Patrick Bade
Berlin 1900

Patrick Bade - Berlin 1900

- So this is Berlin in around 1900, and it’s between the unification of 1870 and the First World War that Berlin becomes what the Germans called a Weltstadt, a world city. It was booming, it grew at a faster rate than any other city in Europe. The population quadrupled during this quarter century, and it’s also the first time that Berlin became a cultural capital. You see, unlike Dresden, Munich, even Dusseldorf, it had never really aspired to be a cultural capital. It was an administrative capital and it was a very important commercial city. Here is a map of Berlin at the time with its inner suburbs, and last night, some of you may know, Wendy threw a wonderful, huge, splendid party for Trudy’s birthday and also for the birthday of lockdown. And really, I feel there is almost nothing that Wendy couldn’t organise if she really turned her head to it. So I live in hope that one day she’ll find a time machine and she’ll organise a wonderful cultural trip to all these cities, Berlin in 1900. And if we do find our time machine and we arrive in Berlin in 1900, we would in 1900, we’d want to stay in this hotel, the Central Hotel, which was the grandest hotel in Berlin. And it was clearly modelled architecturally and in all its facilities on the world’s first Grand Hotel, which was Le Grand Hotel, built in the 1860s and in Paris right next to the opera, which was open in time for the World Exhibition of 1867. Here you see the two buildings compared, and you see how similar they are. Each had a huge central dining space with a glass and iron ceiling, somewhat like a railway station, Grand Hotel at the top and the Berlin Grand Hotel at the bottom. But if we move on a few years to 1907, the most fashionable hotel in Berlin from 1907 onwards was the Hotel Adlon, considered by many to be the best hotel in Europe with unbelievably gorgeous and luxurious interiors and facilities.

This is all the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. See the very spacious bedrooms, wonderful dining facilities. And so if we arrive in Berlin soon after 1900, we want to do a sightseeing tour of the city, and this is a sightseeing Berlin bus of around 1905. I think Berlin is a beautiful city. It’s laid out on a imperial scale. Here is the street Unter den Linden, underneath the lime trees, you can see the Reichstag bottom left, Brandenburg Gate, and up the top, you can see the royal palace. Here is the royal palace. It’s a city of canals. Part of its importance was that it was a hub, it was a hub of the railway system, and it was also a hub of a canal system. Here is the Gendarmenmarkt with the Konzerthaus, beautiful neoclassical building by Schinkel and one of a pair of great 18th-century churches on the Gendarmen Platz. This is the new cathedral, which was built between 1893 and 1905, one of two enormous buildings which were clearly intended to express the power and the might and the wealth of the new unified Germany. It’s by an architect called Julius Raschdorff. And the other great building, of course, that expressed the might of the new unified Germany was the Reichstag, which went into history for sinister reasons, as you know, when it burnt in 1933. Although it still exists in a transformed state. Here it is again, and this was, as always, a building like this in 19th century, there will be a big international competition. And the commission was won by an architect called Paul Wallot, and it took 10 years to build, from 1884 to 1894. So it’s, as I said, a city, it’s got many railway stations, and it’s an important transport hub with the canals and the stations.

