Deutschland’s “Firenze-am-Elbe”

I knew very little about Dresden before I got there. I knew it had a beautiful opera house, demolished in the war and then rebuilt; I knew R Wagner had achieved something along the lines of normal worldly success when he lived here in the 1840s, before he went off the deep end and underwent the transformation that changed the successful, popular author of Lohengrin into the mad genius who forged Das Rheingold. And I knew that Dresden had been called Germany’s “Florence on the Elbe”—the way East Lansing, MI likes to refer to itself as “the Boston of the Midwest”. But the name is well deserved. Dresden is honestly one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit, even though my stay there was way too brief. I concentrated on five things:

The Frauenkirche.

Completely demolished in the war, this early 18th-century church is the heart of the city—so imagine what a great source of civic pride it was when the rebuilt church was reopened last fall. (Everywhere else you go in the city you see re-constrcution projects proceeding apace.) The church is built from Saxon sandstone found nearby (Dresden is the capitol of the state of Sächsen, Saxony, from whence came one half of the Anglo-Saxon group, who set up in England ‘East Saxon-land’ (Essex) and ‘South Saxon-land’ (Sussex) before being raped by Vikings and conquered by French Norsemen. But that’s another story, and hardly relevant here. Sorry.) It’s the tallest thing in Dresden, by law, and from the top of the dome (100 m or so) you get an amazing view of the city and the river.

Inside the church proper, all is air, light, and pastel.

The contemplative underground crypt, where they were playing Enya while setting up for the evening’s concert, was too much for me.

Semper Oper.
Or, “Opera Forever!” What a slogan; we had t-shirts printed last summer, for sale in our gift shop, which read “Life is Short / Opera is Long / Wagner is Forever”. The architect Gottfried Semper designed this opera house to match the nearby, Baroque, Zwinger Palace. The architectural style in which he was working was thus about a century old—and when the theater was restored, after the war, the style was more than two centuries old. No matter, it’s a dazzling building. Richard Wagner was Kappelmeister working for this company, but never in this building—it was built after he was exiled for playing a role in the Dresden uprising of 1849. (He had tried to get Semper to join the revolutionaries, too, but the architect knew better than to follow his common-sense-challenged composer friend. Later, Semper would work with Wagner to design a glorious new theater in Munich—a theater which was never built. I was also delighted to find the building where Wagner lived, right across from the Zwinger Palace, in luxury he couldn’t afford, amassing his famous Dresden library.


Now, when I first got to the Semper Oper, there was quite a to-do; somebody was making a film with the opera as backdrop for a shot. Seemed to be a music video or music dream-sequence of some kind, since the camera on a big dolly kept swinging down onto an old man with white hair, singing (the sync-tape was broadcast for each take) a well-known waltz the name of which is escaping me. Viennese but with a dark eastern melodic contour.


In the shot, while he sang, pairs of attractive young people swirled around him, waltzing.

And of course a crowd of tourists (including me) had gathered to gawk. I, of course, was busily storing up ideas about how to film in Dresden for when I create my own magnificent up-and-coming Wagner bio-pic!

Zwinger Palace.

I was disappointed to find that the Dresden museum with paintings by C. D. Friedrich, one of my favorite painters, was closed for renovation (always check these things on the website first!). So I went instead to the outrageously beautiful Zwinger Palace, right next to Semper Oper, to check out the Alte Meister Gallery, their collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. You all know the detail of a Raphael Holy Family they have there—-these two cherubs are really staring up at Mary and the rest, and they only take up the bottom sixth of the very large painting.


Neustadt.

I had a wonderful and memorable evening in Dresden, lying on the banks of the Elbe in the sunset like Anselmus enamoured of the three green snakes (but more on that famous story—perhaps much more—to come). Then I went up and explored Neustadt, which according to my research is where all the hip young Dresdeners live today—a neighborhood which reminded me of Capitol Hill, first Altounstraße (the Pike/Pine corridor) and then Bautzner Straße (15th). I joined the cast of my favorite SIFF film last year, The Edukators, for dinner (couldn’t tell you what we were eating, but it was cheap) at a little garden with a grill and great people-watching, in the Pike/Pine-ish area. (In case you’re wondering, hip German youth look just like hip Amerikanischer Jugend—eccentric jeans, hoodies, and all the kids these days are wearing white belts.) Then I betrayed my revolutionary acquaintances—just like Semper—and went to the charming Café Neustadt on the 15th-ish street, where two girls were playing jazz and eine hübsches Kind served me some unnecessarily strong coffee. I realized the minute I walked in that if I lived in Dresden, that place would be where I’d be found.

Graupa.
But the weirdest—and best—of my Dresden adventures was my voyage to the lame Richard Wagner museum, in the village of Graupa on the outskirts of Dresden. Wagner came to Graupa for a summer holiday in 1846, and apparently wrote much of Lohengrin out there. The museum (formerly in the house where he lived, now in a nearby school) doesn’t have anything especially exciting, except a postcard with a picture of Georg Unger, the first Siegfried in 1876, which I’d never seen.



But the trip out there! It took me an hour, by tram and bus, and would only have been marginally quicker with a car. It was great. I met an old lady from Stuttgard who had grown up in Dresden in the 50s, but who escaped before the wall was built and escape became impossible. She was returning home after many years; her daughter, it turned out, taught Japanese at the University of Washington (although she herself had never been to Seattle). Anyways, the trip went through some charming neighborhoods of Dresden I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, crossed the Elbe, and then went up the hills into wine and farm country and eventually to this adorable village, where even Richard Wagner found it possible to chill out, hunker down, and do some creating. And thank heavens he did!

The Glories of Mass Transit

It may very well be that Richard Wagner was wrong; the most important activity in human life, I begin to feel, is not creating art, but rather transit—getting from one place to another. Whether you’re destroying your shoes, feet, and legs by walking everywhere, or destroying the planet by using fossil fuels to propel your transportative vehicle, this is the big one—we need to do it (especially we travelers) and we haven’t yet figured out the best way. We have lots of ways to travel! I’ve taken many so far on this very trip, including:

Air Travel. I flew from Seattle to Copenhagen. Obviously, I didn’t do it in a balloon, as in the picture, but rather took a very comfortable SAS flight over northern Canada and Greenland. The ballon was flying over Dresden when I went out for a walk last night, and I just couldn’t resist—I did get to watch the movie Casanova again, while on that very SAS flight, and although in the end I was glad I hadn’t shelled out $25 for a DVD when it first came out (it’ll get cheaper later on) that was an awesome sequence where Heath Ledger takes his girlfriend up for a balloon ride until she figures out he’s really Casanova and they come crashing to the ground and he gets arrested by the Inquisition.

