Barenboim plans concert to make Hitler 'turn in his grave'

Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor who has made it his business to use music as a bridge between old enemies, is stepping over a new frontier.

Next year he will conduct his Divan Orchestra, of young Arab andJewish musicians, in an opera by Richard Wagner at a Berlin theatre built by the Nazis.

Ithas beensix years since Barenboim bashed through Israel's unofficial ban on performing Wagner, an anti-Semitic composer whose writings influenced Adolf Hitler.

But this concert will go further, asmusicians of Semitic origin join to play Wagner together in an arena built by the Nazis as part of the complex for the 1936 Olympics.

"Can you imagine that?" Barenboim said Wednesday in Germany's Die Zeit newspaper.

"The Waldbuehne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves."

Barenboim created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999 with Palestinian-born writer Edward Said, reasoning that music was excellent ground for peaceful co-operation between Jews and Arabs.

The orchestra, now based in Spain, has already played Tristan and Isolde, with theIsraeli musicians attracted to Wagner's operabecause it gave the brass section a lot to play.

"It had purely musical reasoning," Barenboim said. "With Wagner, it is never about the politics or Wagner the person, but about his great music."

Barenboim, who was born in Argentina and holds Israeli citizenship, acknowledged his choice of repertoire is provocative.

But as an artist, he saidhe seeks to separate Wagner the man, whose politics he calls "despicable," from Wagner the composer, whose music cannot be ignored.

"I had long pondered how it was possible that such gruesome despots like Hitler and Stalin could be such huge lovers of music," he told Die Zeit.

"My explanation: For them the music was a kind of secret garden, their own realm, that had nothing to do with real life."