Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     ‘The gramophone burst into loud, braying music. Most of the people in the room began to dance. They were nearly all young. The boys were in shirt sleeves; the girls had unhooked their dresses. The atmosphere of the room was heavy with dust and perspiration and cheap scent. An enormous woman elbowed her way through the crowd, carrying a glass of wine in each hand. She wore a pink silk blouse and a very short pleated white skirt; her feet were jammed into absurdly small high-heeled shoes, out of which bulged pads of silk-stockinged flesh. Her cheeks were waxy pink and her hair dyed tinsel-golden, so that it matched the glitter of the hall-dozen bracelets on her powdered arms. She was as curious and sinister as a life-size doll. Like a doll, she had staring china-blue eyes which did not laugh, although her lips were parted in a smile revealing several gold teeth.’

     ‘There was a great deal of experimenting. There were oddities, and occasionallv even absurdities, but the common denominator, the characteristic sign of those days, was an unparalleled mental alertness. And the alertness of the giving corresponded to the alertness of the receiving. A passionate general concentration upon cultural life prevailed, eloquently expressed by the large space devoted to art by the daily newspapers in spite of the political excitement of the times. Musical events naturally aroused public interest to no less an extent. The Philharmonic Concerts led by Wilhelm Furtwängler; the ‘Bruno Walter Concerts’ with the Philharmonic Orchestra; a wealth of choral concerts, chamber-music recitals, and concerts by soloists; the State Opera, deserving of high praise because of premières such as that of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck and Leos Janacek’s Jenufa under Erich Kleiber’s baton; the newly flourishing Municipal Opera under my guidance; the Kroll Opera under Klemperer; and a number of other institutes matched the achievements of the dramatic stage.’

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

     The first paragraph is from Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains; the second from Bruno Walter’s volume of autobiography, Theme and Variations. Both refer to the Berlin of the late twenties and the early thirties: the immediate pre-Nazi period. It was a time when social and artistic life had a great variety of excitement to offer; when there was, for instance, as much experimental music to be heard in the concert halls and opera houses as there was (and, for that matter, still is) experimental sex to be had not far from the Kurfürstendamm. Two famous survivors from that musical and theatrical Berlin of thirty years ago have been in London this spring: Otto Klemperer, a great force in Berlin opera of the time, and Lotte Lenya, widow of Kurt Weill whose music, which mirrored its time with such cunning and precision, is coming into its own after a generation of near-neglect.

     Dr Klemperer became the musical director of the Kroll Opera in Berlin in 1927. I asked him if he had been given a free hand in the choice of works to be produced.

     K.: I was not fully free. The Generalintendant, Heinz Tietjen, was my superior, but he nearly always agreed with my suggestions.

     O.: Which would you say were the most important of the modern operas you produced there?

     K.: The Stravinsky works — Oedipus Rex, Mavra, L’Histoire du Soldat, Krenek’s three one-act operas, Der Diktator, Das heimliche Königreich and Schwergewicht, as well as Das Leben des Orest; Hindemith’s Cardillac, Neues vom Tage, and Hin und Zurück; Janacek’s Aus einem Totenhaus with its libretto from Dostoevsky; and Schönberg’s Erwartung and Die Glückliche Hand.

     O.: What was audience response to these works like? Were the Berliners a progressive and intelligent audience?

     K.: For the most part, yes. Of course, we naturally encountered some opposition.

     O.: It must be fascinating to look back on such a period of great activity. Not all the novelties of the time have survived. I wonder which works you now consider to be the most likely to endure. Oedipus Rex, I suppose that goes without saying. The Janacek House of the Dead?

     K.: Yes, both of those. Also, I think, The Soldier’s Tale, Hindemith’s Cardillac and Schönberg’s Erwartung.

     O.: Can you tell me anything about Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage? I know it was a satire on modern newspapers. I suppose it was a completely topical work, a Zeitoper. Could it stand on its own feet today, do you think?

