Music in Germany: Berlin Revisited

by NICOLAS NABOKOV

1

FASTEN your safety belts, please,” said the neutral voice in the loud-speaker. “Thank heavens, it’s nearly over!" I thought as a last bump jolted me half out of the seat. I looked out of the window where the left wing dipped menacingly over the ground. Yes, there it was, so familiar, so unchanged — just as I had left it three years ago. The same pitiful squares of vegetable gardens planted between ruins and rubble; the same treeless parks; the same naked sadness, ruin, and desolation.

The plane skimmed the jagged ruins towards the gray semicircle of the Tempelhof Terminal. Inside, the terminal seemed equally unchanged. The wornout sofas and club chairs stood in the same old places; the same sickening smell of doughnuts and coffee; the same row of bored, jaundiced porters in their black Luftwaffe overalls.

The customs ritual took five minutes. Then I climbed into a tiny “bug" — the Volkswagen-type taxi — and we began driving towards the center of West Berlin.

Suddenly all was different. From the low windows of the car, I could see rows of small stores, their show windows packed with goods, and one-story dwellings, newly built and freshly painted. True enough, between them were gaping cavities, blocks of ruins, heaps of rubble. But most of the cavities had been cleared of rubble and transformed into parking lots; the ruins had been tidied and surrounded by brick walls; the rubble had been piled in orderly heaps, encased in flower beds, or framed with borders of freshly mowed grass.

And the people had changed. No more the sallow elderly men, the gaunt women with their sickly children, who dragged themselves along the streets of Berlin in 1945 and 1946, with sullen expressions. The people looked younger, fresher, fatter. They walked faster, and some had new clothes, new handbags, new shoes. Mothers pushed new perambulators. Boys and girls passed my “bug” on new bicycles. Even the Kaiseralle had changed. The mass of pinkish ruins had receded into the background and had acquired an ageless permanent visage. Some of it was already covered with moss, grass, and even ivy. It had become, like so much else in Berlin, part of a curious, neo-romantic bombscape.

We stopped at the Hotel am Zoo where the Herr Fortier himself took me up in a silent and sedate lift to a large, impeccable room. It looked newly painted, waxed, dusted, brushed, polished, rubbed, and scrubbed. “Some change!" I said to the porter. “Na . . . dann!” he replied with a bitter grin. “Darin it was all a mess,”he continued in English. “What could you do mit de French and English Journalisten? So disorderly, so disorderly . . . ” he lamented. “All of dem coming and going . . . always in and out . . . three or four in a room . . . never sleep, always parties . . . and what goings on at those parties . . . what drinking . . . what ladies!!” And having thus completed his lament, he added sententiously, “It costed de manachment nearly a million marks to put de Hotel again into a ships-shape.”

I asked for a telephone directory and inquired whether it contained Russian sector numbers. He looked at me in astonishment, visibly taken aback by my unexpected request.

“No, the Hotel does not have a Berlin-Ost telephone book and Russian numbers you can’t get,” he replied with a proud finality in his voice.

I picked up the telephone and called a friend, the composer Boris Blacher. “Oh! Hello,” answered a cheerful voice at the phone. “Welcome back. We got your wire and we’re expecting you. When arc you going to come?” I suggested after dinner. “ No, no. Why after dinner?” he replied. “Come for dinner.” And he laughed in the phone. “You see, times have changed; now we can invite you for dinner. We’ll ask the Rufers to join us and it will be like old times.”

2

My good friend the eminent German composer Boris Blacher has had a complex and twisted career, an illustration of the hazards and vicissitudes to which a creative artist is subjected in our absurd and cruel century. By birth he belongs to a Russified Baltic family of German extraction which, after the outbreak of the Bolshevik terror, fled from Russia to Harbin in Manchuria. Thousands of Russian bourgeois and intellectuals flocked there escaping the charms of Lenin’s regime and soon established Russian schools, political parties, Russian newspapers and libraries, Russian publishing houses and hospitals.

