Berlin glows: Barenboim Beethoven Staatsoper livestream

Berlin, gleaming gold in the autumn evening sunshine - Daniel Barenboim Beethoven Symphony no 9 in the open air, on the Unter Den Linden, part of the Staatsoper für Alle festival,  a gala marking the re-opening of the Staatsoper building after seven years’ renovation and improvements. Thousands of people (close to 10,000?) packed in the length of the boulevard and perhaps in the squares beyond, all paying rapt attention to a superb performance.  Barenboim conducted the Staatsoper Orchestra with René Pape, Burkhard Fritz, Diana Damrau and  Okka von der Damerau.  Barenboim conducted stylishly, the orchestra, looking relaxed, responding with verve.   As always, excellence sells itself !  A happy crowd, kids and old folk, there for the music, looking slightly embarrassed when the cameras panned on them.  This is what "music education" should be - no silly gimmicks.  Sadly, I don't think this could be done in the UK.

How astonished Beethoven would have been. "Alle Menschen werden Bruder,Wo den sanfter Flugel weilt".  Hundreds of thousands listening in, all over the world, wonderful music, presented without hype.This was modern technology used to maximum advantage without overkill.  Even the filming was good - the cameras picked up on tiny details like the elderly couple resting against each other, and the handshake between two of the singers at the very end.

And of course, Berlin itself. Once a provincial backwater, transformed in the Age of Enlightenment by Frederick the Great and his ancestors and successors, who are laid to rest in the  Cathedral crypt in elegant but simple tombs : "the Prussian spirit" with its values of integrity, piety and dedication.   At the other end of the Unter den Linden, the Brandenburger Tor, with its grand columns and Quadriga above. The great grandson of the architect, a relative of Henning von Treskow who was executed by the Nazis, observed wryly that the horses in the statue were placed so their metaphorical droppings would land on the heads of rulers who lost touch with reality.  And so the Quadriga has witnessed the comings and goings of despots of all kinds.  Not far away, either, the university named after Alexander von Humboldt who pioneered modern geography and natural science, and the Museuminsel with its amazing collections: relics from Egypt and Assyria through to paintings of the Romantic era, all part of an audacious vision of a cosmopolitan world.   Had Victoria not married Albert, where would London be? The livestream  will be rebroadcast soon on arte.tv for 30 days. 

Berlin - Symphony of a Great City DOWNLOAD

Berlin : Symphony of a Great City (1927) is showing again in London this weekend, but here is the FULL DOWNLOAD. It's also available on DVD, which is worth getting as it's a cleaner version with music, because this is a film that you can watch over and over again without getting bored - like a symphony! It's not a film in the usual sense of a narrative motion picture. Instead the very concept comes from abstract music. Multiple, diverse images are used like themes in music.  They're layered and juxtaposed like musical ideas. The images are grouped in several main "movements" that as a whole follow a trajectory from morning to night. A snapshot of the life of the city. Please read my analysis of this wonderful work HERE, describing the structure and individual images some of which aren't readily obvious.

The idea of film as music wasn't unique, since early audiences were often more used to music than movies, and several early films unfold as "movements". The full title of Nosferatu is Nosferatu : eine synfonie des Grauens, "a symphony of horrors". This, too, is available in full download on this site. But Berlin : Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt develops the idea on a grand scale. Because it's abstract, much more detail is possible, and more possibilties of interpretation. Like music! The Director, Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) also made experimental films, bypassing actors and plots. He used technolgy as a pa[nter might, exploring the possibilties of light, shadow and movement for their own sake.  The process dictates the form. Please see one of Ruttmann's early Lichtspiele HERE. They were made in co-operation with Hanns Eisler, who wrote music to be played live as the films were screened.  So again, the concept of music combined with film before the technology to make sound movies was even possible.
Plenty more on this site on earlty art film, Eisler, Weimar etc and many full downloads.

Death of the German Emperor - McGonagall

So spake William Topaz McGonagall, never one not to enjoy a funeral, turning his flinty gaze upon Berlin, and the Begrabnis of the Kaiser.

"YE sons of Germany, your noble Emperor William now is dead.
Who oft great armies to battle hath led;
He was a man beloved by his subjects all,
Because he never tried them to enthral."

"Twas in the year of 1888, and on March the 16th day,
That the peaceful William's remains were conveyed away
To the royal mausoleum of Charlottenburg, their last resting-place,
The God-fearing man that never did his country disgrace."

