Patrick Bade
Munich: A Cultural History, Part 2

Patrick Bade - Munich: A Cultural History, Part 2

- Now when we left Munich at the end of the last talk, Bavaria had recovered from the devastating war of the Spanish Succession and had then entered a very glorious phase in the 18th century of architecture and also of music. Now, when the next great European war broke out, the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century, Bavaria played a very canny game and actually came out of it all very well. This is the Elector Max Joseph, later king. So initially Bavaria allied itself to France when Napoleon was on the up. And that paid off very, very handsomely was in 1806 when the Holy Roman Empire was disbanded. With the blessing of Napoleon, Bavaria was promoted from being an electorate, a Princeton, into being a kingdom. Then exactly the right moment, just as Napoleon star was waning, Bavaria switched sides, and it joined the allies against France, which meant that at the Congress of Vienna in 1813 to 14, technically Bavaria was at the table as a victor in the war, and Bavaria was able to retain its status as a kingdom. So the connections with France for a decade or more left their mark. Napoleon married, got his adopted son, Eugene de Beauharnais, he was of course the son of Josephine. He had him married to a daughter of Max Joseph, so he became a Bavarian prince. We see evidence of the strong French influence in the palace of Nymphenburg. This a wing of the palace, which was redecorated in the Napoleonic period completely, as you can see completely in the French Empire style, very magnificent, very blingy, lots of gilded bronze mounts and so on. Eugene de Beauharnais, he was a much loved local figure really in Bavaria.

And you see his splendid Neoclassical tomb by the Danish sculptor, Thorvaldsen, that still exists in the Michaelskirche. So I’m just trying to remember off the top of my head when Max Joseph dies, it’s in the middle of the 1820s, I think it’s 1826. And he is succeeded by his slightly propagate son, Ludwig I, who was very influenced by the ideas of well of romanticism actually. And as a young man, as a crown prince, he went down to Rome and he mingled with artists and lived a rather bohemian life that has commemorated in this very famous picture, which is in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. He is the man on the edge of the bench with his arm out, reaching towards bottles of wine, which are being handed to him. So he was certainly somebody who enjoyed the good life and he enjoyed very much the company of artists. And here you see him depicted as Patron of the Arts. He was passionately interested in architecture and painting above all. Unfortunately, he was also passionately interested in beautiful women. And another one of the famous attractions of the Palace of Nymphenburg is the runway of the beauties, the most beautiful women of Munich and Bavaria. He commissioned all these portraits, and no doubt many of them were his mistresses, but the most famous notorious was the Irish beauty and courtesan, Lola Montez, who you see on the right hand side. And it was eventually she who brought him down 1848 with all the revolutions going on everywhere.

The students in Munich were protested at what they saw as her excessive and unhelpful influence on the king and the government. And Ludwig I was forced to abdicate, but not before he had actually completely transformed the city. As I said, Bavaria was relatively poor and relatively backward in Germany as a whole. Munich in the early 19th century was a very small city within its mediaeval walls. Mediaeval and baroque architecture inside those walls. But Ludwig I wanted to turn Munich into a great cultural capital, and he modelled it on ancient Greece and Renaissance Florence. And so what we’ve got here is images of important buildings constructed during the reign of Ludwig I that completely transformed the city. You’ve got the university, you’ve got the Ludwigstrasse, various churches, and the new 19th century wing of the residents and so on. And you can see that most of the buildings are, well, here we are looking down the Ludwigstrasse, splendid straight street lined with great Neoclassical buildings. From here, we’re looking from the Straugbing end towards the centre of the city. And you can see that the street concludes with the Feldherrnhalle, great triumphal arch at the end of the street. Here, this is what it looks like today. This is what it looks like from the other end towards the Siegestor, the Victory Arch. And Munich people like to boast that when Dugal went on a diplomatic visit to Germany to visit Adenauer in the post-war period, he was driven down the street and he was so impressed, he proclaimed, A real capital city.

