music under a bell jar

The Berlin Philharmonic, virtually alone among German cultural institutions, continued playing right to the end of the Second World War. Even after their hall, the old Philharmonie, was destroyed by bombers, they continued performing in the Admiralspalast downtown, and at makeshift hospitals around the city. It's understandably not a period people in the orchestra are proud of, but a remarkable new documentary by Enrique Sanchez Lansch, The Reichsorchester, chronicles and records the memories of the last two surviving orchestra members who played in the Berlin Phil during that time.

One of those members, violinist Hans Bastiaan, describes that time as "like being under a bell jar" -- the orchestra was protected and sheltered by the Nazi ministry of propaganda, performing a regular concert schedule and touring widely to boost morale and to symbolize of German cultural might. Bastiaan and double bassist Erich Hartmann, the other surviving member who speaks at length in the film, both understood that they were serving an evil regime -- yet they both claim the Berlin Philharmonic was never a Nazi orchestra, even if certain members were party loyalists.

The vast majority kept playing out of dedication to their craft; out of allegiance to their music director, Furtwangler, and to their colleagues; from pride for the stellar reputation and musicianship of their orchestra; and, in the final days, for sheer survival. Orchestra members were given an exemption from military service -- and their family members offered special protections and allowances as will -- and so from the beginning they were tied to the regime and its continued stability.

Only in the last few months, playing before audiences of severely wounded soldiers and civilians, did Bastiaan, Hartmann, and their like-minded colleagues recognize the shame of their role as state-supported artists. Other members, such as violinist Bernhard Alt (who earlier composed of a double bass quartet, written for his Berlin Phil colleagues) committed suicide. Still others died amid the chaos of bombings and occupation (this was the case with the interim conductor Leo Borchard, who died by American gunfire in a tragic accident). One violist, dismissed by Furtwangler for missing a concert early in the war, had his exemption revoked and died on the front -- just one terrible story among many that Bastiaan and Hartmann have to tell.

It's fascinating to hear them tell it, even though they still seem to struggle with the moral quandaries of that time. Among the musicians, Bastiaan notes, their understanding of politics was often "child-like", and they only wished to keep performing great music under the best conductors -- and yet the harsh realities around them wouldn't disappear, or be vanquished by sublime concerts. In the end, they were given a perfect opportunity to witness the crumbling of the Nazi regime, from within the protective 'bell jar' it provided, and to take part in the rebuilding efforts that followed.

The documentary includes extensive footage of the orchestra performing, mainly Beethoven and Wagner, including a complete performance of the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger, recorded in a German factory in 1942.

Persepolis and Proust

I just saw the movie Persepolis, which is based on a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It's a coming-of-age story narrated by a character also named Marjane Satrapi, about her childhood in Iran under the Shah, and the subsequent Islamic revolution.

The story itself possibly couldn't be less like Marcel Proust's novel -- though politics do find their way into In search of lost time, amid all the love stories and dinner parties. Still, that was the work that kept coming to mind as I was watching Persepolis. There's the eponymous narrator, of course, and also the movie is in French -- beyond that, both are about young artists trying to live creative lives in an uncooperative world. And both are ultimately success stories, the proof of which is their very existence.

The form of a graphic novel turned into a movie -- which I'd never seen done quite like this -- really propelled the story. The subjective reality of Marji comes out more directly and immediately than it could in live action. In one scene, she has just broken up with her boyfriend after catching him cheating on her. As she re-imagines the history of their relationship, we see the same scenes we just watched, redrawn -- meeting at a party, him driving her home, etc. -- but where before they were idyllic and joyful, they've now been transformed to show all his ugly qualities. It's a brilliant way of dramatizing the reversals of perception and memory, and one of which Proust would have completely approved.

Chaplin's "Modern Times"

I just watched the 1936 film Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin - the first Chaplin film I've watched. All I really knew of Chaplin was the silly mustache and the waddling walk, but he was an incredible performer - expressive facial expressions, brilliant comedic timing, and a physical grace that is really startling. His character is painfully awkward, yet once in a while he'll do a beautiful roller-skating routine, or spin around in a cocaine-induced frenzy, and you realize that he couldn't do all these things so elegantly if he weren't a brilliant actor and dancer.

Here is the climactic scene, in which Chaplin throws away the words and has to sing nonsense. It's worth checking out the recently re-mastered version on DVD, which is much higher quality.