T"he funeral service was conducted in the cathedral by the court chaplain, Dr. Kogel,
Which touched the hearts of his hearers, as from his lips it fell....

"Then there was a solemn pause as the kings and princes took their places,
Whilst the hot tears are trickling down their faces,
And the mourners from shedding tears couldn't refrain;
And in respect of the good man, above the gateway glared a bituminous flame."

"And as the people gazed on the weird-like scene, their silence was profound;
And the shopkeepers closed their shops, and hotel-keepers closed in the doorways,
And with torchlight and gaslight, Berlin for once was all ablaze.
The authorities of Berlin in honour of the Emperor considered it no sin,
To decorate with crape the beautiful city of Berlin;
Therefore Berlin I declare was a city of crape,
Because few buildings crape decoration did escape."

Read the whole sorry tale here and more on the Bard

Frederick the Great and the Enigma of Prussia

Watch Frederick the Great and the Enigma of Prussia which is now available on demand on BBCTV4 iPlayer. It's superb, an excellent example of what can be done by film makers who don't dumb down. The presenter is a real historian, Christopher Clark, whose book is one of the key sources. Also read Giles McDonough and David Fraser.

Frederick the Great shaped Prussia, and in doing so shaped western  culture as a whole. Der alte Fritz is  influential even today. He is surprisngly "modern". His bad luck was to be born a Prince because that carried obligations. To harden him for a difficult job, his father abused him, killing the son's boyfriend while he watched. As the film says, Frederick withdrew emotionally, "the mirror that dare not reveal what made it". As soon as he became King, he attacked Austria: political Vatermord. Conquering Silesia and Saxony changed the whole political balance, making way for the unification whose fallout would lead to two world wars. Austria's a rump, but the Federal Republic is Europe's biggest player.

Frederick didn't do kingly in the usual sense. He was a brilliant miltary strategist, who wernt into battle himself, dressed in a plain costume. Even more radically, he embraced the Enlightenment. In France Louis XV ruled brutishly as Absolute Monarch. Frederick was no democrat but Voltaire was house guest at Sans Souci for three years. Frederick's enlightened ideas led to an intellectual Renaissance. Prussia modernized through idealism, the emphasis on learning and intellect. Humboldt, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Lessing, many others. Educating the people, and changing society from above staved off revolution, which kind of explains the dilemmas of the 20th century.

The filmakers don't do the usual caricature waffle. They get real experts and German experts at that. To discuss the Junkers, they get Heinrich von Kleist-Retzow, no less. Much nonsense is written about the Prussian military class, but as Von Kleist explains, the idea of honour was ingrained. Duty and self discipline, not petty selfishness. Knightly ideals, as relevant to the idea of Enlightenment as to the Teutonic Knights and real Christian ideals. Von Kleist's ancestor wrote The Prince of Homburg, who could have been a prototype of young Frederick the Great, except that the real Prince was tougher material and understood his place in society. Duty screws people up, but sometimes it's the nobler way. By being a King, Frederick achieved much more for the world than if he'd run off and had a good time.

Education and an effficient military machine - is this the enigma of Prussia? (Hitler was a southerner). After the battle of Leuthen, the Prussian army spontaeously broke into song - Bach, Nun danket alle Gott. If Frederick hadn't had a demanding day job, he might have been a musician. He was an extremely accomplished flautist who composed and commissioned difficult works. Perhaps in music, Frederick revealed his sensitive soul, obliquely. It's never occured to me that he wasn't gay, but that wasn't something he would have expressed openly as it wasn't relevant to his public life. Again, the idea of service to society rather than self. He had no illusions. This is his famous portrait, where he's shown with wrinkles and jowls, no fake vanity and self image. Even now, politicans could learn from him.

BBCTV4 is also running other shows with a German theme, but they're nowhere as good as this. The one on Berlin is shamefully shallow even though it claims to deal with "Dangerous Ideas", prettiy much parallel with the ideas in this film. At one stage the presenter tells a Berlin drag queen that he's a presenter, and needs tips for his makeup. Is he kidding? Drag queens are much more interesting for who they are and why, not what lipstick they use. Though like Frederick the Great, they'd never admit it. Me, I'd let the diva do the show.
Please see my other posts on Berlin and Prussian culture.