Now this is the Feldherrnhalle, somebody in the questions last week asked me about this. Why do they have a full scale copy in Munich of the Loggia dei Lanzi from Florence? And the answer to that is that Ludwig I aspired to make Munich the Florence of the North, ‘cause that term is also applied quite often to Dresden what’s called Florence on the Elbow. But in Ludwig’s case, this finds direct expression in the architecture that he commissioned. This structure became very notorious for reasons that I’ll explain later in this lecture in the 20th century. The other building which expresses his desire for Munich to be the new Florence, is the 19th century Wing of the Residence, which you see left, which is clearly based on the facade of the Pitti Palace in Florence. But ancient Athens was also on the agenda. And this is the Konigsplatz and the Glyptothek in Neo-Greek style. And there were of course connections, very close connections between Bavaria and Greece. And Ludwig went all out to spend huge sums of money on ancient Greek works of art. This one of the most famous statues in the world, this extraordinary erotic nude of a satyr lost in an in erotic revere. This is the famous “Barberini Faun”, one of the most celebrated ancient Greek statues from the Hellenistic periods. He had to pay an enormous sum to prize this out of the Barberini family in Rome. I think probably more appealing to modern taste, the sculptures from the Temple of Aegina. Now I said that the Wittelsbach family had close connections with Greece when Greece won independence. 'Cause in the 19th century, it was assumed every country would be a kingdom. It needed a king.

There were no Greek aristocrats. There was no Greek royalty. They’d been under Turkish rule for centuries. So they had to tout around Europe to find a prince and perhaps rather unwisely, given the amount of insanity in the Wittelsbach family, they chose Prince Otto Wittelsbach, who later had to be disposed of because he was completely bonkers. But this connection with Greece enabled the Bavarians to acquire, these are from is impediment sculptures from the top of Greek sculpture, Temple of Aegina. Very, very beautiful. They mark the transition between the Archaic period and the Classical period of Greek art. So they immediately proceed the so-called Elgin marbles, the Parthen marbles, which of course are hugely disputed now with the Greeks wanting to claim them back. I’ve not read that they’re equally anxious to claim back the Aegina marbles. Personally, I find the Aegina marbles more beautiful than the Parthen marbles. So one of the things to do when you go to Munich, of course, is to go to the Glyptothek, the Museum of Ancient Sculpture. Apart from British Museum, it is the best collection of ancient sculpture outside of Greece and Italy. And the last room, when you walk through it, it’s not a huge museum, is the room of Roman portraits. I love this room, but when you walk into it, I always have the impression of attending an ancient Roman cocktail party.

These faces are so real. These are people you could looking forward hugely, to going to a big party to celebrate Trudy’s birthday and three years of lockdown. And these are people I could meet at that party. These are people, all people you could meet on the bus, really. They’re so real. And in fact, these Roman portraits, of course, were often made from life masks, casts from a living person. Munich is a great city of museums. I think if I had to rank what, I have never been to St. Petersburg, so I can’t really talk about St. Petersburg. But as far as Western Europe is concerned, I suppose at the top level would be Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna. But I would really put Munich up close to those. In fact, I’m not sure I wouldn’t say that Munich is richer in its museums than Vienna because certainly the range of material you can see in the Munich museums is greater than that you can see in Vienna. This is the Alte Pinakothek which was built by the architect, Klenze. He was the favourite architect of King Ludwig I. And it was built to house the great Wittelsbach art collection. I mentioned a substantial part of it had come from the Palatine had been brought in the late 18th century by the Elector Karl Theodore. This is what it looks like today. And two things to point out here, two great pieces of British sculpture, oddly enough in front of it. Henry Moore, I’m sure you’ll recognise.

And to the left, a piece by Eduardo Paolozzi called “Leonardo”. The other thing I want to say about this building is like so many buildings in Munich, it was severely damaged in the second World War. And I said last time, what is interesting when you go around the city is the different solutions for restoring the damaged buildings. Whether you try and make it look like nothing ever happened, make it look like a brand new. In this case, they made the decision to show very clearly what had been damaged and what had been replaced. And this is what the building looked like at the end of the second World War. Inside, I mean, fantastic museum, really thrilling museum, the greatest collection in the world without doubt of German Renaissance painting Durer, Altdorfer, Grunewald. all the top names of this amazing, amazing picture. Mesmerising when you stand in front of it by Altdorfer, author of the “Battle of Alexander”. It’s also the world’s greatest collection of Rubens. These were pictures that came from with Karl Theodore. And you see a side of, you see two sides of Rubens, really. You see the bombastic Catholic counter reformation pictures. I remember going through that museum once with Trudy, and she got a terrible fit of the giggles in front of one of the religious, over the top religious pictures by Rubens. So this may or may not appeal to you, I can’t say it enormously appeals to me, this type of Rubens. But you see another side of Rubens, very personal side here. Here are the two wives of Rubens. On the left paintings to celebrate his first marriage to Isabella Brunt.