"Bourne Identity" meets "Three's Company"

A couple of weeks ago I was complaining about the lack of CIA thrillers involving orchestral musicians - apparently someone in Hollywood agreed with me, way back in 1985:



In The Man With One Red Shoe, Tom Hanks portrays a typical orchestral violinist named Richard: he lives in a luxurious old house in Washington, D.C., never learned to drive a car, teaches 12-year-olds while lying on the couch in his bathrobe, and is having an affair with flutist Paula (Carrie Fisher), wife of timpanist Morris (Jim Belushi).

The movie is more sitcom than thriller, though there are some grisly scenes of CIA dupes getting all their teeth extracted and nearly drowning in a sewer. Back in 1985, you could still make a light, screwball comedy about CIA torture. Strangely, this movie was a remake of another spy comedy involving a violinist: The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe.

The Bourne Ictus

I just watched The Bourne Identity, which is the first part in the three-movie Bourne series. Thriller movies like this are a lot of fun, but they always seem to challenge my excuses about how I'm too busy and stressed to have a relationship. This is what I tell myself a lot of the time: "Being an orchestral musician is a time-consuming career, it takes a long time to get settled and established, you have to practice endlessly and travel quite a bit..." Then I watch Jason Bourne, who at the beginning of the film washes up on a boat in the Mediterranean with no clue as to who he is - then he has to dodge police forces, fight off thugs and goons, hitch, steal, and lie his way around Europe, finally take down a whole CIA operation - and he still has time to meet someone, get to know her, fall in love, etc.

It all seems a bit unfair. Of course I don't have amnesia, but I do have some liabilities that Jason Bourne didn't need to face. He's played by Matt Damon, for one. He's able to take the wheel of love-interest Marie's Mini-Cooper, pursued by droves of Paris police, and swerve through sidewalks, down staircases, and up a busy highway in the wrong direction - I get squeamish if I have to ask to use a girl's bathroom. I get nervous calling a friend to ask her out for coffee - Jason Bourne picks up the cell phone of a guy he's just shot to death, calls up a CIA director in Langley, Virginia, and demands a meeting the next afternoon on a bridge in Paris. Then he hangs up before hearing an answer, so they can't trace the call and send more goons. That would be a problem for me, but maybe I need to develop that sort of dashing self-confidence.

Jason Bourne must have gone through some serious training to gain all those skills though. I wonder what if, instead of a top-secret CIA agent, he had waken up in his amnesiac state to slowly discover that he was an international guest conductor. Here's a character-explication scene from Identity with Jason and Marie that I've adapted:

Jason and Marie have just sat down at an orchestra concert in Switzerland. Marie speaks first.

Marie: So what's the deal, Jason? What are you doing here?

Jason: (agitated, tired of all the questions he can't answer) Listen, here's how it is. I walk into this concert hall and I'm immediately checking out the sight lines, locating all the brass and percussion players, so I can put up my hands and discourage them from playing too loud. I know that the third trombone is a little tipsy, the second oboist hasn't had a good reed in weeks, and both second stand violinists think they can play the solos better than the concertmaster, but only the inside one is right. I can read opera librettos in 5 languages, then schmooze potential donors in 8 languages. I know that the guy three rows down is humming La Traviata, but he's 5 cents flat. And I know that I can beat the first 50 bars of the Danse Infernale before my hands start to shake. So you tell me, how can I know all this, and still not know who I am?

It probably wouldn't work too well, though I think it would be great if someone made an action movie about a conductor or orchestral musician. He (or she) could race through exotic city streets to get to the gig on time - subdue angry audience members tired of long introductory speeches - wield a music stand or a viola bow as an improvised weapon. It would be thrilling stuff, I'm telling you.

on bad music

As I wrote yesterday, I really believe that listening to great music can make people better - kinder, braver, wiser, more compassionate - just as it changes the character Wiesler in the movie The Lives of Others. I wouldn't be doing what I am if I didn't believe music can have a transformative effect on people, often more powerful and far-reaching than any other art form.

Then again, I wonder if this is a double-edged sword. Does bad music, or music badly played, make people more cruel, fearful, narrow-minded and selfish? Even wondering about this is a little disturbing, since it raises the specter of what is "bad music". From there it seems like a short leap to "degenerate music" and the artistic censorship of '80s East Germany, or Stalinist Russia. I'd much rather think that music can only have a positive effect - or that bad music will purge itself, since no one will continue performing and listening if it is actually harmful.

