Stephen Moss’s guide to the music of Europe’s great cities: Berlin

In putting Berlin under the microscope in the last of our post-Brexit tours of the great cities of Europe, it seems that all roads lead to Kurt Weill. “Berlin will forever be associated with the turbulent times of the 20th century,” says @abkquan, whose suggestions have been a mainstay of these surveys. “The Weimar period produced the definitive Berlin work – Weill’s Threepenny Opera with its many familiar tunes, especially with Lotte Lenya singing Jenny.”
The Threepenny Opera, a collaboration between Weill and Bertolt Brecht based on 18th-century dramatist John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, was premiered at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928, and after some initial resistance was a great success, vindicating Weill’s ambition to reclaim opera as an art form for the people (though Berlin’s elite of course delighted in its scabrous tale of cutthroats and prostitutes).
@abkquan’s point about the cultural and intellectual richness of Germany in the 1920s is well made. While society was in ferment and the postwar economy hopelessly unstable, writers, artists and composers were producing urgent, vivid work. Far from inhibiting artists, the instability and danger proved an inspiration, and fundamental questions about the future direction of Germany were being asked.
Much of the musical excitement of the period can be traced back to the pianist, composer and conductor Ferruccio Busoni, who was born in Italy but made Berlin his home from his late 20s until his death in 1924 at the age of 58. As well as a wonderful pianist, Busoni was at the forefront of introducing contemporary music to Berlin and was also a great teacher of composition, numbering Weill among his pupils.
@abkquan calls Doktor Faust Busoni’s “summation work”, and that was certainly the composer’s ambition. He spent almost a decade working on it, but it was still not quite finished at his death. Rarely staged, not often recorded and generally regarded as brilliant but uneven – like so much of Busoni’s work – it deserves a hearing.
Busoni’s epic piano concerto, premiered in Berlin in 1904, is also a wondrous piece – its 70-minute length and need for a male chorus in the final movement are presumably the reasons it isn’t performed more often. Busoni also wrote for solo piano, though these many works have been overshadowed by his transcriptions of Bach. A composer in urgent need of reappraisal. Busoni, that is, not Bach.
For a lover of classical music, Berlin is perhaps the most rewarding city in the world. @PositivistDinosaur certainly thinks so. “[It] not only supports its justly celebrated orchestra but three opera houses, all with ticket prices a fraction of those in London, and goodness knows how many other musical venues. This summer, Iréne Theorin was singing Brunnhilde there at the same time that Nina Stemme was singing Isolde 400 metres down the road. Is there any other city where that would have been possible?”
@PositivistDinosaur links this glorious present with the intense excitement of the period after the first world war. “The interwar years,” he points out, “saw the premieres [in Berlin] of operatic works by Berg, Hindemith, Milhaud and Schreker, in that extraordinary decade or so of creativity before the Nazis’ rise to power and their banning of ‘degenerate music’.”
Alban Berg’s Wozzeck was first performed at the Berlin State Opera in 1925 under its music director Erich Kleiber, a champion of Berg’s music. It was the banning of Berg’s Lulu in 1934 that led Kleiber to resign his post, leave Germany and begin a peripatetic exile that eventually ended in Argentina – and the reason his son Karl, who grew up to be an equally formidable conductor, became known as Carlos. Erich Kleiber was not Jewish, but chose to give up plum posts in Berlin and at La Scala because of fascism. Staunch defenders of Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler please note.
Paul Hindemith’s relationship with the Nazi authorities was more ambivalent – he made various attempts at compromise before opting for exile in Switzerland in 1938. His opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the German Renaissance artist Matthias Grünewald, was a metaphor for his own struggle to maintain artistic freedom under the Nazis. While working on the opera, Hindemith, who taught at a music school in Berlin, also published a symphony with the same title. Perhaps not surprisingly, the symphony tends to get more outings than the opera.
@abkquan brackets Hans Pfitzner’s 1917 opera Palestrina and Mathis der Maler together as works that set the freedom of the individual artist against an overbearing regime. In Pfitzner’s case, this becomes complicated because he made an accommodation with the Nazis far more damaging than that of contemporaries such as Richard Strauss, and Pfitzner’s reputation, already a little threadbare, has never recovered. Revivals of Palestrina are still met with tut-tutting about his pro-Nazi sympathies.
Yet it is a great opera, and the view that it presages the dilemma faced by composers under the Nazis is a valid one. The composer Palestrina, the hero of the opera, refuses to kowtow to a cardinal who wants him to write a new piece to use in a doctrinal battle he is waging against the pope. Palestrina refuses, but then writes it anyway while in a dreamlike state, and is saved from execution. The metaphor can be read in several ways: there is nobility in refusing to bow to pressure, but also nobility in producing a piece that ultimately saves the polyphonic music the pope is trying to ban. What is incontestable is that the opera contains some inspired music – far too good to be kept hidden because Pfitzner later prostituted himself before the Nazis.
As the conductor Christian Thielemann told me when he conducted Palestrina at Covent Garden in 2001: “What has C sharp minor to do with fascism? Nothing. I am not interested in what composers have eaten or what their political beliefs were. Music doesn’t get better because one person was better than another person.”
Two final thoughts before we take our leave of Berlin. @abkquan, without whose contributions these mini-essays would have been very feeble (thanks to him and all the other commenters for suggestions), reckons we should include David Bowie, who lived in the city in the late 1970s. The obvious discs to include are his Berlin trilogy – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. But even more appropriate – and neatly circular – is Bowie’s version of Weill’s Alabama Song. Truly essence of Berlin.
He also thinks we should mention the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 to mark the tearing down of the wall between the eastern and western halves of the city. “That was a time of hope, of integration, of cultural and intellectual exchanges,” writes @abkquan. “Sadly, a quarter of a century later, the west is again building walls metaphorically or, as Trump proposed, literally.”
Brexit and Trump! How blessed we are. But the wheel will turn again. It always does. The small-mindedness of Trump and the Brexiteers cannot for long compete with the largeness of spirit of a Bernstein. Or, indeed, a Beethoven.
Previous cities in this series: London | Paris | Venice | Helsinki | Prague | Hamburg | Rome | Vienna | Amsterdam
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this series.