CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Berlin: Symphony of a City

Zankel Hall
Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Helmut Imig, Conductor
Eric Huebner, Piano
Stephen Gosling, Piano
Eric Poland, Percussion
Haruka Fujii, Percussion

In beautiful black-and-white images, the 1927 silent film Berlin: Symphony of a City, directed by Walther Ruttmann, depicts a day in the life of Weimar Berlin; these screenings feature a live per-formance of the original score by Edmund Meisel, arranged for two pianos and percussion.

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with The Museum of Modern Art.

The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp, Fundación Mercantil (Venezuela), and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding provided by Axel Springer AG, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Lothar Prox

The premiere of Walther Ruttmann’s masterpiece with live music by Edmund Meisel took place in Berlin’s Tauentzien-Palast cinema on September 23, 1927. The composer conducted a 75-piece orchestra whose composition and positioning in the room indicated the filmmakers’ unusual intentions. In fact, Ruttmann and Meisel wanted a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total art work”) with new effects. Both artists were obsessed with the idea of using the suggestive association of sound and image, together with changing tempi and rhythms, to do aesthetic justice to the phenomenon of “Berlin” and to express the essence of the uniquely vital and sensual presence of the metropolis.

Such an aim was open to misunderstanding. Nearly all the reviews praised the formal superiority of the result, but several criticized the vagueness of its content. Evidently the intellectual elite of the time expected a realistic statement about urban and social conditions, about the economic and political structure and the resulting social contradictions as reflected in everyday life in Berlin.

Film historians have upheld these early objections, although Ruttmann’s achievement, even without the acoustic elements, is as effective as ever. The present attempt to reproduce the work in as authentic a form as possible may help to show the avant-garde practice of both artists in a new light, and to review the prejudice that they produced a failed documentary. In terms of the conceptions of its creators, Berlin corresponded to the coded messages of an abstract film. The idea came from Carl Mayer, the expressionist film writer. Under the influence of New Objectivity, he was fascinated by the documentary possibilities of a film comprising a cross section of the complex everyday realism of the capital. He was joined by Karl Freund, the renowned cameraman and head of production at Fox Europa, and Walther Ruttmann, until then an abstract filmmaker.

Shooting took a year. They met at dawn, during the day or at night; they wandered the great city, filming from high buildings, descending into the sewers or the tunnels of the underground system, submerging themselves—often with a hidden camera—in the pulsating life of the city: “Week after week we met at four o’clock in the morning to film the ‘dead city.’ Day after day I drove my recording van through the town, now catching out the spoilt residents of the Kurfürstendamm in the West End, now capturing Berlin at its poorest in the deteriorated Scheunenviertel district.” Ruttmann worked without a script. A system of index cards, which could be expanded and altered at any time, served as a means of orientation and control.

There was another colleague who influenced the aesthetic concept: Edmund Meisel, composer at Erwin Piscator’s theater, who had recently leapt to fame with his brilliant and congenial score for Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. In close collaboration with Meisel, Ruttmann arranged whole complexes of images to correspond to musical intensification; he took his bearings from the structure of the composition, to which he subordinated several sequences. “The aim was to organize the temporal as rigorously as possible according to strictly musical principles. Many of the best shots had to be left out, because this could not be allowed to become a picture book; rather the structure had to be like a complex machine, which can only operate when every tiny element fits with absolute precision into the next.”

Meisel, for his part, had listened to the sounds, the rhythms, and the tempi of the city. “For this abstract [!] film, Berlin: Symphony of a City, I wrote the only score that could make it audible: a rhythmic composition that gives the film its acoustic tempo throughout. I listened to the noise of the city for hours, I noted the tempi of the sounds, the ringing bells of the tramcars, the honking motor horns, the rhythm of night work on the tracks. Best of all were the factories. The film music was intended as an integral part of the whole.”

There can be no doubt that the structural unity of film and music that Meisel helped bring about represented a considerable advance for the cinema of the 1920s, which up to that time had merely created the standards of an al-fresco art due to inadequate rehearsal time and economic pressures. This practice could not be expected to give more than atmospheric support. Edmund Meisel, regarded by colleagues as “the most important personality among the German silent film composers” (Paul Dessau), had the gift of realizing dramaturgical and musical projects in a way that was specifically cinematic. By using strange instruments, he achieved unusual effects and constructed exciting rhythmic sequences that seemed to vitalize the images. He was the master of an expressionist style that did not shrink from dissonant sound combinations, quarter-tone music, jazz, and noisy (Bruitiste) inventions. And he created adequate forms that the film demanded and that he intuitively sniffed out.

Meisel’s score must be regarded as lost. Conceived for a large orchestra, jazz ensemble, quarter-tone instruments, and numerous unpitched instruments (e.g. anvil and sheet iron), it allowed the development of extraordinary effects. Among the music that has survived is a piano master-edition, a sort of mini-score, which the musical directors of the smaller cinemas could adapt to fit their individual instrumental resources. Meisel stipulated: “The smaller the orchestra, the more essential it is to aim energetically at the primitive—in other words: follow the clear thematic line at the expense of the counterpoint.” At the end of 1980, the Foundation Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin, together with the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf (State College of Music Rhineland), acquired the piano part from the London-based journalist and film expert Dr. Hans Feld, until 1933 the editor of the daily paper Film-Kurier (“film courier”). I was working at the Düsseldorf Institute at that time, heading a project on silent-film music, which had the support of the science minister for North Rhine Westphalia and was concerned with the systematic reconstruction and revival of original performance practice as well as with investigation into their feasibility today. One member of the working group was Günther Becker, Professor of Composition and Live Electronics at the Robert Schumann Institute, who took on the task of providing new instrumentation for the first four acts of the “Berlin” music. The jazz-based fifth act was reworked by the arranger Emil Gerhardt from Cologne.

