Artistically, Berlin reclaims reputation for tearing down walls

BERLIN - The music is Vivaldi's

The Four Seasons

, presented in ways never before seen. That's right -

seen

.

Violin soloist Midori Seiler somehow stays in tune while covered with snow, wrapped in a sheet, and carried on the shoulders of a rail-thin dancer who at one point kisses her, producing a red ribbon that stretches between their mouths across the stage.

Alte Musik Berlin, the acclaimed 35-member baroque chamber orchestra, had always resisted playing the Vivaldi warhorse, if only because everybody else did. Then the expansively named Spanish dancer-choreographer Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola proposed performing it with the ensemble - stripped to his underwear, writhing with a rock in his mouth, scattering leaves among the skittering instrumentalists. You can see it on YouTube and the DVD titled 4 Elements 4 Seasons.

The project embodies how Berlin's artistic life has evolved in the two decades since the reunification of the communist East with the democratic West. While Alte Musik Berlin, formed in 1982 in East Berlin, is readying Bach, Handel, and Telemann for a typically baroque U.S. tour in March, the current climate in Berlin urges artists to forswear the typical.

Having been the scene of world-changing artistic revolutions - from Walter Gropius' Bauhaus architecture to Bertolt Brecht's political theater - the city has survived its debt-laden, often-rancorous mashup to retake its place at the top of sanctified artistic tradition as well as at numerous cutting edges, retaining its sardonic humor and fondness for unflinching social commentary and ideas taken to uncompromising extremes.

Berliners "simply seem more willing to engage in active listening, willing to give the new a chance without preconceived notions of value," says Philadelphia composer Michael Hersch, whose dark, knotty works have been booed at home but met few barriers during his 2002 fellowship through the American Academy in Berlin.

Encouragement is tangible. At the city's most prestigious concert hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, ensembles get a 50 percent break on rent if the program is 50 percent new. And coexistence thrives. While Yannick Nézet-Séguin was making his Berlin Philharmonic debut in October, the gleefully morbid rock group the Tiger Lillies played to their cult followers at a sizable theater nearby.

That same weekend, the Berlin State Opera - located for decades in what had been East Berlin - offered a staging of Wagner's Das Rheingold in which the walls of Valhalla were a cross-section of the bodies it took to build it. And the Berliner Ensemble - founded by Brecht in 1949 in East Berlin - presented Friedrich Schiller's social-commentary play Der Parasit, outfitting each actor with puppet legs and arms that gave the show a knockabout mobility, but with human faces that made the caricatures real.

Such events were only the most visible that weekend: The reunited city has eight orchestras, three opera companies, and, on Museum Island, five institutions that now include the war-damaged, recently reopened New Museum.

Berlin's artistic allure emanates not just from its great artistic tradition, but also from being the nerve center of a country whose leaders once gambled everything on two world wars that left the city all but destroyed. Torsten Wöhlert, spokesman for the Berlin Senate on Cultural Affairs, has written that if the 20th century was an age of extremes that showed humanity and art at their highest and lowest, Berlin is where you understand what that really means.

Symbols of past tragedy are inescapable: the half-destroyed church that still stands in a major shopping district; the 75-foot fountain on Bismarckstrasse commemorating West Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter, who led resistance to the Soviet blockade in the late 1940s; the area that was once the Berlin Wall and now is one of the world's largest ongoing outdoor art shows, each panel painted more ferociously than the last.

Yet what can seem from a distance like an artistic utopia is, in fact, a feat of survival that has been particularly heated since reunification. The impact of the wall's fall was roughly analogous to the U.S. Congress' 1996 whack in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts - but times 10, because government funding here is a tradition that dates back centuries, to the days when royal courts employed orchestras and opera companies.

"Before the wall came down," says Pamela Rosenberg, dean of fellows and programs at the American Academy, "both sides were showcases to the opposite side: 'Look at how great we are!' Both sides were heavily subsidized. Then the wall comes down, and the federal government says, 'April fools!' . . . That was the drama in Berlin - a plethora of institutions.

"But the city fathers have come out with resounding support. They absolutely recognize that this is the identity of Berlin."