The White Ribbon - Haneke

Michael Haneke's film The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) at the Barbican is worth rushing out for. I was going to wait for the DVD (also available on download) but I'm glad I didn't wait. It's won the Palme d'Or at Cannes but that alone means little: this a very compelling movie whatever the accolades.

It's set in 1913, but framed by the voice of an old man recalling events that happened long ago when he was the village teacher, and says "it might explain what happened later". Don't, however, fall into the trap of assuming it's some kind of pseudo-history. This film is about human nature and could apply anywhere.

The village preacher punishes his kids by making them wear a white ribbon to remind them to be pure in heart and mind. He loves them and genuinely believes he's guiding them well. By the standards of the time it wasn't so unusual to think masturbation caused death. So purity as ideal and symbol. But the story isn't nearly as simple as you'd think. Many dangerous things are happening in this placid little village. Someone causes the doctor to fall off his horse. Two children are brutally tortured. A barn is burned, cabbages in a field decapitated. Who is doing these things and why? Are the events even connected? As the old man says, perhaps the greater damage was that it created a climate of suspicion, everyone sniffing out evil, even where it wasn't. Then the real "white band", the villagers' innate purity, was lost forever.

This film doesn't do stereotypes. The Baron is the main employer but he's not a remote capitalist exploiter. With status come feudal obligations. He knows the locals personally. When a woman is killed in an accident in his barn, her son wrecks the cabbage patch. Then the Baron's son is beaten up - he hangs out with the local kids, too. Yet the Baron tells the village he knows it wasn't the woman's son. In any case, he tells the villagers, Felder (the woman's husband) is so straight and so upright, he'd die rather than be sneaky.

What's interesting, too, is that the narrative is oblique. It's a series of vignettes which hint rather than explain. The teacher sees the preacher's son walking dangerously on the edge of a bridge. "Now I know God doesn't want me to die", says the kid. His little brother looks after a wounded bird. The steward's son has pushed the baron's son into the brook (this time he's quickly saved by the steward's other son). When questioned by his father he denies it, but as the father leaves the boy plays the baron's son's flute - it's proof, without the need for words.

One day, the teacher encounters Frau Wagner, the midwife, who's rushing off to town because she "knows" who the perpetrators are. It turns out that the doctor, who'd been sleeping with her and his own daughter, has disappeared with the kids. But the midwife doesn't come back either. The local kids are at the doctor's house, trying to look in. Why has the midwife barricaded the windows, in a tiny Dorfchen where doors are left open to all?

The teacher remembers how the band of kids were present at all the strange incidents. He doesn't know (though we do) that the preacher's daughter killed her dad's pet canary by spiking it with nail scissors. The teacher questions the kids, but they're so used to clamming up, they act innocent. So he goes to the preacher, who goes berserk, as any parent would, although it's not just his kids. He threatens mayhem on the teacher if word gets out. But he doesn''t act. Nor does the midwife return. All is unresolved.

Much has been made of the sensational parts of the story, such as the doctor's son seeing his dad and sister in bed, but the film is about wider concepts like taking responsibility. Hence old peasant Felder, whom the baron had exonerated, is found having committed suicide right after the barn where his wife died is razed in a dramatic fire. The baron's wife says she's leaving him, not because there's another man but because she doesn't want her kids growing up in this unhealthy environment. And perhaps the teacher becomes a tailor because his girlfriend's father - a totally direct man who gets straight to the point and doesn't do chat - asks him why he didn't take over his dad's business in the first place.

Watch the trailers HERE 
Get the DVD HERE

Because English language audiences don't know anything about Germany other than Hitler, they might see The White Ribbon as a simplistic allegory about the war. But Haneke connects the story to 1914 for much more complex reasons. Anglophiles assume the First World War was the Western Front, not realizing that the devastation on the Eastern Front was infinitely greater. Both world wars stemmed from events in central and eastern Europe, rather than from the western peripheries. But history is written to suit the winners, and English is so dominant a language that it pushes other accounts out of the picture.

Setting The White Ribbon is that specific time and place adds extra resonance if you think beyond Anglophone assumptions. We might deduce that the film is set in East Prussia because of the reference to Frederick the Great as flautist, and to general knowledge about north German society. German communities, were established as far as Russia around 1000 years ago, nominally under the control of various kingdoms, but effectively self-contained. Hence the Junkers, on whom so much is blamed. In practice, though, feudal throwbacks maintained different values. Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit bis an dein kühles Grab. Honest and honourable until the grave.

