We saw the world end in Berlin, again. Another Ring Cycle – hurrah! – in the beautiful Staatsoper theatre on Unter den Linden. Christian Thielemann led the house’s superb orchestra from the dawn of Creation in Das Rheingold to the downfall of the Gods in Götterdämerung. It was a brisk Ring, coming in at seven minutes over 14 hours. The playing was magnificent, the singing of a very high order and the anti-mythological staging by Dmitri Tcherniakov startling. Particular praise must go to the Sieglinde of Lithuanian soprano Vida Mikneviciute – try saying that after a few scoops of pilsner. Thrilling hardly does her justice.
In April 2002 I was fortunate to hear Daniel Barenboim, Thielemann’s predecessor as the Staatsoper’s music director, conduct all ten major Wagner operas in a fortnight. It is now an even finer orchestra, and we were the lucky ones. A week of joy and, as Dämerung can mean dawn as well as twilight, the Ring enfolds us forever. ‘A wind that is always blowing, a stream that is always flowing,’ an early reviewer wrote of this colossal work. We unrepentant Wagnerians will keep returning to the Rhine – not that we saw it in this production – because, as James Merrill wrote in a memorable poem about the Ring, it is ‘where everything began. The world’s life. Mine’.
It was my 14th Ring Cycle, but my introduction to the Master was not a happy one. In November 1971, a friendly teacher at prep school invited a group of us to his study, where he put on a disc called, somewhat improbably, Wagner’s Greatest Hits. ‘Listen to this, boys,’ he said. ‘One day you’ll grow out of pop music.’ It sounded dreadful. Nearly two decades later, Furtwangler’s recording of Tristan und Isolde unlocked the gate. ‘A perfumed fog,’ Thomas Mann called the opera, and it didn’t take long to surrender. W.H. Auden sang the love duet from the second act with his mother when he was still in short pants. It took me until my late twenties, but I got there.
The record topping the hit parade that day in 1971, by the way, was ‘Coz I Luv You’ by Slade, with its opening line: ‘I won’t laugh at you when you boo hoo hoo.’ It’s not so different to Siegfried and Brunnhilde finding one another on that rocky mountain top. Wagner, like Noddy Holder, had long sideburns and liked to wear natty hats. Richard Harding, our friendly teacher, died in the summer and was laid to rest last month in Wiltshire. In his final months, I told him how he had introduced me to another Richard one autumnal Sunday in the long-ago. Teachers go through life without knowing what a difference they have made. We should tell them more often.
Darkenbloom was the book of the week. Eva Menasse, the author, is a Viennese long resident in Berlin, and her Holocaust novel merits every bouquet she has collected. It’s a riveting read, lighter than one might expect, while being entirely serious about the nature of evil. The book is about borders, of the mind as much as geography, and reminded me of a friend, Peter Steiner, who played cello in the Berliner Philharmoniker for 47 years. Vivi, Peter’s wife, was Hungarian so she was German in Hungary, Hungarian in Germany, and Jewish everywhere. That’s the fractured world of Darkenbloom. Wallace Stegner, the American novelist, believed an understanding of history had less to do with the hymns of the victors or the sorrows of the vanquished than the memories of the survivors. Yet memory is unreliable, as Menasse reminds us. A.E. Housman’s ‘sumless tale of sorrow’ never ends.
A great race is approaching its final furlong. Daniel Barenboim, who has made Berlin his home for 35 years, is suffering from Parkinson’s, which means his appearances on the concert platform are hit and miss. He made it to the podium this time, to conduct Peter’s old orchestra in Schubert and Beethoven, though it was painful to watch a man so formidable in his prime struggling to put one foot in front of another. As well as those Wagner operas in 2002, I heard him perform all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas at the Royal Festival Hall, and caught his last three concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. How can you repay a debt like that?
Ghosts in Charlottenburg, my favoured parish. Florian, the Swabian restaurant on Grolmanstrasse, and Eulenspiegel, the ‘private restaurant’ on Uhland, have long gone. But much abides. Marjellchen, on Mommsen, still serves classic East Prussian dishes and Zwiebelfisch, in Savignyplatz, remains a Berlin landmark. This great bar, which burnt down in 2020, in the first week of Covid, has been restored to glory. Hartmut Volmerhaus, who ran it, died two years ago, and Claudia, his daughter, has taken up the baton with aplomb. Brian Clough used to say he wasn’t necessarily the best football manager – ‘but I’m in the top one’. That’s ‘the Fish’. There isn’t a finer bar anywhere.
Civilisation may be listening to Wagner at the Staatsoper, or Beethoven at the Philharmonie. It may be spending an hour in the Caspar David Friedrich room at the Old National Gallery. Or it may be nursing a beaker in ‘the Fish’ at twilight, raising a glass to Hartmut and all those other friends who have helped make this great city a second home.
Comments