Earlier this fall, the relationship of the music of Wagner and the State of Israel once more leapt back into public prominence, a Valkyrie of controversy once again bellowing its “Hojotoho” to the world.

An Israeli radio station – the public broadcaster no less – broke the longstanding and hardened, if unofficial, ban on Wagner’s music in that country by presenting the third act of Götterdämmerung to an unsuspecting public at the beginning of September. The station soon apologized, citing the pain that the broadcast might have caused Holocaust survivors. Ironically, the performance in question was a live recording from Bayreuth led by the Jewish Daniel Barenboim, long a Wagner champion.

The apology itself created another firestorm. Although the traditional arguments for banning Wagner in Israel are both Hitler’s affinity for Wagner, and the composer’s own repulsive anti-Semitism, the head of the Wagner Society in Israel, Jonathan Livny, said the ban was a mistake. Livny admitted that although Wagner’s ideology was “terrible,” the music was beautiful, and the “aim was to divide the man from his art.” This, I’m relatively sure, represents the view of many enlightened listeners all over the world, both those who love Wagner and those who hate him. Art and the artist should be separated; the work must be allowed to stand on its own merits. That is what art itself demands.

These days, interestingly, this traditional view (which is not only confined to music, but exists in all the arts) is beginning to come under renewed scrutiny from an unlikely source – the #MeToo movement. Granted, the connection is a tangential one: much of #MeToo, with its wide ambit, has nothing to do with the arts, let alone Wagner, but the movement has, among other things, reminded us that for many, it is perfectly legitimate to refuse to divide the artist from his or her art. Maybe they shouldn’t be divided; maybe artists and their art exist in a complicated, roundabout, mutually self-referencing cycle of meaning. Maybe allowing judgments of the two to intersect is a more sophisticated and honest view of artistic reality. Maybe the old traditional “hate the artist but love the art” is a very superficial attitude towards the power of aesthetic life. Maybe that’s only what you believe when nothing is at stake.

I must say I have more than a little sympathy for this line of reasoning. The notion that music exists in some perfectly insulated temple of pure meaning, untroubled and unconnected to the rest of the turbulent, messy activity of life robs it of its authenticity and credibility, robs it of the opportunity it has to be firmly and powerfully in the world. Music-making is deeply grounded in politics, ideology and social discourse. It always has been. To assume that there is a separate, unsullied aesthetic dimension, in which pure judgments of musical worth can be made, is appealing perhaps, but is simply an ideology that passes as unassailable truth. It’s dangerous, no doubt, and demands from us care and attention and grace, but perhaps it’s time to suggest that art can legitimately be judged on moral as well as aesthetic grounds, including the moral behaviour and actions of its creators.

That might mean one thing when we’re discussing the revival of Louis Riel, another when we look at Madama Butterfly. In Wagner’s case, if we would just be honest with ourselves, we would admit that the personality of the composer, his beliefs and his art have always been inextricably linked. We always let the overwhelming power of the music blind us to a reality we know is lurking in the background. It’s not that we don’t understand the questionable quality of Wagner’s art – it’s just that we decide not to care.

The basic bone caught in the throat of modern Wagnerians has to do with his oft-stated and repugnant anti-Semitism, a virulent anti-Semitism that we are expected to believe infected his life but left his art untainted. But surely just to state that is to play at the edges of the absurd. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz has said that all art in the end is a portrait of the hand holding the pen creating it, and surely he is right. It would be almost inhuman to suggest that an ideology and worldview so central to Wagner’s life and being could be hermetically sealed off from his work. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was not merely a prejudice, an unreasonable hatred of a group of people. It was a world view. Jews to Wagner were the ultimate scapegoat – the root cause of everything corrupted in the German world. Wagner was not just an anti-Semite; he was a primary intellectual progenitor of the Third Reich. To blithely say that Wagner was Hitler’s “favourite” composer, the way you might choose Bedřich Smetana or I might choose Michael Haydn, is to glide over this central point. Wagner was the key to Nazism. “Whoever wants to understand National Socialism,” said Hitler, “must first understand Wagner.” From the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

And, of course, this philosophy is not just central to Wagner’s life; it is at the heart of Wagner’s art as well. In his magnum opus, the Ring, the gnomic and dwarfish Alberich and Mime are surely none other than thinly disguised, dog-whistle portraits of his ultimate Jewish scapegoat, obvious to Wagner’s 19th-century audiences, banging out a dissonant hammered song in the bowels of the tetralogy’s body. It is the curse of Alberich, of the ultimate scapegoat, that haunts the Ring, and, in the end, no one, not Wotan, not Siegfried, not Brünnhilde, can escape it, a curse symbolized by the burning Valhalla. Perhaps if some intrepid director made the flames at the end of Götterdämmerung emanate from a Reichstag fire, or inscribed Arbeit Macht Frei over Mime’s demonic workshop, we would get the point. The Ring is as inherently anti-Semitic as Das Judenthum im der Musik.