The German communities of Prussia and beyond no longer exist. They were subject to ethnic cleansing in 1918 and again in 1945. Of course that doesn't diminish what happened to Jews and Communists in Nazi times. But the point of the film is that evil comes from human nature, and innocents suffer. Everyone gets caught up in the madness, culpable or not. Which is why real purity comes from being direct, like the teacher's girlfriend's father, and the old peasant widower.

Like the period it depicts, Haneke's The White Ribbon ends in a kind of of limbo. The teacher never finds out what happened because he left the village soon after. Then the war came, overturning everything. By the time the teacher became an old man, the world he knew was obliterated. What happened to the people? Where did they end up, what did they do?

The photo is a real family, taken around this period from an archive collection. No one knows who they are or where they ended up, but in the moment when the photo was taken, they're preserved forever happy and smiling.

Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt - download

This is "Berlin, Symphony of a Great City", Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt, a film made in 1927 directed by Walther Ruttmann. A symphony, but a silent movie? Partly they didn't have the technology then but this film actually works better with silence, for many reasons.

First, you concentrate on the images and the way they flow together to create a "symphony" in the original sense of the word, a weaving together of images. And what images - trains moving into the heart of the city, the lines so carefully choreographed that they move almost into one another, telephone cables crisscrossing in the sky, the innards of a telephone exchange dissected to show how thousands of lines cross and don't cross. The S Bahn and U Bahn and recognizable stations. This is abstract art, using real images, incredibly beautiful. Even now it looks modern, but in 1927 this was truly avant garde, for it celebrates state of the art technology.

Second, there's no need for narrative as this film depicts the life of a big city, teeming with people, each with individual narratives of their own. Each has his or her own life beyond what's caught on film, They've come from somewhere and will be going off to somewhere else, but for a few frames they're immortal, caught on screen. Most of them probably never knew they were being filmed. All of them are now dead, even probably the laughing babies in their prams and the kids scampering in the gutter (an image that any modern parent would howl at).

Third, the film doesn't judge. It's not some simplistic Marxist dialectic. All people and objects were filmed as they existed. The monk watching the demo, the beggar seeking alms, the old woman painfully climbing up the stairs to a church, rich and poor, old and young. A black man smiles in one shot, and in the background of another, two Indonesians in sarongs walk past - no explanation. A pretty girl in pale silk, her scarf blowing in the breeze, caught forever in motion. Animals and humans, lions and street dogs, beggars and government big brass. A little girl tries to pull her dolly pram up some steps, but fails. Two slightly older girls walk past, with looks that say "What a baby". A tram speeds past an elaborate 19th century hearse, pulled by horses.

Horses and streetcars, trains and tiny propeller airplanes that take us up for an aerial view of the city - almost unprecedented back then. The plane is Lufthansa but not the Lufthansa we know today. Everything seems excitingly modern - the bride and her family look as if it's the first time they've been in a car. Yet so much they take for granted is unknown to us now : elaborate puppets in shops, and in the streets musicians playing strange hurdy-gurdys we cannot hear. There's a procession of men dressed in weird costumes - they're advertising salt, of all things. And the footmen around the official building wear 18th century costumes - no one bats an eyelid, it must have been normal uniform. Footmen? yes, coaches with horses, straight out of Frederick The Great.

The film is like a symphony too in that it works in "movements" or Aktes - transport, food, night. And like a symphony it flows together theme by theme, images juxtaposed impressionistically to create the feel of a great city, alive and thriving. These aren't actors, but real people, There's hardly any mis-en-scène except perhaps the sequence with the dangerous ride in the funfair spliced with the desperately unhappy woman and the horrified crowd waving at something fallen from a bridge. I'm not sure whether Brecht and Eisler's On Suicide was written before or after this film, but it's a climactic moment. "In diesem Lande, und in diesem Zeit... there should be no melancholy evenings, or high bridges, over the water...... for these are dangerous...." But the image, now, is poignant because we know the film was made on the precipice of German history, even though the filmmakers didn't know it then.