Many, many canals. So a busy, not unlike really, I suppose, the city of London, not a city that was mostly built with aesthetics in mind. This is the famous Cafe Bauer on the Unter den Linden. So there’s a cafe culture, which is not dissimilar. It’s very continental. You could spend all day in a cafe reading newspapers provided by the cafe. Here is the shopping centre of Berlin, Potsdamer Platz. This has been, I don’t think there’s even a brick or a stone left of anything you can see in this image, all very very destroyed in the Second World War and completely rebuilt in recent years. I found it rather scary. It doesn’t feel like Europe. It feels like Dubai or Abu Dhabi, or something like that. Great, great commercial centre. And I know Trudy’s talked a lot about the famous Berlin department store, the various stores, like Tietz, nearly all, of course, in the hands of Jewish families, and all of them violently attacked in the 1930s, bricks through the windows on Kristallnacht. And this is the Kaiser-Friedrich alley, which was, it was one of the, it was this kind of passage, the Kaiser Gallery, actually, it was called, it’s built in 1873, and they first appeared in Paris. Paris, of course, has a huge system of these covered shopping miles, really they are. The first one dating back to the end of the 18th century. But in Paris, they’re mostly built in the early to mid-19th century. There are miles and miles of them, and they’re wonderful to explore. But there were just two that were built on this absolutely imperial scale in Europe. There is the Victor Emanuel Gallery in Milan, which still exists, and this is the Kaiser Gallery, which doesn’t, it was destroyed. So Berlin, like every other city in Europe, major city, goes Art Nouveau at the end of the 1890s. These are the central law courts by an architect called Otto Schmaltz, built between 1896 and 1904.

They survived and still exist. Sadly, this wonderful-looking tobacco shop by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde, it was very famous for illustrating lots of magazines of the period, and this sadly doesn’t exist anymore. But there’re outside the centre of the city, particularly in a suburbs like Charlottenburg, there are very attractive Belle Epoque Art Nouveau apartment blocks like these. And so, already before the First World War, Berlin became one of the really important cities for development of modern architecture. This is the AEG turbine factory, dating from 1907, by an architect called Peter Behrens. Any illustrated history of modern architecture will feature this building. It was a very innovative building. The art was, I would say, somewhat held back, for at least the first part of this period, by the extremely conservative tastes of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Like Hitler later, Wilhelm detested modern art, did everything he could to suppress it, and show his disapproval of it. This is his favourite artist, an artist called Anton von Werner. I’ve shown you this picture before, I think probably several times in different context. It’s an interesting picture. It always enrages me because it’s a sort of gloating picture, really, about German victory over the French in 1870. And it shows blonde healthy Aryan German victorious soldiers with their muddy boots in a decident French Louis cast interior. And they’re showing their superior culture by singing Schumann “Lieder.” The resistance to modern art began to break down in the 1890s. And quite often there’ll be a particular event in a city that is the breakthrough event for modern art that, you know, in New York, of course, it was the Armoury Show in 1913, Americans will know all about that. In London, it was the Post-Impressionists Show in 1910.

Of course, in France, it goes back much earlier, if you think of the first Impressionist Show in 1874. But there was a show in 1892 in Berlin of the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. This was at the Union of Berlin Artists, and it was extremely controversial, was even shut down halfway through. And that is the event that is normally seen to be the trigger for the birth of modern art in Berlin. So it was certainly ahead of London and New York. Here is another illustration of that show with paintings by Munch. And here is Munch. Now Munch was, of course, Norwegian. Norway, wonderful country, but I would say in 1890, pretty well the back of beyond. It was not yet independent, actually, it was a province of Sweden. So it’s rather extraordinary that Norway should have produced two of the great prophets of early modernism, the playwright Henrik Ibsen and the painter Edvard Munch. Here he is in a very melodramatic self-portrait. I can’t actually see my image on the screen, but I’m going to try and recreate the effect of this portrait. If you light a face from below, it makes a slightly scary horror film effect, very melodramatic effect. So really, both Ibsen and Munch, in order to really develop as artists, they needed to leave Norway. Both of them spent a lot of time outside of Norway. Both of ‘em spent a lot of time in Germany, actually. So Munch had already been to Paris. He’d already absorbed elements of impressionism, very influenced by money, I would say, in particular.