Boats. We took lots of boat rides while in Denmark; another picture, here, of the Scandline ferry, which get you off of Scandanavia and onto the rest of Europe. I think it was a Scandlines boat that Stephen Sprenger and I took from Hoek van Holland to Harwich a couple of years ago, across the North Sea.

Trains. The real glory of traveling in Europe, of course, are the trains, whether S-Bahn (like in the picture, Berlin’s above-ground metro system) or U-Bahn (the underground metro trains, although all of them go above and below ground back and forth) or real train-type-trains, like the ICE which barrels across the countryside at alarming speeds. I love traveling by train, I just love it. So good for people-watching!

Bus. Usually the bus is a second best alternative to the train; certainly in Seattle I resisted participating in our metro system for many years, and finally gave in because I had gotten rid of my car and had no other choice. I’ve had nevery nice adventures here so far, taking buses in Copenhagen, Berlin, and Dresden.

Tram. In Dresden the entire city is criss-crossed by these little tracks, which are something between a train and a bus. In San Francisco they call ‘em ‘light-rail’, and perhaps one day we’ll see such a thing in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath...

Cars. I don’t much care for cars, I’ve discovered over the years. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that the automobile is responsible for what's wrong with America today. I don't know about Germany. The Germans love cars(this picture comes from a weird ‘fancy-car-design-store’ we passed the other night). I’ve really only taken two car rides so far, both taxis to and from the Dresden Train Station, which was too far to walk, even to a bus/tram stop.

Bicycle. By far the most energy-efficient form of transportation yet designed by man, and it works great in most of the cities I’ve been to so far because they’re all flat. This picture is taken in Copenhagen, on Frederiksborggade near where I stayed; you see the commuters heading to work in the morning on their special bike lanes. I only ended up getting a bike out for about an hour so far; it was in Copenhagen, where they have these ‘city bikes’, nasty free bikes theoretically placed all over the city, and (for the refundable deposit of 20 DKK, about $3) you can take one from one rack, ride across town, and replace it in another. I did so Sunday morning, and discovered that this system doesn’t really work, because most of the bikes were stolen when the system was invented ten years ago; I looked 45 minutes to find a working bike, by which time I could have walked to my destination and back. The bike I ended up with was so nasty, by the time I had gotten to Lagehuset and got my Danish, I biked back only as far as the subway station and took the train the rest of the way. Now—if only I’d had my OWN bike!

A Really Weird DREAM

No, that was a headline from The Onion’s historical archive, something along the lines of:“Martin Luther King: ‘I had a really weird dream last night’, an article in which King rambled on and on about one of those dreams the person feels compelled to tell you about even though it’s all nonsense and you wish they’d shut up. I refer you to my thoughts about Freud, obscurely mentioned in the last blog (somewhere between two parentheses, probably).

No, I must needs write you now a little blog entry “which shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it has no bottom.” I just stepped out of a performance of Ein Sommernachtstraum here at the Deutsches National Theater und Staatskapelle Weimar, which was one of the strangest things ever.

We often tell Americans that every tiny town in Germany has its own opera house, but it’s one thing to repeat that because it’s something you’ve heard the smart set talk about and something else to experience it proper. Weimar is a really small town (a great town, but really small). And this theater is just outrageous! It’s a little Lincoln Center all to itself, with a joint playhouse, opera house, and symphony sharing a couple of performance spaces, every performer and artist a state employee, with a huge bevy of stuff they’re constantly producing. Tonight, this bizarre Traum; tomorrow, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, a fabulous opera but one requiring so many performers and such production value we couldn’t afford to do it in Seattle recently; and the day after, Schiller’s Maria Stuarda. Yesterday they sang Rossini’s Otello. Judging from the booklet for next season, it’s like this year-round in this small little town: just the operas scheduled for next year include a “Musical Farce” by Nino Rota, first performed in 1955, called The Florentine Hat (who knew he wrote operas?); Così, co-produced with the sister theater in Braunschweig; The Rocky Horror Show; Die Walküre, out of a Ring they’re doing here next month; Luisa Miller; and a few others. Imagine if this (plus a full bevy of plays and symphony concerts) were being put on in Mt. Vernon all the time. It’s a good-sized theater, probably seats a few less than the Copenhagen Opera, and it wasn’t full tonight. There were lots of kids (every theater and museum I’ve checked out since coming to Germany has been swarming with kids) and nicely-dressed Weimarians, out for a night on the town; I had dinner afterwards with a local high school teacher and her husband, who aren’t exactly subscribers but seem to come to the theater a handful of times each year (with or without students in tow).

Our dinner conversation was a bit strange, since I make mistakes all over the place in German and she was, how do you say, more interested in communicating with me than he was. (Only when you travel in a foreign country do you realize, it’d be a good thing if Americans learned to speak more slowly and clearly, and use simpler words and less irony, when talking to non-native English speakers who have wound up on our shores!) I was okay at the theater because a) I’ve had a few days now to blow the dust off the language where it’s stored up in the attic of my brain, b) I was in Midsummer Night’s Dream years ago, have seen it a thousand times, and know the play more or less by heart, and was chuckling at August Schlegel’s wondrous old translation as much as I was the acting and c) there was plenty of singing, too.

It’s hard for me to tell if this is a new departure for this theater; but this show was a co-production between the two departments of the theater, plays and operas. The performers included a Baroque orchestra, an opera chorus, and 22 soloists—one saxophonist, four opera singers, and the rest actors. It was the Schlegel text of Shakespeare’s play, with some cuts, and then lots of music by Henry Purcell. I note that they’re planning on doing something of this kind again next year, for a Don Quijote show which, the program promises, will draw “from the rich fund of Baroque music, but also from rock and pop,” and which intends to “let the poetic speech of Cervantes give life to a new, unaccustomed form of art.” That kind of describes what happened this evening, as well. Remember that when Richard Wagner ran a theater just like this one, in Dresden in the 1840s (I was there yesterday, I’ll blog about it soon) he got annoyed that opera and theater were considered separate departments and so invented his own kind of weird art form. Just a reminder—you’re on a slippery slope when you start doing this kind of thing!