Everyone in this film is dead now, even the babies in their prams. We know what was going to happen in Berlin barely five years later, and the apocalypse to come. The thing about history is that it's happening around us all the time. We don't know it as it happens, because it "becomes" history only in hindsight, when things seem to fall into analyzable place. The film makers are presenting us with an almost - not quite - objective source material which we can interpret in ways they probably could not foresee. History is no more than an ordering of documentary materials according to principles that might not be evident at the time they happen. That's why history is an art, and much more dangerous than the way it's taught in schools. It should be a search for truth, but often it's a way of rearranging reality to serve a purpose.

I tried to think of music to go with this but it's impossible, It would deface the dignity of these images, which bear silent testimony to a world long gone, which sometimes we can still catch echos of today. Better to switch off the world around you, and sit suspended in time, alone, for an hour, and watch this amazing film as it unfolds. This movie can be watched fullscreen and freeze framed if you want to check details.
Please see my other posts about Berlin, Furtwangler, The Wall, and German history

Berlin Furtwängler and the Philharmonie

Another photo from the series of Berlin 1959-1964 mentioned below. This was when the Philharmonie site was on the edge, literally, just in the west but visible from the east. We forget the symbolic importance.

The Berlin Philharmonic was an icon in the Third Reich, too, not quite for the reasons the regime would have wanted. Wilhelm Furtwängler was the subject of de-nazification proceedings because he didn't escape into exile and played concerts in Poland just before it was invaded. I've read some of the original archives, see HERE. Yet Furtwängler also fought Goebbels and won (sort of) which few others dared or could get away with. He went "on strike" for several years, returning to the podium because he realized that the human soul can be more powerful than regimes.


This is the famous clip where he's seen conducting Beethoven 9 for Hitler's Birthday, 1942. It's sometimes cited as evidence that he collaborated. Of course it was propaganda, but in totalitarian states such things happen. It doesn't follow that what's on the surface matches what's in the heart. Anyone who knows Beethoven 9 knows the words, and knows what Beethoven - and Schiller - thought of tyrants. Party goons probably didn't know or care, but for Goebbels, who did know (and knew how Furtwängler felt about him) it wasn't quite so comfortable.

Incidentally, watch the Berlin photo sequence full screen. There's a shot which shows a small, insignificant piece of graffiti, which says "Berlin muss eins sein". Several shots of graffiti with "KZ" scrawled on the wall, in case anyone still doesn't know why people feel so strongly about the fall of the wall. When the wall fell, it was covered in graffiti. It was a political statement. Earlier, graffiti could get you killed.

What the fall of the Berlin Wall means to me

A view of from the Potsdamerplatz along Stresemannstrasse in 1962, Please follow the link as the man who took this shot has a whole series of photos, in two sets 1959/60 and 1962, which can be viewed in photostream. Watch both series as slide presentations - they're very moving.

The division lasted only 40 years, and before that Germany had only been united under Bismarck. But the fall of the wall needs commemorating because of what it stands for.

Once it seemed that the Iron Curtain would never lift. It seemed almost impossible to imagine that the stranglehold of the Soviet Bloc would ever end. When Kurt Masur led the non-violent protest in Leipzig, many held their breath, expecting reprisals to follow. No one had forgotten 1956 or 1968. when tanks rolled in elsewhere. Yet the simple, brave Leipzig stand snowballed. Europe isn't divided in the same way now. Of course there are problems, but it's altogether less insane. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes that things can change, no matter what the obstacles might be. And without violence.

The other day in the UK people commemorated the "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605, an inept attempt by Catholic plotters to blow up Parliament. Relative to that actual danger the plotters presented, it tapped into jingoism and uglier things. When people burn an effigy on Guy Fawkes night they're commemorating hate. So it does matter to remember the Fall of the Wall, because it commemorates another way of thinking and being. It may be fashionable to be cynical, but sneering is a symptom of cancer in the soul. There are still walls all over the world, physical or otherwise, so remembering Berlin - and Leipzig - is an act of faith that might doesn't always vanquish right.

A few weeks after Masur made his stand in Leipzig, the Gewandhaus Orchestra came to the Sheldonian in Oxford for a concert, scheduled months before, in very different circumstances. It was their first appearance outside since the situation had developed. The turmoil was still going on, even then no one dared hope for too much. When the musicians trooped in, the atmosphere was palpable, hundreds of people willing them to know they were supported. They looked overwhelmed, looking all round, at the building, the people. The programme was all-Beethoven, and they played their hearts out.