Blacher got his first education in music at the Russian conservatory of Harbin and only moved to Germany, I believe, in the middle twenties. Once in Germany he completed his studies and soon developed a great facility in composing combined with an equal versatility in the various techniques that govern the modern use of musical materials. Fortunately his versatility in adopting the devices discovered by his older contemporaries went well in hand with a natural lyrical gift and with an intuitive sense of clear-cut formal structure. He also developed a liking for a transparent sound texture, achieved by means of neat and well-mannered linear writing. Towards the end of the twenties and in the early thirties, compositions by Boris Blacher began to be performed, his first scores began to be printed, and the more alert music, critics and young composers talked about him as a rising star.

Like many musicians all over the world, Boris Blacher has always been essentially apolitical. Although strongly opposed to the rising tide of Nazism in the early thirties, he did not bend to the other extreme, as did some of his colleagues, and he did not join or coöperate or even sympathize with the Communist Party in Germany. Yet despite his relative lack of musical status and nonpolitical record, as soon as the Nazis took power Blacher was forced to go into eclipse for the duration of the twelve-year Third Reich. This forced eclipse was caused by Blacher’s partly Jewish ancestry, by the fact that his music fell into the category of the socalled “degenerate art,” and by his own reluctance to play any role under the Nazis. His music stopped being performed or printed in Germany, and Blacher’s name henceforth was never mentioned in German newspapers or magazines.

I vaguely remember hearing about him during those years when he was more or less “in hiding” — that he was diligently composing; that he had a small job as an arranger and orchestrator at the Dresden radio station; and that occasionally some of his music did get performed in a semiclandestine way.

Towards the end of the war Blacher moved to Berlin and when the collapse came he suddenly found himself in an unexpectedly advantageous position. He had not collaborated with the Nazis; he had suffered from the obscurantist strictures of the Nazi regime; he spoke Russian fluently; and he was known as a serious, highly promising musician of the “pre-Nazi” era. Consequently, as soon as General Berzarin became Berlin’s first Russian commandant, Blacher was assigned as the music “specialist” of the Russian-controlled radio station of Berlin. Here, by a curious irony, he assumed exactly the same duties he had performed during his long “exile” under the Nazis. He had to arrange, adapt, orchestrate, and write background music for radio.

He was compelled to continue at the Berlin radio for nearly two years. But his fame as a composer was rising fast in Central Europe, Switzerland, and England. 1 le was asked by all sorts of radio stat ions, musical associations, and festival organizations to write operas, symphonic pieces, quartets, and piano music. He had in stock a sizable amount, of music composed during the lean Nazi years. Besides, during his long “radio penance,” he had developed a technique of composition surpassing in rapidity even such champions of compositional stenography as the Italian opera composers of the eighteenth century. Blacher’s output for the years 1945 and 1946 was two and one-half operas, four symphonic pieces, one oratorio, several chamber music works, songs, piano music, and of course kilometers of radio music. All this phenomenal accomplishment was achieved in the wretched surroundings of post-war Berlin.

I met Blacher during the winter of 1945-46 and we soon became friends. I liked his imaginative, agile mind, his amusing wit, his crisp sarcasm about his own work, about Berlin, and about the state of music in devastated Germany. He seemed so different from other Germans, with their stodgy spirit and ways, their constant laments and protests of innocence, or their embittered sense of inferiority. On the heavy horizon of Berlin’s civilian life, with its innumerable hardships, the Blachers, both husband and wife, seemed light, witty, and fresh. It was not that they were inordinately gay people, but Boris’s eyes held an amused and friendly glint and he was optimistic and confident about the future. They were among the very few Berliners I knew at that time who had not lost their sense of humor and had not developed what the late German poet Ringelnatz used to call “the ingrown toenail complex of the German race.”

Blacher finally succeeded in disentangling himself from his radio obligations and began to make a living as a free-lance composer, occupying posts at the Berlin Conservatory, at the music summer schools of Bryanston in England and Salzburg in Austria. For, besides being an eminent composer, Blacher is also a teaching wizard. His analytical versatility enables him to explain or to “indoctrinate” young composers in the secrets and “devices” of all modern techniques. Among Blacher’s students are some of the best young composers of Central Europe; such as the Austrian composer Gottfried von Einen, whose opera Danton’s Death was produced with considerable success at the Salzburg Festival in 1948.

3

THE Blachers lived far out in the American sector and it took me three quarters of an hour to get there. Boris greeted me cheerfully on the steps. “Well,” he said, offering me a chair, “sit down and tell us all about yourself. Where have you been, what have you done, and what is new in America?

