In March of 2020, Berlin, like the rest of the world, shut down its live performances. Gradually, as late summer blended into fall, indoor concerts began to reappear in a few selected places, and by the time I got to the city at the beginning of October, I had my choice of a number of classical music venues. In the course of less than a month—that is, before the second wave of coronavirus arrived and locked everything down again at the beginning of November—I was able to attend eleven performances in five different locations.
At first, I was like a hungry person set down at a banquet table, stuffing myself past the level of comfort. I attended a performance on the very night I arrived, something that expectations of jet-lag generally prevent me from doing; and although I was thrilled to be hearing live music for the first time in eight months, I found myself barely able to focus on anything but the germ-laden aerosols I imagined Jörg Widmann was blowing out at us through his clarinet. Three nights later, I packed in two concerts in a row—a 5:00 p.m. symphonic performance at the Berlin Philharmonic, followed, after a brief subway ride, by a 7:30 quartet concert at the Pierre Boulez Saal—and again, my eyes proved bigger than my stomach. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the Belcea Quartet under any circumstances (I have heard them before, and they are always a bit too harsh and unmodulated for my taste), but coming immediately after Simon Rattle’s splendid interpretations of Beethoven and Haydn, they just seemed unnecessary.
I was also distracted, during that first week or two, by observing the differing approaches the various venues took to our safety and security. At the Konzerthaus—a vast, beautiful old auditorium—the ceiling was high enough and the surrounding seats empty enough that I felt comfortable taking off my mask during the performances, as we were allowed to do. At the Pierre Boulez Saal, the relative crowdedness of the chamber-music venue was countered by the high quality of the masks that were handed out free at the door and were required throughout the concert. (A Berlin friend, when I showed him my Boulez Saal mask afterward, told me they retailed for between five and eight euros apiece.) My evening listening to a musically terrific though dramaturgically nonsensical Die Walküre at the Deutsche Oper was ruined by the fact that the management insisted on retaining the standard two lengthy intermissions, replete with maskless dining and drinking; I was so terrified of the possible contagion that I spent these dangerous periods huddling alone in an empty stairwell. Even the Komische Oper—which put on a tremendous live Bassarids last year that required us to sit in our seats for two and a half hours without pause—cravenly inserted an intermission in its video-heavy Magic Flute this fall, increasing the chance that we could infect each other while going to and fro in the crowded, narrow hallways.
Only at the Berlin Philharmonic, with its ninety-minute intermissionless performances, did I feel a hundred percent safe and comfortable. I was grateful for every element of precaution: the cordoned-off rows behind and in front of me, the three or four empty seats on either side, the masked ushers escorting each and every patron individually to pre-reserved places, even the contact-tracing paperwork we had to fill out before the concert and drop off in a box afterward. On my first night there, when I came to the wrong door and had to be led around to the sole mobile-ticketing entrance, the masked young man who escorted me confided as we walked, “We have to be really cautious, because even a single infection will close us down.” Add to this that I also heard the best music of my Berlin month in this acoustically perfect hall, and you will see why I regretted that a mere three out of my eleven concerts were held at the Philharmonie.
And the music itself? It ranged from pleasurable and fascinating to deliriously exhilarating. Admittedly, only one of the three concerts—the evening designed by artist-in-residence Tabea Zimmermann in conjunction with visiting conductor François-Xavier Roth—featured what I would normally call adventurous programming. Zimmermann, herself a brilliant violist, surrounded Paul Hindemith’s Der Schwanen-dreher, his concerto for viola and small orchestra, with complementary pieces by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (the twelve-minute Symphony in D major) and Béla Bartók (the always welcome Divertimento for String Orchestra). The Hindemith was a revelation, especially as performed by Zimmermann, who allowed the other members of the orchestra, and particularly the harpist, to shine along with her. And Roth proved a distinctly able if not terribly exciting leader of the somewhat reduced Berlin Philharmonic that was spread across the stage.