Even if we decide a certain music is bad for us, though, it seems clear that we can't declare it unacceptable for anyone else. As MTT discussed in his talks on Shostakovich's 5th, different people can hear the same music in very different ways - and sometimes the more true message of a piece is not the most obvious. In the last pages of Shostakovich's 5th, a long and apparently triumphant march emerges from the brass, with the upper strings repeating a high shrill note and the timpani blasting the same two notes that begin the theme. Many conductors follow the swell of the music with an accelerating tempo, though the music only says "ritenuto". It's not a ritardando - a natural slowing - but a forcible pulling back, as if the whole orchestra is struggling against a force we can't control!

Early in the film, Wiesler's Stasi friend (and now his superior) Grubitz calls Georg Dreyman "our only non-subversive artist". It's a funny line - there is a lot of these ironies in the film - and I think it underscores that every artist, in a sense, is subversive. Wiesler himself is a kind of artist, as we see at the beginning of the film. His art is interrogation, spying, and uncovering others' secrets, and he practices with all the dedication and determination of the most devoted actor or writer. And yet all this skill and craft, he soon realizes, is being used for terrible ends - ruining lives, destroying careers. Perhaps that's the final standard of bad art - it makes the artist himself ashamed of what he's created.

The Lives of Others

I haven't seen too many films lately - the last before this was Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth - but yesterday night I saw a movie that I would recommend to anyone, even if you're less of a film-buff than I am. It's called The Lives of Others, it's in German, and it's about the struggle to retain one's humanity in trying circumstances, and how art, music, and theater can help us in that struggle.

I had been interested in the film ever since I heard its director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, interviewed by Dave Davies on NPR's Fresh Air. He talked about how Vladimir Lenin loved Beethoven's Piano Sonata "Appassionata" but avoided listening to the piece. As one of the film's main characters explains, he couldn't complete the violent work of revolution while listening to such compassionate music. What music would you play, he wondered, if you had only a few minutes alone with an evil man, a man who had lost his reverence for humanity?

The film's composer answered that question with a solo piano piece, titled "Sonata for a Good Man", which is at the heart of the film. It's played at a point of despair, as the main character Georg Dreyman mourns the suicide of his friend and artistic colleague, a theater director who was blacklisted and destroyed by a corrupt regime. Dreyman doesn't realize as he plays that an official of that regime, a Stassi spy named Weisler, is listening and attempting to destroy him as well. Listening to that music and being immersed in the plays and poetry of Dreyman's life, changes Weisler in a fundamental way. He does regain his humanity, and begins to act on his conscience, rather than the orders of his superiors.

I'll try not to spoil any of the plot twists, which are sometimes excruciating - the greatest villain, it seemed to me, was the system itself, which gave so much power to corruptible men, and allowed them to exploit and destroy the lives of others. It's a cruel irony that a system meant to be truth-seeking and egalitarian instead became replete with duplicity and corruption. Amid all this unhappiness, music and art might seem like a small consolation - but for these characters, and for a lot of us, it's the greatest consolation there is!

MTT's cinematic Shostakovich

Until recently, I had no idea that MTT was such a film buff. Whether he's quoting Cher from Moonstruck ("Snap out of it!), complimenting our Polish trombone player Maciej on his cowboy solo in Copland's "Buckaroo Holiday" ("The best tribute to the United States since Borat"), or recommending we check out director Andrei Tarkovsky for a flavor of Russian cinema, this week has been full of film references.

We're rehearsing Shostakovich's 5th Symphony, which we'll play this Friday in Lincoln Theatre, then Saturday in the Carnival Center (along with Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto with Yo-Yo Ma) before taking all of it on tour to New York. MTT points out how Shostakovich structures the symphony using all sorts of film editing techniques: cross-cutting, fading in and out, dissolves, close-ups, etc. In the very beginning of the symphony, an angular, leaping figure cries out furiously in the strings, before moving off into the distance. MTT acted the whole thing out for us, becoming this angry, contorted figure first in close-up then out on the horizon. Those far-off howls and grimaces are heard in the lower strings, fading into the background as a new character emerges in the violins.

MTT will speak in detail about the symphony at the Discovery Concert on Friday (and next Wednesday in New York). Tomorrow evening at the Lincoln Theatre you can see a documentary film on the same topic, "Shostakovich Against Stalin: The War Symphonies". Check out the New World website for more information.

