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In Berlin, Opera Houses Brace for the Cold Hand of Reform

27/12/2002 |

 

As the mercury drops and the city's lakes freeze over, the winter cold is creeping over Berlin's three opera houses. New plans for structural reform may save them from closure; but the outcome is far from certain.

Ever since the Wall fell, Berlin — not an affluent city then and certainly not one now — has grumbled that it cannot sustain its position as the only German city with three opera houses: the Staatsoper and the Komische Oper in the former East, the Deutsche Oper in the former West. But each one of a long succession of disheartened cultural officials in the Berlin Senate has failed to introduce any satisfactory plan to remedy the situation. Everyone agrees that something has to change: the city, well and truly bankrupt, cannot afford the 115 million euros a year the houses cost; internal organization is chaotic; the houses do not communicate with one another on matters of artistic planning — resulting, occasionally, in the same opera appearing simultaneously in two or even all three venues.

In the lead-up to Christmas, the crunch came. Thomas Flierl, the current Cultural Senator — the city's highest cultural official, and a man with less personal interest in the art form than any of his predecessors — was determined to cut costs and rationalize the city's operatic landscape. His own plan involved the amalgamation of all three houses under one common administration; the combined entity would be responsible for total budgetary planning, so that if one house were to incur a debt, another would be forced to make up the shortfall. Needless to say, none of the three found this suggestion appealing; when summoned to discuss the details of a merger with Flierl, the houses' three Intendants (general directors) wrote a public letter refusing to participate in any further talks.

Rival cultural planners in the Berlin parliament suggested combining the Deutsche Oper with the Staatsoper, amalgamating the orchestras and spreading repertoire between the two venues in a way that mirrors the Paris Opera's operations at the Bastille and the Palais Garnier. But the idea of dissolving the Staatsoper's prestigious Staatskapelle orchestra — once conducted by Richard Strauss, now led by Daniel Barenboim and still one of the country's best ensembles — and merging it with the unquestionably inferior Deutsche Oper orchestra seems doomed to failure. Who would lead the new mega-band — Barenboim or the music director of the Deutsche Oper, the younger hot-shot Christian Thielemann? A clash of super-egos would be inevitable.

As it happens, two of the three opera houses' Intendants — Udo Zimmermann of the Deutsche Oper and Albert Kost of the Komische Oper — have been given notice in the past four months, and Peter Mussbach, the Staatsoper's aggressive new boss, has placed himself in a precarious position by voicing such loud opposition to Flierl's plans. Ioan Holender, the Vienna State Opera Intendant hauled in by Flierl to sort out the mess at the Deutsche Oper in the wake of Zimmermann's sacking, has already declared himself willing to drop the reins as soon as a full-time successor can be found. That would leave only the two powerful conductors to battle over the remaining power vacuum.

The fact remains that 9 million euros must be saved from the total Berlin opera budget, a figure which could cost the houses 200 jobs. Flierl's merger plan was a last-ditch strategy to persuade the German federal government to step in with the missing funds, as it has on rare occasions in the past: the national government has consistently refused (apart from a one-time grant to the Staatsoper in response to pressure from Barenboim) to bail out Berlin's opera houses, claiming that it would be unfair to single out one of the three — but if the three were united, there could be no charges of favoritism in extra funding. Yet Flierl's hopes seemed unfounded, and there were no indications that the Fatherland would come up with the fiscal goods; all that national culture minister Christina Weiss was willing to promise was a fund (of undisclosed size) to pay off sacked employees.

At the end of last week, the three Intendants had a change of heart, and the meeting with Flierl went ahead, lasting several hours. Rumpled but triumphant, the participants emerged on the Sunday before Christmas, announcing that they had reached consensus. Consensus over what? All that they'll say is that, largely thanks to Peter Jonas, the London-born Intendant of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and former director of English National Opera, there is a new model. It will ensure that all three houses remain open, that each retains its artistic independence, and that the necessary money is saved.

Flierl will present both his old plan and Jonas' new one to the Berlin Senate on 6 January. Though the future sounds brighter after the Sunday meeting, the closure of one of the three houses has not yet been ruled out. The amount of money that the new plan would save has merely been described as "significant."

And so Chistmas has found Berlin's operatic world in a state of unprecedented uncertainty. Perhaps the intervention of Peter Jonas and the productive debate between Flierl and the Intendants will prove enough to guarantee a brighter future for the three houses — and perhaps not. Post-reunification Berlin has repeatedly avoided real solutions in favor of stopgap measures in a futile attempt to avoid larger conflicts in cultural politics. The Senate, which is to decide over the houses' future, will not be motivated by purely artistic concerns — and even if the looming financial crisis can be evaded, the fact that all three houses are in bad shape artistically will have to be faced sooner or later.

Shirley Apthorp
andante.com