I had come from the State Library on my bike, a long-term rental courtesy of an excellent and cheap Dutch company called Swapfiets with outlets in many European cities. I’d just pedaled down Unter den Linden, then picked my way through the evening crowds milling in the square on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate.
Through the sandstone columns, I could see that the tourists beyond all had their backs to the Gate. They were looking not at the monument but west at the sun setting in spectacular shades of red and orange, trailing bands of magenta and pink at the far end of the Straße des 17. Juni, Berlin’s widest, longest, straightest avenue—though the Karl-Marx Allee in the eastern part of the city gives it a run for its capitalist money.
The name of the “Street of the 17th of June” resounds with echoes of the Cold War. Formerly called the Charlottenburger Chaussee, it was rebranded in the early summer of 1953 in support of widespread workers’ protests in East Berlin and across the German Democratic Republic.
The boulevard’s present conception—its ruthless drive out towards the province of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, and seemingly to the horizon—was the work of Nazi architect Albert Speer. In 1938, Hitler had charged him with creating a triumphal avenue that would lead from the Brandenburg Gate six miles west to the Olympic Stadium and down which victorious athletes and armies could march.
The thoroughfare takes on a whole new meaning when one realizes that its thoroughness is of totalitarian origin. Where would it end, this paved parade ground, in its journey west out into the wide, white world to be united under the 1,000-year Reich?
A mile down the avenue, an angel glowed, perhaps dangerously, in the evening light: Viktoria atop the Siegesäule—the Victory Column. Speer had had the know-how, resources and arrogance to move this nineteenth-century monument from its original position just northwest of the Brandenburg Gate by the Reichstag to a grand circle (“star”—Stern) down the avenue.
The column is decorated with sixty gilded cannon barrels set vertically in their niches, the weapons supposedly captured in the three wars of unification (against Denmark, the other German states and Austria; and France) fought between 1865 and 1870. The victories led to the establishment of the modern German nation, which called itself an empire, and crowned its king a Kaiser (Caesar) in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The square at the Brandenburg Gate is called the Pariser Platz, tonight a hall of handheld mirrors. Raised in reverence or routine, hundreds of screens displayed hundreds of suns.
In those looking glasses, as on her column, Viktoria appeared to be on fire. Would she collapse in a heap of molten gold or blast off from her perch and towards the Prussian blue heavens?
The traffic light changed from anodyne, electric red, to orange, and then to green. I pedaled into the intersection. Just after I’d crossed over the line of bricks set into the asphalt to mark the former course of the disappeared Berlin Wall, I turned slightly left towards the city’s central park, the Tiergarten.
A mass of dark matter whizzed just in front of me in the opposite direction, missing me by what seemed like less than an inch. I’m not sure I ever saw the thing, but I felt the wind and the frightening closeness of mass and velocity. Before I realized what had happened, this stealth delivery guy was already long gone, trailing only a vicious baritone curse that sounded like “Arschloch” (asshole) and was quickly sucked away with him in the draft of his supercharged e-bike.
I pulled into the shaded park and stopped, shaken. Waiting for the light to change, I’d been basking in sunset worship, historical reverie and its coefficient of melancholy amidst the theater of photo-op tourism. E-bikes are a new development in Berlin and certainly new to me here, and one of them had nearly ended my sojourn and/or me.
It would have been quite the crack-up and surely meant a trip to the Krankenhaus if not the morgue instead of my intended goal—the Philharmonie just through the park.
I got back in the saddle and a few minutes later pulled up to the famed concert hall with its celebrated acoustics and groovy 1960s design—an unpredictably polygonal whose yellow-gold corrugated cladding was also ablaze in the evening light.
I found an available stand among the throng of parked bikes, locked mine and made my way inside and up through the three-dimensional maze of stairways that led to the various seating sections. The auditorium is in the round, and I was in K-block, up behind the orchestra. At one of the higher stairway landings, concertgoers were lining up at a west-facing window and taking photos of the sunset. I waited for my turn, directed my phone westward, then continued upward and to my seat.
