On Sunday night I had the great privilege and honor of being in attendance when the Berlin Philharmonic gave a concert to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Getting to the Philharmonie itself was quite a negotiating trick, as the entire area around the Brandenburg Gate and over toward Postdamer Platz - where part of The Wall once stood - was thronged with people. And the city had put up a row of white balloon-like lamps to mark the actual trajectory of that immense monstrosity which kept an entire people contained within a totalitarian system that was among the most pernicious and invasive of all Warsaw Pact countries. The atmosphere inside the Philharmonie was electric. For me it was hard to fathom that, twenty five years ago on this night, I sat with my then-wife in our very small flat in a rather drab inner suburb of London, watching the live BBC broadcast of this momentous event. Having lived in Germany in the early 1980s (an experience I later used several decades later in my novel, ‘The Moment’) - and having visited Berlin at the virulent height of the Cold War - the sight of East Germans streaming across the now-breached Wall, being embraced by their western counterparts, had me crying. My entire childhood had been shaped by Cold War realities. I had traveled extensively in my late twenties/early thirties throughout the Eastern Bloc. To see this symbol of ruthless state tyranny breached was nothing short of extraordinary - and quite overwhelming. Especially as freedom is something we in the West so take for granted. Anyway, all these memories came flooding back on Sunday night as I walked down Unter der Linder and crossed what was once No Man’s Land - a place where you would have once been shot for entering its boundaries - onto the old western side of the city. The Philharmonie was packed; the sense of expectation tangible. There was not a single free seat in the house. The concert had sold out months earlier. And after a performance of blazing intensity of Karol Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater - a work that speaks volumes about finding some sense of divinity amidst the chaos of life - Sir Simon Rattle retook the platform after the interval to lead one of the most searching and galvanizing readings of Beethoven 9 I have ever heard. What Rattle found in this performance was the radical, revolutionary life-force of Beethoven - the great musical metaphysician who simultaneously remains such a profoundly existential composer, and one whose work speaks to the inherent need to battle through the agonies and inequities of human existence. Given that the Ninth Symphony is also such an immensely humanistic statement about the nature of freedom and fellowship, the fact that we were marking a quarter-century of reunification - and the triumph of ‘l’espirt humaine’ against tyranny - was nothing short of humbling. Rattle and the Berlin Phil (and the amazing Berlin Runfunkchor) played and sang with a dynamism and technical brilliance that was matched by the sheer reassertive power of a symphony that remains one of the absolute cornerstones of western civilization. It was a concert that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Especially given the undercurrent of political chill in the air right now; the sense of menacing nationalism and fundamentalist fascism that so dominate geo-political realities this year. The capacity for human triumph over human despotism remains such an intrinsic subtext to Beethoven’s still radical symphony that it continued to be one of the great musical encapsulations of the ‘freiheit’ we all must strive to protect. To hear Rattle and his Berlin players perform the symphony with such ferocious power was to rediscover the work in new-minted form. And to be reminded of an immense shared humanity that we also eschew at our peril.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 04:11:11 +0000
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