The two other programs were heavy on Haydn and Beethoven, who both turn out to be great mood-lifters during a pandemic: Haydn because he is relentlessly cheerful, even in the face of bad news; Beethoven because of his willingness to confront his own interior agony, which outdoes and in some way counters any external dire events. In the concert conducted by Marc Minkowski (another visiting Frenchman), we were treated to Haydn’s Symphony No. 59, which I don’t recall ever hearing live before, followed by an even greater rarity, Beethoven’s ballet music for The Creatures of Prometheus. Both works were beautifully performed by the Philharmonic musicians, and both had their high points (quite a number of them, actually, in the sixty-minute Beethoven piece), but I never quite got that feeling of transcendent lift-off that arises from the most enthralling concerts.
Perhaps I had been spoiled by my first experience back at the Berlin Philharmonic, that late-afternoon Simon Rattle concert which took place on the fourth day of my Berlin stay. By that time, my accommodation to the city and its habits was already pretty complete, so I was not distracted by mundane irrelevancies like jet-lag and mask etiquette. It was also a thrill just to be back in the beloved building, with its warm wood tones, its terraced seating in the round, and its perfect sound quality. I have to admit, too, that Simon Rattle—for a long time the reason I returned to the Philharmonie to hear concerts year after year—was a big part of the draw.
And he did not disappoint. This time he was conducting, not the fabled Berlin Phil itself, but a smaller, younger group called the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. I’d heard them before, conducted and accompanied by András Schiff, so I knew they were good, but I didn’t know how good until I saw them under Rattle’s baton. He has a way of taking a familiar old chestnut—in this case, Beethoven’s violin concerto—and introducing subtle variations of volume and pacing so as to make it seem a newly minted piece. In this case the chestnut happened to be a very delicious one, and Rattle was assisted in his reconfiguration by an astonishing young Norwegian soloist, Vilde Frang. This slender, swaying, almost dancing violinist appeared to be about sixteen, at least from my seat (though when I looked her up later, she turned out to be thirty-four). But she had the kind of ageless genius that makes the musician seem a perfect channel for the music, a living embodiment of its vital force. As I watched Frang play and listened to her violin’s swelling communion with the orchestra, I had the sense that I was truly hearing live music once again. Nor did the distinctly humorous Haydn symphony that followed—No. 90 in C major, with its series of false endings leading up to a final firm conclusion—subtract one iota from the overall experience. If the Beethoven had offered an intense emotional high point, the Haydn was a pure joy, effortless and thrilling.
As the concert ended and I made my way out, down scarcely peopled stairs, through the unoccupied restroom, then past the uncrowded cloakrooms to the nearly empty lobby, I had a sense of my own privilege that was so overwhelming as to be viscerally guilt-inducing. This is what royalty must feel like, I thought. I had sat through the concert in splendid comfort, with no nearby patrons to annoy me with their coughs or page-turnings, no tall heads in front of me to obstruct my view, and now I was exiting the building—a building that had always before, in my experience, been filled with crowds—as if it were my own space alone.
Many things about the pandemic have made me aware of my privileged existence. It is impossible to live through something like this and not feel the unfairness in life and death, the way some people end up shielded, through no merit of their own, and others take the brunt of the punishment. But until I attended that Simon Rattle concert at Berlin’s Philharmonie, I didn’t fully connect that sense of privilege to the role of art in my life.
This belated realization does not make me inclined to renounce art. I couldn’t manage to do it even if I wanted to, and in any case I am not a person prone to self-sacrifice. It does, though, make me more conscious of the isolated splendor in which I normally dwell, now exacerbated by the worldwide virus and its effects. I am used to thinking of live music as a communal experience, and to a certain extent it is that. But this time, at the Berlin Philharmonic, I was also made aware of how separate my existence is from the general lot of humanity. The awareness is discomforting and, perhaps for that very reason, valuable.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book, Scandinavian Noir, will be out in paperback in May.
