[Dixielandjazz] Berlin - Music City

[Steve Barbone]

          For the Classical Music Lovers on the List, but also a message
          about "Musical Cange" in a city that supports 8 orchestras and
          3 Opera Companies. Note especially paragraphs 8, 9 and 10 if
          you read this article.


Cheers,
Steve Barbone

August 15, 2004 - NY TIMES By JEREMY EICHLER


    Ich Bin ein Music Lover


BERLIN

THE satirist Karl Kraus once described turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna 
as a city whose streets were paved not with asphalt but with culture. 
Today his description could not be better suited to Berlin, a capital 
brimming with creative activity. Theater companies ply their wares in 
hidden cobblestone courtyards, bohemian artists gather in majestically 
crumbling buildings, and festivals of every variety pile up on weekends 
like verbs at the end of a German sentence.

Certainly, when it comes to classical music, few cities are so 
abundantly and audaciously full of life. As an inheritance from its 
decades of division into East and West, unified Berlin boasts a 
gloriously impractical number of musical institutions: eight orchestras 
and three opera companies. Municipal finances are in a shambles, and 
institutional squabbling abounds, but if you tuned out all the 
background noise this summer, you could find a thrilling array of 
options: fiendishly good orchestral concerts, willfully scandalous opera 
productions, open-air concerts on a beautifully restored square, 
contemporary chamber music and even music piped underwater into a 
swimming pool.

New York, of course, has its own claim to sonic plenitude. But musical 
experiences in Berlin offer something qualitatively different, an 
intellectual energy and cohesion that have much to do with the 
particular niche classical music occupies in contemporary German 
society. In short, it is integrated and taken seriously.

I first glimpsed the special qualities of the scene here at a Berlin 
Philharmonic concert in early June. Claudio Abbado was conducting for 
the first time since he stepped down as the orchestra's music director 
in 2002. As you might expect on such an occasion, well-to-do Berliners 
of a certain age turned out in quantity. But in addition, young 
bespectacled listeners, dressed in well-worn suits and looking as if 
they had come straight from a heated cafe debate over Habermas, pulled 
up to the Philharmonie on rickety old bikes. They were there because 
something significant was about to happen in the Berlin musical world, 
and for an impressively wide circle, it actually seemed to matter.

Mr. Abbado did not disappoint, leading a gripping performance of 
Mahler's Sixth Symphony. The Berlin Philharmonic has mighty depth to its 
string sound and a refined power in its brasses, and Mr. Abbado's 
reading was responsive both to the music's details and to its epic 
sweep. The audience called him back for solo bows long after the 
orchestra had left the stage.

There was an intensity to the listening that night, a depth to the 
adoration of the crowd, that suggested a particular connection to this 
Austro-Germanic repertory and perhaps a deeper link between classical 
music and German culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Germanness in 
music became an article of faith, alternately propounded and exploited 
by figures ranging from Wagner to Hitler to Thomas Mann, who in his 
novel "Doctor Faustus" allegorized his country's entire modern history 
in the person of a brilliant and disturbed Schoenbergian composer. In 
practical terms, as one traverses city streets named after famous 
musical figures, one is reminded that today's Berlin Philharmonic 
embodies what is, among many other things, a fantastic local tradition.

But Germany's musical vitality also owes something to a mainstream 
assumption that classical music has a place at the table alongside pop 
culture, and not merely as a generic signifier of gentility and 
refinement or as a tool for enhancing relaxation, romance or a fancy dinner.

Anyone used to seeing classical music marginalized might have been 
astonished by the scene last month at the opening of the Bayreuth 
Festival, where celebrities and politicians turned out in droves, along 
with the national media. With so much hoopla, it was hard to believe 
that the whole scene centered on, of all things, an opera festival.

That level of excitement speaks not just to how Germans respect the 
classical tradition, but also, in a way, to how they disrespect it. The 
more audacious of the summer's opera productions, for example, used 
sadistic bloodletting, pornograpy and repulsive stage projections of 
dead rodents to accompany cherished works of the standard operatic 
repertory. How to make sense of these excesses?