Very, very happy marriage that was. In fact, he was unusually for an artist of genius, I think he must have been a rather wonderful and lovable man. And he seems to have been very happily married twice. And on the right hand side is one of his portraits. There are several in the museum of his second wife, Helena Fourment. He was obviously totally besotted with her. And as I always say, standing in front of this picture, it’s pretty obvious what it was about her that really appealed to him. It’s a very sexy image. He was 53 and I think she was 16 when they got married. Wonderful Rembrandt, wonderful Rembrandt, this early astonishing self-portrait where he seems to be looking almost shocked as he looks into the mirror. And one of, of several very, very moving depictions of Jesus Christ. As I’ve mentioned in many lectures before, Rembrandt was the first and indeed the only artist in Europe until the 19th century who acknowledged that Jesus was a Jew and who depicted him not as a Northern European type, but as a Middle Eastern looking character. This is the great Opera House of Munich. It was actually built by an architect called Fischer, but then burnt down very quickly within a year or so, rebuilt by Klenze. It’s in the Neoclassical style.

Of course, it’s one of the world’s greatest opera houses with performances of a very, very high standard, receiving a government grant many times that of Coven Garden in London. So here you see it as it is today, as it was before the war, and as it was bottom right after its destruction in the second World War. Luckily the plans, Klenze’s plans still existed. And so this is a case where they rebuilt it meticulously after Klenze’s plans. The only details really where you notice that it’s a rebuild or reconstruction are in some of the sculptures. But here is the interior of the auditorium as it was at the end of the war and as it looks today. Now in the 1860s, it was Ludwig I grandson, Ludwig II, who that became king of Bavaria. He’s a sort of mythical figure. He’s a cult figure in Bavaria, you know, treated almost as a saint. A very extraordinary story. I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with it. He suffered, I think from the mental illness that was inherent in the Wittelsbach family. Lots of inbreeding again, like the Hapsburgs. A very beautiful man, very handsome man. And that is part, at least when he was young, he was very beautiful. Everybody when Wagner first saw him, he thought he was an angel in his extraordinary beauty. And it’s a strange in a way that in such a Catholic conservative country as Bavaria, that this man who was widely known to be homosexual, could achieve this kind of status as a quasi-saint. He’s remembered very much today for his profligate building of absolutely extraordinary castles in the foothills of the Alps.

This is the most outrageous of the Neuschwanstein castle, which was still not complete when he was deposed. So he actually spent, only having spent all this money on it and built it over years. It was hardly ever there, or only for a very, very short time towards the end of his reign. Now it’s one of the most famous images in the world. I think it’s a castle that looks better in the distance than close up. When you get up close to it, first night I’m having my God, once you’re having to sleep in that room, I think that, you know, keep you awake all night, all that busy decoration. Wagnerian murals on the wall and so on. That Wagner, of course, he was a total obsessive Wagnerian. And the whole of the castle is full of Wagnerian references. This is the even more over the top interior at Linderhof. Another one of his great heroes was Louis the 14th. And he was very, very Francophile. And this actually, the style of this is more Louis 15th. It’s more Rococo. But it’s more Rococo than any real Rococo ever was. It’s totally outrageously over the top, enough to give you a migraine to spend more than five minutes. But his most lasting contribution was his extremely problematic patronage of Wagner. He’d fallen in love with Wagner’s “Lohengrin”, blew him away, as of course it did Kandinsky and many other people later on. And the first thing he did when he became king of Bavaria was to send people out to find Wagner.