But in the '90s, between 1892 and '96, he’s in Berlin, and he’s part of a group of artists, intellectuals, and writers that used to meet in this restaurant, cafe, Zum schwarzen Ferkel, The Black Pig. And the circle consisted, oh, here are three of the main figures apart from Munch. There’s the Polish writer, Stanisław Przybyszewski, there’s August Strindberg in the middle in a portrait by Munch, and a very important figure for the introduction of modern culture to Germany, a man called Julius Meier-Graefe, and he was a very influential art critic. He was very aware of all the latest developments in Paris, and he tried to introduce them to Berlin by organising exhibitions, and as the editor of a magazine I’ll talk a little bit about in a minute. These three men and Munch were all involved in love affairs with this woman, a very beautiful Norwegian woman called Dagny Juel. She eventually married Przybyszewski so you sometimes see her name as Dagny Juel-Przybyszewski And she was a bit of a femme fatale, I suppose. She eventually came to a very sad, bad end. She took a young Russian lover, and they played Russian roulette together in a hotel room, and she lost and blew her brains out. But this is Munch’s comment on this very tense relationship between these four men, who were all part of this circle at Zum schwarzen Ferkel and all involved with Dagny Przybyszewski. I mean, they were rebels, they were bohemians, they were believers in free love. They were trying to throw off Judeo-Christian morality about sexual relations and so on. This painting entitled “Jealousy” shows Munch with a semi-naked Dagny Juel, she’s offering him an apple.

I’m sure you get the biblical symbolism of that. And there is her husband on the right hand side, Przybyszewski, not looking at all happy about it. Here is Munch’s lithographic portrait of August Strindberg. Munch and Strindberg had a very tense relationship. They were frenemies, I think you could say. They were sometimes friends, sometimes supporting each other. But this portrait by Munch really incensed Strindberg, partly 'cause, I don’t know whether you can see it, it’s blocked in my image on the screen, but at the bottom, he’s actually misspelt his name, and on the right, he’s placed a naked woman. Given Strindberg’s extreme, extreme misogyny and his idea that women are toxic and dangerous and so on, Munch was being quite provocative to place a naked woman. It’d be like placing a hand grenade under his pillow. So there’s an awful lot of the, although they’d embraced free love, free love was not as straightforward and simple perhaps as they imagined, and there was a lot of grief going on. This is a painting made in Berlin by Munch, which he’s titled “Vampire,” and it was something he’d actually seen. He famously said, “I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I saw.” So he’s painting from the experience of his life. And in this picture he’d seen a male member of their group break down, weeping, and a female member of the group put her arms around him to comfort him, and as she did so, her hair fell over him. And he’s interpreted this in a very negative way, as the woman sucking the lifeblood of the man.

That’s very typical of the period and this group of artists. So here is Julius Meier-Graefe on the right hand side. He was widely assumed to be a Jew, and that is interesting in itself. I think everything about him, the fact that he was a bit of an outsider, he was unconventional, he was an internationalist. He was what the Nazis would later call, “A ruthless cosmopolitan,” and he was very open to new ideas and new art. Add all those things up in 1900, and everybody would assume that you were Jewish. Apparently, he wasn’t. But he was the editor of an art magazine called “Pan.” And this is the golden age of art magazines around Europe. Every centre, of course, Vienna has “Ver Sacrum,” Paris has “La Revue blanche”, St. Petersburg has the “World of Art.” These magazines played an enormously important role in internationalising the whole art scene at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. They could do it because of new technical innovations, colour lithography, much better quality photographic illustration, that made them real vehicles for the spread of new ideas. For two years, from 1893 to 1895, “Pan” was really very exciting. But there was, in 1895, there was a massive scandal. The magazine had original prints bound into it. So if you can get a hold of a copy of “Pan” from this period, it’s a very, very valuable item. And in 1895, Meier-Graefe, he put in this lithograph by Toulouse Lautrec of the singer Marcelle Lender, and it just caused a massive outrage among in conservative art circles in Berlin.

