A Musical Tour Of Berlin: From Wagners Epic Opera To Techno Raves
Music accompanies our journeys, kills time and is a fun distraction. In Berlin, with more than 300 stations and a panoramic view of everything from the S-Bahn plane, a fully charged smartphone or MP3 player turns the journey into a movie with a soundtrack.
I have more documents about Berlin than any other city. I think the city should have a nexus or mother place where all currents intersect, the musical equivalent of the mighty Berlin Hauptbahnhof that opened in 2006, a powerful symbol of unification.
And which artists would play there?
For a child of the 70s, it would be easy to start and end with David Bowie. But Berlin is more interesting than any artist. The city was part of the ancient German classical music. Weber's Der Freischütz, considered the first German romantic opera, was performed in 1821 in the Schauspielhaus, now known as the Berlin Concert Hall.
The Berlin Philharmonic was founded in 1882 and is housed in the beautiful, asymmetrical, dome-shaped Berlin Philharmonic. The orchestra's first recording, Wagner's Parsifal, was conducted by Alfred Herz in 1913. the musicians crowded into a small room to sit as close as possible to the giant recording horn.
The headquarters of the Weimar Republic was in the Reichstag, although in the fictional story it was run by local cabarets and bars. Tourists search in vain for the ephemeral and wildly exaggerated decadence of Weimar. In Christopher Isherwood's novels Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), vaguely mentioned in cinemas, Isherwood tells Bowie: People forget that I'm a very good fiction writer.
In the late 1930s, after several moves, Isherwood moved to an apartment at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in the Schöneberg district, which he shared with the English war correspondent Gene Ross, the model for Sally Bowles in fiction and eventually musical comedy. - Cabaret.
In the early 1920s there were 38 cabarets in Berlin. Isherwood may have been in a show called Tingel-Tangel at the Theater des Westens (Kantstrasse 12). Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker performed there. The repertoire of the Berlin cabaret is of course very extensive. The most famous work is Dietrich's Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt ( To Fall in Love Again) . is the English version) It was written in two languages for the 1930 film Blue Angel Babelsberg Film Studio near Potsdam . Danish tenor Max Hansen, founder of Kabarett der Komiker, Meine liebe Lola and War'n Sie schon mal mich verliebt make fun of Hitler as a homosexual ?
The Nazis considered much of the Entartete art and culture to be degenerate. Jewish music was banned. In the 1930s, the Lithuanian Hirsch Levin ran a "Jewish bookstore" at Grenadierstrasse 28 (today Almstadtstrasse 10) - the building is still there - and devoted the rest of his time to writing klezmer songs and performing them on the Sower -tag to publish. The Nazis ransacked his shop and destroyed many pieces of shell and original plates, but in 2016 the international ensemble released several songs on the Berlin Piranha label. Scholem Baith is for a bold call and response as important as any Dietrich ditt.
Hitler loved Wagner and hated jazz, experimental music and Roman people. A song often cited in studies of Nazi propaganda is a 1942 hit by the Swedish singer Zarah Leander. Ich weiss , es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh'n (I know now when a miracle will happen one day ) , was recorded at Lindström Studios (Schlesische Strasse 26) .
During the Soviet era, East Berlin musicians played quietly to avoid censorship or worse. German easy listening, or schlager, was a safe haven, and the GDR-sanctioned Amiga label released hundreds of albums full of songs like Ilya Glusgal's 1950 Nein Nein Nein , including the soundtrack to the comedy Black's Stasi invasion. . The GDR Museum has a large collection of albums from the period. As the influence of jazz and big band waned, Schlager became more passionate, filled with crooners and country and western surrogates; sometimes the Eurovision camp is seen as a harbinger of kitsch. The German public loves it. Last year, Berlin's Mercedes-Benz Arena hosted the 25th Schlager Nacht. This year the "Happy Music" festival takes place on 16 November.
The careers of Lou Reed, David Bowie and Iggy Pop have crossed many times. Spiritually, Reid was the first to go to Berlin. His 1973 album Berlin tells the story of a couple destroyed by drug addiction and violence. The title track evokes beer kegs and cabaret vibes. Reid said he sees the city as "the home of film noir and German expressionism," while also seeing the Berlin Wall, now a memorial museum and art gallery, as a metaphor for broken relationships.