Wagner was a political exile and he was also somebody who had to constantly move and hide because he built up huge debts and he never paid them. So they managed to track him down and he initially thought they were just people coming after him for a payment, so he tried to avoid them. But then it turned out that the king of Bavaria was willing to pay all his debts and support him in every possible way. And it was initially almost like a love affair. But eventually, Ludwig despite loving Wagner’s music, came to realise what a monster he was and how dishonest he was. Wagner cheated him, he betrayed him again and again. And Ludwig was incredibly forgiving of this. In the 1860s, four Wagner premieres were presented in Munich in 1865. “Tristan and Isolde,” which as I’ve said before is for many people, it’s the starting point of the history of modern music. Very momentous occasion. Then 1868 “Meistersinger”. And then very much against Wagner’s will, Ludwig staged the first two operas of the ring cycle, the premieres in Munich, because Wagner wanted to keep hold of them in order to present them all in one go in the festival, which he finally did by Bayreuth in 1876. Ludwig had every right to do this. He’d bought them, he paid for the rights, but Wagner in a very truculent mood, did everything he could to sabotage the premiers of his own operas.

Now, Munich did fulfil Ludwig I ambitions to become an art capital. And there were a series of so-called Painter Princess in Munich. Painters, who at the time had huge reputations, earned vast sums of money, and where artists flocked from all over the world to study with these artists. This is an artist called Karl von Piloty. And this is one of his works that’s now in the Pinakothek enormous overblown, pompous piece of as the Germans would say, but it really is , as you know, it means ham. But at the time, he had a world reputation. He won a medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1867. An artist like Muka, for instance, Muka was attracted to Munich to be a student of Piloty before going on to Paris. Even Picasso in the 1890s, briefly considered coming to Munich to develop his career rather than to Paris. Piloty was followed by another Painter Prince, and this is Franz von Lenbach, who became immensely successful and wealthy. And he built this gorgeous Italianate villa on the edge of Central Munich, the Bach house. He probably is turning in his grave now because it houses the collection of the city of Munich, which contains the world’s greatest collection of Munich expressionist artist, the Blaue Reiter. His fortune large, well, he was highly prized, fashionable portraitist, and you could earn a lot of money that way in the 19th century, as of course Sargent did later and Winterhalter before him.

But his chief source of income was an endless repetition of portraits of those two great Germans, Wagner and Bismarck. So he had a real kind of, almost a factory line of turning up, God knows how many portraits or versions of portraits that are of Wagner and Bismarck Franz von Lenbach. He was succeeded as painter prints of Munich by this artist, Franz von Stuck. Here he is with his beautiful American wife. This is a self-portrait. And another artist with a huge, huge reputation. The painting on the left, “The Keeper of Paradise” was the one that first made his reputation was held as a masterpiece, but his most successful work was called “Sin”. And he produced 17 versions of this work, A rather kitschy, kinky work, I think. But when it was first shown, it was shown in a huge auditorium, the front of the auditorium, and they set up rows of seats so people could sit and contemplate it. And it was claimed as one of the greatest masterpieces ever produced. And compared with the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance. Rather pretentious, I think, I hope I’m not being too stereotypical when I say that there is this sort of pretension to be a philosopher as well as a painter and to paint great ideas. Although I think this is a rather trivial idea. It’s called “The Struggle for Woman”.

And it’s meant, you know, it’s meant to be showing some kind of really basic element in human nature. The men fighting one another for women. He was so famous that he attracted students from all over Europe, including Kandinsky, including Paul Klee and many others. And he became so rich, he was able to build a very splendid villa, again on the outskirts of Munich on the other side of the Isar in Bogenhausen. And his palace, as it was, became really a salon where the good and the great, every famous international celebrity visiting Munich, you were invited to a dinner with Stuck. Here is his painting of all the students of Munich leading a torch lit procession to do him honour on his birthday. You can see him standing the small figure on the balcony on the front of his palace. Now Stuck’s paintings, I don’t think they’ve really stood the test of time that I think they now look like a lot of them, like ridiculous kitsch. And you may say the same also of the interior of his palace, the Stuck villa. That is absolutely extraordinary. And I must say I find the interior design of his palace more interesting than his paintings. Here on the right hand side is the altar to “Sin” that’s in his studio, upstairs in the Stuck Villa. Now, it’s often said that the great geniuses in German culture come from the east. Saxony is really the part of Germany. It’s produced Wagner, it produced Bach. It’s up in the north east part of Germany and Gerta and so on. Bavaria cannot really claim to have produced many native geniuses or Munich. And the one outstanding figure is, of course, Richard Strauss.