The music for this Midsummer was drawn from Henry Purcell, mostly (I don’t know what the saxophonist was playing—maybe his own composition). But it wasn’t Purcell’s Fairy Queen, the masque which (as you know) was obstensibly based on Midsummer but didn’t contain a word of Shakespeare in it. I don’t know Purcell well enough to recognize all the sources raided by tonight’s music director (the extremely charismatic Marco Comin); the ones I spotted were “When I am laid in earth”, sung offstage by the narrator figure as Helena is finishing up her “How happy some or other some can be!” monologue, not played at all for laughs with that music beneath it. And, the bass who sang tonight (a wonderful, huge, woofy Hans Hotter-type sound, I’m sorry I didn’t get his name) was a sort of Bottom/Falstaff/Bacchus figure, who appeared shortly before the first Bottom scene and did a Purcell piece I didn’t recognize, in which he was drunk and stuttering and a bunch of fairies were pinching him; and then he reappeared before Bottom’s dream, wearing only underwear, covered in welts from the fairies’ mistreatment of him, and singing the Frost Monster piece from Purcell’s King Arthur. (Ah, what memories that brings back!) Uh...there was one other piece I recognized, although I didn’t take notes at the time and now I’m blanking on it. I think it may have been from the St. Cecilia Mass.

The set, designed by Dirk Becker, was a huge turntable with large, movable white walls and a green projection at the far back. It reminded me plenty of our Macbeth set, except every time there needed to be a scene change the turntable swiveled and we saw some new, non-descript playing space. Idea for a MSND production—it didn’t really happen here, but why not build a forest floor piece, a sort of big carpet, with blankets of the same material hidden to the eye because they blend in. That way, when everybody goes to sleep on what otherwise always looks like a bare stage floor, they could pull blankets up over them and it would look as if they were wrapping themselves in the forest?

I’ll stop trying to design another production and tell you a little about this one instead. It’s a weird temptation, though, because honestly I adore this play, know it like the back of my hand and adore every word of it, but I don’t feel so strongly about how IT SHOULD BE DONE. I’ve never really thought about what I would do in “my production”, for instance (as I have with, say, the Ring). I think there’s absolutely no one right way to do Midsummer, and love it that it’s so darn ambiguous, that it works so well in so many different approaches. A few specifics about this approach to the characters:

The Narrator. The show opened with a decent Baroque singer (I wouldn’t hire her for my opera house, but she was fine for this production) who seemed to be a narrator of some kind, singing Purcell with a thick German accent. Oberon and Titania entered on either side of her, and Titania started making love to the narrator—clearly in order to make Oberon jealous, but perhaps it was inspired by the fact that they cut Titania’s great speech about the changeling boy’s mother.
Titania. The woman playing Titania, Rosemarie Deibel, had a voice that reminded me incredibly of Judy Dench’s. (She was a bit taller than Dame J.) I’m guessing she was a big German actress who’s been around for decades, and there was a certain school of vocal production in the 70s that must have encouraged that husky, Glynis Johns kind of sound.
Oberon. The very attractive Jürg Wisbach played Oberon, with tight white pants and a big white cape/coat, made (I think) out of leather and fur. He was clearly in love with Titania; we didn’t see hide nor hair of the changeling, and when Puck first appeared with the flower, Puck had obviously tried it out to see if it worked because he/she (Puck was androgynous) immediately began making love to Oberon. Luckily for him, Oberon had a little of the antidote juice ready to go, squeezed it on Puck’s eyes, and Puck let him alone and they continued their scene. (At the top of the second act—located about where Britten starts his third act—Oberon got a moment to caress the narrator respectfully.)
Puck. Claudia Meyer played Puck, with a bald skull-cap and roller-skates, most of his/her lines given through a microphone and distorted. Much of the more sing-songey stuff was in English (with a thick German accent), although when he/she was having conversations it was in German. The roller-skates gave a singing-acting-DANCING quality to the whole production.
Theseus and Hippolyta. Renée Listerdal’s costumes for the court of Athens were black and white and pseudo-Renaissance, often with wild collars. I’d spent much of the afternoon today looking at old Dutch Masters at the Dresden Alte Galerie, and so recognized the style. In this production Theseus and Hippolyta don’t have much to do (Theseus seemed a jolly Bavarian wurst-and-bier kind of guy; Hippolyta, who had two zappy red wigs, a different one in Act 5, was a little busier than normal).
Egeus. Hermia’s father enters dragging her by a rope, which is tied around her hands and a white gag around her mouth. Theseus removes the gag so she can say her first line; but it’s all a good shorthand way of letting us know what goes out at the Egeus household.
Hermia. This Hermia was very into martial arts and physical combat. I think she took her cue from Helena’s line ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’. It occurs to me that Midsummer Night’s Dream is basically Hermia’s story, the way Lord of the Rings is more or less about Frodo. Maybe that’s why these characters are so hard to approach.
Lysander. This Lysander did a ridiculous strip-tease in the forest as he was going to bed with Hermia for the first time. The defining moment for him is when Hermia won’t have sex with him that night, so he decides he doesn’t love her and loves Helena instead. In fact, you get the sense that of the four of them, Lysander is the biggest turd.
Demetrius. The defining moment for Demetrius comes when he tells Egeus he’s changed and no longer wants his daughter, the morning after the dream. That’s when he stands up and, by switching his desire, resolves the conflict of the whole show. I should point out that this Lysander and Demetrius at one point were so enamoured of Helena they both jumped her; the three of them struggled around for a bit, then Helena crawled away to look back and see Lysander and Demetrius continuing to kiss and roll around passionately. Eventually, they sat up, milked a few double-takes for all the laughs they could possibly scare up, and got on with things.
Helena. To me, Helena is usually the heart of the show—the most grotesque, but most human character in the piece, the only one who actually gets a big monologue about what this lunatic love is all about. And there’s something automatically funny, if a little sad, about her. The Helena tonight wasn’t especially played for laughs.
Quince. I played Peter Quince a thousand years ago in a production of Midsummer, and I kind of love the part—he’s the one who’s so literal-minded and slow he thinks they need to have actors come in to play the Wall and the Moon, or else the spectators might not get it that those things exist in the world of Pyramus and Thisbe. Tonight we had a female Petra Skranz, who seemed a parody of the current German head of state. I also got the sense that she had a thing for bottom.
Bottom. For some reason Schlegel called Bottom “Zettel”. The fellow who did the role tonight, Aleksandar Tesla, was incredible—a dancer’s body, so he was completely expressive (not to mention beautiful) even with a big ass’s head on. The other four mechanicals were a sort-of barbershop quartet, and the six of them had worked the timing and the stylization out in each of their scenes brilliantly and beautifully—I wasn’t sure I was going to laugh at the Pyramus and Thisbe scene without Shakespeare’s silly English text, but they were so funny (and Schlegel did such a good job—where Shakespeare has Bottom say “O night, O night! alack, alack, alack” Schelgel manages to improve on it in German with “O Nacht! O Nacht! O ach! ach! acht!”) I ran out of breath from laughing so hard.

