Operatic anniversaries

This year (2013) was a big year for operatic anniversaries. Both Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi were honoured with 200th birthday celebrations while Benjamin Britten's birthday rolled around for the hundredth time. Naturally enough, these milestones provided ample opportunity for the programming of celebratory operatic productions the world over. Melbourne could not have imagined a better year in which to mount its first ever production of Wagner's

Ring of the Nibelungen

and most opera houses around the world have performed at least one opera by the big three.

But last week I saw a wonderful new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) by Richard Strauss at the Bavarian National Theatre in Munich, an opera that has a different set of historical associations for the city. Many of Europe's great nineteenth-century opera houses were badly damaged during World War II, with those of Munich, Vienna and Berlin being high on the list. In the postwar years they were gradually reconstructed. In each case, the reopening celebration was an important event for the respective cities and the operas chosen to mark such occasions make an interesting little case study of other operatic celebrations. 

Vienna's State Opera reopened in 1955 and the opera chosen to be the first performed in the reopened building was Beethoven's Fidelio. In Berlin things were more complicated. The reconstructed Berlin State Opera was reopened in 1955 with a performance of Richard Wagner's Mastersingers of Nuremberg but by then the theatre found itself in a East Berlin. And in Munich the National Theatre remained a construction zone until 1963, when the first sounds thought most suitable to its reawakening were those of Strauss' Frau ohne Schatten. 

It is an interesting challenge: from the entire operatic repertoire, choose one work that best encapsulates the feelings of rebirth, hope, recovery and closure that must have come to each of these cities as they reconsecrated their opera houses. Fidelio was perhaps an obvious choice for Vienna. Its composer had adopted the city as his home. Its story recounts a release from darkness and captivity through the love of a woman. Wagner's Mastersingers presumably made for a safe choice in the East Berlin of 1955 (still six years before the building of the infamous wall). Die Frau ohne Schatten was a fine choice for Munich. Richard Strauss was one of the city's favourite musical sons and this is surely his ultimate operatic masterpiece. Like Fidelio, its plot deals with themes of triumph through self-sacrifice, of birth and of the emergence into light. 

To cap off the operatic anniversary celebrations, lovers of the operas of Richard Strauss will have plenty to look forward to in 2014, the composer's 150th birthday.

In the Führer's footsteps

I was in Munich the other day. I went to see the Haus der Kunst (House of Art). This is a large art museum that is now home to contemporary exhibitions. When I was there, there was a show by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. But what I really wanted to see was the building itself. It was built under the Nazis in the late 1930s and survived the war more or less intact. Hitler intended it to be the new home for German art. In his mad world German art would be freed of Modernist influences and the art of jews, Communists and anybody else he didn't approve of. And this museum was to be the new home to this ideologically cleansed German art. It was an embarassment to the Nazis that the exhibition of works by the banned, so-called "degenerate" artists (everybody that Hitler didn't like) was more popular than that of the officially approved new German artists who were shown here at the Haus der Kunst.

Nazi ideology placed considerable importance on the arts. For those artists prepared to tow the party line (and with the required racial profile), the Nazis were good for business. Hitler himself was an artist of sorts and was keen to open the new museum himself when it was finished in 1938. There is a well-known photo of him delivering his speech to a bevy of luminaries in this very building. The building has changed very little since then. The monumental pillars of Nazi architecture are all there, the megalomania is still very present. It is not hard to find the exact spot where the Führer stood to delivery his speech and his views on arts policy. It is still somehow an eerie experience, standing in the footsteps of the most "evil" man in history. Europe is, of course, full of traces from Hitler and the Nazis, but for me at least, this was the first time I had stood in the same spot where he stood and delivered one of his withering speeches. It was a sobering moment indeed.

Photo: Adolf Hitler opens the Haus der Kunst with a speech in the main hall. The hall still looks much the same today.