Although Walter loved being in Berlin and participating in its “symposium of the minds,” his brief tenure at the Municipal Opera was by no means harmonious. He found the facility itself to be “the most uninspiring and unmagical of theaters,” blighted both by physical ugliness and a lack of history. While he managed to inject some new life into the place, he fought from the outset with the institution’s general director, Heinz Tietjen, who also directed the Prussian State Theaters. Tietjen, a competent but ruthlessly ambitious administrator, wanted to fuse the Municipal Opera with the Berlin State Opera on Unter den Linden, and to this end he often shortchanged the former house. For example, he obligated talented young singers, some of whom Walter had discovered, to perform exclusively at the Linden house. Unwilling to tolerate this arrangement, Walter left the Municipal in 1929, though he stayed on in Berlin until 1933, conducting a subscription series at the Philharmonic.
In his short time at the Municipal Opera Walter managed to put it on Berlin’s musical map, but it was never as experimental—never as “Weimar,” one might say—as the so-called Kroll Opera under Otto Klemperer. This was the primary venue for new opera, as well as for older works performed in new ways. The “Kroll” (thus called because it occupied the old Kroll Theater next to the Reichstag—its official name was Theater am Platz der Republik) opened as a second branch of the Prussian State Opera on January 1, 1924. After the war the facility had been taken over by the Berlin Volksblihne, which hoped to produce socially progressive opera there. But the Volksbühne had run out of money for the project during the inflation era and transferred the property to the state, while holding rights to one-half of the seats. Architectural renovations had produced a technically up-to-date but physically unattractive house. From the beginning the Kroll suffered from a lack of adequate financing (Prussia could not really afford two operas in Berlin) and from the requirement to reserve seats for the Volksbühne, which had become little more than a cut-rate ticket agency with a middle-of-the-road clientele.
The appointment of Otto Klemperer to be principal conductor at the Kroll in 1926 gave the house its moment of brilliance but also added to its problems. Always a risk-taker, Klemperer set the tone for his tenure at the Kroll by including Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta in his opening program. He followed this with a totally new Fidelio, replete with cubist sets. This caused an outcry from conservative critics, who regarded Beethoven as sacrosanct. One of them spoke of “German shame everywhere one looks.” From Munich, the Nazis’ Völkischer Beobachter denounced Klemperer as an Obermusikjude who could never understand a German genius like Beethoven. Undaunted, the conductor mounted an all-Stravinsky program on an evening when the entire stalls section had been sold to the Association of Berlin Businessmen and Industrialists, who had expected some familiar music and a big-breasted diva. Not surprisingly, they hissed and booed.
And so it continued in subsequent years. While opera-goers with a predilection for the new were making the Kroll their house of choice, more conservative patrons escalated their protest. At a production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale in fall 1927 the audience included Einstein, Brecht, Weill, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Gustav Stresemann. All were enchanted. But the Volksbühne subscribers were deeply upset, wondering once again why they weren’t seeing Carmen. Matters became even worse when Klemperer turned to Wagner, who by the 1920s had been appropriated by the nationalist right as the chief deity of Deutschtum. In 1929 the Kroll mounted a futuristic Flying Dutchman that did away with all the pious traditionalism that most Wagnerians had come to expect. The (beardless) Dutchman’s sailors looked like a gang of dock laborers and Senta came off as an unsubmissive visionary a la Käthe Kollwitz. Fearing that there might be violent protests, the police ringed the hall on opening night. As it happened, there was no violence inside, but plenty of heat in the reviews. The critic Fritz Stege, who later became the Nazis’ chief oracle on music, said the performance was “an act of unparalleled cultural shamelessness, with which a sneering grin has reduced a German cultural monument to ruins.” Paul Schwers, in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, labeled Klem-perer’s “proletarianized” Dutchman “an artistic betrayal of the people.” It was, he added, another example of the way in which the conductor was wasting the public’s money and “damaging Berlin’s reputation as a cultural center.” Either the Kroll’s “methods must be changed . . . or it must be shut,” he insisted.
While Klemperer was battling for his artistic life at the Kroll, Wilhelm Furtwängler was struggling to establish himself as musical director at the illustrious Berlin Philharmonic. Unlike his beleaguered colleague, however, Furtwängler prevailed and became an institution in his own right. No doubt it helped that Furtwängler saw himself more as a custodian of traditional musical values than as a prophet of the avant-garde.
Not that Furtwängler eschewed the new. On December 2, 1928, he presented Schonberg’s Variations for Orchestra. Many people in the audience rattled their house keys, which was the upper bourgeoisie’s accepted manner of expressing displeasure. The conductor sprinkled other new works through the Philharmonic’s programming without occasioning too much protest. He caused more consternation because of his frequent absences, made necessary by the fact that he was also principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. He also conducted often in New York, even toying with the idea of settling there permanently. But in the end he opted for Berlin as his central base, and his alliance with the Philharmonic became the most solid attachment in his life.
While Berlin’s musicians, especially its jazz composers and performers, tended to think of America as the promised land, the city’s dramatists often disparaged the world’s richest democracy as a rapacious predator. A long-running review entitled “Oh, USA” portrayed Uncle Sam as a bill collector before whom Russia, Germany, and Italy had to bow in submission. America’s middle classes were depicted as bigoted and hypocritical, while its workers came across as mere machines. The play was so stridently anti-American that the U.S. embassy lodged a protest with the German government.
Rather than America, Berlin’s playwrights turned to the Soviet Union for inspiration. Like Moscow, Berlin spawned a number of theater collectives that produced topical works with a left-wing slant. Among them were the groups led by Erwin Piscator, who in the early 1920s had thrown off the multihued colors of Dada in favor of the solid red drapery of communism. Determined to promote the communist cause via the theater, Piscator staged an agitprop production entitled Revue Roter Rummel for the KPD’s 1924 election campaign. In the following year he directed a documentary about the German revolution of 1918/19 called Trotz Alledem! (In Spite of Everything), a phrase made famous by Liebknecht. It employed film clips along with stage action, a device that became standard in Piscator’s documentary theater. While thumping for the KPD, Piscator also worked for the Volksbühne, but quit in disgust when it tried to trim his radical sails. With the support of a newly rich businessman whose wife hoped to act in his plays, the playwright rented the Theater am Nollendorfplatz and launched a “dramaturgical collective” to mount socially progressive works. In 1927/28 he directed four productions, each of which explored new theatrical territory. His production of Schweik (based on Jaroslav Hasek’s antiwar novel, The Good Soldier Schweik) featured two treadmill stages and sets by George Grosz. A play about skullduggery in the oil business called Konjunktur included music by Kurt Weill. Among these plays only Schweik made money, and the businessman-patron, whose wife never did get to act, withdrew his support. The collective shut down.