What Wigmore Hall tells us about the best — and worst — of Europe
On Sunday my wife and I went to a morning concert at London’s Wigmore Hall. The Zemlinsky Quartet — from Prague — played quartets by Beethoven and Suk.
The Wigmore Hall first opened in 1901. It was built and owned by the Bechstein family of piano makers, who had their piano showrooms nearby on Wigmore Street. Wigmore Street runs parallel to Oxford Street and was always a fashionable and wealthy area on the edges of Marylebone.
The Bechsteins spent the enormous sum — for 1901 — of £100,000 to build a grand hall with wonderful acoustics in which recitals would reveal their pianos at their best. (In straightforwardly relative terms, £100,000 in 1901 equates to just short of £10 million pounds today. But if we take into account labour costs and property values, it may well be closer to £63 million. Much wonga.)
Unfortunately, when war came in 1914, public opinion turned against German businesses — and anyone with a German name. Then, in 1916 the government followed public opinion and started forcing German businesses to close. Bechstein was forced to sell not only its British assets but also the recital hall. It received the grand total of £56,500 for its stock of high quality pianos, its warehouses, its offices, and, of course, the recital hall. Meanwhile, another family with a German name — Saxe-Coburg and Gotha — changed theirs to Windsor and were not forced to sell anything.
The ex-Bechstein Hall was renamed Wigmore Hall and opened again in 1917 with a concert of Beethoven sonatas, no doubt played with no irony at all. Dead Germans were, as the saying might have been at the time, good Germans.
The Zemlinsky Quartet are Czech, as was Suk. The hall was built orginally by a German company — with the help of British architects and designers — and the audience on Sunday contained people from quite a few European countries, I suspect, as well as further afield. It was a perfect example of European culture at its best. The music was appreciated no matter its origin or the nationality of its performers.
In short, it felt like the best of Europe and a celebration of Europe. The forced closure of the Bechstein business and the appropriation of the recital hall is a memory of what can happen when divisions are manufactured or left to grow. Cutting oneself off — regardless of the apparent justification — is a precursor to regarding yourself as special and different. People who believe themselves to be special and different start thinking they’re superior.
I’m lucky to live in the UK. But I believe I’m equally lucky to be part of Europe and to be able to tap into the deep cultural roots that make Europe rich in ways more important than any financial consideration. It is only recently that, for reasons that can only be sinister, we are being force-fed propaganda that highlights divisions again and which neglects the history that lies behind the formation of the EU and its predecessors.
Simplistic it may be, but if it comes down to a choice between the culture best represented by drunken English fans — or Russians, for that matter — chanting outside Marseilles bars or that reflected in the non-nationalistic enjoyment of the music of Beethoven and Suk, I know where my loyalty lies.
