Friday, Oct. 18, 1963

Midas Across the Wall

Both Berlins were absorbed in competing culture festivals last week -- alien celebrations of the arts, one on each side of the Wall. West Berlin had invited three symphony orchestras to help spotlight the inauguration of its new, $4,000,000 Philharmonic Hall, and East Berlin had theatrical troupes from Moscow and Prague in town to play alongside its own Berliner Ensemble.

But nothing in either Berlin could quite compare with the Komische Oper, perhaps the world's best lyric opera company and East Berlin's finest cultural ornament. In an atmosphere where the culture bullets really sting, the East's operatic triumph had one touch of irony: Walter Felsenstein, the Komische Oper's founder and director, is an Austrian who lives in West Berlin.

Moral Acrobat. To Felsenstein, the East German regime has one blinding virtue: it grants him $2,500,000 a year to produce opera any way he likes. As long as politics do not disturb the opera, Felsenstein disregards what he cannot help seeing in the streets. The world may have been outraged when the Berlin Wall went up, but Felsenstein was furious. What would become of his tenor? Could the West Berliners in his chorus and orchestra still cross the border for morning rehearsals? With bureaucratic agility developed by directing state opera houses for both the Nazis and the Communists, Felsenstein swept past the crisis with a flurry of bargains and deals, and the Komische Oper was ready to greet the season six weeks after the city was cut in half. Since then, the Wall has ceased to exist for Felsenstein -- even though he must pass through it twice each day in order to enjoy the best of each side.

Felsenstein's ability to ignore the sentiments his home address should imply has made him a scoundrel in many eyes. He makes enemies by cheerfully accepting culture prizes from the East Germans for whom he works -- and it is no secret that he was willing to bring his Jewish wife into Germany during the war, having bargained for her safety with the Nazis for the dubious privilege of making music in Berlin. But his admirers -- who include editorial writers as well as music critics on many West German papers -- excuse Felsenstein as a "fanatic genius" naively uninterested in anything that goes on outside the opera house. He yo-yos back and forth across Berlin, a social vegetable, a moral acrobat, an idiot-savant -- and a genius of the opera.

Encouraging Cast. Felsenstein's productions are supreme examples of musical theater, shouted denials of the primacy of voice in opera, manifestoes in defense of drama. His idea of song is "communication heightened and intensified," and he demands that singers produce it as if they were inventing both words and melody in dramatic conversation. His production of The Magic Flute is the current classic, and no opera house can respectably ignore the standard that Felsenstein set with his Traviata, Bartered Bride, Otello and Tales of Hoffmann.

Felsenstein, 62, has a 30-year reputation as an operatic Midas, but his methods would ruin any opera company that lived by the box office. He usually trains only one singer for each role --and if anyone gets sick, he merely cancels the night's performance. At home only to sleep, Felsenstein works a 14-hour day seven days a week, spends months preparing a new production, and keeps the dozen operas in the company's repertory in constant rehearsal. His standards are as stern as the dueling scars on his cheek. In a recent session with a 68-year-old baritone, Felsenstein abandoned his instructions only when the old man collapsed at his feet in seizures of nausea. When a singer once demurred at a Felsenstein command to jump onto the stage from a seven-foot tower, Felsenstein jumped himself to demonstrate how safe it was. He broke his arm but was back at rehearsal 45 minutes later to wave his cast in encouragement as the despairing singer finally jumped.

Felsenstein has now spent 16 years at the Komische Oper. His very first production established the company's reputation, but it has taken years to develop a repertory of Felsenstein chefs-d'oeuvre. The commuting director still remains immune to any thought about whose side his operas might be on, but even if such worries should begin to plague him, his age and his years with his company provide him with a serene excuse to reject any thought of leaving the Komische Oper for some place out West. "This is my life's work," he says. "It cannot be repeated."

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