So maybe our Israeli friends are not so crazy. As for the rest of us, sitting in the opera house or concert hall, assiduously “dividing the man from his art,” it’s time, perhaps, for us to be neither surprised nor indignant if we find #MeToo-inspired questions disturbing our pleasure.

Robert Harris is a writer and broadcaster on music in all its forms. He is the former classical music critic of the Globe and Mail and the author of the Stratford Lectures and Song of a Nation: The Untold Story of O Canada.

It hasn’t opened yet. We don’t know what awaits us. But the Canadian Opera Company’s bet on Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian can’t lose.

Oh, it can be a failure, for reasons I’ll explain below. But failure doesn’t mean failure.The very fact that Hadrian is opening as scheduled is a small triumph. When plans for the opera were announced five years ago, the Canadian compositional aviary exploded in a cacophony of aggrieved screeches, wails, squeaks and caws. How dare the COC give its first commission in decades to a pop star, with one “opera,” Prima Donna, to his name, one which he didn’t even orchestrate himself? How dare they pass over the many worthy Canadian serious composers waiting in the wings for just such an opportunity. What postmodern nonsense was this desperate ploy to attract new audiences with warmed-over Top 40 drek?

And then, to compound the anxiety, lurking in the recesses of the Canadian music community’s fearful id, was this never-expressed worry – that Alexander Neef, clearly a man who knows and understands international operatic excellence at every level, had passed judgment on the Canadian compositional community with this commission. That he had revealed to us a truth we didn’t want to hear, that we were the Pawtucket Red Sox in the world of international classical composition, not the New York Yankees. That for Neef, apparently, Rufus Wainwright, despite his lack of “serious” music credentials,had one thing that all of the Canadian compositional community did not – he had written music whose originality and charm had won him an internationally appreciative audience.

The anger over Hadrian seems to have been replaced by a stiletto-sharpened skepticism. A repressed hope for its demise. And Hadrian can fail – but only if Wainwright and Daniel MacIvor, the opera’s composer and librettist, have let it. It can only fail if they haven’t pushed their vision far enough, haven’t solved the knotty and intractable artistic problems that bedevil every creative work, or, faced with the horrors of rewrite after rewrite, have taken the easy way out. It can fail if it is just another pop pastiche, floating along on the grandeur of operatic convention, ear and eye candy for a new generation of operagoers.

But even then, it would hardly be the first new opera to flounder. This is Neef’s greatest triumph with Hadrian, that he has been unafraid to push the opera towards its reality in sound and sight. In an international world where new opera is so difficult and expensive, bedevilled by delays and false starts and outright stillbirths, he has persevered to the end, probably spending upwards of two million of his cherished and hard-won funding dollars on a production that has so far failed to attract any co-commissioning partners. Hadrian will succeed first and foremost because it showed up – it will be presented as planned on the Four Seasons mainstage, undoubtedly attracting international attention, announcing the COC’s ability to walk the walk of new commissions. With a dozen screaming demons undoubtedly bellowing in Neef’s ear that the opera is a mistake, he will nonetheless march it into the world on October 13, unbowed and unafraid. (Well, at least unbowed.)

And let’s put away the increasingly irrelevant and odious pop music/serious music dichotomy that swirls around Rufus Wainwright and Hadrian. Where would you put the American Nico Muhly, who has worked both sides of the street, whose Marnie, based on the Hitchcock classic, is opening this season at the Met. Where, indeed, would you put Philip Glass? Opera has always been fluid and porous at its boundaries (the Habanera was based on a current cabaret song when Bizet re-wrote it for Carmen). That is one of its strengths. And let’s also not forget the other, often overlooked originality of Hadrian: not only its recovery of opera’s always present, but often repressed, eroticism (there’s already a nudity warning on the COC website) but that it is an explicitly and unashamedly queer work occupying centre stage at the Four Seasons Centre. Here’s a prediction – that if, as I suspect, everyone is talking about the production details after it opens, no one will care anymore about the score and whether it’s any good or worthy to be presented. The reaction to opera is unpredictable. However, anything that engages an audience, pro or con, can’t be all bad. That’s what opera has always been about. After all, it wasn’t until several revivals of Carmen later that critics could get past the “immorality” presented on stage to actually discuss Bizet’s score.

