Ten years after Heiner Müller's death

"What remains?", asks Jörg Sundermeier in Die Tageszeiung, ten years after the death of the East German playwright Heiner Müller, who was referred to in both East and West as the "most important German playwright since Brecht". Sundermeier concludes that Müller hasn't left purgatory. "When Heiner Müller died ten years ago, the Berliner Ensemble theatre mourned for a week. Devotional objects were piled on his tombstone, the obituaries never ended. But today his work remains mute. And this is not only due to the decision to banish Müller's writings to an edited collection of his works, which has sounded the knell of his own publication of his writings with Rotbuch publishers, modelled in the spirit of Brecht's 'Versuche'. What Müller's works are lacking most are readers. The ground-breaking humour in Müller's demand for a Kohl mausoleum as a monument to German unity is out of fashion. One-liners like "ten Germans are naturally more stupid than five Germans" are quickly refuted today. The drama of socialism, which Müller described unlike anyone before or after him, interests no one. The idea of 'all or no one', in other words the sort of humanism that kills, is now a thing of the past."

In Die Welt, Uwe Wittstock praises Müller as a cherished opponent in disputes of bygone days. "To a certain extent, Müller's impact in the six years between the fall of the Wall and his death can be seen as a textbook media career. Certainly, he was famous before that, he was the most-loved end-of-the-world dramatist of the apocalyptic 80s. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall with all the interviews and talk shows, he took on another role: the rhetorically brilliant lateral thinker, the unforgettable intellectual with his cigar and whiskey glass, who couldn't give a damn about political correctness, and who spiced up the often so lacklustre arguments of the time with a refreshing dose of cynicism."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30.12.2005

In the run-up to Mozart Year 2006, the paper runs a five-page dossier on the late great man.

Composer Dieter Schnebel has penned some musings for the first page: "Amazing, everything he had the courage to do! For example, he was the first one to use real atonality (the beginning of the C major quartet), polyrhythm (scene 20 at the end of the first act of 'Don Giovanni') and polystylistic elements (the entire 'Magic Flute': he was the first post-modern composer). At the same time, his music was filled with the zeitgeist, hitting the nerve of the time. And it does it so lightly – as if it were nothing at all. Mozart's music is elegantly (and effortlessly) skilful, true to the motto of Johann Nestroy: 'if you can do it, it's no longer art; but if you can't do it, it never was'."

Conductor Nicolaus Harnoncourt tells in an interview with Jörg Königsdorf how Mozart saved him from early retirement: "You mustn't forget that until 1969 I was still playing cello in the orchestra. But Mozart's G-minor symphony catapulted me right out of there. The work was being played a lot in Vienna at the time: always unbearably sweetly which which meant the critics were endless talking about the 'purest Mozart joy'. Then from one day to the next, it suddenly struck me: I can't stand it like this any longer. That's how the G-minor symphony changed my life: otherwise I would have retired twelve years ago."


Die Welt, 30.12.2005

In an interview with Kai Luehrs-Kaiser, Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin, talks about the human element in Wagner's works and the pleasures of cigars. "Arthur Rubinstein taught me how to smoke. When I was 14, I visited him once in his hotel in Tel Aviv. He knew my parents, and I was often allowed to play before him. On this day I was sick. I was burning with fever, with a temperature of 39 degrees, and still I went to see him. But Rubinstein wasn't there. When he finally arrived, I saw how embarrassed he was that he'd forgotten our appointment. But then we sat together until one in the morning. He gave me vodka and the first cigar of my life, a fat 'Monte Cristo'. Of course my parents were horror-stricken. My father took me by the shoulders and gave me a good shaking. I've been smoking cigars ever since."


Berliner Zeitung, 30.12.2005

Jenz Balzer takes stock of the (reputedly not at all bad) year of pop music 2005 and describes the latest techniques employed by the record companies in their fight for survival. "As in recent years, the major record labels sought their salvation in the criminalisation of the customers – in Germany alone legal action was taken against several thousand 'illegal' file sharers – and in their own criminal practices. The people at SonyBMG are the most radical. On the one hand they have tried to aid the progress of their own products in US radio with an elaborate system of bribes, and on the other, they have taken the world by storm with their novel copy protection system which when a SonyBMG CD is played on a computer, loges itself deep in the operating system from where it transmits personal data about the CD buyer via Internet back to the record company."