THE annual rite of the Proms is perhaps the most singularly impressive BBC production. The Beeb merely piggybacks on a Glastonbury run by its own commercially driven management; the Proms, in contrast, exists only because of the scale of resources that the BBC can throw at it, and a commitment to programming rarely performed works that need large — and expensive — musical forces.
One such example was the first Proms performance since 1988 of Frederick Delius’s A Mass of Life (Radio 3, 18 August), by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and LPO Chorus, under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. There is a “diffidence”, even among professionals, about Delius’s music, with its reluctance to resolve quickly or simply. Written in 1905, the Mass sits lightly to conventional musical syntax, a herald of the wholescale abandonment of tonality that would erupt soon afterwards.
This is not a Christian mass but a setting of texts from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Delius responded to Nietzsche the ideologue more than the poet, and, in contrast with Mahler, who still sought a path to redemption through the writings of the great anti-Christian, Delius saw Nietzsche as a path to embracing mortality — or, at least, the musicologist Daniel Grimley taught me in the interval feature, which can, on a good day such as this, be one of the best things about Proms coverage.
Katja Hojer, an East German transplanted to Britain, returned to her home town on the Polish border for Germany: United and divided (Radio 4, Sunday).
Communist East Germany suffered from profound mutual distrust between people and politicians; that seems to have carried over into the democracy of reunified Germany, fuelled by bitter memories of a reunification process that amounted to a western takeover.
Eastern industry and institutions were destroyed, leading both to a sense of being colonised and to years of mass unemployment and depopulation, as young adults streamed westward. Even the Ascension Day public holiday that provided the programme’s first cameo was a Western import into a region once overwhelmingly Protestant, and now with one of the world’s lowest rates of religious identification.
Wages remain lower, and Easterners are represented in national institutions at one tenth of their population share. All this has driven the rise of the Right-populist AfD, in a region where political correctness reminds many of Communist-era censorship.
Yet there is now net internal migration from west to east. Young people are lured by cheaper property, including a Vietnamese German musician who rapped about the beauties of the small AfD-voting city that he had moved to. By global standards, eastern Germany is a prosperous, attractive, and stable place. Eastern German alienation is about a less tangible sense of disrespect and rootlessness. The loss of Christianity can hardly help.
