TONIGHT'S PROGRAMME

Kurt Wei/1 ( 1900- 50) Berlin ( 1928)

1 Ballade vom ertrunkenen Madchen (Ballad equivalent of our Radio Times). Four years later of the Drowned Girl) he was the youngest of several well-known 2 Grabschrift: Die rote Rosa (Epitaph: Red Rosa) composers (among them Hindemith and 3 Erster Bericht iiber den Unbekannten Soldaten Schreker) who were invited to write musical unter dem Triumphbogen (First Report on works specifically designed for broadcasting, and the Unknown Soldier Under the Triumphal for the ever-widening radio audience. The scheme Arch) - possibly the first of its kind in the world - was 4 Zweiter Bericht iiber den Unbekannten sponsored by the German Broadcasting Authority Soldaten unter dem Triumphbogen (Second and administered by the quasi-autonomous Report on the Unknown Soldier Under the stations within its network. Though Weill had Triumphal Arch) been working in close association with the Berlin 5 Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen (Under station for years, and had already composed a the Oak Trees on the Road to Potsdam), substantial and much-admired score for its drama division, his commission came from Frankfurt orch. Waiter Goehr ' 6 Grosser Dankchoral (Great Thanksgiving where the first performance of his 'little ' ) Das Berliner Requiem was given on 22 May 1929. It was to be the work's only performance HK Gruber chansonnier in its composer's lifetime. Garry Magee baritone In a prefatory note, Weill described his cantata Norbert Meyn tenor as a 'secular requiem' that attempted to express European Voices the thoughts and feelings of 'contemporary city­ dwellers' with regard to human mortality. He did not, however, refer to the 10th anniversary, in November 1928, of the end of the First World n 1924, and only a few months after the start War, whose horrors are reflected in no less than of public broadcasting in Germany, Kurt Weill three of the previously published Brecht poems became music correspondent of the weekly that constitute the cantata's text. Although he PROGRAMME NOTE I © DAV ID DREW publication Der deutsche Rundfunk (the had been collaborating with Brecht since March

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1927- first on the opera The Rise and Fall of the servicemen were long forgotten, whereas the City of Mahagonny, then on The Threepenny legend of an undefeated German army 'stabbed in Opera - there is no evidence of a similar the back' had taken root, and rumours of the collaboration on the Berlin Requiem. Reichswehr's secret rearmament were rife. In such Weill had originally planned to open the work a climate, Brecht's Potsdam poem might well with a 1 0-minute setting (for bass voice and 10 have had an incendiary effect. Although the wind instruments) of Brecht's 1918 poem 'Vom Imperial censorship had been aboli shed and its Tod im Wald' ('Concerning the Death in the apparatus dismantled by the republican Forest') which had been premiered at the Berlin constitution of 1919, freedom of expression was Philharmonic in November 1927. But shortly by no means unrestricted in the German media of before the cantata's premiere, he realised that the the 1920s -especially where religious or political inclusion of the quasi-atonal Vom Tod im Wald susceptibilities were at stake. would create too many structural problems and The brief tenor solo that follows tonight's stylistic discrepancies. The premiere of the opening number, 'Ballade vom ertrunkenen cantata had originally been announced for Madchen' ('Ballad of the Drowned Girl') had February 1929, but was postponed more than originally been a setting of a memorial text for a once until its actual premiere in May. The delays young girl robbed of her innocence. After the were due to objections raised by various 1929 premiere, Weill published the song with an watchdog committees. Recent research- notably alternative and highly political text - the by the German Weill scholar Nils Grosch - has 'Grabschrift' ('Epitaph') heard tonight­ revealed that one of the chief provocations was commemorating the pacifist and Spartakist leader the inclusion of the Potsdam march, 'Zu Potsdam Rosa Luxemburg, murdered in January 1919 by a unter den Eichen' ('Under the Oak Trees on the group of extremist army officers after her arrest Road to Potsdam'). and brutal interrogation. Since her corpse had Brecht's poem describes an anti-militarist been found floating in Berlin's Landwehr canal, procession whose central feature is a coffin this alternative version of the text serves to relate daubed with the derisive legend 'A home for the 'Red Rosa' of the 'Epitaph' to the anonymous every warrior!'. In the immediate aftermath of the 'drowned girl' of the preceding ballad. First World War, just such a slogan might have Between 1929 and his hurried flight from appeared in the election manifesto of almost any Germany in March 1933, Weill had at least three German centre-right or centre-left party of the further tries at establishing a definitive form for day. Ten years later, however, housing the cantata, seemingly without fully recognising programmes to woo the votes of returning the reasons for his unease. For in truth, an

