Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums.
Great bafflement during a recent week in Berlin, city of bleak exteriors, whose human and cultural rewards are almost wholly indoors — in its wealth of concert halls, opera houses and museums.
Museums are, 20 years after reunification, ever-reliable. The music scene is passing and evanescent. I had hoped to find, over the Easter period, seasonal relevance of the most exalted kind — a St Matthew Passion or Parsifal on or around Good Friday itself. But schedules were bare, if not literally barren. The nearest with Wagner was an old Tristan reputed to be weary and routine; with Bach, I happened, in the course of my explorations, upon the Maxim Gorki Theatre, and realised with a frisson that it was in this fine little building that Mendelssohn had directed the landmark revival in 1829 that launched the St Matthew Passion after decades of neglect as the greatest imaginable work of its sort.
More routine than even the drabbest Tristan were the programmes associated with Pierre Boulez’s 85th birthday: so Pollini plays the 2nd Sonata; so the maître himself conducts the Philharmonic in Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces and his own Improvisations sur Mallarmé. It’s a long time since Adorno declared that ‘modern music is growing old’: this is fossilisation incarnate, as frozen in ritual as the absent Bach and Wagner, without the excuse of supreme suitability that still obtains even in a post-Nietzschean world. I was prepared to waive reluctance since I did want to see for the first time the famous interior of the Philharmonie, and experience its remarkable seating plan and its celebrated acoustic. But when it transpired that the event was nearly sold out, and the cheapest available tickets began at €66 (£58), I ‘took the Gospel’ and passed by on the other side to take consolation in the adjacent Berlin Musical Instrument Museum, the Philharmonie’s poor relation architecturally and, once within, in its absence of chic.
This potentially pleasing space, filled by interesting and curious items, has an air of neglect (though it is quite well attended). Noble horns, trumpets, trombones, tubas could do with a rub of Brasso; lovely stringed instruments with the flick of a duster. Above all, it lacked noises. Fortepianos, harmoniums, organs piped or electronic, could easily be imagined, but the wilder rarities — instruments both blown or bowed disguised as walking sticks; sprung coils, player-pianos, a one-man band, and other freaks of fantasy — sat mute and inglorious. Especially melancholy was a sealed case containing three specimens of tromba marina (neither a trumpet nor marine; rather, a single string slackly stretched up a narrow wooden neck, capable only of a defunctive twang). Especially frustrating was the amazing orchestrion with its banks of strings, woodwinds, brasses and percussion looming behind glass wardrobe doors. Headphones lay to hand; all very well, but the living texture of actual sound was absent as though one were in an art gallery.
Posters in the underground advertised a new Eugene Onegin, a Carmen (instead of Parsifal? Nietzsche would be delighted!) and a disconcerting image for Verdi’s Otello of Desdemona, not her consort, in blackface. Well, one doesn’t make the trip to Berlin for any of these. And pacing the streets can exhaust body and spirit with their grim unrelieved uniformity and the virtual total absence of the nooks and crannies of surprise that keep the stroller ever-alert in London, Paris or New York.
No, Berlin’s chief glory lies on the internal walls of its museums; from the Pergamon to the celestial austerity of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s temple of 20th-century art, via the compacted wonders of the Museum Island, the oasis of the Kulturforum (amid deserts of stone, concrete, Tarmac that make the South Bank seem almost homely), to other places widely scattered around the terrain. Rather than settling comfortably into seats for concert or opera, I ricked my back craning forward for three or four hours every day to peer (till reproved by fierce attendants) at the incalculable wealth of wonderful things for the eyes. One must suffer for Art, even while acknowledging that it is given us lest we perish from the truth (Nietzsche again).
Comments