MUSIC; Ich Bin ein Music Lover
By JEREMY EICHLER
Published: August 15, 2004
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.