The Philharmonia Orchestra's new series,
Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis,
takes us to the very heart of the German capital.
And so much of the music you're going to be hearing
over the next few months drew its inspiration from this place.
The composers who created those scores
also provided a soundtrack for the events that unfolded here,
including works by the three composers
featured in the first concert of our series.
Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill, based in Germany,
and Alban Berg, who was drawn from Vienna
to this thrilling metropolis.
But the Philharmonia also has a very personal link to the period.
Its first chief conductor was Otto Klemperer,
who'd been a hugely important figure in the musical life of the Weimar Republic.
As music director of the pioneering Kroll Opera in the German capital,
Klemperer oversaw the premieres of works
by Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Weill.
He collaborated with designers who had trained at the Bauhaus,
and together they pioneered an entirely modern way of producing opera.
Unhappily, however, his Jewish origins placed him
in a dangerous position when the Nazis came to power in 1933.
At first, he fled to America,
conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic
and performing in New York, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.
But then, in the 1950s, he came to London,
becoming the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor for Life
until his final appearance with the orchestra
at the Royal Festival Hall in 1971.
That baton has now passed to the Philharmonia's
current Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor,
Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will be taking us back to the 1920s
and the spirit and the wisdom
of one of its musical frontrunners, Otto Klemperer.
So we open the program with a suite
from Berg's masterpiece, Wozzeck.
Wozzeck was premiered in Berlin,
and it was a sensation from the very first second.
And it has stayed in the repertoire ever since.
Incredibly strong, stark psychodrama.
And interestingly in the world of opera,
there's not one character who is entirely sympathetic.
The second piece is the Concerto for Orchestra by Hindemith,
which is raucous, very, very entertaining virtuoso
short Concerto for Orchestra by a very young composer.
Very rarely played,
and I'm actually really happy to get my hands on it.
The third piece in the program is a Suite
from Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera,
Dreigroschenoper.
Which is one of his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht.
A very famous piece.
There are few songs that have stayed
in the folklore to such degree that some people think
that they are folk tunes, because they are so much
part of everybody's musical world.
The reason why we wanted to include Shostakovich in the series
is that he was an important composer,
who was greatly influenced by what was going on in Berlin.
Young Shostakovich visited Berlin
during the Weimar years.
It might have been one of his very first trips abroad.
He went to Warsaw to take part in
in the Chopin piano competition.
He didn't win, his pal won it, and Shosti got the
you know, fourth or fifth prize, something like that.
But on the way back home,
they decided to make a little detour to Berlin.
And I think he had a hell of a good time.
He heard jazz for the first time, most likely in his life.
He encountered music by Hindemith and Kurt Weill.
He was greatly influenced by this.
Not only the expression but also the sound world.
The use of guitars, and banjos, and percussion,
and the kind of funny in-between land
between so called serious classical art music
and music hall, and in his ballet the Golden Age
he uses those influences in a very imaginative way.
Perhaps there is no composer who better represents
the Weimar Republic than Kurt Weill.
He was born in this industrial city of Dessau in 1900,
and came of age just as the Weimar Republic was beginning.
Although traditionally trained, Weill distanced himself from the past.
Instead, he forged a crucial link
between the predominantly avant-garde world of classical music
and that of popular culture.
He listened to jazz,
worked with mavericks like the poet and playwright
Bertolt Brecht,
and embraced the rougher aesthetic of cabaret and cinema.
All of that can be heard in his greatest success
The Threepenny Opera.
Weill and Brecht's play opened
at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm
on the 31st of August 1928.
And quickly become one of the period's greatest hits.
Based in part on John Gay's Beggar's Opera,
The Threepenny Opera follows the fate
of the pimp and and criminal Mack the Knife
and his beloved, Polly.
As well as her disapproving parents,
the prostitute Jenny, police chief Tiger Brown,
and his daughter Lucy.
I remember in my distant childhood
that I have attended a performance
of the Dreigroschenoper in Dessau actually, in the theatre.
Probably now thirty years ago.
