Alone, Together

Beethoven and the rubble women of post-war Berlin

These last two weeks in Undone have looked at two sides of a Janus coin: making music in West Berlin just after the Wall had gone up, and making music in East Berlin just after the Wall had come down. In the case of the former, very little has been written on the historical or political significance of the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s Don Giovanni opening just over a month after the events of August 13, 1961. On the flip side, it seems you can’t write about the “Ode to Freedom” concerts without mentioning their place in the larger landscape of history. 

I think about context and significance a lot these days as we live in an era whose historical landscape we are working to define, codifying and recasting in real time (often in bursts of 240 characters or less). Even before the current pandemic of COVID-19, these seemed like especially heady times to revisit two recent periods of similar uncertainty, in a city that was shaped by its division — which calls to mind Elaine Kelly’s phrase “the Ja…