My next talk will be entirely devoted to him. Here he is as a young man and then as a very old man with one of his grandchildren to whom he was utterly devoted and who he did everything possible to protect during the Nazi regime. There they were very much in danger as they were half Jewish. Now, when Ludwig is removed from the throne, it was very melodramatic story, I’m sure you know all about that. And his arrest and his imprisonment, and then his mysterious death by drowning in the Starnberg. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Was it an accident? We don’t really know. But his brother who should have taken over as king was also completely bonkers, certifiably so. So it was actually his uncle Leopold who becomes regent of Munich. And his regency period in the 1890s, and the early 1900s, here he is, is another golden age for Munich. It’s Munich was suddenly much more prosperous than it had ever been with the unification of Germany. And these very beautiful Jugendstil suburbs of Munich Schwabing, Bogenhausen were constructed in this period. Luckily, a lot of this architecture survived the war. It’s a very distinctive version of the Art Nouveau style that’s very different from either Belgian, French, or Vietnamese Art Nouveau. And it incorporates certain traditional elements, the liking for a brightly coloured facade, a certain sort of , rural element in the decoration of the facades. Now, the German word for Art Nouveau is Jugen, Jugendstil, the youth style.

And that actually derives from an illustrated magazine that was founded in Munich in the se in the 1890s called Jugen. And the magazine commissioned these very beautiful covers from artists, not just German artists, but from all over Europe. And they were often in an Ar Nouveau style. So that’s why the name Jugendstil was adopted. This is a caricature that shows mocking really the excesses of the Art Nouveau style. And it shows normal, healthy, young women who then drink from the , the Fountain of Youth. And they come out as sort of on the other side. This was the most extreme and eccentric Jugendstil building in Munich. The Atelier Elvira, it was on the Odeonsplatz. It’s by an architect called August Endell. Really extraordinary, isn’t it? It’s one of the most extreme Art Nouveau buildings. But it was actually, it was destroyed even before the second World War. 'Cause the Nazis hated it. They thought it was degenerate art, degenerate architecture, so they had it demolished in the 1930s. The other very distinguished Art Nouveau architect, Jugendstil architect, in Munich is Richard Riemerschmid. And happily, this theatre by him survived. It wasn’t damaged in the war. Very beautiful as you can see, Art Nouveau Jugendstil Theatre, I think it’s called the . And he was also a very important designer of particularly furniture. And this chair is a real classic, you’ll see illustrated in every book about the history of early modern design.

As you can see with its rather organic curvy lines, it is Art Nouveau. But what’s exceptional about this chair, it’s thought to be the first chair designed to be mass produced by industrial means. Another great, this is of course a important period, 1890s, early 1900s of illustrated magazines. They thrived partly because of new technical developments, illustration, the colour lithography enabled mass production of colour illustration. Simplicissimus is a satirical magazine tended to be rather left wing and very critical of the establishment. Often very outrageous, really outrageous, you think, I mean it’s the equivalent, the German equivalent of Punch. But they got away with kind of pretty near the knuckle jokes that you could never have had in an English magazine of the period. It’s funny that the Germans are, in some ways are much more uninhibited, I would say, than the English. And as I said, they have a certain, they have a sense of humour, a different one from the English. And on the left hand side, you see a man, a bearded man asking a very obese couple if they have children. And the the sarcastic answer is, Impossible, do you think we’re acrobats? And on the right hand side here, you’ve got a caricature of rather ugly German women visiting Italy. And the comment underneath is it’s obvious why homosexuality is so widespread in Germany.

So satire and cabaret. Cabaret born as an art form in Paris, right behind where I live in Paris on the Boulevard, and so on. It was there, it then spread. I would say the next important capital of the art of cabaret was Munich, followed by Vienna, and then of course golden age of cabaret in Berlin, which I’ll get to in a couple of weeks in the 1920s. At the most notorious cabaret club in Munich until it was shut down by the authorities for subversion was the Elf Scharfrichter, the Eleven Executioners. When it was shut down, it reopened then as And I’ve asked lots of people in Munich what exactly what is the meaning of . And it’s ambiguous because it could either be seven aunt murderous, murderous aunts, or it could be seven murderers of aunts. But the key figure for cabaret was the very outrageous Franc Wedekind. You see him, he was an actor, a performer as well as a writer who was really, really pushing boundaries on both political and sexual matters. And frequently found himself in conflict with the authorities and even thrown into prison at one point. The comic genius of Bavaria in the first half the 20th century was this man, Karl Valentin has a whole museum devoted to him in Munich. Although really, the honour should be equally divided between him and the lady you see with him here.

