OPERAPOLITIK.(future of opera houses in Berlin)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Only in Berlin would an argument over the future of three opera houses take on the dimensions of a constitutional crisis. Here is how things stand in the first days of December: the Social Democratic Party, which governs Germany with the Greens, supports a plan to unite the Staatsoper, on Unter den Linden, with the Deutsche Oper, in the west. Daniel Barenboim, the Staatsoper's music director, fiercely opposes the idea. The Christian Democratic Union, meanwhile, wants to put not only these two companies under one administration but also a third--the smaller-scale Komische Oper. Thomas Flierl, Berlin's cultural tsar, who belongs to the ex-communist Party for Democratic Socialism, has yet to commit himself one way or another. Berliners have lost all patience with this mess, but visiting Americans may be charmed by the fact that politicians here take an interest in opera at all. I realized that my sojourn in Berlin had taken me into uncharted waters when, during an intermission one evening, Professor Christoph Stolzl, the chief of the Berlin C.D.U., took me aside to talk about Arnold Schoenberg. Any right-minded American politician would sooner be photographed dangling...

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