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In the center of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s suite of incidental music for “Much Ado About Nothing,” there’s a march meant to accompany Dogberry, Shakespeare’s comedian constable, and his fellow watchmen.
Written within the late 1910s, and performed by Ensemble Modern at Zankel Hall on Friday as a part of the Carnegie Hall pageant “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” the march stepped alongside crisply, with dryly officious humor. But it additionally had an fringe of honest sternness. Cast over the bumptious appeal was a touch of the ominous, of an actual (moderately than satirical) army buildup.
The identical uneasy mixture of optimistic power and darkish clouds characterised Germany in the course of the Weimar Republic, an experiment in democracy that started within the wake of the nation’s defeat in World War I, in 1918, and lasted till the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Weimar has currently been seized on by many Americans who see in it parallels to our personal period. (To wit: tenuously free republican establishments, mainstream conservative complicity with the far proper, divisions on the left, concern of a fascist overthrow, and many others.)
For Election Day 2020, two former U.S. attorneys normal printed an opinion piece in The Washington Post, saying that photos from the Weimar period had been “contemporary sufficient in reminiscence to supply a cautionary story.” Just a few months later, Foreign Policy supplied “Weimar’s Lessons for Biden’s America.” This January, Bernie Sanders stated that if President Biden couldn’t show authorities’s efficacy to voters, “then we’re the Weimar Republic of the early Nineteen Thirties.”
That month, Carnegie opened “Fall of the Weimar Republic,” now in its ultimate weeks. Past Carnegie festivals have centered on South Africa, Vienna, Berlin, Venice and migrations to America, amongst different matters.
But none have been so pointedly related to present occasions. Carnegie promised that “Fall of the Weimar Republic” would yield “many classes in regards to the fragility of democracy.”
A tall order, even when the pageant had been single-mindedly centered on the tradition of the Weimar interval — its devil-may-care decadence and world-weary cynicism. But the programming has been a bit unpersuasive.
Earlier customary repertory works have been thrown onto many packages, typically dominating them, with the weak clarification from Carnegie that in Weimar individuals listened to Beethoven, too. The influence of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (1913) is so acquainted that certainly we didn’t want to listen to it twice in two months.
Some teams understood the task. The Cleveland Orchestra opened the pageant with Bartok works from the appropriate interval and Ernst Krenek’s not often heard Little Symphony (1928), in addition to Krenek’s completion of the Adagio from Mahler’s tenth Symphony. (The pageant has featured swaths of Mahler, whose frenetic juxtapositions can appear to anticipate what was to come back although he died seven years earlier than the Weimar Republic was based.)
The Knights performed Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 1; the Philadelphia Orchestra, his Symphony No. 2. The Vienna Philharmonic carried out Paul Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for wind orchestra; the American Composers Orchestra, George Antheil’s “A Jazz Symphony.” Chamber live shows have supplied every kind of little-played treats from the interval. On May 2, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra comes with Hindemith’s “Rag Time (Well-Tempered)” and Alexander Zemlinsky’s aching “Symphonic Songs” — earlier than, sure, Mahler’s Sixth.
In Ute Lemper and Max Raabe’s Palast Orchester, Carnegie had skilled purveyors of Weimar-style cabaret. Partnerships with different establishments across the metropolis encompassed movie screenings, artwork exhibitions, performs and talks.
But why had been there solely glimpses of necessary composers like Erwin Schulhoff and Hanns Eisler? I wished extra Zemlinsky, even a observe of Hans Pfitzner and an even bigger serving to of the period’s progressive music theater and opera.
And I perceive Carnegie’s notion of presenting the music that fashioned the context for Weimar along with Weimar-era works, however actually: The Bamberg Symphony, from Germany, is approaching April 24 beneath the pageant’s auspices with requirements by Wagner, Schumann and Brahms, the newest of which was written in 1883.
Ensemble Modern’s live performance on Friday was one of many pageant’s few absolutely Weimar packages — and all of the extra compelling for that. The group, from Frankfurt, performed with a precision and lucidity that confirmed two sides of the interval as extra related than antithetical: the jazzy, angular urbanity of Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 1 (Op. 24) and, written just some years earlier than, the fashionable nostalgia of Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Schoenberg’s brooding “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene” was the right lead-in to Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Performed in a current association for lowered forces by HK Gruber, who carried out the live performance, and Christian Muthspiel, this “ballet with singing” — a sung monologue a couple of fanciful journey by way of America, with ensemble interjections — was delightfully intimate and witty.
The mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta, joined by members of the vocal group Amarcord, guided the viewers by way of a parade of misadventure with a light-weight, meticulous contact, neither too offhand nor too exaggerated — as bracing but candy as a shot of schnapps.
If solely your entire pageant had been this fastened on its topic. For classical establishments in search of modern political relevance, there are few extra interesting matters nowadays. (Just earlier than the primary pandemic lockdowns, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen placed on their very own multidisciplinary Weimar pageant.)
But the connection between Nineteen Twenties Germany and 2020s America already has its limitations, and has served to overshadow different, probably much more useful historic analogies. The Carnegie pageant shies away from a transparent, thorough reckoning even with the interval’s music, making it tougher to assist us be taught from Weimar the place we’re and the place we may be going.