The concert was by the Orchestre de Paris under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Finnish by birth and musical training, but by now a borderless cosmopolitan. A simultaneously energetic and poised 67, he was a wunderkind director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in his twenties. At 32, he took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was an important force in the building of Disney Hall. He was chief of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and, while also serving as an iPad pitchman and creative consultant for Apple a decade ago, directed that group in a concert at the Apple Store in Berlin. Until May of this year, Salonen was music director at the San Francisco Orchestra, but parted from that institution’s board of directors on brittle terms, citing artistic differences unbridgeable even in the City by the oft-spanned Bay.
Salonen’s Berlin appearance came on the third evening of the city’s Musikfest, which, over its more than three weeks, presents thirty carefully curated concerts by leading international orchestras and ensembles, interspersed with avant-garde, improvised, experimental, and electronic offerings.
Conductors thrive—indeed exist at all—as gravitational centers of attention, black holes of fascination both for the musicians and the audience, not to mention the media and marketers. Last Monday’s concert expanded that truth in unforeseen directions.
The program opened with the Requies of Luciano Berio, who would have been 100 this year. The work was a memorial to his ex-wife, the category-busting soprano Cathy Berberian, who had died of a heart attack on March 6th, 1983, at the age of 57, the night before she was to have sung the Internationale “in the style of Marilyn Monroe” on television on the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death.
Working without his baton for Requies, Salonen was less still than a statue, but not by much, at least not for a conductor. His fingers stroked and sculpted the air, precisely, gently, respectfully. His bearing was as ramrod straight as those Siegesäule cannons, his mien reverential as a priest and as impassive as a general. His hands drew out ethereal pitches and timbres. Plaints emerged, then insisted. Not melodies, but intimations of melodies pulsed, haunted, and then receded from the pared-down Parisian ensemble, which at full strength numbers more than 100. Salonen had also studied in Italy and, as this moving, minimal performance proved, paid his dues to the modernist titan, Berio.
Salonen is also a compelling composer, even if his own path has been a more accessible, though by no means facile one. Prone to taking leaves from his busy conducting career to concentrate on his own music, Salonen has in recent years produced a catalog of concertos for leading soloists. The latest, his horn concerto, was premiered earlier this year by Stefan Dohr under Salonen’s direction in Lucerne. Along with composition and conducting, Salonen had studied the horn at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. In this work, autobiography then, was inherent, inevitable. Standing next to Salonen at his podium, dedicatee Dohr, principal hornist for the hometown Berlin Philharmonic, was as much narrator as soloist, explaining with measured confidence, cajoling with arcing humor and celebrating the collaboration with an all-embracing exuberance.
Salonen has confessed an Oedipal desire to escape the pervasive presence in his homeland of Sibelius, the father of Finnish music. Yet while a student in Italy, Salonen discovered a score to the Fifth Symphony at an antiquarian and saw in it a divergent path of modernism; even though a euphonious one, it strayed willfully from received symphonic forms and conventions.
Sibelius was the most performed international symphonist of the first decades of the 20th century, but not yet 50, he felt himself a has-been, left behind by the avant-garde bad boys Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg and their demolition of tonality. A wintery writer’s block seized up Sibelius’s imagination. But in the spring of 1915, he went walking in the wild and a dozen swans flew over him, circling him. Their honking chorus gifted the composer the finale’s half-note theme swinging across wide intervals that, under Salonen, now wielding his baton, was transcendent rather than triumphant, shudderingly profound in its reconciliation of art and nature, the naked, yet artful beauty of its humanity. Viktoria, on her pillar, could never achieve this kind of limitless, ungraspable victory.
A Ravel pastry of an encore let the French band bite into their French brand, even if the pastry chef hailed originally from near the Arctic Circle.
The next morning, it was announced that Salonen would become principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris. The sun had yet to set on his far-flung, ever-moving musical empire.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
Be First to Comment