Two batons better

The morning after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra failed to elect a music director, I took a call from Bild-Zeitung, Berlin’s most popular tabloid, seeking analysis. Later, they asked me to write a full-page op-ed.

Now shut your eyes a moment and try to imagine any circumstance in which the Sun would ever shine an inch of space on an orchestral conductor — unless, of course, he or she was snapped pants down by paparazzi in an M4 layby. Nothing will ever convince British tabloids to overcome their class-based scorn for art and, while we may think of German media as less counter-elitist, Bild readers consume no more Beethoven per head than Sun browsers. So why the sudden interest?

Because, for Germans, this is existential. In Germany, culture defines nation. In Britain, it defines nothing. Angela Merkel likes to be seen enjoying herself at symphony concerts and, every summer, at Bayreuth. David Cameron would not know how to chillax at a Britten opera, or when to clap.

The intense focus on the Berlin Philharmonic election was triggered by the emergence of a German candidate as music director, the first since Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1922 (Furtwängler’s 1955 successor, Herbert von Karajan, was a fly-in Austrian who overnighted at the Kempinski Hotel).

The German of 2015 — hailed by some as a man of destiny — is Christian Thielemann, Berlin born and bred, German as bratwurst in a bierkeller. German, and then some.

Thielemann, 56, is a musical conservative who shuns atonality and pretty much anything written after the death of Richard Strauss. His outlook is resolutely retro. He likes saying that Germans have nothing to apologise for, a coded phrase that places him on the outer fringe of the democratic right. In January, he issued a diatribe that appeared to show support for the Pegida anti-immigrant movement.