Still, the collapse of the East German government, the decline of industry in the East, and a 2001 banking crisis had put the city's debt at $84 billion by 2007. Funding cuts meant merger threats among the three opera companies. Conductor Christian Thielemann left the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2004 protesting that the Berlin State Opera in the former East Berlin was unfairly favored for funding - a common plaint about everything from music to road improvements. In the former East, the Berliner Ensemble's director, Claus Peymann, repeatedly threatened to leave because of inadequate government support.

But despite some cultural losses (one orchestra and three theater troupes have died), all three opera companies - the third is the Komische Oper - exist intact, and Peymann remains at the Berliner Ensemble. Seemingly through sheer determination, the bloodbath didn't happen.

In recent years, record budget surpluses chipped the city debt down to $78 billion in 2009. Cultural funding, after dipping from $1 billion in 1994 to $750 million in 2009, should rise this year.

About $321 million was found to renovate the Berlin State Opera's Unter den Linden theater in the former East. The Berlin Philharmonic reorganized in 2002 into what dramaturgic adviser Helge Gruenewald describes as "not a private enterprise but a foundation with special rights." In other words, government funded, but with independent governance that requires it to earn 62 percent of its budget through concert fees, box office, and rentals of the Berlin Philharmonie. (That compares with the 20 percent earned-income support more typical in Germany; in the United States, it's 33 percent.) Now concerts sell out so regularly that when subscribers threaten to bolt over chief conductor Simon Rattle's taste in modern music, eager wait-listees grab their seats.

In contrast, Alte Musik Berlin is still run by 10 founding owners. Started as a subsidy-free sideline by symphonic players with day-job paychecks from the East German government, the ensemble survives without government money. It maintains its 48-week season with recordings, tours, and foundation grants. Instead of presenting its own concerts, it depends on those who hire it.

"In many ways, we're still a communist [era] orchestra," says Felix Hilse, the group's manager. "All 10 owners are from the former East and are having to deal with a certain kind of business they don't want to deal with because they're artists."

Financial necessity takes the group outside Berlin for tours, recordings, and special projects. But because its regular season at the Konzerthaus Berlin is regularly sold out, the orchestra does not advertise locally and thus risks fading from view in its own city. Having a special niche as one of the world's best authentic-instrument ensembles guarantees nothing: Its superb Cologne counterpart, Concerto Köln, temporarily disbanded in 2004 - a tocsin of the need for change.

So on release of its new recording of The Magic Flute in the fall, Alte Musik Berlin presented a concert version of the complete opera. Though a budget-buster, the event was a public-relations breakthrough, says Hilse.

Other success stories from the former East Berlin, where isolation bred originality, are in a different stage of addressing the unwalled world. Daniel Barenboim, music director since 1992 of the Berlin State Opera and its Staatskapelle Berlin orchestra, recognizes and treasures the value of their preserved-in-amber style and traditions, and tours the orchestra widely.

After Barenboim's uneven tenure with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, more than one critic noted that he had found a more defined, distilled voice as a conductor in Berlin. No surprise, then, that at the close of an October Das Rheingold, Barenboim took no solo bow, but stood in the ranks of the orchestra in its onstage curtain call.

Similarly, the Berliner Ensemble's political theater - biting caricature coupled with human veracity - has been acclaimed for its renewed sense of purpose in recent years under Peymann. Any given week welcomes a wide array of events, including evenings with Rufus Wainwright, readings of works by Philip Roth, and, of course, the company's own repertoire, somewhat incongruously performed at the ornate 19th-century Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

These two survival stories share one thing: charismatic leaders who aren't Berliners but have redefined the artistic life of a venerable culture, illustrating how a zeitgeist evolves through like-minded outsiders.

New York, for example, is energized by a community often described as orphans, runaways, and renegades with revolutionary zeal. Berlin seems to attract the wounded and widowed, whose art is like a pressure valve to relieve the burden of having seen too much. Under steely Prussian skies, little is varnished or idealized. Truth is seized. Might this city of extremes, this two-time scourge of Europe, be morphing into the Continent's conscience?