Richard Wagner saw Midsummer Night’s Dream in his apprentice years in the theater, in this same translation, the first time it was ever staged (by Devrient, I think? Somebody want to look this up?) with Mendelssohn’s incidental music. I know it made a big impression on him, because before long he was putting together Meistersinger, which is another great, big, glorious, weird, unfathomable, deliriously wonderful DREAM.

Berlin: Land of Museums, Churches and Theaters

I’m happy to report that after several nice days full of Berlin adventures, the city has stopped making me nervous. And I think a lot of that has to do with the language slowly coming back to life in my brain—I noticed the other night, after going to the theater and hearing a play in German, I was thinking in German again, something I haven’t done in lo these many years. It probably has something to do with so much of my Wagner agenda for this trip clicking into place, now that I’m here in Germany. And more than that, it probably has to do with Berlin being one of the world’s greatest cities, and a joy for anyone to explore.

Where to begin? Tough question, because it’s vast. Berlin’s incredible size reminds me only of New York and London, among sprawling cities we’re I’ve walked my feet to pulp. (Berlin has in fact a great mass transit system; more on that later.) I’ll begin where the last blog left off—I posted a photo I took of the Berliner Dom at night, seen from the fountain, the big cathedral on the main drag, Unter den Linden. It was made by Kaiser Wilhelm I in the 1890s, and is in that bric-brac fin de siècle (what you’d call in Yiddish onge patchket) allied with a massive Teutonic monumentalism. Thus, the organ features more than 7000 pipes:



And to reach the top of the Dom you climb forever and ever. But you get a nice view up there, assuming it’s a decent day; the Dom is on Museum Insel, a small island in the River Spree which is covered in museums and monuments. From the dome, to the north and a smidgen east, in the center of this photo, the gold hemisphere you see is the dome of the main Berlin synagogue:



And, closer up, that synagogue may be worth a visit if you get particularly interested in the Berlin Jewish community. I was, and here’s the story: the synagogue was built in the mid-19th century as Berlin became a magnet for Jews from all over Germany and eastern Europe. It held services up to 1943, at which point the Nazis took it over completely; and it was largely destroyed by the bombing before the end of the war. But so were most of the Jews in Berlin, and only a few stayed after 1945, so it wasn’t until the 80s that they started dealing with the synagogue. They’ve reconstructed the front façade on Oranienburger Str., with the beautiful dome:



But behind, where the synagogue proper used to be, is just an open field. (There’s a mediocre museum with some stuff saved from the rubble beneath the dome.) So it’s not necessarily worth the trip. (The Schwules Museum also turned out to be a big bust. Oh—poor choice of words, that.) If you’re interested in the Berlin Jewish Community—or even if you’re not—you really ought to go to the striking Jüdisches Museum Berlin, which is a ways south of Museum Insel. I got there by walking down a little alley named for one of my all-time favorite authors:



Bet you didn’t know Hoffmann was all those things listed on the sign (Dichter, Komponist, Maler und Kammergerichtsrat). Well, it’s true. Anyway, the Jüdisches Museum opened in 2001; it was designed by Daniel Liebeskind, who built a truly bizarre space. See the photo below. The large building to the right houses the main permanent exhibit and also the space for temporary exhibits; but there’s no doors in that building (of course I had to discover this fact the hard way, walking all around the block in the pouring rain!). You enter through a much more traditional building next door, go downstairs, and find yourself in three long intersecting hallways laid out something like a letter ‘A’ if the middle line kept going on either side. One Axis takes you to the main building; a second, the Axis of the Holocaust, takes you past memorabilia of Holocaust victims to the big white blur in the middle of the photo—that’s an empty concrete tower, a memorial to those murdered in the Holocaust, and at the end of that axis you can (if you choose) enter the bottom of the tower, which is a cold, dark space, reminiscent of prison or death—with one glimpse of light, way high above, dazzling even when it’s raining out. The third line of the ‘A’ is the Axis of Exile, with memorabilia of Jews who lost their homes in recent diasporas; it leads to the ‘Garden of Exile’ a sort of chess board with 48 concrete pillars (you see the tops of the pillars poking above the ground in the center of the picture, with willows growing from them) standing for the year 1948, when Israel was formed. Wandering through this pillared space is disorienting, as is being exiled; although I did notice some kids having fun hiding behind the columns and surprising one another while I was in there.



Speaking of kids and exile, along the Axis of Exile I had to grab a photo of this reproduction: an 11-year old boy’s family left Germany for Uruguay in the 1930s, and he kept this record of his journey “Von der alten Heimat zu der neuen Heimat” (from the old homeland to the new homeland) on his trip, with every form of transportation they used at the top and a vague map of their route below: an early trip blog!



The permanent exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin is about Jewish life in Germany from the Dark Ages up to the rise of National Socialism. (The more recent stuff is well-covered by many other institutions! Among them are the Deutsches Historisches Museum, whose current exhibition on German poster art/advertising over the last 130 years follows this story—and is well worth a gander.) The special exhibition at the Jewish Museum, yesterday, was a “Happy 150th Birthday, Siegmund Freud” suite, complete with an enormous, room-sized birthday cake upon which puppets acted out every chapter of Freud’s biography, from the scene where the young Ziggy (the puppet for the little boy already had a beard and big round “Where’s Waldo” glasses) stumbles upon his mother naked to the hypnotism of Anna O and her dream:



I gotta say, I loved this cake—and I didn’t even get to eat a slice. (Nor am I much of a Freud fan.) It reminded me of something I once tried to do in a Seattle Opera Parsifal publication, a timeline of Richard Wagner’s life in the style of a boardgame, ie “Help Richard find his way to the Temple of the Holy Grail!” See, kids? Who’d have thought learning could be so much fun?

