Germany
'I’ve told everyone that it’s a comedy – but will anyone laugh?' Jonathan Dove on his new Marx opera
Jonathan Dove
Marx is having a terrible day. He is supposed to be finishing volume two of Capital but he’s distracted by his lust for the maid, workmen are taking away the furniture, his daughter thinks she’s caught a spy.... and what will his wife say when she discovers he’s taken her silver to the pawnbroker? Where is Engels when Marx needs him most?The answers are in Marx in London, my new opera opening in Theater Bonn on 9 December. If the plot sounds a bit like Richard Bean’s play Young Marx, that’s because at one point I asked Richard to write the libretto for my opera, and that gave him the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The famous names on Kreaturen Der Nacht: Deutsche Post-Punk Subkultur 1980–1984 are Christiane F., Die Haut, Malaria! and Mania D. Committed collectors of German post-punk and those who there at the time might be familiar with Ausserhalb, ExKurs or Leben Und Arbeiten. In eschewing DAF, Die Krupps, Der Plan, Einstürzende Neubauten, Liaisons Dangereuses, Holger Hiller, Palais Schaumburg and Die Tödliche Doris, this deep-digging compilation paints a picture of German music from the first half of the 1980s as stimulating as it’s unfamiliar.Kreaturen Der Nacht collects 16 tracks by 16 bands/ Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s insidiously seductive celebrations of Nazism and the propaganda excesses of Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß (1940), the films that were made in Germany during the Hitler period have been air-brushed out of cinema history, almost in mirror image of the culture that was entartet, or banned by the Nazis themselves. There is something repulsive about cinema that was micro-managed by “Dr” Goebbels, in most cases served the regime rather than questioned it, and during the war provided increasingly fantasy-driven escapism to soothe both the women left behind and the troops at the Read more ...
David Nice
Latvia is fighting fit. The recent elections did not see the expected victory for the pro-Kremlin Harmony party; support for the European Union and NATO will be well represented. Last week the feisty Lavtian Ambassador to the UK, Baiba Braže, landed a perfectly diplomatic punch on the smug mug of our latest apology for a Foreign Secretary, taking former Remainer Hunt to task for his outrageous parallels between the EU and the Soviet gulag by reminding him how Latvia had suffered under the USSR and how eagerly it has adopted the best European values. And last night's second Royal Festival Hall Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During his quarter-century in charge of the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, the late Kurt Masur nobly held out a musical hand of friendship and collaboration from the other side of the Iron Curtain. So how heartening to hear that the Southbank Centre has inaugurated a five-year partnership with the venerable Saxons – just when, as Bob Geldof, Simon Rattle, Ed Sheeran, John Eliot Gardiner and other celebs have warned in their recent open letter, the “serious madness” of Brexit threatens to shut British music into an East German isolation of its own.For all his versatility as a conductor, Masur Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The terrace beside the restaurant in Cologne’s Stadtgarten – the city park – is heaving. Agreeably so. A bar and a food counter facing onto it are fringed by rows of long tables. Overhanging trees unite in a canopy suggesting this might be forest clearing. And despite the amount of people of all ages and despite the amount of the local Kölsch beer and the Riesling you’d expect in Rhine-straddling city flying around, the atmosphere is relaxed.On the terrace’s bandstand, Tigger-ish Berlin band Champyons bounce through a mix of electro-inclined pop and guitar-focused songs suggesting a punked-up Read more ...
David Nice
It was the C major Prelude and Fugue from this second book of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, not its more familiar counterpart in Book One, which found itself tracked on a gold-plated disc inside Voyager I to reach whatever intelligent life there may be outside our solar system. Surely more interesting, though, is the universe within the minds of certain exceptional individuals – in this case not just that of the composer, which remains unfathomable. How can an artist like András Schiff not only have all 48 Preludes and Fugues in his head, but communicate them to a huge public with such Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Men in a wilderness, uneasy interaction with the locals, a horse… German director Valeska Grisebach’s third feature Western certainly does not lack the staples of genre that her title suggests. But there’s a vulnerable heart to this tale of cross-cultural bonding, with accompanying ruminations about changing human landscapes and fate, that moves it far beyond the expected.We first meet her protagonists, a group of German construction workers, at their dour backwater home base as they’re preparing for the next job, and sense something of the group’s dynamics. But the assignment ahead isn’t at Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Cannes jury in 2017 gave best actress to Diane Kruger for her performance in In the Fade. She plays Katja, who turns avenging angel when her son and Turkish husband are murdered. It’s Kruger’s first acting role in her native German and she’s on screen for almost the entire film. Whether you are absorbed by the narrative of In the Fade (German title: Aus der Nichts) or find yourself distanced by the stylistic tics and plot holes, probably depends on how much Kruger/Katja convinces you. I kept being reminded of another intelligent, beautiful model turned actress, Jessica Lange, who took on Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever wondered why the Steinway grand piano is invariably the instrument of choice in every hall you visit, great or small? Why do the halls in question not offer a choice between two or three pianos of different manufacture, as so many did before the Second World War? How is it that the hand-crafted pianos pioneered by Julius Blüthner in Leipzig from 1853 onwards, and still being made to the highest specifications on a different site just outside the city, don't usually get a look-in?Famous for their layered, mellow richness, cited by more than one great pianist as enablers for Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If you ever find yourself in Leipzig at a weekend during school term, the Bach motet (and occasionally cantata) performances in the great cantor’s old church, the Thomaskirche, are an absolute must. But if you happened to be in that city this weekend just past, you will have been able to immerse yourself in practically a whole year’s worth of cantatas in the space of a little more than forty-eight hours. The Leipzig Bach Festival is an annual event. But it has surely never been quite like this before. The festival’s artistic director, Michael Maul, and the president and director, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The invaluable work being carried out by the Wim Wenders Foundation to preserve the legacy of the great German director continues to bear fruit. In 2012, with the help of the World Cinema Foundation, Wenders bought back his entire back catalogue (which he had lost in associated bankruptcy proceedings a decade earlier), and the process of 4K digital restoration began.The challenges – much more than just repairing images drawn from some very tired original prints (though that was considerable work too, as an accompanying extra here, Restoring Time, reveals) – were particularly demanding in the Read more ...