This type of opera, I mean it's a small-scale opera,
and you kind of think you want,
you're actually going into a jazz club.
It serves the everyday listener.
Language which everyone understands.
It hits you right in the face, this kind of thing.
And this was music that Otto Klemperer
introduced to the Philharmonia and its audiences.
But the orchestra's first principal conductor
didn't just have important links with Weill.
Otto Klemperer was a major exponent
of contemporary music, and knew Alban Berg.
Klemperer gave crucial early performances
of the Suite from Berg's second opera "Lulu",
and his Violin Concerto,
both of which feature in the Philharmonia series.
But the concerts begin with music
from Berg's first opera, Wozzeck, telling the story of a hapless foot soldier.
Completed in the aftermath of the bloody First World War,
the opera was first seen here at the Berlin State Opera
on the 14th December 1925.
Wozzeck is a very extraordinary play
in the sense that it consists of short scenes,
it's almost like a movie script,
so we cut from this to that, enter the next one, and so on.
It's essentially a story about abuse.
There's a slightly simple soldier
called Wozzeck, basically a good man,
loves his family, wants to do the right thing.
And he's being tormented by his boss, the captain,
and the regiment doctor.
And he uses Wozzeck as a guinea pig,
basically, in his stupid experiments.
Meanwhile an officer in the army seduces Wozzeck's wife, Marie,
and gradually, bit by bit, Wozzeck is being driven into a crisis.
And finally he, in jealous rage, kills his wife
and drowns himself.
And at the end of the opera all we see
is the little son on his hobby horse
going hop-hop, hop-hop, on the river bank
trying to understand what happened.
An opera libretto doesn't get more tragic than that.
And what makes it worse, or harder to take,
is that it's very realistic, it could have happened.
From the first second we know that this is not a fantasy.
This is not symbolic, this is real.
Wozzeck was the first opera I ever conducted in my life,
when I was still in my twenties,
at the Stockholm Opera.
And I accepted it when they asked,
'cause I had no idea how difficult it was.
There's a lot of friction in the music
and in the expression.
There are very few moments of conventional beauty.
There are some, and because of the fact that they're rare
they become very expressive,
but most of it is kind of thorny and very anguished in its expression.
And I think that was very new at the time.
And I think that people realised that something very important had happened,
but they didn't quite know how to relate to it yet.
Like Berg, Paul Hindemith understood music's power within society.
He said that music reaches out beyond political boundaries,
and consequently devoted the 1920s
to writing various different works
from orchestral pieces to opera.
As a violinist and viola player,
he was also a fundamentally practical musician,
composing for children, amateurs, radio, mechanical instruments.
Music was no longer the reserve of the upper classes,
it was a medium for everyone.
That sense of communality is absolutely key
to Hindemith's 1925 Concerto for Orchestra.
Over the course of four thrilling movements
the piece provides a showcase for each and every member of the orchestra.
Its music constantly juxtaposes solo groups and the wider ensemble,
providing discourse that seems to represent the vim and vigour of Weimar itself.
Paul Hindemith was a naughty boy.
His first successful works during the Weimar years
were kind of outrageous little operas,
and not so little operas, that dealt with subjects
that were kind of risky.
And I'm sure he enjoyed that kind of attention.
The young Hindemith had a very sort of vivid musical imagination,
all the gestures, and the harmonies, and rhythms, they're very captivating.
You really feel that he's throwing in ideas.
Many per second.
In just three works, the opening concert of our series on the 9th of June
encapsulates so much about the Weimar period.
The republic was formed after the mess of war,
as explored in Berg's masterpiece Wozzeck.
And for all the optimism of the 1920s,
it soon became a time in which finances were shakey
and politics were even shakier,
witnessed in the dark criminality of Weill and Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
But it was also a period when artists, composers,
writers, and thinkers imagined a more balanced,
utopian society with everyone contributing to the greater good,
as you can hear in Hindemith's Concerto for Orchestra.
Little wonder then that Dmitri Shostakovich,
the last composer featured on our program,
was so wowed by the music and spirit of the Weimar Republic.