This is Liesl Karlstadt and they were a comic duo. She was always the straight man or the straight woman to he’s absolutely lunatic humour. I’ve got a little excerpt I’d like to play you if you really want, if you understand German and you are interested in this kind of thing, on YouTube, you can see lots of short films with Karl Valentin, including this one, which is the Record Shop, And he walks into this record shop and initially asks for cigars and the Liesl Karlstadt has to say, no, no, we don’t sell cigars, we sell records. And then he says, well, why don’t you gimme some then, gimme some records. And she said, well, what kind of records do you want? Well, anyway, I’ll play a little bit to you. I want you to hear the flavour of his accent 'cause I think if you, even if you don’t understand the words, I’d like you to hear this very Munich voice and get a sense of the Munich sense of humour. And it just gets more and more crazy. As I said, Munich was considered a great art centre, probably next to Paris in Europe. And so art students came from all over the world to study there. And the most famous artistic suburb of Munich was, I’m having a senior moment. God, where the concentration camp is just outside. Now a beautiful, it’s like the Hampstead of… It’s terrible how these things happen in the middle of the lecture. Anyway, you all know the name of the place, I’m quite sure.

And there’ll be lots of, I can see there’ll be lots of people putting it in the Q&A, but I’m sure many people have been there. But the extraordinary thing, of course, I think for us is when I first went to Munich and I could see Dachau and I could see Dachau on the tube map, and it is as close to the centre of Munich or closer than Hampstead is to London. So people often say, well, how could people not know about concentration camps and gas chambers and so on and ovens when it’s right there, inside the confines of Munich. But so long before Hitler, Dachau had, there was a whole Dachau school of painting, rather Art Nouveau, slightly symbolist landscape painting. This is the most famous of all the artists who was attracted to Munich to study. This is Kandinsky, who really went native, as you can see, is dressed up in Bavarian costume with his mother. I’ve got a whole lecture on Munich, on German expressionism. So I’m not really, I’m just going to run through some images now 'cause I’ll talk in more detail when I get to German expressionism. These are early works by Kandinsky from before the first World War. And then he sets up that the so-called Blue Rider school. We have works. Here’s Franz Marc and August Macke. Wonderful, gorgeous painting by August Macke, tragically killed at a very early age in the first World War. Franz Marc, again, Kandinsky. Now, 1914 Germany by this time of course has been part of the greater Germany since 1871.

So when war is declared in 1914, inevitably, of course Munich is part of this. And you can see the newspaper Germany on the March. And then this extraordinary picture on the right hand side, taken from the steps of the Feldherrnhalle, you can see the in the background and a great mass jubilant people rejoicing at the outbreak of war. And in amongst them, isn’t it amazing that somebody has been able to pick up the very young Adolph Hitler still in his late teens amongst the crowd welcoming the onset of the war. After German defeat, there is a revolution and a brief communist republic. And I know that Trudy’s talked quite a lot about this. So again, I’m only going to mention it in passing. And the fateful, the revolutionaries, the communists, all the leaders, Erich Muhsam, Eugen Levine and so on, they were all Jews. This is significant because this very much fueled the antisemitism of the Nazis later in the 1920s and 30s. Somebody, a couple of people asked me at the end, were the important Jews in Munich, and not really in the period I was talking about last time, but obviously more in the 20th century. But even so, the Jewish community in Munich was relatively small and relatively insignificant compared with those in Vienna and Berlin. Nevertheless, there are some very distinguished figures. This is the great conductor, Bruno Walter. He was originally from Berlin, then he went to Vienna where he was a protege of Mahler. And between 1913 and 1922 was a golden age of opera in Munich led by him. He was again, really promoting the ideas of Mahler that opera should be He wanted everything to work together. He didn’t want just famous soloist strutting their stuff.