     K.: No, I don’t think it would be effective today. It was, as you say, a completely topical work.

     O.: You also gave regular symphony concerts in the Kroll Opera House. Can you tell me some of the more important new works you performed there?

     K.: Again Stravinsky: Apollon Musagète, Les Noces, the piano concerto, and Capriccio with the composer playing the piano part. The Sinfonietta of Krenek. A number of Hindemith works: the Concerto Grosso, Violin Concerto, Viola Concerto, Cello Concerto. And the Sinfonietta of Hauer.

     O.: Hauer. Josef Hauer? He’s the atonal theorist and composer who, in a way, preceded Schönberg. He seems to have sunk into obscurity nowadays. Were there, in Berlin at that time, any promising young composers who later disappeared under the Nazis?

     K.: Most of these composers were no longer performed under the Nazi régime.

     O.: Did you experience, at the Kroll, much violent antagonism from the more reactionary, conservative musical forces of the day?
K.: Yes.

     O.: The Kroll Opera was closed in 193], I believe. Why did this happen?

     K.: To this day, I don’t know the reason why the Krolloper was closed. There were no financial difficulties, because we got a small subsidy. I suppose I was the reason. The government was afraid of the coming Nazis, who regarded us at the Kroll as ‘cultural bolsheviks’.

     O.: So you went to the Staatsoper in 1931. Did you find it very different from the Kroll?

     K.: The main difference was that the Staatsoper was a repertoire theatre: the Kroll was a theatre for every day with a small repertory and many repetitions.

     O.: Did you encounter much State opposition at the Staatsoper?

     K.: No, not really.

     O.: Incidentally, did you play a great deal of Mahler during your Berlin period? Was he popular in North Germany?

     K.: Yes. I played many of his symphonies. Audience reaction was always very favourable.

     O.: Towards the end of this period, were you at all aware of the imminence of Nazi domination? Did it feel like the dissolution of an era?

     K.: Naturally we were aware of the coming Nazi regime. We felt that the great era from 1924 to 1933 was over.

     O.: What did you think, at that time, of the music of Kurt Weill?

     K.: I admired his work very much. I think perhaps the best of his works is the Dreigroschenoper. And it came just at the right moment. Lotte Lenya in the Weill operas is unsurpassed, as singer and actress.

     In 1933 Otto Klemperer was presented by von Hindenburg with the Goethe Medal, for his services to German culture. A few weeks later he had to leave Germany: his contract with the State Opera had been cancelled without warning, and with no reason given. He made his way to America.

     Among the many who left Germany that year were the composer Kurt Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya. They, too, managed to get to America. Weill died there in 1950. Four years later his Threepenny Opera was revived in New York with Lotte Lenya as Jenny, the role she had played in Berlin in 1928. Born of working-class people in Vienna, she studied ballet in Zurich, gained experience also as an actress, and came to Berlin in 1923, where she met her future husband.

     O.: Miss Lenya, it’s true, isn’t it, that Kurt Weill studied with the composer Busoni in Berlin between 1921 and 1924? Do you remember anything of Busoni?

     L.: My first memory of Busoni goes back to 1917, when I was studying ballet at the Stadttheater in Zürich. One morning we were called to rehearsals for Busoni’s Turandot, which was based on Gozzi’s version of the fable. When I arrived, Busoni was already sitting at the piano, and he played throughout the rehearsal. His attitude at the piano was very special. His long, beautiful hands seemed to belong more to the keyboard than to his body. He created a sort of stillness. I only remember one other pianist who made a similar impression on me, and that was Schnabel (whom I heard many times — once at a private house, when I remember him saying of some other pianist, ‘I don’t like him, he has such a noisy spiritual life’). After his rehearsal was over, Busoni sat down on the floor, which Weill later told me was his favourite relaxing position, and started talking about his opera. But he was talking to us, the girls, not to the waiting rehearsal-pianist. The music? Oh dear, I don’t remember a thing about it. . . I never saw Busoni again. When I met Weill, Busoni was suffering his last illness. He died in July 1924, and Weill was very shaken. There had been a deep sympathy between them: I still have two of Busoni’s autographs, with the warmest dedication to ‘dear Kurt Weil’. But I don’t think Weil felt Busoni’s death as an end. Partly because he had just met Georg Kaiser — and that was a beginning.

