New. Objective.

August Sander, Secretary at the Westdeutsche Rundfunk in Cologne [Anneli Strohal], 1931; c. 1980 (print Gunther Sander) © Private collection | Photo: Private collection, Die Photographische Sammlung / Stiftung Kultur der Sparkasse KölnBonn – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; Bildrecht, Wien 2026.
The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in Germany and Austria between 1918 and 1933 was a radical reaction to the Expressionists, whose romanticism of color and abstraction was undermined by the events of the First World War. The movement expressed itself primarily in paintings, cinema, and music, but its photography too sought out a brooding sensuality in its representational subjects.

NEW.OBJECTIVE. is a new exhibition at Vienna’s Leopold Museum, opening tomorrow and running through February 28 of next year. August Sander may be the best known of these photographers and his work is represented in the show, along with less well-known artists like Ellen Auerbach, Aenne Biermann, Karl Blossfeldt, Alfred Ehrhardt, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Sayeth the web site for the show:

Sober, clear, objective – these adjectives describe the new way of seeing the world following the fallout of World War I. The type of “art photography,” practiced until 1914 especially by ambitious amateurs, with its romanticizing estheticism, had become obsolete. This new movement provided a direct, unadorned pictorial style, which accommodated the needs of the medium and represented a clear commitment to technological Modernism. In Germany, [these photographers] adhered to a “new objective photography” which culminated in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto organized by the German Werkbund. Championing a visual language in keeping with the times, the exhibition, which was shown in Vienna straight after its initial presentation in Stuttgart, impacted on the oeuvres of Austrian photographers, including Trude Fleischmann, Grete Kolliner and Rudolf Koppitz.

NEW.OBJECTIVE. features more than 100 photographs from these artists; a brief sample can be found at the Leopold’s digital exhibition for the show.

I’m a great enthusiast for the movement, which is primarily known through its German representatives, but I’m coming to know more about the Austrian strain of the genre, which seems to edge more towards a psychological and occult approach in the work of Franz Sedlacek and Rudolf Wacker and is, to me, more haunting.

More information about the exhibition can be found here, and the accompanying catalog can be found here — alas, I fear the Leopold Museum book store does not ship internationally, but I’ll be on the lookout for any eBay bargains. Like all Leopold Museum exhibitions, highly recommended.

 

Writing Vienna

For some time now, I’ve been meditating about writing a small book about Vienna, especially about my visit there in March, and to that end will soon launch writingvienna.com, a new web site where I will try to put those meditations into words. Whether it will all end up as a book, God knows, but I have the feeling that a more fragmentary approach may help me along and interest others who feel uncannily at home in the Austrian capitol.

You can visit the site here and sign up for an announcement when it’s launched. The first post will be published there within the next week or so.

 

Opernabend: Don Giovanni

The Stavovské divadlo (Estates Theater) in Prague, where Don Giovanni premiered in 1787.

Tomorrow’s offering on radio klassik Stephansdom‘s Opernabend will be Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Thomas Allen in the title role, Simone Alaimo as his sidekick/henchman Leporello, and Karita Mattila as Donna Elvira, in a 1991 recording performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner.

Certainly among the most highly regarded operas ever composed, Don Giovanni demonstrates to me the extraordinary intellectual and emotional range of the Classical period, a range usually accorded to the music of the Romantic era. The aesthetic restrictions of the Classical period, borrowing something from the Baroque, encouraged a demanding focus of expression often dissipated by the wild emotional, subjective imaginings of the Romantics, Beethoven excepted (Beethoven always excepted from generalizations like this). Don Giovanni ranges from the comic, leering, lascivious skirt-chasing of its title character in Act One to a vision of the jaws of Hell at its conclusion, which is to say that it contains just about everything from sex to death. As such, it’s had an impact on musicians and philosophers ever since its 1787 premiere in Prague, conducted by the composer himself. Flaubert called Don Giovanni one of “the three finest things God ever made” (it was in good company; Hamlet and the sea made up the remainder of the trio), and a discussion of the opera introduces the central ideas behind Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Whether Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute (or any other of his operas) is Mozart’s best is a matter for cocktail party sniping, but it certainly ranks up there, and therefore ranks as one of the best of all operas. radio klassik Stephansdom airs Don Giovanni tomorrow, Saturday, October 3, at 2:00 pm Eastern time; you can stream it here. Barrie Kosky’s insightful production for the Wiener Staatsoper, which some will no doubt find rather grim but which I find rather wonderful, is available at Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ platform; the trailer for the Vienna production is below.

“The eternally unwinnable War of Liberation”

Page 12 (right) of Ludwig van Beethoven’s original Ninth Symphony manuscript. Source: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

I’m looking forward to Thursday night and the opening night performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in D minor, under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Premiered in Vienna in 1824, this symphony, certainly among the finest achievements of the human imagination, is also among the world’s most familiar, especially its fourth movement; and indeed, “the Ninth is the work most often used to solemnize an important event — the opening of the United Nations, the signing of a peace treaty at the end of a war, the fall of the Berlin Wall,” as Harvey Sachs has it in his book about the symphony. “It has been used as a battle flag by liberals and conservatives, by democrats and autocrats, by Nazis, Communists, and anarchists.” A celebration of the tenacity of the human spirit, yes — but because of those Nazis, Communists, and anarchists, that celebration seems to call for some thoughtful distance between ourselves and how we perceive the work. To paraphrase Nicholas Cook’s excellent monograph about the Ninth (which unfortunately I do not have in front of me), it may be that the Ninth is so familiar to us that we have lost the ability to hear it, especially in 2026. Well, I will try to listen to it, and to hear it, on Thursday night.

