Berlin

The kaiser was also unable to stem the rise of Max Reinhardt, a Jew from Austria who arrived in Berlin at the turn of the century to launch an acting career. The city immediately impressed him: “Berlin is veritably a magnificent city,” he wrote a friend. “Vienna multiplied by more than ten. Truly metropolitan character, immense traffic, a tendency toward the grandiose throughout, and at the same time practical and upright.” Reinhardt failed at acting but showed brilliance as a director when he opened a small cabaret called Sound and Smoke

. From there he moved on to the legitimate stage, taking over the Deutsches Theater in 1905 and quickly changing it from a stronghold of grim naturalism into an arena of magic and excitement. Although his repertoire ran the gamut from Sophocles to Büchner, everything he produced seemed fresh and modern due to his use of the latest dramaturgical techniques. Reviewing his production of Maxim Gorki’s Nachtasyl (Night Refuge)

, a critic enthused: “The production came across like a premier. The public had the impression of seeing it for the first time. Reinhardt treated the piece with such intensity that it seemed as if it had just been written.” Unable to do anything to counter Reinhardt’s popular success, the kaiser ordered his productions off-limits to the military and, when war broke out in 1914, rejected the playwright’s offer to tour the front with his company. Such was the official reception of the artist who more than any other launched Berlin as a world center of modernist drama.

Berlin’s musical scene, unlike its theater, commanded international respect well before the imperial era. Its royal orchestra, founded in 1842, was led for a time by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. In addition, there was a privately funded symphony orchestra directed by a former military bandleader named Benjamin Bilse. His pedigree notwithstanding, Bilse coaxed some brilliant music from his players, and a weekend bei Bilse

became a regular part of bourgeois life in Berlin during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1882, however, a dissident faction among Bilse’s players, tired of being treated like soldiers, defected to create a rival ensemble that they called the Berlin Philharmonic. Performing during its first years in a converted roller-skating rink, the new group did not seem terribly promising. But in 1887 it came under the direction of Hans von Bülow, a brilliant pianist and conductor who combined a mastery of the classics with a commitment to contemporary music. In 1889 Bülow brought his friend Johannes Brahms to Berlin to conduct his D Minor Concerto. Whenever Bülow directed, the Philharmonic sold out.

As might be expected, Bülow’s fans did not include the kaiser, who hated modernism in music as much as in any other art. Bülow, for his part, despised Wilhelm, and used the occasion of his last Berlin concert, in 1892, to express his contempt. Noting that the emperor had recently advised his critics to “wipe the German dust from their shoes and vacate the Fatherland with all haste,” Bülow took out a silk handkerchief, dusted his shoes, and announced his departure. The orchestra he had led to greatness, however, continued to prosper under his successors, from Arthur Nikisch through Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Glaudio Abbado.

Bülow had long been a champion of Richard Wagner (Wagner rewarded his loyalty by stealing Bülow’s wife, Cosima), and a belated infusion of Wagner’s music helped to revitalize the Berlin opera scene, which had been moribund since the glory days of Meyerbeer in the 1840s. In the late 1870s and 1880s Wagnerian music-drama became a staple at the Royal Opera. The capital also boasted Germany’s largest Wagner Club, which among other services helped raise money for the Master’s new theater at Bayreuth. Yet Wagner’s success irritated important elements of the political establishment, who, recalling the composer’s support for the revolutions of 1848, considered him a dangerous revolutionary. Once again, the kaiser led the opposition. Although he had been a Wagnerian in his youth, he announced soon after ascending the throne that “Glück is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.” This was an odd comment coming from a man who adored John Philip Sousa, and Wil-helm’s objections probably stemmed less from a genuine distaste for Wagner’s music than from resentment over the splash he was making in Berlin. “What do people see in this Wagner anyway?” he asked. “The chap is simply a conductor, nothing other than a conductor, an entirely commonplace conductor.”