Classical, Contemporary and Early Music 2024
Despite cultural cuts and changing times - music remains political

At the end of 2024, the German Music Council is talking about a "freefall" of cultural budgets. Massive cutbacks are putting the very substance of the music scene at risk, the shock is deep-seated. There have been signs of this crisis during the year, but also innovative developments in opera and concerts.

By Dr. Eleonore Büning

We need to fight “tooth and nail” to defend artistic freedom. This was the archaic expression used by the great civil rights liberal Gerhart R. Baum from Cologne in an editorial feature for the NMZ (Neue Musikzeitung; new music journal) – as if time had transported us back to the Neanderthal era. Baum reminds us that the freedom of art is a “lifeblood of democracy”, precisely because it opposes the “dictatorship of quotas”.

His essay was published in December 2023, a year ago. The occasion was the first landslide victories of the right-wing parties, some of which were classified as right-wing extremist, in the state elections – a new trend “in a dimension” that he had “not experienced since the founding of our Republic.” In retrospect, Baum's analysis reads like a portent, a prophecy. The fact is, as anyone involved in the music scene will remember in particular, a new cultural distance of politics became manifest in 2024, with devastating consequences. The German Music Council is talking about a “freefall” of cultural budgets. Nobody had anticipated this unprecedentedly ruthless reduction in cultural funding.

Tooth and nail

Contracts will be terminated, projects will have to be aborted, lights will go out. To sum up, here are a few statistics and examples from the resolutions of the city treasurers in the last quarter: in Munich, the budget for museums, galleries, concerts, theatre, dance, film, literature, club and off-culture will be cut by 16.8 million euros, while the Münchner Volkstheater and Münchner Kammerspiele are facing insolvency in the medium term. In Cologne, the music sector alone is facing cuts of 27 per cent. The Cologne Philharmonic's Eight Bridges Festival, a beacon of contemporary music, is no longer funded at all. The same applies to the Concerto Köln ensemble. In Dresden, where the cultural budget is being reduced by five million euros, the Festspielhaus Hellerau and the State Operetta are in peril. In Berlin, an amount of 130 million euros is at stake. This damages larger establishments as well as independent groups. There will be closures in the future, layoffs. The Opera Foundation's budget is 15 million euros short, with the hardest hit being the Komische Oper, which is currently using alternative premises. In addition to the approximately 5 million euros it will save, another 10 million euros have been blocked by the construction freeze imposed by the Senate on the renovation of the original building. The construction site is idle. While costs continue to rise. Every treasurer should actually know that even a temporary construction stop generates many times more additional costs.

Calculation errors and laissez-faire in dealing with cultural real estate are the bureaucratic norm elsewhere too. The reopening of the Cologne Opera House, planned for December, which has been under renovation for almost fourteen years, was postponed yet again in March 2024. In November it was announced that the renovation of the dilapidated Littmann Opera House in Stuttgart, which was approved in 2019, would be delayed by another four years. Städtische Bühnen, Frankfurt’s municipal theatre company, can no longer be renovated at all, because this monument to the sixties (drama and opera under one roof) is so run-down that demolition plus new construction would be cheaper. This was determined in 2017 in a feasibility study. Only now, in mid-2024, are negotiations about a new plot of land underway. In Munich, where the Gasteig is closed for long-term “complete renovation”, the location for the construction of a new concert hall was agreed back in 2016. Since then they have been busy “planning”, without results, which is why State Governor Söder announced the “replanning” phase in June 2024.

But other long-term “music construction sites” became critical this year as well. One of these relates to the documented educational and cultural remit of public broadcasting and concerns young emerging musicians. In January 2024, the Broadcasting Commission cancelled 50 per cent of funding for the long-established ARD Music Competition. The 73rd ARD competition did in fact take place in the time-honoured format in September. 726 entrants from 58 nations competed in four categories, fourteen top-level young musicians received awards. Looking forward, the 2025 competition will be on a smaller scale. On the one hand, the goal stated in the public service programme reform is to attract young listeners. On the other hand, the funding of young talent will be halved. Seems paradoxical, but there’s method in their madness: by implementing this measure, they are once again playing off pop music against classical.

The third channel relaunches, from rbb to WDR3 to SWR2, are following a similar pattern. In Berlin and Brandenburg, for example, no classical music has been played between six and ten o'clock in the morning since February 2024. It has been replaced by pop. The loss of regular listeners has been taken into account. The so-called “serious music” was, they said, not compatible with the “serious” topics of the news features in the morning segment. A wisecrack by composer and critical radio listener Wolfgang Rihm aligns very well with this view – he said: “Well, we don't pay a fee to be underchallenged.”

Robust in the niches

Rihm is one of the three great deceased on the music scene this year. He died on 27th July at the age of 72 after a long illness. His Berlin colleague and friend Aribert Reimann went before him on 13th March. He was 88 years old. Finally: the composer, conductor, pianist and percussionist Péter Eötvös, who was closely associated with Germany‘s music world. He died at the age of eighty, a few days after Reimann, in Budapest. Although these three do not belong to the same generation and their music comes from incomparably different worlds, it still has to be said: With these three bereavements, an era of contemporary music came to an end. A chapter in music history is closed.

