Great Singers at the Berlin State Opera

Note by Dominic Fyfe











'Berlin was absolutely marvellous in those days...You have only to consult the Sunday newspapers of those times to be overwhelmed by the number of wonderful concerts and world-famous artists advertised there. The plays produced by Leopold Jessner or Max Reinhardt were events discussed by the press all over the world. The State Opera and City Opera existed side by side in friendly artistic rivalry, under such great conductors as Leo Blech, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Berlin was the focal point of German art and science.'

Frida Leider, 'Playing my part', Berlin 1959

These reminiscences by the State Opera's great dramatic soprano between the wars capture the embarras de richesses which greeted Berlin's audience for opera in the Weimar Republic. The performances assembled on this disc date from 1925, the year when electrical recording revolutionised the gramophone industry and when no fewer than three opera houses flourished side by side in the city. The question 'aren't three opera houses too many for Berlin?' was addressed by one of their conductors, Otto Klemperer, in an article published in the 'Deutsche Tonkünstler-Zeitung' in April 1931: 'I believe not only that Berlin can fill three opera houses today and tomorrow but that the city needs three opera houses and can fill them every evening. There is, admittedly, one condition, a sine qua non, and that is: only if all three opera houses are of the highest artistic standard.'

In retrospect the three houses which Klemperer speaks of - the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Kroll Opera and Berlin Städtische Oper (City Opera) - set high yet often complementary and competitive artistic standards.

Daily performances of opera had been instituted in the 1870's when Berlin's population approached one million and by the 'Roaring Twenties' demand had grown greater than ever. In 1927 the Prussian Ministry of Culture established in the Kroll Theatre a branch of the Staatsoper - the Staatsoper am Platz der Republik - to perform new and standard works in a non-traditional manner; as Klemperer put it, 'The idea of doing away with the concept of repertory opera and introducing opera for everyday - everyday opera.' The vocal standards of the Kroll were more modest than those of its parent but then it was a place where audiences went to see and hear operas by Hindemith, Janacek and Weill, conductors such as Alexander von Zemlinsky and Fritz Zweig and bold experiment in production, whether in Le Nozze di Figaro or Schönberg's Erwartung. The fate of the Kroll, however, was determined from the start: being an attempt to establish an institution representative of the Weimar Republic it could not escape economic decline coupled with right-wing pressure. It closed after four seasons in July 1931.

Further west, in Berlin's bourgeois suburb Charlottenburg, the Städtische Oper rivalled the Staatsoper more closely; once, in 1914 and in its previous life as the Deutsches Opernhaus, it arranged the first performance of Parsifal outside Bayreuth, four days before the Staatsoper's. In 1925 the Bismarckstrabe site was acquired by the Berlin City Ministry and with performances directed by Heinz Tietjen and, until 1929, conducted by Bruno Walter the Städtische Oper had its best years. Walter then left for Leipzig to succeed Furtwängler at the Gewandhaus, while Tietjen transferred to the Staatsoper. This move was typical of the singers too and invariably lent the Lindenoper greater prestige; Erna Berger, Gerhard Hüsch, Alexander Kipnis and Margherita Perras were among those who made their Berlin debuts in Charlottenburg before joining the Staatsoper.

Until 1918 the Staatsoper had been a court institution, run by Intendants such as the legendary Botho von Hülsen (who assembled the first outstanding ensemble of singers, including Lilli Lehmann, Albert Niemann and Adelina Patti) and general music directors from Giacomo Meyerbeer in the 1840's to Felix von Weingartner and Richard Strauss in the years before the Great War, (both Heinrich Schlusnus and Elfriede Marherr-Wagner made their debuts then and both sang at the Staatsoper until the end of the Second World War). As the Königliche Hofoper (Royal Court Opera) it had been in many ways a province of the Prussian Empire and the prerogative of the monarch in matters of artistic administration, the hiring and firing of Kapellmeisters and composers, endured until the collapse of the Hohenzollerns when control passed to the new Ministry of Culture and with it the building on Unter den Linden. This last inheritance proved a greater asset than the largely French and Italian stage repertory which accompanied it. Lilli Lehmann, returning to Berlin after the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, complained of the 'old repertoire treadmill' and went on to imply a decade later that on most nights the Hofoper revealed only the worst in German character: 'Man proposes, the artist hopes, but too much beer brings everything to naught' ('My Path Through Life' 1914). Between 1850 and 1918 there had been only three world premieres; first performances of Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser were refused and Emperor Wilhelm II personally prevented the premiere of Strauss' Feuersnot in 1901, leading to the loss of Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier to Dresden in the years which followed.

The German composer and conductor Max von Schillings was appointed first director at the new Staatsoper in November 1919 and before his departure in 1925 to the Prussian Academy of the Arts he transformed the aristocratic house into a company reflecting Germany's new democratic ideals. The classical repertory was revitalised by the work of the directors Jürgen Fehling and Gustaf Gründgens (his 1938 Zauberflöte for Karajan is still talked about today) and the designers Caspar Neher, Theo Otto and Traugott Müller. At last there was an emphasis on contemporary composers - Busoni, Hindemith, Pfitzner, Schönberg, Stravinsky - and twelve premieres were given between 1919 and 1932, including the legendary series of Berg's Wozzeck under Kleiber in November, 1925. Schillings' eventual successor Heinz Tietjen, who had presided over the Bruno Walter era at Berlin's Städtische Oper, concentrated the repertory on German works, especially those of Wagner where Staatsoper productions often surpassed the precision of Bayreuth. The singers for those productions, however, commuted between both Bayreuth and Berlin and, as Herman Klein noted in 'The Gramophone' in 1929, 'they tell their own story'. Klein wrote of Schorr in Both Schorr and Kipnis were later obliged to leave Germany on racial grounds, in 1933 and 1935 respectively. Klemperer left Berlin for the same reason and the Staatsoper's Generalmusikdirektor, Erich Kleiber, departed in protest in 1934. In this period the Nazi Reichskulturkammer under Goering circumscribed and politicised much of the Staatsoper's activity: performances of Hindemith, Berg and Stravinsky were prohibited and Goebbels manufactured the infamous rivalry between Furtwängler and Karajan. Almost all the remaining singers in this collection survived the 1930s and 1940s and some, notably Erna Berger and Tiana Lemnitz, saw the Staatsoper reopen on Unter den Linden in 1955 after a decade when performances had been given temporarily in the Admiralspalast. The spirit which sustained the ensemble in those years is perhaps best heard in the Quartet from Fidelio and best articulated by Wilhelm Furtwängler: 'As a musician I am more than a citizen. I am a German in that eternal sense to which the genius of great music testifies'.


© 1993 Dominic Fyfe

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