And the scandal around it and the comments about it really pre-echo what would be all the stuff around the idea of degenerate art. It was seen as decadent, degenerate, undermining good German traditional values. And the fuss was so great that Julius Meier-Graefe was actually forced to resign as editor of “Pan.” And after that, of course, the magazine really lost interest. I’m being quite selective about the artists I’m including in this lecture because there’s going to be a separate lecture, the one after next about German expressionism. So I’ll talk a lot more about them in that lecture. This is a Berlin painter of modern life, particularly Berlin nightlife. And there’s an element of impressionism here, but it’s, as I said, it fits in more with the sort of thing that Degas was doing and Monet, giving you the nightlife of Berlin. His name is Lesser Ury, and he was Jewish, and he was mentored and promoted by Adolph von Menzel. Now, at the end of the last talk, somebody pointed out to me, and I followed it up, that Menzel made an image of Christ in the temple, where he’s surrounded by Jewish doctors who are depicted in a rather caricatural and arguably anti-Semitic way. I didn’t know this image, but I do now, I’ve followed it up, and I will actually talk about that in my lecture on expressionism, 'cause there’re, I think, interesting things to say about it.

But I would just say at this point, the fact that Menzel, who was the most admired artist in Germany and quite an old man right at this point, was prepared to stick his neck out and promote and support a Jewish artist, doesn’t suggest to me that by the standards of the time he was anti-Semitic. These are wonderful pictures. We really don’t know a lot of these German artists in this country. But this has got real bravura, hasn’t it? In its depiction of the Berlin nightlife. Another artist who’s just particularly Berlin, but painting a different kind of nightlife, the Lesser Ury is showing elegant people, but this is Heinrich Zille who shows the lumpenproletariat, the real bottom of the heap socially. And he’s an artist who had quite a big influence on Kathe Kollwitz, who I’ll be talking about in my next lecture. Now, I can’t leave it out altogether, so I’m just going to mention very briefly Berlin, 1910. This man, he called himself Herwarth Walden, his real name was Georg Lewin. Again, very typically of so many of the movers and shakers in early modern art of this time were of Jewish origin. But obviously, he changed his name to hide that but I don’t think many people were fooled. And he set up another magazine, an avant-garde magazine in 1910, called “Der Sturm,” “The Storm.” And the following year he opened a gallery, and I will be talking about that actually in two future lectures in the context of expressionism and also of Berlin in the 1920s. So between 1911 and 1932, when the gallery closed, this was one of the most exciting galleries of modern art in Europe, promoting not just expressionism but all different tendencies of modern art. Italian futurism.

On the left, you can see Kandinsky, so “Blue Rider.” Franz Marc, also “Blue Rider,” but he was promoting cubism. And it’s no coincidence that the year he opened his gallery, Ernst Kirchner, the Dresden Brucke expressionist artist, came to Berlin. And between 1911, 1914, he’s painting kind of Lesser Ury subject matter, street life and nightlife of the great metropolis, the Weltstadt of Berlin. But I’ll talk much more about him in two weeks time. In the '90s, and up to the end of the Weimar period, Berlin becomes a very important theatre capital. Paris and London, I suppose, would’ve been the most important theatre capitals in Europe at this time, and also New York was coming into the picture. The New York Broadway theatre scene, very important, end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century. But again, it’s often a particular event, a particular moment, a cultural phenomenon like this is kickstarted, and this was the 1892 premiere of a play called “Die Weber,” “The Weavers,” by Gerhart Hauptmann. And this was a play, was a very political play, a very radical play, it really excited people, and it was a play with a political message. It was a play about a revolt of exploited, horribly exploited workers in the textile industry in the 1840s with a revolt insurrection, rather like the ones going on in France at the moment. It’s interesting, people keep on saying to me, everybody was saying to me last night, “What is going on in France? What are they on about? You know, retirement age of 64 is surely not so terrible compared with other places.” But I think it’s a folk memory, really, of the great battles of the past of the workers to achieve certain rights.