I was reminded of Wagner in the Jewish Museum particularly on the Axis of Exile, since Wagner’s life is all about exile—he was a German, and for most of his life there wasn’t a Germany, and even so for the most productive years of his life, due to his political activities, he was exiled from what Germany there was.

We saw more about exile this morning at the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, a very grass-roots museum about the Berlin Wall, and the separation of East and West Berlin and East and West Germany, and nonviolent resistance in the 20th century. This experience I also recommend highly—it’s a story I thought I knew, but I didn’t know the half of it, the bizarre, dangerous, and ingenious ways people from the east invented to escape to the west and the well-documented ethical conundrum experienced by the soldiers who worked the wall, who were told ‘shoot to kill’ any time someone tried to escape, but who (like Vader’s stormtroopers) most of the time seemed to have terrible aim. As an American, the experience of the divided Germany reminds me of our Civil War—a house divided against itself cannot stand and all that—but of course it’s the opposite experience because no one in Germany WANTED to be divided in two. The scars of the American Civil War are still healing, and I’m sure the same will be true a hundred years from now in Germany. On the other hand, there are plenty of teenagers (swarming every museum and theater I’ve been to since I got here), some of whom now were born AFTER the wall fell. What do they think of it? What would RW have thought of it? Oy vey!




A few other Wagner-related experiences I’ve had these last couple of days, and then I’ll end this post. The problem is, since Wagner basically engorged the entire world and made it strangely his, it’s possible for everything in life to relate to Wagner. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. This afternoon I managed to spend a little time at the Staatliche Museum zu Berlin Gemäldegalerie (Painting Gallery) studying the current exhibition on “Albrecht Dürers Mutter”. This exhibition centers on a drawing the great Renaissance woodcut and sketch artist and painter Dürer did of his mother shortly before she died (right); it’s a wonderfully thorough exhibition which gathers hundreds of images of old women, old men, beauty, ugliness, and death from Dürer’s time. He is far and away the greatest artist of them all, and it’s his incredible humanity and love for his mother which still shines brightly from this drawing. The Wagner connection, of course, is the prominent mention of Dürer in Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s greatest opera and his love letter to “Heilige Deutsche Kunst”, Holy German Art.

Meistersinger is his most accessible opera, despite its ridiculous length, because the music sounds like Bach and the story is like a Shakespeare comedy. With that in mind, I visited two theaters these last two days: this evening, the Berliner Philharmoniker Kammermusiksaal, the smaller of the two Berlin Phil rooms (it seats 1500, in the round) to hear the Berliner Figuralchor and Berlin Baroque, under the fingers (no baton) of the not-very-charismatic Gerhard Oppelt and a quartet of soloists, doing the Bach B-Minor Mass. What a piece! The closest Bach ever came to writing an opera, I’ve always asserted. The Berliner Baroque is a small ensemble reminiscent of Seattle Baroque (and where are THEY now?) who play on period instruments—for this mass, we had three old-timey violins with weird bows, two old-timey flutes that sound kind of like recorders, three wonderful old-timey oboes, a valveless horn (amazing work from that guy, who had to do it all with his lips and his hand in the bell), three trumpets, continuo of cello, lute, and organ, and old-timey timani which seem to be even harder to keep in tune than modern timpani. The singers weren’t really opera singers, but rather the kind of people who specialize in lieder or concerts with orchestra. The countertenor who sang the alto part, Alex Potter, was pretty good. Anyways, it was great to be there, and to hear this piece I’ve always loved. And which reminds me of Meistersinger.

I checked the schedules at Berlin’s three opera companies this week, but there wasn’t anything I HAD to hear and frankly, after last week, I figured I could take a break from opera. So I went instead to the theater; to Vaganten Bühne, near where I’m staying at Savingy Platz, to see a play I know extremely well in English: Shakespeares Sämtliche Werke (Leicht Gekürzt) (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—Abridged). If you don’t already know this riotous farce, think “Jon ‘n’ Perry get a bunch of high school kids to act out the Complete Works of Richard Wagner in a half an hour” and you’ve got the right idea—infotainment, even more so than that Freud Birthday Cake. I was surprised and pleased to see that the translator, Dorothea Renckhoff, has taken a few liberties with the immortal words of Messrs. Long, Singer, and Winfield: the Troilus and Cressida gag is gone, the Macbeth section expanded to feature Lady M, and the biography of Shakespeare gag altered for obvious reasons. (In the English version, the very confused actor reading Shakespeare’s bio from a bunch of index cards ends up saying things like “Shakespeare annexed the Sudetenland and the invaded Poland; in 1945 he committed suicide with his mistress, Eva Braun” but in Germany he moved to Weimar, lived opposite Goethe, and penned the immortal words of the “Ode to Joy” instead, as did Schiller.) Since Wagner idolized Shakespeare, wanted to be the next Shakespeare (far more than he ever wanted to be a composer), and spent much of his childhood and young adulthood working for low-budget theater companies like the one which presented this masterpiece tonight, I felt it highly incumbent upon me to attend—after all, as you know, I SEEK RICHARD!

