Deutsche Oper Berlin

Stand on the pavement of Bismarckstraße and listen. Traffic runs past on the wide boulevard. Then look up at the building in front of you. It is a long, low wall of grey concrete, pressed with small pebbles, and almost completely without windows. It does not look like an opera house at all. It looks closed and private. That first impression is deliberate, and it is the start of the story of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

The opera on this site is older than the building you see. In the early twentieth century, Charlottenburg was not part of Berlin. It was a separate, wealthy city with its own ambitions. Its citizens wanted an opera house of their own, one that did not depend on the royal court. In 1912, the Deutsches Opernhaus opened here. It was an opera for the middle class, built by a city that wanted to show it could compete with the capital next door.

That independence did not last long. In 1920, Charlottenburg was absorbed into Greater Berlin, and the opera house became a Berlin institution. The decades that followed were turbulent. Under the Nazi regime, the house was taken under state control and used for propaganda purposes. Then came the war. In 1943, Allied bombing destroyed the original building. The company lost its home, but it did not stop performing.

After the war, the company moved into the Theater des Westens, a theatre a short distance from here. It played there for well over a decade. Berlin, meanwhile, was being divided. The great historic opera house on Unter den Linden lay in the Soviet sector, in the East. West Berlin needed a major stage of its own. So the decision was made to rebuild here, on the old Charlottenburg site, with a completely modern design.

The new house opened in September 1961. Think about that date for a moment. Only a few weeks earlier, in August 1961, the Berlin Wall had gone up across the city. West Berliners suddenly could not cross freely to the East anymore. This opera house opened into that shock. For many people in the western half of the city, it became their main opera stage. It also became a statement that cultural life in West Berlin would continue.

The architect was Fritz Bornemann. His design is a clear example of postwar modernism. Look again at that closed street front. The concrete panels carry a rough texture of embedded stones, and the surface changes with the weather. On a grey day it looks heavy. In low evening sun, the pebbles catch the light and the wall becomes warmer. The idea behind the closed front was simple: the outside world stays outside, and the music happens within.

Not everyone loved the result. Some Berliners gave the building a teasing nickname, Sing-Sing, after the famous American prison. The windowless facade made the comparison easy. But walk around to the sides and the building changes character. Here, tall walls of glass open the foyers to the street. In the evening, when the lights are on, you can see people inside during the interval, holding glasses and talking. The building is closed in front, but open at the sides.

In front of the entrance stands a large abstract sculpture of steel. It is the work of the sculptor Hans Uhlmann. Its sharp, angled forms rise from the pavement and stand in contrast to the flat concrete wall behind. Many visitors walk past it without a second look. Stop for a moment. The sculpture and the building were conceived as part of the same modern vision, and together they show how West Berlin wanted to present itself in the early 1960s.

Now a story that most visitors do not know. On the evening of June 2, 1967, the Shah of Iran came to this opera house to attend a performance. Outside, students protested against his regime. The police response was violent. Nearby, on Krumme Straße, a young student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a police officer. He had been attending his first demonstration. His death shocked West Germany.

That night changed the country's politics. The student movement grew sharply after Ohnesorg's death, and the protests of the late 1960s took on a new intensity. Close to the opera house, you can find a memorial to this event. It is a bronze relief by the Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, called The Death of the Demonstrator. It is easy to miss. Many people come here for music and never learn that this pavement saw one of the defining moments of postwar Germany.

Inside, the auditorium is the largest of Berlin's three opera houses. The others are the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Komische Oper. The hall was designed so that a large audience could see the stage clearly, without the deep side boxes of older theatres. The style is calm and modern. Wood and soft colours surround the seats. The focus is meant to stay on the stage, and on the sound.

The house has always had a strong connection to large-scale repertoire. The works of Richard Wagner have held an important place here, along with the big Italian and French operas that need a wide stage and a full orchestra. The Deutsche Oper has also staged bold modern productions, and some have caused controversy. Today, it shares a common foundation with the other Berlin opera houses, but it keeps its own artistic identity and its own Charlottenburg character.

The neighbourhood around you is part of that character. This is western Berlin, with broad streets, solid apartment blocks, and cafés on the side roads. The underground station directly beneath the boulevard carries the name of the opera house itself. On performance evenings, people come up the stairs dressed for the evening, while others are simply going home from work. The opera is not set apart in a park. It stands in the middle of ordinary city life.

Before you walk on, look once more at that long concrete wall. It was built in a divided city, in a year of fear, as a promise that music would continue. It has seen celebration and protest, applause and grief. Notice the small stones in the panels, the steel sculpture at the entrance, the glass at the sides. And as you leave along Bismarckstraße, listen again to the traffic... and imagine the orchestra tuning, just behind that wall.