Passing the Baton at the Berlin State Opera
By Francesca D’Agata
Black-patent, crocodile loafers clicked across grey cobblestones in the heart of Berlin last Saturday evening, as Christian Thielemann pushed his way through a sea of violin bows and glistening brass trumpets. The 65-year-old conductor with his towering height and barrel chest, looked larger than life in a blue silk button-down suit. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and walked up a flight of stairs to a makeshift outdoor stage, greeting members of the crew with a firm handshake and a piercing blue-eyed stare.
As the orchestra tuned up, Thielemann gazed out at a crowd of thousands camped out on a vast plaza for a ‘concert for all’ in front of the Berlin State Opera, where he is soon to become musical director.
A white baton appeared from the left of the stage and landed in Thielemann’s hand. He ran his right index finger up and down the powerful tool, put it firmly in his right hand and marched to center stage.
“I am looking forward to the next few years I will spend with you,” Thielemann announced to the sea of spectators.
He lifted his hand and the first notes of Richard Wagner’s Tannhaüser Overture wafted effortlessly over the city. Germans, tourists, classical music fans, children, friends and lovers went silent for a moment as a wave of Thielemann’s baton lifted the sound of violins over their heads and a tear slipped from the corner of many an eye in the crowd.
The concert, at Bebelplatz in Berlin, was in effect Thielemann’s debut in his new role, and the beginning of Act Two for the 21st century Berlin State Opera. The baton had been passed.
Thielemann is replacing the retiring 80-year-old Daniel Barenboim, the face and soul of Berlin’s ornate opera house for the past three decades. The passing of the baton is a transition that reaches beyond the gilded walls of the 19th century opera house, reverberating through the streets of Berlin, where opera is a key part of the cultural landscape, not merely a niche passion among classical music lovers.
In a country with more than 80 opera houses, Berlin’s Staatsoper, as it is known, might be the most symbolic of the nation as a whole. Barely one mile from the Reichstag parliament, it was frequented during the 1930s by Nazi leaders who identified their ideology with the music of 19th century composer Richard Wagner. It was a proud moment for a newly-reunified Germany in 1992 when Barenboim, an Argentinian-born Jew who also holds Israeli citizenship, was named the opera’s musical director, helping to pick up the pieces of a long-shattered Berlin.
“He was the good conscience of the bad Germans,” says Axel Brüggemann, a music critic and podcaster who knows both conductors well.
Brüggemann says the appointment of a Jewish conductor was a symbol of reunification and a message that Germany had progressed from its dark past. With the light touch of his delicate hand, Barenboim conducted the previously divided city into a union of western and eastern performers and audience members. Western German music lovers relished the opportunity to cross the former borders and return to their flagship opera house, relieved of the burdens of post-World War II history.
Barenboim also endeared himself to liberals worldwide by forming the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999, together with Palestinian academic Edward Said, a project devoted to promoting peaceful coexistence in the Middle East. Barenboim also played a healing role in Israel’s cultural realm, braving hecklers and critics to conduct the first performance of Wagner in Israel in 2001 at a major music festival near Tel Aviv.
Barenboim announced his retirement in January of 2023, citing a neurological disorder. After Thielemann, former chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, was named last September, Barenboim praised him as, “one of the preeminent conductors of our time,” and expressed confidence that the Staatsoper, “will continue to maintain and expand its exceptional position in Berlin and international music life.”
But musicians and cultural leaders all over the world were left wondering how the next era in the Berlin opera scene will sound.
Christian Thielemann is by most accounts a brilliant conductor, but a more conservative and combative personality than his predecessor. The 65-year-old Berliner made his mark conducting German composers like Wagner and Strauss, grandiose symbols of a history that many Germans would rather turn away from than face.
The appointment was a disappointment to Berliners who had hoped for a more progressive choice.
“He stands for old-fashioned, backward-looking structures,” Daniela Billig, a parliamentarian for the Green Party, told the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. “His authoritarian leadership style and his statements do not fit in with the liberal, cosmopolitan and diverse Berlin.”
Opera occupies a prominent space in Germany’s cultural sphere, far more so than in the United States and even most European countries. Long before Berlin became renowned for techno and experimental theater, it was a mecca for opera with three major houses. Germany has more than 80 opera houses, an exceptionally rich assortment that is often attributed to the fact that until the late 19th century Germany was a collection of principalities and states, each of which built its own magnificent house.
Opera Sense, a website devoted to the art, once calculated that Germany hosted more performances annually than any other country in the world — nearly 6,800 during the 2015–2016 season, as compared to fewer than 1,700 in the United States, which has four times the population. Opera attendance is boosted by relatively low ticket prices, which are enabled by generous state subsidies. Student prices can be as low as only 7 euros ($7.66).
Although Germany has other renowned opera houses, such as Munich’s state opera and the baroque theater in Bayreuth that hosts a world-famous Wagner festival, the Berlin Staatsoper is laden with greatest historical significance. Built on orders of Frederick the Great, then later beloved by the Nazi leadership, it was destroyed by a Royal Air Force bombing raid in World War II. “Berlin’s grand opera house Unter den Linden, where Adolf Hitler often listened to Wagner, his favorite music, now lies in smoking ruins,’’ gloated a dispatch sent out in 1941 by the wire service United Press International.