First Impressions of Berlin

The journey down from Copenhagen: I’ve never before been on a train that then got onto a ferry, although I’ve heard of such things. They used to have one in Northern Michigan, connecting the two peninsulas, before a) they built the Mackinaw Bridge and b) trains became so monstrously declassé in the midwest. I mean, honestly, who takes a train these days? Gas is so much cheaper! Anyways, in this picture you can see how the train was loaded onto the car deck of the ferry:



I didn’t understand, when I bought the train ticket, that this would be the case; but I was overjoyed to get to ride a boat as well as a train. We sailed from Rodby Havn, Denmark, to Puttgarden, Germany, across the strait that separates the Kieler Bay (which, in the west, washes the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, the disputed German/Denmark land border) from the Mecklenburger Bay (which gives onto the Baltic Sea). Both bays are vast, and you can’t see to the other end. The boat was vast, too (only a member of the Runions family could tell me the specific dimensions):



From Puttgarden the train went on to Hamburg and then I transferred to the ICE, the inter-city express, which whisked me off to Berlin at some alarming speed and was a remarkably smooth and pleasant ride. Now, this is my first ever trip to Berlin. I find it a little strange that I’ve waited until I’m this old to get here; I started studying the language on my own back in 1990, first came to Germany in 1996, and have been working closely with German operas all this time—but for whatever reason I haven’t spent a whole lot of time travelling here. There is a reason; it’s hard to put into words, but I’ll try. I noticed yesterday, when I got here, I was a little nervous. I’m guessing I’ll grow more comfortable being in Germany over the course of the next week; but at first, it was tough for me to relax and be at ease. An unusual experience, not one I’ve often had travelling (except when visiting certain parts of the Midwest!) Richard Wagner, who spent most of his life on the run, certainly had this kind of experience all the time. You can hear it in his music, here was a man who was never comfortable in his own skin. And there’s something about his country—this vast, dense, incredibly complicated place—which confuses me as well.

The following picture may help give you a little sense of what’s confusing about Berlin:




That’s the steeple of Mary’s Church flush with the Television Tower, not far from Alexanderplatz. And that’s the first thing you notice about Berlin, as a visitor: you’re conscious of the past, all the rich history of this part of the world; and all the energy of the people is currently directed toward the future; and where, pray tell, is the present? There’s an elephant on the table, it can be tough to see in the city but everyone at all times must be conscious of it—the gap between past and future, that immediate past in which the city was obliterated. It’s weird, this is the first time I’ve ever been to a big European city which reminds me of an American city—big wide streets, lots of cars everywhere, everything spread out, parking lots. The reason is not because the Germans like cars so much; it’s because most of this city, like most American cities, dates from after 1945. (To be fair, much of the City of London was also obliterated during the war, and it’s tough to get a sense of the history from simply wandering about there as well.)

The other reason I’m nervous, I’m sure, is because my ability to speak what Mark Twain once called "the awful German language" has grown quite weak—the last time I wrote a translation of a German opera was a couple of years ago (Ariadne or Lohengrin, I don’t remember which I wrote first) and this is a city and a country with the deepest respect for the German language, as this sculpture outside Humboldt Universität attests:



So yeah, we’ll see how we do with that! Two more examples of this Germany past/future kind of thing from last night’s brisk tour of the city: I stopped for some food in the Noodle Cafe, a Wagamama-style restaurant with tasty Asian-fusion cuisine. The flirty waiter mistook me for a food critic, with my notepad and nosy questions about the place, an error I was keen to exploit since it meant I got to try more of the really interesting menu.



This Noodle Café is situated in the Radisson SAS hotel on Unter den Linden, near the Deutsche Staatsoper, and upstairs there’s another pan-fusion restaurant, hEAT, which looked plenty interesting as well—world cuisine, each region’s food prepared as would be traditional in that region instead of the jumble we sometimes get in our multicultural fast-food restaurants. The Radisson itself is absurd, with a central atrium built around an enormous fish tank. The lighting wasn’t great but this picture gives you an idea: that’s a vast aquarium above the check-in desks, and from each of the rooms on each of the levels you can gaze across to see what the fish are up to:



Outside the Radisson you cross the river Spree, and, on the other side, step into the past: the Berlin Dom, the main cathedral, which houses lots of random musical and cultural events, and obviously belongs architecturally to the pre-war Germany, instead of the Radisson’s futurism.



So I’m off now to the new Deutsches Historik Museum to try even harder to wrap my brain around the weirdness which is this great country.

The End of All Things

‘Well, I’m back,’ he said. We made it. Copenhagen produced its first Ring in almost a century. And we were there for the final performances; no one will ever see that particular Ring ever again, since they’re planning on trashing the production and never remounting it. (The dramaturg tells me that since Wagner said, “Kinder, schafft neues” (Children, make something new) every time the Ring is produced it ought to be different; and thus, if Denmark’s Kongelige Teater ever does another Ring they’ll do everything differently next time. I don’t think they have any immediate plans to do it at all; my next Ring will be the first-ever Canadian Ring, in Toronto next September. (Maybe I’ll even blog it, if there’s popular demand.)

Ragnarok, as the Danes call the final opera, is quite a show. It’s my favorite of the four operas, because I feel it has the most stuff in it, as well as the most sophisticated music. Tonight’s production, like the rest of this particular Ring, was full of interesting stuff but far from definitive.

The first line of Götterdämmerung is sung by the First Norn: “Welch Licht leuchtet dort?” (What light is that?) It was fun, in the Copenhagen production, when she was sitting in the first row of the audience, stood up, tapped the conductor on the shoulder, and pointed to the maestro special light hanging from beneath the boxes. Fun—but really, kind of a waste, I take this moment as indicative of the basic issue I’m having with this Ring (and which I suspect I’d be likely to have with many others: EFFECTS WITHOUT CAUSES. The phrase is Wagner’s, complaining about the Meyerbeer operas which were so much more popular than his, while he lived, and which are all but forgotten today. Splashy, superficial effects, zappy and fun though they may be—such as having the First Norn break down the 4th wall of theater, implicating the audience in the show—do not, in the end, an evening in the theater make. Or rather, they do, but we’ve witnessed a string of unrelated vaudeville acts jumbled together, not a great story thoughtfully told. Which—maybe I should have said this first thing—is what I want from a night in the theater.

The effect of that “Welch Licht leuchtet dort” moment is powerful. It acknowledges to the audience that we are there, that it is all about our experience—that we’re not watching a movie. It’s like when the storyteller looks you in the eyes, when the Ancient Mariner fixes you, o Wedding Guest, with his glittering eye. But the story-teller is supposed to be telling a story—there should be a cause behind the effect.

In fact, that line inquiring about the light is a great story-telling place to start; it relates to the basic theme of the opera, to the opera’s title. Götterdämmerung, usually rendered in English Twilight of the Gods, is even better translated as God’s Gloaming, because the German word Dämmerung applies to both dawn and dusk—that time of mixed light, one going and one coming. The title of this opera doesn’t tell us which it is. Neither does the ambiguous ending of the story—was this a defeat or a triumph? What light is that? The answer, several lines later in the Norn scene, turns out to be ‘Loge’—the most ambiguous figure in the whole Ring, the fire that serves and rebels, that protects and harms, Wagner’s greatest symbol of the modern age—a figure for technology, science, industry, skepticism, cynicism. What light is that? What is that light? It’s so much a part of the very fabric of our lives, today, everything most of us do, all day long, the Norn’s line is a great and very important question. Wagner gave us, in this moment, a worthy cause. So why can’t the effect stem from that source instead of this arbitrary conceit of the director?

