Pierre Boulez Saal opening concert : Schubert Der Hirt auf dem Felsen

The Opening Concert  of the Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin's new hall for chamber recitals.  Daniel Barenboim  did the honours in the Mozart Piano Quartet KV 493, with his son, Michael, the violinist, beside him.  No way would a concert as significant as this have been  complete without a star like Barenboim.  The invisible star, nonetheless was Pierre Boulez, for whom the hall is named. Fittingly, the concert began and ended with Boulez: Initiale initiating proceedings, with Sur Incises as the grand highlight. Both pieces also demonstrated the acoustic and flexibility of this new hall.  It's more than a recital hall, since it can be adapted for larger ensembles and even, potentially, for chamber opera.  Seating seems generous, so backstage facilities might also be of the same high standard.  Coffin-shaped concert halls are dead.  London, wake up!

Barenboim will also be remembered for posterity because he nurtures young musicians, just as he himself was nurtured when he was a child prodigy. It was good to hear Karim Said, whom Barenboim has mentored since childhood. Please see my article Why we need  to know who Karim Said Is from 2008. Said has matured nicely. He was the soloist in Alban Berg's Kammerkonzert for piano, violin and thirteen winds, with Barenboim as conductor. Later, Said was the lead pianist in Sur Incises.  Jörg Widmann appeared, both as clarinettist and as composer, performing his own Fantasie. The whole concert can be heard on repeat here, a good idea since you can fast forward past the inordinately long breaks between pieces.   You can see who's in the audience, too - Simon Rattle. 

Being a Lieder person,  I was keen to hear Schubert Der Hirt auf dem Felsen D 965 with  Barenboim, Widmann  and the incomparable Anna Prohaska.  Pauline Anna Milder-Hauptmann, the celebrity coloratura of her day, wanted a showpiece that would test her range and artistry. Der Hirt auf dem Felsen is a challenge, even for the finest performers.  The piano part is dense, "rock-like" in its complexity, and the clarinet part equally daunting. But the soprano is the star. The piece runs for twelve minutes, connecting three different poems (Wilhelm Müller and Karl August Vernhagen).  Schubert's setting replicates the imagery in the first poem,  Müller's Der Berghirt, whiuch describes a young shepherd, sitting high on a rock on a mountain, looking down on the valley below, where his beloved lives, far away. Thus the extremes of height and depth,the soprano's voice soaring upwards, while the clarinet's lower register floats seductively around her, sometimes in duet.

In the early part of the 19th century, there was a craze for "Alpine" music connecting the Romantic concepts of Nature, purity and freedom with picturesque mountain scenery and peasant simplicity.   Weber's Der Freischütz premiered in 1821 and Rossini's William Tell in 1829, the year after Schubert wrote this remarkable song. Tragically, it was his last completed work., but it might indicate how Schubert might have progressed had he survived.  Later in the century,"Alpine opera", such as La Wally came into vogue.   Strauss and Mahler wrote music in which mountains appear, figuratively. Indeed,  the whole genre of Bergfilm is an adaptation of the style. Lots on this site about mountains in music and Bergfilme.

Although the soprano in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen certainly does not yodel, the idea of a song designed to carry over long distances applies, and requires good breath control (as do pan pipes and Alpenhorn), Milder-Hauptmann and Schubert no doubt realized the piece would be a tour de force.   Prohaska was wonderful, singing with mellifluous grace.  Her words rang clear and true.

"Je weiter meine Stimme dringt,
Je heller sie mir wieder klingt
Von unten".  

In the last section, Prohaska's voice trilled deliciousl, .duetting with Widmann's clarinet. Tricky phrasing, but joyously agile, like a mountain spirit. 

"Der Frühling will kommen,
Der Frühling, meine Freud',
Nun mach' ich mich fertig
Zum Wandern bereit"

It might seem trivial, but I loved the outfit Prohaska wore: cropped trousers, knee-high boots and a long jacket.  Very elegant, yet also reminiscent of a 19th century traveller, a poet or a wanderer.

Cultural minefield - Daughter of the Samurai

There's just so much odd with Arnold Fanck's venture into Japanese cinema it's hard to know where to start, but that very strangeness yields insights into the way different cultures view each other  Fanck's Daughter of the Samurai was made about a decade after his masterpieces like The Holy Mountain (1926) and The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929)  By this stage in his life, Fanck wasn't "free". He had to do what the Third Reich wanted, or else. Compared with Leni Riefenstahl's films, like The Triumph of the Will,  Daughter of the Samurai is not a "Nazi" film as some suggest. On the contrary, it's film by a European who doesn't know much about Japanese culture, or Japanese cinema, but does know mountains.