So I talked to my French friends, and they all carry on about, you know, “We can’t allow these rights to be diluted or dissolved.” Here is another play by Hauptmann. This is actually from an article in the leading French theatrical magazine from 1898 to 1914. It’s a wonderful magazine called “Le Theatre.” I have a full run of it in my library behind me here in London. And it’s an incredibly important source of information and illustrative material about the history of theatre in this period. Although Paris liked to think of itself as the theatre capital of the world, there were regular articles about theatre in New York, theatre in London, and 1907, rather surprisingly, given the enmity between France and Germany, there was an article about theatrical life in Berlin. All these pictures I have to show you here are of the latest theatre productions in Berlin. The king of Berlin theatre from the early 1900s up until 1933 was, of course, Max Reinhardt. At one point he’s running five different theatres in Berlin. He was a great impresario, a great showman, a great discoverer of theatrical talent of all kind, writers and actors. This is the Deutsches Theatre, which he took over in 1901, and he did famous productions of Shakespeare. Of course, the play that he’s most associated with is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and his final great achievement, of course, was the movie he made of that in Hollywood in the mid-1930s. This is Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” represented by, I suppose the most distinguished German actress from the early 1900s up to 1933, and this was a woman called Tilla Durieux. Here are photographs of her in the role of Circe, Circe, And here she’s painted by Franz von Stuck on the left, and insert she’s painted by Renoir.

That painting was commissioned by her second husband, an art dealer called Paul Cassirer, and he commissioned it before the First World War. In fact, they had to wait till the end of the war to get back to Paris to collect it. She’s an interesting character. She wrote a very voluminous, she had a long life, she lived to be almost a hundred. And she was, all three, she married three times. She was not Jewish, but all three of the husbands were. The first one was the artist Eugene Spiro, that marriage didn’t last very long. And she was married for quite a long time to the dealer, Paul Cassirer, and very sensationally in the 1920s, she wanted to divorce him, and in the actual law courts, as the divorce was pronounced, he shot himself in the head and committed suicide. And her last husband was a theatre director called Ludwig Katzenellenbogen. And, of course, because he was Jewish, they fled from Germany in '33 to Austria, and then in '38, of course, they had to flee again, and he was eventually arrested and died in Sachsenhausen. But the greatest German actor in this period, and right, again, up to '33, 33 is just such a huge break. This is Alexander Moissi, considered a great Shakespearean actor. He was like the Laurence Olivier or the Jean-Louis Barrault of Germany throughout this period. And I mentioned before that for Germans, Shakespeare is an adopted German because there were these very famous, wonderful translations of Shakespeare made in the early 19th century. And I thought you might be amused to hear a bit of “Hamlet,” a bit you all know by heart, so I don’t need to put in a translation, recited by the great Alexander Moissi.

• Very much of its period. So two great, well, I dunno if they’re great, really. I was having a discussion last night with Janet Suzman, who happened to sit at the same table as me. Very fascinating, what a privilege and a pleasure to talk to her about how ephemeral playwrights reputations are. These two men, Hermann Sudermann and Gerhart Hauptmann, Hauptmann was certainly a Nobel Prize winner, I’m not sure about Sudermann, but they were both considered to be very, very great playwrights. But Hauptmann’s “Weavers” is still done, I think, but his reputation was very tarnished during the Nazi period, when he really failed to stand up against the Nazis. I suppose, in that sense, you could compare him with Strauss, although I think his complicity was greater than that of Strauss. And same with Sudermann, Sudermann who was very famous for a play called “Heimat,” which became a vehicle for all the great actresses of the early 1900s, Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, and so on. But somebody who certainly never got a Nobel Prize but whose name is still kind of relevant and still interesting is Frank Wedekind. And he began his career in Munich, and I talked about him with his role in the very subversive cabaret, “Die elf Scharfrichter.” But his most notorious play is “Fruhlings Erwachen,” which was premiered in, I think it’s 1906, and it deals with a whole range of, you know, incredible taboo subjects. Child abuse, homosexuality. There’s a notorious scene of group masturbation in a school dormitory. I mean, it’s pretty, pretty full-on. And in fact, in this country and the country I’m in at the moment, Britain, it was censored, and this first full performance was not until after the ending of theatrical censorship in late 1960s.

