Christopher Morley puts his feet up in the best concert venue that Germany can offer.
Though Sir Simon Rattle and his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra were wowing audiences at the BBC Proms in London last week, we shouldn’t forget that there are several other orchestras active in the German capital.
And last weekend I was over there, checking out one of them, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, as it prepares for a major tour of England next spring.
Formerly renowned as the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, it renamed itself in order to be identified more closely with the wonderful performing venue which is its home. I understand the logic, but wouldn’t be best pleased if the CBSO were suddenly to be reborn as the Symphony Hall Orchestra Birmingham.
After extensive fire damage the Konzerthaus, originally built as a theatre, had to be restored, and the work was completed not many years earlier than the building of our own Symphony Hall.
But nothing in the respective concert-rooms could be more different in appearance. Birmingham combines modern functionalism with 1930s ocean-liner sophistication, while Berlin replicates the elegance and graciousness of the 19th century. Chandeliers from the ornate, decorative ceiling overhang the auditorium, and the 1500-capacity audience is seated in swish individual chairs, rather like miniature thrones.
“The seats altogether throughout our various halls cost more than the organ.” Dietmar Hiller, head of Dramaturgie and pre-concert speaker, tells me with relish.
I enjoyed the comfort of my throne during Friday evening’s concert, conducted by the Konzerthaus’ music director, Lothar Zagrosek. Earlier in the day he told me how he has a very friendly relationship with Simon Rattle, and how they both conducted many concerts with the London Sinfonietta in the 1970s and 80s.
Friday’s programme was an interesting one, combining Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Isabelle van Keulen the soloist, in a reading which underlined both the work’s poetic and dramatic aspects, with a masterpiece by a composer scarcely known here in Great Britain: Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie.
This is a 65-minute, 11-movement work with texts mainly by Bertolt Brecht, of bitter political engagement. It was written during the late 1930s, and rails against the Nazis and Hitler. The tone reminded me of Tippett’s Child of our Time and Britten’s War Requiem, but its obvious great ancestor was the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.
And Beethoven and politics is the theme of this year’s Beethovenfest in Bonn over on the western side of Germany, a huge undertaking presenting 134 events over four weeks during the glorious Indian summer which is bathing the composer’s birthplace in a sunshine we have scarcely seen in England this year.
Ilona Schmiel, director of the festival since 2004, is very clear on Beethovenfest’s aims, which are to restore Beethoven’s music to the people after the way it was hijacked by politicians during much of the last century. Both the Nazis and the Communists appropriated the Ninth Symphony for their own purposes – it was even used as background music for the announcement of the death of Hitler.
“Next year is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state, as well as the tenth anniversary of the Festival being held on an annual basis,” she tells me after a refreshing wind quintet concert last Sunday morning in the concert-room of the Hotel Koenigshof on the banks of the mighty river Rhine. “But we didn’t want the politicians taking over the event, so we’re doing the political idea a year early.”
Works by Beethoven are intermingled with those of composers who have been involved in politics in one way or another, whether as messengers (Eisler, Weill, HK Gruber, among many others) or as victims, such as those who perished in the gruesomely “cultural” Theresienstadt ghetto during the Second World War (Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann, and others).
And the insistence upon commissioning several new works, with the help of seriously enlightened sponsorship, underlines the interest that Beethoven, himself derided as being “too modern”, took in contemporary music.
The Beethoven presence is, of course, huge. This year a complete cycle of the symphonies is being performed by the Orchestre National de France under the great, revered Kurt Masur. I heard their opening concert on Saturday evening in the Beethovenhalle (the Symphony Hall acoustic has spoiled me for any others, but it’s a stylish place), with symphonies 1, 2 and 3 – the Eroica, certainly the world’s greatest symphony (I’d challenge to a duel anyone who disagreed), also one with a significant political subtext.
Politics done and dusted, next year’s festival will turn to a consideration of Romanticism in the arts, and there could be nowhere more appropriate for such an exploration than Bonn on the river Rhine which has inspired so many composers and writers.
This is a gorgeous, compact, higgledy-piggledy city, almost everything important – the Beethovenhalle, the Rathaus (Town Hall), the University, the Minster – within comfortable walking distance.
One of the exceptions is the Schumannhaus, a dignified example of late 18th-century domestic architecture built out in what was then the countryside surrounding Bonn.
In 1844 it was turned into a private asylum, and it was here that Schumann installed himself in 1854 when the first symptoms of approaching mental illness developed in him.
He spent the remaining two years of his life here, sustained by long periods of remission when he could walk to the Beethoven Memorial in the centre of Bonn, and when he could enjoy the flowers in the pretty garden of the nursing home.
Today much of the building is given over to an excellent municipal music library, but the two rooms on the first floor which were Schumann’s (one for his devoted male nurses, the other his own room where he breathed his last, reunited at last with his wife Clara) now house a museum of memorabilia – not only of Schumann, but also of his great disciple Brahms and members of his circle.
Bonn’s greatest son, Ludwig van Beethoven himself, is commemorated in the wonderful museum housed in his birthplace, right in the centre of the city. Every room throughout this modest but well-proportioned building is packed with manuscripts, scores, letters, musical instruments, pictures – and, poignantly, several of the ear-trumpets made by well-meaning friends to alleviate the composer’s hearing problems. There is also an interactive computer room, and an intimate chamber-music recital hall.
As with all such places, there are crowds of visitors (don’t we all wish we were the only ones there?), but late on Saturday afternoon, as I reached the attic in the house, I arrived at Beethoven’s birthroom, divided from the public by a rope across the threshold, and empty save for a bust of the composer on a plinth in the middle of a tiny chamber with a very low ceiling and a small casement window under an alcove.
And somehow, miraculously I was alone, and the atmosphere was overwhelming. It was a long time before I could tear myself away.
But eventually I did, and a few yards to the right as you leave the house there is Im Stiefel (“In the Boot”), a wonderful oak-panelled and decoratively timbered tavern dating from the early 1700s. The food is typical Rhineland and remarkably cheap. The atmosphere is welcoming and the service is warmly friendly. And they told me Beethoven used to go there every night and drink their cheapest wine. No, I don’t think Queen Elizabeth I ever slept there.
Bonn is remarkably easy to reach from Birmingham. The flight to Dusseldorf takes about an hour, as does the express train service from the airport there into the centre of Bonn. And the travel is astonishingly cheap. I’m determined to go back next year.