That said, there was actually much I liked about yesterday’s Götterdämmerung. The only thing I absolutely hated was the voice of the Hagen, who was about as great a singer as I am. (After the show I told Speight: “This performance makes hope blaze brightly in my bosom! As you know, it’s been my lifetime dream to sing Hagen, and if they hired that guy maybe someone will hire me!”) Just as Rheingold stands or falls by its Loge, so a Götterdämmerung sits on a tripod of Siegfried (Stig Anderson, wonderful), Brünnhilde (Tina Kiborg, less so) and Hagen (yesterday it was basically an actor who occasionally tried to hit a few notes). And since Hagen controls the plot—he’s the Iago, the cunning mastermind manipulator who plays all the other characters like puppets—it’s a serious thing when he gives an incomplete performance because he can’t sing. One of the things I love about going to hear Götterdämmerung is the sound of a big, rich, dark, supremely evil bass voice, in scenes like the Watch Song or the Summoning of the Vassals, and in unforgettable lines like: “Hoiho! Wohin, du heitrer Held?” or “Heil, Siegfried! Theuer Held.” or “Meines Speeres Spitze wag’ ich daran: sie wahr’ in Ehren den Eid.” or “Meineid rächt’ ich!” When you don’t really hear or enjoy those, it’s only a partial Götterdämmerung, says I.

I’m also sorry to say that despite the intentions of director and dramaturg, there really is no concept to this Ring. They called it “Brünnhilde’s Ring” in their publications on the subject; we’d taken to calling it the feminist or matriarchal Ring because of the way it was pitched initially, which implied that their point was: men are unfit to rule the world and run things because their narcissistic, aggressive, short-sighted ways make a mess of everything; and furthermore, in the new world order of the new millenium, it’s the girls (the made-wise-by-experience Brünnhilde, for example) who will be doing a better job of running things. All I can say is: maybe so. But a) I’m not sure that’s what the Ring is about; sounds to me like a case of square peg and round hole, an artistic team who want to say what they have to say regardless of what the piece is about; and b) if that in fact is what they were trying to say, they did a poor job of saying it!

The only ‘feminist’ or ‘strong woman’ features of this Götterdämmerung, that I recall, include Brünnhilde coming in with a gun when Hagen tries to take the ring, after he’s killed Gunther. Ordinarily Siegfried’s dead hand rises up at this point, greeting Brünnhilde’s entrance as per the prophetic words with which he died. (It may be this is not one of Wagner’s strongest moments; it’s often perplexed stage directors, since it seems an example of a Wagnerian effect with no cause, or at least a dubious one. The other example of this kind of thing would be the Norns’ rope breaking, to end the first scene.) Our director in Copenhagen had Hagen shoot Gunther, advance towards the dead Siegfried with his gun, and Brünnhilde enter from the other side of the dead Siegfried, her own gun pointed at Hagen. Hagen makes a little gesture of “Uh-oh! She’s got a gun,” and for some reason he drops his on a nearby couch and slinks away so she can sing her immolation scene. It didn’t make any sense to me—as a plot point, it wasn’t even the story of Brünnhilde’s weapon being more powerful than Hagen’s. (Which, had that been the story they were trying to tell, could hardly be considered productively feminist!)


The other ‘strong woman’ moment comes a few lines later, when Brünnhilde forgives Gutrune and the two share a warm embrace. (See picture.) Whatever. Wagner leaves Gutrune’s fate ambiguous; directors who hate such loose ends always feel a need to finish her story. Since the world is about to be destroyed, it’s never mattered much to me what happens to her. I wasn’t sure, in this production, this Gutrune was deserving of forgiveness...she was a pretty bad lot.

I want to describe some of the things I liked about the Copenhagen Götterdämmerung. (Sorry to be so crabby thus far!) I loved such elements as:


Light-hearted Norn Scene. I know many who found it sacreligious, but something about the fun this production had in the Norn scene appealed to me. This scene contains some of the greatest music Wagner ever wrote, but typically it’s hard to make it interesting or dangerous in performance, since there’s something undramatic about watching three old biddies gossip and spin threads and tales for twenty minutes. And it’s only great music if you understand the text; without the words, I doubt it makes a heck of a lot of sense. As I mentioned, the Norns were in the audience for their first three speeches (Wotan’s past, present, and future); they appear onstage for their second round of speeches (Loge’s past, present, and future) and their triple rejoinders about Alberich—then, when they sing “Es ris! Es ris! Es ris!” (where the web of fate traditionally breaks, for obscure reasons) the curtain goes up to reveal the set for the next scene. The staging didn’t have much to do with the specifics of the stories they were telling—but it was engaging and structurally interesting.


Houseplants chez Brünnhilde. After a week of complaining, in this blog, about the ugly Valkyrie Rock with its artificial forms of manufacture, I was pleased to see that somebody must have been reading me—in the first act, that set was now a greenhouse, with plants all over the little room where Siegfried and Brünnhilde have been living. That’s all I wanted...natural shapes, the chaos and proliferation of a vine hanging from the walls and ceiling, tails of white flowers hanging from it like fuschia, and lots more plants everywhere else. Makes me want to go live in a jungle!

Stig and Tina. Setting the voices aside for a moment, Stig Anderson and Tina Kiborg make far and away the strongest VISUAL Siegfried and Brünnhilde I’ve ever seen. They’re both impassioned actors, warmly giving of themselves onstage; they both hurl themselves into these roles; they’re both beautiful, and (being Danish) look kind of like you think Siegfried and Brünnhilde probably looked; and, being husband and wife, there’s a terrific chemistry between them which they bring onto the stage. Now, I’ve already noted that I don’t think Kiborg really has the appropriate Brünnhilde voice. Anderson, on the other hand, sang it very well—perhaps not the best I’ve ever heard, but beautiful, nuanced, interesting, and (except in the parts that no one can sing) accurate.