And even then, I can remember, just remember, I think I was at school at the time, reading the reviews of how outrageous and shocking this play was considered to be. This is how it looked in 1906. Now I want to talk about music and the performing arts. A few years ago, I was looking for an image of the Philharmonie, the main concert hall of Berlin, course it’s a post-war building, which many of you have been to. It is a wonderful, famous post-war modern building. But I was really startled to find this image on the internet, which is an artificial recreation of what the Berlin Philharmonie looked like before its destruction in Second World War. Here is an actual photograph, what it really looked like at the time. And the Berlin Philharmonic at this time was already considered to be, aspiring anyway, maybe in rivalry with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Ludwig Gewandhaus, to be one of the greatest orchestras in the world. And this was thanks to this man, Arthur Nikisch. In earlier periods, of course, conductors had not been particularly important, but in the course of the 19th century, as composers became more ambitious and wrote more and more elaborate and complicated music, of course Wagner has a big role in this, and bigger and bigger orchestras. So the role of the conductor becomes more important. And you have already quite famous conductors in the middle of the century, like Hans von Bulow, but Nikisch is the conductor who’s credited with creating the cult of the star conductor, which reach a peak in the first half the 20th century with these huge star conductors like Toscanini and Furtwangler, and Bruno Walter, and Klemperer, and so on. Here you can see he’s very much a showman, very, very flamboyant. You can see he’s pleased with himself. The impresario Walter Legge once said, “A conductor is only as great as his ego.”

And that would’ve been a truism really until I think now we’re sort of reacting against that idea that you need to have a monster ego to control an orchestra. But here is a somewhat primitive recording of the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1900s conducted by Nikisch in a Brahms’ “Hungarian Dance.” And very much dominating the musical scene in Berlin was the great Hungarian Jewish violinist, Joseph Joachim, who owned two Stradivarius violins, one of which is on display in the violin museum in Cremona, which I visit every year on my Verdi Palmer Festival visit. Fascinating, fascinating place, and I’m always mesmerised to see Joachim’s violin, and each year I ask the same question to a specialist guide who takes us around, “Do we know which of the two violins Joachim premiered the Max Bruch and the Brahms violin concertos?” I think it’s not known whether it’s their Stradivarius or the other one. But here is a tiny taste of Joachim playing one or other of his Stradivarius violins. Music by his friend, Brahms. Two great pianists who are based in Berlin, Ferruccio Busoni on the left hand side, and Artur Schnabel on the right. Schnabel, of course, based in Berlin, again, up till, Busoni died just after the First World War, but a hugely important and influential figure. Schnabel, considered by many critics to be the greatest interpreter of Beethoven of the 20th century, forced to leave like so many in ‘33. And here is a little bit of Schnabel playing Beethoven. Nowadays, of course, it’s very common to go to a concert hall, small-scale concert hall like the Wigmore Hall, which was originally called the Bosendorfer Hall 'cause it was the piano manufacturers who sponsored it to start with, to hear concerts of chamber music and lieder.

Because chamber music and lieder were never conceived, certainly in the early 19th century, for public performance. They were conceived for private performances, even if it was going to be in a large room in a aristocratic house. So it’s a new phenomenon really at the end of the 19th century. Initially chamber music and then later lieder around 1900. These are the first two singers who made a career of giving performances not in the theatre but of concerts of songs, lieder concerts, serious songs, and if you’d gone to a concert of songs up till the early 1900s in most places, it would’ve been a mixture of different things, popular songs of opera arias, and maybe the odd song of Schubert. So these two ladies, Julia Culp on the left-hand side, and Elena Gerhardt on the right-hand side, were the first pioneers of this new type of concert. Interestingly, both were Jewish, both had to disappear from Germany in 1933, although this was late in their careers. Elena Gerhardt came as a refugee to Britain, and she can continued giving concerts actually right through the Second World War. Julia Culp, who was Dutch, and she survived the German occupation of Holland, apparently thanks to the protection and intervention of Furtwangler. So I want to play you, I’ll play you, I decided to play you Julia Culp, partly 'cause I prefer her records to those of Gerhardt, it’s a very, very lovely voice. So here is Julia Culp in “Der Nussbaum” of Schubert.

