Invited to the Bayreuth Festival this year, Roberto Paternostro will break with an informal, but passionately held, ban on Israeli ensembles performing the work of Richard Wagner when he conducts the Israel Chamber Orchestra playing the composer's Siegfried Idyll on Tuesday at Bayreuth.

The ban dates from 1938 when the then Palestine Orchestra - now the Israel Philharmonic - made the decision in response to the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and the propaganda value the Nazi's had found in the antisemitic views of the composer. Hitler was a frequent visitor to Bayreuth Festival in the 1930s.