Nowadays, composers do not have to self-define by demarcating themselves from avant-garde maxims and dogmas. That time is over. This can be seen from the individualisation of genres and the diverse means of expression on offer at the series of world premieres at the Donaueschingen Music Festival under the new director Lydia Rilling. Not only is she the first woman to hold this post. She is also the first festival director who is not involved as an editor in the SWR broadcasting corporation, which is the sponsor of the Donaueschingen Music Festival.

Her second festival programme in 2024 showed that a new era of diversity has begun. All styles, trends, fashions and methods are now welcome, and new records are being set in terms of visitor numbers. This development is also reflected in the portfolio of established festivals such as Eclat in Stuttgart, Ultraschall in Berlin or the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik – a chamber music festival at which Patrick Hahn took over as artistic director in 2024.

In this context, it is worthy of note that 2024 was an extremely good year for the avant-garde label bastille musique. The founder and operator, Sebastian Solte, networked with radio editorial offices, focusing on the little-explored and experimental area of avant-garde. While the major labels are going with the flow down the streaming route with fewer and fewer productions, Solte has released more (old-fashioned) CD formats with new music in 2024 than ever before. When asked about this, he explained: “Inflation is making life harder for us record companies. There has been early warning of the cutbacks. But bastille musique serves a niche that has proven to be relatively robust, there have been some great concerts, with grateful audiences!”

The whole truth about lies

But as far as the three exceptional composers of new music mentioned above are concerned: their works have been accepted into the repertoire. Aribert Reimann's opera Lear was staged  in two productions in 2024, at Staatstheater Hannover and at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Wolfgang Rihm's Hamletmaschine was re-released in March at Staatstheater Kassel – a dystopian scenario based on Heiner Müller’s play that foresaw the “Ruins of Europe”. In December the Berlin Philharmonic, who have been celebrating Rihm as composer-in-residence since the beginning of the season, including posthumously, put on a brilliant performance of his one-act opera Das Gehege based on a text by Botho Strauss with a chamber music series and several large orchestral concerts. It is about an eagle that is freed from its aviary, which does not work out well: a symbol for the German eagle, which has apparently forgotten how to fly. Two strong women caused a sensation in the play: Simone Young on the podium, the young Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė on stage. In January 2024, a new production of the opera Sleepless by Peter Éötvös based on The Trilogy by Jon Fosse was released at Graz Theatre. In February, the German premiere of his thirteenth and last opera ever took place at Regensburg Theatre: Valuschka, composed after the novel Melancholy of Resistance by László Kraznahorkai, glosses over the inexorable rise of manipulative demagogues.

So much for six highlights from German repertoires that exemplify how serious political questions of the present are negotiated in “serious” new music. Smaller theatres and the independent scene are always more willing to take risks than tied larger theatres. The Berlin music theatre group Nico and the Navigators brought out a new play in Schwetzingen that responded perfectly to the German government crisis. It conveys the message in the title: The whole Truth about Lies. The opera directors in Essen and Dortmund, Meiningen and Karlsruhe put largely unknown operas by women on the programme for the first time – with spectacular results. Tatjana Gürbaca staged Louise Bertin's Faust opera (Essen), while Emily Hehl ran La Montagne Noir by Augusta Holmès (Dortmund). And the seapiece The Wreckers by Dame Ethel Smyth had not one but two German premieres, by Keith Warners and Jochen Biganzoli. The Bavarian State Opera, on the other hand, jumped on the compensation bandwagon for Polish composer Mieczysław Weinberg, who was murdered during the Holocaust, as did the Salzburg Festival – better late than never. In Munich, Tobias Kratzer directed The Passenger, while Krzysztof Warlikowski had a triumphant success with Idiot at the Felsenreitschule. The greatest acclaim from critics and audiences, however, was the epic The Jewess of Toledo, composed by Detlef Glanert on behalf of the Dresden Semperoper, staged by Robert Carsen and premiered on 10th February. Five months after the terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel, the play deals with the historical material of a Jewish pogrom in the Spanish Middle Ages and does not seem in the least escapist, but shockingly contemporary. Anti-Semitism is exposed as an instrument of holding onto power. Pious believers are transformed into fanatical murderers. Against a backdrop of thunderous brass, cymbals, howling clarinets, roaring tubas, booming timpani, screeching piccolos, shelling and artillery fire, “the world (...) to hell for all those who sacrifice their humanity.”

Another scene imagines, in delicately magical night music, the peaceful coexistence of the three great world religions: Some wear kippahs, others suits, others cowls. They hug each other and break bread together. A utopia that harks back to the enlightened years of peace under Alfonso the Wise. Maybe opera – this hybrid theatrical powerhouse of emotions – is the only platform on which contradictions like this can successfully be picked up from reality and exposed to a collective experience of catharsis. In any case, that would be a strong argument: former Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters, CDU, used it when she was questioned about the capital's slashed culture budget on the Deutschlandfunk Kultur show on 5th December. She said: Certainly, art is “a location factor, in Berlin together with science it is probably the most important one. But it is more than just that. It is an expression of humanity. Therefore they must not be reduced to standards of economic usability.”

On 6th December, the Bayreuth Festival announced that celebrations for the 150th anniversary of its founding in 2026 had already been radically slashed due to the tight budget situation. There are four opera productions fewer than planned. The most recent new production of Tristan from 2024 will not be included at the event either.
From a different perspective, the ray of hope this year is that the German Cultural Council is dedicating the September issue of its magazine Politik & Kultur to the subject of artistic freedom.