Lost Boys of Sudan

It was probably not their main intention, but the makers of the documentary Lost Boys of Sudan seem to raise the question: which is better, life as a refugee in Kenya, or life in poverty in America?

We meet its two subjects, Peter and Santino, when they are still at the refugee camp in Kakuma, a desolate area in the Kenyan desert. We are told that they have lived there already for ten years, and along the way we get a glimpse of the other horrors they have already faced: villages ransacked, parents killed, rivers crossed at gunpoint. The documentary is mainly concerned with their latest journey though, as immigrants to the United States.

Interestingly, Peter and Santino left Kakuma just weeks before Valentino Achak Deng, the narrator of the recent Dave Eggers novel What is the What? Eggers' book first drew my attention to the Lost Boys, and many scenes are shared by that book and this film: the huts and basketball courts of the refugee camp, the board where names are posted of the boys selected to move to America, the promises and emotional farewells to those staying behind, the plane ride from Kakuma to Nairobi, then on to the United States.

Every immigrant story is a little different, but these Lost Boys' stories all have some common themes. Coming to America is seen as something like a trip to heaven, and the rapturous smiles of the boys as they board the planes and arrive at the airport in Houston are almost heartbreaking. The disappointments come quickly and from all sides: low-paying jobs, difficulties with school, medical and legal problems, struggles to form and maintain relationships. Money is tight, social situations are strange and awkward, relatives back in Africa are demanding, and both Peter and Santino find themselves disillusioned with America.

These Lost Boys are incredibly strong, religious, determined people - they would not have survived otherwise - and it's a testament to their strengths that Peter, Santino, and Valentino all eventually managed to get a foothold. It's interesting to see just how many problems they have had to overcome, though, and how those problems have differed from those they faced in Sudan. Whereas in Africa they faced gunfire, starvation, and lions, here they cope with loneliness, discrimination, and alienation. As filmmaker Megan Mylan notes, in Sudan they had eachother, no matter how harsh the situations they faced. As those social connections fray in America, all of their problems seem to worsen, and the loneliness becomes almost unbearable.

So for all the material advantages, the Lost Boys have some ambivalence about life in the United States. As hard as it is to comprehend all they survived in Sudan, it's easy to understand this American part of the Lost Boys' story, and to sympathize with their plight.

Film reviews: Before Sunset, Melinda and Melinda

There's a great chapter about visual perception in Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink. Gladwell describes a study of the way people watch movies, in which the researchers used instruments to map the movements of people's eyes as they watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. They found that people followed the conversation in remarkably consistent patterns, constantly shifting their focus between the characters in order to read on their faces the subtext of what they were saying as well as the emotional interplay taking place between them. I thought of this study as I watched two interesting and dialogue-rich films recently.

The writers of Before Sunset, Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy, seem to realize how enthralling and dramatic a conversation can be, because they built the entire movie around one. The film's two characters, played by Hawke and Delpy, first appeared in a 1994 movie called Before Sunrise, and this sequel begins with their unexpected reunion nearly ten years later. I haven't seen Sunrise, but Sunset quickly introduced their story and had me entranced by these characters, and in suspense about where their conversation will lead. The movie lasts only around 80 minutes, but both actors are on screen for almost the entire time, and even without the beautiful scenes of summertime Paris the quality of both actors' performances provides plenty of visual interest.

I watched the movie yesterday on DVD, and immediately wanted to tell other people about it, so I took my DVD player to the TV lounge in my building. A bunch of other people there watched and were just as captivated as I was - at first I worried they might be bored, because no one said anything, but I soon realized they were hanging on every word.

Another film I saw recently was Woody Allen's latest, Melinda and Melinda. The idea here is that a single story can become either a tragedy and a comedy, depending on the talents and inclinations of the playwright. Interestingly, Allen skips over the original story and drops us right into the tragic and comic transformations conceived by his two playwrights. He actually pulls off the slightly gimmicky premise pretty well, though the audience I saw it with in South Beach laughed a bit more at the tragedy than the comedy. I would attribute this to Will Ferrell, the lead actor in the comedy, who is even more lame than usual as one of Woody Allen's standard good-naturedly neurotic New Yorkers.

On the other hand the lead actress, Radha Mitchell, is really effective in both the tragedy and the comedy, and her performance alone might make it worth seeing on video. I found it made a neat sort of puzzle trying to piece together the original story, and picking out the many similarities between them. Melinda is definitely a cleverly constructed film, but I would rate Before Sunset as stronger and more compelling.