“How long are you staying in Berlin, or are you like most Americans, just here between two planes?” And he continued with a chuckle, “Isn’t it true that Americans stay two or three days in Berlin, just enough time to collect material for several articles? Then they go back and write wonderful things about us Berliners — how courageous we are, what splendid morale we have, how well we resist hardships . . .” He spoke in an amused and slightly malicious way, yet there was no trace of scorn or sarcasm in his voice. I replied that I was going to say in Berlin for six days and that I was counting on him to guide me around and take me to hear all the new music.

“That’s not difficult,” said Blacher, and laughed. “You don’t have to stay six days in Berlin to do that, you can do it in two.”

Blacher’s wife came in with a roast and placed it on the table. I couldn’t help staring at the meat with astonishment. “Ah yes,” said Mrs. Blacher as if reading my thought. “This is the first time we can invite you to a real dinner. In 1946 only black marketeers could afford butter, white bread, and roast beef. Now ...”

“But you know,” interrupted Blacher, “sometimes I regret the hunger of those years. Now that we have it all,” and he nodded towards the plate his wife was passing to him, “I’m not so sure that those hunger years weren’t in many ways better than ... at least then we were full of hope . . . and now . . . what can get better now?

“But let’s talk about you and about America,” he started anew. “What have you written? How is Virgil Thomson?” (He had met Thomson when the latter came to visit Berlin in the summer of 1946 and wrote a brilliant post-war report on music in Germany, naming Blacher as one of the top composers.) “Have you seen Stravinsky? How is his opera progressing? Have you heard any of it? What interesting new music is there in America? What is Menotti’s Consul like?” He kept bombarding me with similar questions all through the meal. I told him all I knew and did my best to give him a complete picture of musical affairs in America.

The Rufers, father, mother, and daughter, arrived in time for dessert. The Rufers, although different in temperament and cultural background, had in other ways a kinship with the Blachers. Joseph Rufer, the eminent Viennese musicologist and a disciple and friend of Schoenberg, was the first to resume a music conservatory in the American sector of Berlin in 1946 and to publish a music magazine, Stimmen. He, his wife, and their daughter Iselin were, like the Blachers, friendly and “light” people, and like the Blachers had not lost their sense of humor, their natural gaiety.

I asked Blacher to show me some of his new music but he refused. “First of all,” he said, “I haven’t written anything for months; and secondly, why should I bore you with my music?” I pressed the point; I wanted to know why he had ceased writing.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said hesitantly. “I simply don’t feel like it. Besides, I have written too much music in the past . . . and . . . why, may I ask, should I be expected to write music all the time and particularly now?” Rufer agreed with Blacher. “I don’t see how composers in Berlin can be expected to compose music. Everybody’s mind is elsewhere.”

Blacher’s wife nodded and said, “We can think only of one thing: When will it begin again?”

“No, I didn’t mean exactly that,” said Blacher, drawling out every word; “it’s not the fear of a new war that made me stop composing. It’s something different. You see,” he said, “in the last four years I have explored in my music most of the techniques, styles, and forms which are current nowadays. I have tried to experiment and to understand most of the aesthetic problems raised by my contemporaries. Suddenly I feel tired of them all and realize that very little new has transpired in music in the last ten or twenty years. Of course a lot of music has been written and some of it is quite good, but the principles were established long ago — some thirty or more years ago. . . . Somehow I feel that we have come to an impasse and that all our efforts are quixotic; they only lead to a kind of repetition or continuation of the same old things. Besides, the public continues to prefer Brahms and Wagner to our music. Nobody really seems to need new music.

“In the early post-war years, all seemed hopeful,”he continued. “Even though we had nothing to eat in Berlin everything was exciting. We had been cut off from the rest of the world and had lost contact with what all of you were doing abroad. I remember how interested I was when in 1945 you gave your lectures here on music in America. I heard the names of Copland, Thomson, Barber, and other American composers for the first time. Then, all news from abroad seemed fresh and stimulating; the world outside of Germany was a vast unexplored territory. Now, of course, I realize that it was largely an optical illusion.

