was vehemently philosemetic?

Maybe somewhere that I've not encountered. On the other hand, there's this, from On The Geneology of Morals (part 7 of the First Essay):

"Let us quickly consider the greatest example. Everything on earth which has been done against “the nobility,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the possessors of power” is not worth mentioning in comparison with what the Jews have done against them—the Jews, that priestly people who knew how to get final satisfaction from their enemies and conquerors through a radical transformation of their values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge. This was appropriate only to a priestly people with the most deeply rooted priestly desire for revenge.

In opposition to the aristocratic value equations (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = loved by god), the Jews, with a consistency inspiring fear, dared to reverse it and to hang on to that with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of the powerless), that is, to “only those who suffer are good; the poor, the powerless, the low are the only good people; the suffering, those in need, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious people; only they are blessed by God; for them alone there is salvation. By contrast, you privileged and powerful people, you are for all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lecherous, the insatiable, the godless—you will also be the unblessed, the cursed, and the damned for all eternity!” . . . We know who inherited this Judaic transformation of values . . .

In connection with that huge and immeasurably disastrous initiative which the Jews launched with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the sentence I wrote at another time (in Beyond Good and Evil, p. 118)—namely, that with the Jews the slave condition in morality begins: that condition which has a two-thousand-year-old history behind it and which we nowadays no longer notice because it has triumphed."

Whatever you want to call Nietzsche, however you want to characterize the entire body of his work, it's not particularly difficult and you don't have to be ignorant to see why his philosophy would jibe with Nazi ideology. It's not just his devotion to the Great Man, either. There's also stuff like this (from the same essay, part 5):

"The same is true for almost all of Europe:
essentially the conquered races finally attained the upper hand for themselves once again in colour, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts. Who can confirm for us that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that preference for the “Commune,” for the primitive form of society, which all European socialists now share, does not indicate a monstrous counter-attack and that the ruling and master race, the Aryans, is not being defeated, even physiologically?"