Did a concept album inspire David Bowie and Iggy Pop to try the real thing? First, he said he left to escape Los Angeles and cocaine-induced psychosis. The story of how he wrote the three seminal albums that would later be collected as the Berlin Trilogy is long and complicated, and many of the songs on Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979) evoke the city and the cold up. War. : . . The title track " Heroes " (also released as " Helden " in German) became one of Bowie's most popular songs, with lovers lining a wall with guns firing overhead. Low's Subterraneans first recorded in Los Angeles for The Man Who Fell to Earth (which ended up not using his material). In 1977 he told the Record Mirror that the song was "about what was left of East Berlin after it fell apart, so the slightly jazzy saxophones remind us of what it was like".
Iggy Pop's "Passenger" (from 1977's Lust for Life) may be an ironic comment on working with Bowie. You can also listen to it as a song in the car during "The Winding Ocean Road". But Esther Friedmann, a former partner of the German photographer and singer, told Zeit magazine that it was "the anthem of the Berlin S-Bahn". Pop "took the S-Bahn almost every day," he said. "Travel inspired him to write songs, especially the Wannsee road." Bowie and Pop recorded several doors down at the Hansa Tonstudio, Köthener Strasse 38, just south of the Berlin Wall, as seen on this map showing the wall's route. Many other artists followed suit, including Depeche Mode, U2 and Boney M.
Also in 1977, the Sex Pistols made a brief visit to Berlin, which inspired their most famous single Holiday Sun. There were no wall-kissing lovers in the Berlin of Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon); the song begins with the sounds of a procession. boots and the line "A cheap vacation in the misery of others." Lydon later said: “I loved Berlin. I loved the wall and the craziness of the place. Communists turned to the circus atmosphere of West Berlin, which never sleeps.
Nico, who worked with Reed on the Velvet Underground's debut album, played his last concert in 1988 at the West Berlin Planetarium. in June. Born in Cologne, Christa Pafgen grew up in Berlin selling underwear at the KaDeWe department store. Nico is buried Grunewald-Forst Cemetery.
The Berlin metro of the 1970s and 1980s embraced DIY art scenes, expat activism and drug culture; He congregated with heroin users at the Bahnhof Zoo (as seen on the soundtrack of the 1981 Christiane F, Bowie cult film). Tangerine Dream was one of the bands that has been out of the scene the longest (despite frequent line-up changes). They played huge concerts in West Berlin and were one of the first famous bands to play in East Berlin. On January 31, 1980, their concert at the Palast der Republik, home of the GDR parliament (since demolished), was severely hacked.
Radical music adapted to Berlin's crumbling wasteland comes from the West Berlin industrial/experimental rock group Einstürzende Neubauten, whose lead singer and screamer is Blixa Bergeld, a key member of the Bad Seeds and Birthday Party. Steh auf Berlin (Wake Up Berlin) is a classic trash track from Kollaps' debut album, played on counter instruments made from scrap metal and construction tools.
It's easier to hear the synth-pop punk that came out of Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), the German New Wave. Nena's English-language international hit 99 Luftballons was her highlight. I remember in 1982 a friend of mine released a compilation in Holland called Die Neue Deutsche Welle Ist Da Da Da, which I thought was the height of imported aggression. Much of the album's music sounds like Kraftwerk upped the ante and adapted for the mosh pit, or at least adapted for Andy McCluskey's bouncy dance. Berlin's best NDW, punk and metal bands are mixed by Harris Jones in the Music Lab Berlin studio in the courtyard of Tempelhofer Ufer 10.
Many venues have come and gone, SO36 in Kreuzberg, where Einstürzende played, as well as Die Toten Hosen, Throbbing Gristle and Dead Kennedys are still standing, although I don't see Bargeld appearing in clubs on Mondays. The club's Gayhane, the monthly QueerOriental Dancefloor night, is legendary.
Opened in 1991, Tresor was one of the first clubs to bring Detroit techno to the city and continues to host popular DJs. Berghain, another big club, occupies a former power station near the monumental socialist Karl-Marx-Allee. Built in the modernist, monumental style favored by the Third Reich, the former Templehof Airport was once admired. With its roots in West Berlin's liberal attitude towards nightlife, Berlin's zero curfew makes it attractive to tech tourists. Detroit-born DJ Rolando maintains a transatlantic alliance. his Expo 2000 remix pays tribute to Düsseldorf Kraftwerk, whose influence on many of the aforementioned artists is well documented. Berghain resident Ben Klock's Subzero looks like a retro-futuristic train on ice rails and is the perfect way to end our S-Bahn odyssey.