“And even politically . . . then, at least, I was foolish enough to believe that somehow things would work out and we would all be able to work in relative peace and rebuild our broken culture . . . but now . . . now, just look around and see what goes on here in Berlin. We are living on the front line, in trenches, and the only incomprehensible thing is that, as yet, nobody is shooting. Of course that makes for constant anxiety and gradually paralyzes one’s will. It makes one feel old and worn. Most of us have grown fatter in Berlin. So much so that sometimes I can barely recognize some of my colleagues in the conservatory. But in a true sense we are more tired than we were. I often think that you in America must feel the same anxiety, but probably your degree of awareness is less. Ours is perhaps more acute, more immediate. The reason is simple. Even a five-year-old child in Berlin understands it. The reason is there,” and he pointed in the direction of the Soviet sector.

I here was a silence. Everyone looked down and all smiles were gone. Then Blacher’s voice, calmer, gayer, broke in. “Maybe if I were in America,” he said, turning to me, “I would feel otherwise, I would write again — and teach. You know how much I like teaching.” And he looked me straight in the eye and said emphatically, “I believe that today America is the only country where a composer can work fearlessly.”

It was late when I left the Blachers but I didn’t want to go to bed. I told the cab driver to take me to the center of Berlin, to the Potsdamer Platz where the British, American, and Russian sectors meet. We drove through well-lit streets. Strains of dance music were coming from cafes and night clubs, and caravans of huge trucks rattled along, exhaling clouds of black Diesel smoke. The driver stopped on the British corner of the Potsdamer Platz in front of a newly rebuilt department store. I got out and walked towards the Brandenburg Gate, past the former gardens of the Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office.

At the Brandenburg Gate a file of cars waited to get into the Russian sector, and as I passed behind them I noticed a policeman in black, standing on the other side of the gate checking plates and papers. I stopped near the last arch of the gate and peered through it. As I looked at the weird cavities of the Pariser Platz and, beyond it, at the dim, dead Unter den Linden, the sense of threat concealed in the night came over me. Just in front, beyond the column upon which I leaned, practically within arm’s reach, lay the boundary. Suddenly I felt its sinister and almost palpable reality. There it lay, under the shadow of the warscarred gate, the border line that divided this vast, helpless city into two parts and made all life seem an absurdity. And Blacher’s words came back to my mind: “The only incomprehensible thing is that, as yet, nobody is shooting.”

4

DESPITE Boris Blacher’s gloomy outlook I soon discovered that, outwardly at least, there had been a change for the better in the musical life of Berlin. Everything had improved, including both the quality of and the quantity of the music-making. The standards were of course still far from those I had known in the days of the Weimar Republic, but on the whole the musical life was that of a capital and not of a battered and half-dazed ruin. The mainstays of musical life remained the same big music-making organizations; the Berlin Philharmonic, the Municipal Opera, and the State Opera. All of them had stayed in the same old places: the first two in the Western sectors, the last in the Russian. To these old organizations should be added a new one, the Symphony Orchestra of the radio station in the American sector, which began to function late in 1947 and which in the last two years has become a first-rate ensemble, thanks to its dynamic young Hungarian conductor, Ferenc Fricsay, and American dollar standard salaries. This orchestra is particularly important to young composers, for it is the main outlet for new German music and the only outlet for contemporary American music.

Like all Americans, I was warned by the American authorities in Berlin to forbear any visits to the Russian sector in view of possible arrest and complications, and although I did not entirely conform to this suggestion, I renounced a visit to the State Opera in the Soviet sector, chiefly because its program during the five days I was in Berlin did not seem interesting enough to warrant any kind of risky adventure. Yet I was able to find a few facts about some of the protagonists of the “democratic cultural front” of East Berlin which seem to be true. For example, it is an incontrovertible fact that the composer Hans Eisler had taken a position in regard to Western music unusual for Stalin’s cultural minions. A year and a half ago in a public lecture at the Humboldt University of East Berlin he declared, to everybody’s surprise, that it is “foolish to deny” the fact that Stravinsky and Schoenberg are “great craftsmen” of musical composition, and in fact probably “the greatest living masters of modern music”; but that in their music they “reflect only the world of decaying, capitalistic society” and thus their art is totally “incomprehensible, uncongenial, and unnecessary” to the masses of the world proletariat which has now built and is extending a new socialist society all over the world. Therefore, he called upon the composers of “democratic Germany to “accept wholcheartedly the principles of the Prague declaration to abandon useless experimentation and formalistic tendencies ” and to concentrate on writing “songs and music for the working classes.”