Fanck created Bergfilm: poetic, esoteric movies filmed in the Alps, with actors and cameramen who did their own climbing, often in dangerous conditions, with little of the equipment climbers rely upon today. This sense of first person danger permeates the films. Fanck was a geologist who knew how mountains were formed  and how powerful they were. In Bergfilms, mountains are the real stars, towering majestically over all else, including the actors, auteurs and cameraman. The mountains are highly symbolic, connecting to the intellectual challenges of the late Romantic period. To call them "German westerns" is hopelessly superficial.

Daughter of the Samurai was largely shot in the studio, though there are wonderful shots of Mount Fuji, of terraced rice fields and snow-covered peaks,  showing that Fanck and his cinematographers still had an eye for the patterns of Nature. In this film, they also show shots of industrial processes and stylized dancers. They even respond to the rhythms of rice-planting : like mountain climbing , planting rice is repetitive and physically demanding, but worth doing for an ultimate reward.

The film was made in 1937, when Japan yet again invaded China. Germany and Japan became wartime allies since they had a common enemy: Russia. At the time neither was at war with the west. The Germans were happy to support Japan's invasion of China. Both countries wanted Lebensraum.  In Daughter of the Samurai, a Japanese man who speaks German and a German woman who speaks Japanese  meet on board ship. Teruo Yamato (whose name means "Japan") is played by Isamu Kosugi, a star and director in the Japanese film industry which was as sophisticated and active as anything in Europe.  Therein lies some of the tension in the background. In theory the film was a joint Gertman/Japanese venture, but the Germans won. Daughter of the Samurai is totally Eurocentric. It is not racist, because the Japanese are treated with sympathy, but not as equals. There are good shots of Japanese progress, eg modern buildings, fast trains, neon lights etc, but like most foreigners the film-makers fall back on clichés like cherry blossom and lanterns. Swastika flag and the Rising Sun flags fly together for a brief moment but that's about as political as the film gets. Perhaps the Germans  just didn't know how advanced the Japanese cinema industry really was, even then. The film isn't deliberately offensive, but it sustains colonialist ideas. No surprise that the Japanese weren't amused.

Setsuko Hara plays Mitsuko, Terou's dutiful wife. She too was a big star in  Japan and, like Kosugi, international in the sense that she travelled a lot in the west. Teruo's father is played by Sessue Hayakawa,  who emigrated to the US  and made his name in American movies. Had he stayed in Hollywood during the war years, he would have been interned in the notorious camps for Nisei, where thousands perished.  So it's ironic to see him in this film funded by the Nazi regime.  That's him in the photo above with Ruth Eweier, the German blonde whom Mitsuko  fears will take her husband away. Here's a good shot of the two women in a modern kitchen. A sophisticate like Hara probably had a western kitchen (she's still alive, aged 95) but you can understand the pointed cultural tension.

Being a daughter of samurai, Mitsuko decides to kill herself. Teruo, realizing what she's doing, jumps into his fancy car, driving on hairpin bends on a  cliffside. The road collapses round a lake. He then swims the whole way across, and climbs a volcano, burning his feet. Amazingly, he meets Mitsuko at the summit though she left their house and walked all the way, dressed in a kimono. Nonetheless, we get to see good shots of cliffs and mountains - traces of Bergfilm, after all.  Some scenes are quite spectacular. .The volcano erupts, destroying the Yamato farmhouse in the valley. Somehow, though, Teruo and Mitsuko survive. His feet are bandaged but she's in full Geisha regalia.  Unlike Fanck's gutsy heroine Leni Riefenstahl, Hara must revert to being an unrealistic "Japanese wife". You can understand why the Japanese director and crew, highly experienced professionals, were annoyed.

Now, it's time to offend the Chinese. Teruo and Mitsuko move to Manchuria, where they farm with tractors, since they're modern, unlike the Chinese peasants whose land they have occupied. Daughter of the Samurai doesn't set out to annoy, any more than many other films of the time, like The Good Earth, made in Hollywood in the same year, and a big hit with non-Asian audiences. These films just represent the way whites looked upon non-whites, which was how things were then. As long as we see Daughter of the Samurai in context, it's OK.