• This is the Berlin Staatsoper, well, this time it was the Hofoper, it was the Royal Opera House. It’s an 18th-century building on Unter den Linden. It’s been destroyed, I dunno how many times actually. There was a fire in the 19th century. It was actually bombed, destroyed twice in the Second World War. First time early in the war, and Hitler had to put great resources into rebuilding it. It’s a lovely theatre. One of the things I like about it is that it’s not too big inside. This is the star tenor in the period we’re talking about, Hermann Jadlowker. I’ve talked about him in several lectures before. He was a nice Jewish boy who started off as a cantor in Vilnius, but he was the most famous Lohengrin of his time. I think I’ve told that story about him singing Lohengrin for a gala performance for a visit of Tsar Nicholas II and Wilhelm saying to Nicholas, “What do you think of my wonderful Lohengrin?” And Nicholas saying, “What do you mean your Lohengrin? He’s from Vilnius, he’s my Lohengrin.” So I find it quite amusing to think of these two men quarrelling over this, as I said, nice Jewish boy from Vilnius. I don’t think I’ll play you. I’ve played him before, I’ve done a half a lecture on him, so I don’t think I’ll play that tonight. But what came out of my previous mention of him, I was really amazed. Somebody wrote in from South Africa to say that when he ended his career in Germany, of course he had to, they considered inviting him as a cantor in their local synagogue in South Africa instead, of course, he ended his life in Israel. This is the beautiful and charismatic American soprano, Geraldine Farrar. And she began her career in Berlin. She conquered the city. She was absolutely adored. She also conquered the crown prince, the son of Wilhelm II, and she’s discreet about it. But there are rumours that she was having an affair with the crown prince of Germany, and that’s why she had to leave. But then she moved back to America, of course, became a huge star of the Met. So we’ll have a just a little taste of what she sounded like around the time she sang in Berlin.

• This is the great Czech soprano, Emmy Destinn, and when I talked about Strauss recently, I said how unsatisfied he was with the original soprano in the World Premiere of the Opera in 1905 in Dresden. So when it came to premiering it in Berlin, the following year in 1906, he wrote his ideal cast, headed by Emmy Destinn as Salome. So let’s hear what she sounded like.

• This is the Metropol-Theater. It still exists, I think, in Berlin, which was an operetta theatre. Oh, here’s what it looked like inside, you can see, quite modest. Was popular entertainment really for the bourgeoisie at this time. This is what an audience looked like. Oh, this must be from today, what it looks like today, you can see, hasn’t really changed that much. So there was an inexhaustible appetite for operetta. It was a very, very popular art form throughout the world in this period. Of course we had Gilbert and Sullivan here. In France they had Offenbach and Messager, and many, many other wonderful composers. And then Viennese operetta, above all, Franz Lehar. And this is the operetta queen of Berlin. This is Fritzi Massary, and I will talk her about her again in the 1920s. She was Viennese, she never lost her Viennese accent and her very characteristically Viennese charm. She was involved in a, she was already popular in Vienna, but she had a passionate love affair with an Austrian prince. She was a Jewish girl from a working-class background in Vienna, and she got pregnant. It was a huge scandal. The prince really, really wanted to marry her, but massive pressure was put on him and her, and the couple were broken apart. And she was lavishly paid actually to leave town and go to Berlin, and in the end, it turned out to be good for her, I suppose. She was the operetta queen of Berlin right up to 1933, when she was, of course, immediately forced to leave. A singer of incredible charm and charisma really. Here is she, Fritzi Massary, in all her various roles. And although she wasn’t a beautiful woman, she was what French would call jolie laide, but she was a very elegant woman. I’m going to play her again in a later recording in the 1920s, but this is what she sound like in the early 1900s.