In so far as Eisler himself is concerned, this was not difficult. Except for the period from 1939 to 1945 during his “Hollywood idyl, where he wrote interesting but utterly “decadent-corrupt-bourgeois-passport less-cosmopolitan” music, according to the standards of Stalinist aesthetic catechism, Lisler has always written so-called Cebrauchsmusik (“music for use”) for the masses. Hence it was easy for him, upon his return from America, to resume the writing of songs and choruses whose characteristic qualities are banality, tunefulness, and march-time rhythms — exhibiting that particular brand of official “optimism” so well reflected in most of the odes to Stalin or songs of the German and French Red Pioneers. In these one can find all the harmonic banalities of the so-called “class-conscious” songs of the late 1890s, the worst aspects of Kurt-Weillism of the 1920s, and, at times, a sprinkling of Hindemithical or Bachlike counterpoint. The astonishing thing about the whole affair was of course the fact that Hans Eisler termed such “vile lackeys of capitalism” as Stravinsky and Schoenberg “master craftsmen,” but the phrase may have been necessary in the complex environment of not entirely “assimilated” Germany.

During my visit in Berlin the Municipal Opera House in the British sector had only one novelty on its program: a full evening ballet, Abraxas, by the European composer Werner Egk. The rest was staple repertory: Tristan and Fidelio. Of the two staples I chose the latter and was very agreeably surprised to hear one of the best Fidelios of my life. The young Hungarian conductor Fricsay produced an ensemble of singing and playing that was so homogeneous, so precise, and at the same time so profoundly lyrical that all the moving, humane parts of Beethoven’s music stood out as they rarely do in the average performance. None of the singers was permitted to be an individual star; all of them were stylistically perfect. The staging was impressive, particularly in the prison scene, where the able director Heinz Titjen suggested the atmosphere of a concentration camp rather than of a prison and thus gave the whole scene an additional gruesome poignancy.

The ballet Abraxas, on the contrary, disappointed me. Its title is derived from medieval cabalistic legends but its action reflects a number of incidents of Goethe’s Faust. Unfortunately, the high aim of the composer and of his collaborator, the young French choreographer and ballerina Janine Charrat, in dealing with such a famous subject in a new way and by means of ballet, does not quite come off. Abraxas, to me, seemed dull, repetitious, provincial, and terribly Central European. it began with a bearded gentleman (Faust) who appeared on a dark stage, followed by a white spotlight. He made all sorts of angular gestures with his arms, hands, feet, hips, and head, which I presume suggested a cabalistic ritual invoking the powers of nature (or Hell). After a while a greenish creature in tights crept up to the bearded gentleman and started to wind herself, eel-like, around his feet and legs. Suddenly the spotlights faded, and when they went on again the beard had disappeared and the gentleman was dressed in the pretty clothes of a medieval rogue, surrounded by equally prettily garbed ladies. From then on he began making violent love to a succession of ballet ladies, including a Margaret, a Helena, and Miss Janine Charrat herself, under the guise of the greenish, tight-clad devil. His love-making was supported by a large imitative cast. It was intense, obnoxious, and lecherous. The dancers rolled on the floor in realistic poses. At a certain moment a devil whipped everyone into a trancelike, orgiastic dance, and at other times Faust appeared entwined with one of his paramours in frozen promiscuity. The whole affair ended with the safe return of the beard to its former owner and with a rowdy mass lynching of the innocent Margaret. Egk’s music with its square rhythms, its obvious repetitive thematical material, and its somewhat obtuse stressing of tonality unmitigated by fresh modulators inventiveness formed a curiously anemic background to this orgy.

As we were leaving, my companion, a young American girl, considerably shocked by what she had seen, remarked, “Look at them, and she pointed at the crowd of rosy-cheeked German couples around us, still applauding enthusiastically. “They all look as if they were licking their chops after a good dinner.”

