90 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
Esa-Pekka Salonen likes to isolate a pivotal moment and space in musical history.
MUSICAL EVENTS
STRANGE INTERLUDE
The L. A. Philharmonic revisits the music of the Weimar Republic.
BYALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
I
n modern discourse, the term “Wei-
mar Republic” conjures a lurid host of
associations, few of them related to the
stately old German ducal city of Wei-
mar. One thinks, instead, of the mythi-
cal Berlin of the nineteen-twenties: dance
halls, cabarets, the sexual underground,
street fighting among Communists and
Nazis, the clash between a decadent lib-
eration and a decadent counterreaction.
The complex reality of the Weimar era,
which lasted from 1918 to 1933, is filtered
through popular reimaginings: Christo-
pher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories”; the
musical and the film “Cabaret,” based on
Isherwood; revivals of “The Threepenny
Opera”; and, most recently, the television
series “Babylon Berlin.” It is easily for-
gotten that the German Republic was
founded in the spirit of the Enlightenment;
the constitutional assembly met in Wei-
mar, where Goethe and Schiller had once
infused the city with their aesthetic ideals.
The composer and conductor Esa-
Pekka Salonen, perhaps the most con-
sistently imaginative force in modern
classical music, likes to put together fes-
tivals that isolate a pivotal moment and
space in musical history. In the past, he
has organized series dedicated to Paris
and Vienna, respectively, at the turn of
the twentieth century. In early Febru-
ary, he returned to the Los Angeles Phil-
harmonic, which he led from 1992 to
2009, to present a festival titled “The
Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933.”
Salonen has presented this concept be-
fore, in London, and he will reprise it
next season at the San Francisco Sym-
phony, where he is about to take over as
music director. Adding breadth to the
L.A. event was a surrounding program
of exhibitions, installations, auxiliary
events, and film showings, all under the
direction of the art curators Stephanie
Barron and Nana Bahlmann. More
American orchestras should pursue this
kind of cross-disciplinary engagement,
which pulls abstract musical ideas back
into the flow of history.
Although the L.A. Weimar series in-
cluded an obligatory cabaret night, it
took a broader view of the era’s multi-
farious stylistic trends. Yes, we had a gen-
erous helping of Kurt Weill, who cre-
ated the bitterly hummable soundtrack
for what Germans call the Golden Twen-
ties. But Salonen gave equal weight to
Paul Hindemith, who set the pace for
musical invention in the Weimar period.
Hindemith, especially in his early years,
was brash, caustic, even Dadaistic. He
also revered tradition and, especially in
his later years, adhered to a more orderly,
humanist philosophy. He left Nazi Ger-
many in 1938, but not before contem-
plating the possibility of an official po-
sition, and settled eventually in the United
States. The mixture of radical and con-
servative strains in Hindemith’s temper-
ament gives a faithful picture of the Wei-
mar Republic as it really was—a modern
state struggling to overcome an upwell-
ing of chaos and rage. Needless to say,
the spectacle is disturbingly familiar.
T
he festival began with the giddy up-
roar of Hindemith’s “Rag Time
(Well-Tempered),” a Jazz Age prank on
the sainted Bach. Hindemith wrote it in
1921, at a time when he was augmenting
his ensembles with alarm sirens, asking
sopranos to scream at the top of their
lungs, and telling instrumentalists that
“beauty of sound is beside the point.”
The main theme of “Rag Time” is de-
rived from the C-Minor Fugue of Bach’s
“Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book I. In a
program note for “Rag Time,” Hindemith
proposes that “if Bach were alive today
he might well have invented the shimmy,
or at least absorbed it into respectable
music.” In keeping with the condescen-
sion of that remark, the score more re-
sembles rowdy marching-band music
