Author: Tobias Möller
ca. 6 minutes
Do we live in the most divided and divisive of all worlds? This season our theme is Controversial!, allowing us to reflect on today’s debate culture from the standpoint of music. Here, too, the struggle to find the right course has been going on for centuries. After handling a score by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, for example, said that he needed to wash his hands. Or take Brahms, who dismissed Bruckner’s works as a “hoax”. Here we shall encounter all of them in ways that allow us to compare and contrast them to exciting and thought-provoking effect.
The phrase “I we’re still allowed to say that, right?” has become ubiquitous. It conveys not only a sense of indignation, but also a feeling of widespread unease. In 1990, 78% of all Germans still thought that they could express their opinions freely, but by 2023 that figure had shrunk to 40%. It is unlikely that many people fear any real legal consequences, but something different is at stake here: the belief that in expressing a view that we may feel is plausible, we may encounter determined resistance. It does not need to be a major political topic that triggers this sentiment: anyone who has ever taken part in a discussion about gender will be amazed at how impassioned a debate can become when asterisks and participial constructions are involved. Whether we are talking about technology, social norms or international crises, our world is changing so quickly that many people feel permanently challenged. This feeling and the concomitant stress seem to leave their mark on every public debate, and so it is understandable if we feel that we are living in the most divisive times ever.
But is this really the case? For our 2025/26 season we have decided to focus on the topic Controversial! and to examine our debate culture from the standpoint of music, because if we do nothing, the inclination to settle differences by recourse to violence is so deeply ingrained that it could be unleashed out at any moment, no matter what the subject of discussion may be. And this includes music. “His instrumentation is so horribly muddy that you have to wash your hands after handling one of his scores,” Mendelssohn waxed indignant at Berlioz’s music, and you sense that this was not simply a competition about whose music was “more beautiful”. The major aesthetic debates on music have always examined the question of how the medium should continue in the most general terms. In the early days of Romanticism the alternatives were the balanced Classicism of a composer like Mendelssohn or the style of someone like Berlioz, who refused to accept many formative norms. As in today’s discussions, the central argument revolves around our place in the world in other words, our sense of identity.
The central argument revolves around our place in the world
It is this quest for a sense of identity that we may hear reflected in this season’s chosen theme, allowing us to grasp it through our senses. Such a comparison may be drawn when Tugan Sokhiev conducts Mendelssohn’s formally perfect Overture Die Hebriden (often known in the English-speaking world as Fingal’s Cave) and contrasts it with Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a work that explores extremes. Nor can we avoid examining the central confrontation of the nineteenth century, which contrasted Brahms, as the heir of the Classical tradition that he continued to develop, with Franz Liszt as the pioneer of a type of symphonic poem that was based on literary models. To this end Michael Sanderling compares and contrasts Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestral version of Brahms’s First Piano Quartet and Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz, which depicts a scene from Faust. The concepts embodied here struck their representatives as altogether irreconcilable: Brahms regarded “all that kind of thing, ‘symphonic poems’ and so on” as being “at odds with the innermost essence of music”. Such works could only be “regretted and condemned”. For his part, Liszt despised composers “who slavishly and unthinkingly imitate empty forms”.
The fact that Baroque composers, too, fought over what they regarded as the “right” course in music is demonstrated by a programme with Emmanuelle Haïm, who contrasts the elegant stage works of Jean-Baptiste Lully with the highly emotional dramas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. As part of a double portrait, Jordi Savall, too, performs music by Rameau, who in his own day was seen as a subversive, and presents it alongside works by Christoph Willibald Gluck, the second of the eighteenth century’s theatrical revolutionaries. Lully, Rameau and Gluck all enjoy the status of greats today, but in their own time they were at the heart of a series of battles that can be described only as genuine culture wars.
Other concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker resemble nothing so much as contests fought out simultaneously over considerable distances. In a programme conducted by Simon Rattle, the three composers Percy Grainger, Sergei Prokofiev and John Adams are all engaged in an attempt to find a musical language for the twentieth century that evades Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system. Under Daniele Gatti, Brahms and Stravinsky seek to revive the genre of the symphony, each in his own unique way. And at the concerts conducted by Lahav Shani, Charles Ives and Antonín Dvořák set out from diametrically opposite standpoints to invent a new American musical idiom.