     O.: Did you know Kaiser?

     L.: Yes, I knew him very well. I met him for the first time in Berlin three or four years after the first war. By that time he was one of the key figures in German drama, though he had only achieved fame during the last years of the war, when he was already in his late thirties. I became great friends with him and his family, and for almost a year I lived with them in Grünheide, which was an hour from Berlin. They used to rent a house near the edge of a lake. It was an odd, Chas Adams-ish sort of place, but Kaiser was very fond of it because he liked to live outside rather than inside, and he had a mania for boats. One of the reasons why he was always in debt was that whenever there was any sign of money coming his way, he bought a new boat. There was a weird assortment of paddle boats, sailing boats, rowing boats, sculling boats and so on. Still, it was in one of those boats that I first met Kurt Weill. He was coming to discuss The Protagonist with Kaiser, and I was sent to row him across the lake from the station. I must add that Kaiser had a passion for music (though sometimes I wondered whether it was just a passion for Wagner’s Tristan), and one of his best friends was the conductor Fritz Stiedry. I think it was Stiedry who had introduced Weill to Kaiser.

     O.: Der Protagonist was Weill’s first opera, wasn’t it? How did it come to be written? Had Kaiser written a libretto first, which Weill wanted to set?

     K.: It was originally a one-act play set in Elizabethan England, which Kaiser wrote in 1921. The first collaboration really only amounted to deciding a few cuts with Kaiser. Weill set the text almost as it stood. That’s one of the extraordinary things about Kaiser’s literary style, it is so condensed that the slower tempo of music is almost an advantage. After The Protagonist Kaiser wrote two texts specially for Weill. First, the little comic-opera, The Czar has his photograph taken, and then the big play with music, Der Silbersee.

     It’s rather ironic that Kaiser, whom Brecht acknowledged as one of the indispensable pioneers of the new drama, and who was the most performed German playwright after Hauptmann, should today be hardly more than a name outside Germany. I am sure that as soon as a complete edition of Kaiser’s plays is published (not one is in print at the moment, partly thanks to Kaiser’s very odd business arrangements), his remarkable stature will be realized.

     O.: He was personally rather an odd character, was he?

     L.: He was always strangely remote and isolated, the very opposite of Brecht. Although he wrote about sixty plays, he never once went to a rehearsal, or even to a première, and he prevented us from going too. (His wife and I used to go secretly to Berlin to see his plays.) He refused to read press reviews: I remember that if somebody in ignorance brought a paper to the house to show him, he would pick it up with the tongs and put it into the fire as if it were contagious. He was the most enigmatic and contradictory man I have ever known. He was almost hopelessly generous in giving money, and almost hopelessly ruthless in taking it. He gave his life to the theatre, and he hated the theatre. He dreamt of being an English country squire and master of an estate, and yet he lived a life which swung like a pendulum between gut bürgerlich and Adlon elegance.

     O.: This was the period when late-night political-satirical cabaret flourished in Berlin, I believe?

     L.: Yes, indeed. Margo Lion, Rosa Valetti, Kate Kühl, Dolly Haas, Trude Hesterberg, Blandine Ebinger, Claire Waldorf, Liesl Karlstadt, Karl Valentin, Werner Fink and many more besides appeared continually in that kind of cabaret. People often think it was all left wing, but of course much of it was non-party and purely satirical.

     O.: Did you ever appear in such shows?

     L.: No, I was never in any of the cabarets.

     O.: Was theatre in Berlin at that time politically aware?