He wanted to discipline the singers and make them work together with the orchestra and the designer and the . In his time, he was very keen on contemporary opera and he presented many important new works. Pfitzner’s “Palestrina”, very young, still teenage Korngold’s opera “Violanta” in 1916, delightful “Susanna’s Secret” of Wolf-Ferrari. I mean, nowadays when it’s done, it’s always performed in Italian. But actually, Wolf-Ferrari was half German, half Italian. And his early operas, which were presented in Munich, the premiers were all in German rather than in Italian. And an opera, which Bruno regarded as a masterpiece and was a great success at the time, Braunfels’s “Die Vogel”. But as Braunfels was I think half Jewish or even quarter Jewish, his opera was suppressed by the Nazis. And it’s only being revived in Germany really quite recently. Although, as I said, Bruno Walter was very keen to subordinate singers to the ensemble. He nevertheless had an ensemble of very wonderful, wonderful singers. Tenor Karl Erb and his wife coloratura soprano Ivogun. And there you see them together, rather bizarrely as father and son in the premiere of Pfitzner’s “Palestrina”. And I’m going to play you a tiny excerpt 'cause I can’t resist it, of a singer who adjoined the Munich ensemble in 1919 and was there for a couple of years. When she auditioned for Bruno Walter in 1919, she went through some of her show pieces and his jaw dropped. He just said, is there nothing you can’t do with that voice? It’s the most fabulous voice. Rudolph Bing said, it was the most beautiful mezzo voice he ever heard in his life. And you’ll see just what she could do.

Amazing breath control, amazing coloratura, amazing trill. Munich had an important literary life in the 1920s. And the two most distinguished figures were Thomas Mann on the left and Lion Feuchtwanger. Thomas Mann, of course was not Jewish, but fell out big time with the Nazis and had to go into exile in America in the 1930s. Lion Feuchtwanger, who was Jewish, and of course he had to go. I think Trudy told me she was going to use quotes from him and talk about him. I don’t really have the time to talk in any depth, but a very distinguished novelist. Most famous perhaps for his novel, “Jew Suss”, which was a denunciation of antisemitism based on the historical story of the Jews of the 18th century. It also famous for his novel, “The Oppermanns”. And perhaps most interesting in this context is his novel “Erfolg”, which means success. This was a novel set in Munich in the 1920s discussing recent history. When he wrote that at the end of the 20s, he’s discussing the rise of Hitler, the putsch of 1923, which of course had been a failure. So at the end of the 20s, Hitler seemed like history. He was yesterday’s man, he was finished. And it was only the Wall Street crash and the world depression, economic depression, that gave Hitler a second bite of the cherry.

Here is Hitler, who is based in Munich in the, I’m always, I can’t get it. People say that he was so charismatic. 'Cause I can never really divorce him from the caricature of him of Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator.” But he always looks to me like a joke. I can’t get the charisma. Obviously it was there for millions of people, but I don’t know. There are various places. It’s funny when you think of all the destruction there was in Munich during the second World War. How many of the places associated with Hitler and with the Nazi regime got through it all intact. This is his apartment on the right hand side, in Bogenhausen, now police station. And the Australia Bavaria, which is now an Italian restaurant, which was his favourite beer hall to go to. The 1923, Butch was very brutally put down. There was a big street battle right next to the Feldherrnhalle. And it was an insurrection 'cause we very similar, I suppose to January the sixth in America. But it was very brutally put down. And some of Hitler’s followers were shot down in the street. And when he took power in 1933, he had this monument built to them on the side of the Feldherrnhalle. And night and day, it had guards in front of it. And the people of Munich, if you walked past it, you had to do the the Nazi gesture. And if you didn’t, you risked being beaten up or being arrested. So people who didn’t want to do the Nazi salute, and believe me, there were plenty even in Munich who didn’t, interestingly the figures of the elections that brought the Nazis to par, even Bavaria was very conservative and very pro Nazi, Munich itself was far less so.