The scoring for two pianos and percussion duo seemed the most suitable for several reasons. First, the solution for further performances had to be practicable—and also financially feasible. Second, the authentic character of Meisel’s composition had to be preserved; his demand that “all lyrical portamento is to be avoided—rhythm, nothing but rhythm” can be meaningfully met by two keyboard instruments plus percussion. Finally, the reworking should reveal our historical distance from the 1920s and give the cinematic document a contemporary musical feel. Confining the instrumental possibilities to the conceptual heart of the work may mean a reduction in sensual fullness, but it results in greater transparency and intelligibility. This shift in the factors dominating reception seems, after half a century, an appropriate way of encountering tradition anew and of gaining deeper insights into the aesthetic richness of these old films.

Notes copyright © Lothar Prox, reprinted with permission
Lothar Prox is co-founder of the International Film Music Biennial.

Helmut Imig, Conductor
Born in 1941 in Bonn, Germany, Helmut Imig studied musicology at the University of Bonn, and piano and conducting at the Musikhochschule in Cologne. In 1964, he won a scholarship to continue his performance studies in Paris with pianist Annie D’Arco and conductor Pierre Dervaux. Mr. Imig has participated in master classes with conductors Franco Ferrara in Venice and Igor Markevitch in Madrid.

Mr. Imig began his career as a conductor in various German cities, including Bremen, Munich, and Essen. He has worked with the Bamberg, Nuremberg, and Limburg symphony orchestras; the Orchestre National de Lille; the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano; Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn; the Ljubljana, Lugano, and Cologne radio symphony orchestras; the Szombately, Osnabrück, and Hagen symphony orchestras; the Essen and Rotterdam philharmonic orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Verdi Orchestra in Milan; and the German Film Orchestra of Babelsberg. Mr. Imig has performed in China, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, Russia, Israel, and Italy, specializing in avant-garde music, children’s programs, and silent films, for which he resurrected many original scores by Saint-Saëns, Mascagni, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Milhaud, and other composers.

Eric Huebner, Piano
Pianist Eric Huebner has drawn worldwide acclaim for his performances of new and traditional music. At the age of 17, he appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in solo performances at the Los Angeles Music Center and Hollywood Bowl. More recently, Mr. Huebner performed with the New York Philharmonic in Ives’s Fourth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka. In Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, he performed Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, and at a recent gala celebration at Alice Tully Hall, Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques—both conducted by David Robertson. A member of the ensemble Antares since 2001, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from The Juilliard School, where he was a student of Jerome Lowenthal.

As soloist and chamber musician, Mr. Huebner has performed throughout the US, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. He has appeared with nearly all of New York City’s new music ensemblesand has performed numerous times at the Museum of Modern Art’s Summergarden Series and at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt.

Mr. Huebner’s performances have been nationally televised on PBS and broadcast over KMOZ (Los Angeles) and the BBC. He has recorded for the Col Legno, Centaur, Bridge, Albany, and Innova labels.

Stephen Gosling, Piano
Pianist Stephen Gosling enjoys a varied career as soloist and chamber musician, with a particular focus on the music of our time. He is currently a member of the New York New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Sospeso, Columbia Sinfonietta, American Modern Ensemble, and Ne(x)tworks. He is also a frequent guest artist of many other groups, including the New York Philharmonic, Orpheus, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Bang on a Can, American Composers Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Speculum Musicae, and Absolute Ensemble.

A graduate of The Juilliard School, Mr. Gosling has collaborated with a number of American composers—among them Adams, Babbitt, Carter, Reich, Reynolds, Wuorinen, and Zorn—as well as several European composers, including Boulez, Ferneyhough, and Knussen.

Recent highlights include the world premiere of John Psathas’s Three Psalms with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and performances of Xenakis and Ligeti with Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Barbican Center in London.

In ever-increasing demand both as soloist and chamber musician, Mr. Gosling has performed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and has made over 30 recordings to date.

Eric Poland, Percussion
Percussionist Eric Poland has established himself as a versatile performer in New York City. He has premiered numerous works by some of today’s leading composers with such groups as the Zankel Band, Continuum, The Locrian Chamber Players, The Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, and the Fireworks Ensemble.

He has performed with the Metropolitan Opera and the Mark Morris and Martha Graham Dance companies, and as part of the Lincoln Center Festival and Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. Eric is also an active Broadway musician and has played over a dozen different shows including Wicked, Mamma Mia!, Spamalot, A Chorus Line, and Spring Awakening.

He recently worked with Roger Waters, formally of Pink Floyd, in a New York premiere of songs from his opera Ca Ira and also with Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty. Eric can be heard on a Deutsche Grammophon release of Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs with soprano Dawn Upshaw and on the soundtrack to Hollywoodland. He holds his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School, where he was a student of Gordon Gottlieb.

Haruka Fujii, Percussion