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unfinished state was the one that the work's very in their green uniforms- at once an authoritarian subject matter seemed to call for. In the dominant, and dominant authority. Pure satire in circumstances, it is hardly surprising that no the tradition of Heine, the Potsdam march is complete copy of his original score has survived, clearly at odds with Weill's official preview of the or that the principal casualty was the Potsdam cantata as a 'serious and un-ironic succession of march, which exists only in vocal score. memorials, epitaphs and dirges'. In 1967, the late Waiter Goehr orchestrated Unquestionably serious, on the other hand, is the Potsdam march, with due regard for two the concluding 'Grosser Dankchoral' ('Great crucial instrumental indications given in the vocal Thanksgiving Chorale'). Whereas Brecht's poem score: the low bells in the F minor funeral-march uses the language and tone of Martin Luther for verse, and the tinkling celesta in the concluding a systematic denial of Christianity's redemptive C major refrain. The latter mimics the second of message, Weill meticulously avoids the Lutheran the two carillons commissioned in 1797 by tradition so clearly evoked (only four months Friedrich Wilhelm Ill of Prussia for the bell-tower earlier) by the chorale that ended The of Potsdam's Baroque Garrison Church. Chiming Threepenny Opera. In the Berlin Requiem itself, at the half-hour, in reply to 'Lobet den Herrn' the same tradition had been anticipated by the ('Praise the Lord') on the hour, the second neo-Bachian recitative-and-aria of the baritone's carillon echoed the secular tones of a popular 'Zweiter Bericht uber den Unbekannten Soldaten' favourite composed by Mozarr only a few years ('Second Report on the Unknown Soldier'). Pre­ before- Papageno's aria 'Ein Madchen oder Christian in a way that Stravinsky would have Weibchen' from The Magic Flute. For the benefit appreciated precisely because the musical of Potsdam's citizens and soldiers, the aria was language is not at all Stravinskyan, the chorale is soon furnished with a new text commending the also exceptionally far-sighted. Whether or not it virtues of loyalty and honour, and the carillon contains some premonition of the paganism that continued to sound for the next century and a would become Nazi Germany's official religion in half until a British bomb finally silenced it, just just over four years' time, it also and more before the Nazi surrender in 1945. significantly examines the black holes in its In the double-edged irony of Weill's setting, telescoped and modally estranged harmony. In the celesta's Mozarrian message is immediately the pure physics of its composition, the chorale obliterated by the brute force and music-hall already seems to convey some inkling of the comedy of the wind 's cadence to a expanding universe. Paradoxically, however, it C major refrain that has emerged from the also makes room for further metaphysical modulatory scheme like the Potsdam constables speculation.

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TONIGHT'S PROGRAMME

The final vocal melisma on the word 'sterben' statesmanlike Adolf Hitler at the doorway of ('die') comes to rest on the barest of open fifths, a Potsdam's Garrison Church. Such was the skeletal rendering of the already ambiguous opening ceremony on the Day of Potsdam, held harmony with which the guitar begins tonight's on 21 March 1933 in celebration of Hitler's opening number, 'The Ballad of the Drowned election victory. Early on that same day, Weill Girl'. The open-endedness of the Chorale is also had left Berlin by car, hea ding for France; and consistent with Weill's setting of the words 'ruhe well before the Day of Potsdam had reached its sa nft' ('rest in peace') at the end of the following appointed climax- a massive torchlight parade in 'Grabschrift' ('Red Rosa'), which leads on to the fron t of that ultimate symbol of Prussian Berlin Requiem's secul arised 'Dies irae', the first militarism, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin­ of the two 'Reports on the Unknown Soldier'. Weill was safely across the French border. A few Even as the chorus is singing 'ruhe sa nft', the days later, the Mozartian carillon proclaiming music identifies a wish that would only have been 'loyalty and honesty' from the bell-tower of fulfillable in the context and faith of a traditional Potsdam's Garrison Church was adopted by the 'Agnus Dei'. The victim commemorated in 'Red Propaganda Minister's radio network as one of Rosa' is one who would never 'rest in peace'. its station ca ll-signs; and, seven long years later, Although the names of the army officers Hitler's victory parade in Paris reached its responsible for her murder were a matter of predestined culmination at the Arc de Triomphe. public knowledge, none of the principal cu lprits was ever brought to book, and their junior accomplices were either lightly sentenced for trivial offences, or allowed to escape. Justice is among the unnamed victims mourned by a Requiem whose true end- the 'Great Thanksgiving Chorale'- may also, as Weill recognised, serve as its false beginning. Poised mid-way between the 1918 Armistice and Previously at the Proms the outbreak of the Second World War, the The only previous Proms performance of the Berlin Requiem was in cantata expressly repudiates the afterlife as if 1985. when David Atherton conducted the London Sinfonietta and better to train its eyes on near and distant Voices, with soloists Phi lip Langridge. Stephen Roberts and Michael futures. Only four years after the attempt to Rippon. The three-part concert also included Weill's Kleme suppress the Potsdam march, the aged President Dreigroschenmus1k and works by janacek. Birtwistle and Bartok. Dovid Hormon Hindenburg would receive a soberly dressed and

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