Expressionist classic in its true glory
The Philharmonia must have known it was on to a winner with its Weimar Berlin series, now under way at the Southbank. We just can’t get enough of that fabulous era, which was politically utopian, excitingly modern and deliciously sexy in a way we can only envy. As for the era’s music, we all know what it sounds like: it’s a jazzily muted trumpet perched atop a grimly sardonic anti-communist song, with a hint of a foxtrot.
Except that it wasn’t, at least not always. Thursday night’s showing of Fritz Lang’s tremendous expressionist classic Metropolis, complete with the original score played by the Philharmonia, revealed another side of the music of Weimar Germany. It also revealed the film itself, in its true glory. We were treated to a beautifully restored version, incorporating around half-an-hour’s worth of recently rediscovered footage. Below the screen was a hugely enlarged Philharmonia Orchestra, incorporating a couple of saxophones to give that authentically sleazy sound.
There was indeed the odd sleazy moment, when the film took us inside the club where the lucky rich few in the towering, soulless dystopia of Metropolis went to enjoy themselves. Here chaps in top-hats and pince-nez
danced giddily with girls with bobbed hair and clingy spangled frocks, just like they do in Cabaret. But in fact these were the weak moments in Gottfried Huppertz’s score. Huppertz just couldn’t do sleazy, and he couldn’t do jazz. What he was very good at was a yearning romanticism straight out of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, which were perfect for the romantic scenes involving Maria, the saintlike figure worshipped by the downtrodden workers. The scenes we all vaguely remember from Metropolis, showing biplanes and aerial railways careering shakily between impossibly massive towers, were accompanied by Wagnerian pomp, tinged with Debussy-ish harmonies to give just a taste of the modern.
Modern music itself was in surprisingly short supply. The scene where workers tend the implacable Machine, I remembered as having the kind of hissing, clanking modernist score that Edgar Varèse might have composed. But I was wrong; what Huppertz actually composed was a Gothic vision of modernity, weirdly tinged at times with an orientalist cruelty not far from Puccini’s Turandot.
In all, this event was a revelation, not just for the sumptuous sound of the orchestra – coordinated with miraculous precision with the images by conductor Frank Strobel – but for its vivid reminder that not everything in Weimar Germany’s music was brand-new.
The Philharmonia’s Weimar Berlin series continues at the Southbank until Sept 29. Tickets: 0800 652 6717; southbankcentre.co.uk