5

THE evening after this libidinous fare I was invited by the Rufer family to go with them to a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the ever-present Fricsay. It was summer and most German conductors were on various music festival junkets. Hence Fricsay combined the normal work of three men, conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra, the Municipal Opera, and the American radio orchestra. I was very eager to hear the orchestra. I had admired it in the twenties, and during the hard winter of 1945-46 I had a great deal to do with the resumption of its artistic activities. The orchestra was unrecognizable. The various defects in its sections, so hard hit by the war and the post-war period (loss of instrumentalists and instruments, denazification, and malnutrition), had been corrected and the Merlin Philharmonic was once again one of the finest symphonic ensembles on the European continent. Its playing was again stylistically and technically irreproachable, its discipline superior to that of most European orchestras, and its sense of communal effort combined with a specifically German earnestness in the performance of duty was again of the highest order.

What struck me particularly was the solid power and richness of its brasses, a specialty of good German orchestras - a fact which I had forgotten after having been accustomed to the more suave and technically more accomplished brasses of American and French orchestras. I marveled also at the disciplined precision of the bowing technique of the strings (chiefly the first violins). The balance of the four sections and the individual qualities of the soloists were perhaps not as polished as those of some American orchestras, but its general sense of tradition, particularly in phrasing (chiefly in the German classics: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert) and its wholehearted obedience to the music’s dynamic and structural needs, is, I believe, superior.

After the concert we drove out to Ferenc Fricsay’s house for a quiet and pleasant supper. The amiable young conductor and his lovely Viennese wife showed me the warmest and most kindly hospitality. I complimented Fricsay on his Fidelia performance and on his handling of the Philharmonic concert during the same week. “That’s nothing,” he said smilingly; “there is something else that I did earlier in the week,” and he pointed at several rolls of tape lying near a recording machine. I’ve recorded two complete programs of modern German music which the station is beaming to America in exchange for modern American music. I wanted to hear the pieces he had recorded and as soon as we left the table he played the recordings.

The most remarkable piece was a symphony for strings by the Munich composer Carl Amadeus Hartman. Here is a work of real imagination, where the string ensemble is used as ably as in Bartók’s concerto for strings and percussion and in the six quartets. The polyphony is transparent and solidly built. The harmonies are logical and fresh; the formal structure is laconic, intelligent, and well-proportioned. Best of all, it has none of that pernicious avitaminosis which is so frequent now in Western European music. It is a vivid, dynamic piece written in personal and convincing language.

Every time Fricsay would put on a new roll of tape I would express my admiration for his superb performance. He would smile and say, “Well, that’s the advantage of working with the American radio. I can have as many rehearsals as I need, and I believe modern music needs much more rehearsal time than old music. It has to be performed in detailed perfection in order to make sense.” After the last roll had been played he said, “Of course I have exceptionally good musicians in the radio orchestra. I was able to wean them away from all over Germany, and chiefly from the Eastern zone, because we pay dollar standard salaries, higher than most orchestras in Western Germany and much higher than those in Eastern Germany, which, besides, are paid in rather ‘unpopular’ East marks. What can a musician get for his East marks in Berlin? Nothing! They still live on ration coupons, you know, down there . . .” And like Blacher he pointed in the direction of the Soviet zone.

In order to form a clearer picture of creative musical developments in Germany, I asked both Fricsay and Rufer a few essential questions. Their answers can be resumed thus: the leading composers in Western Germany at the present time are the following five — Werner Egk (at this moment perhaps the most successful), Carl Orff, Wolfgang Fortner, Johann Wolfgang Hartman, and of course Boris Blacher.

The tendencies of these five composers vary from primitivistic medieval revivalism and comfortable neo-classicism to a more complex expressionism in the Bartók vein and to a shy and somewhat awkward experimentation with atonality and twelve-tone technique. The latter tendency is gaining ground among the younger composers, chiefly those who are in contact with French developments in that direction. The main influence in the last five years, however, has unquestionably been that of Boris Blacher. His pedagogical ability, his prolificness, and his versatility have combined to make him the most influential person in Central European music. “If only you could help him to go to America,” said Rufer. “He is so disgusted here with all this political mess and the ever-present Comrades in the East that he can’t work. Yes, like most of us younger musicians here in Berlin,” echoed Fricsay, completing Rufer’s thought, he dreams of going to America, where one can still work and teach in peace.”