Tash Siddiqui, Flying the Republican Colours: The 1929 Krolloper Production of ‘Der fliegende Holländer’

March 2012, Volume 6, Number 1, 15–34.

Nearly ten years after the famously avant-garde production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer opened at the largely Jewish-led Berlin Krolloper, Hans Severus Ziegler’s 1938 exhibition of so-called Degenerate Music included a panel attacking Otto Klemperer, the conductor of the production. Featuring a crudely-cropped photograph of a particularly demented-looking Klemperer, the panel described the production thus: ‘The Jew Otto Klemperer, as Generalmusikdirektor of the Kroll-Oper in Berlin, carried out the main attacks against Richard Wagner. His production of Der fliegende Holländer became one of the biggest theatre scandals of the Weimar system.’ The panel was captioned ‘Juden gegen Wagner’, or ‘Jews against Wagner’.