     L.: Intensely aware. When one thinks of Piscator’s Theater am Nollendorfplatz, which was entirely political, and directors like Jessner, Karl Heinz Martin, Jürgen Fehling, all of whom had some kind of political line, it is quite obvious that the serious theatregoer couldn’t escape politics. And, of course, the playwrights (for instance, Kaiser in his Gas plays, Toiler in all his plays) took advantage of the situation even before Brecht.

     O.: Was Dreigroschenoper in 1928 the first Zeitoper to appear?

     L.: Zeitoper is one of those catchwords which Weill very much distrusted. He was against things which were merely contemporary. Of course, the point about Dreigroschenoper is that it generalizes. There were ‘purely contemporary’ operas before that: Jonny spielt auf, for instance. But what became of them? Incidentally, Dreigroschenoper did not set out to be a ‘great artistic statement’. It was an in-between work, written in answer to a special request from the producer Ernst Josef Aufricht. Before it was even begun, Brecht and Weill had already planned the Mahagonny opera.

     O.: Our English picture of pre-Nazi Berlin is largely drawn from the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood. To what extent do you think they give a true and accurate picture of the feeling of that time and place?

     L.: It’s a funny thing the way people think of Berlin in those days as a sexual paradise, or hell. Perhaps Mr Isherwood’s very brilliant novels have something to do with that. But besides the famous corner of the KDW and the well-walked pavements of the Friedrichstrasse, there were other places and other occupations. People did go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. They did — some of them — fight for the things that matter, and continue to hope for a better life. Somehow that old picture of Berlin as a sink of iniquity seems in danger of being applied to everything which came out of it, artistically. Only the other day I read a description of the song of Seeräuber-Jenny in Dreigroschenoper, which stated that it was a song about a whore which it most certainly is not. The only whores in any work of Brecht and Weill (not forgetting the girls in Mahagonny, who are just gold-diggers) are the ones in Dreigroschenoper. And they come straight out of your English ‘Beggar’s Opera’. And, by the way, am I not right in thinking that until recently, some London pavements also knew the sound of those high boots which were one of the ‘attractions’ of the old Berlin?

     O.: How right you are. You know your Soho. Tell me, did you listen to classical or modern music in Berlin? Did you, perhaps, hear a Klemperer performance?

     L.: Yes, of course. I don’t think there was a production at Klemperer’s Kroll Opera which we did not go to. Above all, I remember Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, a completely new conception of Madame Butterfly, with Jarmila Novotna, who sat on a swing to sing one of her arias, and a wonderful Fidelio. We also went to the modern music concerts of the Novembergruppe, of which Weill was a member. I also remember going quite often to the Kolisch Quartet whenever they were in Berlin; and I certainly heard Hindemith in chamber music. For a time we saw a lot of the Hindemiths, but after we emigrated we never met them again.

     O.: What can you tell me about Caspar Neher, and Die Bürgschaft?

     L.: I think it was one of Weill’s happiest collaborations. They had been very close friends since 1927, and completely understood each other. The work is based on a parable by Herder, the great classical humanist, and it is about justice in a primitive society and injustice in a totalitarian society. I have a very special love and admiration for his work. For Weill, it was a kind of relief after the restraints of writing for untrained singers, children and the special needs of Brecht. I remember him saying: ‘Jetzt muss ich mich mal wieder ausmusizieren,’ meaning that he wished now to let the music speak out as fully as possible.

     O.: What were the immediate circumstances of your leaving Berlin in 1932?

     L.: After the Reichstagsbrand, the last security was gone for those who had ‘fought for the things that matter’ and who were the open enemies of the Nazi party. Weill and I managed to get across the border at the last moment, with the help of Neher.

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

     The great days had come to an end. The prophecy of Brecht’s lines in Mahagonny were fulfilled:

Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man,
es deckt einen da keiner zu,
und wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es,
und wird einer getreten, dann bist du’s!

     Mahagonny survives triumphantly today as perhaps the finest achievement of its period. A monument, a warning, a work of art. The bitter, ironic, tender sound that it makes is the voice of Berlin itself.