As I listen I will bear Harvey Sachs’ observation about its Romantic, revolutionary reputation in mind:

The conjunction of Beethoven’s last symphonic masterpiece with crucial works or events in the lives of so many other outstanding artists made 1824 a particularly fertile year. …. The fact that the Ninth Symphony, Byron’s death, Pushkin’s Boris Gudunov and “To the Sea,” Delacroix’s Massacres at Chios, Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare, and Heine’s Harz Journey and North Sea Pictures all futhered, in one way or another, Romanticism’s rear-guard action against repression underlines the significance of that speck of time. And perhaps these brief glances at those artists and their states of being at that moment will have helped to remind readers — as they reminded this author — that spiritual and intellectual liberation requires endless internal warfare against everything in ourselves that narrows us down instead of opening us up and that replaces questing with certitude. Nearly two centuries later, the world still overflows with people who believe that truth not only exists but that it is simple and straightforward, and that their truths — be they political, religious, philosophical, moral, or social — constitute The Truth. Federico Fellini’s characterization, a generation ago, of the fascist mentality as “a refusal to deepen one’s individual relationship to life, out of laziness, prejudice, unwillingness to inconvenience oneself, and presumptuousness” describes the obedient adherents of most prefabricated beliefs, everywhere and at all times. The others — the disobedient, the nonadherents, those who think that the world is not easily explained and that human experience does not fit into tidy little compartments — are still fighting the eternally unwinnable War of Liberation. Until our sorry species bombs or gluts itself into oblivion, the skirmishing will continue, and what Beethoven and company keep telling us, from the ever-receding yet ever-present past, is that the struggle must continue.

I fear that the meaning of this struggle, too, is provisional, especially given the contradictory, sometimes perverse human spirit.

My good friend Bruce Hodges takes a look back at the recorded history of Beethoven’s Ninth here.

Opernabend: Rienzi

Rienzi at the 2026 Bayreuth Festival in a production designed by Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka. Photo: Enrico Nawrath.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 19, radio klassik Stephansdom offers Richard Wagner’s 1842 Rienzi on its Opernabend program at 2:00 pm Philadelphia time and 8:00 pm Vienna time. A brief synopsis from Wikipedia:

The opera is set in Rome and is based on the life of Cola di Rienzo (1313–1354), a late medieval Italian populist figure who succeeds in outwitting and defeating the nobles and their followers and in raising the power of the people. Magnanimous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles’ rebellion against the people’s power, but popular opinion changes and even the Church, which had initially urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the Capitol, in which Rienzi and a few adherents have made a last stand.

Barry Millington reports that the original 1842 Dresden production, featuring one of Wagner’s favorite mezzo-sopranos Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient as Adriano, ran with intermissions from 6:00 pm to the other side of midnight. “[There] are elements of grand opera throughout both parts of the work; in the spectacular mises-en-scène (massive crowd scenes, dramatic excommunications, collapsing buildings and so forth) … and in the abundance of marches, processions and ballets. … The grandiloquence of the music may perhaps be seen as a reflection of the extravagant pomp and ceremony that were perceived — by an anonymous contemporary biographer of Rienzi — to have been the cause of the demagogue’s downfall.” Wagner biographer Ernest Newman called Rienzi an “attack of musical measles” (ouch!) and Charles Rosen cheekily described it as “Meyerbeer’s worst opera,” but Mahler considered Rienzi one of the greatest of Wagner’s music dramas. So your own mileage may vary.

Although Rienzi‘s reputation has suffered compared to the rest of Wagner’s corpus (a year later Wagner conducted the premiere of Der fliegende Holländer, the earliest of truly Wagnerian operas, in Dresden), its populist political theme as well as its comparative rarity in live and recorded performance are apparently rendering it more attractive to producers and musicians today; this year saw its first-ever production at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. Gaby Reucher considered the implications of its contemporary production for Deutsche Welle in July.

While Rienzi was Wagner’s first great success, later in his career the composer tended to dismiss it as a minor work, but it wasn’t minor for everybody. In his diaries, Albert Speer recorded a comment from Adolf Hitler to his Nazi comrade Robert Ley; Hitler described the impact of Rienzi, a production of which he had possibly seen as a teenager in 1906 or 1907 in Linz, on his own political ambitions:

You know, Ley, it isn’t by chance that I have the Party Rallies open with the overture to Rienzi. It’s not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper’s son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more.

The manuscript of Rienzi has disappeared. Hitler reportedly received it as a fiftieth birthday gift in 1939; it was possibly in Hitler’s personal possession in his Berlin bunker in 1945; it either burned or was stolen.

Tomorrow’s radio klassik Stephansdom broadcast features a 2013 recording; Sebastian Weigle leads the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester; Peter Bronder sings Rienzi and Claudia Mahnke sings Adriano. Fortunately for all of us, perhaps, it runs only two hours and 24 minutes.

The 2026 Bayreuth production is available as a recording on Deutsche Gramophon’s Stage+ platform. The trailer, which looks tempting indeed, can be found here.