And so if you didn’t want to do the Nazi salute, the only way to avoid, and you wanted to get to the Ludwigstrasse. So you want to get to the Ludwigstrasse, you want to go to Schwabing on the other side, what do you do? So there’s a little passageway, , behind the Feldherrnhalle and you could slip down that and go around the other side. And there is I think a very touching memorial to those people now in Munich. You can see it here that they’ve put bronzed, little paving stones that show the path that people who took down the street to avoid giving the Nazi salute. Elections of 1933, and then we know what happened. And Munich was a city very dear to Hitler’s heart. It’s where the Nazi movement began and the city prided itself on being, the capital of the movement. This is 1937 and you can see the bombastic architecture in the background of the Haus der Kultur, monstrous building that amazingly survived the second World War completely intact. And it was probably no way to get rid of it, in short of a nuclear bomb. It’s so massively built. I think, although I’m not keen on doing Nazi tours of Munich and I try and avoid that. But I do take people into this building partly because there’s a very good cafe overlooking the park on the other side. And also they have interesting art exhibitions. But when you go in that building, it gives you an incredible sense of the nature of the Nazi regime. That everything is overscaled, everything is designed to make you feel small and insignificant.

This is the Konigsplatz with the two temples, Ehrentempel, honour temples, built to celebrate or honour the martyrs of 1923. And to the left you can see the . You can actually see the balcony where it Hitler came out to announce the success inverted commerce of the ninth of the Munich Conference. 37, the launching in Munich of the Entartete Kunst Show, which was denouncing all forms of modern art. And then it became a touring show going to other German cities. End of the war, Dachau, as I said, actually inside the city of Munich, and the unbelievable horror of the revelation of Dachau. People or the Americans were so appalled that they actually rounded up people from nearby and forced them into the camp to witness what they were responsible for. Munich itself largely reduced to rubble. It’s very poignant pictures taken at the end of the war of the ruined Munich. But then, here of course you can see Munich is in the American zone of occupation of Germany. And revival after the war. People are asking me, where does the money come from? Where did the money come from for the reconstruction of Munich. Munich becomes one of the richest cities in the world. It is a showplace for the economic miracle of the recovery of Germany after second World War. All made possible of course by Americans, American support, American money, wanting to promote Germany against communism.

Somebody again last week mentioned the Olympics, the 1972 Olympics that ended so tragically. This is the Olympic city that was actually built, it’s on this rather hilly landscape. The hills are actually created artificially from the rubble of the destruction of Munich. 'Cause I arrived in Munich the following year, 1973. And I remember going to see it and I still think it’s actually extremely beautiful, the Olympic village of Munich. And it was of course so terrible that it ended the way it did. And so how to… I don’t, is apologise the right word, I don’t know. How to move on and also somehow acknowledge the past at the same time. This is the new central synagogue in Munich on the Jakobs Platz, so it’s right in the heart of the historic Munich. A very impressive building. You can see that the exterior is inspired by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. And next to it is attached to a Jewish museum. But there isn’t, unless they have a special exhibition, there isn’t really a lot to see in it because unlike, as I said, unlike Berlin and Vienna, Munich doesn’t have a very rich Jewish history to show. Right, so I’m going to finish now and see what people are saying.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, I remember seeing a performance of “Barber of Seville” in German. German is not a comfortable language for singing Rossini.

How did Ludwig become so, well, he was king. If you’re king, you are rich 'cause you’ve got all the taxes of the poor.

Q: Any comment on how dedicated you are on the Deutsche Museum?

A: Yes, well it is considered to be the greatest museum of, science museum in the world. And it is totally spectacular and amazing. I don’t go there very often. I suppose I’m not particularly interested in science and technology. But if you are, it is a place to go. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Munich humour must be an inspiration. Yes, the idea of the straight woman, I don’t know Gracie, is she always straight? She’s also a bit wacky really, isn’t she?

15 minutes, is it that much? It’s on the S-Bahn or the U-Bahn. You can get there very, very quickly. I would’ve thought it was less than 15 minutes.

That name of the mezzo is Sigrid Onegin. Like in Eugene Onegin.

What else have we got here? Thank you, Rita. Thinking about the film “Wings of Desire”. That rings a bell, but I can’t think of it for the moment.

Anyway, thank you all very, very much and I’m going to move on to my hero, Grisha Charles, perhaps my favourite composer. I know he’s contentious, but I hope to deal with those issues that will be on Sunday. Thank you.