Gunther as Modern Warlord. As this Ring kept advancing through the twentieth century, we end with Götterdämmerung set in the late 90’s or maybe 2000, with (Guido Paevatalu as) King Gunther of the Gibichungs seen as leader of a private army, possibly in the war-ridden Balkans. He might have ruled someplace in the mideast, or Africa, but the cityscape looked sort of European. Anyways, the characterization was great—his degeneracy and basic uselessness reminded me of plenty of spoiled Eastern Europeans I have known.

Psycho Hagen. I thought this Hagen was a non-singing actor because he acted the part so well. We first saw him in Siegfried Act Two, where he’s made up to look like a college boy; in this opera he’s older, an albino-mole person like his father and uncle (since Nibelungs live underground?) who resembles Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (and at the same time Principal Seymour Skinner, if he were a real person). He has an obsession with shooting and killing people, which we noticed in Siegfried Act Two as he was constantly pointing his fingers like a gun at his father, or at Siegfried, to indicate how he wished to shoot them. In addition to stabbing Siegfried with his bayonet and shooting Gunther (both of whom Wagner asks him to murder), Hagen stabs Alberich in the belly with a pocket-knife (Alberich continues to sing, “Sei treu, treu...treu” after the fact, which made the moment of stabbing seem kind of arbitrary), murders a bunch of prisoners captured by Gunther’s army, and finally exits the stage (after “Züruck vom Ring!”) with his right arm on fire—remember, his father lost his right arm—after reaching into the flaming Valhalla library trying to retrieve the ring. Peter Kazaras, you’re not the only one whose arm can light up in Götterdämmerung!

Scuzbucket Gutrune. I liked Yiva Kihlberg, who played Gutrune as a trashy sexpot, engaged at their first entrance in an amorous scene with her brother. While I’ve often speculated on just what the real deal is with those Gibichungs, and I think it’s possible that the thought crossed Wagner’s mind that Gunther and Gutrune were up to something, I can report—now having seen it—that it really doesn’t add anything to the show. Unless you kept returning to the idea, in scene after scene, you quickly forget about their incest after Siegfried arrives. So what’s the point of playing it up? It only makes unsympathetic characters even more repulsive.


Drink as drugs. The magic potion can be a tough plot point, in Götterdämmerung, but I honestly think it’s great. It makes perfect sense, in a production like this one, where they give him lots and lots of alcohol, laced with some unindentified drug, and Siegfried immediately becomes a different person—as people do who are addicted to drugs.

The reverse Rhine journey. The orchestra played the reverse Rhine journey very nicely, I’m happy to report. I was dreading it, ‘cause usually it’s a very dull piece indeed—all about Hagen’s inner emptiness and Brünnhilde’s loneliness, which she can’t understand. But I think it was their best playing of the evening.

Waltraute. Again, we were all surprised and delighted by Annette Bud, the really great Waltraute. There wasn’t anything unusual about the staging of her scene, but she did a fine job of singing and acting it—and that’s not always the case.

Real Vassals. The nice thing about a contemporary, updated production is that it forces everyone to think of the characters are real people. Sometimes, when they look really far out, you go into a weird mental state where you know you’re supposed to be suspending disbelief, but you aren’t, really; yet you think you are. When the Gibichung Vassals come out dressed in outrageous quasi-medieval costumes, and stand in semi-circles like your standard nineteenth-century opera chorus, it’s easy for the audience to stop living the show as drama. In this case, with them Slobodan Milosevic’s private army of terrorist thugs, they were all too real to all of us.

Staging of Act Two Quintet. You’re probably thinking “Wait, there’s no quintet, there’s a trio! The man must be mad!” And no, the trio was no good at all (none of them were good singers, which you need if you’re going to do that piece). I’m talking about one of the hardest scenes in all drama to stage sensibly, the five-person pentagle earlier in the second act, the double wedding of Brünnhilde, Gunther, Gutrune, and Siegfried, assisted by Hagen. Only once before have I seen that scene make any sense at all, in terms of the drama—who knows what, who’s thinking what, and who wants what from who. It’s very obscure in the text, probably on purpose, but always a danger spot in the theater—here negotiated with great success.


Old Rhinedaughters. Siegfried dreams of the Rhinedaughters at the top of Act Three. (Don’t ask me why it was a dream. Makes no difference to the plot one way or the other.) They, at first, are still wearing their 1920s costumes and wigs, but when they dive under the Rhine and resurface they now look like hideous old hags—much like how the Norns usually look. I thought this was fascinating, although what bearing it has on a matriarchal/feminist interpretation is beyond me.

Death of Siegfried. Stig Anderson’s rendering of the death scene, with the narration before it and the vision after he’s stabbed—sung, in this case, directly to Brünnhilde, was musically the climax of the week.

Singing “Ruhe” to Wotan #4. This director annoyed me many times by bringing on characters who aren’t supposed to be in those scenes and not giving them anything significant to do; two exceptions are the appearance of Brünnhilde in Siegfried’s death scene just mentioned, and the appearance of Wotan during the Immolation—a Wotan double (that’s the fourth Wotan we’ve seen this week! I’m going crazy!), looking very old, sitting in a chair and facing upstage, interacts with Brünnhilde during the part of the Immolation where she’s addressing him. A very nice idea.


Video Projections. In the final act we had a huge screen illuminated by rear projectors at the back of the stage; twice a phalanx of airplanes flew toward us from the distance and soared over Brünnhilde’s head; and then, when she set everything on fire, we saw a fire burning on the screen. Okay...so the use of projection in this case was a little basic. But I think it offers lots of possibilities for future Ring directors...think, guys, think...


Baby. Brünnhilde was pregnant all through Götterdämmerung, and runs offstage after “Selig grüß dich dein Weib!” to have her baby—she then returns, holding it, for the final motif, which refers to her self-sacrificial love. John Nesholm had predicted this before we even arrived at the theater, and when he said it, I remember saying: “Oh, please, no, what a cliché, how obvious.” Yes; and yet, when I saw it, and heard that music, I had a little emotional moment. It’s probably the old theater adage—nothing is as guaranteed irresistible as a baby (so don’t share the stage with them!). A physical reaction kicks in, and we all go: Aww... Which is perfect for that music. So, yes, it was cheap—but effective. In this case, an effect with a cause so deep that I’ll allow it. Just don’t anybody else try it!