There are no simple answers to the mysteries of German stagecraft. One 
can argue about the merits of individual productions or the power of 
opera staging to channel a society's darkest collective fantasies, but 
on the most basic level, these trends in German opera reflect a 
fundamental confidence with the repertory, an irreverence born of 
familiarity. Berliners, it seems, are convinced that these works must 
change with the times if they are to remain vital.

There is an important grain of truth here, and you have to wonder 
whether, for example, Franco Zeffirelli's opulent and ultraconservative 
stagings at the Metropolitan Opera alienate new and younger operagoers 
even as they delight faithful fans. But as the revered composer 
Ferruccio Busoni, the wisest of musical Berliners, often warned the 
young radicals who sought his counsel, newness itself can also become a 
fetish, a force as limiting as blind conservatism. The thirst for 
productions with shock value can override judgments of taste and even 
one's ability to be shocked.

Such forces were definitely at play in Calixto Bieito's ridiculous 
setting of Mozart's "Abduction From the Seraglio" in a contemporary 
brothel, full of sex and gore and very little Mozart, at the Komische 
Oper. At the other extreme, one of the most effective productions was 
the simplest and least sensational: Christian Pade's new staging of Hans 
Werner Henze's "Elegy for Young Lovers" at the Staatsoper Unter den 
Linden. The sets for the third act, in which a mountain storm takes the 
lives of a young couple, could not have been more spare, yet the stage 
pictures worked with Henze's hauntingly iridescent music to produce a 
shattering emotional impact.

Berlin's extraordinary modern history — its status as a palimpsest onto 
which memories of imperial splendor, fascist terror and failed Communist 
utopia have all been inscribed — inevitably adds resonance to the city's 
musical life. The Staatsoper itself directly abuts the Bebelplatz, the 
infamous site of the Nazi book-burning in 1933, an event that the 
Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth described unflinchingly at the time 
as the capitulation of the European mind.

The book-burning, just like the closure of Berlin's radical Kroll Opera 
in the 1930's, epitomized the ultimately genocidal obsession with the 
purity of German culture. Against the backdrop of this history, perhaps 
all the Eurotrash on the German stage, even Christoph Schlingensief's 
hapless "Parsifal" at the Wagnerian shrine of Bayreuth, can seem like a 
healthy display of unchecked freedom. Whether it counts as good art is 
another question.

Do average Berlin music fans think about this history when they go to 
hear a bit of Puccini? Probably not. The city's residents have of 
necessity perfected a dance of remembering and forgetting, commemorating 
the past but also tempering its demands. One of the most moving 
memorials in Berlin, at the Bebelplatz, is an underground room lined 
floor-to-ceiling with empty bookshelves. I tried to visit it after the 
Henze performance, only to discover that the entire square has been 
closed while the city builds a new underground garage. Public memory 
lies temporarily closed for reconstruction.

Certainly, signs of Berlin's more recent traumas linger closer to the 
surface. A few portions of the Berlin Wall still stand, and its former 
path is now marked by a double row of bricks, cutting through the city 
like an impossibly long scar. In the music world, the unified Berlin can 
at times still feel remarkably divided. Former Eastern and Western 
institutions have retained separate and largely nonoverlapping 
audiences, even as they compete aggressively for common public funds.

Programming, too, can carry memories of division. The Berlin Symphony 
Orchestra, for example, the predominant ensemble of the former 
Communist-controlled East Berlin, still performs a lot of Russian 
repertory, a cultural legacy that patrons were apparently not ready to 
give up.

Meanwhile, its Western counterpart the Berliner Symphoniker will 
probably fold after having been denied precious public subsidies for its 
next season. To be sure, the musical landscape will shift in the future, 
not least because a new foundation will soon govern all three opera 
houses. Their artistic independence has been assured, but some critics 
and opera fans have been skeptical.

Politics and fiscal pragmatism may continue creeping in on Berlin's 
musical dreams, but it is hard to imagine those forces completely 
transforming this city's allure. Berlin, it seems, thrives on a bit of 
uncertainty as it takes the measure of its complex history while 
tumbling sonorously into the future.