|| .burnynng on just lyke a matchh you stryyke to incynerate ||

english compre (plagiarised!)

hehe i dun care about paper 1 but i simply lurrvvvvveddd paper 2!to trust mr heng to set on germany and classical music!oh well they are both my favourite subjects!history and classical music going together...yum yum!(sorry if i'm boring:D).anyway i realised something creepy.prelim 1 compre was set on Rome.guess what this comp freak had been doing the day before-playing the severely outdated age of empires -RISE OF ROME!i thought coincidences would be only by chance when it happened again.the day before the english paper-i was playing empire earth-the german campaign oh holy.i just love mr heng!(but i'm not gay,just no way!)i so so so love the passage,that i want to read it every now and then.what better way to preserve it?type here,duh!*cackling heard in the distance*
P.S.you can choose not to read :D

The satirist Karl Kraus once described turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna as a city whose streets were paved not with asphalt but with culture.Today his description could not be better suited to Berlin,a capital brimming with creative activity.Theater companies ply their wares in hidden cobblestone courtyards,bohemian artists gather in majestically crumbling buildings,and festivals of every variety pile up on weekends like verbs at the end of a German sentence.

Certainly,when it comes to classical music,few cities are so abundantly and audaciously full of life.As an inheritance from its decades of division into East and West,unified Berlin boasts a gloriously impractical number of musical institutions:eight orchestras and three opera companies.City finances are in a shambles,and institutional squabbling abounds,but if you tuned out all the background noise this summer,you could find a thrilling array of options:fiendishly good orchestral concerts,willfully scandalous opera productions,open-air concerts on a beautifully restored square,contemporary chamber music and even music piped into a swimming pool.

New York,of course,has its own claim to sonic splendor;it is as musically vibrant as Berlin,and even more so.But music experiences in Berlin offer something qualitatively different,an intellectual energy and cohesion that have much to do with the particular niche classical music occupies in contemporary German society.In short,music is integrated into German society and taken seriously by the people.

I first glimpsed the special qualities of the scene here at a Berlin Philharmonic concert in early June.Claudio Abbado was conducting for the first time since he retired in 2002 as the esteemed music director of this premier orchestra of Berlin.As you migh expect on such an occasion,well-to-do Berliners of a certain age turned out in quantity.But strangely,young bespectacled listeners,dressed in well-worn suits and looking as if they had come straight from a heated cafe debate over Habermas,pulled up to the Philharmonie,home of the Berlin Philharmonic,on rickety old bikes.They were there because something significant was about to happen in the Berlin musical world,and for an impressively wide circle,it actually seemed to matter.Mr. Abbado did not disappoint,leading a gripping performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony.The Berlin Philharmonic,Berlin's premier orchestra,has mighty depth to its string sound and a refined power in its brasses,and Mr. Abbado's conducting was responsive both to the music's details and to its epic sweep.The audience called him back for solo bows long after the orchestra had left the stage.

There was an intensity to the listening that night,a depth to the adoration of the crowd,that suggested a particular connection to a German musical tradition and perhaps a deeper link between classical music and German culture and identity.In the 19th and 20th centuries,Germanness in music was an ideal that German society firmly believed in,alternately propounded and exploited by prominent figues ranging from Wagner to Hitler to Thomas Mann.In practical terms,as one traverses city streets named after famous musical figures,one is reminded that today's Berlin Philharmonic embodies what is,among many other things,a fantastic local tradition.

But Germany's musical vitality also owes something to a mainstream assumption that classical music has a place at the table alongside pop culture.Anyone used to seeing classical music maginalized might have been astonished by the scene last month at the opening of the Bayreuth Festival,where celebrities and politicians,for musical edification or mere self-promotion,turned out in droves,along with the national media.With so much hoopla,it was hard to believe that the whole scene centered on,of all things,an opera festival.That level of excitement speaks not just of how Germans respect the classical tradition,but also,in a way,of how they disrespect it.The more daring of the summer's opera productions,for example,used sadistic bloodletting,pornography and repulsive stage projections of dead rodents to accompany cherished standard operatic works.On the most basic level,these trends in German opera reflect the society's fundamental confidence with the standard operatic works.This has thus resulted in a disrespectful attitude towards these standard works.Berliners,it seems,are convinced that these works must change with the times if they are to remain vital.

There is an important grain of truth here,and you have to wonder whether,for example,the opulent and ultraconservative operas at the Metropolitan Opera alienate new and younger oper-goers even as they delight faithful fans.But as the revered composer Ferruccio Busoni often warned,newness itself can also become an obsession,a force as limiting as blind conservatism.The thirst for productions with shock value can override judgments of taste and even one's ability of Mozart's opera "Abduction From the Seraglio" in a contemporary brothel,full of sex and gore,performed at then city's Komische Theatre.At the other extreme,one of the most effective productions was the simplest and least sensational:a new staging of the opera "Elegy for Young Lovers" at the Linden Staatsoper(opera theatre).Its simple and stark stage pictures worked with the hauntingly iridescent music to produce a shattering emotional impact.

Berlin's extraordinary modern history-a slab onto which memories of imperial splendor,fascist terror and failed Communist utopia have all been inscribed in the short span of some 100 years-inevitably adds resonance to the city's musical life.The Staatsoper(opera theatre) itself directly abuts the Bebelplatz,the infamous site of the Nazi book-burning in 1933,an event that the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth described unflinchingly at the time as the capitulation of the European mind.The book-burning,just like the closure of Berlin's radical Kroll Opera in the 1930's,epitomized thhe ultimately genocidal obsession with the purity of the German culture.The city's residents have of necessity perfected a dance of remembering and forgetting,commemorating the past but also tempeting its demands.One of the most moving memorials in Berlin,at the square Bebelplatz,is an underground room lined floor-to-ceiling with empty bookshelves.I tried to visit it after the Henze performance,only to discover that the entire square has been closed while the city builds a new underground garage.Public memory lies temporarily closed for reconstruction.

Certainly,signs of Berlin's more recent traumas linger closer tothe surface.A few portions of the Berlin Wall still stand,and its former path is now marked by a double row of bricks,cutting through the city like an impossibly long scar.In the music world,the unified Berlin can at times still feel remarkably divided.Former Eastern and Western institutions have retained separate and largely nonoverlapping audiences,even as they compete aggressively for common public funds.Programming,too,can carry memories of division.The Berlin Symphony Orchestra,for example,the predominant ensemble of the former Communist-controlled East Berlin,still performs a lot of Russian works,a cultural legacy that the east Berliners were apparently not ready to give up.Meanwhile,its Western counterpart the Berlin Symphoniker will probably fold after having been denied precious public subsidies for its next season.To be sure,the musical landscape will shift in the future.Politics and city finance concerns may continue creeping in on Berlin's musical dreams,but it is hard to imagine those forces completely transforming this city's allure.Berlin,it seems,thrives on a bit of uncertainty as it grapples with its complex history while tumbling sonorously into the future.

"plak!";
x 9:30 am

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