Explicitly political
Two programmes have an explicitly political connotation. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts works by Prokofiev and Mieczysław Weinberg, two composers who, by adopting different stances, survived the Stalinist Terror. Prokofiev employed a flexibility that often seemed opportunistic, while Weinberg was a committed Communist who continued to maintain his beliefs even after Stalin murdered his father-in-law and he himself was imprisoned. A revolutionary programme is presented by Gustavo Dudamel. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony celebrated the freedom of all mankind, while Gabriela Ortiz’s Revolución diamantina, which was recently awarded a Grammy, takes as its starting point the feminist protest against the continuing violence to which women are subjected in Mexico. Here the controversy is not confined to the music, but exists between the works on the one hand and, on the other, the realities of life in the world that created them.
Within the context of works on the subject of controversy, a particular place is occupied by three pieces that gave rise to some of the greatest theatrical scandals of all time. These works were not at odds with any alternative concepts on the part of other composers, but represented a violation of the norms of their day. The orchestra’s chief conductor Kirill Petrenko directs Bartók’s pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, which Cologne’s then mayor, Konrad Adenauer, banned on the grounds of its allegedly decadent subject matter following its world premiere in the city. François-Xavier Roth will conduct Stravinsky’s ballet music The Rite of Spring: no other work in the whole history of music has ever caused a comparable scandal. The audience even came to blows, offended by the staging and affronted by the archaically pounding music. Daniel Harding will conduct the Overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser, a work that triggered a chorus of whistling and catcalls when it was performed in Paris in 1861. Paris’s operatic public expected to be entertained, but instead found itself faced with an uncompromising theatre reformer: the whole affair was bound to end in tears.
The season’s main focus of interest is not limited to orchestral concerts. Brahms and Liszt were both great pianists, and their opposing attitudes will be set in stark contrast at a piano recital by Kirill Gerstein. Our Baroque Weekend in February 2026 will also allow audiences to relive the arguments that raged at the end of the Renaissance over the “right” way to compose music. One of the Baroque Weekend’s concerts will also feature a number of dramatic scenes that draw on the expressive devices of the Baroque to present conflicts on the stage. These works range from Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda to an evening of arias on the subject of jealousy. Our series of public discussions explores the question of how we can deal with the irreconcilable differences that still divide people today.
Shostakovich vs. Schoenberg, Bruckner vs. Brahms
The series of chamber recitals given by members of the Berliner Philharmoniker offer what is arguably the most focused forum for a discussion of the theme of controversy. Here Shostakovich and Schoenberg are twice brought face to face with one another. Shostakovich was one of the most powerfully expressive musicians of the twentieth century, a composer whose works are emotional, dramatic and often ironic. As a result, he was never likely to warm to Schoenberg’s complex ideas about twelve-tone music. Indeed, he even went so far as to dismiss such music as a “meaningless game with musical sounds”, something that was “confused and soulless”. Perhaps he was also exercised by the more general concern about whether his own music would still be relevant in the future.
Further recitals in this series of concerts examine the theme of Bruckner and Brahms as antithetical opposites – Brahms is said to have complained that Bruckner’s works constituted “a hoax that will be dead and buried in one or two years from now”. We shall also travel to late nineteenth-century Paris, where a new generation of French composers was struggling to gain acceptance for their works in a world dominated by German music. Nor can we forget one of the most famous conflicts in music history: the one fought out between Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Finally, a conciliatory voice is heard among these warring factions: in his own works, Joachim Raff sought to strike a balance between the schools of Brahms and Liszt. The history of music has not thanked him for this: Raff’s works have now been largely forgotten – undeservedly.
What can we take away from all these contrasting impressions? First and foremost, we have an opportunity to listen more closely to these works. After all, it is through a sense of contrast that the specific quality of a composer’s musical language emerges at its clearest. Mozart’s uniqueness is all the more apparent when juxtaposed with Salieri, whose music was emphatically not as original. By the same token, the individual nature of Dvořák’s search for a specifically American kind of music becomes all the clearer when audiences can hear it next to the very different approach of a composer like Charles Ives.
Over and above all this, our decision to focus on the question of what is controversial today reveals not only the extent to which irreconcilable attitudes blight our present lives but also the productive, positive force that lies behind the great debates in the history of music. Only in the rarest cases have any clear victors emerged from these contests, but this is surely a positive sign. It is a good thing, after all, that neither Schoenberg’s nor Shostakovich’s music has survived without the other one and that we do not have to decide between the symphony and the symphonic poem. As this focus demonstrates, music may have developed, but not in any linear way. Instead, the most varied ideas are intertwined in its growth. And this is what makes it so rich.