Music: Rebirth in Dresden

AN INFERNO LIKE DRESDEN MUST NEVER BE REPEATED! proclaimed one banner, its white letters imprinted on a scarlet background. EUROPE WANTS NO EUROSHIMA! exclaimed another; SOCIALISM, PEACE, FREEDOM, declared a third. In the streets, toddlers waved tiny red flags with the hammer and sickle, and huge portraits of Marx, Lenin and Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko bobbed above a crowd of some 150,000 gathered at the Theaterplatz. From a platform emblazoned with the dove of peace, East German Communist Party Chief Erich Honecker faced the blackened ruins of the city’s cathedral and, without a trace of irony, intoned: “Today Dresden is a healthy, reconstructed city!”

Thus, with a ruffle of pennants and a flourish of rhetoric, the German Democratic Republic last week celebrated the restoration of the Semper Opera House, 40 years to the day after one of Germany’s most gracious cities was destroyed in a blazing rain of fire bombs. Despite the propaganda, the occasion was another significant step in the postwar cultural reconstruction of Europe. Dresden, a baroque jewel set gracefully on the banks of the Elbe, has long been a center of German musical life. It boasts a distinguished lineage of kapellmeisters that extends back to Heinrich Schutz in the 17th century and includes Carl Maria von Weber and Richard Wagner. It has been called an “El Dorado for premieres,” and so it was: among the operas first performed there are Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser, and Richard Strauss’s Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier. Symbolically, the resurrected Semper Opera opened with Weber’s Der Freischutz, the last work heard in the hall before it closed in 1944 to await the violent, cataclysmic end of the Third Reich.

Hoch Kitsch transformed into high art, that is Architect Gottfried Semper’s theater. His first opera house opened in 1841, burned down in 1869; his second design, an elaboration of the first, was supervised by his son Manfred and dedicated in 1878. A whimsical intermingling of neo-Renaissance Italian design and quasiabstract German folk-art motifs, it looks like an improbable combination of the Pitti Palace and a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Inside, its bright colors (whites, golds and reds) and intimate dimensions (only 1,300 seats) give it a light, cozy ambience. Trompe l’oeil reigns: columns that appear to be marble turn out to be made of skillfully disguised plaster. Scenes from plays like Goethe’s Faust and Lessing’s Nathan der Weise adorn the doorways; in the auditorium, the gilt chandelier is topped with the crest of the old Saxon monarchy. It illuminates a mid-19th century musical pantheon that includes Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Spontini.

Postwar restoration began decades ago, but the major work did not get under way until 1977, when the new cornerstone was laid. The East German artisans were not quite starting from the ground up. After the bombardment by British and American warplanes, the building’s shell was left standing, and although the interior was badly burned, some original details remained as clues to the materials Semper had used. The acoustics–vivid and unforced, warm and full-bodied–are a particular triumph. The rebuilt Semper Opera disproves the notion that acoustics are still a hit-or-miss proposition: just build a classic horseshoe of wood and plaster, and fill it with statuary and curtains, then sit back and savor the beautifully blended results.

Would that the opening night’s performance had been worthy of both the moment and the surroundings. Instead, it was prosaically conducted by Wolf-Dieter Hauschild and, with the exception of Bass-Baritone Theo Adam’s noble Hermit, provincially sung by an all East European cast. The Freischutz production further suffered from Joachim Herz’s relentlessly proletarian staging. The first great German romantic opera and a major influence on Wagner, Freischutz is the story of a forester, Max, who almost falls into the devil’s clutches trying to regain his lost marksmanship and win the hand of his beloved Agathe. In Herz’s hands, though, Weber’s tuneful, folkish fable became an undisguised metaphor of the new social order in the farmers’ and workers’ state. He illustrated the class struggle, for example, by having the villagers manhandle Prince Ottokar at the opera’s conclusion. But with Honecker occupying what used to be the Semper’s royal box, the impulse to political orthodoxy was undoubtedly strong.

For the opera house’s future, indications are a bit more promising. The opening week also saw the world premieres of a ballet by prominent East German Composer Udo Zimmermann and an opera by Siegfried Matthus, so perhaps Dresden’s reputation as a home for new music will be at least partially restored. And Wolfgang Wagner, the composer’s grandson who maintains the family shrine at Bayreuth, will direct a new production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg in December. But what the Semper needs is what the rest of Eastern Europe’s houses need: the free exchange of singers, designers and directors with the West so that the art form can flower fully. The current political chill between the superpowers may not allow it, but the higher cause of culture demands it.