Hadrian will succeed, even if it fails, because many great operas have succeeded when they have first failed. And Hadrian may not be great – few operas, of today, or yesterday, have been. Hadrian is a success because it has announced to opera audiences the world over that the COC is a place that dares, a place that is willing and able to break down all the barriers that separate the conventional operatic stage from the currents and passions and jouissance of the rest of the world. For once, even though they are seeing a piece set in ancient Rome, COC audiences will not have to trade the omnicultural carnival of the Osgoode Subway Station for the hermetic confines of the Four Seasons Centre when they go to the opera. For once, the two worlds will travel in synchronicity, both alive to the terrors and dangers, joys and exuberance, of actual lived life.

Robert Harris is a writer and broadcaster on music in all its forms. He is the former classical music critic of the Globe and Mail and the author of the Stratford Lectures and Song of a Nation: The Untold Story of O Canada.

I'm a composer, pianist and self-isolating accordionist.

I released a solo piano album at the end of March about climate change called, A Little Dark Music vol. 2, it was released exactly on the 10th anniversary of the original album. The original album launched a whole North American (sustainably-planned) tour. This one ended up being released with little fanfare as I wasn't prepared for the quick and drastic changes as they unfolded in March around the world.

The premiere of my environmentally-themed piece, Pedal Music, was supposed to happen in Ecuador this June. Hopefully it will still circle the streets of Quito this October. I have a couple of chamber album projects in the works. For the first album, Project Dovetail, I was supposed to be in the recording studio from April to June working with other musicians. I very much miss this part of the creative process.

I've been fortunate to connect with soloists online during this pandemic who have been recording and sharing my new 'Music for Self-Isolation' solo pieces from their homes (http://frankhorvat.com/composition/music-self-isolation). It has been a wonderful experience working with so many talented musicians from all over the world through social media and email. Would be really nice to be in the same room as all of them but I’ll cherish being in the recording studio even more when I get to go back there.

Feel free to drop me an email (contactme@frankhorvat.com), connect on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/frankhorvat1) or listen to my music on Spotify or Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/frankhorvatofficial).

I’ve seen Toronto change over the last 27 years but nothing as drastic as what has occurred these past two months. I can only imagine how this will alter the city in the coming years. I'm hoping positive change can come out of our experiences this Spring.

I am Nurhan Arman, music director and conductor of Sinfonia Toronto.

We have postponed our 'Cellissimo' concert with cellist Stéphane Tétreault that was scheduled for April 3 at Glenn Gould Studio and a repeat of the program on April 4 for the Algoma Conservatory Concert Series in Sault Ste-Marie, but we did have to cancel our May 2 'Beethoven & Ginastera' concert in George Weston Recital Hall. Our guest artist for May 2 would have been pianist Marika Bournaki, who was a wonderful soloist with us several seasons ago; we hope we can re-invite her eventually.

Our website sinfoniatoronto.com is updated continually. We are happy to respond to inquiries from the website's Contact page or emails to info@sinfoniatoronto.com. And we welcome anyone who would like to, to subscribe to our e-news. That goes out every couple of weeks, and during this quarantine time it frequently includes a home video by one of our musicians.

I am Debra Chandler, and I have the privilege of working with a wide range of professional musicians who perform under the banner of Concerts in Care Ontario for our aging population in long-term and memory care (LTCs), assisted and independent living facilities. We perform in more than 115 facilities in Ottawa, Pembroke, Sudbury, Windsor, London, and the GTA. 

As a result of COVID-19, we can no longer perform the remaining 300+ in-person concerts inside these seniors' facilities, and the research we had planned with Kate Dupuis of the Sheridan Centre for Aging, has been deferred. We also had a pilot series of concert-lectures ready to go for the Resident Doctors at McMaster University.

It will likely be 2021 before we can even contemplate returning to inside concerts in LTCs, but we suspect retirement/independent living homes will open in the fall. We will be there as soon as safety allows. And the research will follow. AND, once McMaster is up and running, we will run there, too!

In the meanwhile, the isolation and health situations compel us to help in any way we can. We have, with our colleagues in BC, Alberta, and Quebec, started production of a series of 30-minute video concerts called "From Our Home to Your Home." This is an opportunity to ensure music for the seniors, and some decent work for the musicians. They are recorded in an up-close and personal frame with the artists addressing their audiences through the camera in a manner that makes the listeners feel as though they are in the same room with the performers, just like in-person Concerts in Care performances!

People reading this interested in finding us can stay in touch with what we are doing and planning by visiting www.concertsincareontario.com, or by contacting me by email at debra@concertsincareontario.com