Marooned behind the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, it was used for offices of the Stasi secret police, until the communist East German government was able to rebuild it 1955. But the magnificent old house wasn’t restored to its former glory as a cultural epicenter until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
No doubt, Thielemann has almost impossibly large shoes to fill. “[Barenboim] is the connector in the whole ordeal of German guilt,” said Berlin journalist Anna Noryskiewicz, who has met Barenboim many times. “He fulfills a role that Germans want to see within themselves, but maybe are unable to.”
Berliners and Germans adhere to Barenboim’s ideas of unifying both the city of Berlin and also contributing to harmony between Israelis and Palestinians.
“You listen to [Barenboim] because he already has a position in society,” Noryskiewicz remarked. “You can drive a debate, and you can be listened to, regardless of what political opinion you have.”
The relationship between Barenboim and Thielemann is complicated, perhaps best summed up by the slang “frenemy.” Thielemann worked as Barenboim’s assistant at the Deutsche Oper, across town in the former West Berlin when he was just 19 years old.
“I am in his debt,” Thielemann told the media after his succession was announced. “Barenboim has played the biggest, most important role in my life.” And yet the two had a nasty and very public falling out in 2000 after Thielemann became music director of the Deutsche Oper on the other side of town, and the two opera houses had to compete for government subsidies.
Barenboim argued that the Staatsoper represented Germany and Berlin and must be supported. Thielemann argued that the Deutsche Oper was underfunded.
Rumors swirled that Thielemann made antisemitic comments in the heat of the dispute. When Barenboim threatened to leave as musical director of the Staatsoper after a proposed merger, there were reports in the German press that alleged Thielemman said, “Now the Jewish mess is ended.” Thielemann denied making any such comments and said the only issue between the two men was the distribution of state funds.
Opera singer Elizabeth Neiman, who has met Thielemann a few times, describes him with the Yiddish term, mensch, saying he is much more gentlemanly in person than his abrasive public persona would suggest.
“The media created this narrative of the dueling maestros,” Neiman said.
The two men are a study of contrasts: A child prodigy as a pianist, Barenboim was born to Russian Jewish parents in Buenos Aires. His father was the only piano teacher he ever had. In 1954, when famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler asked him to play for the Berlin Philharmonic, his father told him it was too soon after the war for a Jewish boy to perform in Germany. Barenboim ultimately defied his father, moving to Germany nine years later. He went on to become an international jet-setting celebrity, married to British cellist Jacqueline Du Pre, who died in 1987 of multiple sclerosis.
Barenboim eventually fell in love with Berlin as Berlin fell in love with Barenboim. The relationship was officiated in 1992 when Barenboim became the first musical director of the State Opera after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Thielemann is a native Berliner, born into an upper middle-class family of music lovers. His grandfather worked at the Staatsoper as a scenery shifter during the first World War. All things drew him East. As a young boy he would cross the checkpoints into East Berlin to attend shows at the Staatsoper.
A self-proclaimed Wagnerian, Thielemann has been called by German music critics “Wagner’s representative on earth.” Some have described his conducting style as overwhelming, like “sound baths,” devoid of artistic freedom, an experience not welcomed by everybody.
Thielemann is unabashedly a cultural conservative, scorning political correctness. “I am not interested in what composers have eaten or what their political beliefs were,” Thielemann told the Guardian in a combative interview in 2001. As for Germany’s problematic past, he told the newspaper, “Never has everything been wrong. There are some very dark points; there are some very good points.’’
Often abrasive, Thielemann lost several jobs earlier in his career after clashing with management and colleagues.
Opera expert Catherine Peterson, executive director of Arts Boston, thinks Thielemann’s earlier stumbles should be forgiven. “He has matured a lot and learned a lot and has the capacity to bring real pride and excellence to his leadership right now,” Peterson said. “[Thielemann] can really make this something that he is proud of and the city can be proud of.”
Thielemann is expected to elevate the classical cannon that he loves, perhaps moving away from the avant-garde tilt of Berlin’s cultural scene.
The city’s popular Komische Oper, until recently headed by the Australian Barrie Kosky, who likes to refer to himself as a “gay Jewish kangaroo,” is famous for its provocative productions — this year it is performing Handel’s Messiah in an airport hangar.
Even at the normally staid Staatsoper, a current production of Puccini’s Turandot uses a giant marionette to represent the titular Chinese princess and employs a chorus costumed in military-style uniforms.
Norbert Schenker, a Berlin opera devotee who last week was enjoying a pre-curtain cocktail under the gold gilded ceilings and chandeliers of the State Opera’s lounge, says that Berlin is big enough for all styles.
“I like the modern and crazy style at the Komische but also the traditional at the Staatsoper. I like both,” Schenker said. “When I want traditional, I come here.”
Berliners like Schenker grow up with opera and choral music as a part of their daily lives, alongside film and TV, and the changeover at the Staatsoper is major news.
Though the outgoing and incoming conductors have different fans, different music styles, and different attitudes to Germany’s history, Thielemann could just be the best next thing for Berlin, say opera watchers.
“He may not have the outward verbal declarations that Barenboim has had, or the special efforts that Barenboim has had in terms of uniting factions,” said Catherine Peterson of Arts Boston. “But the way that he runs the operations of the opera house can reflect a sense of unity, pride and fairness and equity that is so needed in a turbulent divisive world right now.”
Francesca D’Agata is an undergraduate student of Media and Journalism at University of California, Santa Barbara who is reporting from Berlin this summer.
