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OPERA

Munich opera defends Nazi tattoo singer

The Munich opera hit out on Monday at the organisers of the Bayreuth Festival over their handling of a row about a Russian singer with a Nazi tattoo who had been scheduled to perform.

Published: 24 July 2012 06:33 CEST
Munich opera defends Nazi tattoo singer
Photo: DPA

The head of the Bavarian State Opera, one of Europe’s leading opera houses, described the way the matter was handled by Bayreuth’s co-chiefs Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier as “dishonest” and a clear attempt to draw attention away from the festival’s own murky past.

“The affair is more a problem for Bayreuth and the Wagner family than for the singer,” opera chief Nikolaus Bachler said after Russian bass-baritone Yevgeny Nikitin pulled out of his hotly anticipated debut at this year’s Bayreuth Festival just days before the premiere.

The 38-year-old rising star of the prestigious Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg was to have sung the title role in a brand-new production of “The Flying Dutchman”.

He is now to be replaced by a Korean colleague, Samuel Youn, at the glitzy opening night on Wednesday, as well as at all the other performances.

Nikitin, who played drums in a Russian heavy metal band in his youth, has said that his tattoos – two different Nordic runes used by Adolf Hitler’s SS during World War II and a swastika that the singer appears to have attempted to cover up with another tattoo – had no political significance for him.

In an unusually sharply-worded reaction, Munich opera chief Bachler said: “It is dishonest that the foolishness of a 16-year-old rock singer, who has long regretted his actions and tried to undo them, is being punished by the Wagner family.

“They are clearly pointing the finger at someone else because they have a problem with their own past,” the statement said.

Nikitin not only clearly regretted the incident but had expressed repentance as well – something that Bachler believes “the Wagner family have never expressed in the past 50 years,” said the 61-year-old Austrian.

“The whole affair is extremely ugly and shows how very much present the past still is.”

The Munich opera had no such problems with Nikitin who would appear in another Wagner opera, “Lohengrin”, at the Bavarian State Opera in November, Bachler said.

By contrast, German star conductor Christian Thielemann, who has conducted at Bayreuth more than 100 times and is seen as the festival’s unofficial general music director, defended the uproar over Nikitin.

“A swastika is a no-go, not only in Bayreuth. It wouldn’t be acceptable in Australia, either,” Thielemann, who is conducting the new production of “The Flying Dutchman”, told the Berlin regional daily BZ in an interview.

The conductor blamed Nikitin’s agents for not having warned the singer of the scandal his tattoos might cause.

The affair erupted after Nikitin’s tattoos were the subject of a special feature shown on an arts programme of the ZDF public television on Friday.

The Bayreuth Festival was founded by Richard Wagner to showcase his operas.

Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite, was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer and after the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, Hitler became a regular guest at the Festspielhaus built on Bayreuth’s fabled “Green Hill”.

AFP/jcw

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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