• So that’s it. I think I’m going to stop here 'cause I’ve run out of time, and we will continue, of course, with Berlin in a couple more lectures.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Would I consider the Grand Hotel in Milan?

A: Of course, it’s very historic, the Grand Hotel in Milan, it’s where Verdi died, and in the Grand Hotel in Milan, the first really important successful opera recordings ever made were made in a room in Milan in 1902 with Enrico Caruso. And it’s not on the same scale, it’s a much smaller building than the Grand Hotel in Paris or the one in Berlin, but it’s a beautiful building. I don’t know what the standard of service was there in the 1900s, I imagine it was very high.

Q: Where did the migration come from?

A: Well, as in most of these cities, it very often came from the countryside. People moved to big city for jobs, and a lot came from the east, and, of course, a huge number of Ostjuden. Of course the term, I’m sure you know, it must have been discussed in many, many lectures. This great influx of very poor Jews from the East, which was resented not just by the Christians, it was often even more resented by the assimilated Jews who were already there.

One of the paintings of a rainy evening is having some elements of impressionism. Impressionist, it’s not really a palette of the impressionist. The loose brushwork, the spontaneity is very impressionist. But if you compared it to a night scene, well, actually, impressionists didn’t very often paint night scenes, Pissarro did. If you compared it to a painting by Pissarro, I think you’d see that it has a much more limited palette of colour.

Thank you, Rita.

Moissi, speaking lines from Shakespeare, yes. Yes, it’s true, the Schlegel antique. And I think I told you that story about an elderly German aristocrat one sent to me. Ugh, ya, Shakespeare, of course, Shakespeare, yes, he was English after all.

Q: When did Karajan start?

A: Much, much later. Karajan starts around about 1930 in Austria. And I will be talking about him later. Not a conductor I admire either really as a musician, certainly not as a man, awful man.

Schnabel taught famous pianist Leon Fleisher. Yes, and he was not only a great interpreter, he was a very great teacher as well.

Q: A Schnabel meaning a gig?

A: I don’t know. That’s interesting. I don’t know whether there was a reference to the pianist.

Q: What do we know about men’s neckwear in these days?

A: Yes, interesting. I’m not sure I can enlighten you very much apart from what you saw in the images.

Not Bechstein? You’re quite right, Bechstein, not Bosendorfer. You’re absolutely right, Barbara, thank you very much.

Geraldine Farrar, quite a femme fatale. Of course she had a famous affair with Toscanini, and later there’s that, well, there are several very famous stories about that, but particularly a time where during a rehearsal he interrupted her to correct her, and she said, “Arturo, I do it like this.” And he said, In other words, “You can call me Arturo in bed, but here you have to call me Maestro.” Thank you, Rita.

Q: What happened to her?

A: I don’t know which her you’re talking about though, during World War II.

Erica, thank you. And I’m glad you tolerate and like my old recordings, which you know are my obsession.

Thank you, Eva. Yeah, for me, those old recordings, it’s so moving for me to hear a voice from more than a hundred years ago, even if the quality of the recording is not perfect.

Yes, Karajan, of course, when he moved to Germany, but he was already active in Austria before Aachen, and we’ll come to that. Of course, you probably know that he was one of the earliest members of the Nazi party in Austria when it was still illegal.

Thank you, Caroline, and everybody.

And so next one is three great women artists in Germany, Kathe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Lotte Laserstein, and then continuing with expressionism and then on into the great period of Berlin in the 1920s.

Thank you very much, everybody.